Mara flopped down across the counter and said, “Enough.”
The bubble collapsed.
The ball of light winked out, and the copper disk fell to the floor, rolled on its edge emitting a reverberating ring and dropped onto its side with a soft clank.
CHAPTER 23
PING SAT SURROUNDED by nine empty chairs, staring to his right at a painting of three horizontal bars in differing hues of green hanging on the beige wall at the end of the conference table where he waited to be interviewed by the accident investigators. The picture provided the only color in the room located at an office park near the Portland airport. Opposite the picture, to his left, at the other end of the conference table was a blank wall with a black tube mounted horizontally near the ceiling, a retractable projection screen. Behind him stood a bank of windows that ran the length of the room, covered by beige plastic venetian blinds. Directly in front of him, across the conference table was the only door to the room.
Detective Bohannon opened it and stepped inside, followed by Special Agent Suter.
“Mr. Ping, we appreciate you taking the time to come and talk to us,” Suter said as he sat down. He did not offer to shake hands, even though Bohannon reached across the table.
“Sorry I could not meet you at my place of business, but we are remodeling, and it can get too noisy to carry on a conversation with all the construction going on,” Ping said.
“No problem. As I said on the phone, we’re talking to some of the passengers to see if we can figure out what may have caused the accident on Flight 559.”
“Whatever I can do to help.”
“Can you tell us if you observed anything out of the ordinary before the flight took off?” Suter asked.
“Before we left the ground? No, I can’t say that I saw anything unusual.”
“After takeoff?”
“A few minutes after we left the ground, I saw a strange light in the passenger cabin. A swirling blue light that appeared to be able to pass through people and objects. It was very strange and disorienting.”
“What do you mean, it could ‘pass through people and objects’?”
“It looked somewhat like a flashing X-ray. I know that sounds strange. It not only spun around the cabin, but it seemed to pass through everything. It made me dizzy. Given the reactions of the other passengers, I’m certain it had the same effect on some of them as well.”
“What was the source of this light?”
“I did not see where it came from. I had the impression that the source might have been moving around inside the plane.”
“Did you see anyone carrying an object that could have emitted this light?”
“No, I was in a window seat, so it was hard to see very much, especially after people became panicked. There was a great deal of crying and yelling.”
“What caused the panicking among the passengers?”
“In the beginning, I think some passengers were concerned about the light, but after that, when the plane began its descent, I’m sure that was the motivation for most of the fear and noise.”
A knock came from the door.
“Come in,” Suter said over his shoulder.
A jowly man in a pin-striped dress shirt and tie stepped into the room. When he locked eyes with Ping, all the color drained from his face.
“Mr. Pirelli, this is Mr. Ping, one of the passengers from Flight 559,” Suter said.
“Ah,” Pirelli nodded and looked away quickly. “Of course, passenger interviews.”
“Have we met before?” Ping asked.
“Oh, no. No, I don’t think so. I’m not even from Portland,” Pirelli said.
“What can we help you with?” Bohannon asked Pirelli.
“I needed to talk to the two of you out here in the hallway for a few minutes. Mr. Ping, can you excuse us for a couple minutes?” Pirelli asked.
“Actually if you can point me to the restroom, I’ll excuse myself, and you can talk here.”
“Just go to the end of the hallway and take a left,” Bohannon said.
Ping got up and walked around the table. Pirelli stepped out into the hallway to let Ping exit the room. As Ping got to the end of the hallway and turned left, he looked back down the hall. Pirelli stared after him but quickly turned away.
“Man, I’m sorry. I was not ready for that,” Pirelli said as he closed the door.
“Ready for what?” Suter asked.
“I saw his dead body just a few days ago. It is hard to believe there’s another copy of him running around alive out here. Coming face-to-face with it is almost too much to deal with,” Pirelli said. He wiped his brow with his bare hand. “Sheesh, that was weird.”
“There are so many bodies, I can’t see how you would remember anyone well enough to recognize them,” Bohannon said.
“I think he might have been the only Asian on the flight. That’s why I remembered him.”
“Strange stuff, no doubt about that,” Suter said without a hint of commiseration. “So what did you want to talk to us about?”
“I need some guidance on whether we are going to need resources to interview passengers outside of Portland. We’ve got people all over the country, some even outside the US.”
“We have not uncovered any information that links to a passenger outside of Portland. The only lead we have points to this Mara Lantern girl, the one we don’t have a dead body for,” Suter said. “I don’t think we need to talk to people outside of Portland.”
Bohannon nodded.
“Okay, let me know immediately if anything changes,” Pirelli said, turning to the door. “Sorry about that thing earlier. I’ll need to figure out a way of keeping a poker face the next time I encounter one of our dead passengers.”
Pirelli opened the door and nodded at Ping in the hall.
*
“Just a few more questions, and we should be able to wrap this up, Mr. Ping,” Suter said after they took their places around the table. “So you did not see where this light was coming from during the flight. Did you see a red-headed boy running in the aisle or a young woman chasing him?”
“No, like I said, I was in a window seat.”
“Do you know a young lady named Mara Lantern?”
“Yes. She works at a repair shop next door to my business.”
“What a coincidence. Were the two of you traveling together on the flight?”
“No, we are just acquaintances. It was happenstance we took the same flight to San Francisco.”
“Did you see her get up, leave her seat during the flight?”
“No. I’m not even sure where she was seated. I think she may have been farther back in the plane than me.”
“Did you see or hear an explosion prior to the plane going down?”
“No, no explosion.”
“I think that does it for now, Mr. Ping. If we have any further questions, we’ll be in touch,” Suter said.
CHAPTER 24
“ACCORDING TO THE newspaper, the investigators have reconstructed the airplane from our flight in that hangar,” Ping said, pointing across the dark road. He and Sam had pulled into a shipping company’s unlit parking lot across the street. “Now, you stay right here and keep watch. Do not leave the car.”
“Okay, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll do exactly what you told me,” Sam said.
“Right, if you see someone pull into the lot across the street, you send me a text message. Nothing else. Don’t get out and do anything else, got it?”
“I got it. I won’t get out of the car.”
“If I get caught or tied up in there, I’ll text you. If that happens, there’s a motel about a mile that way. Go there and get a cab back to my house.”
Sam nodded. Ping reached for the door, hesitated, then locked eyes with Sam. “You promise?”
“Just go. Don’t worry.” Sam rolled his eyes, slouched back in his seat.
Ping got out, jogged across the street and turned before getting to the hangar parking lot. H
e had driven past the building several times and identified the door he planned to enter. The guards had regular twenty-minute rounds and stopped every three rounds to smoke in the parking lot. They were just about due for a break and would not see him if things worked out.
The door featured a vertical pane of wired glass just above the handle, which he chipped away at with a chisel and hammer. He covered the end of the chisel with an old sweatshirt to muffle the sound. Five minutes later he had a hole in the window large enough to reach through. He pressed the door release bar.
Entering the midpoint of the building, Ping found himself directly behind the partially reconstructed plane. He paused at the sight of the gutted airliner, pondered how lucky he was to be alive. Silently he stood in the darkness, thinking about his new life in this new reality and hoped he would be able to stay.
He shook off his reverie and looked in both directions. To the right there was nothing of interest, but to the left, beyond the plane, he saw ambient light and shadows that showed more promise.
He needed to get off the main hangar floor soon or one of the guards would spot him. As if on cue, a door slammed. A guard stepped in for the interior portion of his rounds, occasionally passing through one of the circles of muted light sparsely dotting the floor. Ping stepped back and walked along the wall where it was dark, creeping past the plane.
It took him fifteen minutes to slow-walk to the far side of the hangar. Occasionally he could hear the guard’s footsteps, a tap, a click or other noise reminding Ping that he was not alone. The cavernous space made it impossible to tell from what direction the sounds came.
Ping sensed a structure ahead, but the light was too faint here to show any detail. He ran his hand along a wall, taut plastic that felt much cooler than the rest of the hangar. Most likely refrigerated or just heavily air-conditioned. He skulked around until he felt a frame, looked down and saw the silhouette of a handle. He went inside.
*
The guard heard something over by the tents, like the slip of a shoe on concrete. It’s hard to be sure with the hum of generators and cooling systems on this end of the hangar. He slowed his pace, cocked his head to listen more closely. He sensed movement off to his left. Someone stood in the shadows ahead…or maybe it was just a trick of light. He slipped behind the metal cabinet that held bio suits and waited, just in case.
Five minutes later, a silhouette, too short to be a full-grown man, too unsure to be another guard, stepped out of the shadows. The boy’s profile turned left and right, his body tense, his arms extended as if trying to feel his way through the dark. His movements conveyed confusion. He looked lost. The guard stepped from behind the closet, and pointed a flashlight and his gun at the boy.
“Hold it right there,” he said.
Sam froze and squinted into the light. He raised his hands as the black-clad guard approached.
“What are you doing here, young man?”
“Looking for my father. Have you seen him?”
“There is no one in here. Do you realize you’re trespassing on secure federal property? Put your hands behind your head.”
Sam locked eyes with the guard. “You don’t need to arrest me.”
“I don’t need to arrest you,” the guard repeated in a monotone.
“I’m just some kid playing around, and you told me to get out.”
“You need to get out of here.”
“Okay, I will,” Sam said. “You hear something on the other end of the hangar and have to investigate.”
The guard cocked his head. “Did you hear that?”
He jogged away, disappearing around the tail of the wrecked airplane. Sam started toward the door into the tents, just as the door swung open. Ping staggered out, rubbing his arms, shivering. They both froze.
“Damn it, I told you to stay in the car. We have to get out of here. If they catch us, they will never let us go. This is much more serious than I had anticipated.”
As they headed for the back of the hangar, a second guard jumped out of the shadows, pointed his rifle. “Stop right there. Put your hands up!” he yelled.
Wide-eyed, Sam turned to Ping, but before Sam could speak, Ping evaporated into a cloud of dust. His body simply dispersed into nothingness, dissipated, blew away, molecule by molecule.
“Ping! Ping! Where’d you go?” Sam panicked. The guard had blown Ping away somehow, but Sam had not heard a gunshot. His face reddened, and he gritted his teeth. “What did you do?”
“Where did he go?” the guard said, his head looking quickly in both directions.
Sam turned on the guard. “You need to take a nap. You’re getting sleepy.”
The guard lay down on the spot, curled up into a fetal position and began to snore.
The boy swung his entire body around, waved his arms in the air.
“Ping! Ping!”
Sam ran the length of the tents, looked out toward the airliner and saw no sign of Ping. Walking back toward where the guard slept, Sam nearly sobbed.
“I’m so sorry, Ping. I should have stayed in the car. I’m sorry.” He sat on the cold concrete floor, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand.
A few minutes later, a soft hissing drew his attention. Between the shadows, in a band of ambient light, a small mote of dust spun and grew, pulling more material from the nearby dimness. The mass elongated into a vortex, gathering more material and growing darker, more dense. It stopped spinning, spread out into a cloud and took the shape of a man. It solidified as details emerged from the dust into features Sam recognized.
It was Ping. He wiped his hands over this chest as if getting rid of some lint and said, “You’re a prompter. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“And you’re a…a dust ball. Why didn’t you tell me?” Sam hugged him. “We need to get out of here. The prompts will only last for a few minutes. Once they change their minds, they’ll come after us.”
“Then let’s get out of here.” Ping took Sam’s arm and pulled him into the shadows at the back of the hangar. “Will they simply turn around and come after us once the prompts wear off?”
Sam jogged alongside Ping, following his lead without giving much thought to his surroundings. “They will only remember what happened up until the moment before they met me. If we don’t draw their attention again, they won’t come after us.”
Ping leaned into him and whispered, “Okay, then let’s slow down and get out of here quietly.”
They skulked to the rear wall of the hangar, stopped for a minute to listen for the guards. All they heard was the hum coming from the tents. Ping pointed to the right, toward the door he had entered. Sam nodded and followed.
Outside a light rain fell. Sam stepped away from the hangar wall, intending to bolt across the street to their car, but Ping stopped him.
“Wait. Let’s make sure there is not a guard around the corner who will see us leave.”
They sidestepped along the wall until they got to the end. Ping looked around the corner. He turned back to Sam and said, “Okay, let’s run for it.”
*
“What’s with the poofing or disappearing or whatever that was?” Sam stared at Ping’s face, tinged green from the dashboard lights.
“It’s called panic dispersal. It’s a survival mechanism that has evolved over millennia,” Ping said.
“So all the people where you’re from do this when they get scared?”
“It usually happens when someone is startled or in a life-threatening situation. Simply being afraid or scared doesn’t do it. And it’s not just people. All the animals have developed the same way.”
“Must be tough to be a lion on the hunt where you’re from.”
“They just have to be a little bit faster.”
“I don’t think the people here can disperse like that.”
“No, I’m pretty sure they can’t.”
“How are you so sure?”
“It’s not in any of the books or movies or televisions shows. Dispersal scenes
are some of the most compelling in our literature.”
“Yeah, I can see why.”
Ping glanced at Sam. “So tell me about being a prompter.”
“How do you know about prompters?”
“My field was metaphysics and applied philosophy. While the concepts I studied were theoretical, I am aware of prompters and the levels of sentience.”
“I don’t know what you mean by sentience, but it’s not that big of a deal. I can create thoughts and give them to people. They only last for a few minutes.”
“They lasted long enough to get us out of there. I’d say that’s a pretty big deal.”
“It’s nothing compared to what my sister can do.”
CHAPTER 25
MARA PLACED A damaged mantel clock on her work counter and was about to size it up when the bell above the door jangled, and a bald elderly man stepped into the shop. He looked to be eighty years old, six feet tall, but slightly hunched with age. He stepped gingerly, as if he doubted his legs would hold up.
“Hello, young lady.” He smiled as he walked to the counter. His eyes were bright and alert.
“How can I help you, sir?” She smiled back, noticing he was not carrying anything for her to repair.
“I have a friend who informs me that you might have some unique items that would make an excellent gift, especially for the nostalgic type.” He surveyed the shelves and the wall behind Mara.
“We occasionally do sell some of the items on the shelves, but our primary business is repairing things.”
“Do you mind if I look around?”
“Not at all. If you see something that interests you, let me know, and we’ll see if we can work something out.” She went back to her clock. The man nodded and turned to lean over the display counter.
After a few minutes, he said, “You know, I used to have a pocket watch just like that one.” He pointed into the case. “Where did you get it?”
“That’s actually one I found down in Crater Lake when I was ten years old. I was on a trip with my grandfather at the time.”
“Did you repair all the items in this store?”
“Oh, no. Mr. Mason, the owner, has been fixing things for decades. Most of these things he repaired, but I’ve done some in the last couple years.”
Broken Realms (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 1) Page 12
