Wu appeared at the door.
“Ms. Ashe, we met last night, I don’t know if you, uh, remember—”
“Yes. Wu. The sword guy.”
“Armando asked me to—”
Will shushed everyone. The feed blinked to life.
It was a man in a hospital bed—a nearly unrecognizable Molech, so pale that Zoey thought he looked like he’d been gang-bitten by vampires. His handless stumps were now thick clubs of stained gauze. At the sight of him, three different people in the conference room spat three different curses. Zoey was proud that her’s was the most profane.
Zoey whispered, “So he is in a hospital, can we find out which one? Go pull his plug?”
Echo said, “We’ve been watching every hospital within driving distance since last night, he didn’t check into any of them. He didn’t charter a flight, either.”
The camera settled on Molech’s pale face.
“First of all,” he said, “I want to say that was a lovely funeral last night and I’m sure Arthur Livingston would be pleased if he weren’t burning in Hell right now. Second of all, I want to thank the Livingston crew for the new hands. See, I had been wanting to add robot hands for months now and they’ve finally given me an excuse to stop procrasturbating and get it done. As my dad always said, you can use space-age technology to give your joints and muscles godlike strength, but you can’t punch through a wall if your fragile little hand bones are going to get turned to powder on impact. The new ones are titanium. We’re gonna fit them right after I’m finished with my message here, then I’m gonna see what it’s like to get jerked off by a robot. And third of all, I want to show you somethin’. Zoey Ashe, if you’re out there, pay attention. This is live.”
The feed switched. They were now looking at the interior of a car, two gloved hands on the steering wheel—the feed from a glasses camera. A coffee cup was raised up to the bottom of the screen. As the driver drank, he turned toward his passenger.
Sitting there in the passenger seat, visible above the curved white rim of the cup, was Zoey’s mother.
Zoey heard herself say, “No…”
Molech said, “Say hi to your mom. She and the craziest bastard in my employ are currently driving together toward an undisclosed location in Colorado, where I assure you the local bumpkin cops will not find them. Now, don’t be alarmed. My man is not going to kill her. He’s just going to temporarily paralyze her with a spinal block. Then he’s going to nail her into a box, and put a live cam in there. Then he’s going to bury that box. I’m going to broadcast that coffin feed live, round the clock, for you and the whole world to watch. When I get you—and I will get you—I’m going to lock you in a room and put that feed on every wall. You’ll get to see the moment your mother regains control of her limbs, and then the moment she realizes she’s been buried alive. You’ll watch her scream and claw and cry and beg. For hours. Until she slowly runs out of energy, and air, and hope. You’ll wake up to it, you’ll go to sleep to it, day after day, week after week. You’ll watch her die. Then you’ll watch her skin turn gray, as the fluids ooze out. You’ll watch as the maggots turn up, first in her nose, in her eyes, in her mouth. You’ll watch the first face you saw when you were born slowly rot, lips turning black and shredding away from the teeth, eyelids eaten away to reveal that blank stare, frozen forever in that awesome last moment of panic.”
Zoey screamed, “Don’t touch her, shitspider!”
Will said, “He can’t hear you, it’s just a broadcast.”
Molech continued, “So, the box goes in the ground one way or the other. The only question is who goes in it. You got two hours until we nail her in. Two hours to bring me the gold, and that’s only because I got to take an hour to install my new hands and give them a test drive, if you know what I mean. My people will meet you in the lobby of Livingston Tower. If you bring security, we’ll know immediately, and the clock on your mother instantly winds to zero. If you hand over the gold, my man will walk away from your mom, we’ll take you into custody, sew your filthy mouth shut, and let my fans vote on what to do with your various holes before we put you in the ground instead. Remember, you brought this on yourself.”
The feed clicked to black, replaced by white numbers counting down from 120 minutes.
Zoey stood and dug her phone from her bathrobe pocket. “I’m calling Armando.”
Wu said, “Ms. Ashe, Armando has resigned. You, of course, are free to hire protection of your choosing, but Mr. Ruiz asked me to take on his shift in the interim. If you do not find my credentials satisfactory I will take no offense.”
A message popped up over her phone, telling her the user had blocked her number.
Zoey said, “You call him. Tell him the job isn’t done. Tell him Molech is back. Tell him I won’t show any boob, not while he’s on the clock.”
“I honestly don’t think he will—”
“Tell him Molech has my mother. And tell him…” she stopped, not sure how to phrase it. “Tell him I know the truth, and that it’s okay. Tell him I still trust him.”
Nobody in the room knew what that meant. Wu dialed.
THIRTY-FOUR
By the time Armando arrived at the front gates, they had already lost fifteen minutes. Will was nervous—he showed it differently than other people, but Zoey could smell it on him. It was freaking her out. He was wandering around the conference table doing a trick with Arthur’s lucky one-sided coin that involved flipping it, catching it, slapping it down on a forearm, then lifting the hand to show the coin wasn’t there. Then he’d pull it out of his front pocket and do it all over again, and again. They were all watching the replay of Molech’s announcement, trying to deduce clues about the location.
Echo said, “Pause it here. See how the oxygen tubes plug into the wall behind him? None of this is makeshift. It’s not a single-bed facility, either. To the left of him is a privacy curtain, like they pull between beds in surgery prep.”
Zoey yelled, “You just said he wasn’t in a hospital!”
Will shook his head. “Got to be some kind of underground clinic somewhere…”
“Which,” Zoey chimed in, “we already knew he had, because he keeps cranking out psychopaths with these Raiden gadgets implanted under their skin. He’s probably lying in the exact same bed where he got his own implants done. So why don’t you geniuses, with your degrees and billions of dollars, already know where it is?”
Zoey screamed that last part at them. She waited for someone to tell her to calm down, but she guessed that wasn’t the sort of thing to say to your boss.
Will said, “Now you know why I was so intent on getting the Doll Head guy back here alive, that first night. Unfortunately…”
Before Zoey could retort, Armando rushed through the door and said, “What do we know?”
Zoey said, “We need to get to Molech before he can hurt my mom. The good news is he’s bedridden, because you lopped his hands off—we think he’s in a facility where they do their surgeries, for the implants. The bad news is we don’t know where that is. And we need to know. Now.”
“Well … I’ve heard rumors that—”
Zoey rolled her eyes and interrupted, “Armando. You’re wasting time.”
He looked confused, but not as confused as Will and Echo. The difference was their confusion was genuine.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
Zoey said to Will, “Armando has had the surgery. The implants. He has four little incisions on his arms and back.”
That brought silence to the room, which was broken by the clinking of Will dropping the lucky coin. Zoey wasn’t sure what in that moment had alarmed Will more—that the near-stranger in the room was now revealed to be some kind of mechanically augmented monster, or that Zoey had just figured out something before he had.
Armando said, “Zoey, that is not—”
Zoey said to Will, “From the beginning he seemed strangely uncurious about the whole implants thing. Then when I was in the c
ar last night he opened up his shirt a bit and I saw what I thought was a Band-Aid, but I saw it closer later and it was one of those skin patches with painkillers that they give people after surgery. I had to see him with his shirt off to make sure the scars were there, but…”
Armando was clearly trying to craft a response, but interrupted his own thought, saying, “Is that the only reason we—”
Zoey said, “No, of course not. Can’t a girl have more than one reason for doing a thing?”
Will said, “I’d argue that’s the norm.” He thought, then said, “Hold on, you saw the Raiden scars while you were getting undressed, but then instead of running out of the room and calling someone, you just kept going?”
“Eh, by that point, I was willing to risk it. Will, the Statue of David could sue his abs for copyright infringement.”
Echo closed her eyes and groaned.
Armando seemed to weigh several options, before finally saying, “It was two months ago. I heard about it by random chance, I had no idea where the technology had come from. They did a demonstration and started taking bids. The same day I got my procedure, a patient blew up in the recovery room. Splattered himself and fried a nurse. I did some digging and found out we’d all basically implanted bombs in our bones. I literally only used the implants once—to swing that katana last night, and I held my breath when I did it. If I could have the implants removed, I would. I know now that Molech just wanted crash dummies, because he couldn’t figure out why the stuff he stole wasn’t working. It was a foolish decision in retrospect. The waiting list was full of crazies.”
Zoey said, “I know, I’ve met them. But why in the hell were you in line with them? Why would you even want that?”
“This is not the politically correct thing to say, but only a woman would ask that question. The chance to be stronger, faster, than the predators who come after my clients … I suppose it would be the same if you could get a device implanted inside you that would make you young and beautiful, and keep you that way forever.”
“Uh, you mean more young and beautiful, right?”
Echo asked, “What do your implants do? Just strength enhancement?”
“Actuators in the elbows, wrists, shoulders, braces that extend down the back for stability. Preprogrammed movements. Strength, speed, reaction time, automatic stabilization to aid aiming. Told me I could punch through brick, or catch arrows, and could download Krav Maga for an additional hundred thousand.”
Zoey said, “And you showed up here that first night because…”
“Same reason Molech came into your life. I want the gold.”
Zoey growled and made a motion like she wanted to claw out her own hair. “We. Don’t. Have. It. If we had time, Echo could program it for us—”
Will said, “Actually, she can’t. That was a bluff.”
Armando said, “You do have it. Arthur told me himself.”
Zoey threw up her hands in exasperation. “Oh my freaking god. When the hell did you talk to Arthur?”
“Two weeks before he died. He came to me. He’d heard I’d gotten the implants, said they’d made their breakthrough. Asked if I’d volunteer.”
“To be a guinea pig?”
“No. He said the testing phase was over. He wanted me to become what this city needs.”
Zoey rolled her eyes and said, “Another mechanized kill freak?”
“A hero.”
She took a deep breath and said, “All right, that’s … a whole other discussion. Where did they do the surgery?”
“I don’t know. They had us gather at another location, down in the warehouse district, and blindfolded us for transport. We were in a vehicle for four hours, but felt like we were driving in circles for a lot of it.”
Zoey cursed.
Echo tapped at the wall screen, and a map of the city and surrounding suburbs appeared. She said, “We’re going to need to know everything you remember about the place.”
Armando thought for a moment. “We went downstairs. No elevator. So, a basement somewhere. Clinic was makeshift, but with very advanced equipment. Big stuff—they had one of those surgery machines that did the whole procedure, looked like a robot octopus. So a large building, lot of floor space.”
Echo tapped. A spray of red dots appeared. “That’s every building and private home with a basement.” She tapped again, about seventy-five percent of the dots vanished. “These are just the ones in commerical properties with more than ten thousand square feet of floor space.”
Zoey said, “That we know about. He could have dug himself an underground headquarters, in secret.”
Will shook his head. “He could dig an underground headquarters, but not in secret. Dirt’s got to go somewhere. You’d need to rent or buy equipment to dig, get trucks to haul out the debris, pay a crew to do it … impossible to do undercover. It’s one of these buildings, most likely.”
There were still dozens to pick from.
Zoey said to Armando, “If we figure out where he is, will you go after him?”
Armando took off his sunglasses. “Even if I was still working for you, I’d be your bodyguard, not your mother’s. This in no way is part of my job description.”
“Not as a bodyguard, no. But as a superhero?”
“Well, for that I would need the gold. And you do have it, somewhere. Arthur knew this, or something like this, was coming. His will, all of that was done in preparation for it. He did not care about this house or the cash or the real estate, he cared about Raiden. It was his life’s work, his legacy. He would have kept a backup in a safe place, and he would have made sure it found its way to you after his death. You have it. You have to. Think.”
Zoey said, “The vault was empty. I don’t know, maybe he meant to and forgot. Or never got a chance.”
Will flipped the coin. Slapped it down. Raised his hand to reveal an empty sleeve.
She said, “It wasn’t even mentioned in the will.”
Will produced the coin from his pocket, flipped it, caught it, then said, “Oh, son of a—”
Zoey said, “What?”
Will tossed the coin toward Zoey. She dropped it, then picked it up and looked it over.
He said, “Press your thumb against the blank side.”
She did.
Nothing happened … then, a few seconds later, it made a tiny beep.
A holographic menu blinked to life above the coin.
Will said, “We are the dumbest assholes on earth. It’s a solid-state drive, he had it embedded in the coin. He left it to Zoey. I kept missing with the trick and thought I was just rusty. But the weight of the coin is different. I could feel it but it just … never registered.”
Zoey said, “Then why didn’t Arthur just say the gold was in the freaking coin?”
Will shook his head. “In case somebody else got into the vault first. It was a way of making sure that either we got it, or nobody did—nobody else’s fingerprint would unlock it. He thought … he thought I would be smart enough to see what he had done. He was wrong.”
Armando said, “Give it to me. Upload it, or … whatever you need to do. Do that, I’ll go after Molech.”
Will said, “We need a piece of the tech to try it on. Do we still have Sanzenbacher’s hand?”
“Or Molech’s hands?” asked Zoey. “Any of the many hands we have?”
Echo shook her head. “Sanzenbacher’s mechanism was too damaged. Molech’s hands were stolen out of our truck by fans who presumably wanted them for souvenirs.”
Will cursed. “Oh. Wait. Call Kowalski. Tell him we need the Hyena.”
Zoey said, “There’s no time.”
Will said, “There’s eighty-five minutes, assuming he holds true to his word. But we have the gold, which means we have the one thing Molech wants and, therefore, leverage.”
“We don’t need leverage, we need to—”
Zoey was interrupted when Candi materialized and said, “Budd and Andre are here, and they’ve brought a strapping
young guest! I hope he likes being the meat in a manwich!”
Andre’s voice came over the speaker and said, “Got a guy here we need to talk to.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Andre and Budd escorted in a smirking nineteen-year-old who Zoey thought had “trust fund punk” written all over him—he had shoulder tattoos that reached up onto his neck, but they were top-of-the-line work he’d paid thousands for. He had his hair dyed and teased oranges and yellows to look like roaring flames—probably four hours in the chair and five hundred dollars for that.
The kid was restrained by a bulky pair of black handcuffs, the pacification cuffs cops use that give you a nasty shock if you try to twist out of them, and can be activated remotely to give you a knock-out injection if you get really out of control. Budd escorted the guy into the buffalo room, while everyone else huddled in the hall and got a quick rundown of the situation from Andre.
“Guy’s name is Kevin Baughman. A bunch of Team Molech dudes followed the pursuit out of the park last night, trying to get it on Blink. This guy went on his feed and said he and his boys had picked up Molech a couple blocks from the construction site and dropped him off at his HQ. I think he’s tellin’ the truth—had video of the bloodstains in his back seat. Won’t say where they took him, says he’ll take that to his grave.”
Zoey said, “So what, do we just beat it out of him?”
Will said, “Torture is useful for when you don’t particularly care about the quality of the information you’re getting, but that’s about it. You want a false confession out of a guy, beat him up—he’ll say anything. But when everything hangs on getting the right information…” Will mulled this for a moment and said to Andre, “There’s a stack of metal munitions cases in the hall that Armando’s people left behind last night, empty one of them, and go get Arthur’s Buddha off his nightstand.”
Andre turned and jogged off to go fill this order, without a single question or so much as a raised eyebrow.