Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

There was a pleasing pop, and then Rishi drew in a screeching breath.

Evan pulled himself upright and looked at Rishi.

For a moment they were eye to eye.

And then Rishi toppled to a knee. He clutched his ribs, his mouth guppying.

“Your lung is collapsing right now,” Evan told him. “I punctured it with your sixth rib. That drowning sensation? It’s from negative pressure building in your chest cavity. It’ll get worse.”

Rishi fell back onto his rear end, his legs squirming on the carpet. His friends looked on in horror.

“You will suffocate from this,” Evan said. “Unless.”

He fished the stainless-steel pen tube from his pocket and held it up. Zack and Scotty watched him, their pale faces bathed in sweat. Evan flipped the tube at them. Zack bobbled it but managed to hang on.

“An emergency chest decompression.” Evan stepped forward. “Excuse me.”

Zack and Scotty parted, and Evan knelt over Rishi, whose mouth was stretched in an oval, his face purpling. Evan peeled Rishi’s shirt aside and used his thumb to find the second rib space in the midclavicular line. He looked up.

“Come here.”

Scotty fell to his knees.

“Put your finger right here. No. Here.”

Scotty complied, his hand trembling.

“You need to punch the tube through into the chest cavity to relieve pressure,” Evan said.

Tears dotted Rishi’s cheeks. He waved his head back and forth, clawing the carpet, his lips struggling for words. He mouthed, Do it. Do it .

“One of you probably should,” Evan said. “Decide among yourselves. Because I’m not going to.”

As Rishi thrashed from side to side, Zack and Scotty started shouting at each other, fumbling the pen tube between them. Rishi’s Pixel phone had dribbled out of his pocket. Evan scooped it up and pressed Rishi’s thumb to the screen to open it.

No one seemed to notice.

Evan stood up. Looked down at Rishi. His eyes bulged, the sclera pronounced.

“You could have left at any time,” Evan said. “You had a choice. Until you didn’t.”

He walked out, Zack and Scotty still locked in a panicked argument behind him. He’d just reached the stairs when a bellow of pain rolled up the hall, Rishi’s breath coming back online. Moving down the stairs, Evan entered the security setting of Rishi’s phone and updated the thumbprint setting to match his own.

Crossing the front yard, he fished the gum out from beneath his upper lip with his tongue and blew a bubble.

Evan drove Cammy back to an apartment building worn down by too many generations of tenants with no stake in ownership. Stucco with missing chunks, weedy front lawn littered with cigarette butts and dog droppings, a bicycle wheel locked to a parking meter, the frame long liberated.

She hesitated in the driver’s seat. “Can you walk me in?”

He climbed out and followed her up a set of splintering stairs to her apartment. She clicked on the lights, peering into the dark bedroom nervously.

Evan said, “Want me to check the space for you?”

“Yes, please. I’m gonna go change.”

She cast off his hoodie and disappeared into the bathroom. The blinds were drawn, the sheets mussed, plastic water bottles collecting on the nightstand—the environment of someone who slept a lot. He searched the closet and looked beneath the bed to set her mind at ease. The place called to mind Andre’s sad little room above the Chinese restaurant.

A thin stack of bills and work scholarship time sheets rested on an IKEA desk in the corner, laying out Cammy’s hours and telling a familiar story of mounting student debt. A grade-school class picture of herself was tucked into the frame of a mirror above the bureau, a reminder of who she used to be.

One thing he’d learned time and again was that you never could tell what kind of private hell people were fighting through.

He heard the hinges squeak behind him and turned around.

Cammy was standing in the bathroom doorway wearing only a bra and panties. She had a bruise on her lily-white skin across the strokes of her ribs.

He lowered his gaze.

Her toenails, painted baby-girl pink, were chipped. He thought about her paying for the pedicure out of the hours she spent working the front desk at the Foothill College Fitness Center. That school picture—third grade, maybe fourth.

So much humanity reduced to flesh and function.

“Do I owe you anything?” The question was strained; she’d had to force it out.

He felt the words like arrows to his sternum. He kept his eyes lowered. “What if everything you thought about yourself was wrong?”

“God, am I that fucked up?”

He crouched, picked up his hoodie where she’d sloughed it onto the floor, and offered it to her. She took it, her head drawn back. Then pulled it on, zipped it up. The waistband touched the tops of her knees.

“You were cursed with being pretty, which means the world told you what you were supposed to be before you could figure it out for yourself,” he said. “But what if who you could be is something vastly more important and powerful? Some men are afraid of that. Especially in an attractive young woman. Do you want to let them write your story?”

“Important.” Her nostrils flared. “Powerful.”

“Sure.” He held her gaze. “What if?”

Tears ran down her cheeks though she made no sound.

He crossed to the cheap desk, picked up the phone, and called the operator. He asked to be put through to a rape-crisis hotline.

After a few rings, an older woman’s voice answered. “Counseling.”

Evan said, “A young woman here has been through a traumatic experience.”

The woman said, “Who’s this?”

Evan turned and held out the phone to Cammy. She stood staring at him, her arms folded, tears still running silently down her face.

She uncrossed her arms.

She took the phone.

He walked past her to the door. As he shut it behind him, he heard her say tentatively, “Hello?”

A pause. He eased the door shut. Her voice carried faintly through the panels.

“My name is Cameron,” she said. “Someone hurt me.”

48Better Than Real Life

Evan called Joey on his drive back to the Stanford Park Hotel.

She picked up with a full mouth and made some sort of vowel sound in greeting.

“What are you eating?”

“Room service,” Joey said, “might be my favorite thing in the world.”

“You got the footage from my contact lenses?”

“The good doctor’s supervillain lair. Uh, yeah. His tech is lit .”

The streetlights of Palo Alto rolled by overhead, an upside-down river of LED blue. “It’s less lit when it might be trying to kill you.”

“You’re such a drama queen,” she said.

He felt a faint throb on his forehead where the defused robotic bee had struck him. After the evening he’d had, he could muster no retort.

Fortunately, Joey was not one to let a silence linger. “I read some of the code off that laptop on his lab bench. A lot to dig through. I’ll need a day or two and a Costco pallet of Red Bull.”

“I have a Pixel phone for you, too,” Evan said. “One of Molleken’s guys. He looks to be logged in to a couple databases so you can poke around behind the firewall. I changed the security thumbprint to match mine so you can get in.”

She snorted. “I can get in without that. Those things only record partials. I have a digital master fingerprint I built using the most common whorls, loops, and arches.” She took another bite of something and mashed it around in her mouth. “Works seventy-two percent of the time.”

“How come every time I talk to you, I feel less intelligent?”

“I just hold up a mirror, X.”