She solidified. “Careful with the gun.” She gestured at the glass walls. “If you miss…”
“I’m not going to shoot you. I need you awake so I can beat the truth out of you.”
“The truth.” She smiled. “You sure you want the truth, Jane? Because the truth is, even if you get me to tell you where Phil’s hiding, you won’t save him. He belongs to the Troop now. You might catch him, but you won’t turn him. He’ll curse you for even trying.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”
“I know you are worried about it. That’s why there’s a part of you that really would like to shoot me, to shut me up before I can talk. Go on, check it out.”
I glanced down at the gun in my hand.
The dial was turned to the MI setting.
“Yeah,” the bad Jane said. “If you kill me, Phil gets away, and then you can go on pretending there’s hope. But there is no more hope, Jane. You had your chance to protect Phil twenty-three years ago. Now he’s got power, and position, and a purpose—more than you ever had—and he’s never going to give that up willingly. He might have shared a little of it with you, but that chance is gone too. So all that’s left is death. You can hunt him down and execute him, like the bad monkey he is. Is that the truth you’re looking for, Jane? You want to be responsible for finishing Phil off?”
As she talked, she moved along the catwalk towards me. She started to get a little too close for comfort; I took a step back and my heel caught, throwing me off-balance. It was all the opening she needed. She came forward in a blur, chopping her hand against my wrist to make me drop the gun. Then her hands were around my neck.
“Don’t fight it,” she said. I tried to melt away, but she held on to me firmly, using the last of her power. “Don’t fight it, Jane…You know this is the best way.” She bent me backwards over the catwalk railing. I felt the heat of the light scorching me. “Just let go. Just let go. No more guilt for you, no more screwups, and Phil gets to go on…”
With the last of my strength, I reached up, placed a palm flat against her chest. I pushed, merged, my hand passing through her jacket, her skin, her breastbone. I grabbed her by the heart, and squeezed.
She gasped and let go of me. She tried to step away, but I lifted her off the ground.
“Now,” I said. “You’re going to tell me where my brother is…”
Her arms and legs started flailing like mad, but her slaps and kicks were nothing to me. I pivoted around, lifting her over the railing to dangle her above the searchlight. I concentrated; the light blazed up, not just like the sun now, until I could see all the way through her, all the way to her soul. Steam, then smoke, curled off of her.
“Tell me where he is,” I said. I gave her heart one more squeeze.
She threw her head back, screamed it out; the words echoed off the glass tent as the light continued to blaze.
“Thank you,” I said. “And good-bye, Jane.”
I opened my hand. Her body, limp now, slipped free. Descending, she flashed into fire, the light consuming her more thoroughly than a Mandrill bomb. Not even ashes were left.
Tapped out, dripping with sweat, I slumped against the catwalk railing.
A dark shape moved at the edge of my vision. There was a flash of pebble glasses.
“Well,” Dixon said. “That was rather medieval.”
“I didn’t like her,” I told him. “I don’t like you much, either. But that doesn’t matter now…I know where Phil is.”
“Yes, I heard. I hope she wasn’t lying.”
“She wasn’t. But we’re going to have to move fast. By now Phil will know that this operation has gone wrong. When the bad Jane doesn’t report in, he’ll run.”
“Not to worry.” Dixon flipped open his cell phone. “I have a Bad Monkeys strike team standing by.”
“I don’t want any help. Just get me to him, I’ll go in alone.”
“You aren’t going in at all. Even if I trusted you, you can barely stand.”
“Even if you trusted me? What…Wait. What do you mean, ‘strike team’?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“No. We’re supposed to bring Phil in alive. Love promised me he’d honor True’s deal.”
“Love is on his way to the hospital,” Dixon said. “He had a heart attack—a real one. That puts me in operational command.”
“It doesn’t change the deal! You can’t—”
“You know that bomb you left on the baccarat table? The technician we sent in to defuse it said that the ‘damper switch’ was just a dummy. If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the casino.”
“It wasn’t Phil who put me up to that. It was her.”
“It was his plan. This is the sort of thing your brother does for the Troop. This is what he is, now…And I am not going to go in soft and risk letting him escape, just to assuage your guilt about being a bad sister.”
“You prick,” I said. “You’re just doing this to spite me!”
“I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.” He raised the cell phone to his ear.
I scooped my NC gun off the catwalk.
“Don’t be a fool,” Dixon said.
“Don’t think I won’t…” The dial was still on the MI setting. I tried to switch it back to narcolepsy, but it must have been damaged in the fall. It wouldn’t budge.
A cold smirk formed on Dixon’s lips as he watched me struggle with the dial. “How very convenient,” he said. “To stop me, you’ll have to kill me…And as there are no witnesses, you’ll be free to blame the bad Jane…”
“Shut up!” I banged the dial against the catwalk railing. It still wouldn’t turn. “Put down that goddamned cell phone!”
“No.”
“I’m not going to let you kill my brother, Dixon.”
“And what about all the other people he’ll kill, if he gets away? I suppose you’ll blame their deaths on the bad Jane, too.”
“Dixon—”
“Go ahead,” he said, staring me down. “Pull the trigger. Prove me right.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No…” Relaxing my grip, I let the gun drop. It bounced off the catwalk and vanished into the light.
Behind the pebble glasses, I caught the tiniest flicker of relief. “That’s better,” Dixon said. “Now—”
Before he could finish his sentence, I dipped my hand in my pocket and came out holding the bad Jane’s knife.
“I’m not going to let you kill my brother,” I repeated. “But you’re wrong about the rest of it. I take full responsibility. For everything. For Phil.”
Then I flicked open the blade and stepped towards him.
white room (viii)
“SO YOU KILLED DIXON TO PROTECT your brother.”
“No, I killed Dixon because I didn’t protect my brother…and because I finally realized I couldn’t save him.”
The doctor shakes his head. “I don’t understand. If you thought Phil couldn’t be saved—”
“I didn’t say that. I said I couldn’t save him. The bad Jane was right about that much: I’d missed my one chance, and all I could do now was get him killed…But Phil could still save himself.” She looks the doctor in the eye. “I don’t care what the Troop did to him, what they made him do, I have to believe there’s some part of him that’s not irredeemable. He was a good kid, you know? He deserved better than me for a sister…But I was what he got, and if I wasn’t strong enough to bring him home, I could at least buy him some more time to find his own way back.
“So that’s my story.” She shrugs and sinks back in the chair. “What do you think?”
“I’m not sure what you want me to say, Jane.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I could point out some more holes in the narrative, if you like,” the doctor says. “I could tell you that there have been no reports of bodies found at the Venetian: no butchered guests up in the penthouse, no mimes with their throats slit beside the Grand Canal. I could tell you that the security guards at the Luxor are quite certain there was only one Jane, not two, running amok in the casino that night, and none of them witnessed any laws of physics being broken—just a lot of punching and kicking. I could tell you that, but then you’ll tell me that Catering covered up what really happened, and if that explanation still leaves a few loose ends, well, it’s a Nod problem.”