Her words were like an ice pick in my chest, and I shook my head. “No, Brooke, you don’t love me.”
“I love you more than anything,” she said fiercely. “I’ve loved you for a thousand years—I’ve loved you since the sun was born and the stars sang songs to wake it up. I love you more than life and breath and body and soul. Do you want me to show—”
“No,” I said, trying to calm her. “Just stop. I’ll get you out of here, but you have to stop saying that.”
“It’ll be our secret, then.”
“No,” I repeated. “It’ll be our nothing. You don’t love me.”
She paused for a moment, studying me with eyes that looked far too old for a seventeen-year-old girl. “I know all about nothing,” she said softly. “I’m Nobody.”
I sighed. “You and me both, Brooke. You and me both.”
*
Nathan Gentry tapped his fingers on the conference-room table. “This chick is crazy.”
Of all the people on our team, Nathan would be the easiest to kill. Not that I wanted to kill any of them, necessarily, but I had a plan for it in case I needed to. It never hurts to be prepared. Nathan was soft without being fat, an ideal mix of “out of shape” and “uninsulated” that left his vital organs right at the surface, without any muscle or fat to get in the way. For the others I needed a plan, but for Nathan all I’d need was a knife: slash the gut or the legs to slow him down, get in close, and cut his throat. He’d fight, but I’d win. If he was distracted at the time, buried in a book with his earbuds in the way he spent most of his time, it’d be even easier.
I kind of hoped, if the time ever came, that he didn’t make it easy.
I wasn’t supposed to think about that, obviously. I had rules to keep myself from hurting anybody, rules I’d been following since I was barely seven years old—ever since I’d discovered, with a dead gopher’s blood trickling down my hands, that I was different from other people. That I was a sociopath, cut off from the rest of the world, surrounded by normal people but forever and relentlessly alone. I had rules to help keep my most dangerous impulses safely locked away. But I also had a job, and my job was to plan killings. All day, every day, I studied our targets, discovered their weaknesses, and figured out exactly how to kill them. It’s a skill set I’m particularly gifted at, but not one that’s easy to turn off.
I looked away from Nathan and back at our surveillance photos, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand. The “chick” Nathan thought was crazy was Mary Gardner, and he kind of had a point, though that didn’t make me hate him any less. I deflected my hatred into what I hoped was playful teasing.
“Sensitivity training,” I reminded him. As government employees we had a lot of sensitivity training, and it had become one of our go-to punchlines for any kind of joke, insult, or banter. I liked having running gags like this because they made it easier for me to know what the others would find funny and what they’d find off-putting. I couldn’t always tell on my own.
“Sorry,” said Nathan, “this ‘woman’ is crazy.” The cadence of his voice was off, in a pattern I’d come to recognize as frustrated sarcasm. I suppressed a smile, knowing I’d gotten to him.
“That’s not what he meant,” said Kelly, and her voice had a fair bit of frustration in it as well. “He means that you shouldn’t use ‘crazy’ as an epithet, since John has a mental-health issue too.”
Kelly Ishida would be much harder to kill. She’d trained as a cop and worked homicide for six years, according to her file, so she knew how to handle herself. Her file also said that she was twenty-nine years old, but if I’d seen her on the street I would have sworn she was twenty-two. Twenty-three at the oldest. She was about my height, Japanese-American, with long black hair and dark eyes. I also knew that she slept very lightly and kept a gun on her nightstand, neither of which is a sign of a particularly healthy psyche; I assumed it had something to do with the incident that caused her to leave the police force and join our team, but I didn’t know for sure yet. The exact details were redacted from her file, but whatever it was had left her with a lot of trust issues. Not as many as she thought, though; she still had me pick up her coffee almost every day. When the time came—if the time came—I could poison her virtually at will.
“Us crazy people have to stick together,” I said, still studying the surveillance photos. I had seen something in one of them, and after another moment of thought I slid it across the table to Kelly; trust issues or not, she was an excellent detective. The photo was mostly identical to all our other photos of Mary Gardner—a nurse’s uniform, a sweater, and a blue hospital face mask—but this one had a key difference. I tapped an odd shadow in the center. “Look at this bulge by her waist.”