“The day will come when everything will fall on you. The fate of everything will be in your hands.”
I smiled and shook my head. It was almost funny. Not quite, but almost.
“Then the fate of everything is in big trouble,” I said.
“That’s true.”
She turned and threw the big electrical switch on the wall. A buzzing sound came from the ceiling and three lights snapped on at the far end of the room. Two people were standing there, not moving, one under the left light and one under the right light. The spot under the middle light was empty.
The person on the left was Nico. The person on the right I recognized too. She was there that night in the factory.
“This one could be your salvation,” she said, pointing at Nico. The number 3 was pressed into his forehead in black ink.
“What happened to him?” I asked, moving closer. That scar of his usually covered a big patch on the right side of his chest and right shoulder, but now it was just on his chest. Before it got to the shoulder it stopped in a neat line, like it had been painted over or something. The other half was just gone. Everything on the other side, the shoulder and arm, were the wrong color. Unlike the rest of him, his shoulder and arm were pale and gray. They were the same color as the dead woman.
“Your chance of successfully navigating this relationship is sixty percent,” she said. When I looked at her, she was staring at him, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. After a minute, she pointed to the woman.
“This one is a destroyer. She will cause you to lose something very dear,” she said.
She was a mean, muscle-bound woman with a bent nose and black lipstick. She had the number 2 inked on her forehead.
I got a flash, then, from that place with the cages and the dead men, the place where they tried to study us. There were other people there, people like me, all locked up, and the dead men forced us to do things…. When I thought it was all over, a small woman appeared to me and told me something …something important. She showed me how to take control of a woman I’d never met; this woman with the mean face and the broken tooth. I brought her down there to me, and she saved my life.
“What will she make me lose? Why?”
“Your chance of successfully navigating this relationship is ten percent.”
“Lose what? What does she have against me?”
Another boom went off overhead, making the light fixtures sway and shadows play over the walls.
“Goddamn it. What is that noise?” I asked.
“Some people are more susceptible than others,” she said, ignoring me. She was still pointing at the woman.
“I know.”
When I looked closer at the muscle-bound figure, I saw her left hand was a pale gray, just like Nico’s arm. It triggered a flash of memory.
“She was there that night. I’ve seen her here before too,” I said to myself. A lot of what happened two years ago, I never really got clear on. The shakes were hitting me really bad by then, and everything was happening at once. I remembered a woman peeking through a hole from the cell next to mine. I remembered being hooked up to a bunch of electrodes, and then ending up in the green room….
“I called her,” I said, remembering. “I could sense her, and I called her, and she came.”
I remembered her shooting the lock to my cage and pulling me out.
“She rescued me.”
The dead woman nodded. “She may save your life a second time.”
“What about the middle spot?” I asked, but as soon as I said it, it came back to me. We’d had this conversation before.
“The middle spot is where—”
“You stand,” I said.
“We will meet two more times, before this is all over,” she said. “Your chances of successful navigation are, respectively, one hundred and zero percent.”
“Can those be changed?” I asked her. “If I can pass or fail, can the percents be changed? Can I change them?”
She wasn’t listening, though. She moved away, back toward the table, and flipped the switch back down. The lights over Nico and the other one went dark.
“You said I die in a tower. Can that be changed?”
“You die in a tall tower.”
With the lights out, I saw something flickering through the glass window in the room’s door. I got on my toes and looked out into a dimly lit hallway, where a bunch of people were sitting, leaning against the walls. They were all looking at the floor, their clothes and skin burned black. Orange and red spots glowed under the ash on their coats and boots. One, a woman, looked up, her face covered in soot. Her skin was cracked and raw. She mouthed something, but I couldn’t hear her.
“What do you want from me?” I asked the dead woman. Three men in uniform stepped into view down the hall and started tromping past them, toward the door, dragging a scrawny, dirty man in handcuffs between them.
“It’s too late for us,” the dead woman said, “but not for you.”
I turned, forgetting about the people in the hallway.
“What?”
“He still needs you. He will call to you again,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘It’s too late for us’?” I asked.
“Should he fail, it will fall to you.”
“Wait!”
The metal door opened, and dust swirled in from the hallway. The uniformed men shoved the one in handcuffs toward the far wall where the three lights were.
“This is a mistake …” I heard him whisper.
Behind them, I caught a glimpse of a woman, a skinny woman about my height, with her hair in a bun, but she was in shadow.
“Who are—”
She turned her head to look back over her shoulder, and when she did, I could just make out some kind of tattoo that circled her scrawny neck.There was a ring-shaped scar there, where her jugular stuck out. Against the dim light behind her, her profile had a big, beaklike nose….
I woke with a start and my eyes opened. The green room and everyone in it were gone. Something was beeping.
“Damn it,” I whispered.
I was on the monorail, leaning against the window. The car was packed, and there were bodies all around me, damp from the rain and murmuring on cell phones or getting work in during the commute. A fat man in an overcoat formed a barrier to my left, leaving me in my own little world as I watched rain streak across the plastic and the city sprawl by outside. In the distance, the CMC Tower rose like a giant needle out of the fog.
The beeping sound came again, and I realized it was my phone reminding me to take my medication. The fat man glanced at me as I fished out my cell and shut off the alarm.
Mornings were when I still got the strongest urge. I thought it would be at night, but it wasn’t. It was when I first woke up, then for the rest of the morning. I held my hand out of view of the guy next to me and watched it for a minute. The fingers shook, just a little, not like before. I still missed it, though. I kept waiting for the day to come when I stopped missing it, but it never seemed to come.
I reached into my coat pocket and found one of the pill tabs. I pushed the chewable tablet through the foil and into my palm, and then popped it in my mouth. They were minty, but had a real bitter aftertaste. When I swallowed, it left a medicine taste on my tongue. That was one. I was supposed to take them three times a day.
The medication helped, that was for sure. Nico got me on a program, which I pretty much agreed to try only because he said I couldn’t come back to the FBI until I did. I didn’t think it would work, but whatever was in the tablets, it took the edge right off. When I woke up in the morning, I didn’t feel sick until I could get a drink. My
