The Blue Light Project (17 page)

Rabbit sat with his back against the parapet and thought about options. Soldiers, obviously. But soldiers you weren’t supposed to see. These tight and lethal communities. Delta Force, Alpha Group, JTF
₂
, SBS. The Black Hats.

He crouched low, palm flat to the roof gravel, working it through. If they were in the yard, then they were clearly using this building. Which meant the building itself would be secure. Which meant that each floor would have been searched. Which meant . . .

Rabbit’s heart loped up to a sprinting pace. Which meant they were going to search the roof. Not later, but immediately. Any second now.

He swallowed and worked to govern his breathing. A sensation like this had taken him only once before, a brief but complete feeling of being out of control. He’d been at the top of an abandoned grain silo that time, out at one of the old river terminals. He’d crossed a narrow concrete beam over a hundred feet of blackness to reach a door that he understood would open to a catwalk on the far side. But he never found out if it did or not because, at the end of the beam, stones pinging downwards in the murk below, he found the door was locked. Turning and retracing his steps had not been in the plan. But after the heart-rate spike, the dawning awareness of what you had to do, you just did it. Your options whittled down to one, you took the last option with what remained of your confidence and all the care you could manage. Do it. Do it now. Don’t rush.

So now Rabbit stood and moved quickly to the roof edge nearest the alley, where he’d been less than twelve hours before. Fifteen feet away and six feet down, the roof of the next building began. It was angled gently towards him and covered in gritty tarpaper, which had given him landing grip on his jump the previous afternoon. Although that had been in daylight, when he could actually see the surface approaching. He couldn’t see it at all now. He wondered if he might see it halfway across, three-quarters. Maybe not until the instant before impact. Or even then.

Rabbit winced and looked around. He was aware of himself suddenly as if from an outside perspective. Doing his own pat-down. Checking straps and shoelaces, smoothing his hands over his face and clothes as if to streamline himself further.

He took one last long look at the hard roofline opposite, the pool of black beyond. Then he turned and paced off six long steps back from the parapet, where he stood with his hands dangling, shaking them, trying to loosen up, trying to breathe deeply. He reached down and took each ankle in turn, stretching his quads. He listened to the door
opening behind him at the top of the elevator shaft, looking slowly back over his shoulder to see this for himself. No yellow light blooming. Only the darker shadow of the door intercepting street light. Charcoal on slate gray. Shapes coming clear too, moving in casual silence. One, two, three. Fanning towards the far roofline, nearest the square. Rabbit had time for a single thought: the reason why these soldiers were so effective had less to do with their being unafraid, and more to do with their having no anger. In their smooth movements and stable pace, Rabbit thought, they revealed themselves to be utterly calm about their relationship with death.

Rabbit turned back, square to the alley. He knew he could do this with barely a sound until whatever muffled bang he might make at impact. No time to calculate the risk there.

Six steps. Bip bip, bap bap, bam bam. Air.

And no memory of it, particularly. Rabbit, afterwards, could recall only snips from the beginning and the end of his flight. The cold moment of contact between the ball of his foot and the concrete parapet. Then the approaching pool of black shadow, and in it a glint of metal. A shred of tin foil, a beer can, the tip of a hypodermic needle. Rabbit never determined what, exactly. But it winked at him, like a runway light through the fog. This bit of refuse that had found its way onto an anonymous rooftop. And Rabbit tucked his feet up, and hit the surface hard. Then rolled, sprawled, bled from the nose. Dragged himself into the black shadow of a wide brick chimney. And for several moments after that, not daring even to roll his head and look back the way he’d come, he lay completely still.

FIRST LIGHT, AND THE STREETS around the plaza were taking on a certain slow seething energy. The press had been arriving since late the previous night and another rush was expected when the first flights started coming in from both coasts and overseas that morning. Already the white vans were queued along the side streets, their satellite dishes telescoped high into the billowing gray sky. Already there were miles of cable underfoot and chairs set up under tents, cameras draped in plastic against the threatening drizzle. And everywhere, spots of white as updates and hourly briefings were completed, some bright-eyed person haloed in light, beaming back the troubling news to a waiting world.

Eve picked her way through the crowd, noticing how people were showing up with different, often conflicting expectations. There were chanters and singers, vigil keepers. There were placards angry and distraught, but all tuned to some separate motivating wavelength that the Meme Media Crisis emitted. Scattered hundreds beginning to cluster and mix at the cordoned-off eastern fringe of the plaza, furthest from the theater, and at the barricades that blocked other streets. The air was
pregnant with suspicion and fear. And in the cafés and on the street corners Eve could hear arguments and position taking.

A man outside a convenience store was gesturing, face animated: “They simply have to go in. You cannot negotiate with these kinds of people.”

“Well then the blood will be on your hands,” came the reply.

At which point the first man brushed past the second one, jostling him as he did so. Careless or out of aggression, it hardly mattered. Now they were pushing and shoving. People were yelling. Friends pulling them apart. Eve was frozen, staring at this spectacle. Horrified. Disgusted to see civility stripped so quickly away. Both men were right, to a point. You couldn’t deal with people who took children as hostages. And if one mistake was made, then blood would indeed be on all their hands. But the implied stalemate had the effect of making Eve quietly angry.

Nick would be asleep again by then. He did that well too. Resumed rest. No matter that the disagreement had been sharp and unresolved between them on her leaving. He counted up his investment in every dispute and knew when to stop his losses.

The other thing Nick told her not to do: don’t sleep on the couch. You’ll wake up after four hours with that television still going. Same broadcast, same news, which Nick somehow felt was unhealthy.

Eve did wake up on the couch, although the television was off. But then she turned it on immediately. And there were the same tired, concerned anchors. The same exterior shots of Meme. And this had an effect on her that suggested maybe Nick had a point. Maybe it was unhealthy to greet the day with images of a world still shaped around the tragedies and impasses of the day before.

She woke Nick before leaving and he did something she’d never seen him do in the years she’d known him. With her first touch, he came instantly to consciousness and seeming lucidity. He pulled off the sleep mask. He sat up, night-tabled his earplugs, popped free his mouth
guard and fixed her with a comprehensive stare. She had to wonder if he’d been awake the whole time, waiting for her to come upstairs. But then the sudden rush of words. And these didn’t come from the measured Nick, the careful and self-aware Nick. They came from the one still easing free of his dreams.

He said: “Don’t go, Eve. Please don’t. I know you’re showing around pictures of your brother to people. I trust you of course. But Stofton. Eve. There are drugs and guns down there. And nothing we do changes that. What time is it?”

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him. Dimple in his chin. Every hair in place. “I fell asleep downstairs,” she told him. “I’m heading out early.”

“What? Eve.”

“I want to be there in the morning, first light. I want to see who else arrives. Who else wakes up needing to know what happens.”

He was awake now. “You mean your brother. But why wouldn’t he watch it on TV like everybody else? Why do you need to see him so urgently?”

She put her right hand on his where it lay on the sheets. Then she pulled her hand away: “I have a feeling.”

“I have one too. It’s called anxiety. About you lately.”

“When I last spoke to him, things weren’t going well for him. And I didn’t help him much.”

“It’s history. What is it, five years ago?”

“Seven. Almost eight. Far too long.”

“But you can’t keep worrying about him. Or whatever it is you’re doing about him.”

“He was so convinced it was all going wrong. Railing on about, I don’t know what. Agribusiness. Show business. All the businesses.”

Nick rubbed his eyes. “I don’t understand what this has to do with anything.”

“If he’s still here he’ll be drawn to this thing. To the crowd. The vigil or protest, or whatever it is. I’ll see him down there. I’ll run into him in the crowd.”

“What’s the news anyway?”

“Not much more,” Eve said. “But I feel charged by something.”

“By what? By whom?” His voice was raised now. In the next room Otis stirred and muttered something. Not yet awake, but close enough to the surface to hear and reflect his father. Anxious, confused, agitated.

“By an energy. I realize this sounds manic.”

“You’ve never been depressive, I’ll give you that.”

She got up off the bed, sharply. “How did you know I was showing his photograph around, Nick? I don’t recall mentioning it.”

He blinked at her. Apparently this detail hadn’t risen with him from the gray zone of near sleep. He reached for the water. He held it in both hands on the sheets in front of him. “Katja’s husband. I asked him and he did me a favor. I was worried.”

“You had our gardener’s husband follow me. Why not just ask me?”

“For me, since your father . . .”

She waited while he finally took the sip.

“Since your father, for me, that period of time hasn’t been so good,” Nick finished.

“You mean us not getting married.”

“Of course I mean us not getting married. It was what we had planned. And while a six-month delay because of a death in the family is understandable, a two-and-a-half-year delay is harder to explain.”

“Explain to whom? I don’t think I owe anybody an explanation.”

“And that makes you feel better about things? Your hallmark of successful living: zero obligation to explain yourself to others.”

She was at the stairs already. He was calling after her: “Eve, I’m sorry.”

Still in bed, though. Still sitting in bed while he called the words.

EVE DROVE EAST, the city alive in all the wrong ways. Traffic surges on the boulevards where there should have been nothing but the earliest of morning traffic. People trying to get close. People going the other way too. Eve worked these currents, cutting north to try a different artery, to no effect. The city was out of its ordinary rhythm. Traffic rips and whirls, freak waves. And up ahead along the road, she could see stop and go. She could hear honking and see the flashing lights already, police checks high on the hill.

Eve had prepared for the possibility that she couldn’t get the truck close. So now she pulled down off the main road and into the maze of one-way streets in the West Flats, down towards the condo-town of River Park. Here you crossed the last major east–west street and headed down towards the river, and there was suddenly no traffic at all. Streets silent and gray, lined with parked cars. Glass towers sleeping, restaurants dark. The only sound came from the exhaust fans ventilating deep-buried parking garages, rumbling to life and fading away, low moans from beneath the surface of the earth.

She found a parking spot in front of a condo called the Paradise and pulled in. Then she climbed between the seats and back under the truck’s low box canopy. She sat there in the close darkness and pulled on her running things: tracksuit and trainers, fleece gloves, wool cap. She popped the back hatch and climbed down onto the cool pavement, jogging in place for a moment, eyes across the river to the downtown spires. Then she locked the truck and padded off up the street, parallel to the river.