“I’m not going to blow anything. I just need to know if Wu is behind the attacks. I need to know if we’re part of it.”
“There’s no relation! The attacks were happening before we ever took these jobs, remember?”
I don’t answer, and Donovan just shakes his head as he parks the car in the alley next to the high-rise. It’s dark and empty, but a careful glance at the blinking cameras embedded about twenty feet up the concrete walls reminds me that we’re never really alone. Not in The Grind. Not in The Citadel.
“What if there were others delivering the cases before us? Wu never said we were the first,” I whisper, opening my door.
“Stay there. I’ll come around to your side. Ugh, you got brake fluid or whatever all over the carpet!”
I put my feet on the ground, but the sensors in my right leg don’t register in my head, and it feels like I’m just dangling my foot over an edge—no ground reception.
Donovan offers an awkwardly large arm.
“I got it,” I say, bracing against the car.
He grabs my arm anyway. “Yeah, because you’re planning to hop up there?”
We move as nonchalantly as we can to the front of the building. The street is abandoned with the exception of more cameras mounted on the streetlights like a bunch of one-eyed vultures scanning for prey. Donovan pushes the intercom button for Nyssa’s dorm once we get to the door.
“What happened?” she asks almost immediately. “Why is he bleeding? Wait—Donovan?”
The camera next to the intercom turns loudly to focus on us.
“Little accident,” Donovan says. “We can’t go to the hospital.”
“Okay, hold on.” Nyssa punches something into the keypad on her side, and a second later, the door buzzes. “Come on, come on!”
My foot drags along the slate tiles all the way to Nyssa’s room at the end of the hall, and I still don’t feel anything. Panic starts to radiate in my chest.
We don’t even have time to tap on the door before Nyssa slides it open. She waves us in and turns quickly back into the room.
“Thanks for—” I start, but stop when I notice how small the space is. Just a little, straight-lined couch with a bunk bed above it, and a table crammed into a tiny kitchen, which still takes up half the room.
“Were you attacked? There were three more reports . . .” Nyssa starts to ask without looking back at us. “Lie down here. Come here . . .” She points me to the kitchen table she’s pulled out from the wall and draped in a bed sheet, but then blanches when she turns and sees Donovan. “What . . . ?”
“Nyssa, just listen,” I say quietly, trying to calm her down.
Donovan helps me over, and for a second, I see a flash of the last time I was hauled into Nyssa’s house in the middle of the night, bleeding. Only last time, it wasn’t a closet-sized dorm room in The Citadel. It was a dilapidated flat in The Grind.
“I need to get the car back to the garage,” Donovan says, looking at his watch, then taking a second to admire the new vascularity in his forearm.
“You’re not going anywhere until you explain . . . uh, yourself,” Nyssa says, looking him up and down.
Donovan just bounces his eyebrows at her and smirks, pulling the empty bottles out of his pocket to show her. “I gotta get these back too . . .”
“Those are from my lab,” Nyssa almost whispers, shaking her head in disbelief when she sees the last few drops of colored liquid in the bottles. She suddenly sobers. “Don, no. Listen, there have been . . . problems with the formulas.”
“No problems here, as you can see,” he says, quickly kissing her cheek. “I gotta go! Ryder, we’ll cover for you tonight and swing around to get you in the morning. Keep your phone on.” He smirks, then shows himself out the door despite Nyssa’s disjointed protests.
“What did you do? What happened?” she demands, bewildered. “Knox, what did you do!?”
“He did it. Kira gave him the bottles full of fake liquid and the code to the briefcase. He was in the backseat with it all, and before I knew it he was sticking me with—”
“He injected you too? Oh no, Knox . . . which one did he use?”
“I don’t know, blue I think?”
“But nothing happened? There could be a delayed onset. Do you feel the same?”
“It was hot for a while, but that’s it. Something would have happened by now, right?”
“Usually,” she says unconvincingly.
“And the . . . problems? They would have happened by now too?”
Nyssa sighs. “I wish I knew more.”
I search her face, feeling like there’s something she’s not telling me. I’m about to ask her again when I feel a tickle down the side of my leg. Uh, sorry—sorry, your rug . . .” I say, pointing to the dripping brown fluid.
“Put it up here.” She lifts my foot and reaches for a pair of scissors. I must look confused because she rolls her eyes at me. “Your pants?”
“Oh, right.”
She cuts a line straight up the front of my pant leg. My shin is a wash of colors from bruise-green to black in places and dark red in others. Gouges in the skin around my knee ooze more brown fluid, and my ankle is encircled by a blue ring.
“The nerve belt is severed . . .” Nyssa shakes her head and blows out a breath. “All right, Knox. What happened tonight?”
“I had to see you.”
She squints at me. “You did this to yourself?”
“Well, not this part,” I say, trying to keep the laugh out of my voice as I point to my head. “Donovan did that when he almost crashed the car.”
“Knox!”
“I’m sorry, I just knew you wouldn’t see me unless . . . you had to.”
“That’s not my choice. You know nobody in my lab is allowed to socialize, Knox. They don’t want us talking about our work.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I just had to see you.”
Nyssa pulls in a deep breath and closes her eyes in a long blink. “Just tell me what happened while I find my old student issue kit because I have a feeling if I’m not fixing you, I’m going to kill you.”
Her blonde hair is pinned up in the back except for a few loose strands, which she pushes behind her ear as she rifles through her cabinets. She gives me one more side-eye blue glare before crossing back to the table with the instrument set they gave us at the beginning of our internships.
“Is it true, Nyss?” I whisper, looking at her hard. Willing her to read my mind so I don’t have to come right out and ask her about the briefcases. “Did you know?”
“Did I know what?”
“About what we’ve been delivering.”
“I have to rebuild this entire knee. Do you know how long that’s going to take with this old kit, Knox?”
“Long enough for me to convince you to tell me what’s happening? Is it true?” I start to whisper again. “Zhang said something about ferals tonight. Is that what’s behind the attacks? Nyssa, listen to me. Are you making something that is turning people into . . . monsters?”
She stops threading wires and looks at me desperately for a second, but then quickly reaches for a set of small stick pins.
“I know not to ask questions,” she answers, stiff-lipped.
“Nyssa . . .”
“Stop being stupid, Knox. We have two weeks left of these internships.”
“You know there were three more murders this week,” I say, ignoring her comment. “The feeds reported three new animal attack stories the day after we delivered the last brief—ow!”
She glares at me in warning after hitting a nerve in my knee. “I heard about them.”
“Did whatever was in those syringes create the animals, Nyssa? Are those animals the ferals Zhang was talking about?”
“I don’t know, Knox.”
“Because if so, it’s as much our fault as Zhang’s.”
“I don’t know!” She almost shouts as she stops poking around in my leg. “Maybe, all right? The only thing I ca
n tell you is that the syringes are longevity cocktails. When they work, they all add years, some more than others. At least they’re supposed to. I overheard the chemists saying something about there being a rogue strain, but I don’t know what that means.”
“Zhang’s case tonight . . . that was his second batch, Nyssa. You made him a second batch because the first one didn’t work the way he was expecting? Was that a rogue strain?”
“I don’t know. I just package the orders—I’m dispensable.”
“What does that mean?”
“The serums are stable until the final ingredient is added. It’s this clear gel. I don’t know what it is, but it makes everything volatile. That’s why I always say to keep the case still. I just add the gel, Knox.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
Nyssa stops working on my knee to gape at me. She lowers her voice again and squares her shoulders. “When, Knox? When would I have said something? They escort us to and from the labs every day. We’re never alone unless we’re asleep. In fact, someone will be here to pick me up in about six hours. At least in The Grind I could—”
She bites off the rest of her sentence and returns to her work, but it’s too late. And she’s right. I never should have gone to her that night.
“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head. “This is all my fault.”
“Knox . . . no. There was no other way. The only choice that made sense was taking the scholarships.”
I tuck a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “I just never thought it would be like this.”
Nyssa’s eyes soften just before she brushes adhesive over the gouges in my synthetic skin. I watch it melt into the edges of the holes and graft them together again like nothing ever happened.
“We’re going to be authorized medics in a few weeks, Knox. Just like we always hoped,” she says without looking up from her work. “We just have to get through the next few weeks, okay? And then we’ll have social percentage. We’ll be free and clear,” she adds, looking up at me now with those wide blue eyes.
“Okay, Nyss. Okay . . .”
Another hour of patching and rewiring, and I can walk again. I lie awake on Nyssa’s couch for what seems like hours until whatever it was she gave me for my head wears off and I finally fall asleep. That only seems to last for five minutes before my phone is buzzing again, shocking me awake. I fish it out of my pocket while frantically pushing all the buttons to get it to shut up.
“Ryder?” Pritchard’s voice comes through my phone before the image of him displays, and my head starts pounding all over again.
“Yeah?”
“I’m in the alley. Can you walk? We need to go right now.”
“Yeah. Okay, I’m coming.”
Nyssa is still sleeping when I get ready to leave, so I scribble a quick note and leave it on her table.
Thanks for saving the day . . . again.
—Knox
Outside, I open the car door and see the briefcase Pritchard was supposed to turn in sitting on the seat. I start to ask him why, but he looks like he’s aged ten years.
“Shut the door . . . shut the door!”
“What the hell happened to you?” I ask, looking him over.
“Donovan happened . . .” he says, pulling out of the alley. “It’s Kira.”
“What are you talking about?”
Pritchard turns a hot corner and I have to grip the dashboard to keep from sliding into him. “Don missed check-in for the car, so I tracked it to Kira’s apartment—he’d probably gone to return those stupid bottles he was going on about—but when I got there I heard screaming . . . Kira’s screaming. I was halfway up to her door when it just stopped.” Pritchard shakes his head like he’s watching a movie he can’t look away from. Like the whole thing is playing all over again right before his eyes.
Cold dread drops into my stomach as everything starts to piece together . . . the serum Donovan injected—that he injected into me too—the ferals . . . and I’ve never wanted to be wrong about something so badly in my entire life. “No . . . no, no, no, no . . .” It was a dud, I remind myself. It was a dud.
“Her table was overturned, man. There was food everywhere,” Pritchard talks absently. “He killed her. But it wasn’t him. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t,” he says, stopping abruptly to look at me for a long second. “He was covered in hair, and his teeth . . . his nails. And all the blood.”
“Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“What do you mean gone?”
“He ran. He saw me, and I don’t know . . . he looked like he suddenly realized what he did, and then he jumped out her window and ran. He just ran and ran.”
“Okay . . . all right. All right . . .” I blow out a breath. “But you just left? Didn’t you try to help her?”
Pritchard gives me a stupid look and shakes his head again. “Ryder, do you think I’d be here right now if I could have helped her?” He pushes a hand through his dark hair and blows out a big breath. “There was nothing I could do. People started stirring. I saw the car keys on the floor and drove back to get the briefcase out of the dropbox at Wu’s office. However much is in that case should be enough to set us up for a while. We need to leave, Ryder. Right now.”
A knot tightens in my chest. I scan the streets behind us for people following us—someone watching because there’s no way all this went unnoticed.
“And go where?” I ask.
“The car is late to check-in,” Pritchard says, but it’s like he’s talking to himself. “We can’t take it back now. The impound will lock us down.”
“There’s nowhere to go—are you hearing me?”
“Wu will be asking questions. We can’t stay here, Ryder.” Pritchard turns down a side road with no street halogens, which makes it feel even more like someone is following us. “It’s only a matter of time before he figures out that Don used those syringes. Then, it’ll be too late to leave.”
He’s right. I don’t want to believe it, but I don’t have a choice. There’s no undoing this. There’s no finishing out the two stupid weeks of internship we had left. Not anymore.
“We’ll figure it out. You just should have told me all this before we left Nyssa’s—we need to go back for her.”
“How? I can’t take this car back there.”
“Drop me off at the interior gate. I’ll go back and get her, and we’ll go to the docks.”
“The bay docks? Why?”
“No, in The Grind. They won’t look for us there.”
“Are you crazy? Did you forget about the patrols at the exterior gate? It’s Grind land just beyond there.”
“It’s the only way to the outside. We need to get out of here.” I glance at the time display on the dashboard. 3:37 A.M. “Remember the barges this time of day? There should be one going out just before dawn. We need to be on it.”
I ring Nyssa’s room for an eternity, my stomach knotting in anticipation of a sweeper droid driving by to catch me loitering outside. She finally comes through the lens.
“Knox? What happened? Did your nerve seals break?”
“No, Nyss. We need to get out of here. Get a bag because we’re not coming back. I’ll explain on the way.”
“Wh—?”
“Nyssa, now.”
She nods and the screen in the wall goes black again. I scan the long stretch of pavement in either direction, and fortunately, it’s completely abandoned.
Nyssa comes through the door wearing a dark sweatshirt and a dark backpack, which is good because it hides her long, blonde hair.
“Knox, what’s going on? Are you all right?” She scans me, but I take her elbow to hurry her toward the alley across the street.
“I’m fine. Donovan isn’t, though. He killed Kira.”
“What?”
We move through the alley and head to the interior gate, which fortunately doesn’t require a retina scan to get out. I look up and down the streets again before we go any farther
and see two sweeper droids standing around a corner just before disappearing into the mist beyond. I pull Nyssa behind a nearby tree and blow out a breath.
“Something happened to Donovan, Nyss. Pritchard caught him with Kira . . . He had claws and teeth like an animal. Is that what Zhang meant by feral? Is that what the rogue strain is?”
“I don’t know, I told you—I only heard part of what the chemists were talking about,” Nyssa says quickly just before we make our way down the street again. “Where are we going?”
“There’s a ship leaving from the docks in The Grind. We need to get out of here before Wu finds out about Don.”
“We can’t just leave him here, Knox! We have to help him!”
“How? Do you know how to cure him? You said you just put the last ingredient in that serum.” I look back at her, but Nyssa doesn’t answer me as we make our way down the empty street. I turn to her again when we get to the airbus rails. “If we could help him, we would, Nyss. But right now there’s nothing we can do. And they’re going to be coming for us.”
Tears fill her eyes as she shakes her head in frustration, but there’s no time to argue. She sniffs and glares at me, and again, we’re running.
We dodge a few more pairs of sweeper patrols before we get close to the outer gate to The Grind. It’s lit by several floodlights on both sides, and the sweepers are two and three deep in places.
“There’s no way we’re going to make it through there,” Nyssa says just as Pritchard pulls up behind us in Wu’s black car. He kills the headlights, but not quickly enough. Two of the sweeper droids start running directly toward us.
“Get in! Get in!” Pritchard yells to us through the open window, gesturing to the back seat when I make for the passenger door and stop myself when I see someone slumped over already in it.
“Who is that?” I crane my neck to peer into the front seat, which is enough for me to answer my own question. “Don?”
Donovan doesn’t look anything like the creature with fur and claws that Pritchard described earlier, but he is covered in blood and dirt.
On the Brink Page 27