Chapter 33

THEY LEFT US THERE.

"Wish we could work together, but you two are a risky proposition," Mwadi said, pulling herself up into the open maw of the truck.

"We didn't mean to lead them to you." Jen's face was blackened by smoke, streaked by tears. "We were just playing them for information."

"They wound up playing you."

"We'll be more careful next time, I swear."

Wickersham nodded. "You better be careful. The purple heads will be keeping their eyes on you. You're their only link to us. And that makes you useless for future operations."

"But we know the territory, like you said."

"Exactly, and the purple heads know you do. If you keep looking for us, you'll bring them straight to my doorstep."

"But - "

"Just forget we exist, Jen James. Pretend this never happened." She smiled. "If you're good, I'll put you on our mailing list."

Mwadi stamped her skate once against the metal bed of the truck, a sovereign, final sound, and it jerked forward, rumbling in a slow circle around the blackened pile, then out of the courtyard and down the alley.

Jen followed for a few steps, as if to plead her case again, but didn't say anything. She stood silent until the sound of the truck had faded to nothing.

When it was gone, she turned and faced the pile.

"There must be something left."

"What?"

"Pieces, clues." She strode forward to the blackened edge, teeth gritted, her feet kicking ash into the air. "Maybe we can find a sample of the canvas, or an eyelet, or one of those laces."

I almost smiled. With everything in ashes, Jen had returned to her roots: shoelaces.

She dropped to her knees in the smoking pyre, pushing her hands through the ruin, face averted from the heat still coming off the smoking plastic.

"Jen..."

"We might even find a whole shoe in here. When houses burn down, they always find weird stuff the fire didn't - " She lost the rest of her words, coughing from the smoke and ash she'd raised. Her hands went to her face, leaving solid black streaks on her cheeks. She gained control of her breathing, then spat out something black.

"Jen, are you crazy?"

She looked up at me, clearly wondering why I wasn't down there with her.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"What does it look like I'm doing? I'm looking for the damn shoes, Hunter. That's what we've been doing all along!"

I shook my head. "I was looking for Mandy."

She spread her blackened hands. "Well, she turned out to be fine. She's probably up for a promotion. You want to give up now? Just because Mwadi Wickersham tells us to?"

I sighed and walked into the pile, feeling the warmth of the ashes through the soles of my shoes. The sun had gone down, and the remaining light in the courtyard came from the still-glowing core of the fire. I knelt next to Jen.

"Give what up?"

"Looking."

"For what? The shoes are gone."

She shook her head, as hard and angry as a twelve-year-old forced to move to New Jersey. Like the answer couldn't be expressed in words, and only an idiot would think it could. She was looking for lost cool, the hardest thing to find.

I spoke softly. Jen, maybe it's better this way.

"Better?"

"I mean, do you really want to work for those guys? Carrying out the grand plans of the Jammers? Spending every minute of your life thinking you've got to change the world?"

She glared at me, eyes flashing. "Yeah, that's exactly what I want."

"Really?"

"That's what I've always wanted." She dug into the ash again, raising a black haze that settled over us, forcing me to turn away, eyes shut. "I mean, what do you want to do, Hunter? Go back to watching advertisements for money? Hang out in focus groups and debate whether leg warmers are coming back? Poach the latest shoelaces? Just watch instead of making something happen?"

"I don't just watch."

"No, you take pictures and sell them, theorize and read a lot. But you don't do anything."

My eyes opened wide.

"I don't do anything?" I sure felt like I'd been doing things, at least for the last two days. Since I'd met Jen.

"No, you don't. You watch. You analyze. You follow. That's the part of the pyramid you like the best: the outside, looking in. But you're afraid to change anything."

I swallowed, the taste of smoke in my mouth like burned toast. No denials came to my lips because frankly, she was right. I'd followed her every step of the way here. Whenever I would have given up, she'd provided the next step. Just as cool hunters have always done, I'd latched onto Jen's initiative, her dogged pursuit of the weird and terrifying.

And in the end, I hadn't even managed the one thing I am good at: watching. I hadn't noticed us being followed and had let Jen be used by a bunch of stupid purple heads, leaving her with nothing but ashes.

I remembered sending the picture of her laces to Mandy - selling Jen out the very first time I'd met her. I was nothing but a fraud. As I'd found out from the moment we'd left Minnesota, there wasn't anything cool about me.

I didn't belong with the Jammers or deserve to be with Jen.

"Okay. I'll get out of your way." I stood up.

"Hunter..."

"No, I really want to get out of your way." I'd never heard my voice so harsh or felt the lump in my stomach so hard.

I walked away, and even before I reached the alley, I heard her back at work, picking through the pile.

Chapter 34

"DID YOU WASH YOUR HANDS?"

"Yes, I washed my hands."

My father looked up at me, for once finding my tone more disturbing than this morning's terrifying graph.

"Oh, sorry. Of course you did."

Victory. If only I could have smiled. After so many years of trying, I had finally managed exactly the right robotic voice. Toneless, soulless, empty. I knew Dad would never ask me again if I'd washed my hands.

My anger at Jen, and at myself, had faded on the way home the night before, turning to something hard and cold by the time I'd gone to bed. This morning I was a dead thing.

Mom poured me coffee silently.

A solid minute later my father asked, "Long weekend?"

"Very."

"Still love your hair like that," Mom said, her voice tipping up at the end, as though she were asking a question.

"Thanks."

"And those hands don't look as purple today."

"I wouldn't go that far." Under the harsh light of my bathroom mirror, I could see that the dye had faded only a tiny bit. At the current rate of decay, I might be graduating college with non-purple hands.

"Tell us what's wrong, Hunter?" Mom asked.

I sighed. They'd probably already guessed, and I do tell them most things, sooner or later. Might as well get it over with.

"Jen."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hunter."

"That was fast," Dad added, bringing his brilliant empirical mind to the matter.

"Yeah, I guess it was." I'd met Jen Thursday afternoon. It was what? Sunday morning?

Mom put her hand on mine. "You want to talk about what happened?"

I shrugged, moved my face around, tried out different sentences in my head, and finally said, "She saw through me."

"Saw through you?"

"Yeah. Straight through." I could still feel the hole her gaze had left. "Remember when we moved here? When I lost all my friends?" My confidence, my cool.

"Of course. That was really hard on you."

"I'm sure it was hard on you guys too. But the thing is, I don't think I ever got over it. It's like I've been a wimp since then. And Jen figured me out - I'm too lame to hang with her."

"Lame?" Dad asked.

I found a better word: "Afraid."

"Afraid? Don't be silly, Hunter." Mom shook her head at a forkful of eggs. "This is probably something you two can work out."

"And if you can't," Dad chimed in, "at least you haven't wasted much time on her."

Mom did a minor coffee spit at this, but I managed to say the mature thing: "Thank you both for trying to make me feel better. But please stop now."

They stopped. And went back to saying and doing the usual, predictable things. Eating breakfast with the parents is always calming: they follow immutable patterns in that married-couple way, as if things have always been and will always be the same. They aren't Innovators. Not at the breakfast table. For one hour every morning they are Classicists of the best kind, my own Rock Steady Crew.

But after I finished and went back into my room, there wasn't much to do but sit on the bed, wishing I still had my bangs to hide behind.

The tiny teams of bottle jerseys were mocking me from their shelves, so I began a little project. I took the jerseys off the empty water bottles one by one, entering the vital statistics of each into eBay, then placing each jersey underneath its own book full of obscure and useless facts, flattening them for shipment.

It was sad to break up the carefully assembled teams, but every general manager has to go into rebuilding mode every few years, sending away the familiar players and starting over with the low draft picks that losers are guaranteed. Plus if the auction gods were good to me, I might have the minimum payment for my next credit-card bill by the time it arrived.

When my phone rang, I closed my eyes and took a breath. It's not her, I repeated silently a few times, then forced myself to look at the caller ID.

shugrrl. Mandy.

I should have been glad that she was calling, that she had escaped the purple heads and was already talking to me again. But the name made my heart sink a little further. If it was going to be like this every time the phone rang and it wasn't Jen, my life was going to suck.

"Hi, Mandy."

"Hey, Hunter. Just wanted to catch up with you."

"Sure."

"First, let me say sorry for missing our meeting Friday."

I laughed, which hurt because of the cobblestone in my stomach. So those were the rules: no mentioning the Jammers or the shoes. Mandy's lost weekend would be our little unspoken secret.

"That's okay, Mandy. I know it wasn't your fault. I'm just glad you're okay."

"Never better. Actually, I'm up for a promotion."

I nodded, feeling a little twinge of pain that Jen had called that one.

"But thanks for your concern. Greg told me you called. So did Cassandra. In fact, everyone told me about how worried you were. I may have seemed annoyed the last time I saw you, but I won't forget that you came looking for me."

"No problem, Mandy. Looking for you led to some... interesting adventures." The cobblestone rumbled at the words.

"So I hear. That's the other thing I wanted to call you about." She paused.

"What's up?"

"Well, there are issues around this weekend, things we need to let chill for a while. The client doesn't want to get connected with events at a certain launch party. Certain influential persons are annoyed, and we have constituency relations to consider."

"Oh." My mind translated slowly, however straightforward the text: The client didn't want the purple-headed powers-that-be to know about their deal with the Jammers. Those powers were very pissed off and would be for a while. "What does that mean, Mandy?"

"It means that I can't give you any work. Not for a while, anyway."

"Ah."

I saw it all clearly now: I was the fall guy. The only person that the hoi aristoi could get their purple hands on, the only thread that might lead to the Jammers. The client would be keeping its distance.

Everyone would.

"I'm really sorry about this, Hunter. I always liked working with you."

"Me too, with you. Don't worry about it."

"And you know, these things don't last forever."

"I know, Mandy. Nothing does."

"That's the spirit."

Five minutes later I was searching my shelves for more things to sell, and the phone rang again. Again I averted my eyes from the caller ID.

It's not her, it's not her.... Maybe ten times would do the trick.

It was her.

"Uh," I said. (Which is like «yeah» but much, much less hopeful.)

"Meet me at the park. Where we first met. Thirty minutes okay?"

"Okay."