I handed the phone back in shock. I felt like the world had been suddenly filled with invisible syrup, and I was trying to move through it.
Maybe I should have stayed with the fake foster parents. But Yggdrasil had guns and tinted cars. They were tapping phones. This was hardcore.
“The problem with you is you run to conclusion too quick,” Auntie Lynn told me in the hotel once, while I was helping her fold towels. “Take you time, breath deep, consider all the options first.”
I took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to do next as I watched the sinister suited men reach the public phones I’d been at earlier. They started looking around.
“Your aunt can’t help you?” the lady asked, her wide sunhat flopping in a slight wind.
“No. I’m on my own,” I said with a sigh.
The couple looked at each other. “You said you were going to Mitad Del Mundo?”
I nodded, trying to get between the two of them and the suits.
“We were going over there today anyway,” they said. “We can leave right now. We’ll take you to your parents.”
I wanted to hug the hefty old man, but I licked my lips, stood straight, and shook his hand. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s no problem.” The man said. He looked embarrassed. Maybe from thinking I was begging for money earlier. “I’m Tony. This is my wife June.”
“I’m Kadie. Kadie Stephens.” I slipped in front of Tony as he moved to continue to keep him between me and the Yggdrasil men. We walked out of the market to the street.
“That’s an interesting accent, Kadie. Where are you from?” June asked.
“St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands,” I told her.
“Oh, we went on vacation there once. We were on a cruise ship, what was the name. Tony? Tony?”
I scrunched myself into the back of their red, air-conditioned Jeep. I sweated, but not from the heat.
“I don’t remember,” Tony declared. He fumbled with the keys, and I tried to keep as low as I could without appearing obvious about it all.
The rental car pulled away, headed north toward the shiny thread that rose up into the clouds, while men in suits walked through the market place just yards away.
I felt like Anansi the Spiderman from the old tales mom used to read me before bed as we left the market behind. My smile faded a little as June began telling me all about the five hours she’d spent in St. Thomas, and then St. Maarten, and on down the Caribbean.
She had pictures on her phone to show me as well.
***
A whole mess of people crowded the parking lots of Mitad Del Mundo where Tony and June dropped me off. They spilled all out over and past the grass and scrub around brightly colored buildings that surrounded the plaza. And it was the plaza where the end of the All Tree’s space elevator wire touched the ground.
News crews stood outside vans with large dishes on top that made them look ready to tip right over. Stalls selling food, trinkets, and postcards made the place feel just like the market I’d fled.
Police in navy blue uniforms walked up and down by yellow wooden barricades around the buildings. A line of people made its way toward the plaza.
“Tourists stand over the yellow line,” said a girl on the other side of the barrier.
“What?” I stopped looking for my fake foster parents to look at her. She was an Indian girl with jet-black straight hair and oak-brown eyes.
She straddled the yellow line in the brick walkway, crossing her arms over a bright red and blue polo shirt. “Like this. See? Half of me is on the north side of the world, the other half on the south! You should take a picture now.”
I didn’t know what to say. Her mother wore this bright yellow sari, which I’d only ever seen in movies. She wore it with a sort of discomfort that made me wonder if she was doing it more for the cameras than because it was something she wore often. “Sita, he doesn’t have a camera,” she said in a British-sounding accent. She’d been staring up at the space elevator’s ribbon, I realized. Most of the adults in line were.
They would hurt their necks if they kept at that. I did the first time the Yggdrasil Corporation drove me through one of the big cities in New Mexico: I spent the whole time looking straight up at all the tall buildings through the sunroof, because in St. Thomas hardly anything was as tall as these.
One of the Yggdrasil people had laughed at me back then. Now everyone in the square here was behaving like I had.
“I know that,” Sita said, quite seriously. “I was just making conversation.”
Someone up the line shooed away a large cat with a tuxedo kind of pattern on its fur. That fluffy cat didn’t belong in the heat, I figured it must have escaped from someone in line. It meandered its way along the barricades and stopped nearby to lick a paw.
“You should take a picture of me,” Sita said. “I’m going up to the All Tree. You won’t ever have a chance to meet me again for a long time. You’ll have something to remember me by.”
I scanned further up the line and there they were: my foster parents.
They had an older boy along with them.
The older boy sort of, if you weren’t paying attention, looked like me. Dark brown skin. Hastily pleated hair that kind of looked dreaded. But not really my tight locks at all.
“I’m very happy for you,” I muttered to Sita. I left her and shoved my way along the barricades. Was Yggdrasil trying to sneak a look-alike up to space?
They had my ticket.
They’d replaced me. First they’d replaced my parents, now me.
That, I realized, was why they’d tried to get me at the telephones. I’d run away, they switched to a new plan to use my ticket, and now they wanted me shut up.
They had stolen my name to do whatever it was that Yggdrasil wanted to do up on the All Tree.
I waited, crouched behind one of the barricades, as the line moved on. What were my options? Auntie Fixit said she would support me no matter what. What should I do? Yggdrasil had my passport. I had no money.
Could I get all the way home like I’d gotten from the edge of the city to Mitad Del Mundo? I doubted it.
So what now?
Here they came. The fakers. All three of them.
My imposter wasn’t even the right age. He was muscled, squinty-eyed, and probably eighteen. I’d bet he was a soldier like Alan. He straggled behind Alan and Maddy, pushing all their luggage along on a flat wooden cart with wheels.
Not just their luggage. I recognized my purple suitcase stuck in with everything. Apparently they’d gotten him to fake being me so quickly they didn’t even get him any of his own luggage, he was just going to use mine.
I should have let it go. But the moment he passed in front of me I reached out under the barricade and tapped him. He looked back, and then down.
“Know who I am?” I demanded. He looked startled, then nodded.
He glanced at Alan and Maddy, then back down at me as he shoved the luggage cart forward to block their view of us. “You’d be Kadie.”
“That’s right.” I opened my mouth to tell him that I was going to expose them to this crowd so I could stop Yggdrasil. Stop them from stealing my name and chasing me.
But fake-Kadie stopped me. “Here’s a card with a thousand dollars on it. It’ll get you home. If I were you, I’d take it and run. They’re looking for you everywhere.”
He kept moving, and I looked down at the fancy hologram on the card.
For a moment, I believed him.
For a moment, I half turned away.
But then I thought about the men in tinted cars showing up when I made the phone calls in the market, and I threw the card back at fake-Kadie.
I’d bet anything that the moment I used this card, Yggdrasil would know where I was. And how would I travel without identification? Identification that fake-Kadie probably had? “You can’t just do this,” I shouted. But I knew that wasn’t true. They’d stolen my ID. They were a corporation that worked with the government: they probably had access to anything they needed.
Alan and Maddy turned around. They put their hands up to their ears and started whispering, like secret service agents in a movie.
I’d blown it. Now they knew I was here.
I looked around for reporters, and stopped as I spotted familiar-looking men in suits elbowing through the crowd at me.
Left, right, and in front.
I was trapped.
***
I ran in the only direction available: out into the line, under the barricades.
No advice for something like this, Auntie Lynn? No, I thought. Run and think later. Cause a big scene. Get everyone’s attention.
The police turned, but I was close to the plaza buildings, and while I wasn’t muscled like fake-Kadie or my foster parents, I’d been running on beaches and walking to school long enough. I’d been dodging punches and bigger kids all my life. I was quick.
As I ran into the plaza I saw that the wire that descended from the clouds was more of a ribbon. And the giant tadpole-shaped pod at the bottom was one of the climbers. It was huge now that I was this close to it; on TV they seemed so more like the size of a bus, not a small house.
“I’m Kadie Stephens,” I screamed as I ran, the only thing I could think of doing to stop Yggdrasil. The police were catching up far quicker than I thought they would. “I’m Kadie Stephens! I’m Kadie Stephens!”
I screamed it as I ran past the line toward a giant, tongue-like ramp where a seven-foot tall tree with purple leaves stood.
No, I was wrong. The tree wasn’t standing, it was turning around slightly.
Its six limbs, or trunks, shuffled it forward at me.
“I’m Kadie Stephens!” I screamed at the first alien I’d ever seen with my own eyes as five Ecuadorean policemen tackled me, hundreds of feet away short of my goal.