But Will’s death destroyed me. It was bad enough after our dad died. The show fell apart, of course. My mother fell into a deep, deep depression and she did things. Horrible things. Like mess up the bikes so we’d crash. Will and I both did during practice. But it was so apparent that the bikes had been tampered with, it led the safety manager straight to her. She threw a fit, yelled and screamed. They had to drug her to calm her down. And the next day I found her sprawled out in a pool of blood in her trailer and that was it for the Masters family in the circus. Finding lost girls who needed help was one thing, but a dead body would not be good for the business. And every once in a while there’d be social workers nosing around trying to find out if any of the show kids were being abused or worked too hard.
I was already a teenager by then, so no one was worried about me. But there were other kids. And the same day that my mother tried to take her own life, one showed up.
It was either get her professional help or the social worker was going to open an investigation on all the kids. Will and I agreed, of course. My mother needed help. But once she went into the institution, she only got worse. And that’s the real reason I took the job in Cathedral City. I want to help her, I just haven’t had the courage to go over there and see her yet. I have never visited. Will and I were too busy surviving after things fell apart.
Once I turned eighteen Will and I drifted apart because he got into racing. I sigh into the darkness. I was so stupid to let him do that. But Will was the one in control, not me. He was my rock. Even after my father died, he was still my rock. I never worried about him. I justified my father’s death. He was older. He took a few risks to make the show better and he lost.
But Will was always so rational. I guess I counted on that. I counted on him to hold us together and then he went and got himself killed.
It blew my mind and the depression hit me so hard. The realization that I was all alone in the world was just too much. I needed to get out. Escape. It was so easy to drop out of life like my mother did. So easy to give in to the sadness.
Then this job offer came and I saw a way forward. Maybe it was grasping at straws, or maybe I had some deep memory of what Cathedral City meant to me.
The school.
Lincoln lets out a soft snore and then turns over, releasing his tight hold on me.
I miss him immediately. Whatever bonds we formed as children, they are still there. Delicate, maybe. Thin strands of memories and emotion that have tried their best to be put to rest over the years. But still there.
I’d like to try with him. Strengthen those bonds. Find what we lost that winter night when we parted ways.
His cave is the perfect place to hide from the world and put it all back together. And I guess that’s what he’s been doing here. Hiding from life. Just like me and my life in the circus, and later the military.
I’d like to join him. I’d love nothing more than to stay here and never go outside again. It could be perfection. Lincoln and me and our little home in a cave filled with tools, and labs, and computers.
I wonder what he does down here. Does he have a job? I bet he’s some kind of engineer or mechanic. And what’s he hiding with those gloves? I look over at the computer in the corner of the room and study the screen. The desktop has no icons on it and the background is a picture of glowing circuits.
I have a sudden urge to snoop, but it’s obvious the screen’s on lock, so why bother.
No. No snooping. I want Lincoln to tell me things in his own time, in his own way. But I am dying of thirst right now and I have to pee. So I ease myself out of the bed and feel around in the darkness until I come up with my panties. I pull them on and go searching for my shirt, but all I find is Lincoln’s. It will have to do for now, so I shrug on his tee and smother myself in his scent.
I tiptoe towards a crack of light coming from under a door and, after a few seconds of searching, find a handle and pull it open.
The light is not bright, but I squint my eyes after the black of his room. The Batcave is humming with computers and the light reflected off the wall-sized jellyfish aquarium is throwing a wave pattern over everything. That giant monitor on the wall where he was talking to Case Reider is grayed out now. But a lot of other things are going on. The hologram of a bike in progress is still hovering over a table and robots scurry around it, busily working as their metal appendages whir with motion.
What does he do here? It sure looks like he’s a bike builder. I walk forward a few paces and then spy an expansive hallway I missed on the first trip. The far left side of the cave is a huge glass wall, and on other side are rooms. One is filled with tanks that hold luminescent jellyfish, smaller versions of the one in the main tank. They flicker rainbow colors in the darkness and I’m mesmerized by their weightless dance in the water.
The main tank is giant, something you’d find in a city aquarium. And the jellyfish are huge. They seem like decorations or pets. I walk forward to get a better look at the new tank room. These smaller versions look like specimens when you take in the equipment surrounding them. Microscopes and refrigerators.