“You have great night vision,” I said as we ran, neither of us winded so far.
“You have no idea. My brother, not the hacker, but my other brother, is a pilot. His vision is twenty-ten. My whole family is freakishly talented, apart from my sister. She’s four and tells everyone she’s an alien or a visitor from an alternate dimension, depending on her mood. She collects toy horses, then covers them up with little blankets for bedtime, except she covers them all up—including their heads. Her room looks like a fluffy pink horse morgue. She also wants to design shoes made out of human hair. She doesn’t say where she’s going to get the human hair, though, so when I go home to visit, I tend to lock the door. By the way, I was going to ask if that was a ferret in your pocket or were you just happy to see me, but I already saw the hard-on, so I’ll just go with nice ferret.”
I grinned. With Ariel, there was no point in being embarrassed or you’d spend every minute of the day bright red. “Thanks. His name’s Godzilla.”
“The ferret or your penis?”
“I’ll let you guess.” I stopped to get my bearings. Looking up at the position of the stars, I started running again, bearing to the right.
“With my night vision and the ability to visually measure to within approximately one centimeter, do you really want me to?” She was laughing again. Not many people laughed after being kidnapped, being involved in a car wreck, and having to use yoga skills to choke out an evil son of a bitch.
Godzilla poked his head farther out of my jacket pocket and chirped curiously. “I think I’d rather you didn’t. Godzilla, meet Ariel. Ariel, meet Godzilla. He bites pretty much every chance he gets. I think the Visitor Center is this way. We can call for help.”
I didn’t say call my brother. I’d been careful not to give out any details about Stefan or to mention that he even existed when e-mailing or talking to Ariel. I’d been taking a risk with her from the beginning by investigating the genetics issue, and growing to know each other hadn’t made the risk any less. I hadn’t been willing to add Stefan into that mix. When she asked about family, I told her my parents were dead and my sister had been in the Peace Corps but died in a plane crash in Africa. That tended to limit questions and made me as sympathetic an orphan as a grown man could possibly be.
“It is? How do you know? Have you been here before? You know, when you weren’t running from a crazed psychopath with deep, dark, and mysterious designs on you that you haven’t bothered to explain yet?”
Since I’d met Ariel online, I’d noticed she never used one word when five hundred would do. Just as she never wore one color when there were at least seven right at hand. “Yes, I’ve been here before.” I picked the question that could get me in the least amount of trouble. And saying, no, but I had memorized the maps of every state we’d passed through so far in case escape routes were needed wasn’t something I was willing to offer. It wasn’t as if I could pass it off as an interesting hobby.
“So, if we find the Visitor Center”—she sailed over another petrified tree—“and we break in to use their phone, who are we going to call? That guy’s government, the kind of government that the government itself barely knows exists. He can eat police for breakfast and make prisoners disappear forever. The police can’t help us with whatever bizarre thing you’re involved in. Oh, hey, my little sister would kill me if I didn’t ask: Are you an alien? This is just like all the movies where peaceful aliens come to Earth and the evil government tries to dissect them. Although I highly doubt any alien would come here. I believe in aliens. Trillions upon trillions of galaxies; we can’t be the only intelligent life out there. But with all our fighting, wars, disease, poverty, and reality TV, we’re like the meth–central, white-trash trailer park of our corner of the Milky Way. No alien would stop here to gas up. And who could blame them?”
There’d been a question in there somewhere. Now, what had it been again? Right. Whom were we going to call. “I have a friend who lives close to here. I’ll call him.”