“Well,” he says. “I guess I have a bargaining chip after all.”
“Didn’t you assume that from the beginning?”
“You never know,” he says. “People have been known to waste what’s right in front of them.”
It’s true. They have.
He picks up his tea, and his teacup slips out of his sweat-slicked, unsteady hand, crashing to the floor. He stares after it, at his hands, which are shaking. He touches his face, feeling the sweat on his cheeks, and he looks at me. I stand up, realizing that staying as long as I did may have been a mistake.
“They’re not coming,” he says. “You’re the only one. Why—what did you do to me—what’s happening?”
I step away, and he reaches out and grabs my wrists. I can feel his inhuman strength, and I wonder if I’m about to find out just how wrong I was that he wouldn’t turn it against me.
“The FBI came first. They told me what you’d done. The CIA came second. And they wanted me to make you an offer—to tell you that if you gave me your formula to bring back to the US, and it was useful to them, you could come home. There’d be no charges. They knew you were here, but they thought I’d be able to approach you.”
“But instead,” he says, “You decided to kill me.”
“I demanded your notes. I said I needed whatever they had so that I could tell—or at least guess—before leaving China whether you were giving me fake information. They gave me what they had. I designed a bacterium that’s harmless to most humans. Harmless, in fact, to any human who hasn’t had the serum. It’s fatal to you. It undoes, but only partially, what your serum did for you.”
“I don’t need to kill you,” he whispers. “They’ll kill you.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I’m going to tell them that your serum wasn’t as good as you thought. That you died from its effects. Hopefully that’ll discourage them from further research.”
“What if it doesn’t? What if they just start with the notes I left behind? You don’t think the US Military will kill thousands to get this serum?”
“No,” I say, honestly. “Not because they aren’t evil. But because in the end, even the strongest, fastest, smartest human is still a human, and still the weakest link in the chain.”
Overcome with dizziness, Andrew lurches to the side, grabbing his table for support; he tries to lower himself back to his chair, but misses, and lands hard on the floor. His window to kill me has probably closed.
He covers his face with his hands, and then says, “You’re a terrible liar. You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met. You barely fooled me for five minutes and I don’t think you’ll be able to fool the people who sent you.”
“Maybe not,” I say. “But if your serum dies with you, it’ll still be worth it.”
He laughs, very faintly, and waves toward a corner. “My laptop,” he says. “Password is your name.”
His clothes are soaked with his sweat, and now he’s starting to cough, as his lungs fill with fluid released from their own cells. He gasps for air, like Tom did. Unlike Tom, his eyes are open. Open, and fixed on me. I watch as the whites of his eyes turn red, then black, as the blood vessels in them hemorrhage.
* * *
One summer day when we were sixteen or seventeen, we went to a park and climbed up onto the roof of the picnic shelter and watched the sunset, and watched the sky grow dark, and then lay on the warm roof and looked up at the sky and watched for falling stars. It was the night of a meteor shower and my parents weren’t willing to let me stay out all night to watch it at its height (which was supposed to be three to five AM) unless I wanted to do that from our backyard, but they were willing to let me stay out until midnight, so that’s how late we stayed.
“Are you going to wish on the falling stars?” he asked.
“That seems silly,” I said. “I mean, they’re not anything magical. They’re caused by debris from a comet. They just look cool.”
“You’re so scientific,” he said, complaining a little. “I bet you wished on shooting stars when you were little.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“So what did you wish for when you were little?” he asked, when I didn’t elaborate.
“I wished for a friend,” I said. “It wasn’t just falling stars, either. First star of the night, white horses, whatever. I always wished for a friend.”
* * *
The story I’m going to tell is that he was dead when I arrived.
Andrew’s right that I’m not a very accomplished liar. But this is a simple lie.
They will definitely want his laptop. But he’s given me the password—and that means I can ensure that the data is unrecoverable, even if he didn’t.
I take gloves out of my pocket, pour out my tea, and return the cup to the cabinet, thinking about the step I’m about to take. Laptops are often very personal. Mine has my work in progress, but it also has notes, journal entries, letters, musings, poetry.
I would very much like to take the time to read all the things on Andrew’s laptop that are not his research notes for the serum.
But I’ve already murdered my friend; if I don’t destroy his notes, that will have been for nothing. So I wake the laptop, unlock it. I format the hard drive, then encrypt the formatted drive, making a fist and tapping the keyboard randomly to create a key for the encryption. Then I close the laptop and slip it into my bag to bring home, and sit down at the table, and wait for the rise and fall of Andrew’s chest to stop.
Naomi Kritzer Page 4