by Keith Thomas
Three minutes, Matilda repeated to herself. Just three minutes.
Then she ducked down beside Ashanique and wrapped her arm around the girl and held her tight. She wanted to reassure her that she was safe, that the nightmare was over. But she knew she couldn’t. So she just enveloped Ashanique and let the girl melt into her, the only safety she could be sure of.
Seconds later, Janice barreled around the corner, Glock in hand. She glanced around the room for a moment before ducking down to peek under the counter. Her eyes locked with Ashanique’s.
“I think I hit him,” she said.
“Mom, I don’t want to run anymore.”
Janice calmly got to her knees and crawled under the counter to her daughter. She took Ashanique’s right hand in her own and squeezed it before she leaned in and touched the tip of her nose to the girl’s.
Ashanique began to cry.
“No, baby,” Janice said, gun still gripped tight in her left hand. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be just fine. You have to do something for me, though. You have to listen. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes,” Ashanique said, voice breaking.
“Police will be here soon, Janice. Just a couple of minutes.”
Janice ignored Matilda, focused solely on her daughter.
“What’s happening in your head—the voices, the people—is only just starting. You have to take the medication every four hours. Have to be exact. If you go too long between doses, you’ll get a headache. Skip one and the headaches will get much worse. Miss more than three and there’s no going back.”
Ashanique pulled the capsules from her pocket to look at them.
“What if I like the memories? What if I want them?”
“No, baby,” Janice said. “The memories are bad. Tell me you get that.”
Ashanique nodded.
Janice continued, “Tomorrow afternoon, you need to have Matilda take you to the library at the International Museum of Surgical Science by four p.m. Don’t forget. Can’t be late, okay? Someone named Childers will be waiting there for you. You trust Childers, understand? No one else.”
“You’re gonna be there too, right?”
Janice bit her lower lip before she kissed Ashanique’s forehead. The girl’s eyes were turbulent and teary; Janice stabilized them with her own steeled gaze.
“I love you,” Janice said. “Always will.”
“Mom . . . ,” Ashanique squeaked.
The sound of her voice crumbling under the weight of pain and distress nearly broke Matilda. She unconsciously wrapped her arm tighter around Ashanique, trying to stabilize the girl against a psychological cataclysm.
Janice said, “I need you to remember that I love you more than anything. Everything I’ve put you through, all the moving, all the medications, all the difficulty was because I needed to keep you safe. All I ever wanted was for you to be okay, to live a good life. That is why I have to leave now. Even if you forget what I look like, and you will, remember my love for you.”
Ashanique called out as Janice pulled away.
Matilda held her back as the alarm shredded the air. As Ashanique screamed and struggled, Matilda watched Janice vanish around a corner.
Scattered gunshots quickly followed.
With every distant pop, Matilda cringed and Ashanique cried louder.
“They’ll be here soon,” Matilda said. “We’re safe. We’re safe. . . .”
She realized she was saying it, almost chanting it, more for herself than for Ashanique. Matilda needed it to be true. She needed to believe this wasn’t how her life was going to end. Just a day earlier, every cell of her being was coded with a singular goal—find the key to memory. Ashanique switched it all up. She was now the only thing keeping Matilda going; that shift, rooted in the primal core of her being, wrenched her focus toward a new goal: You have to save this girl’s life.
“We’re safe. I’ve got you.”
Ashanique’s cries subsided and she settled, but only momentarily.
The spasms began with a violent jerk as the girl suddenly wrenched her head back. Her eyes rolled to white, her teeth chattered. Matilda held her as tightly as she could, worrying Ashanique might bite off her own tongue and praying—for the first time in a long time, honestly, sincerely praying—security would arrive.
Just before she passed out, Ashanique opened her eyes, pupils widening.
“I see everything,” she said.
Matilda held the girl and whispered half-remembered psalms.
“You will take refuge under his wing. . . . No harm will come to you. . . .”
She felt silly saying the words out loud, trying to peel back the decades to find language that made sense. Matilda wasn’t religious, but in that moment, it felt like the only thing to do. There was peace in it.
Matilda heard more gunfire.
Then shouting, running.
Seconds later, campus police officers appeared. Guns drawn, the radios at their hips rattled with static and panic. An officer with light-brown eyes crouched down by the pharmacy counter and looked over at Matilda and a limp Ashanique.
“It’s over,” she said. “You’re safe now.”
22
1:34 P.M.
AUGUST 23, 1662
PATNA, MUGHAL DYNASTY, INDIA
RUNNING.
Heart pumping.
Tunnel blind.
Branches whip the young boy’s face as he races down the narrow trail. The other hunters are close behind him. He hears his uncle’s rapid breathing. The musky scent of the tiger is strong, hanging like a vapor over the trail. He sees its tail in every creeper, its stripes in every shadow.
This is his moment.
His to own.
Around him, the forest pushes in. Birds call and scatter. Monkeys shriek in the low-hanging branches. The trees buzz with life. Every leaf hides an insect. Beneath every stone, a snake. The hunters know this trail but not like the boy. He’s spent his life memorizing its turns and straightaways, navigating each stone and root.
The boy is twelve today.
His celebration is this hunt.
He wears a simple length of fabric tied about his hips. In his hands is the push dagger his uncle made for him. It has never pierced flesh, but the young boy is anxious to use it. In his mind, if he kills this tiger, he will be a strong man like his father. If he fails, he will be a simple villager. He’s seen how their lives are measured by their kills. The boy’s bare feet slap against the hard soil as he carefully dodges every approaching obstacle.
The boy and the hunters run through a field of shoulder-high grass before scrambling after the tiger as it winds its way down the rocky side of a steep gorge. A river churns far below. The hunters stop at the edge of the gorge, but the boy follows the tiger down—he is fleet, his balance uncanny.
Reaching the waterline, the boy jumps over boulders, slick with moss and washed by constant waves, before cornering the tiger in the roots of a vine-choked tree. The hunters egg the boy on from above.
He pulls his push dagger from his knotted sarong. The beast flashes its teeth and hisses. Heart racing, breath caught in his throat, the boy moves closer. The tiger lashes out with razor-tipped paws. The boy dodges but catches a claw on his thigh—it leaves a long, paper-thin gash.
The boy stabs with the dagger; the tiger lunges.
It slams into the boy, and the watching hunters shout as both tiger and boy tumble into the fast-moving river. They are swept into the river, tumbling, head over feet, in the choppy, dark water.
Two miles downstream, the river widens and slackens.
The boy is first to claw his way out onto the muddy bank. He rolls over, hacking up lungsful of water, and stares back at the river.
Birds flock overhead, their screeching echoing through the jungle.
The boy’s heart slows, his breathing steadies. He is just pulling himself up when he sees the tiger paddling toward him. The boy freezes. It shakes off the water, eyes locked on him. The boy doesn’t dare t
urn his head. The tiger growls once before leaping over the boy and vanishing in the forest behind him.
The boy falls backward and sighs.
The sun is reflected in his dark eyes just as . . .
23
7:17 A.M.
NOVEMBER 14, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
THE BOY’S EYES became Ashanique’s eyes.
The tiger and the river and the forest melted away, and all she saw were the bright lights of the ceiling spinning overhead like exploding constellations. She found herself lying in a hospital bed with an IV in her arm. The clear tape used to keep in the IV hurt, her skin was stretched around it, and the blood under the tape, a tiny puddle smooshed flat, discolored her skin.
Ashanique was alone.
The door was closed. Outside, she heard nothing. As though the very planet had stopped moving. Wherever she was, it seemed safe. Safe enough. Ashanique closed her eyes for a few moments and replayed the jungle chase. As it came rushing back, her pulse quickened. . . .
The jungle foliage crushing in . . .
The tiger jumping at her, its teeth flashing before . . .
A bomb explodes . . .
Clods of dirt fly skyward . . .
A British soldier falls, mouth gushing blood . . .
Ashanique’s eyes snapped open.
She had to breathe slowly to calm her pulse, to stop her heart from bursting like a rabbit’s. Calming down, she looked around the room. It was small, the bed enclosed by all manner of medical equipment—some of it on, most of it not. Despite the presence of the machines, deep down, coiled somewhere in her chest, was the soft, glowing feeling of knowing she was not sick.
No matter what Matilda said.
No matter what the doctors who hooked her up to the machines thought.
She wasn’t sick, not sick like someone with cancer or a brain disease. Whatever was happening to her was organic . . . a process that felt determined and inevitable but at the same time familiar. Intimately so. Whatever was coming to life in her was integral. Ashanique also knew, intrinsically, inexplicably, that her mother was out there, alive, and that the bald man with no eyebrows was coming to kill her.
He had come for her mom. Ashanique was next on the list.
The Night Doctors always found their patients.
That is why Mom told you to run. Why she told you never to trust anyone except Childers. Go to the museum. Get there by sunset tomorrow.
With her uneasiness quickly rising, Ashanique pulled up the edge of the tape over her IV. The skin came up with it, the tiny, invisible hairs too. It hurt and the flesh around the IV was quickly turning red. But Ashanique knew she didn’t have a choice, she had to push through the pain. Gritting her teeth, she pulled the tape away from her wrist. The IV came out with the tape, the long catheter emerging with a bubble of blood. Ashanique staunched the wound with the edge of the pillowcase.
Then she swung her legs around the edge of the bed and got up.
She was woozy for a moment.
The last rivulets of blood running down her arm tickled.
Ashanique found her clothes in a bag on a chair in the corner of the room. Dropping the pillowcase, she slipped out of the thin hospital gown and into her clothes. Fully dressed, shoes slipped on, she peeked outside, into the hallway.
It was empty.
Moving quickly, eyes to the ground, Ashanique walked out of her room and into the hall. She headed to her right, hugging the walls with her shoulder. Though she had no idea where she was going, she assumed this hospital was like most hospitals—stairs and elevators would be readily available.
The hallway ended, branching to the left and right. But twenty feet away, directly across from her, was a service elevator. It could only be accessed with a badge or a key, and there was an armed security guard standing in front of it, distractedly looking at something on his cell phone.
Ashanique mentally replayed the image of the bald man splitting open Matilda’s friend’s throat. She replayed the heavy gush of blood. She replayed the bald man’s emotionless expression. His merciless speed.
Ashanique had to get into that elevator.
The intersection was busy. There was a nurses’ station to her right, where two men and a woman, all clad in green scrubs, sat and talked. To her left, a man restocked a cart stacked high with folded bed linens. He had earbuds in and was nodding his head in time to a silent beat.
Ashanique figured she’d just walk over, as calmly as possible, press the call button, and hope the guard left her alone. It was risky.
What if he notices you? Asks you what you’re doing?
How are you going to talk your way past him?
Think, silly. Come up with something good . . . something believable. . . .
Ashanique remembered the Indian boy and the tiger. While his memories didn’t surge back, the sensation of them did. Looking over at the security guard, her eyes tracking his movements, she noticed subtle things about him—the fact that one of his shoulders slouched lower than the other, that he had coffee stains on his pants and orthopedic shoes. Things she never would have noticed two days ago—things she never would have cared about. But now, here, she saw them and put them together as though she were assembling a puzzle.
You’re going to take him, a voice inside her head said. He’ll drop easy.
Ashanique unconsciously balled her hands into fists.
She was a passenger in her own body. Someone else, someone older, someone dangerous, had taken over. The voice was strong, cold.
You bring the guard down and then get into the elevator. If you hurry, we can be out of here before the alarms even go off. You need to find Childers. Dr. Song can help you; he can help all of you and stop the Night Doctors and their killer.
Ashanique moved, every muscle taut, ready to spring, but just as she crossed the carpeted intersection, the security guard’s radio blurted a static fart. He grabbed it and walked away, talking. Never even noticing her.
But Ashanique was in motion now.
As she walked to the elevator, Ashanique grabbed a ballpoint pen from on top of a crash cart parked against a wall nearby. With each step, she took the pen apart. Unwinding the pen’s tightly coiled spring to pick the elevator lock, Ashanique stepped up to the elevator, hands unnaturally still. A heartbeat before she inserted the unwound spring, the doors whooshed open. Two doctors stood inside, staring at her. Both wore blood-spattered scrubs and medical masks.
Night Doctors.
Ashanique didn’t think. She didn’t plan what happened next, her body simply reacted. She swung the pen’s ink cartridge hard into the first doctor’s side; embedding the sharp tip of the pen in between his ribs like a small black arrow. The doctor screamed and collapsed backward into the elevator. But Ashanique didn’t see that, she’d already turned, already started to run in the opposite direction.
Right into Matilda.
Seeing Matilda’s face was like seeing the shore after being dragged, tumbling, by a riptide out into the dark sea. Ashanique ran to that shore, her composure breaking down, her strength crumbling away with every emotion-choked breath.
Matilda opened her arms to Ashanique.
“It’s okay, I’ve got you.”
“I need to get out of here. He’s coming for me.”
“You’re safe,” Matilda said. “You’re safe here. The doors are locked and there are guards on every floor.”
“I got out of my room easy.”
Matilda looked over Ashanique’s shoulder at the elevator, where several nurses were helping the injured doctor over to a chair. Security guards, their radios a riot of robot voices, raced over, eyes pointed in Ashanique’s direction.
“The man isn’t here anymore. The police are after him, okay?”
“And my mom?”
“I promise you they’re looking for her, as hard as they can. As soon as the police hear something, they’ll tell us.”
Asha
nique let go of Matilda and turned to the elevator. She watched as a nurse pulled the pen from the doctor’s side. “She’s going to be okay, right?”
“I’m sure she will.”
Three security guards, hands on their weapons, were walking over.
Ashanique looked at Matilda, eyes swimming with tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt him . . . I—I thought he was one of them. You understand, right? Please. Please tell them that I didn’t mean it. That I’m just so confused.”
Matilda waved off the security guards.
“Just give us a minute, please,” she said.
The guards stopped a few feet away.
Matilda kneeled down and Ashanique followed. Heads close, eyes locked, Matilda asked, “Do you need to talk?”
“Yes. But not here.”
“I understand,” Matilda said. “Are you hungry?”
Ashanique nodded.
“Great.”
Matilda looked down at Ashanique’s wrist.
She noticed the oozing bruise where the IV used to be.
“The doctor’s going to be okay. It was just a misunderstanding. You’ve been through . . . Well, you’ve experienced something this morning that most people never see. And shouldn’t.”
“You saw it too. It was your friend.”
Matilda nodded, swallowing hard.
Ashanique watched a single tear form in the corner of Matilda’s left eye. As it slid down her cheek, the girl reached up and wiped it away. Matilda smiled.
“Do they have pancakes here?” Ashanique asked.
“Yes. Very good pancakes.”
“Can we go?”
Matilda stood.
“Yes, we can go.”
24
7:46 A.M.
NOVEMBER 14, 2018
WEST GARFIELD PARK
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
KOJO OMABOE WAS looking for the cathedral patterns in a cherrywood board.
The bearded forty-five-year-old homicide detective was working on another end table. This one was for his neighbors, Morris and Barbara Thomson. They’d been excellent neighbors, watching out for his place when he’d been away and keeping an eye on his son, Brandon, though they didn’t need to. Neighborly was how they described themselves. He figured that went a long way in today’s world. And he wanted to reward them for it.