John Hawks - The Dark River

“What happened?” Naz asked. “You saw them, right?”

“Vicki was climbing the ladder. Hollis was just a few feet below her.”

Naz jumped up and began to pace back and forth. “We can’t stay here.”

“Sit down. It’s only been a couple minutes. We need to wait a little longer.”

“Good luck, man. I’m gone.”

Naz hurried over to the escalator and disappeared into the upper level of the terminal. Gabriel tried to imagine what had happened to the others. Were they trapped below? Had the Tabula caught up with them? The fact that a tracer bead was hidden in the ceramic gun had changed everything. He wondered if Maya would take an unnecessary risk to punish herself for what had happened.

Gabriel left the eating area and stood in the open doorway that led to the tracks. A surveillance camera was focused on the platform, and Gabriel had already noticed four other cameras mounted on the ceiling of the concourse. The Tabula had probably hacked into the terminal’s security system and their computers were scanning the live feeds for his image. Stay together . That was what Maya had told them, but she had also provided a backup plan: if there was a problem, they would meet up tomorrow morning on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Gabriel returned to the dining area and concealed himself behind a concrete pillar. A few seconds later, four tough-looking men wearing phone headsets came down the escalator and ran through the doorway to the track area. The moment they were gone, Gabriel went the other way, climbing a staircase to the main concourse and passing through a doorway to the street. The cold winter air made his eyes water and his face sting. The Traveler put his head down and stepped into the night.

DURING THEIR TIME in New York, Maya had insisted that everyone memorize safe routes through the city and a list of single-residency hotels that were off the Grid. One of these places was the Efficiency Hotel on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan. For twenty dollars in cash you got twelve hours in a windowless fiberglass pod that was eight feet long and five feet high. The forty-eight pods lined both sides of a corridor and made the hotel look like a mausoleum.

Before Gabriel entered the hotel, he took off his leather jacket again and folded it so that the bloodstains weren’t visible. The hotel clerk was an elderly Chinese man who sat behind a bulletproof barrier and waited for customers to slip their cash into a narrow slot. Gabriel paid him twenty dollars for the use of the pod and an extra five dollars for a foam rubber pad and a cotton blanket.

He received a key and walked down the hallway to the communal bathroom. Two Latino restaurant workers were standing bare-chested in front of the sinks, chattering to each other in Spanish as they washed the cooking grease off their faces and arms. Gabriel hid in a toilet stall until the two men were gone, then came out and washed his jacket in the sink. When he was done, he climbed a ladder to his rented space and crawled inside. Each pod had a fluorescent light and a small fan to keep the air circulating. There was a single peg to hold his jacket, and the wet leather began to drip softly, as if it were still sodden with blood.

Lying on the foam pad, Gabriel couldn’t stop thinking about Sophia Briggs. He had felt the Light within her, surging and moving like a powerful wave of water, and then it had flowed through his hands. He could hear muffled voices through the thin walls of the pod and it felt like he was drifting through shadows, surrounded by ghosts.

MAYA HAD TAUGHT Gabriel that the Grid was not absolute; there were still gaps and shadow areas where you could move safely through the city. The next morning, it took him about an hour to avoid the surveillance cameras and walk over to Tompkins Square Park. In the financial district and in the Midtown area, the gray bedrock of Manhattan was close to the surface, providing a foundation for the skyscrapers that dominated the city. On the Lower East Side, the bedrock was hundreds of feet below the surface, and the buildings that lined the streets were only four or five stories high.

Tompkins Square Park had been the traditional site for political protests for more than a hundred years. A generation earlier, a group of homeless people had established a camp there until the police had closed the park and surrounded it with a massive circle of officers. The police then walked toward the center, ripping apart improvised shelters and beating anyone who refused to leave. These days, huge elm trees shaded the park in the summer, and black iron railings surrounded every patch of ground. There were only two surveillance cameras in the park; both were aimed at the children’s playgrounds and easily avoided.

Gabriel walked cautiously through the park and approached the small redbrick building occupied by the gardening staff. He passed through some open gates and stopped in front of a white marble stela with a small lion’s-head fountain at the center. Faintly visible in the marble were the outline of some children’s faces and the words THEY WERE THE EARTH’S PUREST CHILDREN, YOUNG AND FAIR . This was the memorial to a 1904 disaster when a ferry ship called the General Slocum left New York Harbor carrying a group of German immigrants to a Sunday school picnic. The boat caught fire and sank without lifeboats, and over a thousand women and children died.

Maya used the memorial as one of three message boards around Manhattan. The boards gave their small group a communications alternative to the easily monitored cell phones. On the backside of the stela, at the marble base, Gabriel found some graffiti that Maya had left a few weeks ago. It was a Harlequin sign: an oval with three lines that symbolized a lute. He looked around at the nearby basketball court and the small garden. It was seven o’clock in the morning and no one was there. All the negative possibilities he had pushed out of his mind this morning returned with a dreadful power. Everyone was dead. And somehow, he was the cause of it.

Gabriel knelt down like a man about to pray. He took a felt-tip pen out of his jacket and wrote on the monument G. here. Where you?

He left the park immediately, walking across Avenue A to a small coffeehouse filled with old tables, rickety chairs, and a pair of school desks that looked as though they had been found on the street. Gabriel bought a cup of coffee and sat in the back room with his eyes on the doorway. His feeling of hopelessness was almost unbearable. Sophia and the families at New Harmony had been murdered. And now there was a strong possibility that the Tabula had killed Maya and his friends.

He stared down at the scratched surface of the table and tried to quiet the angry voice in his brain. Why was he a Traveler? And why had he caused all this pain? Only his father could answer these questions-and Matthew Corrigan was apparently living in London. Gabriel knew there were more surveillance cameras in London than in any other city in the world. It was a dangerous place, but his father must have gone there for some important reason.

No one paid attention as Gabriel opened his shoulder bag and counted the money in the packet Vicki had given him last night. There seemed to be enough cash to buy a plane ticket to Great Britain. Since Gabriel had spent his entire life off the Grid, the biometric data on his passport chip couldn’t be compared against any previous identity. Maya had seemed sure that he wouldn’t have problems traveling to another country. As far as the authorities were concerned, he was a citizen named Tim Bentley who worked as a commercial real estate agent in Tucson, Arizona.

He finished his coffee and returned to the memorial in Tompkins Square Park. Using a scrap of newspaper he wiped out his previous message and wrote G2LONDON . He felt like the survivor of a shipwreck who had just carved a few words on a scrap of wood. If his friends were still alive, then they would know what had happened. They would follow him to London and find him at Tyburn Convent. If everyone was dead, then it was a message to no one.