Part 2 (2/2)

He closed his eyes. ”I don't know.”

”It doesn't matter as long as you're safe, right? You know if anyone came through here and gave you trouble, Alex would go after them, right?”

He almost laughed. Like she knew anything about it. ”That isn't the point.”

He'd raised his voice without realizing it, glaring at her so that she leaned away, a spark of animal flas.h.i.+ng in her eyes. Heavy boots stepping across the floor inevitably followed, along with a wave of musk and anger, as Alex came to stand beside Jane. It was the two of them, bad cop and good cop, keeping the pack in line. Like they were one big happy family.

T.J. should have gone with Gary.

He stood, putting himself at eye level with Alex-also a sign of challenge. ”I'm leaving,” he said. Alex frowned. His mouth had been open to speak, but T.J. had done it first. The rest of the pack was here-they'd fallen silent and gathered around, the happy family. T.J. recognized a gang when he saw one.

Alex laughed-condescending, mocking. As if T.J. were a child. As far as their wolf sides were concerned, he supposed he was. He thought back to Alex throwing him to the floor, felt that anger again, and tamped it down tight. The alpha was trying to get a rise out of him, goad him into some stupid attack so he could smack him right back down. T.J. wouldn't let him. All he had to do was stare.

”You'll be on your own,” Alex said. ”You won't like that. You'll never make it.”

T.J.'s mouth widened in a grin that showed teeth. He shouldn't taunt Alex. He ought to just roll over on his belly like the others. But he shook his head.

”I've done it before,” he said. ”I can do it again.”

And the wolf rose up, standing in place of the scared kid he used to be.

They could all jump him. He looked at the door and tried not to think of it, pus.h.i.+ng all his other senses-ears, nose, even the soles of his feet-out, trying to guess when the rest of them would attack. He'd run. That was his plan.

”You don't really want to leave,” Alex said, still with the laugh hiding in his voice.

T.J. looked around at all of them, meeting each person's gaze. The others looked away. They'd all come here by accident, through werewolf attacks, or by design-recruited and brought to the cage. T.J., on the other hand, had come to them alone, and he could leave that way. Maybe they didn't mind it here, but one of these days, T.J. would fight back. Maybe he'd win against Alex and become the alpha of this pack. Maybe he'd lose, and Alex would kill him. But they could all see that fight coming.

Which was maybe why they let him walk out the door without another argument. And rather than feeling afraid, T.J. felt like he'd won a battle.

He hadn't been brave enough to live out his old life. But he'd been brave enough to stick his hand in that cage.

Before he left the area, he had one more thing to do. Just to be sure.

A different guy was working at the clinic, which was just as well. ”Have you ever had an HIV test before?” the staffer said.

”Yeah. Here, in fact. About eight months ago.”

”Oh? What was the result? Is there a reason you're back? Let me look it up.”

T.J. gave the guy his name, and he looked it up. Found the two positives, and T.J. wanted to snarl at him for the look of pity he showed.

”Sir,” he said kindly-condescendingly. ”With a result like this you should have come back sooner for counseling. There's a lot of help available-”

”The results were wrong,” T.J. said. ”I want another test. Please.”

He relented and took T.J. into the exam room, went through the ritual, drew the blood, and asked T.J. to wait. The previous times, it had taken a half an hour or so. The guy came back on schedule, wearing a baffled expression.

”It's negative,” the staffer said.

T.J. exalted, a howl growing in his chest.

The staffer shook his head. ”I don't understand. I've seen false positives-but two false positives in a row? That's so unlikely.”

”I knew it,” T.J. said. ”I knew it was wrong.”

He gave the guy a smile that showed teeth and walked out.

SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE.

STEVE DUFFY.

24-HOUR DENTIST said the sign, in Mandarin and English. Hayden tried to put out of his mind that awful old joke of his father's, when's your appointment, tooth-hurtee, and stepped inside. Though it was close on midnight, the streets were still bustling, tangy with exhaust fumes and the smell of the all-night noodle stalls. Inside the frosted-gla.s.s and brushed-metal reception area it was air conditioned and monastically quiet. The nurse who answered the buzzer installed him in a futuristic bucket chair, discreetly indicating the selection of reading matter spread on a nearby coffee table. Running, for the hundredth time that day, his tongue along the edges of his teeth, Hayden noticed with little or no surprise that among the magazines was the very issue of Scientific American he'd been reading on the plane, back at the start of it all.

”MIRACLE” CHINESE DENTAL TREATMENT TO UNDERGO TRIALS IN WEST, announced the headline. Trapped in mid-flight hiatus, equi-distant between London and Hong Kong, Hayden had been leafing through the magazine like the diligent sci-tech rep he tried to be, on the lookout for snappy, comprehensible articles free of algebra or chemical symbols. Medicine wasn't his area, so what drew him to this piece? Simply that long-distance plane travel often tended to set his teeth on edge, start up aches and twinges in his back fillings. Something to do with the cabin pressure, he wasn't quite sure. Did it matter that his crowns had been fitted at ground level, where the PSI would be different? Perhaps the whole thing was psychosomatic, a displacement of some unconscious phobia to do with long-distance air travel. There wasn't really anyone he could ask: no one he knew seemed to suffer the same problem. Unconsciously, Hayden stroked his jaw as he read on past the headline.

According to the text, scientists from the University of Hong Kong -using a groundbreaking mixture of ancient Chinese herbal lore and cutting-edge stem cell procedures-had come up with a paradigm s.h.i.+ft in the treatment of dental problems. Initial trials of the new medication, a simple rub-in gel, had exceeded all expectations, and already there was said to be a flouris.h.i.+ng black market as small pirate gene-tech labs churned out their own bootleg versions of the remedy. A side-bar explained the science part. The genes which controlled first and second dent.i.tions in the human-milk teeth through wisdom teeth-had been identified several years previously, in the wave of slipstream discoveries subsequent to the Y2K breakthrough on the human genome. The Hong Kong scientists, experts in the field of transgenics, had concentrated their efforts on the so-called genetic switches which . . . Here Hayden paused, distracted by a slowly increasing sense of no longer subliminal apprehension.

He'd been grinding his teeth, ever so slightly, as he read. He knew this was something he did, not just in his sleep but when concentrating; both his girlfriend and his dentist had told him so. Now, if he clicked his top molars against his lower, he could feel . . . what was that? He tongued around furtively inside his mouth, inserting a finger once he was sure no-one was looking in his direction. There, just at the back . . . oh, great. Of course. Naturally. Six weeks on business in the Far East, and a wisdom tooth cracked clean down the middle.

It had been the Bombay mix back in the departure lounge, he recollected glumly; no doubt about it. He distinctly remembered chomping down on the bulletlike roasted chickpea as his flight had been called, that suspicious splintering feeling he'd put to the back of his mind amidst all the check-in anxiety . . . that was the culprit, all right. Super. He didn't even like Bombay mix that much. Maybe he could sue Heathrow for the cost of the treatment.

Dismally he manipulated the injured tooth back and forth, feeling the broken surfaces grind together like shattered crockery. The tactful, near-subliminal voice of the flight attendant at his shoulder made him pull out his finger with an audible plop. ”Have you got any painkillers?” Hayden asked, knowing in advance what the answer would be. Regret-fully, the attendant explained the airline's strict policy with regard to pa.s.senger medications. Hayden nodded despondently, and stared out of the window at the c.u.mulus clouds below. They looked like brilliant white molars in the cerulean gums of some unimaginably huge sky-troll.

The first actual sensations of pain had kicked in just prior to landing, after some four hours of incessant fiddling (tongue and fingertip) and an ill-advised gla.s.s of ice-cold mineral water. On the shuttle in from the airport his cheek had begun to puff out; once in his hotel room he'd hooked open his mouth in front of the bathroom mirror, fearing the worst. And finding it, in spades. Hard up against the gum-line there was a lump roughly the size and colour of a cherry tomato. It was hurting so badly, Hayden suspected it might actually be throbbing, visibly and palpably. Fully aware of what a stupid idea it would be, he inserted both index fingers, bracketed the swelling, and squeezed experimentally. The resultant right-hook of pain sent him staggering back from the mirror, cursing and whimpering through a mouthful of abscess and hurt.

In this way Hayden spent most of his first night in Hong Kong: alternately checking out the site of the damage in the mirror and pressed against the window in search of distraction. The waxing moon rose over the Island, soared across the tops of the skysc.r.a.pers and plunged into the fuzzy sink of light pollution above the western districts. Hayden followed its progress like a wounded timber wolf, baying with each pulsing wave of toothache, the pain as relentless and regular as the jets that slid across the night sky, heading for Lantau and the International Airport.

He was up in plenty of time for his nine o'clock at Chen 2000 Industries. Unfortunately, between the sleeplessness and the jet lag, he looked like a homeless man who'd sneaked in off the street to panhandle cash in the atrium. With some difficulty-everyone at Chen 2000 spoke excellent English, but he was starting to sound more and more like the Elephant Man-he went through his sales pitch, careful not to let his molars clash as he spoke. Suffice it to say that the case for fast-surface gate conductors from England could have been better put. On the way out he tried to make a joke of it all, pointing ruefully to his swollen cheek, and was rewarded with polite nods and smiles from the junior executives a.s.signed to see him off the premises. Their smooth uncaring faces had showed marginally more interest in his PowerPoint slides and sales patter.

If the first night had been bad, then the second had been raw torture. As part of his duties, he'd been obliged to attend a banquet in the company of several important clients. Torn between not eating, which he understood would be disrespectful to the local culture, and eating, which he knew would probably end in tears, he'd chosen the latter, and had gingerly inserted a dressed tiger prawn into the opposite side of his mouth from the shattered tooth. Even before the chopsticks had cleared his lips the magnitude of his mistake became apparent. The hot hoi sin had sluiced around his tender mouth and gone straight to the root of the infection, where it had cut clean through the various a.n.a.lgesic treatments he'd been able to score from the pharmacy next door to the hotel. Like a dental probe wielded by some n.a.z.i Doctor Death, the chili sauce skewered straight into the flaming abscess. The pain that ran up the outraged nerve nearly split his head in two.

His involuntary moan of anguish had turned heads all around the table. Pa.s.sing it off as a cough hadn't really helped, since even the slightest movement of his head was by now enough to make it feel as if his jaw was about to crack apart. Desperately, he'd searched the platters spread out before him for something-anything-he could reasonably appear to be eating (his plan was to nibble round the edges, and to smuggle the rest of it into his napkin), but whatever wasn't marinaded in chilli appeared to be crispy and/or chewy, and neither option was feasible for Hayden in his current predicament. He'd spent the evening with one hand clamped to his jaw, as if trying to suppress the mother of all belches. From time to time a more than usually vile blast of pain would cause him to make a squashy razzing noise like an electrical buzzer under water, which he suspected was unacceptable in any social context the world over.

Somehow, he'd got back to the hotel. Things were starting to fray around the edges by this time, though no matter how much he drank the numbing edge of the alcohol never quite kicked in. It was the pain that was blurring things; that, and the killer sleeplessness. He'd made yet another raid on the nearby pharmacy, triple-dosed on everything (ignoring the compendious lists of contraindications in the packaging), then retired for another night of horrors.

Sleep was out of the question: he was unable to set his head down on the pillow, not even on the nominally good side. The ache oscillated between thumping pressure and piercing intensity, and by daybreak he'd felt so wretched that even the transition from one variety of pain to another-throb to stab-seemed like a relief of sorts. A grey-faced zombie leered back at him from the mirror. Was it possible, thought Hayden with the feverish, lachrymose wretchedness of a small child, for someone's entire head to go septic?

The next day he didn't even want to think about it. Don't go there. And the night? Well, the night- ”Sir?” The nurse materialised at his side. ”Dr. Pang will see you now.” Hayden nodded cautiously, and followed her through the translucent screens, carrying with him the copy of Scientific American from reception.

Dr. Pang was a neat young man in immaculate whites who projected a powerful, slightly inhuman air of professionalism. Shaking his hand, Hayden found himself wis.h.i.+ng he'd flossed more thoroughly, changed his s.h.i.+rt before leaving the hotel, and generally lived a better life. To his credit, the dentist spoke excellent English and seemed genuinely concerned for his patient. So he should at the price, Hayden reflected ungenerously.

He settled back in a high-tech treatment chair, tilted and swivelled to the precise pitch of accessibility; the gas-cylinder hydraulics of the chair, with their all-but-imperceptible hiss at each resettling, were probably the noisiest pieces of equipment in the surgery, which otherwise resembled nothing so much as the sterile a.s.sembly room at Intel-a.s.suming, that is, Intel were keeping on top of all the latest thinking in interior design.

”So, Mr. Hayden.” Dr. Pang perched on an adjustable stool at the side of the treatment chair, leaned slightly forward after the fas.h.i.+on of a father-confessor. ”What seems to be the problem?”

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