Savant

3: The Gang's All Here!

At first, we didn't see how Dr. Fields's story, however amazing it might be, had much bearing on our own mission. After all, from what we read, it seemed there was little left of the laboratory in the Amazon, even if we were able to somehow find it. The girl she'd written about, around whom this entire jungle project had been built, reminded me a lot of ourselves with her extraordinary abilities (well, some of them, anyway-we were amazing individuals, all right, but even we would bleed if you shot us). But if what Dr. Fields had written was true, then the girl was out of our reach. We dismissed Harriet Fields and her story as intriguing, but ultimately useless, information.

Then Nina had an idea.

Nina wasn't generally the idea-generator in our little band of misfit toys. She was brilliant, don't get me wrong. She could remember conversations and repeat them back to you verbatim months later. She was a masterful sculptor and painter-which is the main reason she seemed to be one light bulb short of a chandelier. Dragging her away from her artwork was like dragging a fish out of water and asking it to walk. Nina without paint on her fingers wasn't a pretty sight-her Savant operation had left her with the insatiable, constant need to create and the personality of a vicious five-year-old. She was known to bite. But all of us Savants had our... eccentricities, and we'd gone through an awful lot of trouble, Diego and Colin and I, to rescue Nina from the Moscow facility four months ago, and we'd grown fond of her since. Teeth and all.

And it was Nina who spoke up one evening as we were sitting around disconsolately staring at the walls and wondering where our next lead would come from.

"It was the same lady," she said in her soft Russian accent (as best we could tell, Russian had been her first language and she'd picked up English from the doctors who'd converted her into a Savant). She was lying on her stomach, finger painting gorgeous fractals onto the concrete floor. When we weren't chasing leads all over the world (funded by money Colin milked from Corpus itself-as far as we knew, they hadn't yet discovered the tiny hole he'd drilled through their treasury cyber-floor, and we all appreciated the irony of us fighting Corpus with their own moolah) we were at home sweet home. At that moment in time, "home" consisted of an airplane hangar on an abandoned airstrip in-well, never mind where. Somewhere secret. And temporary. Since escaping the Corpus lab a year ago, the three of us-and now Nina-had been constantly moving, never staying in one place for more than a month or two.

Anyway, despite our strict absolutely-no-lights-after-dark rule and the fact that we shared our hangar with a small colony of field mice and one large barn owl we called Bruno, it was pretty cozy. Couches we'd scavenged off the side of the road (this before Colin had hacked his way into Corpus's wallet), bunk beds from Ikea (these after he accomplished cyber theft), glowing flamingo lights of the redneck campground variety strung from the high ceiling, Colin's Hive (a corner consisting of twelve computers of every make and model and Wi-Fi stolen from a farmhouse down the road), and of course, Nina's artwork. It was everywhere. She'd painted the walls, the floor, the furniture. Her notebooks were stacked around like additional end tables, piled in the corners, stuffed under the beds. The only thing we lacked for was a decent working bathroom, and had so far been taking care of business in the woods behind the hangar and making the two-mile hike to the nearest rest stop on the interstate for showers.

So this is where we were the day Nina had her epiphany. Diego and I were cuddled on the couch. He was reading Around the World in Eighty Days to me as I attempted to comb the coiled brunette springs I had instead of hair (when she was mad at me, Nina liked to call me "Slinky-head"). Colin was, as usual, lost in his computers. He might not bite if we pulled him away, like Nina would, but he did get cranky.