“You hate that you were chosen by an alien race to be their envoy? That they think you’re special enough to give unique knowledge to, and to keep from being currently dead?” She said this somewhat mockingly—like, of course I loved being special.
“Yes, OK! I hate it!” I was suddenly angry. We had made it to the treacherous ground and now we had to deal with it. “I hate it now and I hated it the first moment I thought it. I hate that they saved me and let all those other people die. I hate that the weight of this bullshit situation is all on me!” My volume level had increased, but it was Manhattan—people screamed into their phones all the time.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m sorry I didn’t think of that.” She paused. “But it’s not just you, you’ve got help. You’ve got good friends. Good people. I love Andy, of course, and Miranda and Robin seem lovely.”
There was no way I was going to get into the weeds of my day thus far, so I just said, “I don’t know that I do, Maya.”
“Oh, April.” She sighed.
“Yeah. I sure do know how to fuck shit up.”
“Yeah, you do,” she agreed.
Those words should have been extra weight on me, but for some reason they made me lighter. The silence hung for a while. For that one moment, I forgot that I was at the center of a swirling storm of political intrigue and I was just a shitty ex-girlfriend. It was kinda lovely. I laughed.
“OK.” I headed back to the topic at hand. “So the Carls really did choose me and they really are treating me different than everyone in the rest of the world. How could that help the Defenders solve the 767 Sequence?”
“I don’t know, April,” she said, a little dejected. I didn’t know why, possibly because we had gotten close to talking about something else and, again, I didn’t let it happen. “I think the Carls, maybe they didn’t pick you because of who you were but because of who you could become.”
“That’s a nice thing to say, though I don’t know that I love who I’ve become.”
“Maybe you’re not done yet.”
I didn’t respond to that.
“April, I’ve never stopped being obsessed with . . .” And then she paused.
I waited patiently, silently for her to finish that sentence.
But then I couldn’t because I had solved the 767 Sequence.
“Obsessed with me!” I said.
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, I thought I could detach from this whole weirdness, but after you left, I just threw myself in. I lied when I said I just liked the Dream. I needed to keep being a part of it. I thought I was better than you, but I was exactly as obsessed, just in a different way.”
I let her finish because it was important, but it was also agonizing.
“OK, but that is also not what I meant. I meant the Defenders are obsessed with me. They have a thousand conspiracy theories, Maya. They know everything about me. Every move I’ve ever made, every poster in the background of every video. Everything public I’ve ever done in my life!”
“And?”
“Row six,” I said. “I sat in it that first week when I was flying out to meet Jennifer Putnam and do that late-night show. I got upgraded because someone was in the seat I’d been assigned, but they’d been assigned it too. It was my first time in business class. It was a 767. It was row six.”
“Six like the Mayan number on the tail of the 767?”
“Yeah, and my little TV was broken. Or, I thought it was broken. It had a bunch of weird code on it!”
“Weird code like . . . ?”
“Weird like hex code.”
“But how would the Defenders get their hands on that? How would we?”
“BECAUSE I FUCKING TWEETED IT, MAYA! GODDAMN IT!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There were people looking at me, which wasn’t great because I was pretty recognizable. I moved as fast as I could, with my back and shoulder still stiff and twinging, back toward Andy’s place but then, instead, popped into a coffee shop on 12th. It was a cute place with a couple of bars and a few two-tops. About a half dozen student-looking people were drinking their lattes in front of their laptops.
“HELLO! My Name Is April May and I Need A Laptop Computer Right Now,” I said.
I had bet correctly, and there was indeed one person, a guy in his late teens or early twenties, who was not just willing but honored to give me his computer.
In a moment I had my tweet up:
@AprilMaybeNot: On my way to LA and got bumped to business class. My little plane TV is broken though, so I want the money I didn’t spend back!
That was a simpler time.
The little plane TV indeed showed code that I now instantly recognized as hexadecimal. Was that the passkey? It was a lot of characters. So I popped it into its own window and started typing it out. As soon as I was done, about five minutes later, I emailed it to Miranda and Maya, which hopefully wasn’t going to cause any drama.
The Key?
I think this is the key, though I don’t know what it is or what to do with it.
Then I texted them both separately, Check your email. Maya wrote back first, It’s hex, I’ve converted it, would you like to guess what it is?
Me: The lyrics to a song?
Maya: Last night they loved you, opening doors and pulling some strings, angel.
Me: Of course it’s Bowie
Maya: Hell Yes
Miranda replied back with the same information, except to say that she had also inputted it into the latest version of the full code compiled on the Som. I’m sending you the result right now. It is not complicated, but April, let’s talk about this.
It wasn’t complicated; it was an address in New Jersey and five words, “Only April. No One Else.”
Until that moment, I had fully made up my mind to call the president as soon as we were sure we’d cracked it. It wasn’t even a question in my mind, we had the procedure down and I was going to do what I’d been told. I was tired of making big decisions and I was especially tired of screwing everything up when I made them.
But now I was being told to do something else, and while I’d made up my mind what to do, it hadn’t stopped me from fantasizing about what might be waiting for me at the end of this road. My secret heart said that it was a face-to-face meeting with the intelligence behind the Carls—rather, the entity that I had come to think of as Carl in my head. The thought of that meeting happening between Carl and Peter Petrawicki made me want to vom. That’s not actually accurate: It made me angrier than any other thought I had ever had.
I was being asked to do one thing by the president, who had been honest with me, who had trusted me, who was the absolute personification of authority. And then there was Carl. Carl who changed my life, who saved my life, who let everyone die except me. Carl the mystery. My mystery . . . my identity.
I logged out of all my accounts and thanked the guy for his computer. He wanted a photo, we took one, I told everyone else who had gathered to watch that I was in a bit of a rush but thanks for watching my videos! Less than half an hour had elapsed.
Miranda wrote again, Are you going? If you’re going, just let us know.
But I didn’t think I’d been given a choice, or maybe I didn’t want to think I’d been given a choice. I finally felt fully comfortable with what I’d become. Did I know the Carls were good? No. I thought they were, I hoped they were, I felt they were. But I didn’t know. What I did know is that I’d chosen my side, and my side had chosen me.
My phone rang—it was Maya. I didn’t pick up.
Then it buzzed with a text: I plugged in the key, I saw what it said. You can’t go on your own.
I didn’t respond, but she didn’t stop.
April, maybe you can go on your own, but don’t do it right now. Let’s take some time.
But the Defenders were already on their way, who knows what mess they would cause. She didn’t give up: APRIL JUST CALL ME, TALK TO ME.