The Lost Gate (16 page)

“What did you see?” Danny asked.

“It's what I didn't see,” said Eric.

“And what was that?”

“You.” Eric grinned. “Neat trick, turning invisible like that.”

“Is that what I did?” asked Danny.

“That's what I saw,” said Eric. “Come on, you can tell me. The whole way here to DC from Lexington, you were holding out on me, you owe me now.”

This irritated Danny. “I think we're about even. You got more from begging
with
me than you usually do without me. And you kept all the money.”

“I shared the food,” said Eric.

“I earned my share of the food. Nobody owes anybody anything.”

“Yeah, I think you do,” said Eric. “For instance, what if I tell the cops about you?”

“Are we five years old?” asked Danny. “ ‘Do what I say or I'll tell Mom'?”

“I think there are some government agencies that would love to study you.”

So maybe Eric wasn't a friend after all. Then again, his life had been all about hustling, turning anything he could to his advantage. All Danny had to do was let him see how little hold he had over Danny, and that old cooperative big-brother attitude was bound to come back.

“See, that's not going to happen,” said Danny.

“You think it's not?”

“First,” said Danny, “who's gonna believe you when you tell them all about this kid you met in Lexington? What are you going to tell them about me?”

“You can turn invisible.”

“Yeah, they always listen to teenage beggars who tell them stories about invisible kids. They got a whole department full of agents who investigate claims like that.”

“All right,” said Eric, dismissing the whole idea with a wave.

“Plus, if you gave it about three seconds' thought, you'd see a huge hole in the idea of turning me over to the government.”

“What?”

“Three seconds,” said Danny.

“Don't screw with me, kid.”

Danny counted to three on his fingers.

“All right,” said Eric again. “All you'd do is turn invisible and they'd never be able to get you. But what if they surprised you and got handcuffs on you? What good does it do you to be invisible if you've got handcuffs on?”

“And that's the third thing,” said Danny. “I have never, not for one second, been invisible.”

“I know what I saw.”

“You did not see an invisible kid,” said Danny.

Eric was about to say something scornful when Danny held up three fingers and began the count again.

“What were you if you weren't invisible?” demanded Eric.

“Not what, but
where,
” said Danny.

“Oh,” said Eric. “You weren't there-but-invisible, you were visible-but-not-there.”

“And as for telling you,” said Danny, “would you have believed me? And what if somebody overheard me as I told you? We were always around people.”

“So if you can just go away, why didn't you split when I surprised you here?”

“I thought about it,” said Danny. “But I decided that even though you ditched
me
just because I wanted to see all the tourist stuff on the Mall, I wasn't the kind of guy who ditches a friend.”

Eric rolled his eyes at first, then closed them, nodded, and stuck out his hand. “Okay, man. Friends.”

“Well, I know
I'm
a good friend. But you just got through threatening to turn me over to the cops or the government. How do I know I can count on
you
?”

“I didn't have to bring you with me in the first place,” said Eric. “And I also didn't have to follow you up and down the Mall, Lincoln to Washington to the Capitol.”

“Why didn't you just come walk with me instead of stalking me?” asked Danny.

“Can we just drop it?” said Eric. “I was worried about you.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought.”

“What did you think?”

“That you
care
about me.”

“Okay, now's when I puke,” said Eric.

“So you aren't going to try to boss me around?” asked Danny.

“Of course I am,” said Eric. “It's just not going to work.”

“As long as you know that.”

“We decide stuff together,” said Eric.

“Works for me,” said Danny.

“But first you have to tell me how this thing works, this thing you do.”

“And there we are, back to ‘have to.' ”

“How can I figure out how to turn it to our advantage if I don't know how it works?”

“
Our
advantage?” asked Danny.

“Friends and partners, aren't we?” said Eric. “You didn't mind using the stuff
I
knew how to do. Can you teach me to do that? Disappear and reappear somewhere else?”

“In a word—no.”

“Can't or won't?” asked Eric.

“I'm still trying to figure it out myself,” said Danny.

“So when you disappeared from here, and then came back, where did you go?”

“Into the library,” said Danny.

“What, you were having a library emergency? Jonesing for a book?”

“Needed the restroom,” said Danny.

“So that's really where you went?” asked Eric.

“Really.”

Eric studied his face. Seemed satisfied. “Well, there you are. You can go through walls.”

“Of course I can,” said Danny.

“Why ‘of course'?” said Eric. “Why would I know you could go through walls?”

“Okay,
not
of course. But yes, I can go inside buildings and leave buildings the same way. Without doors.”

“Do you make holes in the walls?”

“No,” said Danny. “It's a
gate.
”

“Please stop talking like you think this is stuff any idiot would know,” said Eric.

“Sorry,” said Danny.

“How far does it work? How far can you go?”

“I don't know,” said Danny. “Most I've ever done is a couple of miles, maybe.”

“But you can go anywhere?”

“Anywhere I wanted to, so far,” said Danny.

“Can it be a place you've never been before?”

Danny thought about it. When he first made gates through the perimeter of the Family compound, he hadn't known where he was going on the outside. And when he gated his way into the space inside the wall of the Family's library in the old house, he certainly didn't know what it was like in
there.

“Yes, it can,” said Danny. “But I'm not sure how I do it. I keep worrying that I'm going to gate myself into a tree or a stone wall or something and blow up half the city.”

“But you haven't so far,” said Eric.

“I'm still in existence,” said Danny, “so no, I haven't so far.”

“Can you take me with you?” asked Eric.

Danny shrugged. “I don't know.” He held out his hand. “Want to try?”

Eric hesitated. “What happens to me if it turns out you
can't
take me with you?”

“I don't know,” said Danny.

“Or what if you can only move me away from
here
, but you can't deposit me
there
? Do little bits of me get scattered all along the way?”

“You really do have a weird imagination,” said Danny.

“Got to try to think of the consequences,” said Eric. “There's always consequences.”

“I don't know how any of this works, Eric.”

“I think I'll pass on testing whether you can take me with you or not.”

“For what it's worth, I take my
clothes
with me every time,” said Danny. “And all the stuff in my pockets. And I've pushed stuff through gates without going all the way through myself.”

“That's ‘clothes' and ‘stuff.' You tried it with anything
alive
? And was it still alive when you got there?”

“Never tried it.”

Eric grinned. “See? I don't want to be the first experiment, in case I end up having my body half-swapped with a fly and I'm trapped in a spider web waving my arms and saying, ‘Help me! Help me!' ” He said this last in a high soft voice.

“What are you talking about?” asked Danny.

“You never saw the old black-and-white
The Fly
? Not the Jeff Goldblum but the good one?”

“Movies? You're talking about movies?”

“Why not?” asked Eric. “This
is
a movie. I mean, I'm just minding my business and along comes a kid and I take him under my wing, and then it turns out he can disappear in one place and appear in another. I'm in a
Twilight Zone
episode. Teleporting.
Stargate
!” Whatever “Stargate” was, Eric apparently thought it was brilliant. “Why didn't I think of that already? Of course,
you
don't need some pyramid or a big machine or anything so it's not the same.”

“I don't see a lot of movies,” said Danny.

Eric shrugged. “Let's see what we know. You can go through walls. And you can push stuff through gates without actually going through yourself, right? So you're, like, the perfect burglar.”

“Burglar?”

“You know, guy breaks into a house, steals stuff without waking up the people.”

“I know what a burglar is.”

“How would I know you know that? If you don't know
The Fly
or
Stargate,
I figure you might not know how to put your pants on frontward.”

He said it with a grin. Danny grinned back. “I'm not a burglar.”

“Really?” asked Eric. “Where'd you get those clothes?”

“Wal-Mart,” said Danny dryly.

“Credit, debit, or cash?”

“Shopping cart plus gate,” said Danny.

“So you're a burglar.”

“Shoplifter.”

“So you'll steal stuff from Wal-Mart and that's okay, but stealing stuff from rich people's houses…”

“You gotta draw the line somewhere,” said Danny. “Stealing from Wal-Mart just causes them to raise prices a tiny bit to amortize the cost.”

“ ‘Amortize'?” Eric said it slowly and mockingly, as if there was something wrong with knowing the right word.

“Breaking into somebody's house is different, Eric, it's stuff they own personally.”

“So … what if I promise that we'll only steal stuff from the houses of people so rich they'll barely notice that it's gone?”

“What kinds of things do we steal?”

“Whatever the fence wants to buy,” said Eric.

“In your life of crime in Washington, you know who deals in stolen goods?”

“No, but I know people who know people who probably know people who deal in stolen goods.”

“And we trust these friends of friends of friends?
That
experiment worries me a lot more than trying to take you through a gate.”

“Why should
you
worry?” asked Eric. “No matter what happens,
you're
okay. I'm the one taking all the risks.”

“So does that mean you think you deserve more than fifty percent of what we make?”

“Yes,” said Eric. “I deserve twice as much as you.”

“Even though I'm the one who goes into the house and risks getting caught.”

“But it's not a risk for you. You
can't
get caught.”

“I can get recognized. Posters can go up with my face on them.”

“So what?”

“That happens, I can't go into stores, I can't walk the streets.”

“Nobody pays attention to that kind of thing. Come on, there are neighborhoods in DC where
everybody's
on a poster somewhere.”

Danny still hated the idea of burglarizing people's houses. At the same time, it sounded better than begging. Indoor work, more money for the time expended, and as long as they only went into the houses of rich people, who would they be hurting?

Danny heard voices and looked up to see several uniformed men with guns. They were skirting the library and looking down at Danny and Eric.

“Let's get out of here,” said Danny.

“Too late, they've seen us,” said Eric. “If we split, they'll be sure they've got the guys they're looking for.”

“But I
am
the guy they're looking for,” said Danny.

“Oh, so you were getting a little burglary practice in the library, were you?”

“I put it back.”

“So your backpack's got nothing bad in it?” asked Eric.

“I'm clean,” said Danny.

“Then talk your way out of it and you won't be on a wanted poster.”

“I've never talked to a cop,” said Danny. “I'll screw it up.”

“These aren't cops, they're building security guys, and let's get real about this, kid, you can talk a one-armed woman into knitting you a sweater.”

Since Eric had just talked Danny into becoming a burglar, it seemed to Danny that it was Eric who could talk anybody into anything. But the security guards were yelling at them to stay
right there,
so there wasn't a chance to argue the point.

“Open that backpack,” shouted the guard as he approached. “And both of you turn out your pockets.”

“Yes sir, right away sir,” said Eric.

Danny unzipped all the openings on his backpack. As he did, it occurred to him that this was just like when the security guy at Wal-Mart accosted him. There weren't any passersby to serve as witnesses, but the same idea should play—go way farther than what they asked for, and throw them completely off balance.

So Danny pulled his shirt off over his head, stepped on the heels of his shoes to get out of them, then started pulling off his pants.

“I said to turn out your pockets!” yelled the guard who was doing the yelling. “What are you doing!”