“Who’s Uncle Hickory?”
“My great-uncle. Remember that super-big, super-ugly oil painting in my dad’s office? Point is, his tone—like Where does anyone keep a desk key? Behind Uncle Hickory. Duh—shows you exactly what kind of weirdo my father is. And the reason he drives my mother crazy.”
“What if your mom hadn’t asked where he keeps the desk key?”
When he turns his head to look at me, the hood of his sweatshirt blows over his eyes, and he sits upright to pull it back off his face, riding in the sun with no hands, eyes closed, open as a dying tulip. He laughs. “What kind of magician would I be if I couldn’t bust open the lock on a desk?”
“The kind who loses the key in his underpants?”
He beams. “Exactly.”
When we cross the river and pull up at the plant, though, the cockiness fades a little and then a lot. There’s a truck parked out front, an old beat-up Ford pickup.
“Shit. Someone’s here.”
“Would your father be caught dead in a twenty-year-old Ford F-150?”
River laughs nervously. “Not even twenty years ago.”
“Then I think we’re fine.” I’m striding toward the front door like we own the place. In fairness, one of us does.
“Mab, stop. He must have security on already.” River grabs my sleeve. “I didn’t think he would yet, but we’ll have to get in some other way.”
I keep walking. I don’t recognize the pickup, but I’m not worried.
At the door, there is indeed a security guard behind giant mirrored sunglasses, sitting on a desk chair that looks totally out of place outside though I guess a security guard in a lawn chair would be even stranger, and there’s no one here but us so there’s no need to stand. River is still clutching at my sleeve, still begging me to turn back, even though, clearly, we’ve already been seen. I look to see if security has been issued a gun. He has.
“Mab,” he says. “Mr. Templeton.”
“Hey Hobart,” I say. “How’s things?”
“I’m not—” River starts, but Hobart’s answering my question.
“Not bad. Got a job.” He spreads his hands to show me, as if I couldn’t already see, as if I didn’t already know.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. How are you?”
“Fine,” I say. “Same.” Even though that’s less true by the moment.
“Your sisters?”
“Them too.”
“Glad to hear it.” A short pause. “You kids headed in?”
“Yup,” I say.
He turns to River. “Your dad know you’re here?”
“We’ve even got the key,” I assure Hobart and gesture at River to show it to him.
“No need, no need.” Hobart reaches around us and unlocks the front doors, glad to be of service. But on our way inside, he puts a hand on my arm.
“Mab, listen.” I pause and do. “This job? Your mom knows, but she doesn’t know, you know? She doesn’t know I started yet. If she’s upset, would you tell her? I just really, really needed it.”
* * *
I was picturing derelict, dusty expanses, nails and washers and stray parts scattered across a stained and cratered floor, cobwebs and mouse shit and broken glass, hulking machinery so out of date even I would recognize it was beyond repair. I was picturing leaking, cracked, and broken because that’s what Apple said. But what I see is shocking, and the longer we look around the more shocking it gets.
There is, at first, no hint of a chemical plant, no hint of a plant of any kind. It looks like an office but an office in a magazine, much nicer than anything we have in Bourne. There’s a lobby with comfortable-looking chairs and sofas surrounding a thick gray rug with splashes of red like uneven sunburn, a coffee table with fans of never-read magazines, a water dispenser with cold and hot and a variety of tea bags and cocoa packets and sweetener choices, a matched set of mugs, a coffee maker. A fireplace. Behind that, offices and conference rooms, some glass-walled so you can see inside, some with the glass frosted so you cannot.
“Wow” is all I can manage.
“That’s what you’re supposed to say,” River tells me grimly. “Come on. This is just the front office. That’s not what you wanted to see.”
It’s not? I have no idea what I wanted to see.
“Let’s find your revolution,” he says.
A series of corridors, all pristine. Shining. A series of rooms, and River’s key opens them all. One holds nothing but office supplies. Another paper towels and tissues and toilet paper. Another is filled with brand-new desks and chairs wrapped in plastic like sandwiches. Another is empty save for maybe a dozen phones trailing cords from the wall and dotting the carpet like weeds.
Finally, behind another nondescript door, row after row after row of filing cabinets, filing cabinets to the moon. This is the room I’ve come for. This is the room Mirabel’s sent me to find. But even if it’s in here, even if I knew exactly what to look for, I’m no closer to Duke’s buried paperwork now than I was at our house. It could be right in this room, inches from my fingertips, but given all the time there is between now and the end of the world, I’d still die in there before I found it.
But River is on to the next door anyway. It opens to a garage like an airplane hangar full of forklifts fitted together like vertebrae, tires full and black as ticks. You can tell just by looking that, unlike the equipment on the torn-up grass outside, these have never been driven. You can tell just by looking they have never even been turned on. The door next to that reveals another enormous garage, this one of demolition equipment—bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks, excavators—some dirt-caked and mud-splattered, some fresh and untouched and yellow as buttercups. If real backhoes shipped like toy ones, most of these would still be in their original packaging. I realize: This is not a factory that’s been through a war. This is a factory gearing up for one.
At last we reach the floor of the plant, the heart of the beast. We’re up above it on a kind of walkway enclosed in glass, peering down like far-off gods. There’s something very strange about looking out windows and seeing inside. You expect trees when you look out a window. Or, if your view is unlovely, then cars, parking lots, the outside of the house across the way. But to look out a window and see in is dizzying. Also, because we’re so high, the floor so far below, I can’t quite make out what I’m looking at. But slowly it resolves. Vats upon vats upon vats, pipes snaking into their tops, out from their bottoms, crisscrossing in layers of chrome and steel, bending hard at right angles and veering away, plunging into the floor only to re-emerge somewhere farther along, like loons. They are punctuated at intervals even as railroad ties by bolts that rise like nipples from their rounded hulls.
I don’t know if Apple was wrong or lying or being lied to herself, but this place is not a leaky mess in need of repair. This place is perfect, pristine, and ready to go.
I’m having trouble catching my breath.
“You okay?” River looks at me, worried.
I nod. He takes my hand. This does not make it any easier to breathe.
“You’re kind of pale.”