The Invisible (21 page)

I look past him at the scrap yard, teetering towers of crushed cars as far as I can see. No movement. Not from people or machines or even rats.

“I know you weren’t born this way, Anthem.” He sighs, irritated with me. “Someone made you the way you are.”

“What way?” I shrug theatrically, opening my empty hands upward. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’ve all seen the footage. Do we have to go over this?”

I look away. Up at the graying sky. At the enormous sheets of metal leaning like huge thin dominoes against a teetering pile of drywall studs. The piles of flattened cars appear to shake slightly in the scrap yard and I tense up, alert for signs of anyone else here. But then the moment passes and all is still.

“I want to know who put those stitches in your chest, Anthem. The stitches Will told me about. That’s it. Easy peasy. You give me that, I give you your foul-mouthed friend Zahra back.”

So this is what Invisible has wanted all along. To be fixed. To become “like me,” though he has no idea what that really means. And Zahra is his bargaining chip.

I think of Jax alone in her lab, a pit of dread expanding deep in my stomach. If she runs to the police, she could be jailed for life for crimes she committed long ago. And if she doesn’t run, if she helps him—who’s to say he’ll ever let her go?

“And if I don’t tell you?” My voice shakes. Part of me already knows. But I want to hear him say it. I lift my leg slightly off the ground, prepare to grab the gun from my boot.

“I think you know the answer to that. Let me show you a little live feed I’ve got going on.” He pulls a phone from his pocket, looks at it, then flips it over so I can see it.

It’s a surveillance camera image, green and black, of Zahra sitting on a concrete floor in a narrow room the size of a garden shed, unfurnished. No windows. Her chin rests on her knees.

When the camera pans upward, I gasp.

Hanging from the ceiling above her, like party decorations, are hundreds of sticks of dynamite.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I look around me for a quarter-second. The scrap yard is empty. I am able-bodied and armed. He is in a wheelchair, holding a phone, with a smug smile decorating his glossed lips.

“Take me to her,” I whisper, walking toward him. He looks amused. There’s something in his eyes I don’t like. Something assessing and impervious and proud. “Or I’ll finish what that bullet started.”

“Do it,” he calls out, sounding bored.

I feel something bite into my upper thigh.

When I look down I find a purple plastic dart sticking to my jeans. It looks almost like a child’s toy. I fight a queasy slow-motion sickness rising inside me, grit my teeth, and pull it out. The tip of the dart is over an inch long, metal and wet.

I start to stay upright, turn to face whoever did this, but the poison is already working, radiating outward from my right leg, which is now refusing to move.

My vision starts to fade, purple creeping in from all sides, reminding me of the pink gas at the masquerade ball.

I’m too weak now to do anything but try and grab my gun and hope I can hold on to it long enough to get off a shot or two. I’m not thinking straight, can’t quite put together how shooting anyone is going to save Zahra, but somehow I sense there’s a connection.

The purple, hazy world of the scrap yard is slanted now, all the people—
so many goddamned people!—
moving toward us, out from behind the mountains of cars and metal.

It takes everything I’ve got to pull the gun from my boot, but I wrench it out at last. Only my fingers will not cooperate, and my hand refuses to close around the gun.

“Don’t hurt Zahra,” I say, but it’s garbled, my jaw floppy and uncooperative now.

I fall to the ground. The gun falls from my grasp. He looks down at me with a clinical sort of interest as I fumble for it on the ground. I’m touching the edge of it. The signals my brain is sending are getting scrambled, my body attempting to respond, but everything’s in sickening slow motion.

I try to ask if I’m dying now, but all I hear are loose syllables, just a string of nonsensical vowels where words should be.

“Look how long she’s fighting it. Amazing. She should be out cold.” The others nod. How many are there? Five? Ten? A hundred? I can hardly see now, the figures are ghostly shadows.

My head lolls backward until my skull smacks against the ground. I barely feel it. White pinpricks of light dot my vision. I can’t lift my head up anymore.

They’ve surrounded me, the Invisible army, over my shoulder, and they are coming out every which way, people dressed in black and white, the stupid eye on their shirts. They are young people, many younger than me. The purple goes gray, sweeping in from the periphery to cover everything so that I cannot see at all.

And then everything goes black.

“Hello? Hello hello, fast girl?”

I open my eyes. A man in a white lab coat snaps his fingers above my head. “Blink if you can hear me,” he says in a thick foreign accent. So help me, I blink.

“You are still a bit blue, but I think out of the woods. The IV did the trick. Sensitive system you’ve got. Whatever’s in your chest is a tricky one.”

“Where am I?” I try to ask, but it comes out garbled, like
whaama?

“Few more minutes, and I think the muscle relaxers will be out of your system. They gave you animal tranquilizers. Double dose of Tremorga. It should have been enough to take down a charging elephant instantaneously. All very amazing how you kept moving,” he said. “I look forward to meeting him.”

Who?
I breathe. It sounds right. Intelligible.
“Who?”

“Oh good. Mouth starting to work. Very very good. Your doctor, of course. You will lead us to him. And you have my word he will not be hurt. Unless he doesn’t cooperate. But we seldom find people unwilling to cooperate.”

No
, I breathe.
No no no.

“But fast girl, I am sorry to inform you that you do not have options.” The doctor genuinely looks sorry. He wrings his hands. The bags under his eyes are massive. He looks like a sea turtle. “You see, they will blow up your friend in three hours. Timers are set. It is the way of the leader of Invisible. He is wild about timers.”

The man sighs, as if it’s a tragedy that cannot be helped. As if he, a lover of peace and nonviolence, would never condone such acts.

“
Don’t let him
,” I whisper.

“It is not in my power, speedy girl,” the doctor says. “Do you want to see your friend? I have a screen. I am authorized to show you. You can look at her. You can see the clock.”

I lift my head from the gurney and look around me at the all-white, spotlessly clean room.

“You’ll be good to the doctor,” I whisper. “She’s a genius, you know. You’d be losing so much knowledge if you hurt her. You’d be hurting humanity.”

“Her? Very interesting indeed, I had not pictured a woman. We will not hurt her,” the foreign-born sea turtle–like doctor assures me. I wonder where he came from. Why anyone would leave their country to come here, to this place where nothing is fair and everything is tainted with violence. He seems kind. Crazy, but kind. “We only want to use her science to help our leader.”

“Why is he your leader?” I ask.

“We believe things have gone too far in a certain direction,” he says. “We believe it’s time for a . . . correction.” He blinks, hard, then he smiles down at me in a kind way. He pulls my hand up off the table and examines my fingers, which I see are still horribly blue at the tips. “We believe he will change things for the good.”

“By killing people?”

“Oh no, not at all. He’s absolutely nonviolent by nature. Violence inflicted on the very few is only a means to an end. For less everyday violence toward the very many.”

I nod, but in my head I think
lies
.

I reach down and feel for my gun. Of course they’ve taken it away.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

My head feels like someone sawed it in half and put it back together, but I think my legs work, and at least I’m forming sentences again. I slip down off the gurney and stand on my two feet, walking slowly around the large white room and swinging my arms over my head, rolling my neck, stretching and moving and testing to make sure all my muscles work again. The walls are coated in a shiny white plastic, like we’re on the inside of a balloon. As I stretch, I study an open cabinet full of medication. Most of it in plastic-wrapped clear syringes.

When I see a box of syringes marked Tremorga
^™
, I wait until the doctor begins to gather his tools with his back turned slightly away, then grab a handful and stuff them under my shirt, careful not to break them or snap their delicate metal tips.

As the doctor gathers up his tools into two black leather bags, I look at an open laptop set up on a table. I see Zahra, still sitting in the dark room. Terror is etched across her face.

And in one corner of the screen, red digital numbers of a timer, the seconds ticking down in three decimal places, the numbers slipping and slipping closer and closer to zero.

2h56m2945s to go. I take a deep breath as the doctor swings the door open.

“After you, speedy girl.”

I nod and step outside.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

The door to Jax’s lab has a complicated code inspired by the formula for the composition of sodium. I try it a couple of times, but my hands are shaking too much to get it right.

In the end, I knock. My chest whirs with foreboding, but beside me, the doctor appears relaxed. He straightens his tie under his lab coat, as if he wants to make a good impression.

After a long wait, Jax’s shadow appears in the peephole, then the door swings open. “Anthem,” she says, pulling me inside. “You look terrible.”

“Hello hello,” the doctor sings, stepping inside behind me. Then he carefully closes the door behind him.

“Who is this?” Jax looks at the man in the white coat. “A doctor?”

Already she’s nervous. On her guard. Ford and I know not to bring anyone here. Jax is very private. As a wanted fugitive, she has to be. Her door is always locked to outsiders.

“I’m sorry.” My voice cracks. I stumble over my words, tongue-tied. How can I possibly explain this? “He is hoping you can help him with a project.”

She nods, her silver curls springing out in all directions. Her big blue eyes wary. “A project?”

“This is . . . Doctor . . . uh, what’s your name?” I ask feebly. My eyes bore into Jax’s, trying to communicate many things—how sorry I am to have brought him. How she needs to be on her guard.

“You can call me Dr. I,” the man says, his eyes big as saucers, taking in the lab with its twenty-odd animals in cages against one wall.

“Fine, this is Dr. I. He’d like to work with you.”

“Work with me? I don’t really . . .” She trails off, sensing danger.

I move closer to her, conscious of the syringes under my shirt.

“We would like to consult with you about a difficult case,” Dr. I says. “And we can pay you very handsomely for your trouble.” He opens one of the bags and reveals dozens of paper-wrapped stacks of bills.

Jax turns to me, eyebrows raised. I nod, pressing my lips together. I let one of the syringes peek out from the bottom of my jacket.

She averts her eyes quickly, but she’s seen it. “That’s a lot of money,” she says to Dr. I.

“Half now, half when finished.” Dr. I smiles broadly. His teeth are very white. He has a deep dimple in his stubbly gray chin.

“When what’s finished?”

“Our project.”

“And what is that, exactly?” I ask.

“Medical rehabilitation.” Dr. I speaks as if he has nothing to hide. As if this is just a routine visit, doctor to doctor, and not the “rehabilitation” of a wheelchair-bound maniac with a taste for killing children. Obviously he’d like to walk again. And with Jax’s help, he probably thinks he can do that, and maybe more.

“Right. Dr. I, can I please say good-bye to Jax privately before I go?” I say, forcing my mouth to curve into a civilized smile.

“Of course, your time is running out,” he says, bowing a little as if it’s us who are in charge, and not him. “I will acquaint myself with your animal subjects,” he says to Jax. And he crosses the room to look in Mildred’s monkey cage, to study the dozens of white rats running on their wheels.

“What is this?” Jax asks, panic creeping into her voice. “Why are your lips so blue?”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “They captured me with a tranquilizer gun. They’re going to kill my friend.”

“Who?”

“Invisible.”

Jax gives me a blank look. I remember that she doesn’t get out much, doesn’t keep up with the world too well from inside her underground lab. “Have you heard about the group that calls themselves Invisible?”

“Ford mentioned something. It didn’t seem important. I may have not paid much attention.”

“Their leader is a pretty scary guy. Turns out he’s in a wheelchair. He thinks you can help him walk again. They’ve promised not to hurt you. I’m sorry, I had no choice.”

“I’m not a miracle worker,” Jax snorts. Figures she’d be stuck on the
help him walk again
part and not the
scary killers
part of what I’ve said. “I can’t fuse the spinal column back together, I can’t splice severed nerves . . .” As she talks, her hands flap around like two out-of-control birds.

“But you can bring a girl back to life with a hummingbird heart,” I remind her. “He knows about my . . . enhancements.”

“I mean, who knows. Maybe I can help, maybe not.” She blushes slightly. “I certainly haven’t helped Ford as much as I would like.”

Ford.
My insides rattle at the mention of his name. A momentary terror passes through me, that he’ll walk into the lab and see this. But I can’t do anything about that right now. There isn’t time. I just have to hope he’ll stay away until this is over.