The Doubt Factory

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  He stopped short, glaring at her. Took a step back, fighting to master his rage. Finally, he said, “That’s what you people do. You’re the ones who kill. I’m better than you. I’m not going to dirty myself like you.”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve never killed anyone!”

  “Your dad kills people. He gets paid to kill.”

  “That’s a lie! He’s never done anything to you! He doesn’t even know who you are!”

  “That’s because to him, we’re just numbers. We aren’t even people to your dad. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you how he makes his money. Too much of a coward, I guess.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  Moses laughed. “You know what’s nice, Alix? I don’t have to care if you believe me or not. I don’t have to spin it for news cameras. I don’t have to argue it in court.” He paused, suddenly thoughtful. “You know how nice that is? Just for once, I don’t have to convince anyone. It’s just the truth. Everything good in your life comes from blood money. Your school, your house, your pool, your fancy Architectural Digest kitchen, all of it. You might want to deny it, but your whole family’s covered in blood.”

  “You’re lying!”

  Moses laughed. “Well, someone sure is, but it isn’t me.” He started walking away.

  “You’re lying!” Alix shouted after him.

  “Enjoy the cage, Alix.”

  17

  YOUR WHOLE FAMILY’S COVERED IN blood. Your dad kills people. He gets paid to kill. To him, we’re just numbers. He didn’t tell you?

  Alix huddled in the darkness, trying to process the claims that Moses had made. Trying to make them fit into some kind of picture that made sense. But it was insane. Dad didn’t kill people. He did public relations—

  “Alix!”

  Suddenly the warehouse floor was flooded with light. Huge overhead hanging lamps blazed alive, making Alix blink and squint in the brutal glare. Cynthia came dashing across the concrete floor.

  “What the hell have they done to you?”

  Alix didn’t understand why Cynthia was concerned. Cynthia had betrayed her. At least that was her memory, but here the girl was, frantically trying to unlock Alix’s cage.

  Alix stared up at her, squinting against the stabbing bright light.

  “Cyn! Come back!” Moses and three others came pelting through the door. “We’ve got this under control!”

  Cynthia whirled around. “You’re a fucking animal!” she shouted at Moses. “This isn’t what we talked about!”

  Moses stopped short in the face of Cynthia’s rage. The others drew back as well: the blue-haired girl and Tank and a tall white kid with bleached hair… the DJ from the rave, Alix realized.

  “Give me the keys,” Cynthia demanded.

  “I was going to let her out earlier,” Moses said defensively.

  “Are you okay?” Cynthia asked Alix.

  Alix didn’t know what to think. With Cynthia there, and Moses back on his heels, it felt like some kind of insane prank, like a joke or game that had just gotten a little out of hand. “Well, I’m still locked up,” she pointed out.

  “Give me the keys,” Cynthia said again to Moses, her voice turning dangerous.

  “Look what she did to me!” Moses protested, pointing to his face.

  “Looks like what you deserved!”

  “Cyn,” the girl with the blue hair said, “we all agreed.” She jerked her head toward Moses and his bruised brow. “Wonderboy here got himself beat to shit—”

  “Thanks,” Moses said.

  “—so we decided it was safer if we didn’t let her out. This isn’t a game. If she gets out, we’re done. And she’s a fighter. No telling what happens if we let her out. We’ve got to be smart about this. Keeping her prisoner like this, it’s not simple.”

  “We agreed she wasn’t going to get hurt!” Cyn shouted. “That was what you promised me. We weren’t going to hurt her.”

  “You know, I’m the one with the bruises,” Moses pointed out.

  “Look at her! She looks like a lab rat!”

  Everyone’s gaze turned to Alix, sitting on the floor in her cage with her paper plate and water bottle. Everyone’s eyes went to the urine stain in one corner. They all suddenly looked abashed.

  Tank went over to the cage, a key in his hand. “Do you promise not to run away if we let you out?”

  Alix stared at the kid, perplexed by the question. “Sure. Yeah.”

  “You can’t believe her!” Moses said. “She’ll say anything to get out.”

  Cynthia glared at him. “I believe her, and I’m the one who lived with her for the last eight months.” She took the key from Tank.

  “I’m sorry, Alix,” she said. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” She glared over her shoulder at Moses. “It wasn’t supposed to have been like this at all.” She unlocked the door. “Come on. You can come out. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Hesitantly, Alix crawled out. Cynthia helped her up. Alix wasn’t sure if she wanted to shove Cynthia, but her body took the decision away from her. She was so stiff and sore that she staggered. She ended up leaning against Cynthia for support.

  “Thanks, I think.”

  Cynthia was still glaring at Moses. “You promised that you wouldn’t hurt her,” she said again.

  “I didn’t want to hurt her. I wanted to keep you safe. She’s too dangerous to all of us on the loose.” He shrugged. “If it’s a decision between us and her, I’m going to worry about us first.”

  “Nice speech,” Cynthia said. “Remind you of anyone?”

  Alix was surprised to see Moses suddenly look stricken. The expression was so fast she almost missed it, but it was there: shock and shame and then a hardening into a blank wall.

  “This is all on you,” he said to Cynthia. “You’re risking everyone.”

  For a second Cynthia hesitated, then said, “We can’t do it this way. If we do, we’re no better than they are.”

  She took Alix by the arm, and her voice was gentle. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  18

  CYNTHIA GUIDED ALIX THROUGH A bewildering maze of workshops, empty manufacturing lines, and old storage racks to what appeared to be a locker room where workers had once bathed and changed into uniforms of some sort. There were orange industrial lockers in long rows, and benches, and rows of sinks and showers, along with cracked white ceramic tiles on the floors and walls.

  Cynthia pulled a bunch of the workmen’s lockers open.

  “You can use some of my clothes,” she said. The opened lockers revealed neatly stacked T-shirts, carefully hung skirts, and blouses. Designer labels. Prada bags. Michael Kors skirts and jackets. Manolo high heels. Derek Lam blouses. One locker had makeshift shelves welded into it, holding makeup: NARS lip glosses, Dior eye shadows. Another locker for accessories: ECCO bags and Ray-Bans, Oakleys, Dolce & Gabbana. Another held perfectly pressed Seitz uniforms. White blouses, pleated skirts, Seitz school emblem blazers, kneesocks. Other clothes. Juicy jeans. All-Star high-top sneakers. More and more lockers.

  “You have clothes here?” Alix asked, puzzled.

  “I live here,” Cynthia said softly. “This is my home.”

  An entire girl’s wardrobe jammed into scratched metal lockers. Bangles. Hair clips. All the things a girl might need, stored incongruously in the factory.

  “But…” It was too surreal to take in. “But…”

  “We’ll get you cleaned up, then we can talk. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  Cynthia led Alix down the locker aisle to a row of shower stalls and pulled aside a water-stained vinyl shower curtain, revealing a dubious, fifties-era tiled stall. Old lime-green tiles, some of them cracked and shattered. Bare concrete overhead.

  “Go ahead,” she said when Alix hesitated. “I’ll keep out the wolves.”

  The shower pipe was rusted, and the spray head appeared to be a scavenged fire-extinguishing nozzle of the kind that hung from the ceilings of Seitz. Al
ix remembered the little welder kid. Tank. The one who wanted her to promise not to run away. He must have done this.

  “Shower’s optional,” Cynthia said at her hesitation. “It’s up to you.”

  Water gushed over Alix, cleansing hot, stripping away the darkness and fear. Cynthia stood outside the bathroom, guarding it.

  “I won’t let them bother you,” Cynthia had said, and Alix, against her best instincts, believed her. What else was she supposed to do? She didn’t even know where she was inside the factory complex, let alone how to get away if she managed to break out.

  Not yet anyway.

  The scalding water poured over her, sluicing away grime and sweat, the hangover of the party, the pain of sleep, the stains of imprisonment.

  The water was so blissfully hot that Alix thought she’d never loved a shower so much: the relief of being out of the cage, the sense that she could stop time as long as she stood under its spray, the feeling that behind this vinyl curtain she didn’t have to face whatever was out there. She didn’t have to confront the strange youths who lived in this warehouse, who looked at her with such calculated interest that it seemed as if they weren’t even from the same planet as she, let alone that they might speak English and be part of her country.

  Alix scrubbed herself and soaped up again, and still she lingered in the gushing water. Despite everything, she felt grateful for Cynthia’s kindness. And then she wondered if that was some kind of mindfuck that they were gaming on her as well. Cynthia playing the good cop, and Moses playing the bad one—the one she was supposed to fear.

  If she was honest, she did fear him. She didn’t understand him. She didn’t know what he wanted, but she suspected it was something she wouldn’t want to give, no matter how much Cynthia pretended to be her friend.

  And what about the rest of them? Were they really Cynthia’s friends? That blue-haired, pierced gutter rat? The shaggy little brown kid with the ringlets of hair who reminded Alix more than anything of a scruffy Hobbit? The tall one, lanky and smooth, who had DJ’d the rave—what about him?

  And, of course, there was Moses. Presiding over them all. He was the one they looked to. The boy who had been so seductively intriguing when he’d stood behind her and whispered in her ear as he wrecked Seitz, and who had turned out to be so monstrous when he’d put her in a cage.

  “Your dad kills people.”

  “Your whole family’s covered in blood.”

  It sounded ridiculously melodramatic. As if she were part of a family of assassins. As if her father were someone who went around with a sniper rifle, killing targets for cash. The whole thing was so absurd it made her want to laugh.

  Except that Moses and his crew clearly believed it, and were crazy enough to kidnap her.

  At least you know he’s not planning on murdering you.

  So what did he want from her? Why grab her at all?

  It didn’t matter, she decided. All she needed to do was keep playing for time. Dad was out there, and right now he’d be calling all the people he’d called when he’d thought Jonah had been taken. Right now, there were people tracking her down.

  Just hang on.

  “Did you drown in there?” Cynthia called through the shower curtain.

  “Just a sec.”

  She shut off the water. Cynthia passed in a towel and Alix wrapped it around herself.

  She came out, feet cold on the tile, and navigated around the drains, with Cynthia hovering as Alix went back to the lockers.

  As nice as Cynthia was acting, she was standing a little too close. Keeping an eye on her still.

  Alix turned on her. “I’m not going to bolt while I’m in a towel, okay?”

  “Alix—”

  “You aren’t going to let me go, are you?”

  Cynthia’s lips compressed. She avoided meeting Alix’s gaze. Instead, she turned and rummaged in her lockers. She pulled out a tank top and then a black hoodie. She found some painter’s jeans. “These should fit. They’re loose on me.”

  “You’re just like them,” Alix accused. “You just pretend to be nicer.”

  Cynthia’s head jerked up, anger flaring, but the expression was gone as fast as it came. She took a breath. “Just listen to what we’re going to tell you,” she said. “That’s all. Just listen.”

  “Listen to my kidnappers, you mean.”

  “We might know something you need to hear.”

  “That’s rich, coming from someone I don’t even know.”

  “You do know me, Alix.”

  “Are you even a student?”

  Cynthia had the grace to look apologetic. “I graduated a year ago. I could have gone to any college I wanted. Full ride to the Ivy Leagues. I’m here instead. You should listen to us.”

  “So that’s why you’re so good at everything. You’ve already done it.”

  Cynthia didn’t meet her eyes, just dug in her lockers again. “You want underwear, too?”

  “No thanks.” Alix didn’t bother hiding her anger. “I think I’ll go commando.”

  “Whatever.”

  Fully dressed in another girl’s clothes, Alix let Cynthia guide her back to the factory’s main floor. They walked past long empty production lines with rusting machinery sitting silent, ducking under snaking tracks of conveyor belts and rollers that seemed to go nowhere in particular. The factory was huge.

  Now that she was less disoriented, Alix tried to pick out details. Anything she could use to identify the place. She noted high clerestory windows, where sunlight filtered down and laid angular shapes of yellow on the open, smooth concrete. Not far away, a pair of double doors beckoned, offering escape, but their handles were tangled in heavy links of chain.

  Cynthia led her out of the production area and into what Alix thought might be warehouse space. Flat concrete stretched ahead for what felt like a quarter mile. Along one side, empty steel racks rose from the floor all the way to the fifty-foot-high ceilings. An abandoned forklift lay on its side near one of the aisles between the racks.

  At the far side of the warehouse, the DJ kid and the younger kid whom Moses had called Tank were riding skateboards. They skidded along makeshift iron skate rails, which looked like they’d been refashioned from what might have been part of the factory’s production lines, and rumbled up and down a couple of plywood ramps.

  Tank shot upward, pulling his board out from under his feet, kicking his legs, and then tried to land. He failed spectacularly, coming down hard, and slid down the ramp on his back. Alix winced. She could practically feel the kid’s skin shredding, but Tank popped right back up, unconcerned, and kicked off again, making another run at the ramp.

  When the two boys caught sight of Alix and Cynthia, they slewed to a halt.

  “Took you long enough,” the bleached DJ said. Tank didn’t say anything at all. Just stared at them. For a second Alix thought it was her they were hating on, but then she realized it was all about Cynthia. The tension between them was palpable.

  “She’s here now,” Cynthia said. “You want to do this or not?”

  “Moses is pissed,” the DJ said.

  “Yeah?” Cynthia shot back. “Well, so am I.”

  The lanky boy laughed and dropped his board to the concrete. He kicked off easily, weaving between imaginary obstacles as he rumbled across the open space. Tank rolled in his wake, leaving Cynthia and Alix following on foot. The boys popped their boards beside a door and pushed it open. When Cynthia and Alix reached them, the DJ made a mocking bow and waved them through.

  “M’ladies.”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Adam,” Cynthia said as she shoved past.

  “Don’t be pissed at me. I didn’t lock up the rich girl.”

  Inside, Moses and the pierced gutter girl were leaning against a steel counter, talking. They shut up as Alix entered.

  The room was a large kitchen space. A big metal table dominated its center, with an assortment of folding chairs surrounding it. The rest of the kitchen was all industrial st
eel sinks and gleaming steel counters and big steel walk-in coolers. An impressive pile of pizza boxes was stacked in one corner, and a thick wheel of some kind of hard white cheese sat on one of the countertops. Adam and Tank sidled in behind her.

  Alix felt surrounded.

  Once again, Alix was struck by how different Cynthia looked from the rest of the freak parade. She was perfectly coiffed, even now. Long lustrous black hair, combed silky, carefully applied makeup. A Seitz girl, through and through.

  And yet Alix had seen the lockers that Cynthia lived out of. She was one of these—kids?—too. Some kind of Stepford plant of a perfect daughter, used to snare her.

  Moses was looking at her, smiling slightly. The confidence was back. The relaxed persona that he used when he wasn’t… whatever the other version of him was. The version that looked like a real person and had feelings like a real person.

  Alix realized everyone’s eyes were on her. The blue-haired girl with all the piercings looked like she’d be happy to rip out Alix’s lungs. More than anything, she reminded Alix of a predatory creature from the Realms of Fey, a strange, bloodthirsty urban sprite. The blond DJ was watching her, cool and amused, like he thought she was beneath him. Like he was too beautiful to be bothered with her at all.

  Tank was different. His tangled, curly black hair hid his eyes almost entirely, but Alix could see them roving the room, taking stock of everyone and the situation almost as carefully as she was.

  “So,” Moses said slowly. “Cynthia thinks we owe you an apology.”

  It wasn’t what Alix had expected. She’d expected him to be like he’d been when he had her in the cage. All swagger and confidence, telling her how it was, and how ignorant she was, and trying to sell the line about Dad being a killer.

  Instead, he was carefully picking his words. “You should know that was my call. If you want to blame someone, blame me. I overreacted.” He touched his face. “I knew you were a fighter, and then I got pissed when you fought. You made me lose my head.” He smiled slightly. “Not often that happens.”

  “Is that your apology?” Alix asked. “You’re blaming me for making you angry when you stuck me in a cage?”