Authors: John Sandford
Outrage
LUCAS DAVENPORT NOVELS
Rules of Prey
Shadow Prey
Eyes of Prey
Silent Prey
Winter Prey
Night Prey
Mind Prey
Sudden Prey
Secret Prey
Certain Prey
Easy Prey
Chosen Prey
Mortal Prey
Naked Prey
Hidden Prey
Broken Prey
Invisible Prey
Phantom Prey
Wicked Prey
Storm Prey
Buried Prey
Stolen Prey
Silken Prey
Field of Prey
Gathering Prey
Dark of the Moon
Heat Lightning
Rough Country
Bad Blood
Shock Wave
Mad River
Storm Front
Deadline
The Fool's Run
The Empress File
The Devil's Code
The Hanged Man's Song
The Night Crew
Dead Watch
THE SINGULAR MENACE
Uncaged
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by John Sandford and Michele Cook
Cover photograph copyright © 2015 by Adrian Neal/Getty Images
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBNâ9780385753098 (trade) â ISBNâ9780385753104 (lib. bdg.) â eBook ISBNâ9780385753128
July 2015
Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v4.1
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She stalked across the Home Depot parking lot: a West Coast punk with brutally cropped black hair, a black tank top, muscles in her shoulders and arms, wearing jeans and lace-up boots. At her knee, a wolf-dog wearing a phony “service” tag.
Like a raven-haired, bad-news version of Alice in Wonderland, she led the animal through the store, past shelves that rose to the ceiling: cleaning liquids, paper towels, paint, insect killers, tree trimmers, and toolsâwalls of wrenches, hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, tape measuresâ¦and bolt cutters.
Everything from hand-sized cable nippers to four-foot-long monster jaws that could slice through the roof of a truck. Momentarily bewildered by the choices, she reached up and selected a tough-looking twenty-four-inch H. K. Porter general-purpose bolt cutter for $44.97.
She had plenty, she thought. She slipped the fingers of her right hand into her jeans pocket and touched the wad of bills thereâ¦and her fingers came away with the sticky, rusty stains of drying blood.
The sight of the blood struck her like a thunderbolt. She brought her hand close to her face, could smell the coppery scent of blood and deathâand was instantly transported to a makeshift prison a hundred and thirty miles away, back in time by half a day, a bleak, concrete box of locks and bars and tiny cells, screaming, desperate, mutilated inmates, the stink of torture and human wasteâ¦.
The images tumbled through sixteen-year-old Shay Remby's mind: her brother Odin's beaten face, the torture room with its tub and hoses, the Asian girl with the grotesquely wired-up scalp. Beneath all those thoughts, the image of a handsome black man, Marcus West, lying in a pool of his own blood. Down the hall, in another puddle of blood, the man he'd shot in self-defense.
West still had a gun in one hand. Shay was kneeling by his side, trying to lift him, while he pleaded with her to run. There were armed men coming, he said, killers who'd shoot her as well. Then Cruz pulled her from the floor, away from West, and half carried, half dragged her out into the night.
Then it started over again, like a bad film loop playing through her mindâ¦.
Shay had no idea how long she stood there, frozen by the images. She came back from the nightmare and found X anxiously licking her left handâher right hand, the one with the blood, was still crooked in front of her face.
She whispered,
“Shit, shit,”
and looked down at her pocket: she hadn't seen it earlier, but there was a palm-sized bloodstain on the denim. The contact point with West's bleeding rib cage. Down her leg, she saw more of the rusty blood spots.
She shuddered, put the bolt cutters back in their bin, and looked wildly around, then hurried X down the aisle toward the back of the store. The restrooms were always in the back of the storeâ¦.
The ladies' room was big and clean but not quite emptyâan elderly woman was pushing a walker from the handicapped stall to the sink. She flinched away from the punk and her tethered wolf, and made straight for the exit; Shay heard the yellow tennis balls on the walker's front legs swishing. She locked herself and the dog into the stall at the end of the row and pulled the money out of her pocket.
A wad of fifties, and every bill had been touched with West's blood. For some, the blood extended into Ulysses S. Grant's bearded face. Others had only minor stains.
She stuffed the bloodiest bills into her left front pocket and took the rest to the sink. The blood had been nearly dry, but the water seemed to reanimate it, a thin red stream that seeped out of the bills and curled down her fingers. She teared up as she worked, watching West's blood flow down the drain.
X whimpered at her, and when the water finally ran clean, she dried the bills as best she could by blotting them against paper towels, then carried them to the hand dryer to blast them with hot air. The bills came out limp, but clean. She took a second to throw cold water on her face and said to X, “Let's go.”
She went back to the bolt cutter aisle, got the H. K. Porters, and carried them to the self-checkout counter. She kept the blood-dappled side of her jeans to the counter, nodded to the woman supervising the checkouts, and went out to the Jeep.
West's Jeepâ¦She opened the door and saw a smear of dried blood on the driver's seat, where she'd been sitting. She dug into the backseat, found a pack of insect-repellant wipes, pulled one out, and used it to scrub the blood off the gray leather. She dropped the wipe in the parking lot and turned the leather key fob in her hand as she was about to start the ignition. More damn blood: West had been clutching his side and laid down a complete thumbprint when he thrust the keys at herâ¦.
She flashed back to the basement again, could see her own face reflected in the shine of West's brown eyesâ¦desperate to get her moving, thinking only about her safety, not about himself. Insisting that the wound wasn't fatalâhe knew that from his past as a soldier. He said the police would get him to a hospital and into surgeryâ¦.
And then, when she'd landed back safely with her friends, they'd given her the bad news. West had died.
The anger came suddenly, bursting over the sadness, the guilt at leaving him behind. Singular had murdered him, and the anger enveloped her, and she began to tremble, to shake, until she had to grip the steering wheel to keep herself from shaking to pieces.
Then the trembling subsided, and she started the truck.
“No mercy,” she vowed to her wolf. “No mercy.”
Odin Remby held a rolled-up washcloth in the young woman's mouth as she thrashed in chains on the narrow motel bed. Cade Holt had thrown his torso across her bucking legs, and Cruz Perez was trying to restrain her flailing arms. The harder she struggled against her bindings, the more she'd bleed, and the yellowed sheets were already striped with blood.
“Careful, careful, let's not make it worse,” said Twist. He was standing back from the bed, leaning on a gold-headed cane, watching the struggle. The curtains were drawn, and the TV was turned up. “It's okay, sweetheart, you're almost through it.”
Another seven or eight seconds, and the woman's thrashing limbs began to slow. She went still for a moment, then began to tremble, went still again, suffered another fit of trembling, and finally went still and stayed that way.
She was wearing a gray hospital smock and sweating heavily, and the stink of her sweat saturated the room. When he was sure the fit had ended, Odin pulled the washcloth from between her teeth. Her lips were crossed with healing wounds made when she'd bitten herself in earlier, unprotected fits. Cade and Cruz both backed away.
Twist looked at Odin. “We've got to get the chains off her. Where in the hell is your sister?”
“She'll be back,” Odin said. He was thin and pale, breathing heavily. There were vicious purple bruises across his cheeks and hands, as if he'd been patiently and thoroughly and repeatedly beatenâas he had been.
“She's been gone for almost an hour,” said Twist. “If she needed to cry, that's fineâbut we've got things to do and crying's a luxury right now. We don't know what Singular's doing, we don't have any communications, weâ”
A key rattled in the lock, and the door banged open. Shay was there with X, backlit by the Reno sun, carrying an orange Home Depot bag. She kicked the door shut with the heel of her boot and pulled a heavy set of bolt cutters from the sack. Her eyes were dry.
“Let's cut her loose,” she said to the men in the room, who were all thinking a version of the same thing: the red-haired, camera-friendly beauty of a week ago was gone. Standing before them was a fugitive with a harsh black hack job of a haircut and a smoldering fury in her hazel stare.
Twist tipped the head of his cane toward her. “Don't leave us in the lurch like that.”
They locked eyes, and after a few seconds, she nodded, snapped open the blades of the bolt cutters, didn't bother to apologize. “We've got things to do.”
“Like what?” asked Cade. He was a tall, tanned kid, seventeen, with shoulder-length Jesus hair.
“Like revenge.”
For a long moment, everyone in the room just looked at her. Then Odin slowly stood, body stiff, moving as though his bones hurt, and did something he hadn't done in weeksâhe smiled.
Cruz, the exâgang member from East L.A., simply held out his hand, and Shay passed him the bolt cutters.
“These'll work,” Cruz said, snapping the heavy jaws.
Shay was studying the woman on the bed. She was Asian, with delicate features gone gaunt from months of stress and pain. “She looks worse than when I left.”
“She had another seizure,” Odin said. “They're so violent. That was the third sinceâ”
The chained woman was coming around: she tilted her head up at Odin and whispered, “Water.” Odin grabbed a cup off the nightstand and held it to the woman's lips. She drank it all, greedily, then lay back on the bed.
“Where're we cutting?” Twist asked.
The woman was bound in a twelve-foot chain, a cold metal boa constrictor that circled her slender waist and looped like handcuffs around her wrists and ankles. Each set of loops was cinched with a U-shaped padlock.
“Start at her waist,” Shay said to Cruz. Shay pulled the chain as far off the woman's body as she could, about three inches, and Cruz carefully gripped a link in the blades and squeezed. It broke in half with a quiet pop.
Twist: “Cade, pick up the chain and the padlocks, wipe them, stick them in a pillowcase. We'll dump it in the trash somewhere.”
Cade grabbed a pillow, and Cruz moved on to the woman's wrists and then ankles.
“Please don't move,” Cruz said, positioning the blades on the chain. “I don't wanna cut youâ¦.”
When the woman's chafed and bloodied wrists were free, she groaned in relief and said, “Thank you” and “More water, please?”
Odin got her another cup of water. Twist packed a pillow behind her back and said, “Better?”
She took another long drink and looked around the bed at the six of them: four men, a girl, and a dog with mismatched yellow and blue eyes. The dog sat away from her, but his nose was working hard, sniffing at the blood on her ankles.
As a group, her rescuers looked more than a little tattered: teenagers, mostly, the girl had a swollen lip, the long-haired kid had recently been hit in the face, the heavily muscled Hispanic had a bandage wrapped around one hand, the older man, perhaps thirty, was leaning on a cane. Her grateful gaze settled on OdinâOdin, the boy with gingery whiskers who'd been imprisoned in the same Singular warehouse. He'd cradled her head in the back of a truck as they'd fled from the scene. Now he patted her arm awkwardly and said, “You're safe.”
Twist asked, “Can you talk?”
She nodded and put the cup down. “Yes.”
Shay: “What did they do to you?”
“They put an American woman into my mind,” she said in precise, heavily accented English.
“Into your mind? You meanâ¦What do you mean?” Twist asked. He sat on the end of the bed, his cane between his knees.
The woman rubbed at her sore wrists and said: “I have memories that are not my life, I know things that are not my knowingâ¦.I am unable to think only for myself.”
The rescuers looked at each other, and Twist said, “They're that close. This is science fiction.”
“It's depraved,” Odin said. “They drilled into her head just like they did all those poor monkeysâ”
“Monkeys?” the woman asked.
Shay gave her brother a look that said
not now,
but the woman had a flicker of understanding.
“Yes, I think I am like a monkeyâan experiment,” she said. “But I do not think the experiment worked. Not completely. If the experiment worked, she would have taken over my brain and driven me out. I think only pieces were successful. I do not knowâ¦.There is much confusion.”
They'd all been staringâand trying not to stareâat the woman's horribly mutilated head. Now, as if suddenly realizing what it meant to have her hands free, she reached up and probed her skull. Spread across the whole dome of her depilated scalp were dozens of tiny brass caps, each sprouting a wire as thin as thread. The wires swept back and ended in pigtail-like connectors at the back of her neck.
“I have not felt my head since before the operation,” she said, answering their faces. “I was chained, to keep me from pulling these things out. Please, may I see a mirror?”
Twist didn't think that was a good idea, not now or for the rest of her life.
“Why don't you wait until you've rested,” he said.
She arched her eyebrow and said: “I am not so afraid that I cannot see the truth.”
An iPad belonging to West, sticking out of his leather briefcase, pinged. Shay said, “Just a second,” and stepped over to the table to check it, then turned back to the others, agitated. “It's a note on BlackWallpaper.” That was the Facebook account West had set up to communicate with themâbut obviously it wasn't West postingâ¦.
“From them?” Cade asked. He went over to view the screen and nodded. “Yeah. Singular.”
Last night can be forgotten. Return the copied flash drives and we're done.
A warning: You are associating with a Chinese spy who came here illegally to attack government officials. If you help her, you will be equally guilty of espionage. The FBI is looking for her and won't stop until she's in custody.
“Last night can be forgotten?” Shay seethed. “They murdered West. They murdered him. They think we're going to let them forget it?”
Twist put a hand on her shoulder. “Let me show it to⦔ He turned to the girl on the bed. “I don't even know your name.”
“Fenfang.”
“Let me show it to Fenfang,” Twist said. “Can you read English?”
“Of course.”
She took the slate, frowned as she read the message. “I am not a spy! I am a university student. My cousin Liko and I, theyâ¦they⦔ She touched her head again, and her eyes began twitching and then rolled upward. Twist said, “She's seizing again. Get the washclothâ¦.”
Fenfang fell back on the bed, shivering, her teeth beginning to chatter, and she moaned as if someone was indeed fighting her from inside.
Odin knelt next to her, grabbed the washcloth off the nightstand, and thrust it between her teeth. She began to gnaw at it and struggle, and he said, “Help, hold her armsâ¦.”
The spasm went on for two minutes, peaking a minute after it started and gradually subsiding. When it ended, she opened her eyes and said, “I can't⦔ She closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep.
Odin, staring at the woman's scalp, sickened by it, said, “We need to get her some kind of treatment.”
“What kind would that be?” Shay asked. The anger was thick in her voice. “They made her into a lab rat. If she's like those monkeys you turned loose, or like X, her brain is full of wires. Where do you go to get that fixed?”
“I don't know,” Odin said. “But leaving her like this is not an option. We've got to do something.”
Fenfang's eyes fluttered: she'd been unconscious for no more than a few seconds. She said, “You cannot cure me. I think I will die soon. Or I will kill myself.”
Odin crouched beside her. “Don't give up. Please. Don't.”
Fenfang focused her eyes, which were dark brown, almost black. “I have no control. These things they put in my headâ¦I see things. I do things. They connect me to a machine.”
“No machine here,” Cade said.
“No machine ever again,” said Odin.
Twist leaned in. “The note from Singular said you're a Chinese spyâ¦.”
“I am not a spy.”
“We're under the impression Singular might be dealing with North Koreans. Are you Chinese or Korean?”
“I am Chinese, from Dandong,” she said. “I was a university student there. My cousin, Liko, and I, we studied together.”
Cade's fingers rapped across the keyboard of his laptop, and he checked a map. “Dandong is on the border, across the Yalu River from North Korea.”
“Yes. We made money for school, trading with North Koreans,” Fenfang said. “Then an American man came, he was a Christian man. He wanted to go across to do research on the suffering, and we took him. On the third night, we were captured.”
There was a flurry of glances between Shay and the others. One of the videos from the encrypted flash drive Odin had cracked showed a robotic Asian man speaking as though he were an American Christian aid worker who'd gone missing a year earlier along the ChineseâNorth Korean border.
“Was it Robert G. Morris?” Cade asked. “Robert G. Morris from St. Louis?”
The young woman seemed startled when she heard the name. “Yes. You know Robert?”
“No,” Twist said. “But we foundâ¦evidence of him on a Singular video. We also found news reports that no one had seen him for months.”
Cruz, who'd stepped back and was petting X, asked, “How did you get from North Korea to here?”
“On a ship,” she said, her voice trembling with effort. “There were other people with me, also experiments. One of them was my cousin. Everything was clouds. They gave me drugs, all of us had drugs, to keep us quiet, almost to the end. The last four or five days, they did not give us drugs because they wanted our blood to be clean for the examinations. One man died when we were on the ship. We were in a metal box, he was sick, and then he did not move, and they came and took him out. We never saw him again.”
Shay jumped in: “Fenfang, we don't know who the other prisoners were at the facility we broke into last night. Do you?”
The young woman squeezed her eyes shut, as if trying to see inside the cells where Shay and West had spied several catatonic men in the moments before they found Odin.
“No,” she said. “I heard crying, but I only ever saw Odin.”
Odin said, “They were dragging me down the hall to my cell after waterboarding me. I couldn't walk, I was just hanging off them. Fenfang was being taken the other way. One of the guards said, âWater Boy meets the Girl with Two Brains,' and the other guards laughed.”
“Not laughing now,” Cruz said.
Fenfang nodded and looked at the group again, scrutinizing each of their faces: Shay, Twist, Odin, Cade, Cruz, and X. Then she asked, “Who are you?”
Shay said, “That's a complicated story.”
“I am a good listener,” Fenfang said.
Odin ran his hands through his hair and started at the beginning: “I don't like animal experimentation in research laboratories. Most of the time, it's unnecessary and cruel, and if you'd seen the messed-up monkeys with their heads cutâ”
Shay squeezed Odin's arm, gave him a quick shake of her head that said
spare her the details
. “My brother's got a very kind heart, but basically, what happened is, he and some extreme animal rights people raided a lab to wreck their experiments, and they got away with a lot of computer files and our dog here. Turns out the company that owns the lab wasn't just experimenting on animals, they were experimenting on people, like you. We think they're trying to find a way to make peopleâ¦immortal.”
Odin broke in: “The problem is, they can't create a brain or a body, so they have to use one that already exists. They kidnap a living person, try to erase her memories, and then they try to move the mind of another person into her brain.”