Chapter 12
Simon
A few hours earlier…
“Put your fucking hands up and get down on your knees!”
Guns.
They’ve got guns.
I forgot about guns.
Hard to believe, really, but I did.
I thought I could fight a dozen men, and to be fair to me, if I had been willing to transform and rip their throats out, I could have. However, in human form, with weapons drawn on me, I am forced to put my hands up and surrender.
“Go and get the girl,” the leader of the security patrol says. “We need her.”
“You want me to go get her?” I suggest.
“No. You’re coming with us.”
They take me back to Veronica, who is gloating right up until she realizes that Lydia got away.
“You won’t be able to bring her in,” I tell them. “Not without me.”
“She’s a glorified copywriter. I’m sure she will be easy to find,” Veronica says, dismissing me immediately.
“I wouldn’t count on it. She’s persistent. That’s why she waited for me for so long, and it’s why she will outwait you, too. Just let me go, Veronica. I know you’re pissed about the cat thing, but in a few months, or maybe years, it will be something you can laugh about.”
“Of course,” she says. “I’m going to laugh about it with you stuck in my metaphorical basement, and your little side piece pumping out hybrid babies we can use for further experimentation.”
“I never agreed to that.”
“Of course you did. You just didn’t pay attention to what you were agreeing to when you agreed,” she says.
“Any genetic material synthesized in the course of this research belongs to the company. You synthesized genetic material in yourself. Thus, you belong to the company. And your girlfriend will too.”
“This is an overreaction.”
She slams her fist on the table. “Don’t you tell me what’s an overreaction!”
“That’s also an overreaction,” I comment, deadpan. Maybe some of Lydia’s bratty energy is rubbing off on me. Or maybe I’ve always been that way; we just tend not to give men the moniker. Worth thinking about, perhaps.
“Neither one of you are going to see the light of day again,” Veronica promises me. “You are going to do your work here, for me. You are going to share your discoveries with the company, and she is going to produce testing protocols.”
“That’s the cat talking, Veronica. You have to let the energy go. I’m sure it wasn’t fun finding yourself in a feline body, but now you understand how the product works, you have more of an insight than most.”
Her eyes glitter at me with what I would call animal fury, but I think the anger is all too human.
“I don’t want your rationalizations, Simon,” she says. “You’ve fucked with the wrong person for the first and last time.”
I’ve got to calm her down, or this is going to get out of hand.
“I got stuck in animal form too,” I say. “It wasn’t pleasant. It was frightening.”
Her expression hardens for a moment, and then she seems softer, and I make the mistake of thinking I might have gotten through to her.
I haven’t, of course.
“I wasn’t frightened,” she says. “I was inspired. The things that can be done with this technology are myriad, perhaps even endless. You have forever taken the line between man and animal and made one the other. There will be people who choose to live as dogs, or cats, or lions. Our species can depart for the animal kingdom whenever it chooses. You are invaluable, Dr. Seek. And so is your little mate. So I will have the two of you in my custody for as long as it takes.”
“You can’t do this to people, and you know it.”
A broad smile lights up Veronica’s face, “We’re firmly in a post-consequence world, Simon.
Try looking around sometime. Does it seem like anybody is called to task for anything anymore?
No. Precisely. You will stay here as my captive, because I have the power to make it so.
And your girl will be hunted down and brought here too.
If you’re very good, I’ll allow you to mate in captivity. ”
I used to like Veronica because she believed in my work. Now I deeply dislike her for much the same reason.
“This isn’t going to work, and you know it. My family will look for me. Her family will look for her.”
“And they won’t find you,” Veronica says. “I really think you’re failing to understand how much money there is involved here, and therefore how much people will be willing to sacrifice to wring every last bit out of your brain.”
* * *
Lydia
It is 6:00 a.m. I am at the park. The men Veronica paid to kidnap me are milling around uncomfortably.
A couple of them break out a hacky sack.
It hits me, viscerally, that I could be captured by a man who hacky sacks, if I am not careful.
I am starting to think that Veronica designed this all mostly as a humiliation ritual.
I watch them trying to catch me, and I think about how stupid they all are, and how dumb they clearly think I am as well.
But I am also missing Simon, and afraid for him. Veronica had an absolutely unhinged look in her eye when she told us that she was going to keep us, and I think she meant it. She clearly has the manpower to try to enforce it.
I know she won’t hurt Simon. He’s the whole reason any of this is happening. I also know she doesn’t really need me. So it’s possible they’ll stop looking soon.
I can walk away from all of this, maybe.
Just throw in the towel, let Simon rescue himself.
That’s probably what he wants me to do. He wants me to evade detection, stay out of trouble. I should do what he says. Or what I think he’d say. After all, he let them take me because he wanted me to be able to get away.
On the other hand, Simon is in Veronica’s grip. And I don’t like the idea of another woman having my man captive. It strikes me as wrong. Simon is mine. If anybody is going to introduce some weird and frankly inappropriate power dynamics to the situation, it should be me.
I start to get excited, the way I do when I’m about to do something I shouldn’t. I know I should stay free and just wait for Simon to contact me, but I’ve got nowhere to go. I just spent the night in a gym. I need a real place to sleep, and I need to feel Simon’s arms wrapped around me.
I put two fingers in my mouth, and I whistle.
“Losers! Over here!”
A dozen heads snap around at me. I jump out of the tree and I run.
I don’t know why. I guess I want them to catch me after all. I just want the feeling of escaping, I think, the chance to try. I can’t just stand there and let them take me in, that would be like surrender. In all things, I never give in. I have to be overpowered.
The nearest place to hide is a mall at the edge of the park.
I dive in through the morning commuters, none of whom want to be part of this fuckery.
They are wearing drab, beige, gray and black clothes, and desperately sucking on coffee in the attempt to wake themselves up enough to pretend like they care. I get it.
I slip between them easily because I am just a girl.
My pursuers are not so agile. They come barreling through like a stampede of rhinos, making more trouble for themselves in the process. The crowd surges back against them, in that old Newtonian way. Every force is met with equal and opposite force.
Long story short, I get away. I get up to the second level of the mall and crouch down next to the railing so I can watch the guys who are supposed to be catching me mill around in confusion as they try to work out where I went.
Some of them head out the back entrance, others go into some of the stores. Not one of them takes the escalator up.
“Oh, my god! What the fuck?” I curse with annoyance when I realize that I got away. All of that effort and money to get me, and they missed me completely.
Feels a little bad, if I’m to be honest. Am I not worth properly hunting? Fuck it. If they are going to make my life hard, I am going to make their lives even harder.
I call Z-Corp and ask to be put through to Veronica.
It takes a few minutes, but eventually I hear her ice queen tones on the other end of the line.
“Yes?”
“I’m watching your guys try to catch me and they’re doing a very poor job,” I tell her.
She pauses for a moment, her breath hitching on the intake with obvious annoyance.
“Is that so?”
“It is so. They’ve lost me. And I think they’re going to keep losing me.” I draw in a deep breath too, but I let it out in a dramatic sigh because unlike my nemesis, I am not trying to hold my emotional state back. I am more free than she is. I am also having more fun.
“You could turn yourself into me,” she says.
“Oh, I don’t think I’d turn myself into you,” I muse, deliberately misinterpreting her words. “I think I’d like to know what being a penguin feels like first.”
If she were a man, she’d growl, I think. As it is, she draws in her breath in a very annoyed hiss. “You know what I mean.”
“What will you give me if I come in?” I ask the question with a smile on my face.
“I will let you live.”
“Wow. Threatening to kill me. Not very chill of you.”
“I…”
I don’t know what she was going to say, because I end the call. This woman clearly has absolutely no limits when it comes to what she will do in order to get what she wants. If she were a man, I’d call her ruthless. I call her ruthless now too.
I guess I am finding somewhere to stay tonight. I do need to get a few things from my apartment first. Simple stuff. Socks and underwear kind of stuff.
I know it’s a risk, but at a certain point, risks have to be taken. I want a bag of things.
I wait until late at night, like 2:00 in the morning.
It’s been a day and a half since I was home and I am missing the basic security of my own environment.
I do my due diligence first, of course. I keep an eye out to see if there are any weird cars nearby.
I don’t see any. No vans for businesses that don’t exist in our area, no slowly circling cruising cars that keep showing up.