Epilogue Day One #4
"The truth is Katie, I don't have any real access," Emma said, her voice low. "I'm nobody here. Not yet at least. A lemming, if I'm lucky." Katie laughed and Emma smiled at her. "But I want to try and help you."
Nobody had said that to Katie in three years. Three years of JPL heads turning her away, three years of empty promises or no information at all, three years of wondering what happened to her sister and whether she was okay.
Katie lifted her arms and hugged Emma, right there on the path, before she'd thought it through. But the gratitude was so big it had to go somewhere, and Katie's arms were the only place it fit.
"Thank you," Katie said softly as she pulled away. Emma had the decency not to look shocked.
"You're welcome," she said. "Let's see what we can do today. Because even if all I can do is get you on campus so you can go bother people that may have answers for you, I'm in."
Emma smiled, and Katie felt a bit of the anxiety she'd been carrying for three years start to lift. So she smiled back.
They met off-campus later that week and came up with a plan.
But records led nowhere, names turned out to be nothing. There were late nights at Emma's kitchen table with files spread out and the radio on low, because Emma always had the radio on.
And suddenly, three years went by.
Katie watched a bored intern become a woman with a security clearance and, somewhere during it all, Katie earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology, studying how a people holds together and how it comes apart. Emma had understood exactly why she'd chosen it the first time Katie said it out loud.
And throughout all of it, the whole three years since meeting Emma, a question lingered in the back of Katie's mind that she kept needing to de-escalate.
There was only so much of Katie to go around, and every part of her that wasn't already spoken for with school and life had Charlie's name on it.
"Do I like women, too?" was a question for a time after she found Charlie.
In fact, everything was for after she found Charlie.
That was the deal she'd made with her own life, and she'd kept it for six years.
But then, three weeks ago, Emma got promoted, and last night, she called at three o'clock in the morning and told Katie she thought she may have found something.
Here they are, indeed.
They walked down the last corridor and into a room that was small and cold and lit too bright.
There was a table. And then there was a single sealed case on it.
"This is it?" Katie said.
"This is what got flagged and buried the day Charlie disappeared, six years ago.
" Emma set her badge on the table. "Materials recovered from the lab she was in.
Logged, sealed, marked unidentified, and never opened again.
It took my new, shiny security clearance and me four days to even find the record that it existed. "
Katie looked at the case.
She felt the weight of her backpack on her back as she stared at it.
She didn't want to take it off. It held six years of new mixtapes for Charlie, and she'd gotten superstitious about being caught without them.
Every song she'd loved since 1990, taped off the radio and out of her own collection, one cassette a season, labeled in her own handwriting.
For when I find you. She had never once stopped making them.
Charlie was going to have a lot of catching up to do.
If I ever find her.
Emma's radio, the little one she had in her apartment and then moved to her office when she was officially hired at JPL, sat on the corner of the table.
It was already on, "Mr. Blue Sky" starting up, all strings and downbeat and open sky, the sound of a morning that thought something wonderful was about to happen.
Katie reached for the case.
"Katie," Emma's voice shifted. "Maybe not with your bare—"
Katie opened it.
Inside were a few small, dark fragments
They weren't very remarkable, and Katie couldn't hide some disappointment. Six years of everything, and it came down to a handful of gravel in a box?
She picked up the largest piece.
It was cool, and far too light for its size. She turned it in the fluorescent light.
"It's a fucking rock, Emma," Katie said, her disappointment rising. "It's nothing, another piece of nothing at the end of another dead end."
Then it started to hum. It came up through Katie's fingers, and then the fragment began to glow in a color she didn't think existed. In fact, she knew, instantly, she had never seen it before.
Katie looked at the light in her hand.
"Well, shit."
"Katie!" Emma was already moving.
Her hand closed around Katie's wrist.
The fragment erupted in light.
And a sound that was electric and wrong tore through the lab. All the debris in the case rattled. The fluorescent lights above flickered and then surged. Then the fragment blazed with new light, light that shouldn't exist, light that had no color and every color all at once.
And then the room was empty. The case lay open on the table with the fragment on the floor where it had dropped from a hand that wasn't there anymore.
The only thing left was a radio, playing to an empty room about the sun, and the sky, and not a single cloud in sight.