The road is easy. We make it to Seattle in two days with our pockets full of money. I use the trip to practice writing music while I’m awake. I can do it, but I end up in a sort of trance where I’m only halfway aware of what I’m doing.
Cassandra spends the trip talking endlessly.
She acts like she’s all in for erasing the witnesses, but I can hear what she feels, so I know better. She’s almost as conflicted as me. I don’t tell her that I have other plans—that’s between me and Corina.
A helpful lady gave us $17,000 and we use it to buy a car. Cassandra wants to get a used Corvette that can go zero to sixty in 2.3 seconds, make four hundred miles per charge, and has a ten-minute charge capability, but I convince her to get a Cherokee instead.
“It’s bigger,” I explain, “and it can off-road if we need to.” I don’t mention that we might need the extra room.
Cassandra drives it over the bridge from Seattle. It takes us a bit to find the right neighborhood, but when we do, we park the Jeep across the street from where Corina and me ran into the park.
It was less than a month ago, but it feels like years have passed. School is still in session at the high school where we stole the car.
“You ready?” Cassandra asks me.
“Yeah.” I lean back so I can get comfortable. I need to find the guards. I can hear the noise from the students at the school; the local Jungle is filled with their jangling. The younger people are, the louder they are. I have to work at keeping them from drowning out the people I’m trying to find. It’s hard because I don’t know the guards. I’ve never met them and I’ve never heard them, so I search instead for Richard, hoping that I can move outward from him, reading the music of those closest to him.
I search, but I can’t find him. Paul is missing, too. I find Maddie. There are instruments around her and I sort them as best I can. There are two others that are still jangly and loud, probably Billy Williams and another witness. I mute them and listen to the sounds close to them.
There are several others in the immediate area around the compound. They aren’t complicated sounds—the music sounds bored, like people waiting for something to happen and thinking about things that have already happened or that will happen. I open the drawer and search for the sheet music that matches what I hear. I find it. I read the next bar:
The man is color-blind. Alan. Alan Garcia. His world is black and white but with brown and green tinges to things. Even so, I know what’s red and what’s green and yellow and purple. Everything is bright. I’m sitting at a bank of security monitors. Driveway, Long Hall, entry hall, pool deck, gym, kitchen, commons, witness hallway, dorm hallway. Nobody’s on any of them at the moment. The kids—he doesn’t know exactly what Sabazios is doing with a pack of teenagers, but he’s never seen anything inappropriate—are all in the non-monitored rooms, just like they are for much of every day.
My back hurts. I’m hungry.
I’m bored.
The others? I put the question in his head to see if he’ll answer it.
Sabazios’s private detail is somewhere in the main house—separate team. Gordon and Nick are at their stations, Nick at the gate and Gordon at the hilltop.
I pull out of his mind and set about rewriting his tune. I do the same thing I did to the lady who gave us the seventeen grand—I write Cassandra and me into his music.
I find Nick and Gordon and do the same.
I listen for the others that Alan said were in the main house, but I can’t sort them, so instead I mute all the instruments at the compound. There are things besides music here. Undertones. Notes that have been held for so long that they’ve faded into the background of the song. They’re the sound that I imagine a witness in a frozen loop would make.
And I hear something else. Something that sounds like Sybil.
There’s a Gentry here.
I surface.
“Well?” Cassandra asks, looking up from her book.
“I rewrote the guards I could find.”
“Is Sabazios here?”
I hesitate a moment before I nod. The single harmonic, like Sybil. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he is.”
“Richard?”
“Couldn’t find him.”
“Bishop?”
“Gone.” I say it quietly, like he might hear me.
“Okay.” She shoves her book into her bag and tosses it onto the backseat. “You message your boo yet?”
Corina’s not available. She’s still inside the trailer. I can’t feel her. “Not yet. She’s not outside.”
“So we wait.” Cassandra retrieves her bag from the backseat and rummages through it. I watch her, waiting to see what she’s getting. A cigarette. She lights it and cracks the window.
Annoying.
We stare out our respective windows.
“I saw something about us on my self-glide,” she says finally.
My heart sinks. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Relax, Plugzer. I didn’t see anybody die or anything, but I did see something that I’ve had in my head ever since.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“We end up together, Alex.”
I don’t say anything because it takes everything I’ve got to keep from losing my temper completely. I can feel her watching me.
“You knew!” she says suddenly. “You already knew!” She shrieks and pushes me. “You little dog—you’ve been keeping secrets!”
“It’s not going to happen!” I’m yelling, but I can’t help it. “I love Corina, and you and me? We’re never going to be a thing, so just forget it.”
“It’s seen time, Alex. That shit’s fixed in stone. You and me are gonna be together someday and there’s nothing either one of us can do about it.” She makes bug eyes. “We’re destined for each other.”
And then Corina’s there. I can feel her and she’s the best feeling I’ve ever had. I let her flood in and my anger slips away. “She’s out.” I open the door without looking at Cassandra. “Let’s go.”
IT’S TIME.
“Corina.” Both her forms are in my mind right now, fully present, filling me and I cannot tell them apart. “I don’t want you to die.” I say it to one of them, but I don’t know which one.
“SEEN TIME.” Then she’s quiet. Then: “IS THE ONLY TRUTH.”
“DON’T BE SCARED, BOY. I LOVE YOU, PLUGZER,” they say together, a chorus, and I know this is near the end for her.
“NO!”
“DO WHAT YOU’VE ALREADY DONE, PLUGZ. IT’S THE ONLY WAY.”
And then one of them is gone and the other one’s all business.
“Time to go, Plugzer,” Corina thinks to me, and I know it’s the live one, waiting for us to move down in Slab City.
I close the Jeep door and put Sybil’s little package where she told me.