“He didn’t like that job anyway.”
“He loved that job. He was totally broken up over losing it. Don’t you remember him looking everywhere for this thing?”
“His company didn’t need it as much as I did. The devil wanted me to have it. It wasn’t theirs to keep.”
“Mom…” What’s the point?
If he hadn’t gotten fired for losing the prototype, he would have gotten fired for something else Mom did anyway. It’s hard to be an engineer when your wife calls you every two minutes. And if he didn’t answer the call, she called the receptionist or his boss or random coworkers to find out if he was okay. And if nobody answered, then he might get a surprise visit from the police, wanting to talk to him about how his wife freaked out in public, screaming and yelling that they had gotten to her husband.
“What is that?” asks Clara.
“A prototype device for tracking pets,” I say. “It uses a tiny tracker. Waterproof and impact resistant. My dad showed it to us once. Apparently, my mom liked it a lot.”
“He was an engineer?”
“He was,” I say. I don’t tell her that by the time he finally left us, he was working night shifts at 7-Eleven, our nearest convenience store, where Mom could sit in the corner while he worked the cash register.
“My husband Brad was an engineer, too,” she says wistfully, almost to herself.
On my mom’s device, the arrow blinks and follows a path. Its target is on the move.
“What are we tracking?” I ask.
“Paige,” says Mom.
“How do you know this is Paige?” I ask, pretty sure this is another fantasy. It’s one thing to have Dad’s tracking device. It’s another to actually be tracking Paige, considering she needs to have the transmitter on her.
“The devil tells me.” She lowers her head, looking troubled. “If I promise him certain things,” she mumbles.
“Okay.” I rub my forehead, trying to be patient. There’s a certain art to getting information out of my mom. You need one foot in reality and one foot in her world to get a better picture of what she’s talking about. “How does the devil know where Paige is?”
She looks up at me as if I’d asked the dumbest question in the world.
“The transmitter, of course.”
25
SOMETIMES, even I make the mistake of underestimating my mother. It’s easy to assume that she’s not smart and cunning just because she believes in illogical things and makes poor decisions. But her condition has nothing to do with her intelligence. I forget that sometimes.
“Is the transmitter on Paige?” I hold my breath, not daring to breathe.
“Yes.”
“Where? How?” If Mom had put the transmitter in a bag or something, thinking that Paige would have it on her, then we might be following a Resistance trash truck instead of Paige.
“There.” Mom points to my shoe.
I look down and at first I don’t see anything. Then I realize that she’s not pointing at the shoe. She’s pointing at the yellow starburst sewn on the bottom of my jeans. I’m so used to these starbursts that I don’t even see them anymore.
I reach down to take a good look at the star for the first time. A hard corner beneath the yellow threads pokes into my thumb. It’s tiny and unnoticeable, or at least I’ve never noticed it.
“This is you,” she says, with her finger on the lower arrow in Redwood City.
“This is Paige.” She moves her finger to the upper arrow in San Francisco.
Could she have gone so far in such a short time?
I take a deep breath. Who knows what she’s capable of doing now?
I remember Dad showing us a tiny flake of a chip perched on the tip of his finger. He had handfuls of them in the container with the receiver. The chip was covered in plastic coating that made it dirt-free and waterproof, so the dogs could roll in the mud and be sprayed off without affecting the transmitter.
This is how Mom showed up so regularly when Raffe and I were on the road. This is how she ended up at the aerie.
“Mom, you’re a genius.”
My mother looks surprised. Then she beams a delighted smile. I haven’t seen her this happy since I don’t know when. Her face radiates joy like a little girl who just found out she did something right for the first time in her life.
I nod. “Good job, Mom.” Kind of a disturbing eye-opener to realize that your own parent needs encouragement from you.
WE DITCH the noisy police car for a quiet electric vehicle that has the keys in the ignition.
I rummage through the police cruiser’s glove compartment and trunk for anything useful to transfer into the new car. I score binoculars and a grab-and-go bag full of emergency supplies. If there’s one thing Obi’s men are good at, it’s survival on the run. I suspect all the Resistance vehicles have these.
Clara takes me aside on our way into the new car. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she whispers.
“Don’t worry. I know my chances of finding Paige are slim.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean about your mom.”
“Believe me, I have no hopes about her.”
“But you do. I can see it. There’s a saying, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ Well, the reverse is true too. Just because someone’s out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The world going crazy doesn’t mean your mother isn’t still crazy, too.”
I pull back from her. I wasn’t thinking that.
Not really.
But did she have to steal that possibility away from me?
“I used to be a nurse. I know how hard this kind of condition can be for a family. It can help to talk about it. I just don’t want you to get hurt, thinking your mom might be—”
I kick in the headlights and running lights on the new car to keep it from being a beacon. I smash them so hard the bulbs are practically pulverized.
We don’t need those lights. There’s enough moonlight to see the hulks of cars on the road even if we can’t see much detail.
I slide into the passenger seat.
“Sorry,” says Clara as she slips into the driver’s seat.
I nod.
And that’s the end of that ugly topic.
She turns on the engine and we head north again slowly toward San Francisco.
“Why are you here, Clara? My mom and I aren’t exactly the best traveling mates.”
She drives in silence for a while. “I may have lost faith in humanity. Maybe they’re right to exterminate us.”
“What does that have to do with you traveling with us?”
“You’re a hero. I’m hoping you’ll restore my faith and show me that we’re worth saving.”
“I am so not a hero.”
“You saved my life back at the aerie. By definition, you’re my hero.”
“I left you in a basement to die.”
“You broke me out of the grasp of a living horror when I thought all hope was gone. You gave me the opportunity to crawl back to life when no one else could.”
She glances over at me, her eyes shining in the dark. “You’re a hero, Penryn, whether you like it or not.”
26
MY MOTHER mutters nonstop at the receiver. Her voice turns into a cadence, and it creeps me out that it’s the same cadence as when she prays. Because this time, she’s addressing the devil.
It’s slow going weaving through dead cars in the dark but we manage. We follow the same route that Raffe and I had when we drove into the city. Only this time, there’s no one on the road. No refugees, no twelve-year-olds driving cars, no tent cities. Just mile after mile of empty streets, newspapers tumbling along the sidewalks, and abandoned cell phones crunching under our tires.