“No.” Brady had allocated a bit of Al Brooks’s rapidly diminishing memory storage space for this very task. Besides, when the job needed to be done, Freddi would be the one doing it.

“Should I tell him that part?”

“No. Just tell him root kit plus source code. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“Brady Hartsfield wants you to come visit him again.”

Freddi’s eyebrows shot up almost to her crewcut. “He talks to you?”

“Yes. It’s hard to understand him at first, but after awhile you can.”

Freddi looked around her living room—dim, cluttered, smelling of last night’s take-out Chinese—as if it interested her. She was finding this conversation increasingly creepy.

“I don’t know, man. I did my good deed, and I was never even a Girl Scout.”

“He’ll pay you,” Z-Boy said. “Not very much, but . . .”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars a visit?”

“Why?”

Z-Boy didn’t know, but in 2013, there was still a fair amount of Al Brooks behind his forehead, and that was the part that understood. “I think . . . because you were a part of his life. You know, when you and him used to go out to fix people’s computers. In the old days.”

• • •

Brady didn’t hate Dr. Babineau with the same intensity that he hated K. William Hodges, but that didn’t mean Dr. B. wasn’t on his shit list. Babineau had used him as a guinea pig, which was bad. He had lost interest in Brady when his experimental drug didn’t seem to be working, which was worse. Worst of all, the shots had resumed once Brady had regained consciousness, and who knew what they were doing? They could kill him, but as a man who had assiduously courted his own death, that wasn’t what kept him awake nights. What did was the possibility that the shots might interfere with his new abilities. Babineau pooh-poohed Brady’s supposed mind-over-­matter powers in public, but he actually believed they might exist, even though Brady had been careful never to exhibit his talent to the doctor, despite Babineau’s repeated urgings. He believed any psychokinetic abilities were also a result of what he called Cerebellin.

The CAT scans and MRIs had also resumed. “You’re the Eighth Wonder of the World,” Babineau told him after one of these—in the fall of 2013, this was. He was walking beside Brady as an orderly wheeled him back to Room 217. Babineau was wearing what Brady thought of as his gloaty face. “The current protocols have done more than halt the destruction of your brain cells; they have stimulated the growth of new ones. More robust ones. Do you have any idea how remarkable that is?”

You bet, asshole, Brady thought. So keep those scans to yourself. If the DA’s office found out, I’d be in trouble.