“A movie.”
“Oh, yeah. Never saw it. So the ash man wasn’t just a projection. He had mass of some kind.”
“You’re doing it again,” Alex said, rolling his eyes as he canted his body to face her.
“What?”
“Saying things in a way I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand mass?”
“Not the way you said it. We need to make a new rule. Whenever you do that, I’m going to say ‘time-out.’ Do this with my hands,” Alex continued, making a T with his right fingers stuck into his left palm, turned downward.
“‘Mass’ meaning there was something physical about him, even though he wasn’t really there. And something was there, on the floor when he disappeared, remember?”
“Like a shadow.” Alex nodded.
“Maybe that’s what he was, a shadow. Maybe he was a projection, but a projection with some type of gaseous mass, some type of substance included in the mix.”
“But the androids weren’t shadows or projections at all. They had real mass.”
“Until you tore them apart.”
“I did,” Alex nodded, “didn’t I?”
“What was it the ash man said about them?”
“He called them drones.”
“That’s right,” Sam followed. “And something about them being hastily assembled.”
“Because whatever brought them to my house must have happened fast, must have been unexpected. Sudden.”
“Even though the ash man said something about looking for you for a long time, even since you were born. So what changed? Why tonight?”
Alex shuddered, the memories striking him like an electric shock. “The hospital,” he muttered.
“Huh?
“CPMC. My doctor getting murdered in his office. Somebody waiting in my room.”
“That doesn’t tell us what changed,” Sam said, repeating her original point. “How the ash man found you all of a sudden.”
“Maybe it does,” Alex told her.
43
BY THE NUMBERS
“THE CAT SCAN,” ALEX continued, shifting his leg now so it rubbed against Sam’s. “Payne ordered a second one, remember? He told me the first one showed a shadow, said not to worry. Know what happens when someone tells you not to worry?”
“You worry.”
“Of course. Guess I should have figured.”
“Figured what?” Sam asked, liking the feeling of their knees pressed against each other.
“That something was wrong. Because of the headaches … the ones I was having before the game last night But I was afraid, afraid of somebody telling me I couldn’t play football again.”
“Like the headache you had when I came to the hospital.”
“It doesn’t matter now. Just normal shit from playing football.”
“You mean, like a concussion?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s football.”
“You said that already. But concussions are serious, Alex. Nobody ever examined you?”
“With the play-offs coming, I wasn’t about to let them.”
“So you didn’t tell anyone.”
“I’m telling you.”
“I meant before.”
“‘Before’ doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
Sam watched the lights of the motel sign flickering through the flimsy blind. She thought she saw an elongated dark shape projected against it, but she blinked and it was gone.
“That shadow could mean the results of the first scan were just inconclusive,” Sam said. “Something wrong with the dye or the machine itself, something like that.”
“What if it was something else?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, Sam. All I know is that’s when all this started, with the second CAT scan.” Alex swallowed hard, fighting to cling to whatever composure he had left. But thinking it out, working the problem, took his mind off what had happened just a few hours before. At home, to his parents.
“Occam’s razor…”
Alex formed his hands into the time-out signal. “Occam’s what?”
“Razor. A principle postulating that the simplest answer is often, even usually, correct. That’s what you’re suggesting about the CT scan.”
“Why couldn’t you just say it that way?”
“I thought I did.”
“What time is it?”
Sam checked the watch her mother had given her a few months back for her eighteenth birthday. “Almost one.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Well, today, actually.”
“Sam,” Alex snapped.
“All right, tomorrow.”
“I’ve never wanted a day to end more.” Alex’s gaze turned downward, his bare feet kicking at the worn carpet, faded and stained in as many places as it wasn’t. He rested a hand on her knee that had rubbed up against his. “And I need new clothes. I feel like I’m wearing a dead man’s.”
“You are, but it’s not like your doctor was killed in them. Was he?” Sam asked, stiffening so much at the thought that Alex pulled his hand from her knee. She missed the feel of it immediately.
“No, but it still feels weird. I don’t know why, but it does.”
“We’ll get clothes tomorrow.”
“Then what?”