Victor managed a tight smile. “I don’t think so.”
“Let me get this straight,” she said. The short red hair framed her face, frizzing in the winter weather. “You think that if you die, and manage to come back, you’ll turn into what, one of the X-Men?”
Victor laughed. His throat was dry. “I was hoping for Magneto.” The attempt at levity failed, the look between shock and horror and annoyance still firmly scrawled across Angie’s face. “Look,” he said, sobering, “I know it sounds crazy—”
“Of course it does. Because it is crazy. I’m not going to help you off yourself.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“You just told me you did.”
“Well, I don’t want to stay dead.”
She rubbed her eyes, rested her forehead for a moment on the steering wheel, and let out a groan.
“I need you, Angie. If you don’t help me—”
“Don’t you dare spin it that way—”
“—I’ll just end up trying by myself again—”
“Again?”
“—and doing something stupid I won’t recover from.”
“We can get you help.”
“I’m not suicidal.”
“No, you’re delusional.”
Victor tipped his head back against the seat. His pocket buzzed. Eli. He ignored it, knowing it would be a matter of moments before Eli contacted Angie instead. He didn’t have much time. Certainly not enough to convince her to help him.
“Why can’t you just…,” mumbled Angie into the steering wheel, “… I don’t know, OD? Something peaceful?”
“The pain’s important,” explained Victor, inwardly wincing. She wasn’t so upset at what he was doing, then. Only that he was involving her. “Pain and fear,” he added. “They’re both factors. Hell, Eli killed himself in an ice bath.”
“What?”
A grim, triumphant smile itched on his lips as he played the card. Victor had known that Eli wouldn’t have told Angie yet. He was counting on it. The betrayal showed in her eyes. She got out, slammed the door, and sunk back against it. Victor followed, rounding the car. He drew tracks in the snow as he went. Through the partially tinted glass he could see her phone on the driver’s seat. A red light flashed on its front. Victor turned his attention toward Angie.
“When did he do it?” she asked.
“Last night.”
She looked at the film of snow on the concrete between them.
“But I came by this morning, Vic. He looked fine.”
“Exactly. Because it worked. It will work.”
She groaned. “This is crazy. You’re crazy.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Why would he…”
“He didn’t tell you anything?” prodded Victor, shivering in his thin jacket.
“He’s been weird lately,” she mumbled. Then her attention narrowed. “What you’re asking me to do … it’s crazy. It’s torture.”
“Angie…”
She looked up, eyes blazing. “I don’t even believe you. What if it goes wrong?”
“It won’t.”
“What if it does?”
His phone buzzed angrily in his pocket.
“It can’t,” he said as calmly as he could. “I took a pill.”
Her eyebrows knitted.
“Eli and I,” he began to explain, “we isolated some of the adrenal compounds that kick in during life-or-death situations. We fabricated them. Essentially the pill acts like a trigger. A jump start.”
It was all a lie, but he could see that its feigned existence impacted Angie. Science, even completely fictional science, held sway. Angie swore, and tucked her hands into her jacket pockets.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” she muttered, turning toward the building’s front doors. The engineering lab itself was a problem, Victor knew. Security cameras. If something did go wrong, there would be footage.
“Where’s Eli now?” she asked as she swiped her access card. “If you’re in this together, why are you here with me?”
“He’s busy relishing his new status as a god,” said Victor bitterly, following her through the key-coded entry, scanning the ceiling for the red light of recording equipment. “Look, all you have to do is use the electricity to turn me off. Then turn me back on. The pill will do the rest.”
“I study currents and the effects on devices, Victor, not people.”
“A body is a machine,” he said quietly. She led the way into one of the electrical engineering labs and flicked a switch. Half the lights turned on. Equipment was stacked along one wall, a variety of machines, some that looked medical, others technical. The room was full of tables, long and thin but large enough to rest a body on. He could feel Angie waver beside him.
“We’d have to plan it out,” she said. “Give me a couple weeks, and maybe I could modify some of the equipment in here for—”
“No,” said Victor, crossing to the machines. “It has to be tonight.”