Pyramid Lake (20 page)

“Or GPS. Or satellite imagery. Or WiFi.” Cassie nodded with a look of dawning comprehension. “Oh my God, Trevor.”

“Democratization of technology is inevitable,” I said. “It’s literally unstoppable. After a few years, Moore’s law will bring the cost and the form factor down, and MADRID will find its way into consumer products—into the hands of ordinary people. Pretty soon, it’ll be ubiquitous. Everyone will have it on their phones and tablets and baked into their TV screens and Webcams. Built into sunglasses, contact lenses. It’ll be everywhere. And it will
transform
our world.”

I took her other hand, held them both in mine. “Can you imagine what that will be like? A new era of transparency in how people interact with each other. No more pretending, no more hiding our feelings, lying to one other, lying to ourselves. All of that—
it comes to an end
.”

“But… do you really think forcing everyone to face the unfiltered truth about everything, all the time, will bring about world peace?”

“World peace?” I laughed. “I don’t give a fuck about world peace. Do I seem like a particularly peaceful person to you? World
truth
is what I care about.”

“But why?”

“My daughter, Amy… she sees how insincere people are, the false faces all around her, and she can’t understand it. It hurts her inside. I want her to be able to grow up in a society free from hypocrisy. I can’t stand to see her hurt anymore.”

I stared out the windshield, seeing Amy’s face, and my eyes blurred and stung.

“My daughter deserves to live in a better world than this one. And I’m going to
give
that to her… A world without lies.”

C
assie let me drive. She didn’t say anything, and I wondered what she was thinking about. It had been a weird day for both of us. After a while, she took my hand again, gently rubbing the back of it with her thumb. Her touch felt nice, and I started to relax. We rode in silence for a few minutes.

I thought about Frankenstein, working away right now in my daughter’s behalf. My long-term purpose had always been to remake the world as a gift for Amy.

But the world hadn’t waited for us. Before I could neutralize it, it had reached out prematurely with its venomous, hypocritical claws to threaten—to try to
damage
—my sweet, vulnerable child again. Now Frankenstein and I were forced to put our bigger plans on hold while we dealt with this new and more immediate threat to Amy’s welfare and happiness: these bogus accusations of psychiatric illness and mental dysfunction. But we would crush
that
cynical lie, too—and, in the process, reinvent psychiatry and fix another great wrong.

I figured that Frankenstein would be achieving roughly 80 percent accuracy in his diagnoses by now. But 80 percent was nowhere near good enough—not where my daughter was concerned. We couldn’t accept less than 95 percent—two standard deviations—and the closer we came to that goal, the longer it would take to achieve each incremental gain in accuracy.

I looked at the dashboard clock: eleven p.m. Time was slipping away, but there was nothing I could do about it right now.

Cassie shifted on her seat, tucked her calves under her, and leaned toward me. I felt her lips brush my forehead gently, where it was bruised, giving it a small, chaste kiss. Then she turned away to look out her window. Her voice sounded melancholy.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to live in your world yet, Trevor.”

I had no answer for that. I wasn’t even sure which world she meant.

Right now my feelings were a turbulent mess. I couldn’t sort them out, and that scared me. This thing that was happening between Cassie and me was not simply a distraction. It was moving too fast, taking on a life of its own now. I was having trouble keeping it from spilling over the boundaries it had to stay inside. I needed time to think, to figure out how to handle the situation before things got even more out of control. I couldn’t let it to go any further.

I couldn’t risk hurting her; I already cared too much about her for that.

She squeezed my hand. “This isn’t going to end well, is it?”

My throat tightened. No, it wasn’t going to. I knew that already. I shook my head.

Her fingers squeezed mine again, and she let go.

“Then let’s not think about that now,” she said. “Tell me something else instead...” She fiddled with the ankle cuff of her jeans, watching my face. “No one can possibly work all the time. What do you do for fun? I want to know you better, Trevor.”

Her eyes were bright with brittle enthusiasm, and I felt the tightness in my own chest loosen a bit, too. It had been a strange day for sure. And when your morning started off with someone you knew getting murdered, it was far too easy to let yourself get caught up in downer thoughts. Tomorrow, things would make more sense. I would know what to do about Cassie then.

“We’ve had a long day,” I told her. “Right now we’re both tired and confused and don’t really know what we’re saying, so let’s pick this conversation up later.”

“Uh-uh. Don’t
you
start making decisions for me, too,” she said. “I’ve already told you how much I hate that.”

“Sorry. But I just don’t feel like talking anymore.”

“Then answer this one little question, and I’ll leave you alone,” she said. “What do you do to unwind?”

“Umm… get in bar fights?”

“Besides that.” There was something new in her voice. She sounded almost playful.

The turnoff for Sutcliffe was coming up. Looking at Cassie’s little cat smile, I came to a decision.

“I’m not going to tell you what I do to unwind,” I said, braking to take the turnoff. Her look of surprise made me smile.

I pointed out at the lake, bright under the moonlight, filling the horizon ahead of us.

“I’ll
show
you.”

• • •

Another spray of water splashed our faces, cooling my cheeks. Inside my helmet, my grin widened. I leaned us into a wide turn, carving another arc of foam in the black water.

Laughing, Cassie tightened her arms around my chest and snuggled herself closer against my back, her chin on my shoulder, her helmet next to mine. The roar of the Waverunner’s blueprinted, aftermarket-tweaked 1,800-cc engine split the silence as I eased the throttle forward, accelerating.

“This is
so
illegal,” she said. “I can’t believe he just gave you the keys to the marina. When you started pounding on his door in the middle of the night I thought you were about to get shot.”

“Jay’s a good guy,” I said. “Besides…” I slapped the green-and-carbon-black flank of the race-modded 2013 Yamaha FZR. “…I let him borrow this sometimes. He owes me.”

The full moon loomed large above us, supernaturally bright, reflecting off the dark, rippling surface in a gleaming ribbon that stretched across the lake.

In its own way, my customized Waverunner was as ridiculous an exercise in overengineering as Roger’s Humvee. But the modifications I had made served a real purpose. I braced myself and tightened my shoulders.

“At a hundred miles an hour, water’s as hard as concrete,” I said. “You might want to hold on tight.”

“Don’t you
dare
!” Her arms squeezed my chest so tight, it was hard to take a breath. But she was giggling.

Gunning the throttle, I circled back around and headed toward the white line of my own wake. I half stood, lifting Cassie off the seat with me, and felt her weight shift as she scrambled to stabilize her footing. Blipping the throttle off to drop the nose, I then cranked it hard as we hit the wake’s ramp-like edge, blasting us eight feet into the starry sky. Throwing our combined weight to the left, I spun us into a midair 360 that made Cassie squeal.

We came down with a splashing thump that knocked our helmets together and sank us past our knees. As we bobbed back to the surface and took off again I could hear the joyful peals of her laughter next to my ear. Her arms loosened around me.

“Let’s do it again!” she said, slapping my wet-suited stomach. “Show me something else now.” Then her arms circled my chest once again, and I felt her thigh muscles tighten against my hips.

Endorphins coursed through my system, filling me with calming, uncomplicated, Zen-like pleasure. It felt good to slip the leash, at least for a while. This was a night for ignoring all the internal warnings and jangling alarms that were trying to knot my insides. A night to simply enjoy, heedless of later consequences.

I laughed out loud. “Okay. But don’t forget…
you
asked for this.”

The FZR’s monster engine scarcely noticed the extra weight of a passenger. I had hand-assembled it piece by piece, using the best parts from different manufacturers: a Riva Turbocharger and Stage 1, R&D R2 reflashed engine control unit, Jim’s FF-cut ride plate, and Dynafly prop. Even carrying both of us, it would still probably top out at close to a hundred miles an hour. But having a second rider shifted its center of mass. It handled differently, which took some getting used to. Pretty soon, I had the hang of it, though, and was able to reproduce most of the tricks—bunny hops, wheelies, tail stands, power 360s, and big-air corkscrews—that I had spent weekend after weekend out on the water perfecting.

After twenty minutes, I could see that I had just about exhausted Cassie, who wasn’t used to the adrenaline. She leaned forward, arms loosening, and pressed her helmet close to mine. I could tell she was about to say she had had enough.

Turning my head, I pressed the opening of my helmet against hers and smiled, letting her feel my muscles relax as I eased off the throttle. Relief appeared in her wide eyes, inches from mine.

She sagged against my back, smiling. “I think I’m about to pass out.”

“Remind me,” I said. “What does the klaxon on a submarine sound like?”

“Trevor, you’re crazy!” she shrieked, tensing up again and tightening her arms around me. Then she burst into laughter. “Oh, God, I
knew
I should have stayed away from you. Now I’m going to
die
.”

I had saved the best for last, but there were a couple of possibilities. Accelerating, I considered an underwater corkscrew rollover. But no, that was too dangerous to attempt with a passenger. The drag of the water would rip Cassie loose from me as soon as we were upside down, before I could roll us all the way over to pop upright on the other side. She could even break her neck or drown.

I decided to stick with the porpoise, instead.

Bouncing the Waverunner with our body weight as I sped up, I sent us arcing in and out of the water, deeper and higher every time, until our helmets were briefly dipping beneath the surface at the bottom of each arc.

Completely soaked now, I rolled my wrist forward to let off the throttle, and we came to a stop. I killed the engine and took off my helmet, tucking it under my arm, and Cassie did the same. She shook out her wet hair and raked her fingers through the long side, sweeping it back away from her face.

The Waverunner rocked gently as we drifted in the middle of the lake, recovering our breath, savoring the silence. Swiveling on our seats, we looked at the wide, rippling expanse of black water that stretched in all directions around us—wavelets glinting silver in the moonlight, ringed by the distant dark silhouettes of mountains.

The full moon floated overhead, almost close enough to touch, seeming to fill a quarter of the sky. A dense scatter of stars dusted the heavens—gleaming pinpricks against the blue-black dome of desert night. The pale, luminous band of the Milky Way stretched above us, a vast speckled ribbon with a central band of darker infinity, stitching horizon to horizon.

Cassie leaned against my back and draped an arm over my shoulder. I reached up and wrapped my arm around hers, hugging it to my chest, and my fingers felt the sleeve of her wetsuit. The cuff was stretched high on her upper bicep. I looked down at her leg alongside mine, seeing the lower cuff riding halfway up her slim thigh. She was a tall woman, and the sleeves and pant legs of the shorty wetsuit were too short on her.

It felt so
wrong
to see her in that wetsuit. Irrevocable, somehow. My face tightened, and I looked away.

She hadn’t asked me why I had a woman’s wetsuit and a second helmet, still wrapped in their clear packaging, sitting in my locker at the marina. She had just accepted them wordlessly when I handed them to her, and gone to put them on. I had bought the wetsuit three years ago, but it had never been worn before tonight.

A third, smaller wetsuit and child’s helmet, unused and still wrapped, also sat collecting dust in my locker. For Amy.

Sensing the change in my mood, Cassie laid her cheek against mine and stroked my hand. “Whatever’s bothering you, please let it go. Look where we
are
right now, Trevor—where you brought me. It’s so beautiful and still, as if we were on another planet, just the two of us. But right now you’re making me feel like I’m all alone.”

I closed my eyes and rolled my neck. She was right. Four years of purgatory was enough. It only got more and more painful as time went by. It was time I stopped deluding myself.

Jen wasn’t coming back.

“Seeing McNulty dead…” Cassie took a deep breath. “It made me realize something. We can die anytime. Life’s too short to torture ourselves about the things we can’t control. Whatever happens tomorrow… however tonight changes things between us… I don’t care. We’ll deal with it. Just please,
be
here
, right now
,
with me, instead of off moping in your head somewhere.”

I nodded and swiveled at the waist to face her. Her eyelids were closed now. Moonlight glinted on her earrings and washed her face in silver. I leaned toward her, and her long, dark lashes slowly slid open.

Her wide eyes were black and bottomless in the moonlight; I could see the pale, bluish whorls and swirls of the Milky Way reflected in them.

“You can’t change what’s past,” she said. “I learned that a long time ago. Just let go of it, Trevor. Let it go.”