Vox(78)

“Whatever. Now we want the same thing, but different.”

Lorenzo rolls his eyes. “You want semantic opposites, Morgan?”

If this jab bothers our boss, he doesn’t show it. Maybe he doesn’t get the joke. Morgan never was a shining star in the linguistics universe. “I want the opposite of what you’ve already given me. I want a neuroprotein that induces Wernicke’s aphasia, and I want it by tomorrow. So get to work.”

Lorenzo speaks first. “What did they promise you, Morgan? A lifetime membership to Washington’s finest girlie club? I didn’t know you could get it up.”

“Just give me what I want.”

Every pair of eyes in the lab is now looking at us.

“No,” I say.

Morgan leans over until his nose almost touches mine. “Excuse me? I didn’t hear you.”

“I said, ‘No.’ It’s a negative, Morgan. A denial to your request. The opposite of agreement.”

For the first time since I’ve known him, Morgan laughs. It’s a titter of a laugh, breathy and hollow. “It isn’t a request, Jean.” He checks his watch, sighs as if this business is taking up more of his valuable time than he anticipated, and calls one of the patrolling soldiers over to our corner of the lab. “Corporal, take these two to Room One and show them what’s inside. When they’ve had a good look, bring them back here.”

Room 1 is on the other side of the lab, through a set of locked doors, which might hold anything. I try not to think of Orwellian possibilities like rats and snakes. In any case, they’re not my worst fears. My worst fears walk on two legs and have names like Sam and Leo and Sonia. My worst fears are my kids.

The corporal, dressed in camouflage and combat boots, leads us to the steel doors. With his left hand—he also wears a ring, I notice—he slides a card into the electronic reader and stands aside as the doors slide open, revealing a vestibule and an additional door that remains closed as we leave the lab behind us. Only when the entry slides closed do I realize this space is like a tomb.

I hate confined spaces, always have.

Lorenzo reaches over for my hand. His own skin is hot; the entire room is a furnace, and sweat trickles down my face in what has to be rivers of salt, burning me underneath the bandage on my cheek. But I don’t feel warm at all. I feel as if an ice sheet has wrapped itself around me as the corporal steps forward and unlocks the next door.

Inside, seated on the only furnishing in the room other than a lidless toilet, are three people.

I think of the great apes, the hominoids. Gorillas and orangutans, bonobos and chimpanzees. And, of course, humans.

The human on the left speaks my name, my old name, a name I haven’t heard for twenty years. By the second syllable in “Jeanie,” a jolt of pain knocks her back into the steel wall. The sickening thud echoes in the room.

It sounds like the muffled shot of a gun.





SIXTY-SIX




I lunge forward on unsteady feet, but Lorenzo catches me by the arm. His grip is firm, almost bruising.

“No,” he says. “If she speaks again, the current will—”

He’s stronger than I am, but I break away, flinging myself at the woman on the bench, whose body sags like a lifeless doll under the harsh overhead lights. She’s not how I remember her, not in low-riding jeans and a crazily printed paisley blouse, not smiling from under a fringe of color-of-the-week hair while she brewed herbal tea in a crappy Georgetown apartment and cursed at the Ikea table instructions that defied minds with multiple degrees. She’s in a gray tunic that matches her hair and the color of her skin, except for the palms of her hands, which have been rubbed as raw as fresh meat from a year of labor that would make even the most stalwart farmer turn his back on the land and find a job pushing paper across a desk. She’s wearing a single black band on her left wrist where a charm bracelet of Chinese horoscope animals used to be.

“Jacko,” I say, placing one hand over her chapped lips. “Jacko, don’t say anything else. Don’t let them make it worse for you.”

Jackie Juarez, once the woman who I thought would stop the world, slumps wordlessly into my arms, and sobs.

The door behind me slides closed, then opens again. I don’t need to turn to check who it is. I can smell the bastard.

“Morgan,” I say. Then I hear the slap, the surprised whine, the metallic click of a firearm being cocked.

This is another thing I know about guns: you don’t cock and aim unless you’re ready to kill.

“Careful, Morgan,” I say, still holding on to Jackie. “You need him. You need his formula.”

He doesn’t, of course; Morgan already has Lorenzo’s notes. I’m only buying time.

And then it hits me: Lorenzo, dashing out of the upstairs lab to check his office, coming back and shaking his head to tell me the papers weren’t there. Morgan demanding a formula by tomorrow.

“Soldier,” Morgan says, “put it away.”

I turn from Jackie toward Lorenzo, who stands stock-still, ready to take a bullet in exchange for a slap, and I realize Morgan can’t possibly have taken the notes.

So, who the hell did?

The question stays in my mind, but I tuck it back in a quiet corner for later as I turn to the other women in the cell.

Lin looks at me, then at Lorenzo. Next to her is the Argentine-Swiss beauty who used to hang out in our department. She’s still a knockout, even without the blond waterfall of hair streaming down her back.