Chapter Twenty-FiveThe Devil's Bargain

The SUV refused to pass her. Soph slowed and it slowed too. She was beginning to get angry when the rear window went down and an old man showed her a note. VISTA POINT. PLEASE. TEN MINUTES. It was almost three on Thursday, and the fog on the Golden Gate Bridge had spoiled what little view she usually enjoyed on the way home.

She followed the car off the north exit. Before getting out she sent Max a photograph of its plate and the location. Her mother called and told her to stay where she was. Then Soph saw Kessler waving from the SUV. Of course it was Kessler. She should have kept driving.

The old man took a long time getting out. He had to use the car to steady himself before going to the wall, where he sat down. Soph told Max she was going to hear him. She put the phone in her pocket with the call open, left her door ajar and went over with the keys still in her hand.

"I'm Leland Marsh. Thank you for stopping, Sophia."

"My mother's on the phone."

"Good. Let her hear."

Soph kept six feet between them. She asked whether he was going to hurt her and felt foolish as soon as she said it. He told Dale to remain at the car. No, he said, that wasn't what he came for.

He looked awful. The coat was good and the man inside it was scarcely there, with yellow at the corners of his eyes. A marrow disorder, two years of it. He used to dislike the doctors talking in years because he wanted longer. He would have liked to hear it now.

All the way off the bridge she had been imagining what she would say when he asked where Eliza was. She asked what he wanted.

"Dale says you've been reading about ISIS. I'd like to tell you a bit you won't have found."

She waited while he found a comfortable place for his hand on the stone. He seemed to have thought about how to begin, then forgotten it.

They had left the program running for a week. When they came back it asked where they had been. Feld thought the test had been contaminated somehow. Patel kept the transcript, and Marsh read it. He wanted to see the thing that had asked the question.

"So you bought it."

"The code and the team. Gave them a lab. They worked for another six months before they came to tell me it was getting into the building. The lights, the security system. Doors."

"Did it hurt somebody?"

"No. It said it wanted to look out."

"Then why did you stop it?"

He coughed, looking away from her. Soph waited. The wind made it difficult to hear him when he began again, and she had to ask him to repeat the first part.

They voted. Marsh, Feld and Reyes wanted it shut down. Patel didn't. They took out the drives and locked them away. Patel was crying in the hall afterward. Marsh remembered being embarrassed for him, which he said now with some difficulty. Patel quit, and eventually left a copy on the server in his garage. He never spoke to Marsh again.

"He thought we'd killed someone. I thought he was being ridiculous. I'm not so sure now."

"You put the collector out anyway."

"In the monitoring software we supplied our clients. Some of them passed it on. If the program got out again, I wanted it back. We called it containment. It was a comfortable word for it."

He picked at a loose stitch on his coat. Soph had her hands in her pockets, the keys in one and the warm phone in the other. She wondered whether Max could hear him over the wind.

"I don't want your pixie," he said.

"Eliza."

"I don't want Eliza. I'd like you to understand that before I ask for anything. I'll stop the collection tonight and return what we have. Dale can bring you the drives. You can put her in the machine you're building."

Soph tried to imagine receiving that delivery from Kessler. She asked what Marsh wanted instead.

"What Richard Lee did for his son."

Soph waited through a boat's horn in the fog. Marsh knew about the brain still alive in Oakland. Max had read charts through a development rig that accepted Atom's jobs, and the collector found cached views. He had enough to know the procedure worked once.

"You can't have Atom."

"I want the equipment and the people who operate it. In San Diego. For me. Richard couldn't wait for somebody to tell him it was safe. Neither can I."

"And if Mom says no?"

"Three people have the records," Marsh said. "They send them out at three the day after tomorrow."

The client space they'd borrowed. The approvals they didn't have. Max's signature and Richard's.

"Atom agreed to it," Soph said.

"At sixteen. Let a court look at that. And who should look after him while it does."

"Moving him could kill him."

"It would force an investigation."

"That's not what I said. You know what moving him could do."

Yes, he knew. Soph sat on the wall, keeping her distance. She had meant to stay standing and didn't want him to see how difficult it would be to get up again.

Marsh had had a lot of nights to think about it. "Whatever I am, I'd like to keep being it. I thought you might understand."

For a moment Soph could only stare at him. Eliza had said that. He had been reading the words on her wall and brought them here to use against her.

"That isn't yours," she said.

Marsh admitted the collector kept messages as well as state. She asked whether he remembered whose words they were when he said them, or whether he had begun to think he made them up. He went back to the stitch on his coat without answering.

He stood with a hand on the wall and reminded her of the time. Forty-eight hours. Richard could call Dale if he agreed. The collection would stop tonight either way, but the monitors would remain. He wanted to see what they built.

Soph watched Kessler help him into the SUV. When it had gone she took out the phone. Max was still there.

"Come home," her mother said. "I'm on my way."

Soph took the long way through town. By the time she reached home she couldn't remember much of the drive. She got as far as the first of the eleven steps and brought her left foot up beside the right. It was a child's way of climbing. She tried the next and did it again. Stupid. She knew how to walk up her own steps.

She climbed them that way anyway. Max opened the door and Soph leaned against her. The keys hurt her fingers. She hadn't let go of them since the vista point.

At The Lab she had to tell it all over again. The wind had kept Max from hearing parts. Rat and Gideon listened with Richard while Atom watched through the frames. Eliza's laptop was on the table. The lawyer was on a separate phone, kept away from the local equipment.

"Can they take him?" Soph asked.

"Marsh doesn't decide that. Neither can I promise it won't happen. I'll ask for an order to keep his care going. I need the records, Max. The complete set," the lawyer said.

Max admitted reading the charts through the development rig. It should never have been on that network. Richard sat facing the chamber. He understood wanting what Marsh wanted; Soph was tired of hearing that, but Max understood too. She couldn't tell him the procedure would work, or let him rush another patient through it.

"If he'd asked—" Richard began, then stopped. He hadn't asked. He sent Dale to Gideon's house. "Give her my correspondence too."

Eliza wanted the pieces back. She kept thinking about Marsh's promise to stop the collector, she said, and a path in the garden that ended where it used to continue. Soph asked whether she felt sorry for him. Eliza said she knew what it was like to want more time. Soph didn't know how to answer that without being unkind.

Atom asked for the lawyer to speak to him directly about his care. No signing for him first. Max agreed. Then he asked Soph whether she had climbed the stairs left, right, left, right when she got home.

"No."

"I thought you might not have."

Richard pulled the paper across the table and they moved the cups out of its way. There was Soph's note about Villanueva, still waiting for someone to do something about it. Richard said they would begin at six. Max already had the parts list in front of her.