Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(88)
There is a knock and the door cracks and a young man with sideburns and a clipboard says, “Ten minutes.”
Buffalo thanks him and tells Chase to stand up and makes a twirling gesture with his hand. “Let me look at you.”
Chase does as he’s told and Buffalo picks away lint and smooths wrinkles and says, “You’re going to be listening to me, right?” He taps his ear. “Right?”
“Always am. Always listening.”
“Good. Hear me out now. We’re going to surprise people tonight. You’re going to announce a visit to the Republic. Two weeks from now, right before the election. Tour the bases and the mines, meet with the troops and hear their concerns. Four years and the president hasn’t been there once.”
“So I make him look like a total chickenshit.”
The dimples rise in Buffalo’s cheeks again. “Doesn’t matter what else you screw up on tonight—that’s what people are going to remember. That’s what’s going to distinguish you.”
“I like it,” Chase says, when in fact he feels chilled and unsteady, as if he has stepped out onto a frozen lake and watched the ice crack beneath him and the water rise like sudden black creeks. The Republic. He talks about his time there often enough, but it’s been more than ten years, and now it’s become less a place and more a story. And he can’t help but feel repulsed at the idea of moving among the crowds of soldiers, who will smile at him hopefully and grab hold of his hand not knowing it is a paw.
There comes another knock at the door and Chase feels something warm on his upper lip.
Buffalo’s face creases with concern. “Here,” he says. “Let me get that.” He pulls out a silk handkerchief and dabs Chase’s nose with it before returning it, spotted with blood, to his breast pocket. “Perfect.”
Chapter 37
OUTSIDE THE FITNESS CENTER, a massive concrete block of a building, the line of students stretches through the propped-open double doors and trails along the sidewalk. They are not here for a basketball game or volleyball match. There is no sports program at William Archer, except for intramurals, since lycans are not permitted to play in any collegiate or professional division, the hazards of blood and adrenaline and litigation too great.
In the gymnasium, after showing their IDs and filling out a form, the students are led to one of a dozen nurse’s stations, where they sit on a folding chair next to a table topped with plastic sheeting. The nurse, wearing a long-sleeve apron tucked into latex gloves, asks how the student is doing and the student says fine, thank you, and then the student’s thumb is pricked and squeezed, a blood sample collected. The nurse then hands over a bottle of Volpexx along with the student’s choice of a Tootsie Roll or a Dum Dum sucker. This is how it is the second Friday of every month.
The gymnasium is crowded with students, whose sneakers squeak against the hardwood basketball courts and whose voices rise to the rafters to flutter and die—it sounds like game day—and that’s a little what it feels like to Claire, a game.
Her family asked her to never tell anyone—anyone, not ever, not unless she wanted to see them all in prison—about the doctor who falsely reported their monthly tests, and she didn’t realize how lucky she was until she stole a pill from her friend Stacey’s bathroom, taking it with a glass of water later that evening and feeling so knock-kneed and woozy that she couldn’t keep her eyes open through American Idol.
Volpexx, like alcohol, affects everyone differently. Some walk around in a fog. Some counter the meds with high doses of caffeine or Adderall or Dexedrine. Some develop a tolerance over time, and some avoid it altogether by way of bribery or family connections.
She supposes it is an improvement over the way things used to be. She has heard stories about lobotomies, the long steel spikes driven into the brain to sever and deaden what the doctors referred to as the aberrant circuitry of the lycan’s mind. Lobos, which means wolf and which means the lobes of the brain. And tomos, which means to cut. Cut the wolf, kill the wolf, and make the patient once again human. Beginning in the 1930s, the psychosurgery was largely successful and widely prescribed, not only among criminal lycans but for those suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Among the psychiatric community, lobos was discussed as a mental illness, an unchained id with physiological symptoms. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the procedure was discontinued—replaced by quaaludes—less out of humanitarian concern and more for the rising number of incapables that became wards of the state and a burden to taxpayers.
She doesn’t have the luxury of a sympathizer doctor anymore. Miriam arranged through some black market a collection of blister packs—the blood within them O positive, same as Claire’s, and laced with Volpexx. They are flesh colored and about as big as a quarter and after she affixes them with spirit gum they are nearly invisible. Still, she always comes to the gymnasium late in the day, after the nurses are glassy-eyed from so many students, so much blood.
She thanks the nurse and takes a Dum Dum sucker and by the time she returns to her dorm sucks it down to the stick.
The room is hers. Andrea is gone for the afternoon, working at the Victoria’s Secret at the mall, where she seems to spend half her paycheck, coming home always with a new top, new eyeliner, new heels. Most of the shorts she wears say PINK across the butt.