I nodded.
“I’m not going to let anyone dunk me with an anchor,” he said. “I’m not going to let Wilder kill me and steal my token.”
“Well, I don’t want your wretched token,” I said. “So stop attacking people, calm the bleepity-bleep down, and—”
“Did you just say ‘bleepity-bleep’?”
“—and work with me, or we’re both toast that Wilder will butter and have for breakfast.”
“I cut off your dad’s arm. You’re not going to welcome me into your little house on the prairie.”
“Maybe there’s a way to … to fix it all,” I said. I wished I could lie to Jacques as easily as Wilder had to Ruth. And to me. “If you testify against GT, the FBI might let you off. You could start over.”
“Start over?” He laughed, though he seemed about to cry too. “You have no idea all I’ve done. Last week I tried to go home again. I tried, but I couldn’t even …” His voice cracked. I hadn’t been sure if he was still human enough to feel anything. “Do you remember Ruthless saying she’d done too much? I am in blood. ‘Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over.’”
He was quoting Macbeth again. He’d forgotten the Beatles but not Macbeth.
“Your mom would forgive you,” I said. “Moms do that.”
He paced, getting closer to the tunnel. I countered, positioning myself before the exit.
“She doesn’t know me anymore, and I don’t want her to.”
Blades formed from both hands, long as scimitars and sharper still. I hefted my iron bar.
“I’m not wasting this power,” he said. “I’m never again going to be that kid the school counselor pities or wear clothes that smell like someone else. I’m going to be a GT. I’m going to be the boss.”
He took another step forward. I stepped back, my hand tighter on the bar. I could feel molecules of metal readjusting, the bar melding into the shape of my grip.
“What if we’re not just killing machines?” I said. “What if there actually is another purpose—”
“GT smartened me up, at least. The only thing my token is good for is making good for me. Let me go, Maisie.”
“I can’t.”
He swiped at me with one of his havoc blades. It made a high, sweet sound as it cut the air, like the ring of a bell.
“Let me out or I’ll cut my way out.”
“You really think you can take me?” I pretended to laugh, though I felt sick to my stomach. “You don’t remember what it took to stop Ruthless.”
“But you’re not Ruthless, and I’ve learned a few things since then.”
Jacques’s blade came down.
Chapter 36
I turned away, his blade just missing Fido and landing instead on my shoulder. The strike stung like the lash of a whip. He came at me slashing, so fast I could barely see the blades. I swung my bar, but he ducked and cut at my side.
I swung my bar again, and he sidestepped. His training showed. I should have joined a dojo or something instead of lying around with Wilder. But of course Wilder didn’t want me too powerful. Just powerful enough so I would take Jacques’s token before conveniently dying and handing the whole cache over to him.
Anger boiled. I swung harder, swiping just above Jacques’s head. He brought his blades down on my outstretched arm, the pain so fierce I dropped the bar.
He was behind me suddenly, a foot on my lower back, climbing to my shoulders and jumping off, using the force of his fall to chop his blades down.
I screamed.
Another useless swipe. He dodged. I wished for Mi-sun’s blue shot, for Wilder’s plotting.
Keep him fighting, Wilder had said.
I needed to compromise the armor, force Jacques to make new havoc skin. But I couldn’t even get a touch. And I was short an arm too, keeping Fido close to my chest. That arm wouldn’t survive contact with his scimitar.
I swung with my fist, but his assault was too fast, dodging and cutting, dodging and cutting. My shirt was riddled with slices. He swiped across my middle, getting too close to Fido. Half of the index finger dropped to the ground.
I cried out at the wound done to my cyborg hand, and my attention left Jacques just long enough for him to come in hard. As if he were beating a drum, his blades assailed the back of my neck. Chunks of my ponytail fell around me, the pain so intense my legs buckled. I curled up, my arms wrapped over my middle, shuddering.
Hunched over, shaking from pain, I first realized that Jacques could kill me. I’d felt invulnerable. So had Ruth. Jacques would take my tokens, and then what would he do? Rob more banks? Finish off Dad?
What would Wilder tell me?
Stop trying to hit him. Use your body like a rolling boulder.
I closed my eyes and tried to exchange the pain for anger. When Jacques stepped in for another jab, I threw myself forward. My head caught him in the gut, and he fell on his back. I screamed with the effort of picking him up, and I threw him against the cave wall. The force was enough to crack his armor. He immediately filled in the holes, sealing it up.
He stood up, back on the attack. He was too good at the close game. I retreated and uprooted a stalagmite, thereby undoing thousands of years of slow work with one moment of violence. I kind of
hated myself as I threw it at him, striking him in the chest. One of his blades snapped off. Rock beats scissors.
He grew a new blade.
Attacking, he got me on my arm, but I kicked his legs out from under him. I picked him up by a leg and slammed his body against the ground three times before he flipped out of my grasp. One of his blades and a large piece of armor fell off. He formed it anew.
I saw his glance flick to the corner, where he had a stash of food. He was running out of fuel.
My skin was covered with welts and screaming with pain. I screamed back and flew at him. When he sliced at me, I grabbed the blade and broke it off in my hand. My palm was bleeding, the pain as intense as if I’d been stabbed clean through.
He formed another blade, and I broke it off again. I got ahold of his leg and slammed him against the ground, then attacked his armor, clawing off whole sections. He tried to crawl away, but I held him fast. And he kept forming more. And more. The hollows underneath his eyes were sunken, the whites of his eyes yellowed.
He didn’t have anything left to draw from. But he kept at it. I tore off his chest armor and he made more.
“Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop! Just give up!”
I got my fingers into the hole in his armor around his eyes and broke it off his face. He gasped. I pulled, and the armor cracked all down his front, weak as shale rock. For the first time, no new havoc skin grew.
“‘The yellow leaf,’” he mumbled, his head lolling back and forth. “‘The yellow leaf …’”
“What?” I said.
He tried to sit up but slumped back. More armor splintered and fell away. Jacques was gaunt. His T-shirt sagged, sticking with sweat to his shaking body. His skin was mottled, dried up in patches. I stumbled backward, feeling as if I’d just opened a closet door and discovered a monster. The nanite-enhanced bacteria had run out of fuel to grow more armor and so pulled from his own muscles, bones, and skin. He took a shuddering breath and his eyes rolled, staring at the cave wall but not seeing. He moaned.
“Jacques, why?” I whispered.
He flopped onto his side and looked at the food in the corner. If he ate, would he recover as quickly as he’d broken down? I didn’t think I could fight him again. My body felt like grated cheese. I wiped wetness from my cheeks and realized I’d been crying.
The bags were heavy with soda and energy bars. I drizzled soda into his mouth, and he gulped softly. Then I tore off a chunk of a bar and stuck it in his mouth, eating the rest myself. I picked up my iron bar, intending to guard him in case that much food could bring him back to action, but he seemed unable to chew. And I apparently wasn’t able to stand. I collapsed, my body trembling as if I wer
e freezing cold.
Jacques whimpered, a sound like Luther’s baby sister used to make when falling asleep. I crumpled forward, huddled on the cave floor, washed over with ache. The pain in my hand was louder now that I was still to listen to it, a shrieking that seemed almost audible.
The bite of energy bar settled throughout my body and brought a small, hopeful satisfaction, so I crawled over and fell onto the bags. I ate another bar and drank a soda, wishing it were water. The carbonation irritated my sensitive tongue and went down like a swarm of bees.
“Jacques,” I croaked, holding out a bar. “Jacques, can you eat? If you … if you promise not to stab me anymore …”
He turned his head away, mouth closed. I didn’t have the strength to insist. I thumped back down into the mound of wrappers and kept eating. When I felt strong again, I would carry Jacques out to the police and tell them … what? Not to feed him? To put him in a cell too thick to cut?
I was wondering over this, trying to imagine what solution Wilder could come up with, when I heard a noise at the cave’s entrance and rolled over, expecting to see Luther.
“Hello, Miss Brown,” said Howell.
She was wearing a brown canvas shirt, pants, and shoes, as if trying to be a caricature of an explorer. Dragon crawled through the tunnel behind her, followed by three security guys I thought of as the triplets: Hairy, Scary, and Larry. Hairy was the one with the bushy beard, Scary had this wide-eyed stare, and Larry’s name really was Larry. They never talked much. Also, they weren’t really triplets.
“Jacques still has a tracker in his ankle?” I said thickly.
Howell nodded. “I couldn’t get to him when he was with GT.” She crouched over him. “What happened?”
“He pulled all the energy out of his own body to make havoc armor,” I said.
Howell felt Jacques’s pulse, and her eyes widened. I shivered. He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead. The food in my stomach felt heavy and foreign, and I glanced at the wrappers to prove to myself that I hadn’t accidentally eaten rocks.
“Come here.” Howell’s voice was urgent. “I need you to place your hand on his chest.”
Dread thudded into my chest, harder and louder than the pain of my skin. I scooted away, my back to a rock wall.
“His heart has stopped,” she said. “He’s not coming back. In moments, those nanites will reenter the token and it will leave his body. If that token doesn’t bond with you, it will tear out of his body and leave gravity—rise right up through the cave roof, through the atmosphere and into space.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“I know.”
“But—gravity? Nothing should—”
Howell spoke quickly. “I’ve spent years studying these. That token will go straight through the rock ceiling like it went through the skin of Jacques’s palm. Once it leaves Earth, its momentum will keep it going. Retrieval might be impossible.”
Gone? A token gone, gone forever, don’t let it, don’t let it go—
“Good,” I said, but I could barely cough the word out it was such a lie. Along with increased tolerance of cold and other upgrades, the tokens came with an insistence of their own importance. I knew I was just a wasp-stung caterpillar, but I still felt an urgency to protect the tokens, as if they were babies or puppies or something.
“I won’t lose any of them, I’ve worked so hard,” said Howell. “Come here.”
I shook my head. I felt torn up inside and out—my nanite-infused body wanted me to do it, and whatever was left of me didn’t.
“Do you comprehend how precious and important these are?” she said. “Losing a single token would be like … like losing the Louvre. Or the Great Barrier Reef. Or Cairo.”
Howell hadn’t experienced the agony of the token ripping through her body. I didn’t want the agony. I didn’t want Jacques’s token. I didn’t want proof that he was dead—that I’d helped kill him.
“Maisie—”
“No!”
Dragon picked me up. I pushed him away, sending him to the ground.
Hairy, Larry, and Scary approached, hands in fists.
“Really?” I said.
Dragon glanced back. Howell nodded. He and his guys attacked.
I suppose it was good that I was slowed and tired with pain, so when I backhanded the three guys at once, I didn’t crack their skulls. From behind Dragon grabbed me around my waist, picking me up. He was so much bigger than I was, I couldn’t get away without hurting him. I elbowed him (gently) in the face. He let go.
“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t want to break opera-humming Dragon’s nose.
“Maisie!” Howell’s voice had reached a new pitch of panic.
We all froze, watching as the token rose up through Jacques’s chest. The skin didn’t split or crack, just lifted a little, while the token, bright and teeming with nanites, crept up. The atoms of the token must have been sliding between the atoms of the skin, reconnecting with one another on the other side. Dragon tried to push me forward, and I knocked him away, my eyes never leaving Jacques.
I imagined the token shooting up through the cave wall, up into the night sky, propelled by its momentum on and on forever, and the idea made my skin hurt worse. My own tokens felt hot in my chest, my thoughts were slippery. I wanted to tell myself it was okay, Jacques’s token didn’t matter, but I couldn’t seem to grab hold of that thought. I was all ache and need and fear, and the vague but fevered certainty that losing that token would be very bad.
Howell trembled. “Maisie, please …”
It was almost out, one tip still sliding free of skin.
“No,” I whispered.
The token freed itself from Jacques’s body, and Howell snatched at it, desperate. She screamed in pain. It was entering her palm. I thought it was bonding with her till I saw its tips rising out the back of her hand. I sucked in a breath.
Suddenly it was free, rising up so fast it seemed to be falling the wrong way, gravity working in reverse. In moments it would be through the cave roof and into the sky. Lost. Gone.
Get it, save it, save it. Now!
I slammed my feet against the ground, jumping as high as the cavern ceiling. I swung my arm, my fingertips barely swiping at the cold, rubbery token. That was all it took—the barest touch. It clung to my fingers. I was falling when it slid into my palm. I tucked my arms against my chest, taking the fall as a roll, slamming into the ground and up against a cave wall.
Now I was screaming. The crash hurt my wounded skin, but that was nothing compared to the icy burn slicing through my palm, up my arm. I clutched my sides and folded in half, sobbing so hard I couldn’t close my mouth. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, the sharpness exploding against my heart like a bomb. It couldn’t have lasted long, but each second dragged me along hollering in agony.
When it was over, I gasped, sat up, and wiped tears off my cheeks. I was near Jacques. I looked at his gaunt face and remembered—not the worst or the best. Just him. The way he looked when he smiled, cheek dimples and bright-brown eyes. How he could hit the high notes in a song. How he’d close his eyes when taking the first sip of a soda.
I was leaning over myself, crying, and I noticed through my shredded sleeves that the welts on my arms were gone. Even though the new token was healing my wounds, I felt alarmingly weak, covered in paper-thin skin, built of gelatinous muscles and straw bones. I looked at my chest. The brute token had lightened, like the techno token. Jacques’s havoc token was dark reddish-brown, a brand-new brand. Bleep, bleep, bleep, what had I done?
The brute token had been inside me for months, indestructibility my norm. Now those nanites were undoing their work to let the new nanites take over.
I had never in all my life been so aware of my skin. So much texture, entire ecosystems between my fingers, inside my ears, between my eyelashes. I couldn’t see the new bacteria growing now on my skin, but I felt prickly in a pleasant way.
“I’m hungry,” I whispered.
&nb
sp; Dragon trolled through the food pile and handed me a moon pie. His nose was bleeding, but he smiled.
“Thank you, Maisie,” Howell whispered. She was holding her head, her eyes closed. She’d never called me Maisie before today.
Laelaps padded into the cavern, Luther crawling in after him. Laelaps sniffed Jacques’s body and came to me, licking my chin. Laelaps knew me. Maybe I was still essentially Maisie.
“Who?” Luther asked, pointing to our company.
“Howell, etc.,” I said.
“Isn’t she sort of evil?”
I threw up my hands. “Argh! Who isn’t anymore?”
Luther raised his hand with mock timidity. “Me,” he mouthed. He pointed at me and mouthed, “You?” with a questioning look.
Laelaps was still licking me. I chose to believe that meant I wasn’t evil yet.
Chapter 37
We checked Dad out of the hospital, loaded him into one of Howell’s planes, and flew to HAL.
I had to ask, “Howell, did you gas our house?”
“No.”
“Did your guys chase us in cars with guns?”
“No.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll come back to Team Howell if you find my mom.”
“Done.”
“Okay.”
I needed someone who could bring my mom home and protect my dad and Luther while I went after the Wild Card. Because that was nonnegotiable. Anyone else he killed before I could lock him up would be my fault.
“What happened to your hair?” Luther asked.
I could feel the ragged edges brushing my cheek.
“Jacques and some havoc scimitars,” I said.
“So Wilder will be your next kill?”
I choked. “What? I’m not an assassin! I’m going to capture Wilder and lock him in a HAL thinker-proof cell.”
“Maybe you should kill him.”
“Shut up, Luther.” I knew he didn’t mean it. He was just mad that I’d lost my brute strength for a power he deemed infinitely less cool.
I stayed at HAL for three days while I practiced being Maisie Havoc. Covering myself with armor was as easy as a thought, my brain sending a signal through my nerves to the bacteria to grow havoc. I quickly learned that, when first growing the armor over my body, I had to move around to keep it nimble. After a few seconds it set, and if I hadn’t bent my elbow, for example, my arm would be stuck straight. I’d have to remove the havoc skin and start over, which took a lot of fuel. I could only stand to eat so many energy bars.