VIOLET EYES

by Nicole Luiken

  “I was sixteen! Too young for the documents I was made to sign to be legal. You made me think I had no choice.”

  “Your conscience didn’t prevent you from taking the money. Or from letting us impregnate you a second time.”

  Catherine gasped as if in pain. “You’ll pay for what you did. My sources say you’re going to be fired within the hour.”

  “Your sources are wrong,” Dr. Frankenstein said coolly. “Angel’s little demonstration did stir up a bunch of blame-laying higher up. I’ve been asked to hand in my resignation by nine tomorrow morning or be fired. Which means I have eighteen hours left as project head and I have more than enough power to fire you, effective immediately.” A pause. A door opening. “Captain, please escort Ms. Berringer off the premises. And I do mean off the entire Chinchaga site. Her personal belongings will be shipped to her.”

  Catherine protested loudly and viciously, but the efficient captain took her away. Dr. Frankenstein left not long afterward.

  Mike and I stayed silent for a long fifteen minutes just to be sure. Then Mike put his lips close to my ear. “Wow. You believe them?”

  If Dr. Frankenstein knew we were in the next room that scene could have been a hoax staged for our benefit, but I didn’t think so. “What would be the point of tricking us?”

  “Maybe to get us to track down this supposed underground rescue movement,” Mike said.

  I nodded to concede the point. “But we have no intention of contacting them, so we might as well proceed as if the escape is real.” And I still felt confident that it was real.

  Which meant good news: Dr. Frankenstein fired by morning, only eighteen more hours to outfox him.

  The hours until we could make our move crept by slowly. Finally, at nine-thirty that evening, when we hadn’t heard so much as a footfall for two hours, we decided to go for it.

  Avoiding all the cameras would have been impossible, so we slipped out boldly, acting on the assumption that no one would be watching anymore. Or if Dr. Frankenstein was trying to trail us to the underground movement he would have to allow us a fair amount of rope.

  We had argued during the wait about where we should go first. Mike favored stocking up on food and then making a run for it. “If we go cross-country we ought to avoid the roadblocks. Unless they’ve poisoned the water entirely, we should be able to get by for weeks on fish. I have camping gear at home.”

  Even when I told him about the blackmail Leona had mentioned, he wasn’t sure. “We have to search Dr. Frankenstein’s office first,” I argued. “Just because the good doctor never got around to blackmailing us doesn’t mean he didn’t have some dirt prepared.”

  “Secrets, Angel?”

  I kissed his palm. “Dr. Frankenstein specializes in disinformation of the incriminating kind. He’s already telling the world we’re murderers. I don’t want any more surprises, do you?”

  Finding Dr. Frankenstein’s office proved to be the tricky part. The complex had a lot of locked doors and was singularly lacking in directories.

  “If you were Dr. Frankenstein, where would you put your office?” I asked Mike in frustration.

  “Underground in a crypt?” Mike suggested. “So he can crawl into his coffin every night?”

  A smile tugged at my lips. “Near the exercise rooms so he can get up and bike a mile when he has insomnia.”

  We looked at each other and spoke the same thought: “Near the kitchen.”

  The rooms adjacent to the kitchen proved to be storage and the furnace, but tucked into a corner of the kitchen itself we found a dumbwaiter, a small service elevator that the cook could place trays of food on and send up to the room above.

  I looked at it. “Do you think he’s up there?”

  Mike’s eyebrows quirked. “When there are no cooks in the building? Nah, he’s outside coordinating the search.”

  Our voices sounded loud in the stillness. The building felt deserted, cameras abandoned, but even if someone was radioing frantically for help, it didn’t change anything. We still had only a limited window of time. If we were going to search Dr. Frankenstein’s office, we had to do it now.

  I crawled inside the tiny cage, and Mike sent the dumbwaiter up. If I heard voices we could still retreat and be saved the trouble of getting through the lock on his door.

  I heard no voices, and the panel at the top slid open easily. I slithered out headfirst onto the floor, then sent the cage back down for Mike.

  The room was dark, with only a tiny bit of illumination coming from under the door. “Lights?” I asked Mike when he joined me.

  He shook his head, still wary. We were inside the lion’s den. Dr. Frankenstein could have armed his office with motion detectors for all we knew. He was the secretive type.

  I followed the edge of the desk in front of me and sat down in the large padded chair. I started opening drawers. Most were locked, but the one directly in front of me slid out at a touch.

  It was a computer keyboard. The keys were flat squares instead of raised buttons, and there was a whole set of keys that I didn’t know the function of, but it was still very obviously a keyboard.

  The question was, where was the screen?

  I searched the desktop in case it was recessed into the wood, checked for a TV like the first Texas Instruments computers, hit the return key on the keyboard several times. Nothing happened.

  That was all right. What I really wanted was computer disks anyway. I tried more of the drawers but couldn’t find the body of the computer or the disk drives, much less any disks, not even the new 3 ½-inch kind I’d seen in TV commercials.

  Frustrated, I leaned back against the chair’s headrest, and a visor tipped down over my eyes.

  I was so startled I let out a little squeak but quickly calmed down. Through the visor I could see a holographic image of an office as if I were standing inside it. Various items in the office glowed blue: a fishing net hung on the wall, a notepad and pen on the table, a landscape painting, a chest, one door labeled Kitchen and another Living Room, a spinning globe on the desk, and more.

  It took me a moment to figure out that this was the computer screen. Apple II’s familiar ] prompt was sadly missing. The image on the screen looked vaguely like some kind of computer game, but there was no joystick, and the arrow keys didn’t work.

  I brushed my arm against the chair arm, and the image in front of me rotated an alarming 180 degrees. I found myself staring at a wall I hadn’t seen before. This door said Library.

  I fumbled with the chair arm and discovered a tiny ball bearing that, when I rolled it under my finger, turned the holograph.

  That was all. No buttons to push, no way of walking through any of the mysterious doors.

  I flipped up the visor, restoring my dim view of Dr. Frankenstein’s real office. “This is hopeless. It would take me ten hours to learn how to operate this thing.”

  Mike wasn’t listening; he was poking around Dr. Frankenstein’s shelves and opening up his filing cabinet. The cabinet would be the logical place to put files, but the fact that they weren’t locked discouraged me.

  “This drawer’s stuck,” Mike said, grunting. “Can you give me a hand?”

  It was a large drawer, the height of my knees and fairly wide. Mike had managed to pull it open far enough for us to insert our fingers, but it was definitely stuck.

  “On the count of three: one, two, three!”

  We heaved together, and the drawer popped open with a loud screech, running over my toes.

  I swore, hopped backward, and bruised my hip on the edge of the table. “That hurts.”

  “What a whiner,” Mike said absently. “I want to see what’s inside.” He stuck his hand in, feeling around for a moment. Then a strange expression came over his face, and he pulled back, staring at his hand. Filaments of something clung to his fingers. “Angel, hit the lights.”

  “But—”

  “Hit them!”

  I turned the lights on, blinking in their fluorescent
hardness, and looked in the drawer.

  I almost threw up. The filaments were strands of brown hair. They were stuck to Mike’s hand with blood. He must have touched her face when he reached inside. Leona’s face. She hadn’t escaped in the missing aircar after all. She was curled up inside the cramped drawer, unnaturally still, head bleeding, arms and legs bound.

  CHAPTER 17

  “OH, GOD.” I thought Leona was dead, and I unconsciously started to pray. The drawer was far too small for a human being, obscene in some way, like trying to cram a baby back inside the womb. It was her hipbone that had made the drawer stick. I wanted to throw up again but held back with an effort of will.

  “Help me get her out of here.” Mike was already reaching inside. The two of us strained to lift her. How had that fiend fit her inside?

  I had not the slightest doubt in my mind as to who the fiend was or that he’d put her there deliberately for Mike and me to find.

  We laid her out on the floor, and she groaned.

  “She’s alive!” Mike’s voice held the same elation that was pumping through me. “We have to get her some water.”

  There was no water, but Dr. Frankenstein had equipped his office with a miniature Coke machine—probably another antique—and I quickly popped a can open.

  Mike had brushed the hair back out of Leona’s face and was pressing a pad of cloth torn from his T-shirt to the cut on her forehead. She looked desperately pale, her eyelids still closed and faintly bruised.

  I touched the cold can to her cheek, and she flinched. “Wake up, Leona,” I pleaded. “Hurry, he might come back.”

  Her eyes opened. She looked dazed but alarmed. Mike had pulled the gag from her mouth, and her first word turned a cold dagger in my heart. “Vincent …”

  Involuntarily, my eyes went to the Coke machine.

  Mike sprang up and opened it, but it contained only soda pop. He looked around, then shook his head. There was no space left in the office big enough to conceal a human being.

  I held the Coke can to Leona’s lips, supporting her head. “Shhh, don’t try to talk now. Have something to drink.”

  She slurped noisily, shuddering at the bite of carbonic acid. Her hands moved to hold the can, but they were still bound. Mike produced a pair of scissors from the desk and started snipping. Dr. Frankenstein had bound her with masking tape. It wasn’t as durable as handcuffs, but it was a hell of a lot harder on the circulation. When Leona tried to move, she gasped in pain. “My leg!”

  It was lying at an unnatural angle, obviously broken. Mike gingerly straightened it. Her face paled even more, and she bit her bottom lip.

  I mouthed swearwords. “Why did he do this co you?”

  The alarm sprang back into her eyes, and she pushed the Coke can away. “There’s no time. You have to hurry.”

  We weren’t going to get very far until Leona had recovered enough to walk. Besides, if Dr. Frankenstein had been confident enough to hide Leona here, he must have known where we were. I should have known it was too quiet, too easy.

  “Thin people tend to underestimate fat people,” he had said. “They associate physical bulk with mental slowness.”

  He probably had a dozen guards ready to move in the second we opened the door. No, that didn’t fit. Even soldiers would protest his treatment of Leona. This was some plan of Dr. Frankenstein’s alone.

  “Vincent,” Leona said again.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find him,” Mike reassured her. The hardness in his face equaled my own. Frankenstein would pay for this.

  Leona coughed up a mouthful of pop. “You don’t understand. He’s holding Vincent prisoner. My brother is the prize in his treasure hunt.”

  “What?” Mike said sharply.

  She coughed again. “This is a treasure hunt. A contest between you and him.”

  “A treasure hunt?” I didn’t get it.

  “He hates you. He hates all of us, all the Renaissance children, but especially you, Angel. He wants revenge for all the years you played dumb and left him looking like a fool in front of his superiors. He blames you for the fact that his career has gone down the tubes.”

  I remembered “Uncle Albert” becoming so furious he couldn’t talk when I beat him in some small skirmish. His eyes had been hot enough to burn coal. I had no trouble believing that he hated me.

  “He left you a message on the computer,” Leona said.

  “How do we operate it?” I asked, seating myself in the chair again.

  “It responds to voice commands.” Leona closed her eyes. “Say ‘Treasure hunt.’”

  I flipped the visor down. “Treasure hunt.”

  A small chest in one corner of the blue virtual office expanded, and Dr. Frankenstein’s recorded voice began to play.

  “Project Renaissance is over, its funding cut, all the employees laid off. I’ve sent the military away on a fruitless search. We’re all alone. It’s just you and me now, and I want a rematch.” He sounded smug.

  “I have daVincible Vincent”—Leona began to cry—“and Leonardo has been incapacitated. That still leaves it two against one. You have all the advantages. So let’s have it out once and for all. Michelangelo against Frankenstein, renascentia versus sapiens, in a battle to the death—your death, of course. I’ve set you a little treasure hunt. You have two hours to complete it or I’ll slit Vincent’s throat. If you find me in less than two hours I’ll let you go free. If you run overtime I kill you all. The clock started running at ten o’clock. If it took you a little longer to find my office, too bad.”

  The recording ended.

  I looked at my watch. It was 10:31 already.

  “Please.” Leona grabbed my wrists. “You have to help Vincent. I know you don’t like me, but you have to help us.”

  I patted her hand. “Of course we will. Quick, what’s the first clue?”

  “No,” Mike interrupted suddenly. “Angel and I don’t have to do anything. How do we know Vincent’s really in danger? You’ve been on Dr. Frankenstein’s side all along. This is just another setup like the badminton tournament.”

  Leona’s face spasmed.

  Mike was right, I was chagrined to realize. She wasn’t telling us the truth—or at least not all of it.

  Leona removed the pad from her forehead. “This is real blood,” she said. “And my leg is really broken. Dr. Frankenstein made me stand while he broke it with some kind of gadget. He said if I flinched he might accidentally sever my artery and wouldn’t that be too bad? He made Vincent stuff me into the drawer, when every jostle hurt so much I had to fight to stop myself from screaming—and Vincent knew it. He made my brother cry. Do you think we would willingly have let that happen if we’d had a choice? Vincent is in real danger. Dr. Frankenstein will kill him if you don’t solve the treasure hunt.”

  “But you do know more than you’re telling us,” Mike said softly.

  Leona looked ready to scream. “There isn’t time—”

  Mike sat down on Dr. Frankenstein’s desk, arms folded. “Make time. Angel and I aren’t going anywhere until you tell us everything.”

  I resisted the urge to look at my watch. I believed Leona when she said Dr. Frankenstein would kill Vincent, but I had to back up Mike.

  “All right,” Leona said swiftly, “the badminton tournament was a setup. Vincent and I knew that, but we didn’t know there would be bullets flying. Dr. Frankenstein didn’t tell us that part or we wouldn’t have been there. He used Erin Reinders’s baby to blackmail us into helping him at the tournament. Just like later he blackmailed us into—” She clamped her mouth shut.

  “Into what?” I asked.

  Mike held up his watch, a silent warning that time was running out. My nails dug into my palms, waiting for Leona to crack.

  “You fool,” Leona said. “He’s listening to us right now. If I tell you, I don’t know what he’ll do to Vincent, don’t you understand?”

  “I understand that Dr. Frankenstein has a powerful desire to see us running arou
nd like chickens with their heads cut off solving some treasure hunt. I don’t want to do what he wants. You have to convince me.” Mike’s expression remained hard.

  “He blackmailed Vincent into going with one of his customers.”

  “Customers?” A prickle went up my spine.

  “The purpose of the original top-secret Needham government project was to create perfect weapons. Superspies. Agents to use in Limited Wars. Assassins. Elite soldiers. Us.” Leona spoke so fast she stumbled over the words. “When the Needham government fell, Dr. Frankenstein decided it would be more profitable to sell us to the highest bidder.

  “Not all of us died in the Orphanage fire or escaped. Some of us were only made to look as though we’d escaped. Some of us were illegally sold to powers that have very advanced brain-washing techniques and no scruples.

  “He’s rented Vincent out once already to some terrorist faction. Vincent won’t talk about what they made him do, but I know it was bad. Dr. Frankenstein kept me behind as insurance, but he intends to sell us in pairs. Breeding pairs, he calls them.” Leona laughed, an ugly sound. “He says Vincent isn’t really my twin or even my brother. Maybe he’s telling the truth and maybe he isn’t. It doesn’t matter. Vincent is my twin because we say he is.” Fierce determination shone briefly through her pain and fear.

  “What about Mike and me?” I asked. The word “rented” struck a chill in my heart. “Has he sold us, too?”

  “Not yet. His customers are quite canny. Dr. Frankenstein didn’t get the proof that you were what he said you were until you tackled Dave Belcourt. Since then he’s been negotiating with two groups, iBankCon and a tobacco company, driving the price up and up.”

  “If the Renaissance children are so valuable, why would he kill Vincent?” Mike asked.

  “Because of the riot Angel staged. He was quite pleased with it at first. He saw it as more proof of your abilities. But it backfired on him: he’s been fired. His customers are refusing to pay, saying he can no longer promise delivery. They think they’ll be able to pick us up more cheaply when we’re free of him.” Leona looked so pale I was afraid she would pass out again. “Dr. Frankenstein has lost everything, and he blames us. You have to save Vincent. You damn well have to.”