I run up the block, Thomas trailing behind me, and push through the crowd of agitated people milling around, not sure if they want to watch or look away. Thomas and I take advantage of everyone’s distraction to jump the turnstiles and get inside. The Banshee is right next to the fence, right across from the Cyclone. There’s a piece of clothing lying on the ground nearby. I grab it and see the silver name tag face up: V. ABRAMS.
I can see exactly how Mikey got up on the tower. Sure, there’s a gate. Yes, there’s a fence—a good one, too, with that kind of top that angles inward. That type of fence is supposed to be extra hard to get over.
It’s not.
I search for a few handholds where I can balance a moment to pull myself up and over. Once I glance at these kinds of barriers, all I see are ways to get myself past them. I must have done these calculations hundreds of times.
I climb and pull and strain my way up. Two climbs tonight. My hands are raw. Worse, I’m feeling another surge of memory take over my body. Damn.
What I’m remembering doesn’t even make sense. This memory is so . . . sweet?
“Come over here, honey, I want to give you a hug.”
That voice belonged to Mrs. Claymore—Sarah Claymore, my grandmother, though I didn’t know it at the time. I’d gone to the nursing home where she was living, hoping to find a chink in the Claymore armor, anything I could use against Erskine Claymore. Instead I’d found this kind old lady. She doesn’t know what’s going on right now, but she sure seems to remember things from long ago like they were yesterday.
I take a step back. I really don’t want a hug. From her or anyone else. I’m pretty sure my hugging days are over.
“You’re so kind,” she says.
“It’s no big deal. I just, you know, saw them and thought you might like them.”
Is that the truth?
Yeah, I think it really is that simple. I sought Mrs. Claymore out because I thought she was someone who could give me answers, but by now I know she can’t tell me anything useful that I could use against her husband. And yet I still come. And there’s something about her that won’t allow me to be anything but respectful and gentle.
I feel sorry for her.
Imagine that. After all I’ve lost, here I am feeling sorry for Sarah Claymore. She has to be one of the richest women in the country. Maybe even the world.
And here she is, so ecstatic over such a small gift. I brought her a lousy box of cheap chocolates. I bought them because they came in this box that was shaped like a house, yellow with a red door. Mrs. Claymore had described her childhood home to me, and I was just walking down the street and happened to notice this box of chocolates in a store window and was like, Wow, that box looks a lot like what she described. I bought them on impulse, just because I was struck by the coincidence.
And now she’s thanking me like I’ve actually brought her the house itself. Like I’ve given her something no one else could.
“Funny how the small things make you remember the big things,” she says. Her voice is sad and somehow a little angry. “Do you ever wish you could get a fresh start?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“There are so many things I would do over, my dear. So many. Don’t let it happen to you.”
And then she starts crying and I don’t know what to say or do. I don’t even know how to handle my own tears when they ambush me—how am I supposed to comfort this rich lady?
This rich lady I feel so sorry for.
We cry for the things we’ve lost in exactly the same way.
I want to scream. I feel like I’m remembering important moments, but I have no idea what makes them meaningful. It’s almost like I’m hitting the outer rings of a target but never the bull’s-eye. Last time I climbed, I thought of a person whose name and face I can’t recall but who I know had something to do with my arrest, and now—now I get Sarah Claymore, who’s still locked away in some luxury nursing home, somewhere in Manhattan. And no doubt the keys to her prison are still dangling from Erskine Claymore’s keychain.
Fortunately, even though these memories have overtaken my mind, my body has just carried on out of habit, climbing and climbing, finding a way up. Now I’m at the top of the ride. With Mikey. This Banshee is just like the tower cranes I used to climb. It sways with every gust of wind. I feel like I’m on a boat, trying not to lose my balance.
Mikey leans forward and back again, holding onto the bars on either side of him. He looks almost as if he’s swinging between the opposing points of a pendulum—only those two points are Live and Die. The way his arms and shoulders are tensing each time he pushes himself forward, I have the impression that he’s fighting with himself, like he’s testing which urge inside him is stronger.
I’m not happy to be up here with him, and I don’t know why life keeps asking of me what I don’t want to give. But maybe that’s what it does with everyone and I shouldn’t take it so personally.
“Mikey,” I say gently.
“You shouldn’t be up here.”
“Neither should you. Come on back down with me.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. For you or for me.”
“You don’t really want to be up here at all,” I say.
“What do you know about me?” He turns his head and makes eye contact. This is good. I’m going to use that eye contact like it’s a lifeline. I’m going to pull him back with it.
“There was a time I didn’t think I wanted to live anymore either,” I say, inching closer to him. “They did something to you in that hospital, and maybe now you get these thoughts that scare you or make you think you deserve what happened, but the way you’re looking at me right now, this is the guy I think you are deep down. And I think that guy deserves another chance. I think that guy deserves to live.”
I can almost touch him, but if I make a quick grab for his shirt, I might startle him. I’ve got to keep him talking.
“You don’t understand. I don’t want to be up here right now. Something’s making me . . . I can’t stop myself.”
His face tells me he’s bewildered and terrified. Maybe that’s a good sign. He understands what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want to succumb to what his brain is telling him.
“That’s why I’m here. I know what it’s like for your mind to turn against you. But we’re going to figure it out, okay? Come on.” I hold my hand out to him. “Come with me, okay?”
He nods.
There it is. I’ve got him. I simultaneously grab his hand and his belt, which is probably stupid of me because if he jumps now, I’m going down with him. But then I feel him lean toward me a little. He slides one foot away from the edge, then the other. I think he’s beaten it now, whatever pulled him up here, but I don’t want to spook him by rushing him to move back.
“Good job,” I say. “Keep coming.”
I let go of his hand for a moment so I can put my arms around his chest and pull him the rest of the way. He’s shaking now, tremors racking his whole body.
I make him climb down the ladder first and I follow. I don’t want him changing his mind and bolting back for the top of the tower. As we slowly make our way down, I can see that his hands are now practically curled into claws and he’s having trouble gripping the ladder rungs. I keep telling him he’s doing great, but I know he’s not. His jaw is tightening as if he’s trying to swallow back vomit and his neck muscles are taut. He makes a strange noise as his feet touch the ground.
Right away Thomas can see there’s still something really wrong with Mikey. “Is he having a seizure or something?”
“I don’t know. Let’s just get him out of here.”
We walk on either side of Mikey, holding him upright as his boots drag on the ground, pushing through the crowd of onlookers at the base of the ride. In the distance, a couple police cars pull up. We sneak out toward the boardwalk and then make our way back to the van parked up the street, taking a detour through a side street to avoid being seen by the arriving ambulance. As we help Mikey into the van, his face contracts a moment. He squeezes his eyes shut and runs his hand over the spot behind his ear, like he’s trying to massage the pain away. “I think we should take him to a hospital,” I say.
“Hold on a second.” Thomas reaches down and unbuttons one of the cuffs of Mikey’s uniform shirt.
“What are you doing?”
“Just a hunch,” he says.
He pushes up Mikey’s sleeve and reveals several needle marks in Mikey’s veins, a few slightly scabbed over. There’s a small halo of bruising around one of the injection sites. Thomas rolls up his sleeve and compares the two. Identical.
“Okay,” Thomas says. “I’m ready to tell you what I think is going on.”
I drive fast, too fast, but I feel like I’m now racing against not just one clock but several. I check on Mikey in the rearview mirror every few seconds. His eyes are closed and his head is leaning back on the seat. The tension in his body seems to have lessened but he’s still shaking.
Thomas has the laptop open and pulls up directions to the nearest hospital. “Turn left up there. And by the way, I adore you but you truly are a horrific driver.”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“For now,” he says, smiling. “Here’s hoping your driving does me in long before this stuff they shot me up with.”
I feel like screaming at him for trying to make light of what’s going on. “Stop joking and start giving me answers.”
I’m not afraid of what he’s going to say. No truth is worse than not knowing. Not knowing is a chasm of black, the potential for every worst-case scenario thrown together.
He faces forward again and sighs. “First of all, I haven’t been holding back because I don’t trust you. I was just trying to get a better handle on the situation before I said anything.”
“Do you have a handle now?”
“Not really, but I’ll just tell you what I know.” I slow down for a red light. Thomas clears his throat.
“Here’s the thing,” he says. “The government program that you were part of—it might just be the tip of the iceberg. There was always the possibility that there might be others. Other patients, other places where they did research.”
I’m not surprised. Not even a little bit. When the Feds told me that they shut the hospital down, I wasn’t fully convinced. But everyone told me relax, don’t worry, you’re safe. They said it so much that I started to think maybe—just maybe—I could accept it as fact. Now I feel like a sucker for letting my handlers talk me out of listening to my own gut. They used my desire to put the past behind me as a weapon against me.
“Thomas, if you’ve always suspected that there were other places they conducted research—other people who they experimented on—why didn’t you ever mention that to me?”
“I was hoping it wasn’t true. Because if it is—if there are ongoing projects, any information about the Velocius project could still be relevant, useful, to other research that’s happening right now.”
I think about Thomas’s response to his kidnapping tonight—how he insisted that whatever his kidnappers wanted had nothing to do with Velocius or with me. He was lying. Straight-up lying. More of that insulting “protection” that I never asked for.
I take one hand off the wheel and momentarily pinch the bridge of my nose. “Okay, but we’ve already established that there isn’t any surviving Velocius data.”
“Hold on. I’m not done explaining.”
“Go ahead. Until this light turns green, I have nowhere else to be.”
“A couple weeks ago, the Feds started asking me stuff about you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, it was sort of out of the blue. Up until that point, all we discussed was 8-Bit and all the stuff he’d been doing the past few years. And I’d told them everything I knew about that. Like, everything.”
“What did they ask you about me?”
“They wanted to know if you’ve ever said anything about more research data for the Velocius project. They seemed to think there might be more info out there and that you might have some idea about where it was.”
“Me? I don’t know anything.”
“That’s what I told them. But then I thought . . .” Thomas scrubs his hair with his fingertips. “What if you do, Angel?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Have you had any new memories recently?”
“No,” I say right away, but I realize that’s not quite true. “Well, actually I had a couple tonight, but both are from long ago. Before I was in the hospital.”
“What were they about?”
“One was from that night at the police station. The night that Hodges—”
His biological mother’s name makes him wince.
“The night I got arrested and she told me about what she did to my mother. I couldn’t really get hold of the whole memory, though. There was some other piece to it, something about a friend of mine, a girl from my old neighborhood maybe—someone who betrayed me. And the other memory was about Sarah Claymore. You know, Erskine’s wife. My grandmother. I visited her in her nursing home at some point. I had tracked her down and I was trying to dig up some dirt that could help me expose Claymore’s shadiness.”
“And did you?”
“No. She didn’t know anything. And obviously neither of those memories has anything to do with secret locations of research data.”
Behind us, Mikey starts making a strange, low noise, like an agonized animal caught in a trap. He grabs at the hair on either side of his head but it’s too short for him to get a grip. Even Thomas is looking at him now like he’s feeling sorry for the guy. “Good thing he doesn’t have much hair because it looks like he’s trying to pull it all out.”
That’s when something hits me.
“His hair,” I say.
“What about it?”
“It took months for mine to grow back after they took me off the chemo regimen, and it didn’t all grow at the same rate. If Mikey was in the hospital until a couple weeks ago . . . look at his hair. It’s short, but even all over. Like it’s just been shaved.”
“Like someone was just trying to make it look like two or three weeks’ worth of hair growth?”
“Exactly.”
“Then the story he told you is definitely not real. Or not complete. Could be the result of whatever he’s got in his system.” As he says this, he bends his arm and rubs the inside of his arm where they injected him. He glances back at Mikey and then at me. “Maybe I’m looking at my future.”
I’m not sure how I’m keeping the van on the right side of the road. My mind is too full of worry.
He glances at his laptop again. “Take your second right up ahead there.”
Then he says, “I have another theory. Is there anything only you and Larry would know about?”
“Larry? I don’t think so. Why?”
Larry. The doctor who saved me back at the research hospital. The man who defied his bosses, the doctors who were running the experiments, for my sake. I think of him fairly often, sometimes wondering why he did it and sometimes just grateful that he did. His actions gave me a way out, but he’s as much of a puzzle as my memories once were. I don’t know much about him. Although maybe I knew the best part of him and that’s what matters.
“The way you described to me what Larry did at the hospital,” Thomas says. “He planted information in your head, gave you the tools you needed to save yourself. He found a way to tell you your mother’s name without you or any of his colleagues realizing it. I think he might have done something more. A clue to help you find hidden data about Velocius—something to lead you to a digital storage site or something.”
I try to recall some of what I discussed with Larry during procedures. All of it seems far away and indistinct. Disconnected words and phrases, momentary flashes of images, surges of emotion—all of it is clouded by the drowsy fog that lay over my heavily medicated brain. And I’m sure my memory of those times is even more pockmarked and incomplete because subconsciously, I’d rather not remember any of what happened.
Thomas isn’t the first person to ask me this question about Larry. After I got back to New York, my handlers asked me as well.
Had Larry ever mentioned anything unusual about my case?
Had he ever said something strange to me that might have had another meaning?
I told them that everything Larry said to me was odd. Every topic he introduced was out of left field. After a while the Feds stopped asking.
The light changes and I hit the gas too hard. We hit a pothole that pitches Mikey across the floor.
“You okay back there?” Thomas asks.
Mikey nods once, but his eyes roll back in his head.
Now I think about the morning of my last operation—about how strange Larry was acting, with his cryptic quotes from Hamlet. Of course, his behavior made sense later, but maybe there was more that I was supposed to unpack from his words.
Maybe he seeded something else in my mind—the location of the very information that the Radical Pacifists want Thomas to deliver. Larry to the rescue once again.
“Do a search on ‘Larry and Polonius’ and see if you get any hits,” I say.
I look in the rearview mirror at Mikey again. He’s completely still, though his face is pinched in pain. I wonder if he’s fallen asleep like that.
Thomas types and then says, “Huh. Well, that’s something.”
“What?”
“I’ve just found something called Larry’s Elizabethan Fan Site. It’s pretty bare bones. Just a list of quotes from Hamlet. That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Or else,” I say, “it’s a message.”