by Jenn Stark
“Put it in a lead-lined box,” instructed Ma-Singh. “Near the engine.”
After the man left, he looked at me inquiringly. I blew out a breath, nodded. “We’re clean now,” I said. “Patch through Father Jerome.”
A moment later, the familiar but newly haggard face of the French priest filled the screen.
“Sara,” he said. “It’s happening.”
Chapter Fifteen
“What’s happening, Father?” I asked sharply. Father Jerome looked much as he always did. His white hair was close cropped, his warm eyes deep set into wrinkled skin. He wore a black shirt with a priest’s collar that looked like he’d slept in it, and though his face had lit up as he’d recognized me, it quickly was slipping back into a dour expression.
“The children who’d been forced to take the latest technoceuticals? It’s their hearts. They’re failing.” He swallowed. “Starting with the youngest.”
I frowned, staring at him. “What do you mean, failing?”
Father Jerome looked like he’d spent the night crying, but he stared into the monitor with a blank, ashen face. “The youngest of our patients have all begun showing similar symptoms. Their hearts have been devolving into rapid arrhythmia, some arresting altogether. We have stabilized the children with medical comas but—we don’t have any solution or any way of knowing what specifically is triggering the breakdown. And if it happens to the babies…”
I swallowed. Right now in Father Jerome’s safe house and hospital, there were a half-dozen infants who’d been born to teens injected with this supposed miracle drug that was lighting up the arcane black market. I somehow didn’t think the drug’s vials were marked “may cause heart failure and death.”
“Have any of them died?” I heard myself asking. “The babies?”
“No,” Father Jerome said. “But their sleep has been disturbed, and there are some things we can’t track in them. Precursor events. Even Chantal…”
Hearing the name of the pregnant girl I’d met not too long ago taking refuge in his home, made my heart grow cold. “What about her?”
“She’s begun suffering from emotional breakdowns. We have her in therapy, but she has asked for us to sedate her, to stop the visions she’s having.”
“Visions?”
My face must have telegraphed my confusion, because Father Jerome waved his hand. “The twins had them too. They are all the same image, some sort of origin image—a hideous, complicated mask of some sort. I’ve tried to get them to be more specific, but talking about it brings them great fear. We’re afraid the infants are experiencing the same visions. If they are…their hearts may soon be afflicted like the others, only they may be too young to endure it.”
I couldn’t help with Jerome’s medical problems, so I latched on to how I could potentially assist. “What kind of mask? Can you get any more information—is it a modern mask, something ancient, any indication of a culture for us to start with?”
“We’ve gathered little but screams at this point.” Father Jerome sighed, then shook his head. “We’ll keep trying. There will be something soon, I think. At the start of each affliction, the visions are the clearest and the children’s articulation of what they are seeing is also clear. After that, they both disintegrate.” He paused, his eyes going a little hollow. “At this rate, we will have a new batch of visions and reactions within the next few days, then more comas. The twins will succumb next, I fear.”
“Oh no.” I’d met the twins in France, brought them into Jerome’s care. In attempting to heal them, I’d taken away the hyper-acceleration of their abilities and returned them to their non-Connected, natural states, but apparently…I hadn’t done enough. “But they’d been in that facility for months with no reported effects from the drug. And there would have been, right?”
Father Jerome nodded. “There should be, unless it’s their interaction with other children that’s causing the shared memory to implant. We’ve removed them to isolated quarters as best we can, but I fear the damage has already been done.”
“They’d been kept apart…” I frowned hard, trying to process, then slanted a look at Ma-Singh.
“Can you get ahold of Nigel? Conference him in?” The Brit had been with me in France, had gone in to get the twins from their underground hospital bunker. Maybe he could remember something I didn’t.
“Of course,” the general rumbled. He began tapping on the keyboard as I racked my brain.
“What other similarities and differences exist between the twins and the other children—and are there any who haven’t succumbed to the reactions yet?”
“Not in this group,” Father Jerome shook his head. “Chantal is the most recent abductee we recovered prior to the twins, but she was already suffering effects of trauma. She reported the vision of the mask only as a dream, when prompted, and it had occurred to her days before we realized it was a question we should be asking. The twins haven’t had any such vision that they have shared with us, and we’ve kept the information from them so as not to stimulate a false positive.
“Nigel is coming in on screen four,” Ma-Singh interrupted. “Both Father Jerome and he can see you, but not each other.”
“Got it.” I waited until Nigel’s image filled the screen.
“Sara,” he said, his worried eyes scanning whatever he could see of me on the monitor. “You look…well. We were sorry to hear what happened in Tokyo yesterday.”
I blinked. Had that really only been a day ago? Nodding quickly, I pushed on. “Father Jerome is also on here. He told me you discussed the drug reactions in the afflicted children.”
Nigel’s face sobered. “He did. Has there been any change? We only talked a short while ago.”
“Not yet. But when we retrieved the twins from the hospital, can you recall anything specific about their living quarters?”
“Their quarters?” He frowned.
“They’d been cooped up down there for weeks—maybe months. Much longer than some of these children who’ve already started showing reactions. Makes me wonder if there’s something there that helped retard the process, whether intentionally or not.”
“Well, it was underground,” he offered. “The twins were both wearing electrical bracelets. The room I suspect was lead lined, given the sluggishness of their reactions until they exited into the hallway.” He cocked a brow. “They weren’t so sluggish outside of the room, for sure.”
I snorted. The children had attacked us both with an unexpected ferocity, but they’d been kids—locked up, afraid. We cut them some slack.
Something in Nigel’s words tripped me, though. “Those ankle bracelets. They were electrical in nature, right? That’s why we had to ground ourselves to release them.”
“I’m not likely to forget that,” Nigel said, and I pointedly didn’t meet his eyes. He’d been deep-fried from the inside out from that experience, and closer to death than I liked to think about.
I tapped my chin instead, considering the children’s security clasps. “So maybe there’s something to do with the electrical current—maybe that stabilized them, somehow.”
“Possible,” Nigel allowed. “The lead-lined room would be easier to test.”
“That’s easy enough to check out,” Ma-Singh said. “I can have one of our local contacts obtain the building schematics of the hospital. The materials used should be recorded; it is a public health facility.”
“Do that. Meanwhile…” I blew out a breath. “I’ll have to ask Simon about the bracelets. See if there’s any possible stabilizer we can improvise. Who knows, maybe some kind of low-dose electrical current is all we need, kind of a makeshift pacemaker.”
“If so, it would be a godsend. But you’ll need to do it fast, Sara.” Father Jerome drew my attention again. “I’m not sure how long it will be until we have another lapse here, and I’d rather avoid it. Medical comas aren’t supposed to be permanent solutions.”
We discussed possibilities a few minutes longer, then Jerome
signed off, leaving Nigel on the line.
“Talk to me about what you’re hearing in the markets,” I said.
“Probably no more than Ma-Singh has already told you,” the Brit replied. “Biggest influx of drugs is coming into Mexico City’s arcane black market, but they’re cropping up in Moscow and Bangkok too. And when I say influx, I mean a ton of product, flooding the market in the form of gateway samples all the way up to pallet-sized deliveries available for special order. And they’re going fast.”
“Makeup of the client set?”
“Unknown—but we’re assuming across the board.”
“We need Mercault’s take on this,” I muttered. Nigel shifted in his chair at the man’s name. “What?”
“Mercault’s in it up to his neck. I’m not sure how amenable he’ll be to choking the trade at this point.”
“What do you mean, in it? He’s a friend. An ally.”
“He’s a businessman first,” Nigel said tersely. “And this is the biggest dump of drugs in the market in five years. Everyone wants in, Connected or not, because it’s not simply about augmenting your abilities, it’s about becoming young again. Turning back the clock.”
“But test cases are reporting nerve damage—and now heart attacks and crazy visions. Those are some pretty big side effects.”
“Cases are still isolated enough to be ignored, and a lot of cash is changing hands now. If the drugs turn out to be lemons, it’s not like the FDA is protecting them. Mercault will be sitting on his bags of money and watching everyone die.”
“He better plan on having a ring of machine guns surrounding him and all those bags. The right sort of people start dropping, they’re going to want somebody to blame.” Another thought occurred to me. “Test cases were all kids. Presumably, the target users are not. Are any adults having an issue?”
Nigel hesitated, consulting a screen below the view of the monitor. “Still mostly children. Not sure where this data is coming from, though. But the skin-texture feedback—that has to be adult. Older adults, is my guess. They’re testing it on someone, clearly.”
“Yeah.” A new thought wormed its way into my brainpan.
The last time I’d been in Vegas, we’d gotten reports of missing Connecteds—just enough to make us take notice. Gamon had been in the city only weeks before, on the hunt for Soo. Had she decided the resident Connected community would be easy pickings for test cases of her new drug? It made a certain sort of sense. The population of Las Vegas Connecteds was transient, many of them fleeing circumstances that made it better for them to live off the grid. Especially because they weren’t children, their absence wouldn’t be noticed as much.
“Do me a favor, Nigel, ask Nikki to follow up in Las Vegas, see if we have any more missing persons cases cropping up—adults in particular, and Connected versus non-Connected would be good to know. We’ll be there in…”
Ma-Singh spoke up. “Ten hours.”
“There you have it. If she’s got anything to go on, I’ll be ready to look into it. Meanwhile…” I turned back to the map. “Why these three sites? Moscow isn’t exactly the hottest black market. I get Bangkok and Mexico, but—”
“There’s more money in Russia than there used to be, and a lot of wide open space,” Nigel explained. “If you had a supply of the drug to not only test but reverse engineer, there are worse places to go off and get the job done.”
“Reverse engineering. I hadn’t thought of that.” I passed a hand over my eyes. “Do we have any idea if the drugs causing the reaction are the original vintage versus any sort of synthetic knockoffs? And seriously, how can they already have synthesized the drug?”
“They probably haven’t,” Nigel agreed. “But that wouldn’t stop anyone from saying they had.”
“Dangerous group of users to jack around like that.”
“Agreed. We’ve redoubled security for our scouts, but right now it’s still a party. Any drug can make you feel good. Actual cellular change can’t be tracked except by specialized equipment. Some of the buyers will have that equipment. Most won’t. Certainly not the ones getting the gift baggies. And the reactions being noted are anecdotal. Does the drug really make you look younger, or have you simply decided it has? Are you getting better, or are you just thinking positively?” Nigel shrugged. “The placebo effect alone is going to keep the market thrumming along for a good three months at that level. At the upper levels, however…”
I grimaced. “At the upper levels, there’s going to be a lot of unhappy people, unless they’ve spun it as an experimental drug. And you say Mercault is dealing this?”
“If there’s money to be made, he’d sell anything to anyone,” Nigel said tersely. “I’ll get him lined up for a meeting. He’s been off the radar for the past few weeks, but his fingerprints are all over these deals. We’ll track him down.”
“Good. See you in ten hours, then.”
The rest of the flight went smoothly, with Ma-Singh testing my newly acquired eyesight in a half-dozen other ways, including disturbing the crew for impromptu aura readings. I was getting better at picking up the muddier, more muted colors of the non-Connecteds, but as Chichiro had, Ma-Singh still practically vibrated with color when he was talking to me. The announcement of our descent into Las Vegas had just come over the PA when I looked over at him, trying for casual but not trying all that hard.
“What did you do with the Gods’ Nails?”
He smiled as if he’d just won some internal bet. “They’re in Las Vegas at the desert house,” he said, referring to Soo’s original Vegas stronghold, now taken over by Nikki and, on occasion, me, as well as whatever House staff found themselves in the city at any given time. “I’ve sent for an antiquities expert to analyze them. The bounty on them hasn’t dropped, by the way. It’s still an open call, and Thor is now offering a ransom as well for their return.”
“Yeah? Anything new about me?” I’d been too busy for the past few weeks to follow the arcane black market as closely as I used to, checking for the latest artifacts being sought and seeing which ones I could steal first. I missed it more than I realized.
Nigel shook his head. “There’s been no further mention of you, officially or otherwise. The nails are listed as no longer for sale by the family. We’ve been monitoring that and put it out that you’ve already transferred them to a client. Whether or not they believe that is unknown, but we should assume not. We’ve analyzed the security tape at the club in Reykjavik, identified several of those players. If any of them draw close to you, we’ll take appropriate action.”
“I appreciate that.” It was hard not to say something flip, but that wasn’t fair. I was uncomfortable with the heightened security, but I’d also seen Ma-Singh’s genuine panic when he thought I was in danger at Chichiro’s mountain massage parlor. I’d thought I was in danger, but his panic both during and after my temporary blinding had fallen somewhere between heartwarming and distressing. These people had put their faith in me. The least I could do was to stay alive until I justified that faith.
We landed a few minutes later, and the first blast of the Vegas sun warmed me to the core, as it always did. Everything in the city seemed mirror bright, and I squinted toward the long gray limo that glided up to the private airstrip—then was even more surprised to see a second limo…and a third following behind it.
I frowned at Ma-Singh. “Really?”
“As I said, we are taking your security very seriously. In the wake of your query into missing persons, Nikki has advised me that she wants you to visit with the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, so she will be taking you there. The other limos are decoys. I’ll have a fourth vehicle to trail you both. We’ll track which of the limos are followed, and neutralize any threats.”
“That…sounds great.” It sounded terrible, and all my well-meaning thoughts about putting up with my security detail vanished like ice cubes in the desert. Sooner or later, if Ma-Singh insisted on sticking bodyguards this close to me, someone was goin
g to end up hurt, or worse, dead. I didn’t want that kind of responsibility hanging over me every time I turned around.
Fortunately, I didn’t have too long to think about it. As we moved down the Jetway, the front door of the nearest limo popped forward, and a tall, leggy blonde stepped out and struck a pose. Today, Nikki had reverted to her old-school chauffeur uniform, but she’d paired the snappy black cap and formfitting miniskirted uniform with bright red thigh-high go-go boots and piles of platinum-blonde curls. Even passengers in the planes above us were pinned to the windows I suspected, and despite his best efforts to remain nonchalant, Ma-Singh caught his breath beside me.
“She doesn’t do anything by half measures, does she?” he asked, faintly aghast.
I grinned at Nikki, feeling lighter than I had in days as she waved back enthusiastically. “Dollface!” she cried over the roar of the planes.
“No, she doesn’t,” I agreed.
Chapter Sixteen
It was almost like old times as Nikki held the door for me, waiting until I slid into the purring limo’s oasis of refrigerated air before she slammed the back door shut. She paused outside while Ma-Singh briefed her.
Then Nikki opened her own door and took up position behind the wheel, taking a moment to ensure her hat was at the appropriate jaunty angle and her lips were freshened up before she gazed at me through the rearview mirror. The oversized cat’s eye sunglasses were a good look for her, but I couldn’t see her eyes.
Of course, I reminded myself, I didn’t need to. Once we were underway, I could do my whole all-seeing-eye thing on her, and know exactly how she was feeling.
“You’re taking me to the police station?” I asked instead. “Why, does Brody have a problem?”
That earned me a snort of derision. Detective Brody Rooks of the LVMPD and I went back a long way, all the way to Memphis, Tennessee, when I was a child psychic prodigy. I’d worked with him then to help finding missing kids, and now here we were in Las Vegas, working together again. A lot had changed since he’d been Officer Brody and I’d been Sariah Pelter, but one thing had never changed: there would always be missing people to find.