“Wait, what?” He looked genuinely surprised. “What do you mean?”
“What you said. The CEO—hers is fake, I’m sure—didn’t want to risk her project getting bad press, and didn’t think you’d be on board if she told you the risks, so she set you up with her personal doctor. And I’m guessing when you told other legislators about it, you gave them that number, so they’d get the same privacy you had?”
He nodded.
“They’d never have risked the whole project getting shut down if a member of Congress had a bad reaction like my son’s. They installed a pretty blue light in your head, and maybe something that fakes the data the rest of us see on the app, and then let the placebo effect do the rest of the work of making already smart, quick-thinking people believe they’d been made quicker. It’s not like any two of us describe the feeling in the same way. We don’t have the words, which makes comparing impossible.”
“What about my daughter? She loves hers; she wasn’t lying. And Evan?”
Julie shrugged. “I love mine, too. They aren’t all bad, but none of us knows how many people are suffering because it doesn’t work for them and nobody believes them. That’s all being swept under the rug by BNL. It’s a device, not a drug; they don’t have to report.”
He buried his face in his hands and went silent for a minute, then two, and she waited to see whether her decades of service had earned his trust.
When he met Julie’s eyes again, he looked angry. “The worst part is, I think I believe you. Where do we even start?”
“We start with getting the data. The real data. The studies. People’s stories. Hearings.”
He nodded. “I’ll probably lose my seat, you know. You’ll lose your job, and so will a lot of innocent BNL employees who don’t have anything to do with this. And if there’s too much invested in keeping this quiet, our efforts will come to nothing.”
Julie knew, but for the first time, keeping her job didn’t matter as much as the thing that needed to be done. Her family would be okay, one way or another, hopefully, but this was the only way to bring together their jagged edges. At least they’d see her trying.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
SOPHIE
Sophie’s plan had a lot of parts. She started with torturing Dominic. Physical torture would have been more fun, but she settled for letting slip in front of him that National had developed a device to decrypt any individual’s Pilot information off their implant if it was in close proximity. False information, but something to send them scrambling, and distract from the fact that both Toledo and Julie’s congressman were now digging into the real Pilot story. Dominic didn’t return.
Another facet, convincing her brother he really should run for office, was trickier. She didn’t want to manipulate him into something he didn’t want to do; she needed to convince him he’d genuinely be good at it, which she believed. He was thoughtful and caring and put other people’s concerns above his own to a fault, as was evident if you just looked at what he’d done to himself already. She made sure he stayed updated on what Representative Griffith was doing, and all the things she would do if she held public office, and one day, out of the blue, he said, “When I get out of here, maybe I’ll give that Lana Robinson a call.”
Sophie had hoped he’d try it her way, going around Lana, but she couldn’t have everything. “Just watch out for her. Make sure she doesn’t turn you into something you aren’t.”
“A fire truck? A warthog? I’m not necessarily opposed.”
She laughed.
“What if I insist you’re in the room? Would you help me do this?”
She had plans of her own, so many plans, but this was a worthy diversion. She attended their first meeting, where David came clean about the Quiet issue, and how he’d gotten stuck on the tracks, and the fact that he wouldn’t gloss over any of it. If they wanted games, he wasn’t playing. She was proud of him. She’d spent so long thinking he was a BNL tool, but he had always tried to do what he thought was right, even if he was absolutely wrong about some of it.
He was already adapting to the loss of his foot, like it was the accepted cost for everything he’d done. The bigger problem was the Quiet. His doctors hadn’t wanted to keep him on painkillers when pain wasn’t the issue. They’d suggested meditation and yoga and cognitive therapy, in the same way the BNL doctors had always told him to do more exercises, but he seemed pretty sure that nothing worked as well on the noise as retreating to his Fortress of Solitude, which no doctor would actually prescribe to him.
David had been released from the hospital by the time Toledo’s first article came out, the one connecting Pilots to off-label use of one of BNL’s drugs. It talked about David’s noise and everything, and mentioned the others Val had found with the same problem.
Toledo had texted her to say the article was posting, and she shouted everyone down to breakfast to quote her favorite parts. “‘Under increasing scrutiny, the company maintains they have done nothing wrong, and they will continue to offer their groundbreaking Pilot’—what’s wrong?” She stopped when she saw the concern on David’s face.
“If they go under, who’s going to help people like me?” he asked. “The more damage we do to BNL, the more risk they won’t be able to fix the problems they created.”
Sophie lowered her phone. “That’s no reason not to try. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”
“Others will fill in the gap,” Julie said. “The market abhors a vacuum.”
“And if they don’t?”
Val smiled. “You can
