World After

“Thank you, Clara,” I say. “How did you get the key?”



“Dumb luck,” she says. “Those twins with the funny names dropped it just a few feet away from me.”



“They… dropped it?” Those guys are the most skilled sleight-of-hand tricksters I’ve ever seen. Hard to imagine either of them dropping anything.



“Yeah, they were juggling a bunch of things between them as they walked. The key just fell and they didn’t notice.”



“But you did.”



“Sure.”



“How did you know it was the key to our police car?”



She lifts the key tag to show me. It’s a clear plastic holder that’s probably meant for pictures. This one frames a piece of paper with a note scrawled in little-kid block letters: “Penryn’s police car—Super Secret.”



If I ever see the twins again, it looks like I owe them a zombie-girl mud fight.



“I hope they don’t get in trouble,” says Clara. “They seem like good guys.”



“I’d be surprised if anyone knew they ever had the key. Don’t worry, they won’t get in trouble.” But I’m guessing one of their archenemies might.



Mom whispers urgently beside me into a cell phone, having a conversation with someone who isn’t there.



“So where should we go?” asks Clara.



That darkens my mood. Such a simple question. I can’t even begin to think through this. Both Mom and Clara are older than I am, but somehow they assume I’ll figure it out.



Paige is gone. And that dead body she was standing over…



I shut my eyes to try to blot out the image, which only makes it worse. The blood on her face wasn’t hers, I’m sure of it. Either she will hunt people or people will hunt her. Maybe both.



I can’t bear the thought of either. If they catch her, they’ll treat her the way the Resistance people did—tie her up like an animal or kill her. If she catches them…



Don’t think about it.



But I have to think about it, don’t I? I can’t leave her out there alone, desperate, and scared.



The Resistance will probably be looking for her in the morning. If we can find her first, maybe we can somehow figure out a way to deal with her problems. But how do we find her?



I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s go a few towns away from the Resistance, then hide out until we can figure out what to do.”



“Good idea,” says Clara, who is looking at the sky as much as the road.



“No,” says Mom pointing ahead with one hand and holding the cell phone in the other. “Keep going. Paige went this way.” She sounds sure of herself.



There’s something odd about her cell phone. It’s bigger and clunkier than normal. It looks vaguely familiar.



“Is that a phone?” I reach for it.



“No!” Mom snatches it away and cradles her body protectively around it. “It’s not for you, Penryn. Not now, not ever.”



My mother has a different relationship with inanimate objects than most of us do. Sometimes, a light switch is just a light switch. Until it isn’t.



Out of nowhere, after years of using the same switch to turn on the light, she became convinced that she needed to flip it back and forth to save the city of Chicago. After that, it was just another light switch. Until the day when she needed to flip it back and forth to save New York City.



“What is it?” I ask.



“It’s the devil.”



“The devil is a small black box?” It doesn’t matter, of course. It never does. But for some reason, I want her to tell me about it. Maybe it will jog my memory about what it is and where I’ve seen it before.



“The devil talks to me through the small black box.”



“Oh.” I nod, trying to think of something else to say. “How about we throw it away then?” If only it could be that simple.



“Then how are we going to find your sister?”



The conversation is bound to go in big circles. I’m wasting time.



My mother shifts and I get a glimpse of the phone’s screen. It’s a map of the Bay Area with yellow arrows pointing to two spots.



I know that display. I remember it from something my dad brought home once. “That’s Dad’s prototype.”



Mom shoves it behind her back as if worried that I’ll take it.



“I can’t believe you stole this and let him get fired for it.” No wonder he left us.



“He didn’t like that job anyway.”



“He loved that job. He was totally broken up over losing it. Don’t you remember him looking everywhere for this thing?”



“His company didn’t need it as much as I did. The devil wanted me to have it. It wasn’t theirs to keep.”



“Mom…” What’s the point?



If he hadn’t gotten fired for losing the prototype, he would have gotten fired for something else Mom did anyway. It’s hard to be an engineer when your wife calls you every two minutes. And if he didn’t answer the call, she called the receptionist or his boss or random coworkers to find out if he was okay. And if nobody answered, then he might get a surprise visit from the police, wanting to talk to him about how his wife freaked out in public, screaming and yelling that they had gotten to her husband.



“What is that?” asks Clara.



“A prototype device for tracking pets,” I say. “It uses a tiny tracker. Waterproof and impact resistant. My dad showed it to us once. Apparently, my mom liked it a lot.”



“He was an engineer?”



“He was,” I say. I don’t tell her that by the time he finally left us, he was working night shifts at 7-Eleven, our nearest convenience store, where Mom could sit in the corner while he worked the cash register.



“My husband Brad was an engineer, too,” she says wistfully, almost to herself.



On my mom’s device, the arrow blinks and follows a path. Its target is on the move.



“What are we tracking?” I ask.



“Paige,” says Mom.



“How do you know this is Paige?” I ask, pretty sure this is another fantasy. It’s one thing to have Dad’s tracking device. It’s another to actually be tracking Paige, considering she needs to have the transmitter on her.



“The devil tells me.” She lowers her head, looking troubled. “If I promise him certain things,” she mumbles.



“Okay.” I rub my forehead, trying to be patient. There’s a certain art to getting information out of my mom. You need one foot in reality and one foot in her world to get a better picture of what she’s talking about. “How does the devil know where Paige is?”



She looks up at me as if I’d asked the dumbest question in the world.



“The transmitter, of course.”



Chpater 25



SOMETIMES, even I make the mistake of underestimating my mother. It’s easy to assume that she’s not smart and cunning just because she believes in illogical things and makes poor decisions. But her condition has nothing to do with her intelligence. I forget that sometimes.



“Is the transmitter on Paige?” I hold my breath, not daring to breathe.



“Yes.”



“Where? How?” If Mom had put the transmitter in a bag or something, thinking that Paige would have it on her, then we might be following a Resistance trash truck instead of Paige.



“There.” Mom points to my shoe.



I look down and at first I don’t see anything. Then I realize that she’s not pointing at the shoe. She’s pointing at the yellow starburst sewn on the bottom of my jeans. I’m so used to these starbursts that I don’t even see them anymore.



I reach down to take a good look at the star for the first time. A hard corner beneath the yellow threads pokes into my thumb. It’s tiny and unnoticeable, or at least I’ve never noticed it.



“This is you,” she says, with her finger on the lower arrow in Redwood City.



“This is Paige.” She moves her finger to the upper arrow in San Francisco.



Could she have gone so far in such a short time?



I take a deep breath. Who knows what she’s capable of doing now?



I remember Dad showing us a tiny flake of a chip perched on the tip of his finger. He had handfuls of them in the container with the receiver. The chip was covered in plastic coating that made it dirt-free and waterproof, so the dogs could roll in the mud and be sprayed off without affecting the transmitter.



This is how Mom showed up so regularly when Raffe and I were on the road. This is how she ended up at the aerie.



“Mom, you’re a genius.”



My mother looks surprised. Then she beams a delighted smile. I haven’t seen her this happy since I don’t know when. Her face radiates joy like a little girl who just found out she did something right for the first time in her life.



I nod. “Good job, Mom.” Kind of a disturbing eye-opener to realize that your own parent needs encouragement from you.



WE DITCH the noisy police car for a quiet electric vehicle that has the keys in the ignition.



I rummage through the police cruiser’s glove compartment and trunk for anything useful to transfer into the new car. I score binoculars and a grab-and-go bag full of emergency supplies. If there’s one thing Obi’s men are good at, it’s survival on the run. I suspect all the Resistance vehicles have these.



Clara takes me aside on our way into the new car. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she whispers.



“Don’t worry. I know my chances of finding Paige are slim.”



“I don’t mean that. I mean about your mom.”



“Believe me, I have no hopes about her.”



“But you do. I can see it. There’s a saying, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ Well, the reverse is true too. Just because someone’s out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.”



“I don’t understand.”



“The world going crazy doesn’t mean your mother isn’t still crazy, too.”



I pull back from her. I wasn’t thinking that.



Not really.



But did she have to steal that possibility away from me?



“I used to be a nurse. I know how hard this kind of condition can be for a family. It can help to talk about it. I just don’t want you to get hurt, thinking your mom might be—”



I kick in the headlights and running lights on the new car to keep it from being a beacon. I smash them so hard the bulbs are practically pulverized.



We don’t need those lights. There’s enough moonlight to see the hulks of cars on the road even if we can’t see much detail.