I stopped and put my hands over my face, breathing deep. I wanted to start a fire, a real one, not that fake nonsense in a tiny metal box. But I couldn’t. Not tonight. Tonight had to stay completely hidden from everybody.
I checked my pocket again for money, pausing to count it. Fifty-four dollars and eighty cents. I crouched by a snow bank and scrubbed the coins with snow, removing any trace of my fingerprints that might be clinging to them. When the thrift store opened at five in the morning I bought a used coat, a hat, some thin gloves, and a pair of sunglasses. I walked around the streets in these for another hour, and when the copy center opened at six I bought thirty minutes of computer time and wrote an incendiary flyer about how Pancho’s Pizza was run by the cannibal himself, and that for all we knew the pizzas were topped with finger sausage and people-roni. I was pretty proud of that last one. I signed up for two free e-mail accounts and put one of them on the bottom of the flyers, then printed a hundred copies and distributed them all over Pancho’s neighborhood, an east-side borough called The Corners: shoving them into mail slots, sticking them under windshield wipers, even taping them to windows. I stayed away from Pancho’s itself because I knew the police were watching it. When I was done I took the bus to another part of town, wrote my second e-mail address on my last remaining flyer, and buried it under a small tree in a quiet residential neighborhood. It was just after seven, and no one had seen me. I memorized the location of the tree, made an X in the bark with my knife, and cleaned the blade of sap. I walked four blocks to another bus, rode to the far side of town, and dumped my new clothes in a donation bin. I rode a different bus away.
No one had seen my face, and nothing I’d touched had my fingerprint on it. No one could possibly trace the flyers back to me.
I wanted to stop by an Internet cafe and check the first e-mail address, but I knew it was too early. Even if The Hunter read the flyers and guessed that they were a message, there was no guarantee he would send an e-mail. He was clever, though, and meticulous, so he probably would. Probably. I just had to hope that he read the flyer, guessed what it was, and decided to write me before Ostler caught wind of it and had the e-mail account closed—or, worse, had it monitored remotely. Either way, any conversation that started on that e-mail account would have to move somewhere else immediately, hence the second account. I could give The Hunter the location of the tree, and as long as he got to it first, there’d be no evidence left for whoever tried to follow him. We’d have our own private conversation, with nobody the wiser.
But first I had to wait.
It was nearly eight in the morning, and almost time for Whiteflower to open. I used my last bits of change for one more bus, and walked the final few blocks to the rest home. I was the second one in the door.
Potash was waiting for me.
“Busy morning?” he said.
“You know how it goes.” I sat on the couch opposite him in the lobby. “The carpe doesn’t diem itself.”
“You have those backwards.”
“The eprac doesn’t … me-id … That’s hard to say, are you sure?”
Potash didn’t laugh or sigh or roll his eyes, he just stared. I relied on a very specific set of facial cues to help me figure out what people were feeling, but Potash never seemed to feel anything.
“I had a sausage biscuit on the way over here,” he said. “Three of them, actually. They’re cheap.”
I didn’t know where he was going with this. “Good … for you?”
“Just letting you know I didn’t eat them at the apartment, per your wishes.”
Aha. “Thanks.” I still wasn’t sure what we were talking about. Anyone else on the team would have bawled me out for insubordination by now.
“I know you better than you think,” he said, and lowered his voice as he leaned forward. “You take life more seriously than any seventeen-year-old I’ve ever met, but that’s never obvious from the outside. You try so hard to look like you don’t care about anything.”
“I care very much about not caring about anything,” I said. “Thank you for noticing.”
“I think the difference,” he said, “is that you only care about death. If something can kill you or someone you know, you take it seriously. With everything else, you pretend like it doesn’t matter. It’s time for you to take me seriously.”