“So God bless the shrink,” Brenda said. “Get back to the topic at hand.”
“Okay.” I pressed my hands to the table. “Professor, why don’t you check the US Patent Office and see if anyone has applied for a patent on living metal or some similar term. Brenda, start searching for stock tips, new companies, anything you can find about living metal. And Tank, if someone claims to have invented living metal, see if you can find any mentions of how the substance could be used. If we follow these threads, they’ll lead us to The Gate . . . or at least to one of their shell companies.”
Brenda squinted at me. “Say again?”
“Think of The Gate as the big, bulbous head of an octopus,” I said, “with long tentacles to represent the different shell companies, organizations, schools, whatever. The offshoots may carry on legitimate business, but the head controls them all. If we can find even a few names associated with one of these branch groups, we’ll have the names of people who are either part of The Gate or loosely associated with them.”
Brenda blew out a breath. “Sounds a lot easier than lookin’ through all those boxes of clippings.”
“One question—” Tank held up his hand. “Does this mean we have to watch what we say around the orb? And if that thing’s really alive, maybe we should make it more comfortable. I hate to think of it all cooped up in that rusty cage.”
“Let Andi keep it with her,” Brenda said, standing. “She’s its mother.”
They laughed and left the table, leaving me to wonder if they could possibly be right.
By the end of the day we had made solid progress. The professor reported that no one had applied for a “living metal” patent in the United States, but Tank found a researcher who had created metal cells capable of reproduction. “Dude’s from the University of Glasgow,” Tank said, consulting a computer printout, “and he calls them iCHELLS.” He lowered the paper. “Basically, he took a lot of metal atoms and mixed them in a solution. I don’t understand all the details, but positive ions bonded with negative ions and such. He says he can design the cells to do certain things.” He slid the paper toward me. “More details in the article, if you want to read it.”
“Thanks, Tank.” I set the article aside and bit my lip. The University of Glasgow . . . Scotland. Dr. Drummond was from Scotland, too—coincidence?
“I found a company.” Brenda turned her laptop around and showed me the website, a basic design of not much more than a logo and lots of text. “Summit Biotechnologies. They’re small, but they’re ramping up. I found some stockbroker sites that were raving about a potential IPO in the next year or two.”
Tank squinched his face into a question. “What’s—”
“Initial public offering,” the professor said. “They want to sell stock on the New York Stock Exchange.”
“That’s cool.” I looked around the circle, hoping my excitement was contagious. “Tomorrow, let’s investigate Summit Biotechnologies. Maybe we should take a trip to their office and nose around to see what we can find.”
“I hope they’re in a big city,” Brenda said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her purse. “Maybe New York or Paris. If we have to do some globe-trotting, let’s trot in nice places, okay?”
The rest of us split up and headed to our rooms. I felt tired and happy, and I knew I’d sleep like a rock. Now that Hamish had taken care of my nightmares, I was looking forward to a good sleep.
I pulled out my journal and tapped the cover, wondering if I really needed to keep writing in it. I was feeling so much better . . . but what was the harm? It felt good to write about everything that had happened, and for once I had good news to report.
After putting my journal away, I crawled into bed and was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
I was dreaming that I was a glamorous World War II spy, wearing a trench coat and secretly taking pictures of important documents, when Brenda shook me awake.
“Hey.” She was in pajamas and leaning over me, a shadowy figure in the dark.
“What?” I blinked the remnants of my dream away as my eyes adjusted. “Brenda. What’s up?”
“I was about to ask you the same question.”
“Huh?” I rose onto my elbows and looked around. “What do you mean?”
She gave me an odd look, then sat on the edge of her bed. “A few minutes ago,” she said, “you got out of bed, walked to the desk, and used your phone to take pictures of your journal. Then you crawled back into your bed and went back to sleep.” She tilted her head. “Why’d you do that?”
Curiosity brought me fully awake. “You must have been dreaming.”
“I haven’t been to bed yet.”
Frowning, I got out of bed and walked to the little desk in our bedroom. My journal lay in the corner, right where I’d placed it before going to sleep. My phone lay on the desk, too, and when I unlocked it and checked my photos, I saw only pictures of Abby, the beach, and a few I’d taken of Daniel.
I held up the phone so Brenda could see it. “No photos.”
“Maybe you deleted ’em. You stood there for a couple of minutes before you went back to sleep.”
“Why would I do that? Who would I send pictures to?”
Brenda folded her arms. “Good questions.”
“Here’s another one—why did you watch me do all that before asking what I was doing?”
Brenda snorted. “Haven’t you ever heard that it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker? I called to you a couple of times, but when you didn’t answer, I thought you might be sleepwalkin’. So I decided to wait and make sure you didn’t hurt yourself.”
“I’m not a sleepwalker. I’ve never been a sleepwalker.”
I sat on the bed and checked everything I knew to check—nothing odd in recent phone calls, nothing in text messages, nothing unusual in my e-mails. My address book was open to the page with Hamish Drummond’s phone number, but I had called him the other day.
Sighing, I tossed the phone on the desk. “I think you were dreaming.”
Brenda opened her mouth, and I knew she wanted to say I was crazy.
But instead she clamped her mouth shut, got into bed, and turned her back to me.
CHAPTER
9
By the time I got up Thursday morning, Brenda and Tank were involved in a spirited discussion of what might be possible with living metal
“A robot that looks human and makes its food through photosynthesis!” Brenda said, to which Tank countered, “Terminator Ten!”
The professor had his laptop open at the counter and was reading a long e-mail. I was slipping past him to pour a cup of coffee when he caught my eye and pointed to the screen. “Our marching orders,” he said. “We’re to stay here until we receive plane tickets via messenger. We’ll be leaving in a day or two.”
“And goin’ where?” Brenda wanted to know. “Can I vote for Paris?”
I slid into the chair next to the professor. “I don’t know who these people are,” I said, speaking of the mysterious benefactors who occasionally provided tickets, visas, and other things we needed for travel, “but I’m glad they’re on our side.”
“Why don’t we put a little effort into figuring out who they are?” Brenda asked, casually stealing marshmallows from Daniel’s bowl of Lucky Charms. “Or would that be too much like lookin’ a gift horse in the mouth?”
“I’m just happy knowing the good guys have a team.” Tank smiled above the rim of his coffee mug. “I’d hate to think that we were standing up to The Gate alone.”
“If these people want us to know who they are, I trust they’ll tell us,” the professor said, closing his laptop. “In the meantime, we do occasionally run into others. Like Littlefoot. The nun. And that crazy taxi driver in Rome.”
I tapped the professor’s arm. “Since we’ll be leaving soon, I think I’ll run some errands this morning and maybe stop at my grandparents’ house,” I said. “I’ll try to be back by lunch time.”
After showering and dre
ssing, I picked up my purse, finger-combed my hair, and went into the utility room, then looked around and realized I’d forgotten why I went in there. Whenever my grandmother did that, she laughed and said she had too much on her mind.
So did I.
Muttering to myself, I slipped out the front door and got into my car.
I did want to visit my grandparents, of course, but I felt compelled to stop by Hamish’s office. He had been caught up in our bizarre drama through no fault of his own, and I felt horrible that he’d been terrified by an orb. I also wanted to ask him about the researcher who had invented living metal. Hamish had completed his postgraduate work at the University of Edinburgh while the other man worked at the University of Glasgow, but Scotland wasn’t a huge country. Had they ever met?
I spotted Hamish’s convertible in the parking lot, and the Gumby on the dash. Smiling, I slung my purse over my shoulder and knocked three times on the office door, then stepped into the waiting area. “Hamish?” I called. “Got a minute? It’s Andi.”
“Andi!” He came out of his office, both hands extended as though he were greeting a friend. “How are you feeling today?”
“Great, thanks to you. I wanted to stop by to thank you for—”
“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering me into the inner office. “Have a seat while I make you some tea.”
“I’ve just had breakfast—”
“No matter. A spot of tea always gets the day off to a good start.”
What could I say? The man was Scottish. While he fussed at the coffeemaker, I looked at his window. The curtains had been pushed aside, and both windowpanes were whole and clean. “Your window,” I said. “Repaired already?”
“I couldn’t leave it overnight,” he said, turning toward me as the machine gurgled. “After all, these aren’t my books on these shelves, and I’d hate for anything to go missing while I was renting the space. Thank heaven for 1–800-GET-GLAS.”
He brought over two mugs and gave one to me. “Thank you,” I said. “I seem to be saying that a lot, but I mean it. I was a little lost until I began meeting with you. I don’t know what you did, but I can’t thank you enough.”
“I wish all my patients were as quickly mended.” He sank into his chair. “You were—are—a delight.”
I sipped from my mug, then frowned when my phone buzzed within the depths of my purse.
“Do you need to get that?” Hamish asked. “Might be important.”
I glanced at the caller ID. “It’s Brenda. We’re leaving soon, so she probably wants to know if I’ve seen her shoes or something.”
“Where are you going?”
“We’re not sure. This work we do . . . is often spontaneous. We go where the tickets take us.”
“Rather unnatural way to live. And who sends the tickets?”
I shrugged and let my head tip to the side, where it could rest against the side of the chair. “I don’t know, and this gig is definitely better than being bored. Which reminds me—I am really sorry about the orb in your office. I don’t know where it came from, and I hope you never see another one.” My voice sounded distant, and the room appeared to be filling with a slight haze.
“I have enjoyed getting to know you,” Hamish was saying, “and Mother enjoyed meeting you, too. It’s too bad we won’t see you anymore. Mother greatly admired your thoroughness. She said your journals were the most interesting she’d ever read.”
I blinked and tried to raise my head, only to find that it weighed about thirty pounds. “How ridiculous,” I said, laughing as my nose nestled into the seam of the chair. “I can’t seem to lift my head.”
“It’s the sedative,” Hamish answered, and though I couldn’t see him, I heard the subtle swish of his shoes over the carpet. He was moving about the room, doing something. . . .
“Hamish?” I asked, struggling to lift my heavy eyelids. “Are you still there?”
The phone in my purse buzzed again and again and again. . . .
Slowly, the fog in my head cleared. I opened my eyes and saw that I was still in the chair, but my hands had been tied together. Hamish was not sitting next to me, but leaning on the desk, an expectant expression on his face.
“Andi?” He lifted a brow. “Are you back, then?”
My mouth was as dry as cotton. “I’m . . . here.”
He smiled. “Good. Have a few last minute details to arrange, and I have to collect that orb from you. Can’t have that roaming around, can we?”
“What . . . orb?”
“The one in that beach bag you call a purse.”
I pressed my tongue to my teeth, trying to force the word over my clumsy tongue. “Th—there’s no orb.”
“I believe there is. So excuse me while I plunder your purse.”
I watched in dazed astonishment as he picked up my bag and pulled out my phone. “Ah,” he said, reading the screen. “Bjorn, Brenda, and the professor have called several times in the last quarter hour. I trust you didn’t tell them you were coming here?”
I blinked. What had I told them?
Hamish pulled up the orb, which had filled out the bottom of my large bag. “There.” He smiled at the thing as it hummed and hovered a few centimeters above his open hands. “They will be pleased to know this little one has come home.”
“Wh-who is—who are—?”
“You needn’t worry about that, Andi. Thanks to your faithfulness, we now know everything your little group knows, and we can better plan for the future. You were so dutiful, obeying every hypnotic prompt, sending your neat little reports, keeping us in the loop—good girl. And now, I believe it’s time to wrap things up and send you off.”
“Wh-where?”
“It’s all been arranged. I’m going to put you in your car and give you the trigger word, and then you will drive to the spot I have selected. You’ll be the first to die, but you’ll go peacefully, your conscious mind soundly asleep. Afterward, traces of a sedative in your blood will lead many to believe you were suicidal. Over the next few weeks, the others will meet with accidents, too—the professor is next in line. Due to his advanced age and fondness for you, no one will be surprised when he has a heart attack. The big oaf will follow—probably in a drunken brawl or some such thing. Then the artist, an easy job because tattoo parlors are so seedy, and the clientele not the finest. I believe she’ll be robbed of whatever is in her cash box, just to keep things real. Without you lot to take care of him, the boy will be sent back to the hospital, where no one will mind anything he says.”
Moment by moment, my mind cleared. This was no exercise; he was serious. He was one of them. And he was planning to kill me.
“I think that’s about it.” Hamish looked around his office and absently patted his pocket until he heard the jangle of keys, then he knelt in front of me. “Are you ready to go under?”
“You can’t.” I summoned every ounce of energy to glare into his eyes. “You can’t make someone do what they don’t want to do, even under hypnosis.”
“Ah.” His smile went soft and buttery. “But that’s the thing, Andi—you were so upset over your recent illness that you wanted to die. You thought you were useless, that your splendid mind had gone to mush and your gifts had vanished. For days now, your subconscious has been ready to throw in the towel.”
“But—”
“All we have time for, love. Say good-bye now.” His smile vanished. “On the count of five, you will again fall into a deep and dreamless sleep. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five.
I dreamed Hamish and I were walking along a dock, then Hamish gestured to a boat, opened a hatch, and waited until I climbed in. Then he went around, walking on water, and climbed into the opposite seat.
“Can’t get used to riding on the right side,” he said. “You mustn’t drive without a seat belt, love. Put it on, please.”
I did. As if they had a mind of their own, my fingers pulled the seat belt across my chest, then snapped it into place at my hip.
“Perfect,” Hamish said, turning sideways to smile at me. “Let’s go. Pull out into traffic and drive toward your grandparents’ house.”
I drove the boat, obeying traffic signs and signals and watching other boats zoom past as I held to the speed limit. “You’re an exceptionally careful driver,” Hamish said. “No one would believe that you drove into a retention pond accidentally, so it has to be suicide. Sorry about that. A bit hard on the reputation, I know, but you’ll be past minding.”
We drove into a very busy channel, and I maintained a steady speed in the right lane until Hamish pointed to a buoy. “This ramp, love.”
I took it. “Now,” he said, “pull onto the verge, the shoulder.”
I pulled over, coasting until Hamish told me to stop. “Now,” he said, smiling, “I’m going to get out. When the door closes you’re going to accelerate and drive toward that pond over there. The ride might be a bit choppy, but you will hold the wheel steady. You’ll steer straight toward the pond, and you’ll remain calm as the vehicle fills with water because your struggle is finally over. Your friends will be better off without you, so go ahead, close your eyes, and sleep.”
Then, while I stared at the world beyond the windshield, Hamish leaned forward, turned my face toward him, and kissed me for a long moment.
“Pity,” he said, pulling away. “Such a waste.”
I sat motionless, waiting, until I heard a door click. Then I pressed my foot to the accelerator and heard the responsive roar of the engines.
I heard the trickle of water and felt the boat slide on the surface. So pleasant. I loved sleeping to the sounds of water.
MEGADEATH APPROACHING, CAPTAIN. DEFEND YOUR BATTLESHIP.
I blinked as sirens and horns disturbed my liquid lullaby.
MEGADEATH APPROACHING, CAPTAIN. DEFEND YOUR BATTLESHIP.
I shook my head as reality intruded into my fictive dream. I wasn’t in a boat; I was strapped into my car. Water wasn’t trickling nearby, it was pouring in through the doors, rising from the floor, and rushing up the windshield. The front end of my car had already gone under, and water was crawling up the car doors, covering my seat, drowning my purse.
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