We’re sitting on a couch, legs pulled up under us crisscross applesauce. The air is bright all around us. Her colors are bleached even inside, and with the glare of the sun, everything looks like a faded Polaroid of the world she lives in.
Jordan is nervous. Excited. Her breath is shallow and I can feel her heart beating fast in her chest. She forces herself to take a deep breath. She hasn’t been alone since the party—tutors, church, the “birthday event.”
Last night when she got home, she wrote her thank-you note to Grandma Bev—and a longer letter, which she tucked inside for Grandma Bev to pass on to Will, a reply to the one he sent through Grandma Bev last week, in which he asked her to describe the party she would have.
Party.
Jordan couldn’t use the word when describing her birthday in the letter. It would have been a lie, and Will only gets the truth from her. He deserves the truth. It wasn’t a party. It was her mom, her sisters, Dr. Halliday, Julia, Fran and Tom, Dad on video. In the Central Hall, locked in the tower.
A Rapunzel event. Something her parents did for the daughter they think they have.
The ice cream social last night? She called that her “political cotillion.”
“Alrighty, then,” she says out loud, bringing the screen up so she can see it. We listen. Her dad is back, returned this morning. He’s in the game room next door with Jack, his chief of staff. She can hear them talking, muted by the distance in the hallways between them and her in the solarium. The windows are open, though, and she can hear them more clearly from across the patio.
But they’re not interested in her.
She taps the icon her grandmother told her to. Even though the icon is for a common finance application, that’s not what opens. SECRYPT. She doesn’t recognize the name, but I do. People use it for messages they don’t want anybody seeing.
Jordan wrinkles her forehead, clicks on the “contacts” box.
There are only two names:
Naomi
Will
Will. Jordan’s mind fills with moments. The More to Life, America Working Youth Congress. Will—brown hair cut short, white, built like a football player. He smiles. She laughs. Him touching her hand. A momentary sensation beneath the pit of her stomach, something I don’t recognize until I do. She shifts, straightens her legs, resettles, crosses them. Her heart is beating faster than it was even before.
She taps his name. A window opens. There’s already a message from Will waiting:
“Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your hair.”
She giggles, taps out a reply. “Climb on up, young prince.”
She taps on Naomi. A new window opens. “Ruth cannot thank you enough! How on Earth did you think this up?”
Will’s name begins to throb. There’s a new message. Jordan’s breath catches. She taps his name. “There’s video . . .”
Jordan takes a quick look around. Her pod is in, already connected to the screen.
She could . . . She wants to see Will so badly it hurts physically, but just as we’re about to connect, the patio door opens from the game room. She sees shapes through the curtains, one tall, one shorter. Her dad and Jack.
“Can’t. People around.” Then: “Sometime soon.”
“Soon.”
More movement on the patio. She can see their shapes clearly, watches as Jack lights a cigarette. “It’s not if, it’s when, Vince,” he says. “Every two days, like clockwork—it’s just dumb luck none of them have been filmed yet—you think you’d survive an Incursion video if you go out there and deny they’re happening? How’s that gonna play?”
Incursions. Jordan freezes, her finger hovering over the screen. She knows what Incursions are—she sees a lot of the same channels I do—but she didn’t think.
Incursion.
The word sits heavy in Jordan the same way it did in me before.
“We’ll capture one before that happens, Jack.” Her father always sounds confident, like he has access to the truth, but Jordan knows better—the more confident he sounds, the less he believes. “Operation Roach Hotel is going to work.”
“With all due respect, Vince, that’s crap—Roach Hotel hasn’t captured diddly-squat so far, and they’re not sounding hopeful, either.”
Jordan’s mind races. Secrets are hard to keep in the White House—floors squeak, voices carry. She’s got to keep Sam and Avery from learning that Incursions are real.
Incursion. Roaches. Uncatchable, unseeable.
Demons. Abaddon, destroyers of things. Jordan’s mind swims in biblical names and stories—the image of Dr. Halliday, who leads Bible studies, stories of the crimes of man punished. The beginning of end of days. Jordan thinks about these things like a professor, not a believer—a secret she keeps locked away from all but Grandma Bev, who is the one who told her it was okay not to believe.
Jordan sees a scale in her mind, drops Incursions on the side with the Bible, bringing it to near equality with the side that says “untrue.”
ABADDON. The word is huge in her mind, the letter’s colors thick and dark like a nightmare.
Jordan’s mind fills with pictures when she thinks, in a way that my mind does not. The images make good things better, but they also make scary things even scarier to me.
To her. Jordan’s mind fills with enormous roaches crawling out of a wall, engulfing a screaming child, devouring it until it’s gone. “It’ll play better than the president of the United States citing stuff off conspiracy sites as a legitimate national security threat.” Her dad turns, walks closer to the window of the solarium where Jordan is sitting. We freeze, try not to even breathe. “Unless we’re willing to declassify what we know, our only real option is to pretend it’s not happening.”
“That’s short-term thinking, Vince. Short-term at best—that could come back and kick you in the ass tomorrow—even later today. What happens when one of those things zaps into a TGI Fridays in Fredericksburg and steals a kid? And what about when it turns out that Sabazios has been right all along? Do you think he’s going to stay on the sidelines if you get caught with your pants down? People may think he’s a crackpot now, but if it turns out he’s been right about everything and you ignored the problem, he’s going to beat the pants off you if he runs next year.”
“I don’t know that’ll happen and neither do you, but if we legitimize this threat too soon by talking about it, we’re going to tank the markets and cause panic in the streets.” Her dad turns around again, walks back toward the game room, stops, turns again to face Jack, his voice a low growl. “And that’s why we’ve got to crush this Live-Tech thing before it takes hold—not only is it an immoral invasion allowing man to see what only God should know, but if it is useful against these Incursions we need it to be ours, not his.”
The smell of Jack’s cigarette wafts in through the window—the smoke makes Jordan’s nose tingle; to her the smell is sweet, closer to bread burning than what cigarette smoke smells like to me—and she breathes deeply to get more of it.
Shame settles in. Smoking is wrong. She shouldn’t enjoy the smell.
Jack drops the cigarette. She watches his silhouette through the curtain as he steps on it, grinds it out with his foot. “Don’t sit on this too long or you’ll go down in history as President Nero, fiddling while the world burns.”
They go back inside.
Jordan tries to breathe. Her hand is shaking, her mind filled with blackness and visions of demons.
Her screen flashes. She looks down. Will’s name is throbbing again. She taps on it. This time it isn’t words, it’s a picture.
Of Will. She taps it, clears her throat against the thickness she feels in it and waits as the photo crystallizes on the display.
He’s cut his hair—a flattop. In the picture he waves, makes a slow turn around to show off his entire self, then waves again. “Hey, JJ!” scrolls from his mouth when it opens. “Send me one, too!”
Will is preparing to join the marines and he said in his last letter that the recruiter encouraged him to close-crop so he would be used to it when he enlisted. His face looks square to her, sharp at the edges, less kindly than the shaggy farm boy she sees in her mind. She studies it more closely, sees that there’s still softness there, hidden in the eyes, the partial smile.
She enlarges the picture so it lifts off the screen and she can examine it from all sides like a Will statue. She takes a quick look around before bringing it to her face, placing a kiss in the air where his lips display.
Then more shame. A flush that heats up our face. She wipes the screen.
She watches the screen fade to black in her lap, her thoughts back on Abaddon, her father. Incursions are real, people are dying, and he is saying nothing.
The child in her vision morphs into Will’s face, being devoured by alien bugs, flesh, to bone, to dust.
She can’t let that happen.
Paul’s sitting at the desk when I come up. He smiles when he sees my eyes. “Any longer and I was going to have to read a book or something.”
It gets boring in the glide room when your partner’s down. Richard keeps telling us to bring a book if we’ve got second glide, but me and Paul don’t really like reading that much.
“Beat me and you can get first glide and spend your time dictating, I say.” We play rock-paper-scissors to decide who goes first, but Paul’s completely predictable, so he always loses.