The Invisible (29 page)

“You know I’m telling the truth, supergirl,” he yells behind him. “No way did she drown in that lake. Harris Fleet faked the whole thing. Everyone’s corrupt in the North, you know. Everyone has secrets.”

That’s the last thing he says before the guard pulls him out the door.

A long time passes before I can force myself to get up from the metal table. Before I leave the sweltering room and have to face the task ahead of me. But eventually, I hobble out of there, down the humid basement hallway where the walls seem to sweat and where secrets go to die.

He pulls off the KillBall cap and strokes the short dark hair he’s revealed, his hands shaking with the horror of what he’s done. She cut her hair and dyed it black. She became another person. How could he have known? A cry rises in his throat. A deep and howling moan. Quickly, with the side of his brain that is still, even now, operating like a professional mob boss, he closes the apartment door, which has been swinging open on its hinges since he broke in. That side of his brain is panicking. Who else is here? Where is the punk kid who calls himself The Hope, the boyfriend he was supposed to be meeting?

Why was his daughter alone here; why was she shooting at him?

The other side of his brain is still moaning, is hysterical with grief. And some part of him that is neither of these men, neither the professional crime boss nor the father who has murdered the person most precious to him on Earth, some other distant part of him slowly begins to notice the strangest sound rising to greet him in the dark apartment.

For a moment he thinks it is himself, but he cannot produce a sound like that.

Crying like that can only come from a baby.

That third part of him moves his shaking body wonderingly toward the sound. A tiny alcove. A crib. Jesus, no. It cannot be. But it is. And all the pieces fit together now. Reggie’s disappearance. The months and months. Oh god. And here is the baby. His daughter’s clone, in miniature. Except instead of Reggie’s blond head, the infant has a shock of red hair. It’s
his
, of course. The papers say the vigilante has red hair.

Dangling above the crying baby is a homemade mobile, felt letters tied to fishing wire. Bobbing in the air. He picks up the baby—who is so light it’s almost obscene, how can anyone be so helpless and unknowing and new?—and he bounces it like he used to bounce Reggie. As the baby cries in his ear, he cries too. Choking, unmanly hiccups while he examines the letters. Happy primary colors.

His half-dead heart spasms as he reads the word they spell: ANTHEM.

The boy walks home in the center of the street. A newspaper cone twisted at the bottom holds a pound of cherries from the all-night outdoor market. They were expensive and an indulgence, but he can’t wait to see the look on her face, hear her squeal of delight.
So early in the season
, she’ll say.
You shouldn’t have.
Then she’ll pop one in her mouth and grin, that pointed chin of hers wiggling.

I couldn’t sleep
, he’ll say.
So I went out and found these. I wish I could get you these every day.

He kicks a Buzz Beer can down the broken asphalt and it flies a few feet, then lands in a patch of weeds threaded through with straw wrappers and old newspaper. He can smell the landfill from here, a block away from their building. When the sun rises higher in the sky it will reek to high heaven. They like to tell each other they don’t notice the smell anymore, but it’s a kind lie.

The smell is putrid and decomposing, and it sends him down the same thought spiral as always, that he needs to get them out of here, Reggie and the baby. Move them somewhere green, not gray and brown and drained of color.

Next month, the month after. The riots have caught fire. He’s not needed here anymore. Bedlam citizens are rising up. He can feel it. It’s almost time for him to disappear, to stop going out at night. Stop rounding up the remaining criminals and trust that people will demand change.

Next month, two at the most. They will get a car and go, just keep on driving until they get someplace where wildflowers grow. He’ll pick up work in a small town, rent a little house with a tree in the yard. Somewhere cheap and simple.

He weaves in the center of the street, daydreaming about the fields of alfalfa and aster he once tromped through as a boy when he was shipped off to relatives, after his dad was killed. Those yellow and white blooms that went on for miles. What baby wouldn’t like a field like that to play in?

The daydream is so rich and real, he doesn’t see the cream-colored car until it screeches right in front of him and it’s too late to run. Even with his fast legs, too late.

He makes eye contact with the man driving, a man with wide licorice-black eyes, dusky skin, the whites of his eyes yellowed, cropped black hair. His mouth open as he tries to swerve out of the way. But the car is coming so fast. The moment stretches out; The Hope sees everything, their future stretched out in front of them, the little tree, a stream, a picnic. Endless waves of pale purple blooms blowing in high grass. The baby growing, a willowy freckled thing like him.

The cone of cherries goes flying as he tries to run, their red-black skins like flecks of blood on the blank white predawn sky.

Another man next to the driver, he sees wonderingly in the expanding, pulsating moment before impact, looks like someone he knows. Handsome, strong jaw. Eyes red-rimmed and wild. Dark hair slicked back. So familiar.
Maybe someone famous
, he thinks pointlessly, even as he senses he will not clear the car, will not avoid the skidding screech of the long cream-colored hood, upon which the precious expensive cherries already bounce, marking it with their dark red juice.

An actor, maybe? Someone imp—

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

I feel sick when I leave the police station, too destroyed inside to run home. Eventually I catch the bus and stare numbly out the window as gray Bedlam crawls by. I’ve never seen so much construction in the North Side. So many hard-hatted workers. So many fleet industries redevelopment project signs.

Even when the city almost implodes, we make money,
I think wonderingly.
No matter what happens, how bad it all gets, my father still turns a profit.

I decide to go to the office. It’s early still. I can catch him at work. And this conversation cannot wait.

The thick gray carpet mutes my footfalls as I move down the halls of Fleet Industries. I’ve spent many a school vacation filing for my mother and father here, so I know my way around.

Irene, the receptionist, waves me through the secure inner doors with her key card. The urge to smash the glass pulses through my hands, but I hold back as the doors swish open. “Hi, sweetie. You’re getting so big, growing up so fast,” she says as if I’m still ten years old.

You don’t know the half of it
, I think, but I just smile and say thank you. I wonder if Irene knows about my origins. She may or may not, but certain people close to my parents must have some idea. I think of Serge and shudder involuntarily.

“Your dad’s just finishing a meeting, great timing,” she says, answering a ringing phone. I’m free to walk the halls on my own. The walls are lined tightly with hundreds of pictures of Fleet Industries buildings, both finished and at the blueprint stage. Half of North Bedlam must be on these walls.

By the time I reach the office door with the placard that says
HARRIS FLEET, CEO,
my heart is a ticking bomb, my blood boiling white-hot with rage.

“Tell me about my sister.” I lean against his office door, breathing funny, shallow breaths and fighting to stay calm, to keep from screaming. The city stretches out in front of him the way it does at home, seemingly endless from this high floor. Only here, his office has a curved window that encompasses three sides of the building, so the view goes out in all directions but due north.

Maybe there’s still a reasonable explanation for all of this. Maybe Aaron was just messing with me. Or maybe I’m just grasping at straws.

“Kitten, what a surprise.” My father smiles flatly from his desk chair. His canines seem longer than I remember, his face appears suddenly wolfish and grotesque. I shudder inwardly, take a tentative step inside.

“What are you doing here?”

“Someone told me.” I move closer to him, not wanting to call attention to myself and have someone interrupt us. I lower my voice to just above a whisper. “You killed Regina. And a lot of other things besides.”

My father goes pale. Clears his throat. “Who said that?” he growls. “Who would say that to you?”

“Doesn’t matter. I can see from your face it’s true,” I say calmly, though inside I’m breaking into a million pieces. I need to act like I already know everything or he’ll charm his way out of it like he did last time.

“Of course it’s not.” He won’t look at me. He stares at a pile of papers on his huge desk, gathering them up roughly in his hands. There’s a tremor in them I’ve never seen before. More confirmation that Aaron was telling the truth.

“Tell me now or I walk out that door forever. I disappear and never come back. I spend the rest of my life investigating you. I already know most of the story,” I lie. “I just want to hear you say it.”

My father looks like he might pass out. He sucks a noisy breath in through his nose. “It was
him
. He killed her. He took her away, he ruined all our lives. I wanted her as far away from him as she could possibly be, and I was overruled.” This all comes out fast and so quiet I almost miss it. “If not for that animal she took up with, she would be alive.”

Do I tell him I don’t know who he means? Better to let him keep talking. To think he’s confirming what I already know.

“Did Serge tell you about him? Serge is fired, by the way. As of this moment. Had to be him who told you. Nobody else knows.”

I shake my head, opening and closing my mouth like a fish as I accept the awful fact of Serge lying to me my whole life. “No. It wasn’t Serge.”

“You want to know why we have all this?” My father’s eyes are wild as he stands up behind his mammoth desk. “All our money, all the nice things, all your ballet lessons, your education, this office, the billions we’re about to make from the stadium project? Everything we own? It’s because of me. I made it all out of
thin air
,” he hisses. “The success of this company all depended on people moving north. Fleeing crime. I made sure crime stayed where it needed to. I made sure the North would become off-limits to the thugs who terrorized this city. For Regina. I did it for her. And then I did it for you. And for your mother,” he adds, as if she’s an afterthought.

“Don’t call her my mother,” I say, feeling that same shattering in my chest again, that gaping, whooshing hole.

I’ll never know my mother.

My mother is my grandmother.

“When that egomaniac started changing things, it wasn’t going to be good for me and my family.” My father pauses here, stands up and moves toward the window, his voice shaking. “Real estate prices began to drop in the South. Young families started moving there. He just . . . Anthem, he wanted to destroy the whole social fabric of what I’d created. All of it, just . . .
poof
.” My father snaps his fingers.

“You’d created? But how?”

“Doesn’t matter,” my father murmurs. His eyes travel over the buildings, the factories, the steaming gray beneath and around where he stands. “I had ways of reining in the Syndicate, but it doesn’t matter now. I’m out of that, for the most part.”

“So you lied to me before, when you said you had no knowledge of what Gavin was doing.”

“That’s not what we’re talking about!” my father explodes, moving toward me in his socked feet. I note his wingtips lined up neatly under his desk. He’s close enough to me now so I can see each of the hairs growing in his five o’clock shadow. “I don’t know why you are so
insistent
, Anthem, or how you came to know all this, but I intend to find out.”

“You were talking about her boyfriend,” I say softly to veer him back on course. The words echo in my head. I’m afraid of them. Even though I’m terrified, I force myself to say it: “My father.”

“I’m your father!
Me
. I
raised
you.” His hand darts out, fingers wrap around my chin to force me to look into his eyes. I glare up at him, my lips curling with disdain. I can see the fine lines around his eyes, the wrinkles on his forehead that he and my mother usually work so hard to erase.

I don’t know who I’m looking at, I realize. But I know it’s a bully. A man who’s done terrible things to this city, to strangers. And who’s done the worst thing of all, maybe. Killed his own child. We stay like that for a second, glaring at each other, then I twist out of his grasp.

“Don’t touch me,” I whisper.

“You’ve got to see it from my point of view,” he goes on, his words buoyed by a sort of mania I can hear in his voice. He is afraid, I realize. That I will expose him, or maybe that I’ll leave him. “Because one guy gets really good at sneaking up on criminals in the act, because one guy decides to take a stand, the city started to treat him like some kind of hero. He started
riots
, Anthem. The city was disintegrating. Law and order, what little of it works here, was crumbling before my very eyes! Everything I’d built. And then I find out my own daughter is involved with him? Of course I didn’t take it well. You wouldn’t either, Anthem, believe me. Because I know you. I
get
you. You are a pragmatist. A workhorse. You would react the same way. Especially after what happened with that boy. The pain you went through.”

“You don’t know anything about that,” I snap. “Don’t talk like you know me. You know nothing.”

My thoughts stutter as I try to catch up with what my father is saying. A man who started riots? A man who went after criminals? There’s only one man like that. My sister’s—my mother’s—boyfriend—was the freaking
Hope
? I try to remember what we learned in politics class about The Hope. Is he dead, alive? Disappeared, I remember Dr. Tammany saying. Just . . . gone.