“But that just makes me worry even more,” she said. “I’m mostly concerned about
you,
though. Whatever you’re doing, it’s having a bad effect on you. You look absolutely terrible.” She swiveled my chair around to face her and laid a hand against my cheek. Her gaze flicked around my face, her big dark eyes making their little saccade movements. Then they widened.
“I’m not doing any of it for me,” I said, talking faster. “You’d approve, I swear. Maybe not of my methods, exactly, but you’d agree with what I’m trying to accomplish, and why.”
Her face softened. “You really believe that,” she said. “But then, why can’t you just tell me what it is? Maybe I can help.”
I shook my head. “I can’t involve you in this.”
“I can see you’re trying to protect me.” Cassie straightened up and crossed her arms, staring down at me in the chair. “But I don’t want your protection, Trevor. I want your
trust.
I want you to treat me like an adult. People have been protecting me all my life, making my decisions for me, and I’m fucking sick of it. I can take care of myself.”
“It’s not just you,” I said. “This affects other people, too. I can’t betray their trust.”
I put my hands on my knees and leaned forward on the chair, turning my face up toward hers. “But I won’t make any decisions for you, Cassie. I promise.”
Her gaze roamed my face, but there was no lie there for her to see. I had meant every word. The people who had made decisions for her—people she trusted, like Linebaugh and her uncle—had created an impossible situation for her. A devil’s bargain that she would be forced to go along with, while hating herself for it.
All I was doing was untangling that mess. I would give Cassie
real
options now—good ones—and the leverage to make her own choices without fear of repercussions. When the time came and my work was done, I would step aside.
The ultimate decisions about what she did with Frankenstein, the computer-literacy school, and the DHS detention center on her tribe’s land would be hers alone. I would make sure of that.
Apparently seeing that I was telling her the truth, Cassie uncrossed her arms and stepped forward. Wrapping her arms around my head, she hugged me against her. She stroked my hair, pressing the side of my head against her chest, my ear against her sternum. I couldn’t see her face anymore.
But I could hear and feel her heart, thumping fast against the inside of her ribcage.
“You’re asking so much of me,” she said. “But you’re so goddamned
earnest,
too. I just don’t know what to do with you.”
Her arms tightened, squeezing me against her.
“I hope I’m not making a mistake again,” she said. “Oh shit, Trevor, I hope you know what you’re doing, because right now I sure don’t.”
• • •
The snick of the lab door latch was loud in the silence. Cassie dropped her arms from around my head and took an awkward, wobbly step away from me as I turned to see who it was.
Roger stood in the doorway, one hand still on the handle, staring back and forth between us. “Oh, man. Kate said it, but I didn’t really think…” He blinked and looked at me with a strange expression on his face. “
Damn,
dog—”
Cassie crossed her arms. “What can we do for you, Roger?”
“Dude...” He shook his head but didn’t even glance at her. “Bennett—the Homeland Security guy? He’s gone.”
“Back to D.C.?” I asked.
Roger shook his head vigorously again. “No, man. He’s just fucking
gone.
MPs are searching the base right now. Last night, he was working next door in the administrative wing, but now no one can find him.”
C
assie, Roger, Kate, and I stood outside the main doors while MPs, accompanied by security personnel, swept our lab building—all five stories. Yesterday, to avoid drawing attention to the Trevornet’s antenna dish, I had pulled the strip of wire I’d used to disable the alarm on the stairwell to the roof. But I was more concerned about the mess of shattered robots inside Blake’s lab, and the lighting patch cord I had left dangling from the ceiling. As the security people escorted us out before the search, I had stopped to run my key card through Blake’s door. Poking my head into his brightly lit lab and seeing no sign of PETMAN, I had called Blake’s name. No answer. And I didn’t see his car in the parking lot.
Kate was eyeing me with aggressive contempt. She looked like she wanted to say something to me, so I turned away from her. I wasn’t in any condition to talk to anyone now, especially her. I felt overwhelmed and didn’t have the energy to hold my own against Kate’s nasty verbal sparring.
Last night’s events had taken a severe emotional toll on me. I was a burned-out husk, unable to think straight. I had to be careful or I would start making mistakes, and those mistakes would hurt the people I cared about.
The sad horror of Amy’s mental illness had torn a hole through my heart. But for her sake and for Jen’s, I needed to stay strong right now. I couldn’t help the people I loved if I fell apart in front of everyone.
Frankenstein was helping me but he, too, was depending on me. How awful it must be for him, knowing that others controlled his fate while he sat immobile, paralyzed, unable to do anything to protect himself? To be so intelligent and aware, and yet feel powerless and afraid like that?
Frankenstein had chosen to put his childlike trust in me, which was probably more than I deserved. But I wouldn’t let him down, either.
Lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed Cassie walking away. When I looked up, she was fifty feet from me, standing near the parking lot, with a phone to her ear. She had stepped away to make a private phone call—giving her uncle James a heads-up, no doubt.
Kate took advantage of Cassie’s absence to sidle over and hiss at me. “So, did you kill Bennett, too, now?”
“Fuck off, Kate.” I was too drained to come up with anything more intelligent. I tried to walk away, but she kept coming, like a persistent hornet.
“There is something seriously wrong with you,” she said. “Wrong in the
head,
Trevor. You probably killed both McNulty
and
Bennett, but you’re so screwed up yourself, you don’t even remember what you did.”
I turned away from her in disgust. Looking at Roger instead, I frowned.
“Why are
you
nodding like a retard?” I asked him.
He paled. “I was thinking of something else.”
Kate directed her venomous gaze toward Cassie, who was still on the phone. “We all know what you two are up to, back in that server room, all day and all night like a couple of rabbits,” she said. “You’re such a hypocrite, Trevor, but hey, you sure have
her
fooled. Too bad she doesn’t know you yet the way I know you.”
I raised my fingers to my temples and rubbed them in a circular motion, struggling to clear the muzziness in my head as I tried to put some distance between Kate and me. At any other time, I could have shut her up effortlessly, but right now I couldn’t muster the fight. She could see that my defenses were down, and she was taking full advantage.
I felt like a drug-befuddled little kid again, stumbling across the playground after a forced OD of Ritalin, getting bullied because I was too foggy to defend myself. I closed my eyes, trying not to hear Kate’s mean-spirited viciousness, but all I could think of was my daughter’s scared little face.
Kate stalked after me. “You think you can just get away with anything, don’t you?” she said. “But they’re going to put you away soon. They’re going to lock you up in a cage, where an animal like you belongs.”
Lock you up.
Involuntary commitment. That was what the bastards would do to my little girl if I didn’t get my shit together
right now.
The brutal thought jolted me like electroconvulsive shock therapy.
Involuntary commitment? I would
die
before I let anyone do that to Amy. The fog in my head cleared in an instant, leaving only ice-cold clarity and angry resolve in its wake.
“Hey Kate, if you shut the fuck up, I’ll buy you a shot of Tequila,” I said. “Or maybe fifteen or twenty of them.”
“Oh, hello, look who just woke up,” Kate said, more cautious now. “For a while there, I was wondering who I was talking to.”
“Why were you skulking in your lab the night McNulty died?” I asked. “Bars close early?”
“Asshole.” Kate glanced away. “Here comes your little slut. Try not to kill
her,
too.” Transforming her features into a polite smile, she nodded a welcome to Cassie before I could say anything in reply.
“Any news?” Cassie asked, joining us.
Kate shook her head, then touched Cassie’s forearm. “Listen, it doesn’t look like they’ll be letting anyone back inside anytime soon. Want to catch some lunch together? Just us girls?”
I knew that Cassie could handle Kate, so I moved a few steps away to think through what Bennett’s absence might mean. But glancing back at the two amiably chatting women, I couldn’t help but marvel at the contrast between them.
Cassie was six inches taller than Kate and leaner. Her black, asymmetrical emo hairstyle, with its one side-streak of pale blond-green, was shorter than Kate’s dark-red tresses, now pulled back in a tight ponytail. Kate’s complexion was milk pale, while Cassie’s mixed Native American ancestry gave her skin a nice, soft bronze sheen.
But the real contrast between the two women was in their personalities. Compared to Cassie’s gentle, thoughtful, compassionate nature, Kate was like something that had crawled out from under a rock.
I had once gotten a taste of who Kate really was, after last year’s Christmas party. And once was definitely enough for me. She was stronger than you would expect just from looking at her. She had managed to give me quite a struggle, that one time—leaving me with bruises that lasted into the New Year. I figured she could easily have done the damage to McNulty’s face, using a hammer or crowbar or something similar. I was also pretty sure that she had used her flying OctoRotor cameras to spy on me the night McNulty died. But had she murdered him?
I looked at Roger. I really had no idea what went on in his head, either. There had always been something a little off about the way he acted around me—an ambivalence I could never quite figure out.
And what about Blake? I wanted to let the old guy know I didn’t hold his little PETMAN joke against him, but why wasn’t he at work today? Setting me up that way revealed a streak of cold-blooded deviousness I never would have thought him capable of.
I needed to get all of them in front of Frankenstein as soon as possible and find out who was hiding what, before this blew up in my face and derailed everything I was trying to accomplish.
Pacing back and forth, I glanced up at the three plumes of steam rising from the geothermal plant up into the blue sky. My steps faltered, then halted, as I suddenly realized where Bennett was. Even worse, I wouldn’t be able to hide what I now knew, and just let someone else find him.
Ronald Bennett was about to become a big problem for me.
Walking to the corner of the building, I got out my phone and dialed Ricky in Engineering. He picked up right away. “‘Sup, Trev—”
“Where are you?” I asked him.
“B-one. Electrical. What’s up?”
“Head down to B-two—cooling level—right now. But stay on the phone. I need you to check something for me.”
I heard his footsteps banging down metal stairs and echoing in the enclosed stairwell. “Vegas was
awesome
, bro! You shoulda’ come with.”
“Yeah, next time,” I said. “Listen, check the supercomputer’s main coolant lines. Look at the junction where they enter the building, and tell me exactly what you see.”
A moment later, I heard him grunt. “I see a big problem. The main pipes have little ice crystals forming on their outsides—the water temp is way too low. I’ll grab the guys and head over to the plant, because we gotta get on top of this right away. Shit, Trev, this is really bad! If those coolant lines freeze solid—”
“Do NOT let that happen. I’ll meet you at the plant.”
“But… how did you
know
?”
I hung up on Ricky and jogged back to rejoin the others. I waved at the MPs in front of our building and beckoned them over.
They headed in our direction.
I shouldered in front of Kate, who was still yapping in her fake-friendly voice at Cassie. “Come on,” I said to Cassie. “I think we just found Bennett.”
• • •
Forming a tight crowd around the base of the geothermal plant’s smallest cooling tower, next to the administrative wing, we watched Ricky and his guys unscrew the bolts on the door-size panel that gave access to the geothermal heat pump’s condenser coils. Those coils were a critical part of the heat exchanger, drawing heat away from Frankenstein’s closed-loop water-cooling system. The colder the circulating water, the better—so long as it continued to flow. But if the water in the pipes froze solid and circulation stopped, then Frankenstein’s densely packed CPUs and GPUs would overheat and melt down.
With frost visible on the water pipes all the way over in the lab building, I was afraid we were very close to the freezing point now.
I couldn’t let that happen to Frankenstein. Overheating would damage and destroy his millions of sensitive processor cores, quite literally frying his brain. Even if we managed to avert that disaster by doing an emergency shutdown, Frankenstein’s newfound sentience might not survive the reboot.
Ricky bore down on his wrench, and the last bolt came loose. The other engineering guys slid the panel aside, and he peered through the gap. Then he grunted and took a fast step backward, holding his forearm over his mouth.
The sunlight fell through the widening opening, glistening on ice crystals and shiny coils of three-inch stainless-steel piping—and on the shadowed figure that stood upright in the doorway, covered with white frost, blocking access to the interior.
Bennett’s spread-eagled body bridged the narrow gap between two massive spring-like coils of water pipe that spiraled from floor to ceiling on each side of the opening. A horizontal connecting pipe ran between them at head height, and the corpse’s ice-stubbled jaws were clamped around it, stretching his mouth wider than should be possible. His eyes were wide, their sclerae glazed with a rime of ice, frozen in a terrified cataract stare.