Chapter 16 #2
Time smears around us. Lost somewhere outside its steady flow, I order pancakes in a haze.
Bas asks for a Mountain O’ Meat. It arrives ten minutes later, steaming and perfect, smelling so good my stomach rumbles like thunder in the distance.
I barely hear it. I can’t look away from the wrinkled woman in the booth over Bas’s shoulder, smiling at her gray-headed husband with an old adoration in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asks, but I can’t answer. I swallow hard but can’t choke down the knot of jealousy swelling my throat closed, entranced by the gentle, ordinary beauty of some strangers’ lives.
What’s that like? Living with someone for so long you build a routine? Waking up to the same face every day, the same house, the same life?
She’s wearing a necklace, too, a dainty little diamond pendant to keep her head on straight.
Did her husband pick it for her? Did he buy it knowing she’d wear it every day for the rest of their lives?
Does he suspect how long that’ll be? Does he know the length of his own life’s thread?
Can he feel himself coming to its end? Does death lurk around his blind corners, a constant companion, an inevitable given?
Does he fit in his body? Does he feel his soul straining at its seams?
Is he afraid? Am I allowed to be? Does a weapon—a fucked-up government science experiment—even have the right?
“What are we doing?” I whisper, eyes flicking over to find his. “What’s our plan here?”
Bas blinks at me, tongue darting out to chase an errant drop of egg yolk. “That was the plan? Get you, get out.”
“If what Cain said is true, that’s not a long-term solution.
If it was just my mom, sure, we could outrun her until I turn eighteen.
But it’s not just my mom. It’s the DNR, too, and…
” I falter, staring out the window at a ghost light flickering in the wind, caught like windblown garbage.
Quietly, I finish: “What about the dead?”
Hunching, Bas stabs a sausage hard enough his fork squeals against the plate.
“What about them? As long as we keep moving, they won’t have time to swarm. No swarm to track, no DNR. We’ll be fine.”
“You know that’s not what I’m asking,” I snap.
Bas’s eyes flick to mine, then away, faster than I can read the emotion in them.
“They’ll fend for themselves,” he says. “They’ve had seventeen years of practice. Another couple won’t hurt them.”
“So we just let them suffer? When we’re the only ones who can fix it?”
“Can we, though? The entire country is swamped with ghosts. We opened one door and DNR climbed up our ass. What you’re asking…” He shakes his head. Grimacing, Bas looks away. “It’s not possible. This is bigger than we are.”
After last night—after what I learned, what I am—his words stab me straight in the gut.
“How can anything be bigger than we are, considering what we are?”
Bas sets his fork down with uncommon care. His eyes find mine.
“What we were, Jenny,” he says, so soft and sad. Like he’s breaking bad news gently. Like he’s telling me something true. No—I won’t swallow it. I refuse. We were gods; since when did the rules ever apply to us?
“So, what?” I demand. “You want us to live like fugitives, avoiding ghosts and my—” The word sticks in my throat, caught on the memory of Cain’s smile.
“Babynapper?” Bas helpfully supplies.
“And my babynapper, forever?” My teeth click on the word, so sharp my jaw aches.
It hangs in the air between us, misshapen and ill-fitting, not nearly vast enough to contain the nuance of everything she is to me.
“We just pretend to be normal, filling up all the memories we lost with—with pancakes and meat mountains and road trips?”
Bas’s smile fades. He chews the inside of his lip, staring at me with brow furrowed like I’ve gone insane.
Like his heart is breaking.
“Doing pretty good so far,” he murmurs, too gently.
It hurts me worse than a slap across the face. I would have preferred a fight. I have practice with anger; this determined gentleness unmakes me. Eyes burning, I glance away, flop back against the too-warm vinyl seat.
“It’s not fair,” I protest sullenly, flexing my hands, haunted by the dream of a jackal-headed god and the balance of bronze scales. “It doesn’t weigh the same.”
My skin itches, threatening to spit me out. I dig a fingernail into my thumb pad and for a wild, terrible moment, I expect to hear it click on bone.
Bas’s hand creeps across the table.
“But it’s us,” he urges quietly. “That’s what matters. We’ll make something new.”
“And destroy the world in doing it?” I cross my arms before he can reach me, before he can twine his fingers through mine and hand me memories of who I was while telling me it doesn’t matter.
“Asphodel doesn’t grow in the US, dead boy.
How long before our invasive species covers everywhere we run to?
Climate change has already killed so much.
Do we really want to be responsible for that too?
And how long before we’re traveling with a ghost swarm ten miles across.
We could hurt people. We”—I swallow hard, slumping—“we are hurting people,” I realize. “Our inaction is hurting them.”
A muscle flickers in Bas’s jaw.
“Everyone dies eventually.”
“Not like this.” I meet his eyes, hard, half an accusation. “Not before their time. Not alone and scared, trapped on the wrong side of the river. We’re not doing our job.”
Bas jerks back. His eyes snap to mine, fingers tightening so hard around his fork the metal bends.
“What are you saying?” he demands through his teeth. “What do you want me to do? I just found you.”
“I’m not asking you to leave.”
“It sounds like you’re asking me to die,” he snarls, hurting, and my heart seizes.
The idea of a world without him in it—my hand scrabbles across the table. His bent fork juts through our tangled fingers, ordinary and small and sad, meat and pancakes in the face of war.
My eyes sting. I want to laugh.
“This is stupid,” I choke, voice thick. I force myself to let go, shove my traitor hands under my arms. “This is so stupid. I don’t even know you! I lost the parts that knew you. I shouldn’t care like this.”
Bas cracks a sad little smile. “Who says?”
And I have protests for that. I have logic and common sense and an argument that sounds like my mother giving me a lecture about boys and losing my head—but the moment breaks on the sharp edge of a siren, droning from Bas’s pocket.
“Why do you get to have a phone?”
Frowning, Bas reaches for it.
“It’s a burner. Nobody knows to track it,” he mutters, distracted, tracing a complicated password into the lock screen. The moment he finishes, his face falls. His shoulders go hard, hands tense.
“What is it?” I whisper. “Remnant warning?”
His eyes find mine across the table.
“It’s an Amber Alert,” he says. “They’re looking for you.”
Someone turns up the TV volume. Or else, suddenly, it’s the only thing I can hear, my own name in the announcer’s mouth. And there’s my picture on the screen, my own smiling face staring at me in accusation—temple to temple with Bas in the leaves.
I can’t breathe. My stomach drops out of my body entirely, leaving me empty and cold, waiting for the earth to swallow me and God, I swear I can feel it yawning.
“How do they have that picture?” I whisper. “That was on my phone. I put it in a secret folder.”
My mind flicks back to the night before, Mom calling me to dinner, my research crumbling in my hands.
This website has been blocked. Contact administrator.
“She hacked my phone,” I hiss between my teeth, furious. “She’s been hacking my phone. That’s why she never confiscated it. Because she had it cloned the whole time. She was using it to spy on me.”
My ears throb. Bas’s mouth moves. I pick the words from his lips—oh shit—but I can’t hear him. It takes all my attention just to focus on my own face, the emotionless newscaster breaking in and out like a bad connection.
“…a two-man team… believed to be acting as father and son… male, early forties, last known alias Cain Lokke… alias of the younger partner, pictured here beside the missing girl, is currently unknown.”
Unknown. Unknown because my mother never heard it. Because she broke into my phone, spying on me without permission, but I saved him in my contacts as Big Mouth, set his picture to a stupid singing fish.
“… believed to be headed south from the Pittsburgh area in a 1990 Ford Falcon RV but police advise all states highlighted on the map here to be on the lookout…”
South? We’re not heading south, we’re heading west, well away from that mess. But my brief shiver of relief shatters on the newscaster’s final line.
“Her mother urges anyone involved to come forward and says she will be praying for her daughter’s safe return.”
Betrayal boils into confusion, my anxious thoughts colliding in painful starbursts. Praying? Mom doesn’t pray. When Mom gets stressed, she does science. She has no faith in organized religion, trusts only what she can prove with research and strict methodology.
She would never say she was praying.
My stomach twists, rotting on a gut-hook instinct. Something’s wrong. Something’s weird. I don’t understand. But we’re out of time. Bas shovels in the last of his meat mountain, scrubs his mouth of grease.
“We can’t stay here,” he says and starts to stand. I grab his sleeve before he can move any farther, forcing him back down into his seat. “Jenny—”
“Not together,” I insist. “Someone threw you and Cain to the wolves—and I’m not sure it was my mom. Everyone will be looking for teenagers in pairs, but they probably won’t notice us separately.”
Slowly, Bas relaxes. He slumps into his seat, tips his head toward the window so no one will see, glancing at me from the corner of his eye.
“You’ve got a plan?”
In the back of the diner, beside a kitschy arrow pointing out the bathrooms, glows a green emergency exit sign. Swallowing hard, I nod.
“It’s not a great plan,” I admit. “But it worked last time.”