Plus One (35 page)

D’Arcy spread the folds of the sling and pushed aside the hospital blanket. He pulled out the lifeless gape-mouthed body of Premie Gort.

I now had a quantitative measure of Mr. Thomas’s denseness, based on the amount of time it took him to process that the baby wasn’t real. He finally exploded from a standing position into a lunge faster than I’ve seen any human being move—speed and strength and grooming being his comparative advantages—and tackled D’Arcy against the wall of the cabin, throwing him to the deck facedown, pinning him with the full weight of his body. Gort was crushed beneath them. Jones was by Thomas’s side instantly, shoving his hand against D’Arcy’s head, forcing his cheek hard against the deck. With his other hand he rifled through D’Arcy’s pockets.

“I have a self-destruct code on my phone,” D’Arcy struggled to say, his voice distorted and strained from the weight of Mr. Thomas on his lungs. I tried to go to him, but Ciel anticipated me, locking his arms around me. When I fought him, William joined in and I was subdued.

I understood D’Arcy’s plan. He was going to send the text with Fitz’s location after Paulsen fulfilled her end of the bargain, after she promised to drop the charges against me, after she let me off the boat. It was a hopelessly unenforceable deal and riddled with all the same hostage-negotiation dilemmas we had already discussed in his apartment, but it socked me in the chest that he had even dared to try it. He had used the only card he had to try to rescue me, to erase my mistakes of the last week.

Jones held the phone out for Minister Paulsen.

She took it and said, “Destruction of your papers sends you to jail for life, Noma. Did you really want to throw everything away for a factory Smudge?”

“He’s not Noma,” Ciel said. “You can access his data.”

Minister Paulsen tapped the screen. D’Arcy closed his eyes, expecting the end.

All I wanted was to be at his side.

And then I saw Minister Paulsen scroll with her finger. Her eyes darted around the screen, taking in information. When she came to what she was looking for, she let out a choked sound, something like a sob—a release of anguish that startled me.

D’Arcy’s phone had not in fact fried itself. And I knew why. It was because of me. It was because I had asked Ciel to set his profile back to D’Arcy Benoît, Medical Apprentice with National Distinction.

“Let him up,” Minister Paulsen commanded Mr. Thomas. “Send a unit to the County Day nursery.” And then her voice caught with emotion. “Tell them
Baby Boy Harcourt.
”

I was stunned at D’Arcy’s resourcefulness. He had somehow returned Fitz to the nursery. Or Hélène had done it, but it could only have been at his request with that touching surname. I briefly wondered how you smuggled a baby
into
a nursery, given how difficult it was to secrete one out, but this mother and son were both brilliant hospital insiders.

Thomas climbed off D’Arcy and yanked him to his feet, where Jones held his elbows behind his back. I let out a guttural grunt of frustration as I ripped out of Ciel’s and William’s grasp to tumble forward into D’Arcy’s chest. The descent of the meteor was complete. I wrapped my arms around him. He leaned against me and rubbed his cheek against my hair.

“D’Arcy Benoît,” I heard Minister Paulsen say, still examining his phone. “I recognize you, now that I see a photo as you were. Such a distinctive face. You’re the one in the news footage with Sol. The video camera from one of the police cars caught you dashing across Lake Shore Drive the night Dacruz was hit.” I heard a smirk in her voice. “They’re looking for you.”

“They can have me, if it frees Sol,” he said into my neck, refusing to untuck his face.

“No they can’t,” I said back to him.

“I’ll switch to Night,” D’Arcy whispered.

But Minister Paulsen had heard him and answered before I could. “There’s no chance on god’s earth with your résumé that the Day government would permit a reassignment.” Her voice became trailing, hesitant, like she was simultaneously composing a text on her phone. “And you’d better have told the truth about the location of my son.”

It was time for me to try to accomplish my second goal.

But before I did, I concentrated on the feeling of D’Arcy’s body against mine, and I squeezed him tighter, wishing his arms were wrapped around me in one of his nourishing bear hugs. I closed my eyes and pulled a deep breath of him into my lungs, letting my nose and throat taste him on the way down. I nudged his face with mine until he understood I wanted his lips. I felt every part of his mouth in a kiss that was firm and urgent. I imprinted it in my memory. I prayed to a universe that sometimes granted me unexpected gifts:
Please don’t let me forget
.

“What are you about to do?” D’Arcy murmured, his voice on edge. He might have read my kiss for what it was: a goodbye.

“I’m so glad I crushed my finger during your shift,” I whispered back.

“Sol, no…”

I made myself pull away from him, and with Jones holding his arms he couldn’t stop me. I turned to Minister Paulsen and said, “Let’s make a deal.”

Sunday
11:00 a.m.

Jacqueline Paulsen looked at me as if I were an alien, and then she put on her jacket, which had been draped over the locker.

“I don’t think you people understand the definition of a
deal
. You have to have something of value to trade.” She turned to Mr. Thomas. “Get an expedited Day pass for the arrest of these two”—she meant D’Arcy and me—“and one for my transport home. I have a baby to nurse. And tell Richard to take us to Monroe Harbor while we wait.”

Her phone pinged, and she took it out of her jacket pocket to read a text message. Her face softened and her whole body settled like pills in a counting machine. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how tense she had been. She put a hard look on her face and held up the screen for me, to show me definitive proof of my lack of leverage. It was an uncensored, full-resolution photo of Fitz in the arms of a female Suit who was beaming. And even with his eyes closed, the baby was wearing a defiant frown.

“He’s beautiful,” I said. “Ornery and opinionated … I hope you never try to take it out of him. As a Smudge, he’ll need that strength. Also, you might seriously consider naming him Fitzroy. It suits him.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?”

“Tell Mr. Jones to let D’Arcy go.”

“Excuse me?”

“I can’t make it any clearer.” And then I said to Mr. Thomas, “You might want to hold off on sending that text for a minute.”

Minister Paulsen said, “Just what do you think—”

“Do you know what a future text is?” I interrupted. I knew it would make her listen. She stared at me. Her eyes were small and brown and wired to a very smart brain, the cogs of which I could practically see turning. For a moment I was taken over by the sensation that my parents had held her gaze like this, too, and suddenly those fifteen years were compressed, that moment joined with this one, and I felt them alive in me.

She said to Mr. Jones irritably, “Oh, for heaven’s sake let him go. He’s not Noma, he’s just a Medical Apprentice.” To D’Arcy she said, “Jones can kill you with his bare hands, so don’t try anything.”

Mr. Jones unhanded D’Arcy, who rubbed his upper arms and shoulders.

I took a breath and said, “Really, I don’t give a damn if Mr. Thomas sends that text he’s still working on, but
you
might want him to stop once you’ve heard what I have to say.”

“You’re quite the little bitch, aren’t you?”

“I’m not little.” In fact, I was looking down on her. “And you made me what I am when you killed my parents.”

“I didn’t kill them.”

“When you didn’t stop them from dying.”

“Your parents made a choice.”

She was sort of right on that score. There was an entire web of failures making up my life, fabricated of the finest strands, tangled and knotted over the last century. From the moment on March 11, 1918, that Mess Sergeant Albert Gitchell reported to Camp Riley Hospital Building Ninety-one with a high fever, throbbing head, and sore throat, every stupid decision after that had led to me, standing on this boat, without parents, without a grandfather, with a Telemachus of a brother, without a home. Without D’Arcy.

“They made a choice, and then you made a choice,” I finally allowed. “And now I’ve made one. I’ve programmed my phone with a future text.”

I glanced at Ciel. His eyes were narrowed, reading my face. He knew instantly where I had gotten that text capability. And I knew that I could be putting him in danger by divulging a new technology—one that his boss hadn’t been gifted with—so I said to him belligerently, “You’re not the only one with talent in our family, asshole. You’ve been gone a long time.”

Minister Paulsen looked at Ciel for a moment, gauging his reaction, but Ciel was convincingly agape. She turned to me. “I don’t, as a matter of fact, know what a future text is.”

“It’s self-explanatory, really. A future text is a text sent now, to be delivered at a later date. The only way to call off a future text once it’s been sent is to enter a personal code.”

“You have my attention.” She didn’t take her eyes off me as she said, “Mr. Thomas, pause what you’re doing.”

I went on. “One month from now exactly, a text message will be received simultaneously by three recipients: Grady Hastings, and the Day and Night desks of the Independent News Network. Unless I stop it before then, the text will reveal the existence of secret, mandatory pinealectomies for Night babies.”

The muscles in her face became loose, making her skin look doughy and detached.

“From what I understand,” I said, “this information will help the rhetoric of Grady Hastings and his followers
a lot
. It’s one thing to deceive people that time can be ‘shared fairly,’ and another thing to mutilate their children without telling them.”

She stared at me for a long time. Silences were hard for me not to fill, but I stood still and pressed my lips together to keep my mouth shut. I put my shoulders back. I was getting better at waiting. I would never be a patient person, but I might be able to survive jail time now without spontaneously combusting. It was something of a comfort to realize it.

“So you’re demanding to be reassigned to Day with Ciel and have the charges against you dropped,” she said. As if she could know what I wanted. As if the power to do it had been hers all along.

I shook my head. “Not even close.”

“Take the deal, Sol,” Ciel begged.

“Look again at that remarkable baby of yours in the photo, Ms. Paulsen,” I said, ignoring Ciel. “And then think of the world he was born into. You had to break the law to make sure he didn’t have a part of his body nuked on his second night of life. Is that really how you want things?” I wasn’t being eloquent, but I didn’t care. No one was writing this down for the history books. “I can’t have my freedom, and you know it. I screwed up: I broke curfew, I escaped the custody of an Hour Guard, and then I caused his injury. On camera.”

“Are you forgetting about the kidnapping charges?”

Ciel interjected here. “No one but you knows that Fitzroy was missing, Jacqui. There don’t have to
be
charges.”

She glared at Ciel. “I’m going to name the baby after his father.”

“Someone has to go to jail after that spectacle at Monroe Harbor,” I said, “and I’m the logical person to do it, not D’Arcy. You saw his records just now—he’s an asset to the Day community.
I
corrupted him; I used him. Without me, he’s as straight as they come.”

“Stop it, Sol,” D’Arcy said, his face full of an anguish I couldn’t stand to watch, so I turned away.

“I’m a factory Smudge,” I went on. “Some other grunt is manning my blister-pack station as we speak, and there wasn’t even a hiccup in the transition. No one will miss me. I’ll have a trial and I’ll go to jail. I don’t demand special treatment.”

“So Mr. Benoît gets off with a slap on the wrist, I can arrange that,” Minister Paulsen said crisply. “Although I’m a bit surprised that someone who’s resourceful enough to program a future text into a mobile phone would waste blackmail leverage on a boy.”

I laughed. It was a tired snort, but genuine, and it came out of me without my even knowing it was bubbling up. She shook her head like I was a lunatic.

I said, “D’Arcy’s exoneration isn’t all I’m asking for.”

Ciel said, “Sol,
fais attention.
”
Be careful.

I looked into my brother’s eyes. God, I would miss them. Again. “I really
don’t
want to set the world on fire,” I admitted to him, feeling a sting of tears at the thought of Poppu’s song.

“I just want to start a flame in your heart,” he replied quietly, right in step with me.

I turned back to Minister Paulsen, to finish the job. “The text includes the information that privileged members of the Night government routinely have their children spared the procedure. It names you and describes how Fitzroy took a little vacation in the Ray nursery while his Smudge peers had their pineal glands destroyed with radiation.”

Her eyes were wide. There was a stunned silence around us.

“I’ve had longer to think about this than you have,” I said. “But with time, when you stop trying to find ways to cancel that text, I believe you’ll understand that
you
should be the one to expose the existence of the PinX procedure and take a public, political stand against the policy, rather than have your complicity with the Day government revealed in the news.

“So this is the deal I’m offering: when you begin your campaign against pinealectomies, I’ll cancel the text. Just get my phone to me in jail somehow. I assume the police will confiscate it in the next few minutes.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” There was a hairline fracture in her stony façade. I prayed that, with time, the truth would eventually cleave her open along that crack, revealing whatever decency she had inside.

“It has to be you,” I told her. “Just like it has to be me.”

“Do you understand that my career is over no matter which path I choose?”