Nomad (14 page)

"I should cut these off. Do you think?" Audra held up one of her limp, snake-like wet dreadlocks, dropping water from its tip.

"Maybe."

"Maybe I should. I'm getting too old." She laughed. "Hey, how did it go with that guy? Um, what's his name?"

"Logan."

"That's right. Logan
Carraway
." She spat the name and rolled her eyes. "So how did it go? Did he totally suck, or did he completely suck?"

"It wasn't great. I was nervous." Raven sat down on the toilet lid and held out the joint to Audra, who was too busy toying with a fluff of bath bubbles to notice.

"What happened? Did he ask for your phone number or anything?"

"Yes. I didn't give it to him, though. I took his instead."

"Ha! See, you're already a pro." Audra beamed up at her with glassy, red eyes.

"Am I? I feel pretty amateur. Can I put this out, or...?"

"Yeah, use the flower pot on the sink. So what's your next move, Riley?" Audra asked.

"I'm trying to decide. Right now, I have to go study, so--" Raven stood up.

"Wait, let's
think
about this." Audra held up a soapy hand to stop her. "What college is he, again? You said Pierson?"

"Yeah."

"So, yeah, perfect." Audra sat up a little in the tub, sloshing water over the edge in her sudden excitement. "It's almost Halloween. We go to Inferno."

"What's that?"

"How do you not know? The big Halloween party they have every year. It used to be one of the wildest parties on campus, years ago, until the police kept busting it and they lamed it up. He'll definitely be there."

"And we can just show up?"

"All Yale students can come."

"I'm not one, though."

"Not a problem. I have friends in Pierson." Audra winked, then shook her head. "I can't believe I'm helping you hook up with that guy. Friends support each other in their mistakes, though, don't they?"

Raven laughed. "I really have to study."

"Fine, go study. I'll dream up sexy costumes for us. For you, I mean. I'm celibate this semester. Sober and celibate." Audra laughed and covered her eyes as though ashamed.

Raven stepped through the folding door into her room, where she opened her crawlspace and brought out the data cube from inside her new safe.

She summoned a web of glowing holograms that filled her room from floor to ceiling, and she sifted through pictures and videos from the Secretary-General's administration, comparing them against the snapshots she'd taken of the girls at the rainforest lecture.

Raven didn't find anything among pictures from the 2060's, so she moved backwards in time, watching Logan age in reverse from a steel-haired dictator into a man who still dyed his hair brown, to a sharp young executive in a new suit.

She wished her glasses interfaced with her data cube so she could run a simple image-matching search. The two devices seemed trapped in different worlds, though, the data cube containing only Logan-related records and files from the future, the glasses capable of accessing only present-day information from 2013. They could not communicate directly with each other, as far as she could tell.

She saw an image of Logan in a tuxedo and pointed to it. The picture expanded to life size.

The glowing, pixelated image of Logan beamed as he emerged from the soaring archway of a stone cathedral washed white by sunlight. On his arm, draped in lace, was the girl with baby blue eyes. She gazed up at her new husband with a glowing smile.

"Tell me about her," Raven said.

The web of holograms flickered and shrank, showing pictures of the girl from childhood through high school. Raven opened the associated text files and expanded them until the letters were an inch high--her eyes were tired. The text and pictures floated to the ceiling as she lay back on her bed.

Her name was Macey Ingersoll. Her family had made its first fortune in the nineteenth century, in dry goods and railroads, then invested early in Texas oil. She'd grown up in Oyster Bay, New York. She would graduate from Yale with a degree in Environmental Studies, and she and Logan would marry soon after college. They would move to New York, where she would study law at NYU while he earned a Master of Business Administration at Columbia.

Three years after their wedding, just out of law school, Macey would die in the crash of a small private plane over the Caribbean, while on her way to meet her husband at his family's vacation home on the island of Saint Martin. Macey would die at the age of twenty-four, three months pregnant with their first child.

Raven felt sad for her as she read the girl's obituary. Macey had only a few years left to live. Logan would remarry twice, both times ending in divorce, with no children.

She closed and rubbed her tired eyes, feeling almost sorry for the Secretary-General, too, something she would never have believed possible. The loss of his wife and child could have been the traumatic blow that changed him from the not-particularly-evil boy of today into the callous, empty monster of the future, the man who stood for everything that was wrong in Raven's world.

She waved the holograms away and opened her bedroom window for some fresh air. A chilly wind blew outside.

"Congratulations, Macey," Raven whispered. "I might save your life, if you're lucky."

Her eyes closed. When they opened again, it was morning, and Raven was shocked to discover she'd slept all night with her window wide open. She was growing too comfortable with the safe world of the early twenty-first century.

Chapter Sixteen

The "Inferno" party was at Pierson College, to which Logan belonged. Since he was a freshman, he didn't live at the college itself, but he did spend a good deal of time there. The college was several stories high, made of red brick trimmed in white, every window and door symmetrically placed. The Georgian style seemed happy and welcoming compared to the gloomy, dark fortresses that were more common on campus, any one of which would have been a more obvious place to throw a Halloween party.

A guard checked Audra and Raven's purses for alcohol before admitting them into an interior courtyard decorated with gravestones and spiderwebs. Raven felt nervous about trying to stay in character while surrounded by so many people.

Audra noticed her worried expression and squeezed her hand.

"You'll be fine," Audra said. "Don't worry, those headstones aren't real."

Raven laughed politely, then straightened up as she approached the open doors of the college's huge dining hall, decorated with more fake spiderwebs and black cats. Scattered groups of students in costumes stood under the flickering lights, talking over nonalcoholic drinks. They kept away from the zombie DJ's thumping speakers. Nobody was dancing.

Raven felt herself relax. The party was not intimidating at all--she'd imagined a crowd of well-dressed and snobby rich kids. So far, the students kept to their timid little knots, not mingling. The majority of the crowd was female, and they seemed to come from a range of ethnicities and nationalities. Their diversity comforted her. It would be easier to blend in a situation where everybody had a different background.

Audra greeted a group of four Asian girls with a gasp of excitement, hugging each of them and introducing Raven as her new roommate. They seemed pleasant but shy, and Raven memorized their names as Audra introduced them. They made some excited chatter over Audra's costume--she'd hung her dreadlocks with shiny ornaments and stars, worn a flaring green dress, and gone as a Christmas tree.

Raven's costume was meant to be a little more seductive--her black suede boots, a short black dress just long enough to conceal her hips, a pair of cat ears on a thin hair band. Audra had painted her lips red and applied dark, Egyptian-style liner and eyeshadow, which she insisted would enhance the "cat" look. Raven also wore a black cat collar studded with costume jewelry, which made her feel silly. She couldn't help noticing the boys stealing glances in her direction. The costume was working, maybe, but drawing attention made her feel uncomfortable and out of place.

"What's your major, Riley?" asked one of the girls, whose name was Pam Huang.

"Criminal justice," Raven replied.

"I didn't know that was a degree here," another girl said.

Raven hadn't checked into that. She would have to change her major to something Yale actually offered if she wanted to blend better. She felt stupid for not doing more research.

"Riley goes to Albertus Magnus," Audra said. "We both needed roommates mid-semester, and I was so lucky to meet her. Pam was in charge of the decorating this year, Riley. Doesn't the dining hall look great?" She pointed to a row of paper skulls.

"It's very pretty," Raven told the girl.

"Pretty? It's supposed to be scary!" Pam said, and her friends laughed.

Raven stayed near Audra as she talked to her friends, then nudged her when she saw Logan out in the courtyard.

"Shall I come with you?" Audra whispered.

"I'll be fine." Raven forced herself to smile.

"Good luck. Just remember, you're awesome and he's a douchebag."

Raven walked towards the open door, watching Logan talk with two friends by the fake graveyard. Macey approached Logan from the opposite side of the courtyard, waving at him. Raven's mouth suddenly felt dry, but she resisted the temptation of the mysterious orange "pumpkin punch" served in clear plastic jack-o'-lantern cups. She wouldn't be attracting anyone if her lips and teeth were stained orange.

She approached slowly as Macey hugged Logan. Logan wore a fire-red suit, a tie polka-dotted with pitchforks, and a pair of plastic devil horns pasted to his forehead. Macey was dressed as a rabbit--bunny ears on a headband, a pink and white dress with a fluffy tail sewn onto the back, and fuzzy pink bunny slippers.

Macey's costume reminded Raven that, though they were similar ages, the people around her were really kids. For the most part, they'd lived sheltered and safe lives. They'd never killed anyone or watched their friends die.

"I heard you dragged Logan to some rainforest thing," one of the guys said to Macey. Both of Logan's friends were white, athletic, fairly good-looking boys.

"It was pretty cool, I guess." Logan shrugged.

"It's important," Macey said. "The forests of Ecuador are endangered because of
our
appetite for oil. I mean, it's the twenty-first century, we have to be evolved enough to think about how we impact the ecosystem. We're all connected, more than we know." She looked Logan in the eyes as she said this.

"What about your dad's oil company?" Logan asked with a devilish smile that fit perfectly with his costume. "How does it impact the ecosystem?"

"I've prepared carbon-reduction proposals for him every year since I was thirteen. So don't call me a hypocrite, Logan!" She punched him in the arm, and she let her hand linger on his bicep an extra couple of seconds before dropping away.

"I didn't call you anything. Hey, I love nature, too. I hate being inside," Logan said.

"You go out with ropes and chisels. You don't love nature, you want to tie her up and conquer her." Macey continued gazing into his eyes as she spoke.

"Sounds kinky, Logan," one of his friends said, drawing laughs from everyone except Macey, who just raised a blond eyebrow at Logan.

"Rock climbing is all about appreciating nature! Am I right?" Logan asked the other guys, who hurried to nod and agree with him. "That's why I keep telling you to come with us."

"I don't think so," Macey said.

"When you're up there hanging from a cliff, with nothing but empty space below you, you can see for miles. Trees, mountains...come on." Logan smiled. "That's nature, right?"

"I don't think I'd be appreciating the view," Macey told him.

"Because you'd be too scared?" Logan asked. He noticed Raven, who was finally coming close to them, and he grinned at her. Macey followed his look and gave her a frown.

"Scared?" Macey asked. "Trusting you boys to keep me alive while I dangle off the side of a mountain? I'm not scared, I'm smart."

"Girls are all like that," Logan said.

"Smart?" Macey suggested.

"Scared. Even when a girl says she wants to go, she backs down as soon as she looks up at that high cliff. Every time." Logan shook his head.

"Maybe you're hanging out with the wrong girls." Raven finally spoke up, drawing everyone's attention. She tried not to look nervous.

"It's the mysterious photographer girl," Logan said. "She was looking for ghosts in the cemetery, right?"

"I only found three ghosts," Raven told him.

"Why is she mysterious?" Macey asked, looking at Raven in a way that wasn't particularly friendly.

"She never told me her name," Logan said.

"It's Riley."

"You like rock climbing, Riley?" Logan asked.

"I haven't tried, but I could do it," she said.

"I've heard that before. Girls never do it. I bet you'd chicken out before you even got your harness on." Logan's eyes were fully on Raven now, which left Macey looking miffed. She ran over to greet a small group passing by. She pulled aside a pretty blond girl in fairy wings and glitter.

"I wouldn't." Raven held Logan's gaze firm, looking back at his enchanting green eyes with all the confidence she could summon. She gave him a small smile. "I'm not scared."

"You should come with us, then," Logan said. "Next weekend, Ragged Mountain. I'll test you out."

"Why not?" Raven shrugged.

"I bet you won't do it."

"She looks serious," one of Logan's friends said. "I'll bet ten bucks on her pulling it off."

"That's four guys, one girl," Logan's other friend said.

"I'll come with you." Macey returned to the group with an overly sweet smile at Raven, the kind that indicated she might like to punch Raven in the face. "Sophie will go, too."

"Sure, I'll go!" the girl in fairy wings said. "Where are we going?"

"Rock climbing," Logan told her, grinning. "Up a high, steep cliff full of sharp boulders."

"Oh, hell, no!" The girl shook her head. "I'm not doing that!"