Moses exhaled. Let it all go.
Pretty soon, there would be more work. More problems to deal with. He’d have to take care of Cynthia, make sure she got props for the work she’d done. She’d turned her own self off and become someone else for almost a year. She deserved to be rewarded for that.
When she’d started drilling for the role, no one had thought she’d be able to pull it off. And then, at some point, every time she’d spoken or turned her head or joked, she’d come off exactly like a Seitz girl. It had been creepy. They’d turned Cynthia into a chameleon. Some chick who chewed gum with her mouth open and lived in the sun-drenched Los Angeles sprawl had become something else entirely.
They were so close, he could almost taste it.
All the work of forging records, hacking school databases, building an identity that was credible… and then inserting Cynthia so perfectly into the school. Moses remembered talking on the phone with the headmaster, pretending his poor English, shutting down conversation so that Cynthia became the single point of contact… a nice rich Chinese girl from a Chinese tech dynasty, who could sit beside Alix on the first day of school and shadow her from class to class, and eventually become her friend.
Moses had carved and shaped Cynthia into what he needed. From a girl who grew up in the back of a strip mall grocery store into someone who walked and talked East Coast like a natural, rolling so smooth into Seitz that she didn’t even cause a ripple. She fit where he needed her to fit.
He’d fit each member of 2.0 into the puzzle picture he was building, filing off the sharp edges of distrust and difference so that they could work together. He remembered pulling each one into the team.
It had been such a simple beginning. Just him and Cynthia sitting in the back of the courtroom. Two kids who had lost their dads to heart attacks. He remembered running across Kook by luck. The girl from his uncle’s underworld, who knew how to build credit card cloners and liked to go crusading in her spare time. Kook had been the one who’d managed to tunnel through the labyrinth of industry associations and research institutes to Banks’s actual clients. And that had led them to more class actions and eventually to Tank. They’d flat out rescued Tank. No way was Moses going to leave that kid in the foster system. And then came Adam, the one who had genuinely won his class action, but won too late. After the money couldn’t help his aunt at all.
“Yo, Moses.”
Tank, climbing up out of the trapdoor that he’d cut in the roof with a torch, after welding a ladder and catwalk to make the climb, so that they could all sit up here, high up and see the world. The wreckage of old industrial America, the factory and its warehouses, the chemical plant.
Tank climbed out onto the roof and balanced over to meet Moses.
“Hey.”
Moses nodded to him. “What up?”
“Your girl’s starting to move.”
“She talking?”
“Not yet.” Tank slapped down the visor on his welder’s mask and turned to face the dawn. Moses knew the kid was staring at the sun through the shield, staring straight at the ball of fire. Moses was struck again by how young the kid was. Tank was the one Moses worried most about involving in all this. Too silent. Too weirdly broken by foster homes. Now his hands did more talking than he did. Tank coughed, a muffled sound from behind his visor. The asthma that Azicort had claimed it could fix.
“You should probably go down there,” Tank said. “For when she wakes up, right?”
“Yeah,” Moses sighed, feeling the weight of his responsibilities.
I didn’t ask for this, he thought.
Except, the truth was, he had. He’d gone out and created it. Every bit of it. And now another piece of the puzzle needed to be fitted into place.
15
ALIX STIRRED GROGGILY. SHE’D BEEN dreaming, dreams of music that pounded with a thudding urgency. Music that she was drowning in. Music hammering at her, swaddling her, muffling her. She was drowning in a deep blue ocean of music.
A voice called to her from the bottom of the ocean.
Alix… Alix… Alix…
Something cold pressed against her face. She turned over and banged her head against something hard.
Ow.
She rubbed her head. Ow. She reached out, grabbing at the hard, cold thing in her bed.
What the—?
Alix opened her eyes, squinting against a blaze of light. Bars. Cold, rough iron bars. She sat up slowly, trying to get a sense of her surroundings.
“Alix.”
She turned.
Him. Her stalker. 2.0. Sitting on the other side of the bars, perched on a short stool. Watching her.
And all around her, bars. He had her in a cage, and they were both sitting inside a puddle of light cast by an electric lantern he had sitting beside him. A puddle of light that bled away into darkness.
How the—?
Cynthia.
Cynthia was one of them. She’d walked right into the trap because Cynthia was one of them.
Alix wanted to cry at the betrayal. Cynthia, who had seemed so harmless. Cynthia, who had chosen to sit right beside her on the first day of school. The good girl who turned out to like a little fun as long as it didn’t screw up her college admissions. The wonderfully mature girl that Mom had so approved of.
Wonderfully mature.
Cynthia, who had gotten them fake IDs to get into an over-21 club, and Alix had never thought to question how she’d gotten such good ones. She’d just been impressed at the things Cynthia could pull off.
You are such a sucker.
She’d been so starved for a genuine and empathetic friend that she’d walked right into Cynthia’s trap. She couldn’t help but think of everything that Cynthia knew about her.
Her head was pounding. It felt as if someone were driving a spike into her brain. Alix put her hand to her head, hating that she was showing weakness to her captor, and then not knowing why she cared. She was weak. Of course she was weak. She was in a fucking cage, and she’d walked right into it.
She wasn’t just weak, she was stupid.
“Hey, Alix.” 2.0 had a bottle of water in his hand. He offered it to her. “You’re going to have a headache for a little while. Booze and sleeping pills, you know?”
Alix tried to speak. All that came out was a croak.
He was still holding out the bottle. It took a second for it to register with Alix. The bottle. The concern in his expression. A chance. A bare chance.
“Yeah,” she croaked. She faked a wince of pain. Adrenaline began pulsing through her. She pressed her palms to her temples. “Horrible headache,” she said thickly.
She reached out with a shaking hand for the water bottle. A trembling, grateful hand. “Please…” She let her arm sag a little. She was reaching, but not quite far enough to reach the bottle.
He slid the bottle between the bars.
Alix lunged and seized his wrist with both hands.
Got you!
She yanked hard.
Unbalanced, 2.0 plunged forward. His face slammed into the cage. He yowled and tried to pull away, but Alix had both of her hands tight around his wrist now, and she wasn’t letting go. She knew she had only one shot and she wasn’t going to waste it.