Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  “We’re going with you,” Tasha says suddenly.

  Everyone looks at her and her face feels hot. She nods, affirming her own words. She decides to repeat them.

  “We’re coming with you. Right, Z?”

  Z looks at her and smiles, and Tasha thinks of the way she had come to sit beside her on the couch when Rio was looming above. Wing-woman.

  “Yeah, we’re coming,” says Z. “I didn’t really fancy more quality time with the good doctor, but it is what it is. I hope he has a car with some room because he’s not sitting on my lap.”

  Malakai is smiling but Ishmael frowns and rubs his cheek.

  “Guys…,” he starts.

  “Nah,” says Tasha, shaking her head. “It’s like Rio said. Every wolf needs a pack. And I don’t really consider myself a wolf—you know, maybe, like, a cat or something, or a panther. But I have my pack.”

  Ishmael stares at her, still holding the ladle. Malakai looks from Tasha to his brother and back. The air in the kitchen is bread waiting to be cut. Z obliges them.

  “Well,” she says brightly, clapping her hands together and rubbing them. “That settles it. We’re going to. If there’s a cure, yay. We’ll send a carrier pigeon to Ishmael’s mom. If not, and Rio is a fucking walnut, then on to the West coast. Who’s up for a shopping trip tomorrow? More Prada, Tasha? Hmm? Perhaps some for you, Ish? There’s no shame in a man-purse.”

  Ishmael stares at Tasha a second longer, a smile forming, and then pretends to look stricken at Z’s words.

  “It’s not a purse, Azalea. It’s a bag.”

  Later, after the soup is eaten and the house is still, Tasha lies in bed with Z. She can’t see the ceiling, but she knows it’s there and her eyes grope for it.

  “Are you awake?” Z’s whisper is ragged like a cornhusk, a ghost’s murmur, and Tasha’s nape prickles. Z clears her throat and says again,

  “Sorry. Are you awake?” Her voice is her own again, sweet like always. Like some kind of fruit.

  “Yeah.” Tasha wonders what her voice would be if it were a fruit. A kiwi? A pineapple perhaps, a sweet thing wrapped in rough.

  “Thinking your weird secret thoughts?” It’s Z’s tickling voice and Tasha smiles in the dark.

  “Something like that.”

  Z shifts a little in the bed, causing Tasha to shift. She thinks of the mattress as the earth, the depressions caused by their bodies sinking into tectonic plates, dragging trees and wildlife into the crack. The crack. Tasha thinks of Dr. Rio’s face, the wild universe that opens up in it when he forgets himself.

  “Do you really think there’s a cure?” Tasha whispers the words. She hasn’t whispered in a long time, not in the dark. She’d whispered to Ishmael on the front porch of Dr. Rio’s house, but it was a voice made soft by necessity. Whispering now, in this dark room, the covers up to her neck, reminds her of being eight years old, Leona ten, sharing a room when relatives had come to visit and Tasha had to give up her bed. She had crossed ankles with her sister then, their hair combining on the pillow to make soft brown coils of moss. Whispering to Z isn’t so different. The only thing that seems changed is the shade of the secret she whispers now versus the things she told her sister in the dark then.

  Z breathes out in the stillness. Tasha thinks she must be emptying her lungs of lies.

  “I don’t know. I mean, there can’t be, right? Why would he send us all to California if he knew there was a cure right here in Chicago?”

  Tasha has considered this already.

  “Yeah. But maybe the cure takes awhile to kick in or something. Maybe it doesn’t happen right away. California is still the safest place to be. No Chips. No Cybranu. No MINK.” She never thought she’d hear herself say these things.

  “Yeah, maybe. Anything is possible. Obvi.”

  They lie quietly, letting this sink in. If anything is possible—and it all became possible, everything, the moment an eight-year-old boy in a SpongeBob shirt got up with a crater stitching itself together on the back of his skull—then Tasha can walk to California, and take Z, and Malakai, and Ishmael, and find her sister and Morris and baby Amani—who must be walking by now, and Christ, probably talking—and keep them all in one room and never lose anyone again. If it’s possible for a girl in a yellow dress to wilt while the roots of Chicago break up the earth and send everything in its garden spinning, then it’s possible to cross an ocean of grass and arrive on the other side, gasping at oxygen cleaner than that which had darkened her parents’ lungs.

  “I guess we’ll see.” Z’s voice comes like an echo called across a canyon. “The Apiary would be a good place to hide a back-up plan if something went wrong.” She’s half asleep, slipping into dreams while still imagining what the next day will reveal to her. Tasha can make out the arch of her nose in the dark, and below it her lips, parted to make way for deep, easy breaths. Tasha stares at her until her face blends with the mist of dreams, her breath joining a breeze over hilltops dotted with smiling dogs, and somewhere, her sister laughing.

  Chapter 31

  The smell is back, the unpleasant stench of cabbage and tar. Tasha wonders if it’s Dr. Rio himself, but his goatee is neater than ever, and why would a man bother trimming his beard but not washing his body? It must be his car, which they all are crowded into; one of the first models of electric cars, a Chevrolet, modeled after the Nova. Ishmael is in the backseat with Z and Tasha, his legs bent like a grasshopper’s. Malakai had offered to let him sit up front where there is more legroom, but Ishmael refused. Tasha has the feeling that he’s pissed at Rio. She is too, of course. Sneaky, guilt-tripping bastard.

  Tasha and her friends had shown up for the final caravan, helping pods pack last-minute items the way they had before. But when the cars had pulled off, the four of them—Tasha, Z, Ishmael and Malakai—remained on Rio’s front lawn. He looked at the group of them and nodded once, but his hand had gone from claw to fist. He was angry, Tasha is sure, but she doesn’t care. They’d all piled into the Chevy without speaking, their bags in the trunk, Ishmael in the backseat beside her, as far from Rio as possible.

  Or maybe Ishmael just wanted to sit next to her. If so, mission accomplished. The backseat is too confined to allow much space, and she’s acutely aware of the meeting of their shoulders and thighs. Do men have “thighs” the same way as women, she wonders. Men have legs. Women and chickens have thighs, or so men’s tablets would have her believe. She makes a mental note to comment on a man’s thighs the next chance she gets. She looks down at Ishmael’s, so near in their denim. She could comment on his thighs. But it doesn’t seem like good timing. Instead she looks at the axe that he holds on his lap—it’s not the same one she had seen him use on the Minkers the first night. It’s a bit shorter, but not quite a hatchet.

  “What’s with the smaller axe?” she says, nodding at it.

  “Travel-sized,” he says.

  They’ve been driving down Lafayette and are now turning right onto Marquette, which will take them to State, Dr. Rio steering the Chevy easily around debris and the dead. The radio is on but turned down, and obviously there’s no music or broadcasts to pick up, so the sound in the car is the muted buzz of static. Z had passed the iPod she took from the red Ferrari into the front seat, and Malakai had plugged it in, but somehow the play button was never pressed, so they ride in silence. The static sets Tasha’s teeth on edge, but she’s already asked for someone to crack a window to air out the stink of tar, so she doesn’t want to be needy. Z drums her fingers on her knee and blows her hair out of her face.

  “So…anybody wanna play I Spy?” she offers.

  Dr. Rio smiles at her in the rearview mirror but it’s not an encouraging smile. Tasha gets the feeling he has not even heard her. She looks at the compass sitting on Z’s lap, which Rio had handed back to her when they pulled out of the garage. Apparently he had also noticed Z’s intense study of the maps in his living room. He did not assign anyone the role of captain in their little pod; Tasha assumes this
means he is the captain. Naturally.

  Malakai doesn’t bite at Z’s suggestion either—perhaps they all know she wasn’t serious. Everyone is anxious. The car’s tires hum. They pass a church just before 58th Street—Greater Prayer Garden, it says—outside of which a group of eight or nine Minkers wearing violet choir robes gapes at the passing car. One of them shambles toward the road. Tasha cocks her finger gun—thumb and forefinger—at him and fires. Ishmael looks at her, surprised, then laughs. He blows on the barrel for her. Z nudges her almost imperceptibly.

  “Why did some of them go downtown,” she asks, referring to the march of the penguins she and Ishmael had witnessed the day before, “and some of them stay here?”

  She doesn’t really expect an answer.

  “Different Chips received different programming,” Rio says simply. And then, “You have your Apiary badge, I trust?” He’s looking at Tasha through the rearview now. Tasha is tempted to tell him no, she’d left it, lost it, fed it to a Minker. Instead she just nods.

  “Good.”

  “Why the Apiary? What makes it so special?”

  He looks up at her in the rearview mirror, regarding her coldly.

  “Cybranu’s headquarters,” he says coolly, returning his eyes to the road. “Cybranu’s headquarters are on the 103rd floor of the Apiary. The restricted elevators are the only ones that will take us to the upper floors, and your badge will get us into those elevators.”

  Tasha absorbs this. On some level she had known that the Cybranu headquarters are in the Apiary—she remembers seeing the information on the plaque at the implantation center. It makes sense: the Batcave wasn’t in the Wayne mansion. It was nearby, but separate and hidden.

  It occurs to Tasha that no one, not even Malakai, had responded to Rio’s revelation of their destination. They’d known they were going to the Apiary, but this adds a layer of intrigue to the mood inside the Chevrolet. Tasha wonders what their combination of thoughts would sound like if their heads were opened like the doors of a music hall: the ticking of many clocks, she thinks, or the rustling of snakes’ coils against glass. They are all thinking along the same narrow trail, she knows: combining previous conversations about the possibility of a cure with this new information about headquarters and the 103rd floor. For all her skepticism and fragile hope, Tasha wonders if perhaps there is a cure after all, a vault concealed by a picture frame, or stowed behind a wall disguised as a bookshelf. They’ll have to follow Sherlockian clues to reveal it, deciphering ancient texts or breaking codes. Or maybe it will be sitting on a table in an empty room, or behind easily smashed glass in a sanitized laboratory. What does a cure look like, Tasha wonders. At first she imagines a vial filled with iridescent green fluid, but this hardly fits the kind of malady they’re faced with curing, so she replaces the image in her mind with a simple metal briefcase. It could contain anything, be capable of anything.

  They’re passing the Harold Washington Library, deemed an historic site. It’s dwarfed by the surrounding buildings; the green gargoyle owls perched on its rooftop peering down at the Chevy’s progress. The owls seem very near, with the tops of the other buildings so much higher. The blue car could be a prehistoric mouse, scuttling along a jungle floor, in constant danger of being snapped up. Tasha looks out the window as they pass the empire of Columbia College, which takes up most of the Loop. She and Z had just driven through here a few days earlier, but she expects things to be changed somehow. Entering the Loop is like leaving the prairie for the redwood forest: the canopy stretches vastly above, the predators thicken.

  “Two o’clock,” says Malakai from the front seat, pointing.

  He’s played way too much Halo, Tasha thinks, and looks.

  A squad of Minkers has emerged from the shadows of what used to be the Loop precinct of the Chicago Police Department. They swarm out onto the street and stumble toward the Chevrolet, which Tasha assumes they perceive as large blue prey. Like most Minkers, they’re not quick, but they’re not slow either. They amble gamely after the car, their hollow barks echoing in the vast emptiness of the city.

  “Better step on it, Dr. Rio,” says Malakai, only a little nervous.

  But Dr. Rio doesn’t step on it. If anything, he slows down, the Minkers gaining on the Chevy’s bumper. Tasha cranes her neck and peers up into the rearview mirror—she can see the distorted faces of the creatures as clear as day. One or two have pulled even with the back tires, and more are following. Their badges—CPD glowing gold—gleam through the windows.

  “Um…Rio?”

  The car moves ever slower. There are Minkers on all sides, some even at the front end of the Chevy, their leaden hands slapping against its steel. Tasha is in the middle of the backseat, Z and Ishmael both cringing inwards away from the windows as glaring predators snarl in at them. It’s how the President must have felt, being driven through crowds of protestors—they’re on all sides like dead-eyed fish crowding a submarine. Dr. Rio drives calmly onward, his hands at ten and two on the wheel, his back straight as a chauffeur’s. This is his way of punishing us, Tasha thinks, for coming, for complicating his little plan.

  The crowd of Minkers is around them. If the car stops, they’ll find a way in, and there’s no way the five of them will survive.

  “Rio, what the fuck!” Tasha says. It’s more like a shriek. The time for manners has well passed.

  His eyes flicker up at her in the rearview as the window on Z’s side of the car smashes, glass exploding inward as two pairs of hands grope inside, searching for anything. Z screams as one of the hands knots itself into her hair, the snatching fingers tightening into a fist and yanking her head out the window. Tasha sees teeth, teeth, teeth, Dinah, Vette, the girl in the yellow dress…

  Her knife is in her hand and she’s slicing out the window, screaming curse words, some of them aimed at Dr. Rio. The tip of the knife skewers one of the Minkers’ eyeballs like a shish-kabob before she begins using the blade like a saw on the wrist that holds Z’s hair in its grip.

  She must have severed a tendon, for the hand suddenly slackens and Z jerks her head back in the window, banging her skull on the edge in the process. Tasha is still cursing, Ishmael is shouting, Malakai hyperventilating—the noise is such that it takes a moment before Tasha realizes that the car is moving quickly again, speeding up State, leaving the group of Minker cops staggering around the street in their wake. Tasha is whimpering her curses now, her knife on the floor of the backseat as she holds Z’s head with both hands.

  “Are you okay? Are you okay?” she says it over and over. There’s blood.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.” Z is also on repeat. She says it twenty times.

  And she is fine. She has a few cuts on her face and head from the broken glass of the window, and her hair needs a brush, but she hasn’t been bitten or otherwise broken. Her eyes are wide and her hands are like spiders flitting over her body, checking to make sure she’s in one piece. She is.

  Malakai has fished a long cloth bandage from his backpack and passes it into the backseat, his face lined with tears that he struggles to dam up. Tasha starts to wrap it around Z’s entire forehead, but it’s kind of pointless, so instead she dabs at her friend’s small wounds with edges of the white fabric. She sniffs. The car is silent.

  “No need to rush,” Dr. Rio says, a snake’s voice, and no one responds. You don’t scold a rabid Rottweiler with no leash.

  Rio turns left onto Jackson, ignoring the one-way sign, and drives under the L tracks, which add to the feeling of a forest. The deeper one goes into the city, the less of the sky one can see. The Chevrolet passes the occasional Minker that moans after them if it sees the car in time, but the car doesn’t slow again until they turn onto Dearborn, where Dr. Rio murmurs,

  “We’re near the Financial District. There’ll be a lot of them over here, I think.”

  Them has changed irreversibly. Them will always mean them, now: Minkers. The rest have been transformed into “us.” Tasha thinks of “us,” of th
e running man on Broadway on the day she’d gone to the Post for Leona’s letter. She doesn’t think there are too many runners left this late in the game. There are hiders, and refugees. And then, of course, there are the dead. There are lots of the dead here, downtown where everyone was either on their way to work or already on the clock. Had the Change happened all at once, like a light switch turning on or off? She’s never thought of this before. Perhaps it was more like a flood of water barreling down an alley, enveloping some before drowning others, bystanders watching in horror as block by block the waterless flood overtook the city. She shudders, looks straight ahead out the windshield in order to see less of the dead on the sidewalks around her.

  Ahead, on Madison and Dearborn, a fire hydrant that had been burst by the collision of a Jeep somehow still gushes water. They’re a block from the Apiary.

  “We’ll park here,” Dr. Rio says, and stops the car very near the hydrant. “If any of our little friends come around while we’re inside, they’ll be less likely to notice our return if they’ve already grown accustomed to the movement and noise of the water.”

  No one argues. They’d defied him by coming along on this mission—he’d only wanted Ishmael and Malakai—but in general, they obey. Somewhere between the last flash of the sickle and the most recent incident in the car with the police, Tasha and her friends had slipped on the inky puddle of fearful subservience and fallen into the role of voiceless minions: Muppets. Chess pieces, Dr. Rio pulls their strings, slides them along the alternating colors of squares. Tasha slips back into the groove of obedience that she’d moved beyond since the Change. Perhaps this is why they called him the Shepherd, she thinks with a trace of resentment. Baaa. She starts to put her backpack on, but Ishmael stops her.