Breathe in, I tell myself, one-two-three-four. Hold it, one-two-three-four. Exhale, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight. I repeat the ritual again and again until my body stills and the itch fades into something manageable. I study my hands and feet and see that Max cleaned them, along with the rest of me, too, wiping away the filth from so many days in the cell. Even the abrasions from the restraints are better, and slightly greasy to the touch from the ointment he must have applied. I puke one last time, then thank the gods Max left a roll of toilet paper for me.
I rise and shuffle to the far corner of the room and press my ear to the rough pine door. A clock is ticking in the room beyond, but otherwise, there’s only silence. Slowly, I turn the latch and pull the door open, revealing the rest of the cottage, complete with stone walls and plank floors and thick timber beams running in parallel lines along the ceiling. There’s a fireplace with embers still smoldering, and an old couch with a bedsheet and blanket, rumpled and slept in.
My feet pad across the floor, the boards creaky and smooth with age. There’s a battered teakettle on a black potbelly stove that’s still hot to the touch, and a wooden counter where two empty cans of baked beans and a heel of bread sit neglected. I walk to the fireplace, throw a few more sticks in, and stir it up with an iron poker until they catch. As the warmth seeps through the thick cotton of Max’s gym clothes, I take down a framed photo from the mantel. It’s an ancient black-and-white family portrait, three generations of men in lederhosen and women in long wool dresses assembled formally on a grand staircase.
Behind me, a door opens and a wave of cold air rushes in. I snap around, wincing at the pain of the movement and nearly dropping the photo.
Max stands in the entrance, barely managing a large box overflowing with groceries. He jumps at the sight of me.
“Jesus,” he says. “What are you doing out of bed?”
“Where are we?” I say, and put the photograph back on the mantel.
“A hunting lodge. An old man in town rented it to me.”
“A hunting lodge where, Max?”
“The Alps. Two hours outside Zurich,” he says. “I drove west. I just figured.”
The obvious direction, and precisely where Dr. Simon would be looking. I curse myself for being so stupid. “We need to get out of here. At least I do.”
“Get out of here?” he says. “Gwen, look at yourself. You’re sick. I had to get you someplace where I could put an IV in.” Max sets the box on the counter and begins unpacking. A box of rice. A loaf of bread. “Another few hours, and you wouldn’t have made it.”
I feel a sore spot and fresh bandage beneath the sweatshirt sleeve where he’d stuck me with the IV needle.
“It was killing you. The withdrawal,” he says, almost angry now as he takes out apples, potatoes, meat in butcher paper. “That’s why I got you out of there when I did.”
I lower myself to the couch and pull my legs up against my chest. “You—you gave me a bath.”
“I’m a nurse. It’s part of the job.”
“No, I mean, thank you. For that. And rescuing me.” I swallow hard, my arms starting to shake again. “How long have we been here?”
“Three days,” he says. “I gave you some saline, nutrients. A Naloxone variant. Something to help you sleep through the worst of it.”
I nod toward the bedroom door. “I had a—I’m sorry, I was sick. It isn’t pretty.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he says. “Now get back to bed.”
* * *
Dusk outside, and getting colder in the cottage with every minute. My body shudders, even under the eiderdown. The stretched veins, the itchy mind, the nausea and fearsome pain, they are what it feels like to want and not have. What it feels like to be disloyal.
But stillness and want taste awful together. Both feed off each other, becoming noxious, like bleach and ammonia, so I climb out of bed and lower myself to the floor. I’m sure I could see my breath in the cold if there was any light at all. The planks beneath my toes and hands are smoothed by age, and I press down on them with everything I have, trying to lift myself into a push-up. I make it only halfway before falling, then try again. Ten is my goal; I’ll make it there or die trying.
It takes forever, and it’s brutal, but in the end, I make it all the way to twenty. I swap bad hurt for good, itching for cold, and anxiety for exhaustion. When I climb back into the bed and close my eyes, though, a fresh needle is waiting for me in my imagination.
I sleep for a time, or something like sleep. When I come back, the smell of soup cooking on the stove in the other room torments me with hunger, a new kind of want. It must be a good sign, wanting something I can actually have without it killing me. It smells of simmering carrots and potatoes and something strange and savory, a vegetable or spice I’m not familiar with.
The door swings open, Max pushing it with his foot. He elbows on a light switch, and in his hands he grips the edges of a chipped bowl.
“Fennel soup,” he says, setting the bowl on the table next to me. “My grandma used to make it. ‘Sick soup,’ she called it. Here, let me help you.”
He arranges the eiderdown and pillows just so, then holds the bowl under my chin, raising a spoonful to my lips. There’s no metallic taste from a can, no salt covering up synthetic chicken flavoring generated in a lab. Just vegetable tang and what I assume is the fennel, bits of all of it floating in the broth. Max catches a tickling stream of it down my chin with a spoon, then brings back more.
“A folk remedy,” he says. “The fennel, it’s supposed to help with the nausea. Sometimes the old ways are best.”
Every slurp brings fresh energy into me, the warmth in my stomach pushing steam through my veins and into my head. I hold up my hand when I’ve had enough, and Max brings me a glass of water. It’s from a well and stinks of sulfur, like from those hot springs said to heal arthritis or eczema with a few sips. I hold my nose and drink, knowing the medicine is good for me.
“You’re through it, the worst part, anyway,” Max says. “Congratulations.”
The fennel soup sits uneasily in my stomach, but ultimately there’s no nausea. “Sick soup?” I ask.
He pushes himself up on the bed. “I made it from memory, so maybe I got it wrong.”
A soup made from memory, Nana’s secret ingredient. “Not bad,” I say.
“I figure we can go in a day or two. If you’re feeling well.” Max wipes my mouth with a dishcloth. “You have hard copies, right? The originals of your dad’s testimony.”
I look at him. Sometime in the last few days he’d shaved and now his skin is bare and pink, like a kid’s. The sharp features inherited from wherever his grandmother came from have blended together into a distinctly American prettiness. How is someone like this going to live on the run? I lift a hand and touch his cheek. “We do that, and they’ll kill you. You know that, right?”
He just shrugs, like it’s the least important thing in the world. “It doesn’t get better, this world, if people like us are afraid to do what’s right,” he says.
“That simple.”
“That simple,” he says. “You and I, we have a clear shot. All we have to do is take it.”
* * *
Four days without Theta, going on five. The Naxo-something he’d given me, and the food, are working. And so is time, which dries up the urge like sunlight evaporates water. I want it, badly, but not as badly as I did a few hours ago, or a few minutes ago. The desire is unbolted from the ground now, and if my mind puts enough muscle behind it, I can shove it a few centimeters out of the way, just enough for other thoughts to get through.
Despite the cold and the sheer effort it takes, I climb from the bed and begin the push-ups once more. Ten, then twenty.
Fucking Max. Of all the patients he’d had, what is it he saw in me? The chance to use a murderer to become a saint? His words haunt me. People like us, he’d said. People with integrity like his. Good people. That stretch in my veins again.
So is it betraying my father, releasing the information? Or is it the only thing that can save him? The logic of it is twisty, full of backtracks and detours into contradiction. By the time he’s killed or captured, whatever good can come from the doomsday device will be of no use to him. But it turns out this isn’t a contradiction at all, because my dad never meant it as an insurance policy for his life, but for mine. And if it’s mine, can’t I do with it what I want?
Forty.
Handled right, it could be the one thing that saves us both. Besides, look what Dr. Simon and the others did to me, what they put me through. So it’s fitting I be the one to deliver what’s coming next to them. Max’s principles and my lusty revenge, they snap together nicely, make a pretty couple. She’s right, Dr. Simon. To want is to love, and what we love, we’re loyal to.
Fifty.
* * *
The endorphins and adrenaline do what they’re supposed to. Lift the spirits. Fill one with helium confidence. I go into the next room quickly, before I change my mind.
Max is crouched beside the potbelly stove, shoving sticks into the fire, his face flickering orange. He looks up as I enter, eyebrows raised. “I was going to make some tea.”
“It’s in a safe-deposit box,” I say. “At a bank. In Zurich. Feldman Capital Services.”
“Feldman Capital Services,” Max repeats. As he starts to rise, he grabs hold of the stove’s hatch, then jerks his hand away, waving it frantically.
I approach and take his hand. Pink-gray blisters are already forming along his palm and fingers. “Let me get you some water,” I say.
“I’ll be fine. And the well is all the way down the hill.” He pulls his hand away from me, wraps it in a dishcloth. “Your father’s doomsday device, you mean. You’re sure you want to.”
“You were right. About people like us,” I say. “How the world is, when we don’t act.”
“Tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll drive to the bank. I’ll find someplace we can scan it.”
The pain from the burn is still evident in his face.
“Come on,” I say. “Let me get some water. For your hand.”
Before he can say anything, I’m lifting a pail from the counter and heading toward the door. I slide into his hiking boots and shut the door on his protest. The air is frigid and delicious, tasting of rain and pine sap and wet soil. For a moment, I linger on the small porch, hand on the railing, and just feel the air soak through my sweatshirt and pants. A puff of steam comes out of my mouth, evaporating into the sky. Crickets scratch all around me, and wind stirs the branches.
It’s a long staircase to the forest floor, and I navigate it slowly, the boards slick beneath my borrowed boots, untied and too big. Max is coming down the steps behind me in stocking feet, telling me to come back. The ground at the bottom of the staircase is muddy with half-disintegrated leaves. I start down the path, then feel Max’s hand on my shoulder.
“Stop,” he says. “Gwendolyn, please. It isn’t safe, not at night.”
Before I can say anything, he’s already steering me back up the staircase. Always the nurse, lovely Max. Head full of caring. He’ll be a good dad someday, if he lives.
I raise my hands in mock surrender when we reach the top and step out of his boots. He takes the pail from me and gives me a scolding smile. “Inside,” he says. “Get yourself warmed up.”
Then he’s gone, taking the stairs two at a time and disappearing down the path.
I wander to the bedroom and the chest of drawers and porcelain bowl of water for washing, overtaken suddenly with the desire to be clean. For him, maybe. Or because of tomorrow’s trip to the city. It’s the first time I’ve allowed myself a look in the mirror above the porcelain washbowl since we arrived here. The reflection of my face is warped and distorted, narrow forehead and heavy chin, the better to show a constellation of pimples running from the corner of my mouth to the edge of my jaw, bright red against gray, lifeless skin. I wince when I touch them, then move my fingertips up to my nest of hair and start picking through the snarls. Leaning in close to the mirror, I part my hair to the scalp. Jesus, is that gray? No, couldn’t be. Not at nineteen. I squint: Not gray. White.
They say that happens sometimes. To a convict, the night before his date with the guillotine. Or to a murderer, in the days following the murder. Age never factors into it, just the weight of the trauma and sin. I splash some water on my face, try to rub some life back into my skin, and lean in close to my reflection to inspect my progress. Then, between the cracks in the mirror’s surface, something moves.
Just a little. Like an insect shuffling its feet.
I pull back from the mirror and stare at it. Just paranoia, I tell myself. Exhaustion. Bits of Theta still on the loose. Still, I lean in close again, squinting into the crack.
The edge of a black circle, twisting first to the right, then the left.
I close my eyes, sure that when I open them again, I’ll discover I’d imagined it. But let’s be honest, Gwendolyn, you haven’t been able to tell the difference between real and imaginary for quite some time.
My fingers wrap around the edge of the porcelain bowl. Then I’m lifting it, feeling the water slosh over me, turning my gray sweats to black. Then I’m hurling it forward, watching as the porcelain splinters the glass of the mirror into a spiderweb, then passes through it, into the space behind, a cavity in the wall twenty or thirty centimeters deep. The bowl catches the edge of a video camera mounted to a gimbal and twists it to the side, the lens whirring in and out, in and out, trying to regain focus.
My feet slide on the wet floor as I scramble for the outer room. I snatch up a frying pan from the counter and swing at the light fixture. The bulb makes a pop and explodes sparks and shards of white glass over me. But down comes a black plastic cylinder the size of a tube of lipstick dangling on a wire, its glass eye seeming to wink at me even in the newly arrived darkness. I launch toward the grandfather clock and see another lens in the center of the face, where the two hands are anchored. With all my weight, I drive my shoulder into the body of the clock, waiting impatiently as it lingers as if on tiptoe for a second before toppling to the ground with an enormous crack of splitting wood and the cartoon boing of springs going off.
He’ll be back any second, Max my savior. I throw open the drawers in the kitchen, grab a battered knife with a serrated edge, and bolt for the door. My bare feet slip on the wet planks of the steps, and I tumble down the last half of the staircase, landing on my side in the mud at the bottom. But I’m on my feet within a second, dashing down the path, barely aware of the branches and stones cutting the skin of my soles.
I’m fueled by fury, and my muscles are suddenly as powerful as they’ve ever been. Even my vision is sharper, as I make out shapes in the darkness, differentiating shades of gray as if they were as starkly separated as red and yellow. It’s as if running in terror and fury is my natural state, the way a cat is most a cat when stalking prey. I sprint along the path, deeper into the forest, and see Max up ahead. He’s rushing toward me, discarding the pail in his hand and lowering himself into a tackle.
Then comes a series of baritone pops and the humming of electricity as floodlights erupt from high up in the trees, four of them, no, six, filling the world with white clarity. I glance up, and one of the lights shifts so that it’s shining directly into my eyes. My arm goes up to block the glare, but a hand grabs me by the wrist. I lash out with my other, the blade of the knife streaking through the air and landing in something soft. The hand lets go and a figure staggers backward, face all blown-out white and the blood welling from his stomach blown-out red. It’s not Max. It’s LaBelle, the guard from the lab whom Max had shot—or appeared to shoot—as we’d fled. LaBelle’s mouth is open, a dark featureless hole sucking at the air. He sways back and forth for a moment, as if idly dancing to a song, then he pitches forward, collapsing into my arms.
Two shadows move in from either side, and I whirl around w
ith LaBelle still clinging to me. A metal baton whistles through the air and catches LaBelle in the back of his head. Blood flecks my face like drops of rain. I drop LaBelle to the ground as I thrust the knife toward the center of the silhouetted figure. It recoils and swings the baton again. But I dodge it and step to the side just as the second figure reaches for me. A stun gun sparkles viciously in the darkness, giving me a point of reference. I aim my free hand for the space six inches behind it and grab hold of the second figure’s forearm. I jerk it forward, pulling Max into the light.
I get my arm around Max’s neck and hold the knife close to his bulging artery as I maneuver him between me and the first figure. I recognize the silhouette now as Rossi’s, and she circles me slowly, trying to get me positioned so the light is directly in my face.
“Please,” Max rasps. “Gwen, come on, I was trying to…”
I make a show of repositioning the blade over Max’s carotid, knowing Rossi knows just as well as I do how quickly he’ll bleed out.
“Gwendolyn?” An inquiring voice from behind me, a few meters away. “Gwendolyn, can you hear me?”
Dr. Simon. Polite as ever with her shrink’s permanent calm.
“There’s nothing you can do, Gwendolyn. Know where you are?”
What had Max said? Just outside Switzerland. Two hours outside Zurich.
Her footsteps crunch through the leaves as they come toward me cautiously. “You’re eighty meters from the door to the lab. That’s it. You never even left the grounds.”
My mouth beside Max’s ear: “It is true? What she says?”
I loosen my arm around his neck just enough for him to answer. “Yes,” he gasps.
I steal a glance in Dr. Simon’s direction. She’s in a quilted coat and high boots, just the right outfit for a hike in the woods. In her hand is a small pistol, the muzzle pointed at me and the implication clear: My usefulness is over. “We appreciate your help, though,” she says. “Really, we do.”
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