29
Lily stumbled as Zoe dragged her
down the corridor. “No, really,” she said. “You look like shit.
What happened? Did you get the flu?”
“Shut up.” Zoe jerked Lily off her feet. She thudded down
to her knees on the cold, hard floor, with a gasp of startled
pain.
“But it was only a week ago or so
since I saw you, right?” Lily persisted. Zoe looked wrecked. Stress
would weaken her further, and if there was one thing Lily was good
at, it was driving people nuts.
“You looked great up at the cabin,”
she went on. “Couldn’t help but notice, even though you were trying
to kill me. You looked pretty fine the day you killed my father,
too. Killing seems to agree with you. But you look like crap now.
You must have lost twenty-five pounds. You shriveled. What is up
with that?”
“I said, shut up!” Zoe’s voice was cracking around
the edges as she jerked Lily upright, making her sore shoulder
joint blaze.
“You ought to get that jaundice
checked out,” Lily barged on. “Liver function issues really trash
your complexion.”
“Shut . . . up!” Whack. Zoe whacked Lily across the face,
slamming her into the wall, from whence she bounced down to the
floor. Lily huddled there, her hand pressed against her throbbing
facespa>
Zoe bent at the waist, hands braced on
her thighs, and stared at Lily. She panted, jaw sagging. A muscle
twitched prominently in her bony jaw. Everything showed in her
face—veins, tendons, bones, all in sharp relief, like a skull that
had been dipped in yellow wax.
Zoe squeezed her eyes shut, eyelids
twitching. Veins pulsed visibly in her temples. She dug into the
pocket of her cargo pants and yanked out a small envelope. She
peeled the sleeve of her shirt back with her teeth. Small sheets of
paper covered with red dots fluttered to the ground. A dot was
already stuck to her wrist. As Lily watched, she peeled the last
dot off one card and stuck it in the crook of her
elbow.
She sagged back against the wall,
breathing hard. Then she reached down, keeping narrowed eyes on
Lily, and scooped up the rest of the fallen papers. She tucked them
back into the envelope.
Her breathing was slower, veins no
longer popping out on her forehead. Her crisis was passing. So Zoe
was some kind of a junkie. How very unsurprising.
“What the hell is that stuff?” Lily
asked.
Zoe’s purplish lips stretched in a
sneer. “Mama’s little helper.”
“Would you give me one?” she blurted,
for no reason she could fathom. “I could use some
help.”
Zoe let out a short, contemptuous
laugh. “One dose of this stuff would kill you. You’d die of
convulsions on the spot.”
“But it doesn’t hurt you?” she
asked.
“I’m different,” Zoe said loftily.
“We’re a different order of beings. You wouldn’t understand how
profoundly we’ve been changed.”
“Deformed.” The word popped
out.
Oof, Zoe’s boot connected with her belly and
jackknifed her into a moaning vee. “Mind your manners,” Zoe said.
“Get up.”
Lily struggled up. Zoe jerked her arm,
twisting until Lily squeaked and writhed into a pretzel shape to
ease the pain, but there was no escape. The pain jangled on through
every nerve.
She shuffled, dragging her feet until
Zoe yanked open Lily’s door and flung her inside. Slam went the
door. Click, clunk went
the locks. Lily huddled, curled into a ball. She crawled to the
wall, shook her hair down in a tangled veil, itchily aware of the
camera’s constant regard. She touched the bottom of her bare foot.
Peeled off the grubby piece of paper stuck to it. Stared at it,
behind the veil of her hair.
One of Zoe’s drug patch papers. A full
one. It held sixteen of the little red dots, four rows of four, and
a protective sheet of plastic film on top. Lily held it concealed
in the palm of her hand, palm down.
She had no clue what to do with it. At
least she had a suicide tool, but that had never been an option in
her mind. She’d always been so angry at her father for trying it.
But things looked so different now.
She started to cry. In shock, that
she’d scored even that tiny victory. Terror, at the thought of
daring to use it to defy them. Grief for her father, fear for
Bruno. Too many reasons to count.
She curled up, clutching her prize,
and gave into the storm.
It was an exercise in self-control.
The agonizing, sweatpopping kind, never a talent upon which he had
particularly prided himself. The driver of the bronze BMW, who’d
confided that his name was Julian, had pulled over after ten blocks
or so, offered him a bag to put over his head, d htold him to lie
down in the backseat.
Bruno stared at the bag dangling from
the man’s hand. Black, lined, drawstring at the border. He’d as
soon lie down into his own grave. After a few seconds, Julian just
shrugged, pulled out his cell phone, held it up to his
ear.
Oh, no, no, no. Bruno promised to be
good. He put on the bag and lay down on the seat. The new-car
leather stink made him queasy. He was claustrophobic anyway, and
not being able to see or breathe fresh air made him frantic. It
would have been easier to bear if he’d been bound with rope, duct
tape. But it was just fear that held him.
The car got on a highway. He tried to
estimate the time, but anxiety skewed his perceptions. The best he
could figure when the car got off the highway was more than one
hour, less than two. Julian had tuned into Vivaldi’s “Four
Seasons,” at high volume. The melody of the bouncy, shrill violins
grated on his nerves like a car alarm.
After fifteen minutes, the car
stopped, the window whirred down. Some muffled conversation, a
shiver of cold air, and off they went again. The car moved at a
sedate pace. It came to a stop. Doors, popping.
He was dragged out by more than one
set of ungentle hands. Three people, from the sounds. Someone
jerked his hands back, put the plastic cuffs on, yanked them tight.
Sounds echoed, hollow and booming. Indoors, but the air was still.
Very cold. A big garage?
They gripped him from either side,
dragging him off his feet however hard he scrambled to keep his
feet underneath him.
The first tract was a well-sprung
wooden floor, and then he was shoved into a smallish elevator. A
sliding cage slammed shut. It was so small, one of his captors had
to stand right in front of him. He caught a whiff of perfume. One
was a woman.
The thing made a surprising amount of
jerking and grinding as it went up. Antique. He was in an old
building. The elevator didn’t go far. One floor.
The door dragged, clanged. They shoved
him out and into another long corridor. Finally, a door opened, and
he was shoved through it so hard he tumbled to his knees and then
onto his face, without his arms to brace him. They dragged him
through the room. His butt connected with a chair seat so hard it
jarred his spine all the way up to his skull. They fastened his
bound hands. Then his feet to each chair leg.
The hood was jerked off.
He sucked air into his starved lungs
in wheezing gasps, blinking away tears from the influx of
light.
He was in a large room. Several people
were arrayed before him. Julian was there. The knife-wielding ghoul
bitch from the videophone call. Another guy, too. Young, white,
bland. All of them had a strange look in their eyes. Fascination.
And focused, concentrated hatred.
Another guy stepped into the
floodlight. Bruno struggled to bring him into focus. Big, tall,
backlit by the powerful light. The man grasped Bruno’s chin between
his thumb and forefinger. His face swirled in Bruno’s vision. That
smug smile, those glinting eyes. Did he know this guy?
“Bruno,” the man said.
“Finally.”
Bruno convulsed at the sound of his
voice. The guy grabbed his chin and yanked his face up into that
helpless, supplicating child-awaiting-punishment
posture.
The question building inside him for
the past three days burst out. “Where’s Lily?” he yelled. “What
have you done with her?”
The man gave his cheek a slap. “One
thing at a time. Look at me.”
His eyes stred from the light. Tears
ran down into his nose, a wet, ticklish flood, creeping down. He
had no way to wipe his face.
It felt so fucking familiar. He wanted
to scream, thrash. He got a grip on it and stared right back.
“Yeah?” he said, belligerently.
“Do you know me?” the guy
asked.
Yes.
Yes. His gut knew, but his head still couldn’t nail
it; the how, the when, the who. “No. Who the fuck are you, and what
do you want?”
Another stinging slap.
Whap. “Don’t play dumb,”
the guy said. “I know you’re not stupid. Look again. And dig
deep.”
Terror swelled. He did know this man.
The memory was locked in his body, in muscle and bone. He felt
small, confused. Wanting his mother. So angry. Couldn’t move.
Struggling against restraints until the needle stung his arm and
paralysis took him. And that face, so pleased with himself. That
deep, horrible voice, setting his every hair on end—
“DeepWeave sequence 4.2.9 commencing,”
the guy said.
Bruno convulsed once again, violently.
His body jerked as if electricity juddered through it. The heavy
chair rattled, shook. “Oh, shit. No.”
“Yes,” the guy said. “Yes, it’s coming
to you now, right?”
Bruno wanted to deny it, but it was
flooding back in sickening waves. “The dreams. You’re that guy who
talks in my dreams.”
“Do I?” The man’s eyes sparkled. “I’m
delighted to know that the programming went so deep, even in the
experimental stages of my research. Remarkable, considering how
short a time I had to seed it.”
“Seed . . . what?” It took him a few
tries to get his throat calm enough to choke the words out.
“P-p-programming?”
The hand on his cheek petted him. He
couldn’t stop shaking his head no, even though memory was flooding
back. “You’re the guy Zia Rosa told me about. The one who kidnapped
me from Mamma when I was seven. And then Tony leaned on Michael
Ranieri to get me loose.”
The man’s face tightened. “I will
always regret that,” he said. “I should never have given in to
pressure. At the time, the Ranieris were a vital source of my
research funding. But this is no longer the case.”
“But what the hell did you want with
me?” he exploded.
“Oh, Bruno. You were my inspiration,”
the guy said, patting him on the shoulder. “You sparked a new line
of research that has yielded fantastic results. You are my shining
star, Bruno. My sine qua non.”
“What in the flying fuck are you
talking about?”
Smack, the guy whapped him again, on the
temple. “Don’t be vulgar,” the guy lectured. “I don’t like
it.”
“I don’t care what you like,” Bruno
said.
The man pinched Bruno’s cheek until
his thumbnail sliced into flesh, stinging. “You will learn to
care,” he said. “It’s time you learned.”
Bruno sucked in a ragged breath at the
pain. “Who are you?”
“Oh, Bruno.” The man sounded peevish.
“I tested your intelligence when you were a child. I don’t know how
much of that potential you’ve realized in adulthood—probably a
fraction—but I know you’re capable of answering that question
unassisted.” He released Bruno’s cheek, his thumbnail smeared with
blood. “If you need a name, call me King. Now put it together. What
do you see?” He gestured at Julian. “Addhat to what you learned
from Petrie, about the genetic makeup of my lost operatives.” He
clucked his tongue. “Terrible waste. You can’t imagine the time,
training, and money I invested in those young people.”
But Bruno was still fixated on Julian.
“How old is that kid?”
King turned to the boy. “Tell him,
Julian.”
“I’ll be seventeen in two weeks,” the
young man announced.
Mamma had been cold in her grave a
year before this kid was born. Bruno shook his head again. It was
data he was afraid to crunch. Conclusions he didn’t want to face.
But the mental process ground along without his conscious volition.
He fidgeted against his bonds and felt the crackle of paper in his
jacket pocket. The autopsy report.
It popped out at him, like a fun house
goblin in the dark. “The ovary,” he blurted. “You stole my mamma’s
eggs! You pervert!”
“Ah!” King began to clap. “Here’s a
glimpse of the Bruno I saw twenty-two years ago. All that
potential. Like a nuclear furnace. It broke my heart to see how you
turned out. All that potential down the sewer. All that was left of
my pride and joy was a foul-mouthed punk with no aspirations that I
could see other than seducing as many women as possible. No
guidance, no discipline, no vision!”
Bruno listened to the guy’s bitching,
searching frantically for connections. “What the
fuck?”
King cut himself off with a wave of
his hand. “Excuse my rant,” he said. “It’s been a sore subject for
me for decades, and I—”
“Oh, God.” The realization burst
painfully in his head, like popping flashbulbs. “Lily’s dad. That’s
the connection! He was an IVF researcher, right? He made embryos
for you. Out of Mamma’s eggs!”
“Excellent, excellent!” The man
beamed. “Yes, that’s what Howard did for me. He harvested the ovum
and made me dozens of viable embryos. I paid him very well for the
service. He was brilliant, you know. He’d developed preservation
techniques ahead of his time. Those embryos are still viable to
this day. Amazing.”
Bruno stared at Julian. This boy was
his brother, his mother’s son, with that blank stare. Born after
she died, twisted and deformed. Never knowing Magda Ranieri’s love
or protection.
“You bastard. You cut open my mamma
and stole her children,” Bruno said. “How did you get away with
that?”
“It was easy. At the time, your mother
was too busy worrying about you to worry about her ovary. But she
got worried, at the end, when she figured out what I wanted to do
with it. She even convinced Howard to be worried. She was so
worried, she had to be, well, taken care of.”
“You son of a bitch. I’ll kill you for
that,” Bruno said.
The guy was unperturbed. He folded his
arms and waited, lips twisted in a half smile. Tapping his
foot.
“What?” Bruno exploded. “What do you
want?”
“Go on,” King said. “And the
rest?”
“With what?” Bruno snarled. “Stealing
her organs, kidnapping her potential children, that’s not enough?
Aside from murdering her?”
“You’re not tracking,” King scolded.
“Don’t tell me you skipped so many eighth-grade biology classes
that you have no real grasp of the mechanics of human
reproduction.”
Bruno grunted. “Haven’t gotten any
complaints so far.”
Smack. The slap rocked his head back.
“Focus.” King’s voice cracked like a whip. “I do not appreciate
crude sexual humor.”
Bruno struggled to fathom what the guy
wanted from him. Some trail of reasoning he was supposed to follow?
About those embryos, but he couldn’t . . . oh. Oh, shit. It started
again. That drumroll. Another horrible truth he already knew but
didn’t want to know.
“You’re talking about the sperm,”
Bruno said. “You’re talking about . . . no. No fucking way. That’s
not possible.”
King smiled, delighted, gave his head
a pat. “It is.”
“You?” Bruno’s voice cracked. “You’re
not . . . not my . . .”
“Your father?” King’s teeth gleamed,
unnaturally white, as he finished the phrase for him. “Of course I
am, Bruno. Who else?”