Chapter 22
MRS. HOWARD AND STEVEN JUMPED IN to separate us before things got really bad. I mean, Nikki tried to go to town on me—or I guess I should say, on her old body, as she began hitting and pinching me, pulling at my hair. Dr. Fong shouted at me that I couldn’t hit Nikki back—after I tried to do so, entirely in self-defense—because her recovery hadn’t been as speedy as mine, and she hadn’t bounced back as quickly from her surgery as I had from mine. Nikki hadn’t had the incredible technology of the Stark Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery to help her with her rehabilitation the way I had—only her mother’s tender care and whatever help Dr. Fong could give her when he got home from work. Apparently, Nikki wasn’t a hundred percent yet. “But she’s still well enough to be e-mailing her ex-boyfriends,” I pointed out snarkily. I’m sorry, but that slap had hurt. And the subsequent pinches hadn’t felt too good, either. Mrs. Howard threw Nikki an accusing look. She’d been pretty angry with her over the slap and subsequent attack on me, yelling, “Nicolette Elizabeth Howard! You quit hitting that girl right now, you hear me!” It was the first time anyone had ever called me by my new full name. Only she hadn’t been addressing me. “Look at her, Mom,” Nikki had shouted in reply, as Mrs. Howard dragged her daughter from me. “Just look at her! That’s my dress! And my new Marc Jacobs boots! And look how she’s making up my eyes. They look awful!” Mrs. Howard hadn’t been willing to put up with any crap from her daughter, despite her delicate state of health. “Nikki, you apologize,” she said. “You know that’s no way to behave. Especially in someone else’s home. ” Nikki, looking truculent, jutted out her lower lip and sneered. “Sorry. ” That, apparently, was all the apology I was to get for my throbbing cheek. Mrs. Howard, however, came over to me and put an arm around my shoulders and said, “I’m so sorry, honey. ” Honey. Just like she’d called Steven. Her arm felt soft and comforting. When she looked down at me, I saw that there wasn’t any flicker in her gaze, unlike my own mother’s. The look Mrs. Howard gave me was strong and steady and compassionate. “This has been really hard on her. But I want to thank you. Thank you…for bringing me my son. ” And then she’d kissed me on the cheek Nikki had slapped. And I knew it was just Nikki’s body reacting. But I felt comforted in a way I hadn’t really felt with my own mom in ages. Which was weird, I know. Now Nikki’s mother turned an outraged look on her daughter and said, “Nikki, what are you doing, e-mailing people? I told you, you can surf the Web, but no e-mailing!” Sitting on the couch where Steven had pinned her, scowling at all of us, Nikki pouted. “Well, what else am I supposed to do all day? You can only watch so many episodes of The Hills. I’m so bored!” “Of course you are, sweetie,” Lulu said, going to sit on the couch beside her and stroking her arm. She was trying to calm her old friend down—not that it seemed to be doing much good. Nikki didn’t look any more thrilled to see Lulu than she did to see me. “I can’t believe they’ve been keeping you cooped up in here. But I’m sure they’ll let you out soon. ” “To do what?” Nikki demanded churlishly. “Work at the Gap? Look at me. I’m ugly and my hair is stupid. What are you wearing, anyway? You look weird. ” Lulu touched her chauffeur’s cap. “I think it’s cute,” she said defensively. “I think you look cute. Red hair suits you. And there’s lots of things you can do. This man saved you from being dead. Aren’t you glad about not being dead?” “No,” Nikki said. She turned her attention to Cosabella. “Cosy. ” She snapped her fingers at the dog, who was still wrestling with the other dogs. “Cosy!” She leaned back, frustrated. “God, this sucks. Even my own dog likes this one better. ” She sneered at me. I was apparently this one. “Hon, I told you. We’ll get you a new dog,” Mrs. Howard said. She looked tired, and not just because it was the crack of dawn. It seemed as if this was a conversation they’d had numerous times before. “The important thing is that we don’t let Stark find out you’re still alive. You have to stop e-mailing people. Dr. Fong has gone to so much trouble for you. ” “Yeah,” I said. I looked from Nikki to Dr. Fong. “How come I didn’t see you in the recovery ward at the institute when I was there?” Dr. Fong seemed even more tired than Mrs. Howard. “In order to save Nikki’s life,” he explained, “I was forced to employ subterfuge. While you were having your surgery, I used her brain in one of our demonstration surgeries for some foreign surgeons, with the assistance of some of my colleagues. They didn’t, of course, know where the healthy brain we were using had come from. The donor body we used—the one Nikki has now—belonged to a young woman who had gone into a vegetative state due to a vehicular accident caused by a drunk driver. The donor, unfortunately, was the driver in question. ” Nikki rolled her eyes. “Right,” she said, when I glanced at her. “You get the supermodel’s body. I get the drunk driver’s body. ” “At least you’re alive, Nikki,” her big brother said. Nikki made a face. “Oh, stay out of it, Steven. ” “Once the surgery was successfully completed,” Dr. Fong went on, “in order to keep Nikki from asking any questions that might arouse suspicion when she woke, it was necessary to have her transferred immediately, while she was still in her coma, from the institute—I forged documents stating she was being transferred to another hospital closer to the brain transplant’s home. But really, I had her transported here, and bribed the ambulance attendants to keep quiet about it. Her mother was the one who did most of her nursing. ” “But I don’t get why Stark tried to kill her in the first place,” Christopher said. “Yeah,” Nikki said, looking at Christopher appraisingly. She evidently liked what she saw since she flipped some of her red hair back flirtatiously. Well, what girl wouldn’t like Christopher? Especially one who’d been cooped up in the house as long as she had. Although if she made a move toward him, I’d be forced to break her nose. “Why would Stark want to kill me after everything I’ve done for them? I mean, just because I overheard them talking about that stupid game—” Christopher’s interest sharpened. “What game?” “That computer game,” Nikki said. “The new one. Travelquest or whatever. ” “Journeyquest,” I corrected her. “You mean the new version, Realms?” “Right,” Nikki said. She dropped the flirtatiousness for a look of mystery. “I mean, I might have overheard something about that…Something Robert Stark wouldn’t want getting out. At least, that’s what he said when I brought it up. ” Christopher and I exchanged glances. Uh-oh. Even Lulu knew enough to know this was bad. She took her hand away from Nikki’s arm. “Nikki,” she said, with a gasp. “Did you tell Mr. Stark you knew this secret?” “Sure,” Nikki said, shrugging. “I wanted to see how much it would be worth to him for me to keep quiet about it. And it turned out, it was worth quite a bit. ” She laughed delightedly at the memory of it. Then her face darkened as she stared at me. “Except you’re the one enjoying the money now, aren’t you? What have you been spending it on? It better be good. ” “What money?” I asked, genuinely bewildered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—” But I had a very bad feeling about it…a feeling that, I could tell, was shared by the rest of the room, if the uneasy expressions everyone was wearing were any indication. “The money,” Nikki went on, “that Stark promised to pay me to keep my mouth shut about Stark Quark! I never got to see a dime of it. I had the accident right after that. ” Dr. Fong, who clearly hadn’t heard any of this before, sank his head into his hands and groaned. I glanced at Christopher, who said, with a knowing smile, “Told you. There are no accidents. ” I swallowed. Hard. He had said that. But he didn’t have to look so smug about it. This was a girl’s life we were talking about. A girl who used to walk around in the body I was currently inhabiting, living in the loft I currently lived in…a girl whose dog no longer recognized her. It was so sad. I wanted to cry just looking at her, sitting there on the couch, so proud of herself for something that had, in the end, ruined her life. No, ended that life. “Oh, Nikki,” Mrs. Howard said, with a groan, covering her mouth with both her hands. Her son, however, had a lot more to say about it than just his sister’s name. “Has it occurred to you, Nikki,” Steven demanded sharply, “that Stark might just have tried to have you killed instead of paying you? What you did was blackmail. ” Nikki rolled her eyes. “God, Steven, you were always so dramatic. It’s just a stupid video game. ” “It’s a billion-dollar line of software,” Christopher corrected her. “And even if you were the Face of Stark, you were replaceable. ” He nodded at me. “See? They replaced you. With her. ” Nikki stared at me. As she did so, her lower lip started to tremble, just a tiny bit. It was all starting to sink in. Finally. “They chose the software over you,” Christopher went on brutally. So brutally, I wanted to shout at him to stop. Just stop. This was all too much. I was so tired. I wanted to crawl into bed and go to sleep and make it go away. Except that I couldn’t, of course. “Or at least they meant to. Dr. Fong saved your life. ” For the first time, Nikki began to look scared. She glanced at me, and then at Christopher. Finally, she looked at Lulu. “You guys found me,” she said, “because of an e-mail? An e-mail I sent to Justin?” “Yes, sweetie,” Lulu said gently, taking her hand. “Your mom is right. You have to be more careful. ” “Yeah,” Christopher said. “And what we need to know is…have you sent any more e-mails to anyone else? Because—in case you haven’t already guessed—your location can be traced that way. ” Nikki chewed her lower lip. “Just a couple,” she said in a meek voice. She seemed really frightened now. “But not to anyone who matters. ” “Who, Nikki?” Mrs. Howard asked. She sounded as frightened as her daughter. “Just tell us who. ” “Just to…to…Brandon Stark,” Nikki said. My heart sank. Brandon. Of course. Of course she’d e-mail Brandon. They’d been a couple before the accident. Why, oh why, had we brought Brandon along? It had seemed so innocent at the time. He had been passed out—Brandon was almost always passed out. Except when he woke up and wandered around, begging me to get back together with him. When I remembered this, my heart, which had been sinking, suddenly sped up. No wonder Brandon seemed to have such mixed-up ideas about me. He was getting e-mails from someone named NikkiH telling him how much she missed him. Then he was seeing me, in the flesh…and it didn’t help that sometimes I did flirt with him, a little… Okay, a lot. Great. And he was outside, in the limo. The last thing we needed was Brandon bursting in here, realizing Nikki Howard—the real Nikki Howard, the one his father thought he had had killed—was still alive. “I’ll go check on him,” I said in a tight voice, since I knew I wasn’t the only one freaking out over the fact that we’d led the son of the man responsible for this entire mess to the very door. I leapt up from the chair I’d been sitting in and hurried out of the room and stepped into the foyer. I was just reaching for the handle of the front door when something hard and rough wrapped around my throat, and suddenly I found myself pressed against the wall, all the breath knocked out of me from the impact. And looming in front of me was Brandon Stark, five o’clock shadow standing out sharply all along his jaw. With his right arm, he was pushing me by the throat against one of Dr. Fong’s duck portraits. “Don’t say a word,” Brandon hissed. “If you scream or make any noise at all, I swear I’ll tell my dad exactly where he can find the real Nikki Howard. ”