A catheter snaked out from under the blanket. As her body was rehydrated, involuntary urination became a risk, and no one wanted to clean that up. Luckily, she was starved enough that there was no need to really worry about other waste products. Can’t shit if you don’t eat. And other inspirational proverbs that were never going to catch on.
She looked peaceful, lying there on her back with her eyes closed. Someone had wiped most of the dirt from her face, revealing pale skin with an almost purplish undertone. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose. That seemed incredibly sad to me, for some reason. Whoever she was, whoever she had been before she stumbled, half starved, to my doorstep, she was the sort of person who freckled when she went out in the sun, and must have spent her life drowning in SPF-40. The fact that she wasn’t burnt now told me that she had traveled mostly at night; she’d been filthy enough when I found her that she definitely hadn’t been keeping up any sort of skin care regimen.
“So who are you, strange girl?” I asked. “Why are you here? Why did you come looking for me?”
She didn’t answer. She just slept on.
Chapter 3
Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus
There are people who will tell you that the ends justify the means, right up until they’re talking about their own ends. Then, suddenly, morals and ethics matter. Funny thing, that.
—DR. SHANNON ABBEY
Good morning, class. Who’s ready to learn?
—ELAINE OLDENBURG
1.
“Dr. Abbey?” Not-Daisy’s voice was soft, almost hesitant, like she was afraid that I was going to sic Joe on her for daring to come near my office. For a moment I entertained the fantasy of doing precisely that: unleashing my faithful hound and shutting her up before she found a way to tell the CDC about our mystery guest. I’d always been fairly relaxed about the presence of spies and infiltrators. No matter how often I moved the lab, being connected to the supply chain meant being vulnerable to discovery: The CDC was always going to find me, and having found me, they were always going to send their people in to try to learn what I knew.
Most of the time, what I knew either wasn’t worth reporting, or wasn’t worth protecting, or was hidden behind closed doors and managed by my more loyal staffers. But something like our mystery woman had been vulnerable to discovery from the start. How do you hide a stranger who falls out of the forest and virtually lands on your head? The answer was sadly simple. You didn’t. Mystery girl had been sleeping for two days, and we’d managed to block all of not-Daisy’s attempts to message her government masters in that period. But we weren’t going to be able to stay on high alert forever. Eventually, either not-Daisy was going to get something past us, or we were going to have to make a decision about her probable retirement situation.
“Yes, Zelda?” I asked, looking up and away from my computer. If I was thinking about having her killed for security reasons, it seemed only polite to use her name, at least to her face. She was always going to be “not-Daisy” to me.
“Um, you said that we should notify you if there was any change in, um, our visitor’s status? And there’s been a change.”
I stood, knocking my chair backward in the process. “What kind of change?”
Not-Daisy’s eyes were sad and resigned. She understood what she was saying. That was the moment when I realized that she knew she’d been set up by her employers. They weren’t showing faith in her by sending her to me: They were saying that she was, on some level, essentially expendable. “She’s awake.”
“That’s certainly a change,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. I stepped around the desk. Joe rose to follow me, and I shook my head, accompanying the motion with the hand gesture that meant, “Stay.” “No, Joe. I’m sorry, buddy, but you need to stay here.”
Joe’s butt hit the ground while his face was still composing itself into a look of pure bewilderment. I was going somewhere. I was his person. If I was going somewhere, he was supposed to be going somewhere with me. That was the way the world worked. But I was telling him to stay, and when I told him to do a thing, it had to be done. That was also the way the world worked.
“I know, buddy,” I said, and scratched his ears. “Stay. Guard. We’ll do something fun later, okay?”
Joe slowly sank back to the floor, resting his head on his massive forepaws. He looked at me so reproachfully that I almost went back on my decision and told him to come along. But the last time our mystery woman had been awake, she’d taken a shot at Joe. She didn’t have any of her weapons anymore. That didn’t mean I wanted to tempt her. I shot one last apologetic look at my dog and turned to head for the doorway, where not-Daisy was waiting for me.
We fell into step together as we walked down the hall toward the observation room, not-Daisy shooting sidelong glances in my direction like she expected me to attack her at any moment. I tried to keep my eyes forward, and to resist the urge to whirl and shout “Boo!” at the poor terrified thing. No matter what she thought of me, I wasn’t a monster, and I wasn’t going to let her turn me into one. Even though it would have been fun to watch her jump out of her skin.
Jill and Tom were both waiting in the observation room when we arrived. Jill was seated at the monitoring station while Tom leaned against the wall and chewed a piece of peppermint gum, probably to cover the lingering smell of pot that hung around him like a shroud. “What’s the situation?” I asked, stepping inside.
Not-Daisy stopped in the hall, staying a foot outside the doorway. She knew this wasn’t her project, and more, she knew that she wasn’t really welcome. I respected that, even as I wondered whether she knew just how unwelcome she actually was.
“She woke up fifteen minutes ago,” said Jill. “Sat up, looked around, looked at the IV, and then lay back down. I thought she was asleep again, until I realized that her heart rate was elevated. She’s waiting for something.”
“We thought it was best that we call you,” said Tom. “We can gas the room, knock her out again—”
“Let’s not,” I said. “We want to talk to her, right? And she’s not ripping out the tubes. That implies that she’s at least somewhat lucid, and understands that we’re trying to help her with all this stuff, not hurt her. So let’s assume that she can be reasoned with.”
“You’re not going to go in there by yourself, are you?” asked Jill, sounding faintly horrified—but not, I noted, even remotely surprised. My people were used to me. Jill had been with me for the infamous “Shaun Mason gets exposed to Kellis-Amberlee and fails to seroconvert” incident, and had watched me walk into a room with a man who should by all rights have been a zombie. There wasn’t anything I could do that would surprise her anymore.
That didn’t mean I needed to be stupid just to keep my people on their toes. “Fuck, no,” I said. “Tom, you’re with me. Bring the tranq gun; we don’t want to kill her, but if she so much as looks funny in my direction, you’re going to send her off to play with the magical pastel bunnies in the Shouldn’t-Have-Fucking-Done-That Meadow.”
“Got it, boss,” said Tom, and saluted only half jokingly before he took the tranquilizer gun down from the wall.
I turned to Jill. “Stay here; monitor everything. If her heart rate spikes or you get an odd reading, notify us immediately, and we’ll get out of there. If you get a bad feeling about something, notify us immediately, and we’ll get out of there. If you just don’t like the look on her face…”
“Notify you immediately, and you’ll get out of there,” said Jill.
“Good girl.” I turned and walked out of the room, past not-Daisy, who was still hovering in the hall like she thought that this would all start making sense if she just waited long enough. Poor kid. CDC plant or not, she was going to come to learn that the world was under no obligation to make sense either now or ever. Logic was a story we told ourselves to keep from going completely insane in the face of all the impossible things reality threw at us on a daily basis.
T
he door to the room where our mystery woman was being kept was only a few feet down the hall. I pressed my thumb to the panel next to the doorknob, only grimacing a little as a needle lanced out and sampled my blood. My lab contained less than half the recommended number of blood testing units for a facility of this size, and most of them were external; once you were inside, we figured we’d be able to tell if you were infected. But some doors needed to be locked, and some tests needed to be run. If someone was going into one of the isolation rooms, it was important to be absolutely sure of their amplification status.
The light above the door flashed twice before turning green, and the dead bolt released. “Tom, stay close,” I said, and opened the door. If we’d been a more formal facility, he would have needed to take a blood test as well. I didn’t see the point in that. He was already behind me. If he was infected, it was way too late to start worrying.
The mystery woman was still in the position she’d been in when I looked through the window: arms flat at her sides, feet together, face turned toward the ceiling. Really, if I hadn’t had so much experience with recalcitrant patients, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell that her eyes were cracked just enough to let her see me through her lashes.
“Good morning.” I pulled a plastic chair away from the wall and moved it a few feet closer to her bed, creating space for Tom to stand behind me without holding the door open. I sat, putting my hands on my knees so that she could see I was unarmed. Tom wasn’t, of course, but I was showing trust. Now it was up to her to show me the same. “My name is Dr. Shannon Abbey. You’re in my lab. You’ve been asleep for the last two days. I know you’ve noticed the IV, and I assume you’ve also noticed the catheter, since those are fairly hard to miss. I’m sorry we had to put those in without your consent, but you weren’t waking up, and I figured you’d rather be surprised than dead. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. I have plenty of bullets, and I’m always happy to fix my own mistakes. It seems cleaner that way. Less like I’m trying to avoid blame for my actions. I always take responsibility for the things I do.”
The mystery woman didn’t respond. Her eyelashes fluttered slightly; she was still awake, and she was paying close enough attention that she had allowed her rigid muscular control to slip for a moment. I glanced to the two-way mirror on the wall. Jill would have told me if our guest’s vital signs were showing tension or other indications that she was getting ready to attack.
“We provided medical care in part because it was the right thing to do, but I admit, we also did it because we wanted you to survive long enough to wake up and explain yourself. This is a secure facility. We operate under a veil of strict secrecy, and we do not encourage or invite visitors. So I’m really curious as to how you found us.” Tessa was still working, still running facial-recognition programs and trying to trace our mystery woman to some distant point of origin. The fact that it had taken her two days already, with no success in sight, told me that someone very, very good had gone to great lengths to scrub this woman from the world. Deleting an identity that thoroughly was hard as hell, and not something that anyone would do on a whim.
Still the mystery woman didn’t respond. Her eyelashes didn’t even flutter this time. I was either losing her interest or I was back on ground that she’d expected me to cover. I wasn’t sure what was worse—and I realized I didn’t know how long she had really been awake. Someone who looked at surprise IVs this calmly might well have held her peace for a long time before she even sat up to see what they were. I needed to proceed with caution.
“You’re in slightly better shape now than you were when I found you. Your body was starting to digest itself; you’d gone into a state of what’s called ‘ketosis,’ meaning that you were basically fueling everything you did by burning your own muscle tissue. You’re going to need a lot of rehab to get back to anything resembling fighting shape, and I suppose that what I’m really offering you here is a chance. Not a choice—that comes later—but a chance. If you can tell me why you showed up on my doorstep, why you were looking for me, I’ll consider letting you stay here long enough to recover a little bit of that lost muscle mass. You might have a chance in hell of keeping yourself alive when I finally toss you out. Or you can keep playing silent treatment, and I can throw you out just like you are now. I told my people that my Hippocratic Oath was part of why I let you stay—that whole ‘above all else, do no harm’ routine—but I’ve patched you up. I’ve given you the thinnest sliver of a prayer that you’ll survive. My conscience will be clear if I have to throw you out into the forest to die.”
“I wasn’t looking for you.” Her voice was dry and raspy, the voice of someone who hadn’t spoken in days. Her eyelids relaxed, settling into a closed position. “I was looking for your husband, or your brother, or whoever it is who owns this place. Somebody told me he was out here. They said he could get me what I needed, and all I had to do was find his front door.”
“Hasn’t anybody ever told you that you can’t get something for nothing? Any doctor you could find in a place like this would charge dearly for whatever he—or she—gave you. It usually isn’t going to be worth it.”
Her laugh was small, and utterly devoid of mirth. It was the laugh of someone who had been broken, more than once, and put back together in increasingly foreign combinations, until she had less in common with whoever she had once been than a jellyfish had with a juniper tree. I knew that laugh. I heard it coming from myself, some days. “I knew I’d have to pay. You always have to pay, and the more you need a thing, the more it costs. That’s why we have things to bargain and to barter with.”
“My people searched you. You were telling the truth when you said that you didn’t have any money. You’re low on bullets, and the only recreational pharmaceuticals we found on you were in your bloodstream. There’s nothing you could pay with.”
“I have a body. I have my training. I can kill people. I’m real good at killing people.” She giggled, a high, discordant sound that grated on my nerves. It didn’t seem like it had come from the same throat that had offered the dry, quiet laughter we’d heard before. I glanced back at Tom, and saw that he looked just as unnerved as I felt. That was something, at least. I wasn’t the only one who heard the fault lines in her giggles. “It’s probably what I’m best at. Everybody says so, and everybody needs somebody dead. Goods and services, it’s all goods and services.”
“We don’t need anybody killed,” I said firmly. “We never outsource our assassinations.”
“Dr. Abbey will,” she said. “If you let me see him, I’m sure that he will.”
“That’s going to be a problem, because I am Dr. Abbey,” I said. I couldn’t keep my irritation out of my voice any longer. “My name is Shannon Abbey. This is my lab. It is very large. I have been giving you my patience. It is very small, and growing smaller by the minute.”
The mystery woman was silent for a few seconds. Then, finally, she opened her eyes, blinking rapidly as they adjusted to the light, and turned her head to look at me. She was frowning, lips pursed in what was virtually a pout. The expression was far too young for her, and looked learned rather than instinctual. Whoever had taught her that shrill, nerve-racking giggle had probably taught her the pout at the same time. It made my flesh crawl.
“You’re Dr. Abbey?” she said, uncertainly.
“Have been for years and years,” I said. “No brother. No husband. Just me. This is my lab: I’m the one you came here looking for.”
“You have to help me!” She sat up, nearly dislodging her IV in the process, and tried to reach for me. The catheter pulled her up short. She glanced down, clearly unsure what she should do. There was a small click from behind me as Tom brought the tranquilizer gun into position. She looked up again and went very still, her eyes narrowing with a shrewd, calculating intelligence that didn’t fit with anything she’d displayed so far. Our mystery woman might be awake and talking to us, but she was still a mystery, and she was going to remain that way
for as long as it took to get her to start making sense. Which meant she might be a mystery forever.
“Why don’t you stay where you are, not making any hostile moves, and try telling me what it is you want me to do for you?” I gestured behind myself, indicating Tom and the gun in his hands. “This is Tom. He works for me. If you’re looking for drugs, it’s possible that whoever you spoke to was thinking of him. Tom grows some of the best marijuana you’ll find in this part of the Pacific Northwest, and we trade a lot of it on the black market for things that we need. Is that why you’re here? Did you need some of Tom’s drugs?”
“No,” she said firmly, shaking her head as she settled back on the cot. At least she was trying to play by the rules. Even if she was only doing it to avoid being shot, it showed a degree of understanding about what was going on around her. I liked that. It might mean we wouldn’t have to kill her. “No, and no, and no again. I ran out of cookies, and then I ran out of pills, so I asked some people some questions. Most of them didn’t want to give me answers. I made them. I asked again and again, until I knew what I needed to know.”
Fear writhed in my chest like a fistful of maggots. “Did you kill the people you asked for answers? Did you kill people in order to find me?” My connections on the black market were good, but no one’s connections were good enough to survive something like that. If this little slip of an assassin had carved her way through the local drug dealers and information brokers in her quest to find me, the repercussions were going to be devastating.
“Only one, and he asked for it.” Her eyes flashed. “He liked his hands. He liked putting them on people who hadn’t asked to have his hands on them. He put them on me, after he’d said he didn’t know what I needed to know. So I took them off, and then there was so much blood, and then the people who lived there with him came in, and they said they’d been waiting for this to happen, they said it had been coming for a long time, and they told me to leave, but they weren’t angry. They just didn’t want me there while I was all over covered in his blood.”