There was no more struggling. She slipped into the water, and the current carried her out into the driveway where Dan waited.
Freya wore a sea-green dress and a string of Lassa’s pearls. The collar of a dress shirt peeked out beneath Dan’s jacket. He’d worn a tie, and there was a distant smell it took her a moment to identify. He’d shined his shoes for her.
Shoe polish was a smell she’d always associated with men. Dan stood up straighter, lifting his chin. He had a new confidence, an aspiration to something more, and she felt herself respond to it. She swept into him, and they clung together, lingering in the eddy of a long kiss.
She felt him through their clothes, wound together in a spiral heat. Dan’s eyes drifted past her to focus on the door of the house. It was only a glance, but it was everything. She could take him by the hand and lead him to her bedroom, a word, and they would be engulfed.
Instead, she grabbed his hips and pulled him closer, Dan shut his eyes and let himself be drawn in. For a few delicious moments, she reveled in the sensation. When she drew back, he gave her a shocked look that was almost wounded. She grinned at him, a promise on her lips.
Later.
Dan’s eyes followed her as she walked around the car to the passenger side. As she buckled her seatbelt, he adjusted his jeans before he climbed in to join her. Now, it was her turn to glance back at the house, twisting with want. She held her breath until they were on the road so the words couldn’t escape her mouth.
It was only when the house and Sillas were behind them that Freya could accept that this was happening. All day long, she’d been certain something would ruin this. First that Hiidenkirnu wouldn’t let them go. Next that Lassa would show up, for the last hour she’d been worried the FBI would blockade Elliot Road with black helicopters. She inhaled deeply and rolled her neck, trying to let go of it all, trying to be here.
“I can’t believe we’re going! This is going to be so fun!” Freya’s voice pinged with excitement. Dan was caught in her joy, beaming ahead at the road brighter than his headlights. She chattered with him about his day at the diner, the run he’d gone for that morning, all the trivial things that would have been boring coming from anyone else.
Freya wished she could remain here, in this mundane space where they were just a boy and a girl driving to a concert. Dan must have shared the thought. He took pains to avoid mentioning the Starball. Then he asked why she’d been at the diner with Lynn Harris, and there was no escaping it.
A heavy veil of clouds hid the stars, and the bare trees flanking the road were illuminated for only moments before they vanished into the darkness behind them. As they slid through the night, Freya told Dan that Lassa had vanished again. She told him about the meeting at Hiidenkirnu and the Ø process. His brow furrowed as she described the scale of the response, all the scientists and security people scurrying around the lab in a half-panic.
“The government is definitely going to get involved,” she said, wishing again that things could just be normal. “Everything might get hectic. I’m sorry if you get swept up in this.”
“It’s okay. Can you check and see if it’s on my phone? My battery life has been awful.” Dan was very deliberate as he took his phone out of his pocket and passed it to her. His phone had no password and, like the interior of the car, everything was tidy and ordered. She liked that, even as she felt a mild dread rising while she hunted for the list of running applications. It had taken Karhu about two seconds to do it, but Freya fumbled around for almost a minute before she found it.
Ø - CPU LOAD 80% - RAM USE 1.4GB/2GB
“It’s there,” Freya confirmed.
“What do we do?” Dan asked.
Freya tried killing the application. It vanished from the list only to pop back up.
“I don’t know if we can do anything. I can’t terminate the process.”
“Let’s turn off the phone so other people don’t get infected,” Dan suggested with the faintest shake of his head.
Freya initiated a shutdown, and then something occurred to her.
“Did you have your phone on all day at the diner?”
“Yeah…shit.” Dan already leaped to the same conclusion.
“Tietokone pandemia.”
“What’s that?”
“Something Karhu said. Computer pandemic. If it spreads from phone to phone, there’s no telling how many people got it already.” She handed the phone back to him, then slipped her hand into her jacket pocket for the Starball. She cupped the orb in her palm, peering at it the faint light of the console.
“I wonder what the hell it’s doing,” Freya murmured. The Starball was warm. “Everything would be so much easier if it could just talk to us.”
“Are we still not telling anyone?”
“Do you want to?” Freya asked.
She’d been so sure last night, but the day had eaten at her certainty. Since the meeting at Hiidenkirnu, she’d expected the CIA to pull up in her driveway and drag her away to some black site with a bag over her head.
There was a long silence between them, Dan’s mouth was a flat line. The moment was a needle wavering between two surrenders, to the authorities or the Starball. Freya felt it growing warmer in her hand, as if it sensed her wavering.
“I don’t know,” Dan shook his head in resignation. His words had the reverberant richness of hearing them through their ears at once. They’d slipped into Unity so naturally she hadn’t noticed it happening. The expansive sense of being joined passed through her in a flutter of her eyelids, a rising feeling that spread through her whole body.
Dan tightened. He was worried he would lose control of the car. She was caught in a swell of suspicion; they were being bribed. All their steps had been choreographed, their lines scripted, and the Starball directed everything. She remembered the water cascading down the steps of the flooded auditorium, the edges tumbling into the sea. The vision washed over Dan with her, and he could not escape it.
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“Please,” Dan pleaded. She felt his hands tightening on the steering wheel, and the muscles of his jaw clenching.
“I’m sorry!” she breathed, trying to slow her frantic thoughts, and the effort made it worse. Dan grimaced forward as if he was biking into the rain.
“I have to get off the road,” they said in unison. He fought so hard to get the words out that Freya became his unwilling chorus. She felt his agitation decrease as she took deep breaths, exhaling them slowly.
They drifted to a stop in the parking lot of the Jericho Chapel. Something was going on inside. The parking lot was nearly full, and there were bright lights streaming through the stained glass, casting red and blue shadows on the lawn.
Dan put the car in park, and they felt themselves resynchronizing. Their breathing linked first, and then their hearts began to beat in time. The fear dwindled, and they turned to one another, seeing and being seen in the same instant. For a fleeting moment, there was no fear, no thought at all, only harmony.
Freya broke it. She had a flash of worry they wouldn’t make it to the concert in time, and they both scrambled to try and banish her anxiety. Freya felt guilty for breaking the moment, and Dan radiated assurance it was okay. Her worry felt disproportionate to Dan, and his thoughts hurtled forward. They had plenty of time, they would arrive well before the concert began, everything was fine.
Dan’s thoughts were all logical, purely correct. Freya felt like she was crazy for worrying. She reflected on why, trying to bridge the gap between them. They didn’t see the concert the same way, it didn’t have the weight for Dan that it had for Freya. He knew it was important to her, but he didn’t really get it.
She felt a tangle of explanations rising, strings of words and justifications, but they were unwieldy and labored. She tried to project how she felt, but she only got an echo in return, not understanding.
Freya tried another tack, summoning up a stream of memories. Together they saw Mr. Mathis arriving with his battered guitar case, those old hands dancing along the golden frets of the piano black New Yorker. Dan felt her dip of despair as he announced: “If you’re not going to bother practicing, I’m not going to bother coming.”
Next was a blur of hours upon hours of practice as she tried to escape that crushing feeling. She showed Dan the minute raise of Mr. Mathis’ eyebrows when she finally nailed “Mr. Sandman” after three weeks of trying to get all fifty chord changes right.
Freya tried to stop the cascade of memories, but there was an inertia to this. They slipped downstream, and they were shrinking, looking up as Randall smiled at them, pulling the Ovation off the wall of the guitar store. Freya’s voice piped up, promising she would practice every day.
The memory crashed between them like a cymbal. It was something she’d never thought she would share with anyone else.
For Freya, the memory had been worn as smooth as a river stone by thousands of recollections. But, for Dan, it was brand new and arresting. Through him, she was there again, alive in the moment. The feeling echoed back and forth between them. Freya tried to cling to it until there were only reverberations remaining.
She was there!
It couldn’t last. When the feeling died, Freya felt like she’d been impaled. It hurt so much she could only squirm in the car seat and make a low keening noise in the back of her throat.
Dan had to feel it all with her. In unison, they reached out and grasped hands, not gently as they had before but as if they dangled over an abyss. How it stung! But on the other side of the pain, there was a dawning comprehension.
Now, he saw. Now, he got her.
Euphoria cut through the hurt, a feeling of being completely understood. Freya reveled in it, and she had a fierce yen to reciprocate, to understand him in the same way. As he felt her attention turn to him, his thoughts sharpened into a jagged line of unease.
Reflexively, he sought parallels in his own experience, but they crashed into turmoil. Even as he cried out to be understood, there was something in Dan that did not want to be unraveled.
His anxiety came in black, flickering stabs, like the pointed fingers tapping that had rapped on her bedroom window. Freya couldn’t help but recall the image of Death with his white, gleaming smile. There were screaming notes of recognition from Dan, he released her hand and shrank back from her until his back pressed against the car door.
“Don’t go there!” he hissed.
Dan recognized the shadow! In his panic, the whole car seemed to shudder with turbulence. He tried to throw off Unity. Dan had an animal desire to wrench open the door and bolt into the night.
“I’m sorry!” Freya said the words and projected the emotion simultaneously, trying to reach him. The Starball burned hot in her hand, the cool emptiness spreading through his thoughts as it fought to calm him.
“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” she said.
There was fear in Dan’s eyes. She’d pressed too hard and gone too far. Unity was collapsing. Her breath felt hollow, and her heartbeat unaccompanied. The world crept back in.
Over the sound of the idling engine, music swelled in the chapel. She couldn’t make out what they were playing. A single female voice rose, hitting a high note before the rest of the choir joined her.
Dan trembled, and Freya reached towards his hand. He drew it back. She felt the piercing hurt, the knife in her chest. He watched her expression crumble, and it seemed to snap him out of his panic.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed in reply. It took visible effort, but he reached out and took her hand. “It was too much.”
“I didn’t mean to think about that,” Freya apologized.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to go there.” Dan’s voice dropped to a low whisper, as if the shadow were just outside the window.
“It’s just a dream I had.” Freya wished her voice sounded surer. Dan didn’t respond, his eyes darting around at the night outside. He’d seen the shadow before.
“Where did you see that?” Freya asked.
“Rigo and I tried to get high on Benadryl. We took too much. You start seeing, like, spiders and shadow people. It’s an awful trip. That’s exactly how it looked, those white teeth.”
The choir rose, filling in the empty space between them.
“Everything was so good before I ruined it,” Freya lamented. “Do you want to go home?”
There was a moment of hesitation. Dan was shaken up enough he considered it.
“It’s just a dream,” Dan agreed at last. “You didn’t ruin anything, I’m sorry for freaking out. I just wasn’t ready.”
“I’ll try not to um…go in that direction. There’s more stuff like that,” Freya warned. “Other dreams, some worse.”
“I have some really bad stuff, too,” Dan said with a distant look. His voice was jagged and uncertain.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?”
Dan nodded. His lips were tight.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I haven’t even told Dr. G.”
“Whatever it is, I won’t leave,” Freya said.
“You can’t know that!”
Freya was sure no words could convince him. She leaned across and kissed him instead. He was too shaken to kiss her back. She persisted until his lips responded to hers. She kissed along his cheek and pressed her mouth against his ear.
“I want you,” she whispered. She set her hand on his thigh, and he shifted in his seat. Her pulse pounded, and her thoughts came in insistent flashes.
Here. Now. Right in the parking lot.
“Oh, shit,” Dan said, nodding his chin forward. She followed his eyes. The door of the chapel had swung wide and there was someone backed by golden light, staring at them.
“Ack!” Freya bleated, recoiling into her seat. Dan already had the car in reverse. He whipped them backward and hit the gas, speeding out of the parking lot. A quarter mile down the road, they both started to giggle. It bloomed into laughter.
“That keeps happening to us,” Freya shook her head.
“They must have noticed the headlights,” Dan reasoned. “At least it wasn’t your mom this time.”
“With the gun. Oh, God.” Freya’s cheeks burned at the thought. She hoped Lassa was all right, but the worry slipped away like the trees whipping past the car. There was only tonight, only right now, only him.