A vast network of tunnels stretched out beneath the village, an under-underland that only a handful of Gothams ever visited. Amidst all the storerooms and bunkers and junk-cluttered passages lay a few buried secrets. Journey Tam kept a psilocybin mushroom farm. Rebel Rosen had his own private shooting range. Frank Godden had stashed an entire pornography theater behind a wall of emergency rations—six seats, one projector, and no judgments.
More benign and well known was the half-million-dollar recording studio at the north end of the tunnels, directly beneath the amphitheater. The Gothams had used it to produce fourteen albums over the last eight years, all demo tracks and vanity spins from the clan’s avid musicians. The White Hand Groove, the all-tempic jazz band, recorded a new compilation disc every December. They handed them out as stocking stuffers.
On Tuesday morning, the twenty-fourth of May, the studio was opened once again. Jonathan had recruited a bassist, a drummer, and a rhythm guitarist from The White Hand Groove and spent two days rehearsing with them. Playing “Come Together” was easy. Playing it the right way, the Heath and Beatles way, was a nightmare. The boy ruled the group with tyrannical exactitude, shrieking with rage whenever one of them strayed from the song sheet. The tempics were so fed up with him that Hannah began fearing for his safety. Luckily Jonathan, no stranger to band friction, was able to keep the peace.
By Friday morning, the musicians were ready to cut their single. Heath took his place in the recording booth and cast a doleful look at Hannah.
“You should be doing this,” he said. “You have the better voice.”
It had been seventeen days since Hannah sacrificed her singing, and she had yet to croon a single note. Though she’d never intended to take her testament seriously, Irwin Sunder’s scornful tone had pushed a button deep inside of her. Hannah was fiercely determined to shatter his misconceptions. She’d keep her word like a goddamn champion and show that prick the true meaning of willpower.
Hannah smiled at Heath from the control room. “You got this, sweetie. Nobody knows the song better than you.”
That was certainly true. Hannah couldn’t even guess the number of times Heath had listened to Abbey Road on the old world. He channeled John Lennon with supernatural precision—every note, every cadence, every split-second pause. This was more than a cover. It was a resurrection.
Heath raised his mic to mouth level, then nodded anxiously at the producer. “Okay. I’m ready.”
—
“A song,” Mia had uttered, four days earlier. “You want us to put out a song.”
Theo had gathered the others for a backyard conference: seven orphans and five Gothams, all skeptically watching him from lawn chairs. Mercy and Yvonne had missed the council meeting and had to be briefed on Theo’s latest epiphany. He was still having trouble explaining it.
He paced the grass in a caffeinated tizzy, his shirttail flapping wildly. “The song is just the envelope. I’m talking about an invitation. It’s like Close Encounters. Devil’s Tower. You know, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.”
Even the orphans were blank-faced. Theo tried a new approach. “Okay, when Hannah first saw Jonathan at that nightclub, she didn’t know him from Adam. It wasn’t until he played . . . what was it? Zeppelin?”
“Pink Floyd,” Hannah and Jonathan said in unison.
“It wasn’t until he played Pink Floyd that he stood out like a beacon. She knew right then and there that he was one of us.”
Theo saw Liam swapping a baffled look with Carrie. He shook a finger at them. “Right! See? You don’t know who Pink Floyd is. You wouldn’t know a Beatles song if it humped your leg. But I’d bet my life that anyone from our world—anyone—would recognize ‘Come Together.’ They’d know it at the first very shoop.”
Heath opened his mouth to correct him. Theo waved him off. “I know. It’s ‘shoot me.’ The point is that it’s one of the most famous songs we have.”
“We get the premise,” Zack said. “We’re just stuck on the details. You want to use this song as a bird call—”
“More than a bird call. A dog whistle. A shibboleth.”
“So you want to blanket the world in this bird-dog shibboleth whistle—”
“Not the world,” Theo said. “We’ll have to find a different way to get the foreign orphans. But the ones within our borders? The Coppers, Irons, and Platinums? Oh yeah. We can reach them.”
“How?” Amanda asked. “Even if we get all the right people to hear the song—”
“The Godzilla of ifs,” David grumbled.
“—how does it bring us all together?”
Theo scanned the faces around him and laughed. He’d spent so much time being stressed and overwhelmed that his friends rarely saw this side of him. He’d been a certified genius once, a prodigy. Now after five years of alcoholism and ten months of transdimensional chaos, he was once again in top form.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and smiled charmingly at Amanda.
“It’s easy,” he told her. “We give them a way to sing back.”
—
The next day, while Jonathan and Heath began their rehearsals, Yvonne returned from town with a brand-new powerphone. The device weighed five pounds and fit in the hand like a clothes iron, but its signal strength was second to none. It was the only celestial mobile that was guaranteed to work in the underland.
Soon the handset was charged and the hotline was ready. The big challenge now was giving out the number to an entire nation without having it fall into the wrong hands.
Luckily, Theo had a solution. He gathered Amanda, Zack, and Mia around his laptop and showed them their new phone number. They squinted at it like it was an enigma, an answer just waiting for a question. #83-11-24800.
Mia smiled with fresh inspiration. “I got the three.”
“I got the eight,” said Zack.
“The eleven’s a no-brainer,” Amanda said.
Within an hour, the phone number was converted into esoteric hints: the number of letters in Luke Skywalker’s saga, the number of points in a field goal, the day in September that the Towers fell, the number of World Wars, the number of Beatles, the old prefix for toll-free calls. Any breacher with a pen and two brain cells to rub together would have no trouble reassembling the number, while even the smartest Altamerican would choke at the first alien reference.
Zack and Mercy spent the next two days painting the clue cards on canvases, decorating each one with artistic flourishes. At Theo’s request, they designed a final call-to-action, a three-card plea to all the orphans out there:
WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH.
WE ARE YOU.
CALL US. LET US HELP EACH OTHER.
Mercy filmed the cards on her lumicam. Jonathan and Heath provided the soundtrack. By Saturday night, the group had a four-minute and ten-second music video—the ultimate bird-dog shibboleth whistle. Only one question remained.
“How do we get it out there?” Hannah asked.
The issue had initially stumped Theo. For a nation with flying cars and force fields, their Internet was straight out of 1994. There was no outlet, no bandwidth, no public demand for online movies. The very notion of viral videos was completely foreign.
That only left one option, a rather tricky one at that.
“Surpdog.”
This time, only the Gothams in the group understood the reference. They stared at him with matching looks of doubt.
“That’s crazy,” Mercy said.
“It’ll work.”
Peter shook his head. “No one knows who this guy is. Even if we find him—”
“We’ll find him,” Theo insisted.
“—there’s no guarantee he’ll help us.”
The orphans in the circle remained hopelessly lost. Hannah threw her hands up. “Who the hell are you talking about?”
—
To fully grasp the legend of Surpdog, one had to know a little about the late Dennis Dudley. The third and youngest son of President Irving Dudley was, by all accounts, an unbearable man. He was a narcissist, a nihilist, an unabashed racist, and a paranoid conspiracy theorist. He also happened to be one of the greatest inventors of his generation. In 1976, while working as a researcher at Edison Temporics, Dudley solved a riddle that had been vexing the scientific community for years. He discovered how to send two-dimensional lumic images through the air without electronic conversion. No binary switches. No blocky pixels. Just eye-popping visuals that looked as real as life itself.
His eponymous transceiver—a six-foot obelisk made of wire, glass, and copper—forever changed the face of broadcasting. It was the death of television and the dawn of the lumivision age.
By the time Dudley died in 1985, his invention blanketed the nation—a hundred thousand mini-towers on the street corners and rooftops, in the hills and fields, even floating on lakes. The dudleys worked in perfect harmony, each one routing a million images per second. The average lumivision signal passed through a hundred and twelve relays before bursting into color on someone’s screen.
There was just one problem. Dudley had built a secret functionality into his constructs, a way to turn any tower into a guerrilla broadcast station. He’d wanted an emergency media system in place for when the blacks took over the country and had assumed his fellow white men would be smart enough to figure it out. The exploit was so well hidden that nobody discovered it until 1987, when a twelve-year-old prodigy named Kevin Thurber (a black kid) opened up a dudley and noticed some curious crosswires.
The next night, the sixty thousand viewers of Oklahoma-3 caught a strange flicker in the middle of Laugh Riot. Their lumivisions gave way to a crystal-clear image of a wide-eyed Kevin Thurber.
“Is it on? Did I do it?”
He did it. Thurber had hacked a dudley with little more than a lumicam and a homemade wire bridge, making him the first lumivision signal pirate. A glib local journalist called him “Thurber the Usurper,” a name that led to the new slang term for his accomplishment: surping.
The next two years weren’t kind to the lumivision networks. At least twice a week, some tech-savvy miscreant surped a broadcast for their own purposes, whether it was to vent their spleen, waggle their privates, or air a special message. A woman surped National-12 with a plea to find her missing sister (it worked). A man surped Cincinnati-4 to ask his girlfriend to marry him (it didn’t work). The singer Tamara Tamley got her first big break by crooning a beautiful ballad in the middle of Cop Cat, one of the rare instances of a surpcast offering better-quality programming than the show it replaced.
In 1989, Edison Temporics completed its systematic overhaul of the dudleys, a slow and meticulous upgrade that made the transceivers inviolable, at least to the average tamperer. Surping soon became limited to the crackerjack elite, the technological ninjas who could bypass a tempic wall just as easily as a firewall. Thanks to a new monitoring system and the recent invention of the ghost drill, DP-9 was able to find and catch most of these criminals. The remaining surpers either scaled back their operations or hung up their toolkits entirely.
The lone exception was Surpdog.
The man was a phenom, even among the supersurpers. He’d commandeered more than six hundred broadcasts over twenty-three years, never lingering in one area, never hacking the same dudley twice. Even more frustrating for the Deps, he used a one-of-a-kind solic disruptor to stymie their ghost drills. They had no visuals on him, no witness accounts, no evidence at all except a smattering of dog tracks. His inexplicable paw prints earned him the second half of his nickname.
Surpdog’s motives were just as baffling as his methods. Unlike the rest of his ilk, he never delivered any masked manifestos. His videos were merely fifty-four seconds of beautiful images from other parts of the world—the Highlands of Scotland, the desert sands of Egypt, the bamboo groves of Japan. The pictures kept changing but the theme remained the same. The best anyone could guess was that Surpdog was a worldly dog, one who didn’t appreciate America’s isolationist tendencies. It seemed an awfully strange cause to wrap a criminal career around, yet Surpdog persisted year after year, with no signs of slowing down.
Theo had learned about him last October, while he and Amanda were prisoners of DP-9. The West Virginia field office was a hub of the Broadcast Crimes division and had been littered with flyers about their number one target. When Theo had asked Melissa about Surpdog, she explained the case with shrugging indifference. He was a harmless man with an admirable message. She was in no hurry to see him caught.
Now, eight months later, Theo had become very intent on finding Surpdog. And he knew just the pair to do it.
On Friday morning, while Jonathan and Heath recorded their song, Peter took David on a covert trip to the surface. Tomkins Cove lay ten miles north of Quarter Hill, a small and wealthy suburb on the western bank of the Hudson. If outsiders knew the name, it was from the Tomkins Cove supernatural drama that was wildly popular in the 1980s. The show had been one of the very first casualties of the lumivision era, as the vampires looked pathetic in super-high-definition.
Peter had learned from local news archives that Surpdog had been to the area recently. The dudley he’d used to surp New York–5 stood right behind the local police station. Those who’d been hoping to catch the end of Nina Shield, Private Eye were infuriated to find the show preempted by fifty-four seconds of windmills and waterfalls.
Now Peter kept a watchful eye on the precinct while David scanned the dudley’s past. As Theo had hoped, the boy wasn’t burdened by the limits of ghost drills. He could easily see Surpdog through the solic haze, the curious trick that had stumped a nation for years.
David creased his brow, then broke out in laughter. Peter eyed him strangely. “What? Did you get him?”
He did, except there was no “him” to get. That was the trick. The great and mighty Surpdog wasn’t a man at all.
—
If the police had bothered to look out their window three months ago, they would have seen it: a huge white Komondor, at least a hundred and eighty pounds, charging out of the woods like a woolly bear. The dog ran toward the station—tongue wagging, leash dragging—until he reached the dudley at the edge of the cruiser lot. There he stopped to do his canine business: sniff the grass, scratch his side, pee a little. Even if witnesses had been standing right next to him, they wouldn’t have seen the ten-pound solic disruptor that was strapped to his stomach, tucked away behind the hanging ropes of fur.
In an invisible burst, the area became unghostable. The tempis melted away from the base of the dudley, revealing a small metal access door. The dog scratched at the panel, just as he’d been taught. An electronic passkey on his ankle popped an inner latch.
The dudley had been unlocked before the human half of Surpdog even appeared.
She came shuffling out of the forest, a small Polynesian woman in a tank top and running shorts. After reuniting with her Komondor in fake exasperation, she crouched to pick up his leash. Once safely hidden between the dog and the dudley, the woman activated her tempic gloves, pulled her tools from her water bottle, and hacked the console. Forty-four seconds, in and out. Surpdog walked away in perfect innocence, just another evening jogger and her pet.
David followed their ghosts for eight more blocks, until they entered a white camper aerovan. All Peter needed was the license plate number and a few well-placed phone calls to uncover her identity. She was a forty-five-year-old immigrant from the Hawaiian Republic, a field technician for Edison Temporics. Her name was Alamea Wilson but everyone called her Ally. The dog’s name was Barney.
Two days later, in a Vermont forest clearing, Ally woke up to the sound of thunderous barks. It seemed her partner in crime was worked up about something—a deer, a snake, maybe even a chipmunk. Sadly, there was nothing she could do about it. Her employers had once again sent her on assignment to Bennington, a town without a single Komondor-friendly motel. That meant another week in the camplands, which meant another week of Barney yelling at nature.
Ally folded up her bed, threw on her robe, and grabbed a large bag of kibble from her storage bin. A little breakfast would shut Barney’s barkhole, then she could decide her plans. The Queen of America Pageant was airing tonight, at least twelve million viewers in desperate need of perspective. Unfortunately, Edison had already logged her arrival. She’d have to fly at least a hundred miles out of Bennington if she wanted to hack a dudley.
Barney’s barks grew louder, more insistent. Ally bumped the door open and brought his food bowl outside. “All right. All right. I’m—”
She looked up to find two men and a woman standing just inside her tempic fence. Her bowl fell to the ground. She reached for the handphone in her pocket.
“You have three seconds to leave before I call the—”
“Surpdog.”
Ally’s muscles hardened. Her eyes grew to circles. She stammered at the man who’d spoken to her, a disheveled Filipino who looked young in the face but old in the eyes.
“It’s all right,” Theo told her. “We’re just here to talk.”
It took twenty-two minutes for Ally’s hands to stop shaking. She’d always feared the day would come when somebody sniffed her out, but she imagined they’d be from DP-9 or Edison Temporics. These people were something else entirely. They had no intention of bringing her to justice. All they had for her was an offer and a song.
Theo, Amanda, and Peter watched Ally from folding chairs as she screened their homemade video production, an indecipherable message set to bafflingly strange music.
The moment it ended, Ally closed her lapbook and blinked dazedly at her guests. “There wasn’t a single part of that spoolie that made sense to me.”
Peter smiled. “We told you it was cryptic.”
“What the hell is it?”
“It’s not meant for you,” Theo told her. “It won’t mean anything to anyone but a handful of people.”
“And it’ll mean everything to them,” Amanda said.
Barney’s tongue lolled blissfully as Amanda stroked his ear. The dog had already accepted the strangers as friends, which was more than Ally was willing to do. These people reeked of powerful secrets. Stranger still, the Irishman seemed the least foreign one among them. The other two kept using alien words like “video” and “prime time.”
Ally ejected the spoolie and twirled it in her fingers. “This is crazy. I mean, for all I know, you guys are terrorists. This thing could wake up a hundred sleeper cells.”
Peter smiled patiently. “Terrorists have telephones. They don’t need surpers.”
True. They also didn’t go around offering satchels of cash to complete strangers. Ally could travel the world on what these people were offering, and that was just the advance payment. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe this was too good to be true.
She jerked her head at the disc. “It doesn’t matter. This is a four-minute spool. Anything longer than fifty-four seconds gets shut down by the network. They always find the signal.”
“You’ll get around that,” Theo assured her.
“How?”
“I have no idea. I just know that you will.”
Ally wrung her hands, stymied. She supposed she could try a daring quintuple surp: five different dudleys set to a synchronized time release. It would be taxing as hell on her and Barney, but it would buy enough time to play the whole crazy message.
She took a wistful look at Barney. “C’mere, stupid.”
He galloped to her side, wagging his tail in mindless bliss as Ally hugged his head. “He only has a year or two left. The vets say he can’t handle another reversal.”
“I’m sorry,” Amanda said.
“Don’t be. He’s had a long, happy life. But once he’s gone . . .” Ally shrugged miserably. “My surping days are already numbered. Once Edison rolls out their new magnivisions, the whole infrastructure’s gonna change. Triple-encrypted signals sent directly from space. No more dudleys. No more hacks.”
Theo shuddered. His foresight insisted, without a shred of uncertainty, that the magnivision age would never come.
It’s either the end of the world or the end of the world as we know it, Merlin had told him.
“Then make this your swan song,” Peter suggested to Ally. “Go out with a bang.”
“I’d love to. I just . . .” She opened her mouth to say something, then censored herself. “I’m better with machines than I am with humans. I can read machines. You folks—”
“We’re not looking to hurt anyone,” Amanda assured her. “We just want to find our people.”
“What people?”
“Immigrants,” Peter delicately replied. “They’re lost in this country and they need us.”
“You’ll be helping us save lives,” Theo added. “A lot of them.”
Ally mulled their words a moment, her gaze lingering on the treetops. “It’s funny. I’ve spent half my life reminding Americans that there’s a whole world out there. They’re so goddamn insular. Anything foreign sends them right into their clamshell. I never understood that mind-set. Not until now.”
She waved her finger between Theo and Amanda. “I get the hunch that ‘immigrant’ is a gentle word to describe you two. I think it would break my brain to find out where you come from. There’s a part of me that desperately wants to know. The rest of me . . .” She shrugged. “I like my world the size it is.”
Ally pinched the spoolie between her fingers and held it up to the sun. “Luckily for you, I love confusing the shit out of people. This is right up my flagpole.”
She dropped the disc into her pocket, then fluffed the fur on Barney’s neck.
“Give us a week,” she said. “We’ll get your message out to everyone.”
—
On Sunday, June 5, as the East Coast clocks chimed the nine P.M. hour, a gentle hush swept across the nation. Families turned off their phones and gathered around their lumivisions. Bartenders switched their wall sets to National-1. It was the third and final hour of the King of America Pageant, the most exciting leg of the show. This was the part where contestants stopped flexing their oiled muscles and started beating the crap out of each other.
The pubs and casinos roared with excitement as the Prince of Oregon faced the Prince of Washington in final combat. They circled each other on a suspended platform, brandishing their sparstaffs while they struggled to avoid the air vents on the floor. Unlike last week’s Queen of America Pageant, where the grates’ only danger was an upblown skirt, these vents were set to hurricane blast. One ill-timed step could send a challenger flying into the water. The gamblers in Seattle bet extra money that the long-haired fop from Oregon would be the first to get galed.
Forty-one seconds into the match, an air geyser knocked the staff out of Washington’s hand. Oregon charged at him with a guttural cry. Washington stood his ground at the edge of the platform. His only hope now was to dodge at just the right moment.
Just as the princes converged in the same frame, the image shuddered, then went completely black.
All across the country, viewers screamed in frustration. Some frantically checked their signal connections. Others cursed Surpdog’s name. By now most Americans recognized the telltale signs of Ally’s meddling, and had been conditioned to expect her usual nonsense: fifty-four seconds of international images, all pretty and pointless and very annoying. If they wanted to see Timbuktu or Fuck-a-doo, they’d go to a library and—
A guitar riff suddenly seized everyone’s attention. The masses fell quiet. Twenty-five million brows knitted in unison as Heath’s breathy hiss filled the air.
“Shoot me.”
And then it began: a cryptic serenade, a song for all the orphans of America. For the next four minutes, the viewers of National-1 sat in total silence as they listened to the music of a dead sister Earth. While some were stuck on the impenetrable lyrics and others got tangled on the text of the clue cards, the majority kept their minds on the music. The notes moved through their consciousness like an alien paradox—both mellow and edgy, familiar and strange, unnerving yet utterly mesmerizing. A million people found themselves tapping their feet to the rhythm. The more sensitive listeners reeled at the grief in Heath’s voice. His haunting cracks of sorrow left them thoroughly convinced that the song was an elegy. They weren’t entirely wrong.
The Silvers and Golds watched from Hannah’s living room, their faces quivering with emotion. For all their work and careful planning, none of them had anticipated the overwhelming power of their accomplishment. They’d brought a piece of their world back from the dead and hung it up in the sky for everyone to see. Two Earths had come together, right now, over them.
And for a brief spell, they were home.
Mia turned her teary eyes onto Theo. “You did it. You actually did it.”
Theo shook his head. He wasn’t the one who’d ripped a Beatles song out of his chest, or solved the mystery of Surpdog in less than an hour. It was too soon to be celebrating anyway. None of this would mean a damn thing if the message didn’t get to the right people. That was entirely up to the wind now.
—
As expected, Ally’s monumental surp became the week’s biggest story. Radio stations played “Come Together” in its entirety. Newspapers printed the text of the clue cards on their front pages. Experts and pundits dissected every word of the lyrics (which John Lennon himself had called “gobbledygook”). From state to state, channel to channel, the same question lingered on everyone’s lips. What does it all mean?
Only Merlin McGee, America’s premier prophet, offered a semblance of a rational answer. “I don’t know,” he told a National-4 reporter, “but it’s a damn fine song.”
By the end of the week, there were no new angles to explore, no more trees to shake. The talking heads decided that Surpdog had gone barking mad and that was that. Meanwhile, in other news . . .
Theo turned off the lumivision and paced his room. He’d spent the last five days in jittery anticipation, never once letting the powerphone out of his earshot. It seemed impossible to exist in this country without hearing the message, yet the hotline hadn’t rung once. No Coppers, no Platinums, not even a teasing congratulation from Evan.
“Shit.”
Theo had no idea what to do. His faith had crumbled. His foresight was nothing but fog. He rushed to his laptop, opened his bitmail program, and furiously typed a new message.
I’m asking you again: please help me. You’re the only augur I know who isn’t crazy or broken. And I know you know Ioni. Just tell me what she wants. Talk to me!
He sent the message, for all the good it did. He’d bitmailed Merlin a dozen times this week, using the secure and anonymous address that Peter had given him. The man had yet to respond. Like the breachers of America, Merlin seemed determined to drive Theo crazy with his silence.
Fuming, Theo began a second message. Screw this. I’m done. Next time you see your boss, tell her . . .
The powerphone rang in a shrill, urgent chirp. Theo fumbled for the handset and checked the caller identification screen. All it said was “Calm Down.”
He pressed the phone to his ear. “So that’s what it takes to get you.”
“I mean it. Relax. And stop writing Merlin. He’s not going to answer you.”
Theo was thrown by Ioni’s phone voice, a high and youthful timbre that nearly robbed her of all mystique. She sounded more like an actress in an acne cream ad than the queen of all augurs.
He cradled the phone on his shoulder and resumed his fitful pacing. “You told him not to talk to me.”
“I asked him not to talk to you. I’m not the bossy boss you think I am.”
“You’re not any kind of boss! You give me no information, no guidance. I have no idea what I’m doing!”
“Yes, you do,” Ioni said.
“The song didn’t work.”
“Yes it did.”
Theo heard a fizzy hiss on the other end of the line. Ioni had popped open a can of something carbonated and was pausing to take a sip.
“The Platinums will call you in twenty-two minutes,” she said. “The Irons in fifty.”
Theo stopped in his tracks and scanned the clock on the wall. “Bullshit.”
“Well, half the Irons. The other half will call next week.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Care to put money on it?”
He didn’t. Ioni’s prescience was one of the few things he didn’t doubt about her. But why couldn’t he see these things for himself? How could he be so blind to the events of the next hour?
Theo climbed into bed and draped his arm over his eyes. “What about the Coppers?”
“I’m not sure about them,” Ioni admitted. “They’re a bit of a wild card.”
“But they have the number.”
“Oh yes.” A smile lifted Ioni’s voice. “Your plan was inspired, Theo. Your message reached them all.”
A wave of euphoria washed over him. He wanted to laugh and cry and whoop like a madman. Only the thought of unfinished business kept him grounded.
“There are still five other groups out there,” he reminded Ioni.
“Theo . . .”
“We won’t be able to get them with a song.”
“Theo. You just paved a brighter future for a whole lot of people. You saved your friends from some very dangerous missions, and you did it all without harming a soul. Victories like this don’t come very often. Take a night to enjoy it.”
Theo heard the rustling of sheets, the creaking of box springs. It seemed Ioni was also lying down in bed.
“I still don’t entirely trust you,” he admitted.
Ioni sighed. “That’s okay. I don’t entirely trust myself either.”
“Can’t you give me more information? I mean, with everything at stake—”
“That’s exactly why I don’t give you more. It’s why I don’t want you talking with Merlin.”
“You’re afraid I’ll break the string.”
“I’m afraid the string will break you.”
Theo thought back to his conversation with Ally. Would she have done a better job if she knew about parallel worlds and Pelletiers, the four-year deadline that hung over everyone? Apparently not, because she did her work flawlessly. If anything, the extra baggage would have slowed her down.
A long moment passed before Theo spoke again. “I have dreams.”
“I know.”
“The night I met Merlin, I saw a city in the distance. It was weird and empty and it scared the living shit out of me. It was like looking at my grave.”
Theo gave Ioni a moment to respond. She didn’t.
“Merlin told me the fate of the world would be decided there,” he said. “He said the city was falling either way and so were we. Except I don’t think he was just talking about me and him. I think he was talking about all our kind. The Gothams, the breachers, the Majee, the Pelletiers. All the timebending freaks. Even you.”
Theo covered his eyes with his hand. “I think we all have to die to stop what’s coming.”
The line went silent for another five seconds. “Ioni?”
“I’m here.”
Her voice was low now, somber. At long last Theo could hear her age.
“You’ve backed me into a hell of a corner,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything without risking everything.”
“Then don’t. I’m only saying it because . . . I don’t know. If that’s what it takes to save billions of lives, I’ll do it. So will my friends. I just wish I knew.”
“Why?”
Theo ruminated on it a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe I’m tired of surprises. Or maybe I just want the comfort that my life and death will mean something.” He chuckled. “I’ve already made more of a mark on this world than I ever did on the last one.”
He heard the faint metal clack of Ioni’s watches. He could only guess that she was checking the time.
“Theo, I want you to do something for me, all right? This is the easiest thing I’ll ever ask of you.”
Theo narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What?”
“The minute you get off the phone with the Irons, I want you to share the good news with your friends. Bang the doors. Bring them out. Yell like Paul Revere. Tell them that this is just the start of something wonderful. The orphans of your world are coming together. There’ll be a lot of new houses on Freak Street.”
Theo tapped his jaw, his mind teeming with questions. “I’ll tell them. But—”
“No buts. Just take a night off and have a good time. Can you do that for me? Please?”
Theo heard a foreboding sorrow in her voice, as if the party she wanted was a last hurrah for something—or someone.
Ioni picked up on his hesitation. “Theo . . .”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Just answer me this one—”
“No.”
“Why am I only seeing fog in the future? Are the Pelletiers jamming me again?”
“Goddamn it, Theo.”
“What’s coming? What do they not want me to see?”
“Just do what I say!”
Ioni hung up. Theo jumped out of bed and cursed a storm. His faith in her had never been shakier, yet he was already starting to sense the truth of her words. A warm wind tickled him from the near future—a pleasure, of triumph. Ioni wasn’t lying. Theo and his friends would have a very good night.
Everything after that was shadows and fog.
He sat at his desk, twiddling his thumbs until the powerphone rang again. Theo didn’t bother to check the caller ID. He cracked his neck, cleared his throat, and then, with a grin on his lips, he answered the call of the Platinums.