“I do.”
“I felt something in my head. I felt it . . .” I shuddered. “Tear open. Right after the first man slapped me back in the market. I could feel it. Then it tore more back there at the charred warehouse, and I could see something that I could do. Then I just could do this.” And maybe getting slapped that hard broke something, I thought. And sometimes when something breaks, things come out of the cracks. I shuddered and I looked ahead. Here we were again, the enormous wall of dust, dirt, and sand was rolling toward us like the end of our lives. I shuddered, again. “I think. . .” I frowned, feeling dizzy for a moment.
“What?” he said, staring ahead. “What do you think?”
“It’s so scary,” I said, tears wetting my eyes.
“I know. No one ever gets used to the sight of it.” He took my hand. I squeezed it and sobbed, looking at the Red Eye. “Don’t look at it. This’ll be better than going in with just an anti-aejej. This truck should be made to withstand the wind, it’s probably weighted. It would be stupid to bring it out here if it can’t take it. What did you think? Tell me about that.”
And as I spoke, the great storm blocked out the sunlight we had left. I spoke fast because it felt like I only had seconds. “I think it started when that man hit me in the market. That’s when I first glimpsed the eyes.”
“Eyes?”
The truck was rocking now, but the winds didn’t blow it away. We were still driving forward. It was made to endure the Red Eye. I hoped it was well made. The headlights switched to floodlight mode. They were solid beams of light in the dark chaos. In the back, Carpe Diem and GPS moaned softly, but they seemed okay. The truck remained relatively dust-tight. We wouldn’t need to use the anti-aejej. I tapped the dashboard, which was all touch screen. I ran my hand over it and was able to do what I needed to do. “So easy,” I whispered.
“You can keep controlling the truck?”
I nodded. “I just shut off the tracking that would tell them where we are.” I touched the screen again and worked my hand in a circle. The satellite GPS was useless, but I still had one other tool. Up came a rudimentary thermal and motion scan of the area. The Red Eye’s air currents showed as blue constantly moving lines. For miles around us was nothing that produced heat. Literally nothing. The land was windswept cracked earth.
“There,” DNA said, pointing at the bottom of the dashboard.
“What is that?” I asked. The red shape was pretty big, miles long and wide and it was laid out in the strangest shape. “It almost looks like an infinity symbol.”
“Not infinity,” he whispered. “I know what that is.” He grinned. “It has to be!” He looked at me. “If that’s what I think it is, a lot of people actually do think that place is infinity, that it’s everything. I think that’s the Hour Glass! The anti-aejej protecting it must give off heat, that’s why we see the shape so clearly.”
“Wait, what? There’s an anti-aejej that huge?! What for? Why’s it in the middle of one of the planet’s greatest disaster areas?”
“It’s the biggest anti-aejej in the world and its wind powered,” he said, almost proudly. “Ultimate Corp isn’t the only one who knows how to harness the Red Eye’s wind.”
I squinted at the screen, noting just how big it was. Miles wide and two miles long. “There’s no other way an anti-aejej could be that huge and maintain power. Has to be wind power here, yeah. But why?”
“The Hour Glass is the greatest city of Non-Issues the world has ever seen,” DNA said. “It is legend. It’s where people go to be found, to disappear, or to just be. There’s law and order but there is no Ultimate Corp or Nigerian government.”
“You sound like you really want to see this place,” I said. “Why haven’t you gone?”
“Look around,” he said. “You think I’d travel into this on purpose?”
“Good point.”
I sat back on the chair and just shook my head. I had never in a million years heard of such a place. “This is too much.”
“Oh now you say that?” he laughed. “I was thinking the same thing a few minutes ago when you were using your mind to stop government weapons from executing us.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. But when I did this, I saw a billion eyes looking back. I opened my eyes. How the hell am I ever going to sleep, I wondered.
“The Hour Glass isn’t just named for its shape,” he continued. “It’s also protected by a strong digital net that scrambles any sense of its location every hour on the hour.”