Quicksilver (7 page)

Value Foods was quiet, since most people had better things to do on a Friday night than buy groceries. Between customers I swapped out last week’s gossip mags for the new issues, listened to Sarah complain about her ex-boyfriend, and watched Milo stack flats of store-brand soda in the bargain aisle. I was counting the cases and calculating the total volume of liquid in my head when Jon piped up that he’d bought an awesome new stereo for his truck, adding a few seconds later that it was raining like Noah outside. I smiled vaguely at the first comment and nodded at the other, while pretending not to notice the hint.

At eight thirty I was sitting in the break room leafing through an old issue of
Chatelaine
when Milo poked his head in the doorway. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

I looked up, surprised. “I’m fine. Why?”

“Just wondering,” he said. “You seem kind of … off somehow. Uptight.”

Was it that obvious? I rubbed a hand across my forehead, trying to massage away the tension. Either Milo had some pretty impressive emotional radar, or I wasn’t as good at hiding my feelings as I’d thought.

“It’s nothing big,” I said. “Just some stuff with my parents. You know how it is.”

Milo nodded slowly, but he didn’t say anything more. I picked at an uncut corner of the magazine, feeling self-conscious under that steady gaze. But when I looked up again, he’d disappeared.

I finished my coffee and headed back to my station just in time to keep the lineup at Jon’s register from turning ugly. But my customer-greeting smile felt more fake than ever, and my attempts at small talk fell flat. It was a relief when the unexpected crush moved on and the store was quiet again.

There had to be a way to convince my parents they were wrong about the makerspace being too dangerous. But though I spent the rest of the shift arguing with them in my head, it was no use. I’d already done my best to convince them—it just hadn’t worked. I rang through my last customer, closed down, and stalked off to the office.

Milo was sweeping the corridor as I came in, dark head bobbing to the rhythm of his music player. He hailed me with a lift of his eyebrows. “Heading out?” he asked, a little too loudly.

“Yeah,” I said. I pulled my coat off the hook, thrust one arm into the sleeve, and was reaching for the other when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

Now what? Irritated, I pulled it out and turned it over. There were twenty-three messages.

It couldn’t be Mom or Dad. They knew I couldn’t answer when I was on shift, and anyway they’d have called the store line if it were that important. It had to be someone drunk-texting the wrong number. I opened the message window, hoping it would at least be funny—and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.

–20:35:23 RELAY ACTIVATED

My leg muscles locked, my whole body trembling with the urge to fight or flee. I forced my stiff finger to move, scrolling through one message after another. Activated. Deactivated. Activated again…

“Whoa,” said Milo, leaning the broom against the wall and pulling his earbuds out. “What’s the matter?”

I breathed in through my nose, telling myself not to panic. Something was interfering with the relay’s signal, or it wouldn’t be cutting in and out like that. So nothing major had happened yet. My parents were still out of the house, so if I got home fast and dealt with this, there’d be no reason for them to suspect that anything had gone wrong at all.

There was only one problem. I had no idea why the relay had come online or what it was doing. For all I knew, it might just blow up in my face.

“What is it?” Milo asked again.

“It’s nothing,” I replied, stuffing the phone back into my pocket. “But I need to get home. Right away.”

0 0 1 0 1 1

“Thanks for this,” I told Jon, climbing into the passenger seat of his rusty 1990 Ford F-150 pickup. Drops speckled the windshield, but the worst of the storm had subsided. “Sorry I didn’t take you up on the offer before.”

“No problem.” He turned the key, and the truck revved to life. Judging by the growling noise it needed a new water pump, but that was the least of my worries right now. “So what’s the hurry? Sure you can’t stop for a coffee on the way?”

I was trying to think of a plausible lie when Milo popped up in the headlights, waving both arms above his head. “Hey,” he said breathlessly as Jon rolled the window down. “Can I grab a ride too? I’m just a couple streets over from Niki.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Jon, giving me a
what-can-you-do
glance that I pretended not to notice. Milo climbed in beside me and we started off, splashing through the puddles toward the main road.

Jon switched on the radio, and some country singer began to wail about the hardworkin’ boy who loved her and the harddrinkin’ man she loved. I hoped he’d change the station, but Jon seemed perfectly happy, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel as we waited for the light to turn. “Which way?” he asked.

“Ross Street,” I told him. “Off Hilliard, just south of Caledonia.” I kept my tone casual, though my fists were balled and my foot pressed hard against the floor. Getting home fast might be all I cared about, but I didn’t want Jon getting too curious about why.

“Oh yeah? My grandma lives around there. So how long have you…”

“Hey, Jon,” interrupted Milo, “that arrow’s not gonna get any greener.”

Jon’s mouth puckered, but he pressed the accelerator and swung into a left turn. We drove a few blocks before he spoke again. “You don’t have to keep taking the bus unless you want to,” he said. “Most nights I’ve got the truck anyway, so if we’re on shift together, give me a call and I’ll pick you up.”

“Awesome,” Milo said brightly. “You’re the man.”

I knew and Jon knew and probably Jon suspected Milo knew that the offer had been meant for me. But Jon could hardly say so without being rude, so he forced a smile. “Nah, not really. Like I said, it’s not a problem.”

I almost felt sorry, then, about the way I’d blown him off before. But then Jon edged closer, his thigh pressing mine, and my charitable thoughts vanished in a surge of revulsion. I jerked to the right, crushing Milo against the door. But Milo didn’t protest, or even make a sound. He angled his legs until not even a millimeter of our bodies were touching and kept his eyes on the road.

Jon stiffened, and I knew he’d got the message. I was half afraid he’d stop the truck and tell us both to get out, but he must have decided it wasn’t worth the drama. A sharp turn flung me into Milo again, who let out a barely audible “oof.” Then with a roar we swung onto Ross Street, and I saw the lights of number 28 glowing in the near distance.

“Right here,” I blurted, and the Ford jerked to a halt. I scrambled over Milo and popped the door open. “Thanks, Jon. Night, Milo. See you—” I jumped down onto the driveway and took off, fumbling for my key as I went.

The porch was lit, but the front window was dark, and when I wrestled the key into the lock and shouldered the door open, no one answered my call. Only the light above the kitchen sink and the soft murmur of CBC Radio hinted that anyone might be home, but those were just my mom’s usual antiburglar tactics. I sprinted down the corridor to my bedroom and waved on the light.

At first glance everything seemed normal, from the pile of laundry on my unmade bed to Crackers whining hopefully from his crate in the corner. He didn’t seem upset, just eager to get out, which made me breathe easier. If anything strange had happened in my absence, he’d have been yelping and scratching like crazy.

“Hang on,” I told him, flinging open my closet door and digging through the heap inside. Two pairs of dress boots, a sweater that had fallen off its hanger, a library book on cybernetics that was six weeks overdue … and shoved into the back corner, a cardboard box marked THIS END UP with an arrow pointing sternly at the floor.

Was it safe to look inside? Or was I about to make a fatal mistake?

Yet I couldn’t ignore the danger, and I certainly couldn’t run away and leave my parents to deal with it. There was nobody in the world who could handle this right now, except me.

Don’t panic,
I reminded myself. Then I picked up my old hockey stick, slid it under the bottom corner of the box, and flipped it aside.

There sat the relay, a silver egg on a nest of multicolored wiring. But no light came through the aperture, and the seam around its perimeter was intact.

It wasn’t active. In fact, it didn’t look as if it had powered on recently at all.

I exhaled, my tension draining away. There’d been a lightning storm not that long ago, and the monitoring device was plugged in to my old phone charger. Maybe a power surge had triggered a false alarm? I unplugged the charger and picked up the base, relay and all, for a closer look.

Sure enough, that was the answer. One of the capacitors had melted—my own fault for not using a surge protector. I was inspecting the scorched circuits to see how much I’d have to replace when Crackers started to whimper pathetically.

“Oh, all right, you,” I said, setting the relay down on the nightstand and crouching to unlock his crate. He trotted out, tail wagging, and pushed his cold nose into my hand. “I’ll take you outside in a—”

The lights flickered. The clock radio snapped on, blaring, and the remote-controlled curtains whirred open as the room went into its wake-up routine. I dived for the radio and was smacking it silent when a low hum vibrated the air behind me. “Oh
crap,”
I breathed and spun around—just in time to be blinded by an explosion of white, scintillating light.

Sparks danced across my retinas as I staggered back, tripped over the laundry basket, and fell, cracking my head against the wall. For three vital seconds I lay there in a daze, and by the time I scrambled to my feet, it was too late.

It hadn’t been a power surge that pinged my phone after all. Someone had been signaling the relay, trying to send a transmission through—and now that unwanted packet of information had finally arrived. All six foot three, 185 pounds of him, stretched across my bedroom carpet with his back arched in agony and the roots of his dyed brown hair glinting like gunmetal in the light. For an instant, his body glowed and flickered, and I could see the nightstand through it. Then he solidified and collapsed with a thud onto the floor.

Crackers yelped and scuttled behind me. But I stood riveted, staring at the new arrival. His dark grey uniform shirt was wrinkled and half untucked, one shoulder ripped at the seam as though he’d been fighting. His eyes were closed, and his lips were pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. But he didn’t move, and he didn’t appear to be breathing. Misgiving flashed inside me, and I was stooping to check his pulse when he stirred, groaned, and slowly opened his eyes.

The look on his face when he saw me was extraordinary—but the dismay turned quickly to resignation. “Tori,” he murmured, struggling up onto his elbows. “Your hair’s different. How long…?”

Even in my half-stupefied state, I knew what he was asking. “Since I saw you last? About six months.”

His brow creased in dismay. “Six …
no.
Is that all, really?”

Some people might have been charmed by the absentminded professor routine, but I had no patience with it. “You just scared the crap out of me, Faraday!” I snapped. “If you were planning to come after Alison all along, you could at least have let one of us know!”

He was silent.

“Is it safe?” I demanded. “Is it over now? Or do we still have to worry about—”

But Sebastian wasn’t listening. He had gone absolutely still, staring at something behind me.

Dread zapped into me, lighting up every nerve in my body. I whirled—

And there stood Milo in the doorway, my phone clutched in one hand.

“Um,” he said in a voice that cracked over two octaves, “you dropped this.”

0 0 1 1 0 0

I was so furious I couldn’t even be scared. I grabbed Milo by the collar—he was still wearing his green polo from work—and twisted my fist up under his chin. “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “What makes you think you can just walk into my house?”

“Tori,” said Sebastian Faraday in his deep, smooth voice, but I shot him a glare and he fell silent. He had no idea what was going on here, and I was
not
going to let him pull that Wise Older Brother act on me.

“Your phone fell out of your pocket when you got out of the truck,” gasped Milo, his Adam’s apple bobbing against my knuckles. He had seven inches and sixty pounds on me, but it didn’t seem to have occurred to him to free himself by force. “I only noticed after we drove away. And I knew you’d want it back, so I got Jon to let me off at the corner, but when I got to your place the door was open, and I remembered how upset you’d looked before and I thought…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. Reluctantly I opened my hand and let him go.

“All right,” I said, trying to regain my calm. Maybe Milo hadn’t seen anything, or at least nothing extraordinary. Maybe he just thought he’d walked in on me arguing with my secret university-aged boyfriend. The idea of me and Faraday soured my stomach, but I could fake it if I had to. “So you walked in. Then what?”

Milo blew out his breath and tugged his shirt back into shape. He glanced at Sebastian, at the relay, and a slow grin spread across his face. “That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my
entire life.
What is that thing? Some kind of teleport device?”

So he’d seen the whole thing. The relay going off, Sebastian beaming in, all of it. I sank onto the bed and put my head in my hands.

Crackers leaped up beside me, burrowing under my elbow for comfort. I was tousling his ears, wishing we’d adopted a proper guard dog instead of the sweetest miniature dachshund in the universe, when Sebastian struggled to his feet and came to join me.

“This is my fault,” he said. “I apologize. I should have double-checked the readings before I came through, but I never expected—”