Revolving Door: Volume 2
Chapter 32: City of Smoke and Mirrors - Turning Point
Adelaide wakes to daylight and silence. Her feet hang off the bed, frigid in the morning chill. Everything is still around her.
As her eyes slowly focus on the bright hotel room and its furnishings, she begins to remember again. The escape. The fluorescent gas station. Her green sweater, hanging on the armchair beside her.
Then she notices Felix asleep in the three-seated leather couch, nestled against the diagonal wall across the room.
“Good morning?” she calls as she crawls out of the covers. Rose petals scatter on the carpet. No answer.
Inching closer on tiptoes, she discovers him lying on his side, one arm dangling off the couch and the other curled around a cushion. Her shadow falls across him. His eyes are shut, shoulders rising and falling with steady breaths.
He must be more tired than he lets on—sleeping in chairs and couches night after night. She has never seen his hair this unkempt before. His eyes move under his eyelids.
He clearly thinks it wrong to share a bed, for some reason or other. But she used to share beds with friends at sleepovers, and her mom and dad shared a bed, too—so why? Maybe he sees it in a different light. In his time, she's read, women did not wear dresses higher than their ankles. They must have different ideas of what is good, and what is right, and...
Adelaide is so deep in her pondering that she does not notice for many seconds that Felix’s eyes have opened.
“Oh, hello there—good morning.” It is only at his voice that she starts.
The sunlight glows through the window behind her, scattered in his grey irises. He stares, and she stares back, not a single thought seeming to pass across either gaze.
“Ah, I—I’m sorry, I didn't mean to be rude,” she stammers.
Felix props himself up on one elbow. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he replies. “Was I entertaining in my sleep?”
“No…you were very quiet.”
“Well, then, I hope to be more interesting awake.” He smiles, finally combing hair out of his eyes. “And might I say, you look like a proper deity with the sun behind you. Like your namesake, perhaps.”
“Oh…” At these words, Adelaide's vision starts to spin. All at once, her head feels feverish and light—she must be ill; she needs food, or water, or something, anything but to keep looking him in the eye.
“We ought to go looking for breakfast.” Heedlessly, Felix wanders over to the kitchenette, while Adelaide returns to the bed and lies down, waiting for the fever to subside.
The sun is hidden by clouds when they check out of the hotel and carry on away from the downtown. There are cameras on every wall, flocking like all-seeing flies.
They allow for one afternoon in the warmth, drifting from one shade to the next, giving the tourists a wide berth. Adelaide wears her disguise still. A popcorn stand chugs on the corner, its buttered honey wafting up around street corners. As they pass, Adelaide pleads with her eyes, and Felix buys a box that they share in the shadow of a skyscraper.
A flock of pigeons flutters by in the wake of two playing children, landing near their feet. Adelaide glances at her companion, while the shadows of wings pass over them in the burning sun. He is frowning. “It’s…comfortable here, too much so,” he says. “I worry for you, that you cannot simply be here.”
She twiddles her fingers. “Could there be another place in this world that would have me?”
“I know not the answer to that. The world is being engulfed slowly in flames, or so they say. This city is an oasis in a burgeoning desert.” The sunlight on her skin suddenly doesn’t feel so benign.
They linger for a while on the green, and for half an hour, Adelaide can fool herself into feeling like a part of the scene. But when a police car rumbles by, they take flight again.
“There's no way. No way. No way. No wa—”
Lea's mutter turns into a shriek as she swerves around a woman in heels, wheels and pedals clattering into the last intersection. She hears a shout while the lights cascade on behind her, and then she pedals onward.
Seven o'clock. Seven o'clock was the time she had been told to go to the foot of Coit Tower, to meet Adelaide. Or, the person she assumes to be Adelaide, though she went by the identity of “Felix Mercer.”
There's no way a private investigator would know—or care—for all the biographical details they discussed in that brief time: how “Felix” knew of her dream of writing for science magazines, of the library, the night on the hill, the disappointment that had permeated her mother’s backseat afterwards.
Yet Lea's knees tremble when she leaps off her bike at the bottom of the hill, and she cannot hear her thoughts over the boom of her heart, as she wheels the bicycle up the slopes, up and up past the straggly copses of trees, thinner and drier than a decade ago.
Adelaide, the prisoner. Adelaide, the friend I lost. Her name is a refrain sung by her thoughts. She feels like she's wading through a memory, as she glimpses the silhouette of someone—two someones—at the base of the tower, dim against the glow of the spotlights on the decaying building. She stumbles through gold and blue and green, and she sees one tapping the arm of the other, who calls out:
“Lea?”
She still says it the same way, a long E and a closed A. Timid, thoughtful, hyperliterate, withdrawing, wanted escapee Adelaide Moore.
“Ad—” Lea shuts her mouth halfway, glancing backward over her shoulder, and then holds down the power button of her phone in her pocket, until she hears the shutdown jingle. “Is that you?”
“Yes! Lea! Yes, it’s me!” She’s sprinting to meet her now.
The grass rustles underfoot and the thin trees sway. There are no eyes here, when she finally comes face to face with her friend of eleven years ago. They've both changed in many ways—Lea is half a head taller now, and Adelaide's hair is much lighter than she remembers—but it’s her voice, her face, her huge eyes that stare with such intense fright that one feels like she might flee at any moment.
“Oh…Ad…do you have a name I can use that won't ring alarms?”
“Artemis?” she offers.
“Art…Artemis…” She practices the syllables. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” Adelaide says haltingly. “But I’m scared.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Lea answers. “I’m happy to help you out. But I gotta ask…what’s the plan?”
“Do you have a home? Or a place we can stay, just for now?”
“Yeah, I sure do, but…”
Adelaide’s companion approaches from behind her. From afar, she couldn’t make much out, but now she begins to realise she recognises the silhouette: he wears a black jacket over a collared tee, and his light hair falls almost to his shoulders.
Her thoughts are only just clicking together when Adelaide says: “This is Felix.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Felix puts in with a smile, extending a hand for a shake, which she returns. “I’ve heard plenty about you—all good things, I assure you. A…Artemis trusts you with her life.”
His smile is perfectly practiced, and his accent is perfectly posh. He sounds like the protagonist of a moldy pre-secession English paperback novel.
“Are your phones turned off?” Lea asks. Felix nods. Adelaide pauses, reaching into her pocket, and then gives a thumbs up. And only then does she say: “I’m so, so relieved to see you again, Addie…it’s been horrible out here, everyone is trying to hunt you down, even your dad—”
“Wait…you know about that?”
Lea starts walking them back towards the station. “Yeah, it was in the news. He was talking about how you visited, and I just…couldn’t keep watching.”
Adelaide and Felix are silent, and she can feel the consternation passing between them.
“Yeah, that’s why we need to be out of here as soon as we can,” Adelaide finally says. “Out of San Francisco.”
“Seems wise,” Lea murmurs. “Maybe you wanna go to a different country? The US government probably can't reach you there. In the meantime…you can hang at mine, no problem. I don’t know if it’s weird to say, but I’m honoured you thought of me.”
Adelaide's voice lightens. “I mean, I wasn’t sure at first either, after my dad and everything…but when you said you’d never help the police hunt me down…”
At this, Lea laughs. “You’re unbelievable, pretending to be the police,” she says. “I almost deleted the message, you know. I was like, who the hell is this Felix Mercer with literally nothing on their profile. But nah, you won't catch me snitching to the SFPD. Anyway. Before we head back, I’ve gotta set some expectations.” She gestures with both hands as if laying a tablecloth. “I’m renting a unit at the Hexagon right now, and it’s not amazing. I’ve got a double bed and an inflatable mattress. I think I can fit you both in there if you really have no other options. It'll be a tight fit, buuuut…”
“You have my eternal gratitude,” Felix says, hand to heart. “But I needn’t stay with the two of you, if my doing so would inconvenience you.”
At this, Adelaide immediately says, “But…Felix…”
“Oh, Addie, you know I adore your company—I shall visit with you at the very least. And then we could decide our lodgings thereafter.”
“Okay…”
Lea purses her lips as she listens, trying to fit it in with the rest of the messy jigsaw puzzle that's coalescing in her head. Meeting Adelaide again has been a surprise—but the existence of Felix is another matter, a gaping hole in the fabric of events.
Considering Adelaide escaped less than two weeks ago, they can’t possibly have known each other longer. And yet they appear too close for that—especially for the likes of her. Did they meet in the lab? Is he a childhood friend she never mentioned? There was no mention of him in the news of her escape, not even in the reports of her visit to her father.
All of this mulling leaves her mouth as: “So, Felix, how did you end up getting involved in this…this situation?”
“Ah, well, when I first arrived here, little more than a month ago,” he begins, ringing the first of many alarm bells in her mind, “I learned of Adelaide from my forays in digital libraries. She being a prisoner of such extraordinary skills, taken captive so unjustly, I found I could not abide her situation. And so, I trespassed on the facility and left with her.”
“You make that sound like a walk in the park.”
“I assure you, it involved much preparation.”
“That lab has a lockdown system. You need an access card to even get past the lobby.”
“I have ways of bypassing that.”
She grimaces. “Fine then, keep your secrets,” she mutters. They fall silent as they approach the junction of the winding hill road and the arterial, the first of many cars soaring silently by.
*
When Lea turns to Adelaide at the station gate, she leaps. The person walking alongside her is Adelaide’s height, and wears the same dress, and yet she looks nothing like herself from the neck up: her nose is straight, her cheekbones sharp, and there is an indistinctness to her expression that gives off the impression of a mask.
“Uh, Artie?” she whispers, as a subway rumbles up to the platform. “Why do you look…different?”
Straightening, Adelaide glances in a train window, as if to confirm what Lea sees. “Oh, it’s a disguise. Felix does this sometimes to make sure I…”
“Felix does what?” Becoming aware of her volume, her voice drops. The doors creak open, and they step across the gap one after another. “He does what?” she snaps in a whisper. “He makes you wear hyperrealistic masks?”
“Yeah. I…don’t know if he wants me talking about it, so I think you’re better off asking him—”
Two passengers pass—Adelaide recoils, turning her face to the door until they’ve gone. Lea feels a twinge, and, wheeling her bike between her and the rest of the passengers, waves her to the chairs.
“This guy sure likes his secrets, huh,” she whispers, leaning towards Adelaide, whose unfamiliar face surprises her a little less this time. Felix has sat down on her other side. Their voices drop to a whisper.
“He is nothing but secrets,” Adelaide replies, matching her volume. “Sometimes, I feel like I don’t know anything about him at all. What he was doing before he got here, who he was. But he helped me, so…so I guess I have to believe he has good intentions.”
“There’s just something I don’t get. If he’s the one who got you out…then why is this my first time hearing about him? Why isn’t he in any of the reports as an accomplice or a suspicious figure on the scene, or, or something?”
“He…is really good at not being seen. It’s related to the…masks and everything.”
Lea sighs gently. “I don’t wanna question your judgment,” she goes on, “but this is what it sounds like to me, okay. This dude shows up in SF a month ago, and decides that the first thing he wants to do is break you out of the lab, and then he just does that. But he somehow doesn’t show up on any footage or eyewitness accounts or whatever, meaning if you get caught, he gets off scot free. So now you're depending on him in order not to get caught. Right?”
She freezes for a moment. “Yeah…well, but he’s been so friendly, I can’t imagine…”
“I know,” she replies. “Some people are really good at seeming nice on the surface. And I really don’t know what he’s playing at, and I’m glad someone with his talent for avoiding detection is on your side—or at least I hope he is—but, keep your wits about you, okay?”
“Okay—”
“Six car, two door Santa Rosa train now approaching Japantown.” The train screeches on its braking wheels to drown out the robot voice, and they are all flung forward by momentum.
“That’s us,” Lea announces, voice ascending above the scream of wheels as she rises from her seat.
The Hexagon is tall and surly, and as its name suggests, sits on a six-sided floorplan. Keeping her head down, Adelaide lets Lea drag them through the entrance gate and into the elevator, already awaiting them on the ground floor.
The circular chamber is a rusty far cry from the one in the Acropolis, laced with the musk of industrial metal and concrete. The doors clang shut, and the metal tank judders upwards, decelerating to a stop some unnameable time after. But its doors do not open. It begins rotating counterclockwise like a lazy susan, to face a touch left from centre.
The doors slide apart. They pile out of the lift—and straight into an apartment half the size of Adelaide’s lab penthouse. The lights wink on, revealing a lifetime’s worth of odds and ends. Piles of pots lounge in the sink, and clothes are scattered on the floor that Lea swoops off the carpet with a shout. A window at the far end looks out into the night, and by that window, a bed spans the entire width of the apartment, looking like just enough to fit two people. A linty blanket is draped across it.
The lift doors roll shut behind them, and Lea waves once around. “Welcome!” she declares, lunging for the panel at the head of the bed to jab a few buttons. Beneath the kitchen counter to the left, a matte plastic bench swings out of the wall with a thump. “Make yourselves at home, please.”
Dodging around a stepladder, Adelaide sits down on the pop-out bench. Felix opts to continue standing, occupied with inspecting the upper shelves, the pantries, and the crowded countertop. “Colour me impressed,” he says. “I have never seen space used this efficiently.”
“Thanks! I’ve been living here for like,” she counts on her fingers, “three years now. Cindy, the landlady, comes by to inspect it every month. But I’ll give you the heads-up if she ever schedules. So.” She catches her breath. “What do you think, Felix? Does my place meet your, uh, standards?”
He ponders the space for a moment, and his eyes come to rest on Adelaide. “I wouldn’t mind it,” he replies. “I’m loath to part ways, even so briefly. And we must plot our next venture, the sooner the better.”
“Cool, cool, no problem, then! Could you pass me the mattress?” She points at the shelves by his head. “It’s up near the ceiling.”
Felix plucks the rolled-up mattress off the shelf and hands it to Lea. Pulling on a tab cord, it begins to inflate itself with a hiss of air, and she lays it down parallel to her bed. “I’m just glad I finally have a reason to use this,” she mutters, hands on her hips. “What’s our arrangement here? Who’s on mattress duty tonight?”
“I shall take the mattress for all the nights we are here,” Felix says too quickly. “You two could share the bed.”
“Sure, that sounds fair to me,” Lea says.
At this, Adelaide frowns. “Now I’m confused.”
“About what?” Lea says, hands on her hips.
“I thought sharing beds wasn’t okay.”
Felix looks oddly at her. “Well, you are both women, and it is not improper for two women to share a bed.”
“Oh—oh! It’s,” Lea gestures, suddenly frantic, although Adelaide cannot fully understand why. “It depends on the person, and I’m totally fine with it.”
From that point, all goes silent in the room. Lea resumes her halfhearted tidying efforts, rolling a telescope under her bed. If there is a reason for her shift in demeanor, Adelaide cannot grasp it, let alone begin to try and diffuse it.
That night, Lea defrosts a noodle box and dines in the corner of the bed while Adelaide inspects the pile of belongings on the dresser. Her friend stretches past her to push a combination of buttons on the headboard, and the lights over the bed fade to a rosy hue.
“Hey, Lea,” Adelaide pipes up then, “I need you to explain the bed thing to me. And why Felix thinks it's okay for two women but not a man and a woman.”
Lea sighs, lowering her noodles. “Okay, okay. Right. Before that, I gotta be honest with you. The fact we’re meeting right now feels like such a surreal miracle to me, and I really, really want you to be safe. But I don’t exactly trust Felix right now. He’s…been nice, but some of the things he’s said are giving me weird energy, you know?”
“I’m glad you can sense things of that sort,” Adelaide replies, “because I don't think I could. I don't think I have the ability to.”
Lea chuckles. “You haven't changed one bit, huh? So, the bed thing. As chill and open as people are now, there’s still some people, usually the old-fashioned ones,” she casts a meaningful glance in Felix’s direction, “who think romance is something only a man and woman can have with each other. And, like, it’s really common for them to think a man and a woman sharing a bed implies that they’re banging, in a way that it doesn't for two women.”
“Banging?”
“Uh. Having intimate relations.”
“Do you mean copulating?”
Lea blinks several times at her, then bursts out laughing. “Yes, that’s what it means. My God, you’re unreal,” she wheezes. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, Felix seems like one of those people, with outdated ideas about that stuff—I don’t have much to go off of other than a couple of the things he’s said, but it’s a feeling, you know?” So, she can tell he is from the past without asking, too. “Now, in his defense, he seems…respectful. It’s like, the bare minimum, but he hasn’t tried anything weird with you. Right?”
“Nothing I can think of.”
“Good. Good, good.” Lea waves a hand about. “But, if he turns out to be an asshole, drop him, okay?”
“What if it’s not safe to just leave?”
“You’ve gotta be honest with yourself, then. It feels like there’s a power dynamic here. You’re relying on him to be safe, right?”
“Right.”
“And I'm not saying he will, but if he tries to use that to force you to do anything you don’t wanna…that’s your sign to hit the road.”
“Okay, got it.” Adelaide doesn’t like the way this new thought sits in her mind. Up till now, these fears have only been bubbling under the surface. But if she must live a life of hiding under Felix’s good graces, then…
“So, change of topic. How’s your life been since escaping?” Lea wears a softer smile now.
“Oh! It’s been…a lot. It’s like I’m relearning the world from the ground up.”
“Damn…that must be so much brain work. I don't envy you, the world moves so fast these days. But I can catch you up on everything. Did you hear? the Fortitude 3 finally reached Saturn. It was three years ago now.”
“Wow, I cant believe…they reached Saturn before I got out of the lab.”
*
Lea and Adelaide talk of the world. She explains all that has changed, and all that hasn’t: that self-driving cars now make up most road traffic, that cameras can read the moods of passers-by, and that half of Asia has closed its shipping lanes to the US. These days, not much passes between these continents other than humans, and even then, relations are fragmenting as they speak.
As evening segues into bedtime, Lea dims the lights to dying embers, and bundles in with her tablet phone to watch videos. “Come join me here whenever,” she calls out sleepily as she flops onto her side, hugging a plush comet close.
As Adelaide wanders to the kitchenette to brush her teeth, Felix waves from the pop-out bench. “May we talk?” he says.
Her pulse quickens. Lea’s words flash through her mind. “Sure.”
Taking a sip from his mug of tea, he gestures with his elbow at the bench seat beside him, and waits till she has sat. “Addie,” he says in an undertone, “we must decide what we’re doing next. I much appreciate Lea’s hospitality, but this cannot be our permanent arrangement. It is only a matter of time before they scent us out. There is no permanent arrangement to be had in this city.”
Her head spins. Running, running for her life—it's all that awaits her now.
“We?” she murmurs. “They still don't know you're involved, you know. You could leave without a trace.”
“And I shan't. I cannot leave you high and dry.”
“Why wouldn't you?”
“Well, believe it or not, I care for you. And if I must lose your company, then I'd have no reason remain in this world.”
“Oh, I…” She has never imagined someone liking her presence before. An odd, pleasant embarrassment flushes her face. “I thought you didn't have a choice but to be here.”
Felix stares over the plastic mug, at the cupboard panels opposite them. “Addie, may I be honest?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“I never mentioned it before, but home…home has been consuming my thoughts. More so the longer I spend here.” He massages the bridge of his nose. “I still entertain the fantasy of returning, and to that end, I’ve been scouring every repository of knowledge I can find for a sign of something, anything, that might resemble our Tunnel Machine. And there might be…”
She watches his face just long enough to recognise something there that she’s never seen before: a sadness in his gray eyes that he’s no longer trying to obscure.
“What was your home like?” she asks then. “You haven’t said much. But I always wonder, because you miss it so much, and I wish to know more. I mean,” she twiddles her fingers, “if you don't mind telling me about it—your London, the…transatlantic race, the…”
“The solar machinery?”
Her eyes widen. “Solar? Really?”
He allows himself a smile—a warm one, not like those all-knowing smirks she’s grown accustomed to. “That’s right. It was everywhere, on every house: glass for capturing the sun, the way leaves do. We discovered it almost a century before your world did.”