The Split Second (28 page)
Whereas the effects of Shan’s exposure seemed to have run their course, the Essence had not finished wreaking havoc upon Jackal’s body. He struggled to remove the rest of the Sleeve, but even shedding himself of the soaked clothing didn’t seem to stop the aging process at all.
“Surely there’s something we can do . . . ,” Shan’s eyes asked Becker, but all the Fixer could do was shake his head, while beneath her blanket, the Briefer began to cry. Not for the twelve years that were gone, but for the man who was losing his life because he had saved hers.
“Becker . . .” Jackal willed himself forward and staggered down a thin strip of dirt that led from the center of the Field to the edge of the glass. “Get me my Toolkit.”
The old Toolmaster 44, scarred and weathered from a long life of service, sat on the floor outside the Containment Field. As Becker hopped the ten feet down and dragged the leather saddlebag over to the glass, he could not look Shan in the eyes, because he didn’t want her to see what was about to pour out of his.
“Bring it over here, boy.” Jackal’s voice was getting raspy and weak, so Becker had to lean in close to hear him.
“I know you’re wondering how I could have left my family, knowing that I would never see them again.” Becker shook his head no, but Jackal saw through it. “They wouldn’t let me stay—not knowing what would happen to The World and that I had the power to stop it. They forced me through that Door.”
With the crooked finger of a ninety-year-old man, Jackal feebly pointed to a pouch on the side of his Toolkit.
“I brought something to show you.”
Becker unsnapped the pouch and there was only one item inside. It was a small Polaroid photo of the Jackals—Tom, Rhianna, and their children—piled on top of one another in a heaping mound of snow.
“I told you it was real, Becker.” Despite his age, Jackal’s eyes burned as brightly as they ever had. “It was all real.”
Becker Drane forced a smile because he wanted the last moment of this great man’s life to be a happy one.
“Don’t feel bad for us, son, because our love will survive anything.” The Fixer willed his lungs to draw one final breath. “And I know I’ll see them in A Better—”
With that, Tom Jackal leaned his tired head against the side of the glass, and right before Becker’s eyes, crumbled into dust.
29
. Though Superstition, a sub-department of the Department of Everything That Has No Department, is believed to be close to breaking the stranglehold of the number thirteen, usage of the cursed integer is still not recommended.
30
. “A stitch in time saves nine.”
Alton Forest, Caledon, Ontario
Jennifer Kaley stood beneath the fortress of Les Resistance and looked up at the night sky, disappointed. The distinct feeling she’d had ever since a mammoth tree smashed to the forest floor had mysteriously vanished without a trace. It wasn’t the most pleasant sensation—a mix of chills, goose bumps, and nausea—but now that it was gone, Jennifer almost missed it. Like hiccups.
“Hello?” No one was allowed in the park after dusk (including JK) but she could’ve sworn she heard a footstep. “Is anybody out there?”
The woods had seemed almost enchanted when she returned to this spot, but now that magic hour had passed, and with it the promise of something extraordinary, she felt more than a little bit frightened.
“Marco?” The crunching through the leaves seemed to be getting closer, and judging by the rhythmic “pit-pat,” they were not the tracks of a deer or chipmunk. Jennifer waited expectantly for the “Polo” in return, but all that echoed back were footsteps that were growing in frequency and pace.
“C’mon, you guys. This isn’t funny.”
But then it hit her that none of her fellow club members knew that she was still in Alton. In fact, no one knew that she was—not her parents, not her friends, and not the rangers who had closed up the park for the night. The sounds of the forest rose up like a choir and the night seemed to turn even darker, and Jennifer couldn’t take it anymore. She had to make a run for it . . .
Back through the brushes, over the waterfall, and around the rock formations she went. All kinds of terrible images flashed through her head, of other girls she’d seen on the news and stories people always told at school, and this only prompted her to move faster—until suddenly the footsteps stopped in their tracks. For standing in front of her was a boy about her age, with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder and a badge on his chest.
“Jennifer?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s me, Becker.” The boy stepped farther into the pale moonlight, and even though she’d only seen it once, almost a year ago, Jennifer immediately recognized his face. “Becker Drane.”
If Becker was hoping for a soldier’s reunion, he didn’t quite get it. Not because Jennifer wasn’t ecstatic to see him, but because she was convinced this had to be another dream. She looked the soon-to-be eighth grader up and down, his outfit only confirming that this was definitely a night vision or a hallucination from working too hard on the fort and not drinking enough water.
“Are you one of those dream-stalkers I read about in
Omni
?” Jennifer asked, figuring that since she had to be in an alternate reality, she could pretty much say anything she wanted.
“No,” Becker returned. “This time it isn’t a dream, it’s real. Look.”
Becker took a few steps closer before he realized the girl was truly scared. But she let him pinch her arm anyway.
“So?” She was still a lot more than doubtful. “I can get pinched in a dream and it’s still a dream.”
“Here.” He threw the girl his Blinker. “Digital clocks don’t work in dreams.”
Jennifer studied the weird device, which was not exactly a digital clock and not the kind of object one might use to prove that everything is as it should be, but the accurate time and date onscreen at least gave her pause. She looked Becker up and down, then pinched herself one more time.
“Ouch.” A little too hard. “So wait—if you’re really here”— Jennifer was starting to accept the fact that he was—“then are you telling me that everything that happened last time in my dream was . . . real?”
“Um . . .” It wasn’t totally lost on Becker that he was in grave violation of the Rules. Not just the Rule Against Using the In-Between for Personal Transport, not just the Rule of Thumb, not just the Keep Your Mouth Shut Rule, but the granddaddy of ’em all (and the one he’d recently promised not to break)—the Golden Rule. But after all that had happened tonight, he didn’t really care.
“Yes.”
For the next few minutes Becker spilled the beans and Jennifer picked them up, one by one. The Fixer let her look inside his Toolkit, showed her the Mission Report that explained “the bizarre incident of the falling tree,” even led her to the locked and rusty Door on the side of the park ranger’s hut, which he had used to make the journey here. By the time the two finally sat down on a hollow log in a patch of ferns, Jennifer was in the state of catatonia that can only come from finding out that everything you thought was real—including the very world in which you lived—was actually not what you thought at all.
“So you’re saying that the feeling I’ve had all day was my 7
th
Sense?”
“Yeah.” Becker nodded. “And if you were feeling it that strongly, you should totally fill out a Seemsian Aptitude Test. I bet they’d accept you at the IFR in a flash.”
“Being a Fixer sounds pretty cool.” Jennifer thought it over for a second. “But I think I’d rather be one of those people who try to help everyone on their way . . .”
“You mean a Case Worker?”
“Yeah. That seems like a totally sweet job.”
“Totally. I’ll see if I can put in a good word with Human Resources.”
All around them, the crickets chirped in the night.
“There’s one more thing I don’t understand . . .” Jennifer looked at Becker with whatever suspicion she still had left. “How come you came here?”
“I . . . um . . . I just had a really hard day at work . . .” Becker’s thoughts were running together. There was so much he wanted to say—about Tom Jackal, about Thibadeau Freck, about Amy Lannin, even about how he had followed Jennifer’s progress against his better judgment. But the moment he tried to talk, the weight of The World that he’d been carrying on his shoulders all day, and perhaps all year, finally broke.
“What is it? What did I say?”
“Nothing,” Becker reassured her, beyond embarrassed that he was bawling his eyes out in front of her. “It’s me, not you.”
Jennifer gave him some space to just be where he was, because she hated it when her mom or dad interrupted her when she just wanted to cry and get it out of her system.
“I wish I had a Toolkit, so I could give
you
something,” Jennifer offered, and even though she didn’t, it was the thought that counted to the Fixer.
“Back to your question . . .” Becker rubbed his nose on his sleeve and found his composure. “Remember when we had the Dream and hung out at the Point of View and talked about the Plan?”
“Of course I remember.” In fact, Jennifer could still feel the wind on her face, hear the seagulls, and see the single sculler who had waved to the two of them as he rowed by on the Stream of Consciousness below.
“Well,” Becker continued, “a lot of stuff has happened since then . . . and I’m just not sure if what I told you is true anymore.”
“About The Seems?”
“No, not that.” Becker knew that certain things were definitely true. “Just that there’s a Plan and that everything that happens in it is good. Because I’m starting to think that the Plan—if there even is one—isn’t so great.”
“I don’t know, Becker.” Jennifer smiled at the irony of this situation, for it was the Fixer who had first convinced her to look at the glass half full. “After that dream, I woke up the next day and I tried to do what you said—to pretend that The World was a magical place and there was a Plan—and before I knew it, everything started to look different.”
This made Becker happy, because he had never really gotten a full report as to whether the Dream he had helped design for Jennifer had actually worked. But that feeling quickly faded.
“A friend of mine died tonight,” he confessed. “Somebody I cared a lot about.”
“I’m sorry, Becker.”
“Me too. And it’s really hard for me to believe it was a good thing.”
They just sat there for a little bit, looking up at the stars, both of them thinking they should probably say something else but not sure what that something else was. Jennifer finally broke the silence.
“So that’s why you came here? To talk about the Plan and stuff?”
“Not really.”
Becker didn’t want to come off as creepy, but he had already come clean about The Seems, so he went out on a limb.
“Um, I don’t think we talked about this in the Dream, but Fixers have this thing called a Mission Inside the Mission. It’s kind of like a little story or a person that you keep in your mind when you’re Fixing. So you don’t get really freaked out about the fact that you’re trying to save the whole World . . .”
“That makes sense.”
“Well, I . . . after our last . . . meeting . . . I kind of followed along about how you were doing in your school, just to make sure you were doing okay. And since then, when I go on a job . . . my Mission Inside the Mission, is, um . . . it’s you.”
Jennifer didn’t quite know what to say. She had definitely thought that Becker was cute when he had visited her in the Dream, but back then, she was so wrapped up in her own issues that she had never really thought much about it. (Not to mention she didn’t think he was a real person.) Seeing him again tonight, with his shaggy hair and tear-stained face, basically worn down to nothing by the craziness of work, stress, school, family, and other worlds, she couldn’t help but move a little bit closer to Becker on the log.
“That’s cool. I’ve never been anybody’s Mission Inside their Mission before.”
They both laughed nervously, then looked away.
“I, uh, guess we better get going,” said Becker.
Jennifer knew that he was right and that it was getting way too late to be out here in the middle of the woods. But before she pedaled home to beat the missing persons report her mom and dad would soon be filing, she decided to do something she’d never done before. Sure, she’d practiced it in the upper reaches of her imagination, and when it happened to girls in the movies, she always wondered if it could possibly be that perfect and romantic in real life.