The Shimmers in the Night (17 page)

“I wondered about that,” said Cara, and felt almost sad. Unlike Jax, she'd been alone.

“I think any hollow in our neck of the woods would be at that source, instead of one farther away. Just like we were. The Cold is systematic. And maybe, if I had someone to help pull me back…. We'd have to be in the same place, Zee and I. So I mean, first we'd have to find her physically. And then, assuming she was a hollow, we'd have to get her in a room and someone would have to guard us, her and my body, while I was out basically, you know…looking for the rest of her.”

Jaye shook her head, half disbelieving.

“Say it didn't work,” said Cara. “What could go wrong? Could you get hurt?”

They
should
take a risk to get Zee back. Because what had Roger said? If she
was
a hollow, she was just waiting to be a so-called channel for the Burners' fire, or something. She was in danger right this minute. And always, from here on out.

But what about Jax—should they really risk him again? She couldn't forget those black eyes, expanding in his face like pools of spilled liquid. It made her scalp creep thinking of it; she could hardly believe it had been just hours ago.

“I think the worst-case scenario would be failing—that I couldn't get her back. I don't think they can make me a hollow again. Or you. If you get pulled back before the Burners use you, I'm pretty sure you're immune. The Burners use this one connection in the brain, this one pathway, that kind of gets destroyed in the process. Like a short circuit, basically. So they can't use it to get in again.”

“But
they
brought the hollows back, didn't they? Roger and them? When we were on the oil rig?
They
brought them back to consciousness so they could give them their instructions. Remember?”

“Not really. It's like hypnosis, where there are different levels of sleep—they can bring the hollows up from the deepest level, where they have those black eyes and are open for the Burners, without waking them up all the way. When they're in lighter states, they don't have the black eyes; I think they might look like regular people. They're practically robots when their eyes are like that, they only understand basic commands. Nothing complex.”

“We should talk to Max,” said Cara. “Let's ask him what he thinks as soon as we get home. Let's ask him if he'll help us look for Zee.”

“Kids?” called Mrs. M, standing at the door to the ferry's cabin. “Come back inside! You'll catch pneumonia out there for so long!”

They followed her back in, holding on to posts and the backs of benches as they walked down the aisle and the boat bucked and dipped. When they got to their row of seats, Jaye sat down next to Hayley and nudged her softly.

“What's so urgent you have to go all sixty-words-a-minute on us, Hay?” she asked.

“Maybe I had a chance to actually
bond
with people, and now it's totally wrecked. And maybe standing out there with you guys, getting drenched by polluted water and freezing to death's not my idea of fun.”

“Don't be rude, Hayley,” chided Mrs. M. “You're not a holy martyr suffering on a cross. You're just a girl who had to leave her swim meet a weency bit early.”

“You don't know
anything,”
said Hayley churlishly, half under her breath.

“Oh no?” asked Mrs. M. “Well, you should feel free as a
bird
to share with me.”

Hayley shot Cara a dark look. Cara knew that look: this was one of Hayley's moods. Now that the excitement was over, she was blaming Cara for ruining her social plans. Hayley had many social plans. Some were so minute they were invisible to the untrained eye. But she was always planning.

Cara tried not to feel irritated by Hayley. Back in August, true, her oldest friend had asked to be included; but now school was on and she wanted to do regular things. She hadn't asked to be chased by cloned, inhuman-seeming men, to put out fires or watch one of her best friends get burned and the other get throttled.

Her
mother wasn't missing, after all.

Cara wondered what her own mother was up to. What, and where, and whether she was still fighting. (Hayley had said, with admiration,
supernatural kung fu….
)

She should be more generous. Hayley was basically an innocent bystander in all this.

“I'm sorry, Hay,” she said softly. “I'm sorry I messed up the trip for you.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. M stoutly. “You did do wrong to run off without permission, I admit that, but us going home early isn't your fault. We have Jackson to return, and your hands—well, that was purely an accident.”

“I'm sorry anyway,” she said, and tried to catch Hayley's eye. Hayley knew what she meant, even if Mrs. M couldn't.

“Me, too,” Jax said.

But Hayley wouldn't look at either of them, just gave an angry toss of her head and went back to her texting.

Mrs. M brought their dad up to speed on the official version of events from the passenger seat in the Subaru. Heading home from the ferry dock in Provincetown, Cara, Jax, and Jaye sat in the backseat and Hayley curled up with their bags in what her mom called the “way-back,” self-isolating with her phone.

“I apologize for not calling you right when this happened, William,” said Mrs. M. “But just a few minutes after I realized Cara was gone, when I was still brainstorming what to do, the nice lady at the Advancement Institute called. She'd gotten my number from Cara, and she told me the kids were doing fine, with details right down to what Cara was going to be having for dinner. She was very reassuring. So I decided not to bother you.”

“All's well that ends well, I guess,” said Cara's dad. “But Jackson, you should have let me know you were homesick. I would have driven in and picked you up myself.”

“I just got scared, all of a sudden,” said Jax. “And Cara was near. That's all.”

“Of course, William, I'm sure you'll want to have a serious talk with Cara about what happened here,” said Mrs. M. “The risk she took. I
did
express my deep
disappointment
at her irresponsible behavior, both as her chaperone and as a family friend. It goes without saying she should have contacted you about Jackson and stayed where she belonged. I shudder to think what could have happened there. But the discipline is your area.”

“I certainly will have a talk with her,” said Cara's dad, and caught Cara's eyes in the rearview mirror, glowering. “I certainly will.”

All things considered, though, the talk wasn't too harsh. Cara's dad had never been too comfortable punishing the kids; the worst thing he ever did was give them extra chores or, if he was feeling like he really had to make a show of it, saying they couldn't watch TV. In this case, he opted for telling Cara she had to help Lolly keep the house cleaner—and, of course, that if something like this ever happened again, etc.

He cleared his throat awkwardly at the end of that speech, then patted her on the shoulder and retired to his office to do more writing about the back-whipping guys.

Cara grabbed a couple of slices of cinnamon-swirl bread from a bag on the kitchen counter—she was ravenous—and then took the stairs two at a time up to Jax's room, tearing off generous bites of the soft bread as she went. It was just the two of them and their dad in the house at the moment; Lolly didn't come over till just before dinnertime on weekdays. Since it was afternoon, Max was still in classes, although the school day would end soon.

On Jax's door Messy-Hair Einstein hung droopily, attached by a single piece of tape. She reached up and restuck the other piece of tape on top of the poster with a fingertip, then knocked as she turned the knob.

For a second, stepping into Jax's domain, she missed the days when she'd had to watch out for slugs and crabs crawling around. Now there were elaborate Lego machines underfoot, plus stray bright-colored blocks whose corners were surprisingly sharp when you stepped on them.

Jax was kneeling on his rug, halfway under his desk, setting up his backup computer—a.k.a.
her
computer—by plugging various cables into a power strip on the floor. His own laptop, of course, had been abandoned in his room at the Institute, along with his phone.

When they got the windowleaf back from Jaye—Cara had forgotten to ask for it when they dropped Jaye off—they could maybe get his tech back faster that way, she thought.

“What did Dad say?” he asked from beneath the desk, his voice muffled.

Cara sat down on the edge of his bed, though a chair would have been better. Among the messed-up covers were books, a greasy plate, a stray fork, and what appeared to be a large horseshoe magnet (which the tines of the dirty fork stuck to). She picked up the magnet/fork combo and placed it gingerly on a shelf.

“Extra chores,” she reported. “Other than that, he let me off with a warning.”

Jax scooted out from under the desk and straightened, dust bunnies hanging from the knees of his jeans; he hit a key on the laptop to boot it up, then sat down hard on his swiveling desk stool, which made a quick wheeze.

Suddenly he froze, then blinked and shook his head, as if to clear cobwebs.

“They have this place warded,” he said abruptly. “The whole block, down to the water. I just
got
it. Just now. The opposite of sensing danger. A kind of security fence, you know? I can feel the lines of it, the way you'd see laser beams crossing each other in a movie about a museum robbery. Warded, like with the charm we did in August, to make the house safe for Mom to come back?”

“There were wards at the power plant, too—where we found Mom. So now you're sensing them?”

“I learned a lot down in the Rift Valley.”

“Did you see the animals, too—the glowing deep-sea animals? And was there lava where you were?”

Jax nodded. “And then there was the infrastructure of the Cold.”

“The pipes?”

“He pumps the gas from deep down, I think. I mean I don't know the mechanics of the process. I didn't even know there
were
major reservoirs of CO
₂
in the mantle before this. I thought it was just shifting rock and sometimes some magma or whatever. Geology's not my best field. But I guess there must be. Because he definitely brings it up from somewhere. And he delivers it through the pipes.”

“Did you also see the machine? The machine scraping the bottom?”

Jax looked surprised.

“No.”

“It was some kind of huge vehicle. It scraped the bottom of the sea. I think it must have killed everything in its path. But that was all I could see; it passed me, and it was chasing all these animals in front of it. And then it was gone.”

“It must be a part of his—what does he call it? His ‘Cleaning Initiative.' One of the three prongs.”

“Prongs? How did you
learn
all this?”

“I did get readings off some of the animals in the Valley, but the readings were hard to understand—our brains are too different. Well, they mostly don't
have
brains is the thing; they have these spread-out nervous systems…star-fish, for instance. Sponges don't have centralized brains
or
nervous systems. Sponges aren't rocket scientists.”

“No kidding.”

“I could read the sea turtle last summer, remember? It had this deep intelligence. But sponges? Forget it.”

“So where'd you—”

“Mom. When she pulled me back it was sort of—through her mind. And I picked up all this data, just lying around in there.”

He grinned his little-boy grin.

Cara gaped at him, then realized she looked idiotic and shut her mouth.

“So the main prong is global warming, which he calls Atmosphere Adjustment. He likes these official-sounding names. Then there's what scientists call ocean acidification, which he calls Marine Modification. The third prong is the Cleaning part. He wants to get rid of a long list of life forms, like most of them, to make room for his favorites. A few he's going to help survive to be resources in the new world. Like, in the oceans I think he likes jellyfish. Actually that's a misnomer, they're not true fish at all. Some of them are allied with him, and algae, I think, but I can't keep them straight, the algaes and plankton, some are with us and some with him. Technically even jellies are plankton, a kind of megaplankton also called gelatinous zooplankton, but then you also have your macroplankton—ctenophores, salps, doliolids, and pyrosomes—”

“Jax!
Down, boy!”

“But coral reefs? Forget it. Reefs are his enemies. They're all on our side, all of them. Every single reef species. Not only the corals but all the colorful reef fish like you see in aquariums—they're already dying off around the world because of carbon. And cetaceans. We have
all
the dolphins,
all
the whales…and the mollusks. Every shell-forming organism in the ocean is on our side.”

“And you got this from Mom's brain?”

“Well, her mind. It's not
equivalent
to her brain. But close enough.”

“Um.”

“And on land it's mostly the weedy species that are with him—things that survive in garbage dumps. Although there was a suggestion that the ants could be his. Like,
all
of them. If that's true, it'd be bad. Because ants? There are a lot. Some scientists think they may make up a
quarter
of the total biomass of all land animals.”

He got up from his chair and pulled open his window; a rush of cold air made Cara shudder.

“What'd you do that for? You're letting the heat out!”

“Shouldn't we want to stay cool, anyway? With all those Burners gunning for us?”

“But you said our block was warded.”

“Yeah. I'm kidding. Mostly.”

He leaned down and stared at a seam on the wooden window frame.