Chapters (41)
I’d caught a couple of moths, held my breath as I’d stuck them to cotton swabs dabbed with petroleum jelly, and zoomed my camera in real close. I’d been dicking around, unsure of what I was going to do with the footage. Yusuf had been sitting on my bed, flicking over some Envisioner readouts of the day on his tablet. Scarlett was hooked up to my laptop on my desk, with the footage of the moths projected on one wall. The things had struggled against the goo—twitching their spindly legs and antennas, their trapped wings leaving brown dust on my hands.
“That’s cruel,” Yusuf had said.
I barely looked up from my footage. “What? They’re moths.”
“You’ll mind when you’re the moth.”
It hadn’t really been a fight, but close enough.
Through the hallway after we left the wolf pack for some quiet, I could already see the argument swirling behind his eyes. The patch of sweat down his borrowed T-shirt mimicked the abstract birds on the foil wallpaper surrounding us.
“We can’t take them with us,” he said, once we were inside our room.
“We won’t. But we can help them find someplace safe to land.”
“I’m not saying I don’t feel bad.” He crammed his fists beneath his crossed arms. “It’s just too many variables. We barely know what we’re doing as is. And we have no idea about the consequences of matter from one universe hanging around in another, never mind what we’re already—”
“You’ll mind when you’re the moth,” I cut him off.
His sigh was a white flag. He looked down then back up again, his annoyed smile like you got me, you asshole. He pushed off the wall and walked into the bathroom, where he peeled off his sweaty clothes and stepped into the shower. I watched the droplets on the glass shower door warp his naked body.
“I’ll handle the human variables,” I said to the spray of water. “You just keep working a plan, doc.”
The shower and the bathroom vent drowned out his answer. I plopped on the bed—already making a mess of the neat plain of the duvet that he’d carefully smoothed out with his hands that morning—because I could hear Figueiredo’s low whisper.
SCENE: A CUSHY HOTEL ROOM, WHERE FIGUEIREDO SITS IN A CHAIR FACING THE BED WITH A SNIFTER OF BRANDY IN THE LAMPLIGHT, AS IF HE’S PAID TO WATCH HAYES AND YUSUF GO AT IT – NIGHT
FIGUEIREDO
Interesting that you believe saving thirty men will make up for killing billions. Please.
Figueiredo’s whisper stretched out into the low mechanical whir of solar engines and tires outside. I looked through the wall of windows, out over the white canvas of snow, where six guys from the pack whipped by on ATVs and a flatbed truck to drag the Envisioner back here.