Hopscotch Read online

  When the fresh drinks arrived, Teresa looked at her two best friends in the world. They had been inseparable since they were children, abandoned by their biological parents, taken in and tended by Soft Stone and the other Splinters.

  She held up her glass in a toast, not daring to ask the contents of the new cocktail. “To friends,” she said.

  They all drank.

  2

  In the Bureau of Tracing and Locations, all training was vital. The BTL instructors had hammered that into Daragon Swan from the day he’d entered their ranks. Since his old life had ended at the Falling Leaves monastery more than a year ago, training filled the void.

  Many of the Bureau’s recruits washed out in the first few weeks, but the BTL officials had no intention of letting Daragon fail. His freakish recognition ability was too special, his “inner vision” too rare. The coaches reminded him of this often, used it as an excuse to push him harder. He had finally completed the first phase of indoctrination.

  Three stone-faced coaches climbed into a hovercar and punched in coordinates. Daragon settled in beside them, small in stature and wiry. He had dark hair and almond eyes that flashed in the light. Now, he squared his shoulders, keeping his face expressionless. He didn’t know where the instructors were taking him, and he didn’t dare ask.

  The emerald-green vehicle raised up onto its selected impedance path, and official COM override codes kicked in as it coasted toward the nearby bayshore.

  “Are you ready for this?” one coach asked him, his gruff voice suddenly loud in the white noise.

  “I don’t know what to expect.”

  “Be ready anyway.”

  Daragon clung to his hopes. This was part of becoming a crucial member of the BTL, a group that appreciated him for his special abilities and skills. The Splinter monks had sympathized with his unusual handicap—unlike virtually everyone else, he was completely unable to hopscotch—but the Bureau didn’t belittle him for that. Instead, they saw it as an advantage.

  Daragon had the potential to be a great Inspector, perhaps the best, thanks to his quirk, his ability to see identities. He compared it to a blind man having highly sensitive hearing. Craving acceptance, he could not disappoint them.

  The BTL used a broad spectrum of methods for locating and tracking people as they moved through a society where physical appearance and identity could be made meaningless by body-swapping. Some of the Bureau Inspectors were slightly telepathic; some were gifted database surfers who had a particular rapport with COM—the pervasive computer/organic matrix—and some were just intuitive detectives. Daragon had to learn everything.

  Be ready anyway. Always.

  The hovercar left the main traffic patterns behind, cruising high above malls and pedestrian streets. They wove through a complex of warehouses and cranes and launch platforms on sprawling docks that extended like pseudopods into the Pacific. Daragon looked at the scrambled Brownian motion of commerce, bustling workers, small and large craft skating like water striders across the ocean, bullet-boats tugging barges into port.

  Far out on the water, towering high enough to be an artificial island, stood a massive offshore drilling rig. It had been abandoned in place, modified into a new sort of building. The platform stood on stilts, a citadel above the waves. Daragon knew the main complex itself was protected under the sea. BTL Headquarters. They headed directly toward it.

  The hovercar landed on a metal-plated dock that extended to the edge of the calm water. The emerald doors rose up like an insect shrugging its carapace, and Daragon emerged, standing straight in his dark trainee jumpsuit. The fresh wind struck his face, laden with salt and iodine.

  The man who met him on the platform was well muscled, his stomach like a washboard beneath his tight shirt, the tendons in his neck like cords. The man seemed to occupy a much larger physical space than his actual body required. His chestnut hair was short and dark, just beginning to speckle with gray. His eyes were wide-set, an olive-brown. “My name is Mordecai Ob. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

  “Certainly, sir!” Ob was the Bureau Chief, a powerful man who kept himself isolated, ambitious but rarely seen except by those in the inner sanctum of the BTL. Why would a person of such importance waste time greeting a mere trainee?

  “Walk with me to my offices, Daragon. I’ll show you more of how the Bureau really works.” Ob shook his hand with a muscular grip. “We expect great things of you, young man.”

  3

  Each weekend, Garth arrived at the artists’ bazaar at dawn just to secure himself a decent spot. The pedestrian square was always crowded with other aspiring artists, craftsmen, and vendors.

  At first, he had been delighted to discover that the Splinters had arranged for him a beginning-level job as a “painter.” Unfortunately, Garth spent hours painting polymer coatings and shifting phase-films on walls inside new offices, without a shred of creativity—not exactly what he’d expected or hoped.

  Long ago in the monastery Garth had discovered his heart’s calling to be an artist—and now he tried to make the rest of the world see it. Luckily, Soft Stone’s years of chores had toughened him to getting up early and working until late. He had his drive and his goal, and no one was going to discourage him from following his dream.

  On his days off, he bustled out of his small private quarters, carrying a case of drawing supplies into the stillness of sunrise. Once he had picked his spot at the market, he set up his blanket, burlap seating pads, and working easel. Garth greeted the other craftsmen and merchants as they came into the bazaar, dragging stalls, chairs, cooking equipment.

  A portly man sold potent coffee from a thermal chalice. Since Garth was such a regular customer, the caffeine vendor knew him by name now. Garth drank the coffee hot and black from his own large mug. He savored the acrid richness, closing his eyes, breathing in the aroma. Afterward, he felt awake, ambitious, and excited for what the day might bring. Inspired.

  Garth was amazingly prolific, unable to move his hands as fast as his imagination bombarded him with ideas. Everything about the world was new, a universe of glittering images everywhere he turned. And he wanted to paint them all.

  His first attempt, though—when he was only thirteen years old—had been a disaster. The Splinters had never understood his artistic passion. . . .

  The Falling Leaves was an ancient building embedded in the modern city like a fossil in limestone. Newer buildings with connecting atriums and cliffs of mirrored windows had grown up around the monastery like younger trees engulfing a deadfall. In simpler times the place had been a brewery.

  An exuberant young teenager, Garth had found a hidden spot in the basement of the old monastery, behind thick, long-unused pipes. Inside the shadowy, timeless room, Garth used his imagination to envision chambers crammed with giant beer vats, boilers and fermenting containers, malting bins, roasters, and bottling lines.

  Here, Garth could smell the past, mystical odors that reminded him of the complex Charles Dickens novels he read to Daragon and another orphan named Pashnak. He had so many ideas, and the paintings in his head were so vivid. Garth decided to keep this spot secret even from Teresa and Eduard. Until he was ready, until his project here was completed.

  He found paints and charcoal sticks and surreptitiously carried them into the basement utility closet. To conjure his vision, he sketched outlines on the walls, dipped his brushes into swirls of color. Ignoring the unevenness of the mortar and bricks, he painted a winter scene like a classic Currier and Ives print. Horse-drawn carts pulled up to the brewery’s loading dock to receive kegs of Trappist ale brewed by brown-robed monks. Wagons dodged automobiles on cobblestone streets. Portly men in top hats sang Christmas carols under a gas street lamp next to an elevated railway. He made each detail as real as he could, his painting exuberant but unrefined.

  He worked on the mural for weeks. At first he attempted only a small idyllic scene, but as he worked, he thought of secondary characters, interesting buildings, thinly disgu
ised renditions of the high-tech skyscrapers he could see from the monastery windows. He kept intending to add finishing touches, to call his painting complete, then he thought of just one more idea, and another.

  He became engrossed in bringing to life the panorama he saw in his imagination. He could almost smell the wet snow, the horses, the rich ale pouring into the oak-slatted kegs. . . .

  “I cannot believe my eyes!” a firm male voice said, startling Garth so badly that he dropped his paintbrush. “Young man, what have you done?” He turned to see a stern monk named Hickory. “I noticed the light down here, but I never expected to see this! Who gave you permission?”

  Garth had never dreamed of asking permission. “I was going to show everyone when I was done.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have started in the first place.” Hickory crossed his arms over his chest. “Don’t we give you enough chores to keep you busy? It’s easy to see what sort of mischief idle hands can work.”

  Garth didn’t know how to respond. “But . . . look at it. This is art.”

  “When you paint all over a wall you don’t own, without permission, it is called vandalism. Come with me to Chocolate’s office. We’d better see the administrator right away.”

  Unfortunately, Chocolate didn’t know what to do with him, either. All the “Swan” children in the Falling Leaves were wards of the state, given up by parents who felt no obligation to babies born from bodies not their own, or impregnated during flings, after which the original minds had hopscotched to someone else. The monks received government stipends to teach and raise these young charges, and they took their obligations seriously, considering such children to be entirely new souls, new flames, and therefore something special.

  The chubby, soft-spoken administrator seemed flustered, his brow creased with worry. “Oh, why don’t we just let him paint scenes on all the walls? Maybe then the BTL won’t want to take over the monastery, after all.”

  “Sir!” Hickory said. “We can’t encourage this sort of—”

  The other monk waved his pudgy hand. “This is really not a very good time, Hickory.” He sighed, looking at the papers on his desk. “I suggest we merely have this young man repaint the walls so the room can be usable again.”

  Garth’s knees grew weak at hearing the devastating punishment. “Don’t you even want to look at what I’ve done, sir?”

  “I’m sure it’s wonderful,” Chocolate said, already engrossed in an official-looking document on his desk. “You’re a very talented young man, Garth, but you must learn to respect certain boundaries.”

  Later, the beige paint smelled sour as Garth swathed it on with a thick, inelegant brush. Horse carts vanished under a layer of drab tan. Rosy-cheeked monks continued to gulp foamy brew as he painted right over their faces.

  He dipped the heavy brush into the bucket again, swabbed more paint across the rough bricks. Garth wished he’d been able to at least show Eduard, Teresa, and Daragon before erasing his wall. He managed to keep the tears balanced inside his eyelids, not letting them spill down his cheeks.

  “That’s very good, from what I can still see of it,” Soft Stone said. The bald female monk was a mother and a teacher to her wards.

  Garth took a moment to compose himself before he faced her. “You should have been here before I covered all the good parts. Now it’s all gone.”

  “Not gone—your mural is still there, behind the paint.”

  The motionless brush dripped beige droplets on the floor. “But no one can see it. I can’t show it to anybody. Isn’t that what art is for?”

  The old woman nodded her smooth head. “Art is about sharing and communication, yes, but that’s not the only thing. There is process as well as product. Did you learn from doing this project?”

  He swallowed hard. “You told me to learn from everything I do.”

  “And?”

  “And . . . yes, I learned from it, I suppose. I enjoyed doing it, too.”

  “Then it’s not a total loss, little Swan.” Soft Stone smiled as she turned to leave. “An artist needs to do more than create pleasant scenes. Use your art as a lens for viewing all facets of life. You can’t just imitate what you see, you must first understand the thing. This understanding gives your art a life of its own.”

  He glanced with dismay at his half-defaced mural, and he thought hard about what she had said. With two strokes he covered a street that had taken him hours to paint.

  Now, grown-up at last, he had the freedom to pursue his creative vision. Among the aspiring artists, Garth wandered the stalls to glean new ideas, to study techniques. He saw polymerized butterfly wings, clouded crystals carved into prismatic shapes. Some artists worked with fabric, others with string and thread, one with satin spiderwebs. Each medium was a tool to capture life and its possibilities, and he wanted to experiment.

  The streets came alive with shoppers and curiosity seekers. A few haughty spectators were sourly critical of everything on display, commenting how they themselves could create far superior art “if only they had the time.” Garth had no patience for all their talk; they were irrelevant.

  He sat back on his cushion, doodling while he watched the people. With only limited income from his daily job, Garth lived austerely. He couldn’t afford high-tech creation and conceptualization gadgets, but he made do with the materials artists had used since the first paintings on cave walls.

  A gorgeous woman strutted beside a bronzed, muscular young man, arms linked in an old-fashioned way. The couple anticipated each other’s steps, smiling at half-spoken phrases, as if they had been together for decades. Garth wondered if they were an elderly pair vacationing in younger bodies, rich blue bloods who had rented new forms for themselves.

  Garth tore off another sheet of sketching paper and rummaged in his box for colored chalk. His hands a blur of motion, he scraped dusty colors across the surface, catching the mood, the shapes. He tried to illustrate two old and comfortable souls in fresh and energetic young bodies, the love they shared, the advantages that wealth and privilege had brought them. Charcoal sticks added shadows and stark definition. With the forgiving media of chalk and charcoal, he could work quickly, the better to capture his impressions and ideas.

  Unlike restless Eduard and constantly searching Teresa, Garth had always known what he wanted to do with his life. He drew anything and everything that caught his eye. His art became a user’s manual for his life, a way to sort through and understand and put his own perspective on everything he saw.

  Like a ripple on a placid lake, two uniformed Beetles walked through the market, escorting a trim man with dark hair, sunken eyes, and a bushy mustache. The BTL officers deferred to him, so the man was obviously not a prisoner, though his gaunt face and pale skin made him look wrung out. They followed the trim man as he looked at the various trinkets on display.

  “Chief Ob, may I remind you that a meeting is scheduled soon back at Bureau Headquarters,” one of the uniformed men said.

  The tired-looking man rubbed his mustache. “Another few moments, let me finish looking here.” He stopped in front of Garth’s sketches, appraising them. Garth looked at the Beetles, remembered the problems they had caused at the Falling Leaves monastery, and concentrated on his work.

  “Some of these attempts are really quite inept,” the man said tactlessly, as if Garth had begged for his opinion. He picked up one of the sketches. “Have you had any training at all?”

  The intimidating presence of the BTL officers made him flush, and Garth accepted the insult. “No formal training. I just . . . like to do art.”

  “Well, you’ve got more enthusiasm than talent.” Then the man’s expression softened. “Sometimes, though, sheer persistence may be enough to let you rise above the rest. I always wanted to be an artist myself, but I just didn’t have the drive. Somewhere along the line, I lost my inspiration.” He seemed distracted for a moment, then turned an intense gaze back toward Garth. “You’re a Swan, aren’t you? Raised by the Splin
ter monks?”

  Garth was astonished. “How—how did you know that?”

  The man just smiled. “I run the Bureau of Tracing and Locations.”

  Garth thought of Daragon, but couldn’t believe this powerful man would recognize the name of a relatively new recruit.

  “Sir, we really must get back to the hovercar,” the BTL officer persisted.

  Chief Ob set the chalk sketch back down. For a moment, Garth hoped the man would buy something, but instead Ob met the artist’s eyes. “You need a lot more practice, but keep at it. Don’t give up, like I did.” He strolled away, the two Beetles trying to hurry him along.

  Garth looked at his work, viewing it objectively. Of course he’d had no training, no focus, but he did have a burning desire to create. He could learn.

  He plunged into his work with a greater vehemence than ever before.

  4

  Eduard lay on his narrow bed, cocooned in damp sheets, his pores seeping a feverish sweat from someone else’s illness. All alone, he shuddered, pulling up the blanketfilm. He hadn’t expected the symptoms to be this bad when he’d sold his services, but he would get through it. He would survive. After all, he had agreed to this.

  He had already spent four days in a stranger’s body, enduring a miserable round of the flu just so some businessman wouldn’t miss his stockholders’ meetings. Unglamorous, maybe, but it was one way to make a living without going to work every day.

  He squeezed his puffy blue eyes shut, seeing technicolor explosions behind his lids, throbbing in time with the pounding in his head. He clutched the middle-aged potbelly as his intestines knotted up, then swung off the bed and lumbered toward the bathroom.