“Stop asking me that.”

“Is it turned on?”

She scowled. We waited for ten, fifteen minutes. The pen didn’t ring. I said, “I gotta pee.”

“We wait here,” Hootan said.

“Like a fucking racehorse,” I said.

Hootan took off his glasses to look at me. “Why do you have to be so crude?”

“You want me to just go all over your upholstery?”

“Aaqila goes with you,” he said.

“As long as she lets me go first.” I hustled toward the convenience store, and Aaqila was forced to walk quickly to keep up. The clerk, a chubby blond girl, read my pained expression and pointed me toward the restroom.

“Wait,” Aaqila said. She put a hand on my shoulder and pushed open the door with the other. The room was a few days of hard use past clean, with squares of toilet paper pasted to the grubby linoleum. There were two stalls, a sink, and a stainless steel mirror. One stall door was ajar, the other closed.

Aaqila knocked on the closed door. “Hello?” She knocked again.

I flashed on a fantasy: The door bangs open, knocking Aaqila back. Ollie steps out with a gun. We tie up the girl, duct tape her mouth shut, then … It got hazy after that. The money was back in the car, in the Mr. Squiggly box. So we’d have to get the drop on Hootan too.

Aaqila crouched to look under the stall door.

Second fantasy: I smash Aaqila in the back of the head (with what?), drag her into the stall, and press her face into the toilet.

“Thoughts like those aren’t helpful,” Dr. G said.

I disagreed.

Aaqila got to her feet and looked at her palms in disgust. “Nobody there.”

I took the empty stall. I scanned for pens taped to the toilet, messages scrawled on the toilet paper, words drawn into the grime on the wall … but no. The five sentences that Ollie had beamed onto the wall at Aaqila’s house were all I had to go on:

Been listening

Heard deal for chemjet

All OK

Stop at 401 Morrisburg SC K756

Wait for call from smugglers. XXOO

Historically speaking, phantom messages that appear on walls tend toward the cryptic. I had no Daniel to call on, but I did have an angel on my shoulder, and while we watched episodes of Beam Me Up! Dr. Gloria and I interpreted the words as follows, adding emotional subtext:

This is Ollie. I love you and care for you and have been tracking you through the pen I gave you. I have also, using the same pen or perhaps other devices I’ve placed on your person, overheard the deal you made with Fayza for the chemjet printer. I have a plan that will save us all and get us to America. Just drive toward Cornwall on the 401, and stop at the Morrisburg Service Center located at kilometer marker 756. The smugglers will call with further instructions. Hugs and kisses.

Perhaps, I thought, we’d read too optimistically. Maybe Ollie had no plan at all. Maybe I was supposed to come up with the plan.

“Everything will work out,” Dr. Gloria said, hovering over the stall. “How could you not trust someone who signs a secret message with those middle school Xs and Os?”

“She was being ironic,” I said.

“No, she said it ironically, but she was really being sincere. It was both.”

“Bi-ronic.”

“Bi-rony,” Dr. G agreed.

“So what happens when the smugglers call?”

“I have no idea,” Dr. Gloria said.

“Then would you let me pee in peace?”

In the next stall, a pen began to chime. I heard Aaqila answer. There was a pause, and then the girl was standing on her toilet and looking over the stall at me. “It’s for you.”

She handed me the pen. There was no video. A voice said, “Lyda Rose?” It was electronically modified, and sounded like LYda ROZE.

“Speaking.”

“I’M SENDing GPS coORDinates. DRIVE THERE.”

“Why are they using so much distortion?” Dr. Gloria asked. “There’s perfectly good speech modification technology out there.”

I ignored her. The voice said, “PARK and turn OFF your LIGHTS.”

“They could sound like a British nanny or Samuel L. Jackson, any accent they like, and it would be just as untraceable.”

“WAIT for FUR-thur inSTRUC-tions.”

“No lights, wait for instructions,” I repeated, for Aaqila’s benefit. I didn’t want to give them the impression that I was making any of this up. “Got it.”

The call cut off. A few seconds later I received a text message with a travel link in it. The little map showed our route. I couldn’t decide if the call had been from Ollie or from the actual smugglers. Then I couldn’t decide if it mattered.

“I suppose they think it makes them sound tough,” Dr. G said. “It’s like a font for gangsters.”

*   *   *

I took the front seat with Hootan to relay directions. He wanted me to send the map to his glasses, but I refused on the grounds that HUDs were fucking crazy, blindfolds for people with ADD, and Aaqila agreed. The pen directed me, and I directed Hootan. After forty minutes we left the 401 and took 138 south through Cornwall City, which at night looked like every small city at night. We passed an abandoned port-of-entry station, crossed a short bridge, and came down on Cornwall Island.

The island sat in the middle of the St. Lawrence like a mossy stepping stone between nations. It was technically part of Canada, but it was also inside the Akwesasne Reserve, the territory of the Mohawk Nation. The reserve (or “reservation” if you were speaking Anglo-American) included parts of New York, Quebec, and Ontario. The Mohawks had little use for borders. The tribe went to court every time the Americans or the Canadians tried to set up toll stations or immigration controls, taking the position that you could no more divide up their land than you could cut soup. There were homes on the southeast of the reserve where the New York/Quebec border ran straight through the living room. Sometimes the tribe won the case—like the closing of the port-of-entry on the Cornwall City mainland—and sometimes the governments did.

If we stayed on the highway it would turn into the International Seaway Bridge and carry us to America—and straight into the Hogansburg port-of-entry and the arms of the United States Border Patrol. The legal battle over that POE was one the tribe had definitely lost.

(I came to know these facts the way we all came to know things in the twenty-first century: My internet told me so. The map on my pen came chock-full of textual tidbits, like this Fun Fact: In winter, smugglers used to cross the frozen St. Lawrence in trucks, but for the past five winters the river has failed to freeze solid. Huh!)

We did not stay on the highway. Well before the Seaway Bridge the pen directed us to turn east. Hootan cruised at unsuspicious speeds through the island’s tiny downtown, then into a woodsy residential area. We kept going until we’d almost reached the eastern end of the island, where we were surrounded by a lot more woods than residences. It was still winter here: Snow lined the road and lay thick under the trees.

I pointed to a gap between two large firs. “Pull off the road,” I said. “And turn out your lights.”

Hootan gave me a look. He didn’t like to be ordered around—especially by a woman—but he did as he was told. “Now what?” he asked.

I didn’t bother answering. He knew what they’d told me.

There wasn’t much traffic on this road, but we tensed up as each pair of headlights passed us. After fifteen minutes Hootan said, “We’re going to get stopped by the cops.”

“Can you be stopped if you’re not moving?” Dr. Gloria asked from the backseat.

“Relax,” I said to everyone, including myself.

It was another half hour before the pen chimed. Aaqila had taken it back from me. She held out the device, and all four of us leaned in to hear. “WALK toward the WA-ter,” the same electronic voice said. “Bring the MON-ey. Come ALONE.”