Cynthia and Adam and Kook cracked up. “You should see your face,” Kook said.
“What am I missing?” someone called from up front. Tank?
“Nothing. We’re all good,” Moses called forward.
Alix whirled on Moses. “Is this another one of your damn pranks? Did you set me up again?”
“Whoa! Not me. Not this time.” Moses was slowly dragging himself out of his body bag. Unzipping it and then crawling unsteadily onto the ambulance’s bench. “This wasn’t my gig.”
“It was mostly Tank,” Kook said from where she was perched with her laptop and a pair of DJ headphones around her neck. “He was worried that Wonderboy here was going to do something stupid.” She looked up briefly from her laptop, frowning. “None of us expected you to be the stupid one, though. You about got the two of you killed.”
“You were following us?”
“What am I, an amateur?” Kook made a scornful face. “We bugged the factory before we left. Just had to listen in every once in a while. Sure enough, the stupid came up, just like Tank thought it would.”
“You were listening to us?”
“You and your sexytime.” Kook glanced up from her keyboard. “It would have saved me a lot of late nights if you would have just gotten to the talking instead of all that grunting and groaning.”
Alix could feel herself blushing. Moses looked uncomfortable as well.
Adam clapped her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I mostly made them fast-forward through the embarrassing parts. Straight people getting it on…” He made a face. “I mean, I guess it’s fine. If you’re into that kind of thing. But it would have made our lives a lot easier if you’d actually talked more about your plans while you were at the factory. We couldn’t get all the details we needed. We didn’t have time.”
“So… how did you know we’d be here now?”
They all exchanged glances. “Your brother.”
“Jonah?”
“We heard you saying to Moses that he knew about you both. We got the rest of the details we needed out of him.”
“But… he wouldn’t have…”
“Oh, he was a pain in the ass about it. He wouldn’t help unless he could come along.”
“He’s here?”
“God, no. Waiting in the van, as soon as we switch vehicles. He’s too useful to let anyone see him. As soon as we wrap this up, he’s going right back home to keep an eye on your dad and George Saamsi for us. That kid is a piece of work.”
Alix leaned back, stunned. Jonah. Of course. She should have known that he would never stay put. “I can’t believe…”
“Believe it, girl.” Cynthia was smiling. She gave Adam a shove and said, “Go up and drive before Tank gets us killed.”
Adam went forward. A second later the ambulance swayed as he took the wheel. Tank came back to join them.
The boy’s expression turned solemn when he saw their condition. “You made it,” he said to Moses.
“Thanks to you, I hear.”
Alix looked uncertainly from Moses to the small boy. They weren’t anything alike, and yet some part of them seemed almost as if they were twins. Older and younger versions of an experience she knew she would never fully understand.
Two orphans who had lost everything.
Tank scuffed the floor with a shoe. “Knew you were going to try something stupid.”
“I thought you were done with me.”
“Still family,” Tank said. He looked up. “You’re the only family I got.” His face looked stony solemn, and then, abruptly, the facade cracked and he lunged into Moses’s arms, wracked with terrified sobs. “I can’t lose any more family,” Tank said. “I can’t.”
Moses was taken aback. He wrapped his arms about the boy, feeling Tank’s shaking. “Hey, bro, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, bro. Didn’t mean to scare you. Didn’t mean to scare you at all.”
Tank wiped his eyes. “Can’t lose any more, you know?”
“I know,” Moses said solemnly. “I get it. I won’t do anything stupid. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I still don’t get it,” Alix said. “How did you get us here? The elevator opened and—”
“We gassed you,” Cynthia said apologetically. “We gassed the Williams & Crowe guys who were coming up to get you, and then Adam took their place, and we came up and gassed you, too. After that, it was just about staging and calling up the reinforcements.”
“I got to shoot off some sweet guns, too,” Adam called back. “Don’t forget that!”
Cynthia pressed on. “By the time everyone else had got up there, you were dead and they were focusing on cleaning up the scene. The only tense moment was when Adam had to meet up with the rest of the Williams & Crowe people who were stuck hiking up the stairwells. We were afraid someone would make him take off his SWAT helmet and get a good look at him before we could get your bodies out. But everyone was so freaked out by the other guys that we gassed that it was just a matter of wrapping you in body bags and pretending to be the friendly neighborhood ambulance association wheeling you out.”
“That was actually nerve-racking,” Kook said. “I wasn’t expecting your dad to be right at the doors when we came out with you. Lucky he was so focused on you. I thought he’d recognize Cynthia, even with medical glasses.”
“My dad was there?”
Cynthia nodded, “Yeah. I was just glad you looked as dead as you did. He was all over you. You never could have faked through that.”
“Was he mad?”
Cynthia looked at her incredulously. “He thought you were dead, Alix. He was a wreck. Crying and yelling at George Saamsi and Death Barbie. It was a mess.”
Alix swallowed at the thought, trying to decide how she felt about the news. Her father was stricken with grief at the thought that she’d died. Some part of her felt for his distress, but she couldn’t quite make herself feel sorry. He’d helped kill so many people, and he only felt bad now? Simon Banks only cared when the person dying was his own child. He didn’t feel bad about Moses’s parents or Tank and Azicort. Dad only felt bad when it was personal to him. Alix was interested to discover that she didn’t have much sympathy for him. Mostly, it felt right to her. Maybe now you understand, she thought.
“Where did you get the gas?” Moses was asking.
Kook smirked. “It’s Azicort.”
Cynthia was nodding. “When you absolutely positively want to give someone a near-fatal coma, most doctors choose Azicort. We had a whole vat of the stuff from the rat raid. Tank rigged a blower. The only real problem was not knowing how much we were dosing you with.” She peered closely at them. “You seem okay, though.”
“The more I hear, the less I want to know,” Moses groaned.
A new fear gripped Alix. “What about the files? We left the files!”
“No! I got them!” Adam called from up front. “You can thank Williams and Crowe for that. I would have missed the bag, but it turned up while we were waiting for the bodies to get cleaned out. And seeing as I was so helpful, I volunteered to take it down to Death Barbie.”
Alix slumped back, relieved. “It worked then. We did it.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Kook said. She had her headphones pinched between ear and shoulder, and she was typing madly on her blood-smeared laptop. “Our friends just put our description out on the police bands.”
Cynthia hurried over to listen in. “Hell.” Her face turned hard. “I didn’t think Williams and Croew would risk involving outsiders.”
Kook motioned for Alix. “You got your phone on you?”
“I don’t…” she felt her pockets. “Yeah. Here.”
“You want to call Death Barbie?”