He was old enough to remember a time when Comic-Con was just him and several hundred fellow true believers sifting through cardboard boxes of comics in a hotel basement—not the obscene carnival it had become. He missed those days. As a kid, he was only rarely happy; and his happiest times were there, among his fellow fans. He’d looked forward to seeing them each year. Especially the adults, who’d treated him like an equal. How they hadn’t judged him, or cared where he came from—this skinny, awkward kid with acne so bad it looked like he’d tossed tomato sauce on his face each morning.
At Comic-Con, the dark and disturbing thoughts that had plagued him, that would steal into his head, especially at night—
(yes dark and disturbing he knew he’d always known that but didn’t know how to control them not until he’d met Jenny)
—the ones he’d nursed toward his tormentors through middle school and high school, would dissipate like morning mist in the rising sun.
Staring at the ceiling, listening to the shower water, he stroked the leather cover of his notebook and reflected that he’d never, not once, written down a fellow comic-book fan’s name in it. He’d never needed to.
The comics had sustained him: kept him company during the long, lonely hours of his childhood, nurtured his dreams of scientific things that did not yet exist, and inspired him to a career in which he invented them for real. Because of this, he’d continued to attend Comic-Con every year, like a sacred pilgrimage—well after he’d become a grown man who should have known better.
And then, one year, there she’d been.
On the sidewalk outside the convention-center entrance.
One hundred thirty thousand fans converging on eight square city blocks, and there she’d been. Total, random chance. Serendipity.
Or had it been?
He’d long been convinced that the universe had been telling him something that day. He didn’t believe in a benevolent deity guiding his destiny. But he did believe in a cosmic clockwork, unseen cogs and wheels, spinning under the influence of a divine, orderly plan. The cosmos had deemed that he and Jenny should be together, and its interlocking parts had spun to that purpose.
This had been several months after he’d met her. She’d been wearing a pair of jeans and faded I GROK SPOCK T-shirt. He’d been walking in, she out. He’d stood there, slack-jawed, his brain trying to process the image of her red hair glowing in the summer sun, of believing that she was really there, at his Comic-Con.
She’d spotted him standing there at the door, gaping. She’d done a double take, and blushed; and then she’d laughed, and bathed him in a beautiful smile. He’d grinned, smitten in a way he’d never been, or would ever be again.
They’d talked there by the door for fifteen minutes as the costumed crowd pressed around them. She was alone. It turned out she was as big a fan as he, had been since a teenager, but embarrassed to share it with friends and colleagues because she’d wanted to be taken seriously. He’d laughed and told her he understood, and that her secret was safe with him. He invited her to join him, his stomach turning somersaults, and she’d followed him back inside.
Finney’s status among the old-timers granted him special access to quiet, privileged places. That day, and the next few that followed, he’d brought Jenny to these places. They’d watched from the wings as groups of Hollywood actors appeared onstage before screaming throngs, mugging for the crowd, like British royalty waving from high palace windows. They’d wandered among the exhibits, and chatted with artists and writers in intimate VIP-only meet-and-greets. They’d shared their favorite stories and comics with each other, and talked for hours over long dinners.
And they’d fallen in love.
Through unspoken agreement, they’d never told anyone about the seed of their relationship. It was their secret: a shared connection that was (and always would be) theirs alone. He was sure that the others, the ones who had mocked him behind his back, would have snickered and sneered.
Comic books? Pathetic. And she seemed so normal. Just goes to show you can never tell, though. Can you?
He squeezed his eyes shut.
God, how he’d been pulled, helpless, to her life force, like a moth to light. He’d been carried along by blind devotion. It was exhilarating and terrifying, as if he’d been trapped on a tiny raft shooting down a white-water river.
He’d become a different person with her. Before Jenny, he’d thought of love as a biological construct, electrical impulses firing in the circuitry of the brain, neurons communicating through tenuous biochemical conduits in simple, reproducible patterns. She’d shown him that it was something much more. Something he was incapable of analyzing.
Or resisting.
He opened his eyes, wiped a tear from his cheek, and cocked his head to one side.
Something was happening.
The sound of the shower water had stopped.
He leaned forward and scooted his chair toward the desk. On his tablet, a new signal had appeared in the top right corner of the screen. Dr. Wu was using her phone, in which Sebastian had installed a tiny monitoring chip while she’d lain unconscious in the operating room.
He saw the number she was calling.
It made him want to smile.
But he still didn’t permit himself the satisfaction. He didn’t deserve it.
Not yet.
Instead, with a tap of a finger to the tablet, he opened his link to her brain.
RITA