Nomad (10 page)

A young woman in a long flowered dress opened the door. She had dark red dreadlocks and looked about twenty years old, and she greeted Raven with a tentative smile.

"Hello?" the girl asked.

"Hi, I'm Riley," Raven said. She'd picked the name from a website list of trendy girl names. "I called earlier about the roommate ad...are you Audra?"

"That's me." The girl's smile grew large and warm, and she opened the door as wide as it would go. "Come in. Don't mind the apartment's weird shape, it used to be an attic..."

Raven followed her inside. The apartment was snug, with a single living/kitchen/dining area. Heavy old roof timbers supported the steeply sloped ceiling. It definitely looked like a former attic.

It was furnished with a two-seater futon, potted plants, and a bulky old television set parked on brightly painted cinderblocks. An old, heavy cabinet-style record player squatted near the front door, and a raw-lumber bookshelf stood in one corner, piled with old paperbacks and textbooks. Some portions of the wall were crammed with art and posters, while other large areas were blank, with faint squares and rectangles where items had recently been removed. A cone of incense smoldered in one of the clay flowerpots, filling the apartment with the smell of burning roses.

"Like I told you, not a huge place, but it's cheap...you can walk to the waterfront..." the girl named Audra was saying.

"It's nice," Raven said.

"Full kitchen, stove and all that." Audra walked into the narrow galley of a kitchen, separated from the living area by a low bar. "A little washer and dryer, too, in this cabinet, so that's good. Um...Nina kind of owned most of the stuff. She dropped out because Google offered her, like, a billion dollars to move out to California and start work right away. Some app she was developing for her senior project. They were like peeing their pants to buy it. You'd think she could throw me a little cash for rent, since it's hard to find a roommate mid-semester...but, that's cool, whatever. I can manage." Audra gave Raven a huge smile. "So what do you think?"

"It's a very nice place," Raven said.

"Yeah, I think so. It's less than two miles from campus, or seventy-three hours by bus."

Raven laughed, caught off-guard by the joke. She'd spent a lot of time on the city bus herself in the past few days. She was starting to think she might like this girl, not that it mattered. She had to intervene as little as possible with the past.

"I loved living in Silliman for two years, seriously," Audra said. "I love my Sillipeople. I do. But on-campus is such a, you know, dense ecosystem, socially. I was like, it's junior year, I need to get out in my own space. Right? Your room's over here." Audra pushed open one of three doors crowded along the longest wall. "We share a connecting bathroom, which is a minus, I guess, but..."

Raven looked into a bare room with a steeply sloped ceiling and one large window with a view of gnarled tree limbs. The empty hardwood floor seemed to glow in the sunlight. It was a small space, only three feet high at the low end of the ceiling slope, but it seemed luxurious to her.

To one side, a wooden folding door stood open to a bathroom not much larger than a closet, into which someone had managed to jam a clawfoot bathtub, pedestal sink, and toilet. Another folding door, leading to Audra's room, was closed on the opposite side of the bathroom. A third bathroom door opened back onto the living room. The black and white tile floor was badly chipped, but everything seemed clean and polished. Potted plants hung high over the tub, their long vines spilling over the sides to create a jungle look.

On the other side of the empty bedroom was another door, no taller than a child, built into the short wall where the ceiling reached its lowest point.

"What's in there?" Raven pointed.

"The crawlspace." Audra dropped to her knees and pulled it open with the miniature knob. "Totally sealed with drywall inside, not one of those creepy crawlspaces full of exposed wires and spiders. I hope you love it, because it's kind of all you have for a closet..."

Raven cautiously approached the open door and peered into the low, dark space. Prickles crawled up the back of her neck, and she felt a sense of imminent danger. In the back of her mind, she could hear boots, breaking glass, screams, gunfire. Someone was shoving her backwards through a tiny door like this one, back into the darkness, and she was crying...

"Riley? Hey, Riley, are you okay?" Audra waved a hand in front of Raven's eyes. "How many fingers do you see? Fourteen?"

"What?" Raven blinked. She'd spaced out, lost in a fragment of horrible memory, or maybe a forgotten nightmare. She found herself staring into the dark crawlspace with a sob rising in her chest. She fought it back down.

"You don't like it, do you?" Audra frowned, and her shoulders slumped. "That's too bad. You seem nice, you know?"

"Oh...it's fine. I like the apartment," Raven said.

"You do?" Audra looked her over. "I told you I'm a Silliman girl. What about you?"

Raven realized that she was asking to which of Yale's twelve residential colleges Raven belonged. All students were randomly assigned to one of them upon admission--Audra to Silliman College, Logan to Pierson College.

Because of this, Raven had realized, the community at Yale was tightly networked. She could not pretend to be a student without also pretending to belong to one of the smaller communities. If she claimed to be a Yale student, it would take no time for someone to determine she was a fraud. She'd devised her next lie to avoid that problem.

"I'm actually at Albertus Magnus," Raven told her, referring to a private college across town.

"Oh, the Catholic place, right?" Audra asked. Raven saw something change in Audra's demeanor--it was slight, but she looked at Raven a little more cautiously, putting a little more distance between them. "That's cool. What's your major?"

"Criminal justice," Raven said. She couldn't repress a small smile. The words had popped out at her from a list of degrees offered at the private liberal arts university. Raven was here to straighten things out and make the world more just.

"Oh, wow, that's different. You're going to law school, then?"

"Sure," Raven told her. She hadn't thought so far ahead, but it sounded like a good ingredient for her cover story.

Audra laughed. "You don't sound like you've made up your mind."

Raven shrugged, not sure how to recover from her stumble. She blushed. She was accustomed to challenges that involved hiding and fighting, not elaborate personal deception.

"I know, it's so hard," Audra said. Raven felt relieved when she realized the girl would do most of the talking if she let her. "I mean, I'm solidly an Anthropology major, but I'm still torn within that. Do I want to help record the last pre-industrial indigenous cultures left on the planet? People think that's being done, but it's not being done. Someone has to do it, or we lose our heritage as human beings. But...there's also the future, and I'm so interested in horizontal communication, you know? Like social media. How information empowerment creates broad, evolving networks that undermine traditional hierarchy...whether we're talking about the media, the state...you know what I mean? The revolutions of the future will be organized on a networked basis."

"I do know what you mean," Raven said. "No central leadership, just local leaders, and experts and specialists going where they're needed. Self-organizing. It works because lots of people agree on an idea, or at least they have a common enemy. They share information, resources, they collaborate as needed..."

"Wow, you have thought about this!" Audra smiled brightly again, looking her over. "So how can I get you moved in here, like, today, Riley? I'll carry your couch on my own back if I need to."

"You do want me to move in?" Raven asked.

"Oh, yeah! You said you liked the place, right? I think we'd be good roommates. I get a sense about people...good, bad, in between...and I'm always right. I get a very good feeling about you. I can tell you're a good person."

Raven felt a completely unexpected warmth inside herself, and she was startled that the girl's acceptance of her seemed to mean so much. She felt less like an obvious outsider who didn't belong. She began to feel some hope.

"Thank you," Raven said. She returned Audra's smile.

"Only a couple of things," Audra said. "I'm on total hiatus right now, drug-wise. If you want to get high or whatever, that's your business, but I don't want to see it or smell it or be invited to it. I'm doing a clearing and healing thing with my brain this semester."

"That won't be a problem."

"Also...and this isn't totally necessary, but...if you could pay just partial rent for this month, like even a week, it would really help me survive to the end of October." Audra spoke in an apologetic tone and bit her lip after asking.

"Is cash okay?" Raven asked, and Audra surprised her with a hug.

"You're awesome," Audra said. "I have class this afternoon, but then I can help you move if you want. Let's go get your key."

Chapter Eleven

Raven collected her things from her hotel room. Audra was gone by the time she returned to the apartment.

She stood in the center of her newly rented bedroom and frowned at all the empty space. Her new roommate expected her to bring more items, even furniture, but Raven owned nothing else. She couldn't risk Audra questioning her cover story.

Raven stepped through the bathroom and nudged open the door to Audra's room to see what a college student in 2013 ought to own.

Audra's room was chaotic compared to the rest of the apartment, with books and half-completed craft projects scattered everywhere. She had a bed, a cupboard full of clothes, and a chair facing the window across a small writing desk heaped with more books. Audra also owned an old laptop computer, which she'd taken to class with her.

The majority of used paper textbooks related to Audra's Anthropology major, including books on human evolution, globalization, and archeology. It would be easy for Raven to buy textbooks and scatter them around her room, but furniture seemed like a bigger problem.

Raven stashed her gun and data cube inside the crawlspace in her room. The dark interior of the crawlspace made her feel, for a moment, as though she were suffocating. She hurried to escape it.

She rode the bus to the Albertus Magnus campus, a four-mile journey that took about forty-five minutes. That campus was impressive in its own right, antique brick mansions nestled in a park-like setting of tree-shaded lawns.

Inside the bookstore, she gathered texts for sophomore-level criminal justice classes, including studies of street gangs, poverty, and criminal procedure. Audra owned texts on other subjects not related to her anthropology major, so Raven decided to browse the history section. She felt herself smile just a little as she picked up a slim paperback book on political assassinations. Perhaps she could learn something from it.

She bought an introductory photography book, a hooded black sweatshirt with the school's name, and binders with the school's seal. She filled the binders with blank notebook paper.

Outside the store, she stuffed her new books and shirt into her backpack. Her next stop was a convenience store for a prepaid cell phone.

Her shades could use the early twenty-first century telecom networks to search the internet and even make phone calls, but there was no way for anybody to call her. The disposable phone provided a phone number to go with her address. Her false identity was gradually coming together. She still lacked any legitimate, legal identification, but she didn't know what she could do about it.

She asked her sunglasses where to find cheap furniture, and they quickly mapped the route to a large store called IKEA, down by the wharf. She picked out a bed and a desk and hired a taxi back to her apartment, paying with her rapidly diminishing spool of cash. She wondered how she'd come by such a large supply of brand-new money from fifty years in the past. The money was probably counterfeit, she thought. She hoped it was good enough to fool whatever anti-counterfeiting technology existed in 2013.

She lugged the boxes from IKEA up her stairs one at a time, then took a break to check Logan's activities on the holographic map. He was busy, all over campus from day to day, as though incapable of sitting still for more than two minutes.

Raven opened the box containing the pieces of her bed and quickly grew disheartened at the sight of so many little screws and rods. The directions began with a mystifying cartoon that showed a guy standing over the bed pieces. That cartoon was crossed out, as if to say "wrong."

The cartoon beside it showed the exact same guy and the exact same bed pieces, but now he was joined by a friend with a pencil tucked behind his ear. It seemed to indicate that Raven should not attempt to assemble the furniture without someone watching, preferably someone with a pencil in at least one ear.

She'd hoped to set up her furniture before Audra arrived home, but she'd only pieced together a portion of the bed by the time her new roommate returned that evening.

"Wow, somebody escaped from IKEA," Audra said, glancing into the open door of Raven's room. "You're lucky you made it out alive."

"It's a maze in there!" Raven said.

"They want you to get lost and hungry so you'll be forced to buy Swedish meatballs to survive. So...new bed, new desk." She glanced at the desk, still in its original box, and a puzzled look crossed her face. "Did you ditch your old furniture?"

"It was kind of like your situation, where your roommate owned most of it," Raven said.

"Even your bed?"

Raven had to think fast, and she mentally revised that portion of her story.

"I was living with...a guy. My boyfriend. We stopped getting along. It was his bed."

"Oh, an evil ex-boyfriend." Audra leaned against Raven's doorway, looking sympathetic. "Sorry to hear that."

"It happens. Now I just have to figure out where to put these other nine thousand little screws, and I'll be done."