“She’s here,” Cynthia said. “Don’t sweat it.”
“Who’s here?” Alix asked, fighting off the fog of drugs and booze. When Cynthia didn’t answer, she looked up.
It was him.
Her stalker. 2.0. Standing right there, beside Cynthia.
The two of them were looking down at her, watching while she crawled around in the broken dirt and concrete and weeds, hunting for the keys.
“I thought you said one would be enough,” her stalker said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to kill her,” Cynthia answered.
The two of them became four in Alix’s vision. Alix tried to stand up, but the ground didn’t cooperate. It flipped out from under her. She sank back to the asphalt, groaning.
“Cynthia?” she slurred.
Cynthia shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry, Alix.”
“Sorry?” Alix was having a hard time making her mouth move. It felt rubbery and thick.
Nothing was making any sense. Now the girl with blue hair was there, too. And another one, short, the feral Latino kid she’d seen. He was holding something in his hands. A Taser. She recognized the device from Death Barbie’s many protective toys.
Alix tried to get up again, but her legs were noodles. The ground rose and fell in waves, like when she’d taken a fishing boat tour off the coast of Thailand with her family when they’d spent two weeks in Phuket. She struggled to steady herself and almost made it upright, but the ground betrayed her again and tilted.
She collapsed against 2.0, and he grabbed her as she fell. “Whoa! Slow down there, girl.”
“Whho?” Alix turned her head, trying to see all of them, trying to see where… She reached for Cynthia. “I thought you were my friend!”
Cynthia looked apologetic. “I know.”
The dizziness was turning to blackness. Alix felt herself leaning more heavily against her stalker, and then she was sliding to the ground again, sinking into a deeper darker blackness than any she had ever known.
The last thing she heard was Cynthia.
“See? I told you I gave her enough.”
14
“GET HER INSIDE,” MOSES SAID. Kook and Tank scooped her up and started dragging her clumsily across the concrete.
Moses grabbed them and slowed them down. “Be careful with her, right? She’s valuable.” Other ravers were sitting outside on cars, drinking, going in and out of the old warehouse. Moses watched carefully to see if anyone was paying attention to a passed-out girl being carried by a couple of her friends, but nobody seemed to care. Cynthia was watching the girl being taken away as well.
“Hey,” he said, chucking Cynthia on the shoulder. “You okay?”
Cynthia seemed to shake herself. “Yeah.”
She didn’t sound okay. She sounded weird and uncertain. “You need to talk?” Moses asked.
Cynthia pressed her hands to her head. “I’m too drunk to talk. I had to drink a bunch of vodka with her, and it mixed like shit.”
Moses didn’t buy the excuse. Cynthia looked stricken. “Hey,” he said. “If there’s something going on, you tell me. You were in there a long time with her. Everything I’ve read about deep-cover work is that it hits pretty hard. Maybe you start identifying with the people you’re hanging out with. Even my uncle said he sometimes started to feel bad for people he was working. You know someone long enough, you get attached. It’s natural to get overconnected.”
Cynthia glared at him. “You should talk. Peeping-Tomming her house?”
Moses grimaced. “Yeah, well, nobody said any of us were perfect.”
Cynthia was looking after Tank and Kook as they slowly hauled Alix away. “Her parents are going to freak.”
“Yeah.” Moses turned the fact over in his mind, remembering how he’d looked forward to this exact moment. Trying to decide how he felt about it now. It was happening, for real, finally. The moment when he hit the fish tank and it burst and water went everywhere. The moment when Simon Banks discovered he didn’t have control. The slippery bastard was about to learn that his lies couldn’t save him this time.
“Payback’s a bitch,” Moses said softly.
“Her brother…” Cynthia trailed off.
Moses felt a rush of irritation. “Oh get off it. It’s not like these people cared about any of us. You think they cared about Tank when he was in the hospital on a respirator? For sure they didn’t give a damn about my dad, or yours. Or Adam’s or Kook’s people. These people don’t give a damn.”
“I know, but…”
“Seriously, Cyn. We all wanted payback. This is what it looks like.”
Cynthia looked away. “What happens if this doesn’t work?”
“Rule 4: Always have a Plan B. This will work. It’s Plan A, or it’s Plan B. And either way, we aren’t going to be the ones who lose. Not this time.”
“Did you see how she looked when she went down?”
Moses started to give another sharp retort, but something in Cynthia’s expression made him hold back.
“Yeah, I saw it.” The truth was, Alix’s collapse was worse than he wanted to admit: the girl he’d watched for so long turned into nothing but a limp doll. A rag of a person going flat and vulnerable, her personality slipping away. He couldn’t get rid of the memory of her frightened, dilated eyes, begging. The pretty goldfish trying to understand why she’d been busted out of the fish tank, wondering why she couldn’t breathe anymore.
Let it go. This is just Stockholm syndrome–type shit. Identifying with the target. It’s natural. Let it go.
The first thing to do was not to think of her as a person. She wasn’t the girl who ran track like a demon possessed her. She wasn’t the girl who was stuck taking care of her brother because her parents were too distracted. She wasn’t the girl who had opened her door to him, against all reason.
Alix Banks was the target. They’d nailed their target. Bull’s-eye. Now it was time to make the target useful.
Bull’s-eye.
“Come on.” Moses tugged Cynthia’s arm. “We need to get out of sight. We’re going to have to disappear you, too.”
Cynthia didn’t respond to his pressure. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that,” she said.
“How the hell did you think it was going to be? Did you think she’d just faint all nice and clean? I told you it was serious. You knew that.”
“I knew it, but I didn’t know it, okay? Lay off me.”
Moses sighed, feeling sour. He knew, all right. He also knew that if he started expressing doubts like the ones on Cynthia’s face, it would infect all of them and the plan would unravel, right here and right now. It could all fall apart, just as the stakes had been raised to an impossible level. This was Texas hold ’em just the way Kook liked to play. A game of odds and guts, and, at some point, you were all in, and all you could do was win or lose. The one thing for sure was that you couldn’t walk out, because all your chips were already on the table.
“I hear a good plan lasts for about six seconds after the battle starts. Of course we were going to hit bumps.”
“I don’t know if I can take many more bumps like that,” Cyn said. “Did you see the way she looked at me?”
I saw.
He forced down the thought. “Brace up, girl. It’ll be harder before it gets better.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
Moses put his arm around Cynthia’s shoulders. “It’s not your job to worry. That’s my deal. This isn’t on you. You did good. Now, let’s get you inside. You deserve a break after all the work you did. Wasn’t there someone you were dancing with…?”