But I kept looking, and I knew roughly what the look had to be because my boss groaned and ran his hands through his windswept hair.
“Oh, come the fuck on. Do I seriously have to spell out that the bastard fuckingownedyou? And he wasn’t even a good owner! Heknewhow brilliant you are and hestilltreated you worse than his goddamn dog. Not only did he have you whipped and chained and forced you to work in the dirt, he ripped you away from the girl you love after yousavedher. Someone who does that is irredeemable. You know it. I know it. So for the love of all that’s holy, why are you still wasting even a single ounce of sympathy on him?”
“Because it’snot about him!” I exploded.
Langer groaned. He’d known this was coming, too, clearly. “Kid, she left you. Sheran away. What does that tell you?”
“It tells me there’s more to the story,” I insisted, wishing I had a better answer. “It tells me I need to think more critically. It tells me she thinks I have a plan.” I didn’t, but that was beside the point, right?
“Okay. Let’s be real. Say you decide to play the role of the hopeless romantic idiot, ignore my sage advice, and go after her,” Langer shouted. “What then? You’re still chipped. You’ll get maybe an hour together before the police show up, drag you away, and lock you up, probably for good. Call me crazy, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of critical thinking involved inthatdecision.”
“No,” I replied, turning away for a second. “But there is another option. One that might work if I could get more time.” I swiped some of my own hopelessly windblown hair out of my eyes and raised my eyes to the massive rotor blades still chopping up the atmosphere.
Langer didn’t miss a beat. “Kid, you know I’d take her with us in a second. But to do that, you’d have to find her. And right now, finding her is the dumbest, most dangerous thing you could possibly do.”
“Then I’ll go straight to Keith,” I countered. “I’ll figure out what to say. I have a plan.” A plan I was making up on the spot, but I figured Max probably knew that.
“Right,” he replied. “Except Resi’s goons are still on your tail, so assuming you don’t get killed, which you will, and assuming you do figure out some kind of plan, which you won’t, what the fuck do you think Keith is going to say? ‘Oh, yeah, no, sorry, my bad, I guess you’re a person after all? Here’s my blessing to date my daughter?’ Are we even talking about the same fucking guy?”
I gritted my teeth, fingers weakly digging into the crumpled piece of paper in my pocket, the echoes of every conversationI’d ever had with Langer burying me all at once. Conversations where the guy had proven that he always knew the exact spot to thrust in the spear to make all of my armor fall off.
Langer continued patiently, waving off the pilot yet again, talking loudly over the noise. “Okay, for a trial balloon, let’s say a miracle happens. What are you envisioning with this girl? Dating? A real relationship? Marriage? The white picket fence? Garden parties, family reunions, Christmas? You’ll have no money, no home, no degree, no job, no credit rating, in a world that’s fucking hostile to all of that. And even if you find a way around it, what abouthercareer? Do you think she’s going to take you to med school with her? To her residency? To bougie cocktail parties with her surgical colleagues? If you think Corey was bad, you haven’t seen shit. Medicine is a conservative field, and it’s absolutely infested with guys like him. Sure, you’re a good actor, so you might be able to blend in for a while, and she’ll have your back, but sooner or later, it’s going to come out, and she’ll be a pariah. Her career will suffer.She’llsuffer. And ifshesuffers, you’ll suffer. But the relationship will suffer the most.”
“Louisa’s different.” I knew how naive I sounded. The kind of naivety that just a few months ago, I would have laughed at because of course I was smarter and savvier and more cynical than that. Hell, I’d been more like Maxthenthan I was now.
“I agree.”
I looked back at him with shock.
Max clarified. “I mean, I don’t know her at all, but from what I’ve gathered, sheisdifferent. So I’ll give you that. But she’s still her father’s daughter, and she’s just a kid, and so are you, and neither one of you has a goddamn clue what you’re up against. And I’d say don’t ask me how I know this, but Iknowhow I know. The legacy of slavery, even once you’re free, is like a virus that hides in your cells long after the disease has passed. And itkeeps making you sick, and it always will. At least as long as I stay in the fucking toxic miasma that gave it to me. And if I stay here, I’ll always be in it. Choking on it. Dying.
I didn’t even attempt to argue with that, and anyway, I knew Langer wasn’t finished.
“Kid, I’ll tell you something else. You already know it, but hear me out anyway. Hardly anyone, slave or free, has your gifts. Hell,Icertainly don’t, and I’d give anything to have them, but the next best thing is to haveyou. And I know you’ve always known, on some level, that you were destined for so much more than what you were given. Since before that pompous lush of a professor plucked you out of that cage, since before you could even add or recite the alphabet, you knew it. Youknewit.”
Of course I had. I was just too polite to ever say it.
“But what you might not realize is, not only do you deserve more than slavery, you deserve more than the stigma of havingbeena slave. I don’t know what’s in store for us down there, but I do know that it’s the best place I can think of to get not only real freedom but a reallife. Or at least, I’ll try my damnedest to make sure you get a shot at one. Maeve, too. Because as much as I fucked up with Resi and with White Cedar, I’m going to make it up to you and your sister.”
“I—” I spun around just in time to see the locked metal door to the roof bounce on its hinges, very much like a heavy boot slamming into it. “That door is reinforced, right?” I asked warily.
“It better be. I sure paid enough for it. Anyway, I told you this before, but I don’t think it quite sank in. And it’s that in this world when you break the rules, they’ll put you back in your place every time. Breaking the rules isn’t enough. You have tomakethe rules.”
I stood frozen, almost literally caught between heaven and earth.
Langer tried one last stratagem. “If you could somehow ask her, right now, what do you think she would say?”
Well.She’d tell me she loved me. She’d tell me to take my chances while I had chances to take. She’d tell me I needed to be with Maeve, and that she, Louisa, could take care of herself, even if it meant suffering, the kind of suffering she in no way deserved and that her life hadn’t prepared her for. And she’d tell me I was brave. And all of it would be true.
But then, there were things thatIhad toldher, too.
But all I finally said was: “She’d tell me to go.”
Langer just nodded. It wasthenod, I realized with a swallow. The one that signaled he knew my choice had been made. And ithadto be made. Because that door wouldn’t hold much longer, and the giant metal insect was descending, right in front of our eyes, and the wind and the swirling pastel kaleidoscope of lights were coming to a gentle, precise stop on the yellow circle.
And with one Italian leather shoe perched on one of the thick metal skids, the multimillionaire tech mogul held out his hand. And at once, everything slowed—the shouting and waving of the pilot, the whirring of the rotors, the bright dots making up the city below breaking into a million drunken, swirling pieces of light. Making me forget, almost, the pain, the joy, and everything in between.
“The jet’s already waiting at the municipal airport,” Langer shouted. “We’ve gotta leave before sunrise to give ourselves the best chance. And the sunrise over the gulf, well, like I said, it’s not to be missed. And not to put too fine a point on it—” He paused as if searching for the right words to say to me. Like anybody—except for one person—hadeverworried about the right words to say to me. “I know you didn’t get much of a view from the last plane you were on. And,” he added, “you deserve that, too.” And then he mounted the helicopter. The impatientpilot reached down to hand him a headset, but he paused again, and the other man huffed a sigh.
