She was part of the original testing, I said. That meant two years ago, Lev had taken her.
Yes. She was designated Patient Nine. She exhibited some abilities that I’d honestly like to study further, but I won’t have the luxury. We have to move soon.
Why bother to kill her now?
Wachalowski’s using her, and she nearly got to at least one of our operatives. We can’t take any chances at this stage. Make sure her body can’t be found.
Understood.
Do it tonight.
He broke the link, and I stared at her image. She looked so pathetic, so innocuous. She didn’t look powerful.
She tried to tell you something. Something you didn’t hear, a voice seemed to whisper in my ear.
You never heard the name Samuel Fawkes….
Her memory had stirred up others in its wake. Her face reminded me of someone else’s, someone with that same look of desperation. The hair was different and the nose was different, but those haunted eyes wore the same expression. They looked like they saw too much. I’d seen eyes like that on another woman, years back, when I was a cop. The memories had been hidden, and I hadn’t pieced them back together yet.
“He doesn’t destroy everything …I do …”
I drew forth one of the broken memories, and looked into the place that had been altered. I was in my old precinct, where I sat in the interrogation room. The woman sat across the table from me, her body worn out and sick. She was emaciated, and her teeth were decaying. Bony little fingers picked at needle tracks. At that point, her mind should have been gone as well, but her eyes were like two suns. Like the woman Zoe Ott, she’d seen more than she’d wanted.
“You need to get to a shelter,” I’d told her, but she’d just shaken her head.
“You can’t help me,” she said. “I made a mistake. This is bigger than you.”
“If you’re in some kind of trouble, I can help you.” She seemed to find that funny.
“You’re getting dragged into this just by talking to me,” she said. “They know I’m alive now.”
“Who knows?”
At the time I thought a dealer or a pimp. I’d honestly thought that I could keep her safe, but in the end I couldn’t. We never found the body, but the blood was hers, and there was far too much.
She tried to tell you something …something you didn’t hear …
I wasn’t sure who’d said that. Was it that I hadn’t heard? Or did I hear, but was forced to forget it?
I remembered a knock at my door at night. I took my gun from the drawer and answered it.
“Who is it?” I called, not opening the door.
“I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Miss Dasalia,” a man’s voice said from the other side. “This is about that woman.”
“What woman?”
“You know the one I mean.”
I opened it, but kept my weight on the door in case he tried to force it. There was a man standing there. At the time I’d never seen his face before, but I recognized it now. Years later, when I finally made detective, he would become my partner.
His eyes went wide, and I felt strangely dizzy.
“Put down the gun,” he said, “and let me in.”
…and knowing better, I let the stranger in.
“Forget everything that woman told you.” I remember he’d said that.
“You never heard the name Samuel Fawkes….”
My thoughts scattered as someone approached the car. The lock released, and the driver’s-side door unlatched. I let the memories fade.
The door groaned open and Nico climbed inside, lowering himself into the driver’s seat. He slammed it shut, shaking off rain from his coat, then gripped the wheel with one hand. He reached toward the ignition with his other, and stopped with his thumb over the starter pad. His heart rate jumped suddenly, and I saw his body tense.
I sat up as his pistol swung back around. I caught his wrist before he could target me, impressed by how fast he was.
“It’s me,” I said.
His eyes were wide, but when he saw me, they changed. They looked at me the way they had since that night, when I woke to find that he’d brought me back. It was hard for me to know what the look meant. I could see fear in his eyes, and something else there as well. It might have been pain or longing or sadness. Maybe it was just guilt over what he had done.
“Faye,” he said. He blinked hard and then opened his eyes again. When he did, the flicker from his JZI had faded from his pupils. “You can’t keep coming to me like this.”
“Fawkes authorized me to bring you what you asked for,” I said.
“Really,” he said, like he didn’t believe it.
“Yes.”
“You could have sent it. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m here because of you, Nico.”
He looked down for a moment and he nodded. The gun was still in his hand, but he’d moved his finger off the trigger. Smoky breath trailed from his nose in the cold air. His heart was beating quickly, but his face and eyes looked calm.
“Give me the information,” he said.
I sent him the files Fawkes had given me, and although he held them over for scanning, he accepted the package.
“It goes deeper than you think,” I said.
“You don’t know what I think.”
“You might be the only one who can stop her.”
“I’m not going to kill anyone, Faye,” he said. “You won’t convince me to do that.”
“I’m just here to give you the information.”
“You didn’t need to come here to do that.”
“I wanted to see your face.”
“That’s it?”
“I wanted you to see mine.”
That bothered him, I could tell. His fingers kept squeezing the grip of the gun.
“I remember every time I was with you,” I said. “Before you left for the war, and after you got back too. Those memories all mean something to me, Nico, because all of them are real.”
“Shut up.”
“You understand it academically. I know you understand it. You realize what your friend, and her friends, can do. You must know, even, that they’ve done it to you, at least back when they still could. You know all these things, but you still don’t get it. You can’t, because you can’t see how much you’ve lost. You can’t see what was taken away from you, and you never will see it.”
“I said, shut up,” he said.
“But I can,” I said, “and I know you loved me—”
He slipped his wrist from my grasp and stuck the gun in my face.
“Don’t finish that sentence,” he said. He glared at me down over the pistol’s sight.
“Please do what Fawkes wants,” I said. “If you don’t do it, he’s going to kill you—”
“Shut up!” he barked, knuckles white on the gun’s grip. Blood had rushed into his face, lines of orange branching out underneath the skin. They glowed like electric light. The breath that blew out of his nostrils was warm. He seemed so alive right then.
“You’re not Faye,” he said in a low, even voice. His vitals spiked, but his eyelids had drooped. He looked the way he did when he first woke me, with calm murder in his eyes. “I shouldn’t have done what I did. She wouldn’t have wanted it.”
“I didn’t know what it meant,” I said. “I couldn’t know what I wanted.”
“She would never have helped Fawkes.”
“But I did help him, Nico.”
“She never would have killed Sean. You aren’t Faye. You’re Faye’s corpse.”