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Part 4-12: Range
“Hey, hey now,” said Fergus. “Found it. That’s the bridge, for sure! She’s taken like twenty pictures of it, yeesh.”
“Deluxe, we have to find where it is,” I said, looking around the rest of the room for clues. “Eden’s going to kill her or get her to kill herself there, I’m sure of it.”
“Attempting reverse image searches and other techniques as we speak,” she said. “Nothing yet.”
Tricia’s room wasn’t helping me, so I tried the rest of the place, hoping I’d get lucky and find a picture album or something, anything. The house insisted on being a very plain, everyday house free of mystical clues pertaining to bridges or anything else remotely helpful. I stalked back to the knife, looking again to see if I’d missed anything.
Didn’t seem that way.
“Deluxe?” I said.
“Patience, please,” she replied.
I bit back a mean response and instead vented my frustration physically. I grabbed the knife handle, intent on hucking it into the wall opposite and seeing if the book itself had anything useful in it. But the damn thing was stuck in there like Excalibur, and it took me a few fruitless yanks to remember I wasn’t really in the room at all.
“Persi, wait, hold on!” came Fergus’ voice, followed by the sounds of a car door opening.
Feeling useless and increasingly helpless, my brain offered to distract me with a task I’d never truly considered since learning I could become a ghost-person. I knelt down and touched a scuffed ankle boot. Felt like a boot. I willed my fingers to push through it, and they did. Then I tried to pick it up off the ground.
Stuck.
Persi’s voice rang in my ears. “Do you know where this is?” she said.
“What’s she wearing on her head?” came a laughing, juvenile reply.
“Do you know where this is?” Persi repeated.
Fergus’ voice, distant, caught by Persi’s microphone: “Hey, hey, uh, sorry folks. We’re just curious about this here bridge is all.”
Then a cacophony of conversation as a bunch of people spoke at once. The bing-bing-bing of the open door alert made it worse; presumably Fergus had left his headset behind.
“Where?” Persi’s voice broke through it.
Someone said something to her.
“Danby Creek bridge,” said Persi. “Thank you.”
“On it,” said Deluxe.
I waited, sitting among a sea of clothing and scattered makeup accessories, pulling at them, fascinated by how they were all solidly fused to the ground like a very detailed sculpture.
Car doors slammed and there was a rustling noise.
“Well, that wasn’t very subtle,” remarked Fergus. “But we got a name. Slick thinkin’ madame.”
“If we didn’t know the answer, it made sense to ask others,” said Persi, her tone quite matter-of-fact. Her logic was impeccable, but there was something about exposing our missions to the public that scratched at me in a bad way. It instinctively felt wrong, but paranoia and general insanity were probably natural side effects to participating in these merry adventures anyhow.
“I’ve got a hit,” said Deluxe. “An article about the bridge from almost a decade ago. Should be enough for me to get you estimated long-lat shortly, for now head east, out of town. There is a problem however. This location is completely out of range for Alena.”
“Part of the test, no doubt,” I said.
“The goal is remote access,” said Deluxe.
“Rogue signal needs to travel with us…” I squinted, allowing the blocky shapes of the alien wifi to bleed out of the walls, boots, bras and posters all around me. It was a simple solution.
“You can convert the signal,” continued Deluxe.
“So first we need traveling wifi,” I finished.
“The last remote was lost when the creature consumed… when we fought Eden’s creature last night,” said Deluxe. “But it was, for all intents and purposes, merely a heavy duty hot spot.”
“I’ve got a full battery, car charger and a data plan I pay way too much for,” said Fergus.
“I could build another remote in about an hour,” said Deluxe. “Provided I have the components.”
“No time,” I said. “We have to go now.”
“Understood. Note that our radio communications capacity will be offline; everything routes through my machines for encryption.”
“Emergency texts only,” I said. “Fergus, if you’re headed east, swing by our favourite little cafe for pickup?”
“FergusCab is rollin’. Ten minutes.”
I gave the room one last sweeping glance, then pictured tall windows and the scent of fresh baked goods.
“Alright team,” I said. “Let’s go save a life.”
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