Authors: Patrick Lee

The Breach (30 page)

Her footsteps came toward him across the concrete.

He folded the paper and slid it into the waistband of the transparency suit, the bottom half of which he was still wearing. It vanished there half a second before Paige came around to meet his eyes.

He reacted as if he’d just become aware of her. As if he’d been gazing at the Breach, lost in it.

Lying to her already, before he’d even spoken.

She saw the Blackbird in his hand. Her eyes narrowed, confused.

“Did you take off its key?” she said. “It’s dangerous even without it—”

He held it up to the light, showed her the cellophane-like key still attached to it.

“It’s dead,” he said. “Shut down after I killed Pilgrim. I don’t know why.”

She held his eyes, stared deep into him. If she saw through what he was saying, it didn’t show. She moved closer. Her eyes softened. Her hand touched his arm.

“Hey,” she said. “It’s over. Whatever it was, it’s over.”

He nodded and managed something that wasn’t entirely a frown. She folded into his arms.

Over her shoulder, he found himself staring into the Breach. Blue and purple like a bruise, reaching away to infinity. He considered the track of his future, another path leading somewhere he couldn’t see. Leading to something that would remake him into a man Paige wanted dead. Something lying in his road, out there in the darkness, years and miles away from this moment. Waiting.

“It’s over,” Paige said again.

He held her tightly, and hoped she was right.

Acknowledgments

The following people I can’t thank enough, but here goes. Janet Reid, the hardest-working agent in the business, who may have taken that “city that never sleeps” thing literally when she moved to New York. My editor at HarperCollins, Sarah Durand, who saw what this story needed to be, and made all the difference in guiding it through the transition.

Thank you to Emily Krump and all the very cool people at HarperCollins, for more hard work than I can shake an acknowledgments page at.

THE BREACH?

Don’t miss the next Travis Chase adventure

GHOST COUNTRY

Coming Fall 2010 from Harper

Keep reading for an excerpt . . .

Travis Chase took his lunch break alone on Loading Dock Four. He sat with his feet hanging over the edge. Night fog drifted in across the parking lot, saturated with the smells of vehicle exhaust, wet pavement, and fast food. Out past the edge of the lot and the shallow embankment that bordered it, the sound of sparse traffic on I-285 rose and fell like breaking waves. Beyond I-285 was Atlanta, broad and diffused in orange sodium light, the city humming idle at two in the morning.

Behind Travis the warehouse was silent. The only sound came from the break room at the far south end. Muted voices. The occasional beep of the microwave. Travis only went in there to put his lunch in the refrigerator and to take it back out.

He finished eating, wadded the brown bag, and tossed it into the trash bin next to the box compactor.

He turned where he sat, brought his legs up, and rested them sideways across the edge of the dock. He leaned back against the concrete-filled steel post beside the doorway. He closed his eyes. Some nights he caught a few minutes’ sleep like this, but most times it was enough just to relax. To shut down for a while and try not to think. Try not to remember.

His shift ended at four-thirty. The streets were empty in the last hour of the August night. He got his mail on the way into his apartment. Two credit card offers, a gas bill, and a grocery flyer. All addressed to the name
Rob Pullman
. The sight of it no longer gave him any pause. The name was his as much as the address was his. He hadn’t been called
Travis Chase
, out loud or in writing, in over a year.

He’d seen the name just once in that time. Not written. Carved. He’d driven fourteen hours up to Minneapolis on a Tuesday in March, timing his arrival for the middle of the night, and stood on his own grave. The marker was more elaborate than he’d expected. A big marble pedestal on a base, the whole thing four feet tall. Below his name and the dates was an inscribed verse:
Matthew 5:6
. He wondered what the hell his brother had spent on all of it. He stared at it for five minutes and then he left, and an hour later he pulled off the freeway into a rest area and cried like a little kid. He’d hardly thought about it since.

He climbed the stairs to his apartment. He dropped the mail on the kitchen counter. He made a sandwich and got a Coke from the refrigerator and stood at the sink eating. Ten minutes later he was in bed. He stared at the ceiling in the dark. His bedroom had windows on two walls. Both of them were open so the cross-breeze could come through—it was hot air, but at least it was moving. The apartment had no air-conditioning. He closed his eyes and listened to the night sounds of the city filtering in with the humidity. He felt sleep begin to pull him down. He was almost out when he heard a car slow at the entrance to the lot. Through his eyelids he saw headlights wash over his ceiling. The vehicle stopped in the lot but didn’t kill its engine. It sat idling. He heard one of its doors open, then light footsteps came running up the front walk.

Then his door buzzer sounded.

He opened his eyes.

It couldn’t be anyone he knew. There
wasn’t
anyone he knew.

He listened for buzzers going off in other apartments—he’d heard that before, when people came to the front door and hit every button until someone let them in. He didn’t hear it now.

He pulled the sheet aside and stood. He went to the window and pressed his face against the screen to get an angle on the front door.

There was a girl down at the entry. She was standing on the walk, a few feet away from the pad. She’d pressed the button and stepped back from it. She was staring up at the open window of Travis’s bedroom—had been staring at it even before he appeared there—and now she flinched when she saw him. She looked nervous as hell. The vehicle parked thirty feet behind her was a taxi cab.

The girl looked about twenty, but it was hard to say. She could’ve been younger than that. She had light brown hair to her shoulders. Big eyes behind a pair of glasses that covered about a quarter of her face—they were either five years behind the style or five years ahead of it.

Travis had never seen her before.

She’d seen him somewhere, though, if only in a picture. It was clear by her expression. She recognized him even by the glow of the lamppost in the parking lot.

She stepped off the concrete walkway onto the grass. She took three steps toward the window. Her eyes never left his. She stopped. For another second she just stood there looking up at him.

Then she said, “Travis Chase.”

Not a question.

Travis ran the possible implications through his head. There weren’t many. Actually there was only one.

“Paige Campbell sent you,” he said.

The girl nodded.

“I was under the impression Paige would show up herself,” Travis said, “if she ever needed to talk to me. Which would only happen in an emergency.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “But Paige
is
the emergency. She left a message instructing me to find you here. Right before she disappeared.”

By Patrick Lee

The Breach

Coming Soon

Ghost Country

About the Author

Patrick Lee lives in Michigan.
The Breach
is his first novel and the first installment of several near-future adventures. To find out more, please

visit www.patrickleefiction.com.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE BREACH
.
Copyright © 2010 by Patrick Lee. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Excerpt from
Ghost Country
copyright © 2010 by Patrick Lee

EPub Edition November 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196205-9

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