The pickup’s engine dropped into a lower gear as Alistair Crow took the exit east. Eugene felt the change in the seat before he registered the green sign arcing past his window. Austin. The arrow pointed the wrong direction. They were supposed to be heading southwest, putting distance between themselves and Legacy Lab Solutions, not driving straight toward the biggest city in the region.
“What's going on?”, Eugene asked. His face flushed with numb panic.
Crow kept both hands on the wheel. The silver device sat on Eugene’s knee, still warm from his grip. His mother shifted in the middle of the bench seat, her shoulder pressing against his.
“We're driving to Austin,” Crow said. “The regional championship is tomorrow.”
Eugene waited for the punchline, but Crow’s face in the rearview mirror remained poised, those dark eyes tracking the highway like he hadn’t just suggested the most reckless thing possible.
“You can’t be serious.” Eugene’s right hand twitched. He pressed it flat against his thigh. “There’s a federal agent back there who froze in place because of that thing.” He nodded at the device. “And you want me to climb on a bull in front of a grandstand full of people?”
“I entered you months ago,” Ruby said." The fees are paid; your name is on the roster, and your fans are expecting you."
“That was before I got flagged in a government database.”
“I know what it was before.” Her voice stayed level, but her hands were folded tight in her lap. “I also know you’ve been training for this since you were twelve. Your granddad drove you to every practice. You think he’d want you to quit now?”
Eugene looked away. The scrubland outside the window was giving way to roadside BBQ dives and tourist attraction billboards, the kind of sprawl that thickened the closer you got to a city. Truck hauling horses passed them in the left lane, the trailer rocking slightly in the wind.
“Albright is still back there,” Eugene said. “Frozen or not, he’s not going to stay that way forever.”
“He won’t,” Crow smirked. “But a public event is the last place he’ll look for you if he could remember anything. Look the government banks on us to run, to hide somewhere remote. A bull riding championship with five thousand spectators, television cameras, state officials in the VIP tent.” Crow’s mouth curved slightly. “That’s not hiding. That’s standing in plain sight.”
“It’s insane.”
“It’s the safest move you have.”
The device pulsed.
Eugene felt it before he saw it, a quick thrum against his palm like a cell phone set to vibrate. He looked down. A faint blue light was fading from the etched patterns on the silver surface, retreating from the edges inward until it disappeared.
“What was that?”
Crow glanced at the device, then back at the road. “It’s now keyed to your biology.”
“Erasing memory, freezing people and linking to me. Do I have to be worried about anything else?"
“That’s a few of many functions.” Crow’s voice varied. “It also reads proximity. When something approaches that means you harm, the device registers it. The pulse you just felt. The warmth. That’s a warning system.”
Ruby reached over and put her hand on Crows shoulder. Her fingers were warm and rough; the knuckles chapped from years of farm work. She didn’t say anything. She just held on. A distant part of her still loved him.
The pickup rolled past a sign for the Austin city limits. The skyline was visible now through the haze, a cluster of glass towers rising out of the flat Texas plain like they’d been planted there by someone who’d never seen the rest of the state. The late afternoon sun caught the windows and threw the light back at them.
“The fairgrounds are on the east side,” Ruby said. “We have to get your draw as soon as we get there because the competition starts at nine tomorrow morning.”
Eugene turned the device over in his hand. The patterns etched into the silver didn’t look like any language he recognized. They spiraled inward toward the center, where a small indentation fit the pad of his thumb perfectly, as if it had been made for his hand specifically.
“You really think this is the right move,” he said to Crow.
“I think your mother entered you in a championship you earned a place in. I think your grandfather trained you for it. And I think walking into that arena tomorrow, in front of everyone, makes you harder to disappear than hiding in a barn somewhere.” Crow signaled and changed lanes. “Agents operate in the shadows. They target people who won’t be missed. A bull rider who places at regionals gets his picture in the paper and country wide exposure.”
The device warmed again. Not a pulse this time, just a gradual heat spreading through the metal, like something waking up.
Eugene closed his fingers around it and watched the Austin skyline grow larger through the windshield. The fairgrounds were somewhere out there, the chutes and the dirt and the smell of livestock, everything familiar and everything wrong at the same time. His right hand trembled once, then stilled.
Once in the fairground parking lot, Eugene's mother hurried to the outside pre-registration tent to found out which bull he would have. She then returned to the truck while some rain drizzled on the bridge of her nose.
"You're all set."
“What bull did they draw me?”
“Lone Blaze. Your granddad’s been talking about that bull all summer.”
“Of course he has, nearly killed the last rider," he grumbled underneath his breath.