Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(121)
After a silence, Pax said, “I don’t want to think about it.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then we won’t.”
Finished eating, each of them ordered a second beer.
Pax had brought with him the spiral-bound panther-and-gazelle notebook. Now he opened it on the table to skim through some of the Jasper stories, looking for he knew not what, for anything that might be a clue that would help them fulfill Bibi’s request: Find me.
They were stories written by a ten-year-old girl, but a damn smart ten-year-old. They had flair. They were compelling.
Nevertheless, Pax found himself repeatedly turning past the last tale of Jasper, to the first two blank pages that followed. On the left-hand page were the two lines from one of Bibi’s favorite poems: Now comes the evening of the mind / Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood. He dunked a finger in his beer and wiped it across Now comes the evening. The black ink smeared readily.
“She didn’t write this when she was ten. She wrote it recently. I’d guess within the last month, but maybe not nearly that long ago.”
Squeezing a slice of lime over the lip of his beer bottle, Pogo said, “What do you think—does it mean something?”
“It has to.”
“What does it mean?”
As Pax was about to admit that he didn’t know, words began to appear as if by magic on the right-hand page, in the familiar elegant cursive script. Before all of this with Bibi, he had a few times over his twenty-eight years tasted the spice of the uncanny, but suddenly it was a staple of his diet. Its effects—a chill, a spidery capering sensation along the nape of the neck, a not unpleasant swelling of the heart—were as reliable as the oral heat and pop-sweat that attended the consumption of a habanero pepper.
Pogo, too, saw the words appearing, and Pax turned the notebook so that both of them could read the message as it formed.
The first line declared, I am a Valiant girl.
On the electronic map, the grid of sixteen streets, eight east-west and eight north-south, was given no overarching name. But when the GPS announced that a right turn would bring Bibi to Sonomire Way, a monument sign resolved out of the dense fog, a monolith that might have been erected by godlike extraterrestrials to humble and inspire ape-stupid humanity to make something better of itself during the millennia to come. The slab stood about fourteen feet high and seven wide, polished black granite inlaid with a matte-finish stainless-steel band surrounding embedded Lucite letters that were a luminous blue now at four o’clock in the morning. The letters were smaller than might have been expected in those ninety-eight square feet of granite, as if the slab was a shout to get your attention and the words were a whisper, a name to be spoken only in a respectful hush: SONOMIRE TECHNOLOGY PARK.
Cruising slowly, cautiously along the four-lane street, Bibi had an impression of vast properties. Enormous low-rise buildings, four and five stories, yet of a scale incomprehensible, were revealed only by landscape lamps, which were in fact security lamps in elegant disguise, floods of pale light frozen in mid swash, and by scattered ranks of windows where people or robots labored in spite of the hour. The architecture was unintelligible in the fog and perhaps troubling even in clear daylight, inhuman and somehow militaristic, so that the structures were moored like massive battleships in the sea of mist, no, like starship fleets preparing to venture forth to extinguish not merely cities but entire planets.
“Eleven Sonomire Way, one hundred yards ahead, on the left,” said the GPS.
Bibi pulled at once to the curb, killed the headlights and the engine. She turned off the electronic map and sat in darkness, as the fog invented the many caissons of a ghost army and rolled them slowly through the night. She kept thinking of the bludgeoned man and the gunshot woman in the house from which Ashley Bell had been kidnapped, their broken bloody bodies. Every injury that she had sustained earlier, in the battle with the brute in the Corona del Mar bungalow, seemed to ache more than ever. She needed to gather her courage; the one good thing about doing so was that, given how little courage she still had, she didn’t waste much time in the gathering of it.
She got out of the Honda. The chunk and rattle of the closing door winnowed through the fog, the former traveling not very far, the latter perhaps attracting attention if anyone waited alertly for her arrival. The night pressed white around her, clammy, chilly. Fog in her ears. In her throat. Her lungs heavy with inhaled mist, she found the sidewalk and proceeded on foot.
Apparently not every property in Sonomire Technology Park had built out, for Number 11 was surrounded by a construction fence with a wide double gate, half of which stood open. A metal sign wired to the closed half of the gate declared THE FUTURE SITE OF TEREZIN, INC. The announced completion date lay less than fourteen months away; therefore, lost in the fog must be considerable construction, perhaps finished wings of a central structure or entire completed buildings.
The only light on the property glowed in the windows of one of two large double-wide construction-office trailers. She approached with caution across the unevenly compacted and littered earth, peered in a window, and saw a room containing six or eight office chairs surrounding what appeared to be a dining-table-size scale model of the project. It was a sprawling complex of scalloped and sweeping buildings that seemed about to be airborne, situated among plazas shaded by groves of phoenix palms, enlivened by numerous fountains as well as by a body of water large enough to be called a lake.