The family poses a different problem. They draw strength and confidence from one another. As a unit, they’re dangerous. To better manage them and to prevent them from conspiring to do something reckless, they have been separated.
Here at the house, Alexis Longrin is shackled to a chair at the kitchen table, watched over by Chris Roberts. Chase Longrin has been locked in a windowless half bath off the downstairs hall, sitting on the toilet, cuffed ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist, with a trammeling line that links the cuffs and prevents him from standing.
Paloma Sutherland, who has left Sally Jones alone to block the driveway with the Cadillac Escalade, is with the two younger girls—eight-year-old Daphne and six-year-old Artemis—in the bedroom that they share. Paloma has a way with younger children. They might even like being imprisoned by her. Anyway, Daphne and Artemis are too young to have been fully corrupted by twelve-year-old Laurie, though Daphne earlier exhibited moments of spirited resistance.
Janis has assigned herself to the oldest of the Longrin girls.
Posters decorate Laurie’s room. Horses standing proud. Horses galloping. Airborne skateboarders performing ollies and flips. A solemn Marine in the Corps’ most formal dress mess uniform, right arm across his chest, hand on the hilt of his Mameluke sword.
Laurie’s ankles are zip-tied to the front stretcher bar of her desk chair, preventing her from getting to her feet. Her left hand is likewise bound to an arm of the chair.
Janis leaves the girl’s right hand free, as an insult. “You need one hand to pick your nose. You look like a girl who picks her nose a lot. Do you eat your boogers? You sure look like a geek girl who eats her boogers. You want to give me the screw-you finger, don’t you? That’s the kind of crude, rude girl you are, so I left your hand free for that, too. But you know what? If you give me the finger, I’ll use the butt of my pistol on it, like a hammer, break all three knuckles. You’re done giving me shit. I won’t take any more.”
Laurie neither sulks nor cringes timidly. She sits in stoic indifference, though she is alert to everything Janis does.
A bookcase contains perhaps a hundred volumes, paperbacks and hardcovers, all young-adult novels. Janis has never read any of the books, has never heard of any of the authors. But she spends a few minutes examining the collection, making little sounds of derisive amusement or sighing or shaking her head, conveying contempt for the girl’s puerile taste in literature.
She searches the dresser drawers as well, disarranging the contents. She withdraws some garments for a closer look and then drops them on the floor, treading carelessly on them when she suspects the items are ones the girl particularly likes.
Finally she picks up a side chair and carries it to the desk and sits, facing Laurie. Janis says nothing, but only stares at her prisoner’s profile.
After a while, Laurie glances at her, expressionless, and then turns her head forward once more to contemplate the desk.
“What’s all this shit on the walls?” Janis asks.
Laurie says nothing.
“It’s okay, you can talk. I won’t tape your mouth shut. What kind of girl’s room is this, anyway?”
“It’s stuff I like.”
“I don’t see any girl things.”
“Horses are girl things. Lots of girls love horses.”
“Okay, but what I don’t see is any girly things.”
Laurie says nothing.
“When will you turn thirteen?”
“Next month. What’s it to you?”
“Do you skateboard?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s with the semper fi T-shirt and the poster? You want to be a Marine someday?”
“I could be if I wanted.”
From a distance of maybe two feet, Janis stares at the girl’s profile in silence. Finally she says, “So are you a lesbo?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Other girls, real girls, they’d have posters of boy bands.”
“Boy bands and actors—that’s not who’s cool,” Laurie says.
“So who do you think is cool? Girl bands, actresses with long smooth legs and wet mouths you could kiss?”
Laurie faces Janis again and glares at her. “You’re disgusting. Crude and stupid.”
Janis smiles knowingly. “So who do you think is cool?”
“People who do what’s right but tough to do, what takes guts, what takes a spine.”
“Well, you know, it takes a spine for a lesbo to out herself,” Janis taunts.
“Maybe you didn’t notice, but the Marine in the poster is a guy. He’s a hunk. All by himself, he could wade through an army of boy-band types and knock them all flat.”
They’re eye to eye now, and face-offs are something Janis does well. She has an intimidating stare that disturbs people; they meet it, and they’re afraid, but they’re often even more afraid to look away. One of the men she’s taken up with and later dropped told her that she has ax-murderer eyes. Another said that during sex her yellow-brown eyes were as wild as those of some jungle animal, some fierce predator, which turned him on, except eventually he realized that her stare was predatory when sex wasn’t on the agenda, even in moments that he thought were tender. She receives such insults as compliments. She uses her stare as though it is a stiletto, piercing people with it, some of them being people into whom she would enjoy sliding a real blade.
When the girl doesn’t soon look away, Janis leans closer, until their faces are a foot apart, and she lowers her voice almost to a whisper. “Did Jane Hawk tell you about the brain implants? Or maybe she told your daddy and you overheard it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, even if your daddy knows, he wouldn’t have scared you by sharing it. But I will.”
Maintaining eye contact, Janis touches a forefinger to the crook of the girl’s left arm.
Laurie twitches but says nothing and doesn’t look away.
“That’s where they find a vein and inject you. With three big ampules holding maybe millions of tiny machines suspended in liquid, each just a few molecules. Nanoconstructs. They swim through your blood, into your head, assemble themselves into a web, a control mechanism powered by the electrical current in your brain. Then you’re told to forget it happened, and you forget. For the rest of your life, we own you, but you don’t know it. For the rest of your life, you do exactly what you’re told, and you’re happy to do it. If we say kill your sisters, you will. If we tell you to kill yourself, you will. No more snark from Laurie Longrin. No more smirking, no cheeky backtalk, no attitude. Just obedient little Laurie, so eager to please, eager to kiss my ass if I want it kissed.”
Janis reads desperation in her captive’s eyes and knows that she isn’t misreading this.
The girl can’t keep a faint tremor out of her voice. “If you had such a thing, you’d already be injecting me.”
“I would, yes. Oh, I’d love it. I’d keep you for a pet. But my boss decides who and when—or maybe someone above him decides. My boss says the script requires us to be discreet, to be selective in who we choose to enslave with injections. The script doesn’t call for us to do millions of you overnight.”
Frowning, the girl says, “What script?”
“It’s just the way he talks. But you listen to me, Little Miss Attitude. If I get my hands on those ampules, whether it’s a week from now or a year, I’ll come back for you and inject you. I don’t care what the script says, what my boss says. You’ll spend the rest of your miserable life looking over your shoulder, but you won’t see me coming. Then you’ll be my bootlicker, Little Miss Lickspittle.”