by Shannon Hale
“You sure? That seemed like your plan,” he said, his teeth chattering.
“I don’t make the plans.”
“Yeah, I caught that.” He squinted. “You’re not a robot, are you?”
“No,” I said with disappointment.
“So, what, you got all strong—freak accident, genetic testing—and now you think you can run with the boys?”
“Pretty much.”
“You don’t know anything about these guys. Kid killers. I saw your pal Wilder kill that Asian girl with my own eyes.”
Everything seemed to tilt—me, the car, the whole world. I felt as if I were sliding fast and hard, scrambling for a hold, because when I hit bottom I’d have to think the words “Wilder killed Mi-sun.”
Chapter 32
I froze, bent over the seat trying to reach a blanket. “What?”
“Asian girl, little thing. He was mad at her. She wouldn’t do something he wanted, and he killed her.”
I didn’t breathe. I didn’t move. “She killed herself. She shot herself.”
“Do you hear me talking? I saw him. It was right before Halloween. Wilder had the girl on the floor, choking her till the girl was blue in the face. I’m not claiming to be an altar boy, but killing kids? This is what I’m telling you! Not happy company for a girl who comes back to give me her coat, even if you have freaky robot strength.”
I carefully stilled my face before turning back around and tucking the blanket over Brutus.
“Thanks for the tip.” I got out, shut the door, and ran. It felt good to run.
New data. Brutus could be mistaken or lying. But there was corroborating evidence:
1. Mi-sun’s token sat in Wilder’s chest.
2. On the boat, Wilder had tried to get to Ruth before me. Had the thinker known when she was dead, her token would come free so he could claim it? When the token entered me, Wilder had been so mad.
3. Jacques said Mi-sun was gone, that Wilder had taken care of that.
Wilder said she died just before I came to Philly. But Brutus said it had been three months. Who was wrong? Who was lying?
“Maybe he wants all the tokens.” The words slipped out, hard as the slaps of my feet against the ground. He’d lied again and again and again, but I kept trusting him. Did he deserve my trust? Was I nanite-poisoned—or just blinded by a naive crush?
Perhaps Wilder’s thinker brain figured out that he couldn’t kill Jacques without my help. Once he added the havoc token to his arsenal, would the brute and techno tokens be next?
Maybe I was overreacting, maybe Brutus was wrong, but I couldn’t have Wilder’s voice in my head till I figured it out. I pulled out my earpiece and crushed it between two fingers, letting the fragments fall to the wind. I’d go snatch Jacques and deal with the thinker later.
Wilder might have killed Mi-sun. A nudging anger warned me that I was going to feel this later, like a hard workout that screams in the muscles the morning after. My Fido hand clenched as if on its own, and I realized I was a cyborg now anyway, not far from a total, emotionless robot. How liberating that would be.
In moments I was at the building. This far away, I had to strain to sense Wilder. He was where he said he’d be, in that first building, waiting patiently for his queen to get into position and put his father and Jacques into checkmate.
The front doors were unlocked. There was an informal lobby and a guard station. No one there, but the feeds from the warehouse security cameras were live on little black-and-white screens. I looked them over for a sign of Jacques or GT.
A handwritten note was taped to one computer:
PUSH PLAY, MAISIE DANGER BROWN
I backed away, slamming against a wall. Should I run? This was when it would have been handy to have Wilder in my ear.
You’re indestructible, I reminded myself. Or nearly.
I touched the screen and it lit up. A video was paused. I pushed play.
The color was grainy, but I recognized my father on a bench in a windowless room. Sitting on his hands. Looking down and slightly away as if ashamed to be there. Instinctively my hands covered my face.
GT was sitting on a chair beside him in a casual pose—leaning back, one ankle propped up on his other knee, his elbow on the chair back.
GT: “Did you ever take her to school?”
Dad: “Just … once. One day of kindergarten.”
“And the kids were mean?”
Dad spoke quietly, reluctant but too afraid not to speak. “They ran around with their elbows bent, pretending to be … retarded. Having one arm and mental retardation was the same to them, and a child damaged in any way became an object of ridicule.”
“And Maisie didn’t notice, did she?”
Dad shook his head.
“You wanted her to stay like that. Unaware.”
Dad nodded.
So the small life I’d outgrown was my fault. My arm’s fault. I’d figured, but it still hurt to have it confirmed.
“I get that,” said GT. He patted Dad’s shoulder, one father comforting another. “So why didn’t you have another child? Were you afraid it’d turn out like your first?”
“No. We … we love Maisie …”
“You were disappointed in your daughter—”
“No.”
“Your maimed, handicapped daughter—”
“No!”
“Nick, just tell me. You never meant to have a child at all, right? Maisie was a mistake.”
This video was intended to make me emotional and rash. So I knew what I needed to do: Stay calm. Stay smart. Find my dad. I’d turned away to search the camera feeds again when GT’s voice said, “You deny it? Nick, can you explain why your wife goes by the name Inocencia Rodriguez-Brown?”
Dad looked up sharply at GT.
GT stood, his hands busy with something—unwrapping gum, no doubt. “She worked from home with an invented name and a stolen Social Security number, she kept her daughter out of the school system, she kept her whole life quiet. Inocencia. An ironic choice for her alias, don’t you think? Inocencia is anything but innocent. How many years was she a member of the Yellow Flag? How much blood is on her hands?”
I wouldn’t listen to GT’s lies any longer. I slammed my hand down, splitting the computer in two.
The speakers on the walls spoke to me.
“It just doesn’t seem fair that you hobble through life missing a limb while your lying, irresponsible parents enjoy wholeness. Let’s even things out. In four minutes your dad loses an arm. Yes, go ahead and call the police. They will take seven and a half minutes to arrive. By then you might not recognize your daddy, because at the five-minute mark, I relieve him of his other arm. Can you guess what happens at six minutes?”
One of the security monitors showed figures, hard to make out. The room had no windows. Large. High ceiling. First floor probably. I started running.
“You want to know how to save him?” GT’s tinny voice echoed off concrete. “Just step into my chamber.”
I didn’t slow to open doors, wood and cinder blocks crashing around me. Three and a half minutes. My heart pounded; my stomach felt full of hornets.
I came through a wall, masonry flying. The room was massive. Maybe it was for storing large things like jets, but now it was mostly empty. It was hard to see up in the rafters and corners of the room. There wasn’t a lot of light. But in the center stood a metal box like a large upright coffin. It looked homemade, and not lovingly so. GT’s “chamber.”
Sitting on a bench beside it was my dad. Mouth gagged, hands tied, he looked at me, his bald head shining, his row of hair poofed up by the gag of black cloth. My heart hurt.
GT was wearing a paint-splattered sweatshirt and jeans, an earbud and microphone on his head. He stood behind Dad, apparently weaponless except for Jacques, beside him in full havoc armor.
“I have sharpshooters positioned all over this room,” GT said. “You can’t get to them all, Maisie. And I’m sure you’ve guessed—they�
��re not aiming at you.” He checked his watch. “Two minutes, thirty seconds.”
“You want my tokens,” I said. Dad was staring back at me as if trying to speak with his stare.
GT smiled that self-aware, charmer smile. “They’re a burden anyway, aren’t they? My doctors know a safe way to extract them. Just place yourself inside this chamber. The moment the door is locked, I release your father. And I will only keep you until the extraction is complete. Your family will be safe, everything will return to normal.”
Your family. Did he have Mom too?
“But how do I know you won’t—”
“You don’t know,” GT said, snapping on his gum as if we were chitchatting about the weather. “But you have no other choice. Two minutes, ten seconds.”
If I ran to Dad, they would shoot him. I was strong but not large. I couldn’t shield him from guns shot from multiple angles. I couldn’t see a way through. I needed Wilder.
No, not Wilder.
The fear of losing the tokens made me shudder even as my logical brain calculated that it wasn’t a terrible idea. Ruth had killed. Mi-sun and Jacques had killed. And maybe Wilder. Was I next? Maybe GT’s influence was incidental. Maybe the tokens compelled us to murder.
Get rid of the alien wasp stingers, I thought. Go into the chamber and let it end.
Even though I didn’t trust GT, and the thought of giving up my tokens zapped me with panic as if trillions of nanites were clinging to my every cell, begging for survival, I still might have done it. Except for Mom.
I knew that’s who Dad was thinking about. He blinked once, long. Then he shook his head. Maybe Dad would survive this, or maybe I would. But one of us had to. We couldn’t take away Mom’s entire family in one fell swoop. And if I went into that chamber, GT would have no reason to keep either me or Dad alive.
“Jacques …,” I said.
“What, you wanna switch sides now?” he said. “You realize our beloved thinker isn’t so hot after all? He killed Ruth, he killed Mi-sun, he tried to kill me—”
“Be quiet,” GT said to Jacques.
Jacques took a step back. His nose twitched with a scowl.
Wilder killed Mi-sun … No, I would not think about it right now.
Loose cinder blocks from my crash through the wall lay by my feet. I scooped them up.
GT flinched. “Remember, if you harm me in any way, those shooters have orders to kill your father.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Their order was to shoot if I harmed GT, but it didn’t sound like he’d included the chamber in that command. The thing must be brute-proof. On the inside. I chucked a block at its control panel. The cinder block shattered, the panel sparked and popped. Its lights dimmed.
No gunshot.
“So, new orders,” I said, shouting to the hidden sharpshooters. “If you hurt my dad, I tear your heads from your bodies. Emphasis on tear. None of you will have any mercy from me. But leave us right now and I won’t follow.”
GT was frowning, uncertain. I don’t think he’d planned on my destroying the chamber.
Jacques said, “Don’t you know good parenting, GT? Always follow through on a threat. Pretty sure it’s been four bleeping minutes.”
“I told you to shut up!” GT shouted.
Jacques blinked. His arm lengthened with a havoc blade. He grabbed my father’s right arm and sliced through.
Chapter 33
In a moment I was across the room, backhanding Jacques away from my father. I heard Jacques hit the far wall. GT jumped back. Gunfire erupted. I was hunched over my father, covering up his head and torso with my own body as best I could. As the bullets pinged my back and head, I calculated where they were coming from. The gunfire paused. I hurled the two remaining cinder blocks at the west and north corners. Two grunts. Those shooters were out at least. I had nothing to throw to the northwest, so I angled my body between my father and that corner as the shooting started again.
GT was gone. I couldn’t leave Dad and go after him. A glance proved that Jacques had fled too. Just as well. I didn’t have time for a fight.
For the first time, I dared look at my father. He was slumped on the floor. I was aware now that he had been screaming, something I’d managed to tune out until he’d stopped. I checked his pulse—alive. Just fainted. Fainting is what you want to do when someone cuts off your arm.
The gunfire paused. Sounds of running feet.
My father’s wrists were still tied together, though one of the arms … My stomach clenched as I tried not to vomit. I tore off my sweatshirt and wrapped my father’s arm in it. There was so much blood.
I’m holding my father’s arm. It’s bleeding. It’s bleeding …
I slapped myself mentally. Not a good time to freak out.
I picked him up and ran.
I hunched as I ran, holding my father like a baby, protecting him with my body from the bullets.
More gunshots. His legs were bleeding. We left a trail of blood. I clamped shut my jaw and refused to feel anything. I kicked through doors. I ran.
Dad stayed out cold. Why wasn’t I fainting? I worried about that, because I felt pretty sure my brain shouldn’t be able to handle the fact that I was carrying my bleeding father and his arm.
Don’t you dare faint, Danger Girl. Just run.
Outside, down the street, my brute legs propelling me into arcing leaps. Stopping to borrow/steal a car would have taken too long. I wasn’t tired. All I could do for my father was run. And I could do that nearly forever.
Navigating the dark warehouse streets, I checked my GPS for the nearest hospital. I could run there faster than an ambulance could get to me. I called 911 on Fido without slowing and told them that there’d been gunfire.
“Also, there’s a car in a vacant lot just to the east of those warehouses. A guy named Brutus is tied up in there. He’ll freeze to death if you don’t get him out.”
“What is your name and address?”
I disconnected.
I passed a man crossing the street so quickly, he fell down. I kept running. Thankfully there were almost no people out to see a girl in a T-shirt in negative-degree weather carrying a bleeding man and bounding like a cartoon character.
I must have looked pretty extraordinary bursting through the emergency room doors. My father’s blood soaked my white T-shirt, smeared over my neck and chin.
“Amputated arm,” I called out. “Forty-six-year-old man, no allergies, no prior medical conditions. Arm severed”—I checked my internal clock—“seven minutes, twenty-two seconds ago. He needs help NOW!”
Orderlies took Dad from my arms and placed him on a rolling bed. They wheeled him and his arm away. Someone tried to check me in too, till she understood that the blood wasn’t mine. She wouldn’t let me follow Dad.
I dialed Mom. Straight to voice mail. I kept trying every few minutes.
The police arrived. I smiled, resenting that I had to fear them. At least I wasn’t bloodstained anymore. The nurses gave me scrubs to replace my bloodied shirt.
The officers were wearing face masks, like most of the people in the emergency room. The trend was becoming increasingly common since the Jumper Virus first emerged. I told the officers GT Wilder and Jacques Ames had just cut off my father’s arm. They radioed to get the info on the warehouse. Gunfire confirmed. Brutus found and in police custody. No sign of GT or Jacques. I put my hand over my eyes. I was so tired.
The good-looking cop sat beside me. I wondered if he was a lying murderer too. Seemed to be all the rage.
“Do you know why they did this?”
“They’re crazy!” I couldn’t remember if looking straight in a person’s eyes was a sign of speaking truth or lies, so I ended up meeting his eyes, then looking away, then back again. “GT’s son and I were at astronaut boot camp together last summer, and GT freaked out when we sorta dated.”
“So he kidnapped your father and cut off his arm?”
“I wasn’t there for the kidnapping part. GT called me
to that warehouse this evening. He had a creepy video of my father talking about me. Then I found my father and GT there, and GT had Jacques cut off my father’s arm.” My voice cracked, completely without my permission. But it probably aided the bewildered-teenager schtick. It wasn’t too hard to pretend.
One of the cops gave me a glass of water, which I gulped down. My stomach growled.
“I’m real hungry,” I said. Yes indeed, just like a little lost orphan child.
“Maisie, how did your father get from the warehouse to the hospital?” the older one asked.
“I carried him.” There were witnesses. No fudging this one. “Probably adrenaline helped? Like when people can suddenly lift a van off a trapped child?”
The doctor came in to talk to me, so the cops started to leave.
“Hey, GT’s son, Jonathan Wilder?” I said. “He’s … abnormally smart. And involved somehow. You should keep an eye out for him.”
The Wild Card. Brutus said he’d killed Mi-sun. Jacques confirmed it. And he was the thinker—wouldn’t he have known that sinking Ruth would kill her? Maybe he designed GT’s chamber himself and sent me there to get caught. Maybe the tokens had messed him up as much as Ruth and Jacques and he’d just been better at hiding it.
And where was Mom? There were too many worries banging together in my brain, but I tried to shake some extra space for hearing what the doctor told me about Dad. I felt myself sinking when he used words like “critical” and “blood loss” and “shock.” It’s pretty sad when “viable limb” and “clean severing” are a conversation’s high points.
My body ached and shivered with hunger. I went to the cafeteria. Wilder had given me some emergency cash, and I spent a chunk of it on dinner. The cashier seemed so alarmed by my piled-high tray, I had to offer an explanation.
“I have a parasite,” I said.
She looked down as if my eye contact might be contagious.
The cafeteria was mostly dark and empty. I dialed Mom’s number over and over. Mom was the one who used to put cool cloths on my head when I had a fever and bring me cold soda and soup. And sing me Spanish songs. And cuddle with me on the couch.