“Are we there yet?” John whined, as he adjusted his seat belt. They were on their second day of driving, and it was getting old fast. Virginia seemed like worlds away.
“No. What are you, twelve?” Sammy Jo glanced back at him from the driver’s seat of the car. He grinned at her.
“I sure feel like it, back here,” he said, shifting his long legs. “Can I drive a while?”
“You don’t have a valid licence,” she said, frowning. “And Doctor Beckett’s is expired, so you can’t use his.”
She tilted her head towards Maggie in the passenger’s seat. “And so’s Sherri’s. You’re stuck with me, unless you want to risk it. And I don’t.”
John reached into his back pocket, producing his wallet. He pulled out his own Earth Prime licence.
Expired 2001… damn.
“Nobody tells you these kind of problems happen when you step out of a tavern and near five years have passed.”
Sammy Jo smirked at him in the rear view mirror. “I don’t know why it’s so much easier to talk to you than it is to him.”
“Sam?”
“Yeah.”
John leaned back, his eyes gazing out the window at the countryside. “I relate, you know? I first met him when he had twenty-four years on me, and I was just a student; I looked up to him. Even now that I’m only a few years younger, it can feel like he’s on a whole other level, and I think it’s all the leaping he’s done.”
“He’s really something,” Maggie murmured.
Sammy Jo pursed her lips, seeming to be hesitating. John looked at her with interest.
“Somethin’ on your mind?”
“No, no,” she said. “Just thinking.”
She went silent for a while, and John wondered what he’d said to cause her to shut down like this.
He moved his legs again, as they were uncomfortably pressing against Maggie’s seat. He inadvertently kneed the seat, and Maggie turned to look at him with a frown.
“Stop that, would you? Jeez, maybe you are twelve.”
“I need leg room, alright?” John crossed his arms. “A tall man’s gotta give the extremities space to move. Are you two even aware that cramped, unmoving legs can develop deep vein thrombosis?”
Maggie sighed. “Fine, at the next bathroom stop we can switch seats, alright? Jeez, I think you’re worse than a twelve-year-old.”
“You’re right; I’m forty-five. That’s 3.75 twelve-year-olds worth of obnoxious… and counting.” He gave her a smug grin.
He saw a flicker of amusement pass over her face, just the same as Sherri used to give him when he’d pressed her buttons enough to break her out of her serious thoughts.
Guess it works with every Maggie.
He looked beside him, at the empty seat, and wondered if it had been a good idea to leave Alia out of this trip to grill this Senator Grady guy. Instead, she was back in San Antonio, apparently trying to draw out whoever had pilfered the Higgins crystal from Quinn’s jeans.
He wasn’t terribly sure what use he was going to be, but Sam was busy debugging Ziggy, so he had asked John to fill his shoes: pretend to be him. Almost like he was some kind of leaper, bluffing his way through situations while everyone viewed him as someone else. The thought gave him anxiety.
Looking back out the window, he watched the Virginian tobacco fields pass by in a blur.
“I once threw out a box of cigars that had that junk in it,” came a voice that definitely wasn’t Maggie or Sammy Jo. “Just no flavour in a Virginia Tobacco leaf.”
John whirled around in his seat – the empty seat beside him was now occupied by Al, giving him a wave.
“Sam isn’t the only guy who can be in two places at once,” he said.
John grinned at the hologram. Now it really was like he was leaping.
“Al, what a pleasant surprise,” he commented loudly, gaining the attention of the ladies in the front. “Does this mean Ziggy’s online?”
“Sam’s still working on her, but the Imaging Chamber is up and running with enough resources for a little present-day hologramming.”
“Well, I’m sorry to say that we’re still driving and may be for several more hours. Not a lot happening here.”
“I gotcha. But hey, might as well stay a while, chew the fat. Us observers gotta stick together.”
John smiled. “Sure thing.”
“What’s he saying?” Maggie asked.
“He just wants to hang out and talk,” John replied. “Sorry you’ll only hear one side. Pretend I’m talkin’ on the phone or something.”
Maggie nodded, and turned forward. A moment later, she turned around again. “Say, could you do this to me if you were in the Imaging Chamber?”
“If Ziggy’s got Sherri’s neural data from Higgins, then sure,” he said, chuckling.
Maggie mulled this over. “Okay, just don’t be walking in on me in the shower, okay?”
John stifled a laugh. “Perish the thought,” he said. “Though I admit I may have done that to Sherri by accident on at least two occasions.”
“Oh, you ain’t alone on that one,” Al chimed in. “With Sam, I try to pretend I didn’t see what I definitely saw.”
John felt his cheeks flush – given that he had mostly the same body as Sam.
“There is, evidently, little privacy between a leaper and their observer,” he relayed to Maggie. She grimaced, and turned back to the front.
Al pulled a cigar from his shiny silver jacket pocket. “So what’s your world’s version of me like, anyway? From the story you told, seems his taste in fashion is on point, at least.”
John laughed. “The two of you are peacocks of a feather on that front. But I’ve been hearing you’re still married to Beth. That’s a major point of difference.”
“Oh, did your guy have five wives?”
“Six, actually.”
Al contemplated this for a moment, as he lit up.
“Poor bastard’s just like I was before Sam did me a favour.”
John’s eyes widened. “What did he do?”
“He went back to tell Beth I was alive and comin’ home. Best thing anyone ever did for me.”
John took this information in, and his heart broke for his Al. Then came thoughts of his brother, and the lack of his own world’s Maggie. If only he’d been able to focus on things like that instead of the looming invasion.
“And he brought Sherri into existence by saving Tom’s life, too. He sure caused some ripples, didn’t he?”
“Boggles the mind, don’t it?” he took a drag on the cigar. “And once we manage to finish Sherri’s leap, who knows what things’ll look like?”
A whole new paradigm for all of us… Sherri alive and well. Arturo. Faded memories. How much would we all forget?
He shivered.
“You okay?” Al was looking at him with some concern.
John swept aside his existential dread, and smiled.
“Yeah, no sweat.”
He looked at Sammy Jo. “Got an ETA on the next bathroom stop? My legs are really suffering back here.”
She smirked. “Fine, I’ll pull over at the next gas station, okay?”
* * *
The sun was well and truly down when the car finally pulled into the motel in Charlottesville. John stretched as he got out of the car.
“That was quite hellish,” he said, rubbing the backs of his knees.
“I’ll say,” Sammy Jo added. “At least you didn’t have to be maintaining focus for twenty-six of the past thirty-six hours.”
“Fair enough.”
Maggie emerged from the back seat, yawning and rubbing her eyes. “What time is it?”
“Eight,” replied John, holding up his wrist to show his watch to her. “Let’s just check in and go to sleep. I think we’re all in need of some sleep at this point.”
“Now you’re talking my language,” Sammy Jo said, pulling out her overnight bag from the trunk. “I’m beat.”
She headed for the reception, as Maggie and John pulled their things from the trunk, and closed it up.
“So, do you think Grady’s a leaper?” Maggie asked. “Or was?”
John stroked his chin. “It seems likely, and yet, he can’t be the one who stole the crystal.”
“Yeah,” said Maggie. “It’s a head scratcher, alright.”
“It just doesn’t make sense. There are crucial pieces of the puzzle that we don’t have and it’s driving me nuts.”
“It’s one of those mysteries where everyone’s a suspect,” came Al’s voice, as he emerged from his glowing doorway just by the car. “Who can you trust? Could be any one of us; even you or me. Though, I doubt it.”
“Oh, hey,” John said. He leaned toward Maggie. “Al again.”
“What’s he want this time?”
Good question.
“Just wanted to let you know that Sam figured out how Ziggy had her processes jammed.”
“He couldn’t have called about that?”
Al chuckled. “Like I said, we got a ‘trust no one’ type situation. This is our most secure line of communication. No eavesdroppers.”
“On you anyway,” John said tersely. “Go on, then. What’s the situation?”
“Well, there’s a specific electromagnetic signature that, if deployed close enough to Ziggy, scrambles her up and makes her black out like a size zero blonde at a sorority party.”
John raised an eyebrow. “What does hair colour have to do with – you know what, never mind. So you think it was some kind of EMP tuned to this signature?”
“You got it. We did a sweep of the facility for anything that would do something like that, and came up with diddly squat, so make sure you go through Grady’s place nice and thorough. I’m sure you’ll know it if you see it.”
“Will do,” John said. “Got any plans to defend against the pulse?”
“Working on it,” said Al. “For now Sam and Quinn are setting up a detection system that’ll alert us with a silent alarm if it happens again.”
He leaned in. “Keep that under your hat; we may be able to catch someone red-handed if they don’t know it’s there.”
John gave him a nod. “Gotcha.”
He followed Maggie towards reception. On the way, he locked eyes with someone exiting a room: a middle-aged black man in a neat shirt and pants. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for the intense look of surprise with which he was looking at John.
He broke away from the eye contact as he entered the reception, a little shaken by the encounter.