His update wasn’t encouraging.
<Weird weird weird results. Non-results, actually. Can’t be a glitch.> Melissa frowned as she keyed her reply. <Elaborate.> <Everywhere I drill, I get nothing but Davids. Dozens of him. Walking, standing, hopping. It’s all I see. Unless I’m suffering a schizoid manifestation of my personal fantasies, I’d say the Golden One’s learned some new tricks.> Melissa winced with discomfort. Owen’s deep love for ghosting had mutated into an unhealthy fascination with David Dormer. She’d have to talk to him about guarding his tongue around the others. The Bureau didn’t look kindly on boyers. She typed: <Okay,> she typed. <Keep looking.> She sat at her desk in a state of fidgety distraction, chewing a dreadlock as she twirled Cedric Cain’s contact card in her fingers.
“Something, something, private school. Something, something, private school.”
Her agents traded dark and baffled glances. Howard waved to her from the edge of her desk.
“Melissa?”
She snapped back to awareness. “Hello, Howard.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m all right. Thank you. How are you?”
“Well, truth be told—”
“Has Amanda written anything yet?”
“No. Not that I saw.”
Melissa muttered an expletive and hurried down the hall.
Amanda curled into an uncomfortable fetal position on the sofa, the best she could manage with her chain restraints. Her eyes were dark with fatigue and anguish.
Melissa retrieved the notepad from the floor. A few lines of scribble graced the top page.
I don’t think you have the others. If you knew they were okay, you would have told me like you did with Theo. I’m sorry to use your kindness against you, but information’s the only leverage I have. I plan to use it sparingly.
For what it’s worth, I do believe everything you said about honoring my rights. I pray to God the rest of your people are as decent as you.
With a weary sigh, Melissa sat down on the folding chair and rubbed her throbbing temples.
“When I was thirteen and living in Khartoum, a drunk driver struck me down in a crosswalk. I lost my left arm and my right eye, and my spine was shattered in three different places. It was extreme good fortune that the hospital had installed its first reviver the week before. I woke up inside the machine, fully intact and with no memory at all of the incident. I didn’t believe the story until the doctor showed me photos of my mangled body.”
Amanda sat up on the couch again. Melissa absently twirled the tempic screwdriver in her fingers.
“That was when I first realized the great and wonderful change that was happening all over the world. To this day, I remain endlessly fascinated by temporis. I built my first tempic barrier when I was sixteen, and then my first ghostbox a year later. I understand these devices better than I understand most people. I love them all. Except for the weapons.”
She fixed a heavy stare on Amanda’s long fingers.
“When I think about what you and your people can do, I feel like an amateur all over again. I barely know how to process it. And now on top of all the lunacy . . .”
Melissa shook her head at Amanda in bleary awe.
“You didn’t have temporis at all, did you?”
“What do you mean?”
“On the world you come from.”
Amanda met Melissa’s gaze with brief and pensive silence. “No.”
“I can’t even imagine what you people have been through. The shock and upheaval. It staggers the mind.”
The generators hummed without interruption for ten long seconds before Melissa stood up.
“I don’t have the others,” she confessed. “The lake house was abandoned by the time we got there. My guess is that they’re proceeding to Brooklyn in the hopes that Peter can help them locate and rescue you. I assume that’s where we’ll apprehend them.”
“I hope not,” said Amanda.
“I understand. But the fact remains that your companions are out there right now, hunted by forces far worse than us. And now they have to function without their seeing eye and their tempic arm. At this point, we’re their best option. You’ll just have to trust me on that.”
She opened the door, then turned around to Amanda.
“I’ll do everything in my power to protect you. That’s an unconditional . . .”
Melissa took another look at the rectangular discoloration on the wall. Her jaw went slack with revelation. She knew why it bothered her now.
“. . . chalkboard.”
Amanda looked at her askew. “What?”
“There was a chalkboard there. This used to be a classroom.”
“Uh, okay. Why are you—”
Melissa closed the door and ran back to the bullpen, urgently scanning each agent.
“What happened to the local men? Did they all go home?”
“One of them’s still here,” said Howard. “He’s in the bathroom. Why?”
Melissa rushed to the men’s room. The heavyset blond at the urinal jumped at her abrupt entrance.
“What the hell are you doing?”