by David Wong
“But, strangest of all, when a federal indictment came down for a fifth member of Livingston’s inner circle named Logan Knight, Arthur Livingston gave a press conference in which he made the bizarre assertion that no such man had ever existed. With no further explanation, all charges were dropped soon after.”
Well. That was terrifying, and not at all helpful. Zoey noticed they had made one of these profiles/trailers for her, and she couldn’t resist. She told it to play:
“Twenty-two-year-old Zoey Ashe, a devious and busty—”
She quickly swiped it off the screen.
Zoey fell back onto the bed and covered her eyes. She had no idea what do now, and couldn’t think straight. The long trip, the roller-coaster adrenaline rush, the cold night, the warm bed. She lay on her side and felt herself melting into the mattress. Stench Machine was now prowling around the room, then Zoey finally realized he was looking for food because she hadn’t fed him, because she was horrible at everything. She dug out two cans of cat food from her suitcase—yes, she traveled with cans of cat food in her luggage, like the crazy cat lady she was destined to become—and looked around for a fork. Stench Machine ate a mixture of two different brands and she had to mash them together. She was pretty sure it was some kind of chemical reaction from the combination that made him smell so bad, but it was the only thing he would eat without following the meal with two hours of disapproving looks that would devastate Zoey in her current emotional state.
The room was forkless. Logically she could just mix the stuff together with her fingers or whatever random object she could find in the room, but she had no desire to put her fingers in cat food and, to be honest, there was something else tempting her out of the bedroom, and that was curiosity. So, telling herself she was doing it for her cat, she scooted the table and lamp away from the door and stepped cautiously into the hallway, trying to imagine how a person would find a common eating utensil in a sprawling palace like this. She thought about going back for her golf club and decided if the situation deteriorated into a golf club duel to the death, she probably was already screwed. She tried to see in the darkened hall and took a step, wincing at the sound of the squeaky floorboards trying to rat her out. As stealthily as possible, she took a left toward the stairs and immediately crashed loudly through a low pile of boxes.
Shoes went spilling everywhere. She squinted in the darkness and saw nine boxes containing nine pair of shoes—three different styles similar to the pair she had ruined, each in three different sizes ranging from 6½ to 7½. She found a note from Carlton the butler apologizing for not asking her size first, but saying that he had tried to give her a range of choices and that she should let him know if none were satisfactory. Zoey imagined a pair of goons forcing some Foot Locker manager to open his store at gunpoint in the middle of the night, to get their boss’s daughter a new pair of sneakers.
Zoey picked up the cat again and padded down the stairs, then almost screamed when once again Jacob Marley’s ghost came oozing out of the floor when she reached the landing.
“Scrooooooge!!!”
Stench Machine jumped out of her arms and bolted down the stairs, across the foyer, zipping through an arched doorway on the ground floor. Zoey followed him through the arch and found herself in a long dining room with a table that could seat probably fifty guests. The cat darted through chair legs and prowled cautiously through a doorway at the other end. Zoey followed him into a hallway.
At one end of the hall was a boarded-up door with red tape crisscrossed over it that said “WARNING: MOLD—DO NOT ENTER.” She headed in the other direction, but Stench Machine wouldn’t follow. Instead he prowled around the Mold door, sniffing and pawing at it, as if there was a mouse or something behind it. As Zoey went to go pick him up, Stench Machine took a step forward and passed through the door. Partly, anyway—his butt and tail were sticking out. Zoey went to the Mold door and passed her hand through it—the door was yet another hologram. She could see the little projector on the ceiling, and waving her hand in front of it could make entire vertical slices of the “door” vanish where she was blocking the beam. The illusion had been hiding a real door, another heavy one made of bronze, a foot beyond the fake one. She tried the handle but it was locked, because of course it was. Was this the vault?
She didn’t care to find out. She picked up Stench Machine and headed down the hall, then the big door clicked and squeaked behind her.
A stern voice said, “Who are you? How did you get in here?”
A guy she had never seen before had leaned out through the hologram, looking like a disembodied head had been nailed to the Mold door like a hunter’s trophy. Then the man stepped out toward her, a bald guy with a gun in a shoulder holster over a tight black turtleneck. He had cop eyes.
A voice from inside the room behind him said, “That’s the girl. Arthur’s daughter.” That voice was Will. Zoey had assumed everyone had left, but apparently Will had business in their secret room. The bald guy retreated back inside the room and Will leaned out past the hologram, his posture suggesting he was holding the door closed behind it. They were probably having an orgy back there. Again, Zoey had no intention of knowing either way.
He asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Nothing. I was just trying to find a … it doesn’t matter. Is that … is that the vault?”
“Yes, this is the vault, that’s why we’re all standing inside it and the door is open.”
“I don’t—”
“The vault’s in the basement. This is a private conference room. Finish doing what you’re doing and go back to bed. We’ll come get you in the morn—Hey!”
Stench Machine had twisted out of Zoey’s grasp and darted through the hologram and through the gap in the real door beyond. Zoey ran in after him, shoving past Will, through the metal door.
Will yelled “STOP!” then grabbed her wrist and twisted. Zoey went to one knee. The room had flown into chaos, as the cat had jumped up onto a table, trying to make off with what looked like a hunk of gray meat. The bald guy who had met Zoey at the door snatched the cat by the scruff of the neck and looked like he was going to tear him in half with his bare hands. Zoey screamed at Will to let go of her, but he was dragging her backward, back out of the door. Her wrist felt like it was going to break.
From her knees, Zoey twisted her body around and bit the first thing on Will she could find—his thigh. He cursed and let her go. Zoey got to her feet and was about to demand her cat back, then she saw what was sitting on the table, and everyone saw that she saw, and everything ground to a halt.
Lying on the table was a severed human hand.
ELEVEN
Everyone in the room stood silently in place, staring at Zoey, as if the universe had finally created a moment so awkward that it had stopped time itself. Echo Ling was there, wearing glasses and holding a long metal probe, as if she had been interrupted in the process of prodding at the severed hand. The wall behind her was covered in projections of X-rays and schematics. Zoey’s eyes bounced around the room, involuntarily etching what was surely incriminating information directly into her brain, seeing things these people would not allow to be shared with the world. Stench Machine meowed and that sprang Zoey into action, running over and grabbing him from the clutches of the bald guy with the cop eyes. She edged back toward the door, slowly, as if nobody in the tiny room would notice her leaving if she did it gradually enough.
She heard herself ask, “W-whose hand is that?” but she didn’t actually want to know, knowing would only doom her, as if she wasn’t doomed already. And what possible difference did it make?
From behind her, Will answered, “You don’t recognize it?”
That did it. In a blind, spastic panic, Zoey spun and shoved past Will again, through the hologram door, down the hall, through the dining room and into the foyer with the skyscraper Christmas tree. She ran right for the huge front doors, pulled a cold bronze handle—
Locked.
; Candi the holographic stripper blinked to life next to her, pouted dramatically, and in a babytalk voice said, “Ooh, I’m sooo sorry but house security isn’t allowing exits through the front doors, for your own safety. To make up for the inconvenience, Mr. Livingston will compensate you with a free bottle of champagne or a sexual favor of your choosing!”
Candi giggled and blinked away. From behind Zoey came the steady click of footsteps on the marble floor. Will was in no hurry as he emerged into the foyer, his face an uncanny valley of calm. Trying to scare her, Zoey thought, with how calm he was. It was working.
Zoey’s voice trembled as she said, “Unlock it. I’m leaving.”
The bald guy in the black turtleneck strode up behind Will. Two more men in black overcoats and hats appeared behind them, carrying guns that looked laughably overpowered for a Zoey-scale threat. Will Blackwater had henchmen.
Will said, “No, you’re not.”
“I-I won’t tell anybody. I don’t care about this place, I don’t care about you, I don’t care about what happens here or who you kill. Just let me go, let me go back home, and I won’t tell anyone, I won’t tell the police, my mom, anybody. I don’t even want the fifty thousand, just let me go.”
“And we will do just that. As soon as you open the vault.”
And all at once, Zoey was sure she would never see the sky again.
“Zoey,” Will said. “Think. What are your options here?” As he spoke, two more overcoats appeared—some silent call had been sent out to the house guards. “This is not your world. Now I agree that your father could be a real abscess and dragging you into this was unconscionable. But there is literally nothing else to be done but for you to open that damned vault and stop wasting our time.”
But you see, Zoey thought, what is wasted time to you, are my precious last moments on earth.
Zoey never answered, and Will took it for consent.
He nodded to the bald man and said, “Kowalski, escort her to the vault room.”
The man took Zoey by the upper arm and pulled her along like a little kid. He was dragging her toward another arched door, leading to the opposite wing of the estate. She did not resist. Zoey, her bald escort, Will, and an entourage of armed men in trench coats filed down a hallway, taking her into what under other circumstances would have been the most relaxing room she had ever been in—it was some kind of library or reading room, walls of leather-bound books surrounding ancient leather armchairs and, right in the center of the floor, a crystal-clear koi pond. Fish bearing iridescent scales of orange and white zipped around in the water, the room filled with the soothing trickle of a babbling brook.
From behind Zoey, Will said, “Grab the gold one.” Zoey tried to process those four words into some kind of meaningful command and finally noticed a single, gold fish darting around among the others. “The fish, Zoey. Reach down and grab it. It’s not real.”
She tentatively stuck her hand into the water and once again found that it was just a three-dimensional projection. She tried to grab the golden holographic fish as instructed, which turned out to be exactly as hard as catching a real one. She flailed at it and was starting to think she was the victim of an elaborate prank, but eventually she closed her hand around the image of the fish, at which point it instantly disappeared, along with the rest of the pond. The now-empty basin split apart, revealing a spiral staircase straight down.
Zoey said, “Okay, I did it. Just let me—”
“That’s not the vault. That’s just the entrance to the vault room.” Will gestured toward the stairs. “After you.”
Zoey descended, clanging down the spiral of stairs with one hand on the curved rail, the other clutching Stench Machine to her chest. A sprawl of gold coins came into view, as if the room below her was just piles of treasure, like Scrooge McDuck’s vault. Then she reached the bottom and realized that was just the flooring—it had been tiled with actual coins. Forget the vault, you could come down here with a chisel and scrape up enough money to retire on. And in Arthur Livingston’s world, this was how you decorated the entrance to the room the real riches were stored in. The vault itself was set in the wall in front of her, a perfect circle of ornate brass from floor to ceiling, the door probably weighing as much as twenty cars. There was no handle or hinges, just a giant, cartoonish keyhole in the middle about three feet tall and a foot wide.
The spiral stairwell had finished draining everyone into the room. The bald man, Kowalski, grabbed Zoey again and shoved her toward the vault door, the site of a future bruise throbbing a ring around her upper arm. She imagined some medical examiner noting it in her autopsy.
Will said, “See the keyhole? You’re the key. Go unlock it.”
“But … how? I don’t—”
“Stick your head in the keyhole. Keep it still, it has to scan your brain and match it to the print it has on file.”
Zoey walked tentatively up to the door, let out a breath, and stuck her head in the lock. A mechanism inside whirred and clicked. There were annoyed murmurs behind her. It hadn’t worked.
Zoey pulled her head out. A monitor off to the side of the door had blinked on at some point. In red letters it said: OVERRIDE: COERCION.
A female voice behind Zoey said, “Told you.” It was Echo. Zoey didn’t even realize she had followed them down. “You can’t coerce the vault’s owner into opening it. The software is programmed to stay locked if the owner shows emotional distress, so they can’t be made to open it at gunpoint. See, Will, because that would completely defeat the point of paying eight figures for a vault.”
Will rubbed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and said, “Zoey, we are not forcing you to do this. You want to leave here. You want this to be over. You are sticking your head in that giant keyhole willingly. Just … think that thought, in your mind.”
Echo said, “It doesn’t work like that.”
Zoey said, “I know you’re not going to let me leave the city alive.”
Will growled, “I promise you will be allowed to leave if you make that vault open. In fact, I will throw you over my shoulder and fling you over the goddamned border—”
Echo said, “Will…”
Zoey said, “You have no reason to let me go and every reason to shoot me and toss me in the river.”
To Echo, Will said, “Is there something we can give her to calm her down?”
“What, like a joint? Some Valium? It won’t open if it detects she’s intoxicated, either. This is Arthur Livingston’s vault we’re talking about, the first instructions he gave to the contractor was to make sure it wouldn’t open for him if he was drunk or stoned. Otherwise some call girl would have wound up owning the contents years ago.”
Zoey said, “It won’t open until I have some reason to think I’ll be allowed to leave here. I need some guarantee. If this thing can read my thoughts or my emotional state or whatever it does, it knows I think I’m going to die.”
“Well, what can we do to reassure you?”
Zoey turned toward the bald man, Kowalski. She eyed his shoulder holster and said, “Give me a gun.”
Will had heard her clearly, but still said, “What?”
“Give me a gun. I point the gun at you, I open the thing, and then I keep pointing the gun at you as I walk out.”
Will said, “There are six other guns in this room, you’d still have no chance against them if it came to a shootout.”
“I wouldn’t try to win a shootout. I’d only try to shoot you.”
Will clenched his jaw. Zoey let go of Stench Machine and held out a hand.
She said, “Consider it a gesture of good faith.”
“We’re obviously not doing that.”
Zoey crossed her arms. “Great, the longer we put this off, the longer I live. We’ll all stand in this room and grow old together.”
Zoey thought she could actually hear the man’s jaw clench. She said, “I can see it in your eyes. You so wish you could just torture me into this. Slap me around. Threaten me. Put a g
un to my head. But you can’t. The harder you push, the more locked that door gets. And Arthur knew it. He knew you would try this, and he knew the vault would stop you. It’s so funny watching you try to match wits with a dead man, and losing. Well, you want me to trust you with my life, you trust me with yours. What’s it going to be, Clenchy?”
Will met her eyes, let out an annoyed breath, then glanced at Kowalski and nodded. Kowalski raised an eyebrow as if to say “Really?” but then pulled his pistol from his holster, pulled back on the top of it to cock it or load it or whatever, and spun it around on his finger so the handle was pointed toward Zoey. He looked amused.
As Zoey took the gun, Kowalski said, “There’s no safety. You pull the trigger, it goes bang.”
“How do I know it’s loaded?”
He shrugged. “Point it at the ceiling and shoot. And hope nobody is standing up there.”
Zoey pointed it up, flinched, squeezed the trigger, and was shocked at how loud it was. Plaster rained down on her head. A little brass shell clinked off the coin floor and rolled away. Her ears rang. Everyone in the room looked like they had just soiled their pants.
She took a deep breath, turned, and pointed the gun at Will’s face. She saw something strange in Will’s eyes. Not fear—he looked like he had been on this end of a gun before. Not anger, either—the frustration that flared up earlier was gone. What she saw in his eyes, above the quivering sights of the gun, was a mind that was reconsidering her. Or maybe just considering her for the first time.
All four of the trench coats immediately raised stubby little machine guns at her, the men apparently having gotten a grossly exaggerated report of Zoey’s combat skills. Kowalski whipped another pistol from the back of his pants and brought it to bear, and she wondered how many guns he kept on his person at any given time. Will did not draw a gun. He only adjusted his cuff links and gestured toward the vault.