“Only wish I remembered,” Alex said dryly, sweeping his eyes about. “Maybe I’m a different kind of human, but even my kind doesn’t seem to retain much of what happened as an infant.”
He tried to keep his gaze indifferent, purposeful, avoiding thoughts of the fire from which his mother had saved him. It didn’t work. A coldness gripped him, spreading from the inside out, the chill as bad as any winter could muster. The somewhat cross-shaped spread of interconnected buildings was bracketed at each arm by parking lots that formed endless, glistening seas of steel. But Alex saw only flames and noxious white smoke, more like vapor, overspreading the area like a vast wave. The stench of it was something corrosive and sweet at the same time, and Alex fully believed had he been closer to the buildings themselves he would’ve glimpsed a tiny but brave Chinese woman lugging a baby from the death trap of flames that burned white hot.
Bishop Ranch had either risen from the resulting refuse or been part of the same complex all those years ago, only to be spared the brunt of the blast that had leveled Laboratory Z. “Ranch” was the word he’d overheard his parents use. Never any mention of the livestock Alex’s imagination had filled in. An Chin had said nothing of Bishop Ranch in the flash drive tucked inside Meng Po, which Alex took for a clear sign she never wanted him to come here. Or an even clearer sign there was nothing left to return to.
A waste of time. A fool’s errand.
Still, all he had right now.
“Alex?” Sam prodded.
“Huh?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What’d you ask me?”
“What are we supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t got a clue.”
Then his eyes fastened on a lone figure in a sun-drenched clearing shrouded by a thick umbrella of trees.
“Maybe we should ask him,” Alex said to Sam.
*
The man was seated on a cream-colored blanket splattered with grass stains beneath a frayed and flimsy pop-up tent. He had long flowing white hair, gnarled and matted into ringlets in places, blue eyes the color of the sky, and a bushy beard that looked like cotton candy. The grounds he occupied alone had a park-like feel to them, likely still the civic property of San Ramon, which would explain why the man was allowed to stake his claim here unmolested. He held an unlit pipe in his mouth and a small pot hung from a swivel at his side beneath a sign that read, DEPOSIT A DOLLAR AND ASK THE PROFESSOR A QUESTION.
But it was a series of larger signs staked in a semicircle around the bearded man’s blanket that grabbed Alex’s attention first, among them: THEY WALK AMONG US, TRUST NO ONE, THE WAR IS COMING, and ALIENS GO HOME!
With the exclamation point formed into something that looked like a ray gun aimed downward.
The professor pulled the unlit pipe from his mouth and gestured toward Alex and Sam with it, as they approached. Alex couldn’t help thinking of Reverend Billy and THEND COMES stenciled across his knuckles. Maybe they were related or, more likely, keyed in to something on a cosmic level, able to hear and see things others couldn’t. Alex remembered a tutoring session during which Sam explained that if humans could see as well as dogs could smell, they’d be able to identify a man clearly a half mile away with the naked eye. Begging the question: Who knew more, things being relative and all?
“You kids lost?” the Santa Claus–like figure asked, uncrossing his long legs and stretching them across the blanket.
“That depends,” Alex told him.
“Does it now? On what, exactly?”
“On whether you can help us.”
The professor looked toward the small pot swaying slightly in the breeze. “Answers cost a dollar.”
Alex unfurled a crumpled bill from his pocket and pushed it into the empty pot. “Where was Laboratory Z?”
The professor looked at them with his sky-blue eyes turning narrow and suspicious. “Take back your dollar.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“That’s why you get your money back.”
“I don’t want my money back, I want an answer.”
“Then ask a different question.”
“Where was Laboratory Z located?”
The professor smirked, making him look even more like a mirthful Santa Claus. “Clever, aren’t you?”
“Not really,” Alex told him. “That’s why I’ve got my tutor, Samantha, with me. I’m Alex.”
The professor looked at both of them. “Do you always travel with your tutor, Alex?”
“Only when we’re on the run,” Alex told him, surprised by his own frankness.
The professor tried to look bemused, but failed. “What’d you do, rob a bank?”
“Actually, we’re being chased by really bad guys who killed my parents. Only, they’re not ‘guys’ at all. They’re robots, drones, androids—something like that.”