Page 112 of Breaking the Dark

“Who the hell is Malcolm?” says Fox, cowering away from her.

“Sly,” says Jessica. “Where’s Sly?”

She sees fear pass across Fox’s face and feels her stomach dip and plunge into icy terror.

“What have you done to him, Fox? Where is he?!”

Then she sees his eyes go to a door to his right and she flings open the door and there’s Malcolm, tied to a bed frame, gagged and bound and staring at her with bugged-out eyes. He wriggles and tries to call something out and Jessica rips the gag from his mouth, pulls open his wrist ties and leg ties, and in a voice filled with a frankly surprising level of emotion she says, “Are you okay?”

He nods, his brown eyes wide, his crazy bleached hair on end, and she feels relief subsume her from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, and then a wave of something else that she has a horrible feeling might be maternal affection. She shakes it off and makes herself hard.

“Call your mom,” she says brusquely, handing him her phone. “Tell her you’re okay.”

Malcolm takes the phone from her, his eyes still wide, and she leaves him there to make the call.

She walks back into to the living room to find Luke strong-arming the guy who’d been sitting at the desk.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“I’m nobody,” the guy replies, breathlessly.

His accent is English. He has brown hair, a slightly beaky face, very thick-lensed glasses, a pallid complexion.

“Nobody who?” asks Jessica.

“Literally nobody. I promise.”

She glances at the screens on his desk, and then her eyes take in more details of the apartment. A small dining table covered with cell phones all plugged into a weird black box, three computer monitors and two laptops. There are piles of paper and empty paper coffee cups. A pizza box containing crusts frilled with bite marks sits open on the floor. The room smells dark and putrid, like the ass end of a dirty-hot summer’s day.

In the kitchenette area is a sink full of plates, a trash can overflowing with garbage, more cell phones plugged into the wall; a plug from the wall connects to another big black box on the floor, which has a cluster of red charging cables hanging out of it. She touches the big black box and recoils slightly at the heat of it against her skin, the fizz of black energy it sends through her nervous system. Then she looks at the two screens on the man’s desk and sees that one of them is divided into four windows, three of which display what looks like a view of Central Park. The other screen is dark.

“Malcolm,” Jessica calls out. “Get out here.”

He appears, sheepishly, and hands Jessica back her phone.

“Right,” says Jessica, looking at Fox. “Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

“Nothing.”

Jessica growls. “Nothing! Nobody! Geez.” She turns and looks at Malcolm. “Please,” she says. “Tell me something that makes sense.”

“Shit, Jessica. I mean. I’ve literally been tied up in there for twenty-four hours. I wish I knew what the hell was going on.”

“Okay, well, I need you to take that big brain of yours, sit your butt down here, and tell me what you can see on these screens.”

The beaky guy struggles against Luke and Luke slaps him onto a chair and ties him down with some zip ties from a pile near the chargers.

“Don’t touch those screens!” the guy yells out. “Don’t touch anything!”

“Who is this?” Jessica asks Malcolm.

“I swear I don’t know. He was just here when Fox brought me here yesterday. There weren’t exactly any introductions.”

“Lark,” she says. “Find this dweeb’s passport.” Then she turns back to the guy tied to the chair and says, “Who’s Miranda?”

“I’ve never heard of her.”

Jessica pulls the flyer from her jacket pocket, unfolds it, and shows it to him.