“Yes, well, even I didn’t know how therapeutic it would be,” he admitted. “I come from a ‘big picture’ family. Big thinkers, with our heads always high in the clouds. Sometimes I forget the pleasures of small endeavors.”
Amanda squeezed his hand. She couldn’t have loved him more.
“So do you think you have it now?” David asked her.
“Have what?”
“Absolution.”
The elevator opened. Amanda didn’t find her answer until they reached the door of their suite.
“I can’t speak for God, but I think I can say I’ve forgiven myself.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“What about you?”
David pulled back from the door, shooting her a look that was harsh enough to unnerve her.
“I never said I was seeking forgiveness.”
“I saw you at church, during the penitential rite. You looked upset. I assumed—”
“Amanda, I would hurt a dozen more policemen to keep us from being incarcerated. I would kill a hundred to keep us alive. We can argue the ethics until we’re both old and gray. This is the new reality. I’m sleeping just fine.”
As she cast her silent prayers that night, Amanda forced herself to stay positive. She thanked God for David Dormer—his strength, his insight, his kindness to his friends. All the same, she found herself grateful that he could only throw sound and light at his enemies. She shuddered to think what a boy like that could do with tempis.
—
Zack never thought he’d get tired of lounging in luxury. And yet by Monday morning his liquid daze congealed into a hard and restless boredom.
While Hannah and Theo canoodled in their room and Amanda and David embarked on their mad giving spree, the cartoonist dropped his sketch pad and idly flipped through a dictionary of modern American slang. Ten minutes of baffling word study was all he could take before he jumped to his feet and plucked the history book from Mia’s hands.
“Come on. We’re out of here.”
They hailed a cab to Evansville and caught a big-budget suspense film, a tale of a killer shark that was uncreatively called The Killer Shark. The theater was shifted at 12×, allowing Zack and Mia to suffer two hours of atrocious cinema while ten minutes passed in the outside world. Sadly, there was no escaping once the movie began. The best they could do was dawdle at the concession stand until the building de-shifted and the front doors unlocked.
They recuperated at a quiet seafood restaurant. Zack brought Mia to teary-eyed laughter with his tirade about the film, which he called a “cranial crucifixion” and a “developmentally disabled children’s production of Jaws.” She nearly choked on her soda when he went on to explain the new-world jargon he’d learned from Mia’s slang book.
“Okay, so the act of cloning objects through temporis is called ‘tooping.’ We already knew that. But when you take tooped food and toop it again, it makes a noxious, smelly goo that people call ‘threep.’ You with me?”
Mia bit her lip in quivering suppression and nodded.
“Now, in addition to being a prime element of pranks and hazings, ‘threep’ is the all-purpose word for anything awful. It could be used as a noun, as in, ‘Hey, who cooked this threep?’ Or an adjective, such as, ‘Man, this job is truly threeped.’ If you’re looking for something stronger, ‘fourp’ is . . .”
Mia burst into another fit of giggles. With a droll smirk, Zack proceeded.
“‘Fourp’ is mostly used for emphasis, as in, ‘Wow, that movie was a fourping torture fest,’ or—”
“There’s not a ‘fivep,’ is there?”
“See, now you’re just being silly.”
Mia realized now that Zack was the crucial ingredient in her feel-good week. On the cab ride home, she rested her head on his shoulder and told him that, like it or not, she’d be glued to his side for the next five days. He breathed a furtive whisper through her hair, a sneaky proposition that they break the leisure accord and research the fourp out of Peter.
She squeezed his arm and told him she loved him.
Their work began on Tuesday, in the hotel business center. Sitting side by side at a rented computer, they spent half the morning teaching themselves the gruesomely hostile operating system, which Zack likened to an eight-bit horror from Soviet Minsk. They tabbed their way through an endless maze of text menus until they found the door to Eaglenet, a web that was anything but worldwide. A digital wall had been erected around the borders of the nation, ensuring purely American data for purely American eyes. Despite its rigid structure, the network allowed free public access to fifty years of news archives.