by JA Huss
“Sheila,” I croak out though my dry throat. “What the fuck is happening?” I try to sit up, my whole body feeling sluggish and achy.
“Don’t sit up,” she says, slight hint of panic in her voice. But she can’t stop me. She’s made of light.
“Where’s Lincoln?” I ask, swinging my legs over the side of the operating chair, dying for a drink of water.
“He’s upstairs sleeping. We’ve been worried about you.”
“How the fuck—” I try to make my eyes open. But the room is too bright. “How the fuck did I get here?”
“Lulu Lightly called Thomas and we came to get you. Do you remember anything?”
“I was on the roof?” I ask, unsure how much to say. I do know I went up to the roof. I remember making the cut. The blood. The coolness of the winter storm. Nothing unusual. So why am I here?
“The way Lulu tells it, Steve woke her up and told her to go out on the roof to get you back inside.”
That dick. I will flick him off for this.
“And she found you. In a puddle of blood. You were unresponsive so we brought you here and injected you with the nanites to try to figure out what’s going on.”
I draw in a deep lungful of air. Hold it. My eyes finally adjust enough to the light to open them a crack. I squint at Sheila, waiting for the bad news. “What’d you find out?”
She does the hologram version of a human shrug. “Nothing. You seem fine. They’ve been running on your system for six hours now and they’ve come back with nothing, Case.”
I let out a long breath of relief.
“I’m not buying it for a second. You’re hiding something from me.”
I rub a hand down my face and then shake my head. “I don’t want to tell you. I feel like something’s wrong and every time I come here I expect you to find it. And every time I go home feeling like it’s all in my head.” I look up at her. “Maybe it is? Maybe I’m crazy?”
I’m expecting a protest from her. Something along the lines of, No, Case. Don’t be stupid. Or, It’s probably lack of sleep. Or stress.
Instead I get what appears to be… agreement.
“Where’s Lulu?” I ask. “Did she go home? She can’t be downtown, things are crazy—”
“She’s here. Upstairs sleeping in the media room. It’s not a good scenario, Case. She’s an assistant DA. They are building a case against Lincoln, for sure. Probably Thomas as well. And maybe even you.”
“Well.” I laugh, but not in amusement. “I would’ve been very pissed off if you had dropped her off in the middle of that mess in Cathedral City.”
“As we figured. So…”
I stand up, testing out my full weight on what I expect to be unsteady legs. But, surprisingly, I feel strong. Not great, but not weak. I look down at the hospital gown. “Do you have anything I can wear?”
“Where are you going?”
“Upstairs, obviously. I need to check on Lulu.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why not just rest a little longer and I’ll have her come down?”
“Because I want to go up there,” I say, irritated at this whole situation. If Sheila had found something I might feel a little better about all this. But she didn’t. And that’s not good.
Something is wrong with me.
“Lincoln has some clothes in his old bedroom.”
“Perfect,” I mumble, walking out the door of the operating room and across the main part of the lab to the small bedroom Linc used to sleep in before Molly came along. “Lights,” I say, entering the small room. I go right over to a long dresser on the far side of the room and start opening drawers.
I find a t-shirt, a pair of jeans and some socks, and put them all on. Sheila is gone when I come out and make my way upstairs to the new house. I expect her to be waiting with Linc and Thomas when I get up in the main room, but it’s dark and empty. I don’t know if it’s early morning or late afternoon. My sense of time is all screwed up.
I go with late afternoon since I was on the roof in the middle of the night and that would only have been a few hours ago if this was morning.
The media room is in the east wing of the house. The door is closed, and I don’t knock, just open it quietly and let my eyes adjust to the dark before shutting it behind me.
Lulu is fast asleep on the large sectional couch, a blanket haphazardly tangled around her legs. She’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt too, and since I know she was wearing nothing earlier—which makes me smile—and only had her work clothes when she came to my house, I figure they must belong to Molly.
I ease myself down onto the couch, feeling much less achy than I did down in the cave, and push myself up to her back, wrapping my arms around her tightly.
She jolts awake, trying to sit up.
I hold on to her tightly. “Shhh,” I say. “It’s just me.”
“Case,” she gasps, twisting around so she can see me. “How did you get up here?”
“Walked,” I say, smiling. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“Take it up with Sheila. She says nothing to report. Just like always.”
“You were on the roof, Case. I was so—”
“I’m sorry,” I say, kissing her cheek. “It’s not what you think.”
“You were lying in a pool of blood. It was freezing and your body… your body was hot, Case.”
“How did you know to call Thomas?”
“Steve. He told me to. He woke me up and made me go up on the roof to get you. And then he told me to call Thomas and tell him to pick you up in the helicopter.”
“I bet Thomas was pissed.”
“No,” Lulu says. “No one is mad, Case. We’re worried. Out of our fucking minds. What happened?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I swear. It’s just… I do that sometimes.”
“What… like sleepwalking?”
I wish I could blame it on sleepwalking. “Probably. But the point is, I’m fine. Clean bill of health. I’m sorry you guys got so worried.”
She turns her whole body to face me, both of her palms pressed tightly up against my scratchy cheeks that badly need a shave. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“We’re not fighting.”
“I know. But I feel an argument coming because you’re not telling me things. You’re leaving a lot out. And your friends…” She stares right into my eyes, one, then the other. “Molly thinks this is all her fault. She told me some crazy story about a barbed rope and poison. Said she almost took off your head with it, but Thomas came and… what the hell happened that night at Blue Corp, Case?”
Jesus, Molly. What the hell? “What did Lincoln say?” I ask.
“I didn’t really talk to him. This was when they were downstairs with you, injecting some nanite things.” Lulu shakes her head again. “What the hell is happening?”
“I don’t know,” I say, sweeping a finger up and down her cheek. “And I don’t want to think about it yet. I just want to lie here with you and be quiet.”
She closes her eyes, like she’s searching for patience, then sighs and presses her head into my chest, a hand sneaking underneath my body so she can pull me closer.
This I can deal with. So I close my eyes too, my hand slipping underneath her t-shirt.
“Case?” Lincoln’s voice is accompanied by a knock on the media room door. “You in there?”
Fuck. “Yeah,” I call out.
Lincoln walks in, Molly trailing behind him. Thomas appears, but stays propped up against the doorway.
“Sheila came and woke us,” Linc says. “She says there’s nothing wrong with you. But I think everyone in this room will agree if I call bullshit.”
Lincoln isn’t looking at me, I realize. He’s looking at Lulu. And he’s asking her—pleading with her with his eyes—to back him up.
I reluctantly pull away from Lulu and sit up. She does the same and then Molly walks over and takes a seat on the couch next to her.
Molly
looks at me for a long second, like she’s trying to figure me out. “I told Lincoln what I think happened to you.”
“Oh, yeah?” I ask. “Why don’t you fill me in on that?”
“Molly thinks the barbs in that lariat were tipped with something.” Lincoln speaks for her. “That she poisoned you that night. And then we shot you up with the jellyfish enzymes, which counteracted it in some way. But it’s not working any longer.”
“You guys don’t know any of that for sure,” I say. “Sheila says—”
“Fuck those tests,” Thomas says. “Sheila also says not to trust the data. And no. We don’t have any fucking proof. But we all know something is wrong with you. And if you have any idea what it is, then you need to start talking.”
I say nothing. It’s… not a theory you share with people. Even these people.
“That’s not the first time you’ve been up on that roof,” Linc says. “Steve told us when we were there. He said he was glad Lulu came over so he could out you.”
Stupid spy.
“So what do you do up there?” Thomas asks. “And how often does it happen?”
I scrub both hands up and down my face for a few seconds, buying time.
“Talk, asshole,” Thomas says. “We’ve got a lot riding on the next couple of months and even though yesterday I was telling myself things couldn’t get any worse, what with the complete fucking meltdown of Cathedral City, I am not so pleasantly surprised to find out that I was wrong. Things can get infinitely worse if you’re losing your mind.”
“You had a knife,” Lincoln prods. “Why did you have a knife?”
And I don’t know what makes me look—a feeling? A premonition? Something in the dreams I was having over the course of my convalescence?—but I look. I lift up the sleeve of my t-shirt covering my left arm, and look.
“What the fuck is that?” Lulu asks, leaning across me to get a better look. “That wasn’t there yesterday when we…” She blushes and trails off.
“Is that a scar?” Lincoln asks, turning on a small light on an end table.
And yeah. It’s a scar. All those months of cutting and every time it heals over completely within minutes. But the one time I need it to not be there, there it is.
“Did you carve that?” Finally, something in this room has Thomas’s full attention. He walks over to me, holding my arm up so he can get a better look. “Why?” he growls. “Why did you do this?”
I sigh and look at Lincoln. “It’s got me too, Linc.” He screws up his face in confusion. “The heat, brother. It’s burning me up from the inside out. And the only way to make it go away is to cut out the light. I don’t know why I carve this symbol onto my body. It’s us? It’s the past? It’s the present? I don’t fucking know. It’s just habit. But when I make the cuts, when I let the blood flow out in a river and take the heat and the light with it…” I sigh. It makes no sense. I get it. But it’s all I have in the way of explanation. “It feels good. Eases the pain. Cools me down. Makes the light go away.”
Everyone in the room just stares at me. Blank expressions turn to uncertainty, turn to pity.
“Every night, when the sun goes down, the heat, Lincoln. You understand, right? How the heat takes over? And every night I go up on the roof, naked, dying of fever. And I carve myself up until the blood turns to red light and the heat turns to comfort. And when that’s done, it closes up. That stupid jellyfish shit makes it all go away.” I stand up and walk over to Lincoln, who actually takes a step back when I reach for his shirt, fist the thin cotton in my fingers. “It seals it back up, Lincoln. It’s trapping this shit inside me. Get it out,” I say, pleading with him. “Get it the fuck out of me.”
“Hey,” Lincoln says, voice low, eyes more serious than I’ve ever seen. He clamps a rough hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “It’s OK. I don’t know what’s happening, exactly. But we’re gonna figure it out.”
We pause. All of us standing motionless and silent.
I shake my head. “No. I don’t think we will. I think this is something new.”
“How?” Thomas asks. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t want to kill people,” I say, still looking at Lincoln. “Not like you last winter when things started getting weird. That’s not what it is.”
“Then what is it?” Molly asks, getting up from the couch. She walks slowly towards me. Like I’m a wounded animal and she needs to be cautious. “What does it do to you, Case?”
Do to me?
No. They don’t understand. It’s not doing something to me. It’s fucking talking to me. The goddamned city is talking to me. So far it hasn’t told me to do anything, but it’s gonna. I can feel it. Something big is coming. And if I tell them that I’m gonna find myself with a nice new room over at the newly rebuilt asylum.
No, a voice in my head says. No. They wouldn’t do that to you. They won’t give up on you. They won’t let—
Shut the fuck up.
“Case,” Thomas barks. “Answer us, dammit. What the fuck is going on?”
“Yelling at him isn’t going to help,” Lulu says, surprising everyone by standing up and walking over to me. “He’s sick, OK? And I don’t know what the hell happened the night you guys took down Blue Corp, but clearly something did. He doesn’t need to be lectured,” she says, directing this to Thomas. “And if he actually knew what was happening”—she looks at Linc and Molly—“I’m sure he’d say so. But he doesn’t. Can’t you see that? He doesn’t understand it. Your AI doesn’t understand it. The tests can’t tell us anything because something is hiding inside him,” she says, grabbing onto my arm. “Hiding so well…” She stops, tilts her head slightly and then turns to Molly. “You’re a detective. I’m a lawyer. We should approach this like something that needs to be solved, not an interrogation. Case isn’t the perp, Molly. He’s the victim.”
I give Lulu a sidelong glance from under the unruly hair hanging over my forehead and growl, “I’m not a victim.”
She rolls her eyes and mutters, “Ego.”
“OK,” Molly says, putting her hands up in the air, like she’s begging people for calm. “Maybe Lulu’s right.” She sighs. “We need to be more rational about this. Talk it through.”
“Well”—Thomas grunts the words through a sarcastic laugh—“you’re the one with the answers to what happened to you at Blue Corp.”
Linc glares at him. A warning to tread carefully and not start taking things out on Molly.
“I’m just saying,” Thomas says. “Molly was the only one there. Everyone else is dead. So maybe she needs to dig a little deeper and come up with what that fucking rope was. If that’s what’s causing this then we need to know.”
“Do you remember, Molls?” Linc asks, taking her hand.
She lets out a long sigh. “I mean… some of it. But not that rope. I just don’t know.”
“Then how did you know how to use it?” Thomas snaps.
“Just back off,” Linc says. “Last warning, asshole.”
Molly shakes her head. “I remember fighting him,” she says in a low whisper. “The pain, though. He was conditioning me to give in to him by using pain. He wanted me to think of him as my savior. He said he was there for me”—she shoots Thomas an accusatory glare—“when everyone else left.”
“Hey, you know what?” Thomas sneers. “He made you to kill us, Molly. So you can try to lay that guilt trip on everyone else standing in this room. But I know what you are.”
Lincoln walks halfway across the room, hands up, like he’s ready to choke the fuck out of Thomas, when he stops to grimace away the inhibition poisoning. “You’re so fucking lucky I can’t kill you.”
“Stop it,” Molly says. “Both of you. I know what I am, Thomas. But I overcame that, OK? I’m not his killer anymore.”
“What the fuck is going on here?” Lulu asks, voice rising.
“So you say,” Thomas says, his voice low, deadly, and serious. He pays no attention to Lulu’s question.
&nbs
p; The four of us stand there trading looks. Molly breaks away first, crosses the room and stands in front of the imposing stone fireplace, leaning on the mantel like she just needs a little support.
“He told me to collar you with it.” She glances over her shoulder at Lincoln. “He seemed to think it was some kind of weapon that could control you.”
“But did it have poison on it?” Lulu is talking now. We’re all startled again, unused to having a fifth person here discussing this part of our lives. “What could’ve been on those barbs that would—”
“It has to be some kind of nanite.” We all whirl around to see Sheila standing in the room with us. “I think that rope was tipped with nanotechnology. I think that’s why we can’t see what’s happening, Case. It’s controlling our diagnostics.”
I reach around, feel the back of my neck where the monitoring sticker is making my skin itch.
“They were doing something fishy up on floor twenty-one, remember? We never did find out what that was,” Molly says.
“Yeah,” Linc says, mostly to himself. “They were in the middle of something. All those scientists”—he stops to look at Lulu, wary about saying too much—“the ones who committed suicide—those guys were all from Prodigy.”
Which is why he took them out during his crazy vigilante killing spree.
“They must’ve had something up there,” Thomas says. “Something ready to go, obviously.”
“They could’ve been doing anything up there,” I say. “Hell, they could’ve had—” But I stop it mid-sentence. They could’ve had kids up there. They could’ve restarted Prodigy and they could’ve done it right there in the main spire of the Blue Tower.
“If it’s technology-based shit, then Lincoln might be able to reprogram it,” Sheila says. “I took a sample of Case’s spinal fluid while he was unconscious and I’ve got it set up for you, Lincoln. That’s the only thing I can offer right now.”
“There’s something inside me?” I ask, my skin crawling. “Controlling me?” It might explain the voice. And the heat. But the light? Why do I glow?
“Fuck,” Linc says, scrubbing a hand up and down his jaw. He doesn’t have his gloves on, but there’s no light leaking out from his palms. He’s slowly gotten more control over that.
