Lexie, page 3
A thought struck Danni. “Hey, wait. You said this Burbank guy discovered the signals in forty-one? That’s over eighty years ago. How old is he?”
“Old,” Luka said. “We visited him once. He’s like this wizened gnome in a penthouse on Central Park West surrounded by eighty-plus years’ worth of electronics. A veritable museum of vintage and cutting-edge tech.”
“That’s all very mysterious and it’s certainly an unexplained phenomenon,” Chan said, “but unless it’s going to help find those kids from the mountain, what’s it got to do with us?”
“Just a point of interest for now,” Ilya said, “but who knows where it will lead? You’re now with R3A, and our territory is unexplained phenomena. We asked Burbank to let us know if anything funky happened with the signals, and now he calls to tell us one of them has started to move. They’ve all been stationary since they started. Never until now has one been known to change position.”
Despite the lack of relevance to her own agenda, Danni didn’t want to give Ilya the brush-off. Though there’d never be anything between them, he had a sweetness about him. She liked the guy.
“Moving from where?”
“The Antarctic. Burbank gets only sporadic reports from that area of the world, but the latest report shows a stable frequency, as expected, but far from its original location. This is a new wrinkle and I have to wonder if it has any relevance to what happened up here and in AC.”
“How could they be connected?” Danni said.
He shrugged. “You never know.”
“Everything’s connected,” Zina said.
Danni had gathered that was her mantra.
Ilya said, “They’re all unprecedented. No signal has ever moved before—at least that we know of. And nothing like what happened to Atlantic City or this mountain have ever happened before.”
Zina rose. “We need to look into this.” To Ilya she said, “Check back with Burbank and see if he can get an up-to-date fix on that signal’s location.” To Luka: “Once we get that, you have NSA get satellite views of the location while I see if we have any assets down that way that can get us up close and personal visuals.”
“Well,” Chan said, “here’s wishing the satellites have better luck with finding this signal than locating what’s left of the Family.”
“Don’t forget, you guys,” Ilya said as the Troika departed the room, “we want to find those kids as much as you do.”
Danni knew that. What was the purpose in those mystery genes those kids inherited from their Enhanced fathers? The answer could be important.
But where the hell were they?
2
Pam watched as Nicolette practiced driving the school bus through the entrance to the condo property, around the circular front arrive, and back out again. The bus was a brilliant idea. What better way to ferry a bunch of kids and adults around than a school bus? Nobody would give them a second look. The seller had painted over the name of the school that previously owned it. They’d leave it that way and use it instead of the vans parked in the complex’s underground garage—where all three would stay out of sight from prying eyes.
The two-story condo complex was located in a woodsy area in western New Hampshire. Nicolette had said Samuel owned the whole thing, but she didn’t know if he’d built it or had simply come along pre-construction and bought up all twenty of the two-bedroom units. The nearest town was someplace called Keene. Pam knew nothing about New Hampshire and had no idea what the town was like.
She took a deep breath of the fresh country morning air. Her life had taken a left turn into the Twilight Zone in the last ten days. Not that it had been particularly great before that, but at least she could say it had harbored a modicum of normalcy. Phil’s death had put an end to a marriage that had never recovered from the abduction of their infant daughter. Whatever love they’d shared at the start had dried up and blown away in the seven years that followed. But he deserved better than to be killed by a drunk driver. Still… pretty mundane.
The weird shit began when the mortuary informed her that Phil’s body wouldn’t burn. It had remained totally oblivious to the 1700 degrees in the crematorium retort. And then, as if that wasn’t strange enough, someone stole his body from the mortuary that very night. But that was only the start of the weirdness. Chan Liao came into her life and took her on a trip down memory lane to the realization that everything her husband had told her about himself had been a lie.
That should have been enough, but the weirdness only escalated from there. She—
“Pam?” said a child’s voice behind her.
Her heart glowed as she turned to the seven-year-old redhead she was sure was her daughter, abducted as a newborn. She was wrapped in a towel and her hair was dripping from a dip in the pool. The kids from the Family had never had a pool at their disposal and they loved it. The late August heat made it even more enticing.
“Lexie! What’s up, honey?”
“Can you come into the clubhouse?” She held out her hand. “It’s important.”
“Well, of course.” Pam took the little hand in hers. What a wonderful, amazing feeling to touch the daughter she’d thought gone forever. “What’s so important?”
“I need you and Daphne to sit down for a talk.”
“What about?”
“You’ll see.”
For the past seven years, Daphne had raised Lexie—who Pam had named Julie at birth. Though convinced Lexie was Julie, Pam had said nothing to anyone here. No one else knew.
They entered the octagonal clubhouse to find Daphne already present and seated at one of the card tables. She’d wrapped herself in a white terrycloth robe. Her wet blond hair made it a good bet she’d been in the pool with the kids. She looked uneasy.
“What’s going on?” Pam said.
Daphne shook her head. “Lexie asked me to come here to talk to you.”
Lexie stepped back and looked at them. “There’s too much unspoken here.” She pointed to Pam. “You’re my birth mother.” Then to Daphne. “And you raised me with love and kindness. The two of you need to come to an accommodation because I want you both in my life. I’ll be back in a little while.”
She turned and walked out.
Pam watched her exit in mute shock. Well, so much for no one else knowing. Daphne looked stricken.
Yeah, they had to talk this over, and they especially had to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room. But first, loosen the tension…
“What seven-year-old talks like that?” Pam said, watching Lexie’s retreating form.
“The kind with a one-eighty-two IQ,” Daphne said.
Pam blinked. Another shock. You couldn’t be with Lexie long before you realized she possessed a keen mind and maturity far beyond her years. But a 182 IQ? She’d had no idea…
“Really? I think I can safely say she didn’t get that from me.” She gave Daphne a hard look. “But you got her from me.”
Okay, now the gorilla was front and center. Daphne burst into tears.
“Don’t take her from me! Please, I’m begging you.”
“She was stolen from me the day after she was born. How could you—?”
“I didn’t know!”
“You had to know she came from someone!”
“But I didn’t know she’d been stolen! None of us can have children and—”
“Wait. ‘Us’? What ‘us’ are we talking about here?”
“The enhanced women. Our ovaries don’t produce viable eggs. We can’t conceive.”
“You’ve lost me. ‘Enhanced’?”
“That’s a long story. What matters is we are all what they used to call ‘barren.’”
“You’re talking about you and Nicolette and the other mothers here?”
“Yes. Try to imagine what that’s like, to be told you’ll never conceive, never have a child of your own, and then have someone hand you this newborn and say you can have her to raise as your own if you want her. The last thing you do is push her away. I asked where she came from and was told it wasn’t important. And when I pressed they said if it mattered so much, they’d find someone else to raise her. So I named her Lexie and raised her. And I love her more than anything in the world.”
She knew from watching Daphne with the child that she was speaking the truth. Pam had dreaded this moment. She’d worried about traumatizing Lexie by tearing her away from the woman she’d spent her entire life calling “Mommy.” But Lexie had commandeered the driver’s seat this morning and taken control of the situation.
“Didn’t you get suspicious when they wouldn’t tell you where she came from?”
A shrug. “I imagined all sorts of reasons: the mother was a drug addict or a criminal or a victim of incest, and I assumed they didn’t want me to have any preconceptions about the child. But none of that would have made a difference. I fell in love with Lexie from the instant I held her.”
“And you had no fucking idea?”
Oops. Had to watch that. With Lexie around, she’d walled off Potty-mouth Pam, but every so often she broke through.
“Not until three days ago when I saw the two of you talking. The resemblance was unmistakable. And when I learned your name was Sirman…” She grimaced. “Everything became all too clear.”
“You knew Phil?”
A nod. “We’d met. But it all came crashing together. The females of the Enhanced can’t conceive, but the males are fertile as all get out. So they were sent out into the world and fathered children who were then brought to the Mountain to be raised by the Family.”
Pam leaned back and thought of the toddlers and preschoolers she’d seen in the vans, and grammar-school-age kids frolicking in the pool right now.
“But that’s…that’s…”
“I know. It’s monstrous.”
The same word Danni had used to describe the scheme… the only word that truly fit, she guessed.
Daphne slid her hand across the table toward Pam. “I can’t imagine the pain it must have caused you…to lose your child like that. But I had no idea, I swear. If I had, I never would have…”
Unable to speak, Pam could only take Daphne’s hand and squeeze it.
She could forgive Daphne. But Phil…how could he do that to her? But Phil was dead and beyond forgiveness, so… good riddance.
Finally she found her voice. “I suppose I should thank you for doing such a wonderful job with her. The pain of those seven years… never knowing it she was dead or alive or, if alive, was she being treated well… it’s somehow lessened by knowing she was raised by someone who loved her.”
Daphne’s mouth twisted into a crooked smile. “Lexie’s been sort of raising herself these past couple of years. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have a child who’s so much smarter than you.” And now a genuine smile. “But you’ll learn soon enough.”
“I can’t wait to learn all about her.”
And now Daphne frowned. “You may find some things, well, difficult.”
“Like what? She’s a know-it-all? I went through that phase myself as a kid.”
“The problem with Lexie is that she does know it all, or at least seems to. But that’s minor compared to…”
“What?”
Daphne hesitated, then said, “She can walk through walls.”
Pam stared at her, wondering if she’d heard right, because Daphne’s expression gave no hint that she might be joking. Considering all she’d been through since Phil had died, including the disappearance of a mountain, this wasn’t all that outrageous.
“Walk through walls? You’re serious? You’ve seen it?”
A nod. “A number of times. She tried to hide it from me, but I caught her at it.”
“In one side and out the other?”
“Well, not exactly. She goes in one side and comes out… somewhere else.”
Pam shook her head, baffled. “What’s that mean?”
“The way she explained it to me, she steps through into another world, and apparently there are many of them. The multiverse theory seems to be true. But she can enter realities only where the same wall exists, and where she doesn’t already exist.”
“You mean there are other Lexies out there?”
“Many, apparently. Different walls lead to different realities. Some walls she can’t go through because there’s another Lexie on the far side. That was why she couldn’t get through the walls of our house back on the Mountain, because there were no realities where those walls existed and she did not. But the fort was another story.”
Pam remembered it. “You mean that big stone place where you were gathered during the storm?”
“That’s the one. Something very strange about that building. Lexie could walk through its walls and wind up in weird, surreal places. She’d remember what she saw and then come home and paint it.”
“I saw one of those paintings.” Pam remembered a landscape—a smooth, bright orange plain dotted with strange, asymmetrical shapes at odd intervals and more strange shapes afloat in a dark gray sky. “I asked her where she got the idea and she said, ‘I paint what I see.’ I thought she meant in her mind.”
Daphne laughed. “That’s her little joke. She really did paint what she saw. But the fort is gone now, along with the Mountain, so no more of those paintings from Lexie.”
“That’s a shame. The one I saw was quite good.”
“She can’t walk through any of these walls either. There must be some logic to that but I haven’t figured it out.”
Pam looked at Daphne. Time for the big question.
“So…what are we going to do?”
“You’re the birth mother, Pam. I think it only fair and right that I defer to you.”
“And you’re the mother who devoted seven years to nurturing her into the wonderful child she is today. She says she wants both of us in her life, so that’s the way it will be. We’re going to have to rewrite that book into Lexie Has Two Mommies.”
Tears streamed down Daphne’s cheeks. “I was hoping you’d say that. She’s my life.”
They clasped hands across the table. “I want her to be my life too.”
3
Chan and Danni had been called out to R3A’s rolling command center, a huge, windowless mobile home bedizened with antennas and rooftop dishes that took up most of Cliff House’s parking lot. They all sat among an electronics-store array of flickering screens and blinking lights and watched satellite pictures of a huge iceberg, flat as a landing strip.
Luka was tapping the screen with a ballpoint pen. “That’s D-31, a fractured tabular iceberg late of the Weddell Sea. It started out about a dozen or so miles long, roughly the size of Manhattan. It’s headed north, probably going to pass between the Falklands and South Georgia Island if it holds together. But it’s already breaking up. Just three days ago it split into two parts: D-31a on the north end, and D-31b on the south.”
“Fascinating,” said Danni. “Is that where the mothers and children from the Family are hiding?”
Chan winced a little at the snark but had to agree. What did an iceberg have to do with why they were here?
“Boy, you two have one-track minds. You’re looking at the reason the signal is moving. It’s fixed on the iceberg.”
Zina said, “The Harry S. Truman, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, isn’t far away and so we had them send out a plane on a flyby for a closer look.” She pressed a button and the eye-in-the-sky view of the berg was replaced with a closer-in moving video taken from a plane window.
Chan was about to make a comment like Danni’s but Zina must have sensed it and lifted a finger to shush him.
“Wait for it…wait for it…there!”
Chan saw a dark shape embedded in the broken end of D-31a. Now this was interesting.
“What is that?”
“A U-boat!” Ilya cried, bubbling with excitement. “A Nine-B-class World War Two Nazi sub! We’ve identified it as U-104, reported missing November twenty-eight, nineteen forty on the northwest coast of Ireland with all hands presumed lost.”
“And yet here it is,” Zina said. “A long way from Ireland.”
“And a long way from nineteen forty,” Luka added.
Okay, Chan had to admit, that was pretty cool, even if it didn’t bring them one inch closer to finding those kids.
Danni frowned. “But this iceberg came from Antarctica. What were Nazis doing down there?”
Ilya grinned through his beard. “You’re obviously not up on your conspiracy theories. Supposedly the Nazis set up a secret base in Antarctica during the war. The more far-out versions say they encountered aliens there and were trying to adapt their technology for the German war effort.”
Chan laughed. “And people believe that?”
“People will believe pretty much anything they want to believe. There is some basis in reality linking the Third Reich to the Antarctic, but the facts as we know them are fairly mundane. In nineteen thirty-nine, a German catapult freighter named the MS Schwabenland, arrived off the Norwegian Antarctic territory called Queen Maud Land. They launched an aircraft which dropped markers around the perimeter of a huge area of the coast and claimed it for Germany. They named it Neuschwabenland and sailed back to Germany with thousands of photos.”
“I prefer the story of them meeting aliens and trying to get their technology.”
Another of Ilya’s toothy grins. “Don’t we all.”
Zina turned off the video and leaned back. “I was hoping the iceberg would settle the mystery of the moving signal but it’s only triggered more questions. Yes, the signal is following the berg, but why?”
“Alien technology?” Danni said with a perfectly innocent face, though Chan could tell she was fighting a grin.
Luka shook his head. “Look, I know much of NSA considers us conspiracy nuts who aren’t too tightly wrapped, but we’ve taken critical looks at all these things and we don’t think space aliens are in play on Earth—or ever were.” He waved a hand back and forth between him and his sister. “Our father was a major ufologist. He’s the one who started us on this path, but we don’t need space aliens and Roswell and all the rest to explain the weird shit that goes down in this world.”
