Page 79

“Hey,” he said, as I opened the passenger door and dropped in.

“Hey,” I said back. He wasn’t wearing his jacket today, just a short sleeved black T-shirt with some band’s logo. And for some stupid reason I wanted to grin around him even though I knew I shouldn’t, so I went for the most serious conversation topic I could. “How’s your leg? Did you need stitches?”

“No. I had to break into Uncle Jimmy’s field first aid kit for betadine though—I think it’s clean, but it might scar, and I’ve got a hell of a bruise.”

“Oh.” My urge to stupidly grin at him felt even more inappropriate. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be—if you’d been a second slower, I’d be walking with a limp for life.”

A small part of me deep inside leapt a little. “But if you hadn’t been at my house?—”

“Eh. It was my choice to be there.”

It had been. Which was…discomfiting to me. In a good way. “So—where are we going?”

He looked out my window to check for oncoming traffic and flashed me a grin. “You’ll see.”

We drove out of Redson. Old Jessie, who maybe watched too many horror films and had an overactive imagination might have been scared by this turn of events—but New Jessie just really wanted to see where this drive was headed. I rolled down the window halfway and made my hand dance in the air outside. Darius looked over and I felt the car surge forward and I laughed. There was no way we could talk with the air blowing but we didn’t need too—we were driving, away, away, away, with Redson in our rearview mirror. It felt right—and when the car started slowing down, I was sad that our old lives were catching up.

I rolled the window up before he pulled the key out of the ignition, and got out. My hair looked wild in my reflection in the window and I liked it. Everything around us was flat in all directions. A few fields over I could see a water tower withHome of Bison Baseball!andState Championscurved around its sides. Bisons were everywhere, even out here.

“What now?”

“See that tree out there?” he asked, pointing. One field over had a lone tall tree in the middle, oddly geometric, none of its branches waving despite the wind.

“Yeah?”

“That’s where we’re headed,” he said, and then hopped the fence. I followed, glad I’d worn jeans.

There were no cows here currently, but cow-patties were scattered everywhere, like dropped punctuation marks: exclamation points, commas, and periods.

“Okay—what now?” I said as he pulled up short.

“You tell me?—”

I was concentrating so hard on the here and now, on the way he moved in front of me, how I liked that he knew what he wasdoing, and that he wanted to hang with me, dealing with the fact that I knew I had a crush even though it was a stupid-bad idea, unless it wasn’t and then I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to step in any cowshit—I didn’t feel it till we were half-way out.

“Oh. My. God.” I said, and stood still.

“Yeah?” he said, turning, with a grin.

He was haloed by a beaming torch of data flowing behind him.

The tree wasn’t actually a tree—it was an information transfer system of some sort—I could feel the weight of everything passing through it, felt the pull of it bringing data in, like a yawning vortex, and then the shove of it pushing it out again. I felt trapped in between the two extremes, wavering, liminal.

“You okay?” he said. I couldn’t see him anymore, not really.

“I think so. It’s just—so—bright.”

“It’s a cell phone tower. I thought it’d be a good place to try some things. But if you’re not okay?—”

I heard the concern in his voice and tried to make my voice steady. “What’d you want to try?”

“Here.” I saw him turn with the remnants of my normal-sight, heard-felt him take a picture of something, and then heard-felt-saw him send it. “Fetch.”

The information from his phone zipped up into the tower and was about to get away—I lunged for it with my mind and got sucked in.

It was like being a kid again, lost in a big electronic store, one of those huge ones with the blasting air conditioning. I wandered down an endless aisle of floor to ceiling screens, all the TVs shouting down with skipping channels, image after image, crashing like waves on a shore. Sports, elephants, people, nakedflesh—the moment I figured out what anything was, it changed again, and my ears echoed with dissonant sounds: the cheers of crowds, a blare of trumpets, canned laughter, a grunt of pain, the softest moan—and at the bottom of all of these, the image I’d gone searching for—Darius’s photo. I swayed with the effort of catching it.