by Keith Thomas
Childers said, “You’re making this worse. For all of us.”
“Please,” Ashanique begged. “I trust her.”
Matilda stepped over to Kojo.
She placed her hand on his arm and slowly forced him to lower his firearm.
“This is wrong,” he insisted. “Don’t let her just walk out of here.”
“It’s okay,” Matilda said. “She understands.”
Kojo just kept shaking his head, disbelieving.
“Thank you,” Ashanique said.
She walked over to Matilda and hugged her. As they embraced, Matilda slipped her cell phone into the girl’s coat pocket. Ashanique noticed and looked up at Matilda. Matilda mouthed, Trust me. Ashanique nodded.
Ashanique crossed the room to Childers. The older girl opened her backpack and pulled out a metal detector wand. She scanned Ashanique. The wand was silent. She put the wand back as Ashanique turned to Kojo.
“Thank you,” she said. “Take care of Matilda.”
Childers picked her Glock up off the table.
“You did the right thing,” Childers said.
Kojo and Matilda followed Ashanique and Childers to a staff elevator.
Childers inserted a key, and the elevator doors sprang open.
She stepped inside after Ashanique.
“I’m going to be okay,” Ashanique said to Matilda. “Dr. Song will fix me.”
The doors closed.
Ashanique was gone.
53
4:32 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM OF SURGICAL SCIENCE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
“GIVE ME YOUR CELL.”
They were back in Kojo’s car, and he was furious.
Matilda asked again. “Please. Hurry, I need your cell.”
Kojo couldn’t believe he’d allowed Matilda to let Ashanique go like that.
With some random punk girl?
He held in his rage and handed over the prepaid smartphone, eyes glued to the outside of the museum. He assumed that if Childers and Ashanique came out the front or side, he’d see them. Even if they ducked into an alley behind the building, they’d have to walk back to the street to get anywhere.
“Why do you need my cell?”
Matilda said, “Watch.”
Kojo turned his attention to the screen as Matilda logged into a tracking app. A window opened displaying a map of Chicago.
“I slipped my cell into her coat,” Matilda said. “We can follow them.”
She held up the cell phone so Kojo could see two little blue circles positioned close together on the digital map. One of them was moving down East Burton Place toward Astor. He assumed that was Ashanique. The other, them, was stationary. Somehow, despite his watching, Childers and Ashanique had snuck past.
“Are you waiting for a green light?”
Kojo cleared his throat.
“Nah, I’m ready.”
He fired up the car and pulled out into the late-afternoon traffic. They followed the tracking signal down North Astor Street before it came to a stop near an alley. Kojo pulled the car over and together they watched the screen for a few seconds. Ashanique’s blue circle wasn’t moving. It was sitting in the entrance to an alleyway.
“We’re about to be ditched,” Kojo said.
He kicked the car into gear and back into traffic.
Kojo knew the city well enough to not even bother looking at the screen. When Brandon was just a preschooler, two years before Constance died, Kojo had made the force and was determined to show his first partner, Bob, a fat racist from Michigan, that he wasn’t there because of affirmative action. He wanted Bob to know he was as invested, if not more, in the safety and security of the city he called home. Bob couldn’t divorce Kojo’s dark skin or his “crazy-ass” name from the fact that he’d grown up in a blue-collar neighborhood and went to a decent high school. The way Bob saw it, Kojo had just swum over from Ghana and was two paychecks from joining a terrorist cell. So when Kojo’s shift ended, his education began. Kojo could cite rules and regulations till he was out of breath, but none of it meant anything to Bob—only thing he understood were the streets; for Bob, if you knew the streets, you knew the town. So Kojo spent hours getting lost—mostly in his car, sometimes on his bike or on foot—and finding his way back to where he’d started. He memorized every street around the station house within a fifteen-mile radius. That included every alleyway and parking lot. First time they chased down a fleeing suspect together and Kojo navigated without assistance, Bob was impressed. He said nothing, but Kojo didn’t need the words. He could see it in Bob’s eyes. Bob had a heart attack five months later at the police gym and died facedown on a treadmill. Kojo went to his funeral with Constance. When his widow told them that Bob had only great things to say about him, Kojo nodded appreciatively and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss. He was a great cop.”
The street Ashanique stopped on was one of those Kojo had memorized so many years ago. He hadn’t been down it in well over a decade, but he hadn’t forgotten any of its particular quirks either. He swerved the car right up to the gutter alongside a parking garage and jumped out. Matilda followed.
“There,” Kojo said as they entered the garage.
Matilda’s cell lay on the concrete near an SUV. She picked it up. The screen was cracked, but otherwise the cell looked okay.
“You think they got into a car?” she asked Kojo.
“I think they’re still nearby,” Kojo said.
“Why?”
“You want me to say it’s a cop’s second sense, right? That’d be kinda cool. But, no, it’s actually the fact that Ashanique left us some clues.”
Kojo pointed to one of the girl’s bracelets. It was the yellow one, lying on the ground beside a steel door that was slightly ajar.
Smart girl.
Gun drawn, Kojo opened the steel door. The entrance was clear. He motioned for Matilda to follow him up a staircase to another door marked, in faded letters, NEW BEGINNINGS REHABILITATION. The door was locked. Kojo tried it twice.
“Come on, we’ll have to go around.”
The entrance to the building, just on the south side of the parking garage, was a series of brick steps that led to glass double doors. Both of the doors were marked with the swirling blue New Beginnings Rehabilitation logo. This was a drug-treatment facility. Kojo knew the place well. His neighbor’s kid had wound up here trying to get clean.
Kojo and Matilda walked inside.
“How can I help you?” a middle-aged receptionist asked from behind a small desk lined with fake flowers. He was in his midsixties and had pierced ears.
Kojo flashed his badge.
“We need to take a look around.”
The receptionist hit a buzzer and the door to his right unlocked. Passing through the door, Kojo and Matilda made their way down a wide hallway lined by residents’ rooms. Most were the size of an average hotel room, with two beds and two dressers, a curtain on a track to separate the sides.
Kojo checked the rooms on the right, while Matilda glanced into those on the left. Most were empty—the in-patient residents out at group time or in the dining area starting dinner or playing cards. Flyers on the wall announced there was going to be a screening of The Wizard of Oz in the break room. Popcorn would be served.
They came to the end of the hallway, where it split left and right.
“You head right; I’ll take left,” Kojo said.
“I’m not exactly trained for this.”
“We’re trusting Childers, right?”
“No,” Matilda said. “We’re trusting Ashanique.”
54
4:58 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
NEW BEGINNINGS REHABILITATION BASEMENT
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
ASHANIQUE SAT ON a folding chair in a bare concrete antechamber.
At one time it might have been a furnace room, but it had clearly been remodeled to look like a bunker. The kind o
f place George would have hidden in during a “kraut” shelling. The ceiling lights were inset. The door was burnished steel. After she’d taken Ashanique to the room, Childers told her to wait, that she’d be right back with Dr. Song.
The waiting was hard.
Ashanique didn’t want to panic in the room. But it made her claustrophobic, it reminded her too much of the Clarity base in the snow in her mother’s memories. The feeling of being caged, of being kept, reminded her of the videos Tamiko had shown—those flashing images seemed to hit nerves she didn’t know she had, triggering a cascade of emotions she couldn’t control. Ashanique couldn’t go back to that space—she had to focus, to calm herself. But thinking about Tamiko only led to thinking about Rade and that made the muscles in Ashanique’s jaw clench and ache.
So she took a deep breath and scrolled back through her mother’s life.
Her mother had used so many names, but they didn’t confuse her. Janelle, even though she’d really only just remembered it, sounded much better than Janice. Janice always felt like a name she’d been given at work. It was too perfunctory, too formal, and didn’t fit with who her mother had been. But Janelle, there was something organic about that name. It matched Ashanique’s memories—it felt right for her skin tone and her hair. Ashanique repeated the name over and over in her head; there was magic in it. It was a name to fit a mantra.
There was a knock on the door.
Childers stepped inside.
“You ready?”
Ashanique stood up and followed Childers into the corridor outside the room. It was lined with pipes. This was what Ashanique imagined a subbasement looked like. She’d heard of basements beneath basements, and always imagined they were choked with pipes and wires and rats. She prayed there were no rats in the corridor with her. She also prayed the lights didn’t suddenly go out.
George had seen rats in the trenches.
There was an instance at the Battle of the Somme where he was walking through a narrow trench, past the bodies of fallen regiment men who were injured but dying. George knew they were beyond medical attention—their only hope would be a quick salvation. The dying men plucked feebly at his pants legs. They begged for water. For help. One man begged him to kick the rats away. He said they were chewing through his boots to his toes.
The rats in the trenches . . . so many rats . . .
Stumbling, Ashanique closed her eyes to push the memory away.
She knew she was getting worse.
Dr. Song had to help her soon.
Childers stopped at a door with a biometric lock. She leaned up against it so the sensor could perform a retinal scan. The door unlocked with a heavy clank. As Ashanique passed through the doorway, she felt like a fairy-tale character. The girl who wandered into Blue Beard’s hidden room. She’d never heard that fairy tale before, but somehow she knew it. It was from an earlier life, a quieter life.
The room wasn’t dark or filled with cobwebs.
It was not the subbasement torture dungeon filled with rats.
Rather, it was a clinic. Modern and relatively clean; it was a large, rectangular, and windowless room with low lighting that buzzed from a dozen or so flat-paneled lights inset in the walls. There were cameras and sensors in the corners.
But it was what was hanging in the middle of the room that caught Ashanique’s attention first: there were people suspended from the ceiling.
Three people, in fact—two men and one woman.
All of them hung supine in mesh hammocks from the ceiling, their bodies about three feet off the floor, roughly at waist height.
Around them, medical equipment beeped and droned.
Ashanique had seen this equipment in Janelle’s memories of Alaska—these were heart monitors and oxygen sensors. The people in the hammocks didn’t move; they barely seemed to breathe. All of them were connected to IV drips, the clear plastic bags hanging over their heads like jellyfish floating in the digital glow of the machines. Even though she wasn’t going to take their pulses, she could sense that these people were alive but in deep, deep comas.
“This is the legacy of the Clarity.”
The voice was brittle but familiar.
Ashanique turned around to see Dr. Song standing behind her. He was much, much older. The years had worn him down like rain wearing the side of a mountain. Deep wrinkles etched his face and neck. He wore a lab coat with stained sleeves and an out-of-date skinny tie. He exuded an air of age and comfort. Even the lenses of the big glasses perched on his nose were smeared.
“Welcome home,” he said.
“Who are these people?”
“Those are the survivors,” Dr. Song said. “They’re dreaming. The man to your left is Terry. The woman is Alice. The other man is named Hugh. You know, you are the spitting image of your mother. It is amazing to see her . . . you, again.”
Ashanique ignored Dr. Song’s comment.
“Will these people wake up?”
“That depends,” Dr. Song said.
“Depends on what?”
“On what you have inside your head.”
55
THERE WAS A dragging sound as the door to the clinic opened and Childers appeared.
“Sorry, Dr. Song. I tried,” she said.
Childers stepped aside, and Kojo and Matilda stepped into the clinic behind her. Kojo had his gun drawn and Childers’s Glock tucked into the front of his pants. He pointed to a corner, and Childers obediently walked over to a wall and crossed her arms. Dr. Song shook his head.
“No need for this,” he said. “We’re all friends here.”
Matilda ran to Ashanique and they embraced.
“You need to let me do this,” Ashanique said.
“I need to know what this is first. I made a promise, remember?”
Kojo passed Childers’s Glock to Matilda before he crossed the room to a folded wheelchair in the corner. He unfolded it, then rolled it over to Dr. Song.
“Have a seat,” Kojo said.
The wheelchair creaked as he sat.
“Talk,” Kojo said. “Who are these people you’re hiding down here?”
“These are some of the Null,” Dr. Song explained. “Like Ashanique’s mother, they were members of an experiment that began fifty-two years ago.”
“Project Clarity. The Human Ecology Division. CIA mind-control experiments,” Kojo said. “I know what Janice Walters thought was going on. And I’m not dumb enough to ignore that good people, well-meaning people, can do terrible things. You were part of Clarity as well?”
“Yes, I was a young neurosurgeon at the time, and you’re right, our intentions were beneficent. You have to understand, when Clarity began, it was an attempt at understanding how the mind functioned to improve people’s lives. But, sadly, it devolved into something I’m quite ashamed of.”
“I’m guessing you’re going to tell us that the bald cat—”
“Rade. Number Nineteen.”
“—that dude, yeah. You’re going to tell me he’s out there cleaning up whatever mess Clarity left behind. Removing witnesses like Ashanique’s mom. What I need you to tell me is how we’re going to make this girl well.”
Dr. Song cleared his throat, his eyes on Ashanique.
“The particular condition she has is irreversible. The memories that are flooding into her brain are not going to stop. They will continue to enter her consciousness and overwhelm her. It has happened with every Null since the very first we . . . created.”
Hearing this, Ashanique felt a lump form in her throat. She didn’t want to cry again, certainly not in front of Dr. Song. Her mother had taught her that crying was natural, normal, and to be appreciated but that many people saw it as weakness. Her mother told her those people, the ones who saw it as a negative, would all cry eventually, and when they did, they’d nearly burst.
Ashanique didn’t want to look weak in front of Dr. Song and Childers.
She needed them to know she was strong.
“Janice Walte
rs seemed to be functioning pretty well,” Matilda said.
“She was taking MetroChime regularly,” Dr. Song said. “So is Rade. But it’s only a stopgap measure. It all depends on the neural activity associated with the hippocampus. . . .”
Dr. Song took a moment to reconfigure his thoughts.
“You are familiar with cyberattacks, correct? How hackers will bombard a website with incoming traffic from thousands, sometimes millions, of interlinked computers. Basically, a denial-of-service attack. The same thing is happening in Ashanique’s brain. All those memories, going back to the very ascendance of our species, are awakening. All of the Null eventually go insane; no human brain is able to process all that data. This process can take years, decades even. But Ashanique is different. She’s the daughter of a Null, the first that I’m aware of, and that makes her quite special. I can slow the attacks down with the medication, but eventually, even that fails. With the others, at that stage, there is only one option. . . .”
Dr. Song rotated in the wheelchair to look at the people in the hammocks.
“They are in medically induced comas. It is the only way.”
“Fuck that,” Kojo said. “You’re not putting her under.”
“No, of course not. I want to fix her. Clarity was a tragedy. Our whole network, the former guards and nurses finding and saving the Null, the former subjects who gave their lives to get Ashanique here, they all want the same thing: forgiveness. They found me first.”
Dr. Song pointed back to one of the comatose men.
“Thirteen; his name’s Terry. He and number Twenty-Six, Alice over there, found me a decade ago. Came to my lab. I don’t know how they tracked me down. They’d been taking all sorts of drugs, sharing them with the other Null. They had this whole revenge thing going. They were sending mail bombs to former Project Clarity researchers and staff. I refocused their energies on prolonging their lives and turned them on to MetroChime. But for a lot of them, the damage had already been done. Theo, number Seven, killed himself a couple years back.”
Matilda gasped upon hearing the name.
“Vang?” she asked.
Dr. Song nodded. “Theo Vang. I couldn’t save him.”