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“Aiight.” I shook my head. “This is—”
“Just hear me out!” she insisted. “You know what an earworm is? When you get a song stuck in your head, for days at a time sometimes?”
I scoffed. “That’s what’s going to keep this motherfucker from making me cut my toes off? An earworm? The Macarena or something?”
She laughed. “Hey if that’s what it takes, sure. But the point is that, it needs to be something catchy and annoying; something that you literallycannoteasily get out of your head. That’s the key. That’s how the mechanism works. So that if your song gets played, you’ve still got this other thing happening in your mind that keeps it from completely taking hold.”
I leaned back in my chair, letting out a huff. “So I’ve got to choose some annoying shit to get stuck in my head?”
“Choose it right now,” she agreed. “And anytime you’re not thinking it, you need to start thinking it.”
I combed my brain for just a moment to think of something, already picking up on the fact that it didn’t need to be hard for my mind to land on it. In the common room at thePredatorsclubhouse, it was not hard at all to pick some of the random, extra toxic rap shit the young ones loved. I hated it all, but knew every single word of it.
“You got it?” Alicia asked.
I nodded.
“Good.”
The next moment, there was music in the air.
Alicia fixed me with a serious gaze.
“Drink the coffee,” she said and I looked at her like she was crazy.
“No.”
The music switched.
“How are you doing that?” I asked, and she held up a little clicker remote I hadn’t seen in her hand.
“Drink the coffee,” she said again.
And again, I declined.
“No.”
That shit went on for hours.
So long that I damn near wanted to drink the coffee just to make this experiment stop.
But then, I realized that actually… the cup was in my hand, and halfway up to my lips.
“Stop,” Alicia said.
I blinked.
Alicia nodded. “And now we know.”
“What?” I asked, halfway confused by what the hell had just happened.
I put the cup down, sliding it away from me, disturbed by the proximity.
“Anything could have been in that,” I said, gesturing like it was acid that was going to burn through.
“I know,” Alicia said. “That’s the point. I wish we’d reached this sooner; ’cause I know how bad you’re itching to go after Renard. But, if you give me a week with you, we can get this to a place where as long as you have some people with you, you can approach him without as much fear of being set off.”
I sighed and shook my head, trying to clear away the unexpected fog this little experiment had filling my head. “Why didn’t we get into this from the start? We could’ve been training.”
