Dangerous (15 page)

“We’ll dunk her. When she comes back up, she’ll be easier

to cuff.”

“And then what? It’d be safer just to kill her,” said Jacques,

but I didn’t think he meant it. His hands were twitchy, eyes

wide, too afraid to think straight.

“No one could kill Ruthless,” said Wilder. “All we can do is

slow her down until Howell gets here with the cuffs.”

“She won’t fall for it,” I said. “Who would climb up here to

fight us when it’s so clearly a trap?”

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“Ruthless,” Wilder said, staring at the water. “She feels in-

destructible. It makes her careless. Besides, if she really wants to

break free from this team, she’ll want me dead.”

I knew what he meant. It’d be no easy task for any of us to

run away from the living thinker.

Wilder positioned us around the ship while he stayed on

the bow as the bait. I tried to imagine what would happen if

he died. I wiped my palm on my jeans. At least my Fido hand

didn’t sweat.

The white splashes kept coming closer.

On Wilder’s cue, Mi-sun shot a pipe. It hit Ruth’s forehead,

dunking her under. She came back up and swam closer to the

boat. Mi-sun hit her again. Ruth was furious. She was too easy a

target in the water, where she couldn’t move as fast. She could

have gone underwater, holding her breath comfortably up to

twenty minutes, and punched through the boat. But Wilder

had guessed right—Ruth wanted to get her hands on us. On

him
. She started to climb the anchor chain.

“Go away!” Wilder shouted. “Leave us alone!”

He sounded desperate. Man, he really could act.

Ruth leaped from the top of the chain onto the deck, and

Wilder scrambled back so fast, no way it was acting. If she

touched him, she would kill him. And we’d be next.

The four of us worked fast. Mi-sun struck Ruth from be-

hind, knocking her over a length of anchor chain while I ma-

neuvered the crane to lift the anchor and drop it on Ruth. Sever-

al tons of steel anchor held her down for a moment. The crane

picked up the chain by the anchor end, crossing it around her.

Wilder had Mi-sun distract Ruth with pelted screws

while Jacques sealed Ruth to the chain with havoc bands. She

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thrashed, and I worried she would break free before we had a

chance to dunk her.

I pulled the chain up, dangling Ruth and the anchor. She

screamed in anger. I had the crane release its cargo, and while

Ruth fell, Mi-sun shot a large pipe at Ruth’s chest. The force

knocked Ruth-and-anchor over the water before they slammed

down. The chain sped after her underwater, meter after meter,

clanking angrily as it unwound from its massive spool.

The clicking stopped. Surely Ruth was wrestling with her

binds in the depths. She could hold her breath for twenty min-

utes and had enough strength to either break the havoc bonds

or swim with an anchor strapped to her back. I didn’t see how

this trick would stop her.

“Howell’s on her way,” Wilder said.

Hopefully Ruth’s underwater struggle would tire her

enough that we could get the cuffs on her. And then, fingers

crossed, those temporary restraints would hold her till I could

design and build a Ruthless-proof prison.

I imagined Ruth hitting the bottom of the ocean, and in

a fury pushing back up. Like a torpedo. Coming straight for us.

I backed away from the railing. So did Jacques.

“She’s going to be one
bleeping
mad hornet,” said Jacques.

I had a sudden thought. “She took the scuba course, right?

She knows about the bends?”

The bends—decompression sickness. What happens when

you go deep underwater then come up too fast. The deeper you

are in water, the higher the pressure, and the gas molecules in

your body compress. But then as you come up, all those little

bubbles of nitrogen expand again. Rising too fast, the nitrogen

molecules act like little bombs. To avoid the bends, scuba divers

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take decompression stops on ascent and wait while the nitrogen

naturally seeps out of their body.

Wilder was staring at bubbles starting to form in the water.

“She’s coming up fast.”

“The bends can’t kill her, right?” I said. “I mean, her skin

and bones are strong, her muscles dense. Surely her veins and

organs have toughened up too.”

Actually, Ruth with the bends seemed like a great idea. If

she was in a little pain, she might be too weak to immediately

kill us. But perhaps our oxygen-enriched cells prevented the

bends altogether. After all, dolphins and whales don’t suffer

from decompression sickness.

The bubbles thickened to a hard boil. Jacques was adding

layers to his havoc skin and cramming down an energy bar. Mi-

sun was gripping handfuls of screws. I jumped into the seat of

the crane, my sweaty palm slipping on the controls.

There was a white explosion, and Ruth nearly cleared the

surface before splashing down. Waves slapped against the side

of the ship. Bubbles flicked the surface like a swarm of insects.

Ruth lay floating on her back.

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“Maisie, get her in!” Wilder called.

I steered the crane into the water and picked up Ruth in a

vice grip that would have broken a normal person’s bones. I let

the robot arm drop her onto the boat’s deck. Her groans were

constant, unaffected by the fall. Maybe she wouldn’t need re-

straints after all. Maybe she needed a doctor.

Howell’s incoming helicopter churned the air above us. If

we took her back to HAL, we’d put everyone there in jeopardy

of a crushed skull when she recovered. I couldn’t think of a solu-

tion. Hopefully Wilder had.

Jacques approached Ruth, but he stepped back when she

started coughing and clutching herself, her back arching. She

seemed unaware of anything but her own pain.

“Wilder,” I started, “I don’t think—”

Ruth gasped, gagged, and her loud breathing stopped.

Jacques and I bolted forward, but Wilder pulled us away.

“Don’t touch her. Everyone stay back.”

No.

My instincts that taught me how to breathe, how to stand,

how to be, also said to trust Wilder. Every nanite-enhanced cell

of me was bound to him. But my brain said when someone is

dying, you help. We’d all certified in CPR at astronaut boot

camp. I could help, so I should.

Everything seemed to stop—the wind, the motion of the

boat, the cells dividing in my body.

I met eyes with Mi-sun and Jacques. If we were the ones

Dangerous

who fell, if our hearts stopped, would Wilder let us die too? A

kind of understanding ran between the three of us, a plan that

didn’t include Wilder, and that felt strange and dangerous but

right.

I made for Ruth, and it took Wilder a fraction of a second

to realize what I was doing. He darted for me, but Jacques and

Mi-sun stopped him. That simple action, two people putting

themselves in the way of another, felt like an earthquake.

The team is broken, I thought, and then I tried not to think,

dropping to my knees beside Ruth and releasing my arms from

the robot suit.

“What are you doing?” Wilder yelled, struggling against

Jacques. “Let me go!”

Ruth’s skin was cold from the ocean water and felt rub-

bery to my fingers. No pulse. I tilted her head back to clear her

airway and began chest compressions, Fido on the bottom so I

didn’t crush my left hand with my cyborg strength.

“Maisie, don’t touch her.”

“I have to try,” I said. He was wrong, but at least he cared

enough to worry about what Ruth would do to me if she came to.

Suddenly I was yanked back. I struggled out of Wilder’s

grip, Jacques and Mi-sun grabbed him again, and I returned

to Ruth.

My Fido hand wasn’t as pressure sensitive as my left hand,

so I switched, my left hand over her heart. I was concentrating

so hard on making sure Fido didn’t push my human hand too

hard that I didn’t notice at first. The different sensation on my

palm. The extraordinary cold.

I didn’t notice, until the pain.

I heard my scream before I felt it. I pushed away and my

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back hit the deck. My head ached with the fall before all other

sensation was swallowed in the agony I’d felt on Midway Sta-

tion. Ruth’s token had entered my palm.

I knew that once the pain shot up my arm and flared in my

chest it would ease. I clung to that promise during those few sec-

onds that seemed hours, a path of agonizing fire, bitterest cold,

pain like muscles torn in half, bones crushed to bits. There was

an explosion near my heart like an electric blackout—no sight,

no breath, no hearing, nothing but white-hot pain. I wanted to

die. If I’d been able to move, I would have done anything, any-

thing to end the pain . . .

I became aware again.

My breath was hitting my lungs in slow, hard gasps, my fore-

head prickling with sweat. I was looking up into a sky a shock-

ingly calm blue. Wilder was kneeling beside me, his arms around

me. He was saying, “Maisie, Maisie, what did you do . . . ?”

He touched my palm. He touched the mark on my chest.

“You have Ruth’s token,” he whispered. He shut his eyes,

hard, as if squinting against a glaring headache.

I sat up, pushed away, backed away, looking at him, at

Ruth’s body, at Jacques shiny in his armor, at the helicopter

landing on the upper deck, as if everything was part of a swarm

of bees I should swat. Ruth had died. Her heart stopped, the

nanites swooped back into the token, the token released and

was drawn into my palm.

Howell leaped out of her helicopter and ran toward us.

“Ruth?”

“Dead,” said Jacques, stripping off his armor like an orange

peel and tossing it onto the deck. “We were just trying to cap-

ture her.
Bleep, bleep, bleep
.”

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“Don’t mess this up, Maisie,” said Wilder. “Don’t freak out.

Take deep breaths.”

I took deep breaths, but I was definitely starting to freak

out. Ruth was dead. And part of my brain was dimming. I had

become accustomed to the sharpened thought, the way I could

look at things and understand what was beneath them, like hav-

ing x-ray vision for machines. Now it was as if I’d lost the pre-

scription glasses I hadn’t realized I’d been wearing. The ship’s

robot arm, the helicopter, my Fido arm and robot suit—I could

see their outsides but I could barely imagine their insides.

I looked at my chest. There was the bright-brown double

swoop of Ruth’s brute token. My techno token was paler, washed

out beneath it.

My insides rumbled. It was like hunger pains but not local-

ized to my stomach. I was starving
everywhere
.

Wilder was looking at me as if I were an escaped grizzly

bear. “Hungry?”

I nodded. Really hungry. I wanted a steak. I wanted a cow.

Wilder shouted to Jacques, and he tossed a few energy bars

on the deck. I ate them without breathing, gulped down a cou-

ple liters of water Howell offered, and said, “The techno token

is dying.”

“Dying?” Howell’s eyes widened.

“I guess the brute token is burying it.” I stared at Fido, flex-

ing my fingers, twisting my wrist. “It’s almost gone.”

Wilder shouted something in Russian that sounded like

a curse, tore off his headset, and threw it onto the deck. “The

newest token must trump the oldest. Maisie, why’d you have to

do it?”

His words were getting harder to hear over the pounding of

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my heart, the sweeping breaths in my lungs. Men were sliding

Ruth’s body into a long white bag.

I sobbed, remnants of an energy bar flying out of my mouth.

“Did we . . . did we just
murder
her?” My eyes and nose were wet

and running, sobs wracking my chest. “Am I going to turn into

her now? Am I going to hurt people and end up anchored to the

bottom of the ocean?”

“Maisie . . .” Wilder held up calming hands.

That was all he could say, no promises.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .” I started to back away. Heart-

beats ravaged my chest, and even though I knew I could hold

my breath for twenty minutes, I felt like I couldn’t get enough

air. I ripped off the robot suit and clawed at my own skin as if I

could cast that off too. I wanted to peel away everything, every

part of me. I dug my fingernails into my arm and couldn’t make

a mark.

Wilder was speaking again, his hands in taming-the-wild-

beast attitude. I could hear him making noise, but his words

just scratched at me, not entering my brain. Men were carry-

ing Ruth’s body bag to the helicopter. The wind struck at me

like Mi-sun’s buckshot. I felt trapped on every side—Wilder and

Howell, this strange, empty ship, Ruth’s body. My own body