Quicksilver

  This last was to the waitress, who was standing by the table with order pad in hand. Hastily I skimmed the menu and handed it back to her. “Pancakes and back bacon,” I said. “Oh, and coffee.” I waited until she marched off again, then turned to Milo.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But after what I went through, it’s hard for me to trust anybody. It’s nothing personal.” Then I pulled out the tiny, tentative smile that meant I know I screwed up, but I’m cute, forgive me?—and it worked. Milo smiled back.

  “Good,” said Sebastian. “Milo, I think you’re in. But could Niki and I have a private word? Just for a minute?”

  “Uh … yeah, sure,” said Milo, looking taken aback. “I was going to the washroom anyway.” He slid around the curve of the bench, and Sebastian got up to let him out.

  When he’d disappeared, I leaned across the table and hissed, “Why is he here? We need to talk. Alone.”

  “I know,” said Sebastian. “But I owed him a favor for letting me sleep on his sofa. And after what he saw last night, I don’t see how we can keep him out of it.”

  There was a faint reproach in his voice, and it annoyed me. “Well, it’s not my fault,” I said. “I only kept the relay because I couldn’t find a way to destroy it, and I was afraid to leave it behind. How was I supposed to know you were going to show up? Especially after what you said to Alison—”

  “I didn’t think I’d get the chance,” he said. “You’d only been gone a few seconds when Mathis came in.”

  Heavily armed, no doubt. After the way Sebastian had double-crossed him to help Alison and me escape, he must have been furious. “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “The negotiations were delicate,” Sebastian said. “They included a brief standoff with weapons, a message he really didn’t want me to send, and a long and tedious argument about ethics. But eventually we worked it out.” He took a sip from his mug and folded his hands around it, inhaling the steam. “This is excellent coffee.”

  I didn’t find Sebastian as easy to read as some people, but hiding behind a coffee cup was a bad sign. There was more to this story that he wasn’t telling me, and I had a suspicion I knew what it was about.

  “Does Alison know you’re back?” I asked.

  The cup froze on his lips. He lowered it to the table, a slow and deliberate motion. “No,” he said and then more cheerfully, “Oh look. Pancakes.”

  I gave the waitress a tight smile as she began setting out the plates, silently willing her to hurry up and go away. But she’d only been gone two seconds when Milo returned from the washroom, so I had to admit defeat.

  I wasn’t out of ammunition yet, though. I waited until Milo was happily distracted pouring syrup over his French toast, and then I caught Sebastian’s eye and mouthed, “Coward.”

  He kept his expression bland, as though he hadn’t noticed. But I saw his jaw tighten, and I knew the shot had gone home.

  0 0 1 1 1 1

  By the time Sebastian, Milo, and I had finished our breakfast and about three cups of coffee each, we’d come to an agreement. Milo promised to keep his mouth shut about what he’d seen in my bedroom last night, as well as everything we’d just told him, and that he wouldn’t mention the names “Sebastian Faraday” or “Tori Beaugrand” to anybody ever. And in return, since Milo was so curious, Sebastian pulled the relay out of the old camera case he’d brought with him and explained a few things about how it worked.

  I’d heard the “matter is information” speech before, and I already knew about the relay’s built-in propulsion system, as well as its camouflage and self-defense capabilities. So I propped my chin on my hand and counted the wall tiles until Sebastian said, “Niki, would you mind opening it up for us? Milo wants to see inside.”

  Until last night I hadn’t worried about touching the relay, because I’d thought it couldn’t send or receive transmissions anymore. Now that Sebastian had proven me wrong, I wasn’t nearly so comfortable with it. “Is it safe?” I asked.

  He gave me an odd look. “Would I ask if it wasn’t?”

  It was hard not to wonder what the restaurant staff and other patrons were making of all this. But at the moment nobody was even looking our way. I sighed, and Sebastian dropped the relay into my outstretched palm. I let my fingertips rest on its brushed metal surface for a moment, then gripped the top half and turned it.

  The casing opened, revealing a lattice of gleaming filaments and a bubble of silvery liquid. “Wow,” Milo said, leaning closer. “What is that stuff in the middle? Mercury?”

  “It looks similar, doesn’t it?” said Sebastian. “And since the best translation I can give you for its scientific name is quicksilver, it’s an understandable mistake. But it’s no substance you’ve seen before. It’s a form of programmable matter: a superfast information processing and transfer medium that makes the most sophisticated modern computers look like an abacus. And no, before you ask, I don’t have the recipe. It’s classified.”

  What Sebastian didn’t say and I didn’t feel like saying either was that the chip in my arm had been made from the same substance. I’d seen it used for other purposes as well. But when Milo reached over to poke the gleaming liquid, I slapped the fork out of his hand. “Are you trying to get yourself fried?” I demanded, then closed up the relay and pushed it back to Sebastian.

  “So what are you going to do with it now?” Milo asked, as Sebastian tucked the relay back into its case. “If it came from Meridian and you’re not working for them anymore, aren’t they going to want it back?”

  “If they do, they’ll be disappointed,” said Sebastian evenly. “Because as soon as I get the chance, I’m going to destroy it.”

  Good, I thought, but Milo recoiled. “What? Why?”

  “Because it’s experimental technology, and it’s dangerous,” said Sebastian. “Now if you’ll excuse me…” He got up and whisked the bill off the table.

  “Wait,” I protested, but he cut me off with a shake of his head.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s on me.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Milo said, while I watched Sebastian walk to the register and tried not to cringe with guilt. “So what if the relay’s experimental? It obviously works fine, or Sebastian wouldn’t have used it to get here.”

  “Trust me,” I said distractedly, “you’d have to be either desperate or a masochist to put yourself through that thing. It might only take a couple of seconds in real time, but it feels like you’re being fed through a quantum sausage grinder for about eight million years.” Just thinking about my last trip made me feel queasy. And Sebastian had done it three times.

  “Okay,” said Milo, though I could tell he wasn’t convinced. “But you could still use it to send other things, right? You could revolutionize the shipping industry—”

  “No, we couldn’t,” said Sebastian as he rejoined us, shrugging my dad’s old jacket back onto his shoulders. “Because to make it work, we’d need a second relay and a computer fast enough to process all the information, and we don’t have access to either of those since I left my job. Believe me, Milo, it’s better this way.”

  Milo nodded reluctantly, and the three of us headed out onto the street. But we’d only taken a few steps before Sebastian made an exasperated noise and started patting down his pockets.

  “I’ve dropped my phone,” he said. “Or rather, I should say, your phone, Niki. Go on, I’ll be right with you—” and he dashed back inside the cafe.

  So much for my hopes of getting Sebastian alone for a real conversation. Not only did he show no signs of wanting to send Milo away, but it almost seemed like he was avoiding me. Was it Alison he didn’t want to talk about? Was this his way of keeping me from asking about her?

  If so, it wasn’t going to work. Milo couldn’t stick around forever, and the minute he left, I’d confront Sebastian and get the truth out of him, whether he liked it or not. I leaned against the cafe window, watching a gaunt old man with a mustache feeding the pigeons in
front of City Hall, until Milo said abruptly, “I looked you up on the Internet last night.”

  If anybody but Milo had said that, I would have taken off like a rabbit. But he’d heard Sebastian call me Tori, and he knew I’d been through a bad time last summer. Given those two clues, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to sleuth out the rest. “And?”

  “The articles said you couldn’t remember where you’d been or who’d taken you. That the police had no leads, so the investigation had been closed.” He sat down on the narrow windowsill beside me. “Why didn’t you tell them about Meridian?”

  I watched the old man stoop to let a snow-white pigeon peck grain from his outstretched palm. There was something sweet and sad about the way he craned toward her, as though he were the one begging and not the other way around. “Because I knew nobody would believe it.”

  “Why not? I did.”

  “Oh, come on, Milo. If you hadn’t seen Sebastian come through the relay with your own eyes, would you have believed there was a device that could reduce people to subatomic particles and beam them halfway across the—the planet? Let alone that some wacked-out scientist at a top secret research base had used it to kidnap a teenage girl?”

  “Point,” said Milo. “But there’s another thing I don’t get. Why you? What was so special about—”

  “Stop right there,” I said. Earlier this morning I’d told Milo more about my past than even Sebastian thought he needed to know. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. “What they did to me and why is none of your business. But it wasn’t because I was special, believe me. It was because I was disposable.”

  Milo was silent. Then he said, “I don’t believe that.”

  Anger sparked through me. “You think I’m lying?”

  “No. I think they are.” He drew breath to explain—then glanced at the window behind us and frowned. “Where’s Sebastian?”

  “Probably in the washroom,” I said, but Milo had already pulled open the cafe door and ducked inside. With a sigh, I dusted myself off and followed.

  I was standing by the table we’d left behind, idly drawing patterns in my spilled orange juice, when Milo reappeared from the back corridor. “He’s not in there.”

  I gave him a blank look. “Then where is he?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  Apprehension tingled inside me. I pushed the swinging door open and walked through.

  Milo was right; the washrooms were empty. But there was a fire door leading out into the back lot, where the smell of grease and rancid potato peelings mingled with the exhaust fumes from a truck idling nearby. I stepped onto the pavement and looked around. Aside from the truck driver, there was no one in sight.

  This was crazy. There had to be some mistake. As a last resort, I pulled out my phone, called my old cell number, and let it ring, listening for an echo in the distance.

  No sound. No answer.

  Sebastian Faraday had vanished.

  0 1 0 0 0 0

  “I don’t get it,” Milo said as the two of us sprinted across the diner’s back lot, heading for the street. “Why would he ditch us like that?”

  I had no answer. Until now Sebastian had seemed so calm, so perfectly in control. He’d befriended Milo, made a deal with him—and as soon as everything was settled, he’d panicked and run off? It made no sense. Skidding to the curb, I shaded my eyes and scanned the pavement in both directions. No telltale flash of green from my dad’s borrowed coat, no scarecrow figure loping away into the distance. He’d disappeared so completely, it was almost as though…

  I spun back to Milo, whose bleak expression told me he’d been thinking the same thing. “Maybe he was wrong about the relay,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t safe after all.”

  Could Sebastian have made such a careless mistake? Assumed the relay was dormant, only to have it activate and beam him back to Mathis against his will? The idea was chilling, but the more I thought about it, the less plausible it seemed.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what happened.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s too neat. If it was an accident, it could have happened any time, not just when he was alone. Why would he leave us and go back in the cafe unless he—”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. With a startled glance at Milo, I raised it to my ear.

  “Hello?” The voice was young, female, and unfamiliar. “Hi,” I said warily. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Lindsey, from the Science Museum. Have you lost a phone? Because a guy just dropped one off at the front counter, and this was the only number in it.”

  The last of my doubts melted in a gush of molten fury. The next time I saw Sebastian Faraday, I was going to strangle him.

  “Yeah, it’s mine,” I told the girl. “Thanks. I’ll be right there.”

  0 1 0 0 0 1

  The Science Museum was three blocks down from the cafe, on the other side of the street. As Milo and I raced up to the doors, we barreled into a family coming out. I exchanged breathless apologies with the mother, Milo caught the toddler and plopped him safely back in the stroller, and the two of us plunged inside.

  Coming out of the sunshine, it took my eyes a good five seconds to adjust. But once I’d blinked away the dazzle, I spotted Lindsey at once. She was leaning over the front desk, pressing an admission stamp onto a little girl’s hand, while her parents waited by the entrance gate for her to buzz them through.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Niki. You have my phone? It’s an old Nokia, black with a silver keypad.”

  “Oh—yes—wait a second. I’ll be right with you.” She pressed a button and waved the family through, then stooped and retrieved a bundle from beneath the counter. “Is this jacket yours as well?”

  Green cotton canvas, folded into a neat square. “It’s my dad’s,” I said. “Thanks.” I dropped the old cell into my purse and shook out the coat, feeling its slight weight. “There wasn’t … a bag with it or anything?”

  Lindsey shook her head. “Just what you have.”

  I’d figured as much. So not only was Faraday gone, he’d taken the relay with him.

  “Now what?” asked Milo, as I turned away. “You want to keep looking for him?”

  I draped the coat over my arm, slowly smoothing out the folds. I didn’t really care who had the relay, as long as it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. And I trusted Sebastian, even if he was annoying. If he said he was going to destroy the relay, then that was what he would do.

  “There’s no point,” I said. “He knows what he’s doing, or at least he thinks he does. He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

  “Or maybe he won’t,” said Milo, watching me sidelong. “Are you okay with that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked, and then I realized what he was implying. “Oh, no. No way. And also, ew.”

  “Well, you seemed to know each other pretty well…”

  “Ew,” I repeated fervently.

  Milo grinned. “Okay, okay. Just checking—” He broke off, staring at something in the air behind me. “What is that?”

  I turned, following the line of his gaze past the front desk and into the atrium, where a crowd was watching a demonstration. The children bounced and squealed, while the adults gazed up toward the ceiling, heads swiveling in unison…

  Then I saw it. A miniature flying machine, small enough to fit in my two hands. It hummed low over the audience, flipped over, and shot straight upward, out of sight.

  All thought of Sebastian Faraday evaporated from my mind. I dug into my purse for the admission fee, shoved it across the counter to Lindsey, and slapped my hand down for the stamp.

  “Hey, wait for me!” said Milo. The gate buzzed open and the two of us shot through, straining for a view of the little machine. It paused in midair and executed a triple flip, then dropped six feet before pulling up to another hovering stop.

  “That is so cool,” Milo murmured. “I want one.”

  I did too, but I was pre
tty sure it hadn’t come from the gift shop. X-shaped, with a propeller on all four spokes and a microprocessor wired into a superlight body, it had the unpolished look of a home electronics project rather than some prepackaged kit. As the machine went through its radio-controlled paces, I looked around for the maker.

  And there he was on the far side of the atrium, a stocky, bespectacled man with thinning hair and a goatee. An LED name tag that said “Make!” was clipped to his shirt pocket, and he clutched a control box in both hands. I slipped around the edge of the circle and came up behind him.

  “Hi,” I said to the man. “That’s a quadrotor drone, right?” “Yep,” he said absently, thumbing the controls. The drone flipped over again.

  “And you built it yourself?”

  The quadrotor’s battery was draining, and the propellers had begun to sputter. The man scurried forward and caught it as the crowd broke into applause. “Thanks for watching!” he called. “Check out our information table before you go!” Then he ambled off, my question apparently forgotten.

  Annoyed by the dismissal, I watched as he packed the quadrotor away in its case and carried it toward the exit. There beneath a poster reading GET EXCITED AND MAKE THINGS stood a table covered with refrigerator magnets and brochures—all bearing a logo I recognized.

  My heart did a 180. I chased after the man and tapped his elbow. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re from the makerspace?”

  “That’s right,” he said, thick brows rising. “You’ve heard of us?”

  “There was an article in the newspaper,” I said, as Milo strolled to join us. “It sounds fantastic. Is that where you built the quadrotor?”

  “Uh, yeah.” His poise seemed to have deserted him. His eyes skittered past mine and focused on Milo, as if looking for reassurance.

  “How long did it take you to build?” asked Milo.

  That opened the floodgates. Immediately the man relaxed and started expounding on the schematics he’d used and all the challenges he’d had to overcome in the construction process, popping the case back open and pointing to one part of the machine after another as he talked. By the time he’d finished, Milo looked slightly dazed, but I’d seen as much as I needed to know.