Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(127)

“Stable. Restrained. It won’t happen overnight. It will be years before we get there. But with you, we’re closer than we’ve ever been. And I imagine the breakthroughs along the way will be considerable. To say nothing of the women whose lives will be saved by your work before then. How many more masks do you think Pemberton would have made if you hadn’t stopped him tonight?”

“I don’t actually know what you’ve done with him, so he could still end up making more.”

“One thing at a time, Charley.”

“OK. And the other choice?” she asks.

“Walk away. And we all pretend the last week or so never happened. I might keep some tabs on you, but only to make sure you aren’t sharing too extensively about our time together. But your life will be your own, albeit . . . a little less exciting than if you had chosen to work with us.”

“You’d let me just walk away after everything you told me?”

“After everything you’ve done, for sure, Charley.” She can’t tell if he’s referring to her so-called bravery or the multiple hacks Bailey’s committed on her behalf.

“OK. And Dylan?”

“He would have to die.”

At first she thinks his gentle, conciliatory smile is a sign he’s kidding, but as it fades and his eye contact doesn’t waver, she realizes he’s absolutely serious. For the next few seconds there’s only the muffled chop of the rotary blades overhead as the helicopter swings back to the west.

“You’re serious?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“So if I refuse to work with you, you’ll let me go back to my life, but you’re gonna . . . what? Hunt Dylan down and shoot him?”

“It’ll be more elegant than that, but that’s the basic idea, yes.”

Everything else the man has said to her tonight has felt clinical, rehearsed down to the last word, but there’s something in his expression now that seems raw and electric. She wonders if she had a similar look in her eyes when she snapped Pemberton’s wrist. He’s out for some kind of revenge, and he’s using her to do it.

“Why?” she asks.

“Why? He gave you a drug without your knowledge that might have caused you to tear yourself apart.”

“You don’t care about me. You don’t even know me.”

“For two years, he developed that drug with my complete support. That makes me responsible for you.”

“Right, but if you were so outraged by what he’d done, why not kill him the minute he told you?”

“I wanted to see if he was telling the truth.”

“You didn’t need him alive to see that. You could have just followed me like you did.”

He nods. He’s surveying her. Maybe if she wasn’t capable of bashing his head in, he’d have her killed for speaking this kind of truth to him. Maybe he’s just that kind of guy. Maybe that’s how he got his own helicopter.

“Forgive me, Charley, for the speech I’m about to make. And let me qualify it by saying I really do believe that all people are created equal, even if a fair amount of them go to shit not long after they’re created. But you need to know this.

“I’m not like you. I’m not like anyone you know, and I’m not like anyone you will ever meet. I sit at the head of a company that will make more money in the next five minutes than most people would be able to earn in ten lifetimes. The products that I deliver to the world save thousands of lives every minute, all over the planet. And the development and manufacture of those products, products that people now demand at the drop of a hat for almost nothing, comes at a cost those same people cannot bring themselves to examine. It’s my job to deliver those products while concealing that cost at all times. That’s my duty. That’s what I go to bed with every night.

“Now, I realize we live in the age of the social justice warrior who thinks he can ferret out all the corruption in the world just by doing some Google searches, but the fact of the matter is this. While everyone points the finger at Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the like, it’s companies like mine that actually shape the world, and we have this responsibility because people gave it to us. Because they expect to be relieved of every ache and pain and bad mood, as if being alive itself is a pathological condition, and someone, somewhere is responsible for fixing it. And we meet that need. We meet that need in the hopes that we can someday wrest enough financial gain from this neurotic hunger that we end up developing a cure for cancer. Or a drug that stops strokes once and for all. Or a drug that allows people at risk of violence or abuse to defend themselves in a competent, focused, and effective manner. Something that’s truly important, not just easily marketable.

“That’s my job, in a nutshell. That’s my responsibility, and it was my father’s before he left it to me. And if you decide to wash your hands of all of this, then Project Bluebird is dead forever. I’ve got no more to give to it. And that’s fine. But that also means Dylan Cody or Dylan Thorpe or Noah Turlington or whatever he chooses to call himself tomorrow has no more to give me or my company except dangerous and unacceptable risks. And I can’t have that. I can’t have that at all.”

The pictures still stare up at her from the spread of pages on her lap: the boy with the murdered mother and the mad scientist he became.