Kevin began typing into his computer. “I’m no expert, but it looks like a surgical problem. Bleeding or something like that.”
“Is that what Odin says?”
“Give it a minute. The simulation’s still running.” Kevin sat watching the monitor for a minute, drumming his fingers. “Okay, here we are. Probable etiologies: vasogenic cerebral edema, 40 percent likelihood; hemorrhage from incompletely ligated feeder vessel, 35 percent; status epilepticus, 20 percent; shock, 3 percent; pulmonary embolism, 1 percent. Does that help?”
“No. I’ve considered all that already. What about a SIPNI malfunction?”
“Likelihood of device failure 0.05 percent. Odin rechecked the diagnostics we did in the OR and says everything was well within tolerance. There’s no reasonable probability of a failure this early in the game.”
“Could you come up to the ICU and run another diagnostic check?”
Kevin smiled coyly, as though he had smelled a trap. “No can do, babe. Sorry. I’m a bit tied up at present.”
“It would only take five minutes.”
Kevin shook his head. “Not negotiable. Anything else you need? If not, let’s say sayonara.”
There was a screech, and Ali turned toward Loki’s cage on the floor beside her. Her face brightened when she saw the monkey looking back at her. She pursed her lips and made a series of cheeping sounds, which Loki answered with a couple of clicks. “Oh, Loki!” she said, in a sing-song voice. “Look at you! Going for a car ride, huh!” When Loki pushed his hand through the grating, she bent down and let him grasp the end of her finger.
“You’d better go, babe,” said Kevin.
“I can’t believe this is us ending like this,” she said, still bent over. “We had so much going for us once.”
“Paradise lost.”
“Do you remember when we first met, at that experimental neurology conference at Vail? Here we were, working at the same hospital, but our paths had never crossed.”
“What’s your point?”
She sat up and smiled nervously—a forced smile. Her voice had a forced pleasantry to it, too, almost like something rehearsed. Kevin noticed how her ID badge flapped as she twisted the stupid baseball lanyard around her fingers. “You were horribly irritating that first day. I was trying to give a lecture on stem cell transplants for Parkinson’s disease. In front of everyone, you tore into me, going on about how naïve I was. Every cell had to integrate itself into the neural net, you said, otherwise it would never work in a mature brain. You cracked a joke about a Greek fisherman in a belly dance troupe. I practically ran out of the conference room.” As she spoke, Kevin noticed how her gaze rarely touched his, but kept sweeping back and forth around the room, as though searching for something. What’s she up to? Kevin wondered. He quickly checked the surveillance monitors. No unusual activity. The corridor outside the lab was clear.
“Yeah, well, you bounced back okay,” he said.
“I was up the whole night on my laptop, searching through PubMed for every paper ever written on brain architectonics, neural nets, and dopaminergic pathways. The next day, I collared you in the lobby—”
“And told me that I was right, but short-sighted.” Okay, thought Kevin, I’ll play this out. I’ll find out soon enough what she’s driving at. There was maybe a one in a million chance that she was softening to his proposal. For even one in a million, he didn’t want to risk losing her. He smiled, trying his best to put on a lighthearted tone. “No one knew how the neural nets worked. But the neurons knew. They just needed to be free to guide their own assimilation. Yeah, I remember what you said. It was a fucking original point. I knew then that you weren’t just a green-eyed bombshell. You had guts and you could think.”
“You asked me to come climbing with you.”
“Mount Jackson. The East Couloir.”
Ali locked her gaze with him for the first time, smiling nervously. “I had never climbed before. I was frightened of the cold, frightened of the heights, frightened of trusting my life to a little piece of rope.”
“You hid that well.”
“You showed me how to control the lines, how to use my weight against the rock face. And then … you left me to fend for myself. Any other man would have doted over a girl, checking everything she did, encouraging her, hauling her up over the hard places. But you forced me to do everything myself. At first I thought you were a horrible cad. I had to struggle to keep pace with you. My palms bled where the rocks scoured them. My arms shook with exhaustion. Once, when I was dangling from a little steel peg on the underside of a ledge, you made me overcome my panic and look down — nothing but a thousand feet of air below me. You said, ‘This is what science should feel like. This mix of terror and exhilaration. If your work doesn’t give you this feeling, you’re wasting your time.’”
How true that is, Kevin thought. And it describes this day to a tee.
Ali went on. “When we reached the top, late in the afternoon, the air was thin, and so cold that it seemed to stab my chest when I breathed. There were mountains on every side of us, like folds of a purple blanket that had dropped out of the sky. One of the highest stood out like a band of gold in the sun.”
“Holy Cross.”
“Yes, it was like bright gold, with a cap of silver ice. Far below us, trails of mist threaded the tree-line, bright white against dusky bluish green. I had a peculiar feeling, like I had stood in that place before. Slowly, I realized that I had—as a little girl, I had dreamed a hundred times of just such a place. Only in my dreams, gravity itself surrendered to me, and I glided over the crags like an owl, past all pain and suffering, and a warmth greater than the sun filled me. In my dream, and now again in life, I saw what a small thing it was to climb by toe and bloodied hand over a pile of rocks. The real conquest was of myself—my fears, my weariness, my pain. If I could master that, not all the Alps and rivers and seas in the world could confine my spirit. There was something in me that was unbreakable and inextinguishable. This was what you had been trying to teach me. By forcing me to rely on my own resources, you had made me look inside myself, and recognize the strength within.”
Kevin remembered the exact moment, how he had looked at her then—her hair blowing wildly in the untamed wind, her skin turned golden in the sunset. She had had a look in her eyes as of a fire of genius being lit—a weird merging of girlishness and sagacity, of shyness and determination. It was the first time that he kissed her. It was the moment when he fell in love.
Ali blushed. “That night on the mountaintop, I couldn’t sleep.”
No, neither of them had slept. They had zipped their sleeping bags together, and found new peaks to conquer. By the time the sun came up again over the ridge of Holy Cross, it was as though they had known each other for a thousand years.
Ali hung her head again. “What’s happened to us, Kevin? When did we start to go downhill?”
“When you moved out and shacked up with Helvelius. That was a slip-slide if there ever was one.”
“No, it was long before that. It was Ramsey, wasn’t it?”
“Ramsey?” Kevin raised his eyebrows. “I thought you took a vow never to mention his name.”
“Kevin, that was the worst thing to happen in my life. I wish I had died instead.”
“Not that anyone would have known it. You were a fucking icicle. When we scattered his ashes on the lake—not one tear. Not one word on the whole ten-hour drive back. Scarcely a word ever since.”
“I had so much pain inside me, I … I couldn’t … If I had let even a little bit out, it would have killed me. Don’t you understand?”
“Mothers cry when they bury their sons. Wives … a wife … Fuck, don’t get me started.”
“Couldn’t you sense how much I was suffering, Kevin?”
Kevin’s eyes flared. “So what? I tried and tried to get you to talk about it. But you clammed up, like always. With all your yoga and your meditations and your freaky breath control, I’ve always known
that you were a volcano inside. God knows, I fell for you because of that volcano. But you never trusted me enough to share what you were really feeling. I’ve been married to you for five years and still don’t even know you.”
“What did you want from me? To scream and smash the chinaware?”
“Yeah. For a start. If you felt like it.”
“That’s not me. I … I can’t do that.”
“Which brings us back to where we started from.”
She was twisting on her stool like a little girl waiting to have her tooth pulled. She looked at the door, then at Loki’s traveling cage. “Kevin, what if I offered to come back to you?”
“You’re not serious,” he said with a nervous chuckle. He had lived so long for this moment, that he couldn’t believe his ears.
“Not on your terms. I couldn’t do that. But what if I said, ‘Forget this bomb. Shut down Odin and turn yourself in and face whatever you have to like a man—and if you do that, I’ll tear up the divorce papers, and … and—’”
“And do what?”
“Wait.”
Kevin let out a bitter laugh. “You mean until I got out of prison?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’d need a down payment on that, babe.”
“How?”
“Kiss me.”
She seemed stunned by the suggestion. But, ever so hesitantly, she drew her stool a little closer. She was as pale as he had ever seen her. Her lips were dry and taut. Her lower jaw was trembling. She leaned toward him. For a moment, it seemed that she would actually kiss him. Kevin waited coldly, challenging her with his impassivity. Seconds passed. Her lips were so close that Kevin could feel her breath against his cheek. Then, suddenly, she wrenched away like a snapped rubber band, and put her hand to her mouth, as if she were about to be sick.
“It’s Richard, isn’t it?” said Kevin. “You’ll never forgive me for his death. There’s no going back now, jasmine flower. We’ve reached an irreversible phase transition, as they say in thermodynamics.”
Seeing Ali’s revulsion, Kevin desired her all the more. On an impulse, he seized her by the arm and jerked her toward him, forcing his lips against hers. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly. Oh, it had been months since he had cradled her curves like this, felt the warmth of her body, smelled the clean lemony scent of her skin and hair! For an instant he was on Mount Jackson again.
But the wave of passion broke upon the rocks of her disdain. She was a statue, her lips a sheet of tissue stretched over stony teeth. He pressed harder. With his hand behind her neck, he pushed her face against his, trying to ram life into those lips that were dead to him but had yielded to Helvelius—lips of treason, lips that deserved to be crushed and hurt. He pressed so hard that neither of them could breathe.
When she tore herself away from him at last, she ripped off the cool, smug veneer with which he had hidden from himself the full depths of his bitterness—bitterness he had had to deny at all costs because it meant that she still had power over him and could make him suffer. In the place of that veneer was a raw and howling wound. If Ali had still been in his grip he could have snapped her neck.
He turned away, panting to contain his fury. He knew now why Helvelius’s death had not slaked his thirst for revenge. Helvelius was but a fly. The true source of his rage was here—in this ruined dream, lost to him forever. It was Ali, above all, that he hated. Hated as much as he loved her.
And with that realization, a sobering question entered his mind.
Does Odin know this, too?
He turned and looked at her starkly, searchingly. Like one spent from combat or from the act of love, he spoke with feeble breath. “Listen, Ali, I think you ought to leave the hospital. Right now. Just walk out of here until this is all over.”
“I couldn’t do that. Jamie—”
“I don’t think you can help Jamie.” He waved his hand toward the open chart binder. “You need to look out for yourself. Seriously, leave now.”
* * *
Ali didn’t hear him. Her attention had been caught by something triflingly small, yet out of place. Jutting from the front of the big tower computer case underneath Kevin’s desk was a flash drive—a blue plastic memory storage device small enough for a keychain fob. Ali had almost never seen Kevin use one. Most of his projects took up terabytes of disk space, which he would access directly from his lab, or, when he needed to, from remote interfaces through the hospital terminals or from his workstation at home. So why use a flash drive now, holding no more than a gigabyte or so of memory? No sooner had she asked, than the answer hit her.
It’s his money.
He had bragged about collecting a billion dollars—so much that he had to spread it into hundreds of bank accounts. He needed to take all that account data with him when he left, written onto something inconspicuous and portable—exactly like a flash drive. With this little toy, he could stick his billions into his pocket, and walk off to anywhere in the world.
It was a hunch, but if she were right, that flash drive could be the one thing valuable enough to get him to leave the lab.
Don’t think, try! she thought.
* * *
The kiss had left Kevin’s lips burning, as though he had soaked them in nitric acid. What a fucking screw-up! he thought. What an ass I was to reach out to her! He sought for a line of retreat, some way to piece together his lost dignity. “Look, babe,” he said, trying to appear blasé. “I guess I got a little fresh there. But I think you’ve overstayed your welcome.”
Ali seemed not to hear him. She had a funny, distant look. She pointed to the untouched coffee sitting on the far side of the desk. “If you don’t want that, can I have it?”
Kevin raised his eyebrows, in a kind of weary facial shrug, and leaned back as she reached across him for the cup. Let her take it and leave. Anything. Just get rid of her.
“Oh, hell!” she cried as her grasp fell short. Kevin turned and saw the cup slip from her fingers and tip over the edge of the desk.
“Shit!” he cried. By reflex, he grabbed for the cup, twisting his body around the corner of the desk. It dashed against his fingers, popping its plastic lid, and releasing sixteen ounces of hot latte over a stack of papers on the floor. “Shit! Shit! Goddamn fucking shit!” he roared.
He spun around to curse Ali herself, but the stool was empty. His gaze shot across the room. There she was, racing for the door, drawing back the slide-bolt while still in midstride. In her left hand he saw her clutching something small and blue.
“Fuck!” shouted Kevin. “Bring it back!”
On his feet in a second, he vaulted with one hand over the corner of his desk. He flung the door open and charged after her. She had no more than a six-foot lead, and he closed the gap quickly. He lunged and reached for her hair, missed it, but caught the hem of her scrub top, tearing the fabric under the armpit. The drag pulled her off balance and swung her into the wall. If she hadn’t grabbed onto a water fountain, she would have wound up on the floor. Now she was trapped—caught in the angle between the wall and the fountain. Kevin moved in, slapping her hard against the temple. “Give it back, you bitch!”
* * *
Ali winced with pain. She thrust the flash drive behind her back, pinning her hand tightly against the wall so Kevin couldn’t reach it. The men’s room door was just across the hall, ten feet away. She had to cross those ten feet somehow. She had to break free.
She couldn’t reach the alarm pen. Should I call out for help? she thought. No, I musn’t! One glimpse of Harry, and Kevin will bolt for the lab. There won’t be another chance.
Kevin kept hitting her, again and again, on the side of the head. With his left hand, he grabbed the lanyard of her ID badge, and wound it tightly around his knuckles, digging a deep furrow in her throat. A little tighter, and the carotid blood flow to her brain would be cut off. Ten seconds after that she would be unconscious.
God, oh, God! I’ve got to do something! He’s
going to kill me!
* * *
Kevin could feel Ali weakening. His hands felt supremely powerful, charged with rage. He clenched the lanyard tight as he pushed her hard against the fountain, knowing that the faucet must be digging into her spine. He felt closer to her than he had ever been in the act of love—his knee forced deep between her thighs, his breast crushing hers, his sweat and hers mixing into a single slick.
She bore it all in silence, as though there were nothing more to be said between them, but only a contest of strength and will. The end was foreordained. He had twice her power and stamina. Her muscles, spent of all their reserve of glycogen, quivered and began to sag.
At last, he felt her go limp and begin to slide away from the fountain and toward the floor. Her dead weight pulled him off balance, and on reflex he let go of the lanyard and tried to brace himself against the wall. But as he did so, Ali whipped back to life like a sprung coil. She wrenched hard toward the fountain, twisting him halfway around. He felt a sensation like fire in his right eye, as her fingernails gouged four searing tracks across his face, ripped his glasses from him and flung them to the floor.
Off-balance, half-blinded, and stinging with pain, he lost his grip. She tore free and ducked under his arm.
Fuck! I’ll kill her now! I’ll really fucking kill her!
She sprang across the hallway like a rabbit for the nearest hole.
He lunged after her.
* * *
Ali hit the door of the men’s room, still half-doubled over, and tumbled inside. Her momentum driving her, she slipped and fell onto one knee between some urinals and a trio of bathroom stalls. In the split-second it took her to fall, she saw an utterly empty room—nothing in front of her except a bare white wall.
A rush of despair came over her.
Oh, God! Where are you, Harry? Why have you let me down?
* * *
Barely a leap behind her, Kevin slammed into the men’s room. He saw Ali still skidding across the floor on one knee, bracing herself with her hand and a stiffly outstretched leg. She looked back at him with such an expression of terror that he could already savor his triumph. But then, a shadow flew toward him out of the recess behind the door. Sooner than he could twitch a muscle to react, he felt a blunt, hard blow at the base of his skull. There was almost no pain. The room seemed to disappear in a flash of light, a swarm of spiraling fireflies. When his focus returned, he was facedown on the hard tile floor, bucking against the weight of someone’s knee on his back. He was powerless with his hands pinned behind him. Still, he struggled and moaned with as much breath as he could squeeze out.
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