There was an uncomfortable silence.
"Well, you see, when we were tracking you down, we enlisted some help from an acquaintance of mine" — I cleared my throat—"of the purple-headed persuasion. And it appears that she called all her friends, and they called their friends, and someone had us followed."
"That's what I figured." Mwadi shook her head. "And I thought you kids were so damn clever.
"It's my fault," Jen said.
"Not any more than mine," I protested.
Jen's knuckles turned white on the wheel as she grimly followed Flushing Avenue. "I was the one who told Hillary what we were doing."
"That was just to get her to help," I said. "You didn't plan on telling her what we found out, did you?"
"Of course not. But it was me who spilled the beans. It didn't even occur to me that Hillary might be playing us."
"Take this left," Wickersham said. "And shut up a second."I
She made a call, speaking quickly and softly into a cell phone, guiding Jen with gestures. I wondered what was being arranged for us at the other end of this trip now that we were in disgrace.
But part of me felt at peace: finally we had answers. Things had fallen into place, not far from our theories and paka-paka revelations: renegade cool hunters, a charismatic Innovator, a movement that wanted to rock the world. Maybe Jen and I really did know the territory.
It was nice to discover that sometimes the useless facts in my brain had some relevance, that my fantasy world matched up, at least occasionally, with the real one. That all my time spent reading the signals around me hadn't been completely wasted.
Maybe the signs had been around even before Mandy disappeared, as obvious as the stones in the street. People pushing back from being force-fed, ready to rebel; maybe Innovators only channel something that's already there. Maybe the Jammers had to happen.
And whatever else went down, at least Mandy was okay.
I leaned back and closed my eyes, exhausted. There was nothing more to do but wait for the car to get where it was going.
"That way. ' Mwadi Wickersham flicked her phone closed.
Jen turned, easing us down an alley, the sides of the car scraping stacks of garbage bags. We pulled into a bare courtyard, surrounded on every side by derelict buildings, their black windows watching us like empty eyes. A rental truck was already there, the one we'd spotted on Lispenard Street the day before.
Two figures were tossing shoe boxes from it into an unruly pile. My eyes caught the flicker of reflective panels as shoes tumbled out onto the dirt.
A third person stood next to the growing pile.
She was pouring gasoline onto it.
"No," I whispered.
The limo came to a crunching halt, a bottle popping under one tire. Mwadi leapt out, her wheels gliding across the rubbish-strewn courtyard like it was a hardwood rink.
Jen and I ran to the edge of the pile.
"What are you doing?"
"Getting rid of these, as per our agreement with the client," Wickersham said. "They'll get the prototypes and the specs. The last thing they want is the originals showing up on the street."
"You're burning them?" I cried. "They should be in a museum!"
She nodded sadly. "You got that right. But thanks to you two, our security's been compromised. We got to do this quick and dirty."
A match went down onto the pile, and the smell of burning gasoline rushed at us.
"No!" I cried.
Then a wave of heat forced us back, fire spreading across the pile like the sweep of a hand. Shoe-box lids popped off, carried up by the superheated air, revealing beautiful forms inside. The elegant lines warped and twisted, reflective panels glittering for a few seconds in the blaze before they blackened. The smell of burning plastic and canvas followed, forcing acid tears from my eyes.
Jen tried to shout something but only managed to cough into a clenched fist.
The pyre turned greedy, sucking the air around us into itself. Bits of paper rolled past my feet, drawn toward the blaze by the column of smoke climbing out of the courtyard. Sickeningly, I realized that the thick, black cloud overhead was the shoes, transmuted from something beautiful and original into shapeless smoke. I was breathing the dream shoes into my lungs, choking on them.
Mwadi Wickersham shouted orders into her cell phone as the last few boxes were thrown onto the fire before my eyes. I was forced back farther by the heat, helpless to prevent the conflagration. The shoes were going, going… gone.
Chapter 33
THEY LEFT US THERE.
"Wish we could work together, but you two are a risky proposition," Mwadi said, pulling herself up into the open maw of the truck.
"We didn't mean to lead them to you." Jen's face was blackened by smoke, streaked by tears. "We were just playing them for information."
"They wound up playing you."
"We'll be more careful next time, I swear."
Wickersham nodded. "You better be careful. The purple heads will be keeping their eyes on you. You're their only link to us. And that makes you useless for future operations."
"But we know the territory, like you said."
"Exactly, and the purple heads know you do. If you keep looking for us, you'll bring them straight to my doorstep."
"But—"
"Just forget we exist, Jen James. Pretend this never happened." She smiled. "If you're good, I'll put you on our mailing list."
Mwadi stamped her skate once against the metal bed of the truck, a sovereign, final sound, and it jerked forward, rumbling in a slow circle around the blackened pile, then out of the courtyard and down the alley.
Jen followed for a few steps, as if to plead her case again, but didn't say anything. She stood silent until the sound of the truck had faded to nothing.
When it was gone, she turned and faced the pile.
"There must be something left."
"What?"
"Pieces, clues." She strode forward to the blackened edge, teeth gritted, her feet kicking ash into the air. "Maybe we can find a sample of the canvas, or an eyelet, or one of those laces."
I almost smiled. With everything in ashes, Jen had returned to her roots: shoelaces.
She dropped to her knees in the smoking pyre, pushing her hands through the ruin, face averted from the heat still coming off the smoking plastic.
"Jen…"
"We might even find a whole shoe in here. When houses burn down, they always find weird stuff the fire didn't—" She lost the rest of her words, coughing from the smoke and ash she'd raised. Her hands went to her face, leaving solid black streaks on her cheeks. She gained control of her breathing, then spat out something black.
"Jen, are you crazy?"
She looked up at me, clearly wondering why I wasn't down there with her.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"What does it look like I'm doing? I'm looking for the damn shoes, Hunter. That's what we've been doing all along!"
I shook my head. "I was looking for Mandy."
She spread her blackened hands. "Well, she turned out to be fine. She's probably up for a promotion. You want to give up now? Just because Mwadi Wickersham tells us to?"
I sighed and walked into the pile, feeling the warmth of the ashes through the soles of my shoes. The sun had gone down, and the remaining light in the courtyard came from the still-glowing core of the fire. I knelt next to Jen.
"Give what up?"
"Looking."
"For what? The shoes are gone."
She shook her head, as hard and angry as a twelve-year-old forced to move to New Jersey. Like the answer couldn't be expressed in words, and only an idiot would think it could. She was looking for lost cool, the hardest thing to find.