Rare, p.7
Rare, page 7
What are they looking for? What do they want? She had an idea. A wild, paranoid idea, sure, but crazy as it sounded, she was strangely sure she wasn’t wrong.
Another Emma from another life would have thought it was about drugs. Or gangs. Illegals or terrorists. She would have been so happy to dig for her ID to show she was a Good Citizen, a Good Girl with nothing to hide.
But now. Now.
The patrolman was leaning in to look at the ID the driver was showing him, but he wasn’t . . . paying close attention. He kept looking back at the bus, looking right at it, even as the car’s driver kept holding out his ID. The patrolman just nodded, his hand sliding to the butt of his gun. She couldn’t make out his face—the broad brim of his hat and his reflective glasses made it impossible—but when he moved on to the next car and knocked on the window, he didn’t even glance down. He looked a little like he was sleepwalking, drifting closer and closer to the bus in a dreamy ritual of being law and order, checking on drivers and IDs. Something winked and glittered in the sunlight above him, and she squinted through the tinted windows to try and see what it was.
At first, she thought it was a bird. A crow, maybe. But it didn’t wheel and circle overhead, it just sort of . . . drifted, then hovered over the line of traffic. A drone. Black, whirring, floating with lazy, contented purpose. It hovered high over the bus and then swept off to the right, zipping overhead, and Emma’s throat got very, very dry.
~~~
The officer didn’t know why he was looking, much less what he was looking for. To him, it was just a thing to be done. Someone high up had lit a fire under their asses for this roadblock, so a roadblock had gone up. High terrorist threat? Active shooter? He didn’t know; no one was saying. All he knew was they were supposed to be on Alert. Elevated Risk—fucked if he knew from what. He didn’t know that he was supposed to search the bus. He didn’t know that he was going to find a girl sitting on that bus, terrified. He didn’t know that he was supposed to ask to look inside her black suitcase (just need to make sure, ma’am he was going to say to her). He didn’t know she would probably try to snatch it back, and that in the struggle to follow, he would break the 45 in two. Those in charge of orchestrating this particular moment had calibrated person, place, and situation to an over 95 percent likelihood of this result, acting only when the projected outcome had crossed the threshold from possible to probable. All the little pieces were falling into place—a minor statistical aberration would be removed without fuss, by the numbers, in the simplest and most mundane way. And without loss of life.
Already, Pete Hake felt that tug toward the Greyhound. He would call it a hunch. He’d put it down to his years of training. Gut instinct and all that. But he couldn’t call it for what it was—the slightest, deftest pull of the strings ever-weaving a tapestry of law and order and outcomes—that drew him toward the bus. Officer Pete Hake was a finely trained cog in a series of expertly placed gears. He really had no idea he was going to destroy a miracle. He was only following orders.
~~~
The drone rose over the bus once more. Get out, Emma said to herself. Get out. Now. She grabbed the backpack out of the overhead bin and looped it over her shoulder, her back wrenching a little as the new weight pulled her off-balance. She clutched the suitcase and started to make her way up to the front, then backed away as the patrolman on the left side and another on the right converged on the bus.
The bathroom. The bathroom. There was a little window in there. Maybe too small to get through. Maybe. But the door to the bus had opened, and she was out of options. She melted to the back of the bus and locked the door.
“Sorry to do this, folks,” the driver said over the PA. “But I’ve gotta ask you to get off the bus for a few minutes. Just on the side of the road. Then we’ll be back on our way.”
Emma could hear the grumbling passengers as she tugged at the window opposite the mirror in the cramped bathroom.
“One at a time, people!” That was the patrolman. Muffled as his voice was through the door, the tone was unmistakable. Obey. Emma pushed against the tiny window, and it gave a little more. She pushed her backpack through it, and heard it thud on the pavement below.
~~~
“Just leave everything here, folks,” Hake said. Something was up. That gut feeling was on him, and he couldn’t shake it. Something was on this bus.
“What’s up—” his partner, Roy, said.
Hake waved with one hand, gesturing toward the bathroom door. Roy nodded and started to head off the bus. Already, the strands of law and order were tightening, eager to crush this deviance. Everything good must go. Everything—
“What kind of Stasi bullshit is this?” a burly guy in a plaid shirt said, not moving from his seat. “The fuck’s your warrant?”
“Sir, just make your way off the bus, please.” Normally, that would be all Roy needed. Joe Citizen would accept this as Procedure, keep his head down, and do what he was told. But it was hot in the bus, cramped. And Roy had misjudged Burly Plaid’s dull fury because he was so focused on that . . . other thing. The thing he couldn’t put a name on, the gut feeling that was telling him that It, whatever It was, was going down in the bathroom in the back.
“We’ve been stuck in traffic for an hour, man. This is bullshit, no warrant, no probable cause, no nothing.”
“Sir—” Hake called out from down the length of the bus. Maybe his partner could have diffused the situation seconds earlier with the right words, the right posture, but everything in here was just a second off queue because of that thing jangling on the edge of Hake’s—on everyone’s—nerves.
“Don’t you fucking ‘sir’ me, you goddamn gestapo.”
And Hake, who was so close to the bathroom door, shook his head like he was struggling to wake from a deep sleep, and backed up, because even with his gut and training telling him the thing in the bathroom was going down, Roy was in trouble, and that training went deeper.
“Roy? Everything cool back there?”
~~~
Emma let out a muffled sob of relief as the officer called out to his partner at the front of the bus. She had just barely enough room to push through the window, and she slid out legs first. She had a wild thought that she’d come down between more cops, right there in broad-brimmed hats and glasses, but no one was there. The car behind the bus honked, but the sound got lost in a chorus of other horns. She staggered to her feet and grabbed the backpack under one arm.
~~~
“Sir, you need to stay calm—”
“Asswipe, you need to—”
“Pete?” his partner said, trying to sound steady, calm, in control. Pete Hake already had his hand on the butt of his gun and had sidled closer.
“Got you,” he said.
“Fucking Stasi prick—”
“Sir—” Roy reached out, and Burly Plaid swatted at his hand. That’s all it took. Big as the guy was, broad-shouldered as he was, he was down on the floor of the bus in a second. The other passengers, the driver who could have told them one passenger was missing, one girl hadn’t appeared yet, forgot all about that girl as they watched the two troopers take Burly Plaid down. He scrambled to try and grab the metal bar by the front door, but Roy and Hake were on top of it, now, and he went screaming out onto the highway. People in the cars on either side of the bus who had seen Emma flail out the back window were now leaning out with their cellphones, filming, Facebooking, tweeting. It was #domesticterrorism, #greyhoundbadass, #busbullytakedown, #policebrutality—but nowhere in that cyclone of argument and counterargument was #emma.
~~~
Emma took one second to look at the crowd gathering on the highway before bolting off to the right. The drone overhead whistled past, little rotors spitting in fury, but the fat plastic bird couldn’t follow as she crashed into the trees on the side of the road, dashing away, hunkering down in a little clump of bushes.
The drone was just a glittering spark in the hard blue sky, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was alive, that little beast up there, a dread toy buzzing back and forth, coasting up on air currents, and whirring back.
~~~
Far, far away, in a little room in a place built especially for watching things, the scene was displayed on three large screens as that post-nuclear-age monstrosity with its unwavering, All-Seeing Ocular right in the middle of its belly feasted on the data from leaves on trees, on a path in the woods, transmitting it all back in 4K to this little room with a soft grey carpet and sound proof walls.
“Closer,” a voice said in the silence of that room. A voice as cool and clicking on consonants as the gears in a perfect machine. “Let’s get a little closer, shall we?”
A hand wove over a keyboard, tracing the letters there like a magician weaving glyphs into action, and the wizard’s dread familiar out on a highway near San Diego drifted a little lower.
~~~
Emma scurried under the cover of the trees, working slowly down the lip of a hill, but she wasn’t looking where she was putting her feet, and she tripped over a root hard enough to bite her tongue when her teeth clacked together. The pain brought her back to focus. She had to make sure she didn’t drop the suitcase, didn’t bump it too much, or else everything—the bus trip, the escape, everything—would be just a terrible joke. She leaned against a gnarled old tree and scanned the sky. Even though the thing looking for her was designed to be quiet, she could feel it out there, this predator who had never failed to spot its prey. Patient and content, the little thing drifted lower, a tiny black cloud in the sky full of dark intent.
“Please,” she whimpered, pushing herself further and further into the bushes, knowing it probably wouldn’t be any use. The eye in a thing like that was better than perfect, better than 20/20. It could zoom in, zoom up, filter out leaves, and see body heat. Unlike the policemen, it could never be distracted, convinced, or tricked.
The sun gleamed off the rounded drone’s top and it drifted closer. Emma clutched one of the bushes with one hand, and the other scrabbled in the dirt, looking for something to throw. Her fingers closed around a crushed beer can. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had. She let her breathing slow a little, waiting for it to get closer and closer still, and then she hauled off from the shoulder, missing by a few inches. She was angry now, and she grabbed for something else. Out went a small rock, again missing by an inch or more. Then another and another. She didn’t stop to look at what she was tossing; she threw anything and everything her hand could grasp.
Until finally, finally she heard a satisfying plastic crack and let out a yelp nearly savage in its fury.
~~~
In the small room with its grey carpet and silence, the hand that wove over the keyboard jerked like a spider poked, the starched whiteness of the cuff of a dress shirt now stained a little with sweat. The fingers reared back. A moment only, before those pallid, wrinkly fingers danced once more across the keyboard, pulling up a screen, moving another window to the side. The coughs and murmurs of the net of California Highway Patrol squawked into the man’s earpiece, with its telltale, eerie, Bluetoothed glow.
“Back,” he said. “Draw them back.” He tapped out some quick messages to here and there across the web. “Back. Fall back, fall back.”
The little eye that had given them a live feed into the woods was blinking off and on, on and off. He could send out another of his pets or draw the troopers closer, but those woods. He frowned as he pulled up a map of the area. Those woods were old. Too old a place to put his own men into. He calibrated the risk. With the woods as a factor, obtaining the abnormality came in at under an 80 percent likelihood of success.
“Fall back,” he said. “Back, back, back.” He was already trying to weave another series of events, summon another operation code name that might fall closer to that desired 95 percent chance.
The last he saw of the girl before his drone’s eye went dark for good was her shouting, one hand clutching the case, and the other arm poised to throw. He flinched as the screen went black, trying not to feel the loss as he pulled up maps and went over the roads around the ancient forest.
Chapter 3
To Wear Flowers in Your Hair
G
wen had to hope she’d done enough for the girl. The patches on the pack might protect her a little—Gwen had sewn them in herself, gently weaving little whispers of support and strength into every strand. It should be enough, shouldn’t it? Enough to just get the girl here.
Here: standing in the courtyard of the Sword and Rose, close to the heart of the city. Not too far away, she herself had been touched, had crossed over. And at the time—with the smell of patchouli curling through her nose, the dawn’s light on the dewdrops beading across a clearing in the woods like gemstones lit on fire and the aftermath of laced grape Kool-Aid on her tongue—she had given herself over to the Unseen, and all the troubles had begun.
She snorted at the turn of thoughts. Then, as now, she wouldn’t trade her troubles for all the world.
It was just after eight on the evening she had left San Diego, racing to this rampant, vibrant courtyard so close to where it had all begun for her, a heartbeat away from Haight-Ashbury. A heartbeat that had pounded in her more than fifty years ago. She looked at her reflection in the lights over the door of the Sword and Rose, tried to see herself as she had been—eyes full of the moon, hair brown like the back of a doe, and no dewlap. She frowned at herself before she knocked three times. Waited, and did the same again. And once more. Three. Times three. Times three.
The door opened a crack, and glimpsed yet another hippie refugee hiding in an old man’s clothing. Not the owner of the store, of course, but someone else altogether.
“Gwen,” Eric said. “I hate to say it but—”
“Council business,” Gwen said. He should have opened the door to her, but he looked back over his shoulder. “Eric.”
She put a hand on the door before he could shut it in her face. There were voices inside. Low voices. High voices. Fey voices all.
“We’ve got problems already, Gwen,” he said softly. “Come back tomorrow?” He even tried to push the door shut on her, but she shouldered her way past him.
“I will not,” she said. “I’m still on the Council, aren’t I?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then this is Council business I have to talk about,” she said. “And if I say it’s important, it’s goddamn important.”
“So is this—”
She finally had a chance to look around the room, and as she did, her hand flew up to her chest. Up to her throat.
When was the last time she had seen so many all in one place? Not since she had worn flowers in her hair. Not since after Woodstock. But she wasn’t stoned. She wasn’t meditating; she wasn’t dreaming. She had been sober for years, and yet here they were.
A darkling of some kind crouched in the corner, its muttering whisper of shadow mimicking the bookshelf beside it. A dryad leaned against a large flowerpot, stroking the petals and leaves of the peonies like she was nursing a bruise. Weaving through the air was a full family of sprites. A gnome was polishing his dented and cracked glasses at the tarot table. The room was full to the rafters with the Unseen from all over the city.
And they looked frightened.
“Eric?” All the strength had gone out of her in a rush. Far out, man. Far around, she thought wildly.
“Gwen, if you’re on Council business,” Eric said, “then I need your help with this business, too.”
“I don’t . . . I think I’m out of my jurisdiction here,” Gwen said. Something must have gone truly wrong, for all of these Unseen to be here at once, crowded by the windows and rafters and doors.
“I’m asking,” Eric said. “San Francisco is asking Gwendolyn of the Seaside for help with this.”
He steered her through the crowd of anxious sprites and pixies, talking low until they were in his back room, a small red chamber with a little cot set up and his Tarot deck on a narrow shelf next to a hotplate.
“Coffee?” he said. “I don’t really do this anymore. One cup after supper, and for some stupid reason, I’m up all night.”
“Same,” Gwen said. “But I’ll take one.”
He handed her a mug and sat on the edge of the cot, staring out the window. He started to say something, stopped, and then tried again, never taking his eyes off the open blinds that looked out on the wall of the mini mall. He looked lost, old, tired.
“What have you heard about the wharf?” he said. “On the news, I mean.”
“You know I don’t watch the news,” Gwen said, and Eric smiled.
“C’mon, Gwen. You’re on the Council.”
“Retired,” she said. And then, “Semi-retired.”
“But on the news,” Eric went on, “on Facebook, Twitter. Have you heard anything about the wharf? Seen anything about it?”
She thought about it, sipping on the thick, black coffee, before shaking her head. Eric nodded and seemed relieved.
“It didn’t get out then,” he said. “God, it happened so fast, and I’m trying to keep this contained but . . . ”
“Goddess, Eric, what? What is it?”
“A tourist went missing three nights ago,” Eric said. “Staying at the hostel, went down to the wharf maybe just after midnight? Gone.”
Gwen nodded. That couldn’t be it, of course. The Law didn’t say anything about feeding. About any of the Unseen that fed. People went missing all the time. The Council tried to stop them, but if they hadn’t broken any of the Laws, they were fair game.
“Same thing last night,” Eric went on. “This time it was Bishop. Neil Bishop, runs a restaurant down close to the wharf. Went out for a smoke while he was hanging out in his own place. Gone.” Eric shrugged it off, much as Gwen had done for the tourist. “Tonight, though. Tonight.”
