Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (29 page)

All three of them leaned forward when they saw my suited hands pick up the satellite, but when the footage switched into orbit they practically bumped heads. I let it run until we got to the first selfie I’d taken with the Delta-K booster and the
Lost Boy
AggieSat, then froze the video. You could see my extended arm and the camera reflected in the gold visor, with a background of half black sky and half brightly lit Earth.

Joe’s mouth was half open and he stared at the screen wide-eyed.

Cory said, “So, yeah. We’re on that testing thing.”

Tara leaned back and said, “We’ve got to get some logos on your suit. Do we have to use paint? I thought the suit was supposed to be tight?”

I said, “That’s just Nomex/Kevlar coveralls. The suit’s underneath.”

“Oh. So we could use patches and embroidery?”

I thought about it. “Uh, Probably. Something that can take high temps, though.”

Joe blurted, “That was
you
?”

I looked at him. He was staring at me with wide eyes.

“Well, it wasn’t Sailor Moon,” I said.

“Are you
insane
?”

Jade and Tara flinched back from Joe’s raised voice.

I felt my jaw muscles bulge and my teeth grind together. “We all heard that, right?” I said. I pointed at the door. “They probably heard that in the next
building
.”

Joe held up his hands and looked at Cory. In a
somewhat
quieter voice he said, “That can’t be safe!”

I reached over and picked up my laptop, closing it before tucking it under my arm. “We’re not hiring a health-and-safety officer. You want the job we
are
offering, great. But
you
don’t get to tell
me
what I can and can’t do.”

He clamped his mouth and dropped his gaze to the table. I think his ears were turning red, but I turned my head to Tara and said, “You know where to meet me when you’re done.”

I jumped away.

I waited in the bathroom because I wouldn’t put it past Joe to follow them and I was right. Jade, second through the door, shut the door behind her rather than letting it close on its own, and leaned against it.

I raised my eyebrows and she nodded. “Yep.”

There was a knock on the door and Joe’s voice said, “Is Cent in there?”

My mouth opened by itself but I shut it quickly before I actually said anything.

He tried to open the door. Jade said, “Hey!” and pushed hard against it with her back. I joined her, back to the door.

“Cent? I just want to talk!” He tried the door again. Tara added her weight. I put an arm around each of them and jumped.

We fell in a heap in Jade’s dorm room, Tara falling across the bed and Jade banging her elbow on her desk.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Jade said, hopping in place and cradling her arm.

I’d never jumped two people at once, but it hadn’t been any worse than jumping Joe and his backpack.

“Sorry,” I said to Jade. “You okay?”

She held her elbow up so she could look at it in the room’s tiny mirror. “Funny bone,” she said. “S’okay.”

“So he followed you guys?”

Tara said, “Yep. He did. We didn’t let him in the elevator, but he ran up the stairs.”

Jade nodded. “He saw us push the ‘up’ call button.”

“What did he say?”

Jade laughed and Tara covered her own mouth before saying, “Joe said, ‘What did she say?’” Tara looked over at Jade and shook her head.

I looked at Jade. “What did you tell him?”

She stopped laughing and shrugged. “I just went with, ‘You mean, did she tell us you slept with your study partner?’”

I looked away.

Jade said, “I’m not going to lie—we have to work with him. Better we’re all up front, you know?”

“I … guess.” I raised my chin to nod but instead of dropping it I hesitated, then shook my head.

Tara nodded as if I’d just confirmed something.

Jade said, “Why’d you have Cory hire him? Revenge?”

I sighed.

“Leave her alone,” said Tara. “She doesn’t know.”

Jade said, “Doesn’t know what?”

“She doesn’t know why she had Cory hire him. She’s still working it out.”

I met Tara’s eyes.

That
I could nod to.

TWENTY-TWO

Cent: You should include some Chuck Berry

I found Dad in the living room scooping ash out of the fireplace. I told him, “I need to know how to do that thing you do.”

He looked at me frowning. “Really?” He dumped a load of ashes in the bucket and hung the shovel with the poker, then stood up. “I would’ve thought that you and Joe were working that out for yourselves, but okay. When a guy and a gal love each other very much—”

I struck out but my fist passed through empty space and he was standing behind me saying, “Missed him.
Darn
that guy.”

My elbow caught him in the stomach. I’m sure he
let
me, damn him. He gave an exaggerated “Oof” and staggered back.

“You done?” I said.

He straightened. “What thing that I do?”

“Twinning.”

“Hmmm. Really? What for?”

“Airflow. You know:
lots
of air.”

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows and pointed at the ceiling.

“Let’s go try it.”

“Where?”

“We could do it right here.” He glanced back up at Grandmother’s bedroom. “But then we might scare the horses. Let’s go to your launch site. The sandy wash, okay?”

I jumped.

Dad appeared thirty feet away. He turned in place, carefully scanning all around.

I glanced around, too. It was in the upper sixties and the air was still. It was overcast but you could just barely make out the sun through the clouds. It was a bit past midday. No one was in sight. I jumped up a hundred feet and spun around as I fell, then jumped back to the ground before I’d dropped thirty feet.

Dad said, “Well?”

“There’s a vehicle moving off that way, heading north. I could see the dust, but nothing we have to worry about. Had to be over six miles away.”

Dad nodded.

“What’s the drill?”

He turned to the side, facing east. “The first thing you want to do is to look at yourself. Not with a mirror, mind you.” He jumped to a spot five feet in front of him but appeared facing west, looking to where he’d just been standing. Then he jumped back to his first spot, facing east. “Back and forth, like that, but faster.” He jumped again and again, very little pause between the jumps—and then, just like that, he was in both places at once. His voice, distorted oddly, said, “I am looking at myself.”

I could see through him. Through both of him. The backgrounds were distorted, too. The Dad on my left had a boulder behind him at the edge of the wash. The Dad on my right had a creosote bush in the background, but when I looked through them, the backgrounds had merged, a mixture of bush and rock, no matter which “Dad” I look at.

“You can move the ends,” he said, and suddenly the right hand figure was ten feet further away. And then it vanished.

At first I thought he’d just stopped doing it, but I realized I could still see through his other image and that the background had changed, darkened. His voice was quieter but I still understood him when he said, “I’m in the warehouse.” Then one side of his figure brightened so much, I blinked and looked away for a second. I heard surf and he raised his voice to say, “The beach, in Queensland.” A warm wind pushed through my hair.

And then he really stopped twinning and was back, solid, present, blinking. “It was bright there—full sun.”

His voice was normal again. I could no longer hear the surf and the breeze had died.

“Any questions?”

I’d seen it before, a long time ago, before I could jump, but I found it weirder, for some reason, than I had as a child. “When you do the water thing, is there anything different you do?”

He shook his head. “No. It’s just like the air. You felt the air, right?”

I nodded.

“There was wind on the beach but what you felt was from the air pressure difference. Sea level versus? …”

“At three thousand seven hundred fifty,” I said, remembering launch day. “About 2 psi difference.”

He nodded. “If you’re venting to orbit, you could be pushing it out at fourteen point seven, eh?”

I nodded. “I wouldn’t vent air to orbit, though. Into a container, maybe.”

“You could fill up a balloon pretty darn quick. That could be interesting.” He rubbed his chin. “The first time I did this, I was exhausted, but after I got the hang of it, it didn’t seem any more difficult than any other jumping. How about you? When you started adding velocity?”

I shook my head. “In atmo, if I do it long enough I get exhausted just being buffeted by the wind.” I pointed up. “The orbital stuff, though—not so much.” I had an odd thought. “Did you want
me
to teach you how to do the velocity thing?”

Dad smiled. “I’ll give you credit, Centipede. You beat me there. But no, you don’t need to show me. For instance—”

He left the ground too fast for me to track. I had to jerk my head back to see him, a rapidly shrinking dot against the gray clouds above. Then the dot blinked out and he was back at my side.

He fingered his shirt. “Oops.” Two buttons still held his shirt closed but the others were gone. “Your mom will be annoyed. Let that be a lesson to me.”

“Somebody’s been practicing,” I said.

“I do have one more trick,” he said. “Something I haven’t even shown your mother. If you figure out the twinning thing, I’ll show you.”

“What?” I asked. “I might
never
figure out the twinning thing.”

“Consider it an incentive.” He vanished.

*   *   *

It took me over an hour before my first success, and it shocked me right back out of it. I saw myself, all right, but it was wrong. Besides the transparency and the merging backgrounds (I was seeing through myself twice), I didn’t look properly like me. The Stanford sweatshirt I was wearing actually
said
Stanford, not brofnatS. My hair was parted on the wrong side and my face just didn’t look right.

So, weird, that.

It took me another half hour to get it back and hold it. Other than my own image, the landscape was a mess as my visual cortex tried to make sense of two different slices of desert, combining it in ways that didn’t make sense.

I had to stop, nauseated, and breathe heavily until my stomach settled.

I kicked at the ground, sending coarse sand flying. Except for some very early effects when I started “plummeting” I didn’t get nauseated in orbit. Felt unfair to feel it now.

I jumped to the Eyrie.

Dad had installed blackout-quality drapes so he could sleep there when his clock was set to different parts of the planet. I liked light so I kept the curtains open. There aren’t privacy issues—to see in, you’d have to climb two hundred feet up to the ledge or be clinging to the far wall of the canyon.

I went from window to window drawing the drapes, taking the interior to dark shadows. When I turned off the kitchen light the darkness was profound.

I waited, breathing slowly, until the nausea was completely gone, then jumped back to the bright wash, to the dark Eyrie, to the bright wash, faster and faster, and then it clicked.

I could look at myself, but the sunlit desert completely washed out the dark interior of the Eyrie and I only had one landscape to contend with. The only parts of the Eyrie I saw were where light from the wash shone through me, lighting the floor around my feet.

I shivered, suddenly cold, and my concentration dropped. I was back in the Eyrie, in the dark. When I turned to switch the light back on, I felt sand grate between my shoes and the stone floor. Examined in the light, you could see where I stood, my footprints defined by a border of coarse sand.

I guess water and air isn’t the only thing that could flow through the me-shaped hole. I shivered again. The Eyrie was cold today. I’d been sleeping here, but that usually involved dropping my jeans and crawling under flannel sheets, a quilt, and a down comforter. In the morning, I’d grab my clean clothes and jump to the Yukon for a shower.

I eyed the woodstove, but didn’t really want to go through the motions of starting a fire.

Back in the Yukon, the snows buried the first story of the house most years. When extra-heavy snowfall threatened to bury the second floor, too, Dad melted it away by twinning to a hot place at low altitude. I pulled back one of the curtains and opened the window six inches.

It wasn’t much warmer outside, but I knew someplace that was. It was over ninety degrees Fahrenheit in Perth, Western Australia, and it was still morning. I found a sheltered spot in a back alley, hidden from traffic and pedestrians, and twinned to the Eyrie.

I’d like to say that it happened immediately but it took me several fits and starts before I held both spots continuously.

I was trying for ten minutes but dropped to my knees as my watch display passed six. I was in the Eyrie and though the floor under my knee was still cold, the chill of the air was gone. There was condensation on the walls. Right. It had been humid in Perth.

After one attempt to stand, I
climbed
up onto the bed and flopped onto my back. I thought about taking off my shoes and fell asleep instead.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Discussion

Need to talk in person about your stuff. Could you meet me where we made our deal, tomorrow, at the same time of day?

Roberta

She hadn’t named the Dixie Chicken. Dr. Matapang clearly thought someone else was reading her e-mails and, probably, watching her movements.

Crap.

I shot off an affirmative. I was hoping she was imagining things, but if she was right, I hoped it was just the DIA and not Daddy’s old friends.

I arrived ten minutes early, coming in through the veranda entrance in the back, and took a seat in dark corner. I ordered a Coke and waited, the Coke untouched. If she
was
being tracked, I had no intention of drinking anything here.