A Heart Beat — Saturday, March 2, 1991, 5:41 PM

Cherry Hills Village, Colorado

Denver, Colorado

The footlocker sat open on Emerson’s kitchen table. Good oak, meant for dinner guests who stopped coming six years ago when the second wife packed her Samsonite and took the Volvo north on I-25. Now it held stoppered glass vials in wooden racks, a leather folder, and a sheaf of notes in handwriting that belonged to a dead man’s employee.

Theresa hadn’t sat down. She stood at the table’s edge with her hands flat on the wood, spine straight, weight forward – lab posture, Metro State posture, the body defaulting to the only stance it trusted. She read the labels before she touched anything. The overhead fluorescent buzzed at a frequency she’d never noticed when she was alive. She noticed everything now. The click of the furnace cycling. The tick of ice reforming in gutters outside. Four floors up, Windsor’s heartbeat – steady, sixty-two beats per minute, the sleeping pulse of a man with no reason to be afraid.

Marcus had unpacked the racks without asking. His hands hadn’t trembled. Monica stood with her arms crossed near the refrigerator. Emerson was at the window with his back to the room, watching the circular drive where the IROC-Z sat next to his Mercedes under a dust of overnight precipitation.

Nobody had said Flash’s name. Eight days of nights together and the empty space where the big man should have been sitting had its own gravity, pulling every conversation into orbit around what none of them would touch. Theresa could smell it. Not grief. Grief didn’t have a scent. But the cortisol signatures of four bodies holding something down. A chemical she recognized from hospitals. From triage rooms where the families waited.

She opened the leather folder first.

English. Typed on a Selectric, the font ball slightly misaligned on the lowercase e. Recent. Weeks old at most. Pencil annotations in the margins, the handwriting of a man who annotated everything because annotation was the last honest act available to a scientist working under threat.

Liverman’s preliminary analysis. Cross-referenced against the copperplate labels on the vials. Labels written in a hand that predated typewriters, faded brown ink on adhesive strips no wider than a fingernail, a century of notation compressed into shorthand. Prestor’s own hand. The man who’d put a needle in her arm on February 22nd and made her something the periodic table couldn’t classify.

She read for twenty minutes. The kitchen was silent except for the fluorescent buzz and Windsor’s distant heartbeat and the sound of her own finger tracing lines of text, a dry scrape that in another life she wouldn’t have heard at all.

Serum #1, “Georges/L. Pasteur,” was the donor blood. The source. Old vitae in a glass tube, the active component from which the entire injection cascade derived. The clan-specific vials were variant strains, each one keyed to a member of the cohort. Hers read “T.H.” in that copperplate hand, as if Prestor had known her initials before she was born. Drinking any of them would be feeding. Injecting them into someone else would be making another one of whatever they were.

Anti-Body #1. Liverman’s pencil note, pressed hard enough to tear the paper: All cultures non-viable within 40 seconds of reversion. She translated it. It turns you human. Then it kills you. Forty seconds between the two.

Anti-Body #2. The one Prestor believed was the cure. Liverman was more cautious. Estimate: 30-40% survival at current potency. And then, underlined twice in pencil that had nearly snapped: Prestor never recorded a successful full reversion. All test subjects lost to follow-up.

Lost to follow-up. The clinical euphemism for: he never checked. He assumed they walked away human because he needed to believe the work was finished, and he never drove back to see if the lights were still on.

Theresa set the folder down. Her hand went to her forearm. The injection site. Two small marks that had closed in minutes on the night it happened but that she could still feel, a phantom puncture, the body remembering what the skin had already forgotten.

“It’s not a cure,” she said.

She said it to the chemistry, not to the room. To the equilibrium constant that didn’t balance, to the thirty-percent survival rate that was a generous reading of a dataset that didn’t exist.

“Anti-Body One kills you in forty seconds. Anti-Body Two–” She picked up the vial of clear liquid, held it under the overhead light. Refraction index consistent with saline base, maybe a protein suspension. Nothing to see. Nothing to trust. “Thirty to forty percent. And that’s if it strips everything first. If it doesn’t strip everything, you’re still what you are. Just less of it.”

She put the vial back in the rack. Fingertips only. Slow.

“Prestor never cured anyone. Liverman confirmed it. Every subject he tested this on, he lost contact with. He assumed they walked away. He never looked back.”

Monica uncrossed her arms. “Then what are we sitting on?”

Marcus, from the counter: “A way to make more of us.”

The silence after that had a particular quality. Not dramatic. Chemical. The moment in a titration when the indicator shifts and you realize the solution was past the endpoint three drops ago and everything you’ve measured since then is wrong.

Theresa gathered the vials, the folder, the sheaf of Prestor’s stolen research in its cramped French notation, and set it all back in the footlocker. Closed the lid. Rested her palms on the cardboard.

“We need to get this to somebody who knows what to do with it.”

Monica: “Who?”

The inventory was short. Tony, seven hundred sixty years old, whose motive was theater. Edward, who wanted Prestor’s method destroyed, not studied. Klondike, wearing Flash’s body somewhere in the Colorado dark. And beyond Denver, a world of others they’d heard about but never met.

Marcus leaned against the counter. “Tony said there are others. Older ones. Ones who actually know what this is.”

Emerson spoke from the window without turning. His reflection was a gray shape in the glass. “Tony also said Edward answers to someone older. Someone who wanted Prestor’s method destroyed.” He paused. Swallowed. “We hand this to the wrong person, we become the next thing that gets burned.”

Theresa looked at the footlocker. At the kitchen. At the three faces turned toward her, waiting – the same look her students got when an experiment went wrong and somebody needed to say what came next.

“Edward,” she said. “We give it to Edward. We tell him it’s his, we don’t care, burn it. We’re giving him what he wanted. And in exchange, he stops hunting us. He deals with the thing wearing Flash’s face. And he lets us stay or lets us leave.”

Monica stood. “You want to walk into the court of the man who’s hunting us and hand him everything.”

“I want to not die again.”

The phone book was on the shelf in Emerson’s study, next to a desk calendar still turned to January. Yellow pages. Entertainment, Live Music, Nightclubs. The Broadstreet’s number was listed. Theresa carried the book to the desk and sat in Emerson’s chair, which smelled of leather conditioner and a cologne no one but Windsor would ever notice.

Marcus caught her arm in the hallway. Not hard. His grip was careful. They were all still learning what their hands could do.

“What are you going to say?”

“That we have what he wants. That we want to talk.”

“Don’t give your name.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“I know you’re not. That’s why I’m not stopping you.”

She dialed. Rotary. The clicks filled the study like a mechanical insect counting off its own legs. Three rings.

“Broadstreet.”

Young, male, bored. Bartender or door staff. The sound of a room behind him. Bass through walls, the acoustic of a crowd in a space built for music.

“I need to get a message to the owner,” Theresa said. The voice she used for department chairs and grant committees. Level, precise, stripped of anything that could be mistaken for need. “Tell him the people from last week have what he’s been looking for. The research. All of it. We’d like to discuss terms. Neutral ground. His choice of location. Tomorrow night.”

The voice hesitated. “Hold on.”

She hung up.

The receiver clicked into the cradle. Her hand was steady. The hand of a woman who measured reagents in milligrams and didn’t spill at exotherms and held it together as long as someone was watching, because that was the deal. The Jester held the room until the lights went down, then shook apart in the wings where no one could see.

Monica, from the doorway: “You hung up.”

“He’ll call back or he won’t. If he calls back, it’s Emerson’s number. He already has the address from Brandt’s visit. We’re not giving him anything he doesn’t have.”

“And if he doesn’t call back?”

“Then he sends people. And we’ll know his answer.”

Forty minutes. She spent them in the kitchen with Liverman’s notes spread across the table, reading the same paragraph about antibody cascade mechanisms, the words sliding past her eyes without purchase. The hunger sat low in her stomach, a patient animal, and above her Windsor’s heartbeat measured out the minutes like a metronome set by someone who didn’t know he was keeping time for the dead.

The phone rang. Old brass rotary bell, too loud for the house, a sound built for a bigger room that colonized every hallway and stairwell it could reach. She was in the study on the second ring.

“Cherry Hills residence.”

The voice on the other end was not the bartender. It was full, mid-register, the voice of a man who had spent decades projecting from stages and had never needed amplification. No greeting. No name.

“You have something of mine.”

Theresa gripped the receiver. “It’s not yours. It was Prestor’s.”

Silence. Three seconds. Four. An offered gap – fill it with weakness, fill it with justification, fill it with anything he could use.

She left it empty.

“The woman from the club. The one who left without saying goodbye.” A breath of room behind his voice. Crowd murmur, the clink of glasses. “You’ve been busy since then. My people tell me you’ve been very busy.”

“I said neutral ground. Tomorrow night. Your choice of location.”

“You said you have the research. All of it.”

“I do.”

“And what do you want for it?”

“Three things.” The lecture voice. The voice that held a classroom of freshmen through organic chemistry at eight in the morning and never wavered. “First. You stop hunting us. Whatever you told your people, call it off. We’re not your problem. Second. There’s something out there wearing one of our people’s faces. You know what I mean or you will soon. We need protection from it. Resources. People who can find it before it finds us. Third. We want to stay in Denver or leave safely. Our choice. Either way, we walk out alive and unmolested.”

Silence again. She could hear the Broadstreet behind him, bass and bodies and the rattle of ice in glasses nobody was drinking from.

Then Edward laughed. Short, unforced, the genuine amusement of a man being shown a hand he’d already read.

“You lost one at that ranch. The big one. And now his body is walking around with someone else inside it.” Not a question. He already knew. Sources she couldn’t see, networks that ran on blood and debt and seven hundred years of accumulated weight. “That’s why you’re calling me. Not because you want to negotiate. Because you’re frightened.”

The hunger flexed in her stomach. Windsor’s heartbeat upstairs seemed louder. She could hear the creak of leather in the chair, the blood moving through her own temples, and she wanted to put the phone down and go upstairs and stop the arithmetic, stop counting his pulse, stop pretending the numbers in Liverman’s folder mattered more than the numbers in her veins –

“Frightened people burn things,” Theresa said. “I have a lighter and a footlocker full of century-old research. You want to test which instinct wins?”

Silence.

“Neutral ground. Tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. The Brown Palace hotel. Main lobby. Bring the research. Bring your people. All of them.”

A pause.

“And understand. You will be seen. That is not negotiable.”

The line went dead.

Theresa set the phone in the cradle. She was shaking. She hadn’t been shaking during the call. That was how it worked. The Jester held steady under the lights and the shaking was for after, for the wings, for the empty dressing room where the mirror showed you what the audience hadn’t seen.

Monica was in the doorway. Emerson behind her. Marcus at the end of the hall, his face half-lit by the kitchen fluorescent.

“Tomorrow night,” Theresa said. “Ten o’clock. The Brown Palace. He wants all of us there.”

“And?”

“He said we’ll be seen.”

Nobody asked what that meant. They all understood. Edward needed witnesses. Whatever deal was struck or wasn’t, it would happen in front of his court, under his lights, on his stage. The public vendetta didn’t end in a back room. It ended in performance.

Theresa went back to the kitchen. Sat down at the oak table. Put her hands flat on the wood on either side of the footlocker.

The heartbeat upstairs was steady. Sixty-two beats per minute. She counted them because counting was what she did, what she had always done, the thing that kept the world measurable and contained and sane. Count the vials. Name the compounds. Calculate the survival probability. Read the data.

The data said the cure was a fantasy. The data said the prince of Denver would see them tomorrow night. The data said the thing wearing Flash’s body was out there in the Colorado dark, and the only protection available came from the same man who’d tried to kill them six days ago.

The data didn’t say whether any of them would walk out of the Brown Palace.

She counted heartbeats. Windsor’s, upstairs. Slow, even, oblivious. And her own body, silent in the chair, missing the one sound it used to make without thinking. The wet percussion of a living heart, the rhythm she’d carried for thirty-seven years and lost in a single needle-stick on a Wednesday night in a basement she never should have entered.

The furnace clicked on. The vials caught the overhead light. Outside, the waning crescent had risen over the Front Range, a sliver of white above the mountains, three days from going dark entirely.