“Hey you.” Mom shakes him awake and he realizes he’s slept for ages. The light is dim outside, gloaming. “You want to put that driver to good use?”
With the dusk creeping in, they climb onto the patio and whack golf balls off the deck into the rising dark, until they can’t see their trajectories anymore, or only for a moment before they’re swallowed by the night.
“Vanishing point,” Mom says, then corrects herself, going into art teacher mode, like he doesn’t know. “Not really. It’s a perspective thing, where the lines converge on the horizon.”
“Maybe we need less vanishing, more perspective,” he says. He still hasn’t been able to bring himself to ask.
“Oof. Too smart for your own good.” She reaches out to cup the base of his skull, and he nudges his head into her hand like a cat.
3.
Billie: Black Hole Sun
A pale balloon in the blurry dark. No. Not that. It’s the moon shining right into her skull. Light like a drill bit. Mechanical wolves howling into the night.
Fuck.
Fuck’s sake.
Ow.
Billie opens her eyes. Not a pale balloon, nor the moon. A spotlight with a fuzzed halo. Too bright. Alarms howling. Not wolves. Hey. Can someone shut that racket off? Her lips sound out the words, but she can’t hear herself speak. Too much noise. She pushes herself up, off the concrete. Not an ideal place to take a quick nap. Wouldn’t be the first time she’s guttered-out. But she hasn’t been blackout drunk for…when was the last time? Barcelona with Rafael and the gang, all of them off their tits, couldn’t even remember seeing Nick Cave play. What did they take? She can’t think through the noise. Will someone make those fucking wolves shut up.
Sitting up is harder than she anticipated. She might still be drunk. Fuck, her head. Worse than a hangover. What the hell did they take? She touches the back of her skull where it hurts. Wet.
A wet flap.
The bile and the darkness rise up at the same time. She pukes onto the concrete, a hot and sour mush. That could be a Nick Cave song: “The Bile & the Darkness.”
She’s not going to succumb to the black-hole suns, swimming across her vision. No, that’s someone else, another band. Not how the lyrics go.
And she’s going to stand up.
And she’s not going to touch her head again, where the nerves are screaming in protest.
But she does. She can’t help it.
The ground rushes up to her, working with the darkness now. Hey, no fair. No teamwork. She falls onto her knees, scuffs them through her jeans. Catches herself. Brace position. On all fours. Doggy style. ’Cos you’re about to get fucked!
Get up, you stupid cow. You dumb bitch. Get up. There’s warmth down her back, soaking through her shirt. That’s going to leave a stain. The alarms are still droning.
Not Barcelona. The place…where Cole is. What’s it called. Asphyxia. The billionaire hideout wine farm. She’s in the mechanics workshop. Among the cars. There’s a tire iron lying on the ground in a dark smear of blood. Like the puddles of cosmetic samples on the beauty pages in a magazine. This season’s hottest nail polish color: Head Wound Red. And where is Cole? Gone. Gone with Miles. In their getaway car. All her careful planning. It was her idea, her resources. She came to find them. Had to petition the U.S. government to let her join her sister and nephew as part of their Reunite and Reunify program, “bringing families together.” And now? Left her for dead. Left her for dust.
Billie leans back against the wall. Still not upright. Shouldn’t be standing for this. Might fall again. She tucks in her chin. A fresh pulse of blood runs down the side of her neck. Grits her teeth. Probes the meaty edge of the flap. Careful. Hurts like a mother. Her stomach lurches. Vision blurs. A low moan torn from her mouth. Answering the sirens. She holds fast. Waits out the nausea, those black-hole suns.
Another moan. Animal self-pity. Clumps of hair. Sharp bits against her fingertips. She brings her hand to her face to look. Little black pits in the blood on her fingers, which is shockingly red. Gravel. Not bone shards. Not a broken skull. Not that bad. But not good, either.
Okay. Get up. Get moving. They’ll be coming to see what happened. But gravity is against her. Join the club, she thinks. Furious with Cole. Some high tragedy-level betrayal. The sirens are her own Greek chorus, howling sorrow and outrage.
She’s up. Shaky, but on her own feet. Fuck you, gravity. How long was she out? Minutes. It feels like minutes. She steadies herself against a Bentley. No keys in the ignition. All the keys are locked away in the main building. Part of how they keep the inhabitants “safe.” Same reason all the cars here are manual transmission, another layer of security, because they assume the inmates can’t drive stick. To be fair, the American ones probably can’t. But the South Africans can.
In the faint moonlight, the compound is a windowless expanse, solid and fortressed. Lockdown. Any potential threat and the heavy steel security shutters will slam down. She’s been through the drills, twice already since she got here two and a half months ago, although usually she’s on the inside. Impenetrable, bullet-proof, shock-proof, air-tight. In case of terrorist attack, like what happened in Singapore. No, Malaysia. And Poland, wasn’t it? Bombing the last remaining men to death. Any number of triggers will set it off, including but not limited to someone breaking through the fences. It stops invaders getting in. Not so great at preventing people leaving.
But the car. The Ladida. That’s not right. “Lada.” Ataraxia, not Asphyxia. Cole took the fucking car. After all the orchestration to make it seem a toothless, broken thing. Trojan horse as getaway vehicle. She was impressed with her sister’s duplicity and new mechanical skills. A missing distributor cap, a disconnected fuel hose. You don’t need keys when you can hot-wire. Anyone could have picked up on that, if they’d been looking. They weren’t. But now they will be. All for nothing.
There has to be another way out. She could walk. Simply stroll through the break in the fence where Cole would have busted through, per the plan. Her plan. Worked out with painstaking care. The white SUV waiting in the mall parking lot so they could switch cars like pros. Mrs. Amato’s going to be so pissed. All her investment. All the trouble she went to—and the time and money—getting Billie in here, setting everything up to bust them out of here. The great boy heist of 2023. All for fucking naught. Screw you, Cole and your short-sighted prudish bullshit.
The alarms are still going, her ears are ringing. And a car is coming up the drive. She can see the headlights. She squints against the beams. Not her sister. Unless Cole has hijacked one of the patrol cars, blue sweeps of light stammering on top.
She stoops to pick up the tire iron, holding it low at her side as the security vehicle comes toward her. She slumps against the wall, dramatically. Sincerely. She’s not sure she’ll be able to get up again. Her blood runs down the back of her neck, along her arm. Drip. Drip. Drip.
The car pulls up beside her. Long seconds while the driver waits, making a decision. Hurry up, she thinks, we got a woman bleeding over here. And then the guard gets out, leaving the door standing open, the interior light on, so she can see she’s holding her gun low and at the ready in both hands, the fish-gape of her mouth. It’s one of the young ones. She knows all the guards by name, has baked them goddamn cookies. Not a euphemism. One thing working as a chef to the stupid-rich has taught her: you can buy a lot of goodwill with carbs and sugar. Intel too: what times people get off shift, for example, patrol routes and timings—all of which are essential when planning your escape from paradise. She has shared cigarettes with this one before. Marcy or Macy or Michaela or something. Why can’t she get her words right?