Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Shay looked back at Twist, who merely shrugged and opened up a metal folding chair to sit down. She checked the room again—it felt like a real medical clinic, but it also felt … covert?

  “What kind of doctor are you?”

  The man smiled in a way that suggested things were complicated. He said, not evasively, “An unlicensed one, in California.”

  “Dr. Girard’s a healer, period,” said Twist. “I’d trust him to take out my appendix right here, right now.”

  Girard asked, looking amused, “Didn’t you tell me you had your appendix out as a child?”

  Twist shrugged and Shay interjected, “Is X going to be all right?”

  “Let me take a closer look,” Girard said.

  “Please,” she said.

  “I’d like to examine his eyes. Can you tell me about the patch?”

  Shay shook her head. “I was told he was wearing it when he was found … by someone I know.”

  “All right. Well, let’s see what’s under there—he’s been cooperative so far.”

  The doctor tried lifting off the dirty patch, but the medical tape wasn’t like anything he’d worked with before, the seal like rubber cement. Shay said the dog had been wearing the patch for at least a month, and the doctor said, “Unusual.”

  Twist said, “I’d like to buy stock in that tape.”

  Girard gave up on removing the entire patch and picked up a scalpel to slice through the gauze. The dog jerked his head away, but the doctor’s hand was steady, and with a slice up the middle, he parted the gauze like drapes to reveal a new surprise: the right eye wasn’t a yellow match for the other, but a pale and watery blue. The pupil was a thick black hyphen that didn’t contract with the light.

  Girard trimmed the gauze away to the edge of the tape, then held up a finger and moved it inward and outward to test whether the eye could focus, and though the reaction time was slow, it could. He picked up a scope and leaned in to examine the eyeball through the lens.

  “My God,” he said almost instantly.

  “What?” asked Twist.

  Girard went silent as he continued examining the eye from every possible angle. More than a minute passed before he finally looked up and said, “This isn’t just any dog.” He turned a dubious eye on Shay. “Exactly where’d this dog come from?”

  “I don’t know,” she lied. “I was just told some people were abusing him and, somehow, he got rescued.”

  Twist pushed out of his chair. “What’s the problem, G?”

  The doctor wasn’t ready to say. “I’d like to take some X-rays before we talk about that.”

  It had been more than an hour since Girard had ushered them out of the room to wait on the other side of the blue door. Shay mostly paced the store’s aisles to distract herself, while Twist took a pocket notebook out of his corduroy jacket, turned it sideways, and sketched.

  He was sitting on an old church pew, periodically glancing up at the chatty bilingual parrot—“Lunes, Monday, Martes, Tuesday”—when Shay finally slumped down beside him.

  After a while, Twist said, “I had a dog once.”

  “You did?” Seven days at the hotel, assisting him in the studio, and beyond the observable facts—rich painter who dabbled in guerrilla art and disarmed the occasional knife-wielding hoodlum—Twist had yet to share anything personal.

  “When I was eleven, a mutt I found roped to a tree. Took her water and school lunches for a week. Figured someone would come back for her, but they never did.”

  “So … you got to keep her?”

  Something in Twist’s expression seemed to regret the subject. He tucked his pencil behind an ear, tore out the page he’d been working on, and put away the notebook.

  “Couldn’t keep a dog where I was staying,” he said.

  Where I was staying … Shay remembered the rumors that Twist had been a foster kid. She herself was a master of euphemism when it came to hiding her living arrangements from classmates. Various aunts and uncles were always dropping her off at school in the morning or signing permission slips while her parents were out of the country on “business.”

  Shay probed further—was he staying in an apartment?—but Twist was done being personal.

  “Let’s not overshare,” he said, then handed her the sketch: a frustrated parrot opening its wings through the bars of a cage.

  Suddenly, from the bird, “Adiós, good-bye.” Girard stuck his head through the door and said, “Come in here.”

  The dog’s artificial blue eye was like something plucked from the future.

  A half-dozen X-rays of the dog’s head and body hung on a viewing panel for Twist and Shay to see for themselves. On the back of the eyeball, the image clearly showed a clump of tiny, complex electronic chips, a small black disk the size of three stacked quarters, and a web of wires threading into the animal’s brain. More wires led out of his neck further into his body, parallel to his spine, until they actually entered the spinal column just above the dog’s back legs. And those two legs themselves—they weren’t bone, they were metal, with what appeared to be a miniaturized computer control complex, half the size of an iPhone, buried in the body cavity.

  “I can’t tell you what the mechanisms do, except in a general way,” the doctor said. “I will tell you this dog belonged to someone—or something—with access to new and very expensive science.”

  Twist squinted at him. “You’re saying this dog’s got a better health plan than I do?”

  “I’m saying this dog’s probably practice for people,” Girard said. “This wiring … this is remarkable.” He tapped the X-ray of the computer complex in the body cavity. “This apparently controls the back legs. You can see that the natural muscles are attached to the metallic components—don’t ask me how. A radical new medical glue? I don’t know. The wiring disappears into the spinal column … here. I think they’ve somehow managed to merge natural nerves and these wires—if they are wires—so the dog’s brain actually controls these legs in a natural manner.”

  “A lab rat?”

  Girard nodded. “I’m thinking government. And something else, here.…” He pointed to the black disk at the back of the skull. Shay realized it was probably connected to the plate her brother had shown her.

  “There’s a metal plate behind the right ear. I thought about trying to open it, but there’s no obvious latch, and the dog wasn’t cooperating. Maybe with anesthesia, but there’s a serious risk with putting him under, given his weakened state. So again, I can only hypothesize … the disk might possibly be a battery. What it controls, I don’t know.… This work, I tell you—the technique is marvelous.…”

  Twist pivoted to Shay, who was carefully screwing her own eyes into the floor.

  “Hey,” he said, “is there something you want to tell us? How ’bout ten seconds to compose something with free will, after that, we’ll just go ahead and beat it out of you?”

  Shay bit down on her lip, trapped. Ten seconds of testy silence, a crack of Twist’s cane against the floor, and then:

  “The dog was taken from a laboratory in Oregon,” she said. “They were doing experiments on him and some activists freed a bunch of animals that were being tortured. One of the guys got carried away and took the dog.”

  “The Parkinson’s lab in Eugene,” said Girard. “I heard about that.”

  “It’s not for Parkinson’s,” Shay said a little too quickly.

  “Oh yeah?” said Twist. “Tell us more.”

  Shay clammed up again.

  “Were you there?” Twist pushed. “Is that why you’re here? You took this dog?”

  “No. I didn’t take the dog, and I wasn’t there. I didn’t even know about the dog until yesterday. The people that were—they know the real situation. C’mon. Wiring a dog up like this? Does that seem like legit research to you?”

  “It could be,” Girard said.

  Twist didn’t say anything for a moment, just held his focus on her, studying her, Shay looking back at him
with the sensation she was being X-rayed herself.

  “It’s the truth,” she said.

  Twist turned away and looked at his friend.

  “Is this fake eye causing the seizures?”

  “I don’t know, and frankly, I’m not sure it matters. His white cell count is low, his liver enzymes are high, his heart’s barely pumping blood.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “Yes. I don’t think I’m going to be able to help.”

  Shay stepped forward, anguish in her voice. “You have to do something. The person who found him—okay, it was my brother—I don’t know where he is right now. He might not be around for a while, it’s his dog. Please …”

  Girard shook his head. “We can try antiseizure medicine and sedatives to make him more comfortable, but there’s no cure for congestive heart failure. Animal or human. I’m sorry.”

  Shay put a hand on the dog’s neck and hung her head.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “I’m not a vet, but … a few days. Maybe a week, at the outside.”

  In the Range Rover on the way back to the hotel, Shay told Twist the rest of the truth, so far as she knew it. She told him about West, and his extraordinary legs, and how they’d short-circuited like a firecracker on the beach; about meeting her brother, who’d given her a sack of encrypted thumb drives stolen during the raid in Eugene; about the dog; and about the van, and the men from Singular who’d snatched Odin off the beach road.

  “They kidnapped him. They are not the government, they are not the police. They’re an out-of-control corporation, and nobody knows what they’re doing. But my brother is a good person. The best person I know. He’s smart—that’s why they took him. He was figuring them out.”

  “I don’t know what to make of the guy with the legs or what you think you saw with that van and your brother, but you could go to jail for having this dog,” Twist said. “And maybe those thumb drives.”

  “So I’ll go to jail. I don’t want to drag you into it—I’ll pack up my stuff as soon as we get back.” She reached back over the seat to check the dog; she felt his warm breath on her hand, but it seemed weak, too soft.

  “No hurry,” Twist said. “We need to think about this, and I need those canvases done by six tomorrow night.”

  Shay: “You’re serious? We can stay?”

  “For now, but no bragging about cyber-dog. If that news goes viral, your new sworn enemy—me—won’t think twice about ratting you out to the cops. I ain’t doing time for dognapping.”

  “Not a word,” Shay promised.

  The dog was still woozy from the sedatives the next morning. Shay guided him slowly to the studio, settled him on a bed of blankets, and got busy on the canvases. Her laptop was nearby so she could check her email every half hour or so, and her phone was in her shirt pocket so she could monitor any texts that came in. She’d messaged Odin—wherever he was—about the dog’s deteriorating condition before they’d left the botanica because both she and Twist suspected that Girard was being optimistic when he’d said the dog might last a week.

  Six hours of work passed, with the dog barely stirring. The small appetite he’d had before the seizures was now gone altogether; he showed no interest in a cheeseburger that Emily brought up from the kitchen.

  As Shay applied another layer of gesso to the canvases, her mind kept circling back to her encounter with West on the beach.

  He’d credited the Eugene lab with his robotic legs, with making him whole after Afghanistan. A soldier, maybe even a hero for losing his legs in the name of freedom. Not a bad guy, right?

  The strange mechanical thing she’d pulled out of his back … a power source of some sort for the circuitry that maneuvered his legs. Did the plate behind the dog’s ear function in a similar way? The port through West’s flesh was round and capped, while the dog’s was linear and came up empty on Girard’s X-ray.…

  Shay looked down again at the unmoving animal. He appeared to be sleeping, but she couldn’t be sure from such a distance and climbed down to check his breathing.

  Still alive, but not by much.

  Her hand crept around to his ear, and she pulled up the flap of skin that covered the plate. The dog didn’t move. She gently probed around the plate. The dog twitched, and then lay still again.

  It must be an access port, but how did it work? It shouldn’t be something complicated, if they’d needed access to it. She bent over the dog, got her eye two inches away from the plate, and saw on its top a tiny dome no bigger than the head of a pin, and easy to miss. Easier to feel, in fact, than see.

  She tried pushing it with her finger, but her finger was too big, and too soft. She stood up, went over to one of Twist’s worktables, and found a dental pick he occasionally used for carving the surface of a painting.

  Back with the dog, she bent over, placed the sharp point against the dome, and pressed, first gently and then more firmly, and then felt a faint but definite click. She lifted the pick away and the plate popped up, just a fraction of an inch. She slipped the point of the pick under it and pulled it upward.

  Inside was a rectangular port. She knew that rectangle: “Thunderbolt,” she said aloud.

  A standard computer connection. More critically, she thought, a Thunderbolt connection could feed up to nine watts of power into a target device. That black disk in the dog’s head: Could it be a battery, as Girard had suggested? A power supply for the electronics that fed into his brain?

  She took out her cell phone and called Twist. He answered on the third ring, and she asked, “Where are you?”

  “Kitchen. Trying to hustle a little food out of—”

  “Do you know where you can get a Thunderbolt line? Like a line out to a hard drive?”

  He chewed on something for a moment—a carrot, maybe—then said, “Yeah, there are a few of them around.”

  “Get a line and get up to the studio. Right now. Right now!”

  “Hey. Calm down, I’m—”

  “RIGHT NOW,” Shay shouted.

  Twist showed up five minutes later carrying the Thunderbolt cable. He said, “I was—”

  “Shut up,” Shay said. Twist cocked his head and looked at her. He wasn’t used to taking preemptory orders in his own studio.

  “Please,” she added.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Plug your Mac in,” she said. “Use that extension cord, and get over here as close as you can to the dog.”

  Twist shrugged and moved to do it. “What’s the plan?” he asked as he started unwinding the coil of extension cord.

  Shay was bent over the dog. “I found a Thunderbolt port. I think that the electronics in his brain are powered off a battery—that round black thing we saw on the X-ray. He’s weak because his brain isn’t working. They’ve done something to him that means he needs auxiliary power.”

  “You’re going to plug him in? Isn’t that taking a serious risk?”

  Shay looked up and said, “Yes. But he’s dying. He’s getting worse every hour. If he dies because I plug him in, he’s no worse off than if he dies because I didn’t.”

  Twist plugged the Mac laptop into the extension cord and the Thunderbolt line into the Mac as he thought it over. “What if they pull some other amount of current?”

  “Why would they do that?” Shay asked. “It’s a standard port. You’d just use a standard setup instead of a special one. If the black object is a battery, that means the Thunderbolt doesn’t power the electronics directly, it just recharges that battery.”

  “It’s your call,” Twist said.

  Shay nodded, took the end of the Thunderbolt cable, bent over the dog, hesitated, then plugged it into the port behind the dog’s ear.

  Nothing happened.

  “Could take a while,” she said tentatively. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but for the first time, she unbuckled the muzzle strap and pulled the cage off X’s head.

  Then they sat and watched, and five minutes after the
y plugged the dog in, Twist reached out and put his fingers on the femoral artery, just as he had the first time.

  He tipped his head and Shay asked, “What?”

  “It may be wishful thinking … but it feels stronger to me. Steadier. Like somebody plugged in a pacemaker.”

  Another ten minutes. Twist walked back and forth from a half-finished painting to the dog, watching both Shay and the animal.

  Fifteen more minutes, and the dog lifted his head off the cushion and his yellow eye fluttered open. He stared up at Shay, who was stroking his neck.

  “It’s working,” Twist said. “He seems almost alert …”

  Another ten minutes, and the dog’s mechanical eye popped open. The blue was different from before—not faint and watery, but a deep, dark navy. For several moments, the dog’s gaze stayed locked on hers, and then his tongue slipped out of his mouth and he licked her wrist once, twice.

  Shay felt a lump in her throat, and Twist, tapping his paintbrush against his hand, said:

  “I think you got yourself a dog.”

  18

  She had herself a dog.

  The dog’s recovery was remarkable. Over the next two days, X ate everything Shay fed him. He showed some careful pleasure when he encountered Emily, Cruz, Cade, or Twist, but he was Shay’s dog, never more than a few feet from her. Shay went online and read through how-to sites about feeding and handling and exercising a dog.

  In the meantime, Twist put up an announcement in the lobby that said:

  THE NO-PETS POLICY IS REAFFIRMED.

  WE ARE NOT ABLE TO ALLOW PETS FOR REASONS OF SAFETY AND SANITATION, AND BECAUSE THE CITY MIGHT GIVE US A HARD TIME. I AM MAKING ONE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE: SHAY REMBY’S DOG, X, IS ALLOWED IN THE BUILDING AS HE IS NOT A PET. HE IS WORKING FOR ME AS A MODEL AND AS A WATCH DOG, AND ALSO BECAUSE I SAY SO, AND I’M THE BOSS HERE.

  After that went up, Shay no longer had to sneak X in and out of the hotel.

  In some ways, the Twist Hotel was like a big high school, easygoing most of the time, but sometimes not. There were always kids in the halls, talking, laughing, arguing, coming and going. And gossiping.