Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
A cloud drifted over the sun, and Holly hunched her shoulders, hurrying along the building side of the pavement. The bus had been limping along twenty minutes late, for God’s sake, and maybe he’d think she’d changed her mind.
Maybe she should change her mind. It was her day off and she had better things to do.
There were the dishes, for one thing, laundry to haul up the block, and figuring out next month’s food budget.
Although working at the Crossroads meant she’d never go hungry there was only so much greasy spoon you could take, and if it was one of the days she couldn’t eat, she preferred to dry-heave at home.
Of course, she had plans to step neatly out of her own life like a woman taking off her slippers as she got into bed, but all the planning in the world didn’t mean anything would go smoothly. Life had taught her that much, at least.
Why was she so nervous? It was just coffee. It made sense that he was a bit shy... but still, there were things that bothered her. She couldn’t think of them just now, but she was sure there existed.
Maybe it was just that she couldn’t let anything good through the door after Phillip.
God, are you even thinking about him now? You’re divorced. Let it go.
What was the word for feeling sad even when someone who was nothing but a user hustled their way out of your life? Did a precise term exist? Maybe she was nervous because Reese might be... well, decent, and she wasn’t going to be around long enough to—
A horn blared to her left but she didn’t glance back, shaking her head to get all the second-guessing out instead. I shouldn’t have agreed to this. I should turn around and go home.
If she had looked, she would have seen the black van in the right-hand lane, slowing down as it reached the end of a line of parked cars.
In half a block Montrose Street narrowed, the parking lane whittled away to nothing.
It was the same black van that had been circling her route to the Starbucks on Montrose and Fifteenth, but then again, vans were as common as colds, in the city.
Even black ones.
Should have picked a place closer to home.
Should actually go home. This is crazy. Holly sighed, jamming her hands deeper in the pockets of her gray hoodie.
Picking a place closer to her building wasn’t a good idea, though, if you were a woman alone in the big city.
She could turn around right now; it was only a short bus ride to—
Someone bumped into her, hard, from behind. Holly glanced up, the curse on her lips dying as she realized the midday crowd wasn’t bad enough to warrant that sort of thing, and that it wasn’t a simply an inattentive collision bump. More like someone was pushing her, and—
“What the fu—” she began, but he’d already shoved her across the sidewalk. A black van had pulled to the curb, its paint job neither glossy nor dusty, and she was bundled inside like a bag of laundry.
She couldn’t even scream. A gloved hand clapped over her mouth, her hands yanked back and a slight zipping sound—something bit her wrists, cruelly—and by the time Holly realized she was being kidnapped she had already been jabbed with a needle the size of the DeriCorp skyscraper downtown.
Right through her jeans, too, and it stung like hell.
Her right buttcheek promptly went numb, but she found her wits and began to kick.
She was still trying to yell when the chemical took effect, and everything went black.
* * *
Groggy, blinking, the world smears of wet color on a glass plate. It felt like only a few seconds, but now she was now sitting up, at least relatively. That was, if “sitting up” meant “slumped on something hard and uncomfortable,” and her mouth was cotton dry, too.
What just... I was walking down the street, and then...
Her head was stuffed with dry crackling, and all she could do was listen.
She heard her own voice, slurred and slow as a sleepwalker’s. Questions being asked. It was very important that she concentrate, in fact it was critical, because if she didn’t concentrate bad things would happen.
Sudden light searing her eyes. She whimpered, and remembered her name.
Holly. I’m Holly.
With that came other things. She’d been just walking down Montrose, about to go to a coffee date. With... who?
A sharp, frustrated sound. “How much did they dose her with? She’s useless.” Male, a light tenor, each syllable precise and crisp. Very businesslike, and somehow... cruel.
“Just let her metabolize.” Another male voice, deeper and somehow... anxious? Worried?
What the hell? She was in a chair. The light was too bright, but her eyes wouldn’t close properly.
“We may not have time. Whose bright idea was it to scoop her up?” Flipping paper. The precise tenor sounded distinctly underimpressed.
“We’re thinking Six—”
“Oh, yes. Tell me again how that happened?”
“The civilian doctor went A-45. Pumped a nerve agent into the—”
“That was rhetorical, Caldwell. Three, do we have anything?”
“Nothing yet.” This was a new voice—contralto, female, weirdly uninflected. Sounded like a middle-school Home Ec teacher Holly had once hated. “We had a ping on him near the site where we picked her up. A meet, maybe.”
She concentrated on sitting up, and blinking. It sounded almost doable.
“There’s nothing here. No gray-side contact, nothing.” The tenor sounded disgusted. “It wasn’t necessary to acquire, for God’s sake.”
“Protocol, sir.” The woman sounded like a robot.
More shuffling paper. “What a mess. Caldwell, can’t we give her something to wake her up?”
“If we want a dead body on our hands, sure. They overdosed her, medics say, anything else and her heart might shut down. She’s lighter than she looks.”
“Fine. Three?”
A slight noise of shifting cloth, and the woman spoke again. “We either keep subject until she metabolizes, or we return her. We watch, and see if Six bites. I calculate ten percent odds on that.”
“He’s probably not even in the city anymore. Give him another twenty-four and he’ll be out of the goddamn country.” It would be hard for the tenor to sound any more disgusted.
“Then this subject is collateral damage. A forty percent chance of breach, given Six’s apparent interest and subsequent events.” The woman was very calm. Her voice... it just wasn’t right. Too flat, too emotionless. Like a robot’s.
The tenor sighed. “Fine, fine. But put her back, for God’s sake. I don’t want to sign the paperwork for a cremation.”
This, Holly decided, is a dream. One she would wake up from in a little bit. Then she’d hop in the shower, check the clock and hurry to make her coffee date.
That’s what I was doing, right?
The light faded. That was nice, because it was giving her a pounding headache through the cotton filling her skull. Everything turned warm and gooey, and she slid down a long greased tunnel into velvet blackness.