One,I counted to myself, watching Rianne’s shadow strike from above like a hawk.Two. Now!
I held tight to the handrail and flung myself sideways. Her foot touched down on the wall beside my head, knees bending to give her a greater push off; I released the handrail and seized both her ankles. I held on like death as she thrashed and kicked. In close fighting, the advantage was mine since I was stronger than she was.
Rianne pushed off the wall with her hands, sending us into a spinning tumble. If she’d been hoping to make me vomit, she was disappointed. I narrowed my eyes and pinned Rianne’s ankles together. A moment of groping in my pocket and I found the second pair of handcuffs I’d borrowedfrom the UN aircar. I snapped one around her left ankle before she realized what I was doing.
Rianne screeched in outrage. She pulled my hair and tried to gouge my eyes but missed, putting a long scratch down my left cheek instead. I caught her wrist and cuffed it to her foot, then pushed away from her, out of range of her spitting rage.
I spent the next three minutes carefully collecting the softgun and poison patch and stopping the elevator. Once matters were in hand, I would send the elevator back to the ground, away from the space station.
I turned my attention back to Rianne. I bounced in her direction and used the back of her belt to tow her back down to the ground. I wouldn’t want her to fall if the gravity returned too abruptly.
“I won’t be taken in,” Rianne said. The determination in her face was so great that I would have bet on her against a hurricane. Just not against my Loyalty chip.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. But, I was ashamed to realize, I also felt a surge of satisfaction at having captured her, at having won. I wondered if competitiveness had been bred into my genes or if it was a particular fault of mine. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.
Rianne wasn’t listening. Her breathing sounded harsh, labored. “I won’t let them torture me, as they hurt my mother. I won’t give the Castellans the satisfaction.”
I started to explain that no one was going to be tortured, that President Castellan would clip Eddy’swings, then stopped. Listened. Rianne’s breathingwaslabored.Her heart condition.
Frantically, I searched for her vial of pills, but she wasn’t wearing her necklace today. “Where are your pills?”
She didn’t answer. Hectic red spots showed on her cheeks. Incredibly, she smiled even as she gasped for breath. She looked vindicated, as if things were going according to plan.
RIANNE WAS DELIBERATELY giving herself a heart attack.
I was instantly furious with her. “Are you crazy? Stop it!”
She didn’t listen.
I stopped digging through her pockets for her pills—she must have left them behind on purpose in case she was captured—and prepared to give her CPR. I dragged her over to the nearest flat surface, uncuffed her ankle, and recuffed her to a bracket to anchor her.
If she’d been faking, it would have been a wonderful opportunity for her to attack, but Rianne wasn’t faking. Already her lips were turning blue. As I straightened her body, she stopped breathing altogether.
I felt for the pulse in her throat where her carotid artery should be beating. No pulse.
“Angel, call for help,” Mike said urgently. “Start the elevator up again.”
I couldn’t. If beanstalk paramedics showed up, the whole kidnapping story would come out, and the chip would rather risk Rianne’s death than the embarrassment of Eddy’s corruption.
I opened my mouth to tell Mike so, but shame stalled the words on my tongue. I hated words likecouldn’t,hated the way my body had betrayed me. “There’s no time,” I said instead.
It was true. Rianne’s body was completely limp. Her eyes were half open, unseeing and unblinking, her jaw slack. She looked as if she was dead already.
I put my fingers on Rianne’s chest, feeling for her breastbone so I could find her heart two finger-widths above it—and couldn’t find it.
I was first startled and then panicked. How could Rianne not have a breastbone? I yanked up her white T-shirt—modesty had no place in first aid— and found something even more bizarre. A piece of black plastic shaped roughly like a butterfly was superglued over her heart. In the center, between the wings, was a flap hiding a microzipper. Apparently, Rianne’s heart had been operated on so often that the doctors had removed her breastbone and installed a trapdoor for easy access.
A terrible chill went through me when I saw it, but I didn’t have time to think about where I’d seen that black butterfly shape before.
I started to double up my hands over her heart as I had on so many CPR dummies, then stopped, unsure how much pressure I needed to compress her heart. Without a breastbone to take some of the pressure, both hands would be overkill, so I tried using the heel of one palm. Her chest compressed two inches with every stroke the way it was supposedto, but the recoil almost sent me spinning away. I clung grimly to her hips with my knees.
I started counting under my breath, “One, two, three, four. . . .” I made fifteen compressions in ten seconds.
Then over to her mouth to keep her breathing. One hand under her neck to tilt up her chin and open the airway, the other hand pinching her nose closed. Two slow breaths in.
Back to her chest. Fifteen compressions.
Back to her mouth. Two breaths.
After the third cycle, I stopped and listened for a heartbeat. Nothing.
She was so pale, so still. My hands shook even as I forced them to do the work.
Fifteen compressions. Two breaths. Fifteen compressions. Two breaths. Fifteen compressions. Two breaths. Listen.
Nothing.
I needed all my energy to keep the cycle going, but inside I was swearing at Rianne. Why the hell had she done this?
I was determined that she wasn’t going to die. I kept going for long minutes after my arms felt like cooked spaghetti. Panic spiraled higher inside me when I still couldn’t feel her pulse. She was dead. Rianne was dead.
“Angel!”
I looked up, suddenly aware that Mike had been calling my name for some time now. My hand didn’t stop compressing Rianne’s chest.
“Angel, you need help. Toss me the handcuff keys so I can come help you.” Mike looked desperate.
I wanted to. Tears of fear and frustration drippeddown my nose. “I can’t.” Two breaths for Rianne. It was hopeless. She was dead. Fifteen compressions.
Mike braced both feet against the wall and pulled on the bracket, but it didn’t come loose. “If you don’t trust me, trust Timothy,” Mike shouted.
Timothy. I’d forgotten about him. I looked up and saw that he was no longer off in never-never land. His expression was alert.
“Let me help her,” Timothy pleaded. “I promise I won’t free Mike.”
I nodded, relieved by the solution. I fumbled out the handcuff key, between compressions. “You’ll have to catch it the first try,” I told Timothy.
He paled but nodded and held out his hands.
I took a deep breath, aimed as well as I could and then let fly. Timothy caught it.
I didn’t stop to watch him free himself as I bent over Rianne’s lifeless body. My back ached, and my arms no longer felt as if they were attached to my body. Hope was dying.
“You keep her breathing, I’ll do her heart,” Timothy said.
I moved over gratefully, too tired even to acknowledge him.
Three cycles later Rianne’s heartbeat came back, and her chest began to rise and fall on its own. Color returned, creeping under her black skin and taking away her corpselike pallor.
I drifted weightlessly, mind and body exhausted. I kept watching her, afraid that her recovery wouldn’t last, but her breathing improved, growing less ragged.
She was going to live. We had done it.
“What are we going to do?” Timothy asked aftera long moment. He still held to the wall bracket that Rianne’s body was cuffed to, anchoring himself. “As soon as she wakes up, she’ll ju
st give herself another heart attack.”
“We’ll have to keep her unconscious with Knockout until she’s in custody.” Even as I said it, I was uneasy. Knockout might be dangerous to someone recovering from a heart attack.
“I think we should let her go.” Timothy looked troubled.
“We can’t let her go.” The chip saw her as a threat to SilverDollar. My helplessness made me angry, and I took it out on Timothy. “Why do you care if she goes to jail? She’s never been anything but rude to you, and she kidnapped you.”
“I don’t know why I care.” Timothy’s voice was low. “I just do.” And then he kicked off from the wall, directly toward me. As we collided he pressed a Knockout patch on my arm.
I immediately tore the patch off, flinging it away. I dug out my atomizer of antiKnockout and triggered the nozzle, but, in zero-G, the mist formed into tiny beads, which floated away, uninhaled. And then it was too late. I could feel the drug moving through my veins.
Timothy shouldn’t have had Knockout patches on his person. While I had been battling with Rianne, Mike must have given one to Timothy and told him about my Loyalty chip.
Thank you, Mike,I thought as I sank into unconsciousness.
When I woke up, I was bound hand and foot. To my surprise, so was Rianne, although she was nowlying on the couch under Timothy’s jacket and Timothy’s watchful eye. She looked exhausted and irritable. I watched her through the screen of my eyelashes, not wanting everyone to know I was awake and aware.
We were still in the elevator. The car was stopped but had been moved far enough down the beanstalk to restore partial gravity. I hoped no one else had booked the VIP elevator.
“You’re crazy to try it without a trained technician,” Rianne told Mike.
“I know I’m not a surgeon,” Mike said. “I’m not going to try to remove the chip from her head. I’m just going to switch it from Operative mode to Passive mode. It’ll have the same effect.”
Rianne shook her head. “Even if you do deactivate her chip, chances are her mind will be so screwed up that she’ll still be loyal to SilverDollar. She’ll betray you at the first opportunity, and I’ll be taken in.”
“You don’t know Angel,” Mike said. “She almost fought free of the chip twice on her own. She’s warped its purpose to serve her own.”
Funny, it didn’t seem that way to me. The way I remembered it, the chip had bent me to its will like a pretzel. Even now, I was surreptitiously testing my bonds to see if I could slip my hands free of the cuffs. No go.
“That’s impossible,” Rianne said. “A Loyalty chip is absolute.”
“She did it,” Mike said proudly. “She should have tied you up as soon as she took away your poison. Instead, she wasted time talking to me and then even made you bandage up that tiny scratchon my arm, all to give the elevator time to reach zero-G and give you a chance to win.”
“Carelessness,” Rianne said.
Mike shook his head. “Not Angel. It was deliberate. Somehow she kept the chip from thinking about zero-G.”
Shadow Angel at work again.
“She’s awake,” Timothy said, standing up.
Mike came and crouched by my body. “You know what I’m planning to do?”
I nodded.
“It’s likely to be painful,” he said softly.
Rianne snorted. “Likelyto be painful? Tell her the truth: it’s going to burn like hell, and the chance for success is only forty percent.”
I smiled into Mike’s violet eyes and repeated the words he’d once said to me. “I trust you.”
Mike smiled back at me and said, “Timothy, brace her head.”
Timothy obediently knelt by my head, using his knees and hands to keep me steady. The chip wanted me to buck and fight, but I told it that if I did Mike might accidentally fry my brain and then no one would be able to warn President Castellan of Eddy’s treachery.
Mike pointed the remote at my forehead and started tapping buttons. Each one sent a small shock of pain through my skull.
This isn’t so bad,I told myself.It hurt worse than this when Dr. Frankenstein shot me—And then, abruptly, it got very bad, as if the chip burned red hot, searing my brain. I tried to twist away from the source of the pain, screaming.
Dimly overhead, I could hear Mike swearing asTimothy’s knees clamped down on my ears. Then the pain grew too huge, and I convulsed, chest arching up—
When I woke up for the second time, I had a fierce headache. An hour earlier, I would have described it as excruciating. After the pain of deactivating my Loyalty chip, the pounding took on the half-pleasant rhythms of an extremely loud rock concert. I swallowed thickly and tried to sit up.
Mike studied me anxiously. “Angel?”
I closed my eyes and nodded, meaning yes, I would live and yes, the chip was silent.
Mike folded my fingers around a glass of water, and I drank it gratefully. I swallowed the pain pill he gave me.
“Now that she’s okay, let me go,” Rianne demanded.
“We’ll miss you, too,” Mike said sarcastically. “Remember our deal. You go free, but so does Timothy.”
She nodded agreement, and he got out the handcuff keys.
I put down the glass. “Wait,” I said weakly.
Mike stopped. Rianne went rigid, no doubt ready to give herself another heart attack.
I held up a hand. “No, go ahead and free her. I just want to talk to her.”
“About what?” Rianne shakily sat up. “Stop hovering,” she told Timothy. “You saw me take my medicine.”
“About Eddy Castellan. Our common enemy.” I turned to look at Timothy, and the movementmade my head throb. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your uncle is not a very nice man.”
Timothy shook his head and looked stubborn. “You’re wrong. It couldn’t have been Uncle Eddy who installed your Loyalty chip. Maybe it was Anaximander,” he offered.
“It was Eddy.” I searched for the words that would convince him. I had no proof, but I knew.
Mike helped me out. “Do you know why Eddy went to jail when he was your age? It wasn’t for a misdemeanor. The charge was manslaughter, but it was closer to murder. I looked it up on the news database; you can, too.” Mike gave Timothy the details.
“We don’t know his side of the story,” Timothy insisted when Mike finished. “There could be more to it than that.”
“Will you listen to my side of the story?” I asked him.
“Okay.” Timothy cracked his knuckles.
I described my meetings with Eddy and the way he had constantly belittled Anaximander. I spoke of my certainty that Anaximander also had a Loyalty chip because he sometimes swayed the way I did when coping with the drowning memory. I told Timothy how Eddy had spoken of Timothy as being unbalanced and possibly violent. I reminded Timothy that the terrorists had not taken Eddy who, as Head of Operations, was a better hostage than Timothy.
When I finished Timothy looked miserable and indecisive. “I don’t know.”
“There’s more,” I said. “But it’s not my story to tell. Rianne, I need you to tell us about your parents.”
“My parents?” Rianne looked surprised. “What do they have to do with anything?”
Mike raised a questioning eyebrow, too. He sat down on one of the sofas and held me against his chest. I was all too glad of the support. I felt as if I’d been through a war.
“Maybe nothing,” I said. “But I have a hunch they’re important. Tell me about them.”
Still looking baffled, she started. “The last name I’ve been using is an alias. My parents’ names were Alex and Francine Pelletier. Is that the sort of thing you wanted to know?”
“Yes,” I said. “You told me once that your mother had a similar heart condition to yours and died of a bad shock. Today you said that SilverDollar tortured her. Which is true?”
Rianne’s dark eyes fastened on Timothy. “Both. SilverDollar killed her. My father, too.”
“How?”
“It was my fault,” Rianne said, surprising me. “They died because of me. Because I was born like this.” She gestured to her spindly legs and touched her heart. “The doctors said that without an Augmented heart my life expectancy was sixteen. When I turned fifteen and SilverDollar still hadn’t delivered the Augments it had promised time after time, Dad joined the Radicals.”
“But SilverDollar spends millions every year on Augments,” Timothy objected.
“Liar!” Rianne’s eyes flashed. “That’s what SilverDollar always says, but it’s a bald-faced lie! They spend the bare minimum. My father received a Memory Recorder because it was essential to his job, but they never gave him the silver eyes heneeded. They patched and repatched my heart, always waiting until it was an emergency, and then spending the least amount of money possible instead of buying me an Augmented heart and being done with it.”
“Stop!” I yelled, then winced when my head threatened to fall off. “Timothy, you’ll get your turn later. Rianne, please continue. Your father joined the Radicals . . . ?”
“Yes.” Rianne glowered once more at Timothy and then went on. “The Radicals were tired of hollow promises. They wanted action. So they decided to kidnap the son of SilverDollar’s president to force her to give us what we’d been promised. They were successful, but my father was caught and killed during the operation.”
“How did your dad die?” I held my breath.
“He drowned. He was leading the pursuit away from the others, and his boat tipped. He’d lived his whole life in Space; he’d never learned to swim, and he drowned.”
I took a deep breath. “Where did he drown?”
Rianne was staring. “In a bayou in Louisiana.”
I summoned up the drowning memory.Dropping down, down through murky green water. My boots dragging me down while my arms flailed.
A bayou, not a chlorine-clear swimming pool. Weight in my legs instead of a bullet hole in the shoulder. I hadn’t been remembering the showdown with Dr. Frankenstein. The drowning memory had been implanted along with the Loyalty chip. All this time I had been remembering something that happened to Rianne’s father, not to me.
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