“Counterproposal: I help you find the actual data on Velocius, and then you trade it for the antidote and—”
He kisses me again.
“Kissing me doesn’t make an interruption any less rude, you know?”
But he won’t let anything get in the way of what he’s trying to tell me. His brown eyes are swallowing me up.
“Think of it this way. Someone’s already tried to kill you twice in the past twenty-four hours. We don’t know who or why. All we know is that the people who should be protecting you can’t be trusted. Whatever’s going on with me, whatever these Radical Pacifists are up to, it’s nothing compared to whatever you’re up against. Angel, I’m scared for you. What if what’s coming for you is bigger and badder than anything before? You should walk out right now and never look back. Just disappear. Virgil could help you.”
“Virgil can’t help me unless Mrs. Fitzgerald helps him,” I say. “He’s totally dependent on her. And we know now that she can’t be trusted. Besides, what would happen to you if I just left? You know how much you need me.”
I smile at him, but he doesn’t smile back.
“Please go, Angel.”
“I won’t. And do not ever ask me this again. Do you know something? You’re doing just what they tried to do to me at the hospital. Trying to protect me by not letting me know the truth, by not letting me make my own choices. You’re doing just what your mother—” I stop myself, but it’s too late.
He flinches, like I’ve actually stabbed him with my stupid, impulsive words.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I know you’re not anything like her.”
He looks at me in resignation. “I’m—sorry if I’ve made you feel like that. It’s just a hard instinct to overcome. The desire to protect someone you love. You never know how you’ll react until you’re in the same position.”
“What I’d like a lot more than your ‘protection’ is your trust. Your belief that we’re going to get through this together.”
He reaches for my hand and looks down at our fingers intertwining. “I wish I could believe that. But I can’t say I’m liking our odds right now.”
“Bravery isn’t for times when you know everything is going to turn out all right,” I say.
“Who said that?”
“I did, just now.”
He shakes his head. “That’s a great quote, but brave people still die, Angel. All the time. I don’t want you to be one of them.”
I slap my hand to my forehead and try to stand up, banging my hip against the table as I do. “The quote!”
“Huh?”
“On Larry’s blog. The citations for those Hamlet quotes! They’re all correct except this one.” I fumble with the phone as I rush to show him the quote on the screen. “The last two sentences Polonius speaks after his famous line, ‘to thine own self be true.’ Look. This one makes no sense. There’s no act 40 in Hamlet. There’s no act 40 in any play. So what do you think those numbers could be?”
Thomas’s eyes go round. He grabs the phone and plugs the numbers into the search bar. “Let’s see what we get.”
A few seconds later we have our answer.
GPS coordinates.
Chapter 14
Thomas types quickly and then holds the phone up in front of my face. I see a building, seemingly forged from one continuous piece of silver, polished to a mirror finish. The top of the tower is shaped like a sword.
“Claymore Tower,” I say. The flagship of Claymore’s real estate holdings. One hundred fourteen floors of luxurious condos and offices and, on the lower levels, the most expensive retail stores in Manhattan.
Thomas slumps down in his chair.
“What’s the matter?” I say. “We just figured out a huge piece of the puzzle!”
“Yeah, but so what? The information is useless. Larry might as well have sent us to the Pentagon. What are we supposed to do now? Go up to the penthouse apartment and knock on all the doors? ‘Why, hello there! You ever heard of Dr. Larry Ladner? If so, you got any secrets you’d like to share with a couple random strangers?’ ”
“Hey, that’s a brilliant plan. Let’s go with that.”
I take his hand but he immediately pulls it away. Not in time to hide what I’ve just discovered, though.
“Thomas. How long have your hands been shaking like that?”
“Off and on for the last half an hour.”
“Is it the drug or are you just scared?” I ask.
“I think it’s both.”
Without saying so out loud, we both decide that leaving Mikey behind is the best move right now. We’re about to pass through the sliding doors and exit the ER when I notice the television screen in the upper corner of the waiting room. Reports of Gunfire near South Street Seaport flashes across the bottom of the screen.
“Oh, no.” I stop in my tracks. Thomas plows into the back of me.
“What?” Thomas asks.
I point to the television. We move closer to get a better look.
A reporter stands near the dock, and behind him, the nose of a yacht is visible. The volume is turned off but the closed captioning reads: “Several people reported hearing shots fired and two witnesses claim to have seen police exchange gunfire with an assailant in a white van. Yet there has been no official police response following the alleged incident . . .”
Thomas looks at me, his eyes widening slightly. “We need to get out of here now.”
I’m already two steps ahead of him.
We rush back out to the van. I slide behind the wheel, and Thomas gets into the passenger side and opens up the laptop right away. “Let me see if I can—”
A croaky voice rises from the back, echoing through the empty van. “How you guys doing?”
I nearly bang my head on the inside of the roof when I jump in surprise.
Mikey is sitting against the back wall of the van. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
He’s looking a little better. At least there’s color in his face again, and he’s no longer writhing in pain.
“He’s back,” Thomas says. “Like a psychotic bad penny.”
“Some stuff came back to me while I was in there,” Mikey says.
“That’s great, but we’re in a bit of a hurry . . .”
“I know what they gave you,” Mikey says, looking at Thomas.
“The shot?”
“Yeah. It’s this stuff called Snowball.”
An ambulance is pulling into the ER bay. We need to get out of here before we’re boxed in by emergency vehicles. I put the van in drive and Thomas pulls up directions back into Manhattan.
“So this Snowball stuff—what does it do?” I ask Mikey once we’re on the road.
Mikey scrunches up his face like remembering is hard physical work and he’s not sure he can lift such a heavy load. “They give you the first injection,” he says, rubbing the crook of his arm. “Then they give you a second one sometime later. Could be hours or days, but anything that happens between those two injections, you don’t remember.”
A shudder runs through me. Now there’s some precise way to wipe out tiny pieces of your memory as soon as you’ve created them? There’s no risk of post-traumatic stress disorder with this method. You could put test subjects through all kinds of horrors, force them to do just about anything, and they wouldn’t remember any of it afterward. It’s a much more refined—more advanced—version of what Dr. Wilson’s team did to me.
I almost don’t want to know but I have to ask. “So why is it called Snowball?”
Mikey looks at Thomas with a sympathetic, brace yourself for bad news sort of expression. “Because if you don’t get that second shot . . . the drug just keeps going, it keeps wiping stuff out. It’s like a snowball rolling downhill. It eats up more and more of your memory. Until there’s nothing left. Until there’s nothing left of you.”
I can feel the blood surging into my face. It’s not fair of me, but I feel like this is somehow Mikey’s fault, like he brought thi
s into Thomas’s life. I know he’s probably a victim too, but at this moment, I can’t help seeing him as the carrier of some virus.
And now Thomas has been infected.
“Well, I guess that proves the Radical Pacifists aren’t working alone,” says Thomas, sounding unbelievably calm. “You can’t exactly get memory modification serum at your local pharmacy. They must be connected to some pretty high-powered people. I mean, the guys who nabbed me were losers, but if they know about Velocius and they have access to a top-secret drug, they must be working for a bigger entity . . .”
“Great. We were already outnumbered, and now there might be even more bad guys to fight?”
By now we’re back on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the skyline rising up in front of us as if it were an impenetrable fortress. When I’ve calmed down a little and can fight back the irrational anger I feel at Mikey, I ask, “What happened up there on the tower? Why did you try to jump? Was that another side effect of Snowball?”
“I don’t think so. Not exactly, anyway. If I veer from the plan, I get these urges.”
“Plan?” I echo.
“Whatever I’m supposed to be doing, I’m not doing it right, I guess. I—I don’t think I’m supposed to be on your side. That time I ran onto the highway, and then when I almost jumped off that tower—I think that was my punishment for helping you.”
“You mean because you pulled me out of the river?” I ask.
“No. Not that.”
I rack my brain for other ways that Mikey’s helped us. Knocking out Thomas’s captors, getting the keys to the van, figuring out that we needed to find a bowling alley . . . “You told us about the Radical Pacifists.”
He nods once, like it hurts to move his head. “Apparently that wasn’t something they wanted you to know about. I must’ve endangered their mission somehow.”
“And what’s their mission?” I push.
Thomas crosses his arms. “More to the point, who’s ‘they’?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that some of the things I’ve been doing—it’s like they’ve been programmed into me. I didn’t want to take the—” Mikey clams up and glances toward Thomas, and something clicks into place in my head. Something’s finally making sense, at least in one small corner of this bigger puzzle.
“The syringe,” I say. “You’re the one who emptied it.”
“What?” Thomas says.
I’m still glaring at Mikey in the rearview mirror. “When you went around to the back of the bowling alley to check if there was another way in. There was a door, wasn’t there, Mikey? You got inside, you used the key to get into the locker before we did, and you emptied the syringe.”
I turn to Thomas. “That’s why that guy at the bowling alley said there’d been three guys messing with that locker. The guy who put the syringe there in the first place, then Mikey, and then you.”
Mikey doesn’t say anything. Possibly because Thomas doesn’t give him a chance. “GET OUT OF THE CAR. RIGHT NOW.”
Thomas jumps out of his seat and tries to get into the back of the van, but I grab his tux jacket. “Thomas!”
“Angel, he sabotaged us! He ruined our chance to get the antidote! We were right there, the antidote was in reach, and he—”
“I know! But you have to calm down!”
“Pull over and dump him out.”
“I can’t! There’s nowhere to stop. I’m nearly on the bridge!”
Thomas sits back down, mostly because the van is swerving back and forth as I struggle to hold onto him.
“I don’t get you, man. I don’t care what stuff they shot into your veins. You’re the one who told us to look for a bowling alley in the first place. Why bother, if you were just going to screw us over? What kind of master plan is that?”
Mikey kicks the back of the seat. “I don’t know!” He looks down at his arm as if it belongs to someone else. “You shouldn’t trust me.”
Thomas and I look at each other: Yeah, obviously.
“His behavior’s clearly being guided by someone or something outside his control,” I say.
“Which means he could be even more dangerous than we realized.”
As we cross the bridge and head back into the city, Mikey says quietly, “I still want to help you.”
“Yeah, you want to help us so I’ll help you,” I say. “That’s what you said. Unless that was a lie too?”
“No. I mean, I guess I don’t actually know, but . . . I do need your help. It’s not like I asked for any of this.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Mikey,” Thomas says. “Slow down, Angel, and I’ll push him out. I just hope we don’t get busted for littering.”
“But I know where the antidote is!” Mikey blurts out.
I almost turn around and stare at him before I remember to watch the road. “Are you serious?”
“I mean . . . I remember the inside of the building where it’s kept. The layout. The room where they store the meds. I just don’t know where the building itself is.”
Thomas throws his hands in the air and then lets them drop into his lap. “Well, that’s super helpful. You got anything actually useful to share with us? Because if not, you’re nothing but a continuing liability.” As we roll to a stop at the first traffic light on the other side of the bridge, he says, “Oh, look! Here’s a lovely gutter filled with broken glass and taco wrappers. A perfect place to ditch this loser!”
“Hold on,” I say. “If he has even a vague idea of where the antidote is kept, we need to keep all options open. So for now, I think we’re stuck with him.”
Thomas leans against the side of the car and squeezes his head with his hands. Sort of how I used to do. I need to check that my head is still here sometimes. It’s not a look I’m used to seeing on Thomas, and it unsettles me. Plus his hands are shaking more than ever.
“Thomas, are you all right?”
“This stuff they put in me. It’s . . . I can’t think anymore. My brain isn’t working right.”
“You’re just tired.” But I know it’s more than that. His symptoms are getting worse.
“Lack of sleep usually doesn’t even put a dent in my brilliance.”
“Yeesh,” Mikey says. “Big ego much?”
“It’s going to be okay,” I assure Thomas. “For now we’ll just follow Larry’s clues over to Claymore Tower. But first . . . give me that phone, will you? I’m going to call home.”
“What?! Are you out of your mind? Mrs. Fitzgerald sold you out.”
“We don’t actually know that. We only have Mikey’s word for it, and we agree that’s not reliable. And if we’re wrong, if it turns out she hasn’t betrayed me, then maybe she can help us. So I’m going to call her and test her. Tell her this kid found me and I’m in trouble. We’ll see how she reacts, what she suggests. I won’t tell her where I am, I’ll just feel her out.”
“Okay, but make it quick. Don’t stay on the line long enough for the call to get traced.” Thomas hands over the stolen phone and after I dial Mrs. Fitzgerald’s number, he leans close so we can both listen in.
The phone rings once.
A woman’s voice greets me right away, wide awake even though it’s the wee hours of the morning.
“Hello, darling! Why didn’t you call earlier?”
Already I know something’s weird. First of all, Mrs. Fitzgerald never answers the phone so cheerily. Second, I’m calling from an unfamiliar number, and yet she knows it’s me.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald, I—”
“It’s fine, Sarah. I know you’re staying at your friend’s house tonight. Don’t forget, though, that you’ve got a dental appointment with Dr. Nickles at 1:30 tomorrow. Virgil is worried that you forgot. Oh, and his phone isn’t working properly. In case you tried to reach him earlier.”
Thomas mouths, “What is she talking about?”
I ignore him and say into the phone, “Don’t worry, I’ll be there on time, no problem. Tell Virgil not to worry.”
I h
ang up.
“You call her at three o’clock in the morning and she’s reminding you about a dental appointment?”
“The bit about Dr. Nickles is our code for something unexpected happening. I think she’s trying to tell me something.”
I look down at the black watch I’m wearing. “I’m supposed to hit this panic button if anything goes wrong, and we have an emergency protocol—a safe spot that I’m supposed to go to. I think her question ‘Why didn’t you call earlier?’ was a reference to that. She probably doesn’t understand why I didn’t follow the emergency plan. And telling me that Virgil’s phone isn’t working—I think she was warning me not to try to contact Virgil.”
“In case Virgil might actually be able to help you,” Thomas grumbles darkly.
“Or,” I say, “in case the Feds are monitoring calls to Virgil’s phone. Calling him might give them a chance to trace my location. Anyway, she didn’t sound like someone who’d just betrayed me.”
“I guess. But she also isn’t helping you find your way out of this mess, is she?”
Maybe not. Even if she wants to, it doesn’t seem like she’s in a position to do much. Still, it’s a relief to know that she doesn’t seem to want me dead. At this point, that’s no small thing.
Chapter 15
We’re back in the car again and the sky is starting to grow lighter, but dawn breaking is not good news. The cover of night has given us a small measure of safety, and that’s about to end. Not to mention that Thomas’s window of opportunity is narrowing by the minute. I’m not even going to look at the clock right now, because I don’t need any more pressure than I’m already feeling.
“So we’re going to Claymore Tower?” Mikey says.
“No, Angel and I are going to Claymore Tower,” Thomas says.
“I said I want to help.”
“I believe you, Mikey,” I say. “But the last time you helped us, you almost jumped to your death.”
“Plus we have no guarantee that you won’t screw us over again,” adds Thomas. “Considering that you’re clearly somebody’s puppet, we can’t afford to trust you even this much.” He holds his thumb and forefinger pinched together.
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