Ghost Country by Patrick Lee Read Free Book Online

tell him everything?
    She tried not to think about it. There wasn’t much point. She thought of Bethany instead. Wondered if she’d made it out of Border Town with the second cylinder.
    It crossed her mind that she actually hadn’t told the president everything: she hadn’t said a word about the other cylinder. It simply hadn’t fit into the conversation. She’d left it behind in Border Town on only the most general principles of caution and pragmatism. “Shit happens” principles. It was depressing how often those proved their worth.
    If Bethany had gotten out, then she’d probably already linked up with Travis. By now they might be just seeing what the cylinder did, somewhere in Atlanta. The thing’s basic function was easy enough to understand. But what about the rest of it? Would the two of them figure out what they needed to do—including the parts Paige herself hadn’t nailed down?
    And would they understand how damn little time they had left to do it?

Chapter Seven
    T here was a Ritz-Carlton halfway up the block on Vermont. Travis and Bethany got the Presidential Suite on the tenth floor—Renee Turner was paying for it, and it would’ve been at odds with her pattern to rent anything cheaper. The suite was 1800 square feet with views to the south and west. They could see the green-tinted building without obstruction. They could see the ninth-floor corner overlooking the traffic circle. Past the building they could see all the way down Vermont to the White House. The flag on its roof was flying full and tense in the wind.
    They sat on one of the leather couches, opened the backpack on the floor, and set the black cylinder on the empty cushion between them. It bled heat into the air like a cooling engine block.
    It was Travis’s first good look at the thing in bright light. The object was heavily scuffed and scratched, like a power tool put to years of hard use by a carpenter. There was no way anyone at Tangent had abused it like that. Travis had seen the paranoid care they took with entities. The scuffs could’ve only been made by the object’s original owners on the other side of the Breach. Whoever—or whatever—they were, this thing meant nothing more to them than a cordless drill or a radial saw meant to humans.
    Travis studied the labels Paige or one of the others had taped beside the three buttons. He’d seen them just briefly in the Explorer.
ON
OFF
OFF (DETACH/DELAY—93 SEC.)
    He spent only a few seconds trying to imagine what detach/delay meant. There was no point in thinking about it until they knew what the entity did.
    Aside from the buttons, and their engraved symbols, the cylinder’s only notable feature was a small lens inset in one end. It was about the size of a quarter, and deep black.
    “You said this came out of the Breach along with one just like it,” Travis said.
    Bethany nodded.
    “And that was a few days ago?”
    “Oh—no. They actually egressed years ago. Sometime in 1998, I think.”
    He stared at her. Waited for the explanation.
    “They were sealed,” she said. “Do you know about sealed entities?”
    Travis nodded. Paige had given him a pretty thorough tour of the Primary Lab in Border Town. She’d told him about sealed entities, and shown him a few of them. They were rare. They tended to be the more powerful ones. They emerged from the Breach in their own secure packaging, maybe the alien equivalent of the hard plastic shells that retailers used to deter shoplifters. Each sealed entity was unique, not only in the seal’s color and size, but in terms of what it took to open it. Some were easy: they opened to an electric charge or a certain temperature, or even blunt impact force. Others were tricky. Lab techs might spend weeks or months running them through a battery of experiments, every one a shot in the dark. Exposure to random chemical compounds, wavelengths of light, air pressure settings in a vacuum chamber. Some of them simply never gave up their