When the observation deck doors open, we spill out onto a magnificent, nearly 360 degree view of upper Manhattan, thanks to the clear Lucite walls and thin silver cords designed to make sure the view is as unobstructed as possible.
Seeing the city below—and the seeming lack of protective barriers along the edge of the roof—several people immediately freeze and then turn around. Apparently this reaction happens frequently because another elevator car is waiting to receive all the tourists with cases of cold feet. Even Thomas seems a bit queasy when someone bumps into him and jostles him closer to the edge.
“You just walk around and think,” Thomas says. “I’ll be over here trying not to look too shady or terrified.”
I step toward the roof’s edge. Around me, people are taking little steps, battling the sensation that they’re close to falling. Some of them lunge for the clear wall as if pretending to leap off. Thomas is quickly drafted into taking photo after photo of tourists posing against the skyline background. Then they pull him into their group and want to take pictures with him. Looking at him, I’m struck by the way he can ease himself into just about any situation. I have to force myself to stop staring at him, because my admiration quickly segues into worry.
We have to get him that next injection.
Which means I have to remember something useful.
I put my hands on the nearly invisible railing and look out over Central Park. Then I look north toward my old neighborhood. Out of nowhere, all these feelings hit me like a series of punches, one after the other.
Dread.
Exhaustion.
Sadness.
Longing.
I’m back in the chair, listening to that drill biting down into my skull. This time, it hurts. Not the drill, but the memory it’s seeking out . . .
“What’s your favorite food?” Larry asks.
I can feel the vibration of the drill in my jaw as I try to speak. I’m aware of each breath I take, like I have to remember to keep breathing or else I’ll stop. Maybe this is it, finally it. They’ve hit the wrong part of my brain. The “good-bye, so long, farewell” part.
“Sarah? You with me?”
“Yeah.” I think of caramel-flavored ice cream. Spicy beef empanadas. Coconut shaved ice. Jerk chicken. Chocolate birthday cake made from a boxed mix with vanilla frosting right from the can, the kind my mother thinks tastes terrible.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have lots of favorite foods.”
“Pick one.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Come on, Sarah, this isn’t a life-or-death choice.”
“I have one, I just don’t want to tell you what it is.”
“Why not? It’s a harmless question.”
But that’s not true. There are no harmless questions. Everything he asks, he asks for a reason. Every memory is a trail of bread crumbs to another memory. I’ve given them enough. They’ve taken too much of me already. What will happen when they finally have it all? Will my skull cave in once all the contents are emptied out?
“If I tell you, you’re going to take it away from me,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“I know how this works. I say something, and those electrodes show you those bursts of electrical activity. You see all the lights inside my mind. Then you drill into my head and one by one you put the lights out.”
For a few seconds, I hear nothing but a dull hum of a live mic capturing the dead air between us. Dead air filled with lies.
“No, Sarah,” Larry says, and for the first time ever, his voice is choked with emotion. “Today is different. I promise.”
I’m trying to fight off the sleepy, careless feeling that the drugs bring on. They seem to make it harder to look on the bright side. To believe in the promise of this treatment. It’s like a shot of liquid “I don’t care” straight into my veins. But today, Larry’s words go deep into me, as though they bypass my awareness and instead lodge just below the surface, waiting.
Larry might be able to look into my head but he can’t know, can’t see what I’m feeling. My thoughts are more than just small, colorful electrical storms on a monitor.
I was right.
There really are no harmless questions.
I feel a hand slide across my back and I flinch.
“You all right?” Thomas says.
“Yeah.”
“Did you remember something?”
“Yeah.”
I turn and look out over the park again. Gradually I turn myself north, like my whole body is a divining rod. My old neighborhood. I’ve walked those streets several times since my return, disappointed that I felt like a stranger there. But now . . . now something is different.
Thomas takes me by the shoulders and pulls me into a hug. “Hey, come on. Tell me what’s going on.”
“I could really go for some Thai food,” I say into his ear.
He releases me and gives me a squinty look of confusion. “Um . . . what?”
“I know it sounds strange, but I have this incredible craving for Thai food.” I try to remember ever having it or seeing a Thai restaurant in my old neighborhood. I don’t recall one, not that that means anything, but why would I crave it like this, so specifically, as if I’m starving for it?
I pull Thomas by the arm, pushing our way through the crowd toward the elevators. “It’s a clue. I know it is. I can’t explain it but . . . this means something.”
“You’re jonesing for some pad thai at nine o’clock in the morning and we’re just gonna run with that?”
“I remembered . . . in the hospital. Larry asked me about my favorite food. And there was something else we talked about that day. Something important. I think that’s why he linked the two things in my mind. Anyway, I think we have to go to my old neighborhood . . .” I look at him and suddenly stop speaking, because his expression as he looks down at his phone is broadcasting distress in every language, at full volume. “What’s the matter?”
He turns his stolen phone toward me. “There’s a live street-view cam set up at Columbus Circle. This is a shot of the street in front of the building about ten minutes ago. Right after we went inside.”
There must be ten police cars parked at the curb, and several cops are re-directing traffic around the circle and setting up a blockade with yellow sawhorses. They seem to be asking the tourists to move away from the waiting line. All of them are in riot gear.
“Oh, wow. That’s quite the party going on down there.”
“It gets worse,” he says. “Here’s a video of the street right now.”
The police cars are moving off, and in their place, several unmarked black SUVs have shown up.
“I don’t get it. Where did all the police go?”
“I don’t know, but I’d rather deal with city cops than whoever those guys are.”
“If they were able to clear away the police, that means . . .”
“Yeah. Only a federal agency would be able to just come in and claim jurisdiction.”
Considering how much help I’ve gotten from federal agencies in the past twenty-four hours, this doesn’t seem like a promising development. “Come on, let’s go.”
He nudges me into an open elevator car, cutting directly in front of a group of people waiting to get on. “Sorry, folks! My girlfriend gets queasy from heights, and oddly she had chili for breakfast. Might want to wait for the next car.”
People scramble to step back, and the doors close a moment later.
“Thomas! Why are we going down there if we know they’re waiting for us?”
“The observation deck is the only thing open to the public, and this elevator bypasses all the floors with offices or private apartments. Except if there’s an emergency.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Obviously we’re going to create an emergency.”
Chapter 18
Thomas pulls out a Swiss Army knife and unfolds it. There’s a grim glint in his eye, like he�
�s a military doctor about to engage in a battlefield amputation. He uses the knife to pry off the console cover surrounding the buttons. A bunch of wires spill out, all of which look very complicated and fragile and not like anything someone should be indiscriminately yanking on. Like Thomas is doing right now.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” I ask.
“Not at all.”
He starts cutting wires one at a time. We keep descending. Finally he puts his whole hand in, grabs a fistful of wires, and yanks them out.
The elevator seems to wobble and shimmy. There’s a weird squealing noise and the lights go out. We’re now in a blacked-out box but we’re still descending. Thomas takes out his phone and uses it like a flashlight. “This is not working out the way I envisioned,” he says. “Let’s try this.”
He kicks the console over and over until the elevator car seems to bounce and then drop a few feet, then bounce again. Then after a moment, the car begins to rise very slowly, maybe inches at a time.
“Why are we going back up?” I say.
“It must have a designated floor that it automatically goes to if there’s a problem.”
The doors open with a muffled whoosh and we step out. We’re greeted by an empty hallway. It’s hushed and still and extremely cold. Not temperature-wise, just the decor. The floors are white stone and the walls are covered in some kind of shiny plastic tiles. Sunlight streams in from a large window opposite the elevator bank and the brightness of it all is almost blinding.
“Where to?” I ask.
Thomas is looking down at his phone. He’s got what looks like a map on the screen.
“Hold on . . . okay, according to the real estate listing for the luxury apartment for sale on the ninety-fourth floor, there’s a set of elevators just for residents to use that take you down to the shopping plaza below the building. There’s a subway station down there too.”
“Perfect. Now if we can just find those elevators . . .”
“Over there.”
We rush over. No sooner does Thomas hit the call button than a woman in a black and pink track suit comes trotting up with a dog tucked under her arm. We all step in once the elevator arrives. Thomas presses the button for the lower level shopping concourse and we wait, holding our breath as the woman with the dog decides where she’s heading, ultimately pushing the button for the lobby.
I immediately push the cancel button. “I’m sorry but you’re not going to the lobby.”
Her face seizes up in terror. “Oh my God! Are you mugging me?”
“No, we’re just in a hurr—”
The woman hastily pushes her purse at me. “Just please don’t hurt us,” she says, pulling her trembling long-haired Chihuahua close to her chest.
I can’t help being sort of insulted. “Wait. Why did you give me your purse?”
“We don’t want your money,” says Thomas. “Besides, what sort of idiot robs someone on an elevator? How would we get away?”
The woman is hyperventilating now. I try to push the purse back into her hands, but she backs herself into the corner of the elevator. She squeezes her dog so hard, it yelps.
“Just take it! Don’t hurt me!”
The doors open. We’ve reached the underground level. Thomas yanks me out of the elevator car before I have a chance to offload the purse.
“Now who’s the thief?” Thomas says as we jog down the nearby escalator. “Why did you have to mug that nice lady, you thuggish Latina, you.”
“I didn’t mug her, she mugged herself!”
I stuff the purse into the pouch of my hoodie as we run toward the entrance to the subway. I keep looking back and around me to see if we’re being followed. Thomas produces two fare cards just as we approach the turnstiles to enter.
“Stolen?”
“From here on, I’d just advise you not to ask about the origins of our assets.”
Once we’re inside the subway and standing on the platform, I have a fleeting feeling that we’ve made it to safety, which I don’t trust.
It doesn’t last long. Because now I see them coming. Men in black suits, each with an earpiece and a hand on the weapon at his side. Closing in on us from both sides.
They haven’t spotted us yet. We’re standing in a fairly tight knot of commuters waiting for the next train. But it won’t take them long to pick us out of the crowd.
And that’s when it turns on.
This power.
At first I only want it to give me the focus I need to quickly map out an escape route, but I get a bonus—the courage to try something very dangerous, something that could easily go wrong but might also save us.
“Get down,” I hiss into Thomas’s ear. Thomas drops to his knees and I crouch down next to him. “There are four guys with guns coming toward us. Stay down until the train comes. Then get on. Meet me at the top of the park.”
“Angel, I don’t think we should separate right—”
“It’s all right. This is what I do best.” I see the lights on the rails and then feel the blast of hot breath from the incoming train. “Oh, and I’m sorry about this.”
“Sorry about wha—”
I stand up, step onto Thomas’s back and, from there, leap up onto the top of the subway car. There’s just enough room for me to squeeze between the top of the train and all the pipes and wires crusted with black brake dust along the ceiling. I’m up and over before anyone fully realizes what’s happening.
This stop at Columbus Circle has a weird center platform running between the track for the commuter train and the track for the express train. I land on this platform, successfully putting a high-speed railcar between me and the guys with the guns. Along with the adrenaline rush, I feel a memory returning . . .
The beeping, always the beeping. Sometimes I can tune it out, but sometimes it’s all I hear.
“What do all these machines do, anyway?” I say.
“They keep you alive,” he says.
“Why so many?”
“This is just how many it takes.”
If it were possible to communicate a shrug through the microphone, that’s what I’d be hearing right now from Larry.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” I say. “It’s like, if one thing inside you breaks, you need ten machines to keep you going and two people to run each one.”
“That’s the moral of the story, then. Never put yourself at risk unless you have ten machines and twenty people to operate them.”
“Nobody has that kind of support,” I say.
I sure don’t. I never did. And now I have only me, and maybe for not much longer. I’m becoming more of a stranger to myself every day.
I bite my lower lip hard.
“Something’s upsetting you,” Larry says.
“It’s all upsetting, isn’t it? Remembering. Making yourself relive it.”
Larry waits for me to say more. He knows I can’t resist talking when I’m in the halo. It all comes spilling out eventually. I have no secrets anymore.
“She was my friend,” I say. “I trusted her.”
“What did she do, this friend of yours?”
“She called the cops and told them where to find me. She’s the only one who knew where I was going to be that day. It had to be her.”
That memory has cost me. I was lost for a moment and in those brief seconds, I’m caught off guard. The train departs, leaving me with a clear view of the platform I just escaped, but the men in the black suits are standing there, looking straight at me. We’re separated by maybe ten feet. They could shoot me, but they don’t for some reason. Why are they not shooting me?
Not that I’m complaining.
In fact, they’ve put their guns away. I see one of the men nod as he listens on his earpiece. Maybe they’re still hoping they can take me in without anyone noticing.
They don’t want any witnesses.
Well, I’m not going to help them in that department. If they want to keep what’s happening a secret, then I’m going to
put it out in the open if I have to. I lift my eyebrows, daring them to make the leap over the track.
I can see one of men is practically twitching. He’s thinking about jumping onto my platform.
Behind me, on the other track, the express train is approaching. The train normally goes about forty miles an hour, and it will slow down a little as it rumbles through the station, but not much. If I get this wrong, I’ll probably break something or maybe even electrocute myself on the track. And yet my brain gives me the thumbs-up. I realize that Velocius is no longer some cutting-edge technology that exists like a foreign object inside me. It is me. Me, only faster.
As the train roars behind me, I pivot, start running, and leap onto the very back of the last car as it barrels past me. I barely get a grip on one of the chains that blocks the back door, keeping my head below the glass so no one inside the last car can see me.
The train picks up speed again as soon as it’s through the station. I ride along in the darkness until the train stops at the Seventy-Second Street Station. I hop off the back, hoping no one will see me. One little kid spots me stepping onto the platform. Fortunately, his mother isn’t paying any attention to his urgent finger-pointing.
I run up the steps and out onto the street, then turn toward the park. I’m probably a little ahead of Thomas, since he was riding the local train. I’m jogging along the sidewalk when a taxi pulls up beside me and I hear someone whistle. I turn and see a redhead waving at me from the backseat of the cab.
“Hey, baby. Want a ride?”
I hop in. After a quick embrace and a mutual check that we’re both all right, we notice the cabbie looking at us in the rearview mirror.
“Where to?” he asks, his eyes slits of suspicion.
“Morningside Avenue and 123rd Street,” I say, my jaw set.
“What’s there?” Thomas asks.
“I had another memory. I think Larry wanted me to remember a specific person. The person who betrayed me.”
Chapter 19
Owing to a shoddy suspension and a too-quick tap of the brakes, the cab comes to a bouncy, screechy halt in front of a small restaurant next to a scruffy little dog park. I know right away we’re simultaneously in the right and wrong place. Thomas pays the driver with money from the not-really-stolen purse. As soon as we jump out, the driver peels away like we’ve got trouble written all over us.
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