John Hawks - The Traveler

The candle had reappeared as if nothing had ever happened and burned bright in its brass holder. Gabriel licked his thumb and forefinger, then reached out to snuff the flame. The moment he touched the candle, the flame broke off from the wick and began to flutter around his head like a bright yellow butterfly. It came to rest on a rose stem and this dry tinder started to burn. Gabriel tried to crush the fire with the palm of his hand, but sparks escaped and settled on the rest of the altar.

Instead of running from the fire, he sat down in a center pew and watched the destruction spread through the room. Could he die in this place? If his body was destroyed would he reappear again, like the altar and the barbershop chair? He began to feel an intense heat, but tried to deny the new reality. Perhaps all this was a dream, another construction of his mind.

Smoke had risen to the ceiling and now it began to drift downward, pulled toward the half-open door. As Gabriel stood up and began to leave the church, the altar turned into a column of flame. Smoke entered his lungs. He started coughing, then glanced to the left and saw a shadow appear in one of the stained-glass windows. The shadow was black and deep; it floated back and forth like a wavering particle of night. Gabriel grabbed a pew and dragged it over to the wall. He stood on the pew and pulled himself onto the narrow ledge at the bottom of the window frame.

Drawing the sword, he slashed at the shadow and his right hand disappeared into the blackness. Jump , he thought. Save yourself . He began to fall into the dark passageway, pulled forward into space. It was only in the final moment that he looked back and saw Michael standing in the church doorway.

With Gabriel’s motorcycle hidden in the back of the van, Maya drove north to Las Vegas. She saw dozens of road signs advertising casinos, and then a cluster of bright towers popped up on the horizon. After cruising past several motels outside the city, she checked into the Frontier Lodge-ten individual rooms designed to look like log cabins. The shower stall had green stains bleeding from the faucet handles and the mattress was saggy, but she placed her sword beside her and slept for twelve hours.

Maya knew the casinos would have surveillance cameras, and some of the cameras might be connected to Tabula computers. When she woke up, she took out a syringe and injected facer drugs into her lips and the skin below her eyes. The drugs made her look overweight and dissipated, like a woman who had a drinking problem.

She drove to a mall and bought cheap, flashy clothes-Capri pants, a pink T-shirt, and sandals-then visited a shop where an older woman wearing a cowgirl costume was selling makeup and synthetic wigs. Maya pointed to a blond wig sitting on a Styrofoam head behind the counter.

“That’s the Champagne Blonde model, honey. You wanna wrap it up or wear it?”

“I’ll put it on right now.”

The clerk nodded her approval. “Men just love that blond hair. It drives ’em crazy.”

Now she was ready. She drove down the main boulevard, turned right at the half-sized Eiffel Tower, and left the van in the parking lot of the Paris Las Vegas Hotel. The hotel was an amusement-park version of the City of Lights. It had a small version of the Arc de Triomphe and painted façades that resembled the Louvre and the Paris Opera House. The ground-floor casino was an enormous room with a domed ceiling that glowed with a dark blue color like an endless Paris twilight. Tourists wandered down cobblestone streets to blackjack tables and rows of slot machines.

Maya walked along the strip to another hotel and saw gondoliers rowing tourists down a canal that went nowhere. Although each hotel had a different theme, they were all basically the same. None of the gambling rooms had clocks or windows. You were there and nowhere at the same time. When Maya first entered a casino, her acute sense of balance helped her realize something most tourists would never understand. The ground floor was slightly tilted so that gravity would pull visitors in an imperceptible manner from the hotel section to the slot machines and blackjack tables.

For most people Las Vegas was a happy destination, where you could drink too much and gamble and watch strange women take off their clothes. But this city of pleasure was a three-dimensional illusion. Surveillance cameras watched constantly, computers monitored the gambling, and a legion of security guards with American flags sewn on the sleeves of their uniforms made sure nothing truly unusual would ever occur. This was the goal of the Tabula: the appearance of freedom with the reality of control.

In such an ordered environment, it would be difficult to trick the authorities. Maya had spent her life avoiding the Vast Machine, but now she had to trigger all their sensors and escape without being captured. She was sure the Tabula computer programs were searching the Vast Machine for a variety of data-including the use of Michael’s credit card. If the card was reported as stolen, then she might have to deal with security guards who knew nothing about the Tabula. Harlequins avoided injuring citizens or drones, but sometimes it was necessary for survival.

After checking out the rest of the hotels on the strip, she decided that the New York-New York Hotel gave her the most options for escape. Maya spent the afternoon at a shop run by the Salvation Army where she acquired two used suitcases and men’s clothes. She bought a toiletry kit and filled it with a can of shaving cream, a half-used tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush, which she rubbed on the concrete outside her cabin. The final detail was the most important: road maps with pencil marks indicating a coast-to-coast trip with New York City as the final destination.

Gabriel had left his helmet, gloves, and motorcycle jacket in the van. Back at the tourist cabin, Maya pulled on the riding gear. It felt as if Gabriel’s skin, his presence, surrounded her. Maya had owned a motor scooter when she lived in London, but the Italian-made motorcycle was a large and powerful machine. It was difficult to steer the bike, and whenever she shifted gears she heard a grinding sound.

That evening she left the motorcycle in the New York-New York Hotel parking lot and used a pay phone to reserve a suite. Twenty minutes later she entered the hotel’s massive atrium and approached the front desk carrying her suitcases.

“My husband made the reservation,” she explained to the desk clerk. “He’s flying in later tonight.”

The clerk was a muscular young man with a blond haze of close-cropped hair. He looked as if he should be running a summer sports camp in Switzerland. “Hope you two have a fun weekend,” he said, and then asked for some form of identification.

Maya handed over her fake passport and Michael Corrigan’s credit card. Numbers flowed from the desk computer to a master computer and then onward to a mainframe somewhere in the world. Maya watched the clerk’s face intently, looking for a slight tension if the words stolen card appeared on the monitor screen. She was ready to lie, to run, to kill if necessary-but the clerk smiled and gave her a plastic card key. When Maya entered the elevator she was required to slide the card into a slot and punch the correct floor number. Now the hotel computer knew exactly where she was: in the elevator going up to the fourteenth floor.

The two-room suite had a huge television. The furniture and bathroom fixtures were larger than anything to be found in a British hotel. Americans were fairly big people, Maya thought. But it was more than that-this was a conscious desire to feel overwhelmed by grand furnishings.

Maya heard screaming and then a deep grumbling sound. When she pushed open the curtains, she saw that a roller coaster was on the roof of a building about five hundred feet away from the window. Ignoring the distraction, she ran water in the tub and sink, used a bar of soap, and dampened a few towels. In the suite’s living room, she placed the road maps and a pencil on a side table. A paper bag with greasy wrappers from a fast-food restaurant was left beside the television. With each piece of trash and clothing, she was constructing a little story that would be read and interpreted by a Tabula mercenary. It was about ten minutes since the credit card number had entered the Vast Machine. Returning to the bedroom, she opened the suitcases and placed some of the clothes in a drawer. Maya pulled out the small German automatic that she had found at Resurrection Auto Parts and slipped it beneath a folded shirt.