“I’m old enough to be useful,” Travis said, letting his own voice relax.
“The instructions didn’t say anything about this,” Ward said. Still unnerved. Still on the brink of fleeing.
“What, there’s a rule against someone giving you a hand?”
The points of the conversation didn’t matter. Keeping Ward talking mattered. And closing in on his voice.
But the seconds drew out, and Ward didn’t reply.
Travis continued moving forward. Slowly. Silently.
Then the man said, “Is it already happening?”
Travis started to ask what he meant, but stopped. Asking for clarification might clash with what he’d told Ward a moment earlier: that he knew what was going on. While Travis didn’t need to make sense, he did need to avoid scaring the guy away.
“The filter,” Ward said. “Is it starting now?”
Travis hesitated, still advancing, then decided to wing it. “It’s possible,” he said.
Ward breathed out audibly again. Same location: ahead and to the left.
“It’s not supposed to happen yet,” Ward said. “Not for years and years.”
Travis kept moving. Forty feet to go. He’d have to speak more softly now to hide the fact that he was getting closer.
“Whoever it affects,” Ward said, “it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.”
Travis’s leading foot touched down and froze. So did the rest of his body.
Travis stared at the blackness where Ward had just spoken, and found his thoughts suddenly vacant. The question came out before he realized he was asking it: “What are you talking about?”
He noticed only halfway through—too late for it to matter—that he hadn’t tempered his voice at all.
There was another quick scuff of shoes on asphalt—Ward flinching, maybe—and then a sustained burst of movement as the man took off running through the cluttered dark. Crashing past whatever lay in his path. Stumbling and staggering, but moving fast.
Travis pushed away the confusion and sprinted after him. Following the sound. Gaining now.
All at once he caught a glimpse of Ward, in the vague pool of light below a curtained window. Bald head and T-shirt and jeans—he was still wearing them.
The man had almost passed beyond the light when he sprawled. Caught his foot on something and went all the way down. The notebook flew free again.
Travis doubled his speed and yanked the .38 from his pocket—enough fucking around.
He leveled it as Ward pushed up to a crouch.
But he didn’t fire.
He didn’t need to.
Ward made one desperate grab for the notebook, almost collapsing again as he did, then heard Travis’s running footsteps and threw himself sideways out of the light. The book stayed right where it’d fallen.
Travis pulled up short beneath the window. Stood there catching his breath and listening. He heard Ward staggering in the dark twenty feet off, and then silence again. Had he stopped? Was he weighing his chances of fighting for the notebook?
Travis kept the pistol leveled, aimed toward the last place he’d heard movement. He kept his eyes in that direction too, as he knelt and scooped up the book.
He stared another five seconds, the gun shaking in his small hand.
Then he tucked the notebook against himself like a football, turned back the way he’d come from, and ran.
Travis emerged into the light on Broadway. He heard sirens nearby in the night, coming from several directions and getting louder by the second. He remembered the gunshot inside Garret’s place. There’d be a dozen police cars on this block within minutes.
He sprinted across both wide sections of Broadway and went north toward Ashland, the first street free of construction.
He went east and north for two blocks, then turned west and made a wide swing around the hospital and the crime scene, coming at last to where he’d left the Chevelle. There was a serious-looking ticket stuck under the wiper. He discarded it, set the notebook on the passenger seat, started the car, and got the hell out of Baltimore.
Twenty miles south on I–95, he took an exit to a huge shopping mall. The parking lot was a ten-acre tundra of neat yellow lines and stark white cones of light. There wasn’t a single car in it but his own. He parked out in the center so he could see trouble coming a long way off. He turned on the dome light and opened the notebook.
The first page was blank.
So was the second.
And every other page in the book.
He flipped back to the beginning and saw what he’d missed at first glance: four or five ragged strips trapped inside the spiral binding, where pages had been torn out.
He understood what the zipper-like sound had been, and why Ward had shouted to obscure it.
He got out and stood beside the car and screamed loud enough to hurt his throat. An animal shriek that rolled away across the dark fields and half-built developments at the edge of suburbia.
He paced for a long time, wandering between the car and the nearest light post. Its base was bolted into a concrete cylinder covered with flaking yellow paint. He found himself kicking it every time he reached that end of his track, and wondered how much of his ten-year-old self he was experiencing, emotionally.
He realized he was putting off snapping out of the memory. Stalling. Had no idea how to break the news to Paige and Bethany. He could lie and put his performance in a better light—it wasn’t as if they could check—but had no intention of doing so. He’d tell them the whole thing. He just didn’t want to do it yet.
Reaching the car again, he leaned in and took the notebook off the seat. He stood with his back against the door and stared at the cover in the pale mercury light.
He flipped it open. An entirely idle move.
But he drew a quick breath at what he saw.
The angled light revealed indentations in the page. The ghosts of whatever had been written on the sheet above it, pressed deep by the tip of the pen.
He straightened and moved closer to the light post. Tilted the book and swiveled his body, seeking just the right glare.
The instant he found it his optimism faded. There were indentations, for sure, but they’d come from
Except for two lines.
Two places where, as it’d happened, there’d been no overlap.
He put his eyes three inches from the paper and scrutinized the words, feeling his skin prickle even before he’d begun to read. It struck him that this was an alien message. Spoken by a human and transcribed by a human, but an alien message all the same.
He let his eyes track over the two lines.
The first was impossible to draw meaning from—it was the end of one sentence and the beginning of another.
He considered it for a moment anyway. It seemed to be part of a detailed set of directions. A route to take
