Skinner by Charlie Huston Read Free Book Online Page A

atmosphere, so clumsy.
    “Jae? Are you still there?”
    She nods in the empty room.
    “Here. Getting back online. Terrible cable here. Forty-nine channels. I can barely see anything with forty-nine channels.”
    “Jae, you need to be at Creech in the morning.”
    “Too soon.”
    “Too late. Very close to being too late.”
    Voices in the background of the call, amplified, foreign languages, she recognizes number sequences being repeated. 1099. 6766. 4320. German, French, English.
    “Where are you, Terrence? What airport? Somewhere in Germany.”
    “Yes. Cologne. I’m meeting someone here.”
    Her hands are off on their own now, receiving signals she’s unaware her brain is sending. Tapping keys, launching searches. Cologne. Flughafen. Flights. 1099. 6766. 4320.
    “Jae. Go to Creech.”
    “I’m not ready to look yet. I won’t be able to help them. I’m still in the desert.”
    “No, you’re not. And the pictures will be easy anyway. Something is happening. Something dangerous is happening. A disaster.”
    Her fingers tapping, channels flipping, scanning.
    “What? I don’t see anything. There are no reports. It doesn’t matter. I’m not digging up more dead bodies. They can call Disaster City if they want robots to find dead people. I won’t go. They need me to look at pictures at Creech.”
    “The disaster hasn’t happened, Jae. It is happening. People are going to die. Jae.”
    Nothing, Terrence silent, just the flights being called in the background.
    “Jae. So many people will die. But not yet. Soon. But not yet. We can. Jae. We can stop it this time. Do you remember?
    Her eyes are stinging. She blinks.
    “I’m tired.”
    “Remember when we met. We talked about your configurations. How they all end the same.”
    She remembers. She cannot forget. Her search for the will of the designer. She found it. Every configuration she maps eventually shows her the same land. Land of the Dead. Where they’ll all be.
    “It’s just what’s going to happen, Terrence. The world. It’s not meant to be here forever. Stop, please.”
    But he won’t.
    “I promised you something when we met.”
    She touches her cheek, it’s wet.
    “You said it all made sense. You said if I looked hard enough it would make sense. You said it doesn’t have to end. The configuration doesn’t have to end with everybody dead. You said if I kept looking I’d be able to see the disasters before they happened. And get there in time. You’re such a liar, Terrence.”
    “I didn’t lie. It just took a long time. Go to Creech. I’m sending someone for you.”
    “Who?”
    “Someone with a job.”
    “Who with?”
    A pause, and then he rushes the word to her.
    “Kestrel.”
    “Ah, shit, Terrence. Shit.”
    But he just won’t stop.
    “What happened before, Jae, it won’t happen with him. It can’t. He’s not like. He’s not like other people. And he’ll give you something at Creech, Jae. A map.”
    “To where?”
    “To the future, Jae. It’s a map to the place where the future is being made. There are lives to be saved there. You can help. Believe me.”
    Her cheeks are wet because she’s crying. She doesn’t wipe them. Her hand is going to the trackpad, clicking the call to an end before Terrence can say anything else. Her mind already caught in the tide. Awash in a dream of the future. A future that doesn’t look like the desert.
    The rest of the night she spends upright in bed, TV channels cycling, cable, an increasing number of infomercials, surfing her phone along a wave of links starting with the Wikipedia entry for Weapons-grade .
    Opening her eyes.

repeat and reinforce
    IT WAS HAVEN who first led Terrence to Skinner, directing his attention to a handful of scholarly articles, and more than one sensationalist account of the story in the pages of national news magazines. Back issues, old news, and forgotten. But Terrence had been unable to keep himself from wondering what had happened to the so-called Box Boy.