Ascending the Boneyard (14 page)

I've just barely
processed that I'm standing alone in an abandoned hotel room when Haze's spooked voice calls up to me.

“Tosh!
Tosh!
”

I dash toward the sound, practically colliding with him in one of the stairwells.

“Dude,” he says, panting to catch his breath. “I was explaining the physics behind those sick acoustics in the ballroom, and—”

“They're gone,” I say.

He stares up at me, and I can hear his breath hit hard against the filtered chambers of his mask. “Exactly. Like . . . poof.”

We stand in the stairwell, dust particles bigger than my whole head floating all around us. Haze is probably right. It's probably full of toxins and asbestos, and by the time we get back to Sandusky, I'll be riddled with lung cancer.

By the time we get back to Sandusky . . . The old man took off without saying where. Brought Devin with him. I don't know why he'd do that. Why he wouldn't realize I'd think the worst. That people who leave Sandusky tend to not come back.

The phone rattles in my grip. I pull up the message.

Time unused melts into pools of regret.

And just behind it, the same picture that came through a few minutes earlier. I show it to Haze.

“Do you know what this is?”

He takes the phone from me, looks at the picture, starts tapping the screen—pretty bold moves for a guy who essentially has no idea how a cell phone works.

“There's a link on the page to a bunch of other pictures,” he says.

My face twitches in disbelief. Haze just used a techie word in a sentence.
Correctly.

I take the phone from him, scroll manically through the photos. There's got to be a close-up view here or a link to a map . . . something. Why would the commandos direct me to a specific location on the map without helping me figure out what or where it is?

I'm scrolling at a good clip, not knowing exactly what I'm looking for, but confident that I'll know it when I see it. Sure enough, about sixty pictures in, one photo leaps off the screen at me in full-tilt 3D, and for a split second my knees buckle. Slack-jawed, I rotate the phone in my hand so I can study it from every angle.

High on a wall, surrounded by layers of cracked and curling paint, a clock stands frozen in time at ten minutes to four. The clock face is warped, some of the numbers twisted out of shape or gone completely.

It's melted.

The clock is melted.

Time unused melts into pools of regret.

Haze nudges me. “You're talking to yourself again. Why do you keep saying that?”

“Saying what?”

“Something about melting time? What's that supposed to mean?”

I show him the photo.

“So, do an image search for
melted clock
,” he says.

His out-of-nowhere knowledge of cyber-sleuthing trips me yet again. “I gotta hand it to you, man,” I say. “You may be off the grid, but you've got the mind of a brilliant lunatic.”

He thanks me with a two-fingered salute as I start scrolling down the too-long list.

“Here,” I say, getting a hit.

I click the link, and my hand falls limp to my side.

“Gimme a break,” I whisper.

“What's wrong?”

“It's a
school
,” I say. “Are you
serious
?”

“So it's a school,” he says. “So what?”

So, a school has nothing to do with this mission. So, until we got to this hotel, I'd never even heard of a school in the Boneyard. So, I don't want to tell him that this is just one more dead end, like the ones in the tunnels that belch soldiers out onto the highway in flames.

But I don't say any of that to Haze. I can't. I just hand him the phone so he can see for himself.

Haze starts scrolling through the photos the same way he channel surfs at my house: torturously slow. He stops and studies every single picture before going on to the next; meanwhile, we're cramped inside that dusty stairwell, breathing asbestos particles the size of small cars. Well,
I
am, anyway.

“These aren't all pictures of that school,” he finally says, pushing the phone back to me. “Look.”

I have to confess here: I pull a Haze, start scrolling through the photos nice and slow. He's right. Some are pictures of old banks, old theaters, old schools, old hotels, old churches, even this hotel we're in, the Castle, all with one thing in common: they're all abandoned. Not just abandoned, but deteriorated, some to the point of complete and total demolition.

A fresh wave of fear crashes against me.

“Ravyn found a cockroach on my shoulder,” I blurt out.

He snorts. “Well, isn't
that
symbolic.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. Ravyn had said the same thing.

“You know. Your mom. Stan. The whole trailer infestation thing . . . Of course it would be symbolic.”

The stairway flickers, and I hear the mantel clock
tick-tick-tick
ing like we're about to be ambushed, like we're about to wipe.

Where the hell are the commandos, anyway? When are they going to chime in, send me a brigade, something?

Haze is staring at me.

“That's crap,” I tell him, the words sticking to the insides of my mouth.

But Haze's stupid glasses mirror my bullshit face back to me. “You know what I'm talking about,” he says soft and low. “You wouldn't even leave the house until—”

“Wouldja shut up about that already?” I say, instantly regretting the harsh.

The last thing I need is a lecture on ancient history, though. I mean, that's not why he's here. I brought him along to help me stay focused on the now. Isn't that what he always says?
Be in the moment, live in the now
? Well, I need him
now
, that's for damn sure, and it won't help this mission if he keeps digging up what's already dead and buried.

We sit quietly in the stairwell for a while longer, until Haze, pragmatist that he is, says, “So, what do you want to do now?”

I look up, blink the sting out of my eyes a few times. Dust and asbestos everywhere.

“Let's eat,” I say.

12.5

The two fried eggs
on my plate look unmistakably breastlike. I think about Ravyn and how, if that stupid cockroach would have stayed the hell out of things, I might have had a chance to touch hers.

13

This drippy,
messy breakfast is the best thing I've ever eaten. Eggs swimming in an inch of oil, hash browns leeching grease next to them, bacon with little pools of melted fat in the curves of delicious porkness—even the pop is fantastic. I didn't realize how starving I was until the blue-haired waitress set these plates in front of us.

Haze and I don't talk for at least five minutes, don't utter a syllable unless you count our grunts and moans of gastronomic pleasure. When it finally registers that the tank is getting full, we slow down, actually chew instead of inhale.

I lean back, slide the napkin out from underneath the plate, mop my chin with it. Generally speaking, the Tosh men are napkin averse; the old man lets Devin's food dribble down the side of his mouth instead of wiping it for him, not caring if it stays there until the next meal or even the next day. I usually quick clean him up when the fat bastard goes into the kitchen for seconds, or thirds, or more beer.

But this food is so trashtastic, the napkin is a given.

Haze lets out a long, bacon-scented sigh and stretches his legs so far under the table, I have to move mine out of the way. He scratches his head through his split-pea-soup-colored beanie.

“The Prophets,” he says. “How can you even have techno and folk together? It's self-canceling.”

“Exactly.” I slurp the end of my pop. “But I mean . . . they were there, weren't they? Because the next thing you know—”

“I know. Gone.”

The word echoes inside me with nothing for it to land on. No soft place, no hard place, no safe place.

Gone.
As in, nowhere to be. As in, doesn't exist.

How do you even begin to process ‘doesn't exist' . . . ?

I throw the piece of toast I'm nibbling back onto the plate. The last bite won't go down, even with gulps of water.

I feel restless. Antsy.

“So, what are you gonna do about the school?” Haze says as if he can read my mind.

I let my gaze drift out the window and down the street, turn up the volume on the music coming into my ear so I don't have to hear the
tick-tick-ticking
of the invisible clock lodged somewhere in my brain.

Time unused melts into pools of regret.

I flip back toward Haze with a spark of epiphany.

turn back time

That's what her note said.

A locator app I downloaded one time sits unused on my last wall screen page. Supposedly, it spews all kinds of information about a place just by uploading a picture of it. I bring up the search window again, look for the name of the school since I'm pretty sure that's where the clock will be.
Industrial Tech
, it finally says. I can use the app to verify it when we get there.

“We gotta roll,” I say, grabbing my bag and sliding out of the booth.

Since he's the one with the job, Haze is also the one packing money, so I let him pay for our food. The blue-haired waitress smacks her orange-tinted lips, watching us with mild interest as we wander out onto the sidewalk. Haze follows me silently down the sepia-toned streets of the city.

Before long, we come to a stop in front of what looks like a stone fortress at least half a dozen stories high. As I open the locator app, my pulse goes supernova with heightened awareness that we may have just been lured right into an ambush situation. Without any distinguishing markings on the building, I have no way of knowing if this is a minion fortress or an UpperWorld stronghold or something else completely.

Either way, it looks vacant.

I quick snap a picture, press a couple of buttons, and wait.