“I just love this,” I said.
“What?” Peter replied, looking unsettled. And then his look of concern deepened as the overhead speaker in the conference room started playing a creepy electric organ sustaining a minor chord.
“How massively you underestimated us,” I said. “You actually thought I came alone. You really thought I would make the same mistake again.”
The music crescendoed, and then static broke through and the organ dissolved into digital tones and distortion.
“I love it. So. God. Damn. Much.”
Peter called out to his muscle in the hall, “Get in here!”
They came into the room, and then I surrendered my body to Carl.
—
Three drum hits came crashing through the overhead speakers. On the first beat my fist slammed into one of the guard’s ribs. I ducked under his counter on the second beat, and on the third my legs straightened as my left fist reached high and fast into his jaw. I watched from inside my body as his head snapped back fast enough that I worried he might be seriously hurt. But it wasn’t something I had done, just something I had watched myself do.
Carl had spent time in my body; they had gotten to know it as they were repairing me. And now the full force of their processing power was dedicated to moving my body through space. I wanted to watch as the man slumped to the ground, but my eyes flicked instead to the two men who were rushing me from outside the room. Before I knew what was happening, I had flattened myself to the floor. One man missed me completely and crashed into the window behind me. I heard the safety glass tinkling down in a waterfall around him. The other guy had stumbled to a stop before me, but Carl’s foreign strength coursed through me and I rocketed myself off the floor, my head connecting with the man’s body, just at the base of his sternum. I felt it crack. He stumbled backward, gasping for breath. It was the man who had taken my phone. I stepped inside his guard and, like a trained thief, darted my hand into and out of his inside suit coat pocket. I found myself holding my phone as my leg swept under him. His feet went up and his head went down, knocking solidly into the hard carpeted floor. The music was so loud I couldn’t hear any of their grunts or groans.
My eyes flicked to the doorway, and there I saw the only guard who was still standing reach under his jacket. I tried to shout over the music, but the music shouted back the first words of the song. I turned to the side and then the gun went off—POP—over the sound of the music. I felt the bullet hit, and I staggered under the sharpness of the pain. I threw my phone and then ran toward the man. My phone got there first, knocking into the guy’s head, distracting him before he got a second shot off. My left hand grabbed the gun. It went off again as I ripped it out of his hand and then threw it across the room. Then I bent back down and came up holding the phone. I looked down at it . . . four bars. Not just a signal, a strong signal. Maya and Carl had been doing good work.
I turned around and didn’t even have time to process what I saw before my body ducked and weaved to the side. The man I had sent through the window was back up, cut and bleeding, but now swinging a small bat at me. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t connect. My body was just never in the space where the bat went—until my left arm shot out to block it. The bat splintered as it struck the arm, which then extended into the side of the guy’s face. He grunted but stayed standing as I felt a hand wallop me on the side of the head. My senses spun, and Carl’s control loosened with them and I dropped to one knee.
“Seems like forever . . . and a day,” Electric Light Orchestra sang.
They were standing on opposite sides of me, one bleeding and bruised, the other fresh, having just entered the fight, but both standing in professional stances. I couldn’t even really see both of them at the same time.
Then, as fast as I had lost it, Carl locked back on. Energy exploded in my legs and I twisted around, feeling the centrifugal forces tugging at my cheeks as I spun. My ankle cracked across the fresh guard’s skull, pushing his head toward the ground as, somehow, my feet ended up back under me.
The bloodied guard, I have to respect it, he stayed in the fight. As he lunged at me, I leapt straight into the air and tucked my knees up to my chest. His face crashed directly into my left knee. He fell backward, limp and unconscious.
And then, like that, my body was mine again, and the music faded.
“Jesus . . . Jesus Christ,” I heard Peter’s voice say. I had forgotten, in those moments, that he was in the room.
“Same,” I said, breathing hard, “that was wild.” My heart was thrumming. Whatever Carl had done hadn’t bypassed my stress response.
“He shot you,” Peter said. And I remembered that he was right. The bullet had hit under my left arm, but that entire half of my body was covered in the Carl Stuff. I felt at it with my hand and, sure enough, the blazer I was wearing was in tatters under my armpit. The bullet must have shattered when it hit me, shredding the fabric.
“I guess he did,” I said. And then took out my phone and opened the camera.
“Hello, I’m here at Altus, where a bunch of people just tried to kill me. I came here because a friend of mine, Miranda Beckwith,
