Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

“Yeah,” I say. “I might.”

“And Agent Jones can go down to the commissary and get us something to eat. The hospital doesn’t have much, but it’s not as terrible as hospital food used to be. They have decent burgers and snacks.” She walks over to the other side of her bed and opens one of the drawers in the side table, taking out a brown leather pocketbook. “Ed, why don’t you get a bunch of different sandwiches and cups of coffee. The egg salad isn’t bad. And a couple of bags of chips, some fruit, and something for dessert. Get some extra packets of mustard for Cassel. I know he likes them. We’ll sit down and have a nice lunch.”

“Very civilized,” I say.

Agent Jones ignores her looking for her wallet and goes to the door. “Fine. I’ll be right back.” He looks from me to her. “Don’t believe everything that little weasel tells you. I know him from before.”

When he walks out, she gives me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry if he was difficult. I needed to get an agent on this, and I wanted someone who’d worked with you before. The last thing we need is lots of people knowing you’re a transformation worker. Even here, I can’t count on total discretion.”

“You worried about a leak?”

“We want to be sure that when and if people find out about you, they receive that information directly from us. You know there’s a rumor that there’s a transformation worker in China? Many people in our government feel that that information was carefully planted.”

“If they have one at all, you mean?”

She nods, a smile pulling at one corner of her mouth. “Exactly. Now go freshen up.”

In the bathroom I manage to slick my hair back with water and take a safety razor to my stubble. Then I gargle with mouthwash. When I emerge, I do so in a cloud of mint.

Yulikova’s gotten a third chair from somewhere and is arranging them near the window. “Much better,” she says.

It’s something that a mother would say. Not my mother, but a mother.

“You need help with anything?” I ask her. It doesn’t seem like she should be moving furniture.

“No, no. Sit down, Cassel. I’m fine.”

I grab a chair. “I don’t mean to pry,” I say, “but we’re in a hospital. You sure you’re fine?”

She sighs heavily. “No getting anything past you, huh?”

“I also often notice when water is wet. I have a keen detective’s mind like that.”

She has the good grace to smile. “I’m a physical worker. Which means I can alter people’s bodies—not to the extent that you can, but brutal basic things. I can break legs and heal them again. I can remove some tumors—or at least reduce them in size. I can draw out an infection in the blood. I can make children’s lungs work.” I try not to show how surprised I am. I didn’t know physical workers could do that. I thought it was just pain—sliced skin, burns, and boils. Philip was a physical worker; I never saw him use it to help anyone.

“And sometimes I do all those things. But it makes me very sick. All of it, any of it, hurting and healing. And over time it has made me sicker. Permanently sicker.”

I don’t ask her about the legality of what she’s doing. I don’t care, and if she doesn’t care either, well, then, maybe we have something in common after all. “Can’t you heal yourself?”

“Ah, the old cry of ‘Physician, heal thyself!’” she says. “A perfectly logical question, but I am afraid I can’t. The blow-back negates any and all positive effects. So occasionally I have to come here for a while.”

I hesitate before I ask my next question, because it’s so awful. Still, I need to know, if I’m about to sign my free will away on the strength of her promises. “Are you dying?”

“We’re all dying, Cassel. It’s just that some of us are dying faster than others.”

I nod. That’s going to have to do, because Agent Jones walks back into the room with an orange cafeteria tray, the whole thing piled with sandwiches, muffins, fruit, and coffee.

“Put it on my bed. We can buffet off of that,” she tells him.

I retrieve a ham sandwich, a cup of coffee, and an orange and sit back down while Jones and Yulikova choose their food.

“Good,” she says, pulling the wrapper off what looks like a lemon poppy seed muffin. “Now, Cassel, I’m sure you’re familiar with Governor Patton.”

I snort. “Patton? Oh, yeah. I love that guy!”

Jones looks like he wants to choke the sarcasm out of me, but Yulikova just laughs.

“I thought you’d say something like that,” she says. “But you should understand—what your mother did to him and then what was done to fix him—he’s become more and more unstable.”

I open my mouth to object, but she holds up her hand.

“No. I understand your impulse to defend your mother, and it’s very noble, but right now that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame. I need to tell you something confidential, and I need your assurance that it won’t leave this room.”

“Okay,” I say.

“If you’ve seen him on the news recently,” Yulikova says, “you can almost see Patton losing control. He says and does things that are extreme, even for anti-worker radicals. But what you can’t tell is how paranoid and secretive he’s become. People very high up in the government are worried. Once proposition two passes, I’m afraid that he’s going to try to lock down the state of New Jersey, then round up and jail workers. I believe—and I’m not the only one—that he wants to bring back the work camps.”

“That’s not possible,” I say. It’s not that I can’t believe Patton might want that; it’s that I can’t believe he’d actually try to do it. Or that Yulikova would admit suspecting all of this, especially to me.

“He has a lot of allies in Washington,” she continues. “And he’s been putting more in place. The state police are behind him, and so are more than a few folks at Fort Dix. We know he’s been having meetings.”

I think of Lila pressing her hands to the bars as Sam, Daneca, and I sat in the jail cell after the protest rally in Newark. No phone calls, no charges, no nothing. And then I think of the other people, the ones that were reported as held there for days.

I look over at Agent Jones. He doesn’t look like he much cares either way, but he should. Even if he doesn’t want to admit it, the fact that he’s working in this division of the federal government means that he’s a worker too. If Patton is really that crazy, a badge isn’t going to save Jones.

I nod, encouraging her to go on.

She does. “I’ve been in conference with my superiors, and we agree that we have to stop him before he does something even worse. There are rumors of murders—rumors of terrible things, but no hard evidence. If we arrest him now, he could use that to his political advantage. A very public trial, where we don’t have enough evidence, would play right into his hands.”

I nod again.

“I’ve gotten permission for a small operation to remove Patton from power. But I need your help, Cassel. I can promise that your safety will be our first priority. You can abort the mission at any time if you don’t feel completely secure. We’ll handle all the planning and manage the risks.”

“What are we talking about here?” I ask.

“We want you to transform Patton.” She looks at me with her kind eyes, as if any answer I give will be the right one. She takes a sip of her coffee.

“Oh,” I say. For a moment I’m so shocked that her words just ring in my head.

But then I realize that of course this moment was going to come. Being a transformation worker is the most valuable thing about me—the reason they want me in the program, the reason that they let me get away with murder.

They let me get away with murder so that I can murder for them.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just surprised.”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Yulikova says. “I know that you’re uncomfortable with what you can do.”

Agent Jones snorts, and she gives him a dark look.

When she turns back to me, there is still some of that anger in her eyes. “And I know what I’m asking isn’t easy. But we need for there to be no trace of him. This can’t seem to be an assassination.”

“Even though it is?” I say.

That seems to take her by surprise. “We’d like you to change him into a living creature. I understand that it would be possible for him to survive like that indefinitely. He won’t be dead. He’ll just be contained.”

Being caged, trapped like Lila was in her cat body, forever, seems as awful as death. But maybe it will let Yulikova sleep better at night.

She leans toward me. “I have gotten approval to make you an offer, in light of the huge service you’ll be doing for us. We’ll make the charges against your mother go away.”

Jones brings his hand down hard on the arm of his chair. “You’re making another deal with him? That family of his is slipperier than black ice on a highway.”

“Do I have to ask you to wait outside?” Her voice is steely. “This is a dangerous operation, and he isn’t even a part of the program yet. He’s seventeen years old, Ed. Let him have one less thing to worry about.”

Agent Jones looks from me to her and then away from both of us. “Fine,” he says.

“Here at the LMD we often say that heroes are the people who dirty their hands so other hands get to stay clean. We’re terrible so you don’t have to be. But in this case you do have to be—or at least we’re asking you to be.”

“What happens if I don’t agree—I mean to my mother?”

Yulikova picks off a piece of her muffin. “I don’t know. I’m authorized by my boss to offer you this, but he’s the one who would be making it happen. I suppose your mother could continue to evade justice or she could be picked up and extradited—if she’s out of the state. I’d be afraid for her safety if she were locked up in any place Patton could get to.”

I am suddenly gripped with certainty that Yulikova knows exactly where my mother is.

They’re manipulating me. Yulikova letting me see how sick she is, saying nice things, making us sit down to lunch. Jones being such an asshole. It’s classic good cop–bad cop. Which isn’t to say that it’s not working.

Patton’s a bad guy and he’s out to get my mother. I want him stopped and I want her safe. I’m very tempted by anything that lets me have both. Plus there’s the fact that I’m backed into a corner. Mom needs a pardon.

And if I don’t trust my own instincts toward right and wrong, I have to trust someone’s. That’s why I wanted to join the government, right? So that if I was going to do bad things, it would at least be in the service of good people.

I am a weapon. And I have put myself in Yulikova’s hands.

Now I have to let myself be used as she sees fit.

I take a deep breath. “Sure. I can do that. I can work him.”

“Cassel,” says Yulikova. “I want you to understand that you can decline this job. You can tell us no.”

But I can’t. She’s seen to it that I really can’t.

Jones doesn’t say a single snarky thing.

“I understand.” I nod to show that I really do. “I understand, and I’m telling you yes.”

“This is going to be a very discreet mission,” Yulikova says. “A very small team operating with the tacit support of my superiors—providing we can pull it off. Otherwise, they will disavow all knowledge. I will be running this—any questions should come directly to me. No one else needs to know. I trust I can count on both of your discretion.”

“You mean if something goes wrong, it could be our careers,” Jones says.

Yulikova takes another sip of her coffee. “Cassel isn’t the only one with a choice. You don’t need to be a part of this.”

Agent Jones doesn’t say anything. I wonder if it will hurt his career either way. I wonder if he even knows he’s playing the bad cop. I kind of suspect he doesn’t.

I eat my sandwich. A nurse pokes her head in and says that she’ll be bringing medicine in about ten minutes. Yulikova stands and starts gathering empty cups and tossing them into the wastebasket.

“I can do that,” I say, getting up and grabbing a sandwich wrapper.

She puts her gloved hands on my arms and looks into my eyes, like she’s trying to see the answer to a question she hasn’t asked. “It’s okay to change your mind, Cassel. At any time.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I tell her.

Her fingers tighten. “I believe you. I do. I’ll be in touch in a few days with more details.”

“Let’s not tire her out,” Jones says, frowning. “We should go.”

I feel bad leaving Yulikova with the mess, but now they’re both looking at me with the expectation that our interview is over. Jones walks to the door, and I follow him.

“Just for the record, I don’t like any of this,” Agent Jones says, his gloved hand on the door frame.

She nods once, like she’s acknowledging his words, but the ghost of a smile is on her mouth.

Their exchange makes me even more sure I made the right choice. If Agent Jones approved of what I was doing, that’s when I’d be worried.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I FOLLOW AGENT JONES through the corridors of the hospital, but when I get to the parking lot, I’m done. The guy hates me. There’s no way I’m letting him take me back to the old house. I don’t want him talking to my grandfather again.

>

“Yeah,” I say. “I might.”

“And Agent Jones can go down to the commissary and get us something to eat. The hospital doesn’t have much, but it’s not as terrible as hospital food used to be. They have decent burgers and snacks.” She walks over to the other side of her bed and opens one of the drawers in the side table, taking out a brown leather pocketbook. “Ed, why don’t you get a bunch of different sandwiches and cups of coffee. The egg salad isn’t bad. And a couple of bags of chips, some fruit, and something for dessert. Get some extra packets of mustard for Cassel. I know he likes them. We’ll sit down and have a nice lunch.”

“Very civilized,” I say.

Agent Jones ignores her looking for her wallet and goes to the door. “Fine. I’ll be right back.” He looks from me to her. “Don’t believe everything that little weasel tells you. I know him from before.”

When he walks out, she gives me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry if he was difficult. I needed to get an agent on this, and I wanted someone who’d worked with you before. The last thing we need is lots of people knowing you’re a transformation worker. Even here, I can’t count on total discretion.”

“You worried about a leak?”

“We want to be sure that when and if people find out about you, they receive that information directly from us. You know there’s a rumor that there’s a transformation worker in China? Many people in our government feel that that information was carefully planted.”

“If they have one at all, you mean?”

She nods, a smile pulling at one corner of her mouth. “Exactly. Now go freshen up.”

In the bathroom I manage to slick my hair back with water and take a safety razor to my stubble. Then I gargle with mouthwash. When I emerge, I do so in a cloud of mint.

Yulikova’s gotten a third chair from somewhere and is arranging them near the window. “Much better,” she says.

It’s something that a mother would say. Not my mother, but a mother.

“You need help with anything?” I ask her. It doesn’t seem like she should be moving furniture.

“No, no. Sit down, Cassel. I’m fine.”

I grab a chair. “I don’t mean to pry,” I say, “but we’re in a hospital. You sure you’re fine?”

She sighs heavily. “No getting anything past you, huh?”

“I also often notice when water is wet. I have a keen detective’s mind like that.”

She has the good grace to smile. “I’m a physical worker. Which means I can alter people’s bodies—not to the extent that you can, but brutal basic things. I can break legs and heal them again. I can remove some tumors—or at least reduce them in size. I can draw out an infection in the blood. I can make children’s lungs work.” I try not to show how surprised I am. I didn’t know physical workers could do that. I thought it was just pain—sliced skin, burns, and boils. Philip was a physical worker; I never saw him use it to help anyone.

“And sometimes I do all those things. But it makes me very sick. All of it, any of it, hurting and healing. And over time it has made me sicker. Permanently sicker.”

I don’t ask her about the legality of what she’s doing. I don’t care, and if she doesn’t care either, well, then, maybe we have something in common after all. “Can’t you heal yourself?”

“Ah, the old cry of ‘Physician, heal thyself!’” she says. “A perfectly logical question, but I am afraid I can’t. The blow-back negates any and all positive effects. So occasionally I have to come here for a while.”

I hesitate before I ask my next question, because it’s so awful. Still, I need to know, if I’m about to sign my free will away on the strength of her promises. “Are you dying?”

“We’re all dying, Cassel. It’s just that some of us are dying faster than others.”

I nod. That’s going to have to do, because Agent Jones walks back into the room with an orange cafeteria tray, the whole thing piled with sandwiches, muffins, fruit, and coffee.

“Put it on my bed. We can buffet off of that,” she tells him.

I retrieve a ham sandwich, a cup of coffee, and an orange and sit back down while Jones and Yulikova choose their food.

“Good,” she says, pulling the wrapper off what looks like a lemon poppy seed muffin. “Now, Cassel, I’m sure you’re familiar with Governor Patton.”

I snort. “Patton? Oh, yeah. I love that guy!”

Jones looks like he wants to choke the sarcasm out of me, but Yulikova just laughs.

“I thought you’d say something like that,” she says. “But you should understand—what your mother did to him and then what was done to fix him—he’s become more and more unstable.”

I open my mouth to object, but she holds up her hand.

“No. I understand your impulse to defend your mother, and it’s very noble, but right now that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame. I need to tell you something confidential, and I need your assurance that it won’t leave this room.”

“Okay,” I say.

“If you’ve seen him on the news recently,” Yulikova says, “you can almost see Patton losing control. He says and does things that are extreme, even for anti-worker radicals. But what you can’t tell is how paranoid and secretive he’s become. People very high up in the government are worried. Once proposition two passes, I’m afraid that he’s going to try to lock down the state of New Jersey, then round up and jail workers. I believe—and I’m not the only one—that he wants to bring back the work camps.”

“That’s not possible,” I say. It’s not that I can’t believe Patton might want that; it’s that I can’t believe he’d actually try to do it. Or that Yulikova would admit suspecting all of this, especially to me.

“He has a lot of allies in Washington,” she continues. “And he’s been putting more in place. The state police are behind him, and so are more than a few folks at Fort Dix. We know he’s been having meetings.”

I think of Lila pressing her hands to the bars as Sam, Daneca, and I sat in the jail cell after the protest rally in Newark. No phone calls, no charges, no nothing. And then I think of the other people, the ones that were reported as held there for days.

I look over at Agent Jones. He doesn’t look like he much cares either way, but he should. Even if he doesn’t want to admit it, the fact that he’s working in this division of the federal government means that he’s a worker too. If Patton is really that crazy, a badge isn’t going to save Jones.

I nod, encouraging her to go on.

She does. “I’ve been in conference with my superiors, and we agree that we have to stop him before he does something even worse. There are rumors of murders—rumors of terrible things, but no hard evidence. If we arrest him now, he could use that to his political advantage. A very public trial, where we don’t have enough evidence, would play right into his hands.”

I nod again.

“I’ve gotten permission for a small operation to remove Patton from power. But I need your help, Cassel. I can promise that your safety will be our first priority. You can abort the mission at any time if you don’t feel completely secure. We’ll handle all the planning and manage the risks.”

“What are we talking about here?” I ask.

“We want you to transform Patton.” She looks at me with her kind eyes, as if any answer I give will be the right one. She takes a sip of her coffee.

“Oh,” I say. For a moment I’m so shocked that her words just ring in my head.

But then I realize that of course this moment was going to come. Being a transformation worker is the most valuable thing about me—the reason they want me in the program, the reason that they let me get away with murder.

They let me get away with murder so that I can murder for them.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just surprised.”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Yulikova says. “I know that you’re uncomfortable with what you can do.”

Agent Jones snorts, and she gives him a dark look.

When she turns back to me, there is still some of that anger in her eyes. “And I know what I’m asking isn’t easy. But we need for there to be no trace of him. This can’t seem to be an assassination.”

“Even though it is?” I say.

That seems to take her by surprise. “We’d like you to change him into a living creature. I understand that it would be possible for him to survive like that indefinitely. He won’t be dead. He’ll just be contained.”

Being caged, trapped like Lila was in her cat body, forever, seems as awful as death. But maybe it will let Yulikova sleep better at night.

She leans toward me. “I have gotten approval to make you an offer, in light of the huge service you’ll be doing for us. We’ll make the charges against your mother go away.”

Jones brings his hand down hard on the arm of his chair. “You’re making another deal with him? That family of his is slipperier than black ice on a highway.”

“Do I have to ask you to wait outside?” Her voice is steely. “This is a dangerous operation, and he isn’t even a part of the program yet. He’s seventeen years old, Ed. Let him have one less thing to worry about.”

Agent Jones looks from me to her and then away from both of us. “Fine,” he says.

“Here at the LMD we often say that heroes are the people who dirty their hands so other hands get to stay clean. We’re terrible so you don’t have to be. But in this case you do have to be—or at least we’re asking you to be.”

“What happens if I don’t agree—I mean to my mother?”

Yulikova picks off a piece of her muffin. “I don’t know. I’m authorized by my boss to offer you this, but he’s the one who would be making it happen. I suppose your mother could continue to evade justice or she could be picked up and extradited—if she’s out of the state. I’d be afraid for her safety if she were locked up in any place Patton could get to.”

I am suddenly gripped with certainty that Yulikova knows exactly where my mother is.

They’re manipulating me. Yulikova letting me see how sick she is, saying nice things, making us sit down to lunch. Jones being such an asshole. It’s classic good cop–bad cop. Which isn’t to say that it’s not working.

Patton’s a bad guy and he’s out to get my mother. I want him stopped and I want her safe. I’m very tempted by anything that lets me have both. Plus there’s the fact that I’m backed into a corner. Mom needs a pardon.

And if I don’t trust my own instincts toward right and wrong, I have to trust someone’s. That’s why I wanted to join the government, right? So that if I was going to do bad things, it would at least be in the service of good people.

I am a weapon. And I have put myself in Yulikova’s hands.

Now I have to let myself be used as she sees fit.

I take a deep breath. “Sure. I can do that. I can work him.”

“Cassel,” says Yulikova. “I want you to understand that you can decline this job. You can tell us no.”

But I can’t. She’s seen to it that I really can’t.

Jones doesn’t say a single snarky thing.

“I understand.” I nod to show that I really do. “I understand, and I’m telling you yes.”

“This is going to be a very discreet mission,” Yulikova says. “A very small team operating with the tacit support of my superiors—providing we can pull it off. Otherwise, they will disavow all knowledge. I will be running this—any questions should come directly to me. No one else needs to know. I trust I can count on both of your discretion.”

“You mean if something goes wrong, it could be our careers,” Jones says.

Yulikova takes another sip of her coffee. “Cassel isn’t the only one with a choice. You don’t need to be a part of this.”

Agent Jones doesn’t say anything. I wonder if it will hurt his career either way. I wonder if he even knows he’s playing the bad cop. I kind of suspect he doesn’t.

I eat my sandwich. A nurse pokes her head in and says that she’ll be bringing medicine in about ten minutes. Yulikova stands and starts gathering empty cups and tossing them into the wastebasket.

“I can do that,” I say, getting up and grabbing a sandwich wrapper.

She puts her gloved hands on my arms and looks into my eyes, like she’s trying to see the answer to a question she hasn’t asked. “It’s okay to change your mind, Cassel. At any time.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I tell her.

Her fingers tighten. “I believe you. I do. I’ll be in touch in a few days with more details.”

“Let’s not tire her out,” Jones says, frowning. “We should go.”

I feel bad leaving Yulikova with the mess, but now they’re both looking at me with the expectation that our interview is over. Jones walks to the door, and I follow him.

“Just for the record, I don’t like any of this,” Agent Jones says, his gloved hand on the door frame.

She nods once, like she’s acknowledging his words, but the ghost of a smile is on her mouth.

Their exchange makes me even more sure I made the right choice. If Agent Jones approved of what I was doing, that’s when I’d be worried.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I FOLLOW AGENT JONES through the corridors of the hospital, but when I get to the parking lot, I’m done. The guy hates me. There’s no way I’m letting him take me back to the old house. I don’t want him talking to my grandfather again.