“Wait one sec before you go bait-and-switching,” Sophie interrupted. “Thank you for your vote, but I’m not old enough. You have to be twenty-five.”
David frowned. “How was I supposed to know that?”
“Civics?”
“For what it’s worth,” Gabe interjected, “I think you’d be great at it someday, Soph. You’d have my vote. I could keep things running back at the meeting space. Maybe look at ways to break us off from National, since their priorities are so backward . . .”
“That’s a good idea regardless,” Sophie agreed. “But, David?”
“Yeah?”
“You still haven’t said what you were doing on a train track.”
He shrugged. “It really was an accident. I’ve been taking something I probably shouldn’t have been, to try to stop the noise, and it got out of hand. When I get out of here I’m going to have to find a healthier way to deal with that, starting with figuring out what those pills were.”
“Wait—you were taking mystery pills? Who does that? How do you get them? Do you walk up to a drug dealer and say Surprise me? I take three different antiseizure meds and two meds to counteract side effects, and I know what every single one of them does alone and in combination.”
“Hey, Soph, go easy on your brother. Anyone taking mystery pills is in a pretty fucked-up place. I think he’s probably learned that lesson.” Gabe pointed to the shapes under David’s blanket.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
JULIE
“We should rename them ‘office hours’ instead of ‘visiting hours,’” grumbled the reception desk when Julie answered the phone. “The reporter whose name you left is here. Eduardo Toledo. Still okay?”
“Yes, send him up.” The receptionist wasn’t wrong; they’d kept the paparazzi out, but taken visits from Milo and Karina and Karina’s sister, who Julie thought was kind of cute and might possibly like David, as well as a couple of political activists who’d talked to both Sophie and David with keen interest.
Julie turned to Sophie. “You’re sure about this guy?”
“I’m sure. His work is always well researched and fair. He still hasn’t run the story I gave him, but I think that’s because he’s trying to build a bigger story.”
Toledo, carrying a box of doughnuts, rounded the corner. David gestured to the table beside him, pushing aside the flowers Congressman Griffith had sent. “Food of the gods.”
“I figured you’d be getting sick of hospital food.”
“You figured right!”
“Hey!” Julie protested. “I brought ice cream.”
“That was days ago, Mom. What have you done for me today?” David smiled his most charming kidding or am I? smile, and she melted.
David selected a chocolate-on-chocolate doughnut, then let the others pick as well. “Sophie, I like your friend already.”
“That’s good,” said Sophie. “Because we’re about to get very, very personal with him.”
Toledo settled into the corner chair and pulled a laptop from his messenger bag. They’d dragged another chair in from the nurses’ station, so there were seats for both Julie and Val if Sophie sat on the other bed, which she preferred in any case.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
Sophie started at the beginning, explaining the relationship of each member of their family to the Pilot, as background, then moving on to her work at FreerMind. Then David told David’s story. Val walked out for part of that, ostensibly to get a drink, though she didn’t return until he was finished; Julie forced herself to listen to all of it.
Then Sophie started into the stuff she’d figured out about BNL, again with David’s help. Pride overwhelmed Julie as Sophie connected the corporate spy and the executives with fake Pilots to show confidence in a product they didn’t trust in their own heads. The kid was savvy; no, not a kid, she reminded herself.
“So . . . what do you think?” Sophie asked when she got to the end.
Toledo leaned back, took his glasses off, and rested one stem against his lip. “I think this is a hell of a story, but there are still some gaps to fill in. That thing about the execs is explosive—that’s probably the most damning part—but you don’t have actual proof.”
“I’m sure it’s out there,” said Sophie. “Are there serial numbers or warranties registered in their names? Can we run a metal detector over their heads?”
“Serial numbers maybe, though they could be faked, and I don’t think medical devices are currently required to have them; it’s going to be tougher to prove someone doesn’t have one than that someone does. And they’d have to agree to whatever scan that would be, and we’d have to make sure they couldn’t fake that, too. We need the public to doubt them, so they have to prove it to win back trust. That might fly, but I can’t run your accusation without proof.”
“What about the other stuff?” David reached for another doughnut. “The e-mail I took from BNL?”
“That and the study it referred to are great. I can use that, and it’s even better if you’re on record as a source.”
“The nice thing about my current situation is they can’t penalize me anymore,” said David. “I’m happy to spill the beans. Not that I know much; I didn’t even merit an NDA when I left, just a form saying I wouldn’t use their information in a new job.”
“Um,” Val interrupted. “Maybe don’t connect your name with the e-mail and the study? That’s still probably corporate theft, even if you didn’t sign an NDA. How about all the people online in the same boat as David? There’s a whole Pilot Survivor thing going on separate from the anti-Pilot activists.”
Sophie looked surprised, and Toledo made a note. “I’ll check that out.”
“Me, too,” said David. “I gave up looking for other people since nobody I asked ever sounded like they knew what I was talking about.”
“There’s got to be something more.” Sophie’s frustration was rising. She’d clearly expected the journalist to run with everything she’d given him.
