Seek: Project Xol

by Amabel Daniels

  When he’d reached his quota, he didn’t just stop and sit. No catching his breath. He’d followed through the momentum of his exercise and sprang to his feet with a predatory smoothness.

  “Get dressed so we can get going.”

  I frowned at his back. Jeez. Talk about a one-eighty to how he’d been the previous morning. Unbidden, I felt the urge to tug at my earlobe, as if I was already so stupid to cherish the spot he’d not-so-marked me.

  I didn’t just take orders like that. Couldn’t he at least ask, instead of demand?

  “Please?”

  All right, he’d read my mind there. Still, what was up his ass? Gone was the hot attention he’d given me last night. Or had that just been an act? If he’d pretended interest in me, he’d certainly succeeded in giving me a distraction from heavier thoughts.

  I still hadn’t budged an inch. He turned to me as he pulled his shirt on. “I just want to get this over with.”

  Ah. So there it was. Now that we were so close to me opening the safety-deposit box and potentially being ready to somehow find Rosa, he was anxious to get out of this situation altogether. I couldn’t blame him. It stung, though.

  How much of an idiot could I be? Would I ever learn? My parents hadn’t wanted me. Rosa…she’d adopted me but kept me out of her life from a distance. Scott, he was another no-show. And Luke. I had no grounds to think he’d volunteer to stay with me.

  Just… I rubbed my eyes and flung the covers off me. Just get it over with. The faster I was on my own again, no matter how frightening and ambiguous that path might be, I’d know I wasn’t a burden on anyone else. I’d be free to just be…me.

  I left the bed and was about to brush past him, saying, “I’ll be ready to go in a minute,” when he grabbed my arm. Standing still, I slid my teeth together, refusing to meet his eye.

  “I don’t like…not knowing what’s next,” he admitted. “I can’t strategize and act on the best course of action without answers.”

  And he sure liked to be in action. I nodded, not needing this softer tone to cushion the blow of what he really meant and thought. Not knowing what’s next. He’d made it sound so open-ended, like he hadn’t decided, even though it was obvious he didn’t need my trouble.

  At least he’s been nice enough to get me here.

  “Then wait just a minute.” I yanked out of his grip and proceeded to get dressed. In no time at all, I was clothed and packing my belongings into the backpack. As much as his sentiment hurt, that he had to be so urgently wanting to leave, his words had merit.

  Hell, I wanted answers too, dammit. About this stupid safety-deposit box. Michael. Rosa’s husband I never even met. I had no replies to my questions, and I also had no direction to make a plan.

  How was I supposed to get the contents of the box to Rosa? I shouldered one strap of the bag and sighed. Maybe Zero would be better equipped once I shared the files with him.

  “Ready?”

  Fuck no. Yet I swallowed around the thickness in my throat and nodded.

  The bike ride into the city was uneventful, and I had to refrain from chuckling—giggling hysterically—at the irony that I’d been terrified to get on Luke’s bike, and now I was going to miss it. Once he left, I’d need to obtain my own transportation.

  He parked at a public lot near a subway station, and we followed Zero’s texted directions to Griffin Bank. Pedestrians joined us on the sidewalks, but many more people rushed in the belly of the city, hurrying to get on subway cars. We paid for a couple of visitor passes and hopped on the train to get us to the bank.

  I tried to keep my attention on the passersby instead of Luke, hating the gnawing dread I felt growing at him taking off. Biting my lip, I inhaled deeply, ignoring the smells of too much cologne and perfume in the crowded area.

  “You okay?” he asked as he stood in front of me. He blocked me, caged me in, almost, as he gripped the overhead bar with his left hand.

  “Yeah.” If okay included nerve-wracking anxiety, sure.

  Rosa said I had access to the account. The key waited in my pocket. But what if they asked for my ID? They had to if they were a reputable establishment. So, wouldn’t that just trigger my presence to Michael? Unlike the small-town cop, a clerk in a bank would have all the time and freedom to let a search upload in their database.

  Excuse me for feeling like I was walking into a trap.

  Luke grabbed my hand as we exited the subway, and I assumed he’d done it as a sign of keeping together. Traffic was heavier here, and people dodged this way and that. When he still held on to me on the less-hectic sidewalk above, I scolded myself not to read into it.

  Yeah, right. Luke wouldn’t be a sappy, let’s-twine-our-fingers-together kind of lover. He was keeping tabs on me. So I could finish what had brought us together in the first place. This stupid key.

  “Okay, so…” He stopped a few buildings from the bank’s entrance.

  “So, I go in, provide the necessities, open the box and take the files, and meet you out here.”

  He nodded and frowned at me as I finished his sentence. We’d rehearsed this with Zero last night. I wasn’t stupid. “Ye—ah.”

  “Then we’ll go to the internet café at the corner he told us to go to, and if there is anything digital, we’ll send it to him. And then…”

  “Hopefully find Rosa,” he added.

  It was my turn to nod. Find Rosa and say goodbye to him. “Well, wish me luck.”

  “I’ll be right here.”

  For now. I snorted as I turned from him.

  I was one of the first customers to enter the bank. With the seamless guidance of a polite and prompt teller, I was taken to customer service. There, I filled out forms and handed over my ID. I held my breath as the woman smiled and typed my information into her computer. When she returned my driver’s license, I stared at the plastic rectangle in my hand.

  “Would you like to go to the box now, or schedule for a later time?”

  That was it?

  She wasn’t frowning like bad news had popped up at my information.

  Security guards weren’t being summoned from their posts at the front doors in the lobby.

  I was cleared?

  How could I be? I’d almost killed a cop! Shouldn’t someone be on it already?

  “Now would be perfect, please.”

  What followed was a blur. A painless, efficient process. I was taken to the box and left alone in the room. It took me three seconds to unlock it. Inside was an envelope of papers, labeled in Rosa’s handwriting. Rosa A. birth certificate. I’d been expecting something heftier. Those applied sciences geeks kept meticulous, lengthy reports of data and such. One measly little envelope?

  “Seriously?” I whispered to myself. I put the documents in my backpack without even looking inside. Lying on the velvet surface of the box was one other item.

  Secured to a navy lanyard loop long enough to be a necklace was a USB drive. That was more like it. Luke and Zero’s hunch seemed true. If Rosa had paperwork or data for her research—it wouldn’t be skimpy enough to fit in the narrow shoebox-sized bank storage. What I held in my hand was probably the data that linked Rosa to Project Xol. I slipped the string around my neck and went through the motions of closing the box, locking it again—empty, and calling for an escort to exit.

  That was it. For as much of a pain in the ass it was to accomplish what Rosa had asked of me, actually getting the stuff from the box was easy.

  Outside, right where he’d said he’d be waiting for me, Luke stepped away from the wall he’d been leaning on. I walked, resisting the push to run to him, and nodded once. “Internet café.”

  He took my hand and we hurried to the next step in the plan. I felt reassured by the small weight of the drive resting under my shirt, tapping my breastbone with my rushed trot. Fear trumped my slight elation of success because Luke only gripped my fingers tighter, scanning our surroundings.

  I didn’t speak on the walk because I was too keyed up with
the potentially explosive content draped around my neck. It wasn’t every day one wore a necklace with a USB drive acting as a pendant with the cure to cancer. Once we entered the seedy café and registered on the computer Zero had already remotely hacked into for our use, Luke seemed to relax a little. Dark walls surrounded us, a doomsday mood of little light. I’d never been one to frequent places to use the internet since I’d always had my laptop at home or my smartphone with me all the time. The gloomy aura of the slate-painted room—even the ceiling—lent it a sinister vibe. Or maybe that was my mood. Regardless, I wanted to get out of there and back into the sunlight. Zero had probably located and chosen this place for its low curb appeal.

  We sat side by side and I stuck the flash drive into its slot.

  “Was it just that in the box?” he asked in a low whisper. His hot breath tickled my ear and I squirmed.

  “No.”

  He furrowed his brow and then faced the monitor. A series of documents began to show up in a growing list. Acronyms and dates composed the file names, and none of them meant anything to me. Without needing to consult the paper Luke had pulled out of his pocket, I typed in the username and password to the encrypted cloud storage Zero had given us, and began attaching files.

  Subject line: 2/72

  That’d take…if all of them were as bulky as the ones I’d started with… We were looking at numerous download waits. I’d asked Zero about using a download transfer service, since I was aware Rosa’s research was often long documents and he’d said absolutely not. Only this encrypted route. This place wasn’t operating on dial-up speed, but this PC was lagging.

  “Shit. That’s a lot.” Luke rubbed at his mouth and exhaled hard. Again, he glanced around.

  From what I could see, there was nothing and no one to bother us here. Who’d willingly come here for business, anyway? Just stoned gamers, probably. As long as Zero remotely controlled the computer, Luke and I would look like two people sitting really close to each other…working on homework? I thought that was the line Zero told us to use. I wanted to scoff at the thought. As if Luke could pass for a college man.

  In the first fifteen minutes, I’d uploaded as many file attachments as the ancient computer would handle. Each minute ticked by and I grew antsier. But there was no clear rush. It wasn’t as though I would know where to go from here. And if Luke was readying himself to leave…

  The screen blanked out. I blinked and gaped at the sudden change. The agonizingly slow circle of the mouse pointer was gone. A solid monitor of blackness faced us.

  “What—” Luke leaned toward the screen.

  I jiggled the mouse. No.

  “Yo.” The young woman with piercings along her lower lip approached us. Her grungy attire fit right in with the bleak décor of the place. “The dumbfucks upstairs blew the circuit again. It’ll take a while to get ’em all back up and runnin’.” She coughed and I flinched at the odor of weed that wafted from her.

  Shit.

  “How long of a while?” Luke asked.

  She shrugged. “My manager will have to come out here and do some password thing.” Another shrug. “He’s, like, way the fuck past the Bronx. An hour? Sorry.”

  I didn’t want to wait here for a damn hour.

  “Let’s go.” Luke stood first and I pulled the USB drive from the machine. I clipped it back to the receiving cap end for it and strode out after him. We exited into the bright sunshine and I strapped the backpack on.

  “Now what?”

  He stood on the sidewalk and wiped a hand over his mouth. “We should still get those files to Zero.”

  I nodded. “Then let’s call him and see if he’ll find another safe place for us to download them.” Well, Luke and I were capable of wandering and finding another internet café, but Zero had been adamant about us not popping in anywhere. Seemed weird to me, since he was in Ann Arbor, not New York, but maybe he’d done research of some kind to locate “trustworthy” places. I glanced around at the busier sidewalks. More people were out and faces blurred everywhere. But one stood out.

  One I’d never hoped to see again.

  Across the road, Michael Poole stood next to a streetlight pole. We made eye contact and he tilted his head.

  Fear froze me to the spot and my knees jellied. I couldn’t think. Couldn’t hear anything but the pounding drum of my too-fast heartbeat. A screaming insistence perked me into an ideal solution.

  Run.

  Luke had been talking and must have noticed my paralysis.

  “Cassidy?” He jerked around and scanned what I was locked on. “Cass—”

  He sped off, taking hold of my arm and running. At least he didn’t have a delayed reaction time. Sprinting down the pavement, we twisted around angry pedestrians who didn’t appreciate us disturbing the mob-like flow of traffic. I couldn’t look back. No way to see forward either. Luke’s massive frame plowed ahead, dragging me behind him.

  Where could we go? How could we escape?

  How was that man here? How was he even alive?

  “Here.” Luke’s direction was an exhaled noise, and I rushed after him as he pounded down the steps to the subway. I didn’t know which station, and it hardly mattered. As long as Michael wasn’t right behind us, it could be a teleportation exchange to the North Pole for all I cared.

  We swiped our cards at the nearest turnstile and Luke glanced over my shoulder, waiting on my card to activate entry. The firm set of his lips didn’t deepen, so I figured we were still one step ahead. Maybe we’d get away.

  No. Don’t jinx it. Don’t think, just move.

  He jogged over to the waiting area for a train and kept looking around. No different than the crowds up on the street, people were walking, rushing, waiting, and gathering everywhere. I tried to catch my breath and take comfort in the fact we might be safer in numbers.

  “Shit.” Luke gripped my upper arm, his furious concentration on a sight past me. “He’s coming. Just go.” He looked at me for a second. “Just go down to the other end of the station. I’ll delay him.”

  Delay? He couldn’t beat the crap out of a cop in broad daylight, in a packed subway station with witnesses everywhere. Was he nuts? I opened my mouth to choke out a sound of argument and he pushed me away.

  “Go!”

  Where? I wanted to scream, but as I turned around, I saw Michael shouldering his way through masses of New Yorkers.

  Splitting up was never the smart ploy. But I trusted him. Luke would know how to get us out of this.

  I ran without one more look at the man I didn’t want any distance from. Darting between benches and around people, I hoped I’d gained some safety. Minutes later, out of breath again and still trembling just as fiercely, I slowed and set my hands to below my ribcage, my throat screaming at the raw rapid intake of air. Goddamn, did my feet hurt.

  I eyed the tiled walls around me and realized they weren’t as clean. I’d run down to the end of the boarding area for one of the trains. Caved concrete surfaces took over and blackness waited down the tracks.

  How was I going to find—

  I turned and there was my answer. I didn’t have to find Luke because Michael was bringing him to me. The two men approached, both sporting new contusions on their faces. Luke’s stare bored into me, pleading, begging, apologizing. I couldn’t tell. Michael watched me with the start of something like a cocky grin. They moved almost as one, side by side, and I realized Michael was prodding Luke forward, his right hand inside his coat pocket, thrusting something at Luke.

  “Give me the files and I’ll let him go,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard this monster speak. A no-nonsense authority with a hint of a faraway accent.

  A face-off. No introductions? No announcing he was the law and I must obey? Or did he assume he could out-power us?

  I swallowed and refused to look at Luke. I couldn’t let him distract me or sway me. I could feel the intensity of his stare, warning me.

  I held a piece to a puzzle much larger tha
n my single significance on this planet. A crucial step to the cure to cancer. And opposing the power of that, I had to decide Luke’s fate. The life of a man I’d only just met—someone I unexplainably couldn’t fathom leaving.

  “The files.” Michael jabbed whatever he had pointed at Luke and scowled. “Or he’s dead.” Now he revealed the weapon in his hand, slipping the gun from its confines to prove his intent. I’d seen enough movies and read enough books to know what a silencer looked like. Cops were allowed to have them?

  All the action and busyness of the subways faded to only the three of us existing in the medium of time and space. Roars of approaching trains receded as I listened to my heartbeat, the wheezing rasps of my pants for air. The droning mumble of too many voices blurred into nothing as I stared at Michael.

  Who was I to say what mattered more? If I gave these files to Michael, was I sabotaging a saving grace to all who suffered from the horrendous disease? How could he expect me to let Luke die?

  “Now,” Michael demanded.

  “Let him go, first.” I wasn’t stupid.

  “Cassidy!” Luke roared. “Don’t.”

  I shook my head. “Let him go.”

  Michael smiled then, a creepy grin of wicked glee, and shoved Luke away from his side. Yet he still gripped his arm. Sleek metal came thundering near as an incoming train pulled to a stop. Dings sounded and an announcement cautioned riders to wait until doors opened.

  I held the cord to the USB in my hand and swiftly pulled it over my head. It was the only way. I couldn’t just let Luke be killed.

  I’m sorry, Rosa.

  She’d been right to instruct me so diligently. Tell no one. If I’d never gotten Luke involved, I wouldn’t be in this position right now. Too bad I couldn’t guess the deadly ramifications of her order to keep quiet. I reached my arm out, the slim stick of plastic and metal hanging in the air.

  Whooshes of air burst toward us as the doors opened. People rushed out of the opening, oblivious to the godawful conflict on the platform. Someone brushed into me, blocking me from viewing Luke and Michael. No sooner than I felt the lanyard slip from my fingers, a body barreled into me, shoving me back.