Still. It had been self-indulgent to order the children delivered today. There was no one to attend to them when they woke from their drugged sleep. Hopefully that would not happen for hours yet. Their pod leader had been sent away, not being privy to the secrets of his enterprise. He’d decided years ago to outsource early child care for reasons of cost-effectiveness. Changing diapers and wiping mouths did not require millions of dollars of specialized training. The pod leaders were well paid to do exactly as he requested and to tell no tales—but they weren’t welcome on the premises today.
Once the actual programming of the children began, he used only DeepWeave programmed staff, so as to avoid misunderstandings. Only a DeepWeave alum could understand the totality of his vision, or have the necessary loyalty and commitment.
He sighed and swung the chair over, clicking on the video monitor of the quiet, out-of-the-way room where the children lay in their drugged sleep. No movement.
He swung over to the opposite bank of computers and checked the tracer embedded in Zoe’s clavicle, as well as the ones in Zoe’s cell and Rosa Ranieri’s. Zoe’s signal was stationary, but the two cells were clustered together, on the move. He hit the key that brought the overlaid satellite photo onto the map and zoomed in. Yes, it appeared to be the same vehicle. So it was true. They’d left Zoe unconscious in the storage unit, and one of the McClouds was driving his wounded brother to the emergency room. They had not determined which brother was wounded, but it hardly mattered. McClouds were interchangeable.
He grabbed the earbuds, listened. Muffled cursing and groans were all he heard. No conversation. King sat there, drumming his fingers. He disliked leaving the nerve center of his operation unmanned, but Melanie had not presented herself. Anger simmered inside him. He pulled up Melanie’s mortal commands from his personal database to have them fresh, at his fingertips. He’d ask her to swallow her own tongue. Choke to death at his feet. That would calm his nerves nicely.
He strode toward Parr’s room, thinking about the groaning, whining McCloud with his bullet wound. Odd. The research he’d done on the McClouds would have suggested utter stoicism in the face of pain. But one never knew. Some of the toughestseeming people were as soft as butter inside. And the opposite was also true. Take Lily Parr. Remarkable toughness. The riff about fertilizing her ovum for his next crop of research subjects had sprung into his mind out of nowhere while editing that video for Bruno, but the more he thought about it, the more the idea appealed.
Then again, he’d be gambling with the genes of her wretched failure of a father. Still and all. Chances were, her mother’s attributes would predominate. Howard had been intelligent—that trait he shared with his daughter in full. But he’d had none of Lily’s courage, her drive.
He mused about it tenderly as he inserted the key, imagining the results of the union of himself and Lily Parr. Their beauty, their fire. They might well surpass his and Magda’s progeny, in terms of potential.
The door swung open.
He stood, frozen, while the information battering at the doors of his perception simply would not enter. He noticed the video still rolling. A seventeen-year-old Lily Parr, taking a shower. One of his favorites.
Then the doors of his realization burst inward, all at once.
Melanie lay dead in the corner, mouth gaping. Her jaw, neck, and chest red with blood. Eyes bulging.
How . . . ?
The red dots on her arms came into focus. Transdermal Melimitrex VIII. There was at least five times a fatal dose stuck onto her wrists. He’d taken them for drops of blood at first glance.
Death had released control of her bodily functions. He gagged delicately. The silence of the place seemed suddenly menacing.
King backed out of the room, staring to the left, the right. This was unprecedented. Himself, alone in this huge place, with no allies. Just ten drugged teenagers in the programming room, two drugged toddlers in the far wing—and two hostile elements on the loose.
He sidled down the corridor, punching Julian’s code into his com.
“Sir?” Julian said. “We’re on our—”
“Get back here!” he hissed savagely. “Parr killed Melanie and escaped! I’m alone, and I don’t know where they are in the building!”
King hung up, peeking into the control room. Neither Ranieri nor Parr appeared to be in there, so he sped to the locked cupboard in the back, pulled out the revolver. Furious at himself for the arrogant choice of the Walther PPK as his emergency weapon. He’d liked the streamlined elegance of the small weapon. He’d considered it to have more a ceremonial value than anything else. Who could have dreamed of a situation in which he would need even six shots, let alone the seventeen of a semiautomatic? He’d molded an army to take care of those gritty details for him, and where were they all now?
Damn Ranieri. Damn Parr. He needed them dead.
A glance at the screen to track the tracers that identified Hobart’s and Julian’s positions showed them to be heading toward him at a gratifyingly fast clip, but still too far away for comfort.
He slunk to the door, peered out. Nothing but the creaks, pops, and moans of an aging mansion over a century old. A warren, full of places for concealment, possibilities for ambush.
He finally recognized the unpleasant sensation tugging at the underside of his intestines, like hanging icicles. It was fear. Banal, stupid, helpless fear of events that could not be controlled.
How dare they put him in this position. He, who had gone so far, accomplished so much. Anger steadied him.
They would pay for making him feel like this. They’d both pay.
Screaming.
Pain.
Jagged, flashes of light, and every jolt, every sway hurt.
Zoe’s eyes burned, her ears roared. A warm stream of blood was coming out of her nose. She was used to it. It was a common side effect of her special meds. But it tickled.
Zoe tried to reach up to scratch it. Her shoulders flared like hot coals. She was trussed, arms behind her back. The pain began to come into focus. Dark, smothering. A plall tarp, stinking of mildew, over her mouth. She struggled, coughed, spat blood.
Someone ripped the plastic shroud off her face. It let in a cold, sweet rush of oxygen and a flood of blinding light.
“Coming around?”
Slap, slap,
the blows made her skull pulse with white-hot fireworks of agony. “Had a nice nap?”
She squinted to squeeze tears from her eyes, which felt swollen, full of fluid, like they were going to pop out of her head. Focused on the face.
Dislike registered before recognition did, but it clicked into place in a second. Hobart. That useless sack of shit who had been on her team in Seattle. The one who had fucked her up with incomplete supplies and inadequate intel. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking out the trash,” Hobart said.
She struggled again. “Untie my hands.”
Hobart just smiled. “No.”
Alarm jangled through her nerves. “What do you mean, no? Undo my goddamn hands! When I tell King what you—”
“King is going to Level Ten you as soon as we get back to base,” Hobart sneered. “You’re done, bitch. You are so culled.”
She jackknifed up so that she almost rammed her head into his face. He rocked back, evading her. “No!” she shrieked. “He trusted me! All alone! He sent me on a mission to—”
“It was a suicide mission. He was getting rid of you. Anyone with a brain that still functioned would have seen that. But you’re trashed, Zoe. Strung out on Melimitrex. He was going to Level Ten you as soon as you mowed down the McClouds and the Ranieris, since it was such a simple task, no intelligence involved. But you couldn’t even handle that much. Pathetic, you know? Really embarrassing, for one of us.”
She shook her head, rejecting his words. “No! No, why would he send you to pick me up if he was going to—”
“Use what few synapses are still firing in your brain and figure it out.” Hobart’s voice dripped false pity. “He couldn’t risk you ending up with the police, pulling an auto-destruct, like you antiquated older models were programmed to do. Like Nadia. We’re too exposed.”
“But . . . but he—”
“And you want to hear the really shocking part? We just found out that Lily Parr killed Melanie. And King is back at headquarters, all alone, with her and Ranieri on the loose, until we get back. Because of your incompetence, we’re still miles away, Zoe. He’s completely exposed, with two enemies on the loose. Think about that. Just think about it.”
The horror of it transfixed her with guilt.
Hobart nodded, pleased with her remorse. “You’ll see, when we get back. He’ll fix you. And I hope I get to watch.”
It ricocheted in Zoe’s brain, echoes swelling, horribly loud.
Pop,
a pinpoint of agony bloomed in her eye. Too much pressure. Flashes of light. She saw Hobart’s face through a veil of red. God, how she needed another patch. Her heart swelled, pounding like a trip-hammer.
Lies. It was all lies, the jealous, scheming, lying dickhead. “Undo my hands.” Her voice shook now. “I need a patch.”
Hobart laughed at her. “Fucking junkie trash. No reason to waste meds on you. You’re being flushed, bitch. Down the tubes you go.”
His face wavered, swam through that fog of red. His eyes began to glow, like red-hot coals. His mouth was open, laughinge had fangs, like a predator, a panther. A demon. She couldn’t get any air. Her lungs were locked.
A demon.
Both of them were demons. It all fell into place with a quiet
click.
How could she not have understood before?
Hobart and Julian were demons. They didn’t love King, not like she did. They were only interested in power. They were malfunctions, abominations. They should have been culled at birth. They would stab him in the back if she did not stop them.
She was the only operative whose love was entirely pure. The only one who could protect him from the enemies who stalked him.
Hobart’s demon face swam and wavered, and suddenly he yanked the smothering plastic back down over her face. She vibrated inside her dark plastic cocoon. Galvanized by her holy mission. She would save her King. She was the chosen one. Made for this, by his own hands. Molded, by his brilliant mind. He was her maker, her love, her God.
She was the one. The sureness of it steadied her, made her strong. He would see it in the end. She knew he would. He had to.
They belonged to each other. Forever.
34
S
o many rooms. Lily fumbled, inserting key after key, all unmarked, all perfectly similar. Room after room, some crowded with rotting furniture, some empty. The last three doors had not opened at all.
Click.
Finally, one opened, and light floode
d out. Lily peered in and realized why the three doors had not opened. They’d been boarded shut, since a block of rooms had been remodeled into one long room, pure and clean and starkly white. Crowded with blinking, gleaming medical equipment—and beds. The beds were not empty.
She scanned them. Sixteen beds, ten occupied. She tiptoed in with a sense of dread, swiftly ascertained that Bruno was not there.
These were young people. That boy couldn’t be more than fourteen. The girl next to him looked even younger. What in the hell? They were strapped down. Leather restraints, webbing. Hands, feet, chests, heads. They wore goggles, earphones. They were covered with sensors, wires. They twitched and moaned.
She stood there, shivering. Bruno was not here. She had no business poking her nose into the filthy secret doings of these people. But something prodded her deeper into the room.
A couple of them seemed about twelve. She stopped at one who looked like she might be dying. A girl, Asian. Her body arched against her bonds, her head thrashed, her feet drummed. Her wrists were welted from her frantic struggling. The sounds coming out of her sounded like pleading, as if she were being beaten.
Bruno’s dreams.
Oh, God. That was what the girl was experiencing. It came to her like a splash of ice water. The experiments that had been done on Bruno. Happening, in real time, to these kids.
Lily was tempted to unhook the girl, but then what? Would she scream? Would she see Lily as another opponent and attack her?
No. She couldn’t. The girl in the last bed, a blonde, was in the same condition as the Asian girl, thrashing and gurgling. The others just twitched and moaned, like dogs having running dreams.
Lily backed toward the door, murmuring a silent apology to them.
Bruno. Keep your mind on Bruno. No more distractions.
She peed out into the corridor, unnerved to find the coast still clear. What the hell were they all up to? She was too insignificant for them to bother with, maybe? Great. She darted to the next door. The next. The corridor made an L-curve, revealed another hall, just as long.
She worked her way doggedly down the hall. On the last door, the key clicked and turned and admitted her into a dim room, shrouded by heavy velvet drapes. A suite. She had to check connecting rooms. All this effort would be in vain if she missed Bruno out of sheer sloppiness.
The place felt deserted. The connecting room was a bathroom, with a door on either end. She peeked into the next room and saw two cribs in the light filtering through the narrow strip between the drapes.
She moved closer. Children were in them. Babies. They were very still. Pale. Oh, God. She crept closer, hung over the first crib, her hand clamped to her shaking mouth.
Please
. Don’t let them be dead.
They appeared to be alive. She touched a cheek. Cool, not cold. Toddlers, not babies. She wasn’t much of a judge, but she figured this one was about two. So was the other.
Two plastic travel bucket seats, with clips for fastening into a car, were perched by the wall. They had webbing restraints. No machines were hooked up to the babies, thank God. Then she saw the needles on the table. Sterile physiological solution, a clutter of powder-encrusted drug vials. A baby monitor. She spotted the vidcam. Someone could be watching. Sounding the alarm. Bells ringing, feet pounding.
She reached into a crib, held her hand in front of the child’s nose, wishing she had a mirror. She could barely feel hot moisture, blooming with each exhalation. So slight, but they were alive.
It reminded her of the times she’d tried to find Howard’s pulse, Howard’s breath, amid a litter of hypodermics and other junkie trash. A sick, stomach-clenching memory.
Babies. God help her. She could afford to help these little ones even less than the teenagers. They were twenty-five to thirty pounds each, and fast asleep. If they did wake up, they’d scream the house down.
If she could find Bruno, maybe she could carry one, and he could carry the other. The authorities would have to help save the other kids. She closed the door quietly and continued with the doors. Empty . . . empty . . . empty.
Then a key caught, turned . . . and the door creaked as she shoved it open. She practically fell inside.
Bruno lay on the floor, tied hand and foot, his dark eyes open but strangely empty, as if he didn’t recognize her. His face was white. Lip swollen and split, nostrils encrusted with blood. His eyes were hollow, shadowed.
But it was Bruno, and he was alive.
“Oh, thank God. Thank God.” She ran to him, sobbing like an idiot, fumbling to separate the little knife on the key chain of her bunch of keys. She was babbling, incoherent. She sawed at the hard plastic cuffs that cut deeply into his empurpled wrists. Then the ankles.
He rolled up onto his side, sucking in air, a wheezing gasp of pain. She helped him sit up and hugged him, like she’d been dreaming of doing ever since she woke up in her cell. But he was stiff in her arms, like a block of wood. All his vibrant, buzzing vitality gone.
A horrified notion occurred to her. “Oh, God, are you injured? Your shoulders? Or your back? Did I hurt you when I cut the cuffs?”
He coughed, wincing. “Not injured,="0em">
“Oh, thank God.” She tightened her arms around him again. His lack of response was weird. He was so strange. Not himself at all.
And not happy to see her. Not one little bit.
Fear uncurled inside her, like dark whorls of smoke. “Are you, um, drugged?” she asked, almost hopefully.
“No,” he said.
Well. That was uncharacteristically terse. She smoothed his hair back off his forehead. “My poor baby,” she murmured. “They beat you.” She touched the bruised cheekbone, his split lip with her fingertip.
He flinched away. “Don’t!”
She was alarmed. “Bruno?” Her voice was small.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said thickly. “Did he not tell you?”
“Tell me what?” she asked. “Who? King? He told me all kinds of things. Not many of them were worth knowing.”
He made an impatient gesture. “Quit it with that. What I mean is, did he tell you that I know?”
“Know what?” She was baffled to tears.
“That the game’s up,” he replied. “No need to pretend anymore.”
“Pretend what?” She was yelling. She tried to breathe. Think this through. He turned to look through the doorway, and she saw the blood encrusted in his hair. Understanding dawned with wrenching tenderness. She touched the egg-shaped knot on his skull.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “You have a head injury. Do you have a concussion? Are you nauseous? Let me look at your pupils.”
He batted her hand away. She tried not to feel hurt. After all, he was in pain, injured, addled. “Bruno?” she asked. “What is this?”
His lips were flattened, as if something was hurting him. His face looked so different with that stark mask. Unrecognizable.
“Cut it out,” he said. “I know. So don’t do this.”
Her practical side kicked in. Screw this. They could have this conversation later, after Bruno had gotten a shot of painkillers and a CT scan. “Well, hell. I don’t know what you’ve found, but there’s some stuff I found.” She got to her feet, yanked his hand. “Let me show you.”
Bruno got up, but the world swirled, swung, and he found himself draped over Lily’s shoulder, and she was scrambling to keep her feet beneath herself.
He wrenched away, at the cost of bouncing into the wall. Touching her hurt him. Just looking at her hurt him. Those searching eyes. She was saying something. He couldn’t understand. Sound cut in and out of his head. Something about kids, machines. Babies.
He couldn’t take it in, any more than on her previous visits. She’d been here several times. An angel of mercy at first, and then she morphed, turned seductive and whorish, laughing at what a fool he’d been. Those visits had been interspersed with visits from Rudy, a bloody knife in his hands. And Mamma, wearing her death wounds.
Then his vision would clear, and he would see the room, the floorboards. Feel the bonds cutting into his body.
This new dream-Lily was using a new strategy. She looked more vulnerable, face white, hair tangled. Eyes full of love. She was going for realism this time. Drawing him in, making him want to protect her . . .
You’re my champion.
And whammo, she’d put it to him. Straight to the tender parts.
He wanted her to go away. Either she was a bad dream, or she was a bad reality. But she was such a beautiful bad dream. She could tempt him to stay in the dream world forever. Except that he’d be crazy.
He was probably well into crazy already, though. He stared at Lily, wondering why she didn’t dissolve into smoke, like the others. This dream-Lily was stubborn, like the real one he thought he’d known. She tugged his arm. Wanted him to follow her somewhere.
The memory floated up like a bubble, perfectly formed in every detail. The video footage King had shown him.
I love you. Just you. Only you.
The phrase King had taunted him with:
You’re my champion.
He remembered how that phrase had functioned on him, when she’d said it to him in the diner. Like a switch flipping on, lighting him up like a torch. He’d have done anything for her. He would have died for her. Still would. He stared at her moving lips, her earnest eyes. Strange, that he was hip to the facts and still felt all the same feelings. He was still tempted to give in to the fiction, though it made no goddamn sense at all to perpetuate it, now that her boss had spilled the beans.
But she was a dream. Hey, dreams didn’t have to make sense.
All he wanted was to go back to that fantasy world where Lily was everything she’d said she was. Where he really had saved her, where she really did love him. Where Lily really did open the door, run to him, and cut his bonds. But any minute, he’d wake up, face flat to the floor.
You’re my champion
. She’d used that phrase to reel him in, bend him to her will. Twice. There was no other way King could have known about those exact words. No one had overheard those conversations. The first one in the diner, at four in the morning, at a secluded booth. Even less so the second time, at the cabin, in bed, just himself and Lily.
Those were the facts. He knew what he knew. Even if he hated it. Even if it killed him.
Lily dragged him down the corridor. He wondered if he should be resisting her, just on principle. But why bother? It was all a dream. He might as well go where she took him. See what trash his subconscious mind was littered with. He’d be back on that floor soon enough.
Her voice was shaking with emotion. So convincing. He trotted along behind her. His head hurt. Would a hallucination be so detailed? Cold hands? Pain? She stopped in front of a door, dragged out a bundle of keys. He almost laughed. What a discordant note in the fantasy. How did his dream Lily get a hold of those keys? A kung fu duel with one of King’s operatives? One of the bad guys had a hole in his handbag?
He should have head-butted her the second she cut him loose and run like hell, dream or no dream. It was the dignified thing to do, on any plane of reality. She opened the door, and her words registered. “. . . like your video game dream. And it’s killing some of them!”
The reference to his video game dream jolted him. He looked into the room. Saw the kids on the beds. Goggles, earphones, machines—
Memory thundered over him. He knew that room. Desperation. He thudded to his knees, braced himself against the door, retching.
Lily’s hand, on his arm. “. . . so sorry! I didn’t think. About your memories, of how it would affect you. God, I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”
“Don’t think.” He wrenched free and staggered in, ignoring her anxious voice. Stared down at the first cot. A boy, black, gangly, stringy, and muscular. Hooked up just as Bruno had been for hours of torture.
He yanked the earphones off the boy, jerked the goggles off, tore off the sensors. There was an IV drip. He untapped it, plucked out the needle, left it dangling, dripping its poison out onto the floor. He jerked loose the restraints and smacked the boy’s face. “Hey! You! Wake up!”
The boy’s eyes fluttered open, dilated. He bolted upright with a scream. Bruno grabbed him while he thrashed and flailed. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” he muttered. “You’ve got to get out of here, kid. Can you run?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lily doing the same to the girl in the next bed. He heaved the black kid off the table and shoved him in the direction of the door. The kid stumbled, tottered.