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“No, no. Sit down, Cassel. I’m fine.”
I grab a chair. “I don’t mean to pry,” I say, “but we’re in a hospital. You sure you’re fine?”
She sighs heavily. “No getting anything past you, huh?”
“I also often notice when water is wet. I have a keen detective’s mind like that.”
She has the good grace to smile. “I’m a physical worker. Which means I can alter people’s bodies—not to the extent that you can, but brutal basic things. I can break legs and heal them again. I can remove some tumors—or at least reduce them in size. I can draw out an infection in the blood. I can make children’s lungs work.” I try not to show how surprised I am. I didn’t know physical workers could do that. I thought it was just pain—sliced skin, burns, and boils. Philip was a physical worker; I never saw him use it to help anyone.
“And sometimes I do all those things. But it makes me very sick. All of it, any of it, hurting and healing. And over time it has made me sicker. Permanently sicker.”
I don’t ask her about the legality of what she’s doing. I don’t care, and if she doesn’t care either, well, then, maybe we have something in common after all. “Can’t you heal yourself?”
“Ah, the old cry of ‘Physician, heal thyself!’?” she says. “A perfectly logical question, but I am afraid I can’t. The blowback negates any and all positive effects. So occasionally I have to come here for a while.”
I hesitate before I ask my next question, because it’s so awful. Still, I need to know, if I’m about to sign my free will away on the strength of her promises. “Are you dying?”
“We’re all dying, Cassel. It’s just that some of us are dying faster than others.”
I nod. That’s going to have to do, because Agent Jones walks back into the room with an orange cafeteria tray, the whole thing piled with sandwiches, muffins, fruit, and coffee.
“Put it on my bed. We can buffet off of that,” she tells him.
I retrieve a ham sandwich, a cup of coffee, and an orange and sit back down while Jones and Yulikova choose their food.
“Good,” she says, pulling the wrapper off what looks like a lemon poppy seed muffin. “Now, Cassel, I’m sure you’re familiar with Governor Patton.”
I snort. “Patton? Oh, yeah. I love that guy!”
Jones looks like he wants to choke the sarcasm out of me, but Yulikova just laughs.
“I thought you’d say something like that,” she says. “But you should understand—what your mother did to him and then what was done to fix him—he’s become more and more unstable.”
I open my mouth to object, but she holds up her hand.
“No. I understand your impulse to defend your mother, and it’s very noble, but right now that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame. I need to tell you something confidential, and I need your assurance that it won’t leave this room.”
“Okay,” I say.
“If you’ve seen him on the news recently,” Yulikova says, “you can almost see Patton losing control. He says and does things that are extreme, even for anti-worker radicals. But what you can’t tell is how paranoid and secretive he’s become. People very high up in the government are worried. Once Proposition 2 passes, I’m afraid that he’s going to try to lock down the state of New Jersey, then round up and jail workers. I believe—and I’m not the only one—that he wants to bring back the work camps.”
“That’s not possible,” I say. It’s not that I can’t believe Patton might want that; it’s that I can’t believe he’d actually try to do it. Or that Yulikova would admit suspecting all of this, especially to me.
“He has a lot of allies in Washington,” she continues. “And he’s been putting more in place. The state police are behind him, and so are more than a few folks at Fort Dix. We know he’s been having meetings.”
I think of Lila pressing her hands to the bars as Sam, Daneca, and I sat in the jail cell after the protest rally in Newark. No phone calls, no charges, no nothing. And then I think of the other people, the ones that were reported as held there for days.
I look over at Agent Jones. He doesn’t look like he much cares either way, but he should. Even if he doesn’t want to admit it, the fact that he’s working in this division of the federal government means that he’s a worker too. If Patton is really that crazy, a badge isn’t going to save Jones.
I nod, encouraging her to go on.
She does. “I’ve been in conference with my superiors, and we agree that we have to stop him before he does something even worse. There are rumors of murders—rumors of terrible things, but no hard evidence. If we arrest him now, he could use that to his political advantage. A very public trial, where we don’t have enough evidence, would play right into his hands.”
I nod again.
“I’ve gotten permission for a small operation to remove Patton from power. But I need your help, Cassel. I can promise that your safety will be our first priority. You can abort the mission at any time if you don’t feel completely secure. We’ll handle all the planning and manage the risks.”
“What are we talking about here?” I ask.
