We walk on either side of Mikey, holding him upright as his boots drag on the ground, pushing through the crowd of onlookers at the base of the ride. In the distance, a couple police cars pull up. We sneak out toward the boardwalk and then make our way back to the van parked up the street, taking a detour through a side street to avoid being seen by the arriving ambulance. As we help Mikey into the van, his face contracts a moment. He squeezes his eyes shut and runs his hand over the spot behind his ear, like he’s trying to massage the pain away. “I think we should take him to a hospital,” I say.
“Hold on a second.” Thomas reaches down and unbuttons one of the cuffs of Mikey’s uniform shirt.
“What are you doing?”
“Just a hunch,” he says.
He pushes up Mikey’s sleeve and reveals several needle marks in Mikey’s veins, a few slightly scabbed over. There’s a small halo of bruising around one of the injection sites. Thomas rolls up his sleeve and compares the two. Identical.
“Okay,” Thomas says. “I’m ready to tell you what I think is going on.”
I drive fast, too fast, but I feel like I’m now racing against not just one clock but several. I check on Mikey in the rearview mirror every few seconds. His eyes are closed and his head is leaning back on the seat. The tension in his body seems to have lessened but he’s still shaking.
Thomas has the laptop open and pulls up directions to the nearest hospital. “Turn left up there. And by the way, I adore you but you truly are a horrific driver.”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“For now,” he says, smiling. “Here’s hoping your driving does me in long before this stuff they shot me up with.”
I feel like screaming at him for trying to make light of what’s going on. “Stop joking and start giving me answers.”
I’m not afraid of what he’s going to say. No truth is worse than not knowing. Not knowing is a chasm of black, the potential for every worst-case scenario thrown together.
He faces forward again and sighs. “First of all, I haven’t been holding back because I don’t trust you. I was just trying to get a better handle on the situation before I said anything.”
“Do you have a handle now?”
“Not really, but I’ll just tell you what I know.” I slow down for a red light. Thomas clears his throat.
“Here’s the thing,” he says. “The government program that you were part of—it might just be the tip of the iceberg. There was always the possibility that there might be others. Other patients, other places where they did research.”
I’m not surprised. Not even a little bit. When the Feds told me that they shut the hospital down, I wasn’t fully convinced. But everyone told me relax, don’t worry, you’re safe. They said it so much that I started to think maybe—just maybe—I could accept it as fact. Now I feel like a sucker for letting my handlers talk me out of listening to my own gut. They used my desire to put the past behind me as a weapon against me.
“Thomas, if you’ve always suspected that there were other places they conducted research—other people who they experimented on—why didn’t you ever mention that to me?”
“I was hoping it wasn’t true. Because if it is—if there are ongoing projects, any information about the Velocius project could still be relevant, useful, to other research that’s happening right now.”
I think about Thomas’s response to his kidnapping tonight—how he insisted that whatever his kidnappers wanted had nothing to do with Velocius or with me. He was lying. Straight-up lying. More of that insulting “protection” that I never asked for.
I take one hand off the wheel and momentarily pinch the bridge of my nose. “Okay, but we’ve already established that there isn’t any surviving Velocius data.”
“Hold on. I’m not done explaining.”
“Go ahead. Until this light turns green, I have nowhere else to be.”
“A couple weeks ago, the Feds started asking me stuff about you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, it was sort of out of the blue. Up until that point, all we discussed was 8-Bit and all the stuff he’d been doing the past few years. And I’d told them everything I knew about that. Like, everything.”
“What did they ask you about me?”
“They wanted to know if you’ve ever said anything about more research data for the Velocius project. They seemed to think there might be more info out there and that you might have some idea about where it was.”
“Me? I don’t know anything.”
“That’s what I told them. But then I thought . . .” Thomas scrubs his hair with his fingertips. “What if you do, Angel?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Have you had any new memories recently?”
“No,” I say right away, but I realize that’s not quite true. “Well, actually I had a couple tonight, but both are from long ago. Before I was in the hospital.”
“What were they about?”
“One was from that night at the police station. The night that Hodges—”
His biological mother’s name makes him wince.
“The night I got arrested and she told me about what she did to my mother. I couldn’t really get hold of the whole memory, though. There was some other piece to it, something about a friend of mine, a girl from my old neighborhood maybe—someone who betrayed me. And the other memory was about Sarah Claymore. You know, Erskine’s wife. My grandmother. I visited her in her nursing home at some point. I had tracked her down and I was trying to dig up some dirt that could help me expose Claymore’s shadiness.”
“And did you?”
“No. She didn’t know anything. And obviously neither of those memories has anything to do with secret locations of research data.”
Behind us, Mikey starts making a strange, low noise, like an agonized animal caught in a trap. He grabs at the hair on either side of his head but it’s too short for him to get a grip. Even Thomas is looking at him now like he’s feeling sorry for the guy. “Good thing he doesn’t have much hair because it looks like he’s trying to pull it all out.”
That’s when something hits me.
“His hair,” I say.
“What about it?”
“It took months for mine to grow back after they took me off the chemo regimen, and it didn’t all grow at the same rate. If Mikey was in the hospital until a couple weeks ago . . . look at his hair. It’s short, but even all over. Like it’s just been shaved.”
“Like someone was just trying to make it look like two or three weeks’ worth of hair growth?”
“Exactly.”
“Then the story he told you is definitely not real. Or not complete. Could be the result of whatever he’s got in his system.” As he says this, he bends his arm and rubs the inside of his arm where they injected him. He glances back at Mikey and then at me. “Maybe I’m looking at my future.”
I’m not sure how I’m keeping the van on the right side of the road. My mind is too full of worry.
He glances at his laptop again. “Take your second right up ahead there.”
Then he says, “I have another theory. Is there anything only you and Larry would know about?”
“Larry? I don’t think so. Why?”
Larry. The doctor who saved me back at the research hospital. The man who defied his bosses, the doctors who were running the experiments, for my sake. I think of him fairly often, sometimes wondering why he did it and sometimes just grateful that he did. His actions gave me a way out, but he’s as much of a puzzle as my memories once were. I don’t know much about him. Although maybe I knew the best part of him and that’s what matters.
“The way you described to me what Larry did at the hospital,” Thomas says. “He planted information in your head, gave you the tools you needed to save yourself. He found a way to tell you your mother’s name without you or any of his colleagues realizing it. I think he might have done something more. A clue to help you find hidden data about V
elocius—something to lead you to a digital storage site or something.”
I try to recall some of what I discussed with Larry during procedures. All of it seems far away and indistinct. Disconnected words and phrases, momentary flashes of images, surges of emotion—all of it is clouded by the drowsy fog that lay over my heavily medicated brain. And I’m sure my memory of those times is even more pockmarked and incomplete because subconsciously, I’d rather not remember any of what happened.
Thomas isn’t the first person to ask me this question about Larry. After I got back to New York, my handlers asked me as well.
Had Larry ever mentioned anything unusual about my case?
Had he ever said something strange to me that might have had another meaning?
I told them that everything Larry said to me was odd. Every topic he introduced was out of left field. After a while the Feds stopped asking.
The light changes and I hit the gas too hard. We hit a pothole that pitches Mikey across the floor.
“You okay back there?” Thomas asks.
Mikey nods once, but his eyes roll back in his head.
Now I think about the morning of my last operation—about how strange Larry was acting, with his cryptic quotes from Hamlet. Of course, his behavior made sense later, but maybe there was more that I was supposed to unpack from his words.
Maybe he seeded something else in my mind—the location of the very information that the Radical Pacifists want Thomas to deliver. Larry to the rescue once again.
“Do a search on ‘Larry and Polonius’ and see if you get any hits,” I say.
I look in the rearview mirror at Mikey again. He’s completely still, though his face is pinched in pain. I wonder if he’s fallen asleep like that.
Thomas types and then says, “Huh. Well, that’s something.”
“What?”
“I’ve just found something called Larry’s Elizabethan Fan Site. It’s pretty bare bones. Just a list of quotes from Hamlet. That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Or else,” I say, “it’s a message.”
Chapter 13
Thomas points at the front entrance of King’s Borough Hospital.
“I picked this place because they’re noted for having an especially serene and secure psych ward,” Thomas says.
I pull up in front of the Emergency Room doors. Thomas and I get out and open up the back of the van.
Mikey can’t keep his feet under him, so we sling each of his arms around the backs of our necks and drag him toward the doors.
“Sure you don’t want to just leave him here with a note pinned to his shirt?” asks Thomas as the doors slide open for us.
“Thomas, come on. We owe it to him to at least take him inside.”
The waiting room is standing room only. People are moaning and calling out, kids are crying, phones are ringing but going unanswered.
“Let’s just find a nice quiet corner and put him down and then get the heck out of here,” Thomas says.
We lower Mikey into an empty wheelchair parked next to a wall of pamphlets about infectious diseases, and just as we turn to leave, we hear a voice behind us. A not-to-be-trifled-with kind of voice. The only people who have voices like that are nurses and guards in maximum-security prisons—and I should know.
“Nuh-uh-uh,” the woman says, checking Mikey’s pupils with the kind of mini flashlight that nurses used to poke into my eyes on a daily basis. “The only place you can drop and go is the morgue.” She shoves a clipboard at me and adds, “Fill this out. I’ll let you know what’s wrong with your friend when I can. You can wait in the cafeteria if you want.”
Thomas opens his mouth to protest, but I hook my arm around his, coupling us together like two train cars. As soon as the nurse turns away, I ditch the clipboard on an empty chair and pull Thomas toward the signs for the cafeteria, dodging the flow of patients and nurses and doctors, all of whom seem to be having the worst night of their lives.
“Let’s just take a few minutes to rest and process everything before we decide where to go from here,” I say.
“Fine,” grumbles Thomas. “Guess we can get a closer look at Larry’s little fan site while we catch our breath.”
“But we don’t have the laptop—”
Thomas produces a smartphone from his tuxedo pocket.
“Where did you get that?”
“From someone at the amusement park who wasn’t paying close enough attention to his back pocket.”
“Seriously? Mikey was about to leap to his death and you took the time to pickpocket somebody?”
“You have your skill set, I have mine.”
We follow the signs to the cafeteria one floor up. They seem to have closed down except for one small display case of granola bars, candy, and a bowl of bruised fruit. Most school lunchrooms have more panache than this place.
Thomas puts the phone in my hand. “Sit down and have a look at that Larry and Polonius site while I get us some coffee and something to eat.”
I look down at the screen and read. Within two minutes, I’m blinking fiercely, fighting to focus. Reading lines from Shakespeare plays is not exactly the best way to stay alert in the middle of the night.
Then is doomsday near: but your news is not true.
Let me question more in particular: what have you,
my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,
that she sends you to prison hither?
I can hear Larry’s voice reciting these words to me. When did this happen? Am I just imagining it?
Each memory modification procedure was the same. I would talk to Larry, the hours would pass and the drill would bore deeper into my brain, and then it would be over and I’d be returned to my room to spend a couple days under mild sedation, strapped to my bed so I wouldn’t accidentally pull out any of the tubes or wires. I hated that feeling of being paralyzed, lost in a twilight of confusion while people would come and go. Nurses would take my vitals and then leave the room without saying a word. It was almost like being dead.
The moments, the days all blended together, nothing distinct. Weeks would pass and then it would be time for another session. And now I’ve got to put myself back there again and relive it.
Larry’s voice is suddenly vibrant in my mind as I read the words on the screen.
Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.
I can hear the sound of the drill in the background. I can smell the Betadine antiseptic and feel the straps around my chest. Larry’s voice has weight to it, each word penetrating my mind like the needles sinking deep into my brain tissue.
—to thine own self be true.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Act 40, scene 46.08, line 73.59
A none-too-gentle tap on my shoulder startles me.
I straighten up fast, gripping the sides of the table. Standing in front of me is a very concerned-looking Thomas with a tray in his hand.
“You had me worried. I said your name a couple times and you didn’t respond.”
“I was just thinking. Or sleeping. Or something in between. I feel like there’s something teasing me about these quotes, but I can’t figure it out.”
“Ah, Larry. Man of a thousand mysteries.” He sets a tray down in front of me. “I brought you coffee and some sort of . . . old-people food. It’s pudding. I think. Or it used to be.”
I recognize the substance in the little glass dish. “It’s rice pudding! I ate a lot of it at the hospital.”
More concern bleeds into his expression. “Maybe this was a bad choice then. I didn’t mean to bring those ugly memories back—more than we have to, anyway.”
“No, it’s okay. It’s not a bad memory at all.” I take a spoonful and eat it. “I think rice pudding might be the least threatening substance on earth.”
He exhales with relief. “Only the best for my lovely lady on our first dinner out together.�
��
I smile and push the tray toward him. “You should eat too. We both need to keep up our strength if we intend to unravel the mysteries of Larry.”
He’s about to take a bite and then puts his spoon down. “Angel, if I told you that you’d be better off getting up from this table, right now, and walking out and disappearing, would you do it?”
“Of course not. I don’t run out on people I care about.”
“Right now you should.”
“I believe I once told you to do the same thing, and you wouldn’t leave. I hope you’re not suggesting you’re nobler than I am.”
“Then you should understand why I’m saying this. Look, you’re the person I care about most in the world and I want to protect you, and maybe the way to do it is to let you go.”
“I don’t want you to protect me,” I say. “I want you to have faith in my ability to protect myself. I’d also like to have some say in any ‘letting go’ you might be doing, especially if it’s supposedly for my own good.”
I reach across the table and take his hand, but his mood is all wrong. The Thomas I know would crack wise while plummeting to earth with a parachute that won’t open. This Thomas—it’s like he’s already given up.
“When you showed up at the church tonight, ready to save me from my kidnappers, do you know what I thought? I thought, ‘Oh, no. I failed her.’ All I want is to keep you out of danger, and I failed.”
Thomas gets up from the table and comes around to my side. He slides into the booth next to me and takes my hand in his.
He kisses me so lightly, I almost don’t even feel it.
“If they threaten you,” he says, “if they tell me that they’ll hurt you if I don’t give them what they want—I will give it to them. Whatever it is. I will give it to them.”
“But you don’t have anything to give them!”
“I’ll make something up. And they will eventually figure out that I made something up, and that will anger them, and that will end badly for everybody. So we’ll all be better off if you go somewhere safe, where they can’t reach you, where they can’t use you as leverage against me.”
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