Fenfang fell back on the bed, shivering, her teeth beginning to chatter, and she moaned as if someone was indeed fighting her from inside.
Odin knelt next to her, grabbed the washcloth off the nightstand, and thrust it between her teeth. She began to gnaw at it and struggle, and he said, “Help, hold her arms….”
The spasm went on for two minutes, peaking a minute after it started and gradually subsiding. When it ended, she opened her eyes and said, “I can’t…” She closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep.
—
Odin, staring at the woman’s scalp, sickened by it, said, “We need to get her some kind of treatment.”
“What kind would that be?” Shay asked. The anger was thick in her voice. “They made her into a lab rat. If she’s like those monkeys you turned loose, or like X, her brain is full of wires. Where do you go to get that fixed?”
“I don’t know,” Odin said. “But leaving her like this is not an option. We’ve got to do something.”
Fenfang’s eyes fluttered: she’d been unconscious for no more than a few seconds. She said, “You cannot cure me. I think I will die soon. Or I will kill myself.”
Odin crouched beside her. “Don’t give up. Please. Don’t.”
Fenfang focused her eyes, which were dark brown, almost black. “I have no control. These things they put in my head…I see things. I do things. They connect me to a machine.”
“No machine here,” Cade said.
“No machine ever again,” said Odin.
Twist leaned in. “The note from Singular said you’re a Chinese spy….”
“I am not a spy.”
“We’re under the impression Singular might be dealing with North Koreans. Are you Chinese or Korean?”
“I am Chinese, from Dandong,” she said. “I was a university student there. My cousin, Liko, and I, we studied together.”
Cade’s fingers rapped across the keyboard of his laptop, and he checked a map. “Dandong is on the border, across the Yalu River from North Korea.”
“Yes. We made money for school, trading with North Koreans,” Fenfang said. “Then an American man came, he was a Christian man. He wanted to go across to do research on the suffering, and we took him. On the third night, we were captured.”
There was a flurry of glances between Shay and the others. One of the videos from the encrypted flash drive Odin had cracked showed a robotic Asian man speaking as though he were an American Christian aid worker who’d gone missing a year earlier along the Chinese–North Korean border.
“Was it Robert G. Morris?” Cade asked. “Robert G. Morris from St. Louis?”
The young woman seemed startled when she heard the name. “Yes. You know Robert?”
“No,” Twist said. “But we found…evidence of him on a Singular video. We also found news reports that no one had seen him for months.”
Cruz, who’d stepped back and was petting X, asked, “How did you get from North Korea to here?”
“On a ship,” she said, her voice trembling with effort. “There were other people with me, also experiments. One of them was my cousin. Everything was clouds. They gave me drugs, all of us had drugs, to keep us quiet, almost to the end. The last four or five days, they did not give us drugs because they wanted our blood to be clean for the examinations. One man died when we were on the ship. We were in a metal box, he was sick, and then he did not move, and they came and took him out. We never saw him again.”
Shay jumped in: “Fenfang, we don’t know who the other prisoners were at the facility we broke into last night. Do you?”
The young woman squeezed her eyes shut, as if trying to see inside the cells where Shay and West had spied several catatonic men in the moments before they found Odin.
“No,” she said. “I heard crying, but I only ever saw Odin.”
Odin said, “They were dragging me down the hall to my cell after waterboarding me. I couldn’t walk, I was just hanging off them. Fenfang was being taken the other way. One of the guards said, ‘Water Boy meets the Girl with Two Brains,’ and the other guards laughed.”
“Not laughing now,” Cruz said.
Fenfang nodded and looked at the group again, scrutinizing each of their faces: Shay, Twist, Odin, Cade, Cruz, and X. Then she asked, “Who are you?”
Shay said, “That’s a complicated story.”
“I am a good listener,” Fenfang said.
—
Odin ran his hands through his hair and started at the beginning: “I don’t like animal experimentation in research laboratories. Most of the time, it’s unnecessary and cruel, and if you’d seen the messed-up monkeys with their heads cut—”
Shay squeezed Odin’s arm, gave him a quick shake of her head that said spare her the details. “My brother’s got a very kind heart, but basically, what happened is, he and some extreme animal rights people raided a lab to wreck their experiments, and they got away with a lot of computer files and our dog here. Turns out the company that owns the lab wasn’t just experimenting on animals, they were experimenting on people, like you. We think they’re trying to find a way to make people…immortal.”
Odin broke in: “The problem is, they can’t create a brain or a body, so they have to use one that already exists. They kidnap a living person, try to erase her memories, and then they try to move the mind of another person into her brain.”
“And that is me,” Fenfang said.
Odin nodded. “It makes me so angry. The worst thing you can do is kill a living being; they killed hundreds of animals trying to figure out how to do it, the monkeys I was telling you about—”
Shay touched his arm again: “Anyway, Odin and his friends stole computer records, and the company, it’s called Singular, went after them, trying to get back the files.”
“And the dog,” Odin said, nodding at X. “He was one of their experiments, and I took him, but God, I forgot the poor little three-legged rat. Then Shay came looking for me and met Twist—”
“I’m Twist,” Twist said.
Odin continued: “And I gave her the dog and copies of the files I stole, and then Singular kidnapped me.”
“We put some of the files Odin gave me on the Internet,” Shay said, “and we caused them some trouble.” She smiled ruefully. “One of the Singular people, a man named West, changed sides to help us. He was with us when we found you and Odin, and they killed him….And that’s where we are. We got Odin back, and you, and we lost West.”
“And now?”
“We fight,” said Twist.
“They’ll be coming for us,” Shay added. “They know we can expose what they are really doing—so they’ve got to get rid of us.”
Fenfang had questions, lots of them: how Odin got into the lab, how Cade and Cruz got involved. They explained about Twist—an affluent artist who lived and worked in a hotel of sorts that sheltered street kids in Los Angeles. Shay had been lucky to land there in her search for Odin, as Cade and Cruz had been when they’d needed shelter from their own messy lives.
When Fenfang asked how long they’d been fighting Singular, Shay was stunned to realize that it had been less than two months. These people who’d helped her rescue her brother, these people she’d lay down her life for—she’d known them less than two months.
Fenfang said, “I would kill myself rather than go back there. Are we secure now?”
Twist said, “Maybe. When we ran out of Sacramento, we were acting almost randomly. We didn’t know where we were going—so I don’t know how Singular could know.”
Odin shook his head at Twist. “Don’t underestimate them. They found me and the group I worked with after we trashed the lab, and we were really careful. They’re probably doing psych studies on us, and who knows what other resources they have? All kinds of places have license plate scanners, and if they can tap into that…Shay came here in West’s Jeep.”
Twist nodded then. “We need to move soon. We’re too close to Sacramento.”
“Where to?”
Shay asked.
“We should talk about that,” Twist said. He looked at Fenfang and then Odin. “First…you guys must be hungry.”
“I hadn’t thought about it, but I am,” said Odin. “They never gave me anything to eat except some rice and biscuits.”
Fenfang nodded. “I would eat anything. But steamed fish and zongzi especially.”
“Zongzi?” Cruz asked.
“Hmm…rice that is wrapped in bamboo leaves? You know? With maybe salted duck eggs or pork bellies.”
“I don’t know if Reno does Chinese that authentic, but we’ll see what we can find,” Twist said. “We can talk about where to go while we eat.”
Suddenly Fenfang’s eyelids began to flutter, and she slipped back on the bed and began to shake. Twist said, “Oh, Jesus, here she goes again….”
But after less than a minute, the shaking stopped, and her eyes popped open, with a disoriented look that slowly came to focus on the group.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Cade said.
“Maybe they’re subsiding…the fits,” Twist said.
Fenfang rubbed her forehead, as if thinking over the possibility. “Maybe.”
There was a loud slapping noise, and Shay turned to see that her brother was flapping his arms, something he’d done since childhood when he was upset. His face grew flushed, and one of his legs started to stomp in time with his arms.
“Odin, everything’s all right,” Shay said, trying to soothe him. “Odin—”
“I—I—I can’t stand what they did! What they did to Fenfang, and to the monkeys, and to the rats, and to X, and to the Xs they hurt before him. He’s X-5, that’s what they tattooed on his ear—what if they started with A and they experimented on ten or fifty or a hundred dogs for every letter? X is the twenty-fourth letter—”
“Odin, stop,” Shay said, and turned him away from Fenfang to mouth more emphatically, You’re scaring her, stop. That got Odin’s attention, and his face screwed up with effort as he pulled in his arms and unclenched his fists.
Shay turned back to Fenfang, expecting to have to explain, but instead, Fenfang was busy propping herself up against the pillow. Twist reached in to assist her, and she said, “I want to stand up.”
Shay: “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Twist pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to Cade. “You and Cruz hit a Chinese takeout. Shay and Odin and I will stay with Fenfang.”
Cade and Cruz went out, and Shay and Odin helped Fenfang to her feet and walked her around the motel room. Eventually—there was no avoiding it—she stopped and looked at herself in the tall dresser mirror, Shay and Odin reflected on either side.
“This isn’t how I thought it would be,” she said, almost to herself. “I’d like to see the back.” She turned sideways and sighed at the cap of wires and the bundle at her neck. Then she turned again, toward the center of the room, done.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, and unhooked her elbows from Shay and Odin, “I can do this myself.” She started another loop around the room, solid enough on her feet to not fall down, though always using a chair, a bed, or a wall to keep herself upright. She sat down a few times and stood up and touched her head, the connectors sparkling in the overhead lights.
Shay said to Twist, “I can tell you one thing: she needs a wig. Like, right now.”
“We need to find one of those cancer places,” Odin said.
Shay took a prepaid phone out of her back jeans pocket, and the knife she’d carried since Eugene out of her waistband. She tossed them both on the opposite bed and then sat down with West’s iPad to search for a wig shop.
While Twist and Odin watched over her shoulder, Fenfang picked up a motel guide from the desktop. “Where are we?” she asked.
Shay answered, “Reno, Nevada. Where there are a surprising number of wig shops. Let’s figure out which one is the closest.”
Fenfang said, “I need to…,” and walked carefully toward the bathroom.
Twist told Shay and Odin he’d been thinking of calling Lou, one of the two women he’d left in charge of his hotel for street kids. He had a stash of cash hidden in his studio, and he was trying to figure out how Lou could get it to them.
Shay put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”
Faintly, they could hear Fenfang in the bathroom, talking in a low voice. Shay looked over at the other bed and said, “She’s got my phone…and my knife.”
She jumped off the bed and stepped over to the door, Twist right behind her. Together, they heard the young woman they’d rescued saying:
“Hurry. Something bad is happening to this body, you have to hurry. Get me away from these people….”
“What the hell?” Twist said, and rapped his cane on the door. “Fenfang? Open up.”
She didn’t answer him, but went on talking, her voice going to a whisper. Shay reached out to try the knob—“Is it locked?”—and when it turned, she pushed inside….
“Careful,” Twist said from behind, “the knife…”
Fenfang, sitting on the toilet lid, tried to get to her feet but staggered, nearly losing her balance. Shay lunged for the phone, but Fenfang swung her other arm around with the knife, and Shay jumped back just enough to avoid being slashed, then Twist hooked Fenfang’s knife arm and wrenched it until she screamed in pain and dropped the knife. Shay snatched the phone.
“Who’d you call?” Twist asked as he held Fenfang from behind, pinning her arms.
“I won’t tell you a thing,” she sneered.
Shay, checking her phone and the last number dialed, said, “It’s a California number, the same area code as West’s phone number. The same prefix…Did she call Singular?”
“Jesus,” Twist said. “Fenfang, did you call Singular? Fenfang?”
“It’s not Fenfang,” said Odin, who’d come up behind them. “Don’t you get it? The other woman made the call. The one fighting for control.”
The young woman looked up at Odin and smiled. She said, “And I have—”
Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she started thrashing against Twist’s arms.
2
When Sync and Harmon entered the suite at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, Thorne was standing at the living room window, staring out over the city, hands in his pants pockets. Micah Cartwell, the CEO of Singular, was sitting on an easy chair in the bedroom, behind closed French doors, talking on a cell phone with military-grade scrambling software.
Sync, Harmon, and Thorne were big men with scars showing lives of conflict—they might have been professional athletes, tall, tough, competent. Cartwell was shorter and rounder, but had the same alpha-male aura. Sync was Singular’s security chief, and worked directly for Cartwell. Harmon was an intelligence coordinator, Thorne ran the enforcement section, and both reported to Sync.
A silver tray of carefully cut triangle sandwiches sat on a round table at one side of the room, with a half-dozen bottles of Perrier in a silver ice bucket. The room had been rented for one night with a credit card that would bill Boeing Aircraft, though Boeing didn’t know about it, and never would.
Sync nodded at Thorne and said, “Where are we in Sacramento?”
Thorne stepped away from the window. Early thirties, with close-cropped hair and narrow-set pale eyes, he was at least a decade younger than the other men, and aggressively ambitious. He was limping, but his expression gave nothing to the lingering pain in his leg.
“Basement’s remodeled and scrubbed, new doors up and down the hallways,” he said. “As soon as the cops left, we brought in a couple of semitrucks full of lab equipment and some door plaques from Staples that say SECURE STORAGE. Some smart-ass on the crime scene crew wanted to keep us out of the lobby for a while, but we talked to his boss….”
“The cops didn’t hear anything from the Rembys?”
Thorne shook his head. “No. Nobody’s heard from them. If they’d told the cops that the shootings were down in the basement, and not
up in the lobby, and the cops had gone down there and found the cells…we’d be toast.”
“But now?”
“We’re good for now,” Thorne said. “We’re blaming everything on West. He had a drug problem, result of his war wounds, went a little crazy….The media’s buying it. We might have trouble with his father, but his father doesn’t know anything about the media. We can send out signals about the grieving father being a bit unbalanced, and contain that.”
Sync nodded and said, “Good. That’s good. We’ve started playing down the Remby connection. We don’t want the wrong cops picking them up, especially not if the Chinese girl is with them.”
Thorne kept talking: “We’ve got to come up with another solution for the experimental subjects. This was too close. We survived by the skin of our teeth.”
Sync asked, “How in the hell could a couple of kids and some flaky artist pull us under?”
Thorne bristled: “We can’t think of them that way. They’re not kids or flakes; they’re the enemy. Same mistake we made when we went into the Twist Hotel and got our asses kicked.”
The fight in the hotel had given Thorne the gimpy leg.
“That might be overcooking it a little,” Harmon said. Harmon was wearing a conventional blue business suit and dress loafers, in place of his usual jeans and cowboy boots. Here, two blocks from the financial district, the idea was to look like everyone else, even if Harmon, with his desert-weathered face and hands, and the mirrored aviators, looked like a stockbroker who could pull your arms off.
“Maybe what we need is negotiation,” Sync offered. “If we can talk to them, impress them with how unbeatable we are, every resource on our side, maybe we can get the flash drives and make them go away. Without any outside proof, anything they could tell the police would sound like a fantasy.”
Cartwell had gotten off the phone and pushed through the French doors in time to hear the last of Sync’s suggestion. He was wearing a thin pair of reading glasses, which he took off and slipped into the breast pocket of his suit. “You’re half right,” he said. “We need to find them and the experimental subject, and do what we can—anything we can—to get the flash drives. We know that Odin Remby cracked at least one. Now that he’s back with them, they might be able to crack the rest. So, if they’ll talk, we’ll talk. If they’ll negotiate, we’ll negotiate. If they won’t do any of that, we’ll hunt them down.”
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