The Texas Twist Read Free Page A

We’re leaving.” She tried to push past de Havilland, but he chested her, and that fully flipped her anger switch. “Fine,” she said, abruptly plucking the vial from his hand. “Let’s find out how much juice go boom.” She strode to the metal mass and held the vial out over it.
    â€œDon’t!” cried de Havilland. “It’s toxic!”
    But it was too late. Fabrice dumped the full vial on the core. A gout of flame shot straight up amid a billowing cloud of gray-green smoke. “Get out!” shouted de Havilland. He scrambled for a fire extinguisher. Holton suddenly remembered his cash and turned back for it. Anticipating this naturalmove, Nick was waiting for him, and from across the room flipped Holton the case.
    Well, a case.
    De Havilland spewed foam onto the blaze, but the smoke just billowed higher. “Oh, that’s not good,” croaked the scientist. He suddenly coughed and collapsed to the floor, clawing frantically at his throat. “Run, you idiots! Run!” Holton gawked. Nick grabbed Holton, threw open the door, and dragged him from the office. Fabrice ran after them, and the three sprinted back through the basement, up the stairs, and out into the damp January afternoon. Holton’s heart raced.
    â€œLet’s go!” shouted Nick, beeping his truck open as he ran.
    Fabrice, though, paused and looked back at the building. “Serves the bastard right,” she muttered grimly. Just then she saw a figure sprinting out the front door of the building with no sign of a limp at all. “Son of a bitch! Nick!”
    Nick looked up to see de Havilland jump into a sports car and speed off. He got in the Staccato and fired it up. Fabrice pushed past Holton, and the case came flying out of his hands. “Wait here!” she ordered. “Call the police!”
    Holton tried to tell her that the case had slid under the truck, but she was already in the cab. Nick stomped on the gas. Holton watched, gobsmacked, as the thundering Chinese hardware shot away.
    Then he looked down. Turns out those clamshell cases aren’t that strong after all. Nor, after all, do stacks of filleted paperback books look much like Big Bens once you get them out into the light.
    And behind the wheel of the sports car, Olivier de Havilland—otherwise known as Radar Hoverlander—looked not much the worse for all the colored water vapor he’d inhaled. He glanced at the clamshell twin he’d thrown onto the seat beside him. All those hundreds.
    All those pretty, heavy hundreds.

The Zizzles
    W hen Sarah told them about it later, she said that it happened like this.…
    On the steps of a medical center in downtown Austin, a young mother named Sarah Crandall stood crying, her frizzy brown hair hanging limp along her cheeks as the tears streamed down. Her son, ten-year-old Jonah, reached for her hand. He wanted to comfort her so badly, but when he touched her, the pain came: electric shocks at his finger-tips, followed by searing pins and needles over the back of his hand, up his arm, and across his chest, then sharp darts straight into his heart. In this little battle between love and pain, pain won. Jonah pulled his hand back, ashamed. Sarah looked down and suffered for her son. She knew the word for what he was experiencing, dysesthesia , but she couldn’t imagine his anguish, his sense of touch so brutally hijacked and bent to his torment in agonizing patches of skin fire or the razor-blade rasp of even the softest cloth against his skin.How do you live in a world where soft doesn’t exist? Where hugs don’t exist? How is that fair to a ten-year-old?
    But the zizzles, as Jonah called them, wasn’t the word on Sarah’s mind. The new one was the one she carried out of the medical center: prions .
    Now, at last, she knew the enemy’s name.
    Folded protein, she thought. What’s a folded protein? What does it look like? A taco? A