Jersey?
She measured the distances and was surprised to discover that Haverport was as close to northern New Jersey as it was to Hartford. They were in opposite directions, but the distances matched almost perfectly.
Could that really be?
Alix switched to satellite view and started looking over the entire area where Maple Confections was housed. All she could see were a lot of huge buildings that all looked alike from above.
She tried Google Street View and was surprised to find that the area was documented. With the street view, she could roam back and forth between each of the huge buildings, as if she were walking. But it felt wrong to her. This wasn’t an industrial area. It seemed to be mostly foods that were produced here. There were a lot of abandoned food-storage and grain elevators.
She stopped and scrolled back.
Gotcha.
One building in particular had the style of windows that she remembered from 2.0’s locker room, and for sure the building was huge.
On the outside it said NEW JERSEY CANNING SYSTEMS in letters so faint she could barely make them out.
It was strange to drive to the place where she had been held captive. Was she insane to be seeking out the people who had kidnapped her? Was she crazy to be tracking down Moses?
He put you in a cage.
And yet here she was, crossing into Jersey.
She’d left a note to her family not to expect her for dinner, that she was going out with Sophie, and now she was crossing state lines.
Alix wondered if she should have done something to protect herself. Set up some kind of fail-safe, maybe. 2.0 had let her go the last time, but that had been part of the plan. What would happen when she showed up on the doorstep?
She found her exit and followed an eighteen-wheeler that was also exiting into the warehouse district. She wound between the factories and warehouses, following the blue arrow on her phone’s GPS. More eighteen-wheelers were parked at loading docks, and big rigs were on all the roads, driving in and out of the area, looming over her tiny car.
She bumped over train tracks, making her way into quieter and more abandoned areas. As she got closer to her target, her heart began to thud, and she noticed that her palms were slick on the steering wheel. Nervous energy ticked under her skin.
“You’re okay,” she reminded herself, and then hated that she had to say it out loud. “You’re stalking them this time.”
There.
She pulled to a stop in the shadow of a wrecked warehouse and shut off the car, staring up at the building. New Jersey Canning Systems. They’d fooled a lot of people, but this was it. This was the real factory. She was sure of it. This was the place she’d first met the rebellious tribe that had shaken her world.
You can still turn around. Go home and call the FBI…
“Who are you kidding?” Alix muttered. She wanted to see them again. She wanted them to know that she’d tracked them down. To show them that even though they were smart, she was smarter.
Hell yes, she wanted this confrontation.
Alix grabbed her purse and climbed out of the car. In case things went badly, she kept her phone in hand. They wouldn’t catch her off guard this time. She’d see them coming. She made her way to the factory.
Weeds grew green between cracks in the pavement. Not far off, the Maple Confections factory puffed steam, but the winds weren’t blowing her way today. She hadn’t smelled bread when she’d been held captive, but there was the evidence. With the winds coming in the right direction, she could imagine the factory blanketed with the scent of baking bread.
This is the place. This is really the place. You did it. You found them.
Slowly, Alix circled the huge building, wary for signs of movement.
Nothing seemed to be happening. No cars were parked nearby. She crept up to a door and rattled it. Locked.
She went around the corner, feeling exposed and out of place in the industrial zone. Half of her expected some workman to yell at her to get out of where she didn’t belong. Her little red MINI stood out like a sore thumb where she’d parked it in the weeds. It looked cute and small and vulnerable among the looming factory buildings.
The next door Alix came to was also locked. She kept working her way around the building and, finally, came to a pair of wide double-bay doors. She yanked, expecting them to be locked as well, but, to her surprise, they opened immediately, sliding aside easily on well-oiled tracks.
The factory was empty.
At first, she thought she had the wrong building.
How could it be empty?
She walked through the echoing factory, trying to match the layout to her memories. Her shoes clicked loudly on the concrete, the only sound in the cavernous space.
It felt bigger now, without anyone in it, and lonely. She remembered Tank skating across the concrete expanse. She remembered a heavy bag for some kind of training. She remembered weights. It was all gone. She opened doors and found old hunks of machinery that might have once been stamps or presses, stored in silent rows.
She paused, listening. Were those footsteps?
“Hello?”
No response.
Was she even in the right place, she wondered? If she was, 2.0 had left it completely pristine. There was no history here except her own memories, and as she walked through the cavernous rooms, she even began to doubt those. It was too clean. She pushed open another door and found a kitchen and felt a surge of relief and recognition.
It was definitely the same place. The steel table was still in the center of the room. The steel counters had the right layout. She’d definitely been here. She walked around the table, running her hand across its surface, and pulled out a chair.
This is where they made me sit. Cynthia there. Tank there. Adam there. Kook on that counter over there.
And Moses, of course, the one they all looked to and trusted, right there across from her. Right there.
But they were gone, just like their pizza boxes and rounds of gourmet cheese.
She left the kitchen and strode out across the open space, her shoes clicking and echoing. The map felt right now. With the kitchen to orient her, it all felt exactly right. Here were the floor-to-ceiling storage racks, and there were the conveyor lines. It was all here.
She was walking faster and faster, recognizing all of it now. In the locker room, she found all six sinks, still in a line. Of course the toothbrushes were gone, and the lockers were scoured clean, without even a cashmere thread to indicate that Cynthia had installed an entire high-end wardrobe there.
“I was here.” Just knowing that the place existed felt like a giant Alix-has-not-in-fact-lost-her-shit kind of affirmation. 2.0 had lived here. They’d showered here. They’d skated here. They’d plotted here.
And now, even though she remembered being frightened and angry and lost and alone when she’d been trapped, Alix was suddenly struck by how disappointed she was that they were gone. Suddenly, absurdly, intensely, Alix wished that 2.0 had never released her.
When Alix had returned to Seitz after the kidnapping, Sophie had asked her what would have happened if 2.0 had kept her; Alix knew she was really asking, Would you have ended up chopped into a million little pieces? But now Alix wondered if the real danger was being trapped at Seitz.
Stifling her disappointment, Alix headed back to the open factory floor and scanned it one last time.
Of course they were gone. It made perfect sense. She’d just been so wrapped up in the puzzle of it all that she hadn’t thought that 2.0 might have lives and plans and agendas of their own.
The world doesn’t revolve around you, Alix.
Moses had even said they were in town for only a little while. So of course they were gone. Their business was finished here. They’d humiliated her and her father, and they’d made fools of Williams & Crowe. Now they were off on some other Don Quixote mission. They were probably terrorizing some CEO in California by now. Filling the guy’s Santa Barbara mansion with ocean wate
r and turning it into a giant aquarium or something.
She turned in a circle one last time, trying to take it in. It was getting dark now, making the building gloomy.
Whatever she’d been hoping to find was gone. Closure? Some kind of conversation? People to hang out with who didn’t feel morally bankrupt?
Moses. She’d at least wanted to find Moses. She’d wanted to look him in the eye and say that she understood. She’d put all the pieces together. She’d figured it all out. And to top it off, she’d tracked him down. Which meant she’d beaten him. For once, she’d beaten him. For once, she’d surprised him, instead of the other way around.
Why do you even care? What do you have to prove to him?
She remembered chasing him after his first prank. With rats running everywhere, and more mayhem to come, she’d grabbed his sleeve and called for him to wait. And he’d whirled on her, and, in that moment, she’d seen herself in the lenses of his glasses, her Seitz schoolgirl uniform and her tidy French braid, and she’d felt painfully naive.
God, she’d hated that feeling.
She wasn’t used to anyone looking down on her, and there he was, looking smug, because he knew more than she did. She’d wanted to be strong in that moment, to be able to stand up to him.
“You don’t need him,” Alix said to herself. She took a deep breath. “You don’t need any of them anymore. You answered all the questions yourself. You figured it all out on your own.”
So what now?
And she found, to her surprise, that she had an answer for that as well.
The Doubt Factory.
Alix started to smile. She didn’t need Moses to answer questions, and she didn’t need 2.0 to give her a direction. She’d already chosen her direction. Sometime between reading about aspirin and listening to her father’s plotting, she’d chosen a direction on her own. This was just a sentimental detour on the way to her actual destination.
With a new spring in her step, she strode out of the factory’s bay doors and slid them closed.
Full dark was coming on. She could see the lights of New York City far in the distance, a glowing skyline. Much closer, a neon MAPLE CONFECTIONS sign illuminated the bread factory, glazing the area in reddish light. Already Alix’s mind was at work, trying to solve the puzzle of how she could crack the Doubt Factory.
Her father made his living helping companies tell their side of the story, and yet every time he did, he kept a portion of their stories to himself. But somewhere deep inside Banks Strategy Partners, the rest of those stories were hidden.
She just needed to find a way to pry them out.
Alix made her way across the weedy lot to her car, listening to the distant rumblings and beeps and groans of shipping and manufacturing, the music of things being made and moved. Her MINI sat like a toy amid the warehouses. All of it was so big. Bigger than any one person.
Out on the water, she could see a container ship, its lights glowing, giant freight cranes crouching over it, starting to unload.
It’s all so big, she thought, and for a second she felt overwhelmed and small. But then she banished the feeling. Sometimes big things fall hard.
She liked that thought better.
Smiling, Alix climbed into the MINI and revved its engine.
As she put the car in drive, a hand wrapped around her neck and jerked her back against her seat. Alix gasped and tried to break free, but she was pinned.
A voice murmured in her ear, “Didn’t expect to see you again.”
33
“MOSES.” ALIX SWALLOWED AT THE pressure on her throat. Her heart was pounding as adrenaline ripped through her.
Stay calm.
She had one hand on the wheel, one on the gear shift. She swallowed again. “I can drive us straight into a wall if you don’t let go of my neck, Moses. All I have to do is step on the gas.”
The pressure eased off a little. “That probably wouldn’t go well for either of us, would it?” His voice was so familiar. So confident. He was always so damn confident.
“I’ve got a seat belt,” Alix pointed out. “A crash will work out better for me than you.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Moses said. “I’ll take my chances. This just feels safer, you know.” He gave her throat a squeeze. “I’d rather have some leverage.”
“Leverage for what?”
“Good behavior.”
“Good behavior?” Alix laughed out loud. “After what you did to me?” She knew she was hideously vulnerable, but she couldn’t help firing back. “You’re the one who drugged me and stuck me in a cage! I should probably drive you into the wall just on principle!”
“Well, there you go—just another reason not to trust you.”
“The feeling’s mutual, then,” Alix replied.
“Seriously?” Moses sounded almost hurt.
“What do you think?”
The sense of play faded from Moses’s voice, replaced by a surprising earnestness. “If I wanted to hurt you, Alix, you’d already be hurt. It would’ve been easy with you snooping around my place.”
“So why didn’t you? If you don’t trust me so much, why didn’t you just do something?”
There was a long pause. He seemed caught off guard at the question. “Maybe I wanted to know what your game was,” he said finally.
“I don’t play games,” Alix retorted. “That’s what you do, remember?”
Moses laughed harshly. “Don’t sell yourself short. You played me. When I let you go, I was so sure you were telling the truth. You made me believe, Alix, and it’s not often that I get played like that. I mean, I really believed. Hasn’t happened in a long time. But I got to hand it to you, you played me perfectly.”
“Would you please let me go? Your hand is starting to make me uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, sorry, but no. I don’t trust you.”
Alix let the engine rev slightly. The MINI was begging to lunge forward. “Let me go, Moses. Or I put us both into the wall, and then I scrape you off the windshield.”
“You think I’m afraid of dying?” he asked. “Try again, Alix.”
Alix clenched her jaw with irritation. “Just so you know, I didn’t play you.”
“So Williams and Crowe just happened to show up on my doorstep? That was a strange coincidence. I let you go, and then Williams and Crowe came knocking with tear gas.”
“That wasn’t really your doorstep.”
“Bet you were disappointed to find out I was one step ahead of you.”
Alix remembered the tear gas rounds crashing through the upper windows, believing that everyone inside was going to be choking and collapsing.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t want that.” She could still feel the horror of that moment. Seeing what she had set in motion and knowing she was powerless to stop it. She swallowed. “I didn’t know they’d do that.”
“If I didn’t have a backup plan, Tank would be dead by now,” Moses said quietly. “We’d all be in jail, and Tank would be dead.”
At first, Alix thought he was accusing her, but the way he said it, it felt more like he was barely even talking to her. Almost as if he were reminding himself of something.
He feels guilty, she realized, surprised.
“I didn’t know they’d be like that,” she said again. “It wasn’t what I wanted. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about that.”
Moses was quiet in the car’s darkness. Finally, he said, “Yeah, well, I guess we did drug you and put you in a cage. I hear that annoys people.”
“Payback is a bitch,” Alix agreed.
They both laughed darkly at that. An oddly companionable silence settled between them. Two people, each holding a threat over the other. Neither one quite with the upper hand. The MINI idled smoothly. Moses’s hand was warm on her neck.
“Truce?” Alix suggested hopefully.
“Truce?” Alix could hear the smile in his voice. “I like you, Alix. But I don’t trust you.”
“You like me?”
she asked. “And this is how you show it?”
“What’s not to like?”
“Didn’t I chip a tooth of yours?”
“That just made me respect you.”
“So what would make you trust me? A punch in the nose?”
Moses blew out his breath. “We’re past trusting, Alix. We’ve got too much water under the bridge for that.”
“You mean because of what I did to you,” Alix said. “Because of Williams and Crowe.”
“Or maybe because of what I did to you. We’ve got history now, that’s all.”
“What if I said I forgave you?”
“I’d say that sounds real nice.”
“But you still wouldn’t trust me.”
“Fool me once, shame on you,” Moses said. “Fool me twice…” He trailed off. Alix saw his shape shrug in her rearview mirror. “I thought I knew what was going on inside your head, but I was wrong. I don’t need to go down that road again.”
“What about when you came to my house?” she asked. “You trusted me then. I could have called Williams and Crowe, but I didn’t. Why did you risk that?”
“Maybe I wanted to trust you.”
“Well, maybe I wanted to trust you, too.”
There was a pregnant pause. Alix could almost hear Moses considering the angles.
Come on, she thought. Just let me go. Just let us talk. Why can’t we just talk?
“No,” he said finally. “That wasn’t real. You could make up any story you wanted about me in your head, and maybe that made you open your door to a stranger. And I could make up any story I wanted about you and think you could be all kinds of things you weren’t. But that wasn’t real. I could pretend you were different from those other Seitz girls. I could pretend that you were just asleep. I could pretend that if you woke up, you’d be…” He trailed off again. “Anyway, that was just me making things up.”
“I’d be what?” Alix pressed. “Snow White or something?”
He laughed. “Actually, I thought you’d be dangerous.”
“Maybe I am.”
“I don’t have any doubt about that now.”
Doubt. He had no doubt that she was dangerous. But he didn’t believe she could be trusted. Alix remembered a long-ago conversation with him. Moses describing his world: