Wired (25 page)

Sweat trickled down between my shoulder blades as I hugged my knees to my chest in the growing heat. I watched the men. Mason shouted, “L. Roxanne
Zaborovsky,” but I wasn't where I was supposed to be.

They stopped fighting, exchanged words. I could tell by their frantic body language that they were finally cognizant of being unwired; that I'd unwired all of us.

Mason searched the ground; Leo's hands dug into his jacket pockets; then both of them started running toward the car.

“The deal is off!” Mason yelled.

“Obviously,” Leo shouted back. “The reset's a bloody mess!”

I reached out to the car keys. This wasn't a simple reset if I did something before Mason spliced reality.

If nothing else, go down fighting
.

I turned the key and the engine caught, blaring out with a full muscle-car roar. Hauling on the steering wheel I hit the gas and peeled away from the curb, one or both of the guys glancing off the broadside of the vehicle as I drove off batshit-crazy for home.

The heat evaporated as I raced down the street.
Oh, my God. The car
. I suddenly understood that reality had spliced the first time around while I was in the car. The heat had been insane, like it was a moment ago. But it must have been the moment at which the guys were fighting and Mason won the advantage over Leo that it was hottest; the minute the fate of the fight was determined, the splice had gone through. Leonardo couldn't do anything to change that fact, so he'd had to go off and identify a new wire to cross to put me back on track for his goal.

But I might have stopped the reset from fully going through, and so the original reality splice didn't seem
like it would be duplicated. There was apparently still wire left, and I was going to use it the way
I
wanted to. If only I knew exactly how to splice things to get what I wanted.

I hit the brakes in front of my place and double-parked the Mustang, grabbing my bag and running full-speed up the stairs. Fumbling with my keys at the front door, I figured I'd bought enough time before they made it back, even at a sprint.

The door opened, and I crumpled down on the threshold and pulled the reader and the punch from my bag. Mason had explained it to me, but that wasn't the same as seeing it done.

I set the reader to
ROXY
'
S APT
and shook the punch, unsure how else to get the tiny chamber to fill with that nanobiotech stuff.
You do not know what you're doing. You don't even know if it works like this
.

All I knew was that I wanted to go home. But home to the Roxy I was becoming, not the one with the life I didn't want to live. I struggled clumsily with the equipment, punching random buttons. I couldn't figure it out, and my shaking hands didn't help.

The damn thing sprang out of my hand and hit me in the face, clattering to the ground in front of me. I cursed, pressing my palm against my forehead. If it hadn't already hurt about as much as metal on flesh could hurt, Kitty's bloodcurdling, “Ohmigod,” in my ear would have done the rest.

“Ohmigod! Ohmigod!” Kitty dropped to her knees next to me, grabbing at my hands. “I shouldn't have left. I just figured that was part of it, you know? That I shouldn't be here and it was all your own doing. Look, it's really okay. The important thing is that you opened the door. Right? That's all that matters. We'll cross the stupid threshold another time. Don't think of this as a setback. It will come. In a couple days when you feel better we'll go back to the 7-Eleven and kind of start the last part again. This is just one step back, two steps forward.”

I stared at her. What was she doing here? Hadn't the reset gone through? Had I effected some sort of change with the punch and the smartie?

All I said was, “What the hell are you talking about?”

She frowned and sat down. “What do you mean?”

“What do
you
mean?”

“You
know
what I mean,” she said. “You panicked.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I just hit myself
in the head. That's all. I mean, believe me, I'm pretty fucking tense, but that's not what you're talking about, is it?” We eyed each other. “What do you know that you're not telling me, Kitty?”

She swallowed hard and didn't answer.

I forced myself to remain calm. “I cannot stress to you how important it is to tell me the absolute truth right now.”

“Wait a minute. You
don't
know what I mean.” She looked at me with pleading eyes. “Don't make me tell you,” she whispered.

My God. Tell me
what? “I'm making you. I'm begging you.”

She looked down at her hands and said, “You're agoraphobic. But since you hit your head maybe you're an amnesiac agoraphobic,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “I'm not an amnesiac.”
Well, not exactly
. “But what do you mean, I'm agoraphobic?”

“You're agoraphobic.”

I started to laugh.

“It's not funny,” she said. “You're scaring me.” She got up on her knees, took me by the shoulders, and forced me to look at her. “You're begging me to tell you the truth, and that's the truth. You're agoraphobic. You don't go out. You work from home. You don't date. You compulsively buy makeup online for nights out and great parties that you never attend. You watch spy movies about people living exciting lives of adventure you will never even come close to experiencing. You're agoraphobic.”

She was serious. She was totally, completely, unequivocally serious. But the person she was describing
wasn't me. It had been once; I remembered. But not anymore.

“Come on,” she said. We went into the house and she led me upstairs to my office. I looked around. It didn't seem particularly different from the first time I'd walked this wire—well, there was an empty box on the ground and a thick red binder sitting on top of a pile of papers. I remembered Kitty coming out of my office with a full box and a red binder on top. She'd taken a bunch of stuff out of my office that time around.

“Look,” she said, tapping her finger on the stack of paper sitting on the desk.

I scanned the contents of the binder, then quickly looked through the papers.
Oh, my God
. It was a mass of material on the subject of agoraphobia. Research, descriptions of symptoms, lists of online support groups, and one in particular caught my attention. “ ‘Tips for Desensitizing to Shopping'?”

She shrugged. “You don't remember. You must have hit your head really hard. We just finished our whole sequence, including some practice runs to the 7-Eleven, and you were going to try to do your first one alone. Obviously you didn't quite make it. But it's nothing to worry about. Now I'd like to take you to the hospital.”

“Why? I'm completely fine.”

“Well, this fainting has happened before, and I thought it was just some typical panic from your condition, but . . . but now I'm thinking maybe it's something else. Maybe you're not getting enough iron or something.”

“Maybe I'm pregnant,” I said darkly, thinking about the nurse who'd assured me I wasn't when I'd been in the hospital just a few days ago.

Kitty burst into hysterical laughter.

“Nice,” I mumbled. “Wait a minute. You told me I was a
workaholic
.”

“No, I said agoraphobic.”

“I mean before.”

“Before when? I mean, you
are
a workaholic, but so what?” Kitty sighed. “Maybe I did the wrong thing here. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything at all about your problem.” She suddenly looked horrified and covered her hand with her mouth. “I'm an idiot. I
shouldn't
have said anything at all. Agoraphobia feeds on itself. One little panic attack becomes one big panic attack. One big panic attack becomes lots of big panic attacks until one day you can't leave your house. Until you don't even want to open the door. Maybe telling you will trigger the problem again. The mind breeds fear, Rox. Now that I've said something, maybe this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's how you once described it to me, anyway. The way the condition just sort of took over. I'm so sorry, Rox. I'm such a fool. Amnesia is way better than agoraphobia, as far as I'm concerned.” She peered closely at my face. “You don't feel panicky now, do you?”

“No. Just completely freaked out. But it's not your fault.”

She frowned. “I totally should have lied. You weren't ready to hear the truth.”

That's why on that last wire you said I was a workaholic instead of what I really was. And being a
Major, I was experiencing a whole jumble of bits and pieces of the different wires crossing. Being an agoraphobic wasn't one that stuck with me. So you lied the first time around. But it doesn't matter
.

I said, “You did the right thing. I promise. Now, help me piece all this together. I wasn't phobic in college, right?”

“Right.”

“But Mason shot me on graduation day and—”

“What?”

“Mason Merrick shot me—”

Kitty burst out laughing. “Through the heart with Cupid's bow, maybe.”

“Mason Merrick wasn't stalking me?”

She sat down in the task chair. “If anybody was stalking anybody, I'd say it was more like you stalking him,” she said with a small smile. “As the song goes, ‘There is a light that never goes out. . . .' I've been saying for the last four years that if I could get you to put that torch down for one second, I think we might actually get you out on a date. Of course, that would require you to actually leave the house.”

“Four years?”

“Four years of ‘Mason Merrick this,' ‘Mason Merrick that.' ” She rolled her eyes. “I mean, the guy was hot and everything, but I don't think he was worth the kind of brain space you've been giving him.”

I looked up at her, wincing at her description of me and the fact that the song she felt best described me was an anthem of a terminally depressed, angstridden eighties band. “I've been carrying a torch for Mason Merrick for four years?” And Mason wasn't a stalker in this reality because Leonardo never kissed
me and made the splice to convince me Mason was the bad guy. Now we were getting somewhere. What about the fact that Kitty and I hadn't spoken since graduation day?

“You and I . . . we said good-bye on graduation day. You left . . . and then what?”

“Graduation day? Oh. Well, I called you just after I got in the cab and it pulled out, intending to tell you I thought I might have left the heater on in the bathroom.”

“That's it? You thought you left the heater on in the bathroom?” I actually giggled. It was so . . . minor.

The phone rings. It's Kitty calling to tell me she left the heater on. Then the doorbell rings
. . . .

“So you called, and?”

“And nothing. You didn't answer. I was almost at the airport when I got a call from Mrs. Bimmel.” Kitty shifted her weight, looking about as uncomfortable as I'd ever seen her. “You sure you want to talk about this? You always said you didn't want to talk about it.”

“I don't remember that either,” I said, trying to crack a smile. “Start from the moment you walked away from the door.”

“Like I said, Mrs. Bimmel calls and tells me you were shot. Obviously, I thought it was a bad joke. But she wasn't laughing. When I realized it was true, I made the cab turn around. I never went to Europe, and I've been here ever since.”

“Who shot me?” I asked, mentally crossing my fingers.

“We don't know.” She shrugged. “Some random guy.”

“Not Mason?”

She sighed impatiently. “Not Mason. Mason had nothing to do with it. Just some weirdo we think saw me leave with my luggage and meant to rob the place. They never caught him and that was that.”

Tears came to my eyes. I blinked them back. She couldn't have known how I felt about Mason now. Not just a crush or a torch. It was something much, much more.

“So you turned around and came back from the airport. . . .”

“Of course. And thank God, because when you got out of the hospital, you became afraid to open the door. I thought it would pass. It didn't. Things got worse. You developed a fear of a lot of stuff, and eventually it just took over and it's only during this last year that you really decided to try to overcome it once and for all.”

“Which led to my going out at two a.m. to the 7-Eleven to practice going shopping.”

“Well, this time you were just going to try to get through the door by the counter, and if things were going really well, maybe buy just one thing before turning back, so I wouldn't call it shopping. That's how it works. One baby step at a time until you stop being afraid.”

“Why two a.m.?”

“Because you said there wouldn't be as many people in the store. Fewer things to panic you.”

“But then Mason and Leonardo come out of the woodwork, and Mason walks me home, and I have no knowledge of what I went out for in the first place.”

“Mason and who?”

Oh, yeah. She hasn't lived through my “date” with Leonardo Kaysar. She doesn't even know he exists
. “Nobody. Nothing. Go on.”

“Well, Rox. Obviously, you never made it to the 7-Eleven.” She checked her watch. “You wouldn't have had time. I just found you on the ground about to pass out from your panic attack.”

And you wanted to take me to the hospital, where a nurse would tell me I hadn't been shot and I wasn't pregnant
. Something occurred to me. “Hey, what exactly are you doing out so late tonight?”

A sly grin came over her face.

“Booty call?” I guessed, laughing a little.

“It happens,” she admitted, laughing too.