It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.
But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.
It still did.
She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.
Time to do this.
She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.
And cleared her throat loudly.
She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.
She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
Her throat constricted; she couldn’t help it. Jesus, even a random moment like this. Especially a random moment like this. The kind they’d had a million of—should’ve had a million more of.
She swallowed the tightness and stepped into the room. “I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
No reason to drag things out: “What was Scalar?”
He didn’t quite flinch. It was more subtle than that—all in the eyes. A flicker of fear and then perfect calm. He tilted his chair back and appeared to search his thoughts.
“Rings a bell,” he said. “Where’d you come across it?”
“In the archives. There’s an index page for it, but all the entries are crossed out.”
“Oh—I remember. Let me guess, the entries went from the early to late eighties.”
Paige nodded.
“It was a clerical thing,” her father said. “Had to do with videotape formats, way back. We used to shoot everything on standard VHS, and then we switched over to VHS-C—digital was still a ways off. Anyway, when we made the switch we decided to transfer all the old stuff too, for shelf-life. Huge pain in the ass. Couple thousand hours of stock. Probably took us six years or more, on and off.”
He shrugged, waiting for her to let it go.
She returned his gaze and wondered if he’d ever lied to her before this. Sure, he’d kept his work with Tangent secret from her, all through her childhood, but what choice had he had? This was different. And harder to stomach than she’d have guessed.
“That all you wanted to know?” he said.
Only a memory. She held onto that idea like it was a handrail at the edge of a cliff. If she called him on his lie, she wouldn’t actually be hurting him. He wasn’t real.
“Honey?” he said. “Everything okay?”
“I’ve already asked some of the others about Scalar,” she said. “No one wants to say much, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t about transferring videotapes.”
His expression went cold.
“There was government involvement,” she said. “And it cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I want to know what it was.”
He stared. He seemed to be coming to some careful decision. When he finally spoke, it was in a calming tone, but one full of fear—for her. As if she were standing there with a gun to her head.
“Paige, you don’t want to get into this.”
“I have a right to know. And I don’t appreciate being lied to.”
“You’re right—I lied about the VHS stuff. But you lied too. No one here in Border Town told you a thing about Scalar. There are maybe half a dozen who know the parts you just described, and none of them would’ve said anything without coming to me first. Which means you talked to someone on the outside. And that scares the hell out of me.”
She couldn’t think of what to say to that. Almost every word had caught her off guard.
Her father stood from his desk and crossed to her. He stared at her with that strange, minefield caution still in his eyes.
“Who have you spoken to?” he said.
“First tell me what Scalar is.”
“Paige, this is more serious than you can know. If you’ve talked to the wrong people, you may have already triggered things we can’t stop.”
“Then tell me. Everything.”
He shook his head. “Knowing about Scalar puts a person at risk. I wouldn’t tell you a word of it to save my life. Now I need to know exactly who you spoke to. I’m not kidding.”
“If others here know about this, then I should know too—”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him—she had to step fast to stay balanced—and shouted into her face. “Who did you talk to?”
She pulled her arm away, turned and ran. Through the doorway, along the corridor, the lights sliding by and her father’s footsteps coming fast behind her. She shut her eyes as she ran. Pictured the deserted B42, where she and Travis were sitting. It was hard to focus on it now.
“Paige!”