Flash Point (19 page)

“Cai was his guardian, too. His name was Josh. But Josh couldn’t even read and I can.”

Waverly had said that Cai had a mentally challenged brother who died. And now Cai had taken over protecting and guiding Tommy. Amy’s heart ached. Cai was such a good guy—far too good for Kaylie.

That’s just jealousy talking
.

Ashamed of herself, Amy stood. Tommy followed her lead. “Where are we going now?”

“I have to check on my grandmother. She’s sick.”

“Is she going to die? Like Cai’s brother?”

Amy looked at Tommy. He didn’t know to not ask stark questions; neither Rafe nor Violet had actually asked her that. Amy said, “Yes. She’s going to die.”

“I’m sorry,” Tommy said simply. “That’s sad.”

“Yes, it is. Let’s go back to our rooms, Tommy.”

“I’ll wait in my room for Cai.”

“Good plan.” And Kaylie had better be with Gran, as she’d promised.

She was, watching music videos on TV. The sisters smiled falsely at each other. Kaylie said, “Monday I need to start back to school, so you’ll have to get a nurse or something to watch Gran.”

“OK.” And then, out of doubt or concern or malice or some unknowable combination of the them all, Amy said in a tone she knew was nasty, “Are you really going to school? Or just getting out of here because it’s boring?”

Kaylie refused to rise to the bait. “To school.” And then, “Cai wants me to.”

“Oh,” Amy said, and went in to check on Gran.

* * *

“We might need to replace Tommy,” Myra said, pushing back a strand of hair that had fallen forward as she peered into the editing machine. “His responses are too predictable. They’ll skew the voting.”

“He wasn’t predictable in today’s Frustration Box scenario.”

“That was Amy’s doing and you know it.”

Alex said, “He doesn’t like being here. Myra, you hired him outside of our audition process—how exactly did that happen? You’ve never told me.”

Myra shrugged.

“He clearly doesn’t want to be here. What’s our hold on him? Because if you—”

Mark Meyer burst into the room. “Who the fuck set up that lame Frustration Box scenario?”

Myra said levelly, “I did.”

“I do tech around here! I thought that was understood! Christ, a lame video parlor prototype—what’s next, we have them play Monopoly?”

“Mr. Taunton likes it.”

“Mr. Taunton hardly falls into our target demographic, Myra. And he won’t like it when he sees the ratings.
And
he knows jack shit about tech! You’re treading on my territory!”

She said pleasantly, “I think you should remember your manners, Mark. This show is my territory, mine and Alex’s, and you create the tech we agree on. You do it superbly, but the responsibility for this show is mine, and I will use whatever scenarios make it a success.”

“I’m going to Taunton with this!”

Myra looked at Mark, running her gaze deliberately and distastefully over his artfully torn jeans, running shoes, and tee that said
THINK OUTSIDE THE QUADRILATERAL PARALLELOGRAM
. Taunton liked old-school polish. But he also had his unpredictable side; after all, he’d insisted on that little bitch Amy Kent. Sudden doubt flickered in Myra’s eyes. Alex saw it; Mark did not.

But all she said, still in that pleasant calm voice, was, “All right, Mark. Take your objection to Mr. Taunton.”

Mark slammed out of the room with the same force he’d exploded into it, and Alex rubbed his chin, thoughtfully eyeing Myra.

Twenty

S
ATURDAY

SATURDAY NIGHT THE
second scenario played on
Who Knows People, Baby—You
?, now referred to on the Internet as
Who–You
. Gran, who seemed to have had a bad day although she wouldn’t say so, had fallen heavily asleep just after dinner and Amy didn’t wanted to wake her. A nursing aide now stayed with Gran full-time, sleeping on the second bed in the larger of the hotel suite’s bedrooms. That left Amy and Kaylie sharing the smaller room, but Kaylie hadn’t come to bed last night. Amy knew she was with Cai, and tried not to think about that, and couldn’t help thinking about it.

To avoid waking Gran, the six Lab Rats plus Kaylie crowded into Rafe’s room. Even Waverly joined them, probably bored with being sequestered in the hotel. She wore clothes that, Amy would have bet, Serena had
not
picked out: an all-but-transparent calf-length skirt, a top made mostly of intricately woven chains, and combat boots. Amy didn’t like the outfit, but on Waverly it looked spectacular. Kaylie eyed it enviously.

All of them had spent hours reading the endless comments about the show in the blogosphere. The hype was building, and Myra was feeding it by deliberately granting no more access to the participants. Or maybe she just wanted the misinformation to build so that it would be harder to vote correctly. However, the lack of facts deterred none of the loonier fans. Various sites on the Internet said that:

• Waverly was a lesbian in love with Violet.
  
• Violet was transgendered.
  
• Cai, with his unplaceable dark good looks, was a terrorist recruited in Afghanistan.
  
• Waverly was a lesbian in love with Amy.
  
• Tommy had run away from a circus, where he had performed as Silas the Strongman.
  
• Amy had a criminal record that had disqualified her from the Olympics in gymnastics.
  
• Lynn was a renegade nun from the order of the Poor Clares.
  
• Rafe was “really” a thirty-year-old genius dropout from Harvard.
  
• Waverly was a lesbian in love with Lynn.
  
• Amy had been raised on an elephant farm.
  

Was there even such a thing as an elephant farm? Amy pondered this as she settled into a chair as far from Cai and Kaylie as possible. They were holding hands. The very air in the hotel room felt thick, clogged with anticipation and dread.

Violet said, “So which scenario will they use? I’m betting on the trees in Myra’s office. I mean, I’m really betting—here.” She tossed a dollar bill onto the floor in front of the TV.

“No,” Rafe said, “they’ll save that one for later. Myra will want the drama to build—won’t you, Myra?” he shouted at the ceiling. “It’ll be Mark Meyer’s fake rats.”

Tommy said, “I don’t have a dollar.”

“I’ve got you covered,” Cai said, tossing two dollars onto the heap. “Which scenario do you think will be next?”

Tommy screwed up his face. “That box with dots.”

Amy said, “I pick the lobby attack.”

Rafe said, “Too much like the predator in the alley. TV feeds on variety.”

He was right. After the initial hyped explanations, the screen showed Cai coming out of what must be his apartment building. It looked even worse than Amy’s. Cai took a shortcut through an alley, and all at once rats swarmed toward him from both ends. A close-up of his horrified face and then back to the raucous music and overexcited hosts presenting this week’s list of options:

CAI:

1. Fights off the rats!
   
2. Tries to run—and escapes the rats!
   
3. Picks up a rat to eat it!
   
4. Is saved by someone else!
   
5. Freezes and cries!
   

Violet said, “‘Picks up a rat and eats it’? Who are they kidding?”

Rafe grinned at her.

Amy said, “You didn’t.” Then it dawned on her. “You knew right away they were fake.”

“Guilty,” Rafe said.

“And that means that by then you’d guessed that these are faked scenarios.”

“Guilty twice.”

He was so smart. But in turning to look at Rafe, Amy had caught a glimpse of Cai. His face had gone white; his dark eyes looked huge; his hand had gone limp in Kaylie’s. All at once, and without the aid of any phantom, Amy knew that he was even more terrified of rats than she was, and that he’d frozen and cried. It hurt her to even picture it. She turned back to the TV.

Each of them encountered the rats in a different place, and each but Cai was with another person, making possible the option “Is saved by somebody else!” Which described Amy’s behavior. When the second half of this scenario aired on Wednesday night, Kaylie was going to be the hero. That would make the second time in a row that Amy had ended up looking like a wimp.

All at once she didn’t want to watch any longer. The rest of the show was going to be filler anyway; the Wednesday-night segments, which revealed both how people behaved and the winners, were stronger. She said, “I’m going to check on Gran.”

The nursing aide was watching the show in the suite’s main room, texting her votes on her cell. She said guiltily, “Mrs. Whitcomb is asleep.”

“That’s good,” Amy said, going into Gran’s bedroom and shutting the door. Her face slack in sleep, Gran looked older than ever. She breathed heavily, as if the effort cost her, but she didn’t seem to be in pain.

The doctor Myra had sent had said that Gran could take as many pain pills as she needed, and Gran was balancing the desire to stay comfortable with the desire to stay lucid. The doctor had refused to say when the end might come, but he had visited every day—and what did
that
cost? Without Myra, Gran’s end-of-life might have been intolerable. Amy should be grateful to Myra. Especially since Amy sensed that Myra was sincere when she’d told Amy, “I lost my own mother a few years ago. I know how hard this is.” And yet Myra had the cruelty to somehow force Tommy onto the show, where he was frightened and bewildered and humiliated. How could one woman be so complicated?

When Amy emerged from Gran’s room, Rafe stood in the living room. She said, “Is the show over?”

“Not quite. Come on, Amy, let’s take a walk.”

“Where?” She was tired of the hotel, tired of everything.

“You’ll see.”

They took an elevator to the basement. At the end of a dim corridor Rafe produced a key and unlocked a door marked
AUTHORIZED EMPLOYEES ONLY
. Amy said, “Where did you get the key?”

He didn’t answer until they were on the other side of the door. “Bribery. It took a big part of last week’s salary. But maintenance staff always has at least one person who feels victimized, and you never know when you might need an escape hatch.”

It didn’t look like an escape hatch; the dim, cavernous room was filled with unopened crates, broken furniture, stained mattresses, and a wall of equipment on metal shelves bolted to the wall. But Rafe led her through an unlocked door on the other side of the room, through a long, low tunnel with pipes overhead, and up a rickety flight of wooden steps. A door at the top said
DOOR WILL LOCK AUTOMATICALLY BEHIND YOU
. Then they were outside, standing in a clean alley with a bustling street at the far end.

Amy peered down the alley. “That’s Fenton Street!”

“With all its classy shops and all its armed guards to keep the peace for rich folk. Come on, you can pass. You look the part.”

Amy wore her jeans, bronze-colored Vince sweater, and new calfskin sandals. For the first time she noticed that Rafe had shed his usual grubbies for jeans, a shirt, and boots that presumably Serena had picked out. Had he planned this even before the TV show came on?

Fenton Street stood out in the economically desperate city like a diamond on a mangy dog. Luxurious shops, expensive restaurants, well-dressed people carrying shopping bags with bright logos. The April night was warm and sweet. Amy and Rafe peered into store windows, mock-arguing over the merits of antique desks, emerald necklaces, handbags of Komodo dragon hide. Nang’s Electronics had state-of-the-art electronics that did everything but take out the trash. Gradually Amy’s mood improved. Rafe bought them lattes at a little sidewalk café where the coffee was priced like fine wine, and Amy knew that, too, was a sacrifice.

“So,” Rafe said, sipping his coffee as they watched people stroll by, “what’s your story, Amy? Are your parents gone?”

“Yes. My father disappeared right after Kaylie was born, and my mother died in a car crash when I was four.”

“My father abandoned us, too.”

“That isn’t what I meant by ‘disappeared.’ I mean, literally. He was a war correspondent and he disappeared somewhere in Afghanistan. Nobody ever learned what had happened to him. Or if the government did, they didn’t tell my mother. Eventually he was declared legally dead, but no one really knows.”

“I’m sorry,” Rafe said.

Amy shrugged. “I don’t remember him at all. I remember my mother, but not very well. Gran raised us.”

“And you had a happy, middle-class childhood.”

She smiled. “How do you know that?”

“All I have to do is look at you.”

Amy wasn’t sure what he meant, or if she liked it. Was she really that transparent? Did he consider “middle-class” the same as “boring”? She said, “I did have a happy childhood, pre-Collapse. Gran was a scientist, working in a biotech lab. We had a nanny who took care of us while she was at work, Rosa Cortez. She was wonderful, too.”

He stiffened slightly at the Latino name. “An illegal alien?”

“No, of course not.”

“What happened to her?”

“She went back to the Dominican Republic when I was twelve. When the Collapse came, she lost all hope of getting the rest of her family here, so she went home.”

“And your grandmother lost her job?”

“And her investments, which had mostly been in the biotech company she worked for. Gran believed in green. What about you? Same story?”

But Rafe didn’t answer her. Instead he pointed discreetly to a girl passing on the sidewalk, dressed in miniskirt, combat boots, and poncho. “That’s something Waverly would wear.”

“No, it’s not. The miniskirt is from Walmart and the poncho is ethnic from someplace in South America. Waverly doesn’t do ethnic.”

He stared at her. “How do you know the skirt is from Walmart?”

“Well, maybe not literally, but it’s rayon and badly made.”

“You can tell that?”

She grinned. “Rafe, anybody could tell that.”

“Anyone female, you mean. If her clothes are so cheap, why wasn’t she being hassled for being on Fenton Street?”

“Because that thick gold necklace she had on was genuine. A gift from a boyfriend, maybe.”

“OK, Miss Fashionista, what about that woman? Her clothes, I mean?”

“Vintage Chanel—1950s.”

They fell into a game, with Rafe making up preposterous stories about passersby based on what Amy said about their clothes. That one was Marie Antoinette reincarnated; this one had escaped from Russian pirates; an innocuous-looking man was a robot designed not to be noticed. Amy giggled and egged him on. It was the best time she’d had since the shopping expedition with Violet.

Rafe turned serious. “What’s your ambition, Amy? If the Collapse hadn’t happened, what would you do?”

“Go to college and study neurology.” Should she tell Rafe about her phantoms? No. She’d never told anyone but Gran. Instead she said, “How the brain processes information—that fascinates me. Do you know about the new experiments on time perception?”

“No. Tell me about it.”

She did, explaining the research she’d read about in Gran’s flimsies. When the waiter came by for the second time to ask if they wanted anything else, Amy realized how long she’d been talking, and she blushed. “I’m sorry. I’ve been blathering.”

“It was interesting,” Rafe said, and actually seemed to mean it. “You’re smart as well as pretty.”

He said it awkwardly, like a person not used to paying compliments, and he didn’t seem to realize it was a cliché. Before Amy could answer, a man plopped down on the chair next to her. Amy could smell him: unwashed, unshaven, thin and ragged, he slumped in the elegant little wrought-iron chair for all of five seconds before security was on him. “Sir? You need to leave.”

“I can pay!” he said, and began pulling dirty one-dollar bills from his pockets. People turned to look.

Without any discussion, the security man had the guy on his feet, his arm behind him, escorted toward a waiting closed car. Amy looked at the greasy bills on the table.

“But he has enough for coffee!”

Rafe said, “Spoiling the ambience.”

Amy darted forward, grabbed the money, and ran to the car just as the man was being shoved in. The inside of the car was nothing but an empty space, seats removed, with a steel grill behind the driver. Three other ragged people already huddled on the floor. Amy pushed the bills at the ousted man and stared defiantly at the security officer. She saw him take in her clothes, her shining hair, her makeup, and make his decision.

“Thank you, miss. Appreciate it.” The car door slammed, the vehicle pulled away, and the security officer strolled off.

Rafe was by her side. “You shouldn’t have done that, Amy.”

“It’s not fair!”