Nomad (21 page)

Raven needed to learn more about the machines of 2013 before she could access secure servers and change information without leaving a trace. They were almost as foreign to her as the warehouse-sized punch-card computers of 1953.

She'd stocked up on computer science texts and planned to spend her alone time studying routers, servers, and contemporary operating software. She felt confident that she could master the old-fashioned technology in a week or two. While all the Yale students were away on holiday, she would be cramming knowledge into her brain.

Raven opened a thick book on Unix and Unix-based operating systems. She read until she found herself nodding off to sleep.

The next day, she awoke, did her exercises--yogic stretching, handstand push-ups, a flowing series of fighting stances--made coffee, and continued her studies.

For a break, she used a target-training program that was installed in her sunglasses. With her plasma pistol disarmed, she chased three-eyed monsters armed with toy-like pastel cannons. Though they were projected inside her glasses, the illusion was so well-done that the creatures actually seemed to be in her apartment, popping up from doorways and behind furniture to shoot her with pink goop. When she targeted a monster and pulled the trigger on her pistol, it exploded into sizzling green jelly and dissolved. She had a great time chasing the monsters through her apartment. To any observer, she would have looked crazed, running around and shooting her disarmed gun at nothing.

On Thanksgiving Day, New Haven lay quiet and still. Raven indulged in a long walk around town, past one shuttered business after another. There was no traffic on the streets, and very few people were on the sidewalks. The world seemed asleep and dreaming.

Logan and Audra both called to wish her a happy Thanksgiving, which made her feel strange and warm inside. Her personal Thanksgiving feast was tomato soup and a grilled cheese on sourdough bread.

Late Thursday night, Raven began to have the eerie feeling of being watched. She poked around her apartment, checking her crawlspace, Audra's closet, and even the kitchen pantry as though she expected to find someone hiding there. She knew she was acting paranoid, but her difficult life had taught her to trust her feelings of danger.

She looked out through each of her windows until she saw him. He stood in the shadows of the three-story house across the street, wearing black gloves and an overcoat buttoned against the cold wind. A hood obscured his face. He held up a small handheld device, and it looked as though he were snapping pictures of her house. From this distance, in the dark, she couldn't tell whether it was a camera from the year 2013 or a hologram imager from her own time.

She grabbed her sunglasses and drew them on so that she could zoom in and see what he was holding. When she looked out again, though, he was gone like a ghost, and only dead leaves remained where he'd stood.

Raven checked from window to window, turning out lights to make it easier for her to look out and harder for him to see her. If he were a Providence Security agent from the future, it wouldn't make much difference--he could watch her with thermal sensors, looking right through her walls.

She didn't see him anywhere, so she crouched at a living room window with a view of the stairs outside. That was the most obvious way for him to access her apartment, if he intended to do so, but it was not the only way. He could climb up the support posts of the rear balcony on the second floor, or he could use any of the downspouts at the corners of the house, if he wasn't too heavy. She held herself perfectly still and breathed softly, keeping her ears open for the slightest sound.

She waited in her low crouch with the plasma pistol in her hands. She was ready to fight, but the fight never came. After another twenty minutes, she made another round of the apartment, peering out the windows, but she didn't see him at all.

Raven slept lightly that night, with the futon barricading her apartment door and her IKEA desk crammed against her bedroom door. She kept the plasma pistol under her pillow, ready to be activated and fired at a moment's notice.

She spent the rest of the holiday weekend holed up inside her apartment, feeling like a paranoid schizophrenic. She tried her best to concentrate on her computer science textbooks, but she was beginning to feel it might be a pointless effort. If Providence agents had tracked her down, then her secret identity wasn't going to last much longer, anyway.

The light of Sunday morning came as a relief to her. Logan, Audra, and the rest of the world would be returning. She hadn't seen the man outside her apartment again, and no drones or security agents had attacked her. Maybe he hadn't been looking at her house at all, she thought, and she'd just happened to look out at him while feeling spooked. Maybe she had a little more time.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Raven idled in Logan's car at the airport on Sunday afternoon. When Logan emerged rolling his suitcase, she popped the trunk, sprang from the car, and ran to greet him like a long-missed lover.

Logan stiffened and drew back from her, avoiding her attempt at a kiss. He flung his suitcase into the trunk and slammed it closed.

"Logan?" she asked. "What's wrong?"

"Give me the keys." He held out his hand, glaring at her. His jaw muscles flexed and chomped inside his cheek, as though he were barely restraining himself from biting her.

"They're in the car. Logan, talk to me..."

He stalked to the driver's side and slammed the door as he sat down. He shifted out of park, and she realized that he meant to drive off without her.

Raven opened the passenger side and jumped inside as he pulled away from the curb.

"What's happening, Logan?" Raven felt sick. Something had gone very wrong. "Why aren't you talking to me?"

"I don't have anything to say."

"Are you mad at me?"

He snorted, shook his head, and punched the accelerator, charging down the road at twice the speed limit.

"Logan, please, just tell me. I missed you so much--"

"Shut up. You didn't miss me."

"What do you mean? Logan, please." She touched his arm, but he shook her off. "Please talk to me."

"I don't even know you. Everything you say is a lie, so why would I want to talk to you?"

Raven froze. If her cover was blown, her plans were ruined. She didn't know what to do next, and she had no idea what to say. She finally broke the silence.

"Just tell me," she whispered in a quiet, defeated voice.

"My Uncle Henry," he said. "He's always poking into my life, making sure I'm not doing anything that could embarrass my family. Politically, you know. He had a Providence investigation specialist check you out--probably because I wanted to invite you home for Thanksgiving. He knew I was serious about you." Logan gave a barking, humorless laugh that sounded strange from him. "I used to hate when he did things like that, investigate my girlfriends, but now I'm glad. Now I understand why he does it. You're not a student at Albertus Magnus. There is no Riley Falcourt. Everything you said...lies. I could kill you right now."

The wheels in Raven's mind spun at top speed. She was in survival mode.

"I hoped I would be able to tell you myself," she finally said. "I was trying to figure out how to tell you, Logan, but...there just wasn't enough time." She scrambled to come up with a story, anything that would salvage her mission.

"Tell me what? That you're a liar? What do you want from me, anyway? Are you trying to blackmail my family or something? "

"I messed up," she said. "I never meant to contact you at all. I definitely never meant to get involved with you...but I let my feelings for you take over..."

"Your feelings for me." Logan snarled. "Who the hell are you?"

"If I told you, you wouldn't believe me."

"That's true. I don't believe anything you say."

"I have to show you. When we get to my place, I can explain everything."

"Save time, tell me now."

"We're almost there. You're really great at driving this fast, you know that? You could be a stunt driver, seriously," Raven said.

He smiled--just a little, but it was there.

As Raven led him up to her apartment, she scanned the area for any sign of the suspicious man from a few nights earlier. She wondered if that had been the investigator sent by Henry Sheffield to study her--a Providence Security agent from the present rather than the future.

She led Logan into her apartment.

"Wait here in the living room," she told him. "It has more projection space."

"More what?"

Raven continued on into her room, where she opened the small door in her wall, shoved her dirty laundry aside, and opened her safe. She backed out of the crawlspace with the data cube in her hand.

She heard a floorboard creak. Logan stood in her bedroom doorway, his arms crossed, watching her.

"You keep your secrets in there," he said. "That's why you didn't want me poking around."

"At the time, I was actually more embarrassed about my dirty clothes. Let's go to the living room." She held up the data cube.

"What is that?" he asked. "One of those evil boxes from
Hellraiser
?"

"Good guess." Raven activated the cube, and a blank blue sphere appeared in the air above it. A cloud of tiny, three-dimensional icons appeared orbiting the sphere.

"What?" Logan leaned toward the data cube for a closer look. "What is this? Who do you work for, Riley?"

After a moment, the living room vanished, replaced by a city street littered with rubble, gaping holes blasted in the buildings, dead traffic lights swinging from loose wires. A row of men in black armor and matching face shields advanced over the rubble, firing white plasma bolts, backed by a convoy of sleek urban tanks and assault trucks. Ragtag revolutionaries shot back lasers and rapid-fire projectiles from scattered positions among the ruins.

Logan shouted when he found himself in the crossfire. He leaped to the pavement and covered his head. After a moment, he looked up at her from where he lay, watching bullets and white fire shoot through Raven as the battle escalated.

"This asphalt feels a lot like the carpet in your living room," he said.

"It's all holograms," Raven said. "You're safe."

"Yeah, thanks for the warning," he told her. He stood up, looking around in awe. "It looks so real."

"It is real," she said. "It will be. This was recorded in downtown Los Angeles in the year 2061."

Logan looked at her, looked at the scene projected all around him, then looked at her again. "You said the year..."

"2061. Lots of cities in America will look like this in the future."

He stared at her for a long moment. "So...the future? And that would make you..."

"A time traveler," she said.

"Yeah, right." He passed a hand through a security agent's plasma rifle. "This is pretty amazing stuff, though."

"I'm telling you the truth. Fifty years from now, the country will be ruled by a terrible, oppressive regime. A dictatorship. Look at the logo on that agent's armor." Raven paused the scene.

Logan frowned as he studied the golden eye-in-pyramid emblem that marked every set of power armor and every fighting vehicle.

"That's our logo," he said. "Providence Security. But the company is just a bunch of middle-aged security guards running metal detectors at the DMV or the Indiana tax office, you know? We don't have anything like this!"

"You will. You'll expand massively, like Henry Sheffield predicted. War contracts. An army of mercenaries, fighting to make you rich." Raven called up dozens of pictures of Logan from different moments in his life--baby pictures, graduation pictures, pictures and video from his future, showing him at different ages across the decades. "You'll run for Senate and win. You'll run for President and lose by a narrow, contested margin, with talk of voter fraud and electoral manipulation on both sides. The economy will be bad, people will be angry and desperate."

"What is this, age-progression software? I'm not going to look that ugly, am I?" Logan said.

"This is real, Logan. Here's the woman who beat you."

A hologram of Regina Vasquez at a podium appeared, floating in a corner of the room. It was taken in the year 2048, when she was governor of Montana and a candidate for President. Her deep brown skin, fiery red hair, and green eyes reflected her Latin-Irish heritage.

"For too long, the megacorporations have held a stranglehold over Washington, enriching themselves with trillions of dollars in public money while the American people suffer," she said. "They rob the taxpayer, gouge the consumer, cheat the worker, and poison our environment! This administration and this Congress have filled the trough of a few megacorporations while a hundred million Americans suffer in poverty. I say, enough is enough! It's time for the American people to take back their country. It's time for an economy with opportunity for all, not just the trillionaires at the very top!" She pointed her finger toward the ceiling. An unseen crowd erupted in cheers and applause, then began chanting "Enough is enough! Enough is enough!"

"No wonder I lost against her," Logan said.

"You were expected to win, actually," Raven said, pausing the hologram. "But she was right. Just six megacorps controlled most of the economy--finance, utilities, media, lots of times with special grants of monopoly or exclusivity by the state...it's not important. What's important is that you were their pick, you had the big money behind you, the powerful interests. She was a dark horse candidate everybody ignored at first, but she had a history of reform that brought her popular support. She rode the grassroots-and-social-media thing all the way to the White House.

"Then the heads of the megacorps decided that she was such a threat, they couldn't wait a few years and gamble on the next election. They decided they couldn't trust the American voter, either, so maybe it was time to overhaul the system into something that worked more efficiently for them."

"Overhaul what system?" Logan asked. He looked incredulous, but she clearly had his attention. Raven hoped her new approach would work.