Veneer (22 page)

Now, staring at a hastily scrawled arrow pointing out of the city, Deron considered the possibility that he was walking into a trap. It was Principal Ficcone’s vague warning that gave him pause, made him wonder why the police would pursue someone who couldn’t see the veneer. The better plan would have been to set up some kind of automated system, like a series of addresses, to draw the blind in, bring them all to one location so they could be rounded up. Hunters of the blind would be crafty in their methods. Those without sight must be detained before they could spread their disease to others.

Deron sighed, followed the viral hypothesis to its illogical conclusion.

He replaced the fantasy with what he already knew: the injury, the Swarm Survivor arena, and the slow degradation of the veneer. Paramel Terminus had been so dim that he could barely see anything. Then on the way home, visions of a strange landscape, reality itself dissolving. A flash of a dingy hallway emerged from his memory and blinked out. A hospital, he thought, nurses with ugly faces, walls with nothing on them.

Deron cursed under his breath. He had seen it, weeks ago, seen the truth and not even known it. It was injury to the brain that caused it, that somehow shut down the evolutionary ability to reconcile visual data onto any surface. They could say what they wanted about magic, but here was real proof that it was biological. There were systems in his body responsible for all the major senses and the one that controlled his reconciliation was broken.

Around him, the foreign veneers of factories and warehouse made him feel lost, as if he had been dropped in another city or another time where reconciliation was a pipe dream, a power wished for as often as invisibility or immortality. He thought about his ancestors, about how they saw the world before veneers. It wouldn’t have looked like this; the buildings were only the color of off-white evercrete because there was no reason for them not to be. It was probably cheaper to crank out the undecorated parts and let the customer update it with the right design.

Truth: Deron was not blind. Rather, he could finally see. He could see as humans had for hundreds of thousands of years, without reconciliation, without what they called
magic
. But why was it so dangerous? What was it about a man with true vision that worried them so? And who was
them
? Deron shook his head, tried to clear away the confusion and the conspiracy theories. It was all too much. Focus on the messages, he told himself.

Deron checked the arrow again; it was still pointing to the outer wall. Though a mile was nothing compared to how far he had already travelled, he couldn’t ignore the sinking sun and the rising hunger in his stomach. Freight Lane went all the way to the edge, cutting through the outer tract of Easton, a ring of the city dedicated to small factories and light industrial. Here, the people simply ignored him and went about their work with forced detachment.

Fortunately, the outskirts were home to a fleet of mobile eateries, little carts that followed lunch bells and quitting times. There were already several in a parking lot across the street, taking up position around half a dozen worn picnic tables. Deron tried to imagine what their signage looked like, how flashy their advertising would have been. Not that it mattered; a hot dog stand needed no signs when there was a mild breeze.

It was a large tortilla hanging from a cart that drew him across the road. The woman smiled at his approach; given the empty tables, it seemed she had been waiting eagerly for her first customer. He ordered an oversized burrito and had the woman fill it with beans, rice, and barbacoa. The anticipation was marred by a tense moment when she held out a palette, wanting payment. Though he couldn’t see the scanner in the portal, he pressed his finger and didn’t take another breath until it beeped approvingly.

Deron chose one of the sturdier-looking tables and sat down to peel the paper wrapper from his burrito. As he savored the first bite, he couldn’t help but glance once again towards the wall. The idea of approaching it in broad daylight made his leg shake uncontrollably. No one touched the wall; it was one of the rules. Don’t mess with it and the double-barreled sentry guns on the watchtowers wouldn’t mess with you. He chuckled. It was just like Swarm Survivor, except
he
was the fleshy blob trying to get
out
.

The burrito went down easy, devoured in a matter of minutes. By then, more people had shown up looking haggard and hungry. They filled in the tables around him, each bringing the smell of dinner and nine hours of physical labor. Only when there were no more seats did they join him at his table. There was no acknowledgement of his presence and no one even looked in his direction until a wide-jawed hulk sat down, glanced at Deron, and asked, “Another one?”

The men took turns sizing Deron up and shaking their heads. They seemed to know something he didn’t.

“Another what?” he asked, his voice squeaky.

“It looks like you’re done,” said the jaw. “Why don’t you move along so someone else can sit down and eat? What you’re looking for is down that way.” He pointed to the outer wall, but only Deron followed his finger.

“How do you know—?”

“Kid, I’m asking politely.” He took a large bite of his sandwich. “It gets uglier after that.”

Although no one else at the table seemed to be behind the threat, Deron knew he couldn’t take on the jaw alone. He stood and walked away, avoiding the glances from the other diners. They knew he didn’t belong there and the more he thought about it, the more he realized he might not belong in Easton at all.

Deron almost missed the next message as he made his way down Freight Lane. It had been placed at an angle along the rise of a loading dock. Its arrow pointed to an empty field or the wall beyond it, but he couldn’t see anything interesting about either. The sick feeling returned; it could have all been a trick, a wild goose chase to poke the eyes of those who were already blind. But who would go through all that trouble?

It could have been anyone, he realized. Anyone could have done it blindly, magic or no magic, just by marking up buildings as they walked to nowhere. It made him wonder if anyone else had ever been dumb enough to follow them.

“Another one,” he said aloud.

That’s what the jaw had meant. Deron wasn’t the first.

28 - Sebo

Easton’s veneers were adjusting to the low light when Sebo set out from Deron’s house. They changed minutely, their intensity ramping up to visible but not overwhelming. Downtown was the exception; even at a distance, it burned as brightly as its daytime counterpart. Signage and decorations at the very tips of the skyscrapers blotted out the stars.

The plan had been to meet up with Rosa and her friend, Ilya, at Perrault’s around eight, but a dinner that ran late had delayed Sebo’s trip to check on Deron. Now, burdened by the weight of bad news, he paced himself, already convinced of how Rosa would react. She had gone all day thinking Deron was ignoring her and now she had to find out he was missing, likely by choice.

Sebo cringed, thought about the faces she might make and how ill-equipped he was to comfort her. At least Ilya would be around, give her a shoulder to cry on if she needed it.

Amber running lights at the edges of the sidewalk began to glow brighter the closer he got to Parker Avenue. That the rest of the world seemed so normal, so unaware of the turmoil happening in the lives of a few students, left Sebo amazed. Not that they
needed
to care, but it made him wonder about the reverse, about how many other crises were taking place in Easton, other stories of violence and despair that he would never know about. Maybe someone else in the city right then felt the way he did, had a friend who by all accounts had gone out of his mind and simply slipped away beneath the veneer.

Slipping beneath the veneer, thought Sebo, smiling. It sounded romantic: becoming one with the artificial world, seeing what other people couldn’t see, hiding in plain sight.

Now there was a frontier to explore.

Parker Avenue was teeming with its typical weeknight bustle. The citizens of Easton walked the street dutifully, tired after a long day on the job, but out and about just the same. Walk around, meet some people, have some food, and do some shopping. Long ago, someone had broken society down into a set of basic habits and used that knowledge in the planning of Easton, the closest thing to a utopia in recorded history, a place where every desire could be satisfied except for a select few and most of those were just down the road in Paramel.

Rosa and Ilya were already at Perrault’s when Sebo arrived. Seated on the same side of a booth near the back where the light was dimmer, their mouths moved simultaneously, as if conversing synchronously. Sebo bypassed the expectant gaze of the barista at the counter and headed for the booth. Ilya saw him first; she nudged Rosa to look up. He gave an ambiguous apology for his tardiness as he slid onto the empty bench. In the middle of the table, someone had reconciled a portal and within it, an image of a gunmetal gray chip, shiny and expensive-looking.

“Thanks for coming,” said Rosa, her previous levity fading.

She was good at reading veneers. If his face betrayed the bad news, she would surely see it.

“Anything, for a lady,” replied Sebo. The sentiment was not quite true. There were some women for whom he would do anything, but their beauty started more at Ilya’s level than Rosa’s. The only reason he sat across from her now was because of Deron and that tenuous connection was always under constant strain. “Is this all of us?”

“All who care,” said Rosa, through a sudden frown.

At that, Sebo cast a quick glance at Ilya.

“Friends have all things in common,” she explained.

“Sure,” said Sebo, shrugging. There was something off about Ilya, beyond the fact that her parents had given her a boy’s name.

A pall followed during which Elijah engaged in people watching while Rosa stared at Sebo with increasing agitation. She had her fingers snaked tightly around a tall glass of pink smoothie. Her concern shone through her veneer as easily as the blue shadows that surrounded her eyes. The façade she had created for herself couldn’t hold back what she was feeling inside and Sebo imagined those emotions boiling in the space between Rosa and her veneer, extruded from the skin but not yet past the outer boundary.

Trapped, compressed, and yearning to break free.

“So what did Deron say?” she asked, the question spilling out of her in a jumble of syllables. Then, in a quieter voice, “Is he mad at me?”

“That remains a mystery.” Sebo shifted uneasily in his seat, thinking briefly about ordering a drink so he would have something to do with his hands. “I didn’t actually get to speak with him.”

“I thought you said you were gonna check on him? Why—?” She stopped abruptly and looked away. Her lips came together tightly, damming whatever angry words she had for him.

“I did go to his house,” Sebo pointed out, trying to keep his voice level. He recounted his time starting from the outset, leaving his house after dinner to make the short trek to Deron’s place. He had been optimistic then, almost confident that Deron would welcome him and explain away his absence from school with tales of fatigue and pain medication. But then he knocked at the door and his normally stout mother opened it with such a piteous look on her veneer that Sebo thought for moment that perhaps Deron had passed on, that the injury sustained in Paramel had somehow caused internal bleeding in his brain. He’d read about that happening before, a slow bleed that filled the skull, compressing the brain until it was no longer viable.

Sebo recalled the face Ania had made when she delivered the news and his veneer shifted subconsciously as he passed it on to Rosa. It was a look that conveyed sympathy before the person even knew they deserved it.

In the stilted conversation that followed, Ania quizzed him on the sequence of events in Paramel. Sebo did his best to answer her questions, but his mind had suffered such a jolt that he couldn’t concentrate. When the news that Deron had fallen during the game slipped out and produced a look of horror on Ania’s face, Sebo realized just how distracted he was. He became more selective with his words after that, tried not to volunteer information that might make Ania think he was complicit in hurting her son.

Deron was gone, she told him, by the time she got home from work. She had called the house a few times during the day, but he never answered. So when she returned and found the house quiet, she knew almost immediately. There was no note, just walls with smeared veneers, as if someone had touched them and thought of nothing. No signs of struggle, no forced entry; he had simply gotten up and walked off. But to where, she wondered, and Sebo had no answer. They stood together on the porch, thinking, Sebo unsure of what to say or where to start. Ania had already informed the police, so his face was on their radar, but they wouldn’t actively pursue him until he had been missing for a day. And even then, the odds of finding him—

“Are pretty good,” interrupted Ilya. “The city is only so big, right? And he can’t get out without going through security, where they’ll pick him up anyway.” She turned to Rosa. “They’ll find him.”

“That’s assuming he went for a walk and just hasn’t come back. What if he’s hurt or in danger? What if he fell in a ditch and no one’s noticed him?” Rosa had more hypotheticals, but she chose to express them as short halting breaths, punctuated by a whimper. Finally, she asked, “How does this happen?”

Sebo thought back, to the shops, to Russo, and everything in between. If causality ruled the universe, then he was obligated to share what he knew. Without his knowledge, Rosa would have no chance of imagining the future.

He cleared his throat and reconciled his own portal on the table. “First, we have the fight.” A shop that Jalay had produced appeared. With each event, he made a little circle containing another image. “Then, Deron goes into the hospital. Coma, stitches. Lots of trauma. Fast forward, he said you two met the day he got out. Did he seem any different?”