by Keith Thomas
Tamiko held the pungent white sticks under Matilda’s nose.
Matilda began to cough, her eyes racing behind her eyelids.
Ashanique exhaled; Matilda was going to be all right.
• • •
“Tell me what that place was,” Ashanique said, her voice trembling more than her hands. “What happened there?”
Tamiko looked up the Colt’s barrel to the girl’s eyes.
“You already know this.”
Ashanique said, “I see things, I don’t know what they mean yet.”
She pulled the trigger and the Colt bucked. The bullet sped over Tamiko’s left shoulder and punched a small hole into the wall twenty feet behind her.
Tamiko started talking.
“Project Clarity was an experiment to alter memories,” she said. “Your grandmother led the project, and your mother was a subject. You have their memories inside you, carried in your genes. I know you only just went Null four days ago. The memories are fresh. They might be overwhelming now, like a dam has burst in your head, but it will only get worse.”
“Null? What does that mean?”
“That’s what we called them, the ones in the study who had what you’re having now. The memories. It’s a stupid name, really, but . . .”
Ashanique grimaced as pain swelled in her head. She thought she heard distant voices like the ones she heard in the static of the noise-canceling headphones. They might have been panicked patients or security guards racing toward the lab. Or they were deeper voices, awakened lives.
“And my mom was right? This is because of . . .”
Tamiko stepped toward Ashanique, hands raised.
“Puberty,” she said. “Your body is transforming. Even though you don’t sense it, not explicitly, you are becoming another being. The foundational pieces of your body are changed. Along with the hormones is a cascade of neurotransmitters that wash over your brain. Glutamate receptors—”
“GluRs?”
“Yes.” Tamiko smiled. “You remember. Yes, that’s it.”
“And AMPAs . . .”
Tamiko nodded. “Amino-hydroxy-methyl-isoxazolepropionic acid receptors. AMPAs. They are chemicals crucial to memory formation. Listen, Ashanique, you have the cure—the way to stop what’s happening to you—hidden inside your memory. Let me get it out. Let me find the solution and we can cure you.”
“You mean symbols that mean different letters and numbers?”
Tamiko nodded again.
“This can all be over if you just tell me what your mother knew,” Tamiko begged Ashanique, her hands shaking.
Matilda sat up; eyes opened wide, she took in the scene with horror.
“Ashanique . . . What is this?”
Ashanique kept the gun leveled at Tamiko.
“They’re going to kill you, Dr. Kadrey.”
Tamiko turned to Matilda, desperate like a drowning swimmer searching for anything, anyone, to grab hold of. “Let me help.”
“I think you’ve done enough,” Matilda said as she stood.
“You okay?” Ashanique asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Matilda said.
“We can’t trust her.”
“I know.”
“We have to tie her up,” Ashanique said. “Use that tubing.”
Ashanique kept the Colt on Tamiko as Matilda wrapped her hands with oxygen tubing from a package on a lab bench. Then she tied Tamiko to a water pipe in the corner of the room. As she worked, Tamiko fumed.
“She’s not like the originals, Matilda. She isn’t going to last very long. She’s already got obvious synaptic degradation. Very advanced. Even if you can get ahold of MetroChime, it’ll only slow the process. With the best treatment you can find out there on the run, she’ll be dead within a year. But I’d give her a month.”
Tamiko flashed a knowing grin.
The look terrified Ashanique.
She wanted to fire again and not miss.
“They know for sure you exist now. They’ll come after you and they won’t stop until they have you. They see everything. They hear everything. Everyone you know, everyone you love, will be crushed. Running will only make it that much worse.”
Matilda finished, the knot looked solid.
“She’ll scream,” Ashanique said.
Matilda grabbed medical tape from a desk drawer and wrapped it around Tamiko’s head, covering her mouth in two long strips. The whole time, Tamiko stared at Ashanique like she was trying to see into the girl’s very soul.
“We have to go,” Matilda said.
• • •
Stepping out of the room, Ashanique and Matilda found a nondescript hallway lined with doors.
They moved quickly toward the end of the hall and a sharp left turn. Rounding the corner revealed an elevator bank. Men and women in scrubs and lab coats stood around, waiting for the doors to open.
Ashanique tucked the Colt into the back of her pants, and she and Matilda moved quickly to join the scrum of researchers. As they stepped up to the nearest elevator, the doors to an elevator two over opened and disgorged a group of passengers. Among them was the bald man who’d come to kill Janice.
The man’s head gleamed in the artificial light.
His hands were encased in purple latex gloves.
Ashanique hid her face as the elevator doors in front of her whooshed open. She grabbed Matilda’s hand and pulled her inside, squeezing past an irritated man on a cell phone. As the doors closed, Ashanique briefly glimpsed the bald man walking down the hallway toward Tamiko’s lab.
She knew they would have only minutes to escape the building.
44
10:59 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE NEUROSCIENCE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
RADE FOUND TAMIKO tied up in the lab.
He looked gravely disappointed.
It was as though Rade always assumed Tamiko would fuck this up; that despite her advanced degrees and cool composure, she was never really part of the team. The fact that Rade couldn’t even be bothered to scream at her said it all.
He locked the door behind him and squatted down beside Tamiko.
Rade pushed the hair from her face and straightened the collar on her lab coat. He did it gently but not out of any concern for her. He just hated how messy she looked in that moment.
“What did she tell you?” he asked.
Then, without an ounce of sympathy, he tore away the medical tape.
Tamiko’s lips were red and puffy, irritated by the tape.
“The girl has Fifty-One’s memories,” Tamiko said, “but she denied knowing the solution. But . . . her readings were some of the most exaggerated I’ve ever seen. Even the initial imagery, only piecemeal and suggestive, was enough to trigger explosive activity in her hippocampus. She is more sensitive than any of the previous subjects. Maybe it’s that I have refined equipment or maybe it has something to do with the strength of her genes but . . . she’s incredible. You have to understand, she’s the first new generation we’ve seen.”
“And the solution?”
“Ashanique needs focus, a little more time, but it’s in there.”
“But you didn’t get it?”
“Like I said, she’s . . . This has just happened. Only days ago, Rade. . . . We’ve never had success with a Null in that short a time span. The electrical activity doubles every few days. It’s only a matter of—”
“Where are they going?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t—”
Rade dragged a straight razor from his hoodie pocket.
Tamiko scrambled. “A detective . . .”
“Yes?”
“Matilda mentioned a detective looking out for them. He was investigating the shooting. I think Matilda and the girl are going to try to get in touch with him. If you find the detective, you can find them. My purse . . . on the floor . . . He talked to everyone after the incident. Handed his card around.”
Rade stood and walked over to Tamiko’s purse. Using the straight razor, he poked through the purse’s contents as though he were an Old West tracker, the kind from classic Western films, digging through the remnants of a fire pit, looking for clues.
He uncovered several business cards.
But only one of them read CHICAGO HOMICIDE.
Kojo’s card.
Rade picked it up and turned it around.
“That’s the one. Find him and you’ll find them.”
Rade walked back over to Tamiko and kneeled beside her again, the straight razor hanging between his legs. Its metal tip scraped the tile floor.
“HED will coordinate the search with local law enforcement. We’ll find them within hours,” Rade said. “The truth is, you aren’t privy to the inroads they’ve made over the past decade. The technology has taken this whole thing much further than a few . . . hired hands out in the field. It isn’t like before. We’re not detectives. But all those fresh faces they have, the ones watching the video feeds or scraping social media, even the researchers designing the next generation of tests, they don’t know what we know. . . .”
Tamiko nodded a bit too forcefully.
It smacked of desperation to Rade.
“They don’t have the insight we have, right?” Tamiko said. “They haven’t had the setbacks we had to work through. All those years of trial and error with the orphans, all those millions of dollars spent chasing our tails on—”
“I wasn’t talking about research. I’m talking about the Null. You, Dr. Sykes, the rest of the team, none of you know what the Null know.”
Tamiko swallowed hard.
“Please, Rade,” she said. “I have always been loyal—”
“Yes. You have.”
“And I’m useful. I designed the protocols for the initial tests. I oversaw the data collection for the first cohorts. I was the one who recognized the first changes. It’s in the notes. You can call Sykes. I can do that again. Even from here, I can help them to fix what isn’t working.”
“What isn’t working here is you.”
Tamiko closed her eyes.
Rade’s razor flashed faster than even he could see—merely a spark, like stone striking stone. It cut through her blouse; blood spilled from the tear, running in rivulets onto her lab coat and pants.
Rade’s gloved fingers explored the edge of the cut. It was very deep. He’d sunk the blade between the third and fourth ribs, slashed through the pericardium, and sliced into her heart itself. Rade knew, from experience, that Tamiko would bleed out within seconds, each heartbeat emptying her body.
But Rade wouldn’t even allow her those precious seconds.
“We have seen everything,” he said as he leaned forward, staring deep into Tamiko’s quickly dilating pupils. “And we know the secret at the heart of our consciousness. You’ve spent your whole life looking for the answer, looking for a way to explain why humanity is so very special.”
Rade caressed Tamiko’s head, running his gloved hands through her hair.
“I’m going to show you now.”
He pulled her hair back and cut open her throat.
45
11:16 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
HAND IN HAND, Matilda and Ashanique ran across the campus.
While Matilda worried they looked too obvious running through the crowds of students and patients, no one stopped them; no one really even batted an eye. Truth was, Matilda thought, most people avoided drama at all costs. Too much hassle. Too much worry. Good thing a surging panic pushed Matilda on. She was amazed she wasn’t winded.
She had never been much for running.
Swimming was always her thing.
Matilda found being submersed was not only relaxing, it was also restorative. In water, sound traveled differently, light bended and warped, and her mind shifted into another gear. One she hadn’t known existed until she’d started doing all her heavy thinking underwater. Meter by meter, kick by kick, she could scroll through her research. Isolated in the pool, complex chemistry made more sense—swimming, she could synthesize peptides and catalyze enzymes with ease. It even had the benefit of being healthy, according to her personal physician, it was the best low-impact activity she could do to strengthen her heart and oxygenate her brain.
But on land, scrambling across campus, dodging passing students, she was weaker than she expected. The air was heavier, the ground that much harder.
“You okay?” Matilda yelled to Ashanique as they rounded a building.
Ashanique grunted a yes.
Matilda could feel the girl holding back. She assumed Janice must have trained her to run, to escape and survive.
Ashanique could shoot; she certainly could sprint.
Breathe in and breathe out. Keep the time. Match the crunch of your feet on the sidewalk with the thump of your heart.
A minute later, they cleared the corner of the bookstore and stepped out onto South Ellis Avenue, where a passing cop car slowed. The cruiser’s lights were on. The bulky cop behind the wheel leaned his head out the window.
“Everything okay?”
“There’s a man,” Matilda began. “He’s chasing us. He has a gun.”
The officer got out of his car with his hand on his gun.
“Go on, get inside.”
As they ran around the cruiser and climbed into the back seat, he reached in through the open driver’s-side window and grabbed his radio.
“Car Twelve to Control.”
A woman’s voice came over the radio. “Go ahead.”
“Four-Adam-Sixteen on scene at university. Possible Ten–Thirty-Two. O-R.”
“Control to Twelve, I read you. Possible Ten–Thirty-Two. What is your location?”
The cop looked back at a street sign.
“On campus, South Ellis near the intersection with East Fifty-Eighth Street. I don’t have a visual. Got two females, one white, one black, a preteen, in my car. Say there’s a man after them. No visual. Over.”
“Stand by.”
The officer got back into the patrol car and hung up the radio before he closed the door. He turned around to Matilda. His name tag read GOMEZ.
“You two all right?”
“I think so,” Matilda said, barely controlling the panic in her voice. She didn’t feel safe, even in the back seat of the cop car. She wasn’t sure she’d ever feel safe again. “He’s in the hospital. If you haven’t gotten the calls already, they’re going to be coming in fast. It’s the same guy from the university a day ago. The same man.”
Before Matilda could go on, the officer turned to the front.
He pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and flipped it open. He dialed a three-digit number. “I have the girl,” he said into his cell.
Matilda stopped breathing.
“Understood,” Officer Gomez said.
He hung up his cell with a sigh.
Matilda put an arm across Ashanique as the cop turned around with his gun. The only thing separating them was the mesh partition and three feet of humid air.
“You went for my weapon,” Officer Gomez said. “I had to defend myself.”
“No—”
A jagged sound split the air as something smashed into Officer Gomez’s forehead. The gun dropped from his hand as he slumped against the steering wheel.
Ashanique lowered the Colt into her lap.
“He was going to kill us.”
Stunned, Matilda silently glanced through the mesh at Officer Gomez’s body. The morning had left her mind scrambled. Her world was not so much turned upside down as it was turned inside out. She had been right after all; she wasn’t even safe in the back of a cop car.
There is no safe place now. Tamiko told you as much, Maddie. They will come for Ashanique; for you. They control everything and everyone.
“We have to get out of the car,” Ashanique said. “Matilda?�
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Matilda felt like screaming.
“We have to get out of the car.”
The doors were locked, so Ashanique lay back and kicked at the left rear passenger window until it shattered. She toppled the loose glass and then reached, gingerly, through the frame to open the door. With a click, it swung wide.
Ashanique pulled Matilda out after her.
“We have to leave now, Matilda. We can’t call anyone. No police. There’s no one we can trust. We have to find a place they’re not going to be looking for us. A place to hide out until tonight.”
Matilda thought immediately of her mother.
It wasn’t so much that she considered Stonybrook necessarily a safe place. Or that she always turned to her mother in times of deep confusion and stress. It was concern. She had to warn the facility. She had to get her mother to a protected place, locked away until this was over. Somewhere out of town. Somewhere they could all hide. Truthfully, she didn’t consider the ramifications—she only knew what she’d seen and she knew she never wanted to see that again. Her overriding instinct was clear: Go to your mother; make sure she’s safe.
“I know a place,” Matilda said.
They flagged down a cab on East Fifty-Ninth Street and barreled into the back seat. Three blocks away, cop cars, their lights blazing and sirens rending the air, charged onto campus. The cabdriver, the ID posted on the Plexiglass partition gave his name as Jasper Adeyanju, turned around and asked where he was supposed to be going.
Matilda said, “Braidwood. Stonybrook Assisted-Living Facility. It’s on South La Grange. I-80’s probably fastest.”
“Okay. . . . It’s your money.”
Jasper started the meter and turned up his music, a rollicking Nigerian “highlife” pop song, before easing the cab into traffic. In the back seat, Ashanique lay back and sighed. Matilda saw tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.
“It’s okay. You just saved our lives.”
“I haven’t killed anyone before,” Ashanique whispered. “Not in this life.”
“You did the right thing—”
Ashanique turned away, wiping her eyes.
“That’s not it. There is no right thing. No wrong. There are only actions and repercussions. And all the bad things, all the cruel consequences, come from fear. Maybe that cop was scared. Maybe that’s why he was about to kill you. I’m not sad about him losing his life, though. He made that choice.”