“Time to go.”
They looked down the street. Two policemen were conferring with the doorman, and glancing over at Javier. Once they noticed him looking, they started walking towards him. As they came closer, all three shared a look of recognition.
“Go back to the boat,” Javier said.
“But you’re gonna get arrested!”
“No, I’m not.” He rolled his neck, and flexed his fingers. “Hey. Wait. Can you search a name for me?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Chris Holberton.”
“What, the designer?”
The police were getting closer. “Designer?”
“He built Hammerburg,” Tyler said. “You know? The theme park? He won big in a New Eden suit, and–”
“That’s the guy,” Javier said. “Where is he?”
Tyler squinted at his reader. “Well… this says that right now, he’s opening a hotel in Las Vegas.”
Javier smiled. Vegas. He’d missed that, his first trip north. “OK. Good to know. Now get going.”
“But–”
“I’ll be fine.” He ruffled Tyler’s hair, and walked up to the police officers. Two versions of his own face looked back. It made sense. This was his clade’s homeland, after all. He had come home. “Primos. Que ha pasado un tiempo.”
8: Man of Constant Sorrow
Javier’s first memories of Arcadio involved his smell: burnt sugar and hatchet grease and lens cleaner. For the first two weeks he thought his father naturally made a jingling noise whenever he walked, a sort of special music that followed him everywhere. Later, he understood that the hooks, carabiners and other assorted forestry kipple Arcadio accumulated for their escape trembled and chimed with each jump and stride. Arcadio carried him in a pack strapped to the front of his chest. He wore a much bigger pack on his back. When he needed to do something important, he left Javier hanging in the pack on the bough of a tree, like a sleeping bat. He would leave him for hours, sometimes, and Javier watched the mists rise up through the trees in great white billows, slowly erasing all the greenery. Whenever this happened he was very afraid, because he thought that in the fog his father would never find him, and he would be left hanging there forever.
In the Nicaraguan prison where Arcadio left him, Javier would often return to those moments. He found them strangely comforting. He had been afraid of something he need never have feared. His father had not left him in the forest. His father had left him here, in a cell. And once he left the cell, he would never have to come back.
Javier thought of this as he smashed his clademate’s face in.
His cousins – he assumed they were cousins; it had been four years – responded by bringing out their electric batons. “Please don’t make us do this,” one of them said, in Spanish.
“You’re family,” the other said. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
“So don’t,” Javier said, and jumped up to the nearest balcony. His right hand slipped on the rain-slicked railing, but his left gripped well enough to haul himself up. Below him, his cousins cursed. They jumped up after him, but he was faster: he monkeyed up to the next balcony, and the next, and then he was on the roof.
“Stop!”
They were behind him, now. In front of him was the spine of a tile roof. A human running the length of it would have to place his feet very carefully. Javier didn’t. He leapt. Ten feet later, he leapt again, this time bouncing from the other foot. The jump carried him to the next building. He slipped a little, pushed himself up on his knuckles, and kept running. It was a flat roof; he ran past a chicken coop. The hens squawked as his cousins landed behind him. He ran to the edge, hopped on the ledge, and jumped. He sailed through open air over an alley, and smacked into a stucco wall. He slid down roughly until he found a windowsill.
Then he heard the sirens.
Growling, he shimmied along the windowsill until he found a drainpipe. The rain ringing inside it sounded like applause. A child watched him climb up it, making little hops with his feet and clutching with his hands until he was up on the roof. Where his cousins were waiting.
“En serio?” he asked them.
Their batons sparked.
“No lo creo,” he muttered, and ran directly at them. They braced themselves, and he jumped, and landed directly on top one of them while punching the other. His cousin stumbled back and waved his baton awkwardly. They were very young, Javier realized. Everything about them looked new: their shoes, their uniforms, the way they didn’t really know how to fight at all. They were more used to stopping human fights than finishing ones with vN.