Ashes of Foreverland Read online

  Danny Boy.

  The foggy remains of sleep blew away, replaced by a shiver. He considered whether to open it or just throw it out like he’d done the first letter. He didn’t want to be reminded of the island. He’d escaped that tropical hell with Reed and Zin, but they’d all split up soon after and hardly kept in touch.

  To start new lives.

  And now this.

  The Earth I tread upon leaves and loam could be any of them. For a time, they’d all wandered around lost. I fly alone could be Reed because he was an introvert, a loner. When they were on the island, he didn’t mix with the other boys, didn’t do what he was told. Everyone on the island knew that.

  Where the sand is home.

  That was the clincher. Only three people in the world knew where Reed’s body was buried—his teenage body, the flesh he was born into. That body was dead. But Reed had transferred his identity, his awareness, into Harold Ballard’s body when they erased Harold’s identity. They did so without guilt, without shame. He was the one doing it to them; he had it coming.

  Reed was a teenager in Harold Ballard’s old body.

  Reed’s bruised and broken teenage body was buried on the beach. Where the sand is home. Only three people knew that. Danny was one of them. Reed and Zin were the other two.

  But why so cryptic? Why the handwritten letter?

  Zin was unreachable. The last Danny heard, he was on a vision quest somewhere in India where phones and computers didn’t exist.

  Reed, though, had moved back to the States. It had been a year or so since he last saw him. Even then he was a little off, dealing with survivor’s guilt. They all were. No one could survive the island and be normal.

  Maybe someone from the island had located Danny and was preparing to blackmail him. This thought crossed his mind. After all, Danny, Reed and Zin escaped with Harold Ballard’s money and left all the boys on the island to be rescued by the Coast Guard. Maybe someone wanted a cut.

  Danny could let that happen.

  If that was the case, he wouldn’t arm himself with a battery of lawyers. He would just walk out of the house and disappear. Money could always be made, but freedom was different. Have that taken away and you realize money means nothing.

  The island taught him that.

  Danny slid his thumb under the envelope’s flap. Another disc fell out, the same as before: a blue edge and reflective sides with hundreds of pinpoints. The holes, he noticed, weren’t simply poked or drilled through the thick plastic, they were angled on the inside, conical but at different degrees.

  A note was attached. Build the bridge, Danny Boy.

  Inside the envelope, there was a tri-folded paper, one edge still had ragged tags left from a spiral-bound notebook. Four lines in green ink.

  We all dream the same,

  A dream that feeds in the dark.

  My demons are different than yours,

  But we all have them, just the same.

  He read it three times. He doubted no more.

  We all have demons, Reed once told him. It was the last thing he said before leaving Spain. Zin went on a vision quest to vanquish his demons. Danny threw himself into innovation. But Reed was different.

  My demons are different than yours, he told Danny.

  “Maps.” The immersion room came to life. “Find Reed’s last known location.”

  Reed never left an address, but Danny had tracked the IP address on his emails, cross-referencing his point of access and snooping through his activity.

  He was good at that.

  The image of Earth rotated on the immersion room’s spherical wall and floor until Boston was beneath him. His stomach lurched as the clouds soared up and the city zoomed toward him. His feet were directly over Holworthy Street in Roxbury, an everyday neighborhood with tall, narrow homes.

  “Street View.”

  The details twisted and formed a three-story house, the siding beige, the door new. A white van with a missing hubcap was parked out front. Reed was living on the second or third floor.

  Why here, in the middle of the city?

  Danny walked near the still form of a man on the sidewalk captured by Google’s roaming Street View vehicles. He was wearing a blue sweatsuit, white stripes down the legs. His pit bull was caught sniffing the curb.

  “Zoom.”

  He pointed at the third-floor window and the view pixelated for a fraction of a second before enhancing. Danny clutched at empty space, turning the view to the side of the house. Nothing of interest there, he went up and down the street and got as far as four blocks before returning.

  He might not even be here anymore.

  He began to call the immersion room off, couldn’t waste the day deciphering an amateur poem and wandering the streets of south Boston. But a small detail caught his eye. It was the second story. The curtains in the window were crumpled.

  A small flash had been captured, like a reflection. But the angle was all wrong for the sun to be reflecting off the window.

  Danny pulled the view closer. The window zoomed but pixelated. It took a few moments for the computer to process the details.

  A jar.

  He pulled the view so close that the window towered over him, warping across the domed ceiling’s curve. He stepped closer. There was something beige inside the jar, hidden beneath the hot flash. At first, he thought it was blurring across from the house’s siding. When the details finally crystalized, he recognized the contents.

  Sand.

  6. Danny Boy

  Valencia, Spain

  “Por favor.” Danny raised his cup.

  A waiter arrived, minutes later, with another espresso.

  Santiago, a plump Spaniard with bristled mustache and thinning hair, sat opposite Danny. Always dressed impeccably, he kept his collars unbuttoned, where a tuft of curly black hair emerged. His attention was buried in his phone, his thumbs busy. Another email to answer, another report to read. He would stop to rub the birthmark high on his forehead that resembled the state of Florida.

  Danny cocked his head. There was something off about Santiago, something he couldn’t quite place. Did he trim his mustache? Dye his hair? Maybe he lost weight?

  He meant to ask him, but forgot. Much later, he would understand what had changed. And why.

  From where they sat, Danny could smell the port and see the beach, the flat line of the ocean’s horizon. It smelled different, more fragrant. Like a flower. Lilacs again. Children were laughing somewhere. This was a good place to do business.

  A good place to live life.

  The Spaniard excused himself. Danny crossed his legs and watched a ship cross the horizon before pulling the reflective disc from his pants’ pocket. It was too thick to be a DVD or a Blu-ray. There were no grooves or inscriptions. He tried inserting a pencil into the holes, attempting to turn the disc like a template but they were too small. He even compared the pattern to various constellations, but nothing matched.

  All he saw when he looked at it was his reflection. Build the bridge, Danny Boy.

  He couldn’t build a bridge with a disc, unless it contained plans that he hadn’t figured out. Maybe Reed would send a special disc reader, but why all the clues? He only needed to pick up a phone.

  Santiago was across the restaurant. Danny sank the disc deep into his pocket. He was nearly finished with his drink when Santiago returned with a tall American woman. “Señor Daniel,” he said, “esta es María.”

  Danny stood.

  “Mary.” The woman reached across the table. Her grip was strong.

  She dropped the leather bag slung over her shoulder. The waiter was at the table before she could sit. In Spanish, she ordered a drink. Her words tumbled off her tongue like misshaped stones, as if she looked it up in a translator only moments earlier.

  Santiago asked about her trip, how she like Valencia so far. She answered with a bright, white smile, looking at Danny more often than Santiago. Her blonde hair was short and smooth, the kind you’d see
on a billboard. Danny found himself smiling.

  She returned his grin. When she did, her eyes sparkled like a car was behind him, the headlights forewarning him.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “My clients are about to invest a billion dollars with your company.”

  “I don’t need their money.”

  Santiago laughed nervously. “Danny’s record is well established,” he said in his most affected English, an accent that was effectively sophisticated. “His age, I assure you, is of no consequence.”

  She nodded while smiling. She’d flown the better part of a day to negotiate when they could’ve met in the immersion room. How do Americans say? Santiago had said to Danny when he arranged the meeting. We meet old school. She wanted to sit in front of him, look him in the eyes and sway him with charm, perhaps nudge him and later bully him with facts.

  The waiter returned with a drink.

  “Danny Jones.” She used his full name, the name he now used. Danny Jones owned a thirty-million-dollar villa off the coast of Spain.

  Danny Forrester left the island.

  “The wonder boy with no past,” she said. “The boy with no family, a teenager that, according to Santiago, learned Spanish within months of arriving.”

  Danny looked at his companion. Santiago shrugged. He did become fluent in Spanish, but she had it wrong. It was two weeks.

  “You’ve invested extremely well and managed to stay out of the spotlight for a sixteen-year-old. What was it you said, Santiago? He is the reincarnation of Einstein with a taste for technology instead of stars.”

  “I, uh...” Santiago rubbed his birthmark.

  “He’s right.” Danny lifted his cup. “And would you do business with Einstein at sixteen?”

  Her smile was less flashy, but genuine. Had she sized him up already? She lifted her coffee.

  All three drank.

  “I suggest you drop the name ‘Danny’,” she said. “Sounds like a kid I went to summer camp with.”

  Santiago filled the awkward silence with the wonders of Valencia while Señorita Maria nodded, occasionally flicking a glance at Danny. He was sixteen years old; she was right about that. And most sixteen-year-olds were full of hormones, enslaved by them.

  Not Danny.

  There was a famous study called the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment that measured children’s intellect with a proposition. The experimenter put a single marshmallow on the table. If the child could wait fifteen minutes without eating it, he or she would get two marshmallows. Those that waited the longest had grown up to be more intelligent.

  Danny would’ve outlasted them all.

  “I would love to see your city,” Mary interrupted Santiago, “but I’d like to discuss a few matters with Danny.”

  She launched into her presentation with ease—nonchalant and conversational. Her clients were aiming to become the largest manufacturer of biomites, not just in quantity but innovation. They saw the artificial stem cells as the future of humankind, the next step in evolution, the perfecting of the human body.

  Immortality was in reach.

  Danny watched her present the facts of cost and production and risk. He wondered how old she was. How many biomites had she already injected into her face, smoothing out the wrinkles and glossing over the rough spots, waxing her intelligence to become one of the world’s best—and most beautiful—negotiators?

  Her eyes were magnetic blue, the kind of blue reserved for the glassy sea on a clear morning. Her lips were perfectly painted, her teeth pearly white. Her eyelashes fluttered. It was hypnotic. Give her enough time, and perhaps every man would melt.

  Eventually, there was a flicker.

  It was a small change in the way the light danced in her eyes, like the headlights behind him turned on the high beams. He turned around. It wasn’t a reflection. There was no light behind him.

  It was as if a piece of color had gone missing, a pixel of blue absent from her left eye. This cancerous gray dot bled out to the surrounding iris just to the side of the pupil, bleaching the pristine color.

  It continued into the white.

  The gray pixilation oozed over her eyelid and consumed her eyelashes, up into the hollow of her eye socket and over the bridge of her nose. Danny slid his chair back and refrained from recoiling as it soaked outward like an inky stain of gray static, eating a hole through the smooth complexion, turning Mary’s face into a mechanical faceplate spouting words that were just sounds, data that were just numbers.

  She glanced at Santiago.

  The gray spot wasn’t eating her face. It was chewing a hole in the fabric of space. As if she wasn’t there. As if nothing was there.

  Nothing at all.

  And it was nothing that howled inside him. He felt it in his gut, heard it deep in his subconscious, calling like wolves. Calling him to be with it. To be nothing.

  To be Nowhere.

  “Señor Danny Boy?”

  Danny snapped back into the present moment. Santiago stared with wide eyes. Mary was beautiful again, not a spot on her cheek or in her eye, as if nothing had happened, the fabric of space just as it should be.

  They were looking at someone next to the table.

  “Señor Danny Boy?” a boy asked, then dropped a letter on the table. This was a standard-sized envelope, the kind that would contain a letter, not a disk. Danny was transfixed by the green lettering.

  Danny Boy.

  “Hey!” He shoved away from the table. “¡Espera!”

  “Danny.” Santiago swiped at his arm.

  Danny jumped out of reach; the chair clapped onto the floor. He leaped over the stone wall onto the sidewalk. The messenger was already pumping the pedals on a beach bike, bouncing over the curb and around a building. Danny leaped around traffic, swinging his arms with the letter squashed in his fist. He was gaining on the young man, whose coarse black hair fluttered over his shoulders.

  He cut down an alley.

  Danny gave chase through a crowd and emerged on the road running parallel to the beach. His side stitched with stabbing pain; he struggled to breathe. The boy was gone.

  He looked at the wrinkled letter damp with sweat. What is happening?

  Had someone tracked him down? One of the old men, perhaps? They certainly would want revenge. Danny had taken everything from them. Everything. But if one of them had survived, managed to elude the authorities that arrived when Danny, Reed and Zin had escaped, they wouldn’t bother with poems or clues; they would’ve come straight away, kidnapped him while he slept. And even if they did send letters, they wouldn’t know what to write.

  The sand is my home.

  Danny sat on the beach, watching sailboats slice across the horizon, the gulls hover over the water. Children ran past. He tore the letter open.

  Another four lines. Another poem.

  He read it over and over, hoping repetition would ease the cold fear rising. Like those days on the island, trapped in the cold concrete room of the haystack when the needle dropped from the ceiling, when he felt like crying.

  When sometimes he did.

  He didn’t go back to the restaurant, didn’t conclude business. He walked to the port where his ship waited. His captain took him back to the house. Santiago would later call him, but he wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t return his messages. Mary would stay in Valencia another week before returning to the United States, and her clients would refuse to invest with an unstable teenager, no matter how bright and promising.

  But none of it would matter.

  Every question contains its answer,

  When the children sing and stare,

  When you look into the blue,

  And see the endless Nowhere.

  Nowhere was the opposite of somewhere. But for those that survived the island, it was more than that. It was the place where existence ceased, where space became a maddening array of gray static, complete chaos.

  He saw it in Mary’s eye, felt
it howl inside him. It beckoned; it threatened.

  As Reed knew it would.

  7. Danny Boy

  An island off the coast of Spain

  Danny swiped the bathroom mirror. Beads of condensation raced to the sink. His irises were blue with dark bands radiating out like spokes. No gray.

  No Nowhere.

  He held the second note, the edges damp in his hand. When the children sing and stare. Just before someone was sent to the Nowhere, they had a blank stare. Is that what it meant? When you look into the blue. Did he mean the blue in her eyes? The blue on the edge of the disc.

  What bridge?

  He shook his head and took a deep breath. He was reading too much into it. The symbolism could mean anything.

  Every question contains its answer.

  “¿Señor Daniel?” Maria knocked on the bedroom door. “Señor Santiago es aqui.”

  “Un momento!”

  A small scar was centered between his eyes, an inch above his eyebrows—the mark was innocence lost. Danny knocked on the mirror and stared at his hands. Ever since he returned from New York, everything felt a little off. Was it his imagination? He had the sense of skating on a frozen pond when spring had already arrived.

  And he could feel the ice thinning.

  Danny got dressed to meet his mentor on the veranda.

  ——————————————

  A cloud of smoke hung around Santiago’s head.

  He was admiring the million-dollar view. Danny watched him from beneath the shade of the pergola. The smoke polluted the ever-present smell of lilac. He hadn’t seen the Spaniard since he abandoned them at the café. Santiago sensed the eyes on him and turned.

  “Cigar?” Santiago waved the Cuban. “You are too young to smoke, forgive me.”

  His laughter cut across the wind.

  “Sit in the shade?” Danny said.

  The heavyset Spaniard shuffled beneath the pergola, the cigar clenched between his teeth. Maria stood in the doorway. Danny asked for water.

  “Scotch,” Santiago said. “Neat.”

  They sat opposite each other. Santiago’s laughter rumbled on for no apparent reason. He did this for one of two reasons: he’d been drinking, or he was nervous.