Contain (33 page)

“
Bren?” her mother cries
out in surprise.

“
The boy's unstable!”
Dominic screams. “Listen to me!”

“
Hannah's telling the
truth,” I say. “Jonah isn't a murderer. Sure, he messed with the
lights, but only to scare us, as I said. But you're wrong about the
rest. He was trying to teach people how to defend themselves once
we left the bunker, not from the Wraiths, but from whatever else
might be out there. He didn't kill anyone. He didn't kill my
father. And neither did Jack.”

“
Finn?” Bren says, breaking
away from her mother. She takes a single step closer before
stopping just out of my reach. I hate the way she's looking at me,
a combination of fear and pity. “Your dad—”

“
Died. I know. Because of
what he knew. Same as Doctor Cavanaugh. The murderer tried to
silence her; he didn't realize that my father knew, too. Or that I
did. It wasn't until Dad checked the monitors in the watch room
that the murderer had to strike again. The identity of the killer
was on those cameras.”

“
That's ridiculous,” Mister
Abramson spits. He struggles against Mister Blakeley's hold on him,
but there's little he can do as long as his arm is twisted behind
his back. “You shame your father by denying the truth of what
happened! By denying the real killer. Shame on you! How can you
refuse to accept the truth? Everyone knows there was no love lost
between your father and Jack. Bren! Honey, get away from
Finn.”

“
You believe Jack killed my
father?”

Mister Abramson sputters. “Yes, Jack.
Because he hated your dad.”

“
Then who killed Jack? It
couldn't have been my father because there was no weapon inside
that room.”

“
It was Jonah! He killed
the others, including his own father. He admitted to
it!”

“
He said the words, 'I
killed them'?”

“
Well, no.”

“
Why would Jonah kill his
own father?”

“
Because.”

Mister Abramson finally wrestles free
of Bix's dad and steps toward me. For a moment he looks like he's
going to push Bren away, but he just steps between us.

I hold a hand up to stay Bix's
dad.

Mister Abramson places a hand gently
on my shoulder. “That whole family was sick. Jonah hated his dad,
feared him. Everyone knew that.”

“
Not enough to kill
him.”

“
Yes, enough to kill him.
Because he was deathly afraid that Jack would discover the truth
about him.” He throws his head back and shouts over his shoulder so
everyone can hear his next words. “Isn't that true, Jonah? You have
a secret your father could never know?”

The question is met with stone cold
silence.

“
What truth about Jonah?”
Bren whispers.

“
That boy did everything to
curry his father's favor,” Mister Abramson replies, not to his
daughter, but to me. “We all know that. We've all seen it, been
repulsed by it. But who are we to judge? Jack Resnick wasn't a
horrible role model: intelligent, assertive, driven. In this world,
those attributes can be useful, essential. Your father recognized
that, Finn. Most importantly of all, Jack Resnick was fiercely
protective of his own.”

Now he turns to Bren. “A trait I fully
understand and endorse myself.”

He steps away from us then, makes his
way back to the railing, though he steers clear of the catwalk.
“But by the same token, Jack Resnick was an incredibly oppressive
man, wasn't he, son? And it was this trait that made him the worst
kind of father there could ever be. He just couldn't accept
anything that didn't fit exactly into his world view. Am I not
right?”

Still Jonah refuses to speak, whether
to defend his father, to deny the claim, or to agree.

“
If something didn't fit
into Jack Resnick's world view,
he
rejected it!
” Mister Abramson shouts,
emphasizing each word with a slap of his hand on the railing. The
harsh sounds peal through the chamber. “
That's
what Jonah was so afraid of,
of being rejected. He was so scared of his father discovering the
truth about him that he would rather kill the man than be rejected
by him.”

“
That's a lie!” Jonah
roars, and he starts to run across the catwalk. Hannah tries to
grab him, but misses.

“
What truth?” Bren asks.
“Daddy?”

“
The truth about Jonah
Resnick.”

“
No!” Jonah yells. “Don't!”
But he's too far away to stop him, and he knows it. He collapses
onto the catwalk and sobs. “Please.”

Seth Abramson turns and glares at me.
There's a wicked gleefulness in his eyes that makes me shiver, but
it's his next words which chill me to the bone: “People are seldom
who you think they are, aren't they, Jonah?”

“
Okay, okay,” Jonah pleads.
“I won't go.”

The grin on Seth's face widens. “Now
you're talking sensibly. Why don't we all return
upstairs?”

“
Jonah?” I ask.

But he shakes his head. “It's over.
I  I can't.”

Seth Abramson takes advantage of the confusion to push his way past
Bix. By the time I can react, he's halfway up the catwalk to
Jonah.

“
Get up, killer,” he
growls, pulling him up by the shirt. He starts to drag him back
toward the group. Jonah's taller, probably stronger, but he doesn't
resist.

“
You can't!” Hannah
screams. “He didn't do anything! Stop him!”

“
Four people are dead
because of him,” Seth declares. “Maybe more.”

“
Liar!” I run after him and
try to block his way.

“
It's over, Finn.
Move.”

“
Let him go.”

“
You heard Jonah. It's
over.”

“
It's not. You say he
killed those people? I don't believe it for a moment, but let's say
for the sake of argument I give you the benefit of the
doubt.”

“
Finn, no!” Hannah
cries.

I ignore her. “Explain to me why he
would kill Doctor Cavanaugh. Why would he or Jack want her
dead?”

Impatience flickers across the man's
face. “I don't know! And I don't really care! His mind is
sick.”

“
You talk about secrets,
Mister Abramson, but you're the one hiding the truth.” I point a
finger at his face. “Before this, I didn't know who the real killer
was. I just knew it wasn't Jonah. But now—”

“
Get out of my
way!”

“
What did she know?” I
demand. “What did Doc Cavanaugh find out about those things in
Eddie's blood that you had to kill her to keep it
secret?”

“
Dad?” Bren says, her voice
shaking. But her father ignores her, and keeps his gaze locked onto
mine.

“
What are you hiding?” I
demand.

“
Daddy? Is this
true?”

Finally, the mask begins to crumble.
His eyes flick to the crowd behind him, revealing panic. I sense
the disquiet spreading among everyone as the truth sinks
in.

I had hoped and prayed that it
wouldn't be him. Oh god, how I wanted it not to be. Just the
possibility that it might be almost stopped me from acting, because
I knew how much it would shatter Bren's world, her soul. But I had
to know. I had to find out who and why for Dad.

And this charade of laying the blame
on Jonah? How long did he think it would hold? Or threatening to
expose some other secret, would it somehow keep his own guilt from
coming to light?

Whatever it is that Jonah's hiding, it
can't be worse than this. Can it?

“
What did she find,” Fran
Rollins asks. “What was in Eddie's blood? What's in
ours?”

I turn to him, but his face is stone,
hard and etched by years of pretense. His eyes glint with ice. It's
become clear to him that he can't hide anymore. He releases Jonah
and shoves him toward me. Then he steps backward over him, putting
Jonah between us.

Hannah's behind him, about twenty feet
away, and now I fear for her vulnerability. Three or four long
strides and he'd have her in his clasp. As if sensing this, she
grips the handrails even harder.

“
You want to know the
truth? Fine. It's not like it matters anymore. Before the
outbreak,” Mister Abramson says, his voice low and menacing, “I
worked for a company that developed medical tools, surgical
instruments, implants. We were focused on tissue healing, cellular
repair and remodeling, regeneration.”

“
Dad?” Bren's face is
white. So is her mother's. “I thought you did computer
programming?”

“
I did, honey. I couldn't
tell you the whole truth because it was a top secret project,
layers upon layers deep within organizations nested within other
organizations. The potential for good was huge. Other parties,
however, were interested in other . . .
applications. We had to be very careful in choosing our partners.
And what we shared with them. But even then, we couldn't control
everything, and there was the inevitable leak.”

“
Seth,” his wife pleads.
“Stop.”

I almost believe she's going to cover
her ears, but she doesn't.

“
I was the lead firmware
programmer in charge of cybernetic interfacing.”

“
What does that
mean?”

“
Specifically, Finn, it
means that I wrote the code that controls those things inside
Eddie’s body. Nanites. Tiny little computerized robots.”

“
No!” Bren
wails.

“
The tech entered limited
clinical trials in Asia a decade ago. Top secret and all.
Everything looked really good and the government here decided that
we could move forward testing them out on a much broader
scale.”

“
How broad?”

“
General distribution. The
entire population.”

“
What?” Kari shrieks. “I
never agreed—
How dare
you?
”

“
The tech was for the good
of us all.”

“
Good? How can any of this
possibly be good?”

“
Oh, spare me your false
indignation, Kari. Without them inside his body, without my
intervention, Eddie Mancuso would have died within days. Our
nanites saved his life! My program saved his life! If I hadn’t been
here to activate—”

He stops abruptly, as if realizing
he's already said too much.

“
Those things turned him
into something he wasn't before,” I tell him. “I've seen Eddie.
He's changed.”

Mister Abramson shrugs. “Changed is
such an imprecise term, Finn. I would have said
improved.”

“
If they're so good, then
why did you have to kill Doctor Cavanaugh? Why keep it a
secret?”

“
The technology was stolen,
then corrupted. We don’t know by whom. That’s what we’ve been
trying to ascertain.” He raises his hands to plead with us. “It
wasn’t our fault. We were trying to stop it!”

And then it comes to me, what he's not
been saying, why he would go to such lengths to keep us from
finding out the truth.

“
It's the Flense, isn't it?
These things in our blood, they're the Flense.”

Mister Abramson turns his gaze onto
me, and I can tell by the look in his eye that I'm right, or at
least partially so.

“
Smart boy,” he says. “You
get the prize for
almost
figuring it out.”

Behind me, Missus Abramson gasps.
She's not the only one.

“
Almost?” I say. But of
course it can't be the whole truth. If the things inside of us are
responsible for the Flense, then why haven't we turned into
Wraiths?

He nods, sensing that I've recognized
the conundrum, and a humorless grin that doesn't reach his eyes
taints his lips. “So close, yet still miles away from the answer.
Light years away, in fact. I told you, we were trying to stop
it.”

“
Why are we even in here?”
Kari asks. “Why lock us up inside this bunker?”