Intrepid (27 page)

Nobu must have reentered the Nothing, and I heard Iago’s footsteps trudge back down the ladder stairs.
 

I stood there stupidly with a hose wound in my hands and confusion in my mind. It felt like every time I got closer to clearing my brain of all the mush, something happened to muck it back up again. I’d been putting so much trust in Iago this past week that I hadn’t stopped to understand before I believed. What if he wasn’t as trustworthy as I’d been taking him for? It was a feeling I’d barely been starting to feel, but this meeting I eavesdropped on solidified it for me.
 

I dropped the hose where I stood, rather than wind it back up, and pushed my way out of the plants.

I sat back down to watch the rest of the sunset. Just when the colors became their most vibrant, the sprinkler system that actually did exist turned on. It layered the deck in a dewy mist, and I sat there collecting the water on my skin and in my hair.
 

“Of course they had a sprinkler system,” I whispered.
 

Chapter Thirty-Two

I went back into the room I’d claimed, and swam in the sheets, adjusting my body every time I’d laid or sat in one position too long. I knew that I’d totally stolen Liam’s room, but he seemed to want me to have it. I wasn’t inclined to protest because after I’d explored
Geeta
, the other cabins felt stuffy and dead. This room was the most homely. I loved the way the books made me feel and the way all the windows forced me to wake up just before sunrise so I could go for a swim.
   

I even took a strange pleasure in making tiny messes. I pulled out books and scattered them in haphazard piles on the floor. I left clothing in dirty mountains at the foot of the bed, and I refused to adjust the blankets when I climbed out of the sheets every morning. I wasn’t by nature a messy person, but Liam was too surgically clean. I needed something to be human, and there was nothing more human than mess.
 

Thinking of Liam made me shiver with an unwanted desire. I had to admit that’s what it was. There was something big about him—something that could swallow me whole. I closed my eyes and thought of the garden. What I’d heard between Iago and Nobu made me crave answers even more than normal, and I couldn’t get enough no matter how deep I dug into the forums.
 

Gaians were a hot mess.
 

The long, torrid history. The battles. The fights. The verbal and physical wars that waged over the correct way to find the Path. Every article I read fed a hunger I didn’t realize had nestled in my stomach, devouring me from the inside out. Every article I read also only added to that hunger.
 

Questions. Answers. Questions. Answers.
 

I needed them, but they didn’t need me.
 

Then, about an hour after I left the gardens, I stumbled upon a forum called
The Eightieth Generation
. The author claimed to be a Saltador from Geronimo. The
entries were the first tugs of recognition I’d felt in a while, and it was a voice that felt safe and familiar and as real as my own.
 

The entries centered around me of all things, and I couldn’t stop reading. The next article was called,
‘On Faith’,
The Eightieth Generation
.
I wondered what the significance of generations was to this person who claimed the name Geronimo, and then I read:
 

We fight our parents’ war.
 

It’s a fact that is both short and simple.
 

Because I was born to a certain cause, I am expected to carry out the duties of that cause despite any reservations I may have concerning them. My Watchers, from the moment I could think, taught me to believe the ideals that propagate theirs.
 

What is the truth behind this will everyone says is so free? Because if this brainwashing is true for me, it is true for you, and free will is just an illusion.
 

How, then, are we to make our own decisions?
 

I ask that you return to the teachings of the Manifesto and understand before you believe. There is a difference between truth and honesty, and we must be Intrepid to walk the fine line between the two.
 

There are rumors of a girl with extraordinary gifts. They say that the Gaian Order hid her away when the Calvary broke the Laws of Humanity just over seventeen years ago. As you read this very article, there may be someone who can rise above our petty disagreements and find the Path.
 

 
The Gaian Order has raised her in secret—secret even from herself. They’ve filled her head with lies.

I know this, because I’ve seen her. I’ve had conversations with her. I’ve been her friend.
 

And the worst part? She has no clue who or what she is. She thinks she’s one of the Sheeple, bored of something called High School and a sport called Football. She hates what her universe calls Cheerleaders and loves to swim and watch the movement of the stars. She lives a completely ordinary life despite the extraordinary raging inside of her.

But we fight our parents’ war, right? Because our parents fear her, so must we, right?
 

Wrong.
 

Where she is now, I do not know, because she must have discovered something beyond herself.
 

Am I afraid?
 

No.
 

I know her and love her. I have faith that she will save us all.
 

She is Intrepid, and she Stands on the Shoulders of Giants.
 

-Geronimo, S-1, V-1.
 

I stopped reading and gulped back some air. Whoever Geronimo was, they knew me. They claimed to be my friend. “Sully,” I whispered. Hearing his name tumble from my lips sent a shiver of missing through me. Back in Spain, he’d wanted to talk. He said something about only wanting to “activate” something. Was there something I didn’t know? Of course there was. There was always something I didn’t know lately.
 

I closed the journal entry and looked at the listing on the forum. The one I’d just read was the last one entered by Geronimo. Whoever it was picked a name I’d recognize.
 

And they knew me.
 

They loved me.
 

I pulled the entry back up and looked into the comments, but there were none.
 

Maybe I should give Sully the chance to explain? He’d been my best friend for years, and I had a feeling there was so much more to what we were. How we left things felt so unfinished and unexplained. I touched my lips and remembered the kiss—the way it stung in so many ways as it danced its way into my core. Was it possible I misunderstood the fingers twisting around my throat? Was it possible he meant me no harm? The least I could do was give him a few minutes to tell his side. After all, if this was him writing these things about me, then it meant he wasn’t trying to kill me.
 

I pulled up a text box in the comments and typed:
She must understand before she can even believe. She wants to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants… she’s just not sure how.—T.P.
 

I smiled at my initials. “You realize your initials are the same ones Gram uses to write that we need toilet paper on our grocery list,” Lindsay always joked. I missed her so much and wished I could talk to her as much as I wished I could talk to Sully. I thought about Iago saying Lindsay probably existed in another universe. There was the possibility of seeing her replication again, but I wasn’t sure I found that comforting. What would it be like to meet a Lindsay who didn’t know me? Would there be a deep feeling of recognition in there—the same feeling of friendship that tied me to the Lindsay on Geronimo? Sully and Lindsay used to be so solid in my mind. What the three of us had carved so deep into my joints that I had trouble believing it didn’t carve irrevocably into them as well. Sully couldn’t have been trying to kill me. Even if he’d been lying to me, I knew him better than that.
 

What did Sully want to activate? Was he trying to activate the Change?
 

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Ringo had written for me to trust S.O., but couldn’t that have easily stood for Sullivan Oliverez as much as it stood for Santiago Ortiz? How could I know? Ringo wasn’t here to set things straight, and Liam and Iago had conveniently written Ringo out of the events of this past week. Plus, Iago had his “syringe.” Could I really trust someone who carried around something to sedate me if he was worried I’d gotten out of hand?
   

Maybe Ringo and Sully were both looking for me?
 

The questions were maddening, and I shut off the screen for good. I closed my eyes and felt the soft pillow against my cheek. I thought about the dance and the moments before my eyes turned into voodoo swirls of chaos. I remembered the way Sully and Lindsay danced off into the crowd and the way their laughter felt on my ears. I remembered worrying about the rumors clicking into place because of Iago helping me in the restroom and the twittering of scandal that meant absolutely nothing in comparison to everything else that happened directly after. I wanted to return back to that place. I wanted to nestle into my memory and dream only of the people I cared about and the life I didn’t realize I loved at the time.
 

Instead, I drifted into dreams that involved Sully’s hand cupped around my face, and his lips on mine. I dreamed of the rumble of my heart and how it sounded like the crackle of static just before thunder bellows its presence into a crashing storm. When I pulled away, Sully’s face had become Liam’s, and there was a fire in my gut that burned through the skin as he leaned in to kiss me again. And when it happened, we drifted in and out of the Nothing while universes collided around us like bursting bubbles. Pop. Pop. Pop.

I woke up to the buzzing on my wrist and felt the sweat dripping down my neck. The stars were vivid in the sky through the windows, and my eyes adjusted to drink them in. My bracelet vibrated once more, and I pulled up the screen. A little message box said:
Private Message on The Eightieth Generation Forum.
 

I clicked the notice and it brought me back to the message I’d left. Underneath my message was a note labeled private, but I was able to read it easily.
 

S-621, V-200-L32343231, Stag. Here you will understand in order to believe.—Geronimo
 

“Pull up Coordinate Plane next to this screen,” I said. My fingers twittered in the correct numbers in the correct boxes, and my heart fluttered.
 

Perhaps I should have thought harder about it. Perhaps I should have been more careful. But the Knowing is a hard thing to say no to, and I just
knew
I needed to see where these coordinates led. I just
knew
I needed more answers than the ones I was getting.
 

I pressed the button after I entered the coordinates, and for the first time, I entered the Nothing truly alone.
 

Chapter Thirty-Three

The white was blinding and the wind was biting. My shorts and tank top were not adequate for the world I’d entered, and once again I found myself cursing my choices in sleep wear. What kind of an idiot was I? I should have put on normal clothes before I Jumped or researched the Vein in the forums to see what I might need! Impulsivity was officially a habit I needed to overcome.
 

My skin became a numb that went beyond cold, so I took on the impossible task of not feeling anything at all. I tried to close off the sense of touch so that no temperature could impact me. Once again, I’d neglected to put on shoes, and my bulbous, big toes burned from touching the iced ground.
 

What the
hell
was I thinking?

My focus shifted from how I felt to where I was. The wind was louder than any train I’d ever heard, and sheets upon sheets of white seemed suspended within it.
 

I thought about lifting my hand to shield my eyes from the pelting frost but came to the realization that movement was too heavy now that I’d numbed my sense of feeling. I knew it was possible to move, but I hadn’t figured out how to unless I tuned up the sense of feeling again.
 

This was a waste of time, and I realized I needed to get back to the boat—fast—before I lost all my fingers and toes to the black death of frostbite.
 

I shifted feeling back into my fingers and felt it drip-drop into my wrists. Awareness reentered my nerves the way an I.V. bag leaks into a patient at the hospital. I began to lift my arm up to enter in return coordinates, but before I could move one hand over to the other, someone appeared out of the Nothing. The body was about a foot away from me. They had a mask on with a furred hood and goggles that hid the eyes. A gloved hand wrapped around my wrist, and the fingers moved along the leather Planck Activation Bracelet I wore and knew exactly how to find the clasp. There was a faint click, and where there wasn’t a latch before showed a break in the bracelet where one end used to enter the other. The fingers pulled it apart and removed a small, barely visible disk from it. Then, they re-clasped the bracelet around my hand before tossing the disk into the snow.

It all happened too fast for me to react, and by the time I regained feeling enough to pull my hand away, the lips behind the mask moved. Recognition reverberated through my core as words tumbled out. “We only have a few minutes before they realize I scrambled their signal to your tracker. They’ll be here soon. Jesus, Tex. You must be freezing. Haven’t you ever heard of clothes?”
 

My mouth fell open in a stupid stupor as the gloved hands took mine, turned on my bracelet, and entered new coordinates. Before I could protest, the Nothing consumed us both and we came out the other side into elsewhere.