Everyone admitted it was a lot of dead rats.
In the end, after hours and hours of investigations, the FBI came up with nothing. 2.0 was gone. Disappeared into the wind, leaving behind a fading memory of their oddball pranks and little else.
If the misfits of 2.0 were still out there, they had probably moved on. At least, that’s what the FBI said. They’d resurface. And in the meantime, the FBI was patient. It had other investigations and other emergencies that were more pressing. Alix’s father was given the name of an agent in charge of their case, and the FBI packed up and moved out.
A few weeks later Williams & Crowe left, too, taking Lisa and their armored SUVs with them.
Alix was hugely relieved to see Death Barbie go, not least because she couldn’t help but get the feeling that Lisa blamed her for getting the Williams & Crowe security people locked in the cages in the first place. It had taken hours to get them all out. They’d eventually resorted to using cutting torches.
After that, Lisa had trailed her everywhere and Alix had meekly submitted to her guard. Neither of them suggested that Alix deserved to have time to herself or that Death Barbie had been overly protective—one of those irritating moments when the adults had read the situation better than Alix had and subsequently let her know that she was now on thin ice and had to earn her way back into their good graces.
But now, finally, Death Barbie was gone, and Alix was left feeling…
Lonely?
God, Alix, you are so lame.
She didn’t have a bodyguard and a spy living with her 24-7. She should have been grateful for that much at least. Sophie and Denise were still here, and boys like James kept asking her out. And Derek was always good for a laugh, even if he didn’t have Cynthia to try to compete against anymore. Derek was ridiculously relieved to find out that Cynthia had actually been a graduated senior.
“I was having major inadequacy issues,” he admitted. “I was studying all the time.”
Days slipped by. Alix went to the occasional Mom-and-Dad-sanctioned party. She rolled toward finals, and everything was fine, in theory.
Except… What?
She’d gotten her SAT results, and they were great, but her first thought was that she should tell Cynthia, who had helped prep her. And then she realized once again that Cynthia was gone.
That girl was like getting your braces off. The smooth, slippery feeling of nothingness, where there should have been something.
Alix looked at her SAT scores and wondered why she didn’t care at all. It all felt so fake. Like she was one of those lab rats that they run chemical tests on. You took the tests, you ran through the maze, you got the score… then they chopped out your brain to check for tumors.
The sound of books being gathered up startled Alix. Even more startling was that it was last period, and she’d somehow managed to drift all the way through the last half of school, without taking much notice of anything at all.
Jonah was standing outside her classroom door, waiting for her. He started jabbering about how Mr. Ambrose was a Nazi for docking him a grade.
“Who gives a damn how I format my bio notebook?” he kept saying as they climbed into Alix’s cherry-red MINI. “I should have gotten a perfect score.”
“Yeah. He screwed me with that, too,” Alix said absently.
Cynthia had gotten a perfect score on her SATs, Alix remembered. She knew how the SATs were built, top to bottom, and had happily tutored Alix.
It was just a test, she’d said.
“You can make the mistake of thinking test scores say something about you,” she’d said when Alix had expressed awe at Cynthia’s numbers. “But they don’t. They’re just something they use to put you in a box.”
At the time, Alix had taken her words for false humility and as a sop to Alix in case she royally screwed the test. After all, Cynthia had gotten a perfect score. But now Alix knew that not only had Cynthia gotten a perfect score, but she’d also walked away from it all to run with 2.0, a surreal gang of OCD crazypants kids dedicated to some other game entirely.
Different rats, running a different kind of maze.
Cynthia, good girl gone bad; a different rat in a different maze, passing a different kind of test.
Tests.
Alix remembered Moses handing her the USB stick.
There were all kinds of tests, and Alix couldn’t decide if she’d failed or passed hers. She’d gotten away from 2.0. She’d warned her father. She’d protected her family—
“Are you even listening to me?” Jonah asked.
Alix realized she’d been sitting in the car with the engine running.
“Sure,” Alix said as she put the MINI in reverse. “Why? What did you say?”
“Fuckin’ A, you’re getting as bad as Dad,” Jonah said. “You never pay attention anymore.”
“I do, too, pay attention.” Alix pulled out of the school parking lot, heading for home.
“Ever since that whole thing with 2.0, you’ve been acting weird.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yeah, you have.”
“My freak show brother is telling me that I’ve been weird?”
“You know what I think?” Jonah said. “I think you miss being caged up by 2.0.”
Alix glared at him. “Take that back.”
Jonah grinned, completely unrepentant. “Oh come on. I bet it was way more interesting being all caged up like that. Kidnapped, by the mysteriously hot leader of the outlaw gang 2.0…” he trailed off suggestively.
“You are one screwed-up—” Alix glimpsed movement on the sidewalk and slammed on her brakes. There was a familiar figure cutting between the cars along the street.
Oh my God.
Black guy in a bomber jacket.
Moses.
Her heart lurched. The guy turned his head. The world righted itself. Not Moses at all. Just some random guy. He didn’t even look like Moses. He had a goatee, and it was graying. He was just some old guy.
Ick.
Alix watched the man unlock his BMW and climb in.
Jonah smirked knowingly as she got the MINI going again. “That wasn’t 2.0,” he said.
“Fuck off,” she said.
“Bet you’re disappointed,” Jonah goaded.
“Seriously, Jonah. Fuck off. If you keep this up, I swear I’ll make you walk home.”
Her brother snorted, but at least he shut up.
Alix’s heart was still hammering from that first glimpse of the man. Something about the way he’d moved or his style had triggered the response. Adrenaline and fear and surprise… and… what? Something else that she didn’t really want to look at, and didn’t like Jonah poking at.
PTSD was what her shrink was calling it.
And not just about Moses. The 2.0 crew all tended to trigger her. Sometimes it was Moses. Other times, Cynthia. Blue hair immediately reminded her of the hacker girl, Kook. Willowy blond boys could make her see Adam. Alix had even hallucinated that she’d spied Tank once, a skate rat barreling down the sidewalk.
Alix’s shrink warned that there might be depression after all of Alix’s stress incidents and recommended medication to combat the lethargy and forgetfulness that Alix had started exhibiting. After all, Alix had stopped getting out of bed on time. She’d forgotten Jonah at school twice. She’d started skipping track and field practice because she just couldn’t muster the will to care whether she remained on the team. As far as Mom and Dr. Ballantine were concerned, these were hanging offenses.
“It’s just running on track,” Alix had protested. “It’s not like I’m failing school, Mom.”