Shadow Unit 15 (7 page)

*

"You're early, big brother."

Eddie sits on a long overstuffed sofa, two seat cushions between him and Natalie, sitting on the other end. They were on the sunny side of the room, where tall, many-paned clear windows with a view of Idlewood's biggest garden let light in. Eddie's scalp showed through the short bristle of his freshly cut hair.

"Thought I'd start coming at this time, so I'm not late for bike polo. Hey, Nats. Was it haircut day?" He's teasing, of course. She couldn't grow two feet of hair in a month.

"This is a wig," she says, and reaches up for Dice's hug.

"You ever see bike polo, Nats? There was a match on that YouTube. You gotta be tough to play that." Eddie says it with pride.

"I haven't seen bike polo," Natalie says. "Did you break anything?"

"I've been lucky," Dice says.

"Natalie plays Go," Eddie says. "She kicks my ass."

"Good. Keep him humble, Nats."

"I will, you bet. 'Scuse me a bit, I'm going to find something to eat."

"Have a strudel?" Dice offers.

"I will have a strudel, and I will still find something to eat. Be back in a bit."

Eddie watches Natalie leave before he gives Dice a
see? I told you so
look. "Board's already set up. You get me cheese strudel?"

"Apple, cheese, poppyseed."

"Best get one while they're hot," Eddie says. "Let's try a Knight's opening today, what do you say?"

"Sure, Eddie. Hey, you get YouTube?"

"We can ask to watch a video on YouTube, but it's restricted. Susanna, the kid, she watches a lot of Netflix." Eddie gets to his feet and they head for the table in the windowed alcove, dappled with shadows cast by a venerable oak.

"All right, so white's opening move is a knight? King's knight or Queen's?"

"You get to pick, big brother."

*

"You're worried, Dann-O," Jason Saito says, once they're seated in their places.

"Everyday stuff. Time for Dallas, right?"

"No. You're giving it up so fast, I want what you're hiding. Is it your girl monster? She's giving you the crawling doubt. She's...up to something," Saito says. "And you don't know what to do."

"Hafidha is fine." Brady rolls his eyes. "I've just got somewhere to go today."

"Gonna see your man? Have what's cooking on the grill, drink beer from a glass, oh, I've got it. You're going to pick out colors for your wedding buffet!" Saito laughs. "And you'll try not to worry that your Girl Wonder is cracking up? Because you are. What's she doing? Give that to me."

"She's visiting a patient today. Latest candidate for the surgery."

"Another adolescent girl? The board has a soft spot for the women. I hear only one man meets their standards. What's with the sexism?"

Brady shrugs. "We teach girls to think of other people before themselves. Probably enhances their empathy through social expectation, by punishing them for asserting themselves the way boys are taught."

"How can you say I don't have any empathy, Dann-O? I literally feel what others feel. That's empathy plus."

"You get off on fear, Saito. Your empathy is the drug lever on a rat cage. That's why you're not a good candidate."

"But that's my point. The chip can teach me a different reward system. That's what it's for, right? That's what it does, right?"

"You should probably talk to Doctor Allison. She's the one who does the assessments, so there's no getting around her."

"That bitch."

"Do you want me to remember Dallas or not?"

"I want you to tell me about Hafida Gates. That chip in her head making her a good girl? Oo. Feel that? I sure did, Dann-O. She's scaring you. Computer girl, with a computer in her head. She can do anything to it, can't she?"

"She's handling the treatment well."

"Liar," Saito murmurs. "You can lie, but why bother? I told you, Dann-O. I'm empath plus."

*

Donatta Fletcher sleeps for another six minutes before waking, and Hafidha Gates is there, spinning silk beside her bed.

"Arachne?" Donatta says, and Hafs parks the spindle.

She finds the cold water bottle and offers it. "Sip. You're still loopy for a bit yet. Let's do the drill. What's today?"

"May 21st, 2014," Donatta says. "My name is Donatta Fletcher. I'm in Idlewood Hospital just outside Ashton, Virginia."

"Okay, you're sharp, kid. But you're going to fall asleep again. How's the melon?"

"About a five. Pounds. Feels hot."

"That's all fine. You dizzy?"

"No."

"Follow my hand and say that," Hafidha says.

"Don't the doctors have to do this?" Donatta asks, and tracks Hafidha's fingers. "Okay, now I'm dizzy."

"I'll get a nurse. Probably you need to sleep more."

"No. Stay. I want to watch you spin. Had a dream," Donatta says. "A weird dream. I was riding a horse inside a long hallway."

Hafidha draws the silk out fine as frog hair. "No river?"

"No river. No underground. Will I dream about it again?"

"Probably. I dream about Erik still. But when you wake up, the chip will activate, and it'll calm you down."

"So I won't be scared any more."

"Only normal scared," Hafidha says, and sends Dr. Allison an email about monitoring fear responses in Donatta's exams.

"And I'll go live upstairs?"

"You'll go live upstairs," Hafs says. "And I'll visit you."

"You said there was a girl my age up there."

"There is. And she knows that you're going upstairs, and she wants to meet you," Hafidha says, and lets the spindle fly. Drafting gives her something to do, so she can be patient.

"What if she..."

"Doesn't like you? You'll get a lot of chances to talk to each other. And she could be worrying exactly the same thing."

"So I should be nice."

"So you should be you, Donna. But I'll give you a tip. Let her show you all her favorite shows.
She's really into TV.
And I only got fifteen minutes, kid. Try to close your eyes for a bit."

Donna nods, but she's watching Hafidha leave when she looks back.

*

When your lunch break comes, you deliberately take your tray of lasagna to the women's locker room and eat it in a bathroom stall, where no one can see you eat two pounds of ground chicken, pasta, and three kinds of cheese in a creamy tomato sauce. When you finish you put the knife and fork in the dishwasher and take the path to the electrical room. You'll have to turn the generators off first, and then you have about two minutes to shut down two power junctions on the grounds. You have to move fast.

You have to stop her.

You're nearly at the exit door when you have a better idea. You turn around and head for the supermax wing.

*

Dyson Ciesclewicz is getting his ass handed to him.

"Think of the positions," Eddie says. "Look at each piece, see its paths. What do you see?"

"That I'm screwed," Dice says.

"Not quite yet," Eddie laughs. "You've actually set up a really good defense. You could play me to a stalemate, I bet."

"Maybe," Dice says. "Think you're just being nice."

"I mean it. You've covered the board pretty well. I have to sacrifice if I want to break through. Like so—" Eddie moves his bishop, taking a pawn on the edge of the board, in place to take Dice's queen.

"So I should..." Dice slides his rook out, taking the bishop.

"See, last week you would have used your queen and the pressure would be off the center board. You took the move that makes your defense even stronger. You are getting better."

"Speaking of last week..."

Eddie shrugs, and a knight floats on its hooked path to threaten Dice's queen. "Dr. Ramachandran says that he'd been expecting it to happen. I don't have to go downstairs. But therapy sucks now. I have to use the hand and talk about what I feel."

"You know, I did that in physio."

"No, I mean emotional feel."

"I did, too. Sucks. You don't have to tell me anything you don't want."

Dice had cried. Cried with his fists clenched and his arms wrapped tight around his middle. Dice didn't think Eddie would want to talk about that. Those are the girl feelings. You must never go there.

"Doc says that it's important to break down the... mythology. Because raised by a superstitious Catholic, no wait, an asshole who used Catholic superstition as an excuse fucked us up, and left-handedness isn't our fault."

"It isn't."

"Just something you're born with, like eye color and—and stuff," Eddie says.

Dice holds still. "Eddie, are you talking about homosexuality?"

Eddie shrugs up his shoulders. "That's what they say, right? You're just born that way. It's in the brain."

"It might be, yeah." Dice says, and he couldn't have a better opening if he tried. Now or never, into the breach, etc. "Eddie, there's something I've been trying to tell you."

"You're gay."

"Well, shit. Close enough. I like women. I like men. I hid it because I didn't want—I'm the only family you have left, and you're all the family I have and—"

"You like both? But then you can just, you know, be with women. No problem, right?"

The door to the TV room opens, and Natalie walks in, holding it open for Dr. Ramachandran and Susanna Greenwood. Natalie looks at them, then purses her lips up in an "oh." She heads for the couch, browsing through old magazines.

Maybe with this many people in the room, maybe he should stop talking. But he had to get it all out. "Not that easy. And—there's a guy I like," Dice says.

Eddie sits back, tips back on the chair, and when it wobbles he lurched forward and the legs thud on the pine floor, squeal as he stands up and walks away from Dice.

Well. That's it then,
Dice thinks.

But then the lights go out.

And they don't come back on.

*

Hafidha wants to probe at Donatta's bugzapper, but she promised not to. Dr. Allison doesn't stop her from checking out her own chip, and uses Hafidha's work to adjust future response programming in other live applications, but she (and Suze Zettler, because she's been talking about this with Suze on just about every trip to her old room in the basement) insist on the importance of doing the science properly, carefully. Maybe in six months they'd know enough of what Hafidha intuitively did to make changes for others. For now she just tweaks the work on herself and dumps the new code.

Dice's pastry lingers in Hafidha's mind. She cocks her head and sends Dice an email: "Lucky. Where are your favorite bakeries? That strudel was good."

She's on her very best manners. She uses his public email instead of just texting his adorable brick of a dumb phone.

She walks from the wing used for surgery to the lobby, and heads for the cafeteria. They don't have strudel, but since Anna had consented to stay close to Idlewood, there could be a wealth of brownies to be eaten if she'd had the chance to make a batch.

She had. Hafidha bought a half dozen—it had just been lunch hour on the floor where she once lived, but there was always room for chocolate. The clear plastic clamshell rested on top of her spindle and fleece, two cartons of milk tucked in beside them. It would be enough for fifteen minutes with Suze.

"You look distracted," the cashier said. "Have you eaten?"

Hafidha stopped her "I'm fine, thanks," to actually think about that. "Actually, I'm not going to get to eat for a couple hours if I don't do it now. Can I get a BLT cheeseburger, fries, gravy, and mozzarella cheese?"

Hafidha hadn't yet paid for her burger when the lights went out.

*

Hurry,
Ash whispers.
Hurry. Hurry.

You run.

Sam asks you to watch the station while he goes to the bathroom. You couldn't ask for anything better.Video shows Hakes in his cell, methodically tearing a copy of
People
magazine into confetti. An empty, soggy plate and fork rest on a cardboard tray. The second the bathroom door closes behind Sam, you open the monster's cage and take off like he's after you, because it could become true in an instant.

Hurry. Hurry.

You run. Your booted feet pound down the linoleum hallway, and you run faster than you ever lope down the trail, just short of a sprint. You slap the doors open and burst through, cutting a hard left to supermax's power box.

"Hey! Partridge! HALT!"

Sam.

Hurryhurryhurryhurry

You're out of reach of the Taser. You think. But you set Ash free with a casting of the power, send her to curse Sam with terror.

When you hear a man screaming a few moments later, you don't know if it's his fear that makes him scream, or if Hakes has made it past the doors to supermax.

You don't really need to know.

You skid to a halt in front of the power room, pull the big switch, and dash out the door.

You can get back to the cage, with the power to protect you. You can get rid of the lightning caller, and if Hafidha Gates manages to survive Hakes, your power can take her down long enough to put her back where she belongs.

Where she can't take Ash away from you.

*

Solomon Todd stares at his computer screen. A cold heady pressure sits inside him, under and behind the rib cage, as if somebody reached inside him and grabbed a handful of intestine and twisted. Icy fear, cold and sharp.

A credit card transaction. Just one; and it could be coincidence or carelessness or arrogance, but he knows. He knows what it means.

He picks up his phone to call Hafidha, and it rings to voice mail, which by itself is enough to give him a nasty start. But then he glances at the screen when he cancels the call and sees the date.
Wednesday, May 21st, 2014.

Visiting day at the monster zoo.

He shoves his feet into loafers on the way out the door, grabs his keys, stops with his hand on the knob. Calls Falkner as he heads back into the bedroom to open the gun safe and get heeled. He'll feel like an idiot if he's overreacting. He'll feel like more of an idiot if he's lying there bleeding out on the floor.