Written in Fire

CHAPTER 2

“I don’t understand,” Ethan said, for about the ninth time. They were in a cab, crawling westward. “Abe beat up those guys?”

“What’d you think, they slipped on banana peels?”

“I figured you did it. Those were DAR agents, right? Abe is in his sixties. And not a ninja.”

Cooper snorted. He was used to people running—mostly that’s what happened when he chased them—but this was different. He’d miscalculated, and the stakes were too high. He thought of the moment when he saw the doctor’s pulse literally double from one beat to the next. Control of the endocrine system to manipulate his own adrenaline level. Probably norepinephrine too, for focus, maybe even cortisol and oxytocin. Enough of those and anyone is a ninja. “We should have guessed. Damn it.”

“Guessed what? Cooper, what’s going on?”

“Your old pal has gone and turned himself brilliant.”

“What?”

“The little lab project you two whipped up, the magic potion that turns normals into abnorms? He must have taken it.”

Ethan’s mouth fell open. For a moment he just sat there, his eyes unfocused. “Holy shit.” A grin split his face. “It works. I mean, the test results were off the charts, I knew it would, but we hadn’t gotten to clinical trials.”

“Looks like Abe skipped that step.”

“What can you tell me about symptom manifestations? I wonder what physical effects he’s feeling. How did his gift distinguish itself? Did you notice any—”

“Doc.”

Ethan caught himself, laughed. “Yeah, sorry. I’m just . . . I’m having a sciencegasm.”

“Try to breathe.” Cooper sighed, rubbed at his eyes. “One way that his gift distinguished itself is that he had a bunch of them.”

“You mean corollary abilities?”

“Nope. I mean distinct gifts.”

“That’s impossible. I mean, in children, sure. That’s why the Treffert-Down Spectrum isn’t administered until age eight. Before then, gifts are a free-floating proclivity toward patterning, manifesting mathematically one day, spatially the next. But as their brains continue to develop—”

“You’re not hearing me.” Cooper turned from the window. “I watched Abe’s pulse double. Instantly. That’s conscious endocrine control.”

“So what? Something like 13 percent of brilliants have some level of CEC.”

“12.2 percent. But more important, he took down four agents. You think those guys aren’t trained for a tweaked-out brilliant? Plus, one of them was Bobby Quinn. I know you and he don’t get along, but trust me, he’s good at his job. Hormonal control alone isn’t the answer. But if Abe were also physiolinguistic, he might be able to read their body language and tailor a series of attacks based on their positions.”

“Those could coexist,” Ethan said. “Your patterning is more than just physical. Souped-up intuition, right?”

“But then, in Grand Central, he was able to move like Shannon. He read the motions of the crowd before they happened.”

“Maybe he just found a hole.”

“There wasn’t a hole. There wasn’t room to inhale. And yet he barely slowed down. As icing, at the same time he worked out a diversion. That’s like solving a quadratic equation while juggling and running a marathon.”

Ethan was quiet for a moment. “If you’re right . . .”

“This is what I do.” Cooper blew a breath. “I’m right. And it’s not just multiple gifts. It’s the strength of them. I’m tier one and thirty years younger, and after what I saw this morning, I’m not sure I could take him. Which means that for all purposes, the good doctor Abraham Couzen is tier zero. And I’d like to know how.”

Ethan hesitated. “I need a minute to think.”

“I bet.” Out the window, the city scrolled past. The same New York he’d visited countless times, and yet, not the same at all. There was an uneasy tension to everything, a nervous twitchiness. America could take a punch, but the last year had been a series of haymakers. The stock exchange bombing in March, resulting in more than a thousand dead. Abnorm terrorists seizing control of Tulsa, Fresno, and Cleveland, the last of which burned to the ground in the ensuing riots. The destruction of the White House and the massacre of seventy-five thousand soldiers. Not to mention the erosion of the social order: shuttered financial markets, basic services falling apart, growing mistrust of the government, increasingly violent tribalism.

America could take more than one punch, but it was reeling, and the evidence was everywhere. Trash bags were piled on street corners, black plastic stretching at the seams. Private military contractors with automatic weapons guarded luxury apartments. Billboards advertised Madison Square Garden as a haven for “those feeling threatened.” The rows of buildings seemed almost to be watching them, and it took a moment to realize that it was because so many had broken windows. A block of small businesses had been burned out, the glass gone, brick blackened, nothing but crusted ruins within. Graffiti on a scorched metal roll-door read, WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

Cooper thought of a flash of white sock, and wondered.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “This is just a theory, right? Without data, I can’t say for sure.”

“Roll the dice.”

“People have been searching for the genetic basis of brilliance for three decades. They couldn’t find it because it wasn’t there, not in the code. Our breakthrough was discovering the epigenetic basis of it. That’s why the answer was so slippery, because epigenetics is about the way DNA expresses, not the genes themselves. DNA is the raw ingredients, but you can make very different dishes from the same ingredients, and human DNA has twenty-one thousand genes. That’s a lot of ingredients. The trick is locating the specific cause. Abe called it the three-potato theory.”

“Right, you told me,” Cooper said. “If the cause of the gifts was eating three potatoes in a row, figuring that out is hard, because it’s a big world. But once you know, all you have to do is eat three potatoes.”

“Here’s the thing, though. Nature is messy. Evolution is about random errors—mutations—that end up conferring a survival advantage and get passed on. But so does a lot of other junk, stuff that doesn’t really do much but hitch a ride. So while you end up with three potatoes, they’re ugly potatoes. Lumpy, deformed potatoes. But what we developed was different. We reverse engineered it, developing a gene theory that was carefully targeted.”

Cooper got it. “You created a perfect potato. The Platonic ideal of a potato.”

Ethan shrugged. “It’s just a guess.”

“But if you’re right, then Abe isn’t just gifted. He’s the ultimate expression of brilliance. He can move like Shannon, analyze like Erik Epstein, plan like John Smith.”

“I . . . it’s possible.”

Cooper took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Well. I guess we better find him then, huh?”

The apartment building was in Hell’s Kitchen, a five-story walk-up on a street of weathered red brick and haggard trees. As they walked to the front door, Ethan said, “I don’t know who this guy is to Abe. Isn’t this a long shot?”

“When a long shot is all you have, you shoot long. Unless you can think of someone else?”

Ethan shook his head. “He’s private to the point of paranoia. Vincent is about the only person I ever heard him mention from his personal life.”

The front door was locked. Cooper found LUCE, VINCENT on the directory and rang the buzzer. No answer.

Well, you could always break the glass with an elbow, then kick in the hallway door. Noisy, though. Or you could—

Ethan Park leaned forward and pressed five call buttons at once. After a moment, a voice said, “Hello?”

Pressing the TALK button, Ethan said, “UPS, got a package for you.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. There’s no way that—”

The buzzer sounded and the door clicked open.

“What’s the point in a lock,” Cooper asked, “if you open it for the first disembodied voice?”

“Manhattan factor. You put a chain and three deadbolts on your apartment, and then start to get lonely. I used to live here, remember? A package isn’t quite a friend coming up, but it’s the next best thing.”

They passed a bank of mailboxes and found the stairs. Halfway up, they were passed by a dude hustling downward, no doubt to meet UPS. The fifth floor was dimly lit and grungily carpeted. One of the doors hung half ajar, the frame splintered.

“Shit.” Cooper motioned Ethan behind him and pushed the door open. The room beyond was typical Manhattan, in that a tall man could have cooked dinner from the futon. The walls were painted tasteful shades, and neatly framed posters of musicians had once hung on the walls. Once.

Now, the floor was covered with broken glass and smashed wood fragments. Stuffing gaped from slashes in the furniture. Shelves had been swept clean, drawers upended, curtains torn. A stand-up piano was lying down; the bow of a violin pierced a lamp shade. Debris crunched beneath Cooper’s feet as he stepped in.

“Oh, man,” Ethan said. “You think Abe did this?”

Cooper spun slowly, putting together the pieces. The shattered dishes, torn curtains, broken mirror. He stepped to the futon and knelt down. The fabric reeked of urine. There was a bloodstain on the pillow, fairly broad but centered in a specific spot, like someone had lain still as they bled. Or been held down.Forced to watch.

“You little shit,” a man said, “we told you not to come—” In the doorway stood a man whose chest bulged beneath a Yankees jersey. Behind him stood two other guys, one with the same bland good looks, the other smaller but thicker. Yankees said, “Who are you?”

Cooper rose. Very consciously, he looked at the destruction, then snapped his eyes up to the man’s face. Caught the quick dart of the eyes, the slight flush, the pulse kicking up, and knew the whole story. He forced himself to smile. “It’s okay.” He showed his badge. “We’re looking for Vincent Luce. You know him?”

“Vincent?” The man scowled. “Thought I did. Heard him playing piano all the time. Weird music, kinda pretty. But it turns out he’s an abnorm. Never said a word about that. Just been living right here without telling anyone.”

“How do you know?”

“Walls are thin. He and some old guy were in here yelling at each other. The old guy said it, and Vincent tried to hush him up. Said it was real important no one find out.”

Cooper nodded, took his d-pad from his pocket, and uncrumpled it with a flick of his wrist. He called up a picture of Abraham Couzen. “This guy?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Okay, listen. I’m not here about a busted door or broken dishes. I mean, we’re all normals here, right?”

Yankees nodded.

“So. You’re a neighbor, and the walls are thin. I figure you probably overheard this going down.”

The man stared at him, smiled slightly. “I got you. Sure.”

“Tell me about the fight.”

Yankees grinned. “Wouldn’t call it a fight.”

“They kicked in Vincent’s door,” Cooper said. “Broke his nose. Held him down while they smashed everything. Then what?”

“We—one of them told him to leave and never come back.”

“You think he did?”

“When it was all done.” Yankees gripped his crotch, mimed a firehose. “He got the message.”

Cooper was overwhelmed by a sudden flash of memory. A bathroom stall, white porcelain stained crimson. His eyes blackened, nose broken, two fingers snapped, spleen ruptured. Twelve years old, back in California, one of his father’s military postings. A bully and his posse standing above.

The worst angle in the world: prone, prey, broken, looking up at others looking down and laughing. Slowly, he nodded. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Hey, anything. Hope you find the freak.”

Cooper let them take a step toward the hall before he said, “By the way, I lied.”

“Huh?”

“We’re not all normals.” He rolled his shoulders and shook out his hands. “The three of you humiliated and beat the shit out of one brilliant. Let’s see if you can do it again.”

Cooper let that sink in, then turned to Ethan. “Doc, do me a favor, would you?” He smiled. “Shut the door.”