Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~

Sonali had gotten pretty far north, and it was a ways coming back through the southern suburbs just to get to the roads that would go south. Not just in distance but in time: a clear Saturday in the summer, of course everyone was going to be out, cars wedged up in traffic, pedestrians stepping off the sidewalk into the bike lanes as they walked around and through each other on the big shopping streets, the glare of the high sun coming down all over everything, glinting off the shining white granite. It was a grand day and all for a ride, but Sonali had one too many things on her mind to pay attention to everything that she'd need to not to, like, run anyone over or get hit by a bus herself, and at the first chance, just past the Victoria Bridge, she ducked off into the back streets, save herself a little time and stress.

Off the main roads, too, it was still a normal summer Saturday. Men out washing their cars on the sidewalk trying to catch her eye, the noise of kids in back gardens playing, distant swatches of music or TV soundtracks filtering down from upper windows, blaring from a transistor radio hung out the back of a builder's van while the workers sat down and took their tea. Sonali's neighborhood was a ways away, but on a day like this, with people outside, you could almost feel that the next intersection, you turn the wrong way and you end up rolling past the shop, baba coming out to yell at you for leaning over the handlebars or racing on the wrong side of the street or something. She slowed up a little, steering around a couple kids stopped in the street over their scooters, looking at something in a handheld device. No, she wasn't quite home, but it took some reminding to remember that she wasn't.

Like, say, the three police cars drawn up onto the sidewalk in front of that house on the next block. No sirens, no tape, but three cars, and that was enough to take it real slow, leaned back, on the far side of the street to stay out of the way. That too was like and not like home; her neighborhood wasn't real tough, not like the one that Colleen was supposed to be from, and this one didn't look much different. In places like these, yeah, you heard about crime, but you heard about it second or third hand, always happening to someone else – and you never saw the police cars in person. And that's all it was, just the patrol cars; none of the cops had even come out of the house by the time Sonali rolled down through the block, out to the junction with the Wellington Road, and out towards the south and the coast.

Sonali avoided the temptation to stop home on the way through – baba was going to be around, and if she could manage it she would rather only get hauled over the coals for this ride once, at the end of the day – and cut through the back of the Petrofac parking lot to get to the coastal access road, rolling south alongside the railroad tracks. The road crossed the tracks as it came back into town, and she had to dismount and push her bike across the bridge by the post office; too much traffic, no dedicated bike lanes. While waiting for the traffic light across from the McColl's, she noticed another flyer taped to a lamppost: Nicky Dunbar, age eight, missing since two weeks back, photos and a description of his clothes, a police tipline number and rewards for any information, anything at all. It was like it was getting closer. Sonali shook her head and mounted up, as the light changed and she pushed out ahead of the traffic. You saw flyers like that all the time – you saw flyers like that all the time, and you stopped thinking about it, stopped noticing it, stopped even feeling sad for the poor kids and their poor families. It was a coincidence. It didn't mean anything. That Liam way back that she couldn't stop remembering, that wasn't connected to this thing with the caves, this thing with the caves and the Pokemon that wasn't even really a thing yet, and this Nicky wasn't connected to it either.

It was nothing, and she was spinning nothing into nothing, and she had more important things to be paying attention to, looking at the cliffs and the landfall and trying to see where there might be ways to get to caves below, and she kept telling herself that, and by the time Sonali got down past the old quarry, she could almost believe she believed it, and that she wasn't forcing herself to miss something by insisting things worked in one way but not another. Across the railroad cut from the quarry, paths led out onto the cliffs; Sonali pulled out her phone to check the signal as she struggled to push her bike up and over the rails. Three bars – there was no telling what a signal might be like underground, but at least someone on the surface here might think that if there were caves down below, there might be rare Pokemon in them. It was worth checking, at least.