Shade and Clearwater

Chapter Three

The thing I didn't tell Jon was how angry I was. Not at Jon, mind you. I didn't blame him for getting me into this little predicament, not really. I was thinking more about Jorge Luis. As far as I knew, he had raised me since I was real little and not once had he mentioned that there were others out there like me. Maybe the calmer, more rational part of my mind understood that he was just trying to protect me, but that didn't stop me from feeling betrayed and generally pissed off.

Maybe that's why I was ready to do the unthinkable and pick a fight with the Feds.

Jon didn't say much when I told him what I'd decided. He just gave a little nod, said he had somebody he wanted me to see. Then we were off again, this time driving down bumpy country roads in the middle of nowhere.

I thought of sleeping again - even with the nap, I was dead-tired - but I felt too jumpy. And since I had nothing else to do, I started noticing things. Jon's car, for instance. Looking at it from the outside, I figured it for an older model corn burner. But it sounded as smooth as a kitten, and no combustion engine I'd ever heard sounded like that. "You runnin' fuel cells?" I asked. "How the hell you'd swing that?"

Jon smiled. "I have a friend who likes to tinker."

"What he'd do, build it himself?"

"Something like that."

"What's the top speed?"

"Over 300 clicks, or so he says. Haven't ever needed to test it."

I whistled. "Some tinkerer. Why would he even want to build an engine that fast? The only roads straight enough to handle that speed are the fedways, and you'd be pulled over sure as shit."

"Because he could. He's thorough, and he likes to test the limits of his abilities. Take these windows. Notice anything weird about them when I drove up?"

"I couldn't see you, but I figured you were doing your thing."

"That too, but no. I can't explain exactly how it works, but basically the window scrambles light so you can never quite make out what's on the other side. Shapes, sure, but no details."

"Why not just put in tinted windows?"

"I told you, my friend is thorough. Also, those're illegal - only the Feds can use tinted windows."

"Right."

"That's not all, either." Jon patted a black box under the dash. "He put in an active radar jammer, a thermal signature mask - hell, he even painted the car with a nonreflective coat that reduces the range of laser finders."

I could barely keep up with all Jon was saying, but his friend sounded like a genius. "I think I'd like to meet this guy."

"Good," said Jon, and his smile broke out into a full-on grin. "Because that's where we're going."

# # #

Imagine my surprise, then, when fifty minutes later, Jon pulled up a gravel driveway and parked in front of what appeared to be a long-abandoned farm. I looked around confused. The farmhouse had no front door - or windows, for that matter - and I wasn't sure there was even a roof anymore underneath that carpet of gray-green moss. The grain silo didn't look much better, with a gaping hole in the side halfway up. Only the barn and stables looked sound, though the peeling wood looked about a hundred years old.

"What, he lives in the barn?" I asked.

"Something like that."

Jon walked past the barn's big front doors and went around the side. Towards the back, a smaller door hung crooked on one hinge. Jon stopped in front of it and just stood there. Puzzled, I stopped right behind him. "You going to knock?"