Jay scrubs at the blood spot on her tennis shoe with her thumb and a gob of spit, hurried by the knowledge that Hardy will be there any moment. It’s swelter-hot on the gravel back road, and she’s doused in the sound of cicadas from the forest behind her and the quiet knowledge of what she’s left in that forest to rot.
An engine growls through the humid air, and Jay straightens up like a kid caught sneaking treats from the pantry. Ivy gnarls up through the rusted mailbox by the side of the road; she sets her elbow atop it, trying for casual, but flinches back when the mailbox creaks ominously. By the time Hardy arrives, Jay’s standing contrapposto, thumb tucked in one pocket. The thin smile stretched across her lips is taut as a rubber band.
“Loosen up,” Hardy says, spitting a wad of tobacco out the rolled-down window. “You look guilty as hell.”
At Jay’s silence, he laughs, grinning wide. “Hop in quick,” he tells her. “Don’t want to be here when the poor sap’s medtag alerts, yeah? Besides,” he adds, “I’m wasting AC.”
So she slings herself into the passenger seat, and the car leaps away down the road, and in the woods, the cicadas sing homilies for the dead.
Thomas Monroe, the poor sap in question, wakes up seventeen hours later in a patchbag the gauzy yellow color of chicken stock. The bag clings to his limbs, tiny patchbots skittering across his skin. He can feel them everywhere—along the throbbing punctures in his chest, squirming through the curls of his hair, marching inside his nose—and he bucks in one painful, abbreviated movement before he hears someone through the bag, voice muffled. Sound is blocked by the patchbag as much as light.
He makes out a phrase—“put him under”—and feels the cool prick of patchbot stingers against his skin, chill spreading. He’s out before he can remember he was dead.
News anchor. That’s what Tom hears first, what he can identify through the ache slowly ebbing out of his head. He barely knows he’s conscious, and still he can recognize the particular tenor of an anchor’s voice, the matter-of-fact tone, the enunciation. They don’t hire human anchors anymore, not with so many years of news broadcasts to train up cheaper algorithms, but even the algos have their tics.
This one he recognizes, his brain pawing through a wreckage of neurons to identify the voice. Yes. The bland-looking redhead from Horizon Updates. The characteristic Horizon jingle marks a transition as she rattles off breaking news reports. It’s a jumble of words, most of which Tom still can’t parse, and he’s about to tune out and drift off again when he hears his own name.
“Thomas Monroe is still hospitalized, recovering from complete resuscitation after his murder. His assailants remain unidentified. Police suspect that Thomas’ killing may be linked to the robbery that occurred just minutes after his death. The Monroe family is offering a reward—”
“Turn that off. It’ll upset him.” His mother’s voice. Tom’s nose tells him it’s sharpened by coffee and impatience.
“The boy’s still sleeping, Rose, it’s not—”
“His breathing changed.” He hears the click of his mother’s fingernails against ceramic, the tic of a mug set down against a table. “Call the nurse. We can’t wait any longer, we need his testimony.”
Tom settles into the gentle haze of whatever drugs they’ve got cycling through him for a moment of respite before the inevitable. When the nurse bustles in and keys a few commands into the console at his side, the cocktail changes, alertness sizzling through his veins.
He blinks. The nurse, a kindly-looking fat man, ratchets Tom’s bed up so he’s nearly upright. Then he’s gone.
Rose Monroe has a laptop set across her thighs. She finishes some unknown but no doubt vital task and shuts it, refocusing her attention on him. Her body language is tight, controlled: perfect posture, creaseless clothing, a brush of makeup that enhances the severity of her features. She was an electrical engineer before she worked her way to a fortune as the CEO of a private space exploration firm, and the way she looks at him now, Tom feels like a faulty design. Sure, he’s been in this position more times than he cares to count, but hey, at least this one wasn’t his fault.
Uncle Elliot couldn’t look more different from his younger sister. Where Rose is clean and pressed, Elliot is rumpled and crumpled, from his mussed black hair to his scuffed-up shoes. He’s leaning over with his forearms braced against his knees, looking concerned. Tom’s not surprised to see Elliot—his uncle has showed up for every one of Tom’s revamps, from his early suicide attempts to the later successes. He is surprised to see his mom.
Then again, the anchor had mentioned a robbery. That might do it . . .
“So,” Tom says, annoyed that his voice comes out gravelly and weak. He coughs. Better. “How much did the culprits get away with? Gotta be an awful lot, if you’rehere.”
Rose rolls her eyes. “Thomas, really. You’ve been murdered.”
Tom lifts the thin hospital sheet and scans himself, then lets it fall. “I don’t know, I look pretty good,” he says. “The anti-scarring tech’s getting better. I can’t even tell where they got me.”
“Shot in the chest,” Elliot says, softly.
“Elliot,” his mother cuts in. “Don’t give details. We need Tom to remember. Tom—is there anything you can tell us? Faces, memories, anything that might give us a lead? We have to catch these criminals, Tom, you understand that.”
“’Cause they killed me?”
“Of course.” She’s too smooth to hesitate. But he catches a flicker of irritation, a tightening at the corners of her eyes, and he laughs. It hurts something still healing in his chest—he bets there are still bots in there, tiny ones, doing the work the patchbots haven’t gotten to—but he laughs anyways.
“How much did they take?” He repeats. “Must be an awful lot.”
Rose Monroe sighs. And lists a number.
Tom stops laughing. His fingers clutch at the hospital sheets. “Mom, really.”
Her mouth is a thin line. “Really. They got it out through your bank account.”
“My account . . . ” Dread slices a line through his chest. “But I didn’t—the Stimplant—you can’t make me agree to the—”
“You’re not expected to abide by our prior agreement, Thomas. Honestly. To bring that up now? The agreement would never hold up in court, anyways, not with you dead during the transaction,” she adds, sounding almost wistful. “How’re your thumbs, by the way? They’re new.”
Tom wiggles his fingers. He does notice, with annoyance, that the patchbots have cleaned away his violin calluses—those’ll be hell to build back up. But as for his thumbs, he doesn’t feel a difference at all, can’t even tell where the new ones attach. “They cut them off? For fingerprints?”
“And they spoofed your voice. Rather well. The authorities think it was someone who’d spent time with you, Thomas. Gotten good, recent recordings.” Rose leans closer. “Come on, Tom. What do you remember?”
And this is the scary thing. The reason he’s been verbally fencing with his mother instead of telling her what he knows she wants to hear.
Tom makes a fist, opens it, closes it again. “I . . . I don’t remember.”
Rose sighs. A familiar sigh—disappointed, unsurprised. “All right, Elliot, I concede,” she says. “Call in the doctor.”
“Your last brain scan was two months ago,” Dr. Abe says, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “If I’m reading your chart right, we had you in every two weeks during the periods of active self-harm—”
“Out of precaution, not expectation,” his mother interrupts.
“—and eased into a monthly schedule when you’d shown promise with the new antidepressants. Now, Tom, you passed away in an extremely remote area. Your killers likely knew that it would take a long time for the appropriate aid to reach you. By the time the medical drones got there, your hippocampal neurons were dead and bloated. With your saved scans, we were able to reconstruct the brain tissue—and, therefore, the memories—you’d accumulated up until two months ago. But since then . . . ”
Dr. Abe shrugs. “We scanned the dead cells. There are still fine-control bots in your head now, doing their best to reconstruct your recent neural connections down to the dendrites. But it’ll be patchy. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to access memories of the past two months. Does that make sense?”
Tom opens his mouth to respond when his brain goes on the fritz. One moment he’s in the hospital bed. The next he’s standing on the beach, bare toes crimping wet sand, staring out at the seafoam. He hears her voice beside him. “No strings attached,” she says, and he feels the back of her hand brush the back of his. “Sounds nice.”
With a shiver, he’s back to himself. “What was that?”
Dr. Abe tilts her head, then nods. “Ah. You may be remembering already.”
“Why was it so . . . ” Tom raises his eyebrows, helpless to explain.
“Oh. This is . . . newer technology,” the doctor says. “It’s likely that returning memories will be vivid. The bots are messing around in your head, after all.” She smiles. “Though they know what they’re doing. What did you remember?”
He opens his mouth when he’s struck by the sensation, strong, that whoever he was with on the beach needs protecting. Whoever it was, she can’t get caught up in all of this.
“A restaurant,” he says. “I went out to eat. God, what a burger.”
The doctor leaves soon afterward, his mother close on her heels. Tom closes his eyes so Uncle Elliot won’t bother him and focuses on the lingering taste of saltwater on his tongue.
The first time Jay saw Thomas Monroe was through a rifle scope. It’d been Hardy who’d taken the pictures. He was ex-military and, Jay had always thought, slightly off. She’d wanted to ask if the gun had been loaded and decided she was better off not knowing.
He tossed the photos down, glossy and blown up big, and tapped them with one thick finger. “This is the job,” he said, words chewed around in his mouth with the wad of nicotine gum he always kept tucked in his cheek. “Monroe family. The space cadets. You know ‘em?”
“The job is the kid?” Jay knew Hardy somewhat distantly—they ran in the same networks in the city. She’d worked with him directly only once before, a grift he’d needed a good face for. (He was excellent with weapons and tech, but sorely lacking in the face department.) Hardy was mostly professional, but he set her on edge; he was the type that didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. She’d heard a rumor he’d double-crossed a partner for a big score a few years back.
She’d been all too happy to leave him in the rearview. Leave all of it, really. Until a few months back, when the life she’d built so carefully for herself came tumbling down. Until Damon.
So when Hardy had reached out to her through a mutual contact, promising an easy mark and a sizable payout . . .
Well. One last job to get her back on her feet, and she was out for good. Just enough to get her away from the city, settled down somewhere no one would care to look.
“Yeah, the kid,” Hardy said. “Thomas Monroe. Junior at WU. We need twenty hours of voice recs from him, minimum.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You manufacturing a voiceprint?”
He smiled, showing teeth. “You’ve been out of the business too long, Jaybird. Watch yourself.”
Yes, all right. No unnecessary questions. She would compartmentalize. All she needed to know was what he needed from her. Hell, she didn’t even know if this was Hardy’s job, or one he’d been hired to do. Above her pay grade. If she wanted to keep her head, she’d leave it that way.
“Monroe family, space cadets,” she echoed Hardy’s words, neatly tiptoeing away from any unpleasant topics, and smoothed her hands against the table. Grounding herself. As far as being inconspicuous went, the room Hardy had rented out was tops: below them was a ghost kitchen, churning out online orders to a constant stream of delivery drivers. No restaurant cams to collect data as customers ate meant none to scrub out images of Jay and Hardy meeting. It smelled nice up here, too, of curry and spices. A combination at war with the way the hair at the nape of Jay’s neck always prickled when she was on a job.
All of Hardy’s stuff was piled in one corner, laptops and cords and a few briefcases she was certain she’d get offed for looking inside. A guy like Hardy kept to himself. She was playing with fire, working with him.
She did a couple of mental calculations. “The Monroe kid’s still in school?”
“Three more weeks before they split for summer, yeah,” Hardy said. “Manufacture a meeting and do whatever it is you do, but get me those recordings. We’ve got two months.” He grinned and tapped his wrist. “Clock’s ticking.”
She caught Thomas on his way out of orchestra the next day. She should’ve felt off-kilter on WU’s campus—she was a few years too old for college—but she was on a job, and somehow that cut all the nerves away with the cold knife of necessity. And although late-spring humidity hung in the air, presaging summer, it was a pleasant day. Clear skies. Sun. Easy to blend in with the clusters of students out enjoying the weather, easy to angle herself towards Thomas as he walked towards her, absorbed in his phone, violin case dangling from his other hand.
Too easy, she thought, and ran directly into him.
She went down hard. The fall looked good, and she knew it; felt her knee split open against the cobbles. Superficial, but he wouldn’t know that.
“Oh my god!” He tugged his headphones down around his neck and dropped to his knees, pushing the violin aside. “Oh my god, are you okay?”
His voice was nice, a little gravelly. She imagined it stretching like spun sugar in the air, carried from his throat to the array of microphones tucked into her blouse, her belt. Keep talking, kid. “Ahh,” she moaned, wincing as she drew her knee up. Oh, excellent, she’d torn her leggings. She poked at the edge of the cut she’d produced—it was bleeding nicely. “Damn.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said—and meant it, too, that was nice. All his focus was on her knee; she, conversely, was cataloging every detail of him. Wide-set brown eyes, lighter than they’d seemed in the photos; cheeks rouged by the cold; a face that hid nothing, baring his concern for her in all its naked splendor. “Can I . . . can I do anything?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “If you’d just write my dissertation for me, that’d fix me right up.”
He smiled. “Opportunism? From the walking wounded, no less. At least you’ve got your priorities straight.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Jay said, getting across with practiced ease that it was, indeed, worse than it looked. She made an aborted attempt at standing up and, somewhat clumsily, tipped over into Thomas.
Huh. He was more solid than she’d expected. Stocky. “Sorry,” she said. “The walking wounded might be the next step. I’m going to be the sitting wounded for a few more minutes, I think.”
That flushed a laugh from him. “Really, though, I feel awful,” he said. “Let me sit with you, at least. That is, if my company doesn’t offend you.”
“Oh, it offends me deeply,” she deadpanned. “Please go away and leave me to my sorrows. No, no, I’m kidding, sit down.” She scooched towards the edge of the path, rather ingloriously. A couple of passersby giggled. “Who are you, anyways?”
He plopped down in the grass next to her. “Thomas,” he said, “but just Tom is fine. You?”
“Jay,” she said, which wasn’t her name and never had been. “Just Jay is fine for me, too.”
He laughed again—it was a good laugh, because she could tell he meant it—and Jay smiled. Caught you, she thought. You took the hook.
And then she did what she did best, and reeled him in.
Tom wakes in the middle of the night with her in his head. Sharp cheekbones, wide smile, bleeding knee. Bleeding knee? He grabs that detail and fights to moor it in memory. A sun-speckled day, the expanse of Lincoln Commons, the leather grip of his violin case twisting in his hand.
Pain, sharp in his chest—so sudden he feels his muscles clench, convinced for a moment the memory is real. An altogether different day, hour, moment. Her face again, close to his, the press of cold metal between them.
And a crested bird—white and black and the color of sky. His mind telling him something, but the name won’t come to him. There—blue jay. Had he seen one, that day when they’d first met? Or on the day he’d died?
No.
Jay. A perfect note, plucked pizzicato.
Your name is Jay, he thinks, but does not say, because even in his darkened bedroom, he can’t be sure who might be listening.
Jay had eased herself into Tom’s life like honey seeping into bread: sweet, slow, and impossible to expunge once settled. This was her art, and she was precise with her instruments. A well-placed chance encounter in the cafeteria the day after they’d first met; plans to meet for coffee the day after that. The meetings, the conversations, the eventual messages exchanged through the day . . . she’d seeded herself into his life so seamlessly that she imagined he’d be surprised if she reminded him they’d only met three weeks ago.
And now she sat in front of her laptop, hovering over the Send button on the most recent audio files she’d collected. Voice recordings, from earlier that day. She’d already gone through and excised her own voice. (Hardy was tech savvy, and he’d set up the system to permanently delete their messages once he’d downloaded the files, but it paid to be careful.) She had a good set of recs from the morning, a conversation she’d shared with Tom over breakfast before he went off to take his last final of the semester.
He’d had yogurt, granola, fresh fruit. When he’d finished eating, he licked—literally licked—the bowl clean, resulting in a gob of yogurt at the tip of his nose. He spent a solid minute trying to reach it with his tongue, and they’d both devolved into laughter. Genuine laughter, from Tom—more frightening, genuine laughter from Jay. She’d caught herself. You can’t like this boy, she chided sternly. You’re conning him.
But it wasn’t the morning’s recordings that she kept returning to.
He’d pressed a slip of paper into her hand after breakfast. “Wish me luck,” he’d said, knocking back his meds on his way out the door. “And see you there at three. I’ll be on the dock.”
The paper had an address—a beach, thirty minutes out of town. Ever since the disaster with Damon, Jay had been staying in a grubby, dirt-cheap motel a few miles off WU’s campus. The light switch sparked every time she flipped it. Electrical hazards aside, it was all she could afford with the money she’d gotten from pawning her jewelry and Damon’s old guitar amp. If she wasn’t so paranoid about Hardy, she’d have asked for an advance on the job.
As it was, she’d been walking to campus some days and braving the unreliable public bus on others. She’d been careful not to give Tom any sense of her transit woes—she preferred him thinking she spent all her time on her research, based on the PhD student cover story she’d gone with—and it was coming back to bite. A quick search told her it would take her the better part of her day to get to the beach.
Better get moving, Jaybird, she heard Hardy’s voice echo in her imagination. The kid won’t record himself.
With a sigh, she sketched out a route on her handheld and set off.
She got to the beach half an hour late. She’d taken the wrong bus, switched to the right one, and missed the nearest stop to the beach, then had to trek back on foot when the return route had never showed. Strands of hair were plastered to her forehead, her feet hurt, and after all that, she couldn’t see Tom anywhere.
Had he assumed she wasn’t coming and left already? With a huff, Jay marched down the sand, heading for the slim line of the dock. Seafoam lapping at the shore, a beautiful blue vista stretching out before her, and Jay didn’t give a damn. She’d been hoping to pull a full hour of a voice recording from this meeting, and now it seemed—
There. Tom’s voice, loud. Talking to someone. He had to be on the other side of the dock, leaning up against the part of it that jutted onto shore—blocked off from her line of sight.
She didn’t quite mean to creep up on him—it was just that the waves hid the sound of her footsteps. Just that she could hear him, now, in a heated argument with someone on the other side of . . . of a phone call?
“—I said I wouldn’t do it, okay? I don’t care—no, you tell him that you signed your son up for a position he told you he didn’t want. That’s on you, dad, not—” he fell silent. Jay shifted just a little closer, angling herself so her mics would pick him up better. This was good stuff, really prime; none of the recordings she’d gotten so far had caught the way his voice growled on some of his words now, the way it sparked with anger. A variety of recordings made for a better-quality spoof—Hardy would be happy, even if he still wouldn’t admit what he wanted this for.
“Of course I’m remembering my meds. Yes—you’ve made that very clear.” A beat. Then, his voice ice-cold: “Over my dead body. I’ll never let you put one of those things in me. I’ve seen what they do—no, mom, it’s not a conspiracy theory, you knew Ravi, how could you say that—
“—then I won’t. I’ll live with Elliot. Eat waffles ‘til I’m sick. Kick me out, I don’t care. Drop it, mom, you’re making me want to kill myself. Yes, again. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.” She realized, too belatedly, that in the course of the damns Tom must’ve hung up; he was standing, knuckles white around his phone, and there was nothing she could do but lift a hand and wiggle her fingers in greeting.
“Hey,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.”
He composed himself immediately, or tried. Swept a hand through his bedraggled hair, summoned half a smile. He still wasn’t nearly good enough to pull it off.
“Heard all of that, did you?”
She shrugged.
“Parents,” Tom said. “Turns out a military tech company is expecting me to start a summer internship with them next week. First I’m hearing of it. Told my dad to go screw himself for trying to strongarm me into it, basically.” He waved a hand. “Sorry. I’m a mess right now. I . . . I . . . ”
“Come on,” she said, offering him her hand.
He took it. She tugged him down to the end of the pier, flicked off her shoes, and sat down, plonking her feet into the water. “Blessed relief,” she said.
He sat down next to her, pulling his loafers off and lining them up neatly by his side. He cuffed his jeans and dangled his legs next to hers.
They sat there in silence for a while. She should’ve struck up a new conversation, worked on getting a few more minutes of recordings out of him, but she kept quiet. Building trust, she told herself. That was all.
“I haven’t told you about my parents,” Tom said, finally. “They . . . they’re a big deal. When they want something, it happens. And they want me to be a golden boy. Except I’m a total fuckup.”
“You’re not a fuckup.”
“You wouldn’t know.”
“I would. I do. You’re not.” It comes out stronger than she intended.
“Hmm. Well. I just . . . I want something different from them. They think they know how to change me into the perfect son. But I think they just want to erase me. Sand out the rough spots. Get just the PR-presentable bits.”
“I get that,” she said. “They want a show dog instead of a child.”
He grimaced. “A show dog would be less expensive.”
“Less interesting, too.”
“Oh, stop.” He raised an eyebrow. “You think I’m interesting?”
“Would I have braved the bus to get here if I didn’t?”
Tom’s eyes widened as he processed this. “Oh my god. You took the bus?”
The conversation had extended after that—a long convo, a good one. Lots of recording time. Nothing personal.
Jay sent the email to Hardy, files attached. A few hours later, she got a response. Last recording’s choppy, he’d written. Missing a section? Seems to start without context. Something about show dogs?
Interference with the mic, she messaged back. Couldn’t get anything before that bit. Sorry.
She didn’t owe it to Tom to keep his secrets. She didn’t owe him anything.
But it was only a few minutes. Only just this once.
Tom goes through the next day trying to piece together new knowledge. The woman’s name, he has it now. And he knows. She killed him, then. Jay, whoever she was.
But . . . why?
Not kill him—he understands that it could’ve been part of the robbery plot, that she could’ve wanted him gone as a witness. But why kill Rose and Graham Monroe’s only son in a way you know won’t stick? Every Monroe worth their salt has a medtag, and any Monroe with the family name would pay for a revamp if their body was in any way salvageable. If Jay wanted Thomas dead dead, he’d be gone. Done for. All she’d have had to do was saw off his head and toss it in a barrel of lye, a swamp, an ocean to be swept away by the currents and never recovered.
This means Jay—if that’s even her name—didn’t want Thomas dead dead. Just . . . dead. Temporarily.
He thinks he might know why.
It’s like it’s on the tip of his tongue, but an idea rather than a word. Something he’d known before his last scan, maybe, but made into a reality during that now-blank period. He flattens a palm against his forehead. The reason must be in there somewhere. It’s nebulous, tantalizing. His head feels like it’s full of slush. Work harder, he thinks in the direction of the bots. Fix me faster.
There’s no news on the search for his murderer, nor the recovery of his money. He isn’t sure whether to be glad.
They ask Tom to come down to the police station to give a report three days after he gets out of the hospital. Rose has swept back into the hectic pattern of her work life, but Uncle Elliot shows up at Tom’s door, morning of. “For moral support,” he says, a little gruffly, not meeting Tom’s eyes.
Tom’s never been in the police station before. The air conditioning is crisp; it smells of citrus. They sit him down by an officer’s desk. Someone pulls up an extra seat for Elliot.
The officer interviewing him, Walker, is a slim man, on the older side. His face droops slightly, as if it was made of candle wax that got a little too warm one day. That’s uncharitable, Tom reminds himself, and tries to focus on the cop’s questions.
That’s harder than it sounds. He doesn’t like the station. Guns make him nervous, have ever since a lockdown for an armed intruder at his elementary school—an hour of terror imprinted on his fourth-grade psyche. The presence of one, even holstered securely at the cop’s thigh, bumps Tom’s heart rate up.
He tries to cooperate anyways, because it’d get back to his parents if he didn’t, and some deep-seated instinct tells him not to let that happen. Gives his name, details, tries to explain to the cop what the doctor told him about the memories, how his hippo-whatever pathways are being reconstructed as best they can, but it might take time.
“Hmm,” says the cop, frowning down at his recorder. “Reconstruction. Don’t know if that scrubs your potential as an eyewitness. If it’s new tech, the court might not have the data to throw out testimony based on it . . . ” He flips through his tablet. “Says here the medical examiner recorded gunshot wounds to your chest. No sign of a blindfold. I’m thinking you saw your killer.”
“I don’t know.”
“Try.” The cop’s gaze on Tom is steady. “We’ve got a sketch artist. If you can remember anything—gender, race, eye color—any detail helps. Try, Mr. Monroe. Think.”
And Tom does—not for Officer Walker, but for himself. He reaches for Jay’s face. Why? He thinks. Why you? Why me? Why my account? What did we—
The room fractures. Something shifts in Tom’s brain, connects—overconnects. He can feel the wrongness of the memory. He’s sitting on the lounge in the living room, upright. His parents are on the black leather sofa across from him, hands folded into each other’s, presenting a united front. The room is just as Tom remembers it through his childhood: embossed editions of the classics lined up neatly on custom shelving; geometric paintings arranged just so along the walls; a fireplace filled with neatly stacked, plasticized wood, never intended to be lit.
The only difference is that overlaid atop the Monroe family living room is the rooftop of the orchestra building on WU’s campus. Jay sits, leaned up against the metal of the fire escape, dark hair drawn back in a ponytail; at the same time, he sees her perched on the edge of the living room coffee table.
“They gave me an ultimatum,” he says—says in the amalgam of memory. To Jay.
“We’re concerned about you,” Rose Monroe says.
“We have a proposition,” says his father Graham, in nearly the same tones.
Jay tilts her head, swinging her legs. “What did they want from you?”
“I was . . . having trouble. My meds weren’t doing the trick, and I’d forget to take them half the time anyways. I kept hurting myself. Killed myself twice, trying to beat the revamp tech. I . . . it was not a good time.”
“This can’t go on, Thomas,” Graham says. “This is something we’ve mentioned before, and we know you’re against it, philosophically speaking, but . . . ”
“We’d like you to get a Stimplant,” Rose finishes.
“A Stimplant?” Jay frowns. “I’ve heard of that, haven’t I?”
“Probably. The ads are everywhere.” Tom runs a fingernail vertically along his brow, right down the temple. “They say it’s an implant for emotional regulation. Analyzes how your brain chemicals are getting on and makes automatic adjustments. Buffers or stabilizes your mood—whatever you need, really.”
“Oh, that’s right. They’re the ones with that slogan—Be yourself again?”
“Feel like yourself again, yeah.” Tom’s parents stare at him, hazy, a memory paused as he narrates it to Jay. Memories folded onto each other, into each other, overlapping—he can’t quite tell which has primacy. “But that’s total bullshit. I had this friend in high school, Ravi. Mood disorder, mild. His parents got him a Stimplant. He was never the same, after that. It was just . . . ”
Tom trails off, thinking of Ravi. They’d gotten in some shit, in high school—good shit, kid shit. Joyriding, once or twice. Sneaking into a condemned building sophomore year for kicks. Ravi had had highs and lows, just like Tom, but after the Stimplant . . .
“ . . . he lost his fire,” Tom says, trying to capture the way Ravi had changed. “It was like there was this thin sheet between him and the world, all the time. Like sleepwalking. I guess he was happier? I don’t know. But he wasn’t the same. I told them that.”
He turns towards his parents, unleashing his tirade. Ravi this, Ravi that. “I don’t trust the Stimplant studies, either,” he continues. “Look how much they’re selling the tech for. It’s for-profit medicine that’s the problem, who knows how many studies they cherry-picked or administrators they paid to look the other way to get it on the market—”
“We thought you might react this way,” Graham interrupts. “Which is why we’ve changed the conditions of your inheritance.”
That stops Tom in his tracks. “What?”
“We’ll continue to fund your college education,” Graham says. “Up through graduation. After that, you’re cut off. No allowances, no insurance. But,” he raises a finger, heading off Tom’s protest, “you’ll have access to the full amount of your inheritance at any time . . . with one condition.”
“The Stimplant,” Rose says. “If you withdraw any of the money, you implicitly agree to the implantation. It’s binding.”
“That can’t be legal.”
“The terms of the agreement are here,” his father says, producing a slim folder and sliding it across the table to Tom. “You don’t have to sign it—but like your mother said, if you use that money, you agree to the Stimplant.”
“Over my dead body.”
Graham frowns. “That’s your choice. But Thomas . . . your mother and I have done so much for you. Saved, spent, sacrificed. Don’t you owe it to us to at least think it over before throwing your life away?” An unspoken last word hangs in the air: again.
“I just want my happy little boy back,” Rose says, softening. “I know you’ll understand someday.”
Jay shakes her head. “No way,” she says. “That really can’t be legal.”
Tom shrugs. “You tell our family lawyer that. She’s as good as they come. Vicious with fine print. She helped them set it up.”
“God, Tom.” Jay taps a fingernail against the railing of the fire escape; a metallic sound rings out through the living room. “Your parents suck.”
“Often,” he agrees. “Found out after Ravi’s Stimplant that they’d been tracking my phone ever since they bought it for me—reading my messages, monitoring GPS, the works. They’re the ones who ratted him out to his dad about some of the stuff we did.”
Tom grimaces. “And there was this girl in elementary school, Char? My best friend. She was a year or two behind in reading, and when they found that out they told me it’d be best to make other friends. Smarter friends, they meant.” He studies his parents’ concerned faces. The same faces they’d turned towards him all those years ago, questioning whether he really wanted to spend all his time with a girl like Char.
“I said no, not that it mattered, because Char transferred later that year and we drifted apart. Like kids do. Found out much later that her parents had “won” scholarships to a different private school for her and her sisters. From my parents’ charitable foundation.”
Jay whistles. “Fuck.”
“Yeah. I took more precautions with myself after Ravi. Bought my own phones and checked them for surveillance and all that. And after college, I was going to go low contact with my parents. Take the money and run, basically.
“But this Stimplant thing, it totally screwed me over. I told them I’d be better about taking my meds, never skip therapy—they wouldn’t change their minds. Worst part, though, is the insurance thing. That’s where they’ve got me. I’d give up the money, really, but the meds I’m on . . . they’re the only ones that work for me, and they’re expensive as hell. Without insurance, I could never afford them. Even if I got a job, most plans won’t cover the ones I need.”
“Rock and a hard place. And these are people who claim to love you.” Jay bites her lip. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. But I’ve never doubted that they love me. Their idea of me, at least.” Tom looks across the coffee table at his parents, immortalized in this memory. Giving him an impossible choice. A life with strings attached. And thinking all the while they’re doing the right thing.
That was when he’d first had the idea, there in the living room. He turns to Jay, to tell her, even though he’s never told anyone, kept this secret tucked in his chest—
“Mr. Monroe,” says his dad—no, not his dad, his dad’s conversing quietly with his mom, lips near her ear. “Mr. Monroe,” says the voice again, and Tom is dredged up from the depths of his mind, the details of the living room and the rooftop sloughing away to be replaced by . . .
The tile floor of the police station, cold against his skin, someone’s jacket stuffed under his head. Officer Walker is kneeling next to him, feeling his pulse. Uncle Elliot has a phone out.
“I’m okay,” Tom says, even though he feels like he’s about to hurl. “Really, I’m fine. The doctor said this would happen—memories coming back and everything. How long was I out?”
“Out? You went unresponsive a minute ago, maybe two,” the cop says. “A memory? Did you get a name? A face?”
“Leave the kid alone.” Uncle Elliot glances at his phone. “No 911 then, Tom?”
Tom shakes his head. “Maybe a doctor’s appointment, though.”
Elliot nods. “Sorry, officer, interview’s over. Come on, Tom. Let’s go home.”
In the car, Tom sets his cheek against the window, feeling the engine’s vibrations in his bones. Thinking. The memory with his parents. The aftermath. “Uncle Elliot,” he says, “when I asked if I could live with you after graduation. Why did you say no?”
Elliot clears his throat. “I thought we’d talked about this.”
“Was it my mom? Did she tell you not to take me in?” Did she tell you about the Stimplant?
There’s a pause, just a second too long, and Uncle Elliot says, “No. Rose never said anything about it.”
It might not be the first time his uncle has lied to him. But this one hurts the most.
I thought you were in my corner, Tom thinks, more tired than angry. All those uncle-nephew weekends—road trips, arcade outings, mornings spent plowing through waffles. He wonders, absently, if he and Elliot already had this conversation—if his anger was spent in that two-month period he can’t remember, and now all that’s left is resignation.
Tom gets three more days of respite, of healing, of memories trickling back into the cistern of his mind. There are still blank spaces, but they’re slowly filling in. Most of it is Jay. Getting to know her. Long afternoons on the beach, deep conversations, laughter. Lots of laughter. He still gets the sense he can’t recall what’s most important about her. Most vital.
Then, late one afternoon, he gets a call.
“This is Officer Walker with the WPD. Is this Thomas Monroe?”
“Speaking,” Tom says.
“We’d like you to come down to the station,” the cop says. “We’ve made an arrest off a tip. The guy’s here for his reward. But before we sign off, we want you to give a positive ID on your killer.”
Jay and Tom went back to the beach. He drove. Jay was quiet on the way, quieter than she wanted to be. They’d been meeting up for almost seven weeks. Last night, Hardy had messaged her that he only needed a few more voice recordings. One conversation more, maybe two.
She’d known this was coming. It still felt like a shock.
They stripped down at the beach, him to garish neon pink swim trunks and her to a one-piece with a waterproof mic hidden in the strap. They walked along the sand, side by side, skirting the edge of the water. It smelled fresh out there, clean.
“Got a lot on your mind today?” He nudged her with one broad shoulder.
She mustered a smile. “You can tell?”
“My uncle always called it the thousand-yard stare.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“I call it my friend, thinking.” He paused and drew a smiley face in the sand with his big toe. Not for her, she thought—just for the pleasure of doing it. “Want to share?”
Not really. “You told me once that you were going to cut off your parents, after you graduate,” she said, a skillful redirect. “What would you do? If you could?”
“Oh, run off with the circus. Get hitched to a rando in Vegas.” He caught her eye and his smile faded. “Honestly? I have no idea. I just . . . I don’t want this . . . this weight. All their expectations, their hopes, their image of an ideal child. I never asked for that. They can have it. I just want . . . life. No strings attached.”
“No strings attached,” she repeated. “Sounds nice.”
“How did you know what you wanted?” He asked. “Grad school, I mean.”
“Oh, you know. I loved Dr. Liu’s research. Thought it’d be nice to make a difference. And I studied migratory patterns in undergrad, so it just made sense to look at the same kinds of things with regards to climate change, you know?” All bunk, of course. She’d picked Dr. Liu’s lab as a cover for a few reasons—they were on sabbatical, and their area of study was one unfamiliar to Thomas. Most importantly, their horrendous, rarely updated website gave Jay plausible deniability for her name not showing up in their personnel.
“I always knew I wanted to be a professor,” she said, “but . . . it’s not the same for everyone. Some people are straight trackers. They know who they are and what they want, and they just follow that clear line of purpose their whole lives. And then there are the wigglers. Trying things out, experimenting. Figuring it out as they go along.”
“Improv,” Tom suggested.
“Yeah,” Jay smiled. “Improv.” She paused, squatting down on the sand to dig out a broken seashell. She polished it on her shirt and set it back down. Do it for the hell of it, she thought, and let her mouth override her logic. “I . . . I knew this girl, growing up. A wiggler, I guess. She was in with a bad crowd from the start. Learned the family business, the kind that goes on behind closed doors or in unmarked cars. Lied to people, hurt people. Her parents died when she was a teen. It was touch and go for a while.
“She kept the plates spinning. Used those skills, those networks. Paid off debts, saved back cash. Met a few people, though none of them stuck until one. This guy. Total stunner. They got together. It was good. He’d yell sometimes, but she was used to that from growing up. She knew what to expect. She trusted him. And he loved her.
“At least, that’s what she thought. Until she woke up one day to the other side of the bed empty and the accounts cleared out. All he left was his guitar amp, the dick.”
A grifter, grifted. Jay sniffled. The sea breeze was messing with her sinuses.
Tom was sitting down next to her, feet pointing towards the sea. She finally brought herself to look at him.
His eyes were locked on hers. Sharp. Attentive. Like he could see straight through her.
Nowhere in that gaze did he believe she’d been talking about a friend.
“You’re not a grad student, are you?” He asked. She could see him puzzling it out.
Damn, she thought, one slip and you’ve made a mess of this job. Triage, come on, triage. “Of course I—”
“No, no, I’ve got it.” His eyebrows lifted in sudden comprehension. “Jay, I’ve got it. I think I’ve figured you out. I think it’s you. You’ve been hired to steal from me, right?”
Oh, she had royally fucked up. How could he have guessed? One anecdote steeped in half-truths couldn’t have been enough to ruin all her groundwork, every effort she’d made over the past two months—
He was laughing.
“It’s okay, really,” he said, holding out one placating hand. “You look like I’m about to bite your head off, Jay, but it’s fine, I promise.” He grinned. “I’m the one that hired you to do it.”
Tom’s not cleared to drive yet—still—so he calls Uncle Elliot to take him down to the station for the ID. “I called your parents,” Elliot says, when Tom swings into the passenger seat. “They couldn’t make it today. Just thought you should know.”
The drive passes quickly. A cop meets Tom at the door and leads him back to a room. “They just brought her in,” he says. “Right this way.”
They turn the corner. Officer Walker is standing, talking with a tall, bald man with a wad of gum tucked in the corner of his mouth. Just past them, handcuffed to an interview table . . .
Dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail. Bags beneath her eyes like she hasn’t slept in days. Sharp cheekbones, wide smile, bleeding knee, Tom thinks. Jay.
And his mind explodes in memory.
“I’m the one that hired you to do it,” he says, watching the sea breeze tousle Jay’s hair. “I didn’t realize this was how you’d . . . I didn’t know how you’d do it. I didn’t know it’d be you. But I hired you to kill me, and steal from my account before my revamp, because I can’t be held to the Stimplant agreement if I’m dead when the withdrawal occurs. You get a cut, I get a cut, we’re all happy. Don’t you see? I understand.”
He understands more than that—his brain is flashing through the knowledge that she became friends with him under false pretenses. But . . . he knows Jay. He doesn’t believe you can spend two months with a person and not see hints of their true self. He’s seen hers. Moments when she thinks no one’s watching. Jay hasn’t changed. Just the framework in which he’s placed her.
“I don’t care if you’re a criminal, Jay,” he hastens to add. “I mean, what I did is technically conspiracy to commit fraud, I think. So we’re in the same boat.”
He’s so confident he’s right that it doesn’t occur to him to censor himself. It’s only watching the look on Jay’s face, moving through a complicated dance of confusion, shock, comprehension, that he belatedly thinks of the consequences if he’s wrong. If she really is a grad student, after all, if she’s not trying to steal from him, if word gets back to his parents what he’d planned . . .
“Thomas Monroe,” she says, after a moment, “are you telling me you hired someone to kill you, take your money, and then give some of it back?” She kneads her fingers into her forehead. “Please say you didn’t. Please. What did you do, post on the dark web under your own name?”
You’d know, he thinks. “You . . . didn’t take the job?”
“No, I goddamn didn’t, the merc who did, hired me to get what he needed from you. He’s upper management, Tom. I’m just a freelancer.”
“Trying to replace what the dick who left you stole?”
She groans. “I am regretting saying a single true thing to you, Thomas Monroe.”
“I didn’t use my name,” he says, rather more quietly. “I did my research. After my last brain scan, ‘cause the revamps always scramble me enough that I might accidentally spit out what I’d done if I didn’t forget about doing it. I didn’t want to accidentally know something I shouldn’t have. But I didn’t use my name—just a pseudonym, with details on my accounts, my habits, what the payout would look like, the split I expected—”
“Hardy,” she says, eyes widening.
“Hardy?”
“The man who hired me. Tom, you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into. Of all the stupid, naïve . . . ” she sucks in a deep breath, tilting her head back.
They’re both silent for a moment. Then she says, steady again, “Hardy will never give you the money. You gave him the scheme on a silver platter with no way to enforce it. I know him. Kill you? I’ve never killed anyone, Tom, but he’s killed people. And he knows who you are. Knows you have a medtag.” She taps Tom’s forearm, just above his wrist—the spot where a thin, faded scar shows his medtag implantation site. “If Hardy kills you, Tom, he’ll make it stick.”
What?
Tom swallows, throat suddenly dry.
It had all been so right. He’d thought it out so well. In too deep, Thomas, scolds a voice at the back of his mind. It sounds eerily like his mother’s.
It’s strange to realize that for once, he’s been banking on a revamp to work. Somewhere along the line, he started wanting to live. Off with enough money for a clean start, after graduation, no strings attached. Which, if Jay’s telling the truth . . .
“I’ll cancel the hit,” he says.
“Too late. Hardy’s done most of the gruntwork, Tom. Two months of it. He’s not going to stop now just because the anonymous account who hired him asks to scrub the job.”
Tom tries to keep his breathing steady. I don’t want to die. A new thought. He clings to it. He won’t panic. He won’t. “Jay,” he says, digging his fingers into the sand. It’s gritty, damp, grounding. “Jay, what do I do?”
“I have to think. Let me think.”
The sun, the sand, the sea. The two of them, as the minutes tick by.
Finally, Jay turns to him. “I . . . I might be able to convince him to let me do you in.” A line crinkles along her forehead. “If I . . . no, he might . . . ” She shakes her head. “It’s risky. But I . . . my family had a reputation.”
“So . . . you kill me.” He pauses, processing. “And the cash?”
She sucks in air through her teeth. “I don’t know. My cut’s supposed to be generous. We could . . . well. Split it, maybe.” She looks pained at the idea of giving up any of the money. “I don’t know. Things have changed.”
He looks at her, really looks at her. “Why?” He asks. “Why would you—why help me?”
She swallows, avoiding his gaze. “Things have changed,” she repeats. “I’ve changed. I know what it’s like, now, to get the rug pulled out from under you—from the other side.” Her gaze flicks up to him. “And I know you. You don’t deserve an unmarked grave.”
“The dick,” Tom says. “The total stunner with the guitar amp. What was his name?”
Jay sighs. “Damon,” she says.
“Fuck Damon. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
She smiles at that, thin and long. That smile is a triumph. She looks at him straight on. “You know what the hardest part of this is going to be?” Jay asks.
“What?”
“You have to trust me,” she says. “And even worse, I have to trust you.”
The memory shifts, dancing forward in time. He wakes up, head pounding, disoriented. It’s dark. He’s curled in the fetal position, hands bound together in front of him. They’re completely numb—this scares him, as does the fact that when he shifts, he can feel that he’s lying on plastic.
A click, and light floods through the space. His head is covered by burlap; he hears a voice, low, unfamiliar. “Be quick. I’ll make the transfers at the time we set.”
Then Jay’s. “Got it. I’m taking him off the road.”
“I’ll be back to pick you up.”
Hands grab him and he lands in the dirt, hard. Dry dust kicks up and through the burlap; he hacks it out. The sound of cicadas singing is replaced, momentarily, by the growl of a car engine.
A few moments later, Jay pulls the hood off of him. “He’s gone,” she says. “Come on.”
He blinks owlishly at her. She’s got a thin plastic covering on, the kind of full-suit waterproof some people splurge on for the rainy season that covers all of you but your shoes. And she’s got a gun. She holds it like it’s familiar to her palm, and Tom feels a spurt of doubt.
“Come on,” she says, pulling him to his feet. “Don’t look at your hands. Hardy took the thumbs off while you were out. Numbed ‘em, but it’s not pretty.”
“I didn’t see it coming,” Tom manages to get out, as she leads him into the woods. He tries to tamp down the apprehension—no, call it what it is, fear. Even the brief glance he got of the road tells him this is the middle of nowhere. “I don’t even remember how you got me out of my room.”
“I told you, Hardy’s good. Scary good.” She shakes her head, coming to a stop. The woods are humid and thick around them, leaf litter clotting the ground. So easy to step on a snake, out here, Tom thinks. Easy to get bit, if you’re not careful.
Jay brushes a bit of a stick off one of his shoulders, wrinkling her nose. “If this works,” she says, “we can’t talk for a while.”
“Meet at the beach, then,” he says. “One year out from today. I get my cut. No strings attached.”
The corner of her mouth tugs up, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She checks her watch. “I’ll have to do it soon.”
“Do it,” he says, stepping close. He takes her wrist, gently, and moves it to set the barrel of the gun over his heart. “Can’t miss.”
It’s hot. They’re both sweating. She smells nice, he thinks, like bottled summer. Her hand is steady on the gun as she clicks the safety off and steps away from him, backing up. Giving herself room. The space between them breathes.
Can I trust you not to kill me? He thinks. Can you trust me not to turn you in?
Too late now. The end of the line. The cicadas keen.
“Careful, Jay,” Tom says, conjuring up a smile. “Don’t get my blood on your shoes.”
She cuts him a smile back, just before she shoots.
“The money’s in your accounts already,” Hardy said, flooring it down the road. “Ran it through my network. Untraceable.” Jay checked the handheld she’d left in his car, thoroughly gutted by Hardy to prevent location tracking. Yes, there it was—every cent.
“A pleasure working with you,” she said. Her hands, set in her lap, were trembling. She could still see the look on Tom’s face. That easy smile replaced by the shock of the bullets. He’d be all right, she reminded herself. If the medtag alerted like it should, if the revamp worked, if, if, if . . .
“I said, a solid take,” Hardy repeated. “Jaybird, are you with me?” He laid a hand on the horn and she nearly jumped out of her skin. He laughed. “Come on, don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts?”
“Not at all,” she said smoothly, stilling her hands. “Long job, though. Glad it’s over.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. She kept thinking of Tom, in the woods. She should’ve been terrified of what he might say in the haze of his revamp, words that could land her in prison for the rest of her life.
But when she thought of who she was really scared of right now, who she didn’t trust, it wasn’t the boy she’d left in the woods.
It was the man sitting beside her.
Jay made it five days.
She’d blown out of town as soon as they’d gotten back from Tom’s body, splurging a bit on a used car off an online marketplace. She’d taken the thing and driven west, six hours straight, before collapsing into a motel. Next day she’d dumped the car and hopped a bus north. Thirteen more hours ‘til she got to a middle-of-nowhere town, with a middle-of-nowhere inn that sported queasy yellow sheets on all its beds.
Safe here, she thought. Safe until I figure out where I’m headed. Out of the country, probably. She was jittery, anxious. Every instinct she had told her that Hardy would sell her out at a moment’s notice. And she’d seen on her journey how much the Monroes were offering as a reward.
The fifth morning she went for supplies, filling a few plastic bags at the grocery store. She wore a hoodie, kept her head down, and chose mostly non-perishables. Enough to hole up for a while as the heat died down.
She made it back to the inn and shouldered through the door to her room, bag handles looped around her arm. She pushed the door closed, turned to the room, and froze.
“Hey there, Jaybird,” Hardy chirped. He kept the barrel of his gun trained on her. Safety off. “Flown the nest.”
“Our business is done,” she said coolly.
He scrunched his nose at her, still smiling. “Not quite. See, there’s this thing about the reward money, for Thomas Monroe’s killer? And I thought . . . ” He snapped, with the hand not holding the gun. “I thought hey, I know her!”
“Can I put down the groceries?” Jay asked. He gestured with an open hand, and she dropped them unceremoniously. A carton of milk split open, spilling across the dirty carpet. They both watched it. Jay made no move to pick it up.
“We can make this easy, Jaybird,” Hardy said. “You’re taking the hit for this one. I’m bringing you in, collecting that reward. This conversation, right now, is just to make it clear between us. You say a single word about me, you’re dead in the water. You don’t know me. Understand?”
She nodded.
“I want to hear it, Jaybird. I’ve got a reputation, you know. I’ve killed for less. Show me your forearm, will you?” She tilted her arm, just slightly. “That’s right,” Hardy said. “I don’t see a medtag scar there, do I? I shoot you, it sticks. So I want to hear it. You don’t know me.”
Jay swallowed. “No,” she said. “Never seen you before in my life.”
“Excellent.” Hardy stood up, tucking the gun into his jacket pocket—still pointed, she noticed, at her. “Come on, stranger, let’s get you to the car. We’ve got quite the drive ahead of us.”
Two months, coalescing into a moment. Tom standing here with the cop, looking at Officer Walker, the man with the gum, and Jay. Jay sitting there, staring up at him.
Walker turns to Tom, nodding at him. “Welcome in, Mr. Monroe. Like I said, this should be simple—we were hoping to jog your memory. She won’t talk yet without a lawyer present, but one of our consultants, a revamp specialist, suggested that meeting your killer might trigger some recognition—”
Jay’s gaze flicks from Tom to the man standing by the officer. The man who turned her in. She lifts her chin—a tiny movement, almost infinitesimal. Meant just for Tom.
Do I trust you, Jay? He thinks. Do you trust me?
“Yeah,” he says, turning to Officer Walker. “You’re right. I remember it all. He did it.” He points at the man with the gum, voice holding steady. “That’s the man who killed me.”
In the course of the following tumult—after Hardy’s eyes widen, after he tries to buck off the cop putting him under arrest, after he hisses at Tom, “but you never fucking saw me”—there’s a moment when he looks to Jay.
“Jayb—Jay,” he says, eyes wild. “Tell them. Tell them, or I swear to god—”
She meets his gaze evenly, quizzically. “I’m sorry, sir,” she says. “I don’t know you. And my name isn’t Jay.”
They say her name is Alice Downey, which Tom doubts. The way the police reckon it, Hardy rolled the dice on Tom’s memory reconstruction and picked Alice as a fall guy. “When he brought her in, he claimed to have seen her in your company a few weeks back,” Officer Walker tells Tom. “This guy has a nasty record. We think you might’ve actually met her, and he was hoping you’d give a false ID on account of your brain being fuc—messed up. Thought the reward would be worth it, threatened her big-time to try to get her to confess.”
It’s a convoluted story, Tom thinks, but still less complicated than what he suspects of the truth. Thanks, Occam.
More importantly, Hardy doesn’t get a chance at bail—upon arrest, scans of his fingerprints implicate him in an unsolved double homicide a dozen years ago. Two trials, stretching long.
Tom leans hard into his brain injury when he commits perjury, babbling through a few snippets of real memories (the cicadas, the woods, the glint of light off the barrel of a gun) and fake ones (Hardy’s face as he shoots.)
The judge strikes his testimony from the record due to his injury, questioning the legitimacy of the reconstructive medical technology, but Tom can see his words already snagging like burrs in the minds of the jury. She can tell them not to consider it, but the seed is already planted.
It’s a little fucked up, actually. He’d feel worse, if he didn’t know all he’d done was describe what Hardy would’ve happily done to him, given the chance. Tom goes back to class afterward—murder trials take forever, it turns out, and school’s already back in session for his senior year—and tries not to think about the woman who actually pulled the trigger.
‘Cause that’s the thing: Alice Downey refused to testify and disappeared off the face of the earth.
It’s a difficult feat, in this day and age, and Tom figures the police would find it suspicious if they kept tabs on Ms. Downey. Tom does—or tries—but the police are otherwise occupied. One of Tom’s parents’ employees, an absolute whiz with computers, traces a sizable chunk of the stolen money to a private account keyed to Hardy’s biometrics. That’s the final nail in the coffin.
“We’re grateful to have the money back,” his mother says on live television in the following days, “but of course my first priority will always be my son.” She places a hand over her heart, red nail polish glinting, and Tom thinks, I can’t remember the last time you called.
Alice Downey. Jay. Fake names, false faces, and yet, when Tom thinks of Rose and Graham Monroe sitting next to Jay in that living-room-orchestra-roof mélange all those memories ago, there’s only one of the three that he trusts.
He plays the part of perfect son at the dinners he shares with his parents once a month. Shows off adequate grades, stays out of trouble, even makes a few good friends, unexpectedly, in a history class he took for the hell of it. He politely continues to refuse the Stimplant in all its forms.
“Sometimes, Thomas,” his father says once, stabbing a spear of asparagus, “it feels like you don’t tell us anything anymore.”
Tom picks at his dinner. They’re noticing, then, that he’s been withdrawing—slowly but surely, as spring approaches. He’s almost surprised. “I have my own life,” he says. “I won’t always feel comfortable sharing it with you.”
Silence. Chewing.
“We’ve found a few jobs for you, for once you graduate,” Rose says. “If . . . if you decide not to use your money.”
It’s the first time they’ve floated the idea that he might not take the Stimplant deal—the Stimplant deal that’s somehow still in effect. He raises an eyebrow. “What kinds of jobs?”
“Oh, you know,” his father says. “The company always has openings for family. We could start you in a management position, or put you in engineering to make use of your degree.” He smiles. “It’d be nice to have your parents for bosses, Tom, don’t you think?”
And you still don’t understand a whit of me.
Tom smiles noncommittally. “Maybe.”
“You’ll have to get some kind of job,” Rose adds, hardening. “You know the agreement.”
No support after graduation, yes. And now I know you haven’t changed.
Or at least, not enough.
Tom meets up with Uncle Elliot halfway through the spring semester. They slide into a booth at a diner, red pleather seats cracking with age.
“Tom—” Uncle Elliot starts, but Tom cuts straight to the chase.
“I won’t be talking to my parents after graduation,” he says. “I’m not trying to give an ultimatum, but I want you to know that if you choose to keep in contact with them, I probably won’t be talking to you, either. No,” he holds up a hand to Elliot’s protest. “I know you. I know you’d tell my mom if she asked about me, otherwise. You can’t help it.”
Elliot looks down at his hands. “I don’t know if you realize this,” he says, “but I can’t . . . look, Tom. Rose paid off my student debt. She helped me with my down payment.”
And now you owe her, Tom thinks, resigned. Monroe money looks so good, right? Before you notice the strings.
“Are you ready to order?”
Tom looks up at the waiter, holding on valiantly to a quavering smile. “We’ll have the waffles,” he says. “Two servings, please.”
The thief is in the wind.
She’s living miles and miles from shitty motel rooms and cicada song, in a country where a different language dances through the streets, in a small apartment she bought outright with what was left of the Monroe money. (She’d withdrawn it, cash, before shuttering the account.)
She has extra funds, unexpectedly, to spare. After Hardy’s arrest, before she wiped herself off the grid, she’d followed a hunch and returned to that rented bedroom above the ghost kitchen.
All of Hardy’s shit, laptops and cords and briefcases, was still stacked in a corner; thank god for the smell of curry, covering the reek of unwashed laundry piled in an altogether separate corner. She’d stepped cautiously over a dirty pair of briefs and unlatched the briefcases.
Yes, she confirmed, he would’ve killed her for looking in them all those weeks ago. He’d probably do worse if he knew she was cleaning out the jewelry, datachips, and packs of cash in various denominations for personal use. But he was in jail at the time and didn’t get a say in the matter.
And now she sips coffee on a small balcony, watching the whirlpool of a market spin beneath her, and every day she lives life vividly, and she doesn’t think of the only boy she’s ever killed. Sometimes she wakes up with his words an echo: Do it, he’s saying, or, One year out from today. I get my cut. No strings attached.
She hadn’t said anything back, then, because after all of that, the gun in her hand trained on his chest, she didn’t want the last thing he heard from her to be a lie. She was set. She was out clean. She was not going back.
The thief thinks of a man named Damon, and the morning he left, and reaching out a hand across an expanse of silky sheets to find nothing but empty space.
A year after his death, Tom’s back on the beach.
He hasn’t been out here since those long walks with Jay. It felt sacred somehow, untouchable in his memory.
He goes early in the morning, because he hadn’t specified a time. To his surprise, there are people already there, a small group of three taking advantage of the weather. He wades into the water for a while, letting it lap up against his shins. Steps in deeper. Wonders if he should’ve worn his swim trunks, the neon pink ones Jay had laughed at the first time he’d showed up in them. (He’d made a point of wearing them every time they swam after.)
The morning soaks into the sand. His time of death was in the afternoon, wasn’t it? He strolls up and down the surf, watches the trio get tired and load up in a rusted minivan, leaving the smell of exhaust in their wake. He passes a good chunk of time building a horrendous sandcastle and then smushing down the towers with his heel so he can build them back better. He’s nearly certified in sandcastle architecture by the time he breaks and pulls a sandwich from his pack, food he’d hoped not to be waiting long enough to need.
Do you still trust me? He thinks. Do I still trust you?
The sun moves across the sky. The day trickles away. Jay doesn’t come.
“That’s all right,” he says to no one. “I should’ve expected it. It’s fine.” And it is fine—or will be. He lifts his chin. He will make his own way, like he’s made his own decisions—like the week before graduation, right before he’d be off his parents’ insurance, when he’d gone to the doctor’s office and asked them to remove his medtag.
“Are you sure?” The doctor he’d spoken to had asked. “These things are expensive to implant, you know. And if something happens to you in the meantime . . . ” she trailed off, which meant she recognized him. Lots of people remembered the story—Thomas Monroe’s temporary murder.
“I’m sure,” he’d said. “I don’t want this thing tracking me everywhere I go.” And I’ve had enough revamps for any sane person. If I never wake up in a patchbag again, it’ll be too soon. “Besides,” he added, “in a couple of days, my insurance won’t cover resuscitation.”
He rubs the thin scar on his forearm. Odd, to spend so long knowing it was almost impossible for him to die. Odd, that he feels so unprotected, so vulnerable, knowing that now he might. This is how most of us live, he reminds himself. You’re not special.Not now. Not with jobs to interview for, insurance plans to assess. He has a month’s worth of meds left before he’ll be screwed. He was hoping Jay would solve that problem . . . but no.
He wanted a life to himself. That’s what he has. He’ll figure it out. Somehow.
It’s nearing sunset. He wanders over to the pier and sits at the end of it, crossing his legs, then changes his mind and removes his shoes to dangle his feet in the water. He looks out at the horizon, the waves, gulls sweeping through the air. He tastes salt. Closes his eyes.
He doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him—just her voice, a little out of breath but the same as he remembered it. It conjures the rest: sharp cheekbones, wide smile, bleeding knee.
“Sorry I’m late. That damn bus,” she says, and when he turns she’s already smiling.
BY TIA TASHIRO