What is this?
There were scalpels and a suture needle on one of the trays, along with a spent hypo. Impressions were left in the plastic that covered the floor where boxes had been removed. It looked like most of the equipment had been packed up. Whatever happened here, it was over.
I looked around for anything that might tell me where she’d gone. On the metal frame of the gurney, someone had stuck a small note:
Destroy everything. Report to me.
The room wasn’t set up on the fly. From the look and smell of it, it had been occupied for days, maybe weeks. There was no way Calliope didn’t know it was there….
Unless she’d been made to forget.
Someone else must have been there, right in the apartment with her. Ai had planted someone there, and kept Calliope from consciously knowing about it. I stared at the surgical tools and the bloody gauze. What had they done to her?
I picked up my phone and called the contact number Ai had given me. A woman’s voice answered, but it didn’t sound like the woman from the restaurant.
“Hello?”
“This is Agent Wachalowski. Who am I speaking to?”
“You are speaking to Penny. What’s up, Agent?”
“I need to talk to Ai.”
“Oh, now you need to talk to her?”
“Can you put me through to her or not?”
“I can, but I’m not going to.”
“I—”
“Save the threats. I don’t care who you are; you don’t get to demand to talk to her. You’ll talk to me.”
“Put me through to Ai, or I’m hanging up.”
“Fine, but if you do that, you’ll never find out what happened to your friend.”
“What?”
“Your friend Flax. I assume that’s what this is about.”
“Where is she?”
“You found the room, didn’t you? Do you have any idea how many times I had to replant that memory so she’d remember seeing a wall instead of that door? She’s got a stubborn streak, that one.”
“If you know where she is, then tell me.”
“Not on the phone. I want to see you.”
“I don’t have time for this—”
“Make time. I’m at Zoe’s new place. You know where that is?”
“I …” it was the first I’d heard of it. I didn’t even realize Zoe had moved. “No, I don’t.”
“Of course not.”
“Look, just—”
“I’m sending the address. Decide what you want to do.”
She hung up. I checked the time. The MSST would be in the air in less than an hour.
If I hurried, I could make it.
Faye Dasalia—112th Street Station
I knelt near a pile of plastic trash bags and looked out through the mouth of the alleyway. Through the LW field, the people who flowed by had a ghostly look. Facial recognition software scanned each one, matching it against my target.
While I waited there, hidden, I looked through the array of my memories for other references to the strange woman. I found one other instance, before Flax had hauled her into the clean room. I’d seen her shortly after I’d been brought back. As the crowds of people streamed by the alley, I brought up the memory and looked inside.
I was in the underground storage unit where Nico buried his past. He brought me there so that he could bring me back, and no one would ever know. The concrete room was cluttered with forgotten boxes and old furniture. He’d chained my ankle to a grate in the floor, and he told me to stay still when a knock came on the heavy metal door.
I watched from next to the bed we’d once lain on, while he crossed the unit and opened the door. A tiny woman stood on the other side. She was zipped up in a huge purple parka, red hair sticking out from under a wool cap. She stared up at him from over a beaklike nose, and I saw heat stream through the veins in her face. She was excited by him.
She’d stepped closer, then, and spoke softly to him. I saw her pupils expand.
“What happened?” she asked. “Why are you so scared?”
“Don’t—”
She put one shaking hand on his. “Shhh.”
“Stop doing that,” he said.
“Why?”
She had put her other hand on his stomach and spread open her fingers.
“I know you miss it,” she said, putting her forehead to his chest. “I know you know how I feel. I wanted to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For caring about me, even a little bit.”
She was placing Nico under her control. At the time I didn’t realize what I’d seen, but I recognized it now. I saw the guilt in her eyes as she touched him, knowing his acceptance of it was coerced. I stepped out from the shadows, and she saw me.
“You’re dead—you can’t be here!”
She’d recognized me back then. We had never met, but still, she knew my face. She stared up at me, hands curled into tight fists, as heat coursed out from her chest. Even then there was something, some base instinct that told me she was trouble.
A small figure passed the mouth of the alley and toward the entrance to the convenience store. The computer took a snapshot of her face. It ran the comparison and got a match.
Target is spotted.
I stood and walked to the mouth of the alley. People streamed past me less than four feet away, but under the cloak, I was invisible. They’d see her, of course, and hear her if she screamed, but it would be over in a few seconds. By the time anyone realized she was dead, I would already be gone.
I watched her enter the store. Through the window, I watched her make her purchase. When she came out, she had a brown paper bag. Her red hair was draped around her sullen face, her lips drawn into a frown. She walked quickly, with her eyes on the sidewalk, and it looked like she’d been crying.
Now.
When she passed by me, I grabbed her by the wrist. I put my other arm around her thin waist and pulled her into the alley. She stumbled, but I held her as the brown paper bag slipped out of her hands. A bottle popped when it fell and hit the ground. An older man who passed by glanced down toward us, but didn’t even slow down. He could not see me; just some staggering drunk.
“Hey!” she yelped, and I clamped my hand over her mouth. She stuck both her legs out straight, but her heels just scraped along the wet blacktop as I pulled her deeper into the alley.
“Quiet,” I said in her ear.
I hauled her behind a trash bin, out of view. Running water ran down an open storm drain and helped cover the sound of her struggling. I forced her back and slammed her to the brick wall, then moved my right hand over her bony chest. I shut off the stealth cloak’s field, and her face went white as she saw me appear.
“You,” she whispered.
My open palm snapped apart, and my forearm split apart to my elbow. As the two halves splayed apart, she stared at the tip of the blade hidden there.
“Wait!” she said. “You’re not supposed to kill me!”
The blood rushed under her skin, and I watched the veins that pulsed along her neck. The blade was in position. One pneumatic blast would send it through her heart.
“You need me,” she gasped.
“There’s nothing I need you for.”
“You said the fate of everything was in my hands.”
“I never said—”
“In my visions. You said it.”
I was about to kill her, but that stopped me. The exact nature of their abilities was something that we hadn’t determined yet, but there was no disputing that they were real or at least based on reality, on possible outcomes. Imposing will or manipulating minds could be done by anyone, if not as well, but not the precognition. We didn’t know what it was, but we knew what it wasn’t, and it wasn’t prediction. The data points to lead them to their visions simply never existed. Nothing led them to the conclusions they reached; they just saw the end result and they were usually, if not always, right.