Intrepid (21 page)

The easy joking and snarky attitude was something I could relate to. It calmed me enough so I could look away from his shadow and reexamine the sky. “No.”
 

“The cool thing about being a Saltador is that you will. You’ll see so many things that won’t feel real but are. This new life of yours won’t be entirely bad.”
 

How did he know what I was worrying about? The comfort I felt seconds before disappeared just as quickly as it came. “Won’t be bad? Do you have people trying to kill you because of what you are?”
 

“Not yet.”
 

I studied the shadowed line of his jaw and reached over to turn on the lamp. It was a face I’d never seen before, but I knew it. A square jaw attached to his ears, and I don’t know why I noticed the ears, but they were absolutely even with each other. The symmetry created a straight line across darkly tanned skin to his turquoise eyes.
 

“I know all these changes are strange, but if it makes you feel better, I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life on this boat. Then, yesterday, I was told I’d been lied to my entire life. How’s that for things we have in common, huh?”
 

I stared at his face and tried to pin it to a memory that didn’t exist. I knew him, but I didn’t know him.
 

He kept talking, though he wouldn’t look directly at me. “They never let me meet you, you know. There are ways to transport children before they turn three. They are called Transport Spheres, but they never took me to meet you. I just spent my entire life Watching you.” He picked up the journal that had been returned to its place by the lamp. “There’s an entire shelf over there with written documentation of things I noticed about your life. If you ever get nostalgic, you’re welcome to read through them.”
 

Between this guy and Iago, who knew how many secrets I actually didn’t have. There was nothing about my old life that was sacred to the people trying to protect me. If anything, my own secrets had been kept from me. Fodder for everyone else’s plans. “Forgive me if I don’t find it flattering to discover I had a stalker,” I said.
 

He laughed. “Sounds creepy, huh?”
 

“I don’t know what’s creepy anymore. I’m past the point of being creeped out. Does my stalker have a name? I’m guessing you know mine? I’m Subject.” I pointed to the journal, and I was surprised to feel a smile spreading along my face as if I hadn’t just been crying pitifully in a dark room by myself minutes before. I suddenly hoped my face wasn’t splotchy and blotchy from the tears and stuttered breaths caused by crying.
 

“Liam.”
 

I let the name nuzzle into my ears, but even that name was unfamiliar. “What’s next, Liam?”
 

“Santiago and I are going to teach you what we can before we have to leave.”
 

“Why here?” I asked.
 

“It’ll be nearly impossible for you to Splice this planet accidentally. The Energy has already converted away from inertia, and there are no Movers to stir it all up. Until we know what you can do for sure, we can’t risk keeping you long term anywhere you can enter into Creation. We will travel to Newly Stagnant Universes for training purposes, but we will spend most our time here for now.”
 

“What’s the difference between this and a Newly Stagnant Universe?”
 

He nodded like he approved of the question. He was obviously the same age as me, but there was something ancient about this boy. “Newly Stagnates still contain an abundance of human Energy. They may even be highly populated, but their Culture Pulse has slowed. They are in a dying Vein, even if the population within it has another hundred generations to live out.”
 

I wanted to ask how he knew the number of generations a Vein had left, but I didn’t. It was like Iago’s triangle in the cabin. I had to accept that I wouldn’t learn everything at once, so I had to be patient with my questions.
 

If Liam noticed the contemplative look on my face, he ignored it. He continued: “Universes like this one are completely dead because the human race finally died off naturally or killed each other towards extinction. I guess you can’t blame them for it. When humans feel the end approaching, madness seeps into every ounce of their souls. The loss of Collective Energy destroys their hope, and they become desperate or self-destructive. Neither reaction saves them.”
 

He didn’t sugar coat any of his explanations, and he spoke as if I knew what every term meant. It was a crash landing into his world, and I tried to latch on to the few things I did understand. “What type of universe did I grow up in?” I asked.
 

“It was an Established Stagnant. There’s no more proof needed to confirm that Geronimo has only a few more generations in it.”

“Huh?”

 
“The underground politics are leading it to a nuclear war. Those that survive will mutate into something else, then die off eventually.”

“How do you know?”
 

“The Culture Pulse tests tell us. In a way, Saltadors can see into the future for at least seventeen to eighteen generations. Sometimes we have to travel deep into Veins before we figure it out. It’s why finding the Optimal Path is so difficult. Sometimes a Vein feels like it’s thriving until all a sudden it doesn’t.”
 

Veins. I ran my finger along the blue veins peeking through the pale skin on my wrist. “How can you tell it’s dying?”

“When you reach a certain point, you feel the shift in culture, as if you’d walked into the shade after spending all day in the sun. I describe it as a shadow, because there’s a darkness in all humans that, once encountered, spreads throughout the whole.”
 

I closed my eyes. That would be the fate for the great, great grandchildren of Lindsay and Gunner and all the people I went to high school with. A deep sense of loss hit me, because not even the world I grew up in would exist for long.
 

“I know it’s hard to hear, but there’s a peace to it all. Look at these stars, untouched by humanity’s greedy light.”
 

I looked out at them and tried to find the peace he had.
 

“It’ll all be okay. You’ll learn to accept it eventually. Explorers search for a pathway to preservation, but we know that eventually, we will all return to the Nothing. As for Lindsay, you may just see her again on a Vein that is not Stagnant. Her lineage may just surpass us all.”
 

“How’d you know I was thinking about—“

“I know things about you that not even you know.”

I laughed. “Again with the creepy, stalker crap.”
 

“I’ll work on being less creepy,” he promised.
 

I fidgeted with the bracelet and made it slide around and around my wrist. “Yeah. You do that, okay?”
 

Liam
 

You seem to think me inferior to the swans in prophecy. They sing before too, but when they realize that they must die, they sing most and most beautifully, as they rejoice that they are about to depart to join the god whose servants they are. But men, because of their own fear of death, tell lies about the swans and say that they lament their death and sing in sorrow.
 

—Socrates on his Death Bed

—S-3000, V-234323-L989877889, Prod.
 

Chapter Twenty-Six

“It was strange,” Santiago said. “I never would have pegged Sully for a Shadow Boxer. He seemed so… un-extraordinary.”
 

I thought about the boy I’d seen in report after report making Texi laugh at mundane, ordinary things. I tried to think of any clues he gave as to what he was, but I couldn’t remember a single one. It made sense that Santiago might have missed it, but how could Nobu and I have? I was supposed to be Mr. Objectivity, and I had to consider the possibility that my perspective could be just as limited by Texi as the others. Was I as distanced from her as I thought I was?
 

I countered his observation with questions. “And he tried to strangle her? That’s what sparked the Bucket Hop?”
 

“Without the bracelet,” Santiago added.
 

I shivered at the thought. She could Hop and possibly Jump at will. The tracker imbedded in her bracelet was more important than ever now, or else how would we be able to find her if she accidentally went elsewhere? How would she know how to get back to us?
 

“Luckily, when we Interim Jumped, I gave Texi some time to settle into it before we came here. I’d hate to think what we would have had to do if Sully’d followed us down this Vein. At least we were able to figure out what his tracker was hidden in.” He added sugar to his coffee, letting the white grains sift into the dark liquid. He swirled it with the spoon and breathed in the steam before he took a sip. “How could I have been so blind to him? He was right under my nose.”
 

“You know that means they’ve always known where the subject was.”
 

“My guess is just not
who
the subject was. We kept her so much in the dark about it all that any prodding Sully did probably came up empty. He couldn’t exactly go around murdering every teenage girl that fit her description, could he? He had to wait until he had proof, and he probably noticed the headaches when I did. They aren’t exactly easy to hide if someone knows what to look for. Plus she had the added benefit of voodoo eyes.”

Her eyes were the things I noticed in that last feed of her in the gym that Santiago sent. There was a fissure in the color. A crack into her soul. The color change was barely audible, but something let me hear it. I almost thought I’d imagined it was there, but it was. The Change. The clue. It was like the Multiverse meant for me to see it, because there was something bigger going on than just the strange eyes.
 

I looked up as if I could see through the two decks above and into my room. I let Texi take it. There were other rooms I could have given her instead, but for the hour we talked, she seemed most comfortable there. It didn’t feel right to make her move, and my room had the second best view on the entire boat. Things were about to get even more chaotic for her, and she deserved the peace of a good sunrise to start her day off in the morning.
 

Texi was different in person. I know I’d seen her a million times before, but there’s a difference in knowing facts about a person and knowing a person in their entirety. In many ways, I’d known her my entire life, and it was surprisingly easy to talk to her. I felt the movement from each question she asked as it transitioned into the next. Some of the things she asked were repetitive and others were inventive, but I could tell she kept some to herself entirely. She was intuitive to the process of understanding—when to push, when to wait. Strangely, what was most impressive was how she was able to set aside her fear and still be a smart ass. From afar, I’d witnessed her snarky nature, and experiencing it in person threw me off a little. She reminded me of Nobu in some ways, with her quick, quirky quips. Except she wasn’t like Nobu in all the other ways. She was the first girl I’d ever met, and I was shocked to find how easy it was to match her attitude step by step. She seemed to respect it more, though I was nervous for reasons I couldn’t describe.
 

“How are you holding up?” Santiago asked.
 

“So, you’ve known, too?”
 

He took another swig of coffee. “I know stuff I wish I didn’t, but that always seems to be the way of things. It’s funny. When I first found out what I was, I hated her. I thought she was the reason I could never be normal, and even when I got to start Jumping, it took me a while to realize that normal was never going to be in my future whether or not Texi was in my life. This existence eventually became my new normal, and I was able to let go of my anger, but she couldn’t let go of hers. She hated me for years after the summer I found out. I said so many hurtful things, thinking it’d make me feel better—that it’d change things. By the time I realized it wouldn’t, she couldn’t stand being around me. This summer, I tried even harder to fix things as we worked on that stupid fence, but it was like the more I tried to make things right, the more she pushed back against the idea. I was scared she wouldn’t trust me when it came time.”

“But she did trust you.” I was growing tired of this line of conversation. I remembered when Santiago was learning how to correspond with us when he was fourteen. The tone of his attached notes to the vid feeds and data he’d collected were full of frustration and anger as he learned to deal with his new reality. He’d gotten better over the last year, but only because he became overly sure of himself and his purpose as a Saltador. He’d grown into a cocky pain in the ass. Mostly, I found both kinds of Santiagos exhausting. I tried to redirect the conversation by asking, “When did the Change finally trigger?” This was the useful information—the kind I didn’t know yet.
 

“I was talking to her when the swirling in her eyes started at the Homecoming Dance, and at first I thought it was a trick of the disco lights. I followed her into the restroom, and when she looked at me, purples invaded the greens of her irises. It was terrifying. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.” Santiago stared into the brown depths of his coffee and the dimples in his cheeks sunk further into a frown. “When I dropped her off, I should have stayed with her. I just needed to think. The eyes were so strange. It was dumb to leave! What if I had been too late? What if Sully had succeeded in killing her? What if I walked into that stupid house only to find her dead?”

I pulled open the refrigerator and grabbed the orange juice. I didn’t want to answer his questions. My mind was stuck on the question of the eyes, and I tried to pull him back to the topic. “What was going on?”