The Invisible (16 page)

And now she is not afraid.

Her hands have stopped their shaking.
I am a defender
, she thinks. Ready for whatever comes.
I was born to this. Born to the wrong family. This is what I was meant for. To make sure he gets away, to protect him so he can save this city. To protect what we have made together. The only thing that matters. This is my path.
A South Side tag on several tall buildings, written in a child’s scrawl, floats into her mind:
Defend until the end
.

She will trust in fate to guide her. There is not a trace of fear in her now that she has put her faith in something bigger. In a plan. In
the
plan, the one they’ve made in case she disappears. He’ll come; he’ll do whatever it takes to make things all right again.

All these illogical, desperate thoughts soothe her as the door opens. They hypnotize her enough so that she can hold the gun, kneel behind the table in the pitch-dark of the kitchen. No moon tonight. A small blessing. It’s so dark in here. If they can’t find her, they can’t shoot her. She cocks the gun and listens to the bolts move in the lock.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

The museum is under police lockdown for hours. We wait our turn to be questioned by a team of two detectives, both of whom have faces that look as if they were formed by having been hit flat with frying pans. I stand with my mother and father in the kitchen, numb and furious, staring at all the uneaten food laid out on the counters. Ford hovers nearby and sometimes stands quietly with us.

All of it wastes so much time. When it’s my turn for questioning I tell the police everything I saw, but the trail is surely ice-cold by then.

It’s midnight by the time we are told at last that we can go home. But all I want to do is search for Invisible. I need to talk to someone about how to track them down. I need to get Ford alone.

“Mom?” I ask as we trudge through the glass-strewn ballroom. “Could Ford walk me home instead of us taking the car? We’d be careful and only go on busy well-lit streets. It’s just, our date was sort of . . .”

“Ruined.” My mother nods, her eyes bloodshot. “Your date was ruined by a group of monsters.” She looks at me nervously, weighing out her fear, trying to decide. “Fine. I don’t want to live in terror. If we are terrified, it means they win.”

“Does that mean . . .”

“That means go,” she slurs, having downed maybe a little more leftover, flat pink champagne than she should have back in the museum kitchen. “Quick, before your father comes and says otherwise.”

“Thanks,” I whisper, and kiss her soft cheek. Her eyeliner is a mess, forming black wells beneath her eyes. Mine probably is too. She’s shocked me by being okay with this. With me and Ford. Alone. At night. After all that’s happened.

I run to get him, stopping to hug good-bye to Zahra, who has been photographing everything with her phone—for the school paper, she claims—and we leave through a back hallway so as not to run into my father.

Outside, I realize my dress wasn’t cut out for all it’s been through tonight. It’s baggy where it should be tight, and the train is all twisted. There’s even a rip, where a piece of shantung flaps loose like a bandage at my waist.

“So,” I say miserably. “Great night, huh?”

“Yeah.” Ford has been quiet for hours.

“I need to get those kids back.”

“But how?”

“If I knew how, I’d already be doing it.” I turn to glare at Ford, struggling to keep the irritation out of my voice. “I should have been stronger, been able to fight the giggle gas faster—”

“I couldn’t believe you could move at all.” Ford shakes his head. “I thought that stuff was going to kill me.”

“It was awful. I’m sore from the convulsions.” I rub my abs, which are used to being worked, but never like this.

“Me too.”

We walk in silence for a few minutes. “So . . . the guy in jail? Who was that?”

I sigh bitterly and feel a hot humiliation rising in my cheeks. “Must have been a decoy. I should know better by now, after everything . . .” Rage chokes my voice.

Ford stops, turns to face me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, okay?”

“It’s my fault this happened. There wouldn’t even have been this party if people didn’t feel safe enough to have it because of my stupidity. Invisible wouldn’t have had the opportunity—”

“Stop.” He puts a hand over my mouth. “You’re not doing them any good by focusing on this.”

“Fine.” I nod. “Let’s talk about where they might be. They are clearly well-funded and organized. They would have to go deep underground to hide all the hostages.”

“How many are there?” Ford says.

“Dunno,” I say glumly. “Maybe eight or nine. They’ll release their names soon, I’m sure.” I think about them, locked somewhere.

“Maybe something in the videos,” Ford suggests.

“Any clues from the video could be traps.”

Ford nods and is quiet, brooding now. “What did they ask you in the questioning room?”

“The police?”

“Yeah. They had a lot of questions about what I was doing at the party. Since I’m not from around here, they said.”

“Jerks,” I mutter. “They’re useless. They looked bored when they were talking to me. Just kept asking if I’d seen their faces, and of course I had, we all had.”

“You should have just told them you were the New Hope,” Ford says, knocking his shoulder into mine playfully. “They would have listened more carefully then.”

“Probably wouldn’t have believed me.” I smile faintly.

“Ford,” I say, still brooding over their glassiness of their eyes, the strange clipped way they moved. “Did they all seem . . . off . . . to you? Drugged, somehow?”

He’s quiet, thinking about this. “Maybe, yeah. Think he keeps them that way?”

“Who?”

“Their leader. Maybe he gives them something. To keep them loyal. To make them tougher, or more dependent on him, or unquestioning. I’ve heard stories about this guy they called The Hammer, a long time ago, big player in the Syndicate, who kept all his goons on the same drugs. If they got out of line, they lost privileges to his primo Smokestacks. The stuff he gave them was laced with something, stronger than the stuff on the streets.”

I nod, thinking about this. It does seem like the Invisible people are all on the same strong drugs.

We’ve walked along the river away from the museum until we’ve ended up in Riverfront, the warehouse district of the North Side. Not exactly the well-lit type of street I’ve promised my mother we’d stay on. Someone has thrown a rock at all the streetlights here, or disconnected the electricity, because it’s seriously dark. The shadows the warehouses make are impenetrable—anything could be lurking up against them and we’d never see it.

But something or someone is near. I can hear it. My ears pick up a scuttling of shoes just ahead of where we are. The sounds of marching. I check Ford to see if he notices, and he doesn’t. Must be riot police, cordoning off the area.

Up ahead, three helmeted police emerge from the shadows. One of them lifts his mirrored helmet and looks at us suspiciously. A lock of black hair is slicked down over his forehead with sweat. He pulls something from his belt and I tense, thinking it’s a gun or a Taser, but then I see it’s neither. It’s a small cylinder with a flat glass disc on one end. “What’s your business here?” he says.

I look at Ford. His lips are pressed together in an angry line.

“We’re just walking home.”

“Area’s been cordoned off. How’d you come to be here?” His eyes small and beady, piggish.

“We came from the museum,” Ford says. “That a problem?”

“I’m going to need to take your prints.” The cop ignores Ford’s question and thrusts the device with the glass disk on it toward me. “Place your index finger on the glass, ma’am.”

“Fine.” I do as he says. After a moment, there’s a beep and the glass turns green.

“Your turn.” The cop motions to Ford.

“I don’t think so,” Ford says. The cop looks around. We’re alone. Just the three of us. His hand moves to a button on his helmet near his ear, hovers over it, and for a second I wonder if he’s going to call for backup.

But the hand drops. “If you choose not to participate in fingerprinting, I’m going to have to book you on charges of suspicious loitering.”

“Suspicious loitering?” Ford’s voice raises. I put out a hand on his arm and the fabric of his tux jacket feels strangely warm. “Ford.” I say it quietly, trying to urge him to remain calm. “Just do it. Takes two seconds.”

“Fine,” he says under his breath. He’s breathing deeply, as if it takes every ounce of his strength to stay calm in front of the cop. He puts his finger on the glass and instead of the beep and the green color, the device emits a series of much louder beeps, then glows red. The cop pulls it away from Ford and shines it onto the ground like a flashlight. A beam comes out of it and suddenly on the street it says

3 PRIOR ARRESTS

PETTY THEFT, GRAND THEFT AUTO, ASSAULT

“It was a long time ago. I was just a kid. Already did my time in juvie,” Ford says.

“And now you’re just taking a midnight stroll on the North Side, with this girl? Who’d you steal the tux from?”

“That’s none of your business,” Ford growls. And then before I can stop him, he grabs the cop’s wrist, twisting it so that the device goes flying. I hear it smash against the sidewalk a moment later, the sound of the glass screen shattering. There’s a sickening stillness in the moment, Ford and the riot cop staring each other down, each contemplating his next move.

“Ford,” I say softly, trying to lower the tension of the moment. This is bad. He’ll get zapped, or worse. In Bedlam, messing with riot cops means jail time. “Officer, he didn’t mean to—” I start saying, desperate for a way to defuse a situation that is quickly getting out of control.

“My business is keeping punks like you off the streets,” the cop says to Ford, ignoring me, his jaw tightening as he puts down his riot shield on his helmet and moves to grab something from his belt—feargas, a zapper, or cuffs. But before he can get whatever he’s looking for, Ford pushes him hard. So hard, he flies off his feet a little and lands face-first against the side of a parked car.

“Stop it!” When I move to grab Ford’s fisted hands, scared of what he’s about to attempt, they’re hot enough to burn my fingers. I let them go, alarmed.

The cop turns around slowly, holding his bleeding head, moaning a little in spite of his uniform and his job.

“We need to get out of here.
NOW
,” I hiss, giving him a horrified look. Ford walks in a small circle in this stilted, jerky way, as if hemmed in by a boxing ring, his eyes glazed red, blinking as if waking up from a fever dream. He moves to the gutter and I hear the splash of objects sliding into the drain, the plop of metal landing in the sewer. The cop’s gun, maybe the print scanner too.

Then he backs away, nodding, looking only at me before he turns the other way and runs.
Fast
. Not as fast as I can run, but fast enough so I understand he hasn’t just gotten better. He’s become enhanced. Like me, only with less ability to control himself.

I follow him, a burning mix of anger and pity thumping in my chest.

“I’m sorry,” Ford says after we’ve been running for ten blocks or so. He slows down to a walk in an alley not far from my house. “I got carried away.”

I stop moving and stare at him, still afraid and incredulous. The heat. The uncontrollable rage. “You could go to jail for this. You will, if they catch you.”

“He’ll be too embarrassed to bother,” Ford says. “Besides, they won’t find me. They’re too busy worrying about Invisible.”

I hear him a pace or two behind me, and I turn to glare at him. “Even if that’s true, it was
stupid
. You were out of control.”

Ford nods, his eyes no longer the scary red saucers they were before.

“I think it’s time to tell me what’s going on.” I cross my arms, shivering a little in the cold night.

Ford looks at the ground and speaks so quietly I have to get closer to him even though right now I don’t want to be. “When Jax gave me those transfusions, they worked. Really well. But the synthetic blood, it . . . changed me.” His voice cracks, and in my heart it feels like a rubber band snaps against it. I know all about the changes Jax can make. I live them every day.

I nod, biting the insides of my cheeks in anger and recognition. That’s why he wanted me to leave that night.

I turn away, hating Jax in this moment. I would have done anything to make Ford better, but it never occurred to me that it could also make things worse. That the transfusions would do to Ford what my new heart did to me. We’re the same now.
Enhanced.
Like me, Ford is no longer all human. He’s something more. And something less.

Finally I talk to fill the silence. “I’m not afraid of you, Ford.”

“You should be.” His eyes don’t meet mine.

“What do you think you’re going to do, kill me?”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat like he’s in agony. Looks at the wall behind me. I lean against the water-stained wall, waiting nervously.

“What happened tonight isn’t the real me. It was just like at Jimmy’s, only worse. I just . . . lost control.”

“It’s okay,” I try. “I know what it’s like to—”

“No you don’t!” Ford interrupts me sharply. “Not like
this.
When I get around you, when I have a powerful emotion, be it anger like tonight, or . . . uh . . . other feelings . . . like at Jimmy’s Corner, when we were.” Here he pauses, looking up. “When we were on the mat. Bad things happen. I get so hot, and this feeling comes over me, like I can’t control myself. Like I’m moving toward a doorway or something, and I can’t trust what’s on the other side of it, but I can’t stop myself.”

“From what?” My voice is tiny.

He peers at me for a second, then swallows. Continuing. “From letting go, going to the other side of that door, where I let this new violent version of myself take over. I can’t trust myself around you right now.” His voice cracks. “It just gets worse around you. I’m sorry. I need some time.”