CHAPTER FIVE

EVIE’S VOICE SWIRLED in the current of my thoughts, rising to the surface amid smells of greasy diner and snatches of fear.

“Daddy.”

The flashback had focused the unbridled cascade of thoughts on a sensory experience multilayered enough to lure my subconscious mind into its proper place. Something more solid had set the hook.

“Daddy, it’s me.”

“Evie.” Blinking, I surfaced to Evie’s concerned face inches from my own. “Help me up.”

She tugged me to my feet, propping me against the wall of the corridor. To steady my transition I left the memory scenario of the diner running in the background. From experience I knew I’d been incapacitated for less than a minute, possibly as little as a dozen seconds.

The cascades were like seizures, though they left less residual effect on my mental processes. Quite the opposite, they often brought a new clarity to my conscious thought via a sort of mental branding. But the experiences were equally terrifying and humbling. I struggled to focus my eyes down the length of the hall.

“No one else saw, but some students are coming.” Evie held my wrist.

With her help I palmed the lock to my office. If a colleague witnessed a full-fledged cascade it could mean my job, my research. My Evie. For years I’d held my mind together with discipline and duct tape. “You were right.”

The door clicked open. Together we stepped into my office. “About what?”

“At the diner, you were right about a lot of things.”

“I was angry.” She caught the door with her foot. “Here’s your desk.” She waited for me to place my hands on its surface. “You got it?”

I nodded.

She whisked into the hall to gather my bag and tablet.

I slumped into my chair, resting my elbows on the desk. Reality had forced me to grow accustomed to being weak and vulnerable in front of Evie. It hurt she took the brunt of my condition, but I’d ceased fighting what I could do nothing about. “Most of my life is an act. The whole professor bit. The turned-down collar and lab coat. Even the ladies’ man. You were right about that.”

“Dad.” Shaking her head, she set my things on the desk in between us.

“One thing should have given me away from the very beginning.” I held my hand in front of my face and stated what should have been obvious to everyone. “I have dirt under my nails.” Dirt and duct tape, and Evie. Those were the only honest things about me.

“You’re not making any sense.”

I rested my hands on the desk, palms up, my gaze shifting to the tablet. Instead of the display, I focused on the face reflecting back at me in the blackened screen. The skin revealed nothing of the inner mileage. Outside, my confident symmetry and muscled ruggedness hinted at the variety of experiences I’d tackled and mastered in life.

Evie tried to understand, but I alone bore the tiredness from straining at the reins of a mind that could not rest. The way I figured it, and I’d spent 8,962 hours figuring it, my grey matter would be turning 1,000 years old by summer.

I continued, “Not you. Never my relationship with you. Since the first day, you and I,” I slid my hand across the desk, “that’s been real.”

She pulled up a chair and sat across from me, taking my hand in hers. “I know, Daddy.”

My vision returned to normal, save a halo shimmering around the idyllic image of my teenage daughter sitting across from me—rambunctious hair and Jewish nose like her mother’s. Honestly, I couldn’t be happier she’d picked up almost nothing from me. Almost nothing. Unfortunately, in that moment I saw again my tiredness, my melancholy. She must have seen the same things staring back at her.

“I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t said those things.”

“No, you meant them and had full right to speak your mind.” I squeezed her hand, doing my best to smile. “And how is it you are always the first to apologize? I’m the one who is sorry. A crusty old dig was a horrible way to spend your fifteenth birthday. I want to make it up to you.”

“With a movie night featuring two of my all-time favorite Spaghetti Westerns, 100 Rifles and Duck, You Sucker?”

“How did you—”

She cleared her throat and nodded toward the contents of my bag, now scattered across the surface of my desk. “You sort of dropped your things.” She smiled, the tip of her nose dipping slightly, her eyes twinkling.

“You’re the most beautiful daughter a father could have.”

“Dad.” Drawing the word into two syllables, she punctuated the reprimand by punching me in the shoulder.

“Okay, okay.” I held up my hands. “Moving on, not that I’m ungrateful for the save, but why aren’t you in school?”

“Friday?” She lowered a brow. “Early release? Did you hit your head in the hallway?”

I slapped my forehead. “Sorry, of course. I knew that.”

“I just thought I’d help my old man unlock his office before I marched home to dutifully start my homework.”

“But it’s a Friday.”

“Uh,” she interrupted me. “The more important question is why you are carrying this around in your book bag, today of all days?” She held up an old book, cover missing, and handed it to me.

I fanned through it, an old dime serial published as a single novel—exactly the sort of thing Evie and I collected together. “It’s not mine.”

She stared at me without changing expression.

“I get it. So you’re getting me gifts on your birthday now.”

“Nice try. I’m not buying it. Come on, Dad. It’s not like it’s pornography or something.”

I resisted the urge to shift awkwardly in my chair.

“You don’t have to hide it.”

“Hide?”

She rolled her eyes before thumping the back of the book.

I turned it over in my hands, finally noticing a stamp on the back of the last page—two round columns, one on either side of the letters, T H and S. “Good God.” I flipped to the second page, “The Austin Job, a Western by David Mark Brown.” I dropped the book, foolishly, as if reading the title could conjure a deathly hex.

“Really. Really?” My daughter was all business. “So we aren’t going to discuss this like adults?”

Shaking my head, I took it up again. One of the rarer lost DMB files, and the first one I’d ever physically seen, the slight paperback represented one of over three dozen stories the Truth in History Society claimed to preserve the secret truth about the origins of the twitch and the people behind it.

The people behind it. As if a secret society of ancient scientists intentionally designed the retrovirus almost a hundred years before modern medicine managed to come to grips with it. “Honey, I know they’re just stories. But the Truth in History Society isn’t fiction. They’re dangerous. You of all people should know that.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“Okay, strike that.” I placed the book down in front of me. “I know you’re curious. That’s a good thing. I’ll read it.” I tried to regain the playfulness from a moment earlier. “It’ll be fun. We can read it together.”

“Gee, that’d be swell, Dad.” She feigned excitement. “That still doesn’t explain where you got it.”

“Come on, Evie. I know you got it for me. Really, I like it. I’m sorry I overreacted.”

For the first time she seemed genuinely perplexed. “No, I didn’t. I promise.”

“Wait. If you didn’t—” a thought flashed. Yanking open the bottom drawer, I removed an accordion folder and fetched the first letter I came across. Already in the heap atop my desk was a paper-clipped pile of midterms. Twice a term I still demanded the students put actual pen to paper.

I removed the one I wanted. Placing it immediately next to the letter, I huffed. The handwriting was different. Samantha had not been the one sending me solicitous letters, claiming to be a member of the THS in dire need of my expertise. Still, the attack, the threat level, her bumping into me, and finding this book in my bag could not all be coincidence. Exhausted of sending letters, the radical conspiracist organization had felt it necessary to prove they could touch me directly at the place of my work.

“Dad, you’re freaking me out.”

I templed my ARGs. Several minutes remained until I was expected at the lab, and no calls had come through. “Sorry, honey. It’s just that, after the attack today, and,” I slid her the folder of letters, “I’ve been getting letters from someone within the THS for months now.”

“What?” She snatched up a letter, scanning it. “That’s so cool!”

“Evelyn Buckner.”

She fumbled over her enthusiasm. “Not what they did today, that was horrible. Killing civilians?” Genuine sorrow transformed her to a much older person. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s not their style.”

“Not their style? So you’ve been doing research, have you?”

She rolled her eyes, all teenager again. “But this, you have to admit, it’s totally cloak and dagger.”

I struggled to remember being her age, able to embrace adventure with innocent fervor. The memory wasn’t so far removed as I might have thought. “Yeah. I suppose you’re right.”

“Darn right I’m right.” She snatched the book. “That means this book contains a hidden message.”

I tried to take it back, but she fended me off.

“Wait.” She started pacing. “Let’s just see what we’ve got here.” She thumbed a few pages into the story and began reading out loud:

The heat and stench licked Oleg’s skin, beads of sweat forming on his forehead, dripping down the ridge of his nose. He split the herd. Stepping over bodies spent of fuel, crushing brittle skulls with his heel, retarding tongues of flame through sheer discipline—he imposed an angry contrast from the corrupt chattel of government and the slaves to wealth surrounding him. Their own predictable indulgence forfeited them to the flames. Tonight he freed them from the illusion of a happiness found in others’ misery.

“Sheesh, a bit on the melodramatic side even for pulp.”

“Not bad for a beginning.” I joined her. “Here, my turn.” She relented, and I skimmed several chapters until a handwritten note in red ink caught my attention. “Hello.”

“What is it?”

I lowered the book so we could both see it before reading the simple note out loud. “You are here.” The three words had been underlined and connected to a section of circled text. I read the text:

Tired as he was, he knew this to be the game. Moves and countermoves. He had thrown the gambit, and one of his knights had fallen. He hoped to get her back. Taking another drink of purified water, he closed his eyes. His memories the only intoxicant he allowed himself, he stumbled briefly into the past. But with a twitch his lip curled as the memory turned unpleasant. He opened his eyes, shaking the image from his mind.

Placing the flask back in the desk, he shuffled to the bookcase where he studied the narrow spine of a nondescript book reading, “What is to be Done?” Tipping the top corner, he opened the hidden passageway from his office to his lab. This sour time will soon pass.