I know enough to realize I should probably have a lawyer with me, maybe Lyndie Nye, but when I mentioned it, the police said this was just “a little chat about what happened on Sumac Street” and that if I wanted a lawyer, they’d have to alert my parents. Nobody was accusing me of anything, the cops took pains to assure me when they intercepted me outside Fleet Tower a few hours ago. Not yet, anyway.
“It’s just, I’m really tired,” I say. How long have we been here? Two hours? Three? I’ve gone over my story a half-dozen times to Officer Rodriguez and Detective Marlowe, but each time they keep demanding more details, finding new ways to ask the same questions. I can’t blame them—my story is thin. They know it, I know it, and whoever might be watching me behind the two-way mirror on one side of the room knows it. But I’m not about to tell them about Serge’s help, or about the criminals I’ve left gift wrapped for them. Or about the real reason I ended up at the Boss’s house. I could get arrested for a hundred different crimes by now—including manslaughter—even if what I’ve done has prevented just as many.
And I’m definitely not telling them anything about Ford.
Spread out on the metal table between us are ten black-and-white stills captured by the surveillance cameras connected to the gate of Gavin’s house. Turns out he was monitoring everything, even his own place.
One picture is of me, my face turned up toward the camera, my features screwed into a worried grimace. There are several of random partygoers in cars, on motorcycles, and on foot. And one is of Ford, the hood of his sweatshirt obscuring half of his face.
I kept repeating that I didn’t know any of these people, but they kept going back to the picture of Ford, asking me if I was sure. I pretended not to know Ford, swallowing the lump of sadness that rose up in me every time my gaze returned to the picture of him. Underneath his hood, he looked panicked. All because of me.
They asked me repeatedly why I was there to begin with, and for a while I just shrugged, opening and closing my mouth like a fish.
Finally I decided I may as well tell them about Gavin. I have no reason to protect him from the police. I told them he was my former boyfriend who’d gotten in touch and said he wanted to meet with me. I played the lovesick little idiot, which was easy since that’s what I’ve been all these weeks.
I recapped what I could, saying that I went to the party and that Gavin was there with a gun. I said I heard people calling him the Boss, and they nodded. Clearly they’d been after him for some time. Over and over, the cops make me relive the humiliation of Gavin’s scam. I leave out Ford and the shooting entirely. I would never forgive myself if I implicated Ford in any of this. As long as I remember not to focus my eyes when I look at Ford’s picture, I can get through this without crying.
“Okay, Miss Fleet, it has been a very long evening. One final thing I want to clarify: You say the last time you saw alias Gavin Sharp before last night was the night he was allegedly kidnapped?”
“Yes.” My voice is small and haggard. I’ve lied so many times tonight, both actively and through omission. I try to tell them some of the truth, just enough to keep my secrets. But still. “My parents didn’t want to negotiate with the kidnappers. They thought it best to call their bluff.”
“That must have been hard for you,” Rodriguez says. She’s tall and broad-shouldered, in her early thirties, buttoned up in a gray suit. She’s been acting blasé and bored during the whole interrogation. Bored, or maybe disbelieving. She’s played Bad Cop, while Detective Marlowe has been the sympathetic one who brings me a can of Sparkle cola from the vending machine.
I look at the mirrored wall behind them. It’s got to be a one-way mirror, just like in cop shows on TV. There could be twenty additional police officers watching. Or nobody. I have no idea. All I want to do is go home, go to sleep, drop out of the world altogether for as many hours as I can until I sneak out to visit Ford. He’s still unconscious in Jax’s lab, but I want to go be by his side.
“I already told you, it was very hard for me. I was furious at them. But it turns out they were right. I was conned.” I say this directly to the mirrored wall, suddenly wishing Harris and Helene were behind it so they could hear me say it.
“And when he called you, you didn’t hesitate before going? To a place you’d never been? Didn’t think about getting a ride with your parents?” Marlowe’s blue-gray eyes meet mine, and I know I shouldn’t be reassured by his nicey-nice routine, but I can’t help but feel he’s my ally here.
“I didn’t want to lose time. I was so excited to see him,” I say, my voice tight with humiliation all over again. I’ve already told them all this. “And I knew they wouldn’t want to take me to him. Besides, they were going out for the evening.”
“And you say when you got there, he told you it was all a con?” Marlowe frowns, shaking his head slightly as if to say What a scumbag.
“That’s right.” My voice is small. It still feels like fifty razor blades cutting into my chest to remember it. Maybe it always will.
“And how did that make you feel?” Rodriguez takes over. “Did it make you angry? I would have wanted to kill a guy who did that to me.”
“I wasn’t aware this was an anxiety assessment,” I say. “But yes, I was upset. I’m not a violent person, though, so killing him didn’t enter my mind.”
“Just one more clarification, Miss Fleet. The man you knew as Gavin Sharp pulled a gun on you. You were in imminent danger. So I’m puzzled why you didn’t stick around when the police arrived. Didn’t you want Gavin caught?” Detective Rodriguez raises one eyebrow.
My heart feels like it’s being squeezed, and I take a second to think about the best way to handle this question. I’m drawing a blank. I put my hands on the table edge, pressing the pads of my fingers into the cool metal as the seconds tick by. Before I remember not to do it, I’m staring at Ford’s picture and my eyes prickle with tears.
“Miss Fleet? Why take off, in that moment? I don’t think I quite understood it the first time.”
“I was sad. I wanted to be alone.” I stare down at the table, my cheeks reddening. “I was . . . embarrassed.”
“And the blood we found upstairs? Are you still asking us to believe you have no idea whose it was?”
“I’m not asking you to believe anything,” I say. “You can believe anything you want. It probably came from one of the hundreds of people at the party that night. Maybe he shot some people after I left. I didn’t see anything, so I really don’t know.” My voice breaks, and I fall silent, thankful that Jax helped me clean off the blood and loaned me a coat and sweater when I left the lab. Mine were completely saturated with blood.
The three of us stare at one another for what feels like several minutes, nobody speaking. Suddenly I need to get out of here more than ever.
I look at my wrist, wishing there were a watch on it. “Unless you are charging me with a crime, I’m going to have to get home now.”
“All right, Miss Fleet,” Detective Marlowe says, pushing his chair away from the table and standing up. “We’ll have a security detail on you for a few days while we find the whereabouts of the perp.”
“I don’t need a security detail,” I say tightly.
“He could come back and try to hurt you. After all, you’ve seen his face. He’s a very dangerous man.”
Let him try, I think, staring at Marlowe petulantly. Let him dare to try.
“Fine,” I say finally. “But you’ll keep your word about this . . . staying between us?”
“Absolutely. And here’s my card, in case you lost it the last time.” He winks as he hands it to me, which feels simultaneously creepy and oddly comforting. I pretend I don’t notice.
“Great. Thanks.” I start to stand up on wobbly, half-asleep legs. “Check the mall, the place they call Hades,” I say halfheartedly. Nothing in me believes they have any hope of finding “alias Gavin Sharp,” but I may as well give them a fighting chance.
“Don’t worry. We’ll do our
job,” Officer Rodriguez chimes in, resting a hand lightly on my shoulder and looking me in the eye. “And you do yours, all right? Stay safe out there. Any details you remember after you get some rest will help out tremendously.”
Detective Marlowe holds the door open, and I walk through it into the coffee-scented bustle of the police station, where four cops dressed in riot gear are dragging a couple of teenagers down the hall. One of them, a green-haired girl wearing a dirty white faux-fur coat, has a black eye. I swear I see two of the riot cops smile at each other. We’ll do our job, Officer Rodriguez said. What exactly does that mean in Bedlam, I wonder? Breaking up protests and clubbing people in the face? Gassing people for no reason? Because from what I’ve seen, it definitely doesn’t mean cleaning up the black market, or ending the drug trade, or catching the real criminals who control this town, or making sure good people are safe.
My job, I think bitterly as they usher us down the hall and out to the lobby, is to forget about all of this. To forget, or die trying.
I’m too exhausted to run home, so I call a cab. When I get there, it’s five in the morning. I eat four of Lily’s blueberry muffins, crawl into bed, and fall into a sleep filled with nightmares of Gavin in a police uniform, handcuffing me to the table in the interrogation room, booking me for a thousand different crimes while my parents and Will and Serge look on, their faces blank and impassive, as if I am a stranger to them.
I nap on and off all day, making an appearance for lunch to tell my parents I’m writing a history paper in my room.
Come sundown, I’m wide awake. I need to be near Ford, but there are unmarked cop cars stationed by the front and back doors of Fleet Tower, monitoring everyone who goes in and out. I peer down to the street and realize there’s no getting out of here via the ground. I just have to hope the security detail is too busy monitoring the street to spend a second looking at the sky.
I open my window and step out onto my tiny balcony. I turn around and grab on to a gargoyle just above my window, preparing to climb. I should be terrified, but grief and rage have made me sure-footed. Or maybe I just don’t care all that much about dying anymore.
It takes less than a minute to lift myself up one story to the roof, my fingers and legs clinging to the few bricks that jut out in a decorative pattern from the façade. I move hand over hand, fighting the wind, and then I pull myself onto the roof to sit on a metal grate in front of the building’s tall metal spire.
I sit for a while and stare out at the city that’s ruined me. The city we all keep on ruining every day. Before, when I thought Gavin was dead, I was stricken, miserable. But now that I know the truth about how he manipulated me, I’m just . . . empty. And inside the emptiness is a desperate prayer: Let Ford live.
The wind howls in the gray evening, and suddenly I’m thinking about Gavin and how stupid I am for being played like that, and how wrong it is that I’m untouched and Ford is in a coma. My eyes mist with emotion, but I squeeze them shut. I refuse to cry any more tears over Gavin. He doesn’t deserve them.
Pathetic, I tell myself. All of it. The stakeouts. The risks. Nearly getting killed at the bookshop, at the bridge, at the school. Training with Ford. Taking out Rosie. All of it for nothing. Everything I’ve done in the name of saving or avenging Gavin is filthy with his lies.
And yet my heart keeps pointlessly whirring, a turbocharged muscle that doesn’t know good from bad or left from right. I am so strong physically—my arms are sculpted, my stomach taut, my ability to run and leap and barely touch the ground is astonishing, even to me—but I’ve never had less mental clarity than I do right now. I look out over the city, the lake an empty purple disk that killed my sister, the rest of it a heaving mass of suffering and lies.
This city is only fit for dead souls and lost ones.
At last I swallow hard and stand up, bracing for the jump. The building next to Fleet Tower is a corporate hotel called Regal Apartments. Fleet is eighty-seven stories tall, the Regal only sixty or so. It’s a long way to their roof.
I swing my arms back and forth, bending and unbending my knees as the icy air whips strands of hair across my face.
I take a few steps back, take a big breath, and without pausing to think, I run. In a moment, I’m leaping off the edge of Fleet Tower, into the oblivion of the blue-gray sky. My heart revving with adrenaline, I spin through the dusky air, my hood flying up around my head, the flat glass roof of the Regal conservatory racing up to meet my body.
In that moment in the air, my mind veers crazily between total terror and utter confidence. My head beats out a rhythmic death death death, but my beating heart assures me I’ll live.
I land more lightly than I could have possibly imagined. On two feet, toes pointed outward in first position. But the glass is much more slanted than I realized. I fall forward, pressing my whole body flat against the slippery pane of glass to try to get ahold of it, but the angle is too steep. In a moment I start to slide down it, toward a section of the roof that flattens out.
In the conservatory underneath me, four men in suits and an older woman in a cocktail dress hold champagne flutes and look out at the view. The woman spots me first. I see her pointing, covering her mouth with her hand as I slide down the glass. I press a palm to the window and mouth Sorry.
I’ll keep jumping from rooftop to rooftop until I’m off my block, out of the range of surveillance. Then I’ll run, not slowing down until I get to Ford. And he’ll be awake. He has to be.
CHAPTER 43
It’s 5:24 A.M. when I arrive. I slow my run to a walk, breathing hard as my feet hit the sidewalk again.
Jax has given me the code to the door, a complicated series of numbers that correlates with her favorite molecular theorem. I pass by the wall of cages, no longer repulsed by the bunnies, the rats, or Mildred, who is passed out in a pile of shredded Dilemma, a dried-out carrot in her leathery paw. I’m one of you, I think as I run my finger along the cage bars. Experimental. Caged inside invisible bars. I take a deep breath and head down the hall to Ford.
The small room presses in on me as I slide Jax’s wheeled stool toward him. Under the now-familiar bleeping of the heart monitor, I listen to Ford’s breath. His lungs are clear now, his breathing slow and regular. I put my hand on his soft black hair and examine him. His cheeks are drawn; the bones above the dark hollows alarmingly sharp. His skin has taken on a greenish cast under the fluorescent glare of Jax’s tiny back room. I dig a pot of lip balm from my pocket and remove the oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth to dab some of it on his cracked lips.
“You are the kind of boy,” I say to him as his lower lip moves under my finger, revealing a few of his teeth, “who would never touch lip balm. I know it.”
So wake up and tell me to knock it off, I say silently. His eyes move rapidly under his closed lids, an automatic physical response to dreams, Jax says.
I put the oxygen mask back on, taking care to make sure it’s not too tight. His hair is so soft under my palm. I sit in silence, my hand moving through his hair.
“They’re still looking for him.” I hear the door swing open, the sound of Jax’s slippers shuffling in behind me. “Gavin, I mean. I hacked into the police radio and heard them talking about a possible lead.”
“They’ll never find him,” I say, turning to look at Jax. Her glasses are stuck crookedly into her silver pile of hair, and her eyes are bloodshot and puffy with sleep. She wears a Bedlam U sweatshirt and blue scrubs. “Sorry I woke you.”
“I like the company, honestly.” Jax smiles. “You going to go after him yourself?”
I shake my head and shrug. I don’t want any part of it. My nights of chasing bad guys are over. All I feel when I think of Gavin is emptiness, deeper and more complete than guilt or grief ever was. The girl who fell in love with a fictional boyfriend died that night in the river. The girl sitting here with Ford is someone else entirely.
“I’m sure he’ll do whatever it takes to keep them off his back. He’s smar
t,” I concede. He may be a monster, but it’s not everyone who can fake his own kidnapping thirteen times, who can fake his own death.
“You’re smart, too,” Jax says gently.
“Not smart enough to save him.” I sigh, watching Ford’s chest rise and fall. “How long do we wait, Jax? I mean, how long until we give up hope?”
“Anthem.” Jax gives me a hard look. “You know the answer. We never give up hope.”
I nod. Ford’s eyelids are still now. His dream, whatever it was, must be changing course.
CHAPTER 44
At 11:30 the next night, I’m bent over my physics homework, the numbers swimming on the page as I drift into what I’ve come to call the Bad Place—an anxious stew of thoughts where Ford never wakes up, and where Gavin finds me and finishes what he started—when someone pushes my bedroom door open. My whole body clenches in anticipation of one of my parents attempting another of their anxious heart-to-hearts. About graduation, ballet, my future. If only they knew how meaningless it all sounds to me.
It’s exhausting pretending to be okay, performing the role of the girl they think they know. But this time, it’s not my parents at the door.
“Hello, Anthem. May I have a word?” Serge says.
I nod, blinking away my surprise and straightening up at my desk chair. Even after all we’ve been through together, he’s never sought me out in my room before.
“Of course, come in,” I say. I stand up, not sure if I should offer him my chair. Serge is a formal man. Even at this hour, his tie is knotted tightly at his enormous neck, his black suit jacket perfectly smooth across his broad shoulders.
Serge walks in, surprising me by closing the door silently, carefully behind him. “I saw your light on. You’re not sleeping much these days,” he says, the corners of his mouth turning down.
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