“Us?” asked Elias. “The two of us? Me and Kess?”
Holifeld nodded. “Yes. I need you two to get something for me, something inside the Holifeld Company compound.”
“But we’re teenagers. We have not yet reached the age of our majority.”
“That’ll be gone soon.”
“What will?”
“The snark.”
That startled Elias into silence.
“Seriously, though,” said Kess. “We’re two random kids. Get anyone else to do it. The cops. Mercenaries. A world-famous cat burglar. Whoever.”
“The Alphas—the Grays—have infiltrated the police, the FBI. Sometimes with their own people, though they find undercover work difficult. Sometimes with bribery, blackmail. In a few cases utilizing brain augmentation more limited and specific than the transformation into an Alpha or a Beta. They hack, they thieve, they extort. You two are already involved in this business, and you are confirmed as the Alphas’ enemies. You are as trustworthy as anyone in this world. And besides, you—” He pointed at Elias. “—will be recognized by the security system’s sensors as an Alpha. And you—” Kess. “—as a Beta are immune to one of the Alphas’ greatest resources, a weapon originally designed to strike against the Alphas themselves. A brain altering substance known as the purge.”
Kess realized what could be described as a “purge.” She grabbed Elias’s arm. “That stuff, that gas that erases memories.”
“Exactly,” said Holifeld.
Kess remembered that day in the coffee shop and the moment that glass ball smashed at Silver’s feet. Apparently she hadn’t needed to hold her breath.
“Okay,” said Elias. “It makes sense to send us. I guess. What is it that you want us to get?”
Holifeld sat back and stared at Elias. He stared at him for a long time. His hand on his knee began to quiver, but he didn’t do anything about it this time, and it made Kess so uncomfortable she almost felt like shaking herself. She had to do something about this, had to break the awkward silence—
“Mr. Holifeld,” said Elias, “the Grays are after you, so it’s rational for you to distrust everyone you talk to. That’s useful. But you already brought us here. You already weighed the risks and rewards and brought us into your home and began to let us into your plans. So your distrust isn’t useful anymore. There’s no point in hesitating now.”
“There’s no point to impatience, either, is there Clever Handle?” Holifeld finally raised his arm and adjusted settings on his glove until his hand stopped shaking. Then he leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “The Alpha project was focused on civilian applications. No soldiers. They changed nothing but the brain, and we had high hopes for them. Depending on programming input the machines could potentially improve memory, cure addiction. Animal testing was highly promising, and it was time to progress to human tests. Dr. Akiyama volunteered.”
“Your lead scientist?” said Kess. “Your lead scientist volunteered to be your first test subject? That’s… that’s stupid. Scientists don’t experiment on themselves. Not real ones.”
Holifeld smiled again, and Kess decided she hated that smile. For some subtle reason, looking at it made her angry and sad. “We never did anything properly,” he said. “We were sorcerers, demon-summoners.”
“The Invisible Man experimented on himself,” said Kess. “In the old black and white movie. He injected himself with invisibility juice and went crazy and burned stuff down and was all like ‘There are things man was not meant to know!’ But I always thought that was stupid. It’s not that there’s things man wasn’t meant to know, just things man was not meant to inject himself with without knowing what will happen. There are things man was meant to learn intelligently.”
“We only intended to improve Jonathan’s memory. We thought it worked. It did work. For weeks he seemed like nothing but a slightly improved version of himself. It grew slowly in him.
“It was his assistant who first noticed signs of strange behavior. You’ve met her, I believe—Natalie Silver. She was a very intelligent woman. Not a scientist, but she made an effort to understand Jonathan’s projects anyway. She was that dedicated to her job. That’s why she suspected what exactly might be wrong with Jonathan. Very intelligent woman. But I never liked her.
“Jonathan I liked. Jonathan made me this, to help with my tremors.” He held up his arm wrapped in its strange dark cables, then set his arm down again and continued. “He told me that nothing was wrong with him, he’d been having some anxiety problems lately, that was all. But he was seeing a therapist.
“Trusting the people you like, distrusting those you don’t—it’s not a very good heuristic. I trusted you, Clever Handle, because I liked you. No one ever learns anything.
“At that point, Jonathan was already beginning to convert others. Fortunately, he began with security personnel like Christopher Stone, leaving both me and Natalie Silver for later. Natalie went to some of the lower-level scientists, claimed to be passing on orders from Jonathan. She turned out to make a brilliant project manager. I should have promoted her earlier. But I didn’t like her. As I said.
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“The purge was developed at her direction. Since the Alpha nanomachines already targeted memory, it was relatively simple to develop an alternate model which erased memory instead. The other project she spawned was more complex. An inoculation. She called it the Nox.”
That made Kess sit up straight in her seat, woken by a sudden electric rush. “An inoculation against Gray-ness? That’s what you want us to steal, isn’t it?”
Holifeld nodded.
An inoculation. That was big. That was beautiful. That could save Elias. Elias’s face was blank even though he must have realized the implications. He seemed stubbornly unexcited. Kess was about to say something when Holifeld started talking again.
“Over the next months, I noticed for myself the strange things that were happening. For me, it was the way they moved that finally got my attention. You know you can recognize people from far away, by the way they move? The Alphas move like machines.
“I approached Natalie and learned of her plans, and then I came here.” He indicated the room around him, the screens and blinking supervillain equipment. “I’d had this built the year before, out of general caution. I offered to bring Natalie with me, but she needed to stay. The Nox was designed, but the first batch needed to be produced, and this base wouldn’t be secure until all knowledge of it had been erased from Jonathan Akiyama’s memory.
“I watched Holifeld Company from here. This is the last I saw of Natalie Silver before she lost her mind.”
He tapped and dragged his finger along the glass tabletop. The entire wall of screens blinked alive at once. A single image stretched across the wall—grainy black-and-green security footage showing what looked like a laboratory with counters and sinks and metal cabinets.
Silver walked in.
Even though she was expecting her, it took Kess a moment to recognize the woman, mostly because of the way she was dressed. Both times Kess had met Silver, the Gray woman had worn drab, unflattering business clothes. This Silver wore a skirt and a blouse with a lace-trimmed neckline. Her feet were bare, as if she’d been wearing heels but had taken them off to hurry through halls. Her dark hair was down and styled in a way that would have been fashionable when Kess was in middle school, her lips were lipstick dark, and her earrings were big and glittery enough to show up on camera. Kess realized that, just as Elias had lost music in his transition to Grayness, Natalie Silver had lost lipstick and lace.
Silver was holding something in a balled fist. She looked around the room, strode over to a closet, opened it, and shoved the thing in her hand somewhere inside. Then she closed the door, walked over to the security camera and fiddled with something on it.
She’d turned the sound recording on.
“Holifeld,” she said, her voice fuzzing from the cheap microphone. “Perelli finished the Nox, but they got to him. Christopher’s after me—if I took the Nox myself he’d kill me, so I hid it—you saw where. I asked Yang to erase everything important off the servers and I think he managed most of it. He says your line into the system should still work and shouldn’t be detectable unless you do something drastic with it. I released the purge into the ventilation system. It should work through the building in the next few minutes.
“Good luck, Mr. Holifeld.” And Silver nodded like Kess would imagine a soldier would nod, or an astronaut.
The lab door opened behind her and Silver turned to face Stone.
Stone had a gun. Silver put her hands up in surrender. Stone didn’t say anything. Instead, he pulled something out of his pocket—a syringe. He tossed it to Silver, who caught it out of the air.
For a strange moment, Kess felt as if she were being pulled forward into the screen, as if she might stumble into that soft-edged green world.
Silver shoved the needle into her elbow.
#
The screens went dark, leaving Kess feeling shaken.
“The original version of the purge wiped out the last year of memory of every Alpha in the building,” said Holifeld. “Only a few low-level employees who were outside at the time were spared. It meant they didn’t know about this bunker, and it severely hampered their efforts on both the Alpha and Beta projects. That was five years ago. I monitored their computer systems from here but didn’t use my administrative override because I didn’t want to tip my hand until I saw an opportunity to weaken their operation. And then they installed automated locks on the animal pens. Terrible idea.
“Since then, the Alphas have been so pre-occupied with the Beta situation—the Red and Blue situation—their security is stretched thin. Now is the time to procure the Nox.”
“Will the Nox cure Elias?” asked Kess.
Elias shook his head. “An inoculation isn’t a cure, Kess.”
“It should stop the Alpha machines from progressing further in converting his brain,” said Holifeld.
“Then we need to get it as soon as possible,” said Kess. “Today. Right now. Your robot car can take us there.”
“Not yet,” said Holifeld. “The right time is very, very soon. I’ll let you know.”
Elias should be upset by that. He should be as eager to get to the Nox as Kess was. Instead he said, “What would the Grays do if they knew where you were, Mr. Holifeld? Would they kill you?”
“How would that be useful, Clever Handle? They’d convert me, if only to keep me from interfering in their operations. And to access my overseas accounts.”
And Elias finally looked over at Kess. She wasn’t sure what he wanted from her, so she gave him a reassuring smile. He gave a quick, faltering smile back.
“Okay then,” he said. “We’ll do it.”
###
PHONE CALL BETWEEN ELIAS KAPLAN AND JONATHAN AKIYAMA (RECORDING):
[J.A.] Why are you calling, Mr. Kaplan?
[E.K.] You can fix me, right?
[J.A.] You are already in the process of being fixed, Mr. Kaplan.
[E.K.] Very funny.
[J.A.] I did not intend that statement to be funny.
[E.K.] I was being—never mind. I want you to put me back to what I was before you jabbed me with that needle, or at least stop the changes. I know you won’t just do it, but you’re reasonable. Can we make a bargain? Is there something you want from me?
[J.A.] We want you to become one of us. That is why we made you one of us.
[E.K.] There’s things I know you want to know.
[J.A.] That is true. We want you to become one of us, but there are things we want more urgently, including information. Do you have any of that information, Mr. Kaplan?
[E.K.] Maybe I… I mean to say, maybe I could find something out. That’s what I mean to say.
[J.A.] Our reach is wide. How do you propose to discover information that we could not?
[E.K.] Never mind.
[J.A.] Mr. Kaplan? Mr. Kaplan, are you there?