Lin studied the painting of the doe for a moment, then reached out and began wiping away the buck beside her. “When my uncle returned me to Germany in 1946, my father wasn’t the same man. He was a shell. He blamed himself for my mother’s death, for making the wrong choice on where to send us. Maybe the war had changed him, too. It had changed me. I was only five years older, but I was no longer a child. I hadn’t been a child since…” She looked around. “This place, this cave, in this very corridor, is where he told me I was going away. This is where my childhood ended.”
Peyton wanted to reach out and embrace her mother, but she knew her better than that. Lin Shaw needed space as she revealed this secret she had carried for so long.
“After the war,” Lin continued, “there was only the Looking Glass for him. He saw it as his way to atone. His duty. Our relationship wasn’t like that of a father and daughter; we were more like partners in this great work. We had seen how evil and dark the world could be. We wanted to end that forever.”
The buck was gone, and her hands were covered in the dark soot now. She took a cloth from her pack and began wiping it away.
“That was our bond, and the thread that ran through everyone in the Citium back then. In Stalingrad, Yuri had gone through an experience similar to my own in Hong Kong, though on a larger scale. We shared our stories and found that, at least back then, we saw the same world and were dedicated to the same cause. Your father had lost both of his parents in the war too. Going through what we did… it changes you. You can’t help but change. You have to. To survive. But some of us, like Yuri, had wounds deeper than they seemed. He proved capable of things I never imagined.”
She traced a finger over the cave wall, where the fawn had been. “No matter what happens after this, Peyton, you must promise me that you will do whatever it takes to stop Yuri. No matter the cost.”
Peyton studied her mother. “What do you mean—what happens after this?”
“As I said, my childhood ended here. My life was dark and difficult after. I believe Papa had another reason for hiding his inventory list here: he’s telling me that my life is about to change again. Darkness lies ahead. Hardship. He’s telling me that I will have to make difficult choices—like he did. And that they might not be the right ones.”
She pressed her fingers into the wall, and it gave, flakes of plaster raining down. Peyton’s eyes widened as she realized it was actually just a plaster layer, and behind it was a foam block. Lin pulled out the block, took a folding knife from her pack, and cut the foam away, revealing a sealed plastic box.
She opened it with a pop. A sheaf of loose pages lay inside.
“Like him, I’ll try to protect you, Peyton. But you may have to finish this.”
Peyton glanced at the smeared lines of the painting, at the buck that had been wiped away, at the child that had been ripped open, the secrets the father had left inside now pulled out into the open. And the doe, painted so many years ago, staring at her, just like her mother.
“Promise me, Peyton.”
“I promise.”
Chapter 40
Desmond didn’t know when it happened, but something had changed inside him, like a season that had ended abruptly, a long winter that had broken. Everything seemed new again. Exciting. He looked forward to going to Phaethon Genetics, especially to meetings he knew Avery would be attending. He found excuses to join projects she was on. And he thought about her in the hours in between.
Yuri often asked him about Lin Shaw, and his response was always the same: “Nothing suspicious.”
Desmond arrived one morning for a meeting at Rendition Games to find that the prototype of the device he had devoted a decade to developing finally worked. He and Yuri celebrated that night at Desmond’s home. Conner was there too. It was like the three of them had landed on the beach of a new world. They all felt that anything was possible, that they had turned the corner on an impossible task. Desmond soon learned there was more work to do.
“What’s your plan for testing it?” Yuri asked.
Desmond hadn’t given that much thought. He had been singularly obsessed with making it work. “Not sure. I was thinking we’d start with animal trials. Primates. If it looks good, move on to human studies. Run an ad for volunteers. Maybe—”
“And how would we explain what we’re doing?”
“Maybe a neurological study, or—”
“That would open us up to regulatory approval. Oversight. And even if it didn’t, it would, at the very least, expose part of what we’re doing.” Yuri drew a folder from his briefcase and pushed it across the coffee table.
Desmond opened the folder. It included a profile of a company called Pacific Sea Freight, along with travel routes for one particular cargo ship. “I don’t understand.”
“We need a place to test Rendition. A large space—out of the way, beyond prying eyes. A secure location.”
“A sea freighter?”
“It’s ideal if you think about it.”
Desmond scratched at his hairline. “Well, not really. What if the subjects experience adverse events? We should be near a hospital.”
“Even more to my point. The subjects need to be very close to medical help—and not just some crowded ER room with overworked staff. Specialists trained to deal with the sorts of issues that might arise.”
“I don’t follow.”
“We’ll transform the ship into a floating hospital and laboratory.” Yuri put his fingers together and steepled them. “And it offers a third advantage.”
Desmond waited.
“Recruitment. This ship,” Yuri nodded down at the folder, “the Kentaro Maru, puts into ports around the world. We could recruit subjects with diverse genetics.”
“They’d need to be informed of the risks. In fact, we need to figure out some idea of the risks before we even get started.”
“Certainly. But we could also target specific populations. The terminally ill. Prisoners governments want to get rid of.”
Desmond opened his mouth to object, but Yuri continued. “They and their families would be well paid. Again, we’d have health professionals close by in case anything happened. We need to move quickly now, Desmond. With the Looking Glass complete, we’re more exposed. If someone is going to betray us, it will happen now.”
Finally, Desmond nodded. “Okay.”
“Good,” Yuri said. “Let’s talk about the specifics.”
Desmond looked at the file. “Do we own this company, Pacific Sea Freight? The ship?”
“Yes. We have for about six months.”
That didn’t surprise him. Yuri was always a step ahead.
“Where’s the Kentaro Maru now?”
“Docked in San Francisco. Fully staffed with contract medical personnel, drawn mostly from the third world, all bound by non-disclosure agreements. We’re ready for the trial, Desmond. Right now.”
“Well, it’s going to take me a few days to wrap things up here—”
Yuri held up a hand. “I have a better idea.”
Desmond raised his eyebrows.
“Stay. Let Conner and I take care of this.”
“What?”
“Rook is complete. So is Rapture. Neither require our attention. We can test Rendition for you.”
“No one knows Rendition better than me—”
“Are you sure? You were the architect, but the people who developed it are the ones we need to make adjustments. They should oversee the test. But there’s an even better reason we need you here.”
“And that is?”
“Lin Shaw.”
“Lin—”
“Could be planning something, Desmond. If she is, she’ll strike now. You’re close to her. You’re the only person in the Citium who’s in a position to watch her.”
Desmond exhaled and thought about Yuri’s words.
“And there’s something else.” Yuri glanced at Conner. “This is an opportunity for Conner to take on more responsibility. We need
somebody we trust to oversee the security on the ship.”
Desmond shook his head.
Yuri ignored him. “Is that something you’re interested in, Conner?”
“Of course,” Conner said quickly. “I’ll do whatever is needed.”
Desmond argued, fought the plan, but in the end, he agreed. Yuri seemed to have anticipated every objection and planned for each one, like a chess game he had already played out in his mind.
Yuri and Conner left the next day. Desmond was there at the pier to see them off, the wind blowing in his hair, the massive cargo ship towering in the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the background.
“Be careful out there.”
Conner hugged his brother. “I’ll get this done for you, Des. I promise. When I get back, it will start.”
The first week brought nearly constant updates from the Rendition team and from Conner and Yuri. The first participants in the trials were recruited from islands in the South Pacific. The results were incredibly positive. No deaths. A few adverse events. The Rendition developers adjusted the device.
And so it went, for months, trial after trial, each port bringing new participants. The rest were held on the ship, told they would be released at the end of the project.
Updates became less frequent, but Desmond assumed all was well.
One Saturday afternoon, he went in to the Phaethon offices and found Avery camped out in the conference room, boxes of file folders open around her.
“Looks like an IRS audit in here.”
She jumped at his voice and held a hand to her chest. “You scared me.” She put the top back on the closest box.
“That’s a first.” He studied the folders. Personnel files. “What’re you doing?”
She swallowed as she put the cover on another box. “Research project…”
She looked as if she hadn’t slept in a week.
Something about the encounter bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Avery seemed to be spending every waking hour at the office, like a college student cramming for finals.
Halloween that year fell on a Friday, and the entire office dressed up. Politicians were well represented. There were three Hillary Clintons, just as many Nancy Pelosis, a few Barbara Boxers, no Donald Trumps, and seven Bernie Sanderses.
Some costumes skewed intellectual. The comptroller wore his usual dark business suit with one exception: the button-up white shirt and tie were replaced with a T-shirt with a line chart on it. The labels below listed the years, starting at 1980 and going up to 2015, a line for every five years. On the left were numbers: zero to twenty. He offered a reward of prime plus ten dollars, $13.50, to anyone who guessed what he was. Desmond instantly realized it, but refrained since the rest of the accounting department was obsessed with the mystery. Until lunch, that is, when he found the accountants crowded around the comptroller’s table, practically grilling him, insisting he was the target fed funds rate.
“No. You’re close, but that’s not it.”
Desmond stepped through the crowd. “Greg, if I’m not mistaken, you’re the LIBOR rate.”
The gray-haired man grinned. “How’d you figure it out?”
“September 2008. LIBOR spiked after Lehman collapsed. The only real divergence with the fed target rate in decades.”
The CFO reached into his pocket and removed an envelope that contained thirteen dollars and fifty cents.
“You’re a real geek, Desmond. You know that?”
“Yes. I’m aware of that.”
The costume voted best was topical. A lab tech had ordered a custom T-shirt from Vistaprint with four images: Gene Roddenberry, Silent Bob, the numeral eight, and a red circle with a line through it. His modern hieroglyphs—representing gene-mute-8-shun, or gene mutation—were lauded throughout the company.
Seeing the costumes reminded Desmond of the house party in Palo Alto the night he had met Peyton, when they had worn matching Mulder and Scully costumes. That had been a good night. There weren’t many that could touch it in his mind.
Like the comptroller, Desmond had also challenged people to guess his outfit, and offered a hundred dollars to the first person to do so. He wore a suit tailored in a mid-1800s style, a green visor on his forehead, and thick chains that hung from his neck and wrapped around his torso. The outfit drew plenty of lookers, most of whom dropped by his office in pairs or trios, peering around the frame as if they were looking into an open tiger cage. Board members were scary animals.
Many of the guesses were the same. Harry Houdini. David Blaine. Some professional wrestlers he’d never heard of. He shook his head and turned back to his computer each time.
Avery stopped by in the late afternoon. She looked terrible—this time purposefully so. Her hair was a rat’s nest, not unlike the first time he had visited her apartment. She had painted her mascara down her face, like Tammy Faye Bakker or a member of Kiss. She wore a teal skirt, tight-fitting, and a white T-shirt. On the front of the shirt the delta symbol was written three times in magic marker. She twirled to let him read the back of the shirt, which read: Bad Decisions.
That stumped him.
He stood for her, letting her take in his outfit.
“Seriously?”
He shrugged. “What?”
“It’s like, almost intellectually self-mutilating.”
“Does that mean you know who I am?”
“It means that I do.”
He cocked his head, surprised. She pointed at his outfit.
“You’re Jacob Marley, the business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, immortalized in a certain novel titled A Christmas Carol. You are, how do I say this…”
“Lay it on me.”
“Okay. You’re dead.”
“That’s a shot to the heart.”
“Indeed.”
“Tell me more.”
“You’re tortured. A ghost, doomed to walk the earth forever for your greedy, selfish, and uncaring attitude toward mankind. You roam the world, unseen, but seeing others’ pain, unable to help them. You realize your mistake. And it becomes your cross to bear. You lay it at Ebenezer’s feet, and arrange for three ghosts to visit him: the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. If your partner, Ebenezer, can be redeemed, perhaps you’ll finally know peace.”
“Wow.”
Avery shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
“Unlikely. You must have been a lit major.”
“Nah. Ira David Wood. He did a production of A Christmas Carol in Raleigh every year. It was great.”
Desmond drew out the five twenty-dollar bills he had extracted from the ATM that morning.
Avery held up a hand. “Keep it.”
“I’ll donate it to charity.”
“Grand. Do you… want to talk about your outfit?”
He squinted. “I thought we just did.”
“No, like what it means.”
“That I’m a lover of classic literature?”
“Clearly, but of all the characters in the history of stories, you picked Jacob Marley.”
“And?”
“And he’s a tragic figure. A businessman who realized his life’s work had hurt others. But only after he died and was reborn—after he wandered the world and saw the full truth. He’s a person on a mission to change his partners and pay for his crimes.”
Desmond leaned back in his chair. “Oh. Well, I was thinking, I’ve got this old suit and some chains in the garage, and the visor I bought cheap at a secondhand store. So, no, I didn’t really get that far in my analysis.”
She smiled. “Well, it’s worth thinking about. Just saying.” She turned to leave.
“Hey.”
She stopped.
“I didn’t guess yours.”
She turned back. “All right.”
He studied her chest, the three deltas, tight against her body. He couldn’t remember the words on the back.
“Turn for me.”
The corners of her mouth twisted slightly, b
ut she spun and showed him her backside.
Delta represented change. “Bad Decisions” was written on her back—they were behind her. And she had clearly been crying. Or in a fight.
“You’re… making changes to leave bad decisions behind?”
“Close. Not quite.”
“Three changes?”
“No changes, actually.”
“Huh.”
She shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. Nobody’s guessed it.”
“What’s the reward?”
“Mystery,” she said over her shoulder as she walked away.
And a mystery she was.
At five o’clock, he stopped by her cubicle, and found her working on another query, with tables he recognized.
“Well,” he said. “Anybody guess it?”
“Nope. You?”
“Nah. No classic literature aficionados around, apparently. What you working on?”
“Your health trait report.”
“That can wait until Monday.”
“I’ve got nothing else going on.”
“No hot date on Halloween?”
“I don’t date.”
He exhaled a laugh. “Me either.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true.”
“And why is that?”
“Faults that are mine alone.”
She pointed at the chains hanging from his neck. “Character flaws that doom you to wander the afterlife, trying in vain to atone for your shortcomings?”