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“What’s wrong with it?” Henry asked. “It sounds like an angry cow.”
Smoke poured from the agitating card reader.
“No, no, no!” Sam tried to intervene and got a shock. He hissed and shook out his fingers.
“Stop it before it catches fire!”
Ling hooked her crutch around the cord and yanked it free from the outlet. With a last stuttering sigh, the machine spat out the severely mangled card and went dead.
Ling examined a few of the other cards. “Maybe they’re too old and dirty. Probably the machine is, too.”
“What do we do now?” Henry asked.
“Nothing, that’s what,” Sam said, sinking down onto one of the beds. “We can’t read these cards, we can’t find any other Diviners. We can’t know about ourselves and what they did to us. And I can’t use that information to find my mother.” Sam buried his head in his hands. “Could you… not look at me right now? Thanks.”
Evie had never seen Sam like this. He was usually the one finding a way forward. It was a little scary to see him at such a loss. She reached for the mangled card.
Sam glanced up. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to try to read it,” Evie answered, sitting beside Sam on the bed.
“You already told us you can’t read it,” Ling said.
“I couldn’t before. I still might not be able to do it. But we might. We already know that together we can strengthen one another’s energy and skills. With all of us working together, I might be able to break through.”
“You’ll be sick,” Sam warned.
“So I’ll be sick,” Evie said.
“Are you sure, doll?” Sam asked.
“Just hand over those cards and gather ’round,” Evie said.
Henry, Ling, Sam, and Evie huddled together on the bed while Jericho stood nearby.
“I wish this didn’t involve so much touching,” Ling grumbled.
“Concentrate, please,” Evie said.
The card was cold, like before. It hadn’t been held in many years. Evie wondered if people were like that, too—if something in them died when they were denied affection for too long. A memory bubbled up: Evie was a child desperate for her mother’s attention. But her mother was busy with housework. Evie threw her arms around her mother’s waist. “I’ll keep you here in my cage!” she’d giggled. Her exhausted mother had a schedule to keep. Irritated, she’d pushed Evie away. “Evangeline, you wear me out!”
A great wave of loneliness surged inside Evie at this sudden memory. That was the trouble with object reading—she was ope
n and unguarded. All the feelings could come flooding in, and none of her usual defenses—booze, parties, flirting, sarcasm—would keep them out.
She heard Jericho’s deep, sure voice: “Are you okay, Evie?”
“Fine,” she whispered. Begone, loneliness. I’ve no time for you.
Evie could feel the card’s barriers giving way and she leaned into it. Come on, show me who you are.… Its history began to come alive. First, there was the secretary who’d punched in the code. She was nursing a grudge against her sister for some small slight. Next, the messenger boy running the card to a new location. He wore short pants and suspenders and loved baseball. The warmth of his affection for the game spread through Evie. Every person who’d handled the card left behind emotions until the cards seemed as human as humans themselves. It made her think about the tubes and wires inside Jericho. The longer they were there, the more they became fused to his flesh, threaded to his organs until it was impossible to know what was man and what was machine. Humans infected all they touched.
Numbers and letters blinked fast behind her eyes, dizzying.
“We’re here with you. You can do this.” Henry’s voice in her head. Ling and Henry’s dream walker energy began to relax her, as if she were drifting off into a deep sleep. She needed to find the person who could read the code.
“Sam,” Evie whispered. “Can you help me see better?”
Sam’s hand was on her shoulder. She could feel him. And then, all at once, she broke through layers of old memories to Rotke Wasserman. Rotke knew what was on the cards!
