Flash Point

by Nancy Kress

  The rat raised its head and stared unmoving at Amy.

  For a crazy minute she thought that the rat was unreal, another of Mark Meyer’s tech tricks like the rats in the plaza outside the doctor’s office. If she moved toward it, it would dissolve. She couldn’t move toward it, couldn’t move at all. Gran called to her, Violet called to her over her cell, and neither of them equaled the message coming from that silent rat with its monstrous flat black eyes and naked tail.

  A long moment spun itself out.

  Then the rat jumped off the corner and disappeared behind the refrigerator, its ugly tail the last to disappear. Amy put out a shaky arm in Gran’s direction, which was supposed to indicate she was all right. Into the cell she said, “Yes. Yes, Violet, yes. We’re moving.”

  * * *

  The car, a black Chrysler with opaque windows and a chassis that looked sturdy enough to withstand ballistic missiles, arrived promptly. All but one of the press vans had given up, and most of the fans—if that’s what they’d been—had presumably gone to jobs or school. Only a few cameras flashed as two men in dark suits helped Gran down the stairs and into the car. She sank back against the seat and closed her eyes. Neither of the men questioned her state or spoke more than bare necessities to Amy. Their impersonal efficiency was a little frightening, as if Amy were being aided by machines with their own agenda.

  Kaylie’s cell was off, but that problem was addressed by the man who met them at what seemed to be the loading dock of a large building. More alleys, more Dumpsters. Amy had a sharp sense of déjà vu, which then became a phantom in her mind: a vast brick pile, grimy with centuries of dirt, its windows barred. Amy had seen that image somewhere before, but where?

  Not here. The loading dock led to a concrete room stacked with crates, one wall of which was lined with locked doors. The men, one nearly carrying Gran and the other Amy’s two pathetic suitcases, unlocked one and led them through. An elevator took them to the seventeenth floor, where they emerged into a hallway with thick gray carpet and bronze-colored walls.

  “Hello, Amy,” Alex Everett said. “We’re glad to have you here. And this is your grandmother? Ma’am, would you like to see a doctor? I can summon one to your suite.”

  Amy thought of all the painful bus rides, all the scrounging for cab money, all the times she’d been told, “No insurance? Well, then, I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.” And now: I can summon a doctor to your suite. Just like that. The profound unfairness of the world flooded her all over again.

  Gran quavered, “Yes, please.”

  The suite was quietly luxurious without being ostentatious. Two bedrooms with full baths plus a half bath, a main room with two sofas, a chair, and a table that sat six. TV and a desk with a computer. Amy saw Gran settled into bed and then returned to Alex.

  “We’ve called your sister and told her to come here,” Alex said. “Any other names you want placed on the visiting list can pass security if they have photo IDs the first time, matching retinal scans after that. You need to get your own retinal scan on file at the security office behind the concierge’s desk as soon as possible. Also tell them what alias you choose to be registered under; only calls addressed to the alias will be allowed through the land line. The clothes Serena chose for you are in your bedroom. You don’t need to report to work today—Myra will call you. Order your meals from room service. Don’t say anything on the phone or online that gives away where you are, and above all, do not leave the hotel for any reason. Any questions?”

  “Yes. Where am I?”

  “The Fairwood Hotel on Sixth Avenue.”

  “How is Tommy?”

  “In good condition. The tire iron hit his arm but without breaking any bones, God knows how.”

  “Did you or Myra order that attack?”

  Alex stared at her. “Don’t be ridiculous, Amy.”

  She believed him, and felt a little ashamed. Shame blunted her next question. “How did you get my sister’s cell number? I never gave it to you.”

  “She called us.”

  “Kaylie did? When?”

  “Which time?”

  Which time? Did that mean Kaylie had been calling Alex or Myra regularly? Why?

  But Amy knew why. Kaylie wanted to be on the show too. That was why she’d been so nice to Amy lately. And Kaylie could easily have gotten Myra’s number off Amy’s cell while Amy slept, going behind Amy’s back to make her case to TLN. That tactic seemed to have failed, but Amy was pretty sure she knew what Kaylie would try next.

  Alex said no more. After he left, Amy went into her new bedroom and sat on the bed, staring at the packages that held all the clothes TLN had picked out for her. Just as they had picked the Fairwood Hotel, had picked Gran’s new doctor, had picked Amy herself.

  But not the rat. That had been in the old apartment already.

  * * *

  The doctor had Gran sign some transfer-of-records forms, gave her some pills “to make you more comfortable,” and promised to return. Amy, who had never seen a doctor make a house call before (all right, “hotel call”), didn’t think he’d helped much. But Gran did seem to be resting easier when Amy finally left her to explore the hotel. The first person she saw in the hallway was Rafe.

  He said in his abrupt way, “You’ve seen the clip of you on the Internet?”

  “I haven’t even turned on the computer yet.”

  “It’s you jumping onto the Dumpsters, Lynn robbing the actor’s pockets, and Violet offering sex,” Rafe said flatly. “Those are the three that went viral. Looks like you girls are winning.”

  “I didn’t know it was a competition.”

  He grinned, but without mirth. “Everything’s a competition, Amy. All of life. Come on, I’m going to have a late breakfast with Violet. She didn’t know when you’d get here and your cell isn’t answering anymore.”

  “I ran out of minutes.” Somehow it was all right to expose her poverty to Rafe, in a way that it wasn’t to, for instance, Cai. Rafe hadn’t even noticed her new clothes, the black jeans and layered silk top, neither of which was what Serena had dictated that Amy wear today.

  He said, “Ask Myra for a new cell. I think we can ask for pretty much anything we want. Temporarily, anyway.” He started down the corridor and motioned for her to follow.

  “What do you want, Rafe?”

  “A medical education. That Myra is not going to give me. I might run an EKG and detect her lack of a heart.”

  Amy laughed. Violet’s room, large but not a suite, was littered with suitcases and ripped packaging and clothes; it looked like an explosion in Neiman Marcus. Violet, looking great in skinny jeans and a one-shouldered top, shoved everything into a corner. Amy was suddenly ravenous. Their room-service orders appeared with amazing promptness and they ate them on a round table of some silvery material that reflected Amy back to herself.

  Rafe raised a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice toward the ceiling. “Thank you, Myra.”

  Violet stopped a spoonful of yogurt halfway to her mouth. “You think we’re being filmed?”

  “I think everything we do from now on is being filmed. And that we should remember that.”

  Amy said, “I think that might be a little paranoid. After all, we weren’t filmed in our apartments, before.”

  “We weren’t TV stars, before. And the second ratings fall, we won’t be filmed again. But right now, we’re lab rats—poke them in their cages to see what they do and carefully record the results.”

  Amy considered this. “OK, maybe filming in the living room of my suite—I have a suite, guys, see the advantage of having actual relatives—but not in the bedroom. I don’t believe it. And do you see any cameras?”

  Violet said, “Don’t you think Mark Meyer is capable of hiding them? He produced an entire forest in a high-rise office, for chrissake. And microcams are easy to disguise these days. But actually, One Two Three, I think you’re right. No filming in bedrooms. Too many potential lawsuits.”

  Rafe j
ust shook his head and chewed another forkful of eggs Benedict.

  A knock on the door, which Violet opened. “Hey, Cai, come on in and . . . oh.”

  Amy’s stomach tightened. She caught Rafe studying her a second before her gaze moved, as if pulled by a tractor beam, to Cai. With him was Kaylie.

  “Hey, sis,” Kaylie said casually, just as if she were expected to be there. “Is that breakfast? Oh, we’re starving!”

  We. Amy sat utterly still. We.

  Where had Kaylie spent the night?

  Violet broke the long, awkward pause, which seemed to bewilder Cai, by speaking directly to him. “How’s Tommy?”

  “Doing well. They’ll release him later today. I just came from the hospital. Kaylie was already there, trying to get information about him.” He looked at Kaylie with adoring eyes, clearly considering her an angel of mercy. Kaylie smiled modestly.

  She looked fantastic. Her dark curls shone and bounced. She wore the green silk sweater that had once represented the height of quality to both her and Amy, and next to the way it darkened her eyes to emerald, Amy’s new top faded into a pile of gray cloth.

  Rafe said coldly, “I’m Rafael Torres.”

  “Hi,” Kaylie said, clearly uninterested. “Cai, are you hungry? Maybe we can order breakfast, too?” She touched his cheek.

  Violet said, “Sorry, we’re all done, and I need to clean up here.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Kaylie said, “I should check on Gran, anyway. Cai, we can order and eat in our suite. Mine and Amy’s, I mean.”

  “Well . . . OK.” Cai seemed to sense that more was going on here, but he didn’t know what. However, from the look he gave Kaylie when she touched his cheek, Amy could see what would be going on eventually. Her breakfast curdled in her stomach. And now she couldn’t even go back to her own suite without seeing them.

  “Well, bye-bye,” Violet said. “Gotta get organized now.”

  Cai and Kaylie left. Violet glanced from Amy to Rafe, clearly unsure what he guessed, or what Amy wanted said in front of him.

  Amy didn’t want anything said, not with anyone. She wanted to go somewhere and get herself under control. After all, how stupid was she being? Pretty damned stupid. She had no claim on Cai, and he had never shown any interest in her. This was just pheromones, just a silly crush, just nothing. That it hurt so much was the ultimate stupidity. “You feel too much, Amy.” Stupid.

  So why didn’t telling herself any of this actually help?

  Then Rafe said the perfect thing. “Amy—want to play some chess?”

  Violet said scornfully, “She doesn’t—”

  “Yes, I do! Do you have a set with you? I brought mine but—” But she didn’t want to have to go to her room to get it.

  “I have one,” Rafe said. “What I don’t have is an official FIDE rating, and yours is pretty high.”

  “But when we first had general introductions and I asked if anyone played, you didn’t volunteer that you—”

  “I don’t tell everybody everything. Come on.”

  Rafe’s room, two doors down from Violet’s, was identical to it but much neater. On the polished table Rafe set up a cheap plastic chess set. He didn’t talk, which Amy appreciated. She beat him, but not so easily that it didn’t keep her mind occupied. As always, absorption in the game, both logical and intuitive, soothed her. Violet might not understand, but Amy was not Violet.

  “Did you know,” Rafe said after he lost the second game, “that Benjamin Franklin loved chess?”

  “I do know that,” Amy said. “He was the best player in the colonies, and considered chess good training for life. Rafe, I think the next scenario will come soon.”

  “I think you’re right. And meanwhile, we’ll get more busywork—oh, sorry, Myra—more game reviews to keep us occupied while we’re sequestered here. And, I guess, selected interviews. To keep us in the public eye and show off those glamorous clothes you’re wearing.”

  So he had noticed. Rafe wore his old jeans and a sweater stretched out at the neck. Amy raised an eyebrow and gestured at the sweater, and Rafe grinned. “I’ll wear the new stuff when Myra gives me a reason to.”

  His cell rang. Rafe answered, listened, and said to Amy, “Credit me with telepathy. That was Myra. All hands on deck in the hotel ballroom an hour from now. It’s interview time.”

  Amy put three pawns in their cardboard box. “What do you think they’ll ask us?”

  “Drivel. Then they’ll write entirely different drivel and attribute it to us. Why are you picking those up? An hour is time for another game.”

  “I have to put on makeup. And the outfit Serena told me to wear. And do my hair. It takes longer than you—I’m a girl, Rafe.”

  “I know,” he said, putting away a clutch of pawns, his head bent so that Amy couldn’t see his face.

  * * *

  The interview at first looked intimidating—cameras, reporters, lighting equipment filling the hotel ballroom—but turned out to be easy because no one but Myra got to do much talking. She controlled the whole thing so completely that not even Waverly got to say more than a few bland sentences. Afterward all six of the “Lab Rats”—Rafe’s nickname had stuck, although Amy wished he’d picked some other rodent—went to the TLN suite for “debriefing.” Myra reminded them, “No blogging, posting, Tweeting, or Facebook until we say so, but you can surf the Internet and e-mail each other. You each have an AOL account under the alias you used to register with the hotel.”

  “AOL,” Violet muttered. “ISP for the half-dead.” Amy stifled a laugh.

  The evening was spent in Amy’s suite with Violet, Rafe, and even Waverly checking out their own images on TV and the Internet. Cai and Kaylie had not appeared, to Amy’s relief. Kaylie slipped into her own bed sometime during the night, although that relief Amy didn’t want to admit even to herself.

  * * *

  Alex Everett keyed a number into his cell. He wasted no time on preliminaries. “Myra, did you order that attack on Tommy Wimmer?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Myra said, and hung up.

  Frowning, Alex slowly lowered the dead phone.

  Nineteen

  FRIDAY

  THE NEXT MORNING Myra startled them all. “Time for your next scenario,” she said.

  Glances among the Lab Rats. Cai said cautiously, “You’re telling us beforehand that it’s a scenario?”

  “Yes.” Big smile from Myra, which no one returned. “You’ve all had breakfast? Good. Change into jeans and meet me at the loading dock in ten minutes.”

  At the loading dock Amy touched the heavy bandage on Tommy’s arm. “Hey, you all right?”

  “Somebody hit me.”

  “I know. Are you all right now?”

  “Yes.” Tommy gave her his sweet smile.

  They piled into a stretch limo. No one spoke much. The ride took them deep into the suburbs, where the car stopped in an industrial park. Its sign said PYLON RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT. Amy blinked. Pylon, newly merged with TLN, the target of the protestors who’d objected to its holdings in chemicals and in nuclear power. Pylon the python.

  “Mushroom cloud, here we come,” Rafe said.

  Waverly said, “Shut up.”

  Myra, who had traveled in a second car, met them in a conference room containing a table with four computers and a pile of neatly stacked boxes of sneakers. “All of you, find the box with your size and put on the sneakers. You all wore the jeans that Serena chose, good. Now, you’ll do this scenario in teams of two. The teams are Cai and Violet, Amy and Rafe, Waverly and Tommy.”

  “No,” Waverly said instantly.

  Myra gazed at her.

  “I won’t work with Tommy. You just want to make me look bad, like I did on the show on Wednesday. It’s not fair!”

  If Waverly had looked bad on Wednesday, it hadn’t been Myra’s fault. Waverly had walked past a bleeding man and then bribed her way out of trouble with her father’s money. Amy expected Myra to ignore Waverly’s outbur
st, but instead she looked thoughtful.

  “Perhaps you’re right, Waverly. Your responses to Tommy might be all too predictable. All right, the teams are Cai and Violet, Amy and Tommy, Waverly and Rafe.”

  Waverly smiled, as well she should: Rafe would make a good teammate. But what if this unknown scenario required brute strength instead of brains? Then Amy would be lucky to team with Tommy—maybe. Tommy’s left arm was bandaged. Was he right- or left-handed? Amy couldn’t remember. Her chest tightened.

  “Because there is only one venue for this scenario,” Myra continued, “you need to take turns. Tommy and Amy are first. The rest of you are free to use the computers or to talk or to send out for coffee if you like. But you may not leave this room. Amy and Tommy, follow me.”

  They were led through corridors and down an elevator to a basement room with nothing in it except a huge windowless white box and a bank of computers staffed with technicians. The techs regarded Amy and Tommy curiously. She was reminded of the hospital room where Gran was slid into an MRI while doctors monitored the results from the outside. Amy felt a shudder run through Tommy’s body.

  Myra said, “This is the prototype for a new virtual reality game being developed by one of TLN’s new affiliate companies. You will recall that the contract you signed prohibits any discussion of the tech you see at TLN, and I want to emphasize that we can prosecute if you violate nondisclosure. And we will. Tommy, that means you can’t tell anybody what happens inside this box, not anybody, or you will get in big trouble. Do you understand?”

  Tommy nodded, wide-eyed with fear. Amy took his hand.

  “All right, then,” Myra said pleasantly. “This game is called Frustration Box. The object is to make the door open to let you out. And here is your only clue: ‘red yellow.’ Did you get that?”

  “Red yellow,” Amy repeated. “What does—”

  “Good luck,” Myra said. Abruptly a narrow door opened in the box and Myra nudged them through. With amazing speed the door sealed behind them.