Chapter 6

After playing for almost a week, Phineas reflected that most people would call it “working.” He had invented at least seven things in as many days and finished as many half-started projects; he had cleaned and reorganized the lab, and fixed the shelves Ethan had been pretending to put together. He had yet to see any signs of the “things happening” he had heard so much about on the CommNet, but he supposed there was still time.

He’d been wondering what measures his father had been taking to find him. He’d watched the news on the tiny hook up at Madam Cho’s (she insisted on the “madam” part, which was what Phineas liked about her), and there wasn’t any public search going on. That meant his father was keeping the information secret, which meant a private investigator, which obviously meant Julian. Anyone else couldn’t be trusted to keep the Maxwell secrets secret, and despite his posturing, Julian was a pushover for demands made by their father, especially when those demands were accompanied by gratuitous amounts of cred that he couldn’t possibly turn down.

Phineas reflected on all of this as he ignored the cat-scratch pain and muted jack hammering of the tattoo gun at his back. It was a Moebius trefoil knot made of multi-colored gears, centered between his shoulder blades--the perfect spot to keep it from being easily spotted by the people in his life who would desperately disapprove. He continued to muse, sitting motionless despite the burning sensation in his back. Ethan had handed him a cred card a couple days into his stay, explaining that he had other things he had to do sometimes, so if Phineas needed anything, to go get it.

This led to Phineas’s decision that he needed science tattooed on his body. That would probably in turn lead to his father’s decision to disown him, which was fine with Phineas, really. Then he could go back to his Jews or come back to make more toys in Ethan’s lab.

He supposed he was lucky they hadn’t carded him, though he couldn’t imagine any other reason than because he was holding money in his hand and was more than ready to spend it--he certainly didn’t look or act eighteen, except perhaps in his stoicism toward the pain. The girl doing the tattoo seemed only slightly impressed, and was chatting amiably at him over the window-rattling music blasting from the stereo. She didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t paying attention.

Phineas was finding, more and more, that he liked No Town. The people there were themselves and not so much pretending to be something else--and those that were were so bad at it that he didn’t think they counted. Everything was smaller and closer together, more suited for someone of his size, and the food was good and cheap. Besides that, there were things to make and stories to hear and tons of abandoned and forgotten places to explore and crawl around in.

“’Kay.” The girl behind him straightened, setting down her gun and peeling off her gloves. “Y’r done, lov.”

Phineas slid off the chair and waited patiently while she taped cellophane over his new illustration-wound, then pulled his shirt on over it.

“Yew know ‘ow t’take care o’ it?” Her affected accent amused him and he turned to face her, finding her toying with one of the three rings through her lower lip.

“Keep it clean, huh?”

She flashed him a grin and a thumbs up. “Yew go’i’, lov. Y’ nee’ any touch ups, y’ come back t’ol’ Angela and I’ll fix yer righ’ up.”

Phineas nodded and held up his own thumb. “I will do that.”

The chime of the door as he pulled it open to exit sounded a little hollow. Was this one of those things teenagers did to rebel against controlling parents? Was he doing this just to piss off his pseudo-father? He guessed that with most kids his age, that would be the case, but he was certainly not most kids his age. He had no reason to want to anger his father and no reason to rebel when he got most anything he wanted most of the time, despite all the rules he kept running up against. No, this wasn’t rebellion, this was just illustrative of his great love for science and mechanics. When his father finally noticed and began to be angry, he’d just point out that it was better and much less noticeable than his original wish to replace his own eyes with cybernetic ones, and that would hopefully appease the old villain.

For now, perhaps, lunch. He stepped outside and the door swung to behind him.

“There you are!”

Phineas turned to face the voice, blinking in the sunlight. A tall specter came through the sun haze toward him and eventually turned into Ethan, who stopped in front of him, fists planted on his narrow hips.

“I’ve been looking for you for hours,” he scolded, while Phineas continued to blink up at him.

”I got bored,” he said by way of explanation. “Can we go get lunch now?”

His request for food was ignored. “I left you alone for less than ten minutes. Hell, I didn’t even leave you alone, I just turned my back.”

“Yes, and I got bored.”

“So you came to get a tattoo?”

“Well, that’s not what I left to do, but that’s what happened.”

Ethan scowled at him, and Phineas could see him working through what to say about this. He finally settled for, “Let’s go back to the lab, and we’ll order take out.”

That sounded like a good plan to Phineas. However, after they’d returned to the lab, before ordering the food (pizza, two for Phineas and three for Ethan), Ethan went about barricading the door. Phineas assumed it was because of him, but didn’t sit still long to watch. Instead, he began to poke around inside the broom closet he’d come across while reorganizing.

It didn’t take him long to find the trapdoor in the closet’s floor. Ethan was still on the phone, and rather than wait even one more instant, Phineas thought it better to go ahead and slide down the ladder into a long, dim room lined on both sides with old, picked-apart machinery. Phineas eyed each one on his way to the far end of the room, identifying its purpose, age and what else the parts might be used for, not to mention which parts were already missing. The assessment of each took only the few seconds it took him to pass it by. Why Ethan had failed to mention this room to him, he wasn’t sure, unless Ethan himself was unaware of its existence, and he thought that unlikely.

The room terminated in a brick wall. Phineas put first one hand, then the other against the surface of the wall, sliding callused palms across the deteriorating bricks. He shuffled to the left, moving from the middle of the wall as far as he could go, then reversed his direction and shuffled sideways to the right until he came up against the side wall. The floor for almost two feet in front of the wall was bare the entire width of the room.

With his hands still on the wall, standing in the right corner, Phineas looked upward, assessing his position within the building. The broom closet was on the easternmost wall of the lab, and the ladder faced west, crammed into the corner of the eastern wall and the wall across from the one he was now inspecting. That meant that the long narrow room—more of a corridor than a real room—lay tucked under the eastern edge of the lab, and he was now standing, he estimated, in the far northeast corner of the building.

With his head cocked back, he could feel a slight draft against his neck. He looked forward again, eyeing the wall. Underground, in an enclosed basement as he was, there shouldn’t have been any draft but the one created by the open trapdoor. This one, however, was very small and cool and smelled a little wet, and it was coming from the wall in front of him. It shouldn’t have been there, but it was, meaning that there had to be a hole in the mortar somewhere, and an open space on the other side of the wall.

He curled his fingers and felts between the bricks at head height, moving from one end of the wall to the other. When he found nothing, he moved up a tier, and then another until his fingertips slid into an empty space that extended the full length of two bricks. He hadn’t seen the slit because it was above his eyelevel, and he’d been too engrossed in inspecting the old machinery on the way to this end of the room to notice it as he approached.

With his fingers curled and braced into the slit, he began to tug at the bricks, and was only a little surprised when they moved, pivoting out from the wall like a double door. What really surprised him was that, once he’d moved them, the rest of the wall moved too, and the bricks, which had looked solidly connected by lines of concrete, slid and turned until they formed an opening only a couple feet wide. Phineas moved through the new doorway immediately and inspected the far side. It was dark, but he could make out a complex system of gears and metal rods connected to individual bricks from mechanisms to either side. The two bricks that he had pulled outward had set in motion a system of weights that had turned the gears and pulled the bricks into new positions. Upon closer inspection, he saw that each brick pivoted on one corner to allow them to rotate when the bars pulled them, in a sort of accordion-like movement.

It was amazing, like something he might have made himself. Only he’d have used a system of water weights.

He turned to look into the tunnel revealed by the moving wall, and went rigid with excitement when he realized where he was standing. It was the sewers! Of course! The lab itself was in the building’s basement, and here on the outskirts of the city proper no building had more than one basement level, making the old sewer system closer to the surface—thus, this room, which was below the basement, was on the same level as the sewer tunnels.

“Didn’t you ever hear that there are monsters in the sewers?”

Phineas turned to face Ethan, who was standing back in the storage room, peering into the darkness beyond the moving wall. Phineas planted his fists on his hips, a grin splitting his face almost in two. He puffed up his chest, and he could almost feel his hair standing up straighter in his pride.

“Oh, sure,” he replied. “But there’s nothing here to kvetch about. It’s just dark, and that’s easily remedied.”

He reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a key chain flashlight that his brother had given him some years back, and held it up beside his head, smiling despite Ethan’s continued uncertainty.

“Now come on.”

He turned to start walking into the darkness, but Ethan’s over-sized hand on his shoulder stopped him before he’d started. He looked over his shoulder, his gaze nonplussed.

“So you’re not scared of them?”

“The stories?”

“No, the monsters in the stories.”

Phineas considered. Ethan seemed to think he was one of the little street children that he normally dealt with, who had no ability to think beyond what he was told.

“Not yet,” he answered after a moment. “I’m not afraid of something I can’t see.”

“I thought you were afraid of the dark,” Ethan shot back.

“I am.” He turned his flashlight on, and the beam fell on a damp wall across from them. “But I can see that.”

“Well...okay. But if we see a dead body, we’ll come straight back, right?”

“Sure, after I’ve examined the offending cadaver to assess identity and cause of death, to the extent that I’m able with no equipment.” That answer would show Ethan he was no street kid to be coddled.

“You’re some kid, you know that?”

“Not some kid, but me.”

Ethan laughed as Phineas pressed on into the tunnel, following behind him. They walked in silence for some time, Ethan letting Phineas lead, which made him think that maybe Ethan thought better of him than he’d suspected.

After awhile, he looked over his shoulder at the giant. “Do you believe in them?”

“The monsters? Hell yeah. That kind of stuff freaks me out--keeps me up at night.”

So he was afraid of the paranormal. The thought amused Phineas. “Nothing keeps me up at night.”

“No?”

“Nah. I don’t believe in anything until I see it, and once I see it, I can explain it, and then it’s not scary anymore. So I’ve stopped bothering to be scared in the first place. Wastes time.”

“And see, I’m not afraid of stuff I can see,” Ethan countered. “Guy with a gun? Big deal. But something I can’t see? Something I can’t explain? No way.”

“Well, I’m afraid of the dark,” Phineas reminded him.

“Me too.” Ethan rubbed the back of his neck, looking a bit sheepish. “You sleep with the light on at your old place?”

“With a nightlight.” Phineas didn’t bother to correct his assumption that his home was old. “The dark scares me because you can’t always know what’s in it. It changes things. Say there’s a pile of stuff in the corner when the light’s on. When you turn the light off, though, there’s nothing to say that pile of stuff didn’t turn into something else--something less harmless.”

“Things don’t just change because you can’t see them,” Ethan pointed out.

“Sure they can.”

“Nuh-uh.”

Phineas stopped walking and turned to look up at Ethan. “There’s nothing to say that I’m not a figment of your imagination when I’m here with you. There’s nothing to say that when I leave your presence, I cease to exist.”

Ethan frowned, partly at the concept Phineas was presenting him with, and partly because when the boy had turned around, he’d aimed the flashlight beam to shine into Ethan’s face.

“Or vice versa,” Phineas added after a moment of thought. “People define their own reality qualitatively, right? There’s no reason they can’t do so quantitatively as well.”

“I...think that what you’re saying is a little over my head.” Ethan’s grin was sheepish.

“Impossible.” The answer was succinct and he turned away as he said it. He wasn’t nearly tall enough for any of his words to float up that high.

They walked for some time without speaking again. When they began again, it was Ethan who asked a question first.

“So, since we’ve talked about all this creepy stuff and I keep thinking I hear something following us, can we go up top to head home?”

“Of course.” Phineas turned left down a narrow side tunnel. Ethan had a sinking feeling in his stomach that the boy was picking his route at random. “I doubt either of us can remember the way back, anyway.”

The sinking feeling burrowed it’s way down into Ethan’s knees.

After what seemed like a very long time, Phineas stopped next to a ladder leading upward and pointed the flashlight beam up to illuminate a manhole cover. “Disappointing.”

“What?” Ethan looked down from their exit with reluctance.

“There’s nothing here.”

Ethan couldn’t understand why this was disappointing. He began to climb upward. Phineas watched him from below until the taller boy had hefted the cover out of the way and climbed through to street level. After one last sweep of his flashlight to inspect the surrounding area, Phineas followed, scurrying up the ladder. Ethan grabbed his hand when he was close enough and helped to pull him through, depositing him on the sidewalk on his feet before leaning over to drag the cover back into place. Phineas snapped his flashlight off and shoved it into his pocket as he looked around. It was already dark enough for the streetlights to have turned on, though there was still some residual light here in this more undeveloped area of the city.

The roar of an engine from behind them made Phineas turn. A motorcycle (rare, these days, since they were hard to fuel, but definitely an eternal sign of a bad boy, or a boy who thought he was bad, but was really an accountant who wore thick glasses under his helmet) raced up the street toward them, its front light bright in the fading twilight. The rider was barreling down the street in their direction at a ridiculous speed, from what Phineas could tell (perhaps someday, he thought, he would install some sort of speed radar behind his eye so that he could accurately assess such things), and it was only a few seconds before he drew up parallel with them.

Time stopped.

The rider’s head was turned toward them, narrow green eyes on Phineas, as though he found the red-head also suspended in time, a crystallized stone waiting beneath the earth’s surface for light to finally hit it and refract into a million little shards of rainbow.

The area behind the rider’s ear (he was not wearing a helmet, exposing him, in his leather jacket and with his broken nose, as a true bad boy and not an imitation), exposed because his speed whipped his hair back, was adorned with a single swirling black feather etched into skin that had never felt an inked needle. He knew the designs covered the rider, hiding beneath the skin until it was their turn to burst out and flower from the center outward like a star exploding.

They stared.

Vibrated.

Light refracted, making them transparent, making their minds--but not their thoughts--loud to each others’ ears.

What did he see? Phineas wondered. A boy with impossible hair, thin as a whisper, but louder, covered in grime and too analytical to fear what he ought to, at his age?

A conduit into gears and circuits?

A machine?

“What?”

Time started again. The light that had hit them, making their crystals refract and reverberate to each other, had fallen below the horizon, replaced by the trail of taillights as the motorcycle, and its rider with it, disappeared around a corner.

Phineas turned with some difficulty to look at Ethan. His mind felt heavy, blurred, like someone had reached in and dragged their fingers through the wet paint and fresh chalk of his thought processes, smearing them beyond recognition.

“Huh?”

“You said something,” Ethan informed him. “But I didn’t catch it.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

He sounded dazed, and Ethan heard it, frowning. “I thought you did.”

Phineas shook his gaze, and his mind sharpened, righting itself as it began to vibrate on the correct frequency again. “No. I’m hungry. Let’s go get the food.” He cast a reproachful eye on Ethan. “There is food, isn’t there?”

“Should be. I left a note and the payment by the door.”

Phineas nodded and turned to walk back to the lab. Ethan followed him, smiling a little, bewildered, and shaking his head. He still wasn’t sure how to quantify the child in front of him, and wasn’t sure that he would ever know how. He also wasn’t sure that it mattered.