Sarah gave a great, shuddering sigh. She blinked. “It— hurts,” she said.
“I know. We’ll make it better soon.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t mean it.”
“Don’t you worry about that. Don’t you worry. What they’ve done to you, they deserve it.”
Tears blurred her vision, turned light into rainbows of color. The hospital had begun to burn faster now. Thicker, black smoke lifted from the roof and drifted lazily in the suddenly calm air.
A few other children emerged from their hiding places. They gathered silently to stare down at the strange couple in the grass like respectful mourners. For a moment this all felt like a dream, and then Jess looked and saw what was left of the man lying at the foot of the steps, hair smoking and skin black and cracked, saw the door blown from its hinges and the darkness inside, and she felt like screaming. She looked down the street at the bodies and the twisted wreckage of cars, and most of all the huge, gaping hole where the sniper’s building had been.
It was desolation, destruction. It was Armageddon. She blinked, seeing everything through a broken prism of light. She could not make it all go away. It was too late for that.
The sirens were very close now. Any moment they would be here.
Sarah coughed and her lips stopped moving. For a moment the air crackled and spat; then the feeling dispersed like smoke from a dying fire, and everything was calm. Jess closed her eyes against the stink of the burn, the shattered remains of what had been left behind.
She waited for somebody to come.
EPILOGUE
Here are the smoking ruins, the scars, and the drift and the silence of what used to be. The Wasserman Facility left deserted among the scrub brush and the wilds of greater Boston. Fingers of burnt wooden limbs point jaggedly to the sky, as overhead a triangle of geese flap southward for winter. Soon the remains will be lightly coated with a fine snow, the first of the season sprinkled like a handful of dirt on the lid of a coffin before it is tucked away and forgotten.
The land lies abandoned as all around it life goes on. The Wasserman Facility has joined the ghosts of its kin, and memories of the laughter and screams of the children are all that remain, until even those drift away, carried by the stiff breeze.
The burial was held on Wednesday morning, in a graveyard in Wellesley adjacent to a white clapboard church. About fifty people gathered under a drizzling rain, their faces matching the color of the sky. Black umbrellas clutched in white-knuckled fists held off the worst of it. The expressions of those in the first row were blank, or tired, or bored.
They probably barely knew her.
But as Jess Chambers looked more closely she began to see familiar faces. A few of the mourners were colleagues; she recognized Professor Thomas with a younger woman, who clung to his arm with one hand and clutched a handkerchief in the other. Some of those gathered along the right were students, red-eyed and blowing their noses into white tissue as Jean Shelley’s casket swung and scraped against dirt on its way down.
The casket was a symbolic gesture. They had been unable to recover anything at all from the wreckage of the fire. The inferno in the observation room had blazed so hot and strong that even Shelley’s bones had been reduced to dust, every trace of her existence erased and blown away.
Evan Wasserman, or what they thought was left of him, would be laid to rest tomorrow in the plot adjacent to Jean Shelley, as his will had requested.
She searched the faces again, looking for those who might appear to be a bit more out of place. She recognized two of the investigators who had already spoken to her at length at the hospital, and another younger man who might be a plainclothes cop. But nobody else stood out. Anyone left from Helix or the Wasserman Facility would be too smart to come here, she thought. Their business with Sarah was done, and Shelley’s and Berger’s deaths had probably thrown everything into chaos. They would wash their hands publicly of the entire mess. If there was anyone left at all who knew the full truth.
The whole story was still coming together in bits and pieces, very few of which the investigators had shared with her. But they clearly didn’t know everything either. What was clear was that Jean Shelley, with a large portion of the significant holdings she had inherited from her father’s steel business, had founded Helix Pharmaceuticals nearly eight years before with at least two other players. It was a privately held company specializing in gene therapy and small-molecule drug discovery, and had remained fiercely independent and guarded until recently, when rumors had begun to float about an investment opportunity. It was said that the company was offering a significant stake in a particularly exciting preclinical program, before an IND had even been filed. They would need a large cash infusion to move into clinical testing. None of this had been confirmed yet, but it was likely only a matter of time before more details came to light.
Why someone with a fortune as large as Shelley’s would have taken a job on the faculty of a small graduate school wasn’t immediately clear. The most obvious explanation, that Shelley had planned the whole thing even as far as five years back, raised other unsettling questions that Jess would rather not explore. It was more likely that she had done it simply because she could, and because it left her closer to where Sarah was being held.
For the past two days, Jess had been struggling to come to terms with a new image of herself, and it wasn’t pretty. She had let Jean Shelley play her like a fine baby grand. The professor had manipulated and controlled her nearly every step of the way.
The fact that Shelley was an authority figure should not matter in the slightest, Jess told herself. She was being trained to notice just this sort of deceit in other people. She should have been more aware of what was happening.
She felt unbalanced, unsure of herself or her own motivations.
But this wasn’t the only thing she was struggling to understand. Another part of her mind had yet to face something even more unsettling. Shelley and Gee had told her she was a psi carrier. What’s more, she had been dosed with some son of drug. Were they telling the truth, and if so, what exactly had it done to her? What did it all mean, if anything?
The minister said his last few words and closed his Bible with a snap, hunched against the wind and drizzle. When the ceremony was finished and the mourners had begun to file away, Charlie gave her a gentle hug, careful to avoid the painful spots. Then she held her at arm’s length and looked her over. Jess knew she was pale and rumpled, out of sorts. “You’re the walking wounded, girl. Should have stayed in that hospital bed.”
“I had to come, Charlie.” I had to see her into the ground. Even if she s not really in there.
“Don’t I know it. But that doesn’t mean a whit to your poor old body.”
“I’m fine, really. Just some scrapes and bruises. I’m like one of those dumb lucky miracles, people who get hit by lightning and walk away with barely a scratch.”
“Are you done with the talking?”
“I’ve got interviews later today. They let me off the hook to come here, but they’re itching to get back to it.”
“What are you telling them?”
“Nothing really. They don’t know a thing about Sarah. Children’s Services had her as deceased for years. As far as the government’s concerned, she doesn’t exist, and I’m not going to do anything to change that.”