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“Something funny?” he asked, not turning around, his voice slightly hoarse, perhaps from the coffee.

“Just a thought I had. Nothing, really.”

“In case you didn’t notice, we’re not in a particularly amusing situation.”

Marci felt her smile vanish. She turned to look out at the ugly mining town. “How come they stay here?” she found herself asking, watching a particularly defeated looking man step out of a rusted, beat up Chevy truck. It must have been twenty or thirty years old.

“What else have they got?” Ramone answered, turning his head toward the window slowly, as though he was tired.

“Dreams. Elsewhere. Maybe?”

“This world doesn’t have room in it for dreams. Not right now. Maybe it did, once.”

“Being here with you is one of my dreams,” she said. There. It just came out on its own. It was like someone else took over and made her say it. Sure, she’d thought it, but she never thought she’d say it. At least, when she’d said it in her fantasies, she was in his arms and it made sense, because she was safe there and he reciprocated. This wasn’t one of her fantasies. This was a
reality
of some kind. But reality these days was so hard to discern from fantasy. Everything had begun to feel like a video feed the more she watched the feeds.

She wished she could disappear. She knew he’d say something terrible, something he could never take back, something that would crush her. Still. There was that brilliant hope wavering like a candle-light in the darkness of fear and maybe he wouldn’t snuff it out. Maybe he would turn it into a bonfire of beautiful, glorious reciprocation. Yes, reciprocation.

No. She was an idiot. Why, Marci, why? Why’d you have to go and ruin everything? Hang on. Calm down. He hasn’t said anything yet.

Her thoughts went a million miles an hour. She took a deep breath. She had time to grow into an old woman and attend her own funeral, the moment seemed stretch so long before he said anything.

“Is that why you’re here?” he asked with his head tilted downward slightly, as though he was looking at his feet, and all she could see of his face was the edge of his eyelashes. It was good that he didn’t see her. She was pale from fear and red from embarrassment all at once.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Can you blame me?” She sounded hysterical. She knew it, but she couldn’t stop, couldn’t sound any other way.
Come on, Marci, he wants a confident, beautiful woman. A woman like Blythe. Not a whining little girl.

“Blame you?”

“Yes. Can you blame me? Can you blame any of us?”

“Us? Who is ‘us’?”

“The world. All the people. Blythe. Me. The ones who love you.”

“Don’t say these things.”

“You need to hear it, Ramone. We love you. We can’t help it.”

“Get out. Please, get out of the car. Leave me alone.”

“I can’t. I’ve nowhere to go, not now.”

“Please.” His voice broke. He turned suddenly to look at Marci, his right hand using the driver’s seat to pull himself closer to her. His cheeks were flushed, his chin trembled, and Marci swore his red-rimmed eyes were swimming in tears. “Please, just get out.”

Marci drew back, her heart thumping. She fumbled for the door-latch, shoved her weight against the door and spilled out into the dirty parking lot. Desert air gusted against her bare legs and pelted her with sand. The clear, pale blue sky stretched above her. For some reason, she felt like she might fall, up, into the atmosphere and pop like a helium balloon. She was uprooted. Unanchored. Untethered. The thing that had kept her tied to earth was sitting in that car, shrinking as she drifted further and further away. She could almost see Ramone sitting in the car, crying, for some reason, hunched over himself. She could see it because she’d seen it on the feed, after he’d kissed Blythe and run away.

What was wrong? With him? With her, she knew what was wrong. Ramone had rejected her.

People were staring. Another dirty old miner (she assumed he was a miner. He could have been a plumber, for all she knew), stepped out of another dusty old truck and ambled into the store. Coming back to herself, she glanced around quickly, feeling embarrassed, before running toward the store.

Inside, she searched for Blythe. Not seeing her right away, Marci walked toward the clothing displays and found a rack of sweatshirts that might do. Her body was covered in goose flesh. The mountain air was colder than she’d planned for, and, as much as it disgusted her, she needed something a little warmer.

*****

Elliot watched as the two women fought over Ramone. The emotional display was dismaying. Disgusting, even. He half expected them to begin clawing at each other’s eyes there in the dirty dressing room of a forgettable store in a forgettable town.

He switched his view from camera to camera, carefully analyzing the situation. He felt cold inside as he observed, having successfully quashed his concerns about having lost his quarry and being betrayed by the Editor Ghosteye, or Gale Randall, according to the new dossier—a document pushed to the side of his heads-up display hovering before his eyes. He controlled the HUD using minute eye movement, and before he shut it down, he checked the location of the three criminals again, hoping to reach them before sundown. He’d found their trail seven hours after they left the city a day ago. By his calculations, he was only four hours behind them now.

Elliot could be a machine when he needed to be.

Ghosteye. He’d be taken care of later. After subject #000451D503—the man called Ramone—was recovered.

A small silver button between thumb and forefinger on the back of his left hand switched the HUD off. Elliot ignored the plethora of pocked scars covering the pale skin of his hand, just as he always ignored them when he pressed the silver button. The HUD vanished and Elliot resumed driving, pulling out of a nearly abandoned rest stop along the freeway. The cigarette burns had nothing to do with him. They belonged to his mother. She asked to see them when he upset her, and he was always ready to comply. Usually she stayed firmly entrenched in the feeds, a glazed over expression on her face as her arm moved food robot-like from the plate on her lap to her mouth, and for that he had Ramone to thank. Thank him, he would, when Elliot caught up to the man.

Sometimes the silence disturbed Elliot. Today as the orange, nebulous sun began to melt into the mountains in the gray distance, disembodied voices rose in the dusk and spoke to him.

“They’re not there,” he whispered to himself, gripping the steering wheel tighter to still the quivering in his bones.

“Stop crying. Shut up, boy, shut up!” said the loudest voice, which sounded like his mother. Elliot pulled the sleeve of his blazer down to cover the scars along the back of his hand. He didn’t want to see them in the fading light. The sun had reached an angle that glinted off the smooth, unnaturally shiny tissue as he held the top of the steering wheel.

“Radio on,” he said. “Play Jackass Feed #23.” The vehicle complied and soon the haunting voices were drowned in the soothing tones of the violent, ribald laughter of frat boys tormenting girls on a college campus somewhere.

There were enough distractions in the world for him to safely avoid unpleasant memories. Edges of the voices touched the boundaries of sound bursting forth from the speakers in his car. Why hadn’t Ramone created a faster way to travel while he was making the nanocamera, Elliot wondered. Of course, he worked on small, nearly invisible sizes. Any means of travel he developed would probably only work for atoms. Elliot laughed at the realization. He’d never fit in an atom-sized vehicle!

Without thinking, Elliot fingered one of the scars at the edge of the HUD control button on his hand. The raised, ragged-edged circle of skin was perfectly smooth, the only part of perfection a scar could be said to possess. He knew the secret of the scars. Others had tried to tell him they came from something broken inside his mother, that obese mass of sedentary flesh hogging his front room all the time. But he knew. The circles of pink and orange skin were tokens of love. Haunting love. The kind of love that put up barbed wire around a field to protect the beasts within from the outside world. The barbs stung and hurt when the creatures bumped against it. For their own good it hurt. Someday the animals learned to not test the boundaries, but it took a few wounds to figure it out. Elliot had been taught again and again, until there were no unbroken patches of skin on his body. But he learned. Don’t make a sound. No tears. No sobs. Ever. Crying only made it worse.

The last fragment of the hazy sun vanished beneath the horizon. The road before Elliot stretched on, nearly empty. Occasionally the headlights of another vehicle appeared in the distance, bearing down on him for miles and miles before the two of them passed each other. The sky above him widened as it darkened, a window into an infinite black space, dark and bright, punctured by burning embers of starlight. Night and its stars always reminded him of his mother, sitting in her dark bedroom in one of her suicidal moods, smoking. He took a deep breath and ignored the vast, empty landscape and the endless space above, dwarfing his car and the tiny road it passed over.

Where he was today, he had his mother to thank. Her lessons had given him the cold, dispassionate temperament that his work required. He was an observer to his own life. Nothing could touch him. The real Elliot was buried deep inside, insulated within layers of consciousness that protected him from a too-strong connection to the world. If he felt himself getting near the surface, he let his immediate self take hold of an imagined rope, and jump off a cliff, hurtling downward into a figurative cave in his mind somewhere. From there he looked out on the world.

He felt nothing when he was inside that cave.

Ramone had almost pulled Elliot to the surface. At first, when Elliot began working on Ramone, trying to extract whatever it was he was hiding, something the man had said startled Elliot.

“I see. They’ve brought out their tools, have they?” Ramone said, his blue eyes suddenly accusing.

“Tools?” Elliot responded. It was a reaction, and Elliot never let himself react.

“You. You’re a tool. A monster.” Elliot’s fingers quivered involuntarily as he tightened the metal bonds around Ramone’s wrists.

“I’m an extraction specialist. You have secrets. I’m here to get them.” Elliot blinked, mentally searching for the rope that could take him deeper, back down into the cave.

Ramone shook his head, slowly, almost sadly.
Why is he sad? He should be angry. Indignant.
“This has come too far. This is my fault. You’re my fault.”

Elliot stared. Blinked. This was wrong. The man should have been fighting against the straps. His pulse should be racing. His eyes should be wild with fear. Babbling. He should be babbling a confession. Elliot could get this back on course. “If you confess now, I don’t have to do this. You still have a chance, Mr. Ramone. Tell me what we want to know. I’ll let you go.”

“The world shouldn’t look like this. We should be free,” Ramone shook his head, and Elliot thought for a moment that the man was going to cry. “I’m sorry.”

Elliot jerked forward, startled, then finished with the straps on Ramone’s ankles. “Tell me what we want to know.”

“What do you want to know? Cut my head open. Get it out. See if you can make sense of it.”

“I’m not a tool. I’m not a monster. I do this because I love seeing men like you break. I
will
break you. Or you will die. How does that sound to you?” The rope. Figurative as it was, it could save Elliot. He found it. It was buried there, behind a memory of his mother telling Elliot he was a mistake. He was never meant to be born. Elliot was a monster. The offspring of another monster, the man who’d done that to her. That. THAT.
That
was him. Elliot.

Ramone would pay for pulling Elliot up out of his cave.

Chapter 12

“That’s your secret?” The lawyer, Blythe, said in a shrill voice.

Ghosteye shook his head even though she couldn’t see him. He glanced up and down the train car, keeping his voice low. Not that it mattered. It was something he wasn’t quite used to yet: being watched
all the time
. In his studio he’d been free. The cameras couldn’t watch him there. Because, as every Editor knew, there were thousands of channels of unedited feeds that streamed perpetually to the web. These were watched by Bots designed solely to monitor for illegal behavior. That’s how threats were identified. Editors couldn’t be watched in their studios. Not being watched, that was illegal for anyone who wasn’t an Editor and given clearance by the Organization. It was this confusing matryoshka doll of people watching and being watched.

“Yes, and it’s all I—” Ghosteye began.

“They’re restricted by time and space. Like us,” she said in a flat voice. “That’s it? That’s the big revelation that’s supposed to make us feel better about being chased by a psychotic torturer?” With each word her voice became more and more shriek-like.

“Yes. If you knew better who we’re dealing with, you’d know that this is quite comforting, actually,” he whispered.

The girl from the platform, the redhead, had picked a seat near him. Two rows away and one seat in, off the aisle. She was cute. Ghosteye didn’t want to suspect her, but he had to. Everyone was on
their
side.

“I can’t hear you, sorry. Can you speak up?” Blythe yelled into the phone.

“No, I can’t, in fact. I’m on a train. There are people around me. Where are you?”

“The middle of nowhere. Where are we going? And where are you?”

“Well, I can’t tell you over the phone. I can text you. Coordinates. Punch them into your GPS. I’ll meet you there. You’ll probably reach it before I do.”

“Great. And what do we do once we’re there?”

“You’ll know when you get there. I think.”

“You think? You
think?
”

“Blythe. I didn’t plan this. You didn’t plan this. We’re in the same boat. Calm down.”

“Forgive me if that’s a little bit difficult, mister-I-have-no-real-idea-who-you-are.”

“You know my name, you know who I am.”

“I know you have some non-descript name that’s probably not found on any public record. And
we’re
in the middle of hell, running from a psychotic torturer and all you’re giving me is some coordinates and a ‘you’ll know what to do when you get there.’”

“The only reason I can’t tell you more is because I don’t know more. I’ve just heard of this place, ok? Over a year ago. My ex-girlfriend told me about it.”

“Ok?”

“Ok, that’s all. That’s all I can tell you. She left me. She didn’t like that I was an Editor. I can’t say more than this. I’m in the same boat as you,” Ghosteye hissed into the phone, covering his mouth with one hand.

“What? You mean like—” Blythe said, her voice suddenly changing, recognizing what he meant.

“Yes.
That
.”

“Oh. Like—”

“Yes. Don’t say it.” He hoped she was going to say something about being watched. Otherwise they were having a completely useless conversation and might as well be playing patty-cake in a nursery. 

“Right.”

“So, follow the coordinates. I’ll be there as soon as I can. If I never get there, you’ll know why.”

“Right.” This time her tone was heavy, as though she did know what he meant. If he didn’t get there, he was dead. Or they’d caught him.

“And if you meet a girl named Beth, well, tell her what I did.”

“You’ll get there. I’m sure of it. Just be careful.” Suddenly it was as though they were on the same team and what he’d been saying, that they were in the same boat (it was the only analogy he could come up with, not being gifted with words), was true.

He ended the call and slipped his phone into the pocket of his jeans, never taking his eyes from the redhead. She appeared to be poring over a newspaper. Ghosteye laughed to himself. Newspaper. It consisted of two sheets, folded in the center. Traditionalists were hilarious. Beth had been a traditionalist. She’d insisted on keeping books lying about in case she wanted to read “something real.” That was what she’d called things like books and newspapers.

Ghosteye frowned suddenly. He hoped Beth was there. A colony of revolutionaries in the mountains of the desert. The coordinates were tattooed in the channels of his thumbprint. Well, one channel. Beth had done it using something that looked like one of those finger-pricking needles they used on kids or diabetics. “Ow! What the hell was that for?” he had said when she’d done it without warning.

“Don’t be a baby. It’s coordinates.”

“For what?” he asked, hissing and shaking his hand.
Let me see your hand,
she’d said, sounding all innocent and sweet.
I want to read your fortune
. Like a fool he’d believed her. Out of nowhere she’d produced the tattoo needle.

“It’s not like you’re bleeding, you wimp. It’s a colony.”

“Really? That small, eh?”

“To see the numbers, you need a really powerful magnifying glass,” she said, ignoring his joke. “Otherwise, it just looks like a tiny smudge.”

“Why?” They were in his studio, had been cuddling on the old couch against the wall until she pulled the tattoo needle from the old blue and red carpet bag she always carried. She found the bag at a second-hand store and said it had integrity because it was from a time before the feeds.

Beth preferred the studio to show her affection.
In the privacy of our own home,
she called it, what they did in the studio.

“In case.” That was all she said about why she gave him the coordinates.

“Beth—”

“Don’t say anything. I know. I just want you to have it.”

“Where’d you hear about it.”

“At the drum circle.”

He had sighed
. The drum circle. Why is she even with me?

“Listen, it’s no big deal. A couple people were just talking about what it was like before,” she said, standing up and burying the tattoo needle in her bag. Stepping away from him, the smell of sandalwood faded and she pulled the rubber band from her hair, shaking the short, red dreadlocks loose. 

“Before what? The feeds? That’s my job, Beth. Without them, I’m living in a cardboard box in the alley.”

“You’d find something else to do, Gale.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“It’s your name. Better than that alias you go by,” she muttered, turning away, walking toward the large screen in front of his console. A feed played, something he’d been working on before she entered the studio and interrupted him. The hand holding her carpet bag dropped to her side. With the other, Beth touched the screen as though to caress the face of the woman on it—an older woman. Mid-forties. The woman’s mascara was smeared down her cheeks as though she’d been crying and had rubbed her eyes. “How can you stare at them all day? How can you invade their lives and know their stories and not love them?”

“Who says I don’t?” he said, his heart beginning to race, as though some part of him knew what might come next. First the coordinates. Then the disgust with his career. Soon she’d be walking out the door.

“You don’t. I know. You’re too detached. Like a little boy playing with ants, unaware that they feel pain.”

“I never played with ants.”

“Never?” she said, almost playfully, turning to look at him, a sort of pout on her lips.

“No. That was my brother. With the magnifying glass and,” he hesitated, “and the sun.”

“And did you stop him?”

Ghosteye shrugged, afraid to stand, afraid to go to her side. She was looking into his soul and not liking what she saw. But he couldn’t lie.

“I didn’t think so,” she said, knowing his silence was the weakling’s consent. She moved to the empty desk chair and sat down, setting her bag on her lap.

“He was older than me. And bigger,” he said, his protest sounding innocuous against her accusation.

“There’s always someone bigger. Always someone who will stand upon the frail and steal from the poor. Who stops them?”

“Someone even, well, bigger.”

“Big in what way? That’s the question, I think. Gale, the coordinates. It’s a place for people who want to stop the feeds. The Organization.”

“How do you know about the Organization?”

“The
Decemviri
,” she whispered, tilting her head, pursing her lips, and finally shaking her head.

“How do you know that name?” Ghosteye whispered back, surprised.

“It doesn’t matter. I just know. And they, the circle of ten, they need to be stopped. This is wrong in so many ways. More ways than I can understand because so much of our lives has now been shaped by the feeds.”

“You’ll never stop them. They have eyes everywhere. How can you stop someone who can see everything?”

She leaned closer to him. Her green eyes became intent and her lips thinned into a line, barely moving as she spoke. “Can we be seen now?”

Ghosteye jerked, pulled from his reverie by a sudden increase in the train’s speed. Out the window were wet, green mountains, covered in evergreens and ferns. The redhead across the aisle had put her paper down on the table she shared with the row in front of her and appeared to be snoozing, her chin bouncing against her chest with the sway of the train. Even this reminded him of Beth, who always fell asleep when they tried to watch movies. The old kind. Before the feeds, which Beth wouldn’t watch, claiming old movies were better and more pure in motive. Ghosteye snorted, resting his chin on his hand, his elbow on the arm-rest next to the window, and closed his eyes.

Can we be seen now? What had she meant?
Ghosteye never found out. In her distress, the woman in the feed that had been playing had suddenly slit her wrists. With Beth there, Ghosteye summoned an ambulance for the woman. Had Beth not been there, well . . . and somehow she knew the truth about him. And Ghosteye knew that was part of the reason she left him. 

*****

Ramone knew they were being followed. It was a different feeling from the constant sense of being watched by the nanocameras, which usually made him want to look over his shoulder. The following. It gave him the urge to turn and stare down his perpetrator. He almost wanted to tell Blythe to stop and let him out so he could stand in the middle of the road and wait for the Enforcer to catch him.

What if he did that? What would happen? Ramone touched the scabs on his cheek where he’d clawed at his eyes after seeing Sue with her lover. The sores were tender, though less so than his other wounds, and feeling them again reminded him of the things the Enforcer had done to him.

“Can you stop at the next rest area?” he asked.

Blythe glanced at him but he couldn’t read her expression in the darkness. “Sure,” she said softly. Was that concern in her voice? He hoped it was. But right now, all he could think about was how fragmented he felt.

Ever since Ramone had asked her to leave him alone, Marci hadn’t spoken. She remained quiet, almost invisible in the back seat. Perhaps she was sleeping.
It’s not my fault. I’m not responsible for her.
But he knew he’d broken her spirit. Or something. These things had never made sense to him, and they made even less sense now. Ramone knew machines. He knew artificial intelligence because it didn’t react based on emotion. It operated under the parameters he gave it. Like the cameras, which responded to heat signatures and electromagnetism. What did Ramone understand of the heart? Not the physiological heart. Emotion. His own children knew not to expect him to open up and be warm unless he’d had a few drinks. The only person who’d ever seen the vulnerable side of him was Sue, and that was before the feeds.

“Is everything OK?” Blythe asked after several minutes of silence.

“I just need to stretch my legs.” He touched the fabric of the pants she’d bought for him. It was rough and coarse—canvas, he supposed. Something he would never buy for himself, not that he ever shopped for clothing. Sue knew what he liked.

He felt like a worker. A laborer. And the shirt—a long-sleeved flannel—completed the feeling. Shifting his feet, the thick sole of the new work boots caught on the edge of the floor mat. He blushed. He wasn’t himself in this attire. Ramone was a thinker, not a worker. There weren’t a lot of choices at the ranch store, he knew, and the canvas pants were a better option than the cowboy jeans sold there, and for that he gave Blythe credit. If he were just going to up and change his wardrobe or personality completely, better a construction worker than a ranch-hand.

Ramone crossed his arms over his chest, the palms of his hands almost raw from rubbing them across the rough canvas over and over again. The sky was visible through the moon roof of the Lexus. He reclined his seat slightly and tilted his head back to look through it and found his thoughts turning again to the Enforcer.
How far away are you, you devil? How long till we meet once more?