“Thanks for the coffee,” I mumbled. He’d spent his last few dollars on me. He could have spent them on one of those other girls, but what girl wants just coffee? Besides me, I mean.
He laid his hand over the tips of my fingers, tentatively. “Great idea, right? Getting you coffee before the performance. Great for the throat.”
I shrugged. “It warms me up.” But that was a lie. I was already warm—in the tips of my fingers and everywhere else.
I realized the woman at the next table had been watching everything. She saw the hole in Cole’s shirt too, I think, because she kept looking at his hand after she came over and he clamped it on his elbow again. I recognized her from the Microsoft-Verizon interviews and went numb with surprise. What was she doing in Woodbury?
First she said to Cole, “Doesn’t it feel terrible to be misunderstood?” I thought, Cole’s not exactly some big question mark—he’s just moody as hell. But I kept my mouth shut and Cole couldn’t figure out what to say, so the woman added, “And a guy can’t help wanting what he wants.” It was like a line from a play, so we didn’t say anything to that either. “I’m looking forward to the concert,” she said to both of us and smiled at the rip Cole was still hiding.
I realized a girl at the counter had been watching us. Even before glimpsing the red tag that circled her wrist, I knew she was from the Other Place. She’d been watching Cole too.
Three years earlier, I had stood on the back staircase looking into our kitchen, where a much older boy drank straight from the tap. He was a farmhand Grandpop had hired for the season.
A creak on the stair gave me away. He turned, drew the back of his arm across his mouth. His face was exactly as I had imagined. Olive-green eyes and fine eyebrows that might knit together in interest over whatever a fourteen-year-old girl might have to say. A streak of dirt bronzed his jaw.
That afternoon, Grandpop took me to look at the collection of junkers he kept in the north pasture and while we were out there alone said, “The people from the Other Place usually stick to the big cities.” I knew. Mostly, people spotted them sitting in cafes and parks, or driving down the street, ordinary as you please. They lived in houses and apartments and hotels, usually hosted by government officials but sometimes by volunteer families. “But the best way to know a people,” Grandpop continued, “is by studying their food.”
I understood what he was trying to tell me—the farmhand was from the Other Place.
I had already guessed it. I knew about vorpals, and that so many people from the Other Place had especially strong ones. They could make you do things they wanted you to do. But they never used that ability. They only ever watched us.
“Why doesn’t he wear the tag?” I asked. I had seen some of his kind on TV before, always with a red tag around their wrist that recorded their location and whether they came into physical contact with anyone. I never thought I’d meet one in person, not in a small town in the middle of the country. I couldn’t guess how Grandpop had gotten one to come here.
Grandpop reached into the nearest junker and popped open the glove compartment. Inside lay a red metal bracelet twisted out of shape. I gaped at it. “Maybe the government doesn’t need to know that a person like him is interfering with a sly fox like me,” Grandpop said.
“No interference, only observation,” I said automatically.
Grandpop’s eyebrows lifted at my conviction.
“I mean—they never do interfere with anything, do they?” I said. “It’s a rule. It’s why they have to wear the bracelets that tell the government what they’re up to. They only watch us, they only want to learn.”
“Oh, I suspect they’ve got bigger hopes than that, Epony,” Grandpop said, gazing out over the blond heads of cornstalks, endless and identical.
I saw something in his faraway gaze, the way it lighted on the distant row of trees that marked the creek where he and everyone else had first learned to swim. I saw his throat move as he swallowed the emotion that tree line brought up: equal parts pain and possessive joy.
That was the first time I got a hint it would all be gone someday.
“You’ve got bigger hopes too, don’t you, Pop?” I said. “You think the people from the Other Place can help us somehow?”
“They can. They have ways of making people see things differently, making people agree. They could help us fix this country.” He shut the glove compartment, hiding the red bracelet from sight. “We live how we want to—use up resources like they’ll last forever. But there’s a price for everything. We’ll have to pay it, one way or another. Maybe they can help us agree on how.”