Cyberking Reclaims His Throne novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fall
A man drops onto a truck outside Melinda's office and a woman watches from the roof; she takes him to the ER and sees his girlfriend on TV mourning him.
The man hit the food truck's awning at 1:40 a.m., and I was standing six feet away with a cold coffee.
I had just finished my night shift on the fourth floor of the insurance building.
I was thinking about nothing but my bed.
The sound was a crack, then a long tearing noise, then the thud of a body rolling off canvas onto the delivery tarp below it.
I dropped the coffee.
He lay on his back in the alley between the Halden Building and my office.
Blood ran from his scalp into one gray eye.
His left arm bent the wrong way at the wrist.
I looked up out of pure reflex.
Nine floors above us, a woman in a white coat stood at the edge of the roof.
She leaned over and looked straight down at him.
She did not scream or call for help.
She looked for maybe three seconds.
Then she stepped back and the roof was empty.
"Hey," I said, and my voice came out thin.
I knelt on the wet concrete beside him.
"Hey, can you hear me? I'm calling an ambulance."
His good hand shot out and locked around my wrist.
His grip was shockingly strong for a man who had just fallen nine floors.
"No police," he said.
"You're bleeding all over the ground."
"No police," he said again, and his eyes found mine.
"She'll know. She'll know in a minute."
"Who will?"
He opened his mouth, and nothing came.
He frowned, as if he had reached for a word on a shelf and found the shelf bare.
His eyes slid shut.
I should have called 911 right then.
Any sensible person would have.
But there was the woman on the roof, and there was the way she had looked down without surprise.
I had spent four years learning what it looks like when powerful people make a problem disappear.
I did not want to hand this man back to whoever she called.
I got my arms under his shoulders and dragged him to my hatchback.
He weighed a ton.
I swore the entire time, and he groaned twice.
By the time I got him across the back seat my hands shook so hard I missed the ignition twice.
The nearest ER was St. Brigid's.
Of course it was.
I drove there with my jaw clenched so tight my teeth hurt.
My father had died on the cardiac ward of that hospital four years ago.
I had not walked through those sliding doors since.
I walked through them now with a stranger's blood drying on my hoodie.
"Car accident," I told the nurse at the desk.
"He fell off something. I found him on the road."
It was close enough to the truth to sound true.
They took him through the double doors on a gurney.
I sat in a plastic chair under a TV that had been left on a news channel with the sound low.
Three hours later a doctor came out.
She told me about a concussion, three cracked ribs, a broken wrist and a gash that needed eleven stitches.
"He's lucky," she said.
"He landed on something soft. Is there family we can call?"
"I don't know him," I said.
"I just found him."
"He's awake and asking for you."
I followed her down a corridor that smelled like floor cleaner and old grief.
He lay propped on pillows with a white bandage around his head.
He looked very young and very tired.
His eyes were a clear, steady gray, and they watched me come in.
"You're the one who dragged me," he said.
"Your ribs would like me to apologize."
The corner of his mouth moved.
"What's my name?" he asked.
I stopped walking.
"I don't know. You didn't say."
"Neither do I," he said.
He said it calmly, but his fingers tightened on the blanket.
"I've asked the doctor. I've asked myself. There's nothing there."
"I know how a car works and how to count and what a keyboard is."
"I don't know who I am."
The doctor said something about retrograde amnesia and swelling.
I didn't hear much of it.
I was watching the TV over his shoulder.
The sound had come up for a breaking story.
A woman stood on the steps of a glass building in the gray dawn, wearing a white coat and a platinum bob.
Tears ran down her face with perfect timing.
I knew that coat.
I knew the way she held her head.
The banner beneath her read: MERIDIAN LABS FOUNDER MISSING AFTER FALL.
"Jonas Wray is the love of my life," Yvette Vandermeer told the cameras, and her voice broke beautifully.
"He fell from our building this morning. He hasn't been well. If anyone saw anything, please, please help us find him."
A photo filled the screen.
A man with short dark hair and gray eyes, smiling at a camera.
I looked at the photo.
I looked at the man in the bed.
He looked at the TV, then back at me.
"That's me," he said slowly. "Isn't it."
On the screen, Yvette wiped her eye and said she would never give up hope.
I had watched her look down at him from the roof.
She had not looked like a woman who hoped for anything.
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