She brought the homemade board over to the desk and set it down alongside the Gossamer, from which she carefully removed the circuit board. She spent an hour soldering the Gossamer’s innards into a shell she had designed to house them. When she was done, she closed up the shell and tested the unit. It worked perfectly. She smiled in satisfaction. She’d always been good with tools.
Next, she placed her homemade board inside the original Gossamer casing, screwed the unit closed, and placed it on the base of a hydraulic press. She turned the press on and waited for a moment, listening to the mechanical whine growing louder and smoother as the machine warmed up. Then she pulled the lever and watched as the steel cylinder descended and crushed the unit flat. The results were extremely satisfactory, but she repeated the process twice more to ensure the absolute maximum devastation, then used a tweezers to pick out and pocket the few pieces with markings that might have identified them as not native to a Gossamer. When she was done, she poured the pulverized remains into a bag and headed back to headquarters, tossing the marked pieces along the way.
Back at the Bat Cave, she made sure to look worried and chagrined. “Alvin,” she said. “You’re going to kill me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What is it?”
She placed the bag on the counter. “I was cutting across the pedestrian overpass at the Light Link University Street Station. And I dropped the Gossamer.”
He blanched. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. I ran down as fast as I could. But a train had already come. And . . .”
She lifted the end of the bag, and what looked like nothing other than the crushed remains of a genuine Gossamer came sliding out onto the counter.
For a moment, they were both silent. Alvin put a hand over his mouth and just stared at the mess, his expression crestfallen. Then he sighed. And then he moved his hand—and Livia saw he was smiling.
“I have to tell you,” he said. “I’ve had equipment misplaced before. Lost. But this . . .” He shook his head and started laughing.
Livia maintained her worried expression. Of course, claiming she’d lost the unit would have been easier. But more suspicious, too. A cop who claimed something had been lost might have stolen it. A cop who brought back something flattened to a pancake was at worst guilty of carelessness.
“It’s not funny,” she said. “What’s going to happen?”
He waved a hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll take a picture and email it to the company. They’ll send a replacement. I’ve got the budget to cover it. No one has to know exactly what happened. Someone dropped a unit and a train ran over it, simple as that. I won’t even tell the lieutenant, okay?”
She offered him a small, worried smile. “Really?”
“Really. It’s not a big deal. I mean, it’s not like you threw it under a train on purpose, right?”
She laughed. “Now, why would anyone ever want to do that?”
14—THEN
Livia was riding an elephant through the jungle. Which was strange, because she had never ridden an elephant before. The sensation was pleasant—a rhythmic swaying as the beast lumbered forward, causing tree branches to brush past her cheeks. But the forest had such a strange smell to it—not the smell of trees and wet and earth she loved. Instead, something sharp and unnatural.
And then she realized with a weary sadness that there was no elephant, and there was no forest—it was another dream, like the last time. But she kept her eyes closed anyway, not wanting to be awake, wanting so badly to stay in the forest, even if it was only a dream.
But she couldn’t hold on to it. The sensation of riding an elephant faded, and she could feel that she was lying on her back. The ground under her was hard, and that swaying feeling and the smell she had thought were part of her dream, were something else. There was a vibration beneath her, and a distant, mechanical hum, the kind she’d first heard when the machine had moved the box onto the boat. But this vibration was stronger; the humming, louder. She heard hushed, unfamiliar voices speaking words she couldn’t understand. The dream broke into fragments, and everything came rushing back. She sat up and cried out in panic, “Nason?”
A woman was kneeling next to her and jerked back as Livia sat up. She was holding a cloth—had she been using it to stroke Livia’s cheek? Was that what had felt like branches in the dream? The woman’s skin was tea colored, and black hair flowed from beneath a colorful scarf, but her eyes were different. They weren’t round like those of the pasty white people—“trekkers”—who sometimes visited the village, but they weren’t long and narrow like those of the hill tribes or Thais, either. Livia had never seen a face quite like it—the cheeks broad, the forehead high, the nose long and narrow. The woman’s expression was concerned, even kind.
The woman said something in a soothing tone, but Livia couldn’t understand her. Everything here was different. The light was brighter, the air smelled cleaner, the tangy salt smell of the ocean was gone. She saw there were other people around, nine of them including Livia. But none she recognized. Who were these people? Where had the children gone? Where was Nason?