An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(78)

She seemed to think about this very hard for several seconds before she launched in on me. Her face got hard; her voice became darts.

“April, we are aware that someone tried to kill you last night. We believe it was the same man who tried to kill you this afternoon. Whatever possessed you to not report the shooting and then to walk out of your building unguarded, I’m. Not. Asking. Maybe it was the foolishness of youth, maybe it was more than that. But when you walked out of that building, you created a new history that we have to live in now.”

She did not say this as something I should be proud of, more something that I had to live with. The dart hit its mark.

“This new history is one in which the alien technology that we’ve come to know as the Carls allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of people to die, and then, today, clearly and intentionally killed a man rather than allow harm to come to you.”

“Well,” I said, and then paused for a long time. “Wait, you think Carl killed that guy?”

“April, Martin Bellacourt’s bones and organs and blood—everything except his skin—are now, as far as our best people can tell at the moment, grape jelly.”

Long pause . . .

“Grape jelly?” I asked.

She did not respond. I thought back to the ambulance—to the grape-flavored lip gloss. My stomach turned, and then a wave of anxiety washed over me and sweat prickled out over my entire body.

“What are they?” I asked quietly, unable to stop myself.

“We don’t know, April.”

Her strength was so comforting, so calming, that I finally asked her the question I hadn’t even been able to ask myself: “Are they bad?”

“April, I don’t know.” I caught a tiny glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes before she went on as confident as before. “What I do know is that we don’t just have a space alien, dream-infecting robot visiting every city in the world, we have a space alien, dream-infecting robot killer. I want very much to frame this correctly and be a voice of reason. However, I feel strongly that you or one of your”—she searched for a word—“posse . . . are right now working on a video that, while probably very good, will not necessarily have all the nuance the US government is looking for right now. So, please, if you could, allow us to analyze your footage and do not release anything for at least twenty-four hours.”

“Certainly there are already other videos out?” I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone was livestreaming at the time.

“There are, but it’s blurry cell phone footage. No one on scene had a camera as nice as yours. Please, just do this for us.”

“And after twenty-four hours we can post our video and you won’t want to review it or stop us from posting it?”

“April, I’m not a fool. I’ve seen the internet, you can’t contain information anymore. Plus there’s the whole First Amendment. It’s one of the bigger rules.”

“I’ll get you the files right away,” I said. “Where should they be delivered?”

“Here,” she said.

“Right here?”

“I would rather not leave without them.”

I took out my phone and called Robin.

“Robin, I need you to make a copy of Andy’s footage from today and bring it to me in the hospital.”

“Are you sure?”

“The president is here. We made—” I looked her right in the eyes as I said it. “We made a deal.” She smiled at me.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.

I hung up.

“We have twenty minutes,” I said to the president of the United States of America.

“Well, we have some other things to discuss. I’ve talked to your doctors and they said you could go home, but I was wondering if you could stay an extra day so that I could come by with the press tomorrow? They’ll ask you a few questions, mostly they’ll take pictures and video of me walking in and talking to you. I have to be shown being active right now or everyone will say, ‘Where is the president at this Time of Need! Probably playing shuffleboard or having her period!’ It’s not my fault I like shuffleboard so much. I always say, add up all the time every other president has spent golfing and tell me that my shuffleboard habit is bad for America.”

I laughed.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know. You’re”—I felt dumb as I said it—“really a person, aren’t you.”

“Oh, April, of all people I thought you would know what this is like. But I understand. The charisma of office, they call it. It’s hard to see past it. Indeed, I work to cultivate it. It’s part of the job.”

It struck me then how very much she was indeed quite like me. As if, maybe, there was real kinship that I might have with this person who was more a symbol than a human.

“So what do you say?” she said.

“Yeah, so you’re coming by again tomorrow?”

“I’m doing a number of things in the city.” She meant New York. “Because it’s where you were attacked, it makes more sense for me to be doing events here.” Then, without even pausing for breath, she changed the subject. “April, I’m going to debrief you personally. This would normally be done by someone else, but since we have a little time and I used to be in intelligence, I’m happy to do it myself.