The Invisible (28 page)

Turns out he’s worried for nothing. Someone in a janitor’s uniform is moving quickly toward the building, a young man wearing headphones, oblivious, almost staggering with exhaustion after the night shift. He walks past and Harris can smell the bleach on his hands. The janitor puts the key in the door and Harris waits until he’s most of the way inside and the door has swung most of the way shut to push it open again. He walks inside with his head held high. Confident the janitor won’t question him, Harris moves toward the stairs like he owns the place.

Maybe he
should
own the place, come to think of it, if this is the kind of home Reggie is going to insist upon. But he’s here to talk sense to her. To make her see reason. To finally, god help him, meet the boyfriend.
The Hope
. Such a ridiculous name. He’s ready to accept him, even though he refused to even meet him before. Because he’s realized during her months-long absence that all he wants is for Reggie to be with someone better than he is. Someone with good beginnings, not foul ones in the bosom of the Syndicate.

He goes up the stairs two at a time, his heart racing at the prospect of finding her at last. He peeks out a tiny barred window when he gets to the fourth-floor landing and sees Serge smoking outside the Seraph, the cream-colored hood reflecting the candy-pink sunrise. Maybe Reggie will be so happy to see him she’ll come home with them today, he thinks crazily. He’s suddenly so full of optimism as he turns to walk down the hall toward 4B that he does a little hop-step—a dance move he hasn’t done since he was a teenager.

After ten minutes of jimmying the lock, sweat pouring down his sides in a way it hasn’t in years as he coaxes the bolts into position, he finally succeeds. He pushes the door open slowly, his heart in his throat. Pictures standing over her bed, shaking her awake, her eyes crusted with sleep, offering his apologies while she’s groggy, before her anger takes over, before she can get her back up. Meeting the boy. Accepting the boy. Harry will do whatever it takes to get his family back. He was stupid. He’ll tell her that. Just needs to catch her unaware, before her fury blinds her to reason.

God, to think she’s been living in this building, fire hazards everywhere he looks, not an extinguisher in sight, the hallway smelling of urine and soup and mold.

His daughter, his angel. Harry has done all he has done to make sure he never had to smell this again—it’s the smell of impoverishment, of hopelessness. And this is where she ends up, right back in the thick of squalor.

The door creaks on its hinges and reveals a dark apartment, but before Harry can even focus his eyes, can even find his way, there is the a
ping—
a bullet released, passing through a silencer; Harry knows the sound as well as he knows his own heartbeat—and he ducks, though not quickly enough.

His shoulder explodes with pain.

What Harry knows is this: Someone is shooting at him. He cries out, can’t help it. The shattering of bone is hard to take stoically. Another
ping
. A second bullet barely misses him. His reaction is swift. Instinct takes over. It has had years of practice, this instinct. Decades upon decades as a violent man have ingrained his response, honed his timing. This is what he knows: Kill or be killed. A figure behind a table rises up for a half-second, and the little punk is all he needs to see before he grabs his gun from inside his jacket. Short dark hair, a baseball cap. Grubby punk who wants his girlfriend’s father dead.

He will kill the little turd. End it right here. Shoot now, explain later.

All of this flashes through his mind in a tenth of a second and he moves toward the table, kicks it at the kid. The kid goes flying back, eyes shining in the hushed blackness of the room like a forest creature, and Harry shoots.

It is swift, the bullet. Harry is an excellent shot. He’s been doing this a long time. Longer than he’d like to admit. No thought of aiming to wound. No, Harry Flatts—Harris Fleet to everyone but himself—aims to kill. That’s who he is. Always will be.

But when he bends over the punk kid, something is not right. The cheeks. Even in the pitch dark he can see they are smooth. That pointy chin. The body is funny. Too narrow. The hands are the strangest part of all. So small, so soft.

Oh god. Oh god. Harry’s hands fly into the air when he sees what he’s done. His gun clatters to the floor. This cannot be. Cannot. Impossible.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

Officer Rodriguez leads me into a high-security meeting room with cameras in all four corners underneath the central police station. The walls are brushed metal. The table is brushed metal. The chairs are black metal. Everything is bolted to the ground. And it’s sweltering.

“Sorry, the air conditioning system is out this week,” Officer Rodriguez says before she leaves. “I’ll be right outside the entire time. This mirror is a window. I can see you.”

“Thanks.” I wipe sweat from my brow and stick a finger under my black wig to scratch at my hairline. “I really appreciate this.”

“Least I can do.” She smiles, and her teeth are bright white against her tanned skin. “Gotta get a few privileges for capturing Public Enemy Number One. You just let me know what else you need, okay? Anything, really.”

When I had called her and asked to speak with Aaron, there was a long pause on her end of the line. “You want to . . . talk to him?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think he has some information about my family.” Why not be honest, at this point?

“I’ll call you back with a time and place” was all she said next. When she called me back, she told me to come wearing a wig, and to enter through the back of the building. In front is a media frenzy full of reporters, but the back, where all the beat cops hang out, was clear of photographers.

And now that I’m here waiting, adjusting my black bobbed wig to try to make it less itchy, it’s obvious she’s taken some risks to make this happen. Maybe bribed the guards here to keep it quiet. Because this is the kind of story the media would jump on, if given even a scrap of information to run with.

There’s still so much talk about the New Hope. My mother has been giving me funny looks ever since the day the buildings sank—it’s not lost on her that Invisible was captured the same day I insisted on leaving my parents for exactly three hours. But she hasn’t come out and asked me anything, so I don’t mess with the lie.

I smile at Rodriguez from the black metal chair, my heels bouncing off the floor with nerves, and she salutes me, then peeks her head out just as the sound of footsteps—one pair of feet walking normally and another walking with a drag—reaches my ears.

Goose bumps break out across my forearms, and I jump up to stand because sitting feels too passive. Too dangerous, somehow. Anything could happen down here. Aaron will be moved to a bigger facility after his trial, but for now he’s housed here, in a maximum-security ward in the bowels of the central police station.

He fills up the frame of the doorway, a bulky guard in uniform at his side. He’s in an orange jumpsuit. His ankles are shackled, a long chain between them. His legs—which still sort of work—appear stiff and bent at slightly wrong angles, the knees bowing out when they should bend forward. He is handcuffed.

I force myself to look at his face. Without the eyeliner, he’s just a little less striking. His eyes still have that light in them. That blazing, penetrating blue. His mouth forms a smile that is sarcastic and knowing and cruel and vulnerable all at once. The guard pushes him forward and he nearly falls, but rights himself as best he can, his left foot dragging across the linoleum behind his right, both legs shriveled and strange.

“Sit,” the guard says. Once Aaron is seated, the guard produces a huge set of keys and twists one into the hole in the center of the table. A round metal joint in the center opens up like a mouth and the guard shoves Aaron’s handcuffs toward it. A moment later, the chain on his cuffs is fastened to the table. He slumps over the table now, closer to me than I’d like. But he has no choice. The chain is so short.

“You have ten minutes,” the guard says.

We watch him leave. I wait until I hear the click of the door closing behind him. Then I dare to look Aaron in the face. He’s three feet away from me. He has a beard growing in, a dark shadow across his cheeks and chin.

“You’re my first visitor,” he says. His eyes are blank, focused on my shoulder instead of my face, but I detect sadness in the set of his mouth.

“What about your Invisible army?” I ask. “Nobody come to slip you a shiv?”

“Just a lawyer who says I’ll be lucky not to get the death penalty.” He just shrugs and stares at the mirrored wall. I wonder what he sees in there. How lonely he must feel. And then without meaning to be, I’m filled with pity for him, thinking about his childhood and what was taken away from him. He was abandoned, left by everyone who’d meant anything to him. And now his goons have abandoned him, too. For good reason, this time. He’s a charlatan, a huckster with a half-baked plan. Without his army and his videos, he’s just empty words, an empty person. That must all seem so clear now to the ones who haven’t been arrested. “All the rest of them care about right now is finding more drugs like the stuff I gave them. They won’t, though. Doesn’t exist without me.”

I think of what Ford said:
Drugs kept them loyal.

The only one who didn’t abandon him might have been my sister.

“Nice wig. You look good as a brunette.”

“Thanks.”

“Are your legs . . .” I trail off, not sure what I want to ask, curious to know if Jax put an expiration mechanism on them, if a time will come when they will fail him completely. If such a thing is even possible.

“They took away the braces. Your . . .”—he pauses here, clears his throat—“friend could only do so much. She gave me the spinal cord fusion I needed to be able to walk with the braces. We’d been working on them for years. Without them, I’m still a gimp. Upright, but a gimp.”

“Oh.” What else can I say?
Sorry?
A shudder of anger rocks through me and for a split second, I’m back in the room where I found her slumped against the wall. And all the pity I might have felt for Aaron Lift melts into white-hot anger again. “I would tell her about it, but as you know, she’s dead.”

“Sorry.” He clears his throat again, a cough. “Really. I’d do it all differently if I could.”

“Right,” I snort. “You wouldn’t be in jail, is what you mean.”

“Is that why you came? To talk about your doctor? Look, I’m sorry she’s dead. My guys got carried away. They’re lunatics, you know. I liberated a big group of them from the psych ward at Weepee Hills. They needed good drugs to function as well as they did, and sometimes they took too much. I tried to regulate it, but I couldn’t always keep close tabs.”

I nod and sit back.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here because I want to know about Regina. We’re both quiet for a long minute, staring the other down.

His neck pulses. I watch the vein go up and down, noting his flared nostrils. I wonder if his hands weren’t fastened to the center of the table, if he would lunge. And what I would do in response.

“I came here to talk about my sister,” I finally say. It’s so hot in here I feel sweat pooling in the small of my back and against the backs of my thighs. Sweat beads up at Aaron’s temples too, and on his upper lip. He nods and shifts in his chair, his eyes flashing with something like pity, the tables turning in who feels sorry for whom.

Don’t look at me like that
, I almost say. But he speaks first.

“You mean your mother.” A prim smile on his face, half pained, half relishing the effect of this on me.

A painful heat fills my stomach, the fire spreading outward. My
mother
?

In my head I’m screaming at him
shut up shut up stop lying
, but I say nothing. I’m too stunned. Of course Regina wasn’t my
mother
. The thought of it is absurd. Impossible.

So why am I shaking?

I think of all the times over the course of my life when I’ve wished I looked like my parents. I think of how old my parents are. The injections and facials and doctors keep them looking young, but they’re not. They’re old. My mother had me when she was forty-two.

I look nothing like either of them, really. And there is nobody in my family with red hair, only stories about an aunt I’ve never met who was a strawberry blond. But still . . .

“She’s not my mother. Helene Fleet is my mother. And hers.”

“She ran away because she was pregnant. I was the only one who knew. Then after she died, Helene Fleet had this . . . baby. It can’t be a coincidence.”

Aaron keeps talking, maybe just to fill the silence. “I tried to tell them about your grandfather.”

“Who?” I say and it comes out like a squeak.

“Harris Fleet,” Aaron says, like it’s obvious. He flattens his long fingers on the table. “Of course by then my father had been disgraced and nobody wanted anything to do with me. Nobody listened, not even the cops. At the time, I couldn’t believe how he got away with it. Now after all these years, I get it. He’s been bankrolling the Bedlam Police Department forever. But it was so clear he did it.”

Now I’m not following at all. “Did what?”

Aaron looks at me like I’m an imbecile, then softens. “This is all new to you, isn’t it?”

I nod, my eyes filling. I blot my eyes with the corner of my sweatshirt, tell myself to toughen up. “Did what? Just tell me.”

The door swings open just then. Our ten minutes are up. “Say it,” I whisper. “Time’s up.”

“Killed her. He killed his own daughter. I can’t prove it, but I know he did it.”

Not possible. No way. “You’re lying.”

“I loved Regina,” Aaron says, and then the guard is unlocking the table hold on his cuffs, pulling him up by his collar. “She was my friend. Why would I make it up? Nothing’s in it for me.”

“Let’s move,” the guard barks. And Aaron shuffles away, a diminished figure in orange. I may never see him again.