More Than This (29 page)

Who knows? And frankly, who cares?

Because Owen isn’t here. Owen is out
there
somewhere. Out there in this burnt-up, empty world. In his own coffin. All by himself.

Alone, like Seth was.

“How could you?” he asks. “How could you do that?”

His anger rises. He knows it’s illogical. That wherever Owen might be physically, he was with his parents, in every way that mattered in the online world. He’d seen it himself for the past eight years.

But still. What if he woke up? What if he was like Tomasz and woke up alone in a strange place, with no one to protect him?

The resolution comes hard and fast, like it’s the thing he now knows he must do.

“I’ll find you,” he says, a new sense of purpose flooding him, a
welcome
one. “Wherever you are, I’ll goddamn well find you.” He reaches to stab his parents’ coffins again, thinking there might be further information, some record of where their youngest son is being kept –

“Ow!”

A static charge shocks him where he touches the screen. It’s not much, the pain is negligible –

But the screen has changed. The coffins are all gone, replaced by a few words.

D
AMAGED
N
ODE
D
ETECTED
, the screen now reads.

S
CAN
I
N
P
ROGRESS
, appears below that.

There is a shift in the lights, as one end of the room is suddenly lit by a strange greenish glow. Far too fast to outrun, it moves along the rows of coffins, until it washes over Seth.

And stops on him.

“Oh, crap,” he says.

R
ESTORATION
P
OSSIBLE
, the screen says.

R
E-ACTUALIZATION
B
EGUN
.

“Shit!” Seth says, not sure what
Re-actualization
means but certain it can’t be anything good. He’s already turning back toward the short corridor to the stairs, already beginning to run –

When a blinding, debilitating pain shoots through his skull –

Right from the spot on the back of his neck where Albert Flynn’s lights were blinking, right from where Seth’s own “damaged node” must be –

And everything disappears in a flash of light.

“There’s always beauty,” said Gudmund. “If you know where to look.”

Seth laughed. “Gayest thing you’ve ever said, mate.”

“‘Mate,’” Gudmund laughed back. “Quit pretending to be English.”

“I am English.”

“Only when it’s convenient.”

Gudmund turned back to the ocean. They were up on a cliff that plunged down thirty or forty feet to the rocky waves below. It was the end of one of those noticeably shorter days that said that summer was winding down and the start of the school year was near.

But not yet.

“I mean, just look at that,” Gudmund said.

The sun, halved by the ocean’s horizon, seemed bigger and more golden than it had any right to be, a huge scoop of butterscotch ice cream melting into the pavement. The sky above it reached out for Seth and Gudmund with dark pinks and blues, the scattered clouds vibrant trumpets of color.

“You turn away from that crappy little beach,” Gudmund said, “away from all the rocks and the waves that won’t let you swim, and there’s no place to picnic with your nice sandwiches and the wind will blow your whole tedious little family away if you don’t keep them tethered to you. But then you look out into the ocean. And, well, there it is.”

“Beauty,” Seth said, not looking at the sunset, but at Gudmund’s profile lit by that same sun.

There were other walkers up on the cliff, other people taking advantage of the day and the sunset, but Seth and Gudmund were momentarily alone, everyone else too far from them to be part of this exact view.

“Gudmund –” Seth began again.

“I don’t know,” Gudmund said. “I really don’t, Sethy. But we’ve got now, which is more than a lot of people have, right? Let the future take care of itself.”

He held out his hand toward Seth. Seth hesitated, checking first if anyone could see them.

“Chicken,” Gudmund teased.

Seth took his hand and held it.

“We’ve got now,” Gudmund said again. “And I’ve got you. And that’s all I want.”

Their hands still clasped, they watched the sun set –

“Can you tell me anything else?” Officer Rashadi asked, gently but seriously, in that way she spoke to him that was so unlike all the other officers.

“He was short?” Seth volunteered, but he knew he’d already said that. He just didn’t want Officer Rashadi to leave, didn’t want this conversation to finish, as this was the most anyone had talked to him in days.

She grinned at him. “That’s what everyone says. But according to the records we have, I’m two inches shorter, and no one ever says that about me.”

“You don’t seem short, though,” Seth said, twisting his fingers together.

“I’ll take that as a compliment. But don’t you worry. That doesn’t mean he’ll be harder to find, Seth. Even short people can’t hide forever.”

“Will he hurt Owen?” Seth blurted out, also not for the first time.

Officer Rashadi closed her notebook and folded her hands together over its cover. “We think he’s using your brother to guarantee his safety,” she said. “And so he knows that if he does hurt your brother, then there’s no chance of any safety at all.”

“So why would he hurt him?”

“Exactly.”

They sat quietly for a moment, before Officer Rashadi said, “Thank you, Seth. You’ve been very, very helpful. Now I’m going to see how your parents are –”

They both turned at the sharp thump of the front door slamming open. Officer Rashadi got to her feet as another officer rushed into the sitting room.

“What is it?” Seth could hear his mum calling from upstairs. She rarely left the attic these days, wanting to be near Owen’s things. “What’s happened? Have you –”

But the new officer was speaking only to Officer Rashadi.

“They’ve found him,” he said to her. “They’ve found Valentine –”

Gudmund’s phone rang and rang and rang. On the second try, it went straight to voice mail.

Seth grabbed his coat. After what Monica had just told him on his doorstep, he had to see Gudmund. There was nothing else that had to happen in the whole wide world. He had to find him. Now. He took the stairs back down to the sitting room two at a time and was at the front door when his father called from the still-in-progress kitchen.

“Seth?”

Seth ignored him and opened the door, but then his father called in a way that brooked no argument. “Seth!”

“Dad, I have to go,” Seth said as he turned, but he stopped when he saw his father standing there. He was covered in fine sawdust from the kitchen work, but he held his cell phone in his hand, staring at it in an odd way, as if he’d just hung up.

“That was your principal,” his father said, sounding baffled. “Calling me on a Saturday afternoon.”

“I really, really need to go, Dad –”

“Said his daughter had been sent a photo of you.” His father looked down at his phone.
“This
photo,” he said, holding it up so Seth could see.

A silence fell. Seth couldn’t move. Neither, it seemed, could his father. He just held up the picture and looked at Seth questioningly.

“He wasn’t mad or anything,” his father said, slowly turning the phone back and looking down at the photo himself. “Said you were a good kid. Said someone was clearly out to cause you trouble, and he was worried that things might be hard for you come Monday. That he thought we should know. So we could help.”

He stopped, but still stood there, quietly.

To his great irritation, Seth felt his eyes fill with tears. He tried to blink them away, but a few escaped down his cheeks anyway. “Dad, please. I need to go. I need to –”

“Find Gudmund,” his father finished for him.

Not asking it, just saying it.

Seth felt caught, more caught than he could ever remember, more caught than on the day the man knocked on the window of the kitchen in the house in England. The world had stopped then, and it had stopped right now. Seth had no idea how it would ever start again.

“I’m sorry, son,” his father said, and for a heart-sinking second, Seth thought he was saying he was sorry because he wasn’t going to let Seth leave but –

“I’m sorry you felt you couldn’t tell us,” his father continued, looking down at his phone again, at the picture of Seth and Gudmund, just there together, but in a way serious and real and undeniable to anyone who might look. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that.”

And to Seth’s astonishment, his father’s voice broke as he said it.

“We haven’t been great to you,” his father said. He looked back up. “I’m so sorry.”

Seth swallowed away the thickness in his throat. “Dad –”

“I know,” his father said. “Go. Find him. We’ll talk later. Your mum won’t be very happy but –”

Seth waited a moment, not quite believing what he was hearing, but there was no time to waste. He opened the front door and raced out into the cold air, on his way to find Gudmund –

And it was summer again, it was months before, and Gudmund smiled at him on the cliff’s edge, the sunset casting his face in gold.

“There’s always beauty,” he said. “If you know where to look.”

Before the world was swallowed by a bright, white light
–

Fiery pain grips Seth’s head like a burning fist, blocking out everything else. It seems impossible to be able to live with pain this bad, impossible to think there isn’t irreparable damage being done. He can hear a distant screaming before he realizes it’s coming from his own mouth –

“I don’t know what else to do!” a voice says.

“Just turn it off!” shouts another voice. “Turn the whole thing off!”

“HOW?”

Hands that Seth didn’t know were holding him lower him to the floor, but there’s pain occupying every free space, every free thought, and he can’t stop screaming –

“That sound he’s making! I think it’s killing him –”

“There! Press that! Press anything!”

With such suddenness it feels like he’s fallen off a cliff, the pain ceases. Seth vomits across the smoothness of the concrete floor and lies there helpless, his eyes running with water, his throat raw, gasping for air.

A pair of hands grabs him again.

Small
hands. And he hears a worried prayer in what can only be Polish.

“Tomasz?” he grunts, and he feels two stubby arms grip him tightly in a hug. He’s finding it difficult to focus his eyes, and it takes several blinks to see Regine’s face leaning down toward him, too.

She looks ashen, and even in his confusion, he can see that she’s terrified. “Can you get up?” she asks, urgency thrilling her voice.

“You must get up, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says, and they try to get him to his feet. Seth’s legs won’t support his weight, and they have to almost drag him across the floor.

“We must go,” Tomasz says. “We
must.
”

“How –?” Seth whispers as they get him up the platform and into the corridor, but he can’t say anymore. His mind is racing away from itself, filled with images, crashing together in a torrent, a tidal wave come to drown him. He can see Tomasz and Regine, but he also sees Gudmund on the clifftop, sees his father, sees himself as a young boy when Owen was taken, all swirling together, and he can’t look away, even when he closes his eyes.

“I guessed that you told an untruth,” Tomasz says, starting to pull him up the main stairs. “An untruth
Regine
tried to conceal.”

“We came back for him, didn’t we?” she snaps.

“And only found him just in time!”

“Again,” Seth finds himself mumbling, though his mind still thrums so fast, he’s not even sure if he’s spoken aloud.