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to see her, smiling broadly and placing both hands on Ella’s shoulders, as if she were a long-lost cousin or cherished old friend. He looked the same, although possibly his dark blue mechanic’s overalls gave him a slightly more mature look than he’d had back in High School. ‘I thought it’d be a cold day in hell before you showed up back in town again. Things didn’t work out in San Francisco?’

      ‘My grandmother died,’ said Ella, with her usual directness.

      ‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Danny.

      ‘I’m selling her land.’

      Danny Bleeker whistled. ‘That must be worth a pretty penny. So you’re rich now, huh? Or you will be. Well that’s great. Good for you.’

      Just at that moment a deafeningly loud babble of voices, like a hundred crossed wires, exploded in Ella’s head like a burst speaker. She clapped both hands over her ears and doubled over, wincing in pain.

      ‘What is it?’ Danny asked, instinctively wrapping an arm around her. ‘What just happened?’

      Ella froze, waiting for the shrieking voices to recede – they usually did within a few seconds – before wriggling out from beneath his arm. ‘Nothing. Only a headache.’

      ‘You still get those?’ he sounded concerned. ‘You know you should really see a doctor. That shit’s been going on for years. D’you remember in Miss Haelstrom’s class, you—’

      ‘Danny?’ Ella asked.

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘Why are you acting nice?’

      He laughed loudly. ‘I’m not acting! I am nice.’

      ‘No,’ said Ella, sincerely. ‘You aren’t. You are a cruel and spiteful person.’

      He frowned, seeming genuinely taken aback.

      ‘Hey, look, I know I was a bit of an ass in school.’

      ‘You were horrific.’

      ‘I’ll admit I was kind of full of myself back then. But, you know, I was a kid. I was seventeen!’

      ‘Everyone in twelfth grade is seventeen,’ Ella pointed out, unsure why he’d brought up what seemed to her an irrelevant statement of fact.

      ‘What I mean is—’

      ‘You told people we’d had intercourse.’

      Danny blushed. ‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’

      ‘You said I’d begged you to have relations with me. “Begged”. That was the word you used.’

      Danny held up his hands in a ‘mea culpa’ gesture. ‘Jeesh, OK. Wow. Well I don’t know what to say. I was a jerk and I’m sorry. But it’s ancient history, isn’t it? I’m married now,’ he brightened. ‘You remember Beth Harvey?’

      Ella didn’t, but Danny pulled a photograph out of the breast pocket of his overalls and pressed it into her hand. It showed an ordinary-looking dark-haired girl, whom Ella may or may not have seen before, with two fat, bald babies, one perched on each hip.

      ‘Those’re our twins,’ Danny said proudly. ‘Nate and Charlie. You got kids?’

      ‘No!’ Flustered, Ella looked around for a means of escape that wouldn’t involve either pushing past Danny or turning on her heel and running.

      ‘Married?’

      She shook her head vehemently. But no matter what Ella did, or said, Danny just kept smiling, like some sort of madman. Why was he asking her these questions? Why was he even talking to her? She liked him better when he was a bully. At least then she knew where she stood. What did one say to a ‘nice’ Danny Bleeker?

      ‘I get it,’ he nodded, his eyes blazing with the well-intentioned but utterly vacant expression of someone who categorically did not get it. ‘You’re all about your career. Right? Well, I guess you always were real smart. Underneath the crazy,’ he added, but it was said affectionately. ‘You went to Cal, didn’t you? So what’d you end up as? Doctor? Lawyer? No? Don’t tell me: Rocket scientist!’ he laughed. ‘You work for Elon Musk or somethin’?’

      ‘No,’ said Ella. ‘I used to be a statistician but I got fired. Officially it was because I took too much time off, but actually it was because I declined sexual relations with my boss. He was extremely unattractive,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘I have to go back to my hotel now. Goodbye.’

      Danny Bleeker turned and scratched his head as he watched his old classmate speed-walk away from him towards the rundown Double Tree, the only hotel in town. Watching Ella Praeger leave was always a pleasure. She still had a great ass. But if anything, the years since school seemed to have made her even weirder. Danny had wanted to sleep with her so bad back then. All his taunting and cruelty had been a clumsy attempt at flirtation, an effort to get Ella’s attention. But with hindsight he reckoned he’d had a lucky escape.

      Back in her bland hotel room, Ella lay back on the ugly brown bed and closed her eyes. She was mentally bracing for more voices to ambush her. So far this trip she’d had two debilitating ‘episodes’ while out on Main Street, and a string of more minor ones here in the hotel, as if a radio were hidden somewhere in her bedroom, crackling out static as its signal veered between two stations.

      Since the man had left her apartment, apparently for good, Ella had had ample time to ponder the outlandish theory he’d given her to explain away her symptoms.

      ‘The voices are real. They’re electronic transmissions, of varying types. You were genetically modified before birth to be able to both detect and unscramble them. It’s a unique ability.’

      Her longing for an answer to the debilitating condition made her want to believe him. But even the most cursory of reality checks made that hard to do. Genetically modified before birth? Come on. Was that even possible? Ella’s brief Google search suggested it was not, any more than exposure to gamma radiation could turn you into a giant green brute, or a spider bite could imbue you with web-spinning hands. Clearly the man, whoever he was, was deliberately playing on her weaknesses, telling her something she wanted to hear in order to win her trust, to draw her into the clutches of ‘The Group’. He’d successfully latched onto Ella’s twin Achilles heels – her thirst for knowledge about her parents, and her desperate search for a cure to her crippling headaches; a way to stop the voices that babbled at her day and night – cruelly using both to try to manipulate her. Was his disappearing act now yet more manipulation, Ella wondered? If so, it was working.

      But why? That was the question. What did he want from her? What did he hope to gain?

      Those were the questions that haunted Ella, night after night, along with all the ‘hows’. How did he know so much about her symptoms? She’d told no one about the voices that plagued her, not a living soul. If her parents had been brainwashed by whatever cult it was that the man belonged to, and if they really were genetic scientists, then his explanation for the white noise in her head seemed at least possible, even if it was outlandish. Genetically modified. It wasn’t exactly comforting, but it was an answer of sorts. A place to start, even if it posed as many problems as it solved.

      Reaching into her pocket as she lay on the bed, Ella coiled her fingers around the USB stick that the man had given her. She still hadn’t looked at the contents. Some combination of fear and defiance held her back, narrowly outweighing curiosity.

      He wants me to look at it, thought Ella, which is exactly why I mustn’t. Doing what he wants, letting him set the agenda. That would be handing him the upper hand on a plate.

      The man clearly saw her as naïve. As malleable, a sheep to be led. Ella intended to show him just how wrong he was. But how could she show him if he disappeared on her? What if he never came back, and this stick was the only clue to the truth about her condition?

      Her fingers traced the grooves in the metal, warm now from the heat

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