Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  She starts, and feels Ishmael’s hand on her back to steady her. She wonders if he knows he has chosen his palm’s placement perfectly: low enough to differ from the hand-on-shoulder friend zone, and high enough to differ from the I’m-only-touching-this-part-of-your-back-because-it’s-as-close-as-I-could-get-to-your-ass-without-you-realizing-I’m-a-creep zone.

  “Don’t worry,” he says softly, “I don’t think they’re interested in us.”

  He’s right; they’re not. Tasha can’t tell what they’re interested in: she’s never seen Minkers behave this way. They seem to be swaying in a long line, one behind the other. This effect is partially because of her vantage point, which views them from the side, so they appear to be almost militaristically aligned. If she were standing directly in front of them—and thank god she isn’t—she’s sure there would be some irregularity, but from the porch, it’s like watching a long row of many strange ducklings, swimming in a line ordained by Nature. They sway a little. Penguins, not ducklings.

  “What are they doing?” Tasha whispers. She realized the moment she saw the Minkers that she’d left her constant companion, the Wusthof, on the counter in the kitchen. She hopes Z has picked it up for her. She hates to think of someone taking it to California without her.

  “I don’t know.” He’s taken his hand from her back, and her skin feels cool under her tank top where his palm had been. “They’re just…walking.”

  “All one direction? In a line?”

  The line moves like a centipede. How many are there? Twenty? Thirty? More. She can’t even see the back of the line from where it comes around the corner, back around Dr. Rio’s garages.

  “Right. Walking north. Like somebody blew a dog whistle. Where do you think they’re going?”

  Her mind flashes to the conversation she’d had with Z in the Web—Z’s stupid hypothesis of a giant ray that could fry all the Chips. It sounded ridiculous at the time, and still does, a little. But seeing the Minkers behave like this raises her inner eyebrow. If something can call them, something can kill them. How’s that for scientific logic, she thinks.

  “They’re headed downtown. Who fucking knows after that.”

  They’re still whispering. If the long line spots them, they’ll be in trouble.

  “Shouldn’t we tell Dr. Rio?”

  “I already told him.” Ishmael doesn’t take his eyes off the slow-moving line. It’s like a chain gang. “He closed the garage doors, don’t worry. He didn’t seem worried. Or surprised, actually.”

  Tasha glances at him.

  “Not even surprised? I don’t know why he wouldn’t be. I’ve never seen them act like this.”

  Ishmael shrugs.

  “He knows a lot more about the implant than we do. Maybe this is what they all do before they die or something,” he says. “Wouldn’t that be something? Then we could all just stay here.”

  “Stay? I thought you wanted to go. I thought you were all gung-ho about going.”

  “Kinda. I mean, I am now. My mom is gone. But I grew up here. I’ve only ever lived here. This is my city.”

  “Weren’t you listening to the good doctor?” she mocks. “Had. You had this city. This isn’t your city anymore. It’s the dodo’s.”

  “The dodo’s,” he repeats, shaking his head and watching the Minkers. “Maybe we’re the dodos. Or the dodo’s kids, at least. It’s a wasteland, but maybe we have to make do with what we inherit.”

  They’re quiet. She feels strangely calm, even with several dozen of the Minkers walking so near. It feels more the way she felt in the zoo as a child: the danger present and observable but dulled by thick glass.

  “Why are you always rubbing your finger?”

  She looks at him, and he’s looking at her hands. She looks too and realizes that her left hand is caressing the fourth finger of her right, rubbing the empty skin.

  “Just a nervous habit, I guess. I used to twist my ring when I had it. It was my mom’s.”

  “What happened to it?”

  She stares grimly at the swaying Minkers, wondering what she would do if she glimpsed Cara’s face among them.

  “This rich lady at my job said I stole it from her, and my boss took it from me. It’s locked up in a safe in the Apiary. That ring was my mom’s, and they took it.”

  “Is your mom…?”

  “Dead, but not Chipped. Just dead. About three years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. About your mom. And the ring too.”

  “It’s just a ring,” Tasha sniffs.

  “It is. But do you know that?”

  She doesn’t answer. She can see the end of the line now; the last few Minkers sway up the block, heading northward behind their brethren.

  “Had to have been at least fifty,” she says, more to herself.

  “Fifty-four.”

  “You were counting?”

  “Yeah.”

  The last Minker in line is a kid wearing jeans and a Blackhawks jersey. Tasha can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl; the swaying gait of the Minkers reveals nothing. Soon she can’t see the kid anymore; the bodies sway in their penguin line, obeying some silent call. She vaguely hears the tread of the herd’s feet, shuffling away toward downtown.

  Chapter 28

  Dr. Rio’s caravan is in the yard now. Tasha imagines the people gathered to leave as a herd of multi-colored mustangs. They paw at the earth impatiently, their anxiety tangible. Some of them look pissed off. Tasha imagines that they, like her, want someone to blame. She thinks of Dr. Rio and his panel of smug doctor buddies in immaculate white lab coats that he almost certainly spent time with, their heads bobbing like marionettes as shadow-faced government operatives laid out the plan of action. She snarls inwardly. What a bunch of bastards, she thinks. They thought they’d prance in and make a quick gajillion bucks, playing off a divided nation’s fear, driving the haves and the have-nots further and further apart. “Just give it to the MINK carriers,” she imagines some suited asshole sniggering. “Make everyone want it. Make them fight for it.”

  Look who’s laughing now, Tasha thinks. But she supposes grimly that it’s still them who get the last cackle. The people lucky enough to have money to pay for MINK or corp jobs that would provide it were turned into cannibalistic maniacs, but who were the people getting eaten?

  “The rest of us,” Tasha says out loud. But then she thinks of the kids signing up for the military—most of them barely out of high school—and it takes the venom out of her. They were being used by the same white-coated jack-offs. But used for what?

  No one hears her, because they’re going. They’re climbing into cars and loading backpacks in trunks. This part might feel normal, the preparation for a road trip, the embarking. Even when the cars die, and they all go on foot—that might feel normal at first. After a mile, minds might change. After ten, the feet will complain. Only two thousand more to go! Tasha imagines herself in pink Lycra and a headband, an overly peppy aerobic instructor, walking at the head of the caravan. “And one and two! That’s right! One more mile! No, two! You can do it! Get those knees high!”

  She exhausts herself.

  They leave quietly, a caravan spreading west. As Dr. Rio suggested, they leave in cars, all electric, good only for a few hours. When the first car dies, all cars will be left behind; each pod will carry on as a unit. One on foot, all on foot. They will be on foot for a long time after that. That’s the plan.

  Dr. Rio has seen to it that everyone has worn practical shoes and packed an extra pair. What will the Chicagoans’ feet resemble when they arrive? If they arrive? Will the Nike checks be eroded from their soles? What about their skin? Will freckles reveal themselves in the long bath of sun, like invisible handwriting exposed by lemon juice? What does Iowa have in store for them? And Colorado? And Utah? Tasha sees the silver Ford carrying Bianca and her pod, driven by Elmo, receding down the road where it will travel West, and West, and West, until it dies. They will leave its body like a dinosaur’s bones left to bleach by the si
de of the road, probably still in Illinois, probably still in sight of the city and its swaying towers of Willis and Trump. If the city burned, they would probably still be close enough to feel its warmth, so near will they be even after the feeling of traveling so far.

  Tasha and Z watch the caravan of cars go. Others watch too, Ishmael and Malakai and their neighbors, some of whom will leave Sunday with Dr. Rio, some of whom will change their minds and hand back their compasses, too afraid to leave behind the mortgages they’ve spent their lives paying and were so close to paying off; the living room whose walls they’d just painted; the yard they spent last summer landscaping; the tax-refund check they’d spent months looking forward to; the green Jimmy Choos shimmering in the closet. They’ll hand back the compass and say, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but that place is too far and who knows what’s out there. I have all this here, all this is mine; this is my place, here.” They will stay, and Dr. Rio will go, and so will Ishmael, and so will Malakai, and so will Azalea, who has no one and has never looked over her shoulder at the apartment she might have left, the earrings she’ll never get to wear again, the mother’s ring she left behind. Z hasn’t looked back at the purse she might have brought if she had known she’d never go home again, the bottle of perfume given to her by a boyfriend when he was still a boyfriend. Z looks forward, never back. Now that’s she’s shaken off the military fantasy, she grips the compass so tightly it tattoos her palm, and Dr. Rio hasn’t even given her the damn thing yet.

  They go. The cars are gone quickly, and none of the passengers wave. They’d hardly known each other, after all. Tasha wonders if Bianca will remember her name: Tasha, the nice brown-skinned, curly-headed girl who helped her fold up her memories and stow them in a bag. Or maybe she’ll look back on her as the girl who could have talked her out of a fool’s errand and didn’t; the girl who’d allowed an old woman to take up a cross-country journey on foot. Maybe she’ll remember Tasha’s name just to curse it.

  Dr. Rio looks on a bit sadly, like a father bird seeing another flock take wing, never to return. He’s the only one who waves, limply, as if waving a handkerchief. When the caravan is out of sight, he turns away and says to the small gathering who remain,

  “They have gone on to a better life, and soon we’ll follow. In two days’ time you will leave for California. Remember everything we’ve discussed.”

  He opens his mouth as if to say more but stops and goes back into his house. The rest of the crowd doesn’t hang around: they’re worried that Minkers might shamble upon the gathering and no one really feels like dealing with the hassle. Besides, there are homes to say good-bye to, precious things to lock up. Tasha has heard some of the people discussing this: putting their jewelry in safes and burying valuables in backyards. They’ll never return to reclaim these things: once buried, they will remain buried, skeletal leftovers to be found by probing archaeologists, aliens, a century or two ahead. Hoarding these things seems silly, thinks Tasha. Yet she remembers locking her door when she left her apartment, so far away on Foster. She’d had the fantasy then of returning, coming back to embrace her closetful of abandoned treasure. When Dinah had died, the parting from Tasha’s closet seemed even harder to bear; her cave of comfort. Now, looking west, standing beside Z and Ishmael—Malakai had followed Dr. Rio inside—Foster seems to drift further and further outside the realm of reality. It’s almost hard to remember ever having lived there at all. She doesn’t even have her keys. Lost along the way.

  Leona feels nearer than Tasha’s bedroom and her closet of suede children. Tasha will walk to her. She has a brief vision of introducing Z to Leona, and Ishmael too. She thinks of Leona’s garden. There would be no Minkers to clear from the pumpkin patch there, no fences wreathed in clanging aluminum cans. What is Leona’s kitchen like? She sees Ishmael standing in it, making soup.

  “I think I’m going to go,” she says randomly and it’s Z’s turn for confusion.

  “Now? By yourself? Where?” Her voice is colored pink with concern, and the mild orange of panic. Tasha wonders if Z would still be in the Web if Tasha hadn’t wandered in for a bath.

  “No, I mean Sunday. With Dr. Rio. With you.”

  “Oh,” says Z. “Oh. Well…yeah.”

  Chapter 29

  Inside, Tasha retrieves her knife from where Z had told her she stowed it, between the cushions of a sagging green couch.

  “People were eyeing it,” Z had said with a shrug when Tasha asked her why the hell she put it there.

  Ishmael is sweeping the kitchen, the dust and debris billowing out into the garage. Malakai sits on the counter, watching wordlessly. They’re all thinking. They leave tomorrow. At dawn they’ll get up, say goodbye to Ishmael’s mother’s house—it will be a more difficult parting for the brothers, of course—climb into a car with Rio, and strike out toward the part of the world where the compass claims California to be. Riding even a tenth of that distance with Rio seems like torture, Tasha thinks: he’s become more and more strange, the bizarre clenching fist resembling a claw when he’s off in his head and unaware of eyes upon him. Tasha looks around for him now but doesn’t see him. Upstairs again, she thinks. Doing god knows what. Plotting, no doubt. He’s a plotter.

  Z is flopped in the armchair that had swallowed Tasha during her first visit to Rio’s house days ago. Her eyes are fixed on the wall and all its maps. Tasha wonders if she’s thinking of her father, her sister, her brother. She wants to ask her about the photograph she’d come across in Z’s bag, but isn’t sure how to broach the subject. Was the young man in the picture her brother Dragon? Or maybe a boyfriend? Suddenly the thought of a photograph stops Tasha’s breath.

  She hadn’t brought the photo of her parents.

  The one she had shown Dinah, the one with Tasha and Leona and their parents, when they’d been happy, when they’d all been a family. It’s locked in her tomb of an apartment on Foster, an artifact among artifacts, dust collecting on their faces. She can’t breathe, nor can she speak. The absence of the photo sits on her chest. She stares at the floor, her hands hanging limply before her, robbed of strength. How could she have been so stupid? To pack her make-up but not the only photograph of her family? Ishmael is still sweeping, Z and Malakai staring off into their own private worlds, and Tasha clenches her fists to keep from sobbing right there.

  Her empty finger. Her fists in front of her eyes, she sees the light path of skin where her mother’s ring had rested. Her mother had been wearing the ring in the photograph, and now Tasha doesn’t even have the thing itself to remember her by. Dinah and Ishmael had said the same thing—“It’s just a ring”—and they were right, but it’s also not just a ring. It was her mother’s ring; she has clutched it like a talisman. She remembers her mother’s smooth dark skin, the ring glowing on it like a bit of star…

  Two black shoes appear in front of Tasha, just beyond her still-clenched fists. She doesn’t look at them, or up at who they belong to. She stares at her empty hands.

  “Ms. Lockett,” says a voice above the shoes. “I need you.”

  Slowly she looks up. Dr. Rio is above her, gazing down over his glasses in the way that he does. The red crack in his stare is closed up, she notes impassively through her haze of sudden grief, no crazy peeking out today. Not right now.

  “Ms. Lockett?” he says.

  “You need me. For what.” She can’t quite manage courtesy at the moment.

  “Well, not you,” he says. He removes his spectacles and wipes at them with a corner of his cardigan sweater. It’s not the reaper-black one he’d been wearing when she’d met him; it’s heather gray. “A part of you.”

  Ishmael has stopped sweeping.

  “What…like my arm?”

  She’s being a smartass, but a small bit of her is afraid that’s exactly what he means, that he’ll whip the sickle out of empty space and take her apart the way he had the woman in the apron.

  “Not exactly,” he says evenly. “Your badge.”

  “My what
?”

  “Your badge. Your employee badge for the Apiary.”

  Malakai has hopped down from the kitchen counter and come into the living room to listen. He hovers in the doorway like a small ghost. Z, too, is listening; she’s swiveled the bottomless chair toward the green couch where Tasha slouches, watching Dr. Rio with alert eyes.

  “Why do you need my Apiary badge?”

  “To get into the Apiary, naturally.”

  “But why?”

  “I have business to attend to.”

  “Business.”

  Rio puts his glasses back on and looks at Tasha with the sparrowhawk gaze. He’s deciding whether or not he wants to reply.

  “Business regarding the…situation of Chicago,” he says quietly.

  Z has stood up silently, floating toward the couch almost imperceptibly. Suddenly she is beside Tasha and sits down lightly.

  “The situation of Chicago?” Z says. “What does that mean exactly?”

  Rio turns away from the two of them on the couch and faces Ishmael, who has joined Malakai in the kitchen doorway.

  “I would like you to come with me, Ishmael. And you too, Malakai, if you’re willing.”

  Malakai’s eyes light up and he nods eagerly. Ishmael looks troubled.

  “What exactly do you need us to do, Dr. Rio?” he asks. “Is this dangerous?”

  “It would be a short operation. With Ms. Lockett’s badge, we could easily admit ourselves to the upper floors of the Apiary and complete the task at hand. It is very uncomplicated. Regardless, there is only one way to help Chicago, and that method lies in the Apiary.”

  Which means yes, it is dangerous, Tasha thinks. So dangerous I don’t want to tell you. But what the hell does he mean about helping Chicago?