Текст книги "Return Once More"
Автор книги: Trisha Leigh
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Chapter Twenty-Four
I put my hand on Caesarion’s arm, not taking my eyes off Oz. “Wait. Stop rowing.”
He followed my gaze, squinting against the sunlight. The protective growl in his voice when he asked who waited on the docks warmed my blood.
“He’s the boy I told you about.”
“You are sure he is not more than a friend?”
I snorted. “I’m not sure he’s even that anymore.”
Caesarion’s shoulders relaxed. “Perhaps he has come to put his trust in you after all.”
“Maybe. But I want to say farewell here, while it’s still the two of us.” Oz would be able to see, but it was better than trying to leave Caesarion with Oz standing right there.
My True nodded, swallowing hard, then uttered a chuckle that sounded the opposite of funny. “This moment has been waiting since the day we met. I did not expect it to be so hard.”
Tears pricked my eyes and I moved, struggling for balance in the rocking boat, but managed to maneuver next to him. His arms folded me against his chest and I squeezed back for all I was worth. When he bent and kissed me, I forgot about the rest of the world for the next minute, losing myself in this strange place that would never exist again. His tongue sought mine and I opened up to him, tasting his love and his sorrow, marveling at the way we fit together, at the way I could have sat in this boat kissing him for the rest of my life.
“Let’s not say good-bye,” I whispered when we broke apart. “We’ll meet again, like you said.”
“What shall we say instead?”
My mind landed on the most absurd thing. When my grandfather had had surgery once to repair an injury—the only allowable surgery in Genesis—he had been silly from the anesthetic when he’d woken. He’d started singing an old song, one I’d never heard, but he claimed it had been featured in one of my grandmother’s favorite films.
“I’ll be seeing you, Caesarion.”
He stared at me a long time before the barest hint of a smile lit his eyes. “I’ll be seeing you, Kaia, my love.”
I helped him row the boat back to the shore, then drag it safely away from the water. Caesarion and I didn’t speak again, maybe afraid to ruin the memory.
Oz’s footsteps were almost soundless in the sand, but I felt his approach. He grabbed my bicep, yanking me toward him, and Caesarion growled. I gave him a look, pleading for his understanding. “I’m fine, Caesarion.”
“Let go of my arm, asshole.” I hoped silent words could feel cold in Oz’s head.
He dropped his hold, looking a little startled. I realized he and I had never communicated that way and how it always felt a little invasive the first time with someone new. I really didn’t care.
“Kaia, you don’t know what you’ve done.”
I gave Caesarion one last look, then stomped away down the beach. Oz followed me until we were out of sight, since we needed to travel and because he’d shown up here without the appropriate attire—he looked completely out of place in his tight black clothes and cape.
At least dealing with Oz held me together when all I wanted was to fall to pieces. To run back to Caesarion. To die with him.
But the Historians were my life, and the people of Genesis might be in danger. Turning my back on my life, on my world, would be to let down all Caesarion had given me.
My brain moved my numbed limbs forward, forced me to focus on the task of getting home, but everything seemed as though it happened to someone else, as though I watched my own body struggle through the sandy Egyptian coastline.
Now that we were alone, I switched to verbal communication, not wanting any more of an intimate connection with Oz than we’d already formed. “Let’s go.”
Without waiting for an answer, I started to set the dials on the cuff, but he reached out and stopped me. “Kaia.”
“Don’t. You’re not my father, you’re not an Elder. I don’t need a lecture from you about breaking the rules to spend time with Caesarion.”
“I wasn’t going to lecture you. I was going to ask if you’re okay.”
“My head is killing me.” Tears gathered in my eyes. It was more than the physical pain. Walking away from Caesarion tore at my insides, ripped like the loss was tangible, and the pain in my head paled in comparison.
Oz handed me a few painkillers, which I chewed. “Thanks.”
“I’m surprised you’re handling it so well, honestly. Denying the bio-tat impulses isn’t easy.”
“You would know,” I snapped, wishing he would shut up.
“I would.”
“I’m still waiting for the lecture.” I was actually buying time to steady myself before having to face my actual life three thousand years in the future.
“I assume you’ve taken precautions to ensure they will not know the extent of your infractions—the interaction, for instance—unless they follow you. There is nothing I can say that you haven’t thought of yourself, and still you came to this decision.” He paused, looking the direction we left Caesarion. “I can only guess you found the risks acceptable in light of the reward.”
The way he said reward bothered me, as though assuming Caesarion hadn’t been worth it. It wasn’t fair. He got to live this every day with Sarah.
I ignored the inclination to bring up his True. I didn’t want to talk about his eternal happiness. “Why did you say I don’t know what I’ve done?”
His eyes remained up the beach, the direction we came, and his body tensed. “This discussion will have to wait, I’m afraid. We’ve got company.”
I whirled to see Thoth, Ammon, and the third guard rushing our direction, weapons drawn. “Yeah, they don’t like me.”
Oz laughed, a startled sound. “I can’t imagine why not.”
“Let’s just go.”
I finished setting the cuff for the return trip, my anxiety growing as the lights turned to green and the blue field surrounded us. The guards were less than ten steps away when the ancient world dissolved, the future tech delivering us safely home.
*
Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis–50 NE (New Era)
The air lock felt too sterile, too cold, after the warmth and beauty of the Red Sea sunrise. Oz’s presence grated on me, made me hyper aware of the hole in my heart. With each passing moment, I fought harder to hold it together. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in my bed and cry.
My grandfather’s death, and then the loss of Jonah, taught me that grief could be delayed but not bypassed. Walking away from Caesarion hit me every bit as hard, even though I had known from the beginning that I couldn’t keep him.
I supposed we couldn’t keep anyone, even ourselves, in the end.
“I need to show you something,” Oz said.
“In the air lock?”
“No.” He studied my face for several moments. “I know you’re in shock, Kaia, but this can’t wait long. It’s why I came to get you.”
I was dressed in Historian garb, now, but Oz was naked except for a white towel since he’d gone to Egypt in the clothes on his back. The decontamination chamber wouldn’t let us out until all of the outerwear had been tested and analyzed.
His words barely registered. The longer I sat here the less I cared about anything. A buzzing took up residence in my head, separating me from the present. Oz said nothing more, just watched me carefully from across the room, then dressed when the drawer returned his clothes.
When the air lock clicked open he helped me to my feet. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know you are, but I’ll feel much better if you let me help.”
“It’s all about you, huh?” I tried a weak joke in an attempt to shake off my lethargy. This was silly. It had been inevitable.
“That’s me. Selfish as the day is long.”
He left me at the door to our room. “We’ll talk in the morning. Get some rest.”
“Wait, this was so important you traveled to get me but now I can rest?”
He glanced down the hall, as though expecting someone to catch us alone again, then turned back to me, impatience in his gaze. “I need you sharp, and you’re a mess. Get it together.”
He stalked off before my overly tired brain conjured a response, but it was just as well. I was exhausted and I did need to pull myself together.
I tiptoed into my room, trying hard not to make any noise, but my roommates weren’t there. My stomach unknotted a little. Analeigh and Sarah were my friends and I loved them, and maybe one day I would find the courage to tell them everything, to let them help me. But tonight my grief, my Caesarion, belonged only to me.
I changed quickly into my pajamas and climbed into bed without any other preparations, turning to face the wall. My body felt heavy—all of it. The outside, the inside, the blood in my veins. Sluggish, as though none of it could decide if it still wanted to work in a world without true love.
The moments I’d had with my True were so much more than most people even dreamed of, and I knew I should feel lucky. The word repeated over and over as I let loose the sobs that had been building inside me like a storm, soaking my pillow and shaking me apart.
*
Meeting Oz the next morning provided a distraction, if nothing else. I had gone through the night on autopilot, exhausted from the sleepless hours passed leaking tears and staring at the wall while scenes from the past couple of days played out in my mind.
Caesarion had to die. I knew it, and I’d accepted it. I had to move on.
Oz waited for me in the hallway, smelling fresh from a shower but wearing a less solicitous air than when he’d left me yesterday. He gave me a once-over and nodded, apparently convinced I had gotten my shit together, or at least feeling good about my not succumbing to some sort of girly meltdown.
“Time’s up,” was all he said.
Our footsteps echoed as I followed him down the hallway, back toward the restricted storage rooms where we’d gotten caught the other night. Quips and sarcastic remarks floated in my brain, comments about how I wasn’t making out with him again or hadn’t we broken enough rules for one week, but they all disappeared before they turned into words. Speaking required so much energy.
He stopped outside the door where the Elders had met the other night, then turned back to me. “I have to hold you against me.”
“What? Why?”
“I need you to see what’s inside this room, but it only admits one person per wrist swipe. My tat will work, but yours won’t. We have to walk in like one person.”
“Good gravy boats, more touching?”
“You didn’t seem to mind so much with Caesarion.”
The comment seemed to surprise Oz as much as it startled me, and red splotches grew on his cheeks. My heart throbbed at the memories. No smart reply choked out, no matter how badly I wanted to let Oz have it.
After a moment, he found his voice, but only barely. “I’m sorry, Kaia. He’s your True, and I’m … I shouldn’t have said that.”
Tears filled my eyes at his unexpected kindness. I looked away, determined not to let him see, and cleared my throat. “Let’s get this over with.”
Oz opened his arms, and I stepped against his chest. His hands found the small of my back, pressing me tight against him until the top of my head wedged under his chin. His breath moved my hair, wrenching loose more memories of Caesarion. For a moment, I wanted to cling to Oz, to break down and let him hold me simply because I needed to be held. To steal comfort.
My breakdown had to be worse than I’d thought to even consider taking comfort from Oz, no matter how easily he could cradle me against his chest.
“Step up so you’re standing on my feet.”
I did as he asked, my body shaking with the effort of not relaxing into his embrace, until our cheeks pressed together. Without another word, Oz maneuvered us both over the threshold, walking with me standing on him without any extra effort at all. Once we were clear of the doorway and close to the center of the room, he dropped his arms, leaving me both cold and relieved.
A waist-high, glass pedestal sat at the center of the room. The top held a table comp, but the base and stem were riddled with tiny pinholes. None of the other pedestal or table comps in the Academy looked like this; they were solid glass and gears. The rest of the room was empty. The holo screens that made up the walls were blank and transparent, and no dots to track apprentices, Historians, or Elders skittered across the floor.
Before I could ask Oz what we were doing here, what this place was, or why the Elders kept it a secret, he moved from my side and to the pedestal. His fingers flew over the table comp’s screen, punching in mysterious information.
His smoky eyes held mine as he finished, a quagmire of guilt, sorrow, trepidation, and maybe even concern. “I shouldn’t be showing you this, Kaia. But I know you won’t believe me if I just tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“That your actions in thirty BCE have had disastrous consequences. We have to set them right.”
My heart thudded to a stop. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been wondering why you’ve seen me traveling alone, and to places we haven’t been authorized to go for apprentice observations. You’ve figured out, likely from your brother,”—he made a face that clenched my hands into fists—“that there are secrets at the Academy. This is it.”
Oz hit one last button on the table comp, then swiped his wrist tattoo over some control along the side of the pedestal. The room lit up. Glowing strands of virtual string spurted from the countless holes all over the pedestal, crisscrossing the room like an elaborate game of cat’s cradle. They seemed to sense objects in their path and left a hole around me, but I moved quickly to Oz’s side when he asked. With both of us in the center of the room, the glowing strands multiplied until the room resembled an elaborate, multicolored spiderweb.
When it finally stopped expanding, there were far too many threads to count or keep track of with the naked eye. If they had been physical, we could have used them like a hammock.
I reached out an experimental finger, intent on touching one of them, but Oz covered my hand and shook his head. “Not yet.”
My eyes stretched wide. “What is it?”
“It traces the trajectory of decisions. Deaths and births, mostly, but it can also track events forward or backward to their point of inception.”
No appropriate answer to this information existed. We’d never been able to do such a thing —not officially. That was the whole reason we needed so many Historians. So that we could do our best to trace the events that led to our evacuation, but also the events and the people who had lifted us up.
If this comp could do it for us, why would Genesis need Historians at all?
“How?” I breathed.
“It’s not perfected. That’s why I’ve been going to suspected points of origin, tracing development of certain things—”
“Like weapons,” I interrupted dully.
His gray eyes narrowed. “Exactly. Like weapons. To see if the comp is right.”
“And is it?”
Oz shook his head, his dark hair falling over one eye until he impatiently brushed it aside. “There are still too many variables.” He motioned at the tangle of virtual threads spread out around us. “And the further back we start, the harder it is to predict an outcome.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I’m showing you the trajectory stemming from Caesarion.” He watched me closely, but I didn’t respond, even though my insides jerked at his name. “Something happened when he didn’t leave Berenice when he was supposed to.”
“What?” My knees went weak at the thought, the same instinctive panic I’d felt when Caesarion told me he’d delayed his departure.
If this room could predict the consequences of his living, maybe it was possible that he would now. Even though it was wrong, even though it couldn’t happen, my heart still hoped. This had to be how Jonah knew he could save Rosie and not affect anything but a baseball season, and the reason behind Oz’s decision to knock that girl into James Puckle’s path. But Jonah had claimed this knowledge was dangerous.
It would be cool to easily trace the development of technology, the trajectory of the people who changed Earth Before for the better and for the worse. But why would we need to know the alternate consequences? The one thing that remained constant about the past was that changing it created unknown outcomes. This mass of twine proved that to me again—there were simply too many possibilities.
Oz studied the table comp for a moment, then touched a button. One of the strands in front of us glowed orange and zigzagged across the room, turning haphazardly this way and that until it dead-ended over by the door.
“What’s that?” In spite of how slow my mind felt after enduring hours of grief, this room warmed it up again. It felt good to flex my mental muscles.
“When Caesarion doesn’t arrive in Alexandria when he’s supposed to—supposed to by our documents, not by any specific day Octavian is expecting him—the delay causes a shift in history. The man who is supposed to execute Caesarion is killed in a robbing. The executioner Octavian chooses as a replacement is sympathetic to the Egyptian ruling family and brings the burned body of a commoner in Caesarion’s place. Your True lives, and it is many years before Octavian—by then Augustus—learns of the treachery.”
“I saved him,” I whispered. My heart swelled at the knowledge Caesarion lived, but my gut churned with horror.
Oz grabbed my arm and squeezed, shaking me out of the trance. “Kaia. He has to die. Caesarion ends up challenging Augustus for Rome, and the years the two of them spend fighting sets the development of the ancient world back hundreds of years. Art, military advancements, annexing new provinces, written language … it’s all affected.”
“How could one boy affect that many things?” I scoffed.
No matter my dismissive response, years of training promised it was possible. Not only possible, but likely. One person’s life affected countless others, even when he wasn’t the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.
“This orange line represents the direct changes to his life in particular. He’s killed at the age of forty in a second battle at Actium, one that puts the first to shame.” Oz touched the table comp again, and more lines lit up. Some were green, others purple, blue, and red. “These are the other major time lines that are affected by the alteration. Major. This doesn’t take into consideration the countless other, minor lives affected.”
“What do the colors mean?”
“Levels of influence on history.” He reached out and touched a purple one. “This is your family, Kaia. If Caesarion doesn’t die within the next month, your family will never exist.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Shock coursed through me, so potent I reached out to steady myself on the comp. Concern etched lines on Oz’s face but my expression kept him from steadying me.
Our families couldn’t be connected … could they? “How?”
He touched the purple thread, making it glow brighter than the others, then turned me to face the pedestal. “Look.”
In purple letters, the trajectory of that particular line spread across the screen, and all of the air left my body. “The Vespasians will never rule Rome.”
“Right. Vespasian, the father of your ancestor Titus is killed in a battle against Egypt that shouldn’t exist. His son Titus never becomes a general, never invades Judea to destroy the Temple, never meets and falls in love with Berenice.”
My hand went instinctively to the necklace at my throat, but instead of the familiar olive branch and laurel wreath, the piece of metal felt smooth. Panic shot through my veins, scalding and quick, as I ripped the chain in my frantic battle to tear it loose. My chest heaved, lack of oxygen blurring my gaze, as I struggled to see the proof of my transgressions in my palm.
The symbols were there.
My heart pounded, sweat forming on my forehead, but ten deep breaths started to calm me down. Common sense said that if those symbols had faded away, I wouldn’t have been here to see it—because if Titus and Berenice didn’t meet and fall in love, I would disappear, too. Along with everyone in Genesis, since my grandfather was instrumental in making our relocation happen. I’d spent all this time feeling smug about the fact that I hadn’t changed anything, that Oz and Jonah were the ones taking unnecessary chances, but it had been a lie. My stomach heaved.
I could have killed us all.
Oz hit another button and the screen changed. “It’s not only your family, Kaia. Another dozen or so families in Genesis will simply disappear. Penicillin will never be invented. Monet will not survive long enough to paint.”
The threads crisscrossing the room blurred as tears welled and spilled down my cheeks. “How do you know that it wouldn’t be better?”
“What’s better? We are here now, on Genesis, and what matters most is ensuring a future.”
His words struck a chord. There was something going on other than my bad decisions. This machine hadn’t been created purely to show potential outcomes of making historical changes—what would be the point? Especially given that we weren’t supposed to make changes.
But Oz’s face was earnest and open, with none of the secretive pissiness of the past several weeks. Whatever his involvement with this project, it was clear he thought it aligned with the Historian principles and tenets that had been drilled into our heads over the past seven years. If so, he was deluding himself.
“Oz, you can’t believe that the future in Genesis is the only reason they developed this comp. Why would they want to predict these kinds of effects without any plans to use them?”
“We are using it. It’s helping us understand how decisions affect the future.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Is this why you knocked into that lady in England?”
“What lady in England?”
“Oz, I followed you. You saw me, I know you did. Enough with the games.”
He refused to meet my gaze, tapping his finger on the edge of the pedestal. “That was an accident. The woman.”
Lie. The action had changed the development of ammunition and firearms, and he had done it on purpose. No one was more in control of every action than Oz Truman, so this machine must have convinced him his actions were safe. I wanted to understand. I wanted him to prove to me that his alteration hadn’t changed anything horrific, while my unintentional change would wreak havoc. The sight of the line, the one that had ended with Caesarion’s death before I went to meet him, took precedence at the moment, though.
Terror ran like ice water in my veins. If Oz and his string-spouting comp were right, all hell was going to break loose in less than a week.
If I didn’t do something about it.
“So, if the guy who’s supposed to kill Caesarion is going to die, and the one who takes his place refuses to do it … how do I fix it?” The truth dawned on me the moment Oz’s face hardened. “No. No, Oz, I can’t do it. I can’t kill him.”
“Is there another alternative?”
I sat down on the cold floor, drawing my knees up to my chest and wrapping myself into a ball. My mind scrambled, a desperate attempt to find another way, but found nothing. It was impossible to tell how Oz was feeling, except maybe nauseous. Probably at revealing such a big secret to the resident rule breaker.
“Kaia, I can help you get your hands on a sonic waver. It will be quick and painless.”
Oz, as helpful as ever. Like I wanted to think about ways to kill the boy I loved.
As much as I wanted to scream, to kick him and punch him and blame him for putting me through this, it wasn’t Oz’s fault. It was mine.
I started this, and because of my colossal inability to accept the limitations and realities of my world, I had to finish it, too. People in Genesis couldn’t die because of me. If it was only me that would pay the price, I might have been willing to do it, but not my parents. Not Jonah. Not others.
“You’re going to have to kill his guards, too. They’ll tell people about you. We can’t have more instances of strange people in black that appear and melt people’s organs.”
“So you know about the dark ones?” I paused, waiting for him to decide whether to trust me, or keep lying. “Where did the legends start? Or when?”
Oz paled, busying himself at the pedestal comp until the glowing threads disappeared, making the room feel cavernous. I grabbed his arm and pulled myself up, forcing him to face me. His eyes stayed stubbornly on the floor.
“Oz, why are there new myths in the past about people in black arriving and turning people to liquid, then disappearing into thin air?” My question was careful. My growing anger was not.
“There aren’t.” His jaw clenched, and when he finally slid his gray eyes to mine, it was clear he would say nothing more.
Fine. He could believe that because he’d somehow gained access to this room that he had authorization to change whatever he saw fit. I swallowed the urge to spill what I’d read in Minnie’s observation. That Analeigh and I thought maybe some of the Elders wanted to find a way to undo the bad decisions that had led to our exile from Earth Before.
Oz could pretend all he wanted, but it didn’t mean I believed him.
*
As much as I needed to clean up the mess I’d made in Caesarion’s world, nothing had changed as far as my having to pick and choose the best time to sneak away. Jonah’s chip might ensure no one knew where I had gone, but it didn’t stop me from being missed. The Projector, which is what Oz called the machine he’d shown me, said I had a week to make sure Caesarion met his proper fate before things started to change that couldn’t be undone.
We had an observation scheduled for today, and there was no way I could skip it. I’d already had to copy Analeigh’s research for wardrobe since I’d spent our allotted independent study time running around Egypt, and it was our first observation where the reflection focus was left up to us—there was no assignment. They never told us when we were being tested, but this felt like a way to gauge whether we were ready for more autonomy going into our final year.
Oz was coming today, and so was Levi. Part of me wondered if Oz would show up or if he’d been diverted to another assignment, but he waited calmly in the air lock when Analeigh and I arrived with two minutes to spare.
He and Levi were bare-chested and wearing patterned swim trunks. Booth, our overseer for the day, had similar bottoms but wore a blue T-shirt with the phrase “Surf’s Up” scrolled across the front. Analeigh and I both had pretty skimpy bikinis on underneath short dresses that served as cover-ups, and all five of us wore cheap plastic flip-flops.
We were all basically naked, a feeling that left my skin crawling with unease. The wardrobe complemented our destination, though—a beach in the Maldives, off the coast of Sri Lanka, 2001. The boys had chosen this particular observation—Analeigh and I had voted to observe the fate of Anastasia, lost daughter of the last Russian tsar, but we’d been overruled.
Instead we got to watch some famous Californian extreme athlete drown. Lovely.
Extreme sports fascinated Levi in particular, and he planned to work on isolating a common strand of human evolution that had sparked a desire to call dancing with death an entertaining pastime. Jay Moriarty had died one day shy of his twenty-third birthday while free diving—diving deep under water without oxygen tanks, a hobby that did not seem advisable. He had been happily married, according to history and our previous observations, and was described as a gregarious guy who loved life. But apparently not enough to want to continue living it. In truth, I wasn’t sure what there was to learn from him or why this even made the list of options for today’s trip.
I found the story depressing, but the worst part was how avoidable his untimely death had been.
If these past seven years had taught me one universal truth, it was that the humans who died the youngest, who had been gifted with the least amount of time, managed to do the most with it. They were often remembered, these tragic children, and their legacies lived on in ways that people who had been given entire lifetimes couldn’t seem to achieve. The reasons behind that observation would make an amazing reflection topic. Maybe I would explore it one day.
Analeigh and I tossed our Historian uniforms into the drawer next to the boys’ and Booth’s. Gooseflesh popped out on my arms and I shivered in the freezing cold air lock, crossing my arms over my chest to avoid giving the boys a show.
Booth checked to make sure we were all ready, then set his cuff and gave it an exact location that would be deserted at the time of day we were arriving, which was just after breakfast, when Jay left his friends to go snorkeling.
The lights on the cuff turned to green, and the five of us shimmered inside a blue bubble for a moment until the decontamination chamber disappeared and we stood several yards away from a deserted beach, under the cover of a grove of coconut trees.
*
Maldives , Indian Ocean , Earth Before–June 15, 2001 CE (Common Era)
My skin immediately warmed in the sticky, tropical air. The view from where we stood stunned me: the beaches were pristine and white, the ocean unbelievable cascading shades of blue. It was almost clear, a crystal aquamarine as it washed onto the shore and deepening to turquoise, then cobalt as it spread farther from the shore.
“Whoa.” Analeigh breathed the word next to me, her eyes round as they took in the perfect paradise.
“It looks a lot like Petra, but the water there isn’t blue like this. More of a greenish brown. This is better,” Levi observed.
If Petra resembled the Maldives even a little bit, I could see why the property there had to be drawn in a lottery.
Over the next hour, the beach filled with sunbathers and surfers, snorkelers and divers, and Analeigh and I stripped off our cover-ups. We all slathered on sunscreen, an unnecessary little product in our System missing natural sunlight. It smelled wonderful. The sand burned the soles of my bare feet, and the sun baked the skin on my shoulders. Waves washed over my toes as I wiggled them, displacing tiny sand crabs that scurried to find new places to hide.
Booth led us to a more secluded section of shoreline, where boats floated just offshore, their red and white diving flags fluttering in the gentle breeze. The lenses on my glasses indentified Jay Moriarty, a rather handsome guy about the same age as Jonah, with a smile that hit me like a punch in the gut from sixty or seventy yards away.
