The Lost Train of Thought (15 page)

“Dang tootin’!” The grizzled prospector winked. “Alls I ask in return is a few minutes with that map you got there.”

Blaque unfolded the twelve-year-old piece of parchment and dangled it in the air.

“It’s yours.”

“Whoo hoo!”

“
After
you take us where we need to go.”

“Done!” Hopeless jumped into the air and clicked his worn-out boot heels together. “Lemme just roust my partner, Zebulon, and we’ll head for the mountains!”

While Hopeless skipped off toward the stables, the second team busted out Turf Boards and Cross-Country Skis™ for the journey that lay ahead.

“Put these on, Greg.” Fixer Blaque pulled a plastic case from his Toolkit and offered it to his old friend. “I think you’ll find blindness as a handicap is overrated.”

“Is not necessary, Jelani. Gregor will not be coming with you.”

The team stopped in their tracks, and wistfulness filled the crags of the Journeyman’s face.

“Gregor has had long and fruitful voyage in this life. From town in middle of nowhere to Middle Nowhere itself, and always he move on. But today he finally know where journey end.”

“But what about the train?” Becker knew what Greg’s strength could do for this Mission, and hated to see it wasted.

“Plan will provide, boychik.” The Journeyman placed a leathery paw on the shoulder of his youngest comrade. “Never has Gregor known that more than he does now.”

As Greg bid his fellows good-bye, none among them could deny he had earned the right to choose this ending. For three decades he had served The Seems’ cause, and his mighty shoulders had literally carried the weight of The World on several occasions. But even Atlas had to shrug.

In the doors of the Far-Out Saloon, Charity nervously gnawed at her fingernails, searching Greg’s body language for whether or not he was planning to stay. But when she let out a holler and jumped into his arms, Becker knew she’d gotten the answer she’d been hoping for instead of the heartbreak that had passed through town so many times before. Heartbreak that Becker himself began to feel— for he’d given someone else a different answer— and he pushed it from his thoughts as fast as he possibly could.

“While I’m young, boys.” The Octogenarian affixed her umbrella to one of her ski poles and opened it high and wide. “Time to saddle up.”

The second team fanned out onto Main Street, heading for the Apothecary to round up Hassan. But halfway there Fixer Blaque stopped, as if some important task had somehow slipped his mind. He turned to face the Far-Out Saloon, and when he shouted out to the blind man who sat on the steps, Emotion that can only be felt by those who have shared a higher calling was dripping from his voice:

“Live to Fix, Greg the Journeyman!”

The red-haired giant clenched a fist and raised it proudly over his head.

“Fix to live, Jelani Blaque!”

22.
Brainstorms in The Seems, like hurricanes in The World, are given alternating male and female names.

8
Au Contraire

Protective Custody, Seemsberia, The Seems

“Wake up, Simly!”

“Just five more minutes, Mom!”

Simly Frye tucked a pillow over his head and tried to hustle back to dreamland.

“Simly,
wake up
!”

Someone gave the mattress beneath him a swift kick.

“Who? What? When?” The lanky Seemsian sat up like a shot, banging his head against the ceiling. “Where am I?”

“In my cell.” A soothing French accent calmed his nerves from the bunk below. “They’re about to do the count, so make sure you’re dressed and ready to go.”

“Thanks, Mom. I mean, Thib.”

Simly wiped the twinkle from his eyes and thought for a moment he might be dreaming, and that he really was back at the Frye family compound in the Seemsian suburb of Everywhere. But when he saw the bars on the window and realized his Jinx Gnomes comforter and allergy pills were nowhere to be found, the reality of his situation came back with force.

After the new arrival narrowly escaped a brawl in the yard, his old friend Thibadeau had paid off a Corrections Officer to let Simly serve out the remainder of his sentence in the safety of the Frenchman’s cell. “Safety” was a loose term, however, for the Protective Custody wing not only housed some of the most dangerous criminals The Seems had ever known, but it had been sequestered from all other wings for a single purpose:

To protect those inside from the rest of the prison population.

“All right, convicts! Up and at ’em!”

As Simly stumbled from the cell and lined up beside Thibadeau, he tried his best to keep his eyes locked straight ahead. Last night he had only caught brief glimpses of the other inmates, but in the morning light he was able to get an all too illuminated view.

“Hey, kid . . . over here.”

Someone was whispering to his right, and the Briefer couldn’t resist turning to see a scraggly prisoner with shaking hands and bloodshot eyes.

“Got any Knockout Punch? I swear I’m gonna lose it if I don’t get some shuteye!”

When a guard came over to see what the ruckus was about, the jittery con pretended to be a model citizen, but it didn’t take Simly long to realize he’d just come face-to-face with the infamous Insomniac. The former employee of the Department of Sleep had been caught rerouting Wake-Up Calls and spiking the Snooze, and when asked on the witness stand to defend his countless acts of sabotage, had infamously offered: “If I can’t sleep, nobody can!”

“Are you present, Lenny?” demanded the Corrections Officer. “Because if you’re not, I can get you in touch with the Inner Child again.”

“I’m present, I’m present, I’m present!”

That threat alone was enough to slap the Insomniac into

shape, and the guard moved down his list.

“Remote Gremlin!”

“Here!”

“Sock Goblin.”

“Yo.”

“Freck!”

“Oui!”

As the count continued with military precision, Simly heard name after name that sent chills down his spine. Son of Seems. Rack the Jipper. Even Drew Keloggian, the dreaded Cereal Killer who had been the scourge of the FDA. But what shocked the incarcerated Briefer most was the sight of a fair-skinned and wispy-haired man four cells up the line.

“Is that . . . ?”

“C’est lui,”
whispered Thibadeau. “Time is no longer on his side.”

“Neverlåethe!”

“Present.”

Even in his orange jumpsuit and without his trademark pocket watch, Permin Neverlåethe was easy to recognize. Simly had watched every second of the deposed Administrator’s trial on SNN, including his full confession of the role he played in creating the bomb that laid waste to Time. Nonetheless, a court of his peers had sentenced him to three consecutive life terms— a punishment that had left him a visibly beaten man.

“Frye!”

“Huh?”

Simly snapped out of his daydream to find the Corrections Officer right in his grille, spittle forming at the corner of his mouth. “I said, Frye!”

“Here!”

“That’s right, you’re here! And you’re gonna stay that way for twelve more hours
if
— and that’s a capital IF— I don’t add a few more days to your sentence. Understood?” The fear behind the Coke-bottle glasses told the guard the answer was yes, and he brought the count to a close. “Everybody back inside!”

Simly was still shaking as he followed Thibadeau back into the cell, and when the bars automatically slid shut behind them, the Briefer took his first real gander at how far one of the best Candidates in the history of the IFR had fallen. Beside the bunkbeds, the cinderblock square was also home to a steel toilet, a naked lightbulb, and some old graffiti that had been mostly scrubbed away. In fact, the only hint that anyone in particular lived there were two oversized photographs taped to the wall—one of a beautiful girl somewhere in Paris, and another of a picture-perfect World.

“I don’t know how you do it, Thib.”

Simly climbed back up to the top bunk and buried his head in the pillow.

“Do what?”

“Survive this place.”

Thibadeau lay down on the bottom bunk and placed his hands behind his head. “One day at a time.”

Neither spoke for a while, the only sounds the ticking of a clock and the Frenchman’s foot tapping against the bed frame. It was unheard of for a World resident to serve time behind these walls, and at Thibadeau’s trial his lawyers had opted for a guilty plea, fully expecting a sentence of “unremembering.” But Judge Alvin Torte wanted to make sure the defendant “never forgot the screams of his victims,” and made prisoner #566-PC3 only the second Flip-Sider in history to call Seemsberia home.
²³

“Why, Thib? Why’d you do it?”

“Join The Tide?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You would not get it, Simly. You are not from The World—”

“You’d be surprised what I get.”

The sharpness of his voice caught even Simly off guard. Maybe he wasn’t born in The World, but he loved it just the same, and deeply resented The Tide’s willingness to put it in danger for politi cal gain.

“It is a powerless feeling to grow up in a place you don’t understand,
monami
. To take it on faith that there is something good behind all the terrible things that happen there. Triton promised a chance to make those terrible things go away.”

“Tell that to the people who died in Time Square!”

“Do you not think that weighs upon my conscience every day?” Simly winced at the sound of Thibadeau pounding a fist against the cinderblock wall. “I was told that the bomb was a decoy, and that no one on either side would be hurt!”

“Then you’re even stupider than I am.”

“Très vrai.”
The voice below grew heavy and tired. “On this we can agree.”

The silence between them returned, broken only by a harmonica warbling behind the bars of some distant inmate’s cell.

“What of Becker? How is he handling his conviction?”

“You know about that?”

“News travels fast— even in this Plan-forsaken place. I’m just glad he wasn’t given a one-way ticket on the Trans-Seemsberian Express.”

“Yeah, but he’s pretty depressed about the whole unremembering thing. As soon as they find that Train of Thought, the Memory Bank’s gonna freeze all his—”

Simly abruptly sat up in bed, seeing the same guard who had put them through the count appear outside Thibadeau’s bars. For a moment, the Briefer thought he was about to get that threatened extra time, but then he realized the Corrections Officer had something else in mind.

“Let’s go, Freck. Captain Marcus wants to see you.”

Maximum Security Wing, Seemsberia, The Seems

Though there hasn’t been a war in The Seems since Green and Blue fought Purple and Red, peace and security are still maintained by Special Forces— an elite battalion functioning under the leadership of a single Captain. Only a handful have held this post since back in the Day, and Robert Marcus was the most formidable of all, a shining light who kept Seemsians ever safe from harm. That is, until he was sentenced to life in Seemsberia for releasing moths into the Fabric of Reality—the heinous act that announced the arrival of The Tide.

Now Marcus and several hundred of his fellow friends of Triton were sequestered in an old gymnasium that served as the Maximum Security Wing, spreading out in concentric circles of workout benches and beds.

“Thank you for joining me on such short notice, Mr. Freck.”

“It is my pleasure,
mon Capitaine
.”

Thibadeau watched in amazement as the nearly fifty-year-old man tore through a final set of upside-down stomach crunches. The Captain’s head was shaved bald, his muscles were taut and lean, and the enormous tattoo of a cresting wave, which spiraled around his body like a black cape, seemed to rise and crash upon the shore every time he yanked himself up.

“So, what did Jelani Blaque have to say?”

“Pardon nez-moi?”

“During your not-so-secret meeting?”

Thibadeau did his best to keep his face calm, but he knew the Captain saw through it.

“It was hardly a meeting,
Capitaine
. More like an interrogation.”