Quicksilver(16)

“I’m no John Grisham or Thomas Pynchon,” Sparky said, “but I’ve always been an incurable romantic, even though it could have gotten me killed back in the day when I was something and then something else and then another something that we don’t talk about.”

I glanced at the rearview mirror. At the moment, there were no headlights from westbound traffic to flense the mask of shadow from his face. “Where does this escape tunnel of yours lead?”

“Under the backyard and two hundred feet into the woods,” said Bridget, “to this fake boulder that’s like a lid. Hydraulics flip it open, so we can exit.”

“From there,” Sparky said, “we went on foot about a half mile, down through the woods to the county road, another property I own under the name Aurora Teagarden.”

“Ever since I was five,” Bridget explained, “we’ve kept one nondescript car or another there, packed with everything we’d need if we had to go on the run.”

I had maybe a hundred questions, maybe three hundred, but two big ones pried at me harder than the others. “So ever since Bridget was four and five, you’ve had a plan to escape. From whom?”

“We didn’t know,” Sparky said. “It was just obvious someone was going to come looking for her sooner or later. Turned out to be the ISA, but we’ve reason to believe there’s others more dangerous than they are and a whole lot stranger.”

“Why was it obvious?”

“Because she’s special.”

“Oh, I can see she’s special, but how is she special?” I asked, thereby both revealing my enchantment and making a fool of myself.

“You’ll see soon enough,” Sparky said. “It’s better you see it happen instead of me trying to describe it.”

By now, I understood them well enough to know that if they were determined to be enigmatic, I would suffer a hernia trying to throw off their veil of mystery.

I proceeded to my second big question, which I addressed to Bridget. In the glow of the instrument-panel light, she was so radiant that I thought of the Roman deity Diana, goddess of the moon and hunting. I’d never met the goddess Diana, of course. I had only seen her depicted in art, sometimes running with a pack of wolves. If I were a wolf and Bridget were Diana, I would without question run with her under the moon. This time I managed to avoid steering the Buick off the pavement onto the graveled shoulder of the road as I said, “What did you do to get the ISA on your tail?”

“I suspect the same thing you did,” she said.

“But I didn’t do anything. They just walked into Beane’s and interrupted my lunch. I think it’s still legal to have a three-cheese hamburger, even one with mayonnaise.”

From the back seat, Sparky said, “She spit in a cup.”

Because she didn’t seem like that kind of woman, I said with some skepticism, “You spit in a cup? Whose cup?”

“My cup. It had a little screw top. It came with the kit after I signed up on the internet.”

She was right. I had spit in one, too. “I spit in one, too,” I said, feeling connected to her by that ritual, hoping she would feel closer to me, feel a bond, even if it had to do with spit.

“You spat in one,” she said. “My cup was from Getting to Know Me dot com.”

“Mine, too!”

Getting to Know Me was a competitor of Ancestry.com and of 23andMe. They read your genome and told you all about yourself: where you came from, who was a relative and who wasn’t, whether you had a tendency to develop a horrible disease, all kinds of useful stuff.

Bridget said, “I wanted to learn who my father might’ve been.”

“I was abandoned as an infant,” I reminded them. “I have no idea who either of my parents are. I was raised by nuns in an orphanage. But why should the ISA come down hard on us for wanting to know our ancestry? We have a right to know. What business is it of the government if we want to know?”

“Did you get your genome report?” Sparky asked.

“No. Not yet.”

“Neither did I,” Bridget said. “But the company sent it to the ISA. Those two suits you killed at the ranch—they explained the situation to us. I’m sure you were targeted for the same reason.”

“What reason?”

When she turned those sea-green eyes on me, the instrument-panel light tinted them a color that I couldn’t name. She said, “Several sequences in my genome are not human.”

She looked like the best example of a human I had ever seen. Confused, potentially more disappointed than frightened, I said, “You’re not human?”

“I’m human, yeah, but I’m something else, too, something more.”

“More what?”

“That’s what the ISA wants to know about me and about you. You’re like me.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m human.”

From the deep shadows of the back seat, Sparky said, “You‘re human, son, but like Bridget you’re also something more. And maybe just a little slow on the uptake.”

Bridget said, “In your own way, you’re as different as I am, Quinn Quicksilver. You have your magnetism. I have . . . what I have.”

“Keep your speed up,” Sparky advised. “We don’t want to be tail-ended.”