didn’t get it back up.
The three soldiers were out of the van, confused but awaiting orders. Thackery, who conveniently liked to give orders, gave them one. They restrained Fujiwara with plastic ties around his wrists and ankles and left him lying in the dirt.
Hector looked at his own watch and came to the obvious conclusion that he didn’t have time to question Fujiwara. “Let’s get the machine out. Now!” he directed, and the soldiers moved with him to the back of the van. The four of them began to lift and move the machine considerably faster and with somewhat less care than they’d loaded it. “I ran the damn diagnostics five times. It was green to go every time. I didn’t find anything wrong.”
“Like… you found… nothing wrong… with the… transplanar.” Fujiwara grinned, a scarlet bubble popping from his split lips. “And who… designed the… diagnostics for the… reintegrator?”
I didn’t need Hector’s grim expression or an Alex Trebek guest shot to let me know that had been Fujiwara’s department.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hector insisted. “He could be lying. He’s lied all along, and we’ve never suspected him. He’s made three attempts on your life, and we didn’t see a glimpse of him once. He’s playing all of this like one big game, and this could be a bluff. It would be in line with everything he’s done so far. Jackson, he can only sabotage you if you let him. Take Meleah’s ring.”
With Charlie’s keys lost in Job’s Quarry, the plan had been for me to use the engagement band he’d given Meleah, the one he’d insisted she keep despite her refusal of him. It had belonged to his mother, and he had known Meleah would end up wearing it one day when Hector and the truth finally came to a meeting of the minds. Charlie had carried that ring with him all the years after his parents had died until he’d given it to Meleah. There was more than enough of him imprinted in the metal for a reading.
If I would do one. But I wouldn’t. Not here. Not in this hour of all hours. I couldn’t open myself at all for fear of what might slip in-memories that had nothing to do with Charlie. I’d already lived that blood-soaked, cordite- burnt day through my own eyes. I wasn’t going to relive it through the eyes of my mother as she drowned in her own blood or through those of that bastard Boyd, whose thick fingers had reached for me as I turned with the shotgun and blew off his face.
And, God, never, never through the eyes of Tess, whose lungs had filled with water when her arms and legs couldn’t keep her afloat any longer. My baby sister, who I knew had thought with her last breath that her big brother would find her. Save her. Her big brother, who never let her down, not one time in five unbelievably short years.
Not one time… until the very first and last time.
“What’s happening? What is so wrong with this place?” Meleah was confused as she pulled the chain over her neck and tried to press the ring into my hand. I jerked my hand back and let the ring fall to the ground.
“It’s home,” I said bleakly. Hector had told Meleah about my file, my past, because she knew-I saw it in her eyes.
Stricken, then determined, she looked from me to the house and back. “No. It can’t be here. You can’t do it here.” She crouched and reclaimed the ring. “Jackson is right, Hector. We can’t ask him to do this. No one can ask him to do this.”
“How did Fujiwara know?” I demanded, as Hector and the others-Thackery, who had a career on the line if not a soul, joining in, too-struggled and sweated in the god-awful heat with a machine that had to weigh more than six hundred unwieldy pounds. “About this place? Is it on your list? In your Big Book of Bloody Massacres?” I’d trusted him, not once but twice, and how stupid had I been to go down this treacherous and broken road again?
“Jackson, God, no.” Hector’s hair was soaked, his breath heavy with exertion. But that’s all it was heavy with. I didn’t hear any guilt. Although I’d not looked at Fujiwara twice, had I? When it came to industrial espionage and a rampant run of sociopaths, ex-con man or not, I was out of my depth. In all of this, I doubted once that I’d actually grasped what was happening around me. “All the places on the list are at least fifty years old. The more time that has passed, the more time the ether has to fray. But it doesn’t matter. Even if it didn’t work that way, I wouldn’t have let them put your house on the list. I wouldn’t do that to Charlie’s friend, and I sure as hell wouldn’t do that to my friend.”
That word, that goddamn word that came so fucking easily to him.
I looked back at the house where Boyd had taken it all from me: my mother, my sister, my innocence, an innocence I hadn’t then realized I had. He had taken my whole life, past, present, and future. He’d taken it all, every breath, every step, every decision, until my dying day. I was who I was, every cell in me, because of him. He had made me more than my mother’s womb ever had.
Because I had let him.
But now, maybe I could unmake some of that. I couldn’t change the past he had gobbled up, but there was a chance I could rip the present and the future out of his long-dead hands. I couldn’t do it for myself, and I was an unparalleled expert at doing things for me and only me, yet I could do it for Charlie. I could do it for that homely kid who’d refused to take no for an answer and helped me when I’d needed help the most. I’d thought I’d been surviving Cane Lake no problem. I’d been wrong. I hadn’t been surviving it; I’d been becoming numb. If Charlie hadn’t been there, poking and prodding, waking me up, showing me there was a life outside the fence, I’d have stayed. Boyd had made me, all right, but add two more years of Cane Lake on top of that, and I wouldn’t have an Abby hovering around the edges of my life. I wouldn’t have Houdini. I wouldn’t have enough to offer even a dog, and they only gave-they didn’t take.
One person I hadn’t managed to push away and a dog. Some people wouldn’t consider that much of a life, but compared with what it would’ve been without Charlie’s influence on me, it was a miracle of one. Whether he knew it or not, Charlie was giving me a chance at another miracle, if I would take it. I could pay him back and put this all behind me in one fell swoop.
I closed my eyes. The heat from above became somehow hotter. I was an ant, and someone had shoved a magnifying glass between the sun and me. Is that you up there playing around, Boyd? No. There’s no up there. If there was, there’d be a down there, and that’s where your wide ass would be burning for eternity.
There was no hell for Boyd, I knew that. It was all right. There was another way to banish him from existence… by banishing him from my life.
I opened my eyes, took off my glove, and held my hand out to Meleah. “Give me the ring. Give me Charlie.”
“Jackson,” she started, already shaking her head.
“It’s all right. Just… don’t let me trip over my own two feet and touch anything else.” I tried for a smile. It didn’t feel particularly encouraging. She must have seen something, however, as she carefully placed the ring and chain on my palm. It was cool, a circle of relief on hot skin.
“Four minutes.” Hector’s countdown was followed by the thud of six hundred pounds hitting the ground. A few seconds later, there was a hum that vibrated up and down my spine as heavy and pulsating as a hive of enraged hornets. “Machine is up and good to go.”
He hoped. I wasn’t as sure. Fujiwara hadn’t needed to bluff before. He’d been what I didn’t believe existed: a ghost. We hadn’t suspected him, seen him, or found any evidence at all that it had been him. I’d felt sorry for the son of a bitch, having to endure Thackery’s rages. He’d fooled us all, seemingly without effort. I had the feeling he was somehow doing the same now.
I closed my hand around the ring. It wasn’t as if I opened myself up to Charlie. It wasn’t as if I’d opened myself up to anyone since this had first begun sixteen years ago, when I’d picked up Tessa’s pink shoe. What I had didn’t come with an off switch, or hell, I’d have taken a simple mute. But right now, there was only the taste of old memories, nothing new.
My eyes drifted to Fujiwara. Flat on his stomach with his hands cuffed at the small of his back, he had his head turned to one side, and although the blood remained a steady run from his nose, he was still grinning. His teeth were red, but the smile was as happy as they came. For a man in a shitload of trouble, he didn’t seem to feel that he’d done anything but come out on top.
“Why’d he let himself get caught?” I asked abruptly, turning to Hector. “You said it before: we never caught a glimpse of him. Now he just gives himself away. Why? There has to be a reason.”
“Three minutes,” Thackery snapped before Hector could reply. “We don’t have time to delve into the mind of this insane piece of garbage now.”
