by Keith Thomas
Ashanique slumped forward, her limbs too heavy to move, her eyes rolling. “Please . . . Stop this. . . .”
“You have to push harder. We need to see this through,” Tamiko said.
Matilda had seen enough.
She stood and moved to pull a limp Ashanique away from the monitor. But Tamiko beat her to the punch, sticking a Taser into Matilda’s right side, just below her breast. Eight million volts of electricity forced her body rigid.
Matilda fell to the ground, unconscious.
Tamiko ignored her and pushed Ashanique closer to the monitor.
“You are unique,” Tamiko said. “You’re the only child of a Null we are aware of. In the lab, we saw the Clarity develop only after weeks, sometimes months, of heavy testing. Heavy exposure. But you, Ashanique, you’re not like the others. They had to be awakened by forceful prodding. Not you, you awoke on your own.”
Wide eyes glued to the flashing screen, Ashanique’s eyes rolled to white.
She sank into herself.
And saw the life just before her own. . . .
42
11:38 A.M.
MAY 30, 1975
THREE SAINTS BAY
KODIAK ISLAND, ALASKA
WINTER IS JUST loosening its grip on the mountains.
Parts of the earth tumble, rocks and low-slung shrubs, toward a slate-gray bay. Fog rolls in ropy coils across the water, shrouding the remnants of an old gold rush town. It was a desolate land then; it is even more desolate now.
The roar of an engine breaks the heavy silence as a camouflage Humvee tears down a twisting, narrow dirt road at the water’s edge. Mud-spattered and worn, the vehicle is tattooed with military insignias and an American flag.
Inside the Humvee a long-limbed but reed-thin African American girl sits between two soldiers. The one behind the wheel has a mustache and red cheeks. His name is Morton. By the window is Phillips, a tall black man with steely eyes and a habit of rolling his cigarette lighter between his fingers in a fluid, hypnotic arc.
“We’re going to see my mom, right?” Janelle Walters asks the soldiers.
She is six years old.
Morton and Phillips are silent. They’ve been silent much of the three-hour drive from the airport. Phillips said a few words to Janelle when they stopped for a snack in a small town with only one gas station. She had to pee something fierce, and he walked her to the restroom and told her to make sure to lock the door behind her. When she was done, she unlocked the door and peeked outside and saw Phillips standing there, still as a statue, with his hand on the gun on his hip.
After they’d climbed back in the Humvee, Morton handed Janelle a bag of chips and a Tab cola. He told her to make sure not to make a mess, the only words out of his mouth the whole time. Then he looked at Phillips, and Phillips shook his head.
“Man, least we outside and stretching our legs.”
Janelle knew they were talking about “babysitting” her. When they met her at the airport, Morton had been in a funk. Janelle figured out quickly it was because he hated being around kids. The idea that he had to pick up this brat from the airport and drive her across the island made him surly. Phillips tried to calm him down, but no matter what he said, Morton just shrugged it off. Janelle thought Morton was an angry person, and she didn’t like the idea of sitting beside him. What would he do if she talked too much? Or asked too many questions? Janelle’s mom said she had a mouth on her. It took everything Janelle had to keep quiet for that first hour. But then she had to pee.
Finally, they’re getting close.
Janelle can sense it in the men. The whole way up until now, Morton was driving with both his hands on the steering wheel. Gripping it like he was trying to strangle the life out of it. Now, he’s leaning back and his hands are loose. Phillips is doing that thing with the lighter. Janelle’s fascinated by it.
“It’s been two weeks since I saw her last,” Janelle says.
Phillips says, “She’ll be glad to see you, I bet.”
“Kinda cruel,” Morton says.
Judging by his tone, Janelle can already tell he’s about to say something mean. Something that will likely upset her. But she’s close to seeing her mom now, no matter what Morton says, she’s determined to not let it dampen her mood. Not one bit.
Phillips says, “Don’t start this. The girl . . .”
Morton gives Phillips an ugly sidelong look. “That’s my point exactly. It’s like bringing your lap dog to the pound to visit all the other poor fuckers. Rubbing it in their faces, you know?”
“Boss wants to see her kid. And watch your mouth.”
Morton scoffs. Janelle has heard worse.
“All I’m saying”—Morton continues his tirade—“seems kinda sick. Makes me wonder what the real reason is. Maybe she just wants to see her kid. Maybe she’s got something else in mind. I don’t care what they tell me, how they talk all big and fancy about revolutionizing warfare, what they’re doing in that base is just a few steps above what we saw gooks doing. Some of that shit . . .”
“You’re gonna scare her,” Phillips says.
Janelle says, “You can’t scare me. I know it’s all just talk.”
Morton laughs. It’s a hollow sound, like a rock tossed into a well.
The Humvee screams around a corner. A half mile ahead is a checkpoint with a rolling fence. It is topped with razor wire like Janelle’s seen in the movies about prison escapes. All she can think is that her mother is safe behind those fences. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, it makes sense to have the maximum protection. Who knows what runs up and down these mountains in the darkest part of night? Janelle certainly doesn’t want to know.
At the gate, Morton flashes his badge at a waiting soldier.
“We got Dr. Theriault’s kid here.”
The rolling fence opens, and the Humvee roars through. Janelle doesn’t speak for the rest of the ride; her eyes are glued on the road. Her whole body is alive with expectant electricity.
The dirt road twists for another five miles inland before the base materializes from the surrounding evergreen forest. It is black and squat and parts of it are covered in camouflaged tarps. Janelle knows that if they’d approached the building from any other angle, it’d evaporate into the trees. How cool? Not only did Mom get to work at a lab tucked into the mountains, but it was a secret lab.
The Humvee stops in a rock-strewn lot a few yards from what Janelle assumes is the front door to the place. Morton gets out first and stretches. Before he opens his door, Phillips turns to Janelle.
“Your mom’s missed you,” he says. “Been talking ’bout seeing you for a long time. Can’t get her to shut up about it, to be honest.”
“Really?” Janelle asks, the surprise in her voice obvious.
Phillips smiles and nods. He’s never spoken to Dr. Theriault in his life. She doesn’t pay any of the military staff any mind. He’s never seen her in the commissary, and she doesn’t ride the elevators like the other scientists. When she’s passed him in the halls, she’s as cold as the air on the top of the mountains. Phillips knows he’s a ghost, so are all the other soldiers. He also knows Dr. Theriault will only break this little girl’s heart. Morton’s right, she shouldn’t be here. But she is.
“She’s been real busy, though,” Phillips adds. “She might be busy still.”
“My mom’s always busy. That’s her job.”
Phillips laughs. “That it is.”
Stepping into the base is like stepping into an electronic cave. She knows it’s made of concrete, but she never imagined it’d be as dark as it is. At the university lab, the walls are white and the floor is an endless stretch of tile. The place is cleaned every single day and the people there wear white coats and laugh a lot. Two breaths into her mom’s forest hideout and Janelle knows that nobody laughs here. A bowling ball solidifies in her stomach. She worries it’ll be there for the rest of her visit.
Janelle follows Phillips down a narrow corridor where the lights
are embedded in the center of the walls, not on the ceiling. She doesn’t ask why. But she counts each one she passes and she’s at fifty-two before they take a left turn to a spiraling concrete staircase. The only other people Janelle sees as they walk downstairs are men in military fatigues and a handful of people in scrubs. Several of the women who pass her smile, but no one says anything. Janelle gets the impression that this place must be sacrosanct. It certainly has the heavy air you find in a church or a cemetery. She wonders what sort of experiments her mother is working on here. She wonders why Morton thought it was cruel for her to see the “poor fuckers.” Who are they?
At the bottom of the stairs, Phillips swipes his badge to unlock some metal doors. They click unlocked and he holds them open for Janelle. She steps into another corridor lined with the same lights just like the one up above. They walk to another door. He unlocks it, but before he opens it, he looks down at Janelle.
“Yer momma tell you ’bout the other children?”
“The ‘poor fuckers’ Morton was talking about?”
“Now, come on . . .” Phillips fights to hold back his laughter. “They are children, but they’re not children like you, understand? They’ve got some medical issues. They’re here to see if they can make things right with them again. Because of that, they’re kept separate. You know, kept in their own rooms.”
“My mom worked with kids at the university. Lots of sick kids.”
“So you understand how this is gonna look.”
Janelle nods and acts confident, though she’s not sure she actually does understand how this is going to look. The children at the university, they were in hospital beds and wore thin hospital nightgowns. Some of them had their heads shaved and needles in their arms. But they were always children like Janelle. Just children who didn’t have the health or the mind she did. As Phillips opens the door, Janelle is worried about what she’s going to see. Are there monsters in here?
They step into a large circular room. It has high ceilings like a missile silo that Janelle read about in school once. Doctors and nurses stand around machines and desks in the center of the room. Janelle doesn’t see her mother, not at first. She’s too busy looking for the monsters they’re hiding in this place.
Janelle follows Phillips into the room, and as they walk across the concrete floor—she notices they are scuffed—she eyes the fifty-odd doors set into the walls. They look like prison doors. Thick and steel, each is painted bright orange. There are no windows on the doors, but there are numbers stenciled in white paint. She notices 32 . . . 33 . . .
“Janelle?”
A young Korean man with a thin mustache and glasses walks over, hand extended. Janelle smiles shyly. She shakes his hand. “I’m Dr. Hyun-Ki Song. But you can just call me Dr. Song. I work with your mother; she’s looking forward to seeing you.”
Dr. Song escorts Janelle to a subbasement via a series of winding hallways and wide concrete staircases. Her mother, Dr. Celeste Theriault, six years older than the fresh-out-of-school Dr. Song, sits at a lab bench in a long, narrow room crowded with scientific equipment and silent technicians. Janelle is reminded of walking into a library.
Janelle runs up to her mother and hugs her.
Dr. Theriault turns and looks down at Janelle with a cool, detached smile. “Hey there, Janny. Good to see you.” Janelle keeps hugging her mom, so happy to be nuzzling her warmth, but she senses there’s something wrong. Her mother is rigid, cold.
“Honey,” Dr. Theriault says, “I need you to let me go now.”
Janelle pulls away, tries to hide her disappointment.
“I know you’re busy, the men said so.”
“Yes, but I’ll visit more with you later. Dr. Song . . . ?”
Dr. Song takes Janelle’s hand and leads her back upstairs. As they walk, Janelle turns and looks back at her mother, who is bent over the microscope again. She wants her to look back, but her mother doesn’t. Janelle heads upstairs, heart breaking.
They pass a room with the steel doors open. Inside, Janelle can see a small, frail boy strapped down on a gurney beneath a massive metal cylinder. Janelle thinks it could be a telescope, but it’s squat and the eyepiece is too big. The machine hums. The skinny boy wears a boiler suit like a prisoner and the number 19 is stenciled on the pant legs. He shakes, then the humming stops. Janelle stops to watch.
“Is he going to be okay?” Janelle asks Dr. Song.
“He’ll be fine,” Dr. Song says. “Just running tests. Come on now.”
“Let me just watch a little longer. . . .”
Dr. Song reaches for Janelle’s arm but stops himself from pulling her away.
The two soldiers wheel the boy from the room. He looks drugged out. Delirious. Janelle and Dr. Song walk alongside them for a moment before the soldiers turn the cart into another room where two women in white coats wait with several men in scrubs. One of the female doctors is Japanese. Her face is half covered by a medical mask, but her badge reads, DR. TAMIKO KADREY. The woman next to her is older, maybe in her late thirties, and her badge reads, DR. DOROTHY SYKES.
The soldiers wheel the boy up in front of Dr. Sykes and she cracks open a vial of smelling salts. The boy suddenly rouses. Dr. Song puts his hand on Janelle’s shoulder.
“We really should be going,” he says.
But there is no way Janelle is going to move. She stands firm. She needs to see what’s going to happen with the boy marked 19. The boy stops trembling. Dr. Sykes asks him to tell her what he’s seen. His voice sounds like a little boy’s, but his words can’t be his own.
“Dobroye utro,” he says.
Janelle has no idea what it means.
“What is your name?” Dr. Sykes asks the boy.
The boy turns to her.
“Anastasia Tschaikovsky.”
Dr. Song pulls Janelle away from the door and drags her back down the hallway. Janelle tries to comprehend what she’s just seen.
She’s frightened, her eyes darting.
She wants to go home.
She’s desperate to see her mom again, to drag her mom from her microscope and this horrible place. . . .
43
10:46 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE NEUROSCIENCE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
ASHANIQUE RETURNED to herself.
Her mother’s memories faded at the back of her mind like ice melting on her tongue. Lingering only for a single nostalgic moment. The monitor was blank now. The buzzing sound had ceased. Tamiko sat beside her. Leaning forward, Ashanique couldn’t see Matilda. She knew Matilda wouldn’t have left her alone.
Something was wrong.
“What is the solution?” Tamiko asked.
Ashanique shook her head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. . . .”
“Your mother hid something from us. It’s a series of numbers, an answer to a complicated math problem. You know what she knew. You must see it.”
“I don’t see any numbers,” Ashanique said. “But I did see you.”
Tamiko blanched.
“Saw me what?”
“You were there, Dr. Kadrey. You were very young. I don’t know why you believed so deeply in something so wrong, but you did. You’re here now, in this hospital, doing all this research, but that place never left you. Did it?”
“I need the solution, Ashanique. I’ll let you go.”
“No you won’t. The Night Doctors never let anyone go.”
As Tamiko turned, reaching for her purse, Ashanique saw Matilda lying on the floor just beyond the desk. She looked as though she had fallen asleep, her body relaxed. But the way she lay, sprawled out, told Ashanique everything she needed to know: Matilda was hurt, and Tamiko was dangerous.
Something heavy, awful, settled onto Ashanique’s chest.
If Matilda is hurt . . .
Ashanique watched carefully as Tamiko reached deep into her purse, past the handle of the Taser,
and wrapped her fingers around the grip of a Colt Mustang handgun. Ashanique knew this was her one moment, her only chance.
Wrenching her head free of the brace, Ashanique turned and kicked Tamiko out of the chair. As Tamiko struggled to get up, Ashanique leaped on the purse. Its contents spilled out across the floor, clattering against the tile.
Tamiko was slow to move.
When she finally rolled over, she saw Ashanique had the Colt leveled at her.
“Wake her up.”
Ashanique motioned to Matilda.
“There are smelling salts by the door,” Tamiko said.
Keeping the gun on the good doctor, Ashanique backed up slowly toward the door. She locked it before she pulled the medical kit from the wall. She slid it across the tile floor to the doctor’s feet.
“Wake her,” Ashanique said. “Now.”
Tamiko opened the kit and dug around for the salts.
“She trusted you,” Ashanique said. “You were her friend.”
“I’m a colleague.”
“And you’d kill her, just for . . . some stupid numbers.”
“Those numbers could change the course of history. They could end wars, end violence and criminality. With those numbers, we could unlock all the secrets of the human mind. Imagine the things we could do.”
“Wake her.”
Ashanique tightened her grip on the gun. Janice had taken her shooting at least twice a month. They shot targets, bottles, pumpkins, and scrap metal. But this was different. This was a person; a real, live person. Ashanique thought her hands would be shaking. She was surprised they weren’t. She was also surprised there weren’t alarms going off and cops rushing into the room. The Colt was lighter than the guns she was used to firing. Almost too light.
She wondered if it could truly stop Tamiko.
“Okay,” Tamiko said, cracking the salts. “Okay.”