On seeing his weary face, Melissa took his arm. “Come on. You can lecture me in the car.”
Cahill didn’t lecture her. He finally saw the futility in trying to instill political sense in this woman. Melissa Masaad was ultimately her own creature—gifted and reckless and hopelessly strange. Cahill could see why she had an easy time getting into the heads of these six runners. Perhaps on some level they were odd birds of a feather.
—
Theo rose from his blanket on the floor and gauged the sleeping breaths of his roommates. After five years of drunken hookups and trespasses, he’d become quite skilled at the art of the stealthy escape. He could move through the dark like a cat, even while his head pounded, his body throbbed, and his sense of worth dangled low enough to trip him.
He tied his shoes by the light of the moon, then slung his knapsack over his shoulder. Between all his frantic inner debates over staying and leaving and robbing his friends blind, a lone voice gibbered in unrelated panic. Run run run. People are coming. Run run run from the people who come.
As he spied the glistening currency on the end table, Theo’s demon assured him that the group would be fine without it. Mia Farisi was a temporal cash machine. Hell, her next delivery would probably include tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers.
He snatched the money, moving two shaky steps toward the door before halting with a guilty wince. He counted eight hundred dollars from the top of the stack and returned it to the table. Maybe now he could slink away as a half bastard, a half wreck of a human being.
While passing the desk, he noticed Zack’s skillful rendition of Bugs Bunny on a stationery pad. Theo seized it and scribbled on the lower corner of the sheet.
I’m sorry, guys. I’m just not
He struggled on the next words until he realized he didn’t need any. It was perfect just like that. As he closed the door behind him, he caught a reflected gleam in David’s eyes, as if the boy were looking right at him. Theo’s heart lurched. He shut the door and fled.
Soon he returned to his bench at the playground park, his heavy gaze fixed on the one store that remained open. The Genie Mart was embellished with faux-Arabian minarets and sported a cartoon mascot that looked like a sneering devil in a turban. A beer poster in the window hinted at great treasures within.
Theo pulled the money from his pocket and studied it. Nestled between two twenties was a scrap of paper he’d been carrying since Sunday, the phone number of Bill Pollock. He was one of Quint’s older physicists—a husky, white-haired genius who could have passed for Santa Claus were it not for his eternally dour expression.
As the only recovered alcoholic on staff, Bill had been put in charge of Theo’s rehabilitation. He’d wasted no time professing his unsuitability for the task.
“I honestly don’t know how to help you,” he’d told Theo, as the young man thrashed and screamed in withdrawal pain. “If I were any good with people, I wouldn’t have become a scientist. The only argument I can make is a mathematical one. It seems you’re one-sixth of your world’s remaining population. You’re the living marker for a billion people. Given the numbers, I suppose it’d be especially tragic if you threw your life away now. It wouldn’t just be suicide. It’d be genocide.”
As the weeks passed, the two men grew into their roles as counselor and patient, improving in synch until Theo finally became clean. When Bill learned that Theo was leaving with Zack, he came to work on a Sunday just to hand off his phone number.
“Look, I think your departure’s premature, but you’re strong enough to make your own decisions. Just call me if you ever feel weak or tempted. I won’t tell Quint a thing.”
Now, forty-two hours later, Theo felt weak and Theo felt tempted, but he couldn’t call Bill Pollock because Bill Pollock was dead. Good people kept dying and yet Theo kept on living. The karmic balance of the universe was fatally broken.
He squeezed the money in his hand and took a teary-eyed glance at the Genie Mart. Whether it was suicide or genocide or something else entirely, the living marker for a billion people was ready to drink enough for all of them. He rose from the bench.
“Finally.”
Theo spun around in surprise. Twenty feet away, a ginger-haired man leaned against the swing set, casually examining his cuticles. He was dressed like Theo from head to toe—same jeans, same sneakers, same gray sweatshirt. It was a surreal and discomfiting vision, like staring at a true dark genie.
“Who the hell are you?”
Evan grinned. “You’ll figure it out in a minute.”
“How long have you been standing there?”
“As long as you’ve been sitting there. I saw you wrestling with your conscience and I wanted to see which way you’d go. Now, while I respect your decision to party like there’s no tomorrow, I’m afraid it was all for nothing. You can’t buy liquor. Not without one of these.”