Outrage Read Free

spy.”
    “We’re under the impression Singular might be dealing with North Koreans. Are you Chinese or Korean?”
    “I am Chinese, from Dandong,” she said. “I was a university student there. My cousin, Liko, and I, we studied together.”
    Cade’s fingers rapped across the keyboard of his laptop, and he checked a map. “Dandong is on the border, across the Yalu River from North Korea.”
    “Yes. We made money for school, trading with North Koreans,” Fenfang said. “Then an American man came, he was a Christian man. He wanted to go across to do research on the suffering, and we took him. On the third night, we were captured.”
    There was a flurry of glances between Shay and the others. One of the videos from the encrypted flash drive Odin had cracked showed a robotic Asian man speaking as though he were an American Christian aid worker who’d gone missing a year earlier along the Chinese–North Korean border.
    “Was it Robert G. Morris?” Cade asked. “Robert G. Morris from St. Louis?”
    The young woman seemed startled when she heard the name. “Yes. You know Robert?”
    “No,” Twist said. “But we found…evidence of him on a Singular video. We also found news reports that no one had seen him for months.”
    Cruz, who’d stepped back and was petting X, asked, “How did you get from North Korea to here?”
    “On a ship,” she said, her voice trembling with effort. “There were other people with me, also experiments. One of them was my cousin. Everything was clouds. They gave me drugs, all of us had drugs, to keep us quiet, almost to the end. The last four or five days, they did not give us drugs because they wanted our blood to be clean for the examinations. One man died when we were on the ship. We were in a metal box, he was sick, and then he did not move, and they came and took him out. We never saw him again.”
    Shay jumped in: “Fenfang, we don’t know who the other prisoners were at the facility we broke into last night. Do you?”
    The young woman squeezed her eyes shut, as if trying to see inside the cells where Shay and West had spied several catatonic men in the moments before they found Odin.
    “No,” she said. “I heard crying, but I only ever saw Odin.”
    Odin said, “They were dragging me down the hall to my cell after waterboarding me. I couldn’t walk, I was just hanging off them. Fenfang was being taken the other way. One of the guards said, ‘Water Boy meets the Girl with Two Brains,’ and the other guards laughed.”
    “Not laughing now,” Cruz said.
    Fenfang nodded and looked at the group again, scrutinizing each of their faces: Shay, Twist, Odin, Cade, Cruz, and X. Then she asked, “Who are you?”
    Shay said, “That’s a complicated story.”
    “I am a good listener,” Fenfang said.
    —
    Odin ran his hands through his hair and started at the beginning: “I don’t like animal experimentation in research laboratories. Most of the time, it’s unnecessary and cruel, and if you’d seen the messed-up monkeys with their heads cut—”
    Shay squeezed Odin’s arm, gave him a quick shake of her head that said
spare her the details
. “My brother’s got a very kind heart, but basically, what happened is, he and some extreme animal rights people raided a lab to wreck their experiments, and they got away with a lot of computer files and our dog here. Turns out the company that owns the lab wasn’t just experimenting on animals, they were experimenting on people, like you. We think they’re trying to find a way to make people…immortal.”
    Odin broke in: “The problem is, they can’t create a brain or a body, so they have to use one that already exists. They kidnap a living person, try to erase her memories, and then they try to move the mind of another person into her brain.”
    “And that is me,” Fenfang said.
    Odin nodded. “It makes me so angry. The worst thing you can do is kill a living being; they killed hundreds of animals trying to figure out