“The other one might get away?”
“Or, you know, find a way to help.”
I spot what seems to be a set of blocked-off stairs on the side of the church. The steps lead down—maybe to a basement? “How about you try heading down there?” I say, pointing.
“Where are you going to go?”
“I guess I’ll go—” I crane my neck and look toward the scaffolding encasing the steeple. “Up.”
Chapter 7
I haven’t done any serious climbing since I returned to New York. It took me a long time to recover from my injuries after Virgil got me out of the hospital. Fun fact: my Velocius abilities might speed up my thinking and even sustain me when I’m on the brink of death, but they do nothing for healing. I still heal at the same rate as everyone else: slowly.
I’m about to find out if my muscles have healed enough to get me thirty feet off the ground.
I put my hands around the scaffolding bars, find a foothold, and start pulling myself up. The steeple is six stories up. In the old days, it would have taken me only a few minutes to reach it, but my limbs feel heavy and clumsy and my hands hurt like crazy. All my climbing calluses are gone. I grunt and grope, ten feet up, fifteen. And as I climb, I start to wonder . . . will this trigger a memory?
I hope not. I don’t need the distraction.
For a while, right after I returned to New York, memories were coming back to me on almost a daily basis. A lot of what I remembered was about my mom. Simple snippets, like sitting next to her on the bus. She would let me stand on the seat and pull the cord to signal for our stop. I loved doing that. I loved remembering doing that. I’d found these little gifts of memory when I least expected it, like pennies on the sidewalk, and I felt lucky to stumble across them.
But eventually my steady flow of returning memories became more of a trickle. I hit a plateau and couldn’t remember more. Until one day, I was walking by this playground just as it was getting dark and on a whim, I grabbed hold of the monkey bars. As I swung from one side to the other, I got this glimpse of my old life. I was talking to someone, arguing with someone about whether it was possible to climb up a crane tower.
That’s how I realized: When I climbed, things came back to me. Something about the motion would jar things loose. I think that’s why I was able to remember so much back in the hospital.
Twenty feet up the side of this building, my hunch gets confirmed. I’m suddenly slammed with a memory. And not a good one . . .
I’m in the police station, just minutes after I attacked Evangeline Hodges—after she told me what she did to my mother.
I’m lying on my side, my cheek pressed to a floor coated with hair and cigarette ash. My hands are still shackled to my waist. The place where they put the taser against my body burns and itches. Hodges is sitting in a chair, using one arm to support the opposite elbow. I hear one of the cops say something about her collarbone being broken. He tries to console her: “At least that reward you offered did the job.”
“The person who called in the tip didn’t ask for the reward,” another cop replies.
“Good,” Hodges says. “Saves my employer a bit of money at least.”
“Can’t imagine passing up a hundred thousand dollars,” the cop replies. “Whoever turned her in must have really hated her.”
The paramedics arrive. I don’t know how much time passes. It’s like I’m watching this happening to someone else.
Maybe I’m already dead. I hope so.
They lift me up. I feel the straps tightening around my body as they secure me to a gurney.
Hodges leans over me—gives me one last, triumphant look. “You’re about to take a very long trip to a very cold place.”
I won’t let myself cry.
In the ambulance, though, after they load me in and close the doors, I can’t hold back the tears anymore. They pool within my eye sockets, and somewhere down the road, the ambulance hits a pothole, jostling me, and the pools overflow.
The only way I can keep it together is to focus on one thing: somebody I trusted turned me in, and there’s only one person it could be.
A flock of pigeons bursts out of the steeple and flies straight into my face. One of my hands slips off the scaffolding planks, and both my feet follow suit. I drop and swing free by one hand before managing to loop my leg around one of the poles and then finally balance my weight on a sliver of planking.
I didn’t come this far to be killed by a bunch of birds.
I hoist one aching leg over the stone wall surrounding the belfry. Inside the steeple there’s no actual bell, just a makeshift floor of loose plywood sheets covering the rafters. I test the nearest board before putting my full weight on it. Then I take a few light steps, avoiding the worst of the pigeon poop and using whatever I can as a handhold in case the wood gives out beneath me.
I slide over to the door built into the belfry wall.
Locked. Of course.
But I notice a slight gap in the boards beneath my feet. I pry up a slab of wood, trying to be as quiet as possible. Below me, I see a single point of light moving back and forth. It’s got to be a flashlight. I quietly slip down through the opening and into the rafters, trying to get a better look. It’s hard to see anything because the inside of the church is filled with as much scaffolding as the outside, with canvas sheets draped here and there to protect the murals on the walls.
I drop down, using the interior scaffolding like stairs until I come to a balcony that probably housed an organ at one point. It’s very Phantom of the Opera up here. At the end of the corridor there’s a door leading to a staircase. I come out into the mezzanine at the back of the church. Someone is speaking angrily in a language I don’t recognize. As I peek over the railing, I see a flash of red—the top of Thomas’s head.
He’s on the ground floor, tied to a chair. Standing in front of him are three men in dark suits, just like the security guard described. One of those men is preparing a syringe.
Thomas is struggling, but they’ve got him lashed so tightly that there’s not much point. The man with the syringe ties off the veins in Thomas’s arm, taps lightly to pick a vein, and injects him.
Thomas screams in pain. I fight the urge get down there as fast as I can. Those guys have guns and I don’t. I can’t let them hear me coming. I need to assess the situation before I make a move.
“What was that? What did you just put in me?” Thomas says through clenched teeth.
The guy slaps Thomas on the side of the head and holds a small metal object in front of Thomas’s nose. Now he speaks in English. “You see this? This is the key to your future. You bring us what we want, we give you what you need.”
Suddenly there’s a rustling movement off to the side. With a boom, a twenty-foot section of the scaffolding topples over onto the nearby pews. Dust rises, and pieces of pipe and plastic sheeting continue to rain down for another few seconds. One of the guys raises his gun toward the heap of broken scaffolding, and another pans his flashlight over the area.
The flashlight beam lands on the name tag of a stolen NYPD uniform as Mikey steps out from behind the fallen scaffolding.
Mikey wasn’t kidding about being good with his hands. He lays one guy out with one punch and then catches another guy right in the face with a second strike.
Now’s my chance to move. I slip down through an opening in the floor. Nearby I spot an unused piece of scaffolding pipe, maybe four feet long, lying against the wall. I grab it and move toward the front of the church.
The guy who just injected Thomas is backing away from Mikey, his back to me. He snatches a gun out of his belt. “Don’t come any closer!” he shouts at Mikey.
I smack him across the back with the pipe.
When he hits the floor, Mikey kicks him in the gut just to make sure he stays down.
Meanwhile I kneel in front of Thomas. He doesn’t smile when he sees me. In fact his face practically collapses.
“Angel?” He shakes his head
. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Chapter 8
This wasn’t quite the welcome I was expecting.
I get to work untying Thomas. “Are you okay?”
“Uh . . . yeah. Hey, can you grab that key on the floor?”
He points to a small object lying a few feet away, near the base of a column. “I need that. Wait, first kiss me.”
I do.
“Okay, now get the key.”
The key is attached to a little red barrel with a number embossed on the side. It looks like the key to a locker.
I look over at the men on the floor. They all seem to be out cold. Mikey pokes one of them with his boot and gets no reaction.
“What did they just do to you?” I say. “Who are these guys?”
“Let’s get out of here first. Why are you wearing a police uniform? And who’s this guy?”
“What makes you think I’m not V. Abrams, NYPD?” says Mikey, pointing to his name tag.
Thomas looks Mikey up and down. He takes in the cuts and bruises on Mikey’s face. The hair. The ill-fitting uniform. The fact that he’s wearing his police hat like it’s a beret, sort of cocked to one side.
I step in before he can say anything offensive. “Thomas, meet Mikey.” I lean in close to Thomas and whisper, “He’s like me.”
“He was at the hospital with you?”
“No, a different hospital apparently. He can’t remember a lot of his past and someone tried to kill him a couple weeks ago.”
“Great. A test-subject class reunion. How did you find him?”
“He found me. When you disappeared, I went looking for you and nearly ended up dead in the river. He pulled me out.”
“You fell into the river?”
“I didn’t fall. Someone pushed me.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know,” I say. “Didn’t see who it was.”
“Where was your security detail? Why didn’t the Feds protect you?”
“They seem to have conveniently disappeared at the exact moment I actually needed protection.”
He shakes his head, looking half tired, half furious. “That doesn’t make any sense . . .”
“Add it to the list.”
As soon as I finally get all the duct tape off his ankles and wrists, I want to hold him and tell him that I’m so glad he’s all right. But he immediately pulls his arm close to his body and rocks back and forth on the chair.
“What was that stuff they put in you?” I say.
“Whatever it is, it hurts like crazy. I felt that stuff go all the way up to here.” He puts his hand over his heart. “And now my whole arm is burning. But they said there’s an antidote. They’ve got it stored in a locker somewhere. That’s what the key’s for.”
“Antidote?”
“Yeah.”
“You only need antidotes for poison.”
Thomas takes a deep breath. “It’s not necessarily poison poison. I mean, I don’t think it’s lethal. I think it’s . . . going to mess with my brain somehow.”
I get so mad I have trouble getting my hands to work. They instinctively clench into fists.
“Thomas, I’m so—”
“It’s not your fault,” he cuts me off. “All this is something to do with 8-Bit. Not you, okay?”
I wasn’t expecting Thomas’s dead biological father to factor into any of this. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. 8-Bit was working on a project for these guys before he died, and he never delivered.”
“The project 8-Bit was working on before he died was Velocius,” I say.
“It can’t be that,” Thomas says.
“Why not?”
“Because these guys are low-budget mooks. If someone was after Velocius data, they would’ve sent someone a heck of a lot classier. And besides, there is no Velocius data anymore. It’s all gone.”
“So we were told,” I say, looking over at Mikey—living proof that there’s a lot about these programs that we still don’t know.
“No, it’s gone,” Thomas says. “Not that I can convince the Feds of that. If I could, they wouldn’t keep—”
He stops himself and looks down, still clutching his arm, though the pain that crosses his face might be there for a different reason.
“Wouldn’t keep what?” I say. “Tell me or I’ll tie you back up.”
He rubs the place on his arm where he got injected. “They keep hounding me, asking me if 8-Bit had some secret backup data stored somewhere, pressuring me to give it to them.”
“Pressuring you how?”
“You know, threatening me with eternal house arrest and endless probation and no sprinkles on my ice cream and . . .” He bites his split lip. “Never seeing you ever again.”
“Is that why your plea deal got delayed? The Feds think you’ve got some secret stash of Velocius files that you’re hiding from them?”
“It’s not that wild of an accusation,” he says. “They knew how 8-Bit worked. He kept backup files on every job he did. He always wanted to have some dirt on the guys he worked for. You work with scum, you need a way to protect yourself when they inevitably turn on you.”
“But you don’t, right? You don’t have anything.”
“Of course I don’t,” he says. “And I’ve been telling the Feds that, but they won’t let up. They say they’ve got evidence that someone uploaded some data via satellite link a few hours before you were rescued—”
I cut him off. “You’re just telling me this now?”
“My lawyer told me that the Feds were lying, just playing some last-minute game, on the off chance that I’d actually cough something up.”
I grit my teeth. “Okay, we can talk about that later. For now let’s focus on getting help.”
“From whom?”
I instinctively touch my watch. But of course I can’t use that. Not if Mrs. Fitzgerald is working against me. “Well, these guys injected you with an unknown substance, so a hospital might be a good start.”
“If we do that, my FBI buddies will be swarming my hospital bed in no time. And if the Feds find out these guys kidnapped me, they’ll see that as proof that I’ve been holding out, that I’ve got something 8-Bit tried to keep from them. Which means I’m never gonna get rid of them. Once I turn eighteen, they might even go from threatening me to actually throwing me in jail.”
“But, Thomas . . .” I look down at the puncture mark in his arm. “You might need medical help.”
“It could just be a bluff,” he says, rolling his sleeve back down and buttoning his cuff. He grabs his tuxedo jacket off the back of the chair and looks around the floor for something. “Dang. I lost my bow tie.”
“What if it’s not a bluff, though?”
“Look. If it were a poison, wouldn’t I start feeling sick?”
“Didn’t you just say you had a horrible burning sensation from your elbow to your heart?”
“Yeah, but other than that, I feel totally fine,” he says, buttoning his shirt cuffs. “I’ll be okay. Let’s just get out of here and pretend this whole situation never happened. No need to overthink it.”
This sends a pang of anxiety through me. Thomas overthinks everything. He is not the kind of guy who casually dismisses a mystery like this. He doesn’t shrug and say oh, well. He always wants to find the answers.
Suddenly one of the kidnappers’ phones starts ringing.
“Maybe one of us should answer that,” I say. “Maybe we can find out who these guys are.”
“I told you,” Thomas says. “It doesn’t matter. Just leave it.”
He tries to pull me toward the door but I stand my ground.
Meanwhile Mikey pats down the unconscious kidnappers and finds the phone in the inner pocket of one guy’s suit coat. “How do you say hello in Russian or whatever?”
“I think they were actually Czech,” Thomas says. “So I doubt you can pull this off . . .”
“If whoever it is starts speaking anything other than Eng
lish, then just grunt or something,” I cut in. “You seem like an accomplished grunter.”
Mikey puts the phone to his ear, presses the button to answer, and then listens. His steely expression doesn’t change at all, though he nods and makes a few sounds like mmmm and tchah.
I hate being in limbo like this, not knowing what’s going on or what to do next—while Mikey seems thoroughly, infuriatingly in control of the situation. I literally climb the wall for a minute, just to burn off some of my nervous energy, until Mikey finally ends the call. He tosses the phone onto the floor and then steps on it. The sound of the glass crunching beneath his boot turns my stomach for some reason.
“Well?” I say a little more sharply than I mean to.
“The good news is the dude spoke English. He said ‘the boss’ was expecting results soon and then he called me a couple names. Apparently this guy,” Mikey kicks the guy he took the phone from, “hasn’t got much brain power and needs to be reminded that he’s not gonna get paid unless he finishes the job.”
“What else did he say?” Thomas asks.
“Something about eight pieces.”
“Was it 8-Bit?” I say.
“Yeah. That’s it!”
Thomas and I look at each other. I’m fighting off swells of dread, but Thomas looks almost relieved somehow.
Mikey gives a big smile. He points to the small locker key in Thomas’s hand.
“Most important: I found out where that belongs. But the place is not gonna be easy to find.”
Chapter 9
Thomas stares down at the key in the center of his palm and then makes a fist around it.
“A bowling alley?” he says. “Are you sure?”
“Yep,” Mikey answers.
“Repeat the guy’s exact words,” Thomas says.
I don’t understand why he’s grilling Mikey on this point, but Mikey reluctantly concedes. “Well, okay, he didn’t say it was a bowling alley, but I could tell from the background noise that that’s where he was calling from. I could hear the balls rolling and that sound of pins knocking over, you know? It’s a distinct sound.” He looks at me. “I used to play all the time. I think.”
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