Deadline

vapor lock, and Mahir shouts at the embassy trying to get a call through to his wife, and you…”

“I see dead people walking around and giving me orders. Great.” I offered her a pained smile as I pulled the van door open. “At least I like having you here. This would get old damn fast if you were Mom.”

George grimaced exaggeratedly. “There’s a bright side to everything.”

“Really? What’s the bright side for Florida? Because I’m really not seeing one.” Our field equipment was piled haphazardly around the van’s interior, stacked on counters and taking up most of the floor space. It would take an hour, maybe more, to get the thing ready for an excursion. I couldn’t blame Maggie and Alaric for putting it away in this condition—they weren’t expecting to leave the house without a lot of notice, and they weren’t field operatives —but I still had to grit my teeth when I saw that the weapon racks hadn’t been properly secured. If we had to run for any reason, we’d all wind up getting killed by our own carelessness.

“If you’re not seeing one, I can’t see it either. You know that.”

I bit back the urge to swear at her. Fighting with George used to be one of my best ways of blowing off steam. I’ve mostly tried to avoid it since she’s been gone; it doesn’t seem fair to start something when neither of us can really leave the room. Besides, in my saner days, I was always afraid I’d say something unforgivable and she’d leave me alone with the dark behind my eyes, and no more George, ever. I wasn’t so much afraid of that anymore. We just didn’t have time to fight.

“Hey, George, do me a favor, will you? Either go away, or stop pointing out how you’re just a figment of my imagination and help me find the damn booster. I can’t handle having you hanging around calling me crazy. I get enough of that from everybody else.”

“Your wish is y command,” she deadpanned, before climbing up to join me in the van. She couldn’t touch anything, naturally, but her feet still made soft echoing sounds when they hit the floorboards, and her shadow on the walls moved just the way that it was supposed to. I had to admire the realism of my hallucinations, even though I knew that probably wasn’t what most people would consider to be a good sign.

“Really? ’Cause right now, what I’m wishing for is a tank.” I paused. “Maybe two tanks. Becks will probably want one, too, and I don’t want to be greedy.”

“Always thinking of others, that’s you.” Her fingers brushed the back of my neck as she moved past me. I shivered. “The last time I saw the booster, Buffy was stowing it back here, with the rest of the backup network hardware.”

“We moved that around Valentine’s Day, when Becks did her ‘romantic places to take an Irwin’ article series.” I snapped my fingers. “The lockboxes!”

George leaned against the counter to watch as I dropped to my knees, rolled back the industrial rug covering the van floor, and pried up the trapdoor it had been concealing. We don’t have a complete second floor in the van— the weight would have been prohibitive, not to mention the structural instability it would have introduced—but we had a few extra storage compartments built in for a rainy day during the first major retrofit. They made good hiding spots for contraband when we were doing certain types of articles, and the rest of the time, they were a convenient place to hide snack foods… or excess hardware.

The first compartment held nothing but weird-looking cartoon porn and Russian girlie magazines. I smiled despite myself. “Damn, Dave. You had smarts and you had guts, but what you did not have was taste.”

“He was pretty much in love with Magdalene,” said George.

I amended: “Most of the time, what you didn’t have was taste. Sometimes, you were spot on.” I pried open the second compartment. A metal box with half a dozen antennae welded to the sides was nestled in the bottom, padded by wads of duct tape. I reached down to wriggle it loose, lifting it carefully out of its cradle. “There we go.”

“Remember, there’s supposed to be a detached battery pack that goes with it.”

“Right.” I stuck my hand into the welter of duct tape, rummaging for a moment before pulling up a small metal square with a power adapter at one end and a USB port at the other. “Got it!” I held it up, turning to show her.

George was gone. Again.

I stopped for a second, looking at the space where she’d been—hadn’t been—had appeared to be—only a moment before. Then I sighed, lowering the battery pack as I picked the wireless booster back up and pushed myself to my feet. “This stage of the crazy is going to get real old, real fast, you know.”

Sorry. But you’re still too sane to sustain that sort of breakdown for very long.

“Guess this means that whole ‘not forever’ thing we talked about before is sort of moot, huh?” My hads moved automatically as I spoke, pulling a bag from under the counter and sliding the wireless booster inside.

I think that depends on you, said George apologetically. I’m not the one who needs to move on. I’m the one who’s here because you still need me.

“Yeah, well, right now? Right now, I think being crazy may be the only thing that’s keeping me sane. Come on.”

I closed the van door and made my way back across the garage. The house security system didn’t say anything. I guess it was smart enough to recognize that I hadn’t gone near any of the exits. That, or it just wasn’t in the mood to argue with me. I didn’t care either way.

Alaric and Becks were still at the kitchen table, in the exact positions they were in when I went into the garage. There was one difference: Half of Becks’s guns were gone, making room for me to put down the bag. “Alaric, you got an extension cord?”

“In my laptop bag,” he said. As he bent to retrieve it, he asked, “Did you find the wireless booster?”

“I did. Got any idea how it works?”

“Not really.”

“That explains why we stopped using it. I guess we’re going to have to hope that my classic ‘smack it until it works’ approach can save the day.” I sat, unpacking the wireless booster and connecting it to the battery pack. Alaric passed me an extension cord. I hooked it to the battery, and Becks took the other end, plugging it into the wall.

Try not to break anything you can’t fix.

“Hush, you,” I said vaguely. “Working now.”

Becks and Alaric exchanged a glance, but didn’t say anything. That was probably the best thing they could have done.

Buffy built all her own equipment. That would have been fine—a lot of people build their own equipment—if it weren’t for the fact that her idea of what equipment should look like was almost completely defined by pre-Rising television. She could put more wires, switches, and buttons on a single remote than anybody else I’ve ever met, and each one had a specific purpose. She also understood that by her standards, she worked with a bunch of ham- handed techno-illiterates. After the fifth time George tried to reboot a server by putting her foot through it, Buffy started putting idiot buttons on everything. They wouldn’t provide access to the more complicated functions, but they’d get things going.

“Red,” I mumbled. “Red, red, red…” Red buttons used to be common. They were visible, hard to miss, and universally understood as important. After the Rising, red took on another meaning: It became the color of infection, the color of danger… the color of death. Red buttons were installed on things that needed the capacity to self-destruct, and they represented the things that you should never, under any circumstances, touch. So of course Buffy, with her perverse sense of humor and pre-Rising aesthetic, made all the really good stuff red.

The center button on the booster’s control panel was a glossy shade of strawberry red. Becks and Alaric knew Buffy by reputation and through staff meetings, but she was dead before they joined the standing office team. They never learned some of her little quirks. So it wasn’t really surprising to see Alaric come halfway to his feet when I hit the button. Becks managed not to stand. She did have to stop herself before she grabbed my arm, but hey, at least she stopped herself.

I took my finger off the button. The wireless booster made a cheerful beeping sound as it started scanning the local network, looking for exploitable cracks in the security. I looked from Becks to Alaric, smiled, and stood.

“Give it five minutes,” I said. “I’m going to get myself a Coke. Either of you want anything?”

Neither of them did.

The wireless booster clicked to itself, occasionally beeping as it verified some part of the network structure to