Chapter 37

  Isaac

  Eric and Isaac sat in stretchy chairs of khaki fiber beneath the shade of a green nylon awning, overlooking a shady tree-lined courtyard. A stage was being set up down there, constructed out of dark lumber, though it looked far from finished. To Isaac, the view resembled a scene from an old and classy European city. Almost. But the trees were wrong in shape and coloration, and the shadows were wrong because light came mainly from the low clouds rather than any sun, and most of all the pedestrians were wrong. Wrong for a European city, that is. In other ways, Isaac thought they were Just Fine.

  Then there was the matter of the three moons up there. The Hollow, Cloud, and Metal moons, unless he was mistaken, of which the Metal Moon was the most remarkable in appearance.

  “Glad you had some money,” said Isaac. He took a sip of the cool fruity drink Eric had bought him.

  “Jacob gave me some,” said Eric. “Said the monsters had some on them.”

  “Right. So. Jacob.”

  Eric reached over and showed Isaac his phone. It had a picture of Jacob Hollow. Almost the same Jacob that Isaac had just met days ago. Maybe a little bit different, somehow. Maybe a little less wild in the eyes, though it was hard to tell from a picture.

  Isaac nodded. “Yup,” he said.

  “So here’s what I think,” said Eric after taking a sip of his coffee. “This has all happened before.”

  “Because of your phone call from your future self.”

  “Right. We’ve done this already, and I guess we fucked up or something because I had to call my past self–that’s me–and tell me to do stuff. It’s impossible to tell what difference my actions have made and whether what I was trying to do worked. You follow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But somehow the Jacob Hollow from the old timeline, like, came back also. To Earth. So now there’s like two of him: the one you met that remembers shit from the future, and this new fresh one that’s meeting us for the first time.”

  “Yeah. Makes sense.” Isaac considered this. “He did already know me, kind of. He knew something about Dwayne.”

  “Dwayne?” Eric adjusted his shades and looked out at the peaceful scene below. A flock of winged snakes erupted from a tree at some unseen provocation and slithered skyward like a bunch of glittering emerald spaghetti noodles.

  “You know, that might also be the case with Black,” Isaac mused.

  “Abraham Black,” said Eric, not asking for confirmation but just tasting the words. He didn’t appear to like the taste.

  “You saw him in the Museum right?”

  Eric nodded. “Saw you too. You were fucked up bro. Had a moon too, or something. Guess that’s also from the old timeline.”

  “Right, right. But I think Black must be like Jacob. Jacob even said something like that. Which means…”

  “There’s an Abraham Black somewhere in here? Shit.”

  “And,” Isaac continued, “don’t forget about the guy who tried to shoot you.”

  “Shade. You bet your ass I haven’t forgotten about him.”

  “And Liz’s weird friends, Shape and Sky.”

  Eric nodded, took another sip. “So a lot of people came back. Wonder how that happened.”

  “Kate knows,” said Isaac. This caused Eric to sit up a little straighter and look at him curiously. “It has something to do with October Industries, and her uncle, and Alan Sheppard.”

  Eric stood up. “Of course it does. Let’s go walk around or something; this is boring.”

  Isaac, who had been enjoying the shade and the people-watching up here on the deck, shrugged. Eric paid their server, who appeared human in every way save for his suspiciously fantastical swirly moustache, and they left the café. Isaac’s sense of strangeness, of being out of place, faded rapidly as they strolled through the streets. He had felt awkward at first, as though he must be strange and obvious to all the others here on the street, but no one had given them so much as a second glance. Which made sense; nearly everything in view was more interesting than two human teenagers, even if one was wearing a slim matte-black spacesuit and carrying his helmet under one arm and the other had a dusty tattered cape, a sword, and headphones around his neck.

  “Aren’t you hot?” asked Eric.

  “Nah, it’s got coolant systems. I’m super comfy, actually.”

  “ARKO-tech right?”

  “You got it.”

  “Damn. Wish I had some of that.”

  “There’s a ton of spare suits on my station. You should drop by.”

  “Cool, cool.”

  They wandered down an empty side street. Isaac stopped to comment on the peculiar shapes of the paving stones. Eric paused to point out the equally unusual topology of the cloudscape overhead. They watched something like a many-horned rhinoceros lumber past, bearing a palanquin with rainbow-striped curtains.

  They wandered through a park, and from a distance watched an old dark-skinned woman slowly juggle a dozen different uncapped jars of viscous liquid. The jars turned as they roved lazily through the air, but none of the stuff inside ever spilled. The old woman had her eyes closed most of the time, and Eric and Isaac hurried along once she opened them because they were glowing yellow.

  They wound up sitting on the edge of a canal, their feet dangling ten feet over the rippling turquoise water as it lapped against the stone embankment. Something big swam down there in the water, but they couldn’t make out details. A faint breeze blew, carrying the wet stone scent of the canal and the aroma of baking bread.

  “I wonder if this is how Jim feels,” said Isaac as he leaned back and felt the grit on the warm stones digging into his palms as he looked up at an angular cobalt cloud. Real and unreal. Conflicting messages. “Hard to convince myself this is real sometimes. Maybe it isn’t.”

  Eric, hunched over and looking down at the water, dug into his pocket and handed something to Isaac. It was Kate’s phone. An effort had been made to clean it, but some dark substance still remained in the cracks on the casing.

  “That’s Kate’s blood,” said Eric, not taking his eyes from the water below. He dug a tiny rock from a crack in the stones and dropped it down.

  Isaac opened his mouth to say something about this, but he had nothing. The thought of Kate’s blood, right there on the phone, right there in his hands, was somehow too horrible and foreign to comprehend. It shouldn’t be there! It should be, like, inside Kate! Isaac slid the phone into one of the spare pockets on his spacesuit, where his own phone might have gone if he had or needed one. So far his station and his spacesuit had rendered a cell phone unnecessary.

  “It’s all real, bro,” said Eric. “We have to act on that assumption.”

  “…ah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

  “So,” Eric continued. “We’ve both met Kate now. Got our wish.”

  Isaac grinned. “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  Eric dropped another rock into the water below. Isaac leaned over to watch. The dark shape in the water circled the place where the rock plopped down. “You’re interested in her, right, bro?”

  Isaac felt an embarrassing heat rise up in his face, but he played it cool. “Eh…um…like, you…well. Hmm.”

  Eric snarked a laugh. Maybe it was his sudden attention to random details, but Isaac realized that Eric had some pretty broad shoulders. When did that happen? Maybe it was that dusty old tarp he was wearing like a coat. Either way, with that sword also sticking up from behind his back, he looked reasonably cool. As expected since they were “heroes” in this new world, maybe, but Isaac couldn’t forget when they’d just been scrawny little punks and their swords had been random sticks they’d found in Jim’s backyard.

  “Well, yeah,” said Isaac after mustering what seemed like an absurd amount of courage necessary for such an admission.

  “She’s pretty awesome,” said Eric. “I was always wondering, you know. Why the text-only rule? Why no Facebook or anything?”

  “Why awake at all hours of the day and night?” added Isaac.

  “Why does she know all kinds of shit about everything?”

  “And the future.”

  “That’s what I meant,” said Eric. “All that. I was actually thinking, like, maybe she wasn’t who she said at all? Like, how would any of us ever know?”

  Isaac dropped his own rock into the water. This time, a blue-gray webbed appendage surfaced with hardly a ripple and caught the pebble before it hit the water. It carefully withdrew the rock back down below the surface.

  “But she turned out to be pretty much how she always seemed in our texts,” Eric said. “So that’s cool. Also the first time I ever saw her was when she saved me from being shot by taking a psycho killer right the fuck out with her guitar. So that was cool too.”

  Isaac nodded. “She’s pretty special. And just really interesting. Maybe it’s the mystery, you know?”

  Eric nodded. “You’re a sucker for mysterious chicks.”

  “How would you know that? I’ve never even–”

  A tiny pebble, maybe the same one, shot out of the water with a small spray and flicked Isaac right in the knee. He recoiled in surprise and pulled his legs up from the water with a yelp. It hadn’t hurt at all. He suspected his spacesuit could withstand small rocks traveling many times as fast. It was just unexpected.

  He and Eric peered down at the moving shadow in the depths. “Didn’t like your rock, bro,” Eric observed as he pried another small chunk of mortar from the stonework. “Yeah, special,” he said as he worked, “but, like, chaotic. Or unpredictable. Like…”

  “Like the sky?”

  Again Eric snorted with laughter. “Sure, you fuckin poet. Like the sky. Just watch yourself, you know? Might bite off more than you can chew with Kaitlyn Carter.” Eric dropped the rock. It plopped into the water; the moving shadow below swirled around it.

  “When did you become the expert?” Isaac suddenly felt that he had to stand up for Kate’s essential unknowableness-especially-by-Eric. “Liz’s who I should be talking to.”

  “You want to talk to Liz about having a crush on Kate? Heh. Good luck.” Eric took hold of his hexagonal medallion and formed a small rock out of mist. He dropped it down to the water, but released it partway so that it was only a puff of vapor when it struck the surface. The webbed appendage that had subtly surfaced to catch it groped about in confusion. “Psyche,” he said. “Who you should really talk to is Jim.”

  Isaac laughed. “Right, I get it. Tell the whole world by means of Jimothy. Smart. That way I wouldn’t even have to confess or anything personally.”

  “What I meant was that Jim is actually solid for relationship advice.”

  Isaac nodded. He knew what Eric meant. “What about you and Liz, while we’re on the subject?” he asked. He kept a close eye on the cloudy water in case more little stones came shooting up at him.

  “Shit, dude, like I know,” said Eric.

  “Woah, that was romantic. You better, like, put those moves on hold or Liz might get scared off.”

  “I will push you in,” said Eric, though he kept his eyes fixed on the water.

  “Why do you like her?”

  Eric kicked his heels over the water. “Why the hell not? She’s talented, smart, gorgeous. And I like her…I don’t know, her stubbornness? Also she’s adorable with cats. You know, how she always tries to pet them no matter what. Fuckin rabid lion just mauled some dude, she’d be all in there trying to cuddle with it.”

  Isaac grinned. He’d never heard Eric talk about someone like this before. And Eric had definitely never called anyone ‘gorgeous’ before. Isaac thought that was a pretty strong word even for Elizabeth, but that just made it better. He said, “Then how about this: do you consider our current situation more or less favorable for your chances in that regard?”

  “My chances for what, just to figure shit out? Maybe I’ll just sit her down and ask her, for fuck’s sake.”

  Isaac nodded. That’s probably another thing Eric liked about her–that she was the kind of person you could just ask directly about the status of your relationship without it getting awkward. Elizabeth was drama-proof. “I think tha–”

  A jet of water burst from the canal and struck Isaac directly in the chest. The force of it knocked him backwards. He was on his back staring up at the pale sky, surprised but neither hurt nor wet. Eric started laughing beside him. “What’d you do to piss him off so–”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Eric received his own jet of water. It bowled him back over onto the walkway.

  “All right,” Isaac heard Eric say as he rolled to his feet, soaking wet. “Is that how it is?” This was followed by a tremendous splash. Isaac sat up to see the whole canal roiling. More jets of water spurted up at Eric, but he dodged them easily and stooped to pick up more rocks and toss them down into the canal. At first Isaac thought he was uncharacteristically angry, perhaps because those red headphones around his neck had gotten soaked, but then he saw the smile in Eric’s eyes.

  Another jet shot out at Isaac. He saw it coming and held up a hand to block it, though it was forceful enough that his hand alone would do little good. It happened in just an instant. The understanding came to him in a flash that his hand was immovable; that it was linked to everything around him; that the water had to hit him only if he wanted it to. And did he want it to? Not really. So he moved it elsewhere. It was like opening a door in his mind. The spout of water rising from the canal reached his hand, and then kept going from a point ten feet off to his left where it spattered against a red stucco wall.

  The next one knocked him over again while he stared at the place where he had sent the water.

  At last, the thing in the canal calmed down. It either moved off or sank below the level of visibility. Eric took this as a sign of victory, posing in cautious triumph at the edge of the canal. Their antics had drawn a small crowd; some of the onlookers rewarded Eric with a scattering of mock applause. Eric stiffened at the attention, suddenly embarrassed. He helped Isaac to his feet. “Saw what you did there, bro,” he said as they walked away and the onlookers turned to go about their business. “That was cool.”

  Isaac looked at his hands. They were bare, the thin gloves pulled back at his wrists, so he couldn’t blame the teleportation of water on the suit. Must have been him. Space. Of course. Void Station = Aperture Science? Which would make ARKO…

  He put on the helmet he had tucked under his arm. It sealed with a tight hiss and Isaac felt the pressurization in his ears. “Show group chat,” he said, and there it was, overlaid on top of Eric’s amused face. No new messages. Still just him and Eric here in Skywater.

  “Real smooth,” said Eric. “Yeah. Discreet. ‘Hang on, let me just put on my spacesuit helmet so I can check my texts.’”

  Isaac took the helmet off again with a squeak of escaping air. “I’m sure there’s a better way,” he muttered. “I’m new to all this, okay? I don’t even have ARKO up yet. Did you know it’s programmed with music? Like, with a piano.”

  “I got a fifty-foot-tall metronome that matches your heartbeat bro, you expect me to be surprised by that shit?”

  Isaac shifted the helmet in his arms. There must also be a better way to carry it. He didn’t really want to walk around in a space helmet all day long, no matter how cool it looked.

  They stopped in a broad plaza flanked with covered stalls to look around. Isaac occupied himself with trying to figure out what time of day it was. This was surprisingly difficult because the small white thing in the sky that passed for a sun here was not visible, and the light instead came mainly from the clouds. The usual tells like shadows and lighting were therefore useless. It could be midday or nearly sundown for all he knew. Maybe it only got dark on cloudless days? The Great Reverse-Overcast?

  “You been having weird dreams?” asked Eric.

  “Huh?”

  “Dreams. Weird. You had ‘em?” Eric was watching a flock of small bony creatures scuttling over the stones.

  “Yeah,” said Isaac. “I think it’s something about this place. It was called ‘the Dream Museum,’ right?” Isaac had dreamed strange dreams indeed. Meta-dreams. Dreams inside dreams, nested like Russian dolls until he became lost in them. Doors behind doors like a modern art installation, stories inside stories like a tale from the Arabian Nights, until Isaac had lost all sense of what was a story and what wasn’t–or if that question mattered at all. He lost track of what was real, including himself. He could not recall ever having existential crises in his dreams before coming here. The sick, confused panic sometimes persisted for many minutes after waking. After all, had he really awoken, and how would he know? Did he know, for certain, even now? And in the end, did it actually matter?

  Was this how Jimothy felt? Maybe what Isaac needed was to get himself a Line.

  He didn’t feel like trying to explain all this to Eric, so he asked, “what have you been dreaming about?”

  Eric stood staring at the little skeletal creatures until they scurried out of sight. “So I’m in a city.”

  “Chicago?”

  “Shut up.” Eric gazed with intense focus at the cobblestones. They weren’t actually that interesting in this spot, so probably he was trying to figure out what to say, how to say it. Isaac shut up.

  “It might be Chicago, or it might be the one on my moon. It doesn’t matter. But…people are falling. Something is happening up there, at the top of all the buildings, ‘cause they’re all fucking skyscrapers, right, fucking huge, and I can’t really see but something bad is happening up there, and maybe I could have stopped it, who knows, but I’m not way up there. I’m down here on the street, and shit’s falling everywhere, the glass is coming down like rain and all this debris and shit.

  “But people are falling too. And that’s why I’m there, like I understand that. That’s what I’m for, that’s what I do. I catch the people that are falling. That’s what I’m supposed to do, right? But there’s so many, and they’re all kids bro. They’re, like, these kids just falling from way the hell up there.

  “So I’m running as hard as I can, but it’s a fucking dream so I’m actually slow as hell like I’m running through water. And I’m getting glass and shit all in my eyes and in my mouth but I can’t look away, and all this debris is falling on me, bricks and chunks of concrete, but I can’t stop, because there’s no one else around and if I don’t catch them they’re all going to just hit the ground…”

  Isaac shifted on his feet, unsure of what to say about that. Probably he should say nothing; that was probably the smart move. So he said, “Kids are used to being grounded. I know I–”

  “But the worst part,” said Eric through gritted teeth, as though forcing the words out through sheer willpower, “is that I know some of them. Leah is falling, and so is Kate. Just…falling. I have to catch them. That’s the only way.”

  He turned to Isaac. “And then the dream ends, and I wake up. Every damn night. Also,” he drew his arm back and punched Isaac in the jaw, knocking him down onto the stones. It hurt enough that Isaac wondered for a moment if his jaw were actually broken. He didn’t even notice having hit the ground, and when he looked up at Eric he saw him massaging his knuckles.

  Isaac worked his jaw around, deciding at last that it was not, in fact, broken, though it might be painful to chew for the next couple of days. “And you said Heidi’s the violent one,” he said, grimacing at the twinge brought on by speaking. He took Eric’s hand, the same one that had struck him, and allowed Eric to haul him back to his feet. Eric had got a lot stronger than the last time Isaac had met him. He was much stronger now than Isaac himself, that much was obvious. Isaac wondered, as he stooped to retrieve his helmet, whether he himself had changed that much. He thought not. Everyone else was growing, getting better, getting stronger, and here was Isaac Milton, head in the clouds, spinning his wheels in a race no one else even cared about.

  Wordlessly, they each moved on from the fact of Eric punching Isaac. Hardly worth noting, really, for either of them. Punishment deserved, punishment allocated, case closed.

  They moved on, and it wasn’t long before they came upon a commotion–not a great and uproarious commotion, but more of a confused muddle of curiosity and bafflement. The residents of Skywater stood in the street and gazed about with puzzlement at their surroundings. It was clear enough what had caught their attention: everything had been painted in bright, swirling colors. The buildings on the street ahead, stone on one side and plaster on the other, were one and all swathed in brilliant graffiti. Ribbons of color, streams, rivers, ran from building to building, down to the street, across the street and up the buildings on the other side. The statuary had been affected, as had the fountains, the trees, the animals, and evidently a number of the pedestrians. The irregular line where the mass of colors met the unmarked city was clearly defined.

  Altogether it looked like the work of some giant graffiti artist who had come by with a load of bright paints and sprayed down everything in sight, except that he’d somehow gotten into all the cracks and crevices. Or perhaps some crop duster had flown past overhead, dumping tanks of dye. But it was too orderly for a random crop-dusting, and too cleanly done for the vandalism of giants. Whatever had done this had left no other mark, no change in texture, not even a smell.

  More and more people gathered to marvel just like Eric and Isaac; this was evidently a very recent occurrence. Newcomers tested the painted paving stones of the street as though dipping their toes in hot water; doors opened in the distance to admit curious and unmarked citizens drawn out by the commotion; and several people who had themselves been painted were trying to clean the pigmentation off of themselves and their clothes. Most didn’t seem to be having any luck. Isaac tried not to stare as one of the more ordinary-human looking types removed a glove from its three-fingered hand. The glove, in a continuation of the skin of the creature’s arm, was divided between lime green and dark pink. The hand beneath was a muted viridian, presumably the natural tone of the creature’s skin. Elsewhere, a street vendor cut some kind of pastry in half to observe that its interior, like the outside, was half bright-pink in a clean line. He at once raised the price.

  Eric didn’t seem to appreciate this remarkable find, nor the fact that it was clearly a brand-new development that the citizens of Skywater appeared to understand no better than the humans from Earth. “Huh,” Eric said, then continued to stroll down the tumultuous avenue.

  Isaac followed, pausing now and then to see some strange sight. A shopkeeper was furious about the hanging fabrics that had all been partly stained. When they crossed a canal, the water moving sluggishly beneath them was red and orange. The Nile to blood. Normal water a hundred yards up the canal was slowly filtering down and replacing the red water as it drained away. What had it looked like when the bloody length of the Nile drained out of ancient Egypt into the Mediterranean?

  “There,” said Eric when they came at last to a crowded open-air market. He pointed to a spot near one of the shops walling in the marketplace. Isaac finally understood; Eric had been taking them to the epicenter. One glance at the spot he pointed to made it clear: the colors had originated there. Streaks of pigment made partial rings around that spot as though a tornado of dye had touched down and from there expanded outward. Eric had been following the patterns to find this.

  They approached the spot, but something kept them from getting too close. That something was a creature: tall, gangly, faintly menacing. It hunched over, squatting down, its long sticklike legs collapsed together, yet still could have looked down at Isaac. It wore a blue diamond-patterned T-shirt many sizes too small for it, pale green stretchy shorts that similarly covered only a fraction of its legs, pink plastic flip-flops that fit only the far ends of its ridiculously long feet, and a tall purple stovepipe hat from which hung limp streamers in many colors. And a mask: a pale, happy, laughing mask. Its skin was mottled yellow-green, and as though to make up for its absurdly inadequate clothing it, was covered in a motley collection of armbands, jewelry, ribbons, handkerchiefs and other scraps of colorful cloth, random shiny baubles including everything from monocles to bottle caps, and at least a few objects that Isaac would have sworn were Christmas tree ornaments. A stirring of vibrant fabrics and a clattering jangle of accessories accompanied every twitchy movement.

  It closely inspected the spot where the color had originated, its expression unreadable through the laughing mask, and around it gathered a crowd of mixed subservient lackeys and curious spectators. Isaac and Eric came close enough to hear the sycophancy.

  “What do you see, Lord Fool?”

  “A terrible business, Lord Fool, a marvelous terrible business indeed!”

  “Why, the spirifers are having conniptions, Lord Fool. Serves them right, of course.”

  “Could it be those dastardly scriveners, do you suppose?”

  “A real humdinger, and no mistake!”

  “By the Ten, Lord Fool, is this your doing?”

  Lord Fool traced a long, slender finger against the painted stones and brought it up to its mask. Its head tilted one way, then the other, and then it laughed. The laugh was high, intense, shallow. Something about that laugh was infectious. All those nearby smiled, then began to laugh themselves. Isaac realized that he, too, was grinning. Lord Fool planted a hand on the stones and sprang off of it in an astounding display of gymnastics. He rose high up into the air, scattering little bits and trinkets that glinted in the light and showered down upon the onlookers. They cheered.

  It took Isaac a moment to realize that Lord Fool did not plan on falling back down. The creature spun in an awkwardly elegant dance in the air; its long limbs curled about its own body like streamers. Then, while still gamboling above everyone, it shouted down at the crowd.

  Nothing of note here, sings the immaculate, the gracious, the effervescently and effusively frivolous, the forgivingly inadequate, the reliably erratic, the one and the only Lord Fool. Wait and see, he says, and we will see what we see. Wait and see. Pry up a paving stone, take it home, and hang it over your mantle. Pry up a laugh, pry up a smile (says the unwise), and hang it over your chin–rightside-up, mind you! Pry up a thought for the future, and discard it into the bay! The future is yesterday, the never is now, the time is right (I promise you), the time is now! It always is. And above all, Fear Not, for fear belongs to the wise, and

  WE ARE ALL FOOLS

  Laughing and capering, Lord Fool danced away over the rooftops, right across the grey disc of the Cloud Moon.

  Isaac blinked, gasped, looked at Eric. Eric had a look of such stupefied disbelief that Isaac laughed in his face. It wasn’t hard; laughing seemed natural right now. All around him, everywhere, people were laughing, joking, singing, even dancing. Someone, was trying to pull up one of the painted paving stones.

  Eric shook himself out of whatever spell had bound him. “What the fuck?” he muttered. Then he grinned. “Jim was right,” he said. “This place is crazy.”

  Jimothy. “Of course!” said Isaac, affecting a Sherlock-Holmsian British accent and stabbing the air with his finger. “I get it now, by Jove! Jim!”

  “What?”

  Isaac pointed at the painted ground. Then, as though he had noticed it before but the information had taken time to filter through his overworked subconscious, he swung his finger to the side and aimed it at an object at rest against the nearest building. It was a cane, painted in shades of green and blue, lying as though discarded and shunted out of the way by the crowd. It was Jimothy’s cane, no doubt about it. Well, maybe a little doubt. But not much.

  “Well shit,” said Eric. He glanced with apprehension back up to the sky as though expecting a surprise reappearance of Lord Fool.

  Isaac gazed around for some Convenient Clues. Preferably ones suitably leveled to his own degree of deductive prowess.

  “He didn’t text,” said Eric, who now scanned the crowd of strange beings, searching for a single familiar face. “Did he just forget?”

  “Maybe…” Maybe what? Did he not have his phone? Isaac’s phone, that is. “I have an idea,” he told Eric. “Hold this.” He gave Eric the cane and put the helmet on. It sealed with a hiss. “Void suit,” he said, “locate my phone.”

  Unable to connect to ARKO.

  “Yeah, yeah. Um. You’re still connected to my phone, right?”

  Yes.

  “Can you use it to track its location?”

  That function is inoperative.

  “Can you…send a message and ping my phone’s response time?”

  Yes.

  “Can you triangulate its position based on this data?”

  Yes.

  “Cool. Let’s do it.”

  Something struck Isaac on the shoulder. “Bro,” said Eric’s voice. “Come on out of there and listen to this.”

  Isaac slid the helmet off and turned to Eric, who stood beside a big brown hairy creature, half of which was purple and didn’t look like it was meant to be. The creature looked so much like a giant Muppet that Isaac bit his lip and struggled to keep a straight face.

  “I seen yer friend,” it said in a deep voice. It had a thick accent. “Ye best be afeared fer ‘im. Carted off by the Xeon was ‘e.”

  “A gang or some shit,” whispered Eric in explanation.

  “Which way?” asked Isaac.

  The creature shrugged, then aimed a thick furry arm down a nearby alley. “Careful,” he said simply, before turning away.

  “Well,” said Eric. That was all there was to say, really. They both turned and jogged toward the alley.