Broken Mirror (25 page)

Victor continued to the exit. The moon shone down on the mostly empty parking lot, casting shadows, creating places for strangers to hide and watch. Where were Pearl and Tosh? He wished he could do something to help them, but the only thing he could do was save himself.

He made it to his car and knocked on the driver’s side window. “I’m driving.”

Elena smiled and scooted over, “Sure, boss. Where are we going?”

Victor sat in the driver’s seat and shut the door. “Back to your lodge to drop you off.”

She shook her head. “No way. You’re not going anywhere without me. Tell me your plans.”

The moonlight from across the marshlands lit her face in eerie blue tones. “I think it’s better if I don’t,” he said.

“Victor—”

“Those people might come back.” He hooked a thumb behind him, toward the towers of Oakland, its hills topped by brightly lit mansions, and the dark-shadowed cemetery where Jefferson Eastmore’s body lay exposed. “Better if you don’t know anything.”

Elena crossed her arms. “It’s not better. It’s a terrible idea. What if you get into trouble and no one knows where to go looking for you? Are you headed back to Little Asia?” Across the bay, the fog layer hovering over the peninsula was lit with a dull red glow.

He shook his head. “I’m leaving.”

“
Leaving
leaving? As in, leaving SeCa?” A goofy smile spread across her face. “That’s wonderful.”

Victor looked around at the BioScan parking lot. Why would it be wonderful to leave? Everything he knew was in SeCa
—
his family, his job. “How is that wonderful?”

“It’s what I’ve been saying all along. You’re better off somewhere else
—
anywhere else. I’m coming with you.”

“You’re not.”

“Come on, we can leave from here. I’ll pick up whatever I need somewhere along the way. I travel light.”

“But you don’t even know where we’re going!”

“I’m not worried. You can’t keep a secret for more than a few minutes. Not from me.” The corner of her mouth formed a smirk. “I’m not getting out of the car. You might as well drive.”

She was right. She knew him better than anyone. Maybe now, a friend was the best thing he could hope for since everything else in his life was going topsy-turvy. He’d always been able to hold himself together much better when she was around. He just hoped that he could trust her.

He said, “All right, we leave now, but I don’t think we should drive all night.”

Elena shrugged. “You’re driving. You choose the turns.”

They drove along the Bayshore road and then cut inland to the expressway. Skyscrapers glittered in the moonlight. Forested hills formed silhouettes against the silver-hazed sky. Ohlone Hill stood apart from the others like a duckling that had wandered away from the brood.

Oakland & Bayshore’s northern border grew closer. The capital wall, topped with razor wire and floodlights, came into view. It had been there since the Asian Refugee Act mandated the forcible removal of Asian immigrants and their children to the slums of San Francisco and the farming towns of Long Valley
—
anywhere except the nation’s capital of Oakland & Bayshore.

Guard posts dotted the full length of the wall, which extended into the bay shallows for half a kilometer. Beyond, a tent city sprawled in the marshy flats, a chaotic jumble of narrow, jagged lanes and rickety shacks. Cooking fires flickered dimly. The mess continued unbroken from the shoreline to the elevated expressway, a wide viaduct of lanes extending along the Bayshore hills.

Victor slowed the car in advance of the security checkpoint. The lanes narrowed, and dividers rose. He and Elena were waved through at once. He knew the checkpoint was mainly intended to control traffic and prevent refugees from entering the Bayshore region, but passing unquestioned was still a relief.

They crossed the Bayshore Narrows Bridge, which arced across a channel of water that marked the northern border of the Bayshore region. Boats carried lumber, rock, and other materials west toward the bay’s wide expanse. They emerged onto a moonlit plain. He kept checking the rearview mirror to make sure they weren’t being followed.

After about sixty kilometers, Victor took a turnoff that degraded to a gravel drive and then a rutted dirt path, undoubtedly a little-used route between one field of desiccated alfalfa and another. He pulled behind a tree and turned the car around so that he could speed back to the highway if necessary. No car could approach them without being visible for at least a half mile.

They reclined their seats and shared a single thermal blanket.

Victor’s sleep was fitful. When the sun rose, he started the car, jolting along the road. Elena woke up after the first few bumps.

In a thick, sleep-slurred voice, she said, “Let’s find a town so I can get a few things. Toothpaste. Some clothes. An air freshener.”

The SeCa Long Valley stretched around them. For a brief span in the seventies, the combination of good soil and a burgeoning workforce of impoverished Asians deported from Oakland & Bayshore wrought a green miracle and enabled SeCa to feed its own and export to other nations.

Then the eight-year drought came. The snow pack vanished from the mountains. Streams slipped beneath the gravel and clay. The Long Valley baked and hardened. Many starved.

After eight years, the rains returned with a vengeance, though snow was still a rarity. On a clear day it was possible to look across the plains and see the Sierras, but today the dew in the air hid everything except monotonous scrublands and dwindling Long Valley farms. It was flat, empty, and desolate
—
the dried-up core of Semiautonomous California.

Elena grimaced.
“Reminds me of the Republic of Texas,” she said.

“What’s it like there?” Victor asked.

“Rotten.” She didn’t elaborate.

They reached a small town where delicatessens, fruit stands, and used bric-a-brac shops lined the street.

Elena pointed. “Stop there.”

Victor parked along the main road. On either side, small shops leaned into their wood frames. Elena disappeared inside one. Victor found a bakery that sold breakfast sandwiches and faux-café. He paid, waited a few uncomfortable minutes under the smiling eyes of the gray-haired proprietress, collected his order, and took it outside.

He found a rough concrete plaza with shrubs and flowering orange poppies in planter boxes leading to a small grassy park. A few parents tried to corral their running, screaming children. An old couple, both wearing large sun hats, sat on a bench and watched the world go by. Several people squatted next to blankets on which cheap devices, books, and kitchen supplies were laid out for sale.

Egg and pork smells escaped from the bag, and his stomach rumbled, but he resolved to wait for Elena to eat. On a normal day, it would be time for his morning dose of Personil. He reminded himself to drink a tincture before they resumed driving.

Buildings painted bright pink and green surrounded the plaza, but their metal downspouts were blacked with soot. Victor realized the area was the footprint of a building that had burned to the ground.

A wave of dizziness came over him, and he closed his eyes.

Someone bumped into Victor, and he lurched forward. The bag leaped from his hands onto the ground.

Off balance, Victor teetered. He flailed and grabbed the person’s jacket to keep from falling, coming face-to-face with a middle-aged man. His weathered face pinched. Wiry black hairs ringed a large bald patch on the man’s head.

“Watch where you’re going!” the man said, pushing Victor away.

The world was spinning. Victor leaned forward, hands on his knees to steady himself. “You ran into
me
.”

The man grabbed Victor by the shoulder. “What did you say?”

Pressure built in Victor’s face. Blankness flowed into him. He couldn’t tell left from right. “Leave me alone!” he said.

The man sneered. “You’re a Broken Mirror, ain’t ya?”

Victor began whispering Dr. Tammet’s calming mantra.
The wise owl listens—

Victor felt a shove in his chest and a sense of falling as blankness took him.

My work focused on using techniques to understand and interpret others’ emotions, such as facial expression color-coding and mind-body synchrony techniques. The goal was to help Victor contain and minimize resonant episodes and achieve cognitive and emotional stability. The techniques I taught him worked, but the effort required to employ them successfully was tremendous. They required depths of willpower and endurance that most people don’t have.

I never focused explicitly on suppressing violent tendencies. I viewed those as ephemeral fight-or-flight reactions rather than symptoms of the underlying disorder. His later actions can only be explained by how his responses to external events evolved over an extended period, the details of which I obviously have no knowledge of.

—Statement by Dr. Laura Tammet, the Eastmore family’s neuroscience advisor (1998)

Standing alone outside a grocery store in the tiny farm town of Gaobeidan, Elena held a MeshBit to her ear. “We’re in Long Valley,” she said to Bandit. She felt as if she were betraying Victor, but Bandit and his female partner, Lucky, were only trying to help.

Bandit said, “You shouldn’t have let him leave Oakland.” He sounded annoyed and gruff. He’d been all smooth talk and charm when she first met him. Something had changed. He said, “Stay where you are. We’ll meet you there.”

Elena’s back stiffened. She wasn’t going to take orders from anyone. Besides, Victor had to leave SeCa. She could see his life unraveling by the day. She had to help him save what he could of his sanity. “No. We’re heading
—
I mean, we won’t stop again, I don’t think.”

Bandit and Lucky had seemed normal the first time they came to her, very professional, setting up check-in times to coordinate their schedules and keep track of Victor’s movements. They claimed the Eastmores were simply putting money on the table to make sure Victor didn’t get into trouble. They spoke about his boss, Karine, and his ma, Linda, with a familiarity that would be hard to fake. She’d agreed to keep an eye on Victor because she believed everyone had his best interests at heart, and she had taken on working with Lucky and Bandit as part of the job.

A string of coincidences made Elena second-guess everything. Victor had flipped out at the funeral and found evidence of radiation exposure. He’d gone to see an herbalist who then disappeared. His reclassification got moved up. Something about the whole situation stank.

Then last night Lucky and Bandit had showed up at her room and raged at her, clearly amped on some kind of drug, so they weren’t the professionals they’d pretended to be. If they were tied to the Eastmores, as they claimed, they might have had an opportunity to poison Jeff Eastmore. Victor said two people had kidnapped his herbalist
—
that could have been them as well.

Elena felt paranoid. She wanted to tell Victor everything, but she knew his reaction wouldn’t be good. She didn’t want to send him completely over the edge.

“Where are you headed?” Bandit asked.

She gnawed on her lower lip, deciding how much truth to feed Bandit. “Victor wants to leave SeCa.”

“We’ll catch up before then,” Bandit said, now sounding unconcerned. “Just don’t let him go alone.”

Elena paced along the grimy sidewalk. “Tell me again exactly what your goal is here.”

“Same as yours. To keep him safe. That includes keeping him safe from himself. Which is going to be difficult until we bring him back to Oakland. You need to help us do that.”

Shouting erupted from the small plaza where she’d left Victor. “I’ve got to go,” she said and terminated the feed.

Elena pushed into a buffer of onlookers and spotted Victor standing at the center of the commotion. Bad situations seemed to arise wherever Victor went, yet he never stopped fighting, never gave up. He was the toughest person she knew. That’s why it crushed her to see him this way.

Victor stood still while a salt-and-pepper-haired man strutted and crowed around him, poking his stomach, flicking his ear. Victor shied away each time the man prodded him but made no effort to evade the abuse. When she saw Victor’s eyes
—
focused but empty
—
she knew he’d gone blank.

Elena dropped two wax paper bags that held clothes, water bottles, and snacks for the road, and elbowed her way to the inner edges of the crowd.

The crowd jeered and laughed at something. The man asked, “Should I?” He held his hand against Victor’s crotch, saying “Anyone want to see what happens?”

Elena felt heat in her face, charged at the man, and knocked him on his butt.

Elena hesitated. No doubt the man deserved a throttling, but he could cause a lot of problems. They were already doing a terrible job of remaining inconspicuous. She pulled Victor away, sat him down, and whispered his silly owl and cuckoo mantra. He began to blink and look around.

Elena knelt down next to the man and, reaching into her pocket, quickly estimated the thickness of about $200 in bills, pulled them out, and held them in front of the man’s eyes. “You get to keep this if you stand up and quietly walk away. No harm, no alarm. Deal?” she asked.

The man grabbed the money. “He your pet freak?”

Elena pressed her lips together. It didn’t matter what he said. She and Victor were leaving.

A few onlookers gawked. Elena rose and stared them down until they turned away. The man rose to his feet.

Victor sat a few paces away, conscious again, blinking and gaping at the bills the man held. “Why’d you give him money?” he asked. “What did I do?”

Elena stepped toward Victor and lifted him up. “Nothing. Let’s go.” She hoisted her shopping bags and led Victor toward the car.

He planted his feet. “Tell me, Ellie.”

“Forget about it. Come on. We’re still in SeCa, remember? We’ve got to keep moving.”

“Where did you get that much money?” Victor asked.

Elena paused. He didn’t need to know that his family was paying for her companionship. Besides, she would have done it for much less. She wished she could explain it to Victor, but clearly this wasn’t the right time.