#unknown quantity

“What’s . . . inside?” Argent asks.

Divan sighs. “The only part of Malik I didn’t sell. His best part, actually.”

Argent doesn’t dare open it. He knows what it is. “And it’s . . . for me?” Argent asks, scarcely willing to believe it.

“It’s an elegant solution, don’t you think?” Divan says. “It fulfills my promise to you, and allows me to see my nephew’s handsome face once more, without having to suffer the rest of him.”

Argent holds the box closely. He feels awful, he feels grateful, he feels damned, and he feels blessed. How could something generate so many conflicting emotions? He decides to go with the positive ones, because the negative ones will surely drive him mad. “Thank you,” he says.

“I do believe Malik is better off living divided,” Divan says. “It’s certainly better than the life path he was on.”

“Would you prefer to serve yourself?” Divan asks.

“I would prefer you hire someone with a face.”

“Malik, you must learn to be more tolerant,” Dagmara chides. “This is the very type of thing that keeps getting him expelled from school. Do you want to tell your uncle why you were thrown out of Excelsior Academy?”

Malik grabs a roll and rips off a piece with his teeth. “I unwound my math teacher’s Chihuahua.”

Sonthi laughs.

“Well, it was a nuisance, yapping all the time,” Malik says. “The guy had no business bringing a yappy dog on campus.”

“No longer on board. Mostly. He was put off in Kamchatka.”

“You left him alone?”

“No, of course not. He’s in the company of your distribution network. You’ll be pleased to know that his parts fetched us more than three hundred thousand dollars.”

Dagmara gapes at him. He’s joking. He must be. He wouldn’t unwind his own nephew. What sort of monster would do such a thing?

[...]

“I’ll be leaving you now, dear sister. “Saying ‘sayonara,’ as it were. You see, there are two parachutes on board. One for me and one for my valet.”

“Wait—you’re just going to leave me here?”

“I leave you with my prize possession: the Orgão Orgânico. As long as you keep playing, the plane will fly true. At least until it runs out of gas, but her tanks are massive. You’ve got at least twenty hours left, maybe more.”

[...]

In a panic Dagmara looks at the keyboard and quickly launches into her go-to piece as she had when she first arrived—Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D-minor.” The chorus of disembodied voices fills the space.

“Very good!” says Divan, as he strides away “Keep playing, Dagmara. Keep playing!”

“Divan!” she calls. “DIVAN!” But he’s gone.

And so she plays for her life, buying herself the seconds and the minutes and the hours until there is nothing but soulless voices and fumes.

“I told you, I can’t.”

And then Malik reaches up and grips the biobandage that covers Argent’s faceless half. “I could rip this off you right now.”

It’s a terrifying threat—because a biobandage is more than just dressing: It grows into the surrounding tissue to protect the wound. If he rips it off, the pain will be unbearable.

Argent still remembers his martial arts moves. He could have Malik in a choke hold in an instant, cutting off his oxygen and rendering him unconscious. If he holds it long enough, Malik could be left with irreversible brain damage—which might be exactly what he needs. But who is Argent kidding? He’ll just get rewound brain bits to replace the damage. On the other hand, perhaps those brain bits will be better than the ones Malik came with.

Argent never gets the chance to find out, because Dagmara comes to the door.

And so Argent pulls back the curtain to reveal the Orgão Orgânico. Eighty-eight faces loom above its keyboard.

Dagmara gasps. “Is that an organ?”

“Of a kind,” Divan says. “A heavenly chorus awaiting a conductor.”

Dagmara approaches it, not horrified as Risa was, but entranced. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” Divan says.

She sits at the keyboard and begins to play.

[...]

“ ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’!” says Divan. “An excellent choice.”

The Lady Lucrezia is filled with the eerie strains of the fugue voiced by the unwound chorus, mouths opening and closing to Dagmara’s touch of the keys. As it builds to a crescendo, Argent concludes that it is the most disturbing thing he has ever witnessed. Even Divan seems taken aback.

And Malik says, “Cool!”

“Play as much as you like,” Divan tells his sister. “It was purchased with you in mind.”

- Neal Shusterman, Unknown Quantity

Argent looks at Divan, holding eye contact—something he never before had the courage to do. “What if I don’t want to go? What if I want to keep working for you?”

“Well then, I’ll pay you a wage worthy of your loyalty.” Divan looks up at Lady Lucrezia’s vapor trail, slowly being torn apart by crosswinds. “When the plane finally does goes down, we’ll all be taken for dead. I intend to take advantage of that. Leave my business. Retire under an assumed name. Of course, I’ll always need a valet.”

They sit down and wait for the arrival of Divan’s “friends,” who will most likely come by helicopter. And as Argent ponders the electrifying prospect of his new future, a question comes to mind.

“Where will we go?” he asks. “Where do you want to retire?”

“Well,” says Divan, “faking one’s death does require a level of continued anonymity.” He feigns to consider the question, but clearly he’s thought about it before. “Did you know that with all that I possess, I’ve never owned a yacht? It has been a long-standing dream of mine to own one, and sail the Mediterranean—sticking only to the smaller, less traveled ports, of course.”

“Sounds like a plan,” says Argent, already settling in to the idea.

After all, what are the chances of running into someone they know?

“Stop that,” she says wearily, because the sound resonates in her aching head.

“I’m afraid that would be a mistake,” Divan says, then removes his finger. Immediately Dagmara can feel the plane begin to lose altitude.

Divan puts his finger on the key once more. The voice sings again. The plane stops dropping. “You see? When I installed the organ, I made sure it was wired into the autopilot circuit, on the chance that this day might come. A mere flick of a switch has sent the control here. Now as long as the Orgão Orgânico is being played, the autopilot is engaged.”