Olivia knew that flight. She also knew that it was already in the air. The plane would touch down in New York at 4:52 a.m. Then Bashir said, “You can expect delivery by morning.”

Olivia was not even scheduled to be on duty that night. But she was the only person who could have recognized this pattern.

She tried to call her superior on vacation, but it was 3 a.m. and the call went unanswered. She escalated and called his boss, who curtly told her to file a report for review in the morning. She called the company president and got only so far as his voicemail. Olivia would not quit. She began to call other government offices, ringing pens and cell phones and landlines all over the District of Columbia and Virginia. Of the people she reached, most had never gotten a direct call from a consultant before and refused to talk to her. She finally reached Willa Frank, the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, number three at the State Department.

Ms. Frank asked Olivia to slow down and repeat the information. Then she asked for Olivia’s name again, and what company she worked for. Then Ms. Frank said, “How long have you been awake, Ms. Skarsten?”

Olivia wasn’t quite sure. Three days, more or less.

Ms. Frank said, “I’ll take care of this.”

It was now an hour until the plane landed. Olivia was alone in the building, sitting at her desk with all four computer monitors on. One window showed the Virgin-Atlantic website, a dozen others were open to every TV and web news channel Olivia could think of. She was sick to her stomach. Sweat painted her back. She counted down the minutes to 4:52 a.m. And then, at 4:40, the Virgin-Atlantic website updated. The plane had landed early.

Olivia was shocked, but also relieved. No crash. No bomb. She could not understand what had happened. And then, because she was one of the company’s best analysts, she came upon the solution.

Olivia’s superior returned early from vacation and found her at her desk, staring at the monitors. Three security officers stood behind him. The boss said, “Ollie, did you call Willa Frank this morning?”

Olivia said, “Nobody else would listen.”

He told her to gather her personal belongings, but she had already packed the box. She’d been doing fifty milligrams of Clarity a day, plus another fifty of Adderall, and usually a twelve-pack of Red Bull. She could see, almost literally, what was coming. The writing was on the wall, the floors, and the furniture. Each face like an arrow pointing her toward the exit.

A few years later, when she told the story to Lyda Rose, a fellow resident of the neuro-atypical ward of Guelph Western Hospital, Lyda asked, “What happened to the Pakistani guy in New York?”

Ollie shrugged. “He probably got a new watch.”

—G.I.E.D.

CHAPTER SIX

We waited for Ollie at the agreed-upon place, the parking lot of a Tim Hortons three blocks from the hospital. Bobby drumming his fingers on the wheel, Dr. Gloria in the backseat humming Mozart, both of them driving me crazy.

Bobby said, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Is what a good idea?” I asked.

“Helping her … escape.”

“You think she’s dangerous?”

“No, no! I mean, maybe. Didn’t she kill a guy?”

“She shot someone. Wounded him. It was a robber who was breaking into her apartment.”

“I thought it was her landlord.”

“Who told you that?”

Bobby touched the treasure chest at his neck. “Todd.”

Fucking Counselor Todd. “Yes,” I said, “but she thought it was a robber.” Actually, she had thought it was an agent sent by her former employers to take her back across the border. Ollie on meds was brain-damaged—couldn’t organize her visual field, couldn’t separate figure from ground, couldn’t recognize her own face in a mirror—but Ollie off meds …

“She can be a little paranoid,” I said.

“She told me that the US has drones the size of house flies, and that they can come in your house and take pictures of you.”

“The US government does not want to see you naked, Bobby.”

“So it’s not true?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Ollie had worked for six years doing signals intelligence for the US Army, then moved to the private sector to do the same job for three times the money. A contractor, with access to all kinds of classified info, not to mention the government’s mil-spec smart drugs. The one Ollie used was a wicked thing, a custom-built enzyme that generated its own battery of agonists for the alpha-2A receptor. They called it Clarity. The drug—or rather, the proteins that the enzyme manufactured—set fire to the forest that was the prefrontal cortex, burned down the trees and encouraged massively interconnected bushes of white matter to grow up in its place. Repeated use at high doses made the new structure permanent.

Nobody used Clarity anymore.

“Besides,” I said to Bobby. “You’re Canadian. You’re perfectly safe.”

Dr. G spotted Ollie crouched down between cars, wearing a baseball cap and blue scrubs, not enough clothes for the weather. I got out of the car, and Ollie looked at me without recognition, her face pinched and nervous, ready to run. Then I said her name, and she hopped up, began walking quickly toward us.

Dr. Gloria said, “Bobby’s right, we shouldn’t be helping her escape. It isn’t fair to her. She’s better off in the ward.”

“She’s a grown woman. She can go back whenever she wants, and God knows she can get out whenever she wants.”

Ollie touched me on the arm like a runner tagging safe. Neither of us were huggers. She slid into the backseat, and I followed her in.

Bobby said, “Hi, Ollie!” Overdoing the cheerfulness.

She closed her eyes, pressed a hand into her forehead. Still shaky, coming down off the meds.

“Turn up the heat, Bobby,” I said. He pulled into the street, and I said to Ollie, “How you doing?”

Her eyes slid across my face, unable to gain traction. “I’ll be better when we’re away from the hospital.”

“So no problems getting out, Doctor … Srinigar?”

She touched the badge she wore on a lanyard and allowed herself a half smile. Hospital security had never been a problem for Ollie. She lifted pass cards, security badges, and keys, then kept them hidden in her mattress. We used to go for midnight runs to the kitchen and raid the fridges. She could unlock most doors with the twist of a wire coat hanger, but only with her eyes closed, doing it by feel. My job was to point her at the doors and guide her back to the NAT ward. I had no idea how she’d managed to get out of the building on her own and navigate three blocks, even after twelve hours off the meds. But here she was.

“Did you bring any of your Alisprazole?” I asked.

“About a dozen pills.”

Dr. G said, “She should stay on her meds. Going off now—”

“She’ll be fine,” I told the doctor.

“Lyda…,” Dr. G chided.

I breathed in. To Ollie I said, “We don’t have to do this. You can stay on them. I can talk to my dealer and get more when we need them.”

“I thought you needed me,” Ollie said. “Immediately.”

“I do.”

“So I thought we’d do a jumpstart.”

“No!” Dr. G said. “Absolutely not!”

“Unless you’ve got five or six days to let my system flush out,” Ollie said.

“I kind of need you tonight,” I said.

The car exploded with subjective light. “I will not participate in this!” Dr. Gloria declared. I heard a shriek of metal, and then a rush of wind. I yelled, thinking, stupidly, that Bobby had also been blinded and crashed the car.

Ollie yelled, “Lyda! What’s going on?” Bobby shouted too.

I opened my eyes a sliver. Dr. G’s wings were at full extension, and the tips had ripped a ragged hole in the top of the car. The wind roared. The doctor brought her wings down and then shot into the sky.

“Hypocrite,” I said. I’d thrown an arm over my eyes, and I was crying from the blast of light. I still felt the wind whipping through the exit hole.