Cynthia. I’ve got to find Cynthia.
A shadow blocked the door, dimming the room. Alix spun.
A girl with blue hair and the feral kid who had taken money at the door were standing in the doorway. They were both shaking their heads and moving to block her exit. Their expressions were murderous. “Glad you could make it to the party, Alix,” the girl with the blue hair said.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Alix said, or at least thought she said, because she was already charging. Their hands raked her, snagged her shirt, and dragged her back, but fear gave Alix strength. All her self-defense lessons came flooding back. Fight like hell. Alix punched and elbowed and bit and screamed, and abruptly broke free of their grip.
Alix plunged into the seething crowd with the pair pursuing, but the swamp and surge of bodies caught her. She couldn’t move. Sweaty bodies smashed into her, pushing and shoving her and making her stumble. In the strobing light and darkness, everything was fragmentary and horrific. The great spinning iron wheel. The frenzied bodies and caged dancers.
Squeezing through the press was like fighting against the tentacles of a monster. Everyone seemed to be grabbing at her, slowing her. The music shrieked demonically, and the pulse strobe of light and darknesss increased. The dancers became blurred traceries of color and shadow and reaching, clutching hands.
Alix tried to make her mind sober, to control the horror of her high. Find Cynthia. Just find Cynthia.
Behind her, the feral kid and the punk girl with the blue hair had disappeared, but she knew they were out there, hunting her, just as she was hunting Cynthia.
There!
Alix clawed her way toward her friend, shouting. Cynthia was dancing with some girl and totally unaware of anything. Their faces were close, almost kissing. Alix stopped short, confused. Was Cynthia gay? She hesitated, embarrassed to be interrupting her friend, suddenly unsure if she would be welcomed.
Fear pushed her on. “Cynthia!” she shouted.
Cynthia whipped around, looking pissed. “What do you want?”
The girl was glaring at Alix, too. Alix broke off, feeling even more uncertain, embarrassed to have shattered their moment. She scanned the dancers, terrified her pursuers were about to emerge from the crowd and grab her once again.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” she shouted over the roar of the music. “I have to leave!”
“Why?” Cynthia shouted back. “Things are good!”
“They’re here! We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Who’s here?”
Cynthia’s girl was disappearing into the crowd. Cynthia wasn’t even listening to Alix now, she was craning her neck and motioning for the girl to come back. “Wait!” she shouted.
Alix gave up and just grabbed Cynthia’s arm and headed for the exit.
“Hey!” Cynthia protested. “What are you doing?”
Alix ignored her, just kept dragging her drunk, high friend through the crowd. Cynthia pried at her grip.
“What the hell, Alix?”
“We’re getting out!”
Finally, Alix found the door. They stumbled out into the chill, late-night air.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Cynthia shouted. “I was having a good time!”
Alix ignored her. “Where is the car?”
Cynthia didn’t say anything. She was just scowling. Alix realized she hadn’t actually spoken the question.
Damn, you really are fucked up.
“Where’s the car?” Alix said again, out loud this time. Her voice sounded tinny and distant against the ringing of her ears and the sudden night silence outside of the party.
“Why? What’s going on?” Cynthia’s distant voice replied.
“They’re here,” Alix said. “2.0.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Where did you get that flyer? That party flyer?”
Cynthia shook her head, puzzled. “I don’t know.… I just got it. They were just around. Denise, maybe? Why? Who cares?”
God, the girl was so slow. Put some booze and drugs in her and the IQ went right out the window. Alix realized she couldn’t wait for Cynthia to get off her high. She grabbed her friend again. “Just come on. I’ll explain later.”
“Will you quit grabbing me!” Cynthia dug in her feet. “What the hell’s your problem?” she asked. “Are you tripping? Are you jealous?”
“Jealous?” Alix stared at her with confusion. “Why?” She spied Cynthia’s Dodge Dart and reached for her friend again. Cynthia jerked her arm away, glaring. “Quit grabbing!”
“I saw rats,” Alix explained.
Cynthia started laughing. “Rats? You saw rats? How high are you? What else did you take in there?”
Alix ignored her and headed for the car. The doors to the Dart were locked.
“Where are your keys?” Alix kept looking over her shoulder, expecting the crazy girl with the blue hair and the little feral kid to emerge from the darkness, but they weren’t anywhere around.
“I can’t drive,” Cynthia said, shaking her head fuzzily. “I’m totally fucked up.”
“We’re both going to be fucked up if you don’t hurry! Give me your keys!”
Babysitting drunks was never Alix’s favorite thing, and drunk Cynthia was turning into a huge, floppy pain in the neck. Cynthia wasn’t taking any of this seriously. Now she was looking back toward the party.
“But I met that nice girl,” she said sadly.
Alix went to dig in Cynthia’s pocket herself, but the girl was laughing now and fumbled them out. “Okay, okay. Here.” She offered her the keys. Alix reached for them. They fell out of Cynthia’s hand and hit the ground in a jangle of metal.
“Oops!” Cynthia giggled again.
Alix wanted to scream. She got down on her knees, feeling for the keys in the darkness. Trying to spy any gleam of metal. Cynthia stood by uselessly and giggled.
“Did you see that girl I was with?” she asked as Alix searched.
“Yeah, I saw her.” Alix swallowed, trying to focus on her search.
“I really liked her.”
Alix’s mouth was dry, and she was feeling more and more blurry. Why did she drink so much? She wasn’t in any shape to drive. She could barely walk. The ground was tilting and swaying under her. She felt horribly sick and dizzy. Her hand made slow, blurred traceries when she moved it.
“She’s here,” Cynthia said. “Don’t sweat it.”
“Who’s here?” Alix asked, fighting off the fog of drugs and booze. When Cynthia didn’t answer, she looked up.
It was him.
Her stalker. 2.0. Standing right there, beside Cynthia.
The two of them were looking down at her, watching while she crawled around in the broken dirt and concrete and weeds, hunting for the keys.
“I thought you said one would be enough,” her stalker said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to kill her,” Cynthia answered.
The two of them became four in Alix’s vision. Alix tried to stand up, but the ground didn’t cooperate. It flipped out from under her. She sank back to the asphalt, groaning.
“Cynthia?” she slurred.
Cynthia smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Alix.”
“Sorry?” Alix was having a hard time making her mouth move. It felt rubbery and thick.
Nothing was making any sense. Now the girl with blue hair was there, too. And another one, short, the feral Latino kid she’d seen. He was holding something in his hands. A Taser. She recognized the device from Death Barbie’s many protective toys.
Alix tried to get up again, but her legs were noodles. The ground rose and fell in waves, like when she’d taken a fishing boat tour off the coast of Thailand with her family when they’d spent two weeks in Phuket. She struggled to steady herself and almost made it upright, but the ground betrayed her again and tilted.
She collapsed against 2.0, and he grabbed her as she fell. “Whoa! Slow down there, girl.”
“Wh-who?” Alix t
urned her head, trying to see all of them, trying to see where… She reached for Cynthia. “I thought you were my friend!”
Cynthia looked apologetic. “I know.”
The dizziness was turning to blackness. Alix felt herself leaning more heavily against her stalker, and then she was sliding to the ground again, sinking into a deeper, darker blackness than any she had ever known.
The last thing she heard was Cynthia.
“See? I told you I gave her enough.”
14
“GET HER INSIDE NOW,” MOSES SAID. Kook and Tank scooped her up and started dragging her clumsily across the concrete.
Moses grabbed them and slowed them down. “Be careful with her, all right? She’s valuable.” Other ravers were sitting outside on cars, drinking, going in and out of the old warehouse. Moses watched carefully to see if anyone was paying attention to a passed-out girl being carried by a couple of her friends, but nobody seemed to care. Cynthia was watching the girl being taken away as well.
“Hey,” he said, chucking Cynthia on the shoulder. “You okay?”
Cynthia shook herself. “Yeah.”
She didn’t sound okay. She sounded weird and uncertain. “You need to talk?” Moses asked.
Cynthia pressed her hands to her head. “I’m too drunk to talk. I had to drink a bunch of vodka with her, and it mixed like shit.”
Moses didn’t buy the excuse. Cynthia looked stricken. “Hey,” he said. “If there’s something going on, you tell me. You were in there a long time with her. Everything I’ve read about deep-cover work is that it hits pretty hard. Maybe you start identifying with the people you’re hanging out with. Even my uncle said he sometimes started to feel bad for people he was working. You know someone long enough, you get attached. It’s natural to get overconnected.”
Cynthia glared at him. “You should talk. Peeping-Tomming her house?”
Moses grimaced. “Yeah, well, nobody said any of us were perfect.”
Cynthia watched Tank and Kook as they slowly hauled Alix away. “Her parents are going to freak.”
“Yeah.” Moses turned the fact over in his mind, remembering how he’d looked forward to this exact moment. Trying to decide how he felt about it now. It was happening, for real, finally. The moment when he hit the fish tank and it burst and water went everywhere. The moment when Simon Banks discovered he didn’t have control. The slippery bastard was about to learn that his lies couldn’t save him this time.
“Payback’s a bitch,” Moses said softly.
“Her brother…” Cynthia trailed off.
Moses felt a rush of irritation. “Oh, get off it. It’s not like these people cared about any of us. You think they cared about Tank when he was in the hospital on a respirator? For sure they didn’t give a damn about my dad, or yours. Or Adam’s or Kook’s people. These people don’t give a damn.”
“I know, but…”
“Seriously, Cyn. We all wanted payback. This is what it looks like.”
Cynthia looked away. “What happens if this doesn’t work?”
“Rule four: Always have a Plan B. This will work. It’s Plan A, or it’s Plan B. And either way, we aren’t going to be the ones who lose. Not this time.”
“Did you see how she looked when she went down?”
Moses started to give another sharp retort, but something in Cynthia’s expression made him hold back.
“Yeah, I saw it.” The truth was, Alix’s collapse was worse than he wanted to admit: The girl he’d watched for so long turned into nothing but a limp doll. A rag of a person going flat and vulnerable, her personality slipping away. He couldn’t get rid of the memory of her frightened, dilated eyes, begging. The pretty goldfish trying to understand why she’d been busted out of the fish tank, wondering why she couldn’t breathe anymore.
Let it go. This is just Stockholm syndrome–type shit. Identifying with the target. It’s natural. Let it go.
The first thing to do was not to think of her as a person. She wasn’t the girl who ran track like a demon possessed her. She wasn’t the girl who was stuck taking care of her brother because her parents were too distracted. She wasn’t the girl who had opened her door to him, against all reason.
Alix Banks was the target. They’d nailed their target. Bull’s-eye. Now it was time to make the target useful.
Bull’s-eye.
“Come on.” Moses tugged Cynthia’s arm. “We need to get out of sight. We’re going to have to disappear you, too.”
Cynthia didn’t respond to his pressure. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that,” she said.
“How the hell did you think it was going to be? Did you think she’d just faint all nice and clean? I told you it was serious. You knew that.”
“I knew it, but I didn’t know it, okay? Lay off me.”
Moses sighed, feeling sour. He knew, all right. He also knew that if he started expressing doubts like the ones on Cynthia’s face, it would infect all of them and the plan would unravel, right here and right now. It could all fall apart, just as the stakes had been raised to an impossible level. This was Texas hold ’em just the way Kook liked to play. A game of odds and guts, and, at some point, you were all in, and all you could do was win or lose. The one thing for sure was that you couldn’t walk out, because all your chips were already on the table.
“I hear a good plan lasts for about six seconds after the battle starts. Of course we were going to hit bumps.”
“I don’t know if I can take many more bumps like that,” Cyn said. “Did you see the way she looked at me?”
I saw.
He forced down the thought. “Brace up, girl. It’ll be harder before it gets better.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
Moses put his arm around Cynthia’s shoulders. “It’s not your job to worry. That’s my deal. This isn’t on you. You did good. Now, let’s get you inside. You deserve a break after all the work you did. Wasn’t there someone you were dancing with?”
He kept on. Talking her down, talking a good line. Helping her feel okay. Leading her to safety and comfort and the certainty that even if they did something hard, they were doing the right thing.
Dawn. Moses perched atop his warehouse, looking out across the city. The sun, breaking through the jagged horizon, its rays bathing him in golden heat and light, a balm and a comfort, caressing his face, sinking into his bones. Warmth and renewal. Despite the night without sleep, he almost felt good. In this moment, with the sun warming him, and the first sounds of the city starting to grind and beep and come alive, he could almost relax. The night had been a frenzy, but now, settled in his home, his muscles were unknotting. Everything was finally arranged. And in the clean and pristine environs of Haverport, the Banks household was surely already awake.
He’d watched the feeds with Kook, enjoying the blow-by-blow of the Williams & Crowe people meeting with the frustrated parents after Alix escaped. He’d listened as Simon Banks reamed out his killer dogs. Watched the man dress down Lisa Price, hammering her again and again as they stood in his living room, unaware that Moses and Kook were silently watching from behind the steady eye of Jonah’s Xbox.
“How could a couple of kids fool you?” Banks shouted.
The Price woman didn’t give an inch. “That’s an interesting question. I was under the impression that you’d convinced your daughter of the seriousness of her situation.”
“That woman freaks me out,” Moses muttered to Kook.
“Death Barbie, for reals,” Kook agreed. “I put some tabs on her. She basically doesn’t have a life. All that woman does is work out, do target practice, and clock hours for Williams and Crowe. She’s a top dog there.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah, Williams and Crowe sent their best for this gig.”
“Good to know we’re so important.”
“Well, Banks and his clients are important, anyway.”
Death Barbie wasn’t backing down from Simon Banks. “My job was to guard you
r daughter, not to keep her from planning an escape.”
“I hired you to protect her!”
Lisa looked at him coldly. “I’ll remind you, once, that you aren’t the only person who’s unhappy that you’ve become a target. We’re doing our best to locate Alix now. She should be back under our care soon.”
“You wish.” Kook snorted.
Moses had to restrain himself from shushing her. They were so close to the action that he instinctually worried that Death Barbie would hear them. The technology Kook had assembled was astounding.
“Can you imagine how much easier this would have been if we just could have bugged his offices in DC?” he murmured.
Kook scowled. “You going to bring that up again?”
“That wasn’t what I meant. We tried. It’s no one’s fault.”
“Well, it definitely wasn’t my fault,” Kook said. “My stuff was all set. You’re the one who couldn’t break in.”
“I wasn’t expecting Fort Knox.”
“Yeah, the house was way easier.”
“Thanks to Cynthia.”
“Access helps. She got just about every room.”
Banks and his killer dogs had lapsed into wary detente. Williams & Crowe people were putting out calls for assistance with the local PD. Moses listened as they debated the seriousness of the situation. Debated whether Alix was actually in danger and how long they should wait before calling in more help.
Moses was glad to know they hadn’t put all the pieces together and were continuing to fumble around. Some of them still even insisted 2.0 was a group of animal rights activists. Trying to peg the blame to PETA or some such.
“Those rats really screwed with their heads,” Kook commented.
Moses couldn’t help chuckling. “Who knew people were so suspicious about animal lovers?”
“One of the top domestic terrorism threats, according to the FBI.”
“No wonder they latched onto that for so long.”
Moses watched them, considering the possibilities. It wasn’t a kidnapping yet. Not to them. It was just one willful girl, pushing back against her parents. They weren’t calling the feds—yet.