World After (14 page)

“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.”

S
OMETIMES
,
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.

W
E
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.

I slide into the passenger seat.

“Sorry,” says Clara as she slips into the driver’s seat.

I nod.

And that’s the end of that ugly topic.

She turns on the engine and we head north again slowly toward San Francisco.

“Why are you here, Clara? My mom and I aren’t exactly the best traveling mates.”

She drives in silence for a while. “I may have lost faith in humanity. Maybe they’re right to exterminate us.”

“What does that have to do with you traveling with us?”

“You’re a hero. I’m hoping you’ll restore my faith and show me that we’re worth saving.”

“I am so not a hero.”

“You saved my life back at the aerie. By definition, you’re my hero.”

“I left you in a basement to die.”

“You broke me out of the grasp of a living horror when I thought all hope was gone. You gave me the opportunity to crawl back to life when no one else could.”

She glances over at me, her eyes shining in the dark. “You’re a hero, Penryn, whether you like it or not.”

M
Y
MOTHER
mutters nonstop at the receiver. Her voice turns into a cadence, and it creeps me out that it’s the same cadence as when she prays. Because this time, she’s addressing the devil.

It’s slow going weaving through dead cars in the dark but we manage. We follow the same route that Raffe and I had when we drove into the city. Only this time, there’s no one on the road. No refugees, no twelve-year-olds driving cars, no tent cities. Just mile after mile of empty streets, newspapers tumbling along the sidewalks, and abandoned cell phones crunching under our tires.

Where are the people? Are they hiding out behind the dark windows of the buildings? Even after the aerie attack, I can’t imagine that everyone left the city.

I find myself stroking the soft fur of the stuffed bear. There’s something especially eerie about the deserted city streets and something especially reassuring about having a kick-ass sword hanging around my shoulders, even if it is disguised as a stuffed toy.

In a couple of hours, we find ourselves working our way toward the piers.

We crest a hill in the dead of night. San Francisco should be a city bustling with sparkling lights, motion, and noise. I used to look forward to and dread coming here at the same time because of all the sensory overload. I almost always got lost wandering around the windy streets the few times I visited with friends or my dad.

Now, it’s a wasteland.

The waning moon drips some light onto overturned trash cans and scurrying rats, but the city is so sooty from the raging fires during the Great Attack that it absorbs more light than seems possible. The once-beautiful city has become a nightmare landscape.

Mom surveys the land with a jaded eye. It’s as if she always knew it would be like this. As if she had seen things like this her whole life.

But even she takes in a breath at the sight of Alcatraz Island.

Alcatraz is notorious for being the jail that held the most infamous criminals. It sits in the bay, glowing dimly under the moonlight reflecting off the water.

It must have its own generator that someone has fired up. The Alcatraz lights aren’t pinpoints of welcoming sparkles. Instead, there’s a dull, heavy glow that permeates the island, just enough for it to be visible in the dark bay.

And just bright enough for us to see the swarm of unnaturally shaped creatures swirling in the air above it.

Mom glances at the blinking on her receiver. She points to Alcatraz.

“There,” she says. “Paige is there.”

Great. How did she get all the way over here in such a short time? Can she really run that fast, or did someone drive or fly her there?

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

At least the angels didn’t have the sense of humor to take over the neighboring Angel Island instead. That’s something Raffe probably would have done if he had been in charge.

Clara parks our car at a random angle on the street, trying to blend in. I grab the binoculars as we get out. We’re on Pier 39 near Fisherman’s Wharf. In the World Before, it was a major tourist attraction crammed full of T-shirt shops, candy stores, and open fish markets.

“My girls used to love this place,” says Clara. “Every Sunday we’d come here for lunch. The girls thought it was such a treat to eat clam chowder in a bread bowl and watch the sea lions. This place was like happiness in a bottle for them.” She gazes out with a bittersweet look in her eyes.

The sea lions are still here, at least. I can hear them barking somewhere near the water. They’re the only things familiar, though.

The docks are skewed and broken like toothpick structures. Many of the buildings have collapsed into piles of driftwood. It looks like the fires didn’t reach this area but the angry water sure did.

The fierce surf from the worldwide tsunamis was dampened before reaching into the bay, but that didn’t stop the damage. It only kept this part of the city from being swamped and utterly destroyed.

There’s a ship lying on its side on the street. Another one sticks out from the roof of a demolished building.

Splinters the size of redwood trees are everywhere. Too bad angels aren’t killed like vampires. We could lure them here and have a field day.

There’s a surprisingly intact cruise liner docked in the water. I want to run over, take it across to the island, and yell out for Paige. Instead, I huddle behind a pile of broken crates where I can see but not be seen.

I peer through the binoculars at Alcatraz.

The things swirling in the night sky above the island are too dark to see in detail, but I can make out their silhouettes against the moonlit sky.

The shapes of men.

Wings.

Fat scorpion tails.

W
HAT
AT
FIRST
looked like a chaotic swarm turns out to be an ordered flight pattern.

Sort of.

Most of the scorpions follow an angel as he rises, then banks, then dives. The scorpions follow him around like baby birds. Most of them, anyway.

Some lag so far behind that they almost get in the angel’s way as he goes through his flight routine. And it is a routine. He repeats his flight pattern to stay near the island. He varies it here and there but it’s mostly a predictable pattern.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s teaching them to fly.

Baby birds are taught to fly and baby dolphins are taught to breathe air. Maybe baby monsters need to be taught how to be monster-like. Usually, babies are taught by their mothers, but these things don’t have mothers.

The angel is doing a poor job of teaching, though. Several of the scorpions are struggling. Even I can see that a few of them are flapping their wings too fast. They’re not hummingbirds and they’re likely to tire out or give themselves a heart attack, assuming they have a heart.