We come to the door and he turns. “I do want you to be happy. I’ve had a lot of time to think, Justine. To reflect. I’ve realized things …” He seems to be searching for the right words. “Now that we’re on this, there’s something I should’ve told you a long time ago, about what I’ve been doing. This whole thing with Jarvis—” He’s watching my hands, and I realize I’m gripping and twisting the purse straps. I feel so confused.
“It’s okay, you want to get going,” he says. “This can wait till you get Otto.”
I don’t want to go. What has Packard been thinking? What does he need to tell me? Why, really, has he given me this advice, this gift that will help me get Otto back? “Okay,” I say.
Without warning, Packard reaches out—I think he’s going to touch my cheek, but he slides his hand around the nape of my neck and pulls me to him, kissing me warm and strong, lips soft, breath like coffee. The kiss takes me by surprise. My whole body wants to follow deeper into him, but he pulls away, and we’re looking into each other’s eyes, and the moment stops. And everything seems to fall out beneath me.
“Good luck,” he whispers.
“Packard—”
He opens the door. “It’s okay.”
I stare at the open door. It feels like a closed door. And I leave.
Chapter
Eighteen
I SIT IN MY CAR across the street from Covian’s house, which looks as it did the first time I stopped by. Dark. Shades drawn. Garage door shut.
I’m here for Otto, but I’m still thinking about kissing Packard. Is it as simple as he says? That he wants me to be happy? The kiss felt like a good-bye kiss, and I didn’t want to leave. Even now, I want to go back, to see what he wanted to say. Maybe kiss him some more. Is it those damn dreams?
I roll down the window, suck in the cool air. Otto needs my help. This is what I’m doing now.
I get out with the bag of cookies I bought on the way and shut the door. Lunchtime on a Saturday. The neighborhood buzzes with the drone of a chainsaw a few houses down, probably cutting firewood; I’m glad for the haze of distraction the loud sound creates.
I head up Covian’s poorly shoveled front walk, avoiding the spots of ice, and knock on the door. I’m following Packard’s advice and not wearing antihighcap glasses, though I did borrow Shelby’s stun gun, so that I have two, in case Covian makes me hand mine over. Second round of knocking. My pretext is that I’m on a mission to see Covian and make sure he’s okay after not hearing from him. And bringing cookies.
No answer after three rounds of knocking. And the door’s locked. I make tracks around to the small backyard. The hedge is almost as tall as I am, and a small concrete porch holds a grill and two lawn chairs, both covered with snow. I knock on the sliding door in back, then peek in the crack at the side of the curtain, but it’s just vague furniture shapes in darkness. I inspect the rest of the windows, and then I go back to my car and rummage around in my trunk until I locate a five-pound barbell and a blanket. Now I’m really glad for the drone of the chainsaw.
Utilizing my best Yeah-I-belong-here stride I go around back once again. I stand at the back window feeling nervous and shaky, and then I realize this whole caper has distracted me from my worries about my head—except now that I thought about it, I’m worried again. Thoroughly disgusted with myself, I hold up the blanket and smash the back storm window with the barbell, clearing the glass all around the bottom. Then I fit my fingers under the main window, which is unlocked, and force it up. Why break both windows? I’m a conscientious intruder. I fold the blanket and drape it over the bottom sill—another thing I’ve seen in the movies—and climb in.
“Covian?” I call. “It’s me, Justine.” I shut the window behind me to keep out the cold, and wander around, checking the rooms. “Covian? Hello?”
No answer. I continue on, through the dark living room, down the dark halls. He’d never hurt me, but it’s still weird and scary to creep around his house. Finally I come to the basement door, just off the kitchen. I can tell it’s the basement door because it’s partly open, and the light’s on, so I can see the stairs leading down, and an old wooden railing.
“Hello?” My stomach flutters as I grip the cool knob. “Hello?”
A sound—an “unh.” Was it human? The house settling? I wait, still as a statue, straining to hear more, but all I get is the distant whine of the chainsaw and the hum of Covian’s refrigerator.
Did I really hear it? I bend my head nearer, pull my stun gun from my pocket, and creep down. “Covian? It’s me, Justine.”
I stop midway, astounded. The basement floor looks like it’s been torn up and rebuilt as a kind of insane maze. Concrete slabs, like chest-high walls, start and stop in random places, and in the middle is some sort of metal contraption—on second glance I recognize that it’s a home gym, tipped over on its side, draped with chains and ropes.
I suck in a breath. Nonstructural. For Otto?
“Hello?” I go all the way down and pick around, checking behind every little half wall. Nothing. I rub my arms, panic rising. “Hello?” Nothing. “Fuck.”
“Unh.”
I look in the direction of the sound. Nobody’s there. “Hello?”
A faint voice: “In here!”
Covian. His voice seems like it’s coming out of the wall itself—a boxy protrusion. I move closer. The boxy part is man-sized, and it’s pockmarked, too, like somebody was shooting at it. I tap it with my stun gun. “Are you in there?”
“Look down.”
A piece of beige cloth waves out a hole in the bottom.
“Oh my God. Covian? Are you okay? How’d you get in there?”
“You have a phone?” Voice weak.
“Yeah.”
“Call Packard. The Dorks have Otto.”
I clap a hand over my mouth. Everything seems unreal. I fumble to press the buttons on my phone.
“Need a team,” Covian continues. “Ambulance. Tools. Have to break the wall.”
“Shit.”
“They won’t kill him. Took him. Carried him. I could hear—” Scarily long pause. “I’m sorry.”
Packard answers and I give him the info. “You stay with Covian,” he says. “I need you to get him to tell you everything he observed, everything he heard.”
“The Dorks have Otto!”
“We’ll find them.”
“I’m glad you’re on it,” I say.
I spend the next ten minutes lying on the cement floor, holding Covian’s alarmingly cold hand through the opening in what seems to be a small, man-sized room Otto made around Covian. Through labored breaths, he tells me how he’d tied Otto to the home gym to prevent him from touching the walls or ceilings. Yesterday afternoon Covian had come down to turn on a football game for Otto when the Dorks burst down the stairs.
Yesterday afternoon. They’ve had Otto almost a day.
Covian continues: the Dorks wore hoodies and face paint; all he can give me is height, weight, and that two were males. One could’ve been female, he thought. Covian went after them and they shot him in the stomach; he staggered back to the wall. Otto was struggling with other Dorks and the entire home gym tipped over. As soon as Otto had contact with the floor, he interfaced with the structure and used his power to make the box around Covian. That’s what saved Covian’s life. They’d shot at the wall.
The rest was a jumble. Covian thinks they must’ve picked Otto up at some point, and he’s pretty sure one of them is named Henji. And he remembers shoes. Vans sneakers.
“Wait, what do you mean one of them was named Henji?”
“Henji,” Covian says breathily. “After Otto boxed me in, one of the Dorks yells out Henji! Mad, it sounded like.” He pauses. I can hear him shifting around in there.
“Hang on, Covian. They’re on their way.”
“And later, Let’s go, Henji.”
“Anything else?”
Covian thinks the Dorks picked the locks, judging from their quiet entry. And th
at they could be taking Otto to the river, or a place with Riverside in the name. Something about riverside.”
Riverside Elementary, I’m thinking. Henji is Otto’s name from that era. Is there a connection between the Dorks and what happened back at that school?
Banging upstairs. The door. I press Covian to tell me exactly what he heard about Riverside.
Silence.
“Covian, stay with me. Are you listening?”
“Only the word. I couldn’t hear. I’m sorry!”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“I don’t think they’ll kill him. Why would they take him?”
“Don’t say anything about Henji or Riverside to anybody. Nothing. Okay?”
He agrees. I force him to give his word, even though I don’t think he’ll be conscious much longer. I have the sense that he remained conscious out of sheer force of will, hoping to pass along these details as a way to help Otto.
I run up to the crash of glass as a sledgehammer comes through the plate-glass front window. “Hold on!” I open the door.
Carter and Rondo come in.
“He’s in the basement. Got to go,” I say. Sirens in the distance. I run out to my car and zoom away.
By the time I get Packard on the phone again, he’s at HQ.
“They know he’s Henji,” I tell him.
“What?”
I give him the story with the Riverside and Henji details front and center.
“No.”
“This reaches back there, doesn’t it?” I say. “Henji and Riverside. Covian thought maybe they were taking him to the river or Riverside.”
“What did they say, precisely?”
“He got the word, not the sentence.”
“Damn.”
“This is a clue. Can you use it to find him?”
“There’s no more Riverside school building, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“How about the site where it was?”
“Condos. Look, I ruled this whole Dorks-Goyce connection out,” Packard says.
“So you thought there could be a Dorks-Goyce connection?”
“I ruled it out. There were no Goyces on the list, and no family names related to the Goyces. It would be impossible, anyway.”
“So the Goyces are a family.”
“If nothing else, we can start looking for alibis during that game Covian had Otto watching. That gives us a way to cull the list.”
“There are hundreds on that list.”
“Hold on.” More talking in the background. A door slams. Then he’s back. “If they didn’t kill him right off, it means they won’t.”
“Maybe they want to torture him.”
No response.
“Oh my God!”
Packard says, “We’ll get him back. In the meantime, we have to hope he holds out and doesn’t relax his force fields. We don’t even know where he’s keeping all his dangerous highcaps, and even if we did, we don’t have the manpower to guard them.”
“I didn’t even think of that.”
“Well, we’re thinking about it here,” Packard says.
“They’d go free all at once,” I say. “Midcity will burn if they get out.”
“They won’t,” Packard says.
“It goes back to that school,” I say. “There’s something in that dream, Packard. I keep having this nagging feeling, like there’s something we’re not seeing. And the fact that the Dorks called him Henji and mentioned Riverside—”
“No.” He lowers his voice. “I have experienced that dream and those events every goddamn night for years. I can sketch and catalog every bit of rubble in that stairwell. There is nothing to be learned in that dream.” He calls for another laptop to be brought in; he wants somebody picked up from a Franklin address; he wants a large coffee.
“Maybe there’s something outside eyes could see.”
“There isn’t.” His refusal feels irrational. A sleepy mind fighting to stay on top of the day. “There isn’t,” he says again. “I have to go.”
He clicks off, but I stay, holding the phone to my ear, not quite ready to end the connection.
Chapter
Nineteen
I DON’T KNOW HOW I get through the day. Otto’s out there, in terrible trouble. Every few hours I call HQ for updates. They never have anything, just vague hopes that the next lead will pan out, and then the next.
I’m starting to get that they’re fishing. By the end of the day they’ve interrogated, revised, and released fifty people. Result: fifty people are walking around Midcity remembering their day wrong. And I think about Packard: tired, weary, doing his best to get Otto back. I think about what he said about the bracelet, and I want to ask him about it. I want to see him; the sense of unfinished business between us is overwhelming. Like a madwoman, I clean my apartment top to bottom, as if outward physical order will calm the chaos in my heart.
Just before I lock myself to the bed frame for the night, I remember the druggie-fencer-burglars, and I put my stun gun under my pillow, just in case the cops haven’t made their arrests. I toss the key across the room.
Exhausted as I am, sleep won’t come, so I pull out my mystery book. As I read, I begin to focus too much on possible telltale sensations in my head. This, at least, is one advantage to being handcuffed to the bed: I can’t go to the computer and read about my symptoms and freak myself out even more. Plus, it’s been months since I visited the vein star forums; I have no doubt somebody has posted scary new information. I remind myself I wasn’t feeling any head weirdness when I was in that tense situation at Covian’s, and that sort of stress would bring on a vein star episode if anything would. This self-talk must work, because I drift off.
The crash startles me awake so violently that I shoot up in the bed, wrenching my arm. Was that from inside my apartment? I’m afraid to move. It’s 2:10 in the morning. Another nearby crash jolts me into action—clumsily I grab my phone and dial Shelby. More cracks—like the cracking of wood. Somebody’s smashing through my front door.
Shelby answers and I frantically tell her somebody’s trying to get in, and I’m trapped on my bed, and why the hell didn’t I call 9-1-1?
“We are calling 9-1-1 and coming there.” A click. More crashes. I hold the phone tight, wishing she was still on the other end.
Another crash, and another. I grab my stun gun. Then a different kind of crash and a bang. The front door, hitting the wall. They’re in. I sit in full alert, eyes wide.
Sounds in the living room. Heavy, plodding footsteps—more than one set. I’m so exposed, so vulnerable! Quietly as I can, I yank at my cuffed hand, like magically I’ll get free. Then I maneuver around, trying to swing over to hide under the bed. Impossible.
In my state of hyperawareness, I can remotely track every movement and action of the intruders through sounds. Clinks of metal is them going through my keys and change dish by the door. Lower-pitched clinking; they’re in my junk drawer.
I consider hiding under the covers—surely they’re just looking for things to steal and fence, and then they’ll leave. And if they’re so out of it, like the reports said, maybe they won’t think twice about a lump in the bed. But I don’t want to be unable to see them!
Plodding footsteps around the living room floor. Another set down the hall to the bathroom. The creak of the medicine cabinet. The sound of a glass bottle, shattering in the sink. My perfume. Chains clacking on glass. They’re pawing around in my jewelry and hair stuff on the ledge by the sink.
More crashing and smashing. My heart slams in my chest. They’re nearing.
Brain flash. I grab handfuls of laundry from my floor beside my bed and pile it up with some pillows next to me, then I yank my crocheted blanket out from under the comforter. You can see through it. I curl into a ball in the corner near my headboard next to the pillows and throw it over myself, praying I blend in with the laundry. Please be really drugged up! Please!
I sit really still, peering through the gaps in
the blanket. Soon a light form plods in—a woman with blonde braids and a shapeless white gown. She bumps into my dresser, then, with mechanical movements, starts to shuffle through my jewelry and trinkets. Take what you want, I think. Take it and go.
A man lumbers in and joins her at my dresser. He’s wearing a loose printed top and matching printed pants. Two more women crowd in after him. One of them pulls scarves out of my basket.
Suddenly the one with braids walks toward me. I curl my fingers around my stun gun, think about lunging, until I realize she’s going for my bedside table, inches away from my head. I fight to stay still even though my every instinct screams to scramble away. Thieves are just like bees, I tell myself. Leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone.
She pushes my book and my glass of water right off the side. Crash. Up close she looks like she’s about forty, and she breathes loudly through her open mouth. She examines my locket necklace, tosses it aside, pulls open my vibrator drawer and rummages through, movements more zombie than druggie. And that steady, rhythmic breathing, almost like she’s sleeping.
Sleeping.
A haze of terror spreads over me. Sleeping. No! There’s no way Ez could’ve linked to anybody else—nobody on the planet can penetrate the force field Otto sealed her in—not without a descrambler.
Unless it’s somebody else turning them into sleepwalkers. With a sick feeling I revisit Simon’s theory about the boyfriend, Stuart Dailey, being the culprit all along.
She shuts the drawer. The man comes nearer, as if to help her search my bedside area. The printed outfit is Spider-Man pajamas. I focus on Spidey’s black, webbed face, willing them not to see me.
As if she hears my thoughts, the woman with braids turns her head, looks at me with dull eyes. She rests a hand on my arm, squeezes, and moans. All of them turn to me.
Fuck!
She tugs at my blanket; I clutch it to myself with my free right hand, which also has the stun gun.
“Help!” I yell. “Help!”
The man starts pulling the blanket away from my feet and I kick him; they seem intent on getting the blanket off me. Morbidly I wonder if they see it as a kind of food wrapper, like foil around a burrito. The woman with braids pulls harder on the blanket, so I just let go of it and zap her with my stun gun. She collapses on me and I shove her off onto the floor by the side of my bed while kicking Spidey, who is making headway with my feet. He seems impervious to pain. One of the other women crawls over the far side of the bed, and suddenly my stun gun hand is caught in the blanket. I kick and squirm like crazy. Spidey presses all his weight onto my feet and the woman peels up my T-shirt and lunges, face-first, at my bare belly. I scream as I feel her warm tongue on my belly, and then the searing pain of teeth breaking my skin.
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