CHAPTER ONE

Four months earlier

The irony of an evolving civilization is that the more dependent it becomes on a certain form of technology, the more likely it is that the tech will break down.

I was already late for dinner at my mother’s and I could tell, by the throngs of frustrated and angry commuters, that I was going to be later. Atlanta’s Olympic Terminal was always crowded, since it was the third-largest teleport facility in the world, but there were so many people here tonight that I had to suspect a complete breakdown in the system.

Nonetheless, hoping it might only be a local issue, I headed for the Chicago gate. There, several hundred commuters milled about, expressing outrage and disbelief and arguing with the attendant about the superiority of teleport terminals in New York, London, and Hong Kong.

“So what’s the problem?” I asked a well-dressed woman about my mother’s age, who seemed resigned rather than furious. She looked up from her tablet and gave me a tired smile.

“I’m not sure. But no one can teleport into or out of the city, and phone calls and texts aren’t going out either.”

I tried to suppress a groan. “Any idea how long it will take to fix?”

“Somebody said an hour. But who knows?”

I nodded, thanked her, and moved away, looking for a semi-quiet corner. Not that I didn’t believe her, but I had to verify for myself that communication was truly impossible. EarFone technology basically meant you could connect with anybody, at any time, and the idea of complete silence in my head was almost inconceivable. Hunkering down by some storage lockers near the restrooms, I cupped a hand over my right ear, where the implant was, and spoke my mother’s code. Nothing. Same when I tried my brother Jason and my best friend, Marika.

Sighing, I came to my feet and looked around for entertainment. Though a teleport terminal is not the place to find that. The whole point of teleport, after all, is immediate transmission, so most people don’t expect to have to hang around too long. The Atlanta facility is a model of efficiency on most days. It’s laid out like one huge multi-pointed star, and each point represents one of the major cities of the world. The local system dumps travelers into gates at the middle of the star, and from these central pads they can walk the shortest distance to their next destination.

I’ve always been fascinated by, but too cheap to pay for, one of Atlanta’s so-called direct terminals. These allow you to make the leap to any other terminal anywhere in the world that’s equipped with a reception port, even a private residence. I mean, teleport itself is essentially instantaneous, but traveling between destinations can take forty-five minutes or so by the time you add up all the short walks between gates and portals. But given the state of my finances, I’d rather spend the time than the money.

After pausing to buy a few snacks against the possibility of a long wait, I returned to the Chicago point of the teleport star. But my luck was in. Just as I was looking around for a place to sit, a collective sigh of relief went through the assembled crowd. The whole irritable mass of people seemed to surge to its feet in one convulsive movement and cram itself toward the gate. Looked like we were operational again.

It wasn’t all that long before it was my turn to step into the closet-sized booth and shut the door. To me, the long-distance jumps always feel smoother and faster than the local ones. Within seconds, my body seems to dissolve and my mind, for the briefest moment, goes absolutely blank. Then I suddenly come to, standing in an identical gate a few hundred miles away.

Today, that gate opened into the clean white lines of O’Hare. I stepped out and fought through the crowds toward a local portal, already calling my mother. She didn’t answer, so I tried Jason again, since I knew he had come in from Denver to join us for dinner.

“Hey, it’s me,” I said, a little breathlessly. “Sorry I’m late. Is Mom worried?”

“She would be,” he said, “but I was smart enough to check the news and learn that all of Atlanta was blanketed by some mysterious electrical storm.”

“I’m at O’Hare now. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Better have your alibi ready,” he said and hung up.

I couldn’t help grinning as I fell in place behind a line of people waiting to use the gate to my mother’s neighborhood. Since we had been children, Jason and I had spent much of our time diverting our mother’s concern. She feared that we would be devoured by rabid dogs, kidnapped by malevolent strangers, vaporized by malfunctioning teleporters. Because Jason had an adventurous spirit and I chafed at confinement, we spent much of our time trying to slip her cautious leash—and then devising stories about the harmless pastimes that had kept us away for all hours.

More than once, when he was in high school and I was in college, I had encountered him entering the house in the morning just as I was leaving. At least as often, when I was dating Danny, Jason would find me sneaking home at midnight just as he was about to go off to bed. We would always issue the same challenge: What’s your alibi? and then offer ludicrous explanations. We never failed to find this routine hilarious.

After we moved out of the house, of course, we no longer had to soothe our mother’s fears. But it had become a joke with us, a habit. If I called him and he did not answer, he had better have a good excuse ready; and if he saw me in public with someone he did not recognize, he would want the full background story. The less likely it was to be true, the better.

It was finally my turn to step into the gate that would take me to a booth a few blocks from my mother’s house. Local portals are more complicated than dedicated long-distance ones, because they contain keypads where you have to punch in your destination. In most big cities, helpful lists are posted on the interior walls, displaying the codes for popular attractions. In Chicago, those include Wrigley Field and Watertower Place. In Houston, where I work, they include the Space Center and the museum district.

I keyed in the code for my mother’s Northbrook neighborhood, and seconds later I was stepping out onto the street. It was cold in Chicago, of course—it’s always cold in Chicago, no reason to expect anything different on this early March night. I had worn a sweater in Houston, where it had been too hot, and now I wished I had brought something warmer. I’d have to borrow one of my mother’s coats before I left.

A very brisk walk and I was at her house, a cute two-story brick building with an indifferently kept lawn and a small garden, just now brown with leftover winter. Jason met me at the door, which otherwise would have been triple-locked against the possibility of intruders.

He was dressed as usual in pressed khakis and a white shirt. His best friend Domenic always said he looked like a “laker,” one of the rich kids from the moneyed suburbs that border the northern edge of Lake Michigan. He was also good-looking in the way rich kids often are, with even features, straight blonde-brown hair, and an easy, athletic carriage that bespoke complete self-assurance. He had inherited all of our mother’s Scandinavian genes, so his skin was fair and flawless, a shade or two lighter than my own. Except for the money part, what you saw with Jason was what you got—a handsome, happy, boyish, charming guy.

“Ninety minutes late. I’d call that a new record,” he greeted me, handing over a glass of wine. “What’s your alibi?”

“Some kind of electronic interference. I thought you knew.”

He made a face. “Not very interesting.”

“Marika accidentally overdosed on that new designer drug—what are they calling it?—”

“Chelsea.”

“And it’s scary that you know that. And I had to rush her to the hospital.”

He considered, but rejected it. “Don’t think you can tell Mom.”

“I was consulting with a hit man about doing away with my brother—”

My mother’s voice called from the other room. “Tay-Tay? Is that you? Honey, you must be exhausted. I managed to save the meat, but the potatoes are so overdone, I hope you don’t mind. Jason’s already eaten his salad, but you come on in and get something in your stomach.”

Jason gave me a brief malicious smile. “And don’t forget to say hi to Dad on your way in.”

I grimaced and followed him out of the half-lit foyer, through the darkened living room and toward the big kitchen. And, though I would have preferred not to, I could not help but look over at my father as we passed him in the living room.

Well, not my father. A hologram of him—a fairly high-caliber one, too, because it incorporated some minimal movements and facial expressions. Most of the time it sat, glowing and stuporous, in the big wing chair he had loved so much, facing the oversize video monitor always turned to the news. Now and then, it would turn its head in response to some nearby motion, and its radiant face would break into a welcoming smile. Once the visitor had moved out of its sensor range, it would return its attention to the screen.

I suppose my mother found this comforting. She’d purchased and installed the hologram about ten years after my dad died, using a windfall she’d gotten when one of his stocks took off. They’re wildly expensive, holograms, particularly variable ones, and this one was both detailed and accurate. I mean, the artist had exactly caught the contours of my father’s face and the slightly ridiculous way he looked when he was truly happy.

Personally, I found the whole setup creepy in the extreme. For one thing, my dad hadn’t been around that much when he was alive, since he was a workaholic who spent fifteen hours a day at his office. For another—well, he was dead. This ghostly representation did not make him feel any more alive to me. Mostly it made me want to avoid the living room.

A few quick steps and I was past him, into the much more cheerful space of the kitchen. This was a large, gracious room of white tile, red curtains, bright copper pans, and fabulous aromas. Food always smells better at my mother’s house, probably because she insists on cooking everything in her antique stove and oven. Me, I flashfry everything or use the hotbox for baking, so I can put a meal on the table in five minutes, but my mom just doesn’t believe such rapid-heat methods cook a meal properly. Sometimes, eating at her house, I agree.

My mother set a generous portion of roast on my plate and directed Jason to pour me a glass of water, “or another glass of wine, I’m sure she needs it, poor thing.” To hear the concern in her voice, you’d have thought I was just home from firefighting or demolition work.

Despite her claim that the food was probably burned, everything was delicious, and we all ate with appreciation. My mother, a delicate frail-boned woman, took dainty bites that managed to conceal just how much food she could put away when she set her mind to it. I swear she could eat more food than her two children put together, even though she didn’t appear to have gained an ounce since she was thirteen. Combine her ethereal features with carefully styled white-blonde hair and you got the picture of a sweet older woman of textbook grace and elegance. An accurate picture, for the most part, though her constant fussing can make me want to scream with vexation.

Jason loves her close attentiveness. Cannot get enough of it. The man is thirty-one years old, and the first person he calls when he’s sick is his mother. Any time he gets a cold, he scoots himself over to her house so she can smother him in concern. I can hardly imagine what kind of woman his own age could compete with that kind of affection.

Tonight, her gentle fretting helped relax my frayed nerves, and I accepted the extra helpings of broccoli and the second piece of German chocolate cake that she had made especially for me. Still, I had arrived so late that the hour was pretty far advanced by the time dessert was served, and I was ready to go the minute I put down my fork.

“Now, Taylor, you call me when you get in,” my mother said, following Jason and me through the living room past my father’s glowing presence.

“I’m thirty-four years old, I don’t think I need to call my mother to let her know I’m safe.”

“Just so I don’t worry. Jason will call me from Denver when he gets in, too.”

“Sure thing.”

“Jason, why don’t you go all the way to Taylor’s apartment with her? Make sure she’s okay.”

My brother and I locked eyes. “Okay,” he said. He bent to kiss her on the cheek, and I gave her a quick hug. I buttoned up my borrowed coat, and a minute later we were out the door, walking as fast as we could through the icy night.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked as we huffed along.

“Class at noon.” Jason’s a part-time student at the University of Colorado; I sometimes think he will never graduate. “And then Domenic and I might go out to California to see a ballgame.”

“Give him my love.”

He fished in his pocket. “Here. New book.”

I wished I had on gloves, but I took it in my bare hand, squinting at the cover in the inadequate streetlights. It was a small, square volume, probably not much more than a hundred pages, though the type, when I flipped through it, looked very small. “ Sociological Theory in Mid-Millennium Urban Centers. My God. Where did you pick this up?”

“Class, of course. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who read it.”

“So I’m supposed to throw away Pillars of the Earth ?”

“Too limiting. Not enough modern references. This one even talks about EarFones and how they’ve revolutionized communication. Actually, it’s much better than it sounds. You might enjoy it if you sat down to read it.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll just scan it for pertinent words.”

When we were kids, Jason and I read all the same books. Science fiction, boys’ adventure books, girls’ adventure books, horse books, whodunits. Everything. In one of the juvenile mysteries, the young detectives communicated with each other by designating a book and working out a numerical code that corresponded with the page numbers, the lines on a page, and the words in a line. So 57-5-3 would be the third word in the fifth line on page fifty-seven. Dinner , maybe. Or served. Eventually you could construct a sentence like “Dinner will be served in the dining room at seven.”

Well, Jason thought this was the most wonderful thing ever. He bought each of us identical copies of some realbook that he’d picked up in a used-book store— A Wrinkle in Time, I think, which comes in a zillion editions, so he had to make sure publication dates matched exactly. And then he proceeded to leave me folded scraps of paper, tucking them into my shoes or my coat pocket, with mysterious sets of numbers penciled on them. I can’t resist Jason’s particular brand of lunacy, so I would instantly grab my copy of Wrinkle in Time and decode whatever pointless message he had sent. It was more fun than I can convey.

At least once a year, he changed the source texts, just in case any spies were onto us and were carrying around the same tattered realbooks that we were. And, once we were into our teens, we found we had to modify the code, since some of the modern words we wanted to use were not readily available in old-fashioned novels. For instance, Pillars of the Earth did not have any references to “teleport,” so we had to assemble it from the skeletons of eight other words, adding a fourth digit to our string of numbers. Therefore, 57-5-3-6 would isolate the sixth letter in the highlighted word. You can imagine how complicated.

You would think that, as we entered our sober adult lives, this particular diversion would have palled, but I can’t say that it has. While I was married to Danny, Jason would often send me texts or emails that were nothing but a series of numbers and I would have to dig out my current book and track down words. Once his message was, “Your husband is a shithead.” Another time it was “Divorce is an option in modern-day America.” I learned to decode his messages when Danny wasn’t home.

Ancient history.

Anyway, I was happy to get the new book. “Hey, it’s small enough to fit in my dainty purse,” I said, tucking it in next to my comb. “I’ll carry it with me always.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he said in an ominous voice, and we laughed as we ducked into the little stone housing for the teleport gate.

No one else was there waiting; not much traffic in this part of town past eight in the evening. Jason stepped back to allow me first access to the gate. He had no intention of following me home.

“’Night, Tay-Tay,” he said.

“See you,” I replied, closing the door and punching in my code. Moments later I was in my own neighborhood. A few more minutes and I was home. Within an hour I had called my mother, checked my EarFone log for messages, mentally reviewed my wardrobe so I’d have a clue what to wear in the morning, and climbed into bed.