BZRK (BZRK 1)

She gave a slight shrug and let Sadie take another blessed, blessed sip of water.

“I need to know how soon I can move her,” the security chief said. Stern. That was his name. Something Stern. He had one of those faces that always looked as if he had just come from shaving. His tie was neat, but the collar was twisted a bit sideways around his neck. And although he was trying hard to look impassive, the corners of his mouth kept tugging downward. His eyes were red. He had cried.

“Move her?” the doctor yelped. “What are you talking about? She has a compound fracture of the ulna and radius, a concussion, internal bleeding—”

“Doctor,” Stern said. “I can’t keep her safe here. We have a place. Our own doctors, our own facilities. And air-tight security.”

“She needs an MRI. We need to see if there’s any brain damage.”

“We have an MRI machine,” the lawyer said, oozing confidence. A Harvard Law voice. A voice with which you were simply not allowed to argue. “I am Ms. McLure’s temporary legal guardian, and her attorney. And I think Ms. McLure would rather have our own doctors. And frankly, you and this hospital would rather not have the media camped outside twenty-four/seven.”

Stern looked at her. He was careful not to be too obvious, but Sadie intercepted the look and understood.

No, it would not do to have strangers looking inside her skull. They might see something they’d have a very hard time understanding. So, Stern knew. Useful.

“Take me home,” Sadie said.

Stern nodded once. “Yes, Ms. McLure. Home.”

There was a park not far from Noah’s home, but it was drizzling and threatened to go to full-on rain, so he and his two mates, Mohammed and Little Cora, kicked the football around in the partial shelter of two high walls.

No

ah dribbled it, did an agile pedalada, and back-heeled it to Mohammed.

“I can, too, do a fuckin’ Chilena,” Little Cora insisted, referring to a bicycle kick that involved somersaulting to kick a ball out of the air. Little Cora felt no sentence was complete without the modifier “fuckin’.”

“You can do it once, maybe,” Mohammed insisted. “Then you fall on your head, and it’s six weeks in hospital.”

Little Cora charged at him, took the ball, and kicked it with impressive power and very poor aim at the nearest wall. It struck the bars on the back window of a pizza restaurant and took a wild bounce toward a motorcycle locked to the fence. The fence separated the alley from the train tracks, and just as Mohammed started berating Little Cora, a train went roaring past obliterating the banter.

Noah grabbed the handlebar of the motorcycle and righted it before it could topple over. Then he went after the ball, which had rolled some distance.

A young man got there first. He stopped the ball, dribbled it a bit just to show he knew how, and kicked it away from Noah and back to his friends.

The man was Asian—Chinese, Noah guessed—and startlingly handsome. Definitely not someone from this neighborhood.

The man said, “Noah?”

And that froze Noah where he stood. His friends moved closer, slowly, protective but wary.

There was nothing threatening about the man. He didn’t bare his teeth, he didn’t move farther forward. He met Noah’s gaze easily.

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m looking for Noah Cotton.”

An American accent, at least Noah thought so.

“That’s me,” Noah admitted with a blend of defiance and indifference. He was a city boy, Noah, bred for wariness.

The American was in his early twenties, tall, especially for someone of Chinese background, thin, immaculate. He wore a long, navy cashmere coat over a dark suit, over an expensive white shirt held at the neck not by a tie but by a sort of white floral pin.

“My name is Nijinsky,” the American said. “I’m a friend of your brother.”

“Nijinsky. That sounds Russian.”

Nijinsky shrugged and smiled, offering a glimpse of amazingly perfect white teeth. “It’s an odd name, I must admit. Most people call me Jin.”