The Invisible (23 page)

Yet again, I can’t seem to type the code correctly on the lock’s keypad. I’ve pounded on the door for ten minutes and nobody’s come. My hands are clammy when I finally think to try the knob. The door surprises me by giving easily.

I swallow a scream when I walk inside—the lab is wrecked. Jax’s wall of file cabinets is gutted, drawers spilling out at odd angles or thrown onto the floor. Papers covered with Jax’s scrawled scientific formulas are scattered all over the floor. There isn’t much equipment here anymore; the banks of machines that used to be crowded into the corner are gone, with just a few wires left snaking across the floor as evidence that they were ever here.

I move toward the tables that used to hold the animal cages. Mildred’s cage door swings open, creaking on its hinges. Mildred herself, little black monkey with the white tuft of fur on her chest and crazy eyes, is nowhere to be found. Her red plastic water dish is overturned on the floor on top of a wet stack of books.

I spot one of Jax’s albino rats—maybe one of the ones she first showed me when I came out of surgery; judging by how fast it moves it also has a hummingbird heart. It races along the floorboards, so fast it’s a blur. It is the only sign of life in the ransacked room. I force my feet to take me to the back, where Jax’s small bedroom, her office, and the operating room are.

I peek into her office first. The desk is knocked over, her computer is gone, and another filing cabinet is on the floor, the piles of papers and files on the ground too tall to walk through. They must have taken her with them. Right now, she’s probably in the same operating room I was in before, the all-white one, so much cleaner than her own, going over Invisible’s chart with Dr. I.

But then why did they destroy her lab?

I walk into her small bedroom down the hall. It’s neat as a pin, the bed made with hospital corners. One corner has a little table with a mirror above it. I move toward the mirror, where a few photos are stuck into the frame. Jax, laughing, her small daughter in her lap. Noa looks two or three. She’s a frizzy-haired moppet with Jax’s big blue eyes. They’re outside, in a park somewhere. Jax’s now-estranged husband probably took the picture, back when they were a family. Before Noa’s heart condition was discovered. Before the marriage dissolved. Before Noa began to die. Before Jax tried something risky to save her. Before it all went so horribly wrong.

I’m not sure why, but I pluck the picture from the frame. When I do, a folded piece of lined paper falls out onto the table. I slip the photo into the back pocket of my jeans, thinking to save it for Jax in case the lab gets raided again, and I smooth open the paper.

Dear Jax,

I don’t know if this letter will ever reach you. I gave it to a woman you used to work with, who said she might be able to send it to the right place. She looked a little terrified when I told her who I was.

I just wanted you to know I’m out here, in case you didn’t know already. I’ve been in a children’s home since I was four, and though it’s not the easiest life, I’m all right. I’ve never been able to remember exactly what happened when I was a little girl—it’s all scrambled, somehow. All they can tell me at the children’s home is that I was sick, that I had heart surgery that went wrong, and when I got better, the hospital turned me over to them because I had become a ward of the state.

Anyway, I’ve always been able to do things physically that aren’t exactly normal. I won’t say more, in case someone’s reading this, but it’s kind of crazy, the stuff I’m able to do. So I started digging through old newspapers, trying to find out what might have happened to me. And I found some things about a sick girl named Noa, and her mother, who was a medical researcher at the university and who tried and failed to save her.

I think I must be Noa. I can sort of remember my name, and being sick. That hospital smell, I guess it’s alcohol, always makes me picture a mom with curly hair. I just wanted you to know—I didn’t die like it says in the papers. The surgery worked. You saved me.

If you ever get this, here’s where you can find me:

Bedlam Children’s Society Home for Girls

80 Willoughby Lane

Your daughter,

Cleo (they named me Cleo at the children’s home, but you can call me Noa if you want)

So this was what had Jax so rattled the day I came over to talk about Ford. I say her name out loud.
Cleo
. Could this really be her daughter? The one she thought she killed on the operating table? How is it possible she survived? And not only survived, but by the sound of it, flourished? And who is this woman who used to work with Jax, the one who Cleo says agreed to take her the letter? Very few people know about the lab.

I’m so focused on the questions the letter brings up that when I leave Jax’s bedroom, I almost skip the operating room across the hall. But then I stop in front of it. Something nags at me. I put my hand on the knob.

I want to skip it. I don’t like that the door is shut. Which is exactly why I have to force myself to make sure nobody’s inside.

Just do it
, I order myself, stuffing the letter in my pocket.

I gulp air and push it open. And then I see how desperately deluded I have been. Because here she is. Her face blue-white, eyes wide open with surprise, gray lips open in a shocked O. My whole body shakes as I move toward her. The wail that has been sitting in my throat opens up into a howl.

She is in her blue operating scrubs, her silver hair tucked into the blue shower cap she wears during surgery. Her body sits slumped against the wall, her head tilted, no visible wounds, but of course there wouldn’t be, not with Dr. I around. He would do it with injections. On the floor, scattered near Jax, the needles I slipped her as protection. Each one emptied and used, on her.

My hands shake too badly to pick them up.

Is that why they killed her? Because she tried to fight back?

When I get a foot away I notice writing on the wall just to the left of her head. The narrow lowercase letters were carefully formed with a pencil, traced over and over so the words show up. The note says
nice try
.

I fall to the floor and sit there facing her. I reach out and lower her eyelids. It’s not easy. Rigor mortis has begun. Her body is cooling. She has been dead for a couple of hours, perhaps more.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper as the tears fall. “You didn’t deserve this.”

After a long time of sitting with her and giving myself over to a wracking grief so awful it feels like it’s ripping me apart, I decide the least I can do is give her body a little dignity. I hoist her up—in death, she feels heavier than even Serge—and lay her as carefully as I can on the operating table. I arrange her hands, which fall off the table, alongside her body, finding the marks where they got her with the needles on her upper arms. Six neat holes, three on each arm. Enough to kill anyone. Like vaccinations gone horribly wrong.

Not only did I bring killers to Jax’s door, I even handed them the murder weapon.

I find a sheet underneath the table and unfold it with shaking hands to cover her.

The sheet billows across her still body, falls softly over her frozen white face. I pull off the shower cap and smooth her curls, then pull the sheet up over them. A stray tear falls on it, a smattering of weather in this room so stale with death.

I tuck the sheet around her, done crying for now, when I notice the rats in the corner are still in their cages, still running on their wheels. I move to open the doors. No creature deserves to starve in here with Jax’s body hardening next to them.

They’re out in an instant, their white albino bodies no more than blurs as they speed across the table, onto the floor. Following the floorboards along the walls, they make their way to the door and are gone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Half an hour later I’m pounding on Ford’s apartment door. He hasn’t answered my calls, and I need to tell him. He deserves to find out about Jax from me and not from the nightly news, and certainly not by discovering her body himself. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. No matter that he wants nothing to do with me anymore, I owe him this.

“Abe. Ford. It’s Anthem,” I’m calling in the hallway, half-hoarse from the tears I’ve shed tonight.

Behind the door there is the shuffling of feet, a heavy, slow gait. I brace myself in anticipation of seeing Ford, how awful it will be to look him in the eyes and tell him Jax is dead—but it’s Abe who greets me.

“Anthem. Hi.”

“Hi. Sorry to come here so late.” I try for a smile. No way do I want to burden Abe with the death of someone he doesn’t even know. “I need to see Ford. Just for a few minutes. I’m sorry to wake you.”

Abe looks pained. “Don’t worry about it. Had the late shift last night, so I’m sleeping weird hours. It’s no problem. Only thing is, uh, Ford’s not here.”

“Not here?” I crane my neck, peek into the dark living room around Abe. My heart revs with alarm. Is he so repelled by me that he’s having his uncle lie for him? So adamant about things being over that he’s hiding from me?

“He’s been gone for a while.” Abe clears his throat. “Want to come in anyway, sit down? I can make you some tea . . .”

I shake my head. “Where is he?” I ask, my voice nothing but a dull croak now.

“Well, see . . .” Abe gets a weird look on his face, a half-wince, half-frown. “He made me swear not to tell you. Said he needed to be alone a while.”

He stares at the floor, his feet inside a pair of blue slippers. An awkward silence sits between us now.

“Okay,” I say, not wanting to make this any more uncomfortable. “If you speak to him, can you tell him to call me? I have news for him. It’s important.”

“Sure thing.” Abe smiles weakly at me. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but he’s left the city. To recuperate more, and to lay low so the police lose track of him. Gonna be back in a couple of weeks, he said.”

I turn away before he can see I’m upset.

Heading back out into the drizzly night, I wonder if I’ve ever felt quite this alone before. Even when Gavin was taken from me, it was just one person. Now it feels like I’ve lost an entire family. Jax is gone. Ford has vanished. Jasper is dead. Martha is dead. And I’m no closer to knowing what’s happened to the man in the wheelchair. For now, he’s all I have to focus on.

But I don’t know where he is, or what ungodly thing he may have become.

I fly along Hemlock—my legs bicycling through the air, arms pumping, pushing as hard as I can, the pain of exertion needle-sharp in a way that feels soothing in my current state of mind—when I see it.

It’s so jarring, I fall forward, nearly careening onto the ground, my momentum cut off so fast. Then I right myself and stare. Am I imagining it?

In front of me are two prominent apartment towers on the corner of Hemlock and Holly. One across the street from the other. Both with gold awnings. Affinia Tower East and Affinia Tower West.

I could swear I just saw both buildings start to
sink into the ground
.

Just then, the pavement starts to rumble and shake under my feet, and a hideous mix of pipes snapping, valves hissing, earth and rock crumbling fills the air. Fire alarms in both buildings begin to bleat, along with several car alarms. And people begin pouring out of Affinia East’s lobby like sand from a bucket. They run onto the sidewalk, half-asleep, wrapped in bathrobes, a few people with coats slung over their pajamas, many with little kids and babies still asleep in their parents’ arms.

All the while, the inexorable movement of the buildings is downward. They’re being sucked into the sidewalk. It’s happening fast enough that I can see the tops of each building lowering a foot or so every few seconds.

After half of both lobbies are swallowed into the ground, the sinking stops. But the damage is done.

Affinia East is now slightly tilted, listing to the left. A cloud of white dust pours out of Affinia West’s lobby doors.

People stream out from both buildings now and stand on the sidewalk, staring at their homes with dismayed eyes. Many seem unsure of what to do or where to go. The one on-duty uniformed doorman in each scurries in and out of the building, desperately hurrying residents outside.

I’m moving closer when the glass doors and front windows on Affinia East explode, followed by Affinia West twenty seconds later. The pressure against the rising ground is too strong. The columns holding up the buildings have bent and warped.

I skirt the block and brush by a woman in a blue terry bathrobe, now covered in tiny chunks of shattered glass. Her eyes are hollow, ringed on the bottom with old makeup. She carries a big black purse and carefully brushes glass from it before clutching it tightly to her and walking away from the building. People stare open-mouthed as the buildings smoke. Taxis start to appear on the street, to take them away from here as the first hints of predawn light appear in the sky.