Page 84 of Anarchy Missing

“How?” Thomas asks. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t want to kill people,” I say, still looking at Lincoln. “Not like you last winter when things started getting weird. That’s not what it is.”

“Then what is it?” Molly asks, getting up from the couch. She walks slowly towards me. Like I’m a wounded animal and she needs to be cautious. “What does it do to you, Case?”

Do to me?

No. They don’t understand. It’s not doing something to me. It’s fucking talking to me. The goddamned city is talking to me. So far it hasn’t told me to do anything, but it’s gonna. I can feel it. Something big is coming. And if I tell them that I’m gonna find myself with a nice new room over at the newly rebuilt asylum.

No, a voice in my head says. No.They wouldn’t do that to you. They won’t give up on you. They won’t let—

Shut the fuck up.

“Case,” Thomas barks. “Answer us, dammit. What the fuck is going on?”

“Yelling at him isn’t going to help,” Lulu says, surprising everyone by standing up and walking over to me. “He’s sick, OK? And I don’t know what the hell happened the night you guys took down Blue Corp, but clearly something did. He doesn’t need to be lectured,” she says, directing this to Thomas. “And if he actually knew what was happening”—she looks at Linc and Molly—“I’m sure he’d say so. But he doesn’t. Can’t you see that? He doesn’t understand it. Your AI doesn’t understand it. The tests can’t tell us anything because something is hiding inside him,” she says, grabbing onto my arm. “Hiding so well…” She stops, tilts her head slightly and then turns to Molly. “You’re a detective. I’m a lawyer. We should approach this like something that needs to be solved, not an interrogation. Case isn’t the perp, Molly. He’s the victim.”

I give Lulu a sidelong glance from under the unruly hair hanging over my forehead and growl, “I’m not a victim.”

She rolls her eyes and mutters, “Ego.”

“OK,” Molly says, putting her hands up in the air, like she’s begging people for calm. “Maybe Lulu’s right.” She sighs. “We need to be more rational about this. Talk it through.”

“Well”—Thomas grunts the words through a sarcastic laugh—“you’re the one with the answers to what happened to you at Blue Corp.”

Linc glares at him. A warning to tread carefully and not start taking things out on Molly.

“I’m just saying,” Thomas says. “Molly was the only one there. Everyone else is dead. So maybe she needs to dig a little deeper and come up with what that fucking rope was. If that’s what’s causing this then we need to know.”

“Do you remember, Molls?” Linc asks, taking her hand.

She lets out a long sigh. “I mean… some of it. But not that rope. I just don’t know.”

“Then how did you know how to use it?” Thomas snaps.

“Just back off,” Linc says. “Last warning, asshole.”

Molly shakes her head. “I remember fighting him,” she says in a low whisper. “The pain, though. He was conditioning me to give in to him by using pain. He wanted me to think of him as my savior. He said he was there for me”—she shoots Thomas an accusatory glare—“when everyone else left.”

“Hey, you know what?” Thomas sneers. “He made you to kill us, Molly. So you can try to lay that guilt trip on everyone else standing in this room. But I know what you are.”

Lincoln walks halfway across the room, hands up, like he’s ready to choke the fuck out of Thomas, when he stops to grimace away the inhibition poisoning. “You’re so fucking lucky I can’t kill you.”

“Stop it,” Molly says. “Both of you. I know what I am, Thomas. But I overcame that, OK? I’m not his killer anymore.”

“What the fuck is going on here?” Lulu asks, voice rising.

“So you say,” Thomas says, his voice low, deadly, and serious. He pays no attention to Lulu’s question.

The four of us stand there trading looks. Molly breaks away first, crosses the room and stands in front of the imposing stone fireplace, leaning on the mantel like she just needs a little support.

“He told me to collar you with it.” She glances over her shoulder at Lincoln. “He seemed to think it was some kind of weapon that could control you.”

“But did it have poison on it?” Lulu is talking now. We’re all startled again, unused to having a fifth person here discussing this part of our lives. “What could’ve been on those barbs that would—”

“It has to be some kind of nanite.” We all whirl around to see Sheila standing in the room with us. “I think that rope was tipped with nanotechnology. I think that’s why we can’t see what’s happening, Case. It’s controlling our diagnostics.”

I reach around, feel the back of my neck where the monitoring sticker is making my skin itch.