Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  Justin was saved from having to do this by Kural, who limped closer with Zaara and Lyle.

  “Everyone is bandaged and healing,” he said. “There aren’t many serious injuries, I’m happy to say.”

  “Now to get back to the hideout,” Hildon said. He sighed. “I’m not looking forward to a journey, I’ll be honest.”

  “Perhaps you don’t need one just yet.” The wizard turned to survey the crater. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, his palms up.

  The first change came with those who were gravely injured. Slowly, they elevated and thick sleeping pads appeared beneath them. An awning rose from nowhere to shelter them from the sun.

  Beyond them, a creaking sound accompanied tables and chairs that sprang into being. A fire blazed into life on the white circle of rock with a whole hog on a spit. On the tables, platters of food appeared and their smell made Justin’s mouth water helplessly. He could see pitchers of wine, bowls of roasted potatoes, and baskets of bread rolls. Two giant kegs of ale appeared at the edge of the crater, propped up on wooden stilts and accompanied by trays of mugs.

  Kural opened his eyes and smiled. “Eat,” he told those around him. “Rest. A journey should only be undertaken on a full stomach.”

  His suggestion was met with enthusiastic applause. Lyle appeared at the kegs with a speed that strongly suggested teleportation and began pouring ale for everyone. He appeared to have a process of drinking a mug of ale himself and pouring one for someone else, then repeated steps one and two as quickly as he could.

  Justin laughed and sat. He was famished and he couldn’t remember the last time anything had tasted as good as the pork and potatoes he shoveled into his mouth. He was on his third plate when he looked at Kural.

  He watched the other man eating with perfect manners and asked, “Are you…I mean, is any of the three faces we’ve seen actually what you look like?”

  The wizard glanced at him, surprised, and smiled. “You know, no one’s ever thought to ask me that.”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” he said.

  The man only smiled.

  “So, what will you do next?” Justin asked.

  Kural didn’t answer immediately. He took another roll and offered him one as well, before—apparently on a whim—he conjured an opulent chocolate cake. “My biggest failure,” he said finally, “wasn’t in losing to Sephith. It was in leaving the people of the valley to his mercy—and mine. It was my spell, you know, that has ash floating in the air. I would like to undo as much damage as I can before anything else. There are buildings still standing at the tower and I can work from there.” He looked at Justin. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Well…I’ll find the third key, I guess.”

  “I’ll aid you if I can,” the wizard offered. “I have several books that might contain some of the lore behind it. Sephith gave you my key and the demon…well, gods alone know where it found the one it gave you. I have my guesses but we’ll likely never know. I’ll send you a message if ever I find a hint.”

  “Thank you.” They clinked glasses, a friendly and oddly reassuring gesture.

  “And what will you do about your mayor’s daughter, hmm?” Kural smiled slyly. “What will she do when she learns you’re not of this world?”

  Justin leaned back with a start.

  “Yes, I do know.” The wizard fixed him with a frank look. “It’s obvious enough to anyone who has the eyes to see.”

  “Well, then, you make a suggestion.” He met his gaze. “And she knows, anyway. She doesn’t believe me, but she knows. And nothing will happen. I have to go back.”

  “Which is why you need the keys, eh?” Kural smiled. “We’ll see.”

  Part III

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  “I feel like a new man,” Nick announced as he came into the lab. This had become something of a ritual since they’d first relocated to the new premises.

  Jacob studied him quickly. “You look like a new man.” He refocused on his work for a moment before he looked up again. “Damn. We joke about this, but you really do look like a new man. In fact, you look good.”

  “Well, I think we can deduce from the exchange that I’ve slept enough and Jacob hasn’t,” he announced.

  Amber snorted into her coffee. She didn’t look up from her spreadsheets and a careful list she had made in a notebook.

  “Amber,” he said. “You also haven’t slept enough. I can answer all the money questions you have in there. We have unlimited money now.” He gestured broadly. “Hell, any one of us could tie up every loose end in there and still have money to spare.”

  She leaned back in her chair and grinned at him. “We do not have unlimited money. No one has unlimited money. For your information, I am making sure that I pass Diatek’s accountants a full list of our debtors as well as a complete accounting of our current situation. I merely want to be careful.”

  “She’s only doing that because she was making a mess drooling all over the equipment,” Jacob quipped. He looked into the lab with a contented smile. “I can’t blame her, of course. Will you look at that? It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  Nick put his armful of things on his desk—the last empty desk in this section of the lab—and settled into his chair to study their surroundings.

  Their old lab had been a small warehouse-esque room in a facility that absolutely was not built to be a lab. While it had seemed like crazy luxury to the three founding members of PIVOT when they first rented the space, it wasn’t remotely in the same league as this new premises.

  The lab was divided into five unequal parts. On one side of the room, set up a few feet from the rest, was a long, thin area partitioned by panels of glass. Four desks were positioned along the wall, which allowed the PIVOT team and Dr. DuBois to work while looking out over the floor. A mirror area on the other side of the room held servers, although the glass there was misted slightly from the powerful air conditioning.

  The main floor was comprised of two sections. The first was the line of pods, each with its own set of monitors to show the vital signs of the patient inside. Only Justin’s pod was illuminated right now, but he could easily imagine how it would look when there were more patients there. On the other side of the room from the pods were all the tools and toys they could possibly want arranged around several black workbenches. It looked like what one would get, he thought, if you asked an engineer to draw a candy store.

  DuBois was in that area now and gestured enthusiastically to a group of Diatek scientists who had been assigned as his assistants. Nick was pleased to see that they looked interested in the doctor’s passion—as well as amused. Between his mannerisms and his genius, the man often reminded him of a cross between Albert Einstein and Doc Brown if either of those two had eaten inordinate amounts of popcorn. His desk was piled with bags of it, in fact.

  The last area of their new offices, set behind more panels of glass emblazoned with the Diatek logo, was a comfortable seating area where the families of the patients would be able to watch the work in the lab without sitting on work stools. Mary and Tad Williams were there right now, and both also looked better rested and showered.

  That was the kind of setup you got, however, when you were bought out by one of the Defense Department’s top private contractors. Diatek had rocketed to the top of its industry without ever going public, instead assisting the Department of Defense and the US intelligence agencies with projects Nick frankly didn’t want to think about too hard. Anna Price, the founder of Diatek, was a chemist—and Nick could come up with more than a few guesses of what kind of things she provided to the government.

  Price, however, had another side as well. As a young woman, she had lost her daughter and her husband within two years. Her daughter had been left comatose after an accident similar to the one that had injured Justin Williams, but where Justin’s parents had been able to turn to PIVOT for help, Anna Price and her husband had found no support. They sold everything t
hey had, only to run out of money anyway. Price started Diatek, determined that she would find a way to make sure no other families had to go through what she and her husband had endured. Two years after their daughter was taken off life support, however, her husband had committed suicide out of grief and guilt.

  He could not imagine what she had gone through, and he felt bad for judging her contracts with the Defense Department. If it weren’t for her efforts and the money from those contracts, after all, she would not be able to help PIVOT with its work.

  Still, the woman unsettled him. She unsettled all of them, he thought. With no family of her own left to save, she was wholly devoted to her goals in a way even the consummate workaholics of PIVOT could not be.

  The young engineer shivered as he booted his computer up. They had made the final decision to allow Diatek to buy PIVOT out, and he could only hope that had been a good idea.

  Mary watched as the members of the PIVOT team set up. It was enlightening to see DuBois work with a team of assistants. When he was on his own, his genius tended to manifest in unsettling ways. She recalled an instance where Justin was in mortal danger in the video game and DuBois tended to be fascinated rather than worried and simply munched on popcorn as he watched the vital signs spike.

  It turned out that the man was also a good teacher. He had spent a solid hour and a half walking his students through the various monitor readouts on the pod and now waved his hands as he explained something in the area of the lab with the workbenches. Mary could not begin to imagine what they were talking about—she probably wouldn’t have any clearer an idea, she thought, even if she could hear the speech—but the assistants were enthralled.

  The group trooped to another of the pods and one of the assistants took their shoes off and climbed inside. The others, under the doctor’s direction, began to hook their colleague up.

  Beside Mary, Tad made a frustrated noise. She looked at him.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Another email came in.” He looked up. “I didn’t read it and only saw the title. They want me to…uh, do something that current technology would make very difficult.”

  He forced a smile but it was impossible not to see how exhausted he was, and her heart ached for him. She’d had very little sleep as she tried to stay up with him, but he’d had even less. He had spent almost the entire night with his aides in DC going over PR strategies.

  Two weeks before, a reporter had been tipped off about Justin’s treatment. The resulting questions to him, shown on live television, had triggered a media storm. It was his first term as a senator and he stood up to many of the big lobbyists in Washington and sponsored bills across the aisle to limit the power of pharmaceutical companies.

  His work should be the focus of the interviews he was asked for, she thought. Instead, the media painted him not as a principled new senator but as a renegade who had no principles at all and no respect for medical ethics. They either didn’t understand that Justin’s treatment was well-backed by research or didn’t care. Mary couldn’t decide which made her angrier.

  The man who had stirred all this up was Dru Metcalfe, a lobbyist for several pharmaceutical companies. One of his main clients had been responsible for getting Dr. DuBois’s seminal work blackballed from FDA trials. It was his research that PIVOT had stumbled across and melded with their own pod technology to enable Justin’s brain to heal from the damage caused by the car accident. By engaging him inside a virtual world, PIVOT and DuBois drew him slowly back to the real world.

  Meanwhile, thanks to Dru Metcalf, Tad was bombarded by inaccurate interview questions and hate mail. The other party was only too happy to jump on this as evidence of their opponent’s immorality, and Tad’s party, angry about his reaches across the aisle, made no effort to defend him.

  Mary was seriously considering taking boxing lessons so she could kick some ass. She was not pleased by this situation.

  Plus, in her opinion, no one would guess that a woman in a pink skirt suit and pearls could beat them up. She clenched one hand into a fist and made an off-season New Year’s Resolution to learn some kind of martial art. She could look it up later.

  Right now, he needed her. She took his hand and squeezed it.

  “The team wants me to come back to DC,” he said. His gaze was fixed on Justin’s pod. “They have ideas for PR stuff to do. They want to drum up support.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” she said. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  He shook his head. “I won’t ask you to do that. You’d do nothing but sit in meetings.”

  “I could give interviews,” Mary pointed out.

  Tad looked at her and considered the suggestion quietly. “I suppose you could. I’ll float that idea to them. For now, though, you stay here. The fewer people who have to go into that snake pit, the better.” He gave her a pained smile. “At least Price is letting me use her jet to go back. I’ll be able to work on the plane.” He lowered his head into his hands. “And I’m sure the media will get wind of the fact that I’m using her jet and it will turn into something about how I didn’t sell out to the lobbyists, I sold out to a crackpot who promised me they could cure Justin.”

  “That’s a terrible way to talk about DuBois,” she said and her lips twitched.

  Her husband was startled into a bark of laughter. He looked into the pod section of the lab, where DuBois ran one cheese-stained hand through his wild hair. “Oh, that man. I have to say, he really grows on you.”

  “He does.” She smiled. “Okay, you go. I’ll stay here and…well, get DuBois to wash his hands. And his hair. Dear Lord. And you…” She stood and took his face in her hands. “You remember something—you didn’t simply throw Justin’s life away on a whim. You saved him from a situation where lobbyists were in charge of his life or death, and you found people who truly wanted to help him—and who had shown they could. The truth will come out, I believe that. For now, remember that you found the best care for your son.”

  Tad crushed her close in a hug. When he spoke, his voice was broken. “I miss him so much, Mary. He’s right there, but I can’t speak to him.”

  “You will,” she promised. “We’ll get him back. Now, you go to DC and fight for all the families that don’t have PIVOT and Diatek helping them.”

  He squeezed her hand and nodded.

  “And when you need to smile,” she reminded him, “remember those videos of me in the game.”

  That drew a reflexive and genuine guffaw. He had persuaded DuBois to show him the readouts of Mary in the game, filtered through with basic graphics, and he had teased her nonstop since then about how she should be his bodyguard now. With a tender kiss, he left with his shoulders a little straighter than they had been an hour before.

  Mary watched him walk away with a smile that faded as soon as he was gone. She had to keep believing that they would get Justin back. If she thought for a moment that they might lose him, she would be lost as well. She had spoken to him in the game and had seen his humor and his strength.

  He was in there. She fixed her gaze firmly on his pod. He was alive and he was in there. They would get him back.

  Dru had just showered when his phone rang. He put his razor in its usual place and his jaw tightened. The ringtone was familiar and he took a moment to compose himself before he moved to the bed and answered.

  “Mr. White. Good morning, sir.” He kept his tone hearty.

  “Yes.” Raymond White, CEO of IterNext, wasn’t a very talkative man. He also wasn’t a happy one in general, especially when one of his employees failed him.

  The lobbyist had failed him for the past five months. What was supposed to be a routine operation had gone sideways when, instead of falling in line, Tad Williams had decided to go rogue. It was the longest a senator had ever held out against the man’s trademark combination of bribery and blackmail, and Dru was absolutely determined to not let it be the first time he failed entirely.

  “Well?” White aske
d. He didn’t waste words.

  “We’re making progress, sir,” he assured him. “The media is doing its job wonderfully. The exposé piece on the PIVOT offices is coming out this morning. There are four journalists waiting outside Williams’ offices. He’ll have to go past them when he gets back from California.”

  “You said you had him,” the CEO reminded him. “You said he would need you to get out of legal trouble. What happened with that?”

  He sat on the bed and tried not to snarl. It wasn’t his fault that had gone wrong. How was he supposed to guess that the founder of PIVOT would be stupid enough to jump on the grenade to save the rest of them? You went in, you threatened legal action, and people fell in line. It was how it worked. Sometimes, they countersued and you let the lawyers go at it for a while until the other party cracked, but you always won. When you had deep pockets and enough lawyers, it always worked.

  Despite the failure, he still believed he could have worked on Jacob Zachary if he’d had the time. Unauthorized human experimentation would haunt the man’s career forever if he were convicted. He could have gotten him to flip in a few days if he had access.

  What no one had expected was for Anna Price to swoop in. Diatek had no goddammed interest in this bill. They were in defense, for the love of Christ, not pharmaceuticals. They had all the contracts they could ever want.

  Now, PIVOT belonged to Diatek, all charges against Zachary had been wiped, and interfering with anything they did was likely to land someone in a prison that didn’t technically exist.

  Dru had lost significant leverage.

  He sketched the details for White, hopeful that the man would offer some connection to Price, preferably something they could use.