With the man taking chase, Starkey sprints into the dark brushy field behind the convenience store, continuing to run long after the cries of the kid and his furious but ponderously slow father can no longer be heard.
When he’s sure he’s too far away to be seen or followed, he checks the phone. For a moment, he thinks its interface is locked and he won’t be able to use it, but luckily, the man was not expecting his phone to be taken from the safety of his vehicle. Starkey pulls up a dial screen and keys in the emergency number he’d been given. It rings twice, then a nondescript voice answers the phone with a standard, “Hello?”
“This is Mason Starkey,” he says. “Something’s happened. I need help.”
He quickly explains the situation as best he can in a single breath. And calmly the voice on the other end of the line says, “Stay where you are. We’ll come to you.”
Following the instructions he’s given, Starkey keeps the phone powered on, to be used as a homing beacon, and within an hour, a helicopter descends from the night sky like the proverbial stork to carry him to a place of greater safety.
• • •
Starkey has no idea where he’s been taken. It’s a city. That’s all he knows. He’s not so sophisticated as to know the silhouettes of a skyline at the earliest hint of dawn. All he knows for sure is that it’s near a large body of water, and that it’s colder than where he was, as evidenced by the blast of chilly air when they open the helicopter door and escort him from the rooftop heliport. It’s a tall building, but not the tallest. Average, as far as skyscrapers go.
He knew the clapper movement was well funded and well organized, but to have such headquarters in plain sight gives Starkey pause for thought. In his own imagination, the clapper movement was far grittier and more counterculture. Hiding, perhaps in the dangerous backrooms of questionable clubs. That they have their own office building, however, is somehow more unsettling. The logo on the building—he saw it as the helicopter approached—is a simple design he did not recognize. It featured the initials “PC,” which seem fairly generic and could stand for a great many things.
He’s escorted down a flight of stairs and into an elevator by two men in dark suits with chests too well developed for them to be anything but security boeufs. The elevator takes him down to the thirty-seventh floor, and he’s brought to a conference room with black leather chairs and a long table of blue marble. No one is present.
“Wait here,” one of the guards says. “Someone will be along shortly.”
The room has only one door, which the men lock as they exit, leaving him alone. There are east-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, but they’re made of the kind of frosted glass that diffuses light while denying a view. Translucent rather than transparent. The rising sun is little more than a golden haze.
He was alone in the helicopter, too. The pilot, sequestered in the cockpit, never spoke to him after letting him into the craft, other than to say, “Buckle in.” The fact that they sent him a rescue craft so quickly, and that they’ve placed him in such a richly appointed room of their inner sanctum, tells Starkey that he’s respected and valued. And yet, there’s unease in him as diffuse and ill-defined as the light coming through the frosted windows.
• • •
No one comes.
After an hour, he tries, without luck, to jimmy the door lock using a paper clip he found on the floor. Despite his skill with locks, he can’t pick this one.
“Hey!” he yells. “I’m still here in case you forgot! Someone get your ass over here and let me out!”
He begins pounding on the door, trying to create enough of a commotion that someone will come to shut him up. Nothing. It’s as if the entire floor is deserted. Or maybe soundproof. Furious, he begins knocking over chairs, making a racket, but if, indeed, no one’s there to hear him, all the sound and fury will signify nothing. Finally, not wanting to be found the author of this particular chaos, he sets the chairs back where he found them and, exhausted, sits down and cradles his head in his arms on the table. He falls asleep in moments.
He dreams of Bam. She’s laughing at him. She’s goading the others to laugh at him as well, and although he fires a machine gun at her, nothing comes out but flower petals and jelly beans and popcorn, and that just makes everyone laugh even more. Then Hayden grabs the machine gun away from him and shoves the muzzle so far up his nose he can feel it in his brain. “That’ll clear your sinuses,” Hayden says, and the laughter all around feels like it can fill a stadium.
He’s gently shaken awake by a hand on his shoulder and pulled mercifully out of the dream.
“Mr. Starkey?”
He looks up bleary eyed to see a well-groomed man with a tightly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. Dandrich.
“About time,” Starkey croaks.
“I gave orders that you be taken somewhere to rest until I arrived,” he says kindly. “Orders, however, are often left to interpretation.”
“Someone should be fired.”
Dandrich considers it. “Or at least reprimanded. Be that as it may, I hope you got some rest. You must be exhausted from your triumphant efforts.”
Starkey rolls the kink out of his neck while the man pours him a glass of water from a crystal pitcher that wasn’t there before. “What is this place?”
Dandrich hands him the glass. “It’s what is commonly called ‘an undisclosed location’.”
“It seems pretty disclosed to me if it’s right in the middle of a city.”
“It’s not only AWOLs who can disappear in an urban environment, my friend,” he says, sitting down casually beside Starkey. “To city dwellers, most buildings, no matter how large, are merely obstacles between home and office. In a city, convenience and anonymity go hand in hand. But we’re not here to talk about our headquarters, are we?”
“There’s a team of traitors.” Starkey says, getting to the point. “We need to take them out if we’re going to save the Stork Brigade.”
Dandrich does not seem troubled. “A coup is always an unfortunate thing. Unless, of course, you are the one staging it.”
Starkey thinks of the coup he staged at the Graveyard. What goes around comes around, but the timing couldn’t have been worse
“It’s not a surprise that after the festivities at Horse Creek Harvest Camp, a number of storks would become disenchanted,” his benefactor says.
“They invented an incriminating recording, but with your help I can convince everyone it’s a fake. Send me back there with more firepower. I’ll get control again, and rally them to the cause.”
“No need.” Dandrich says. “Your last few attacks have been so successful, we’ve decided that no further action on your part is needed.”
“But what about Mousetail?”
“Unnecessary. It would be anticlimactic after what you did at Horse Creek. You were brilliant there,” he says with a smile. Then his smile drifts neutral. “You were brilliant, but now you’re done.”
Starkey shakes his head. “There are still ninety-two harvest camps out there. You need me to take them down.”
“Mason, you forget that it’s not our purpose to take down every harvest camp.”
Starkey stands up. “Well, it’s my purpose!”
Now Dandrich’s expression becomes icy. “We are not in the business of indulging adolescent power fantasies.”
Even though the man is scrawny and at the weak end of middle age, Starkey finds himself intimidated by his unflinching gaze.
“So that’s it? You’re done with me? You’re just going to cast me out into the street?”
Dandrich laughs at the suggestion, and his expression softens again. “No, of course not. We would never abandon someone as valuable as you. You can still serve our cause.”
“To hell with your cause! What about my cause?”
“A wise general knows when his campaign has run its course.” Then he raises his hands in broad sweeping gestures as he speaks. “Look at what you’ve done! Be satisfied that y
ou made yourself the legend that you always dreamed you could be. That you freed hundreds of Unwinds. That you saved so many storks and struck a blow for what you believe.”
Maybe he’s right, but Starkey can’t stand the thought that he was cast out, and now is being denied the right of vengeance. He slams his fist on the table. “They need to pay for what they’ve done!”
Dandrich never loses his cool. “They will. In time.”
Starkey calms himself down. Patience was his strongest asset at the Graveyard. When did he lose it? He takes a deep breath, then another. If he can belay his thirst for revenge, it will be all the more satisfying and devastating when it comes. The betrayal has not undone his good work. He has to remember that. And in this strange organization that espouses the virtues of chaos and mayhem, he will find his place. Here, too, he will find ways of setting gears into motion, just as he did at the Graveyard.
“You’ve been the subject of much discussion,” Dandrich says, “and we’ve decided that your greatest potential lies in our fund-raising division.”
“Fund-raising?”
“There are people who would like to get to know you on a close, personal level,” he says. “Important people. Some very wealthy, some very powerful.”
“So . . . you’re going to introduce me to these people?”
“Not personally, but I assure you, you will be in good hands.” He opens the door, where two more beefy men in suits await. “My associates here will escort you to your new assignment.” Then he shakes Starkey’s hand. “Thank you for all you’ve done. I’m glad that our paths crossed, and that, for a time, our objectives complemented each other. Take care, Mason.” And then he leaves Starkey with the two burly men, who lead him back to the elevator.
“Where am I going, if you don’t mind me asking?” he asks the more intelligent-looking of the two guards as the elevator rises toward the rooftop heliport.
“Uh . . . from what I understand, you’re going lots of places.”
Which is fine with Starkey. He could get used to traveling in style.
31 • Grace
There are simply too many envelopes to mail for this to be a single postal excursion. Grace decides to make three trips—and not all to the same place. She plans multiple trips to multiple zip codes and finds an oversize unmarked shopping bag to carry them in—big enough and sturdy enough to get it done in three trips.
“Less suspicious this way,” she tells Sonia. “So’s if the postmaster general or something gets it into his head to trace all these letters back to a single place, they won’t know where to look ’cept Akron in general, and Akron in general is big—not New York big, but big enough.”
Sonia waves her hand. “Just get it done and don’t talk my ear off.” Which is fine with Grace, who likes being left to her own devices, as long as those devices don’t have too much electronics, like that organ printer. She knows it will take her all day, but that’s okay. It’s something to do, something important, and it gets her out of the basement for a whole day.
Her first two sets of drops go off without a hitch. It’s Sunday, so post offices are closed, but that hasn’t stopped her from paying visits to various mailboxes in strategically random locations. By dusk, she’s hit twelve mailboxes in three different zip codes.
It’s while on her way back to empty out the trunk and mail the last batch of letters that things take a turn. It’s already dusk, closer to the night side than the day, and she begins to think that the third batch will have to wait until tomorrow. The streetlights come on, making the dusk plunge into night—and there beneath a streetlight at the corner, just a few doors away from Sonia’s shop, stands someone who looks familiar. Very familiar. She can see only his profile, but it’s enough.
“Argie?” she says, before she can stop herself. “Argie, is that you?”
At first she’s excited, but then she remembers how things were when she last saw her brother. He won’t have forgiven her. Argent is not the forgiving type. As she gets closer, she can sense that there’s something off about him. Something different in the way he carries himself, like it’s not Argent at all . . . and yet clearly it’s him. She only has to look at his face to know. . . .
Then he turns to her and smiles. “Hello, Grace.”
And she begins to scream. Not because of what she sees but because of what she doesn’t. She doesn’t even feel the tranq dart hit her, because she’s so committed to the scream. She’s still screaming as her legs buckle beneath her and she hits the pavement. Still screaming as her peripheral vision fades. Still screaming as the tranqs drag her down into unconsciousness.
Because when he turned to look at her, Grace didn’t see the other half of Argent’s face. That other half was someone else entirely.
32 • Sonia
She’s absorbed with her favorite playlist of prewar rock, and doesn’t hear Grace’s screams from just twenty yards down the street.
It’s one song later—just after dark—that a man comes into the shop. Sonia takes out her earphones, immediately sizing up the man as a strange one. Strange in an unpleasant sort of way. She’s been repositioning paintings so that they don’t topple over every time some fool customer brushes up against them, and finds herself at a disadvantage being so far from her sales counter. She keeps a revolver beneath that counter. She only had to use it once, when a low-life thug demanded the cash in her register. She pulled out the revolver, and he headed for the hills. She didn’t even have to use it. Right now, the man is standing between her and that revolver.
Putting down the picture she’s holding, she tries to stand as straight as she can, considering her aggravated hip. “Can I help you?”
As he approaches, and comes into clearer focus, she sees what it is about him that’s so disturbing. The left side of his face is that of a middle-aged man. But the right, from just above the jawline, is someone else’s. Someone younger. Facial grafts are not entirely uncommon, but rarely do they preserve the integrity of the donor face. For whatever reason, this man intentionally took not just the skin, but the underlying bone structure of the donor as well. The sight of him is deeply unnerving, which was clearly his intent.
“I hope you can help me,” he says, continuing to saunter toward her. “I’m looking for a very specific chair to complete a set. Solid frame, but a bit unbalanced. Firm, but overstuffed. That is to say, a little full of itself.”
“Dining chairs are down aisle three,” Sonia tells him, but she already knows he’s not really looking for a chair.
“It won’t be down aisle three,” he says, holding her eye contact with two markedly mismatching eyes—one that clearly came with the grafted half of his face. “But I think it’s here somewhere. The piece of flotsam I’m looking for goes by the name of Connor Lassiter.”
“Hmph,” says Sonia, keeping her poker face and pushing past him without any sense of urgency or terror. “Why would the Akron AWOL be in an antique shop? Wherever he is, I’m sure he has better things to do than polish my furniture.”
“Perhaps I should ask Grace Skinner, then,” he says. “Once she regains consciousness.”
Now that he’s behind her, and the counter is in front of her, she bolts toward it, but even with her cane, she can only move so fast.
Suddenly a gunshot rings out. The bullet hits her cane, splintering it to pieces, and she goes down sideways, hitting the hardwood floor. Pain explodes in her hip. She’s sure that it’s broken. What happens next comes with blinding speed, yet somehow in slow motion at the same time, her pain baffling the impetus of time.
She’s dragged into the back room, and before she knows what has happened she finds herself slumped at her desk chair unable to move, her hip screaming in agony. He’s used the chain from an old hanging lamp to secure her, wrapping it around her until it would take cable shears to free her.
Her attacker, with nothing but time on his hands now, saunters out into the shop again, whistling a tune she doesn’t know. He locks the front door and retu
rns, sitting on the edge of the old steamer trunk. Did they hear the gunshot down below? Sonia wonders. Are they smart enough to stay silent? For it’s not her life she’s worried about; it’s theirs.
“Now then,” say both sides of the man’s awful face, “let’s talk about the friends we have in common.”
33 • Nelson
With the infected, sun-scarred side of his face replaced, Jasper Thomas Nelson feels like a new man. Argent Skinner wasn’t exactly a cooperative donor, of course.
“You said it yourself,” he had told Argent before the undamaged side of the young man’s face was harvested by Divan. “My left half and your right half make a whole.” And although Argent insisted this is not what he meant, the complaints of a donor really don’t matter.
Seeing the look on Grace Skinner’s face when she saw him was an added perk. It will be even more rewarding to capture Lassiter’s expression when they meet.
He had used a fast-acting, short-term tranq on Grace. Good thing, too. A stronger, slower tranq would have left her screaming long enough to attract plenty of attention. As it was, no one came to her aid. Nelson was able to throw her into a dense hedge, to keep her out of sight and out of mind. Then he proceeded to the antique shop where the tracking chip showed she was spending all of her time—that is, until today, when she went on an excursion all over Akron.
The moment he saw the old woman in the shop, Nelson read in her face a solid preview of all the things he needed to know. Lassiter is there, or has been there, or is hidden somewhere nearby—and Nelson is willing to wager that that stinking tithe-turned-clapper is here too. He doesn’t know which will be more satisfying—taking the Akron AWOL to be unwound, or slowly killing Lev Calder for what he did at the Graveyard. Punishment for stealing Lassiter away from him, and leaving Nelson tranq’d by the side of the road for flesh-eating predators and the fiery eye of the Arizona sun.
Everything Nelson said to the old woman in the front room of her shop was to throw her off-balance, to probe her to see what she might unintentionally give away. Her reaction told him that he had hit a bull’s-eye.
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