Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [30]
Dennis, sitting on the ground in the doorway headquarters, shook his head sadly. “I tried to come up with something, but at the same time I was trying to figure out how to get off the island. I thought that should take precedence, since if I couldn’t do that none of you would get a shot at the clue either. So I didn’t really make much progress, I’m afraid.”
“Are you sure there’s not more to it?” Boon asked. “How do we find the right pair of twins in a city this size? Must be crawling with twins.”
Felicia flashed her smile again, the one that Will was finding more intriguing all the time. “Maybe it’s not human twins,” she suggested. “There are maps every few blocks. If the twins are a natural feature, or one of the main city attractions, they’ll be on there.”
“Worth a look, anyway,” Dennis agreed. He forced himself wearily to his feet. “You guys have been waiting around here for long enough as it is. Let’s find us one of those maps and see if we can locate some twins.”
A kiosk three blocks down Jones Street had city maps and transport schedules for the whole region. When Dennis entered “twins” on the keypad, nothing came up. But when Estresor Fil called up a city overview, the twins were suddenly apparent to all. Twin Peaks were two round-topped, still undeveloped hills-two of the tallest points in the city, it turned out, even higher than Nob Hill. Will requested a history of them, in case it would help identify where at the feet of the twins they might expect to find the checkpoint, and learned that one of the hills-there were actually more than two, all in the same vicinity, though the two called Twin Peaks were the tallest-had once held a broadcasting tower from which signals could be sent through the air to homes all over the San Francisco Bay Area, and that on clear days the view from the Peaks was considered one of the best in the region. None of which helped a bit when it came to locating their checkpoint.
They had all done enough walking, except for Estresor Fil, who had been standing more or less in one place for hours now. But majority ruled and they hopped an underground transport to the Twin Peaks area. They would have, Will suspected, plenty of walking ahead of them yet, especially if they had to circumnavigate the base of the hills in order to find the spot they needed.
He, for one, was more than happy to sit down for a while.
As the map had indicated, the burnished brown hillsides of Twin Peaks were undeveloped, left open for hikers and view seekers to enjoy, Estresor Fil’s opinion on the latter notwithstanding. But the city came right up to its edge, with houses and commercial buildings hemming it in on all sides. In many spots, the members of Zeta Squadron couldn’t even see where the hillside began because it was behind private homes, with no access to the public. They had to try to peer over fences and between narrowly spaced houses to see if they could locate anything that might be their checkpoint.
After making a complete circuit, they still had no idea what they were looking for. “Maybe we interpreted the clue wrong,” Dennis said glumly. He had stopped walking and just stood on the sidewalk, holding his envelope between two fingers like it had become something unpleasant. “Maybe these are the wrong twins.”
“Yeah, and maybe this is a stupid project,” Boon added. “I mean, if we really were an away team in hostile territory, we wouldn’t have checkpoints to look for, would we?”
“Probably not,” Will agreed. “But we would have a mission of some kind. We’d be gathering information about the place, or we’d be trying to locate a contact, or something. We wouldn’t just land someplace for no reason