Chapter 10
Chloe woke with the certainty that something was very wrong.
Marcus breathed slowly beside her. The bedroom door was ajar, the apartment still, except for the susurration of the white-noise machine in Kleio’s room down the hall.
It was usually a reassuring sound: It meant that Chloe could hear into Kleio’s room and would hear if anything was wrong.
But for some reason tonight, it was not calming.
Her throat was tight and her heart thudded.
She rolled onto her back and took inventory.
By the pattern of moonlight coming through the window, she could see that it was past midnight.
It was normal to feel worried when waking in the middle of the night without knowing why.
She always made Marcus do a sweep of the house, and he always obliged with a sleepy grumble.
But she always felt stupid when he came back and grunted that everything was fine as he fell into bed again.
Everything was fine. She didn’t need his reassurance. The apartment had a state-of-the-art security system. Nothing was wrong. Her mind knew it, so the thing to do was convince her racing heart. Listen to the white noise. Relax.
She listened, and felt her body contract. Every muscle vibrated with tension, screaming at her to do something, now now now before it was too late.
She gave in, rolled over, and shoved Marcus awake.
“Huh, what?”
“Something’s wrong.”
He blinked. She waited for the tolerant little smile that meant he was humoring her, that he would go make sure but he already knew everything was fine.
His eyes widened and he said, “You’re right.”
They sat up at the same time, whipping their feet off opposite ends of the bed, and were out the door in three steps.
The hallway was dark except for the glow of Kleio’s night-light spilling through her cracked door. Chloe ran, elbowing in front of Marcus, but her run felt slow and effortful, as if she were moving underwater. Then she burst through the doorway, and time stopped.
A man was bending over Kleio’s bed. In one hand he held a thick steel canister about a foot long. A tube ran from the cylinder to the medical mask in the man’s other hand.
He was holding the mask over Kleio’s face.
Chloe lunged into the man, but he had braced himself and barely moved.
Marcus flew past her and slammed his fist into the man’s head.
His momentum carried him and the man off the other side of the bed.
There were scrapes and thumps and heavy breathing in the dark; then Marcus’s silhouette reared up against the moonlit window and lunged down as he drove his fist over and over into the grunting intruder.
Chloe scooped Kleio up. The girl was limp, head and limbs lolling, eyes and mouth half open. Chloe bent her ear to her mouth to check for breathing, but before she could hear anything, her head was yanked back violently by her hair.
Two more men had entered the room. One held Chloe back while the other bent to pick up the dropped canister, stepped behind Marcus, and brought the canister down on the back of his head. Marcus collapsed straight down.
The man crouched before Chloe, setting the canister down, and began tugging on Kleio. “No!” Chloe screamed, breaking the surreal voicelessness of the scene. She struggled to gather Kleio back into her arms.
The man let go and reached down for the canister.
His eyes did not leave her, and Chloe could read nothing there except mild concentration, and she knew he was going to kill her, as emotionlessly as he had just killed Marcus.
She was going to die and Marcus was already dead and nobody would save Kleio.
But the man raised the mask attached to the cylinder, and, still with that clinically concentrated expression, held it to her face.
“No!” she screamed again, but her protest was muffled as the mask was pressed firmly over her nose and mouth.
She felt the cool gas against her skin and held her breath.
The man holding her hair was saying something, and even though Chloe didn’t recognize the words, she knew by the biting tone that it was swearing.
The recriminations were directed at the man Marcus had been pummeling, now rising shakily from the other side of the bed.
He glanced venomously down at Marcus, but at a sharp word from the other, he turned and stumbled past them and out the door.
Chloe tried to turn her head away from the mask, but the men were too strong, and she was weakening with the lack of air. Her lungs burned. In another moment, she would have to breathe.
The man holding the mask to her face didn’t want to wait that long.
He jabbed her in the stomach, and she released the breath she’d been holding, then instantly, involuntarily took another.
She tried to hold that breath, but the man punched her again, and she inhaled again.
Her head swam, whether because of the punches or the gas, she didn’t know.
But then the man dropped the mask and pulled Kleio from her arms, and she knew it was the gas, because she couldn’t hold on to Kleio.
The men hoisted Kleio and turned away, and she couldn’t stand. Her limbs were heavy and alien. She crawled instead, dragging herself whimpering toward the door, but the men simply walked away from her. A moment later the front door opened and closed.
They didn’t even need to slam it.
She turned back toward the bed, and her heart rose to see Marcus struggling up from behind it. His face was gray, but his eyes were burning. “Call,” he grunted.
“Call?” she said groggily.
He sat heavily on the bed, clutching his head, and nodded.
She understood. “Call an ambulance.”
He shook his head. “The cops. So they. Can find her.”
She got to her knees, then to her feet, and managed to make it to their bedroom.
A message was waiting on her phone. She knew what it was even as she stabbed it to open it, so it was with a sick feeling of inevitability that she saw it unfold into a picture of Kleio.
The little girl was in the back of a cab, flung across the seat, not belted in, limp as a discarded doll.
Across the image were emblazoned the words Send the Location of the Final System.