Chapter 21
1772 Words
The first thing Elodie lost was the feeling in her toes.
The pavement of the 79th Street Transverse was rough, littered with gravel and broken glass. She was running in a champagne silk slip dress worth three thousand dollars, but right now, she would have traded it for a pair of five-dollar flip-flops.
Don't stop. Don't look back.
The sirens were screaming behind her, a chaotic symphony of red and blue lights flashing against the tree line. They were swarming the SUV. They were swarming Alistair.
Elodie ducked off the road, plunging into the dense shadows of the Ramble.
She knew Central Park. Not the tourist park with the horse carriages and the hot pretzels. She knew the real park. The one she had sketched a hundred times during her "starving artist" phase when she couldn't afford a studio.
She scrambled down a rocky embankment, the silk of her dress snagging on a briar bush. She heard a rip. She didn't care.
She reached the tunnel near the Bethesda Fountain. It was dark, smelling of damp stone and urine.
She stopped, pressing her back against the cold brick archway. Her chest was heaving. Her lungs burned.
She checked her pockets. Empty. No phone. No wallet. They were in her clutch, which was currently sitting on the backseat of the seized Escalade next to the traitor, Arthur.
She was a ghost. No ID. No money. No husband.
Just a brass key clutched in her fist so tight it had broken the skin.
Behind the boiler. The factory.
She had to get to Queens.
She looked down at herself. She looked like a runaway bride who had been through a war. If she walked onto the subway like this, the NYPD would spot her in ten seconds. Or worse, someone would try to "help" her and call the cops.
She needed camouflage.
Elodie crept out of the tunnel. A group of teenagers were hanging out by the fountain, skateboarding in the dark. One of them, a lanky kid with dyed green hair, had a flannel shirt tied around his waist.
Elodie didn't think. She just acted.
She walked up to them. She didn't look scared. She channeled Alistair. She channeled the boardroom.
"Hey," she said, her voice raspy but commanding.
The kids stopped skating. They looked at the barefoot woman in the torn silk dress.
"Whoa," the green-haired kid said. "You okay, lady? You look like you escaped an asylum."
"I need your shirt," Elodie said, pointing to the flannel.
"Excuse me?"
"I need your shirt, and I need a MetroCard swipe." She held up her wrist. "In exchange, you get this."
She unclasped her earrings. Vintage diamond studs. Alistair had given them to her for their three-month anniversary. 'Insurance,' he had joked. 'Portable equity.'
He was always right.
"Are those real?" the kid asked, eyes widening.
"They're worth more than your college tuition," Elodie said. "Shirt. Swipe. Now."
Thirty minutes later, Elodie was sitting on the N train, rattling under the East River.
She was wearing the oversized, smelling-of-weed flannel shirt buttoned over her ruined dress. She sat in the corner of the car, her knees pulled up to her chest to hide her blackened, bleeding feet.
The car was half-empty. A man sleeping across from her. A nurse reading a book.
No one looked at her. In New York, a crazy woman in a flannel shirt was just part of the furniture.
She stared at the reflection in the dark subway window.
For six months, she had lived in the clouds. Private cars. Galas. The "Sterling Luck." She had started to believe that the universe was bending around her, that she was special.
Bianca was right. It wasn't magic. It was a loan.
And the interest rate was lethal.
The train burst out of the tunnel and onto the elevated tracks of Queens. The city lights sprawled out below her, a grid of yellow and white.
Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. Last Stop.
Elodie waited until the doors opened. She limped out of the station, the cool night air hitting her face.
She couldn't go to the front door of the factory. Agent Vance would be there. They would be tearing the penthouse apart, looking for offshore accounts that didn't exist.
She circled the block, sticking to the shadows of the alleyways.
The factory loomed above her. It used to look romantic, with its ivy-covered brick and arched windows. Now, with police lights flashing against the upper floors, it looked like a fortress under siege.
She found the service entrance near the loading docks. It was padlocked.
Arthur had the key to this padlock. Arthur, who was probably giving a statement to the Feds right now.
Elodie looked around. She saw a loose brick near the ground, a hide-a-key spot she had set up for the dog walker.
She pulled the brick out. Empty.
Arthur had cleared it. Of course he had.
"Damn it," she whispered.
She looked at the heavy steel door. She couldn't break it down.
Then she remembered the coal chute.
It was an old iron hatch on the side of the building, a relic from when the factory burned coal in the 1920s. Alistair had talked about welding it shut, but they never got around to it.
Elodie knelt in the dirt. She grabbed the rusted handle of the hatch. She pulled.
It groaned, but didn't budge.
"Come on," she gritted out. "Give me a little luck."
She yanked again, putting her entire weight into it.
CRACK.
The hinge gave way. The hatch fell open, revealing a black slide leading down into the darkness.
Elodie didn't hesitate. She slid feet first into the chute.
She tumbled down the metal slide, landing hard on a pile of old coal dust and debris. She coughed, the black dust filling her lungs.
She was in.
The basement of the Sterling-Rose factory was a cavernous space of pipes, hissing boilers, and shadows. It smelled of oil and rust.
It was hot down here. The building’s massive heating system was humming.
Elodie stood up, brushing the coal dust off the flannel shirt. She was shaking. Adrenaline was crashing, replaced by fear.
Behind the boiler.
There were three massive boilers.
She walked to the largest one, a rusted iron beast against the far wall. She felt along the brickwork behind it.
Nothing. Just grime and spiders.
"Please," she whispered. "Please don't be a metaphor. Please be real."
Her fingers brushed against a loose mortar joint.
She dug her fingernails in and pried. A section of the brick wall, about the size of a shoebox, came loose. It wasn't brick; it was a painted panel.
Behind it was a small, grey safe.
Not a digital safe. An old-fashioned, mechanical wall safe.
Elodie pulled the brass skeleton key from her pocket. It was warm from her body heat.
She inserted it into the keyhole.
It fit perfectly.
She turned it.
Click. Thunk.
The heavy metal door swung open.
Elodie reached inside. There was no money. No diamonds. No passports.
There was only a single, leather-bound notebook. And a stack of cassette tapes.
She pulled the notebook out. It was old. The leather was cracked.
She opened it to the first page. The handwriting was jagged, frantic. It wasn't Alistair's elegant script.
Project Variable. Entry 1. 1998.
Subject: The Probability Engine.
Elodie frowned. 1998? Alistair would have been a child.
She flipped through the pages. It was full of equations. chaotic drawings of stock markets. And names.
Senator Thorne. Silas Rutherford. The St. James Estate.
And then, halfway through the book, the handwriting changed. It became Alistair's.
Entry 402. Dad is dead. They killed him. They made it look like a heart attack, but the algorithm predicted his death to the second.
Elodie’s breath caught in her throat. Alistair rarely spoke of his father. He just said he died of stress.
She kept reading.
They want the code. The algorithm that predicts market crashes. Dad hid it. He broke it into two pieces. Two keys.
One key is the biological data. The other key is the variable.
The variable must be human. Unpredictable. Pure chaos.
Elodie stared at the page.
I have to find a variable. Someone who operates outside the bell curve. If I bind the algorithm to a person, the Trust can't steal it without taking the person.
I found her. The artist. The girl in the elevator. Her probability field is off the charts.
Elodie dropped the book. It hit the concrete floor with a thud.
"I'm not a person," she whispered to the empty basement. "I'm a hard drive."
The romance. The courtship. The "Luck."
It wasn't magic. It was math. Alistair had identified her as a statistical anomaly, someone so chaotic that she could disrupt the prediction models, and he had used her to lock the code away from the people who killed his father.
He hadn't fallen in love with her. He had encrypted himself with her.
Tears, hot and angry, pricked her eyes.
"You bastard," she sobbed. "You cold, calculating bastard."
Clang.
A metal sound echoed from above. The sound of a door opening.
"Sweep the basement," a voice shouted. It wasn't a police officer. It was a voice she recognized.
Arthur.
"He said 'behind the boiler'," Arthur's voice echoed down the stairs. "Check the vents."
Elodie froze.
She looked at the notebook on the floor. She looked at the cassette tapes in the safe.
She wanted to leave them. She wanted to burn them.
But then she remembered Alistair's face in the car. The desperation. You are the only thing they didn't account for.
He knew she would find this. He knew she would read it. And he sent her here anyway.
Why?
She grabbed the notebook. She grabbed the tapes. She shoved them into the deep pockets of the flannel shirt.
She looked around. There was no way out the way she came; the coal chute was too steep to climb.
She spotted a service tunnel labeled STORM DRAIN ACCESS - EAST RIVER.
Footsteps clanged on the metal stairs. Flashlight beams cut through the darkness.
"Miss Rose?" Arthur called out, his voice mocking. "Come out, Elodie. We just want to renegotiate the contract."
Elodie grabbed a heavy wrench from a workbench.
She wasn't the girl in the elevator anymore. She wasn't the Plus-One.
She kicked off the flannel shirt, revealing the torn silk dress. She tied the sleeves of the shirt around her waist, securing the notebook and tapes against her body.
She ran for the storm drain.
She was done being a Variable.
It was time to become the Problem.
- Writer
