for them, so that works out okay. You know?”
“Okay. I—g’night.”
Stacy went home and took two Ambien, but it was hard to drop off just the same. She wished Caitlyn had come home with her, but a tiny part of her—this was so lame it was hard to admit to herself, and she could never have said it out loud—was glad she hadn’t.
Chapter 3
Caitlyn drove up on the lawn, plowed through the snow, parked on the freshly shoveled sidewalk, got out of her Intrepid, and marched over to the glass doors. She slammed her palm down on the touch plate and, big surprise, the doors unlocked.
There was nothing on the outside of the big glass building to indicate what it was—just the address, 2118, in four-foot-high numbers—on the inside. The security guards stood behind their granite desk when she entered, but neither came near her. Good for them.
“Evening, Miss James,” one of them said.
“Is he in?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah. Top floor. He’s—”
“Don’t say he’s expecting me.”
“Well,” the other guard said apologetically, “he kind of is. Did you really take out an entire extractment team by yourself? Because that’s—”
She had already stomped across the black marble floor and was in the stairwell, and didn’t hear the rest. Damned if she was going to be trapped in one of their stupid elevators. She’d seen enough TV movies to know that was a bad idea, thanks very much!
Instead, she took the fifteen flights in about sixty seconds and popped out in the hallway, not even out of breath.
Okay, so. There were some benefits. And it beat being dead. Mostly.
But still. No meant no.
She was in an area she thought of as done up in Expensive Boring Office. Dark wood, dark carpet, light blue water cooler. The desks were also dark wood and looked like they’d been mass-produced and then delivered on the same day. The place smelled like paper and coffee grounds.
“Ah, Miss James! The Boss has been expecting you.” It was always like that, just like that…. The Boss. You could hear the capital letter. “Some coffee? Tea?”
“No.”
“He’s finishing up right now with the senator from Wisconsin—”
“At nine o’clock at night?”
“The Boss works long hours,” the secretary said with weird pride, “but if you’ll—”
Caitlyn kicked the door in. It was easy. It shot off its hinges and slammed into the thick carpet. It sounded like a woman beating a rug—whumpf! And it was so easy. That was, in a lot of ways, the scariest part of all that had happened to her. Been done to her. How easy it was to use it. The technology. It was exactly like using her own muscles, her own brain. She had never been able to see where she stopped and the nanobytes began.
“Caitlyn James to see you, sir,” his secretary said, peeking around her and not missing a beat.
The senator—a tall, good-looking woman with dark hair coiled on top of her head, shot up from her seat, and papers went flying.
“We’ll pick this up tomorrow, Nancy,” the Boss said. “I’m afraid I’ve got a scheduling conflict right now.”
“No doubt,” she said, leaving the file and picking her way past the door.
“Love your hair,” Caitlyn said as the senator passed her.
“What can I do for you, Caitlyn?” the Boss said, sitting back down and folding his hands on his immaculate desk blotter. He was short, in his forties, but powerfully built through the shoulders. He was dressed in a black suit—a good one, probably Italian—and his hair was the same shade, slicked back from his forehead. His eyes were the color of dirty ice, and his eyebrows were so light as to be invisible. As a result, he looked like a mean egg.
“You can die slowly, coughing your guts out in a part of the world that hasn’t heard of morphine.”
The Boss blinked slowly, like a lizard. “I’ll get right on that. I take it our team earned your enmity?”
“You’ve earned my en—my em—you’re the one I’m pissed at!”
“Caitlyn, Caitlyn,” he sighed, shaking his head as if over a daughter missing curfew. She hated that. The fatherly thing. So lame. If he’d been her father, she would have had a Clorox cocktail before she hit puberty. “We’ve been over this before. You work for the O.S.F. now.”
“No, I do not. I already told you. I’m not going to work for you guys. I don’t even know what O.S.F. means.”
“Office of Scientific Findings. And yes. You do. We own you.” He smiled, revealing very white teeth. “Want to see the receipt?”
“Drop dead, you bloodless bastard.”
“Such a lack of gratitude, considering that we saved your life. Three times, if the reports are correct. And they always are.”
She was silent, thinking, I never asked you to. Never, not one time. The question was, would she rather be dead than under the Boss’s thumb?
And here was what kept her up nights: Could they undo what they had done? Push a button from H.Q. and zap all the nanobytes into oblivion?
Could she go on if they did that? Go back to being normal? As normal as she had ever been anyway?
Annoyingly, he was still talking. “Caitlyn, dear, we’ve spent a fortune on you. A bloody fortune. If we traded you, we could get Alaska in exchange.”
“So? I didn’t ask you to save me. You were snooping all the channels, looking for a guinea pig. Some no-nothing loser—”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, darling.”
“—to tinker and fiddle with and—and change.”
“For the better, which you seem not to have noticed.”
“Don’t expect my goddamned gratitude, you snake. Just because you’ve souped me up a bit, I’m supposed to do your dirty work? Fuck you.”
“Yes, so you’ve said. However, free will—at least in the O.S.F.—is an illusion. We work for a higher power here, Caitlyn. Your—how did you put it? Your indentured servitude is necessary so millions of Americans can enjoy their freedom. When you think about it,” he added, sighing again, “you seem awfully selfish.”
“Pal, you haven’t seen the least of it.”
“Think of the havoc you could wreak on terrorism if you only applied yourself.”
“Think of the havoc I could wreak on your lungs if I only applied myself.”
“This
