by S. E. Grove
Something about the sentence jarred me. For a few seconds, I didn’t realize why. Then I realized. Was. Cal was a perfect empath. “What do you mean, was?”
“Is that all you wanted to tell Miss Peña?” Ayles asked, his attention returning to our conversation.
“Almost.” Glout pushed his chair back awkwardly and walked around the table to me. “I just wanted her to have his shirt. The T-shirt he was wearing.” He held out the gray jersey and I looked at it dumbly.
“So sentimental, Glout,” Ayles commented amiably. “I can’t decide if it’s endearing or irritating.”
“I really couldn’t do my job without it, Mr. Ayles,” Glout replied. He pressed the T-shirt into my open palms. I took it. My hands were shaking. Glout squeezed them hard. Really hard. “It’s shock,” he said to me, his voice quiet and level. “Remember, it’s just shock. It goes away.”
“What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t be sure I’d really spoken, but it seems I had because Ayles replied.
“As your lawyer will explain, there was an accident after the transfer out of Glout’s lab. Something about the new space must have triggered him.”
I looked at Glout, whose brow was knotted. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Triggered him?”
Ayles prattled on. “His records indicate that suicide runs in the family. Actually it’s not that uncommon, in children who feel too much. As Glout can tell you, it’s a liability.” Ayles’s tanned face and white teeth formed the words so they sounded pedestrian. “Your lawyer has the details.” He looked at me a moment longer, as if to ensure the receipt of his dismissal, and then he turned back to the work before him.
“No,” I said. “Cal wouldn’t do that. Cal would never do that.”
Ayles didn’t answer. He’d moved on. Glout was still standing in front of me, and he may have said something more, but I didn’t hear it. The high-pitched whine in the distance had grown louder, and now it filled my brain. I looked at Glout’s face, which came close to mine for a moment as he pressed my hand again. Then I found myself walking through the glass door into the sitting room. Someone closed the door behind me.
The room was empty of everyone but the rugby player, who opened the door to the corridor. He was opening it for me—he must have been, because there was no one else in the room. I looked around dumbly for a few seconds before walking across the carpet, past the yellow sofa I’d been sitting on a few minutes earlier, back when the world was different. He followed me out into the corridor and then took a couple long paces to walk ahead. My footsteps disappeared into the carpeted hallway, as if I were invisible. A ghost haunting the corridors, leaving no trace. I didn’t speak.
He pressed the button for the elevator and we waited. The whine in my head persisted. There was nothing else in there. No thoughts, no nothing. Just the whine. A noise broke the whine abruptly—the ding of the elevator—and as we stepped into the cold metal box, something shifted. I could trace the whining sound to its faraway origin: a fast, impossibly fast whirring; a churning mechanism that flew through one image after another, imagined and discarded, imagined and discarded again. I closed my eyes. My mind rapidly conjectured, destroying the conjecture a moment afterward and making another. His slim form, hanging from a rope; strapped to a gurney; recoiling from an electric current; running desperately through hallways; shattering a window, jumping through the jagged opening, landing broken on the pavement. Illogically, nonsensically, I saw him lying on the floor of the Oakland apartment, skull destroyed, gun lying by, just like Mom. What had happened?
I needed to see him. No matter what it looked like, I needed to see Cal. Opening my eyes, I realized that we were still in the elevator; we had hardly moved. My eyes drifted to the gray jersey shirt. I was holding it so tightly my knuckles had turned white. Without thinking, I loosened my grip and unfolded the shirt. It was a child’s T-shirt. Across the front, in unapologetic crimson, it read STANFORD.
This was not Cal’s T-shirt.
Suddenly the whining in my head stopped. I could hear the whirring of the elevator. I could hear my own breathing. I felt my blood pumping, a rhythmic pulse that felt as urgent as a ticking clock. The rugby player beside me was silent and motionless. Glancing his way, I observed that he was a good six inches taller than me and had nicked himself shaving that morning. The elevator was still dropping slowly, as it had been seemingly for the last half hour.
It was impossible that Cal was dead. This wasn’t a thought. It was an instinct. He could not be dead because he didn’t feel dead. I would know.
I would know.
I was still holding the Stanford T-shirt and staring at it like a dummy. The rugby player followed my eyes discreetly. We both examined the shirt. “I think it’s a little small for me, don’t you?” I said.
He shrugged noncommittally. “Maybe.”
“But it might fit you,” I said brightly.
He looked at me. I smiled. A moment too late, he saw what I was going to do. I lifted the shirt over his head and yanked down, the little collar catching on the crown of his head. His arms, halfway to his gun, reached up instinctively. I kneed him in the gut and as he doubled over, I tied the shirt around his neck like a plastic bag. My foot kicked out and hit the elevator panel. The rugby player wrestled with his face mask as the elevator stopped and the doors opened. He reached for his gun. I kicked him, hard, toward the open doors, and as he fell backward, he pointed, looking like a clumsy bank robber. The shots went off into the closing doors.
I was lucky. We still hadn’t hit the twelfth floor. I reached into my bag as the elevator floated down two more floors and took out De rerum. Joey had sent me twenty-six messages. I replied without reading them: Need that distraction now.
The doors opened on twelve.
No one was there to meet me. Yet. I remembered the way to Glout’s office just fine, and now I ran, following the maze of corridors to the office with old-school equipment.
I burst in, chest heaving, and looked around. Glout had clearly said “the last test he did in my lab.” There had to be something in the office that told me the location of the lab.
Maybe the lab was next door. I went back out to the corridor and tried the other three doors I could see. Locked.
Back to the office. I seized on the spiral-bound notebook Glout had left on the desk. Spidery blue writing that was hard to read. Shorthand. I couldn’t read shorthand. I flipped through it, shaking my head at the illegible writing. It had nothing for me.
I gave up on the notebook and looked around the room for another clue. Seven screen decals. An old filing cabinet. The old-timey keyboard with beige wires. The old-timey monitor in the wall. Two office chairs. No doors, no whiteboards with convenient directions to the lab, no keys dangling from a peg.
Thirty feet away, the elevator dinged. I heard boots on the hard floor of the hallways.
I reached into my bag for my lipstick.
35
NATALIA
OCTOBER 15—6:12 A.M.
A few seconds later, the boots arrived. They belonged to the rugby player. He stood in the doorway, gun drawn, and looked me over.
I held my lipstick inside my closed left fist. With my right hand, I snapped the baton open. The rugby player glanced at it. Then he smiled and put his gun down on the file cabinet that stood beside the door. As he took off his jacket, he drew a butterfly knife from the pocket. One hand opened the knife, making it twirl kaleidoscopically over his knuckles. The other hand loosened the knot of his cheap tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt.
“I’d love to do this in birthday suits,” I said to him, “but I’m wearing a corset and unlacing it takes forever.”
He didn’t say anything. The knife danced silver cartwheels across his hands. Then I saw what he wanted me to see. In the gully of his neck, below the Adam’s apple: a one-inch tattoo of a catfish.
Great. Jus
t great.
The knife stopped abruptly, now closed and clenched in his fist. He dove toward me like an Olympic swimmer, arms outstretched, and caught me around the waist. Good thing I’d perfected those backward falls on the Oakland PD gym mat. I fell back against the floor, my head missing the metal desk behind me. The knife hung in the air over my face. His fist came down, bringing the knife with it, and I jerked right. It missed my neck but pinned my collar to the carpet. I hissed.
Before he could pull the knife free, I brought my right arm up and slammed the base of the baton into the soft spot below his shoulder blade. He groaned, crunched, but didn’t let go. My left arm was stuck. I brought the baton down again on the back of his neck at the top of his spine. He grunted, recoiled just enough for me to free my right leg and kick over the chair beside us, which landed on his backside, accomplishing nothing.
He curled himself up, pressing me down onto the floor, crushing my chest with his left hand. The knife was free again, skipping across the knuckles of his right hand. He kneeled on my groin and let his weight drop. Hard. I grunted, feeling like a squashed bug. The knife stopped again. He held it like a letter opener, blade beneath his thumb, and brought it toward my neck. I swung my right hand with the baton toward him and he caught it with his left hand, grinning.
I grinned back. My left arm was free and I had the tube of lipstick on his gut. I zapped.
The rugby player collapsed onto me, all two hundred–odd pounds, hitting his head on the floor past my right shoulder.
I gasped, tried to push him off. He was harder to fight unconscious than conscious. Finally I got out from under him, tearing my hose in the process. “Nuts,” I said.
For a minute I stood there in Glout’s half-destroyed office. We’d managed to pull down a desk and a few of the screen decals, which lay facedown like fallen kites. I let my eyes travel back to the open door. Somewhere in the building, many floors away, an alarm was ringing. I had to hope that was Joey’s distraction.
I took a deep breath and tried to think. Glout had given me a T-shirt that wasn’t Cal’s. He knew it wasn’t Cal’s. He knew I knew it wasn’t Cal’s. He had gone to all the trouble of making up some baloney sandwich about a shirt in order to tell me something. What was he trying to tell me? I thought about Glout’s face, nervous and splotchy, his eyes diving down to the table. His face had flushed bright red when he’d told me Cal’s score.
Cal’s score. Now I remembered what he’d said. I was an idiot. He’d said that Cal’s score couldn’t have been more perfect if he’d had a key.
For a moment I couldn’t breathe, thinking I wouldn’t be able to remember the test score. And then I had it.
The rugby player groaned, shifted. “Lo siento, little catfish,” I murmured. “You’ll feel better by Friday.” On the way out of the room, I grabbed his gun. I ran down the corridor toward the stairs. I tossed the gun into an open office, lights off, to my left. The distant alarm was still ringing, but the commotion sounded closer. When I opened the door to the stairwell I could hear the echoes of voices, hard-edged, rapid but calm. My feet flitted down the steps to the tenth floor and I threw the door open.
1012. I was looking for room 1012.
I found it.
And along with it I found two security guards who made the rugby player look like junior varsity. They eyed me as I slowed my steps, still twenty feet down the corridor. I put my lipstick away and rested my hand against the wall for a minute, catching my breath. Then I resumed my slow walk toward 1012. When I was ten feet away I stopped.
“Hey,” I said to the guards.
One of them turned his head slightly to the right, listening to something through an earpiece. This one had a blond crew cut and a neck wider than his head. Green crocodile eyes. A Frankenstein scar with needle points on his left temple. A tiny gold stud in his right ear. The other one was all shoulders with a long, horsey face. Heavy eyebrows. Black hair in a topknot. It was clear to me that either one of them could easily fold me up like a napkin and tuck me away in a back pocket.
That meant I had to talk to them.
“How are you guys doing?”
They stared at me.
“Could I see what’s in that room?” Always worth a try to ask politely.
Topknot turned his head slightly, receiving some communication, and nodded in reply for the benefit of the ubiquitous cameras. He took a step toward me, the massive shoulders lurching into motion.
I took a step back. I wasn’t ready for this yet. “My brother’s in there,” I said, pointing to the room behind them. “And I know you’re going to be shocked to hear this, but the lovely board members of RealCorp lied and told me he was dead.”
Topknot scowled, swiped an arm out ineffectually as I took another step back. The crocodile watched impassively.
“Can you believe they would do that? Maybe you can. Maybe they do that all the time. Lie. I mean, it would be ironic. RealCorp, faking a death. Get it? Real corp, fake death?” I chuckled, taking another step backward. “I guess that’s not so different from how things usually are. Fake, I mean. Maybe the board members just have a really quirky sense of humor. But hey, look on the bright side. This is your chance to do the right thing.” I gave them a winning smile.
Now the crocodile took a step forward as well, which took him a few paces away from the door. That was good, but not good enough.
“Are you guys actually unable to talk, or are you just not supposed to?” Topknot took two decisive steps forward. The crocodile followed suit. I tripped backward a few more feet, pushing myself up against the wall and away from the door of 1012, but the timing was starting to nag at me. I had only about eight seconds, and I’d run out of witty monologue.
So I did the weirdest thing I could think of. I started laughing hysterically. I kept walking backward against the wall. Topknot and the crocodile frowned at the unhinged lady with the baton and moved forward.
I stopped, my loopy laugh slowing down like a top. I let them get close. Then I rocketed forward, off the opposite wall like a billiard ball, and down toward 1012. The nickel-sized decal I’d stuck to the wall when I was catching my breath blew up, shattering the side of the corridor. I reached the door of 1012 and as I did, I heard the stairwell door open. Nuts. I didn’t mean to stop but I looked up anyway. The guards were recovering, the one sitting against the wall, the other already standing. In the open doorway to the stairwell was Gao. Behind him, uniformed officers.
I let out a breath. Gao raised his hand and tipped it forward, urging me onward.
I nodded. I pressed on the door handle of 1012.
It was unlocked.
* * *
—
Beyond the door was a corridor, dimly lit, with no windows. There were five doors on each side, all of them closed. I reached for the closest door.
The lock clicked, releasing. As the door swung open, lights flickered on over my head: bright, fluorescent. The room was a windowless cell. No doorknob on the inside. Cement walls, no carpet. Desk with a screen decal, chair, toilet, sink, narrow bed. In the twin bed a figure raised an arm to block the bright light. She had brown hair and a pinched face, and her squinting eyes already spoke of fear.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
The girl swallowed; surprise, then hope, suddenly dawned in her eyes. “Are you here to get me out?”
There was only one right answer to that. “Yes,” I said.
She started scrambling out of bed, slipping thin feet into socks, as I turned back to the corridor. I reached for the door across from hers. Identical room in mirror opposite. Slender boy, sitting up in bed, hugging his knees. He was staring at me wide-eyed, taking in the sight of the girl behind me. “Come on out of there,” I said to him.
I opened one door after another. It was the same with all ten rooms. Ten little cells. Ten little children. They stood around me, silent and waiti
ng, adjusting to the unexpected, glancing up at me in acquiescent anticipation. None of them was Cal.
Was this what Glout had wanted me to find? Could it really be that his message with the test score and the tee meant nothing about Calvino at all? Was he saying, “It’s too late for Cal but it’s not too late for these kids”?
Maybe so. Probably so.
But the feeling I’d had in the elevator still hung around my shoulders, a nagging sense that if I turned around fast enough, Cal would be there, looking back at me. I had to believe that feeling. Just because he wasn’t behind door 1012 didn’t mean he wasn’t somewhere else.
The pack of sleepy children followed me out to the corridor, where Gao was standing with his hands on his hips while medics treated Topknot and the crocodile. “Hey, Gao,” I called.
He turned to look at me and stood still for a moment, taking in the sight. Then he tapped the medic closest to him and they came down the corridor toward me.
“They were in locked rooms,” I said.
Gao eyed them as the medic went to work, crouched down, talking to the children in a gentle voice. “We’ll check every room,” he said to me, “but it’ll take a while.”
“I have one more idea,” I said to him.
He shook his head. “You can’t wander off. The building isn’t secure.”
Which meant I might encounter more crocodiles. “I can’t wait.”
He pondered for a moment. “Fine. I’ll come with you.”
He left another uniform in charge of the floor and followed me back up two flights of stairs to twelve. He didn’t ask me where we were going.
As we climbed stairs, I started to hear the high-pitched whine again; muted and distant, like a tornado siren. It screamed something unintelligible about time passing, about catastrophes looming, about lost chances.
I led the way to Glout’s office. The rugby player was gone, but the room was still a mess. We looked around. “What’s your idea?” Gao asked.