“You stay here,” I tell him. “You watch the hole.”
“Okay,” he says, saluting me, settling cross-legged in the center of the garage. “I’ll watch the hole.”
On my way out I stop in the holding room, gratified to see that the 1.5-liter bag of saline solution is empty, sagging and curling at the top like a flattened balloon. The area around the needlestick in Lily’s extended right arm seems just fine also, no purple radius of traumatized tissue around the entry point. Lily, or whatever her name is. Poor girl. Somebody’s something. I step into the cell with her and run my finger gently along the length of her lips; they’re dry still but not nearly so dry, not deathly dry. She’s taking fluid.
“Good job, kid,” I say to her. “Good for you.”
Except for the not inconsiderable problem that if Lily is taking fluid she should be passing it, and she is not. There’s no urine, which is warning me of something but what exactly I don’t know, because my medical training is limited and specific, first responder material, crime scene materiaclass="underline" administering rescue breaths and patching wounds and minimizing blood loss. Piecing together bedside medical clues is uncharted territory. It’s a crossword puzzle in a language I don’t know.
I stand up on a chair and I carefully unhook the bag and switch it out, and that’s all she wrote for my saline-solution supply. Whatever else is going on with this girl, I have reached the limits of my ability to affect medical intervention. At this point her condition has become binary; she will either die or not.
“You’re going to be okay,” I tell her. “You’re going to be fine.”
And that’s it, I’m ready to go, except for a sharp jag of memory, a flash from last night’s dream: Nico, scowling and untrusting, whispering urgently, keep an eye on your goon.
Disturbed, uneasy, I look back down the hallway at the garage, where he is sitting, smoking, waiting. It’s not fair; it was a dream; Nico doesn’t even know the man. But then neither do I, exactly. He is good company, and I have taken advantage of his various competencies, but I suddenly feel how far I am from really knowing him—certainly from knowing him enough to trust him.
And meanwhile, the girclass="underline" asleep, vulnerable, alone. I picture Cortez’s crooked smile, his eyes dancing along Lily’s recumbent figure, admiring her like a bowl of fruit.
It’s an old-fashioned jailer’s key they’ve got here, hanging on an old-fashioned hook. I push closed the door of the cell area, give it a good shake to make sure it’s closed and locked. Then I take the key off the hook and toss it through the bars, where it lands and skitters to the back wall of the cell.
Wednesday, August 22
I’ve got Abigail calmed down now, I’ve got a conversation going, I’ve got lucidity flickering in and out of her eyes.
I showed her my badge and my gun, explained that I am a retired Concord police officer working on a case, not an alien trailing a veil of cosmic dust, not someone from NASA here to inject her with antimatter. We’re at a small, rickety table in the back of the store, in the same back room where I once sat behind Jordan and watched him access the Internet, access the NCIC database, subjected myself to his taunting contempt to gain his help on my case.
We’re sitting at the table and Abigail is telling me haltingly, tiredly, that Jordan is not here and she does not know where he is.
“He is supposed to be here. We were supposed to be here together. Those were our instructions.”
“Instructions from who?”
She shrugs. Her body movements are jerky, pained. “Jordan talked to them.”
“To who?”
She shrugs again. She is staring at the table, pushing a torn corner of a piece of paper around with her finger, first this way and then another, like she is moving it on an invisible game board.
“What were the instructions?”
“Stay—stay here.”
“In Concord?”
“Yeah. Here. Resolution had been found. At a base. Gary, Indiana.”
“Resolution. That’s the scientist? Hans-Michael Parry.”
“Yeah. And the others were going to find him, go to the last phase, but we were to stay.” She looks up, sticks out her bottom lip. “Me and him. But then Jordan went away. Gone, gone. I was alone. And then the dust started to float in.” She stammers. “It—it—it just floated in.”
It’s like she reminds herself of it, of her invisible torment—she starts looking this way and then that, scowling into the corners of the room, rubbing at her skin where it’s coated with the cosmic dust.
“And when was this? Abigail? When did he leave?”
“Not that long. A week ago? Two weeks? It’s hard because then the dust started coming. Coming on in.”
“I know it’s hard,” I say, and I’m thinking, stay with me, sister, just a bit further. We’re almost there. “So the group, when they left, they were traveling to Gary, Indiana?”
She scowls, bites at her lower lip. “No, no. That’s where they found Resolution. But the recon spot was in Ohio. A police station in Ohio.”
Ohio. Ohio. As soon as she says it I know that’s where I’m going, as soon as she says the word—that is the target. The last known location of the missing individual. Nico is in Ohio.
I move forward in my seat, nearly toppling the table with my eagerness.
“Where in Ohio? What town?”
I wait for her to answer, holding my breath, teetering on the edge of discovery, like a drop of water on the side of a glass.
“Abigail?”
“I can feel the planet spinning. That’s also happening. It makes me dizzy and nauseous. But I can’t stop feeling it. Can you—do you understand that?”
“Abigail, what is the name of the town in Ohio?”
“First you have to help me,” she says, and reaches out her hands in their latex gloves and covers my hands. “I can’t do it. I’m too scared to do it.”
“Do what?” I say, but I already know, I can feel it pouring out of her eyes. She pushes one of her semiautomatics across the table to me.
“I know the name of the town. I have a map. But then you do it and do it fast.”
PART TWO
Blue Town Man
1.
Here is how I know that she’s not dead: because she’s never dead. Like that time I found her in White Park, tucked fairylike in the shade beneath the slide, after Dad’s funeral. You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen? And she was right, I had thought so, and she’s given me periodic occasion to think so ever since. Since the year that our parents died I have carried this foretaste of her doom like a sourness in my stomach, this cold certainty that one day she too would slip away: one of her dimwitted underachieving boyfriends would involve her in a drug deal gone wrong, or the junk-shop motorcycle she drove around her sophomore year would catch a patch of ice and flip, or she would simply be the kid who drinks too much at the party and is carried off in a stretcher while the others stand like cows, staring and swaying in the red flash of the emergency lights.
And yet again and again she has managed to swim successfully through the tides of her life, a fish flashing through the dark foam, even in these last terrible months. It was not her, but her deadbeat husband, Derek, who disappeared, sacrificed to the murky goals of her crackpot organization. And it was not her but me who nearly died in a fort in southeastern Maine, shot in the arm on the hunt for a missing man. It was Nico, that time, who rescued me, coming up over the horizon in that shocking, impossible helicopter.