Lee tried to remember what she’d seen in that room. A large metal thing glinting from the shadows. It had seemed to be floating in the air.
“Take this all with salt,” Teutonik said. “The Darknet is an ocean of information, but it is populated by ships of conspiracy theorists and hoaxsters and archipelagoes of rumor and misinformation. Many of us want nothing more than to be the originators of modern mythologies, and thus many of us value the beautiful myth over the mundane truth. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell the island from the sea.”
“Oceans and islands. Teutonik could list for you all the drugs he’s ingested over the years, but it would take the rest of the day.”
“I’ve seen it,” Lee blurted.
“What?”
She told them about the room.
“What was in there?” asked DreamClown.
Lee shook her head. “I don’t know. It was dark. I only saw it for a second.”
“Close your eyes,” Teutonik said. “Try to remember details.”
She tried again. This time a long, spindly figure came into focus, armored in dark metal, and above it a hovering cumulous form. Beyond that it was all shadows and her fear of being discovered. “I just didn’t get a good look.”
• • •
It was dark when she awoke, not remembering having fallen asleep. Her head was marshy with sleep, and for a moment she wondered where she was. Then she saw Annie’s bear, facedown on the floor. She picked it up and held it as she opened the computer. The Subnet browser was still up, as were the video screens, empty now. Artifacts left behind from a conversation that seemed like a dream. She looked at the time: 10:41 p.m. Had she really slept that long? Annie hadn’t come down to bring her dinner, something she always did after her parents had turned in, which they usually did by ten. She’d bring down leftovers and Lee would eat and they would talk and sometimes Annie would fall asleep against her. She had never missed a night.
Lee crept out from her space and stood up, looking up the basement stairs. She hadn’t been up in the main house since she first returned to the Orbisons’ home . . . how long ago was it? Lee placed a foot on the bottom step, then another, testing each for creaks. She took her time, clumsily at first, making more noise than she should, but before long found herself at the top of the stairs. She opened the door into the kitchen. Yellow light from across the street cast over the white linoleum table. Lee took a chicken leg from the fridge, eating as she moved into the foyer. She paused again at the bottom of the stairs, listening for any signs of waking life. Just the silent buzz of a house asleep.
Moving up the stairs, then down the hall, Lee was surprised at how naturally her stealth came back to her. Now she wasn’t making a sound. She stood at the Orbisons’ door, looking in on the two inert mounds on the bed. She moved down the hall.
Annie’s bed was empty. Lee closed the door and turned on the light. She opened Annie’s laptop and looked at the date: December 31, New Year’s Eve. Lee searched around for the flier, knowing she wouldn’t find it. She walked across the hall to the bathroom and looked out the window into the driveway. The car was gone.
• • •
They were both there the minute she logged back on. “She’s gone,” Lee said, pushing down the panic. “I think she went to the Silo.”
“Who?” DreamClown said.
“If they so much as touch her . . .”
“Who went there?”
“Annie. My friend. She had a ticket. I told her not to go, but she went. I have to go get her.”
Teutonik frowned. “I don’t think that is a good idea. They are dangerous people. We aren’t ready yet.”
“I know how fucking dangerous they are. Are you going to help me or not?”
Teutonik and DreamClown looked at each other through their monitors.
“You promised you would.”
“We did more research,” Teutonik said finally. “They are very shadowy. Everything we have is only rumor.”
“Tell me.”
“They are . . . behavioral scientists,” DreamClown said.
“That is a generous term,” Teutonik said. “They run experiments on humans.”
Lee thought about Annie, and her panic began pushing itself back up. “What kind of experiments?”
“Exploring the limits of human consciousness,” said DreamClown.
Teutonik scoffed. “Behavioral control is more accurate.”
“I’m not defending them. I’m just going by what we were able to dig up.”
Teutonik pulled on his beard. “You are too young, but my country has a history of such experiments. Your country too—the CIA in the 1960s. The subject pools are the same throughout: throwaways and prisoners and castoffs, people who won’t be missed.”
“Who are they?” Lee asked. “They must have names.”
“Just pseudonyms,” DreamClown said.
“I know all this already,” Lee said. “Anything on a man called the Undertaker? Or the Priest?”
Teutonik looked to his notes and shook his head.
“Can you help me at all? Give me something I can use?”
“You’re intent on going to get your friend?” DreamClown said.
Lee felt something bristle inside. “Yes.”
“We can get you things.”
“You’re in Philly?”
“Of course not. But the Subnet has members everywhere. People who can be relied on to deliver things. Can you get to the Central Library?”
“Sure. But it’s closed, isn’t it?”
DreamClown just smirked.
“We don’t know your name,” Teutonik said.
“I’m not giving you that.”
“What do we call you, then?”
She thought for a moment. “Bride,” she said.
• • •
Lee pulled out a bicycle from the basement that looked like it hadn’t been used in years, checked the tires, and eased it up the stairs to the kitchen. She pulled on a pair of Annie’s gloves, zipped up her hoodie, and stuffed her right pant leg into her sock. The cold air outside bit at her cheeks and fingertips, and Lee rode as fast as she could, her blood warming quickly. But in just a few minutes she felt herself getting winded. After four weeks of sickness and several more weeks recovering in a room the size of a shipping crate, she had very little in her. She knew how to get to the Silo, and she knew how far it was, and she also knew there was simply no way. Lee turned around.
The lights were off when she pulled up, panting and exhausted after just fifteen minutes pedaling through the slushy Philadelphia streets. She walked the bike back behind the house and leaned it against the wall, then crept up to the back door and listened. She heard only the faint click of a furnace igniting. Lee climbed in the same way she had a few months back, through Steve’s meditation room, the lingering smell of incense making her gag a little. She sat on a pillow to catch her breath and settle herself for what she had to do next. But the room made her anxious and angry, and she got up quickly and paced before going to the door.
A swath of light washed in through the kitchen window at the end of the hall, and Lee could see her mother and Steve’s closed bedroom door. She edged her toe onto the hardwood, listening for a crack. She didn’t have a lot of time, and so she moved forward faster than she would have liked, each creak of the floorboards sounding like cymbals in a marching band. By the time she’d edged as far as the bedroom, she was sweating. Steve was a reptile who hated the cold, and so he kept the heat to a precise eighty-one, day and night. The house was a fucking terrarium.
Steve was a man of habit and ritual—he took a shit at seven every morning, a bath at six every evening, and a cup of herbal tea at eleven every night—and Lee tried to remember where he put his keys when he came home. She closed her eyes and envisioned him opening the front door, stepping into
the house, and putting his jacket in the closet. But that part of her life seemed distant and foggy now, and she could see little past his hanging his coat. In the living room she checked the table by the door, the bowl on the coffee table, Steve’s jacket in the closet. No keys, but she did find his wallet there and took the fifty-six dollars he had and then his credit cards because why not? She hoped she wouldn’t have to go into the bedroom.
She found the keys on a wall hook in the kitchen. Lee paused by two pictures magnetted to the fridge—one of her as a child, tiny as a foal and swallowed up in a too-big sweater, standing in a playground and staring, unsmiling, at the camera as kids ran amok behind her. The other was a picture Steve had taken at her mother’s behest, Lee (at thirteen) and her mother standing on a bridge near Niagara Falls. It was a weekend trip not long after her mother had begun dating Steve, and Lee could see the hostility toward Steve already in her own eyes. She reached up to pull the photos off—she didn’t like the thought of any part of herself, even a picture, being in this house. But her mother had put them up since Lee had left. Lee’s hand fell back to her side. She couldn’t bring herself to take them down.
The kitchen door was dead-bolted. Lee was flipping through the keys, trying to find the one for the door, when she felt the presence of someone behind her.
“Lee? Is that really you? What are you doing?”
Steve’s voice was still sloughing off the sleep, and Lee thought if she could just get the key in before he realized what was happening, she might be okay. She fumbled the ring in her hands and put the wrong key to the lock. She was trying a second key when she felt the pressure of his hand on her shoulder.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s okay. Come into the living room. I’ll wake your mom. We’ve been worried sick.”
Lee felt herself shrink under his touch, all her will draining. He stood there in his tight red underwear, the only other thing touching his skin the bead necklace he claimed was given to him personally by the Dalai Lama. He seemed to have aged in the past months; his eyes were creased and tired. He had grown his hair out, as though to compensate. She let him lead her to the living room. He sat her down on the couch, then plopped down beside her, leaving no room between them.
“The police were here. After your escape. They put your mom through no end of hell.”
Lee stared at a brown stain on the carpet, trying to remember if it had been there before.
“Guess it was pretty bad in there. For you to have to leave like that. You want to talk about it?”
Lee thought about the JDC, how far away it seemed now. She couldn’t stand Steve’s eyes on her own, and she shifted her gaze to a huge new flat-screen TV mounted on the wall above the fireplace. Wires beneath ran to some sort of video game console. Her college tuition.
“You don’t have to go back. We’ll fight it. We just want you home.” He put a hand on her knee and turned her chin to face him. “You understand?”
Lee nodded. She hated how frozen she felt, how helpless to do or even say anything.
Steve squeezed her knee and got up. “I’m going to wake your mom. We’ll all stay up and work this out. Okay?”
Lee nodded.
“You want some coffee? It’s going to be a long night.”
Lee shook her head.
“Okay, then.”
He left the room and Lee sat in the dark, still living room, unable to move. She stared at all the things she’d left behind—the chair she liked to sit and read in by the fireplace, the little jade elephant on the mantel she used to rub between her thumb and forefinger, her mom’s collection of antique perfume bottles in the case by the window. They were as cheesy as hell, but at least Lee had something to give her mom every year for her birthday. She picked up an atomizer and put it to her nose, but there was nothing left to smell.
When she looked up, her mom was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, clutching her nightgown around her waist, her eyes dark and tired, holding a sorrow Lee had never seen before. Her mom shut the door behind her, then came into the living room and sat on the couch. She waited until Lee sat down across from her before speaking.
“Where have you been staying?” she asked. Lee had a hard time meeting her eyes. “You think it was easy for me to let you go to that place. But it wasn’t. You were out of control, Lee. We found drugs in your room. All that money . . .”
“That was my money. I was going to pay for college with that money. You had no right.”
“We had every right. If the police had found it, or the rest of the drugs, you know we could have lost the house? What were you thinking, Lee?”
Lee felt something sharp bite into her palm. She looked down to see her hand squeezing the atomizer.
“We visited you. Do you know how much it hurt when you refused to even see me? Did you get my letters?”
Lee put the little bottle on the coffee table and stood. “I’ve got to go. It’s good to see you, Mom. It really is.”
Her mom got up, too. “Where will you go?”
“I’ll be fine. Are you going to tell the police I was here?”
Her mom came around to be beside her. Lee could tell she wanted to hug her. “Of course not. What about those people?”
Lee stiffened. “What people?”
“A young woman contacted us after your escape. She told us they’d taken you in. She wanted me to know you were safe, or that you had been safe, living with them, but that something had happened and that you’d been separated from them. They were looking for you.”
“What did you tell them?”
“What could I tell her? I thought maybe Edie would know.”
Lee thought about that MISSING sign. “You told them about Edie?”
“Steve did. He talked to them more than I did. Who are they? They said they were a home for youth who had lost their way. It sounded so much better than the detention center.”
“What’s Steve doing now?”
“He went back to bed.”
This didn’t seem right. Steve never took himself out of the picture like that. Lee went to the door but stopped short of opening it. Steve was whispering, she couldn’t make out his words.
She walked into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Steve’s voice: “. . . said I would, didn’t I? You told me she’ll be safe, I just want to make sure.”
“I assure you,” a man’s voice said. “We want what’s best for her, too. Prison is not that. She needs family, and since you and your wife are, unfortunately, not an option . . .”
Lee hung up. As she made her way across the living room, she could feel her mother reaching for her but shrugged her off as she opened the front door and then slammed it behind her. The newish Prius sat in the driveway covered in a dusting of snow. Lee pushed the button on the key, and the car beeped and winked its lights at her. She got in and moved the seat up. It had been a while since she’d driven a car; in fact, she’d taken driver’s ed but never the driving test itself, so she had no license. She stuck the keys in the ignition and twisted, feeling the car hum to life. Something beeped and a light shone on the dash. Lee tried to remember what to do next. It was too dark to see, and in trying to turn on the headlights, she ran the wipers instead, which cleared the snow from the windshield and revealed Steve, stomping out in his underwear, barefoot, his eyes lit with panic. Lee could see her mother silhouetted in the doorway behind him.
Lee grabbed for the shifter, but Steve was already at her door, pulling it open and reaching in. Lee pulled against him, but he was too strong. He had a hand on her arm and was yanking her from the car when Lee reached out with her other hand, for anything, found an ice scraper, and shoved it as hard as she could at his face. It only glanced his cheek, but hard enough to cut, which shocked him into letting go. He dropped to his ass on the cold concrete. Lee slammed the door shut. Steve was on his feet again, shambling toward the car, when Lee
punched the gas. The car squealed in place until she remembered to put it in drive; the car lurched forward, smashing Steve onto the hood, his pale skin squashed against the windshield. As he flipped around and scratched at the glass for some sort of purchase, Lee found reverse and slammed out of the driveway, throwing Steve to the pavement.
Lee screeched out of there, feeling the sweet rush of adrenaline turn her panic into a wave she could ride. She watched in the rearview as her mother ran from the house and stooped over Steve’s pale form. He was sitting up, holding his elbow and grimacing as he watched her go.
· BOOK VII ·
The Bachelor Machine
SEVENTEEN
THE library had been closed for hours, but picking the lock of the back entrance proved little problem. Inside it was silent and dark. Lee found a spot at one of the computers out of view from the windows, turned it on, and logged in to her Gmail account. There was one e-mail, sent a half hour before, by DreamClown. It contained only a single Dewey Decimal number. When she went to the stacks and got close to the number, her eyes running down the line of artists’ monographs—Dalí to Degas to Delacroix—it became quickly obvious that someone was having his fun. There among the volumes on Duchamp, about three shelves of them, Lee found the number she was looking for. She looked both ways down the empty aisle, and pulled the book out. Behind it, wrapped in brown paper, was a package the size of a shoebox. It was heavier than she had expected.
Beneath the wrapping was an old child’s lunch box, the Super Friends fighting crime across each side. Lee sat back against the bookshelf and held the box in her lap. Someone had put a sticker with the Subnet logo on it. Inside the lunch box was a small black revolver, five twenty-dollar bills, a Maglite, and a cell phone.
She popped the cylinder, pulled one bullet out, and rolled it between her fingers. She fumbled it back in, then stuffed the gun into her bag. She turned on the cell phone. It was brand-new, with a single contact added: DC. The number had a 416 area code. She checked the time: 1:39 a.m., January 1.
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