Busted Flush

Drake tried to take a step but lost his footing and collapsed face-first to the floor. His forehead bounced heavily off the cold linoleum. Smitty laughed. Drake clamped his jaw shut. He wasn’t going to let them get him to go emo if he could help it. At least whatever they’d drugged him with dulled the pain as well as making him a spaz.

Justice lifted Drake up by his armpits. “Shut up, Smitty.” He glared at his fellow BICC agent.

“Thanks,” Drake said. “I’m okay now.” It was a lie, but he was going to do his best to pull it off. He could tell that Justice wasn’t taking up for him because he liked Drake. It was because he thought Smitty was a jerk-off. It was one of the few things they agreed on.

On the way back to his room Drake tried to get Justice to tell him what they’d injected him with, not to mention what it had done to him. As expected, Justice told Drake exactly nothing except that it was an advanced interrogation technique. Justice gave Drake a stick of gum when they got back, “to take the taste out of his mouth.” Then he left Drake alone again.

Drake lay on his bed, chewing the gum slowly to keep the taste for as long as possible. As near as he could tell, they were going to keep him here forever. All he knew was that he had to get out of here soon, and he was going to need help. Major help.

Niobe, Zoë, and Zane pretended to watch American Hero in the lounge while Zenobia snuck into Pendergast’s office. Zane chuckled (in the form of cyan and burgundy cross-hatching) when the Laureate, the weakest of the competing aces, managed to get Tesseract, the most powerful, voted off the show. Team Clubs was screwed.

Niobe turned inward, focused on Zenobia. The filing cabinet was locked. Zenobia reached inside with a phantom finger and tripped the latch. It took a bit of searching to find Drake’s file.

Got it, Mom. Zenobia pulled out a thin hanging folder. The tab said “Thomas, Drake.”

Good job, kiddo. Don’t keep me in suspense.

Zenobia started reading. “No. Freaking. Way.”

Drake was, apparently, the only survivor of the accident in Texas that had been on the news. An Air Force reconnaissance patrol had found him, naked but otherwise apparently healthy, near the center of the devastation. SCARE suspected that Drake had played a role in the event. Whatever it had been, it wasn’t a grain silo explosion.

A page slipped out of the folder and fluttered to Zenobia’s feet. It was the end of an e-mail. Pendergast believed in paper trails, apparently, and kept hard copies of everything.

In a report to his superiors in Washington, Pendergast had concluded: “ . . . constant danger to this facility, its staff, and the other patients. As the trump virus has failed, I see no choice but to euthanize the subject.”

My God. Reading those words revived the sickly feeling in Niobe’s gut. The newest entry in Drake’s file, dated that morning, recommended that he be moved to the deepest part of Q Sector for “containment” in case of an accident. Pendergast stressed the importance of keeping Drake calm—which Niobe found at odds with tossing him in BICC’s worst neighborhood—until he could be subtly euthanized. Pendergast suggested piping carbon monoxide into Drake’s new cell.

The television blared. Zane jumped. Pham, a player in Christian’s secret mistigris game, had picked up the television remote and was cranking the volume.

“Hey, not so loud!” Loud!-loud!-loud!-loud! . . .

He ignored Zoë’s echoing protest, plopped down in a recliner, and tore open a bag of corn chips. Niobe hoped his lewd fantasies of superpowered starlets would distract him from wondering where her third child had gone.

Pham shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. After a moment he grunted, unhooked the jangly key ring from his belt, and tossed it on a side table.

“Mom.” Om-om-om-om. Zoë whispered, “It’s too loud for Zane.” Ane-ane-ane-ane-ane . . .

“Hush, kiddo. Don’t make me lose my train of thought.”

Zen, can you put Drake’s file back and pull mine?

The file marked “Winslow, Niobe” was twice as thick as any other. It began with a capsule biography summarizing her life, the long journey from a Connecticut mansion to a subterranean government laboratory.

Next, the file detailed every child she hatched at BICC: photographs, medical examinations, descriptions of their abilities. But they weren’t catalogued by name. The paperwork reduced each child to a serial number, starting with 1-A-1 for her darling and dearly missed little strongman Aaron, all the way to 1-Z-3 for Zenobia.