If Daniel has been trained to be at one with the workings of the universe, Ellie has been trained to understand mechanisms, to take them apart in her head. It’s impossible to fix them if you don’t understand them first.
She walks to the hood. The driver’s door and the hood release check out. This close, however, the changes to the ignition are unmissable. By now, they are also quite familiar. This is not her first car bomb. These changes, however, are a little too familiar.
“I always check.” She waves Daniel over. “It should be safe to pop the hood. I’ll take it from there.”
“You always check?” Daniel unlocks the door and eyes her skeptically as he presses the hood release. “Why?”
Ellie silently berates herself. Talking about her relationship with Chris will never not be embarrassing. Whether she’s ready for the conversation she keeps postponing with Daniel or not, she’s about to have it now. At least Daniel will believe whatever Ellie says about Chris. He’s the only person Ellie knows who doesn’t think Chris is some perfect, helpful angel.
“Chris hasn’t tried to kill me since Mom died, so now it’s just force of habit.” She props open the hood and looks for the ignition switch. “Ah, there it is. A bomb is wired to your ignition. Odd, this looks like Chris’s work, but I don’t think it is.”
Ellie studies the situation. What’s under Daniel’s hood is very recognizably an ignition-car-bomb-shaped thing. The ignitionsparks an explosive. A slapdash framework holds everything in place. The idea is to blow Ellie up, not for the bomber to show how clever they are. It’s not that Chris never repeats an element now and then between attempts. There are only so many ways to kill Ellie. Chris, however, never makes an attempt where all the elements are repeats, even from several different bombs.
“Does she car-bomb you a lot?” Daniel pokes his head in next to hers under the hood. “Do you even own a car?”
“Sometimes, it’s a land mine or some other explosive. Once, she trapped me in a moving van with a player piano snapping its strings, a giant mechanical metronome jabbing its pendulum at me, and a bottle of olive oil trying to slice off my head.” Ellie studies the ignition switch for anything that might identify the bomber. “Another time, it was a swarm of nanobots carrying polonium.”
Daniel stares agape at her. She stares back with a look that retorts “You asked!”
“Why would she plant a bomb in my car?”
“If it’s her, it’s because I would be sitting in it.” Ellie rolls her eyes. “You’re collateral damage. Like you said, making changes to the skunkworks has marked me. For an embarrassingly long time, I convinced myself that she wasn’t lying when she said all she was doing was preparing me for the folks who’d kill me for maintaining the skunkworks.”
“But now you finally realize she’s been lying to you all this time?” Daniel sounds positively hopeful.
“I mean, for the first decade or so, her attempts were more like deadly puzzles that ramped up in difficulty over time. My death had to look like a horrible accident, not murder. For at least the first few years, maybe she really was trying to prepare me, and if she happened to kill me in the process, well, at least she tried.”
The explosive, a gray, gloppy goo held in place by a crystalline containment chamber, is unusual. It comes from several universesout. There’s enough here to vaporize Ellie, Daniel, the car, and some amount of the Chief Architect’s front yard in a dazzling but silent light show the neighbors would remember for ages.
“Daniel, do you think you can create this explosive?” Ellie points at the containment chamber.
“Why would I bomb my own car?” Daniel’s befuddlement looks genuine this time. “Never mind why, when could I have?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Ellie snaps. “Just answer the question.”
“Well, if you describe it in enough detail, I guess.” Daniel reaches for the containment chamber, but Ellie blocks his hand. “That’s a lot of explosive, though.”
Ready access to an explosive from another universe narrows the suspects down, barely. It can still be Chris. Ellie has no idea how Chris sourced the explosive the first time.
“Do you seriously think she was training you at first?” Daniel clearly does not.
“Either way, you either got real good at surviving right away and kept getting better, or you died. Whether she intended it or not, I got a lot of practice with all the builder skills, which came in handy whenever Mom took me to the skunkworks.”
“So what made you finally realize she wasn’t training you in the most passive-aggressive way possible?”
Ellie hesitates. This is all too embarrassing to admit. She’s come this far, though, she might as well go all the way. If she’s going to come clean about this to anyone, it’s Daniel.
“I don’t know. For the longest time, I didn’t let myself think about it.” A tiny blade of light juts out of her left index finger. “Maybe it’s the way she took care of Mom. Generous and giving in a way that also limited Mom’s autonomy. But, before, the only person in danger was me. Once she wanted me to move back, she tried to take out my Boston friends and classmates as collateral damage. And now you, too, of course.”
“I’m flattered.” He flashes a sardonic grin.
“When she stopped, I hoped that maybe she’d changed.” Ellie studies the mount holding the bomb in place for any signs of who might have built it. “This doesn’t have to be her. It’s been over a month. Before, it was like twice a week.”
“Who else could it be? How can there be anyone already trying to stop us? We haven’t even started yet.”
“Chris never repeats herself. Why would she try to kill me with anything I’ve dealt with before? Maybe the bomber doesn’t realize I’ve dealt with lots of these by now.”
Burrowing down to the molecular level to make the explosive stable and noncombustible takes some effort. The goo turns red and solidifies into putty. Likewise, demagnetizing mounts holding bombs in place isn’t what gets Ellie out of bed in the morning. She’s much happier dealing with gears and switches. Even one too small to see is better than this. Still, she gets it done.
