Gadgets. People felt either reassured or alarmed when they saw her tinkering with the parts of a disemboweled machine (or a half put-together one, depending on your point of view, especially of her). Would it be something useful that she created or something destructive? That, oftentimes, it was both was a Warehouse paradox that few seemed comfortable accepting. Her inventions were good or bad. She was good or bad. Myka had never seemed to view her tinkering with approval or anxiety; it was what Helena did, just as she wrote stories about time machines and invasions from Mars and practiced kenpo. . . and grieved her daughter's death. Which had her reminding herself, as she sat at the table in Myka's room with the parts of a pair of walkie-talkies scattered in front of her, why she was tinkering with them since it wasn't going to reassure Myka of anything. Myka didn't think she had any workable plan for retrieving the artefact, Myka believed she would succumb to it first. Unfortunately, Myka was right, but this was the pretense the two of them had tacitly agreed on, that Helena would pretend she could figure out, in less than 36 hours now, how to retrieve the artefact - attended by a busy, busy display of tinkering - and Myka would pretend that she was concerned but not afraid.
To carry off a pretense, one needed to be pretending to do something. So Helena pretended that she was modifying the transmitter to jam the "signal" of the artefact. Not that what she was doing would interfere with any signal, let alone whatever energy was animating the artefact. But she frowned and muttered "diode" and "sine wave" and "amplitude" whenever Myka pretended that she was checking on Helena's progress. What was allowing them to continue the charade was that they had also agreed, in actual words that they had tried to invest with sincerity, not to stay in the same room with each other for any length of time.
"Since your room has the table why don't I work in there?" Helena had suggested, tossing onto her bed the bag from the discount store - which was Wal Mart-like but not Wal Mart, substituting cashiers stolidly waving from behind their cash registers for greeters and cartoon avalanches for the "falling prices" smiley faces. She thought she had struck the right tone, sounding serious yet relaxed, as though the assortment of tools and the walkie-talkies they had purchased, in combination with the genius touch only H.G. Wells could provide, would result in a homely little neutralizer in just a matter of minutes.
"Sounds good," Myka had said with brittle cheerfulness. "I'll stay in here and research the archives for any artefacts that might counteract the replicated Bible, if that's what it is. Jacqui and Claudia are looking through the records, too."
"We're already invincible," Helena had said, suspecting she sounded like an instructor at a positive thinking seminar. But Myka had only smiled, pointing at the desk in the corner of Helena's room and the connecting door as a sign that they should get busy.
Rolling a screwdriver between her thumbs and index fingers, Helena wondered, not for the first time, what her genius touch amounted to. Maybe Edison thought it came hard at 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, but Helena believed that the ratio, for her, was even less impressive, 75% bravado and 24% desperation. The remaining 1% she attributed to luck. It was the bravado part of the equation that she had presented early in the morning on their way to the discount store, when she had breezily recounted the retrieval, when she was at 12, of Mesmer's magnets. They had had the psychological effect of binding the victim's will to that of the artefact's holder; what he wanted, she was compelled to do.
"The downside," Helena had said, sipping at her coffee from the diner (tea wouldn't do on a day like this one was going to be), "was that the holder would eventually become as much of a shell as his victim. The magnets so inextricably fused them that they would end up consuming one another, metaphorically speaking. Although we might have jumped on it sooner had cannibalism been involved. A shallow lot most of us were, always on the lookout for a good spectacle." She had broadened her accent, tried out an engagingly devilish grin, but Myka maintained her death grip on the steering wheel, the large, black lenses of her sunglasses lending her face a similar blankness. "At any rate, we managed to retrieve the magnets without losing any one of us to their influence."
The sunglasses swung toward her as did a disbelieving scowl. "Is this where I'm supposed to ask 'Golly, Superman, how did you do it?'"
"Darling, it's not a fair comparison. Superman never displayed any particular inventiveness, no ingenuity, no cleverness. Just brute power wrapped in overdeveloped pecs."
"All right, Lex Luthor, impress me," Myka had said, turning the SUV into the discount store's parking lot; she left the engine running, so the air conditioner could continue to blast, and had shifted in her seat to face Helena.
"They were magnets, so we demagnetized them, in a sense. We made some agents more suggestible, shall we say, and Caturanga sent them out as decoys. Except they were suggestible only to the desires we had implanted, not the desire of our target, who was using the magnets to compel people to steal for him. The agents were focused on sex or food or poetry, of all things, not money. The new variables we introduced disrupted the magnets' attraction, and we were able to capture our villain." It had sounded easy, even to her own ears. Identify the artefact, isolate its power, and devise a plan for neutralizing it.
"When you say 'we," don't you really mean 'you'?" Myka had taken off her sunglasses and was nibbling on one of the temple pieces. Her eyes looked especially green, they always did, Helena knew, when she was tired. Her eyelids were red-rimmed, and the whites of her eyes weren't white but the color of old lace. She looked like she hadn't slept, and though Helena didn't remember Myka rolling out of her arms, when they, no, she had woken - she had slept - she had noticed that Myka was closer to the edge of the bed. Helena had touched her and her skin still felt hot, as if she had done nothing all night but let her worries burn like a bonfire.
"I'm not easily suggestible. I can't just watch a watch. I have to calculate the speed of its swing or mentally take it apart and improve its performance. An active mind doesn't take direction, Myka, but gives it." Myka was never proof against Helena's indulgence in a bout of childish boasting, and a crooked smile was Helena's victory.
She hadn't really used a watch to hypnotize the other agents; that was a silly bit of stage business. She had used another artefact, a blindfold worn by a popular magician of the time when he had pretended to read the minds of his audience. It hadn't actually allowed him to read minds, but it had allowed him to control thoughts and command the responses he wanted to hear. As artefacts went, it was relatively harmless. The mind control lasted for only a few hours, and the wearer's subsequent blindness was only temporary. Helena had spent the two days she had suffered the side effect - the magnets having been retrieved and a five-year-old Christina left in the care of her doting Uncle Charles and his wife - in the rooms of an actress, enjoying the full play of her other senses. She wouldn't have been any less vulnerable to the property of the blindfold than the other agents, but it had been her idea to disrupt the magnets' power by hypnotizing agents to have competing compulsions, and Caturanga had decided that she should be the one to oversee the retrieval. All Myka needed to know, however, was that she hadn't been in danger of having her mind controlled by anyone or anything, not the less than confidence-inspiring reasons why.
Myka had continued to chew on her sunglasses. "But you knew what the artefact was, exactly what it did, and you had time to plan. We have none of that."
"True. But there's one factor that's the same," Helena said leadingly and shrugged. "I hate to be immodest, but. . . ."
Myka had punched her shoulder then, as if she were Pete. "Sure, right. Let's see your genius tackle what the store has to offer."
That had been several hours ago. Helena checked the time on her phone; it was after 4:00. She was peckish, and in order to drive that from her thoughts, she was tempted to stretch out on the bed and nap. She wasn't unconcerned about tomorrow's retrieval, far from it, but she hadn't progressed to the terror and desperation stage of the process, when she would pace the room and rail against artefacts and throw whatever was at hand, which sometimes, unfortunately, was the device she was working on. Maybe she wouldn't get to that stage, Myka wasn't going in after the artefact. And, in the end, regardless of what happened to her in Ellis, Myka's safety was all that mattered. When you had lived to be almost 150 years old, the thought of dying or becoming, in any way, permanently transformed, which was generally the same thing in the Warehouse universe, lost its power to horrify. The few years when Christina was alive and these recent weeks with Myka and Drew, they weren't enough, but if they were all she had, who was she to say she deserved more given what she had taken from others?
She had kicked off her shoes and flopped on the bed, bunching the two thin pillows behind her head, when Myka opened the door, striding into the room with more nervous energy than the time of day and the overtaxed air conditioning seemed to warrant. Myka had last checked in on her a half-hour ago, dejected that the Houdini séance-busting and cult deprogramming artefacts weren't viable options. The Houdini artefact, a table used at actual séances, was too unwieldy for Claudia to whisk down to Boise City and, furthermore, had the far more objectionable side effect of dematerializing the people sitting at it. The deprogramming artefact, a '70s era lava lamp, which had been among the furnishings of a room in which several deprogrammings had taken place, was at least portable, and the side effect, an inability to give credence to anything, although problematic, wasn't permanent - and, as Myka had said, probably couldn't be distinguished from Helena's native cynicism. But the lamp's glass had been cracked in an inventory-related accident, and no one was sure if the lamp's property hadn't been impaired as well. Myka was holding out hope for an artefact recently retrieved from the set of Mad Men, an ashtray from the desk of a reputedly Don Draper-like ad executive, which made the possessor impervious to any influence, but the side effects weren't completely known. Some people had become alcoholics, others sex addicts -
"If it were the latter, darling," Helena had said, trying to pull Myka onto her lap, "I think the two of us could live with it." At Myka's wide-eyed, disbelieving look, Helena had quickly added, "You would be the only object of my insatiable desire, I promise you."
Myka hadn't been amused then, and she looked even unhappier now. "Claudia just heard from the DHS. Our deadline's been pushed up again. We have until noon tomorrow." She slapped her phone against her leg. "If Lowry were here, I'd kill him." She looked at Helena, who hadn't so much as flinched at the news. Her legs were still casually crossed, her head still pillowed against the headboard. "This doesn't bother you because you have everything in hand, right?" She gestured toward the dismembered walkie-talkies. "Because you're going to jump up any minute and put those together in a way that will counteract whatever's going on in Ellis. Don't tell me I'm wrong, Helena." Dropping her phone on the bed, she swept both hands through her hair.
"Or what?" Helena demanded. "Do you promise to punish me? I often have my best ideas when I'm thoroughly distracted." She pushed herself up and tugged at a belt loop on Myka's pants. "Lie here with me. Let's put Major Lowry and Ellis and artefacts out of our minds for a few minutes."
Myka moved away from her. "I can't do that, Helena," she said irritably.
"Then can I talk you into an early dinner? The diner's special tonight is smothered meatloaf. Isn't meatloaf already smothered in ketchup or tomato sauce? What else is it being smothered in, I want to know." She grinned up at Myka, who had dropped one hand from her hair but continued to pull at it with the other. "Gravy? Velveeta? I suppose its mountains of sodium and cholesterol and calories don't really matter at this point. I could be eating air, staring at a blank computer monitor with the other poor Ellisians this time tomorrow." She paused. "It hadn't occurred to me before, the homonym, but it is rather apt, don't you think?"
"No, Helena, it's not," Myka snapped. "You will not be entering the afterlife tomorrow, do you hear me? Ellis is not the Elysian Fields. . . Ellis is Univille, only without the nice hotel and Applebee's. You don't like Univille, remember? You make fun of it, you can't wait to leave it. You will think about Ellis the same way you think about Univille, as a place to get the hell out of."
She had stopped worrying her hair and pacing; she was standing at the foot of the bed, her hands settling on her hips, a gunslinger about to -. No, Helena decided, a sheriff, a sheriff demanding that she get out of Dodge. Her grin returned full force. They were going to replay this moment someday soon, in a much nicer bedroom, except that Myka was going to be naked, practically naked, with just an old-fashioned gun belt riding her hips and a leather vest with a sheriff's star pinned to it hanging open over her breasts. "I'll be on the next stagecoach out, I swear."
Myka had reluctantly driven them to the diner, where she had picked at a club sandwich while Helena had tried the smothered meatloaf, which wasn't smothered so much as immersed in brown gravy and onions. The diner had had few other customers, and they had studiously kept their attention to themselves. Perhaps they were less curious than the ones who had been in the diner during lunch, or perhaps Major Lowry's clawing back of the time allotted to them for saving Ellis had, like the typical goings-on in small towns, made itself known without the source of the news ever being acknowledged. Even their waitress had seemed unable to meet their eyes, taking their orders with her gaze fixed on her pad.
When Helena had managed to capture the attention of their waitress - since she rarely looked their way, it had to be done through a series of throat-clearings and finally, the waving of her napkin - and ordered a slice of pie, not blueberry or cherry but a mixture of berries called "Berry Heavenly" - Myka had hissed, "Since when do you eat meatloaf and mashed potatoes and pie? This is not a 'last meal,' Helena whatever-your-middle-name-is Wells."
"Like any traveler, I'm sampling the native cuisine," Helena said loftily. "Although I need to work up to the okra. And, since it's time you know," she dropped her voice, "because we are engaged, despite your caviling about a successful retrieval, it's Joy."
"Helena Joy Wells," Myka said slowly, incredulously.
Helena smiled up at the waitress, who managed to slide the plate onto the table while looking in the opposite direction. "Mine was a difficult birth. My parents had already decided my first name would be my maternal grandmother's, but there had been a dispute over my middle name. My father wanted it to be Elizabeth, after his mother, but my mother wouldn't hear of it. And then my birth had been so protracted that my mother said it ought to be 'Joy' because she had never been so joyful in her life as to have finally had an end to what had been, throughout, a miserable experience. My father was too exhausted himself to object. Or so the family story went."
"You're just spinning tales, aren't you?" But Myka couldn't hide a smile. "Your middle name's no more Joy than it is Amber or Tiffany."
"You can't say it's not." Using the side of her fork, Helena sliced off the tip of her pie. Berries, small and large, purplish and red, spilled onto her plate. They didn't have the shrunken look of frozen berries; they looked freshly picked. The crust was . . . pie crust, but it wasn't chewy and carried a hint of cinnamon. Pie wouldn't be her choice for a last dessert, but if this was the last sweet she would have, she could have chosen worse.
After dinner, Helena laboriously put the walkie-talkies back together. Laboriously because she needed to make it look like she had actually done something to them, something that she didn't want to jar by putting them back together too quickly. Though Myka was in her room talking to Drew, the connecting door was open (Helena had impatiently broken its lock the first day) and Helena could hear the pad of Myka's feet as she approached the doorway and then their pad as she walked away, apparently having thought better of checking up on Helena's genius-ing. She heard the outside door to the room open and close, and then she could no longer hear Myka's voice.
When she had finished putting the walkie-talkies together, she pushed them across the table. She would take them with her, but she wouldn't use them. The only things that would help her, according to Esther Price, were her own voices, but Helena wasn't sure that her ghosts, numerous though they were, would be able to mount a defense. She had been listening to them for a hundred years by the time MacPherson had released her from the bronze, and still she had managed to make a glorious cock-up of her reentry into the world.
More door-opening and closing and then Myka was handing the phone to her. "It's your turn."
Drew had wanted to speak with her last night too, and they talked now, as they had then, about the projects they might work on together, tree houses for his friends, go-karts, and bird condominiums (he was no longer satisfied with the simple, single family bird house he and his father needed to build for his math class's final project). "You know how we talked about my friend Tanner and how he wanted you to build him a tree house? Well, Tanner's dad saw the pictures of my tree house, and he wants you to build him a new deck." Drew said it with the mingled pride and possessiveness of a talent agent having latched onto a surefire prospect.
"I'll consider Tanner's request, but Tanner's dad will have to find someone else to build a new deck for him."
"That's good, 'cause I have a new project for us. I want us to make my room bigger."
"That's quite a project," Helena temporized. "Have you talked to your mother about it?"
"She said we could start planning it once you finish your job tomorrow."
Artful little devil Myka was. And shameless, too, using her son as leverage.
"Hey, I know something you don't," Drew gloated.
"Best enjoy the moment."
"Huh?" He sounded so like Pete that Helena couldn't help but smile into the phone. "I promised Mom I wouldn't say anything to you . . . ." Helena had a vision of him biting his bottom lip, just as his mother might.
"It's important to keep your promises," Helena said gently. "If your mother thinks it's important for me to know, she'll tell me." She hesitated for a moment. "I'll talk to you tomorrow night."
"Okay," he said. Thankfully he didn't make her promise.
Drew and his mother talked for a little while longer, and then the call ended. There was silence from the other room, and Helena thought Myka was working on her laptop, drawing upon the Warehouse's archives for yet more artefacts that might be of use. If it kept her occupied and calm. . . . But there was something too silent about the silence, and there was the faint sound of scraping nearby, as if someone were pacing the parking lot, turning rocks over with her feet. Helena pushed back her chair and ran out of the room, her heart pounding.
"Don't do it," she said.
Myka was standing by the hood of the SUV, playing with the keychain. In the waning sunlight, it was easier to hear the keys being tossed and jingled than to see the glints of silver. She stopped, pocketing the keys. "You have no idea what I was going to do," she said.
"You were going out to see Esther Price and talk her into accompanying me into Ellis. Close enough?"
Myka shrugged dismissively. "She's our best bet for retrieving the artefact. We have no choice but to consider using her."
"We do have a choice," Helena countered, running her hand along the hood until it reached Myka's arm. "I know how to get in, find the artefact, and get out. We don't need Esther."
In the twilight, Helena could tell only that Myka was looking at her, she couldn't tell how Myka was looking at her. But she could feel the weight of her gaze, doubting and anxious. "You've been bullshitting me all day, Helena. You have no idea how you're going to manage this." Myka raked her hair with her fingers, giving it vicious tugs. "We're supposed to meet Lowry at nine tomorrow morning, at the barricade north of Ellis. He'll give us until noon, but not a minute more."
"You know it doesn't matter how much or how little time he gives us. Most likely I won't have even a half-hour. I'll have to work very, very quickly." Injecting a silkiness into her voice that wasn't coming naturally tonight, especially now, she moved closer to Myka, stilling the frenetic fingers. "Which annoys me because I prefer to take my time, as you well know, darling." She kissed the corner of Myka's jaw.
"Don't try to work me," Myka said, ignoring the kiss but not pushing Helena away. "I need you to come out of Ellis, preferably under your own power."
"I will." Quietly, half-whispering, she said, her lips gliding just above Myka's skin, "I couldn't bear it if something happened to Esther. My conscience is overburdened as it is. Don't put me in the position of having to worry about her safety."
Myka stepped back far enough to cup Helena's face between her hands. "You don't understand. I need you to be all right, Helena." She started to laugh, but her laughter broke off jaggedly. "I have no qualms about risking her, me, whatever, whoever, to get you out of there."
"But I do." Helena paused. "Please, Myka, don't."
Again, Helena felt the look, disbelieving in an entirely different sense. "How can you not know? What do I have to do? Open your eyes, Helena."
Instead Helena kissed her before Myka could continue giving vent to an incredulity that would have been insulting in another context, one that wouldn't involve turning into an automaton in front of a screen and then either starving to death or falling victim to a "military option." Against Myka's lips, she said, "Tell me what you want me to do."
"I need you to love me, Helena."
She could respond seriously or mischievously or seductively, or she could simply do what Myka asked. For once, she could be the one to offer support, to provide comfort. It was strangely humbling to feel needed and needed not because she could invent wondrous, if not always fully functioning, devices or write novels that Myka could happily lose herself in but because she was Helena, with all her imperfections. Displaying less grace than she had hoped, she lowered herself to her knees, unbuttoning Myka's pants and working the zipper down. With the tip of her tongue, she drew a line across Myka's skin parallel to the waistband of her panties, and Myka shivered. The sun was no more than a faint lemon yellow streak across the sky, but the air remained dense, close, as if she were having to touch Myka through a blanket, not under one. It was time to retreat to the lesser discomfort of their rooms, and Helena was surprised that Myka hadn't already insisted on it. But when she leaned back, Myka made a complaining noise and restlessly, roughly stroked Helena's hair. "No, here," she muttered.
"You do know that we're in a public space, on the verge of breaking laws," Helena murmured, hands moving around to Myka's back, slipping under her panties and gliding slowly over the curves of Myka's butt.
"Now" was Myka's only response.
Helena rose and, still touching, still kissing, they slid and bumped along the side of the SUV until they were against a rear door, which Myka fumbled open. Lifting her hips onto the seat, she helped Helena push down her pants and didn't protest when they, along with her shoes, were flung to the ground. Helena felt the warm press of Myka's legs as they locked around her, pulling her in. For a passing second, Helena was in a carriage, trying to divest her paramour of the hour of her (or his) multiple layers, more clothing than one human being should ever be expected to wear, and then the memory, along with its fragmentary collection of lovers long dead, was gone, as momentary as a cool breeze or a summer rain shower in this blast furnace of a town. Myka was no fuzzily remembered ghost, Helena knew this body under her hands, its long legs and arms, the arch of its rib cage, the shallow valley between its breasts. She thought she had known its voice too, low and half-broken when Myka was close to coming, but the sound Myka was making now was higher-pitched, an actual cry, and growing louder. Helena stopped, confused, until she felt the lock of Myka's legs around her tighten and Myka's hands tangling in her hair, pulling it hard, pulling her closer.
No carriage, a boat this time, not just rocking amidst the waves, but careening down them and rocketing, leaping up them. When she was young, before the bronze, she had never made love on a boat; never enough space or privacy on the packets across the Channel, and on the steamer ships when she had followed an artefact across an ocean, she had been too enamored of the engine's workings to be distracted by an attractive passenger. There had been a few hook-ups on boats, yachts really, in the years since she had left the Warehouse, but she could barely remember the experience let alone her partner. This wasn't a boat she was in, it was still just the SUV, and she had had plenty of sex in conveyances with wheels, but the speed and the pumping of Myka's hips and these new loud cries of hers made it feel so different that Helena thought she was losing her soundings, that she could be moving with Myka through water or air, not giving them both carpet burns as they rubbed against the upholstery. It was a pell-mell rhythm, and Helena was trying to keep pace with the timing of Myka's cries, but some were short, more gasps than cries, while others were longer, more drawn out.
She slowed, withdrawing her fingers, and Myka was shouting in protest, "Damn you, damn you, damn you," and Helena knew it wasn't only about her stopping, and she kneeled above Myka, her head bent against the roof of the SUV, feeling that odd and unfamiliar sense of humility, that anyone could care so much. About her. She crawled out of the SUV and then leaned back in, wrapping her arms around Myka's waist and dragging her to the edge of the seat. Crouching, not entirely sure how long she could maintain this position, she hooked Myka's legs over her shoulders and lowered her mouth. She knew this part of Myka's body too, how wet and soft it was, as if it might dissolve in her mouth if she lingered long enough, and tonight it was more liquid than flesh, and she couldn't resist nipping, just a little, to see if she had skin between her teeth. Myka cried out again, drumming her heels against Helena's back, and Helena set up a new rhythm, one whose speed she dictated because while she was Helena, she was also H.G. Wells, and there wasn't a problem - given time enough - that she couldn't solve, no artefact she couldn't neutralize. Because she was the best, always had been the best, there had never been anyone like her before, and there never would be again -
And then Myka cried out loud enough for all of Boise City to hear, and Ellis too, if they hadn't already been listening to something else, and it was a sound that, for once, drowned out all the voices in Helena's mind, and she thought if she could carry that with her into Ellis, she really would be invincible.
…
The concrete barricades had been moved back, far enough not only for the SUV to pass through with ease but a much larger vehicle as well, one of those military trucks with the camouflage-patterned tarps stretched over their backs, which hid whatever was being transported, maybe boxes of canned goods or. . . troops or. . . weapons. There were no military vehicles visible, other than the sedan that the major and his staff had driven to the barricades and it looked like a regular car. There wasn't anything vaguely military hovering in the sky above, but just like the trucks, Helena knew it was out there, up there, somewhere, waiting for the major's order. Myka and Major Lowry were talking, and Myka's hand was on her hip. It wasn't a particularly good sign that her other hand was in her hair, but it was better than being on the other hip. Myka was in jeans this morning and, despite the already punishing heat, wearing one of her v-neck sweaters. The shoulder holster seemed especially obvious, maybe only because it was black and contrasted sharply with the sea green of the sweater. But the gun looked larger than usual, as if it had swelled in proportion to the danger. The holster and gun were such a part of Myka's uniform on a retrieval that normally Helena didn't notice them, but this morning, they were very. . . weapon-like. As was Myka, she decided, whose every facial muscle seemed bunched with tension.
Helena had watched Myka clean her gun earlier that morning, glasses halfway down the bridge of her nose; she was still squinting, which may have been because she needed a new prescription, but Helena was pretty sure that it was because she was tired. Because she herself was exhausted, holding the back of her hand to her mouth as she yawned. They had returned from the SUV to Helena's room, Myka gloriously and unself-consciously bottomless, although Helena caught only a glimpse of Myka's butt as they darted in and out of the wide arc of a street light. Behind the warped motel room door, Helena was humbled once more, wonderfully humbled, as Myka had pushed her onto the bed and straddled her, itemizing breathily against her ear all the intimacies they would no longer share if Helena didn't make it back from Ellis. And then Myka had demonstrated them. "In case you had forgotten," she said.
Myka was calling to her, and Helena joined them. Her features seemed to squeeze together in one large, tense knot the closer Helena approached, and Helena wasn't sure if it was because of her imminent departure or whatever it was Major Lowry was telling her. It didn't matter at this point, anyway. Nor did Major Lowry's underscoring of their noon deadline or his repeated directive that she was to contact Myka immediately if she noticed any change in Ellis or its residents. She nodded as if she were listening but she was remembering how she and Myka had lain on the lumpy mattress in the motel room, watching the darkness fade as the sky outside grew lighter. She was drifting toward sleep when she felt Myka clutch her hand, interlacing their fingers. The sex, the words they had whispered against each other's skin, it all came down to a simple gesture, one asking for a reassurance she couldn't believe in and the other offering a reassurance she didn't have the power to give.
"Any change, I mean, any change, you call her immediately. Immediately, got that, Agent Wells?" If Myka was looking weapon-like, Major Lowry was looking more rock-like. His head, his chest, even his haircut were squarer, the lines not rounded but forming corners. Helena gave him another nod, but she was trying to take in all she could of the moment.
Like the meatloaf and pie she had eaten last evening, this patch of asphalt and the surrounding fields and pasture weren't what she wanted, but it was what she had. She had to make do with the troopers she and Myka had talked to the day before, who were chatting with Major Lowry's two underlings; the birds, hawks by their size and larger wingspan, which were idly circling above them; the sunlight, as white-yellow as cornsilk, which was mercilessly illuminating everything, but always her eyes went back to Myka. Her hair shone red and was floating in all directions on the breeze. Helena wanted to twine a strand around her finger, but she let the impulse pass. Even something so modestly affectionate was too much now.
Then it was time, and she was walking to the SUV, Myka's curt, controlled "Be safe" and her own careless "Why should I start now" following her into the car. She ignored the walkie-talkies on the passenger seat and drove between the barricades. She figured she would have time to search only one location before she was impaired by the artefact. Selecting the school had no solid logic behind it - the artefact could be anywhere in Ellis or, worse yet, miles away. But people never failed to try to make sense of the nonsensical. If the holder of the artefact thought that he was transmitting a message, gravitating toward the high point of the town would be a rational thing to do, especially if he knew about the old radio club. It was a straw, but, as had become her and Myka's mantra, straws were all they had.
For longer than she thought she would, she heard only the steady hum of the SUV's engine and the whine of its tires on the road, but as the buildings on the northern end of Ellis began to appear, the gas station that Esther had mentioned, a church, she identified a sound that didn't belong to the car. Esther had described the sound as the insistent voice of a used car salesman, but she wasn't hearing one voice, she was hearing many. Softer than whispers, the voices seemed more echoes of sound than sound itself; they were old voices, very old voices. When she had returned to 12, after what she had done to Lebecque and Poule, she fancied that she heard the Warehouse talking to itself in its several voices, those of its long-dead agents and regents, the Eldunari (their constant dance a constant speaking), the artefacts themselves, ruminating about what was to be done with her. She had hoped Caturanga would assign her to a retrieval, but instead, with a chilliness distinct from his customary reserve, he assigned her to several housekeeping tasks in the Warehouse. She had entered its rooms and walked its aisles, its murmurings following her, burrowing into her, like an insect wriggling into her ear. As she checked the numbers assigned to the artefacts against the numbers on her list, she would poke her pencil into her ears, trying to rid herself of the noise -
Helena stamped on the brake, nearly launching herself over the steering wheel. Esther had said she would need all her voices; it was time to find another before the Warehouse's overwhelmed her. She was in Ellis proper, driving down its empty main street; unfortunately, the high school was on the opposite end of town. But she had seen its roofline before she had seen the rest of Ellis. Just a little farther, she had just a little farther to go . . . .
- Mama, Mama, I'm going to hide in your bag so you'll take me with you.
Christina was avidly watching her as she packed a valise for a retrieval in Germany. The voice was excited, tumbling over the words. Listening to it was like seeing her daughter endlessly somersault.
- You'll open it, and there I'll be, saying Surprise, Mama.
- Promise me we'll go on adventures like you have.
- Where's India? Will you bring me back a tiger?
- I haven't seen you in forever and ever. Someday I'll build a rocket, too, and take you and Uncle Charles and Cinders to the moon.
Cinders, their ash-colored mouser, was staring at Helena yellowly from the sanctuary of Christina's arms, looking unmoved at the prospect of flying to the moon.
The voice changed, becoming older, louder, more petulant.
- But I don't want to go to France. I want to stay here with Nanny and Uncle Charles and Aunt Jane. France is boring. My cousins are boring. Nothing ever happens there. It's always the same. Don't make me go, Mama. Not this summer.
- Not this summer, Mama.
- France is boring. Nothing ever happens there.
- Don't go.
- Can't I go to Greece with you?
- I hate France. It's boring.
- Nothing ever happens there.
- Nothing ever happens there.
- Nothing ever happens there.
Another stomp of the brakes, but she had already passed the high school, was on the highway headed south out of Ellis. She wrenched the steering wheel, turning the SUV around with a squeal of tires. She was sweating and shaking, unable to silence Christina's voice, which wasn't spilling over itself with enthusiasm but continuing to mount in fury, shrieking over and over, Nothing ever happens there, Nothing ever happens there. . . .
The voice was masculine, dry, striving to sound urbane, but that had always marked Charles, the striving. The Wellses weren't much above shopkeepers, but Charles strove to suggest there was more. He might have had the ink-stained hands of a scribbler, adopted views unpopular among true gentlemen, but the voice, the voice could be allowed to intimate that if one climbed up high enough in the Wells family tree, one might find among its branches the illegitimate child of a lord, perhaps a duke, a mark of gentility and breeding that couldn't be erased no matter how doggedly the Wellses continued to (re)populate themselves among the lower classes.
- So you've decided to carry it?
- Oh, ho, her, is it? And you know it's a 'her' because of some medical diagnostic you've recently invented? Or perhaps the secret government office that employs you has devised, among its varied, mysterious, and, dare I say, mystical operations, a method you've used to determine its sex?
- You simply know? You don't do anything simply, Helena.
A pause, the voice again, both more mocking and more affectionate.
- Perhaps the child will steady you. You could do with some steadying, someone to keep your feet planted on the ground and to demand you love something besides your inventions and your 'government' work.
- I don't think you're selfish, not unreasonably so, at any rate. But you can't deny that you aren't single-minded, obsessive, even ruthless in your investigation of the latest theory or object that's captured your attention. In fact, now that I think about it, perhaps you should plan to produce a brood, although the shame of it would be enough to send our parents to an early grave.
- Satisfied with just one, hmmm. Yes, one that you can become monomaniacal about. I can see it now. You'll so dote upon her, you'll raise a little monster. I fear you'll be a mother to an insufferable brat. So that's your plan, Jane and I will be the - what did you call it? - 'leveling' influence? The necessary common touch? Don't hide your esteem for me, Helena.
Another pause and then the voice resumed, sharp enough that Helena felt it cut through her.
- You may give birth to her, but you'll never be a mother. You'll never learn to put her above yourself. You'll lose her. But you, you'll go on living because you're the sun in your universe. Nothing can be allowed to eclipse the great H.G. Wells, not even her own daughter.
The high school was on her right. She would. . . what was it she was going to do at the high school? It was difficult to think, to do anything but listen. The Warehouse, Christina, Charles, and the others. Christ, there were so many others. Helena took her foot off the gas pedal and dropped her arms from the steering wheel to wrap them around her chest. The SUV slowed, drifting toward the curb.
- How much? For how long? And if we run into trouble? You're paying us like this to avoid trouble, right.
- Dude, maybe we should think about this some more.
- It's a lot of money.
- I don't know. . . .
- Hey, how 'bout this? Lady, if this thing goes sideways on us, it's all coming back on you.
They were graduate students in anthropology. But she hadn't sought out the best or the hardest-working in the program, she had searched for the ones who still harbored the illusion that field work was one long Indiana Jones movie, that they would discover Camelot or Atlantis, not as a result of research or painstaking study but through a combination of luck and instinct. Sufficiently motivated - or greedy - to do as she directed but not shrewd - or cautious - enough to question why she was hiring them.
Their voices were replaced by the sound of a strong breeze. She had to clutch her skirts to her as she ran after a woman who was running even more frantically toward the end of the roof. The woman climbed the narrow ledge and held out her hands toward them in a stopping motion.
Helena slowed and waited for her new partner, a phlegmatic man and portly, to catch up to her. Dunbar had been with Scotland Yard for many years before coming to the Warehouse, and she was curious to find out how he wanted to proceed. The woman teetering on the ledge possessed a ring, once reputedly owned by Lucrezia Borgia, that she had been using to poison a succession of husbands and lovers. Once he began breathing more normally, Dunbar genially called out to the woman, declaring that they wanted only to talk to her. She regarded him suspiciously as he approached her. Dunbar stopped, not quite close enough to touch her, but he was reaching out his hand, in supplication, Helena thought. Until, with surprising speed, he lunged forward, his hand pushing the woman off the roof. She scrabbled for purchase but she grabbed only air, and her screams as she fell to the street below held more surprise than terror. Dunbar turned around, shrugging.
- I didn't want to waste the afternoon trying to persuade her to hand it over.
When they had descended to the street, he had squatted next to the woman's broken body, calmly twisting the ring off her finger.
- Tell Caturanga if you must. I can always go back to the Yard.
Her voice, equally as indifferent.
- She suffered less than her husbands. You should have dangled her over the edge, given her some hope, then let go of her.
He had laughed in true appreciation.
- I think you and I, Wells, will get along just fine.
The grinding of the SUV as it bumped over the curb startled Helena, and she watched, as if it were unfolding before her onscreen, a corner of a building, a hardware store it seemed, loom ever larger until the SUV struck it, hard enough that she was jerked forward against her seat belt but not so hard that the airbag inflated. She fumbled with the latch of the belt. She needed to get out of the car and go somewhere. . . . Something about a high school. . . . Staggering onto the street, she went to her knees, her hands scraping along the pavement as she tried to break her fall.
She thought about resting on the street for a while. It wasn't as if she was going to be run over, and it would take so much effort to stand up. She wasn't sure which was the greater weight holding her down, the heat or the voices. She lifted herself to a kneeling position, and then, with one of her burning, stinging palms pressed against the pavement, she pushed herself up, awkwardly, unsteadily. Her feet crossed over each other as she attempted to take a few steps, but she didn't fall down again. She wanted to go back to the SUV to retrieve her phone; she needed to look at it, but one of the voices, a woman's, maybe even her own, told her not to do it, and she obeyed it.
The high school was only a few yards away, and she walked drunkenly toward it. She swatted at the air around her head. They were so loud now, those voices, squawking at her like birds, and she craned her face toward the sky, expecting an angry flock of them to be hovering above her head, ready to dive-bomb her at any minute. Maybe she should be shielding herself. . . like that actress. . . in that movie that Cl . . . someone, she could no longer remember who, had made her watch. Cl. . . she couldn't hang onto the name, but it didn't matter. What mattered was trying to find out if the movie was playing on TV. She needed to find a TV so she could watch it again. She slowly turned in a circle, swaying, as she tried to read the signs on the buildings. Was one a café? Haltingly, she began to lurch in the direction of a small, one story building with a large plate glass window. But the voice that had told her not to go back for her phone told her to quit looking for a TV. So she reversed direction, toward the high school; at least the voice - and it was rather bossy that voice, but it made her smile - wasn't objecting to that.
- An unusual request, Agent Wells. To be bronzed is a punishment we reserve for only the most dangerous, the most deranged. The worst of the worst. The process is not without risk. Sometimes it fails to complete, and the individual dies an agonizing death. Despite your grave errors of judgment, you remain of value to this organization. There are other punishments, almost as severe, and if it's suffering for your sins that you think you deserve, certainly more painful, but your . . . talents. . . would still be available to us.
- She's said she's no longer fit to be an agent. She's threatened to destroy the world if she has to live in it any longer, Jefferson. Given all that she's done, I'm inclined to grant her request. She's a monster, and we ought to treat her as one. We thought we had that infernal time machine of hers well guarded, but she managed, despite our best efforts, to gain access to it yet again, and it cost another agent his life. She's made a mockery of our mission. Let her be bronzed, and if she doesn't survive the process, so much the better.
- What do you think, Caturanga? You know her better than anyone here.
- You've concluded that her crimes must be punished. She hasn't asked for your sympathy or your mercy, only your assent to the punishment she's chosen for herself.
- I'm asking you what you think, not to play her advocate.
- Helena doesn't ask for favors, she hasn't ever been in need of them. She has not asked, she has begged us for the bronze.
- Good God, man, speak plainly. You put me in mind of one of those swamis who hold such influence over your kind. What do you recommend?
- He's spoken plainly enough. We bronze her.
All the voices rose in a huge roar of assent, so loud that Helena vainly covered her ears with her hands, her mouth opening as if to scream, but her screams wouldn't drown out the voices. She stumbled and fell, her shins barking against. . . steps, old, crumbling, concrete steps, and they led to the front doors of the school. She didn't realize, until she had dragged herself up to the last one, using a rusted iron railing as old as the steps to pull herself along, that the doors were locked with a padlock chain.
This time her butt hit the concrete first, her back scraping against the support post of the railing. She could think the words clearly enough, bloody bolt cutter. Fucking bloody bolt cutter. They hadn't thought to buy one. And as the voices took another collective breath, preparing for a final assault, she looked at the empty streets, the seemingly abandoned buildings, and thought that what she had done with the past ten years of her life - longer than that really, if she counted back to when she had left the B&B, carrying no more than a travel bag, saying good-bye to no one - was to have constructed a mausoleum, whose confines she endlessly wandered, communing with her dead when she chose, summoning them every time she was called on an appraisal. Irene hadn't been far wrong about her. What more fitting place to become the ghost she believed herself to be than a ghost town?
She had tried to use her voices, but they had used her. She belonged to them as much or more than they belonged to her. It was time to stop resisting. Her eyelids fluttered, and she could feel them coming, descending upon her, tearing at her. But there was one that hung back, not with the others.
Open your eyes.
Ah, the bossy one, the one that made her smile.
Open your eyes, Helena.
Open. Your. Eyes.
In front of her was Esther Price.