“It’s easy. You think I’m on defense, but I’m not.”
“Laying a trap.”
The boy shrugged. “It’s like a trap in your head. I make you see the game the way I need you to.” He was setting up the pieces again; one victory was not enough for the night. “What did the soldier want?”
Caleb had a way of changing the subject so abruptly that sometimes Peter struggled to keep up. “It was about a job, actually.”
“What kind?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure.” He shrugged and looked at the board. “It’s not important. Don’t worry about it—I’m not going anywhere.”
They were listlessly moving pawns.
“I still want to be a soldier, you know,” the boy said, “like you were.”
From time to time, the boy brought this up. Peter’s feelings were mixed. On the one hand, he had a parent’s intense desire to keep Caleb away from any danger. But he also felt flattered. The boy was, after all, expressing interest in the same life he had chosen.
“Well, you’d be good at it.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes. I liked my men, I had good friends. But I’d rather be here with you. Plus, it looks like those days are over. Not much need for an army when there’s nobody to fight.”
“Everything else seems like it would be boring.”
“Boredom is underrated, believe me.”
They played in silence.
“Somebody asked me about you,” Caleb said. “A kid at school.”
“What was the question?”
Caleb squinted at the board, reached toward his bishop, stopped, and moved his queen one space forward. “Just, what it’s like, you being my dad. He knew a lot about you.”
“Which kid was this?”
“His name is Julio.”
He wasn’t one of Caleb’s usual friends. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him you worked on roofs all day.”
For once, Peter held Caleb to a draw. He put the boy to bed and poured himself a drink from Hollis’s flask. Caleb’s words had stung a little. Peter wasn’t truly tempted by Sanchez’s offer, but the whole thing had left a bad taste in his mouth. The woman’s manipulation was transparent, as it was meant to be—that was the genius of it. She had simultaneously aroused his natural sense of duty and made it clear that she was not a woman to be messed with.
I’ll have you in the end, Mr. Jaxon.
Just you try, he thought. I’ll be right here, reminding my kid to brush his teeth.
They were reroofing an old mission close to the center of town. Empty for decades, it was now being converted to apartments. Peter’s crew had spent two weeks dismantling the rotted belfry and had begun to strip off the old slates. The roof was steeply pitched; they worked on twelve-inch-wide horizontal boards, called cleats, anchored by metal brackets nailed into the sheeting and spaced at six-foot intervals. A pair of ladders, lying flush with the roof at the ends of the cleats, acted as staircases connecting them.
All morning they worked shirtless in the heat. Peter was on the uppermost cleat with two others, Jock Alvado and Sam Foutopolis, who went by the name Foto. Foto had worked construction for years, but Jock had been there just a couple of months. He was young, seventeen or so, with a narrow, acned face and long greasy hair he wore in a ponytail. Nobody liked him; his movements were too sudden, and he talked too much. It was an unwritten rule of the roofing crews not to remark on the danger. It was a form of respect. Looking down, Jock liked to say stupid things like “Wow, that would hurt” and “That would most definitely fuck a person
up.
”
At noon they broke for lunch. Climbing down was too much trouble, so they ate where they were. Jock was talking about a girl he had seen in the market, but Peter was barely listening. The sounds of the city drifted upward in an aural haze; from time to time a bird floated past.
“Let’s get back to it,” Foto said.
They were using pry bars and mallets to chip out the old tiles. Peter and Foto moved to the third cleat; Jock was working below them to the right. He was still talking about the woman—her hair, a certain way she walked, a look that passed between them.
“Will he ever shut up?” Foto said. He was a thick, muscular man, his black beard sprinkled with gray.
“I think he just likes the sound of his own voice.”
“I’m going to throw his ass off this roof, I swear.” Foto glanced up, squinting into the sun. “Looks like we missed a couple.”
Several tiles remained along the ridgeline. Peter slid his bar and mallet into his tool belt. “I’ll go.”
“Forget it, lover boy can do it.” He yelled down, “Jock, get up there.”
“I’m not the one who missed those. That was Jaxon’s section.”
“It’s yours now.”
“Fine,” the boy huffed. “Whatever you say.”
Jock unclipped his harness, scrambled up the ladder to the uppermost cleat, and wedged his pry bar under one of the tiles. As he lifted the mallet to strike, Peter realized he was straight above them.
“Wait a sec—”
The tile popped free. It sang past, narrowly missing Foto’s head.
“You idiot!”
“Sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“Where did you
think
we were?” Foto said. “You did that on purpose. And clip in, for Christ’s sake.”
“It was an accident,” Jock said. “Calm down. You’ll have to move.”
They shifted to the side. Jock finished up and had begun to climb down when Peter heard a pop. Jock let out a yelp. A second pop, and with a loud clatter the ladder rocketed down the roof with Jock still attached. At the last second he lunged clear and began to slide down the roof on his belly. After his first cry, he hadn’t made a sound. His hands were madly searching for something to grab hold of, his toes digging into the tiles to slow his descent. Nobody had ever fallen that Peter knew of. Suddenly this seemed not possible but inevitable; Jock was the one chosen.
Ten feet from the edge his body halted. His hand had found something: a rusty spike.
“Help!”
Peter unclipped and scrambled down to the lowest cleat. Gripping a bracket, he leaned out. “Take my hand.”
The boy was frozen with terror. His right hand was clutching the spike, his left gripping the edge of a tile. Every inch of him was pressed to the surface.
“If I move I’ll fall.”
“No, you won’t.”
Far below, people had stopped on the street to look.
“Foto, toss me my safety line,” Peter said.
“It won’t reach. I’ll have to reset the anchor.”
The spike was bending under Jock’s weight. “Oh God, I’m slipping!”
“Stop squirming. Foto, hurry up with that rope.”
Down it came. Peter had no time to clip in; the boy was about to fall. As Foto pulled the line taut through the block, Peter wrapped it around his forearm and lunged toward Jock. The spike broke lose; Jock began to slide.
“I’ve got you!” Peter yelled. “Hold on!”
Peter had him by the wrist. Jock’s feet were inches from the edge.
“Find something to grip,” Peter said.
“There’s nothing!”
Peter didn’t know how much longer he could hold him. “Foto, can you pull us up?”
“You’re too heavy!”
“Tie it off and get down here with some brackets.”
A small crowd had gathered on the street. Many were pointing upward. The distance to the ground had enlarged, becoming an infinite space that would swallow them whole. A few seconds passed; then Foto was moving across the cleat above them.
“What do you want me to do?”
Peter said, “Jock, there’s a small lip at the edge just below you. Try to find it with your feet.”
“It’s not there!”
“Yes, it is—I’m looking right at it.”
A moment later, Jock said, “Okay, got it.”
“Take a deep breath, okay? I’m going to have to let you go for a second.”
Jock tightened his grip on Peter’s wrist. “Are you kidding me?”
“I can’t get you up unless I do. Just lie still. I guarantee, the lip will hold you if you don’t move.”
The man had no choice. Slowly he released his grip.
“Foto, toss me a bracket.”
Peter caught it with his free hand, wedged it under a seam in the tiles, removed a nail from his tool belt, and pressed it into the gap until it bit. Three strokes of the mallet drove it home. He set the second nail, then lowered himself a few feet.
“Toss me another.”
“Please,” Jock moaned, “hurry.”
“Deep breaths. This will all be over in a minute.”
Peter set three more brackets in place. “Okay, carefully reach up and to your left. Got it?”
Jock’s hand gripped the bracket. “Yeah. Jesus.”
“Now pull yourself up to the next one. Take your time—there’s no hurry.”
Bracket by bracket, Jock ascended. Peter followed him up. Jock was sitting on the cleat, gulping water from a canteen. Peter crouched beside him.
“Okay?”
Jock nodded vaguely. His face was pale, his hands trembling.
“Just take a minute,” Peter said.
“Hell, take the whole day,” said Foto. “Take the rest of your life.”
Jock was staring into space. Though he wasn’t really seeing anything, Peter guessed.
“Try to relax,” Peter said.
Jock glanced down at Peter’s harness. “You weren’t clipped in?”
“There wasn’t time.”
“So you just … did all that. Holding the rope.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Jock looked away. “I thought I was dead for sure.”
“You know what gets me?” Foto said. “That little shit didn’t even thank you.”
They’d knocked off early; the two of them were sitting on the front steps, passing a flask. They’d seen the last of Jock; he’d turned in his tool belt and walked off.
“That was smart, with the brackets,” Foto continued. “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“You might have. I just got there first.”
“That kid is fucking lucky, is all I have to say. And look at you, not even rattled.”
It was true: he’d felt invincible, his mind perfectly focused, his thoughts clear as ice. In fact, there was no lip at the edge of the roof; the surface was perfectly smooth.
I make you see the game the way I need you to.
Foto capped the flask and got to his feet. “So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Actually, I think that’s it for me,” Peter said.
Foto stared at him, then gave a quiet chuckle. “Anybody else, I’d figure they were worried about getting killed. You’d probably like it if somebody fell every day so you could catch them. What will you do instead?”
“Somebody’s offered me a job. I thought I wasn’t interested, but maybe I am.”
The man nodded evenly. “Whatever it is, it’s got to be more interesting than this. It’s true what they say about you.” They shook hands. “Good luck to you, Jaxon.”
Peter watched him go, then walked to the capitol. As he entered Sanchez’s office, she glanced up from her papers.
“Mr. Jaxon. That was fast. I thought I was going to have to work a little harder.”
“Two conditions. Actually, three.”
“The first is your son, of course. I’ve given you my word. What else?”
“I want direct access to you. No middlemen.”
“What about Chase? The man’s my chief of staff.”
“Just you.”
She thought only a moment. “If that’s what it takes. What’s the third?”
“Don’t make me wear a necktie.”
The sun had just set when Michael knocked on the door of Greer’s cabin. There was no light inside, no sound.
Well, I’ve walked too long to wait out here,
he thought.
I’m sure Lucius won’t mind
.
He put his bag on the floor and lit the lamp. He looked around. Greer’s pictures: How many were there? Fifty? A hundred? He stepped closer. Yes, his memory had not betrayed him. Some were hasty sketches; others had obviously required hours of focused labor. Michael selected one of the paintings, untacked it from the wall, and laid it on the table: a mountainous island, bathed in green, seen from the bow of a ship, which was just visible at the bottom edge. The sky above and behind the island was a deep twilight blue; at its center, at forty-five degrees to the horizon, was a constellation of five stars.
The door flew open. Greer stood at the threshold, pointing a rifle at Michael’s head.
“Flyers, put that
down,
” Michael said.
Greer lowered the gun. “It’s not loaded anyway.”
“Good to know.” Michael tapped the paper with his finger. “Remember when I said you should tell me about these?”
Greer nodded.
“Now would be the time.”
The constellation was the Southern Cross—the most distinctive feature of the night sky south of the equator.
Michael showed Greer the newspaper, which the man read without reaction, as if its contents came as no surprise to him; he described the
Bergensfjord
and the bodies he’d found; he read the captain’s letter aloud, the first time he had done this. It felt very different to speak the words, as if he were not overhearing a conversation but enacting it. For the first time, he glimpsed what the man had intended by writing a letter that could never be sent; it imparted a kind of permanence to the words and the emotions they contained. Not a letter but an epitaph.
Michael saved the data from the
Bergensfjord
’s navigational computer for last. The ship’s destination had been a region of the South Pacific roughly halfway between northern New Zealand and the Cook Islands; Michael used the atlas to show Greer. When the ship’s engine’s had failed, they had been fifteen hundred miles north-northeast of their goal, traveling in the equatorial currents.
“So how did it end up in Galveston?” Greer asked.
“It shouldn’t have. It should have sunk, just like the captain said.”
“Yet it didn’t.”
Michael frowned. “It’s possible the currents could have pushed it here. I don’t really know much about it. I’ll tell you one thing it means. There’s no barrier and never was.”
Lucius looked at the newspaper again. He pointed midway down the page. “This here, about the virus having an avian source—”
“Birds.”
“I’m familiar with the word, Michael. Does it mean the virus could still be out there?”
“If they’re carriers, it might be. Sounds like the people in charge never figured it out, though.”