“Go!” Rudd yelled, jumping into the front seat. The driver, a black man in a Memphis Grizzlies hat and sunglasses, began to back out of the ramp.
William looked to Lily. “You got out.”
“Barely,” Quincy said. “One minute later and we would have been burnt toast.”
William saw Rudd turn angrily to the windshield. “Don’t speed, for God’s sake. Make it seem like we’re out for a leisurely drive. We were pretty far down that ramp, maybe nobody saw what happened back there. That agent stayed on the floor. If we’re lucky, he didn’t see the license plate…”
Rudd rubbed his eyes. William could see the sleeve of his shirt was singed.
“Do we need to get you to a doctor—?”
“What we need to do is get you out of here,” Rudd snapped.
“How…” William began. “How did you even know where I was?”
“We didn’t,” Quincy said, motioning to Lily. “Looks like you have your own personal tracking device—”
“Can you all just be quiet?” Rudd said. “Please.”
William felt the girl slide up against him. He lifted his arm and she leaned against his chest.
“I’m a monster,” she whispered.
She looked up at him, the proximity to her bringing forth a sensation, almost a jolt, that threatened to take his breath away.
“I’m a monster in the mountain,” she said.
She then snuggled up closer to him and closed her eyes.
He stared at her in stunned realization, almost reaching down to place his finger under her chin, lifting so she would have to look up.
He was wrong to think that Lily looked familiar when he found her inside his trailer. Nothing about her—the tightly-pulled hair, cheeks still round with baby fat, the dimpled chin—was recognizable.
But he knew her.
In his nightmares, a pair of eyes watched each disaster, including the dying people at the hospital. Doctors rushing, gurneys wheeling, sunken skin and faces ultimately covered by white sheets, all observed from another who was somehow inside the stone formations in the distance.
Each time, he went from witnessing the horrors himself at the hospital to being trapped within that stone. There, in the dark, with something slithering across his skin, his only companion was that singular pair of eyes.
I’m a monster in the mountain.
Eyes belonging to the girl beside him.
The helicopter’s blades tossed the flags of the federal building, the last light of day falling across the building’s hundreds of windows. Without an official helipad, the helicopter had to circle the building to position itself to land in a small grassy courtyard.
Circle for hours if you want, Kate thought. Circle for days.
She needed more time to think, to attempt to process what she’d read. The few hours hadn’t been enough.
A lifetime might not be enough.
You were wrong. You have been wrong the entire time.
She felt like an elephant had settled onto her chest. She’d made many difficult decisions in the past fourteen years, from calling for a congressional investigation into a prominent member of her own party using taxpayer dollars to take luxurious trips overseas under the guise of business development, to approving a budget that increased welfare benefits and military appropriations but sank the country further into debt.
Centrist Democrats is what we are, her father often said. And we vote with our mind, but lead with our guts.
But no decision, no maneuver, no judgment came anywhere close to the agony of declaring herself a nominee for father’s vacant seat without discussing it with him, knowing she could no longer associate with her own family.
Yes, she was infuriated by what she’d read in the government investigation into Argentum. But what very few knew is that she privately went to the town herself, to question the staff at the hospital. Hearing denial after denial, a sliver of doubt wormed its way into her heart, which had always aggressively protected her family. And when her own mother—her rock, her guiding star, her dependable foundation—refused to even discuss what happened with her own family, citing her desire to protect them all, that sliver began to expand.
Her father’s abrupt decision to step away from the Senate had been the final straw. She’d lashed out at him, saying he was officially destroying what was left of the family’s good name. Her father, always strong to the point of being defiant, seemed different now. Older. Weary. He’d listened to her furious words saying he was being caught up in a ridiculous conspiracy. He’d simply said, “I believe your mother,” and was committing all his time to her work. She’d left the office that day vowing to not speak to him for an entire day until she cooled off.
Instead, she’d gone directly to meet with trusted strategists. A day turned into weeks and months. There was the campaign, and then the election, and then assembling her staff. Her work was all-consuming. Her dedication to her constituents and her country earned her a reputation as a tireless public servant. The corridors of power had slowly opened up to her, extending the type of access most politicians dream of: to the oval office and a second-term president.
It only cost her a family.
When her father died, she’d realized their fight over his decision to leave politics was the last time they’d ever spoken.
After reading the files on her mother and nephew on the flight from DC, she kept thinking about her father’s face that day of their final conversation. She couldn’t pinpoint then if he was just exhausted from having to make such a monumental decision. But she recalled thinking she’d never seen him look that way.
Having now examined the records from the SSA, she understood. She’d never seen her father look that frightened before.
How much her mother had revealed to her father about what happened in Argentum, Kate didn’t know. But if her mother had told him half of what was contained within the files, then she understood why he was so afraid.
Kate wished she could have seen the videos referenced in the pages herself, of the interrogation of her mother when she was a little girl, and of William at seven years old. All she had was the transcript, but what both of them described, especially William, of why they were returned, and what frightening abilities rested within them, made her physically ill.
She also desperately wanted to know why a large portion of the file on her mother was missing. Stolen, the SSA director had said. An internal problem that we’re still looking into.
But she had seen the videos of the little girl and what she’d done in those moments in the field and at the airport before those fanatics took them all.
“It’s happening again, Senator,” the SSA’s director had said, leaning on his desk. “All you have to see for proof is on any news network’s website.”
He’d then turned around his laptop to reveal CNN’s front page, showing the next burgeoning hurricane on the coast of New Orleans.
“Take your pick. Hurricanes on the coasts of twelve countries now. Wildfires too. Uprising in violence and hospitals suddenly overrun with people dying rapidly of diseases. Over and over. But faster and more powerful than before. And when you look at this,” he said, calling up the surveillance video from the airport, “you understand why.”
She’d told him she needed time to examine the records. He’d allowed her to take copies of them home, and arranged for them to have a conference call at seven. By midafternoon, the news about the disaster in Memphis and William’s appearance broke, and she’d called, demanding to speak with him. Director Wolve was already dispatched to Memphis, she was told. But he had staff coming to her at that very moment.
When the men in suits arrived, they had with them a signed order from the FBI. Having read and reread the files repeatedly at that point, she’d co-signed the document, and accepted the agency’s offer to fly her to Memphis.