hadn’t been able to squash his need to read up on the person who’d hurt Aliyah. Paul reread the reports on the commute over to Samaritan, double-checking that he hadn’t missed anything.
He hadn’t. The information was just terrifyingly incomplete.
Paul ignored the pair of overly affectionate college students squeezing into the subway seat next to him and checked the facts again: two people had burned to death when that gas main had exploded – some young kid brimming with Flex, and the unlucky business executive who’d bedded him. Someone had fed that poor college kid Flex until the world had exploded.
Four people had died of brain aneurysms when a forty-six year-old stockbroker, desperate to see her senile mother speak again, had OD’d on Flex. The nurses on the old-age ward claimed the mother had jolted upright, wailing in tongues about the anathema of civilization collapsing – then her eyes bled. Then her daughter’s eyes bled. When two orderlies moved in to help, all four of them stroked out.
Eight people in a Drake’s Cakes plant died when an obese man on Flex, desperate to have the snack cakes he’d been starving for since his favorite sweets producer went bankrupt, burst in and made a plaintive plea for the good old days. By an astounding coincidence, seven of the plant’s employees had been ex-employees of the now-defunct snack cake manufacturer, and each recalled working there as the happiest days of their lives. As their foremen protested, all eight men set out to replicate the recipe – but in retooling the equipment, a freak accident drowned them in a tide of boiling corn syrup.
Sixteen people waiting in a plastic surgeon’s office had died of a rare allergic reaction to anesthesia when a one-in-a-million canister leak hissed sevoflurane into the air conditioning. Which of the patients had overdosed on Flex had yet to be determined, but nobody doubted that Anathema had struck again.
“Anathema” was merely a code name, a placeholder designation stolen from a weird word the babbling victims at the old-age home had been unable to stop repeating as they died. The only people who’d had direct contact with Anathema had been Anathema’s victims, none of whom had survived to tell the tale. Paul had scoured every file from the FBI, the NYPD, and SMASH, hunting for possible motivations: all anyone knew for certain was that a ’mancer was luring people to their deaths by feeding massive amounts of Flex to desperate people. Was Anathema white? Gay? Indonesian? Genderqueer?
Nobody knew. Not one living soul had seen him, her, or it.
The only thing people were certain of was that if Anathema was not stopped, thirty-two more people would die a strange and hideous death in the next few days. Each of these horrific catastrophes had killed twice the number of the one before. Which was a terrifying thought, as ’mancers’ obsessions were normally self-contained: for all their power, they were usually dangerous only by accident, happy to interact with their own world. Most died to their own flux blowback.
But when a ‘mancer set out to kill as part of his obsession…
Paul crumpled the report angrily; the college kids stopped nuzzling each others’ necks to give him a puzzled look. He ignored them. Aliyah had been scarred on purpose . All her future pain, traceable to one person.
He squeezed his metal ankle absently. He’d get Aliyah her reconstructive surgery so that she’d never endure the pain of people giving her pity-filled looks on crowded subways. But he also wanted to punish the man who’d inflicted her anguish. Two separate goals, each insanely dangerous – but skimming the case files, Paul thought he might have figured out a way to have one hand wash the other. Revenge and healing, wrapped in one dangerous little package.
The question is, could he trust his boss Kit to help him?
Paul had pulled up Samaritan’s case files as part of his research, and had discovered one unsettling