The Savior

“I know.” He fanned out his large hands as if still marveling at the changes he’d been through. “But how did you find me?”

“Did you know the people who worked on you? By name?” Sarah’s heart began to pound. “Did you know them?”

“They always had masks on and they tried not to speak around me. Sometimes they slipped up, but never about names.”

Sarah took a deep breath. “My fiancé worked in the department.” As Nate stiffened, she shook her head. “He’s dead. He died two years ago—actually, he was murdered. I’m not with someone who hurt you.”

Any longer, she thought to herself.

She thought about Gerry sitting at that computer of his, his back to her, all holed up in that home office. Keeping secrets, bad secrets.

“He was murdered?” Nate asked.

As Sarah nodded, her temples started to hum with pain and she winced, rubbing her head. “He was a diabetic. But I believe he was killed.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know who exactly. It’s a dirty business he was in, though. We didn’t know that when we started, of course.”

“Are you in danger?”

Yes. “No.” She forced a smile. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“They’re not going to let you stay, are they.”

“Here, you mean? I don’t think so. I’m going to help for as long as I can, but then I guess I have to go back where I belong.”

“You belong here.”

She thought of being with Murhder and found herself agreeing. But that was emotion talking, not reality.

“I wish that were true.” She patted Nate on the foot. “But enough about me. I just want you to know that I will be sure to say goodbye before I go, okay? And I will not leave until I’m satisfied that there’s a plan for your future that you’re comfortable with. You’re what’s important here. Not me.”

There was a long pause. And the boy—man, rather—shook his head gravely.

“No, you also matter. A lot.”

As tears came to her eyes, she ducked her head and blinked fast. That was what had been missing from her relationship with Gerry at the end, she realized: She had not mattered any longer to him, and since his death? She hadn’t mattered to anybody—including herself.

If you were loved, if you had people who cared about you, you could be by yourself and never feel alone. But if no one cared? You were isolated even in a crowd.

“Don’t cry,” Nate said in his now deep voice.

“I’m not,” she lied in a whisper.

 

 

Robert Kraiten fought his mind for as long as he could.

His thoughts, long the sound and logical road to follow, had taken him into a forest of threatening chaos that he could not find his way out of. And now he was stumbling through his actual glass house, tripping and falling on his face, dragging himself across polished marble … circling the second-story rooms before funneling, like dishwater, down the front staircase.

On the first floor, he caught his breath and tried to resist the impulse that controlled him, but his body refused to stop its forward progression.

He was naked, and his bald elbows and knees, his sweating palms, squeaked over the glossy tiling that he had a vague memory of installing two years ago: Alabastri di Rex by Florim. In Madreperla.

His recollections of spending months choosing the stone were like a distant echo, a pin dropping in the middle of a cheering stadium. Everything was like that. His business. His money. His secrets.

He had secrets. Terrible secrets. Secrets that …

The firestorm in his head whirled around faster, words forming and disintegrating, torn apart by the raging fury that surely his skull could not contain any longer.

He did not want to go to the kitchen. He did not want to go in search for what his brain was telling him he needed. He did not want to use the object for what his mind was telling him he wanted it for.

Instead, he wanted to go …

Robert Kraiten, long the master of his destiny and that of others, could not hold an independent thought.

After a lifetime of self-determination, something had come unhinged deep inside of him. He had only the vaguest sense of when it had started: Leaving the labs the night before. In a car that was not his own … in one of the security vehicles that he’d made a guard give him the keys to.

And he had come home.

The security vehicle was still in his garage. He did not know where the keys to his actual SUV were, nor did he have his wallet or his cell phone. But he had gained access to his house by fingerprint.

He had come home.

He had come home to—

Something had happened at the lab last night. He had met with someone he needed to control in his office, and he had a vague idea that the meeting had gone satisfactorily—the deflection of their interest had been effective. But then, before he could leave, an interruption. A dangerous, Level I infiltration that had—

His body froze. His head reared back.

With a vicious strike, his forehead slammed forward of its own volition, his frontal lobe hitting the alabaster so hard, a crack like lightning striking a tree echoed into the high ceilings above him.

Blood dripped, red and glossy, off his nose, onto the floor.

He smeared it as he crawled onward, creating handprints and smudges in his own blood. Red blood. Drop, drop—now flowing. A river down his face, getting into his nostrils, into his mouth, copper-tasting drool now.

The going became harder, his purchase on the glossy stone compromised by the slick mess he was making.

With relentless fixation, his mind drove his body forward even as his conscious self, his actual will, the true north on the compass of his sentient being, said, No! Go back! Do not do this!

The disintegration and degeneration of his mind had started as soon as he’d gotten home. Standing in his back hall, by the alarm center and computer systems that ran the entire house, he had inexplicably become bombarded with childhood memories, the images and sounds and smells hitting him as cannon shots, rocking him internally until he had collapsed onto his knees.

It was every bad thing he had ever done: All the joy he had taken at the expense of others, the shame and humiliation he had puppet mastered on his younger brothers. On his classmates. On teammates. On opponents.

Lost in the morass of memory, he had watched his younger self ride the ugly, but ultimately triumphant, tide of his own creation, his prominence sustained by the power structures he created and leveraged on his behalf. He had cheated on tests. Gotten his papers written by smarter students who had secrets they needed to keep. He had falsified his SATs and gotten into Columbia on an application written by a fellow senior who had been sucking off their English teacher. In college, he had sold drugs, and he had used women, and he had sparked a campus riot just for the fun of it. He had gotten a physics professor fired for sexual harassment she did not commit just to see if he could. He had blackmailed a dean for swinging because he was bored.

Kraiten had graduated having learned nothing of substance academically, and everything that mattered in terms of exploiting weakness.

Five years later, he had founded BioMed. And seven years after that, he had been driving home from his summer house on Lake George late at night, and come upon a car accident on the rural road halfway between Whitehall and Fort Ann.