She’d left the fire burning, and he was glad for it. He’d sweated through his suit while chasing her, and gotten wet kneeling on the ground. Now that he wasn’t running anymore, he was cold. So he sat and let the fire warm him up, and he didn’t move or open his eyes until his phone began to ring again.
“She’s here,” Jenner said. He was somewhere in the alley, down below. “You sure you don’t want me to come up?”
“I’m sure.”
“Climbing now,” Jenner said, and then he fell silent. Carver could hear the wind in the alley and nothing else. “She’s already on the first walkway, untying the rope. She’ll be at the window in fifteen seconds.”
“I’m ready.”
“I’ll hang in the neighborhood, if you need me.”
“Go on home.”
“I’ll hang.”
Jenner cut the connection and Carver put his phone into his jacket pocket. He listened for Mia coming up the fire escape, but wasn’t surprised that she managed it without making any noise. The first sound he heard was the window sliding open, and then her boot on the wooden floor. A cold current filled the room when she parted the heavy curtains, and then the window slid shut and the air was still again.
He listened as she walked behind him, and then she came into view as she passed into the kitchen. He had his hand inside his jacket, on the gun’s rough grip. He knew he wouldn’t use it to threaten her, but he was ready to protect himself if she drew on him. But she didn’t see him at all. She drank water straight from the tap, and then crouched at the wine cabinet and chose a bottle by the sticker on its base. She stood and set it on the counter, then turned to the cabinet for a glass.
“Better get two,” Carver said.
She screamed and dropped the glass, which shattered in a spray when it hit the granite counter. He stood and came toward her.
“No, Ross—please!”
She dropped to her knees, falling hard on the broken glass. Her hands were out in front of her face. He looked at her, then down at himself. His hand was still inside his jacket, gripping the gun. She thought he was going to shoot her. He raised both his hands to the height of his shoulders, palms toward her, so she would see they were empty. But her eyes were closed.
“Mia,” he said. “Look at me.”
She looked up.
“I’m not here to hurt you.”
“This isn’t what you think,” she said.
“What do I think?”
“That I had something to do with it—with what happened to you and Jenner. With the murders—all of it. But I didn’t.”
He took a step toward her to see how she’d react. She didn’t shrink away from him. So he came the rest of the way to her and took her under her arms to help her stand. Once she was leaning against the counter, he crouched to look at her knee. There was glass stuck to her jeans, and a cut in the fabric, but she wasn’t bleeding. He swept the glass off with the side of his palm and stood up, meeting her eyes. She was sobbing.
He’d meant to scare her, to be hard with her until she told him the truth. But he hadn’t expected it to be like this. He went to the sink, dampened a hand towel, and handed it to her. She used it to wipe her face, and then she came up to him and slid her arms around his waist to hold him. Her hands were inside his jacket, and he knew if she tried, she’d be able to reach his gun before he could. But there was no tension in her muscles, no hidden potential waiting to spring. He was almost holding her up.
“Ross,” she said. She was whispering into his shoulder. “I should’ve told you sooner. I didn’t know how.”
He put his arms around her then. He didn’t know what to say. Instead, he let his right hand go up to her hair to stroke it, then let it fall down the length of her spine to rest above the waist of her jeans.
He thought of the teenage girl, tossing vials of Black Aria into the crowd. Men and women crying out and diving for the perfume while the off-duty cops pummeled the girl so brutally that everyone within ten feet had been hit by her blood. There’d been a woman who’d dropped to her knees just outside the circle of the beating, taking a broken vial and stroking its raised emblem with her fingertip. She’d been wearing a gray wool suit over a white blouse. Her hair was done up in a tidy bun. She might have just come from court, or a board meeting. She hadn’t seemed to think anything was wrong.
How many times had he seen that same scene? How many times had he shrugged past it?
He cupped the back of Mia’s head with his left hand and whispered into her ear.
“Somehow the world changed. It went dark a long time ago, but nobody noticed. Except you. You saw something, figured it out. And now you have to tell me what it is.”
She held on to him tightly and spoke without lifting her face from his shoulder.
“I can’t tell you everything,” she said. “But I can tell you what I know.”
“You’re still shaking,” he said. “You don’t have to.”
“After they got Hadley, it’s all I do,” she said. “They’re looking for me, and when they find me, they’re going to kill me the same way—or worse.”
“You knew Hadley.”
“I did,” she said. “Of course I did.”
She opened the wine and poured it while he found a broom and swept up the broken glass. Then she led him to the living room. She had her wine in one hand and the folder of tomography scans in the other.
He thought she was going to take the same chair she’d used before, but instead she sat on the rug in front of the fire. She drank her wine and he sat opposite her, watching as she calmed down. She was holding the folder on her lap.
“I used to have a different life,” she said. “I lived in New York. I had a husband—for a while, we were trying to have a baby. I had two cell phones, and a tablet, and three or four laptops. We went to parties, and I went shopping with my friends. I had a job.”
“You were a doctor.”
She nodded.
“A neurologist. I’d finished my last fellowship, had taken an offer with a specialty group in Midtown. And on my first day, I saw a patient I couldn’t figure out. We’ll call him James. He’d been to a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a substance abuse therapist. And then he decided none of it was working, that his problem wasn’t psychological. It was wired into his brain. So he came to me.”
“What was wrong with him?”
She took a long sip of her wine.
“He’d been with the NYPD, was a retired detective. His boss—his lieutenant, I guess—wanted a new investigative division. A new task force. They had Robbery, and Homicide, and Sex Crimes. All the usual things. But this lieutenant wanted a new division. Do you know what they wanted to call it? Can you guess?”
Carver shook his head. He didn’t know anything about the NYPD. It was hard enough to keep up with his own city, his own department.
“Brand Cults,” Mia said. “The Brand Cults Special Investigation Division.”
“Brand Cults?”
“You’ve seen them everywhere, for years. Why do you think ten thousand people would turn out for a perfume launch party? It’s water and alcohol in a glass bottle, some scents cooked up in a lab. It costs pennies to make, and what are they selling it for? And people are paying that?”
Carver shook his head.
“It’s a fad. People get excited for a new thing.”
She touched his shirtsleeve.
“This is nice,” she said. “Francesca Cavaleri. You got it in June.”
“How —”
“Everybody got one in June. And then the company disappeared. Just like Black Aria will be gone before spring, and the hotels and the billboards and the flashing postcards in your mailbox will all be advertising something else.”
She took another sip, smaller this time. She moved closer to the fire, which brought her up against his side.
“James worked in the Brand Cults division for three weeks before it got shut down,” Mia said. “They were picking up the desperate
cases. Not just the shoplifters, but the schoolgirls who were trading sex for spending money. The lawyers who zeroed their client’s trust accounts and blew everything on trinkets. And what he found in the interrogation rooms is what he already knew.”
“Which was what?” Carver heard himself ask.
Mia touched his chin to turn him toward her.
“It starts in your head,” she said. “At first, most of them thought they could ignore it. But they’d wake up in the middle of the night, and they’d be aching. Haven’t you ever wanted something so badly it hurts?”
She was speaking in the same tone she had been the first time he’d heard her voice—when he’d woken to the sound of her reading. There was a catch in her throat before the pauses, a reedy sound, like a woodwind instrument’s taken to the vanishing point of silence. Carver remembered the way she’d put her hand on his forehead. He closed his eyes and held his wineglass, and listened to her.
“And it didn’t just stay in their heads. It would spread from there, sweet and warm. Waves of it. It was like sex, how they described it to him. That same golden rush. Except the climax would last as long as they could stand to look.”
“Look at what?”
“At the ads. Have you seen our neighbors, downstairs in the mailroom? Have you seen them go through a stack of glowcards?”
To keep his shame from her, Carver drank the rest of his wine in one go. He knew just what she meant and could not have felt more exposed. If Mia sensed it, she didn’t care. She inched closer to him and went on.
“It’s pure pleasure,” Mia said. “But not something most people are aware of—is it?”
“I guess not.”
“Some people just look at ads and throw them away, but he couldn’t—and it didn’t matter if he could afford what he bought. It was ruining him.”
“Did you help him?” Carver asked. “Could you?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t make a dent—I didn’t understand the depth of it. I saw him for a year. The last time, I cut out his brain and put it in a cooler.”
“You did what?”
“He’d shot himself,” Mia said. “When he couldn’t pay his debts—when they were taking his apartment, he put a bullet through his heart. But first, he wrote a note.”
“Saying what?”
“That it was mine, his brain. That if I cut it up, maybe I’d figure it out.”
18
MIA PUT THREE glossy pages on Carver’s lap. He looked at the first image she’d handed him, picking it up by its edges to study it. When he turned back to her, she read the question from his face.
“That’s an MRI, looking in from the back. The white area, here —” she traced the spot with her fingertip, “—that’s his hypothalamus.”
“Okay.”
“Look at these,” she said. “Do you see them?”
She’d touched a pair of S-shaped tendrils. They glowed with a white light, brighter than anything else in the image. They reminded Carver of the filaments inside an old-fashioned light bulb.
“Is this magnified?”
“Magnified, fine-tuned—you have no idea how long it took to get this.”
“The bright lines, they’re part of the hypothalamus?”
“They run from the hypothalamus and tap in to the optic chiasm,” she said. “But they shouldn’t be there. They’re not part of the hypothalamus; they’re not part of James at all. Turn the page.”
He lifted the top page and laid it on the rug next to him. The next image was another MRI. The filaments were there again, a brilliant resonance against the gray haze of the brain matter.
“That’s looking down, from above,” Mia said. “Now you can see the other legs.”
“Are they implants?”
“They couldn’t be,” Mia answered. “They were buried at the center. The tendrils go to every part of his brain. If someone put them there, I’d have found scarring. I’d have seen lesions and nerve damage. But his brain was perfect. Except for these.”
There were eight filaments, spreading outward from a central point. It looked like a spider, a delicate one holding itself high off the ground on gossamer limbs. In the blur, he could almost make out the thing’s body.
“These are the first two?” he asked, touching two of the filaments with his finger. “But from above?”
“That’s right.”
“What about these other six?”
“They spread all over.”
“How small are they?” he asked.
“Thinner than a nerve axon, but long. You wouldn’t be able to see them at all, but I got them to shine.”
“Shine?”
“I hand-tuned the coil until I got that. It’s like looking for a harmonic on a violin—when you get it, it rings.”
“But you wouldn’t have looked so hard if your patient hadn’t told you to,” Carver said.
“I wouldn’t have, no. We’d done MRIs before, and PET scans, while he was still alive. But nothing showed up—they were always there, but I wasn’t looking the right way.”
“What about this?”
He was pointing at the center, at the place where all eight strands came together. On the page, it was a spot of the purest white. The hint of a sphere shone through the nebular ridges and folds of the man’s brain. It was a bright star behind a thin cover of clouds.
“This?” she asked, circling the center point with her fingertip. “It’s the legs that really tell the story. This is a thousand times smaller than a pinprick. But if we backed out, if we followed the other six legs, they’d spread through the brain, to the pleasure centers. The ventral pallidum, the orbitofrontal cortex—all of them.”
“Pleasure centers?”
“Some regions of the brain, if you stimulate them—if you go in with a wire and run an electric current—you can trigger intense feelings. Joy and fulfillment. Desire. Need, even.”
He looked at the image, at the thin filaments spreading like the roots from a newly sprouted seed.
“These are wires?” Carver asked. “You’re saying he had wires in his brain?”
“You could call them wires,” she said. “They’re made at least partly of metal. But they’re not like anything you’ve ever heard of, because they’re sheathed in protein. So you might say they’re at least half alive.”
“What do they do?”
“Specifically?” she asked. “I don’t know.”
Carver saw the evasion on her face but knew he could ignore it for now. He could circle back to it. The important thing was to keep her talking.
“The legs—you didn’t say where they’re coming from,” Carver said. “What are they connected to?
“Turn the page.”
He lifted the second page by its edges and started to move it aside, but Mia’s hand fell across his.
“Wait.”
He looked up at her.
“I’ve only shown this to a few people.”
“All right.”
“They’re all dead now,” she said. Her voice was barely above the whisper of the gas-fed flames. “Every single one of them. So if you want to forget all this, and walk away, then do it. Do it now, before we go any deeper.”
He studied her face in the soft firelight. After a moment, he took her hand, lifting it from the edge of the page. Then he circled his fingers around her wrist and set her hand in her lap. If Mia had an answer, he needed to hear it.
“You know I can’t just stop,” he said.
“But you can’t go back, Ross. Once you know this, that’s it.”
“Then show me.”
He turned the page.
He was looking at a silvery sphere. On the page, it was the diameter of a tennis ball, but he knew that whatever it was, it had been magnified far beyond its true size. Its surface was grooved, marked with structures and meandering lines. It was like looking at a city map that had been curved into the shape of a teardrop. The eight legs came from its equator and disappe
ared out past the edges of the page.
“This isn’t an MRI,” he said.
“I got this with an electron microscope.”
“And this was from his brain? This thing was in his brain?”
She nodded.
“The MRI showed me where to look. I cut in and took the hypothalamus. Then I made slices, and worked them under the microscope until I had it.”
He looked at it, at the hard metallic sheen of its outer shell. He thought about ticks, how they burrowed into you and didn’t start to feed until they were halfway under the skin.
“It built itself in place,” Mia said. “The wires were like roots, pushing until they found water. Vines, twisting up, for the sun.”
“You’re saying it grew there.”
“That’s what I think.”
“So it’s not a machine?” Carver asked. “It’s a living thing?”
“Not the way I think about life. Maybe it’s something in between.”
He tilted the page toward the fire’s light, studying the thing’s design.
“What does it do?” he asked.
“I’m still figuring that out.”
He lowered the page. She was balancing her wineglass on her knee, the way she had a few nights ago. Poised and lovely. There was still a glow of sweat on her forehead from climbing up the fire escape. He realized he didn’t know a single thing about her that he could rely on, except the fact that she was sitting next to him. She had appeared in his life at his lowest and most vulnerable moment. She was far too smart to let him see any guile. Maybe now she was telling him the truth, but the truth was an endless, dizzying labyrinth. She could misdirect him without ever telling a lie.
“What’s your best guess?” he asked.
She pointed at the two legs near the top of the page, tracing just above them with her finger.
“We’ll just call these wires, okay?”
“Okay.”
She’d had a fair amount of the wine by now, and judging by the new cadence to her voice, it was loosening her up. That was fine. Even if she didn’t say a single thing he believed, he might learn something from the direction of her lies.
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