CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE VACTRAIN WOULD have been faster, but lacked flexibility. I clicked the remote start for my field truck. Even from the top level of the auto garage I could feel the engine turn over as much as hear it. A garish mobile command unit, I’d shamelessly ordered the vehicle as much for appealing to women as for actual work. Of course I charged it to the lab. Today I’d put the V8 overhead, hemispherical engine to the test.

I slid down a handrail and spun off another landing, filling my throat and lungs with the acrid taste of diesel and gas fumes. Bounding down the final three stairs, I slid to a stop against the side of the truck.

Inside the cab, I hit the gas while buckling myself in. Accelerating through the tight turns of the parking garage, the tires squealed as I spiraled back up to the surface and onto Campus Drive. The commute normally took eighteen minutes. Not today.

I ran a stop sign, incurring the wrath of a student heading home. Shifting my grip on the wheel to ten and two, I spaced my fingers out evenly.

“Scan complete. Greetings, Dr. Buckner.” The gravely male voice I’d selected emanated from the surround speakers. “Where are we headed today?”

“Home, but I’m in a hurry. Disable safety protocols.”

“Done.”

“Map me the fastest way through traffic and lights.” I jumped a curb, bypassing several cars stopped at a light and blew the horn moments before barreling across the intersection. “I’d like to avoid as many of those as possible.”

“Understood. Suggested route has been uploaded.”

“Display on windshield.” A pale blue grid of solid and blinking lights appeared in the bottom left corner of the windshield. I flipped the visor down to block the sun.

“At current speed, estimated travel time thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds.”

I pressed the pedal down. “Dial Marisol Cruz, all numbers.” I was clawing to catch up, only thinking one move at a time. To win the game I’d need to get ahead. More than ever, I had to win. If anyone went for my Evie, they were gonna get more than they bargained for. She’d been dealt a crap hand to begin with, dumped at the age of three on the doorstep of a self-destructive, nihilistic father.

“Buckner, donde el diablo,” Marisol answered.

“It’s Evie. I’m on my way to get her.”

She swore. “You’re right. I should have thought of that. You also should have told me. I would have come with.”

“And bled all over my interior? No, once you get on your feet you’ll be needed at the lab.” I glanced at the map, swerved around a slow moving car and goosed the engine in order to merge onto I-35.

“Be careful with that truck. You’re not getting another one.”

“Who are these people?”

“THS?”

“The men in the lab. Before, you didn’t want to tell me everything. That was fine then. But…” I ground my teeth. “They could be after Evie.” Silence on the other end. “Marisol, you have to tell me.”

“No, I don’t, Buck.”

Rage swelled in my background mind. I locked my hands on the wheel, focusing both conscious and subconscious on the moments in the lab previous to my blackout. “How could—”

“I don’t have to tell you anything, but I care for Evie too.”

“I know you do.” I hit the brakes after being blocked off in the fast lane.

“You swear you don’t remember anything about the moment in the lab? The encounter in the hall?”

My background mind flared, temporarily washing out my conscious with an image of a red-eyed man, laughing. I gripped the wheel, slashing across three lanes and nearly clipping the back of a semi. The sign notifying me of my exit blurred past. “Some. Not as much as I would like.” I still didn’t know if I could trust Marisol enough to play all my cards.

She paused briefly, not a good sign. She was still determining how much she could tell and what to withhold. “Connect the dots, Buck. I’ve been strictly cautioned you are not ready for any of this information. But you’ll figure it out sooner rather than later, and I’d never wish harm on Evie.”

“Thank you.” Struggling to suppress my frustration over being handled like a child, I exited the interstate only a few miles from home.

“The ideas behind the THS are obviously not new. Neither is the twitch.”

At the mention of the twitch my background routine hiccupped again with the image of a bullet lying in a man’s hand. I applied the brakes steadily, remaining mindful of the world outside my brain.

Marisol had continued speaking without pause. “We both know of its past. What you haven’t been able to see, Buck, is that your work isn’t new either.”

“What?”

“This war has been going on for a hundred years, one side against the other.” She swallowed. “No one survives for long in the middle.”

“I don’t understand.” I didn’t want to.

“Dammit, Buck. The THS is built on half-truths, but I can’t tell you which halves are true. You wouldn’t believe me anyway. I know you. You need to figure this one out on your own.”

I swung wide to bypass several cars at the bottom of the off ramp as traffic started to roll through the green light, stirring up several angry horns in the process. “You’re right. I don’t believe you.” Yet reluctantly, I could feel my mind acquiescing to the impossible, the ludicrous. “You’re telling me that the twitch is manmade? That the THS and some secret group of centenarian puppet masters behind the Texicas government have been locked in mortal combat over its control for the last century?”

“I’m not telling you anything except to be safe.”

Similar words from Samantha earlier that afternoon reverberated in my head. “Everyone keeps telling me that.”

“I mean it. Get Evelyn and bring her back. In a matter of minutes the lab will be the safest place for both of you. In the meantime—”

“The sequence will stay safely buried in Sandra’s databanks. Chandler must be hopping.”

“Chandler’s always hopping. But it’s not him or Sandra I’m concerned about, it’s you.”

“I’m touched.”

“Increíble. Cierra la boca y escuchar.”

“I’m listening.”

“As long as you alone can unlock the sequence, you will remain both valuable and a target. It cuts both ways, Buck.”

“I get it. We both saw what these people did to Haru. That’s exactly why I won’t give you the override codes.”

“Fine, have it your way. Just keep your big gourd intact until you get back. And your team?”

“Under control. I’ll defer to your expertise to keep them safe. Bring their families in if you think you need to.”

“Done. Keep me posted. I’ve got coordinates on your truck. If I haven’t heard back in thirty, I’m coming after you and Evie.”

“Understood and out.” I ran the stop sign at the edge of our neighborhood, only a handful of blocks from the corner market where I told Evie to wait. I swallowed. Gently I prodded my background routine, afraid my fear would strengthen the current beyond what I could control. The first thing that rose from the river of thought was a voice, both jovial and wicked. We met, once.

“No.” I fought the idea, but I couldn’t hold it back. “Twitchers.” Twitchers that looked like the rest of us. Controlled, disciplined, with strange abilities. Marisol had known about it—been prepared for it. How could the virus have evolved that significantly, that quickly?

Unless…my lab merely replaced the earlier one. Now both sides of the hundred-year battle needed my work. But was the THS telling the truth about trying to stop the weaponization of the twitch? Or were they merely one faction trying to get there first? Whoever they were and whatever they wanted, they weren’t going to get Evie.

White-knuckled, drenched with sweat and shivering, I yanked the wheel and hit the brakes. Floating across the opposing lane, the truck jolted as both right tires clipped the low curb at the entrance of the corner market parking lot. Gaining traction, I gunned the engine a final time before killing it and swinging the car over a hundred and eighty degrees. Finally I slid to a stop in a parking space facing away from the store.

I leapt from the truck, still rocking on its struts, and left the driver-side door wide open. I hit the door at a run. “Evie! Time to go!”

The clerk tensed, both his hands under the counter. The few customers in line froze.

“Evie!” I turned toward the ashen clerk. “Have you seen a teenage girl, dark curly hair?” Slowly he shook his head. I sprinted to the women’s room, throwing open the door. A scream. Not Evie. “Sorry.”

I looped past the beer cooler and burst back outside into the muggy May heat. Evie.

My background mind bucked. I slammed it into the El Capitan routine, clinging to the rock midway up the nose route, and begged God it would save me for the second time that day. I didn’t dare pray for Evie. I couldn’t yet accept she needed it.

All I could think of was to check the house, to ask the neighbors. Find Evie. I sparked the truck’s ignition to life. Pedal down, tires smoking, I swung into the road and cut off on-coming traffic. In seconds I burned up the two blocks of asphalt between the market and our house.

I parked in the yard, my worst dreams already choking my conscious mind. Both front doors, the one to our house and the Claxtons’, were wide open.