Robin Wasserman - Torn

“We won’t have to worry about that,” Jude said, unexpectedly, and approached the bed. Ben pressed himself against the wall, eyes wild.

“Turn over,” Jude said.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“No. No, you want to shoot me, you look me in the eye.”

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Jude said. “But I will if I have to. Turn over .”

Very slowly, Ben turned over, and lay facedown on the mattress. He was shaking. Jude bent over him. Something silver flashed in his palm as he brought his hand toward Ben’s neck. Ben yelped with pain and jerked away.

“You can sit up now,” Jude said, backing away. Ben rubbed his hand against the back of his neck, frowning as he felt something that shouldn’t be there.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“Just a little fail-safe,” Jude said. “Riley designed it. You remember how good he was with explosives.”

Ben looked like he was remembering exactly how good Riley had been with explosives, at least when it came to wiring the Brotherhood laboratory for demolition. He looked like he was also remembering that the explosion in that case had happened somewhat prematurely.

Jude lowered the gun. In his left hand he held a slim cylinder with a button at the end. “There’s a miniaturized explosive embedded beneath your skin, where your spinal cord meets your brain stem. I press this button, you go boom. Elegant, don’t you think?”

He held it out to Zo, who waited a long moment before accepting the offering. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to.

“You’re bluffing,” Ben said.

“You want a demonstration?” Jude asked. “I give Zo the word, and you’ll be smeared all over your bedroom walls. Which, admittedly, could use the decoration—but you wouldn’t be around to appreciate it, so what good would that do?”

“Lia, this is insane,” Ben said. “Tell me you know this is insane.”

“Ben, you scooped my brain out of my dead body and loaded it into a machine. Don’t talk to me about insane.”

“I want you to leave my house right now,” Ben said. “You leave, and I’m calling the secops, and we are done here. Done . You simply can’t do this. I won’t let you.”

“Ben, listen to me—”

“Right shoulder,” Jude said. “Two inches.”

Before I could ask what he was talking about, there was a loud crack. Jude barely flinched with the recoil. The bullet blasted into the wall, two inches above Ben’s right shoulder. Ben screamed.

“You understand I meant to miss,” Jude said. “Next time I won’t. Are you with me now?”

Ben nodded.

“Ready to help us?”

Ben snuck a few small glances at the hole in the wall, jerking his eyes away quickly, each time, like he preferred not to see. Then he nodded again. He was ready.

There were preparations to be made. Auden guarded Ben while we dealt with dyeing Zo’s hair and dressing her up to look as much like Ben’s daughter as possible. Zo herself took care of the fake ID—it clearly wasn’t her first attempt. While she was busy with that, I had Jude to myself, which gave me the perfect opportunity to ask why the hell he’d neglected to mention Riley’s magic mini-bomb at any point before the absolute last minute.

“Because I didn’t think of it until then?” he said.

“You just forgot ?”

“No, I mean, we needed it, so I made it up.”

We were alone in the living room, with no chance of anyone overhearing us. Still, I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You were bluffing ?”

“You thought I just happened to have the exact super-secret weapon that we needed in that exact moment?” Jude snorted.

“If it’s not an explosive, what the hell is it?”

“I palmed some stuff from his lab, just in case.”

“Just in case ?”

He shrugged. “Bad habit. But it came in handy, right? That’s where I got the injector. The ‘explosive’ is just a random chip.”

“And the detonator?”

“Remote ignition starter for the car. Never leave home without it.”

I wanted to punch him. “And when were you planning on telling me? Or Zo ?”

Jude got serious, fast. “Zo can’t find out,” he said. “The bluff works only if she believes it.”

“So you want to send her in blind and defenseless?”

“You want to give up and go home?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know I’m right,” Jude said.

I didn’t know. But I wasn’t going to argue. I didn’t need his permission to tell Zo the truth; I just had to figure out whether I should. So I pretended he’d convinced me, and shifted the conversation to what would happen if and when we got ourselves onto the server ship. We’d have one weapon, we’d have one hostage—and we’d be extremely deep in hostile territory with admittedly no clue as to what we’d do next. Playing it by ear wasn’t exactly a comfortable option, but it wasn’t clear we had an alternative. Ben would be able to guide us to the right part of the ship, and from there it would be up to us to figure out exactly what his team was planning on doing to the servers. I was more convinced than ever that he was clueless, which we could use to our advantage—but if he turned out to be a better liar than I’d thought, if he was leading the phase three charge, then we would deal with that, too. One weapon, one hostage. Worst case, we could try to alert the ship’s security team, revealing BioMax’s plans along with our presence, and probably, if the rumors were right about the on-board lawlessness, getting us all killed. But that was the thing we all understood, even if we hadn’t talked about it: There was a plan to get ourselves safely on board.

There was no plan to get off.

By four a.m. on Sunday we were ready. We drove to the loading zone in silence. Ben sat motionless in the back seat, looking neither at us nor the gun. He’d dropped any vestige of fighting back. He did what we said, followed our orders, and every hour, seemed to turn deeper into himself. I knew what it was like to give yourself over to someone else’s decision making, following an external voice and silencing your own. But he was going to have to wake up soon, because in a few hours Jude, Auden, and I would be trapped inside a shipping crate; Ben would be on his own with only my sister and a dubious bluff to keep him in line. He was the only one who could talk us all onto the ship, and I knew he believed his life depended on it. I just didn’t know how much he cared.

The BioMax equipment crates were being warehoused in a secure facility near the docks. Ben guided us through the shadows and pressed his thumb to the security pad. A panel the size of a garage door creaked open. The interior was dark, but I could make out the dim outlines of towering stacks of crates.

“Where’s the security?” Jude asked, suspicious.

“Coordinates of this dock are on a need-to-know basis,” Ben said dully. “For something like this, the best security is no security.”

Jude shook his head. “Bureaucratic brilliance never ceases to amaze me.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the stacks. “You’re going to hide us in a crate and get us on the ship, right?” I asked Ben.

“That’s the plan, isn’t it?”

“So what happens when we end up at the bottom of a giant stack like this? We just wait a few months for someone to get around to unpacking us?”

“I’ll make sure you end up somewhere private, where you can climb out and… do whatever you’re going to do.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

“You’re going to have to trust me,” Ben said.