Agent Quinn awoke in the ambulance. It was dark. Although the front of the house had been blown open, the rest of the damage appeared superficial. The structure was solidly intact. Fireman and police were clearing the interior, which had not caught on fire.
“Where is she?” he asked in muffled tones through his oxygen mask.
“Relax.” One of the EMTs took his shoulder and leaned him back. “Your partner is already at the hospital.”
“Is she okay?”
“I haven’t heard. Just relax. You’ll see her when—"
“Then what the hell are we waiting for?”
He struggled to get free. He was a big man, and fearing they wouldn’t be able to control him, the medics injected him with a sedative.
Quinn didn’t see Nio until much later, when he stumbled out of his room in a hospital gown two sizes too small. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t moving. She was sitting by herself, motionless, in the hall. She had a dark blanket around her shoulders. Her forearms were crisscrossed in old scars. Her empty eyes stared into space. They didn’t even blink.
He shuffled over to her with latticed artificial legs. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
He plopped into the chair. Bending his midsection raised the gown over his thighs and exposed the bottom of his testicles, which draped over the seat cushion. Nio saw them and laughed. It wasn’t loud but it was deep and genuine. Her eyes squinted to slits and her chest shook in heaves. Quinn looked down. Then he laughed as well.
Their laughter faded after a minute and neither spoke.
“Thanks for the push,” he said.
The broad, flat surface of Maureen’s living room table had caught the main brunt of the blast like a sail and forced them through the front window. They both had severe lacerations. Quinn went first and landed on a lawn sign, which broke under his weight and impaled him in the lower back to a depth of three inches.
“We shouldn’t even have been there,” Nio breathed.
She inhaled sharply then, like she just remembered she had left her oven on, and looked away.
Quinn knew what had triggered it—or could guess. She’d had a flash, an image of Maureen perhaps, or of the explosion. Or she’d heard that awful popping sound in her head. He’d never forget it.
“It was still my choice,” he began. “You can’t blame yourself—”
“I know it’s not my fault,” Nio interrupted. “Okay? You don’t have to say it.” She paused. “But that’s not what it feels like.”
“Believe it or not, I know how that goes.” He was looking down at his legs.
They were quiet again. A nurse in green scrubs passed in a hurry.
“You didn’t even look,” Quinn said.
“What?”
“You could’ve made it out the slider,” he explained. “Couple steps. You didn’t even look. You just dove at me.”
He took her hand and shook it once. She saw the look of shock on his face as the electric field in her skull radiated through her body into his and their bioelectrics modulated in unison. Without knowing what it was he had just felt, Quinn let go.
Local police arrived and took statements, followed very quickly by a pair of agents from Quinn’s office. He debriefed them as best he could and was given a date for a mandatory post-hazard interview. After that, he slept. Despite that he had the more serious wound, he was discharged first. Nio had a loud ringing in her ears that seemed to increase in intensity the quieter it became. The doctors were worried she might have a concussion, especially given the severe headaches she reported. When they saw the tubelike implants inside the bone of her skull, they wanted further tests, which she refused. Eventually, she left over their objections.
The following day passed in a daze. The pair were sent to a nearby roadside motel. The sign out front said “Bikers Welcome.” They got adjoining rooms. Quinn took a long hot shower. Nio tried to sleep but spent most of the time flipping channels or watching The Rockford Files. She tried to sleep but kept seeing Maureen’s body pop apart, like a microwaved doll. She stepped outside for the first time that afternoon and found their rental car had been replaced. Local PD was parked near the entrance. A guard. Quinn’s door was open and Nio shuffled in her striped socks to look inside. He was showered and suited. He was worried about his job. He was supposed to be following the rules. She wondered how much trouble she had gotten him into.
He spun slowly and she could see he was on the phone. He kept nodding and saying “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” She waved and he waved back and turned around again. She walked to the brick-walled office and poured herself a cup of coffee. Surprisingly, it wasn’t terrible. When she returned to her room, she noticed the car was gone. She sat on the bed and searched on the TV browser for news of the explosion. There was none, but that gave her an idea. She searched instead for coverage of Sol’s death. The only broadcast she could find was by a New York affiliate, which began with an elderly anchor declaring that “The world lost one of its greatest minds today” before cutting live to a reporter at the scene. Several members of the audience were interviewed. As was typical of broadcast news, the aired reactions were no more than a sentence or two long. The word “shocked” was repeated several times. After giving a description of the factual circumstances, the reporter—a staid, mustachioed black man—summarized Sol’s work at the Institute, making several factual blunders.
The only interesting part of the 90-second segment was the end, an oddly whimsical addition for what was effectively a man’s obituary. A woman in the audience, who had stayed until the body was carted away, claimed to have felt a strong sense of foreboding in the minutes leading up to Sol’s collapse and subsequent demise.
“And then I gripped my heart,” she said on camera, mimicking the action. She was a large woman and very colorfully dressed. “And I just knew something terrible was going to happen. The man next to me must’ve seen it because he asked if I was okay.”
Alone, it meant nothing. But it seemed several others in the audience had also felt a grim presence, although they were much less vocal.
“I dunno,” a bright-eyed university student said reluctantly. “I can’t really describe it. It just felt like a bad situation all of a sudden.”
“What do you mean?” the solemn reporter asked off camera.
The kid smiled awkwardly. He either wouldn’t or couldn’t articulate it, and the segment cut back to the live report, where the unsmiling correspondent made a few concluding remarks and passed the baton back to the studio. The online segment stopped as the anchors, an older man and much younger woman, were making their brief condolences.
“Our hearts go out to the friends of Sol Einstein,” the woman said, “and to what can only be called his family, the other eleven remarkable products of—”
And that was it. The video stopped, frozen on an image of the group of them at about age 20. Che had already grown his beard. He hadn’t bothered to dress formally, as they’d been requested to. His eyes were restless. Nio was looking at him. Adoringly.
She closed the video, which returned her to the network affiliate’s main page. By the size of the headline, it seemed the internet was abuzz at the death of an attractive 19-year-old wannabe singer, Jules Ringer, at the hands of her lover, who had literally crushed her to death during sex. The man, 26-year-old Jethro Dawson, had voluntarily replaced his arms with cybernetic implants which he claimed had given insufficient feedback to warn him of the danger. Online, everyone was suddenly an expert in haptic systems and either defended the young man or declared his guilt in stark sentences free of any uncertainties.
Nio turned the TV off. She was sitting on a bench in a little grove near the road, planted to give the motel some privacy, when Quinn came looking for her.
“He wants us,” he said, disappearing back into his room.
Nio swallowed the rest of her drink and followed. Quinn was sitting on the bed facing the dresser counter, on which a tablet had been propped. On the screen was Special Agent Erving.
“She’s here,” Quinn said, motioning her over.
Nio sat on the bed next to him, empty coffee cup in her teeth.
“Ms. Tesla,” Special Agent Erving began, “I’m not sure if you realize it, but you do not have a Get Out of Jail Free Card. I will not let the Bureau’s good faith be manipulated. As of this morning, I had papers prepared to send you back to South Dakota—a mere five hours from your location, I might add. That’s as far as you got before you blew up some poor woman’s house.”
Nio pulled the cup from her mouth. “I didn’t blow—”
“You know what I mean. This is unacceptable. However. I accept that a murder has been committed—and that you gave us a credible tip that this man was a threat. That in no way justifies your actions, which I believe directly contributed to the death of the Arneson woman. But Agent Quinn here disagrees. He seems to think the two of you still have something to offer. He’s asked for 48 hours to demonstrate that, and since the Assistant Director is in DC and I won’t have to brief him on this nonsense until then, I’m inclined to give him all the rope he wants. Frankly, at this point, I have no reason not to. He swears the two of you will show significant progress on the Einstein case before my meeting, something that will at least mitigate the Bureau’s exposure in this incident by proving our faith in you was not completely misplaced. But understand this.” He held up a finger. “I will not walk into that meeting empty handed. Either Agent Quinn is right and you will hand me something tangible to give the Director, or I will give him Agent Quinn’s resignation letter, wherein he takes full blame for the tragedy in Sleepy Eye.”
Nio turned, but Quinn kept his eyes on the screen.
“I have you both booked on the red eye from Chicago. From now on, I want the two of you right here, where I can keep an eye on you. Because this is it. As of this moment, the both of you are out of strikes. I expect to see some clear evidence that acceding to Dr. Chang’s request wasn’t the worst decision of my career. Do you understand?”
Nio nodded.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“I understand,” she said.
“And you.” Special Agent Erving turned to Quinn. “You and I are going to have a conversation later that you will remember for a very long time. You need to decide what your priorities are, Agent Quinn. I’m not gonna ask if you understand me because that’s your job. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good hunting.”
He jabbed the screen and the call ended.
Quinn stood. “Get dressed,” he said without looking. “We’re on the road in five.”
“Why the hurry?”
“I wanna beat rush hour. I told Erving we had a lead to follow in Chicago. You made sure your friend was gonna be there. What’s her name?” He produced a notebook from his pocket. That was new. “Chancery Brontë.”
Quinn tossed a plastic bag from a discount department store on the bed. He took his keys and papers from the round table near the door, which was very similar to the one that had saved their lives.
“I’m gonna go check out,” he said.
“Agent Quinn.”
He stopped.
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” he said.
“Thank you anyway.”
Nio watched him go. Then she looked in the bag. Inside was a change of clothes—a baggy jumpsuit, a T-shirt with no blood on it, and a new pair of striped socks.
“No panties,” she whispered.
They didn’t eat. They didn’t speak. They just drove. It was hours, in fact, until Agent Quinn barked a question out of the blue.
“How’d you know what she was gonna do?”
Nio woke up. Her head was leaning against the window. There was drool coming from her mouth. She wiped it.
“What?”
“How’d you know? At the house.”
“Just a guess.” Nio swallowed a yawn with half-closed lips. “What about you? You came running quick.”
Quinn was quiet a moment. “I found a picture of you guys in the bedroom. I figured that couldn’t be a coincidence.”
“A picture?”
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled it out. It was wrinkled from when he had clutched it in the explosion. He had put it in his pocket and forgotten to mention it. He handed it to her.
Nio flattened the clipping. It was a group photo. Everyone was standing together smiling and joking—except for her. They seemed so perfectly normal, like any group of teens.
“I left it out of my statement,” he said.
She noticed his clothes then. “Where’d you get the suit?”
“They cut the last one off me.”
She nodded and looked at the photo. “You know... I can’t remember the last time we were all together. With Sol dead... I guess we never will be.” She paused. “Did you know I didn’t even go to his funeral? I was in jail.”
“Can you please just answer me? Honestly?”
“Okay.”
“How did you know she was going to explode?”
“She called me a soulless devil. We actually got that a lot growing up. All of us.”
“In China?”
“Taiwan. We were boarded at an international school. Rich expats. Businessmen’s and diplomats’ kids. From all over. Bourgeois as fuck. Lotta money over there, as you probably know.”
“That’s why you don’t have an accent?”
She nodded. “The school was founded by Americans. In the old days, when the Chinese came here, they made a Chinatown in every city and more or less stayed inside. Now that Westerners are going to China, no one contemplates that the reverse might happen, despite that in the old, old, old days, when Westerners first arrived in sailboats, they lived in walled quarters. Where I grew up was practically its own country. Totally private. I’ve never even had a public social media profile.”
“Ever?”
“When I was maybe 11 or 12, some of my normie friends thought I was exaggerating and made one on my behalf. You should’ve seen the comments.” Nio shook her head. “Some people have a lot of time on their hands.”
“I don’t get it.”
Nio smiled. “We’re clones,” she explained. “Made in a lab.”
“But you were born, right? I mean we still need a womb for that kind of thing.”
“It doesn’t matter. If you believe life begins at conception, that it’s a holy communion between a man and a woman, that homosexuality is a sin, all of that, then by definition, I’m an abomination against the Lord.”
Quinn looked skeptical.
Nio sighed. “It would take me too long to explain.”
“No, I get that part. I was raised Orthodox.” He waggled his head. “More or less. We got as many hang-ups as anyone. But that’s crazy. You didn’t ask for it. You were just born one day, same as the rest of us. If they want to go after someone, they should go after the doctors.”
“They did,” she said grimly.
“Okay... but I still don’t get how you got from that to human combustion.”
“I dunno. It just popped in, I guess. You found the picture. What did you think she was gonna do?”
“I thought she mighta had a gun or a knife or something. I didn’t think she was gonna turn into Lo fucking Pan.”
“Thunder.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Lo Pan that exploded.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I was standing right next to her. I woulda clocked a weapon. And when I saw the look on her face, it occurred to me that he would’ve seen my replies on his posts. Everything else he did had been so secretive. But Maureen was on the front fucking page. He made sure she told people, he made it so she had no choice—because he wanted me to find her. There could only be one reason for that. And when she did the scratch and sniff...” Nio shrugged.
“But a human bomb?”
“In testing, they used aerosols as a chemical trigger. Aerosols can be absorbed quickly through the lungs. It’s also a hedge against volunteers changing their minds. Can’t stop breathing, right? Suicide bombers, you know, they back out. We hardly ever hear about it. When you’re fighting a holy war, you never want to appear anything but righteous, especially to the numskulls you’re recruiting. They never could find a viable compound, though. The chemicals work, but they’re easily detectable. They evaporate through the pores. We sweat them out, basically. At that point, you may as well use conventional explosives, which are cheaper and easier to hide.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re so suburban. It’s cute. This might come as a shock to you, Agent Quinn, but there are organizations in the world, not just governments, that have been working on that technology for at least a decade—ever since that diet guru came up with a way to burn fat really fast.”
“I thought that was lethal.”
“It is. But think about what you could do if you could make it go all at once. You ever had a grill catch fire? Think about how much energy is released from just a few tablespoons of hamburger fat. Think about what a terrorist cell or malicious state could do with the ultimate smart bomb. You could be frisked, X-rayed, walk through a metal detector. You could even recruit a target’s trusted associates unwittingly by sneaking the compound into their food or whatever. The math is actually really interesting. Stored fat is chemically inert, basically, but because the average person has so much, you only need to activate a fraction to get a modest explosion—which is plenty if your goal is terror or assassination. The compound alters the contents of fat cells. It’s painful but self-catalyzing. If Maureen hadn’t been so thin, the reaction would’ve cascaded through her fat tissue rather than gone piecemeal.”
“Meaning?”
“She would’ve exploded all together and with a lot more force rather than one part at a time.”
“In other words, if Maureen Arneson hadn’t lost so much weight recently, we’d both be dead.”
“Shit.” Nio sat up. “I didn’t think about that. You’re totally right. He didn’t anticipate the effect the experience would have on her. The stress. Not only was her body on high alert all the time, burning more calories, she probably stopped eating. She lost weight, which would’ve messed up his calculations.” Nio got quiet. Her face grew pale. “He’ll be more careful next time.”
Quinn shook his head. “This is why they need to pass that damn law.”
“What law?”
Her turned to her, surprised. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, sorry. I don’t really watch the news.”
“The law your buddy Dr. Chang was testifying for up on Capitol Hill the other day.”
Nio scowled. “What?”
“They debated it for two years. When it passed the House, it was a huge deal. The internet freaked out. There were demonstrations in LA, DC. How do you not know that?”
She shrugged.
“Okay, this is what I was trying to explain to Erving. A minute ago, you said you knew how to spot a weapon. Back at the sheriff’s office, you shook down that secretary on the phone like you’d done that kind of thing a dozen times. And then all that stuff at the diner.”
Nio was quiet.
“Wow,” Quinn breathed. “Still don’t trust me.”
“It’s not about trust,” she said. “It’s about safety.”
“Safety?”
“Yes. You’re a detective. Figure it out. And for what it’s worth,” she added before he could object, “I’m legitimately not trying to screw your career.”
He laughed. “What difference does that make, your intentions? Intentions don’t mean shit. Intentions—Fuck...” He rubbed his beardless face like he expected there to be hair. “Whatever. It’s not your fault. If I’d done what I was supposed to, then I wouldn’t be in this godforsaken situation in the first place.”
He watched the road.
“What did you do?” she asked.
He turned to her as she had to him the day before, making it clear by his face that he wasn’t interested in sharing when she refused to do the same.
“Don’t worry about Erving,” he said. “He can bluster all he wants, but he couldn’t send you back even if he wanted to. Not right away, at least.”
“Oh, I got it. The FBI gets someone out of jail and a day later, a house blows up and a woman is killed. Sending me back immediately makes the prima facie case that it was irresponsible to let me out in the first place. And at that point, I got no reason not to go shouting to the papers that I told them something might happen. They gotta make it look like it was all just a terrible accident and everything is hunky-dory.”
“He’s right that we have to come up with something, though. As soon as all this blows over, they’re gonna ditch you.” He turned to her to make sure she got it. “You know that, right?”
“I know,” she said softly.
“That means we don’t have a lot of time. Are you sure this is the right play?”
“You mean maybe Chancery just happened to call Sol right before his death?” Nio shook her head. “No way that’s a coincidence.” She studied at the photo in her hand. Chancery and Sol were standing next to each other. “I understand why your guys didn’t see it, though. You’d have to know her. Them. There’s history.” She held up the photo. “Can I keep this?”
“Be my guest.” Quinn glanced at it in her hand. “I suppose it’s a forgone conclusion you’re not gonna tell me about ‘E. Guevara.’ You’re holding his hand in the picture.”
“They discouraged us from dating each other. He was a sort of rebellious crush, I guess. I used to think I really loved him.”
“I would think that’d be awkward, dating like that.”
“There are... were twelve of us. It was complicated.”
“You use that word a lot.” Agent Quinn rubbed his freshly shaved neck. He’d nicked himself in several spots. “Anything I need to know about this one we’re about to ambush?”
“Chancery? Yeah. She’s a total bitch.”
“Seems to be a theme with you all,” he said under his breath.
Nio smiled.