The Rising(77)

The professor pulled the unlit pipe from his mouth and gestured toward Alex and Sam with it, as they approached. Alex couldn’t help thinking of Reverend Billy and THEND COMES stenciled across his knuckles. Maybe they were related or, more likely, keyed in to something on a cosmic level, able to hear and see things others couldn’t. Alex remembered a tutoring session during which Sam explained that if humans could see as well as dogs could smell, they’d be able to identify a man clearly a half mile away with the naked eye. Begging the question: Who knew more, things being relative and all?

“You kids lost?” the Santa Claus–like figure asked, uncrossing his long legs and stretching them across the blanket.

“That depends,” Alex told him.

“Does it now? On what, exactly?”

“On whether you can help us.”

The professor looked toward the small pot swaying slightly in the breeze. “Answers cost a dollar.”

Alex unfurled a crumpled bill from his pocket and pushed it into the empty pot. “Where was Laboratory Z?”

The professor looked at them with his sky-blue eyes turning narrow and suspicious. “Take back your dollar.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“That’s why you get your money back.”

“I don’t want my money back, I want an answer.”

“Then ask a different question.”

“Where was Laboratory Z located?”

The professor smirked, making him look even more like a mirthful Santa Claus. “Clever, aren’t you?”

“Not really,” Alex told him. “That’s why I’ve got my tutor, Samantha, with me. I’m Alex.”

The professor looked at both of them. “Do you always travel with your tutor, Alex?”

“Only when we’re on the run,” Alex told him, surprised by his own frankness.

The professor tried to look bemused, but failed. “What’d you do, rob a bank?”

“Actually, we’re being chased by really bad guys who killed my parents. Only, they’re not ‘guys’ at all. They’re robots, drones, androids—something like that.”

“And what’s their interest in you?” the professor asked, playing along as if it was something he was used to doing.

“I’m an alien.” Alex let the professor see him turn his gaze on Bishop Ranch, taking in as much of the sprawl as he could. “My adoptive mother rescued me from here, from Laboratory Z. The day of the fire. Her name was An Chin and she and my father were the best people I ever knew.”

Something had made him tell the professor the whole crazy truth. He couldn’t say what, exactly, something that told Alex this man wouldn’t be surprised by it. Not at all.

“And I can prove it.”

“Prove that your parents were the best people you ever knew?”

“No, that you’re right. They really do walk among us and a war really is coming.”

With that, Alex extracted the slap bracelet he’d taken from his father’s wrist from the pocket of the still-stiff jeans he’d purchased at the Buy Two store. His feet felt much better squeezed into cheap sneakers his own size.

“Alien piece of jewelry?” the professor asked him.

“I guess you can call it that. But slap it on and you won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

“What do you—”

The professor’s words froze in his throat when Alex slapped the bracelet on his wrist. His features seized up and his eyes bulged with fear until Alex stripped the thing off him.

“Where did you get that?” the professor asked, wide-eyed as he rubbed his wrist as if it were someone else’s.

“From my father’s wrist after they killed him.”

“After who killed him?”

“Androids, cyborgs.”

“We call them drone things,” Sam chimed in.

The professor looked at her briefly before returning his focus to Alex, the fear still in his eyes. “You’re saying a cyborg murdered your parents.”

“‘Cyborgs,’ plural, yes. And we haven’t even gotten to the ash man yet, a kind of astral projection. I’m the one he’s after because I’ve got what he wants.”

“And what’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“That’s why we’re looking for whatever’s left of Laboratory Z,” Alex told him. “Because maybe the answer’s there.”





78

MR. WIZARD

THE PROFESSOR CLIMBED TO his feet, one knobby knee cracking and then the other. He held his ground on the grass-stained blanket as if to keep his distance, then suddenly reached down and plucked Alex’s untangled bill from his pot.

“Here,” he said, extending it with a trembling hand.

Alex didn’t take it. “What’s with the refund?”

“You didn’t ask a question.”

“Yes, I did; you didn’t answer it,” Alex said.

The professor suddenly looked like a man who badly wanted to be somewhere else. “You need to leave.”

“Tell me where we can find Laboratory Z and we will.”

The old man’s eyes sought him out, seeming to view him differently now, with an odd mixture of wonder and apprehension. “What makes you think I know?”