Impulse Page 14

  She was tired and really annoyed at the two gentlemen who were not arguing about the evidence, but about the nomenclature. Global warming. Climate change. Anthropogenic global warming.

  I should have gone with the computer symposium.

  The particular session was an emergency meeting added at the last minute to discuss the impact of a particularly nasty storm system headed into the Bay of Bengal. It was five months until the regular monsoon season would start, but there it was nonetheless, carrying a ridiculous amount of moisture and headed right for Bangladesh.

  The moderator of the panel finally quashed the argument about names, and the panel started discussing areas of particular sensitivity regarding the impending rain. Of particular interest to Millie were a couple of areas not normally at risk but in peril because of repair projects on flood control embankments and dikes damaged during a nasty cyclone seven months before, at the end of last monsoon season.

  Millie took a lot of notes.

  As she exited the session she came face to face with a woman with short silver hair who was heading for the door to Woodrow Wilson Plaza. The woman sidestepped Millie, saying, “Excuse me,” and the voice confirmed Millie’s first impression.

  Millie controlled an impulse to jump away. She took a step to the wall and looked around for observers, but there weren’t any obvious watchers, just people streaming by in both directions—coming out of the meeting rooms, heading to the restrooms. Millie turned and followed the woman, catching up and falling in step with her in the middle of the plaza.

  “Becca.”

  Millie was wearing a red wig and slightly tinted glasses. Becca Martingale, FBI, looked sideways at her and raised her eyebrows, but clearly didn’t recognize Millie.

  Well, it had been seventeen years.

  “Do you have time for coffee?” Millie gestured at the Starbucks a hundred feet away. “Or we could go to the one at the Metreon.”

  Becca froze midstep, and Millie, walking past, had to turn back to face her.

  “Millie?”

  “Yep.”

  Becca stared at her, mouth half open. “I guess I didn’t imagine it all.”

  “I wish.”

  “Are you all right? Your husband?”

  Millie nodded. “Yes. I wasn’t seeking you out. I didn’t recognize you until I heard your voice.”

  “I thought you’d heard—” Becca looked around, checking the environment. “We should definitely get a coffee.” She pointed at the Starbucks. “Not the Metreon, though.”

  “All right.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Cent, in the desert, with a blunt instrument.”

  Mom went to a reception at a refugee conference in DC but said, before leaving, “Dad’s handling dinner tonight at the cabin, okay?”

  I rolled my eyes. “At the cabin?”

  “It makes him feel safer. Seven, right?”

  “Right.”

  That gave me three hours.

  It was sixty-eight degrees in the desert in West Texas, where I’d had my encounter with the young rattlesnake, and the air was still.

  I’d arrived standing still, despite the fact that I was several hundred miles south of where I’d left, so my velocity west to east had probably just increased by a good chunk.

  I jumped to the edge of the pit, the sinkhole with the water and the island in the bottom. Without pausing, I stepped off the edge and let myself drop toward the water fifty feet below.

  I flinched—that is I jumped away—finding myself in the pillow cave under my bed, when I’d only dropped a few feet.

  Scaredy-cat.

  I returned to the cliff’s top. It was fifty feet to the bottom. It would take just a bit over a second and a half to drop to the surface of the water below. I tested my hypothesis with a rock. One-one thousand. Two-one— Splash.

  I should at least be able to hold off to the one second mark. And shouldn’t I be able to return to the pit’s edge instead of my bedroom every time?

  I made it to “one-one thou—” before I found myself back under the damn bed. The next time I managed to jump back to the lip but didn’t even make it to the second “one” in the cadence.

  I kept at it.

  At the end of the hour I was dropping a full second and a half and jumping away to wherever I chose. Once I waited slightly too long and my boots splashed into the water before I was gone. They were barely wet on the outside, and the water hadn’t had time to soak in.

  That was pushing it a bit, but even then I managed to jump back to the pit’s edge instead of hiding under my bed.

  Good enough.

  Considering just the local frame, after falling a second and a half, I was moving forty-eight feet per second. I had to go back and use my desktop to translate that: just under thirty-three miles per hour.

  Okay. So I was changing my frame of reference, going from thirty-three mph to zero mph, pretty much instantly. I was changing my physical location about fifty feet when I did this. What I wanted to do was stay in the same place but change my velocity, instead.

  There was a sandy brush- and cactus-free wash farther out in the desert. If I fell down there, I wouldn’t get stabbed or hit my head on a rock. I got out in the middle and started by jumping to exactly where I was.

  Nothing happened. I didn’t really jump. I guess my subconscious knew I was already there.

  I jumped a foot to one side, like I had when Caffeine dove at me in the cafeteria. That worked, so I tried a half foot. Jumping a smaller distance was harder, but I could stay right where I was and change my orientation, as if I’d spun around really, really fast. One second I was facing the darkening east and the next I was facing the sun, which was nearing the horizon.

  I bet that looked weird.

  Okay. This time I tried to add velocity.

  It didn’t work.

  I was hoping for the same velocity I’d achieved at the end of the one-and-a-half second drop, thirty-three mph, only up. I’d just changed my velocity that much over at the pit, but when I tried it, nothing happened.

  “Crap.” I kicked at the sand.

  It was like my first jumps. Frustrating, totally out of my control. Maybe it wasn’t something I could do, even though I was obviously doing it every time I jumped from a moving vehicle, or north or south of my position. Certainly I’d been doing it from the drops in the pit.

  Breathe, I said to myself. It was weird but when I say that, it’s Mom’s voice I hear. I dropped my shoulders and stretched my neck side to side.

  How had I gotten control before? Not those panicked reflexive flinches, but those measured, conscious jumps?

  Right, it had been the smell of things.

  But how do you smell speed?

  I thought back to the pit, to how it had felt as my feet neared the water and the air rushed by. The most memorable thing was the noise, the rising pitch of wind that rose to a shriek as the air rushed by faster and faster. Louder and louder.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember that rushing sound, the feel of the wind, only coming from above. I didn’t want to appear in the wash with a downward velocity of thirty-three mph. I wanted to—

  “Shit!”

  The ground dropped away and I tumbled up, losing my balance, flailing my arms, tilting forward, watching the wash drop below me, like I was looking out of a rising glass elevator. The drop slowed almost immediately, and several stories above the sand I stopped rising and began dropping again, watching the sand come up faster and faster like the water in the bottom of the pit.

  I did end up back under the bed this time.

  Don’t even think about it, young lady.

  Ha.

  I kept my eyes open the next time and tried to stay balanced, reaching for that right pitch and volume of shrieking air, of flapping clothes, and I was flying up, like a thrown rock. I still tilted forward when I bent my head to watch the ground, but not as much. I waited for peak altitude and the beginnings of the drop, then jumped back to the sand belo
w.

  I laughed out loud.

  Happy thoughts. Think happy thoughts.

  It was purely ballistic, like basic physics classes. If I was starting with the same velocity reached at the end of a fifty-foot drop, then I was rising fifty feet before gravity killed my upward velocity. I knew the relevant equation. I sang it out loud. “Distance equals one half A T squared.”

  Wash. Rinse. Repeat. I’d clearly done it enough times when my heart stopped pounding as I shot into the air.

  I thought about the girls on the basketball team. I crouched and leaped, doing the velocity jump at the same time. How many people do you know who can jump fifty feet into the air?

  I let myself drop most of the way to the ground before I killed all velocity by jumping back to the sand.

  If I tried the same thing in the gym I’d crash into the ceiling.

  Less velocity. Less noise? Certainly less air rushing by.

  I worked on that same leap-jump, reducing the amount of velocity until I slowed to a stop with my head about twelve feet in the air.

  Bet I could slam dunk a basketball. Tall as the girls on the basketball team were, I didn’t think any of them could.

  If I could reduce the velocity, could I increase it?

  What would four times as fast be like?

  I tried to imagine what four times as fast would sound like, crouched, and leaped up into the sky.

  * * *

  I wore my nicest kimono to supper with the full katsura wig in the shimada hairstyle, and the white pancake makeup. The kimono and obi are normally a real pain to put on by myself. This time it was almost impossible. My feet made knocking sounds as I walked across the wooden floor in my willow-block okobo.

  “Why are your eyes so red?” Dad asked.

  “I got face powder in ’em.”

  “Ouch.”

  I bowed politely and covered my face with my fan.

  So far, so good.

  It must have been at least ten times as fast.

  I’m guessing—I certainly didn’t have an airspeed indicator, but it was like hitting a wall and, in the instant before I flinched away to the pillow cave under the bed, the wind ripped off my clothes, wrenched at all of my joints, and blackened both my eyes.

  I hadn’t really gotten face powder in my eyes.

  I finally found my second boot in a stand of prickly pear. I never did find one of the socks, and my jeans were completely ruined, ripped in two separate pieces, with several additional tears in each leg. My flannel shirt stayed on but was ripped at the shoulders and pocket, and the sports bra never even shifted.

  The panties were in the middle of the wash near the first boot.

  Don’t even think about it, young lady.

  Well, maybe Dad did have a point.

  Mom arrived, took a look at me, and bowed formally from the waist, hands on her thighs, “Konban wa o-genki sou desu ne, Cent-san.”

  “Arigato, okaasan.” I bowed. “Uh, you look nice, too.”

  “Are we having Japanese?”

  “Indian, actually,” Dad said. He looked back at me. “You want to go change into a sari?”

  I shook my head. It was the makeup that mattered.

  I moved very carefully when we sat down.

  “Don’t fall off your shoes,” Dad teased.

  “Leave her alone,” said Mom. “I think she’s doing very well.”

  In truth, my knees and ankles hurt so much that I was afraid I’d collapse.

  Eating was difficult. Managing the sleeves of the kimono put more stress on my shoulders and elbows. I should’ve dressed as a mime, instead.

  I bent over my plate and tried to move as little as possible. I was hungry.

  Mom said, “I saw Becca Martingale this afternoon.”

  Dad, using his fork to pile some dahl onto a piece of naan, froze. “How did that happen?”

  “She was attending a meeting in the same facility as mine. I said hello.”

  Dad licked his lips. “That’s taking a chance, isn’t it?” He remembered the naan in his hand and took a bite.

  Mom shrugged. “She’s not our enemy.”

  “Is she still with the bureau?”

  “She retires next year.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  Mom sighed and shook her head. “Just that we were well, that’s all.”

  Dad’s eyes shifted sideways to me and Mom said, “No, I didn’t mention Cent.”

  His shoulders dropped a little. “What did she have to say?”

  “Hyacinth Pope was transferred out of her high-security penitentiary to a low-security facility, ostensibly because of prison crowding.”

  Dad’s calm evaporated—his voice raised. “Is she still there?”

  “She never arrived.”

  “Bastards!” Dad whispered, but it sounded more vehement than if he’d shouted it.

  “Well, yes,” said Mom. She was calm but she didn’t look happy. “It probably was them, though you can’t discount personal initiative.”

  Dad was staring at across the room, focused on nothing. His mouth twisted. “No. Not with Hyacinth.”

  “I’ve heard that name before,” I said, tentatively.

  Dad bit his lower lip.

  “Yeah,” Mom said. “She’s the one who drugged your father, when—” She did air quotes with her fingers. “—they got him. She murdered Brian Cox, your father’s NSA contact. She also tried to snatch me, more than once.”

  Dad said, “I’m not sure we should be—”

  Mom laughed but there was no humor in it. “You can’t have it both ways, Davy! You want Cent to be careful, to watch out for them, but you don’t want to tell her about them? Remember our first fight?”

  Dad blinked at the sudden shift in topic. “When you called my New York apartment and got the police?”

  Mom nodded. “What did we agree, after that? When we finally got back together?”

  Dad said, almost reluctantly, “Never lie to each other.”

  “What kind of lie caused the fight in the first place?”

  “Lying by omission.” Dad shrugged. “It’s not that simple. Cent is our child. I don’t lie to her, but she’s our child; I don’t tell her everything, either.” He looked at me and smiled sadly. “And I know she doesn’t tell me everything.”

  I tried to look offended.

  Mom said, “Cent is a young woman who can be thousands of miles away in a heartbeat, going places you cannot follow. You can’t control her but you can educate her. You can give her the information she needs to be safer.”

  Dad pushed his food around on the plate without taking a bite. Mom watched him, eyes narrowed, head tilted slightly forward.

  Me, I froze in place, looking at the table, trying to become invisible. I wouldn’t disturb this conversation for the world.

  Finally, Dad turned to me. “All right, Cent, I guess it’s time you knew.”

  I turned to him, eyes wide.

  He cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with the napkin. “I may have been less than honest about that Santa person. And the Easter Bunny? Total fabrication.”

  I hit him with my fan.

  After supper, Dad built a fire in the big stone fireplace, the one that’s for show, and we gathered around it while he and Mom told the story again, but in a new way. This time they named the characters, they described them, and they even showed me photographs.

  Not of the dead, mind you. No point, there. But they showed me a picture of Hyacinth Pope from sixteen years before and from four years before, taken in prison, that Mom pulled off of an online wanted poster after she talked to the FBI agent, Becca Martingale.

  They talked a lot about drugs and darts and tracking devices and being handcuffed to immovable objects. Mom talked about the time they’d flooded her apartment with anesthetic gas in hopes of knocking her out before she could jump away. Dad talked a bit about the device they’d implanted in him and the conditioning they’d used to keep him in specific areas.


  They’d told me the story before, but this time they talked about about how helpless they’d felt—Dad when he was chained to walls or electronically tethered to one location; and Mom when she was stuck in the Eyrie, before she could jump, and later, when she could jump but had no idea where Dad was.

  She looked at me sideways. “I was falling off a cliff the first time I jumped. Your Dad was escaping a beating with the buckle end of a belt.”

  Dad blinked. “Huh. Wasn’t that your first time, Cent? When I made your mother cry?”

  I hid my face behind the fan.

  Mom laughed softly. “What did you say earlier, Davy? ‘I know she doesn’t tell me everything.’”

  Dad’s eyes widened. “You mean—”

  “Avalanche!” I blurted. “A cornice gave way.”

  Mom nodded and Dad went white. White as, well, snow.

  “An avalanche? The only way you could’ve gotten caught in an—” Dad’s voice started low and steadily rose until Mom held up her hand, palm outward, like a traffic cop halting oncoming cars. Dad actually stopped midword.

  “Zip it, dear.”

  “She was snowboarding, without clearing it with us!”

  Mom shook her head. “And you wonder why she doesn’t tell you everything?” She looked back at me. “I’m guessing Dad’s wet ceiling was involved.”

  I covered my face with the fan.

  Mom gently moved it to one side. “You know that pancake keeps us from seeing your cheeks blush but your ears still give you away.”

  Damn. I gave in. “Yeah. Several cubic yards of snow.”

  Dad sagged back on the couch, opened his mouth, and then closed it again after Mom tilted her head at him.

  “I tried to get it all up, but more of it melted than I’d realized.”

  “That’s why you washed all the cushions,” Mom said.

  “Them I just dried. Needed the washer for all the clothes on the floor—they were all wet and most of them were dirty, too.”

  Dad was still frowning, and Mom said, “Look at the bright side, dear. Her room has never been cleaner.”

  “Yeah,” Dad said drily. “Before or since.”

  Mom snorted.