The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (9 page)

“That’s not exactly the kind of jump I had in mind when I took a nanoshock to the nervous system to protect the Lattice.”

The man’s face reddened. “If you’re not into political jumps, that doesn’t mean you have to—”

“
Political
jumps? That’s what that is?”

“It’s a statement. It’s
art
. Bronwen is a great jump artist.”

Shaw imagined taking a swing at his speed bag back home and decided the red-faced man looked too much like it. “Excuse me, a friend just came in.”

Fortunately it was true. He’d just spotted his old friend Peter Mayfield at the door.

“Peter!” He caught his attention and they threaded their way through the crowd toward each other.

They touched helmets for a long time. “It’s been too long,” Peter said.

“It has. I’m sorry I don’t get down to Mexico much. But thank you for coming.”

“No, my schedule’s a lot more free than yours. You actually have to show up in the same place every day for work. I saw the party on my wrap and I knew I had to come.”

“Are you first tier or second?”

“Second, unfortunately. I just got my fifteen minutes notice.” He held up his forearm and showed Shaw his ticking clock. “Looks like the commons is trying to wind it down.”

Shaw brought up the guest list on his wrap and changed Peter’s setting so he could stay for the remainder of the party.

As the party thinned out and close friends and family stayed, Shaw and Peter caught up on the last few years and Shaw introduced his old friend around. They avoided any mention of Elvin. It was still too painful to talk about their friend who had become an addicted OJ. Especially after Shaw had just saved the very thing that had fed his addiction.

“You want to go to the fights sometime?” Shaw asked. “Ellie’s never interested. We could get a chat room and go back and see Liston-Clay or—” He stopped because Peter was shaking his head.

“I don’t jump unless it’s for work. Just a rule I’m working on.”

Shaw arched his eyebrow and his eyes flickered to Peter’s right arm. There it was, just where his wrap ended. A sky blue arm band. “Good for you, man. Get out and enjoy the real world, right?”

Peter smiled. “I actually go to the fights a lot in Mexico City. They don’t have the headgear rules you have north of the border.” He rapped the side of his helmet.

“I’d love to go to a real fight again.” Shaw looked around the room for Ellie, wondering if she was close.

Peter was silent for a moment. “You ever take time to look at the sky, Byron?”

Shaw nodded, his eyes on Ellie, who was across the commons at the bar talking to her sister.

“I do, Peter.”

“Just think about that—the beauty of the natural world, the sky … it’s more than just a nice color, you know, it’s the depth of it. You can’t capture that in the Lattice.”

“It’s true.”

“Just next time … you know. The next time you think you have to jump.”

“I don’t
think
I have to. I either have to, for work. Or I jump because I want to.”

“Like Elvin did,” Peter murmured. They let that hang there. “Have you thought about taking the pledge, Byron?”

Shaw exhaled slowly. “It’s not so black and white, Peter. I respect you for taking the pledge, but the world is not divided into the Blue Skyers and the OJs. There’s a … a spectrum.”

“And where are you on the spectrum? Elvin’s a damned junkie and I’m—”

“—a damned Puritan.” Shaw caught Peter’s eye. He crooked the side of his mouth. “No offense.”

Peter smirked. “None taken.”

“C’mon. Ellie will want to say hi. And no trying to get her to take your pledge! One Blue Skyer is enough for me.”

After the party, Ellie and Shaw tried once more.

They curled up in bed afterwards, and Shaw thought about how little he’d been home. How he wanted to be there during the pregnancy, whenever that would happen, and during those first few years of his child’s life. His job at the Lattice Installation would keep him away for weeks at a time, and he didn’t want to come home always surprised at how big his kid had grown while he was away.

Moving Ellie to the Lattice was out—too hot to go outside and what kind of a life was it in military housing? Especially with the new lead shielding they were building—how would that change living at the Lattice? And it wasn’t work he could do at home like so many others could. So then what? Leave the Lattice? What else was he qualified for?

Without prompting, Braybrook called—Yang would be waiting for Shaw at the San Francisco airport.

“San Francisco, sir?”

“I know I told you that I want you to run this thing on your own. But I’m scheduling a stop for you before you start visiting universities. Ada Dillon. Now that Wulfgang Huxley is gone, she’s the world’s best expert on the Lattice. She has something she’s working on that could be of help to you.”

Shaw thanked him and hung up the phone.

“I wonder if he heard all that.”

“What?”

“I was just thinking about my … career prospects if I decided to resign my commission, and then Braybrook called.”

“Do you really want to quit?”

Shaw thought about it and finally shook his head against the pillow. “Not right now at least. I like it, but once we get you knocked up, I’m going to want to be at home with you more. The problem is, it’s probably going to take more than nine months to fully get out. I want to be home right from the start.”

“By, remember Kyl, Etta, and Andrew’s kid? The first few months it barely did anything and the three of them just sat around and watched it. We don’t need both of us there for that. Of course you’re going to want to be home, but I can manage for a while. I don’t want you feeling like you’re a bad father because your job is keeping you away.”

“I will feel that way, though.”

“I know. But I also know you’ll be working to change it responsibly. And when you are here, you’ll be a wonderful dad.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m a genius, remember?”

Shaw and Ellie’s goodbye the next morning was extended, when Shaw decided at the last minute to accompany her to the clinic on his way to Lambert Field. He kissed her out front and she put her hand on his cheek.

“Come back soon, Byron.”

“I will, Elinor.”

They kissed again and Shaw hailed a self-driving cab from the curb and hurried to charter a slingshot back to San Francisco. Once aboard and underway, he watched the landscape pass below the window and tried to be one of those people who could do nothing but watch scenery, content. It didn’t work. He got bored and he twirled his jump ring around his finger, wondering about Chamberlain’s bayonet charge at Little Round Top.

He felt wretched for not being able to spend more than fifteen minutes being bored without wanting to jump.

You made it the whole way home without jumping,
he chided himself
.

Yeah, but I had a fresh mystery to think about then.

You have plenty of mysteries you can think about.

I don’t want to think about mysteries right now. I want to think about Ellie and having a family and my future.

Then think about those things.

But I get bored and then I want to jump.

Weak. You’re weak, Byron.

I know.

He made sure he was fully buckled in, touched his ring to his temple, and then let the exhilaration and fear of war wash over him as he and Joshua Chamberlain charged down the slope of Little Round Top toward the Confederate soldiers at the bottom.

Tim Yang was waiting for him, dressed in full uniform.

Yang saluted, and Shaw returned it half-heartedly. “Good to see you again.”

“I believe you’re mistaken, sir. We haven’t met.”

Shaw did a double take.
Right
. Shaw had technically never met him, but it was hard not to recognize the same face that had touched him with the nanoshock and nearly killed him. On top of that, he was only now realizing that the night before, this man’s face had featured prominently in a nightmare.

This was going to be tricky.

“Of course, I met your evil doppelganger.”

“And an inept one, at that, sir.”

“Inept?”

“Lucky for you. If I’d been the one attacking you with a nanoshock, you wouldn’t have had the chance to turn it back on me … Sir,” Yang added at the last moment.

Shaw was struck silent before he belted out a loud laugh. “I suppose if you’re here to protect me, I should be grateful for that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me, do you carry one? A nanoshock, I mean.”

Yang nodded. “For this assignment, but I don’t trust them generally. They’re just as likely to injure the man carrying it as they are the target. As Ono’s mission proved. Have the doctors found an antidote to yours, sir?”

Shaw held up his black fingers. “No, they still haven’t gotten rid of it. Damndest thing. At least it’s not spreading.”

Yang leaned in close. “May I?”

Shaw nodded and Yang delicately held his hand, inspecting the fingers. Shaw suddenly had a flashback to adjusting the cuffs of the other Yang.

Yes, this was definitely going to be tricky.

“Will they always be black?” Yang asked.

“I hope not. The antidote should have cleared it up by now, but the docs aren’t sure what’s going on with this one. It’s something new.”

Yang released Shaw’s hand. “It’s a badge of honor, sir. If it were me, as long as the doctors said it was safe, I wouldn’t let them get rid of it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Let’s get going. I changed our flight to a later one. We have a stop we need to make here.”

“Where are we going first, sir?”

Shaw was about to answer but his attention was caught by a familiar face on a wall-mounted screen next to a small cafe. Shaw’s own face was on a feed, and next to it was the list of universities he planned to visit.

“Stanford,” he answered. “Then to Hefei, China.” He pointed to the screen. “There’s our full itinerary in case you wanted to know.”

Stanford, Hefei, Heidelberg, Paris, Geneva, then across the Atlantic to Boston to visit Harvard and MIT.

Yang glanced up at it and his eyes widened. “I didn’t realize we’d have an audience.”

“Everyone always has an audience. We’re just lucky enough to be reminded of that fact.” Shaw tried to match it with a smile.

Yang nodded and looked away from the screen. His eyes caught something, and he looked over Shaw’s shoulder, suddenly tense.

Shaw felt a hand lightly on his shoulder. Spinning, he saw a young woman remove her hand and start walking away. She looked back over her shoulder, and smiled. “Thank you!” she called. Another hand on his other shoulder, this one from an old man.

Yang was scanning the crowd, anxious. Shaw could practically read his thoughts. Any one of these people could have a hidden nanoshock, just waiting to use it on Shaw and finish the job.

“I’d like to get you out of here, sir.”

“There’d better not be any crowds like this at Stanford,” Shaw mumbled, following Yang out of the airport.

After finding Dillon’s office and her lab empty, Shaw and Yang were directed to the Stanford Memorial Church at the center of campus. Curious students had followed them across the campus—a few stepping forward to touch Shaw on the shoulder—but as the great doors of the church closed behind them, they found themselves alone with the mosaic domes and arches.

“I wonder why they didn’t follow us in,” Yang said.

“Most of my students know better than to interrupt me during my morning prayer,” a woman’s voice echoed in reply.

Shaw stepped forward into the main aisle, his eyes adjusting to the light and searching out the source of the voice. Alone in a forward pew was a bowed head. The woman’s gray hair—uncovered by a helmet, he couldn’t help but notice—was all he could see.

“I’m sorry if we disturbed you, Dr. Dillon. I didn’t think—”

“That anyone uses a church for prayer anymore?” She finished. Shaw was close enough to her now that he saw her make the sign of the cross and rise from the kneeler in the pew.

“Amazing,” she said, facing him for the first time, “that for as often as people are told I’m here, no one gives a second thought as to
why
I might be here. It comes with the territory, I suppose. If you’re the foremost expert on the Lattice, someone’s always interrupting you to ask a question.” Ada Dillon’s mouth bent in something like a smile, and Shaw saw surprising youth there. Her hair might be gray, but she couldn’t have been much more than twenty years older than Shaw himself.

“Of course,” she added, looking at Shaw’s helmet, “the fact that this country’s helmet laws don’t apply inside churches is an added bonus. Feel free to take yours off if you’d be more comfortable.”

“Again, I’m very sorry to disturb you,” Shaw repeated, taking his helmet off as he spoke, “but it is important that we speak.”

“It always is.” Dillon’s tone suggested that she was weary of the attention, but Shaw thought it was plainly obvious she relished it.

“I’m Colonel Byron Shaw, I—”

“If you haven’t learned yet, you’ll learn soon, Colonel. You don’t have to introduce yourself anymore.” Dillon’s eyes caught the motion of Yang approaching. She stared as he came forward and stopped next to Shaw. “Hmm. Interesting. How many billions have seen that face in their feeds in the last forty-eight hours? The face worn by a terrorist, but now he’s here with you, the one who stopped him. I can see the game being played, and yet it still has the desired effect. Fascinating.”

“You must know why we’re here, then.”

She gave a curt nod. “I do. But it’s not ready.”

Yang and Shaw exchanged glances. “I’m sorry, but …
what
exactly is not ready? General Braybrook said that you had something you were working on that could help, but that’s all I know.”

“I don’t usually find myself disappointing people, but in this case, I’ll have to. You can tell the general that my research is not nearly far enough along to be a help to you.”

“What’s your research?”

“A whole new Lattice. Lattice 2.0 is what the reader manufacturers call it.”