Quake (11 page)

Faith was sitting on a pinewood porch swing enveloped in an old familiar feeling, thinking about how fast things had come unglued. She had arrived at a lodge on top of a mountain to find a few weeks of peace, to rest her weary bones and tender emotions. She had let herself feel calm, happy even.

And here she sat, everything in her life blown apart all over again.

Hawk was gone, unprotected, without a sound ring. He was totally on his own, rogue, making choices that could get him killed. For all Faith knew, he was already dead. She shook her head at the thought of it. A world without Hawk in it didn't seem possible. The world needed people like Hawk, people with optimism and energy who could wipe away the darkness just by walking into a room.

Clooger and Carl were dead, the only card-carrying adults they had, gone in a few seconds of gunfire. It reminded her that life was a delicate situation for most people. They could go at any moment, cut short by an approaching bus or a knife-wielding madman. It had become all too easy for Faith to think as if she and everyone else close to her were immortals, or damn close.

What she really wanted was a tattoo; the sting of a needle to numb the pain. A tattoo so big it would cover her entire body and make her forget that Clooger was gone. Carl she'd barely known, but Clooger? The heaviness of his loss felt as if it had enough weight to crush her bones into dust. She could think of it for only a second or two at a time without feeling her chest fill with a sob that would last forever. She had to back away from the information, fill her mind with better memories. The problem was how many bad memories already existed inside her, stacked like cordwood, safely locked away beyond feeling. Faith was starting to feel as if she might burst into flames at any moment, every searing memory rushing forward at once.

Even though Clooger had been a single pulse, unable to protect himself from bullets or bombs or anything else, she'd still seen him as more than just a partner; he was their leader. He had experience Faith didn't have and a wellspring of courage she sometimes lacked. Clooger and Dylan—these two had her back and the power to help her destroy whatever evil approached. And now one of them was gone.

I'm sorry, Clooger
, she thought as she looked through the trees and felt the tears pooling.
Sorry we couldn't get you on the other side of this thing before it was too late.

She looked up at the top of the mountain, the peak that so intrigued her, and thought about how she'd made the whole mountain shake under her feet. It scared her to think about so much power. Her thoughts turned to Jade just as Dylan stepped through the screen door and let it fall back on its rusted spring, clanging against the jamb. He sat down beside Faith and the porch swing wobbled forward.

“We should have known. How did we miss it?”

There was no doubt what he was referring to: Jade's power.

“I can understand why she chose to hide it,” Faith admitted. She rocked back on the porch swing and stared out into the forest, her eyes narrowing against the light coming through the trees. “Everyone else was keeping secrets from her. I think she knew that. This was her secret. I just wish she'd have known how dangerous it was.”

“As soon as we understood she was my half sister we should have all been like, ‘So yeah, maybe she's got the pulse running through her veins. She's Meredith and Clooger's daughter.' They both had single pulses. It was possible Jade would be a carrier.”

“But no one would have guessed she'd been secretly messing around with it. That's what I don't understand. To have that kind of power, she had to be at it awhile.”

“Maybe not,” Dylan said. He glanced around nervously. “Remember how I told you it took me some time to get my power under control?”

Faith nodded. She did remember.

“It was especially bad when I was angry. Meredith always said kids were the most unpredictable once they knew the power they had. I remember I didn't understand how dangerous it was. How people could get hurt.”

“But how did she unlock it without help?” Faith asked. “You had to bring out my pulse. Hers just showed up out of nowhere?”

Dylan breathed a heavy sigh. He didn't want to say what might have been true, but he did.

“My mom used to disappear for weeks on end. No one knew where she went.”

Faith started putting two and two together.

“You think she came up here.”

Dylan shrugged. “If she did, she might have trained Jade in her sleep. Maybe they talked, maybe Jade didn't even know her mother was there. You didn't know I was outside your window all those months. You were asleep.”

Faith thought about it a moment, her eyes narrowing as she tried to remember what it had been like moving an object with her mind for the first time. It had been a heady experience.

“Maybe my mom just wanted to make sure Jade could defend herself if trouble ever showed up on the mountain.”

“But why wouldn't she have told Carl or Clooger?”

Dylan shook his head. He didn't seem to know.

“She's an orphan now, like us,” Faith said, and that was enough to simmer down her feelings toward Jade and remind her that while they were all orphaned on the face of the earth, Jade was the youngest.

Faith turned to Dylan and saw that he was holding a letter in his hand. He looked at it, half smiling and shaking his head.

“It's from Hawk.”

“Have you read it? I'm not sure how much more bad news I can take right now.”

“I found it in his room, but I haven't opened it yet. I wanted us to hear it together.”

Faith nodded, pulling her feet up on the porch swing and turning to face Dylan. She leaned her side onto the back of the swing, wrapping her arms around her knees. It was as if she was preparing herself for a body blow.

“Here goes,” Dylan said. He tore open the envelope and began reading.

I hope you read this before anyone came looking for me, because I'd hate to think anyone got hurt or our position was compromised because of me. Either way, chances are I was way too far gone before you started out, and I'm a tricky navigator. You have no idea which way I went and you're not going to know. Me and the HumGee are doing this alone. End of story. Also, sorry for taking the cool car, but I needed it.

Everyone has a role to play here, and you heard what Meredith said. Mine is to figure out what Hotspur Chance built into the foundation of the power grid. No one else can do that but me, and I can do it only from inside one of the States. That information will be hard enough to get ahold of inside, but outside, it's a total nonstarter. Hopefully I can find Neal Gordon and he can help me, but I have a feeling this is going to require an Intel level of intelligence to figure out. Accessing a hidden layer of technology running under a city with hundreds of millions of people is a tall order. From a deductive-reasoning point of view, it was an easy problem to solve: I had to leave without telling you.

“He's been watching too many action movies,” Faith said.

“You might be right.”

“What else does it say?”

Dylan continued:

We need a relay station. There's not one up there where you guys are now, but if you can get down into Portland without being detected, we can send messages back and forth from a relay station there. Take the Burnside Bridge over the river. Follow it until you get into the old downtown. Then look for the Koin Building. Can't miss it, shaped like a rocket and the angles look like they were made out of Legos. Go to apartment number 1106. That one used to belong to Paul Allen. That guy was a billionaire; he helped start Microsoft about a hundred years ago.

“I read about him in American Technical History,” Faith said.

“Me too,” Dylan said. “He owned pro sports teams and had a passion for Jimi Hendrix music.”

Faith raised her eyebrows up and down:
Keep reading, Professor.

Dylan read on:

One of Allen's obsessions before he died was classic computers and console games. He had some really rare stuff, including a 2018 model that used radio waves to send messages across any network. The product bombed, never made it out of beta. But Allen had three of them, since his company, Vulcan, helped fund the development. I'm betting he kept at least one on display in his apartment, and if we're lucky it's still there. It'll be a Tablet, black casing. Should have the solar powering built in, but it will be dead when you find it. Get it into the sunlight and we should be able to send messages back and forth without being traceable. Write this down:

Relay one: 342459

Relay two: PPd23ed (case sensitive)

Relay three: WS404.12.7.8

Enter those into the network settings. That should jump between three totally independent systems: radio waves, abandoned Wi-Fi, and Western State digital. If we use that pathway, no one will trace and we should be able to send and retrieve messages. Use the app mail resident on the device, log in as:

[email protected]

password: if6was9

You'll get a message from me—[email protected]

“Airwalk at Stalefish?” Faith asked. “What's gotten into him?”

Dylan offered a half smile, the most he could muster given the dire circumstances.

“He never told you about his Tony Hawk obsession?”

“No, he didn't.”

“Must have been guy stuff. He named himself after Tony Hawk, that's how much he wished he could skateboard like this guy. Tony Hawk was this badass skateboarder before the equipment went all hovercraft in 2030. He invented the Airwalk and the Stalefish.”

Faith didn't have any idea what Dylan was talking about.

“They're classic skateboarding tricks.”

“And ‘If 6 Was 9' is a Jimi Hendrix song,” Faith said. She was more into classic rock than most. “How much more did he write?”

Dylan scanned the page. “Couple of more paragraphs.”

I can do this, you guys, but you have to trust me. And if this means I'm stuck in the Western State for the rest of my life, then that's what it means. People are giving up their lives for this shit. A madman is on the loose who wants to kill a few hundred million people in cold blood. This is worth it. And I know you two. You wouldn't have let me go or you'd be trying to keep tabs on me constantly or I'd be doing the same to you. We all need to focus on our part. You two are equipped to face Chance and Wade and Clara. You can kick ass against them in a fight. I can do the most good behind enemy lines, not in the line of fire. I wouldn't last five minutes with those a-holes.

I left Jade a letter, too, telling her where I've gone. She might have gotten it before you guys got this one. If so, I'm really worried about her. I think I might love her.

No, seriously.

Maybe when this is all over she'll come find me, maybe not. I hope she does (P.S. Dylan, now I know what you were talking about, i.e., Faith). Either way I have a feeling she might try to come for me and get lost in the woods, so I've tagged her with a tracking device. It's old tech to keep it off the grid, so you need to be within five miles of her location. But if she's gone when you get this she couldn't have gotten that far. Just use the old wifi protocols with the GPS setting on one of your Tablets and search for Lucy Pevensie. If she's gone, you'll find her.

How to close this thing out?

I'm going with ‘See you soon' because ‘I'm trapped inside the Western State and we'll never breathe the same air again' is too messed up.

I bet I'll figure a way out once we kick some ass.

Hawk

Faith and Dylan looked at each other in silence and understood they'd just been given an unintended gift.

“We can find Jade,” Faith said.

Dylan realized something else, equally as important: “And if we can find Jade, we can find Hotspur Chance and the Quinns.”

“He's right, you know,” Faith said, standing as she stretched, arching her back like a cat waking from a dream. “We'd have tried to stop him. It's better this way. Sad, but better.”

“If anyone can bust out of the Western State, it's Hawk,” Dylan said as he folded up the letter and stuffed it back in the envelope. He stood and looked at Faith. There would always be something elusive about her, and it made him wonder whether he would ever completely win her heart. He hadn't been honest with her at the start, because at the time he'd seen Faith as Meredith had seen her: a weapon in an ongoing struggle. Nothing more, nothing less. He regretted letting himself feel so cold, especially now that he'd fallen in love.

Faith tucked her head under his chin.

“Don't pull away from me,” Dylan said, feeling the warmth of her body. “Don't leave. I can't do this without you.”

Faith knew this was not a request that had anything to do with Faith's physical presence. There had been times in the past when she stopped trusting anyone. Times when she collapsed into herself and could not be found, even by Dylan.

“We need to bury them,” Faith said, tears soaking into Dylan's black T-shirt. “And not with our minds. We need to put in the work this time. We need to feel the weight of a shovel in our hands.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Dylan agreed, and for a moment he choked on the words. He was having just as a hard a time as Faith was. “It's impossible to imagine a world without Clooger in it, ya know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Faith said.

And so they found the tools they needed in one of the sheds and searched until they discovered the perfect spot. It was a bluff that looked over the far side of the mountain, to places neither of them had ever been and might not ever go. The lodge loomed behind them as the bodies rose into the air and landed at their feet, Dylan's thoughts bringing them near.

The digging was hard work, just what Faith needed. She gritted her teeth and groaned with every stab of the earth until she was standing so far inside the hole she could barely see out. Sweat poured off her skin and down her face, mixing with the mud and the tears and the pain.