Free The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor Page B

talking at the Panda Grove with their hands over their mouths. And the dumb-luck coincidence that Rabbit’s childhood best friend had also been deaf, and so Rabbit had picked up some rudimentary sign, this cemented his place in Jabez’s rigid affections.
    “The ID sniper is a rifle designed to shoot a traceable microchip into the human body so a person can be tracked,” someone was saying at the bar, where debates about conspiracy and subterfuge held never-dying allure. This rifle, the man went on to say, had recently appeared at a weapons trade show in Germany and it was understood that American and Canadian law enforcement agencies were very much interested.
    Rabbit kept his head down, poring over his map, its streets and avenues, squares and boulevards. The map was scored with marks and connections. Numbers and arrows, a hieroglyphic tangle to any eye but Rabbit’s. Almost twelve months of his life up on cedar shakes and asphalt shingles, gravel on tar, sheet metal. All over the city. In Angus Lake, the East Shore, the warehouse district. Downtown, River Park. And right there in Stofton too, the Slopes, up into the Heights. Rabbit knew the city from its roofs. And when his index finger had traced all those lines and still found itself bouncing on top of the Peavey Block, right there immediately south of the plaza, the solution to his troubles was plain. He simply couldn’t call the thing finished without that unit in place. So he’d just have to return to the site and reinstall the thing. Which meant building another one. Which meant, against all good sense, that he’d have to borrow more money. And it wouldn’t be from Jabez either, who had many things in abundance, none of them being money. It would be instead from the ever-liquid Beyer.

    “There is a system of tunnels and storage areas under the city,” somebody over at the bar was saying just that moment. Yelling really—there seemed to be a disagreement on this point. “It was built by federal authorities—”
    And then they stopped. Which Rabbit could easily interpret: that would be Jabez crashing into the room and causing every speaker to consider lines of sight and what exactly was being said. Across the floor he came now, directly towards Rabbit, hands already in frenzied motion, twisting and whirling. A cyclone of sign. And the message was clear. The world, as long predicted, was coming apart at the seams.
    Don’t joke about it, Jabez was saying, noting the suppressed amusement in Rabbit’s expression. This time, the terrible news was terribly true.
     
    RABBIT WALKED TO THE RIM OF THE PLAZA. He stood at the south end, in the mouth of an alley, and looked down across the sunken space with its spreading trees and calling fountains. Scattered crowds already, a sense of early gathering. Rabbit could only shake his head. Soldiers, people gesturing, agitation. Rabbit wondered what reflected the times more: the fact that someone would be desperate enough about anything to take children hostage, or the fact that Jabez and his crew had so quickly found a passionate reason to turn this incident into an angry protest.
    Back in the Grove, that was just what Rabbit had seen: real anger. Sure, people hated whatever lay at the root of these events. Whatever it was that made people shoot up a hotel, or call out the helicopter gunships, or take hostages. But people more recently, especially people like Jabez, splintered so quickly on where to finger the blame. That was the contemporary difference. Sitting in the basement of the Grove, Jabez had hardly finished telling Rabbit what he knew—theater, kids taken hostage, guy with a gun—and he was past those
details, on to what might lie behind. Shadowy forces. Hidden causes and secret triggers. Powers and authorities. Nobody used the word conspiracy anymore because it had become a self-defeating cliché. But suspicions turned quickly inward. Things were never believed to be as they seemed.
    Rabbit thought about