by Shannon Hale
But my brain wasn’t going to let my body win. I felt like I’d been dropped in a vat of icy water.
“When you kiss me, my brain stops working. I don’t want to make a choice without my brain. And if I cease to be rational, then I’ve lost myself.”
He leaned over me slightly, his finger tracing my bottom lip. “If you’re worried about being safe, I’m prepared.”
That set me sitting straight up. “You—what?”
“You know, I have—”
“I know what you meant. You carry one with you at all times?”
He blinked, as if trying to catch my train of thought.
“So this is a regular occurrence for you,” I said. “Alone with a girl—doesn’t matter who, really—and you get to kissing, and she’s willing to go further but wary of the risk, and thank goodness! You save the day by being prepared!” I suspected that I was being a little bit ridiculous, but I didn’t care. I was remembering him with his arm around that blonde at boot camp, whispering against her ear.
His smile was incredulous. “It’s a good thing, right? I’m being respectful. I was thinking about you.”
This did not appease. “So you planned this. You thought, ‘I’ll bet I can get Maisie to succumb to my practiced seductions against her better judgment, so I’d better be prepared.’”
I could see that rapid-fire thinking going on behind his eyes. “There’s no way to get out of this gracefully, is there?”
“We should get back to work,” I said, starting to get up.
“Wait …” He put a hand on my arm, then removed it. “Can we just lie here for a minute?”
I hesitated.
“Please. I haven’t … felt much of anything for a while. It’s such a relief just to be near you.”
I lay back down, relieved too. I didn’t want to work right then. I was feeling too much and not understanding all of it.
He was on his side, returning my gaze. Suddenly he laughed.
“My brain is infused with billions of clever-making nanites. You’d think I could come up with a strategy to get a pretty girl to sleep with me.”
“Nice use of ‘pretty’ there. Still working the old strategy?”
“I never stop.”
It was flattering and disturbing and exciting to be wanted. And to want in return. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt so strong—not even with the brute token—as when I said no, not yet.
So we lay there, not touching, just wanting. And it was a feeling I didn’t mind prolonging. The best part of Christmas is the dark side of morning, staring at the clock, anticipating the day.
I drifted to sleep, and when I woke it was night. I was panicking even before I’d opened my eyes because I’d forgotten to call my parents. So I crept to the bathroom and phoned. My dad’s voice was anxious.
“You’re keeping safe?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“I mean …” He cleared his throat. “If you and Wilder are sharing a room together … alone … I want to make sure that you remember all the reasons why—”
The Sex Talk my scientist parents had given me came complete with diagrams, brain charts, and science journal articles. They’d presented a solid argument about why teens should wait. Dazzled by the data, I’d agreed.
“Dad!” But why did he have to ask me about that right now? “I remember, Dad.”
“I know. I trust you, Maisie.”
My throat tightened.
I chatted with Mom and headed back to bed. It seemed suspicious that Wilder purchased boxes of protein bars in anticipation of my arrival but not a second mattress. When I lay down, Wilder pulled me closer, my head against his chest, his right arm curled around me.
“I’ll be good,” he whispered. “I’m a good boy …”
I swallowed a laugh because I suspected he was talking in his sleep. But lying close felt nice, like I had a place, that I wasn’t homeless, weighted with a dead girl’s token, and doing things that scared me.
We woke like that in the morning, still intertwined. When I opened my eyes, his were open too.
“I wouldn’t share a bed with my parents,” I said. “Too worried I’d flail at a dream and chop off their heads.”
“I like that you’re not worried with me,” he said, touching my cheek.
“Oh, it’s not that so much. If I accidentally killed you in my sleep, just think of all the problems solved.”
“With that kind of power logic, you should be the thinker.”
We were both slow to get up. Holding someone in the morning can be a lazy and euphoric way to start the day. I did kiss him again. Not like the night before, partly because he kept grinning.
“Am I the cause of all this amusement?” I asked him.
“I’m just happy. Really happy. And so relieved.”
“Because of me?”
He nodded, still grinning, and kissed my forehead. “For the first time, I feel like everything’s going to work out, because I know what to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“At the moment, just this,” he said, touching my hair. “‘I am looped in the loops of her hair,’” he said, going back to Yeats.
For the next two weeks we slept beside each other at night. By day we held hands. If he was on my right side, he held my Fido hand as if it were no different. And though I missed feeling his warmth and those electric pulses that shivered across my skin, I’d never felt so accepted, so wholly me, than when Wilder was holding the hand I’d made.
He worked on his computer while I bench-pressed the car in the garage or grocery shopped. We did a lot of stakeouts and ate dinner in the backseat. We stared at each other.
I’d drawn a line. And he didn’t push it. There was just holding and touching and breathing and yearning. And there was some kissing. A lovely bit.
A tiny worm of worry burrowed into me that Wilder would be bored soon. But I didn’t want doubt to taint this strange, magical interlude.
When I called Mom to check in, she said, “You sound happy.”
“I guess I am.”
I didn’t tell her why, and that made me feel all the miles between us. Guilt nibbled at me for not yet saving her from the convenience store and her Maria name tag. But Wilder and I wouldn’t give up till we’d set everything right.
And so I floated along, blissfully happy and hormonally insane. I wasn’t scared that it would end. It seemed inevitable.
Chapter 30
I got on Wilder’s tablet to surf the news and then wished I hadn’t. Scientists still didn’t have a clue how the Jumper Virus was spreading across continents in such random patterns. Over a hundred towns were quarantined worldwide. Elections disrupted, some countries under marshal law, and the world economy taking a dive in all the uncertainty.
The mess seemed to bring out the crazies. I watched a security camera video of a man walking up the Delaware state capitol steps, sipping a drink through a straw and holding a gun. The officer spoke to him; the man lunged. Another officer rushed out and shot the man down.
“Whoa,” I said, and clicked on a new link.
“Wait, go back.” Wilder watched it again. Then again. And again. It’d been disturbing the first time. By the fifth I wanted to smack myself with a frying pan.
“Are you worried Mi-sun was involved?” I asked.
“Huh? Oh, no, I just found it … weird.” He turned off the tablet and jumped up. “Let’s get them. Today.”
He’d found another lead. Some of GT’s guys were in a house outside Philly. We watched with binoculars from an alley.
“Most of Dad’s businesses are legit, but he keeps a thug contingent to handle the dirty side of things.”
“Dude’s got power issues,” I said.
“You have no idea. I don’t sense any fireteam members here.”
“But maybe GT’s guys can lead us to them.”
“Since it seems like they’re going to be a while …”
Wilder startled me, pushing me against the brick wall. My
instinct was to hold still so I wouldn’t hurt him. Clearly unconcerned about his own safety, he leaned down to bite my neck.
“We’re working,” I said, resuming my watch through the binoculars.
“You are brutal.”
“You wanna see brutal?” I leaned over and picked up a steel Dumpster.
“If that’s an attempt to turn me off, it’s having exactly the opposite effect.”
Neither of us noticed a guy in a huge parka coming around the corner till he was right in front of us. He stopped short. I put down the Dumpster.
“Hey,” said Wilder, uber-casual.
The guy fumbled for his cell phone. Wilder knocked it out of his hand. The guy wound up to punch, but I grabbed him from behind. He had ahold of Wilder’s shirt, and as I pulled him back, Wilder’s shirt ripped at the neck.
The guy elbowed me, knocked his head back, kicked his heels against my shins.
“Why don’t you feel pain?” he whined.
He clawed at Fido and felt what wasn’t skin.
“Oh no. You’re a robot, aren’t you? Some super-advanced Japanese attack robot. Leggo, leggo, I can’t stand freaky robots. Seriously, I’ve got a bona fide phobia, I can’t … I can’t …”
“I’ve seen you before,” Wilder said. “You work for my father. What’s your name?”
“Brutus,” the guy said, still in full panic. “Please, just get the freaky robot away from me.”
“Brutus, where’s my father and his favorite sidekick?”
Brutus shook his head, his legs still kicking.
“Robot girl,” Wilder said to me, “scare him.”
So I tossed the guy up. Pretty high, actually. I jumped and caught him coming down, my arms dipping with his weight so it wasn’t like hitting a concrete floor. Though it probably did hurt a little.
I landed on my feet, and Brutus, who had been screaming, now stopped in favor of rapid gasps, punctuated with breathy squeaks of “Robot … robot …”
“So … we should go,” Wilder said.
“Because of the screaming?” I asked.
“Yeah, because of the screaming.”
I carried Brutus to the car, joining him in the backseat. Wilder spun around on the gravel, peeling out. Brutus was still trembling when he gave up the address of a warehouse a couple of miles away.
Wilder parked in a vacant lot behind some scrub trees. The sun was low, but the restless clouds smothered anything yellowish and warm looking, bringing night on early.
“Stay here,” Wilder said to Brutus, as if I hadn’t already duct-taped him to the seat.
We jogged to the closest building. “I’ll hide here till you’re in,” Wilder said. “I don’t want Jacques to sense the thinker before you have a chance to scout it out. If Brutus is right, GT and Jacques are four buildings west.”
No one was out in the freezing temperatures. Wilder lifted his arm to place an earpiece in my ear, and the ripped piece of his shirt lifted. He tucked it back in, but I had glimpsed something.
“Wait.” I reached out, moving aside his torn shirt. He flinched but clenched his jaw and let me.
Over his sternum was the henna-brown circle of the thinker token. But there was a second one now, a kind of key shape attached to the circle. I’d seen that mark before, but on someone else’s chest.
My heart seemed to stop. In the long, quiet moment between one beat and the next, all I could think was, No. No. Please no.
Chapter 31
I backed away fast, knocking a branch off a tree, and I turned to run.
“Wait!” Wilder raced toward me and then stopped. “Wait, Maisie, I didn’t kill Mi-sun. You know I wouldn’t do that, right?”
My head went fishbowl, the world slurpy and sloshing every which way. I sat down hard before I could fall over and break something else. Like a building.
“Maisie …” He came closer.
“Don’t!” I yelled.
He jerked back.
Mi-sun was dead. Wilder was wearing her token on top of his own. I thought of warriors keeping the scalps of their kills.
“Stay, please, while I explain. Please.”
“Go ahead,” I said. My voice was dry.
“Mi-sun was working for my father,” he said. “I found her a few days before you came here, and she didn’t run when she sensed me. I thought that meant she wanted to escape with me, but she went crazy. She took off one of her rings, and she shot it at the token in her chest. So fast. She fell over. I pressed my hands to the wound … to stop the bleeding, not sure if she was still alive, but …” He shuddered.
“The token entered you, against your will.”
“Yeah.”
I waited for more. He didn’t explain.
“And you didn’t tell me before because …”
He lifted his hands helplessly. “Because I felt guilty. Because I thought you’d doubt me. And if you doubted me, we couldn’t work together.”
In the lair, Wilder had turned his back to me when he changed his shirt. I’d thought he was being modest.
Mi-sun—like Ruth—gone. Two out of five.
I wanted to run through some brick walls screaming. But my brain refused to get freaked out, biting down hard on the facts that I had. Wilder had hidden something really terrible from me, but I did trust him. Didn’t I? Besides, I’d jumped into the Gulf of Mexico and abandoned Mi-sun to get scooped up by GT. I wasn’t without fault here.
“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” he whispered.
“I don’t think Mi-sun would kill herself unless she felt threatened,” I said, my throat sore, my voice cracking. “Why would she feel threatened by you?”
“Because I’m the thinker? Maybe the breaking apart of the team messed her up, I don’t know.” His eyes teared up. “She just … it was horrible, Maisie. And she died so fast.”
I felt my chin tremble. Mi-sun was eleven, she had two little brothers, she’d been scared to go home …
“I should have told you, but I was a coward. I’m sorry, Maisie. I’m so sorry.”
“Wait …” A new realization rumbled through me. “You’ve got Mi-sun’s blue shot, so your thinker token is buried.”
He opened the rip of his shirt. “Your techno token faded when you got Ruth’s, but both my tokens are equally dark. I guess the thinker token never gets buried.”
“I want to see you use the blue shot.”
He sighed, picked up a piece of gravel, and shot it at the warehouse wall. Blue shot was faster than a gun and silent. All I heard was the click of the gravel tapping the concrete. The electric-blue trail seemed to appear a split second later, a pulse that faded quickly in the graying evening.
My stomach turned. I’d slept beside him night after night while this huge secret lay against his heart.
And another thought … how often he rubbed his hands together. And the way his touch felt, my skin tingling under his fingers. How I fancifully and stupidly decided it was a manifestation of our attraction. But it was just the spare electrons dancing down his fingertips, a side effect of the shooter token. Anger dried my eyes.
“So has your thinker brain figured out what we’re for? Another secret you’re keeping from me?”
“No,” he said, not reacting to my gibe. “But I’ve traced several assassinations back to Jacques, and for the moment it’s the fireteam’s responsibility to stop him and bring him back.”
I didn’t want to be some alien’s zombie servant, doing things against my will. But it seemed logical that we had to protect people from ourselves if we could. And I felt what Wilder did—that the surviving fireteam members needed to stay together.
“I should have told you,” he said. “I’m an idiot, I know. How can you trust me? But please believe I was just trying to do what I thought best to re-form the team. And now that you know, I don’t have to stupidly hide the blue shot. I might actually be of some use backing you up in there.”
GT and Jacques might be in that building right now. If I failed, GT
could make it impossible to find Jacques again. Now was not the time to mourn Wilder’s lies. Now was the time to strike.
“Okay, I’m going in,” I said, standing. Wilder exhaled relief, but I glared. “And we’ll talk after.”
He nodded, putting his hands back in his pockets.
At astronaut boot camp, when he’d turned suddenly cold, I’d felt vulnerable because of our eight kisses on the roof. If I was vulnerable then, what was I now?
I gestured to the building with a nod of my head. “Get going, Wild Card. I need to phone home, then I’ll be there.”
“Wild Card?” he said.
“Yeah, maybe it’s time you had a nickname.”
He frowned. “Don’t forget to turn on your earpiece when you’re done. Stay in contact, and as soon as you’re in, let me know the situation and I’ll come in shooting. Don’t let Jacques cut you. Hit him hard and fast. Between the two of us, we’ll wrap this up nice and easy.”
“Sure.” I was losing faith in nice and easy.
He picked a padlock and broke into the near building while I headed toward GT’s building, dialing my mom’s phone. It went right to voice mail, so I left a short message, saying I was fine. All had been well when we spoke that morning, so I tried not to worry. I called Dad next.
“Maisie?” he said. His voice was breathy as if I’d caught him in the middle of exercising.
“Yeah, hey Dad. How’s stuff?”
The line cut out. I stopped walking.
Low on battery? Bad signal? I called back five times. Nothing. My stomach knotted. Driving to Florida would take at least fifteen hours. No reason to panic without evidence. I’d keep phoning, and in the meantime, I’d go get Jacques.
Frosted weeds cracked like glass under my feet, reminding me how cold the world was to those unfortunates without tokens. Maybe it was worry for my parents that translated into worry for Brutus sitting in a cold car. I ran back, jumping into the car and shutting the door.
He was shivering. “You going to kill me quick or leave me to die slowly?”
“Option three.” I took off my coat and cap and dressed Brutus up as best I could, adding a scarf Wilder had left behind. “I don’t want you freezing to death.”