“You should never have posted those photos.”
“What photos?”
“Don’t play dumb!” She shoves me off her, but before she does, she slaps the plastic cell phone into my palm. I curl my fingers around it on instinct while she reaches back into her sweatshirt pocket and pulls out a snazzier device. She unlocks it and turns it toward my face. “These pictures. The ones you took of me and captionedOnly real love causes reversions.”
“Yuck. No, I didn’t. Gag.” I scroll through the slideshow, horrified at the images. If the cropped video I sent was capable of making it look plausible that Taranis went through his reversion for Cynthia, these stills hammer it home.
There’s a short clip of him dropping to his knees in front of Cynthia; then the next still is of him on his feet, blue and busting out of his tuxedo. The following image is of him with his hand on Cynthia’s arm, and the final image is of Cynthia’s face and the pure elation written across it. It doesn’t matter that you can only see a little piece of Taranis’s blue profile or that his eyes are closed in it, Cynthia’s face says enough. She’s completely in love.
I’m too busy being annoyed at what the PR team did with my video to notice the like and comment count. When I do, I nearly lose my lunch, and that’s a pity because I don’t get a chance to eattteokbokkivery often. There are two million likes and thirty thousand comments, and this was only posted two hours ago.
“Shit,” I hiss, my stomach dropping through my toes, which curl into the tiled floor. I still don’t have any shoes on. Jealousy rears its head in my loins—that’s not right.Scheiße.That’s too many body parts in one sentence. I can’t even think of a good metaphor.
The sudden urge to sit comes over me—sit and stare at what I’ve done—but Cynthia’s sobs have petered out. She snatches her cell phone from my limp grip and wipes her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt, which, the longer I stand here, I start to notice carries a man’s scent. And it’s not Taranis’s.
“Yeah, shit. Take it down.”
“I can’t,” I start to say while the taste of regret coats my tongue, and then I’m hit by the wrongness of her request. “Wait. Why would you want me to take it down? You’re famous. You were taking interviews all night ...”
“I said take it down, please.”
I take a chance and, instead of retreating, sit on the edge of her bed and watch the way she winces away from me. “What happened tonight?”
Cynthia sniffles and sniffles some more. She wipes her eyes and glances around again at the walls, and she’s not looking at me as she starts whispering, “It wasn’t a car accident.”
“What?”
And then it all comes out in a rush. “I was driving out of town, to myeomma’s estate in North Sumnerville.” The wealthiest suburb around Sundale and where her mother lives—that all tracks. “I was feeling myself and wanted to listen to the radio longer, to see if any of my clips had started to play.” That tracks too. “I took Old Highway 68. I was almost home when somebody appeared in the passenger’s seat.” That ... doesn’t track.
I’m about to interrupt with a litany of questions when she says, “I screamed—of course—but they grabbed the wheel. We went off the road, and I saw that we were about to hit a tree, but all of a sudden, we weren’t there anymore. We were somewhere else. It was dark and cold. They put me in a chair, and then the Marduk was there. He asked me how I ... caused Taranis’s reversion.” She starts to hiccup while all my blood runs cold.
“I told him it wasn’t me. I told him that Taranis electrocuted me—he doesn’t love me,” she spits. “But he saw the pictures.” She limply tosses her phone into her lap. The screen is unlocked and that last picture of her beautiful, happy face is shining up at us, making a mockery of the moment. “He said that if I was lying and wasting his time, he would hurt me. I told him thatyoutook and posted the pictures—not me.” That bitch. “But he didn’t care. He asked me where you lived. I told him, and that seemed to piss him off too. He told me that if I went to the police or told anyone at the COE or SDD, he’d kill my mom. And then they broke my legs. I must have passed out, because the next thing I remember, I was in the hospital.”
I shiver all over. Behind me, the door opens. “Ms. Neumann, the OR doctors are ready for Cynthia. It’s time for you to leave,” the nurse tells me.
I nod and slide off the bed, aghast and horrified and struggling to process. “Why the phone?” I ask Cynthia.
She shakes her head. “He just said to give it to you. He put me in this sweatshirt because I didn’t have any pockets.” She shudders justthen and suddenly becomes frantic in her effort to tear it off over her head. She throws it at me. “Get rid of it.”
I nod, and even as the nurse says my name sternly again and again, I hesitate and then rush forward, thinking of one more thing. “Can you tell me anything about the place they took you? Or who the other one was with the Marduk?”
Cynthia’s eyes shut. She shakes her head. “Dark hair, olive skin, I guess. Maybe Greek or something. They weren’t that tall. I’m not sure if it was a man or woman. Only wearing black. Smiling a lot, so fucking smugly.”
“Ms. Neumann!”
“And the place?” I whisper, grabbing Cynthia’s hand and forcing her concentration to my face.
She opens her eyes and shudders as she says, “I don’t know. Some kind of warehouse. It could have been anywhere.”
The nurse shoves me back with force as two other people move into the room and drop the arms of Cynthia’s bed. They start rolling her toward the door. Just before she passes through it, she turns her head to look at me and says, “I smelled the sea.” And then they wheel her away from me.
The nurse gives me an admonishing finger shake before escorting me back to the front desk and then all but kicking me out of the hospital. I stand there under the brightly lit emergency awning as people filter past me, none looking too worse for wear, except for a woman about my age holding a bloody towel to her mouth and being escorted by her absolutely frantic-looking boyfriend. I’m still staring after them, back through the automatic doors of the hospital, when an unfamiliar buzzing picks up in my pocket.
I fish out my phone. Don’t see any notifications. And then I withdraw theotherone. There’s a text. With fingers that feel like sausages as they bumble around, smashing down half a dozen buttons, I open it.
Meet me at Habesha Cafe. 4am. Or
Or what? That’s how we’re playing it these days? Not even anor else? Just anor?
