Rewriting the Apocalypse novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Founders' Dinner
The Deshler ballroom held three hundred donors, a string quartet and a crystal chandelier.
Jo walked in through the main doors at eight o'clock sharp, in a black dress Bess's clinic had kept in its donation bin.
Nobody stopped her.
Two guards at the door looked at a tablet, looked at her face and stepped aside with the stiff politeness of men who had been told to expect her.
Eli walked half a step behind her, in the jacket he had worn to drive her in.
His gloves were in his pocket.
The hum in his wrists was a whisper now, and he kept his hands loose at his sides.
"You can still go back," he said, very low.
"No."
"They'll have you in the chair by midnight."
"They'll have a lot of things by midnight," Jo said.
Across the room, a catering waiter in a white jacket two sizes too small tipped his tray to her.
It was Sam.
He had spent the afternoon behind a service panel of the hotel's sound system, with a screwdriver and a bag of cables, and he had told her it would take him one minute once he was in the room.
A silver-haired man stepped up to the podium on the dais and tapped the microphone.
"Friends," said Norman Kessling.
His voice was smooth and warm, with a donor-dinner smile in it.
The ballroom quieted.
"Ten years ago, I promised you a place where the human mind could be mended. Tonight you meet the first proof."
A tall screen behind him lit up.
It showed a heavy chair in a white room, and in the chair, strapped at the wrists, sat Bess Mulligan.
Bess looked straight into the camera.
Small round electrodes were taped across her chest, and a gray wire ran from them out of the frame.
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