“So you’re in a good mood because it’s easier?”
“Yeah.” Becks gripped the crumbling remains of the banister, holding it as she started going up the stairs. “You went crazy because it was easier. So what’s so bad about deciding to stop scowling for the same reason?”
I didn’t have a good answer. I shrugged and followed her into the house. The others were waiting for us there.
Once we had all removed our shoes, we proceeded into the living room. George hung back to walk beside me, our hands not quite touching. Her presence was almost reassuring enough to make up for the fact that none of us were armed.
The Cat was sitting on one of the room’s two couches, feet up on the coffee table and a tablet braced against her knees. The Fox was nowhere to be seen. I honestly couldn’t have said whether or not that was a good thing.
“You know, I did not think we would be seeing you again,” said the Cat, not looking up from her tablet. Her fingers skated across the screen with the grace of an artist, making connections in some pattern I couldn’t see. “If there’d been a bet, I would have lost.”
“We’re here for our IDs,” said Becks. “We did our part.”
“Oh, I know. I knew as soon as the bug started transmitting. They’ve been naughty, naughty boys and girls there at the CDC. They’re going to be very sorry when they get the bill for this. Killing people, cloning people, arranging outbreaks… it would have been so much cheaper if they’d settled their debts in a civilized manner.”
I went cold. Grabbing blindly for George’s hand, I asked, “What do you mean, ‘the bill’?”
The Cat looked up. For a moment, the smug, almost alien look on her face told me exactly where her nickname had come from. “We’re free operatives, Mr. Mason. You can’t blame me for taking my money where I can get it.”
“It was you.” Mahir’s voice was tinged with a dawning horror. I turned to look at him. He was staring at her, the white showing all the way around his irises. “One thing always seemed a little off to me when I reviewed the tapes we managed to recover from Oakland. Dr. Connelly was traveling on one of your ID cards. She should have been safe. She should have been untraceable. So how is it the CDC tracked her less than two hours after she arrived? And why did they lose track of her after that first ID was consigned to the fires?”
“I don’t know,” said the Cat. “Why don’t you tell me? You’re the journalists. You’re supposed to be the smart ones.”
“Wait.” Becks turned toward Mahir. I didn’t like the edge on her voice. “Are you telling me this woman got Dave killed?”
“If you answer that question, you don’t get your new identities. Think about that.” The Cat looked back down at her tablet, seemingly unconcerned. “You came here because you wanted a free pass out of your lives. You committed an act of treason because you were willing to do whatever it took to get that free pass into your hands. Are you going to let something that happened in the past come between you and getting what you paid for?”
“I guess that depends on whether getting what we paid for is going to get an airstrike called down on our heads,” I said.
Then a small, perplexed voice spoke from the stairs: “Kitty, what did you do?” I looked toward it. The Fox was descending from the second floor. The look on her face was almost childlike in its confusion, like whatever was going on was so far outside her experience that it verged on impossible. “Did you do another bad thing? You know what Monkey said he’d do if you did another bad thing. You remember what he did to Wolf.”
“Go back upstairs, Foxy,” said the Cat calmly. “Watch a movie in your room. I’ll bring cookies later.”
The Fox frowned. “You’re not answering my question.”
“That’s because I don’t have to answer to you.”
“No, but you do have to answer to me.” We all turned toward the new voice, Becks reaching for a gun she didn’t have. Her hand hovered in the air next to her hip for a moment, and then dropped back to her side.
The man who had emerged from the short hallway behind the kitchen looked at us mildly, like he had groups of strangers appear in his living room every day. Then again, maybe he did, considering his line of work.
“Mr. Monkey, I presume?” I said.
“No, no, Mr. Monkey was my father.” His voice was vague enough that I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “You must be the journalists.”
“Yes, we are,” said Mahir. “Are you the gentleman in charge of this establishment?”
“Not sure anybody really runs the Brainpan, but I guess it’s down to me.” A certain sharpness came into his eyes as he surveyed our motley group, belying his earlier vagueness. “Now what am I going to do with you?”
The Monkey was average-looking to the point of being forgettable almost while I was still looking at him. Caucasian male, average height, average weight, features that were neither ugly nor attractive, brown hair with bleach streaks, just like every other man on the planet who cared more about functionality than vanity. No one’s that forgettable without working at it. We were probably looking at the result of years of careful refinement, possibly including some plastic surgery. This was a man who never wanted to stand out in a crowd. He could disappear into the background before you even realized he was there. In its own way, he was as terrifying as the Fox. At least there, you’d probably see the crazy coming.
Or not, said my inner George. Remember the front yard.
I bit back my response to her and smiled at the Monkey instead. “You’re going to give us our fake IDs, whip up another one for my sister here, and send us on our merry way?”
“Monkey!” The Fox shoved her way through our group, all but flinging herself into the arms of the unassuming man. “Kitty did a bad thing, she did, she didn’t say she did, but she didn’t say she didn’t, either, and that means she did!”
“I did not follow that,” said Becks.
“The Cat killed Dave,” said Maggie. There was a low menace in her tone. I didn’t like it. I knew how the rest of us would act if we decided this would be a good time to lose our shit. Maggie… I had no idea. I’d never seen her really flip out. Suddenly that seemed like a genuine possibility.
“Who?” asked the Monkey. He stroked the Fox’s head with one hand as he looked at us, waiting for an answer. She snuggled into his arms, posture half that of a lover, half that of a pet. “I don’t remember anyone by that name.”
“He wasn’t one of your clients,” Maggie practically spat. Mahir put a hand on her shoulder, preemptively restraining her. She ignored him, eyes locked on the Monkey. “You made a new identity for a woman from the CDC. Kelly Connolly.”
“You used the name ‘Mary Preston,’ ” interjected Becks.
“Ah!” The Monkey smiled. He wasn’t forgettable when he did that. For a moment, his face pulled itself into a configuration that was handsome enough to explain how he was able to shack up with two attractive, if psychologically damaged, women who did his bidding without complaint. “That was a tricky piece of work. I don’t usually do that much image replacement for a simple death-and-rebirth routine, you know? It was a challenge. I like challenges.”
I spoke before I had a chance to think better of it, saying, “Yeah, well, that challenge came with a tracker that led the CDC right to her, and hence, right to us. They bombed the whole block. It destroyed our offices and killed one of our staffers.”
The Monkey’s smile faded, replaced by a frown. “That’s not possible. I don’t place trackers in my IDs. It would damage my reputation among my primary clientele, and I’ve spent quite some time building it up.”
“The reputation, or the clientele?” asked George.
“Both.” The Monkey squinted at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead? I remember your face from the news feeds—and from the CDC records I’ve been reading all morning. Fascinating stuff.”
“I got better,” she said.
“We’re losing the thread here,” I said, wanting to d
ivert the Monkey’s attention from George. Somehow, he struck me as the kind of guy who’d love to take her apart, just to be sure she was a clone and not a cyborg or something. “We planted the bug at the CDC for you. We want our papers.”
“You killed Dave,” said Maggie, not budging from her core point.
I was starting to feel like there were at least three conversations going on, and I wasn’t directing any of them. “Can we all settle down for a minute? Please? It’s getting sort of hard to figure out what’s going on here.”
“No, it’s pretty simple,” said the Monkey mildly. “You exchanged currency and services for a set of false identities that could potentially get you out of whatever trouble you’ve managed to get into—which I have to say, is extremely impressive trouble, especially given where you started. You don’t trust me or my girls, but you didn’t have anywhere else that you could go for this sort of service. I understand that. I’ve worked hard to keep down the competition.”
The Fox pulled her face away from his chest long enough to look over her shoulder and inform us solemnly, “That’s part of my job.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “You look like you do it very well.”
She offered a hesitant smile, and then turned to nestle back against the Monkey. He stroked her hair and said, “Now, you’re also having a crisis of… call it faith… because you’ve decided I was somehow responsible for the death of your friend. I assure you, it’s not the case. Not unless he was trying to establish himself as one of my competitors.”
“He was a journalist,” said Becks quietly.
“So he wasn’t trying to set himself up as the competition. Huh.” The Monkey looked toward where the Cat still sat calmly, fingers skating over the surface of her tablet. “Cat? Does what these people are saying have any merit?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she replied. She didn’t raise her head. She might as well have been responding to a question about whether she wanted soup for dinner.
The Monkey frowned, a flicker of irritation crossing his face. He pushed the Fox gently away from him. “Look at me while I’m speaking to you.”
The Cat still didn’t look up.
“Look at me.” The Monkey’s annoyance was entirely unmasked now. He didn’t look forgettable at all. “Jane. Put it down, look at me, and tell me what you did.”
“That’s not my name.” The Cat finally took her eyes off the screen. Her lips were pressed into a thin, hard line as she raised her head and glared at him. “My name is Cat.”
“Your name is scared little girl who couldn’t deal with all the boys who only wanted you for your body, but wished you’d put your brain in a jar so that they could fuck you and be smarter than you at the same time. Your name is ‘I took you in when you said you wanted out.’ Your name is ‘you came to me.’ I own you. Now what. Did you. Do?”
Carefully, like she was in no hurry at all, the Cat put her tablet aside. She stood and strolled over to us, stopping barely out of the Monkey’s reach. “You took the man from the CDC’s money. You said you’d build him the perfect disappearing girl—one who’d never set off any red flags or raise any alarms. And then you went into your damn workshop, like you always do, and you left me alone with Princess Crazy-Cakes here”—she gestured toward the Fox—“to entertain your client until he got bored and went away. He didn’t get bored. He knew how you worked. He was waiting for you to leave.”
“What?” The Monkey glanced at the Fox. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
She sniffled. “Kitty told me to go outside and play with the crows. We found a dead squirrel. I set it on fire.”
“Kids these days,” said Becks dryly.
The Monkey ignored her. His attention swung back to the Cat. “What did you do?”
“He offered me a hundred thousand dollars to plant a tracker in her state ID. You know how easy it is to bug those things. Just swap out the RFID chip for one that broadcasts what you want it to broadcast, and you’re in business.”
“You’re supposed to refer all business decisions to me,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.
“You would have said no.”
“Yes, I would. That isn’t how we do business.”
“Maybe it isn’t how you do business, Monkey, but times are changing, and you’re not changing with them. There are a lot of people out there offering services we aren’t. We need to stay competitive.”
“And that means going behind my back and getting half of downtown Oakland bombed?”
The Cat shrugged. “They only took out half.”
The Fox paused, a thought almost visibly struggling across her face. “Is this why you told me I should put things in their shoes?” she asked.
“Hold up there,” I said. “Whose shoes? What things?”
“Don’t freak out,” said the Cat. “They were tracking devices for the CDC to follow, so they’d be able to take out the horrible bastards who broke into their facility. They must have been too busy to come after you until you’d ditched the shoes. You got lucky.”
“That, or we were staying at the Agora,” said Maggie. “Best security screening technology on this side of the state. No matter how much those trackers were broadcasting, they wouldn’t have gotten through the shields.”
“I haven’t changed my shoes,” said Becks slowly. She looked at me. “Have you?”
“No.”
The Cat stared at us. Then she pointed at the door and started shouting, “Out! Get the fuck out of here! You have to leave!”
“What’s going on?” asked the Fox.
For a moment, I felt almost bad for her. Sure, she was crazy and homicidal, and probably the most dangerous person in the room, but she was also the one who had the least responsibility for her own actions. She needed to be taken care of, and the people she’d chosen to do that had used her as a weapon. That wasn’t her fault.
And it wasn’t my problem. “Kitty did a bad thing,” I informed her. Looking back to the Cat, I said, “Well? Turn them off already.”
The Cat licked her lips, eyes darting from me to the Monkey as she said, “I can’t.”
There was a moment when it felt like the world stood still, all of us considering the meaning of her words. Then Becks shouted, with all the authority of an Irwin in a field situation, “The van! Get to the van, get armed, and get Maggie out of the line of fire!”
“Just Maggie?” I asked.
She smiled thinly. “Georgia Mason always knew how to defend herself.” Then she was off and running, heading for the front door. The rest of us followed her. George didn’t complain as she ran, even though it must have been painful—the dressings on her feet were designed to deal with light walking, not a full-out sprint. She just gritted her teeth and kept going.
We left our shoes where they were. If they were bugged, they were more of a liability than a little barefoot running.
I could hear the Cat and the Monkey yelling at each other when we hit the front door, although I couldn’t tell what they were saying. I wasn’t aware that the Fox was following us until she took hold of my hand and asked, “Is this going to be very bad?”
Mahir and Becks were trying to pry the door open. The security system had clearly engaged once we were all inside, and it just as clearly didn’t want to let go again. I exchanged a glance with George before looking back to the Fox. “Well…”
The sudden shriek of alarms stopped me from needing to figure out the rest of that sentence. Metal sheets slammed down over all the windows, and red lights came on at the tops of the walls, flashing almost fast enough to qualify as strobes. The Fox yelped, yanking her hand out of mine. As she clamped her hands over her ears, I saw that she was holding a nasty-looking sniper’s pistol. At least she came prepared.
Becks kicked the door viciously before turning and jogging the few steps back over to me. “I’m going to go punch our host in the face until he lets us out of here,” she said.
“Punch the woman instead; she seems to deserve it more,
” said Mahir. He walked back to where I was standing. “We’re proper trapped now. Probably all going to die here. I’d say it was nice knowing you, but as you’ve effectively ruined my life, it almost certainly hasn’t been.”
“What he said,” said Maggie.
“Aren’t you sweet?” George was frowning at the door, looking thoughtful. “Hey, George? You planning something, there?”
“A place like this… Mahir, remember when we did the report on the clone organ farmers? The ones who were so used to getting raided that they almost treated it as a reason not to bother washing the windows?”
“Yes!” Mahir’s eyes lit up. “They knew they’d be caught in a death trap if they ever let themselves be taken unaware—”
“—and so they never set up a headquarters without at least three escape routes.” She turned to the Fox. “How do we get out? All our weapons are outside.”
The Fox brightened, lowering her hands. “I have weapons!”
“We know you do, but we need our weapons. Please. How do we get out of here?”
“Oh.” The Fox thought for a moment. Finally, she said, “This way,” and trotted back toward the living room. Lacking anything better to do, we followed.
As we rounded the corner, we were greeted with the fascinating sight of Becks slamming the Cat rhythmically into the wall while the Monkey looked calmly on. “You’re a feisty one,” he said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
The Cat wailed. Becks slammed her into a wall again.
“Last guy I was interested in turned out to be an incestuous necrophiliac,” she said. “So no, not currently dating, and definitely not doing any more shopping in the ‘sociopath’ category. Now tell her to open the doors.”
“She can’t do that,” said the Monkey. The Fox trotted past him without pausing; he turned to watch her go. “Foxy? What are you doing?”