11
Ethan sat at a window table in the Steaming Bean, sipping a cappuccino and watching the toy store across the street. It was called Wooden Treasures, and it adjoined a workshop where a man named Harold Ballinger spent his weekdays building toys. His wife, Kate Ballinger, formerly Kate Hewson, formerly Ethan’s partner in the Secret Service, worked in the toy store.
Ethan had only spoken to her once since coming to Wayward Pines, in the midst of his horrifying integration. But since becoming sheriff, they hadn’t said two words to each other, and he’d managed to avoid her entirely.
Now he studied her through the glass.
She sat at the cash register in the empty toy store, engrossed in a book. It was late afternoon and the light angling through the storefront glass fired her prematurely white hair into a shock of almost blinding brilliance.
Like a cumulous cloud backlit by sunlight.
He’d read her resident file. Read it several times.
Kate had lived in Wayward Pines for almost nine years. When he’d come looking for her, she’d been thirty-six. She would turn forty-five in three weeks. In their life before, he’d been a year older. Now she had him by eight.
Her file told of a brutal integration.
She’d fought, tried to escape, pushed Pilcher’s patience right up to the brink of ordering a fête.
Then—she’d simply relented.
Settled into her assigned house.
Settled into her assigned job.
And two years later when the word came down from Pilcher’s sheriff at the time, she’d married Harold Ballinger and moved in with him without the slightest protestation.
For five years, they were model residents.
The first surveillance report was triggered off an audio strike from the microphone over their bed.
A whispered phrase that just squeaked into the detectible decibel range.
Kate’s voice: The Englers and the Goldens are in.
Then nothing for a month until Kate’s microchip popped one night at two in the morning in the cemetery.
Sheriff Pope had tracked her down. Found her out wandering alone. He’d questioned her, but she played dumb. Made her apologies. Lied and said she’d had a fight with Harold, needed to get some fresh air.
There had been one last incident two days later—Harold and Kate disappearing for an hour inside their bedroom closet, which incidentally happened to be one of the few blind spots in the house.
The footage was flagged, a report generated, but nothing came of it.
There were no further reports for a year and a half until Ted from surveillance sent a memo to Pilcher and Pam.
Ethan read it as he sipped his cappuccino.
Day #5129
From: Ted Upshaw
To: David Pilcher
Subjects: Residents 308 and 294; a/k/a Kate and Harold Ballinger
I’ve harbored a mounting suspicion over the last few months, which I feel compelled to share with you now. After midnight, once every couple of weeks, in eleven households that we know of (Ballinger, Engler, Kirby, Turiel, Smith, Golden, O’Brien, Nighswander, Greene, Brandenburg, and Shaw), the interior cameras produce no video feed for extended periods of time—roughly between four and seven hours. A typical night feed is two hours of tossing and turning with all the motionless activity missing. The only thing that could cause such extended video blackouts would be a complete absence of microchip movement. In other words, no motion to ping the cameras.
But this is impossible.
For a camera to shut off at night for hours at a time, the subjects would have to sleep perfectly still. Or be dead. The cameras are highly sensitive and programmed to wake at the slightest movement, even the rise and fall of someone’s chest associated with heavy breathing.
The cameras have not been disabled. If this was one instance in one household, I might write it off as an anomaly. But the sheer number of extended blackout occurrences, their repetition, and the fact that they’re happening concurrently across multiple households leads me to the conclusion that something bigger, covert, and coordinated is taking place behind our backs.
I believe the above-named residents and possibly more have not only discovered their microchips, but also found a way to remove them at any time in plain view of the cameras. Obviously, without their microchips embedded, residents could move unseen and undetected, in their homes, through town, even beyond the fence.
The possibility of a growing contingent of residents meeting together in secret is a disturbing development, which I believe requires immediate action.
Ethan polished off the rest of his cap and walked out of the coffee shop into the street.
Chimes jingled over the door as he pulled it open and stepped into the toy store.
He had breathed deeply crossing Main, but still his heart was beating like crazy.
Kate looked up from the book—a tattered Lee Child paperback, the last Reacher novel.
It was her shock of white hair that made her look older from a distance. Close up, she was youthful. A few laugh lines, but still so goddamn pretty. Not long ago, at least from his perspective, he’d been in love with this woman.
Their affair had been three of the most intense, reckless, terrifying, happy, alive months of his life. Like how he imagined being on heroin felt if the high never ended, if every syringe didn’t also contain the possibility of death.
They’d been partners at the time, and there had been one week when they’d been on the road together in northern California.
Every night, they rented two rooms. Every night, for five days, he stayed with her. They barely slept that week. Couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Couldn’t stop talking when they weren’t making love, and the daylight hours when they had to pretend to be professionals made it all the more beautifully excruciating. He had never felt such a complete lack of self-consciousness around anyone. Even Theresa. Unconditional acceptance. Not just of his body and mind, but also of something more, of something indefinably him. Ethan had never connected with anyone on this level. The most generous blessing and life-destroying curse all wrapped up in the same woman, and despite the pain of the guilt and the knowledge of how it would crush his wife, whom he still loved, the idea of turning away from Kate seemed like a betrayal of his soul.
So she had done it for him.
On a cold and rainy night in Capitol Hill.
In a booth over glasses of Belgian beer in a loud dark bar called the Stumbling Monk.
He was ready to leave Theresa. To throw everything away. He had asked Kate there to tell her that and instead she had reached across the scuffed wood of a table worn smooth by ten thousand pint glasses and broken his heart.
Kate wasn’t married, had no children.
She wasn’t ready to jump off the cliff with him when he had so much pulling him back from the ledge.
Two weeks later, she was in Boise, pursuant to her own transfer request.
One year later, she was missing in a town in Idaho in the middle of nowhere called Wayward Pines, with Ethan off to find her.
Eighteen hundred years later, after almost everything they had known had turned to dust or eroded out of existence, here they stood, facing each other in a toy shop in the last town on earth.
For a moment, staring into her face at close range blanked Ethan’s mind.
Kate spoke first.
“I was wondering if you’d ever drop in.”
“I was wondering that myself.”
“Congratulations.”
“For?”
She reached over the counter and tapped his shiny brass star.
“Your promotion. Nice to see a familiar face running the show. How are you adjusting to the new job?”
She was good. In this short exchange, it was obvious that Kate had mastered the superficial conversational flow that the best of Wayward Pines could achieve without straining.
“It’s going well,” he said.
“Good to have something steady and challenging, I bet.” Kate smiled, and Ethan couldn’t help hearing the subtext, wondered if everyone did. If it ever went silent.
As opposed to running half naked through town while we all try to kill you.
“The job’s a good fit,” he said.
“That’s great. Really happy for you. So, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I just wanted to pop in and say hi.”
“Well, that was nice of you. How’s your son?”
“Ben’s great,” Ethan said.
“He’s sure growing up fast.”
“That’s the truth.”
God, it felt so stilted talking to her. Like bad dialogue in a novel or actors reading lines.
Hammering started up next door—Harold building something.
“How’s your husband?” Ethan asked.
He didn’t like the word—not when it applied to the man who’d been fucking Kate for the last seven years. Or was it possible their marriage was a sham? That she secretly hated him, but kept up appearances? Had never let him touch her.
“He’s wonderful,” she said, and the authenticity of her smile contradicted everything that had come before, called it all out for the lie it was. She loved Harold. She’d lit up saying his name. In this moment, and only for a flicker of time, Ethan had glimpsed the real Kate.
“He’s next door?” Ethan asked.
“Yes. That’s him hammering away at something. We like to say he’s the brawn, and I’m the brains of this operation.”
Ethan forced a laugh. Said, “I’ve never met him. Well, not really met him.”
He thought she might read his intent. Offer to make an introduction.
But she only said, “You will. He’s a little under the gun this afternoon filling an order for the school. Why don’t you pick out something for Ben? Anything in the store. On the house.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I insist.”
“You’re too kind.”
Ethan moved away from the cash register. It wasn’t a large store, but shelves brimmed—floor to ceiling—with handmade toys. He lifted a wooden car. It had wheels that spun. Doors, hood, and a trunk that opened and closed.
“This is really good,” he said.
“Harold’s work is amazing.”
Ethan put the car back on the shelf.
Kate moved out from behind the counter. She wore a yellow dress the color of turning aspen leaves. Her figure almost unchanged.
“How old is Ben now?” she asked.
“He’s twelve.”
“Hmm. Tough age when traditional toys begin to lose their appeal.” She walked to the back of the store. Bare feet on hardwood that almost glowed under the late-afternoon light slanting through the storefront windows. “But I might have just the thing.”
She stood on the balls of her feet and reached up to a slingshot on the highest shelf.
The craftsmanship was simple but exact.
Carved, raw wood, sanded smooth.
A thick rubber band attached to the forks of the Y and a brown leather pocket.
“This is perfect,” Ethan said.
“It’s my pleasure.”
As he grasped the slingshot, his other hand reached down and touched Kate’s hand. The hammering had stopped next door, but the commotion of Ethan’s heart sounded deafening in the quiet of the store.
He stared down into her eyes, which seemed somehow bluer than he remembered, and unfurled the fingers of her left hand.
Fighting to ignore the electricity as their skin touched.
She didn’t pull away.
Her eyes flicked down at their hands.
She took the scrap of paper from him, clutched it in her fist.
Ethan said, “It’s really good to see you again.”
And walked out of the store.