We landed at Joint Base Andrews late coming back from Vegas. Jordan should be asleep, but she’s not. This is our first moment alone and we’re sitting on the bed behind our scrim, cross-legged with Grandma Bev’s screen in front of us, waiting for a call from Will.
We are going to tell him about The Sign.
I feel weird about this, a feeling that is strong even here on my perch in Jordan. I told her it was a sign. I knew she would think it was from God, that her prayers were answered, but it’s a lie just like the ones she hates so much when she tells them.
When I say that to her, someday soon, I will be lying to her, manipulating her, and even though it’s for a good reason, I feel bad about it.
But it’s done and now we’re going to tell Will about the busboy in Vegas. Jordan’s day since lunch has been a blur of barely missed social cues and flubs, because her mind has been dominated by the busboy, what he said, who he was, how he knew.
This is her Abigail moment. This is her sign.
Even as she wonders about it, the screen lights up with a call. Jordan checks herself to make sure she’s still properly put together for Will.
Voices. Urgent ones. Movement in the Central Hall. Something big is happening.
She taps the decline call button. She’ll call him back.
In Jordan’s mind, the movement in the hall is flashes of color—something she does with things she hears but doesn’t see—and it’s dizzying to a visitor perched in her brain. She’s not worried—this happens sometimes. A terrorist attack, Venezuela, Iran—she just can’t be caught talking to Will.
Then she hears Jack in the hallway. “Another one. Here, in Florida. There are witnesses.”
I watch helplessly as Jordan drops the tablet onto her bed. “It’s too late,” she whispers to herself. “Too late.”
She won’t be Abigail. She won’t be the one to reveal the truth.
The busboy was wrong. God missed the moment. David’s army is on the march without her.
The voices begin to trail away, headed down the stairs on the way to the Situation Room.
She’s tempted to follow them, to learn more, but she hesitates, looks at the black screen on her lap.
Whoever the busboy was, he was no messenger from God. She looks down at the tablet in front of her, wondering how secure SECRYPT really is.
He was probably just a hacker making fun of her.
No! I want to shout it to her, but I don’t have a voice on my perch.
She needs to stay strong. She can’t lose hope. She has a job to do. It’s a requirement—my entire reason for witnessing her. She needs to change her mind. She needs to tell the world about Abaddon.
In desperation, I close my eyes and dive down.
A dive within a dive to the Jungle. I’ve never done it while witnessing before, but my only hope right now is that my Voice will know what to do. If I can ask her, maybe she’ll have answers.
The Jungle. At first I don’t recognize it because it’s not loud and full of movement and color. Instead there’s just a single guitar-music thread crashing loud.
I call out for my Voice, but she’s not there.
It’s just me and the lone guitar. I don’t know what to do, but as I think things through I’m also listening to Jordan’s mind and I realize something: her mind and the guitar are playing the same song. The colors flash in tune with her thoughts. The sounds mesh.
Jordan and the guitar strand are the same.
I explore the thread more closely, trying to understand. It pulses with color, thickens, thins, moves in reaction to what’s happening in her mind.
But then I realize I’m wrong.
Not in reaction.
The thread changes before the mind.
The color/music on her thread is hopeless, afraid. I focus on it, feel myself drawn close to it. Up close what I’m seeing becomes more clear. The colors on her thread have meaning—the bright flashes of color and sound are strong feelings—hopelessness, fear. But there are dark spots, too, moments of uncertainty, doubt. The dark spots are like burnt-out bulbs, rests in the music. They are vacancies.
I focus on a vacancy, it grows larger in my sensations of it. I try and imagine it shifting, becoming something else, desire to follow her father.
A part of my presence in the Jungle reaches across the small space between us, begins to bleed my urgency into the vacancy of her uncertainty.
Jordan’s feelings change, just slightly—the hopelessness she feels loosens its hold.
I made them change. My excitement is contagious. I watch as it bleeds across the bridge between us, brightening her whole thread.
ABIGAIL WOULDN’T GIVE UP. ABIGAIL WOULD FOLLOW AND LISTEN.
I wish hard, like a little kid wishing for Christmas.
FOLLOW THEM. LISTEN. BE ABIGAIL.
The strand bends, shifts. The music has changed.
Jordan’s mind shifts with it. I feel it.
She has a new thought. I hear it as I return to my perch: I can still be Abigail.
I just have to pee. Jordan practices the lie as she jogs to her door and out in the hallway, slowing down for silence. Just have to pee. No longer a lie. She does have to pee.
She can hear her dad on the stairs.
“Can we secure the footage? Stop it from being released?”
“Already done, sir.” She doesn’t recognize the other voice. Some general or another. “We have it for you to watch.”
“We need a statement, sir.” Carol is here. Jordan wonders whether the communications director has a house of her own.
“This is contained for now?”
The general: “We believe so, Mr. President.”
“Then we maintain our position. We call it hysteria.”
Jordan’s heart sinks. Her father is Nabal.
The disappointment morphs into something else. Determination. Excitement.
The busboy was no hacker. The busboy foretold the coming world. In her mind, I appear, my hair down, the busboy clothes disappear, replaced by robes, berries, wild honey. In her mind I am a prophet of prophets. I am her Elijah.
She can still be Abigail. Jordan slips back into her room, forgetting to pee, decides she can hold it.
Back on the bed, her screen lights up. Will calling again. This time she accepts.
My job is done. I fly from my perch.
“I made her,” I say before I even have a thought.
Paul looks at me. He raises his eyebrows.
I’m not supposed to talk about what I see—rules—but this feels big.
“What are you talking about?” Paul asks, and then he holds up his hand, palm toward me. “Forget it,” he says, “I don’t even want to know.”
“Have you ever changed your target’s mind?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not possible,” he tells me.
He’s wrong, I just did it. From the Jungle. Whatever it is, I have power there. I don’t know how. I don’t know why.
But I don’t press the point with Paul.