Adaptation (30 page)

You broke my heart and

Changed my life. Now I’m a dyke

Lovesick on the floor.

Abruptly, she powered off the phone and buried it deep in the duffel bag. She knelt on the floor, the cold tile biting into her knees as she wrapped her arms around herself. It felt as though someone had punched her, their fists landing deep and hard in her abdomen, and she was having trouble breathing.

You’re not an assignment.

Reese choked on a sob. The whole day seemed to rush through her in instant replay, all of its humiliations piling up one after another in a quivering mess. Had it only been that
morning that Amber had been standing in her kitchen? It felt like a lifetime ago. Tears streaked down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth, hot and salty. She remembered the shock of seeing Agent Forrestal in her home; the hard jab of fear in her belly as Agent Kowalski grabbed her. In a way, the sedative had been welcome, because it had staved off her terror—at least until Dr. Singh had examined her like a guinea pig in a mad science experiment. Now the terror was running free in her system, mixing with the shame of being taken in so completely by Amber. She almost wished she hadn’t cooperated with Dr. Singh for the MRI; maybe then they would have sedated her again. She just wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner and cry herself to sleep.

“Reese?”

Her head snapped up at the sound of David’s voice. She saw bare feet beneath the door of the stall.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said quickly, dragging toilet paper from the dispenser to wipe her wet eyes. “I’m—I was getting dressed.” She scrambled to her feet and pulled clothes from the bag, paying little attention to what they were.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Her breath hitched into a sob, and she covered her mouth with her hand.

“I’m getting dressed too. Wait for me?” David went into the next stall, and a duffel bag that matched hers dropped onto the floor.

“Okay.” She put her clothes on as quickly as possible, conscious that David was doing the same thing two feet away from her. There must be only one restroom; she hadn’t seen signs for
MEN
or
WOMEN
. She tossed the hospital gown into the duffel bag and then remembered the phone. She picked it up again and hesitated for a second before sliding it into her pocket. Just in case. She grabbed another wad of toilet paper and blew her nose before zipping up the duffel bag and leaving the stall.

Her reflection was not a welcome sight. Puffy eyes gazed back at her from a blotchy face. She turned on the sink and splashed cold water on her face, gasping at the temperature. She heard David come out of the stall while she was reaching blindly for the paper-towel dispenser.

“Here,” he said, and pressed several paper towels into her hands.

“Thanks,” she mumbled as she dried herself off. When she finished, her face was still blotchy, and David was leaning against the side of the counter and watching her with concern.

“Rough day, huh?” he said gently.

She started to laugh, but it came out in a sob, and her eyes grew hot again. “Understatement of the year,” she muttered, sniffling.

“Reese,” he began, then stopped as indecision crossed his face.

“What?”

“Did they do something to you?”

The question was weighted with a disturbing tone, and she flushed with self-consciousness. “No,” she said. David’s face was hard-edged with worry, and she had the feeling that if she had said
yes
, he would have gone out into the medical bay and done something about it. “No,” she said again, flustered. “I mean, it sucked, but it wasn’t—what did they do to you?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Don’t worry. They just made me put on a hospital gown and then examined me and said a bunch of things about my chart that I didn’t understand.”

She took a deep breath. “Yeah. That’s what they did to me.”

The glass wall behind them whooshed open and one of the lab coats came inside. “You can’t be loitering in the restroom,” he said. “If you’re finished with your business, you need to go back to your exam rooms.”

Reese scowled at him. “You can’t keep us locked up like prisoners.”

The lab coat looked at her as if she were being an idiot. “Believe me, you’re not prisoners. If you were, you’d know it. Come on, get your bags and go back to your rooms.”

Reese lifted the covers on the dishes and saw a mound of mashed potatoes and what looked like cold meat loaf. She wrinkled her nose. It didn’t smell that great, but her stomach growled at the sight of the food. She sat down on the plastic chair and balanced the tray on her knees, picking up the fork to take a bite. It didn’t taste as bad as she expected, but she suspected her hunger helped.

Afterward she climbed onto the bed, still dressed in her jeans and T-shirt, and turned her back to the glass wall. She hadn’t seen a single light switch in the room. The overheads were probably controlled by a remote like the one Dr. Singh had used to frost the glass, and Reese supposed she could ask the lab coat in the medical bay to turn them off, but she didn’t want to talk to anybody. She pulled the thin beige blanket over her head and
hunkered down in the dimly lit tent that it created. Her phone dug into her hip as she tried to make herself comfortable on the creaking gurney. That sharp ache she felt every time she thought about Amber twisted in her gut again.

She should delete those photos. Maybe that would make her feel better. She could erase all evidence of Amber from her life.

She wriggled the phone out of her pocket, making sure to keep it under the cover of the blanket. But just as her finger was about to press the photo album icon, she hesitated. It didn’t make any sense for them—whoever
they
were—to return her phone to her. Did it?

She studied the phone’s home screen. The icons were in different places from where she had left them. For one thing, the e-reader was on the first screen instead of the second. She clicked on it and saw that the library, which should have been empty since she hadn’t downloaded any books yet, contained one item:
PBB Status Report 23
. She touched its icon, and a document opened in the e-reader.

Project Blue Base

Status Report 23

Submitted to the Members of the Board of the Corporation for [Name Redacted]

Eberhard, Carlyle & Reed

June 2014

Her heart began to race. This definitely had not been on her phone before. She swiped to the next page to skim the text.

Executive Summary

As established in the Blue Base Protocol of 1991, the primary objective of Project Blue Base continues to be the development of genetically enhanced operatives, incorporating the Combat Endurance Initiative (CEI) and the Regenerative Process Initiative (RPI). Over the past year, progress on the CEI component of PBB has accelerated beyond expectations, and test subjects have responded favorably to multiple test conditions. CEI test subjects will be ready to be seeded throughout combat operations within twelve months. Unfortunately progress in RPI continues to be stalled this year. Test subjects have not reacted favorably to new test protocols, and mortality rates have increased. Further research should be placed on hold pending Corporation recommendations.

Reese did not understand much of the report—most of it consisted of spreadsheets full of data and medical jargon—but several things became clear as she read. First, Dr. Singh worked for Project Blue Base; her name was all over the report. Second, the attempt to develop some way for humans to regenerate tissue, like salamanders are able to do, had been a massive failure. She shuddered at the descriptions of some of the side effects the scientists had encountered in their research. She thought about her own disappearing scars and the rapid healing of the abrasions on her palms and realized that whatever had been done to her and David, it wasn’t this regeneration procedure. She and David had received some other kind of medical treatment: one that worked.

She suddenly understood what Dr. Singh had meant during the exam when she questioned whether Reese’s chart was accurate. Dr. Singh couldn’t see how Reese could have recovered from surgery so quickly, without leaving scars on her body. Dr. Singh didn’t know what had happened to Reese at Plato. That meant that Plato was separate from Blue Base. There were two regenerative projects going on—the one that had failed, at Blue Base, and the one that had succeeded, at Plato.

And that brought Reese back to the question she still could not answer. What was Plato, exactly, and what had they done to her and David?

The lights in the exam room unexpectedly went off, and the cell phone screen glowed up at her beneath the blanket. She quickly turned the phone over; if the room was dark, the cell phone light would be clearly visible now. She poked her head out from beneath the blanket and glanced over her shoulder. The medical bay lights were still on. Maybe the lab coat working out there thought she had gone to sleep and turned off the overheads in her room. Under the blanket she felt for the power switch and turned off the phone. She couldn’t look at it now; it would be too obvious in the dim room, and she was particularly conscious of the video camera mounted in the corner.

She found it difficult to fall asleep. She kept worrying over the questions the report had raised. It wasn’t until she began to doze off that something else occurred to her. Someone had put that document on her phone, and they had made sure she got it back after it had been taken from her on the journey here from San Francisco. Whoever it was wanted her to know about Blue Base. The question was: Who?

Reese woke up when the overhead lights came on.
She groaned and dragged the thin blanket over her head as she remembered where she was. She heard the glass wall slide open and footsteps click across the floor.

“Time to get up, Miss Holloway.” It was Agent Todd. “I brought you some breakfast and some things to wear.”

She opened her eyes warily, rolling over as something heavy landed on the bed beside her. She saw a pair of dark green shorts, a gray T-shirt, and a pair of the ugliest green-and-brown running shoes she had ever seen. “Why do you want me to wear that?” She squinted across the room at Agent Todd, who was depositing another tray on the counter.

“We’re putting you and Mr. Li through a few tests this morning. Eat your breakfast. You’ll need it.”

After she ate the food—bland oatmeal and overly sweet orange juice, accompanied by a cup of disgusting coffee—she grabbed the new clothes and the duffel to go to the bathroom. One of the lab coats was keeping an eye out for her, and when she approached the glass wall it whooshed open.

The exam room next to hers was empty, but when she entered the bathroom she found David brushing his teeth at the sink. He was dressed in the same outfit she was about to put on. “Hey,” she said. “Where did you get that toothbrush?” He gestured to a folded towel at the far end of the stainless steel counter. A toothbrush and mini tube of toothpaste lay on top. “Thanks.” She desperately needed to pee, but she didn’t want to do it while David could hear. She decided to brush her teeth first.

To her relief, when he finished he said, “I’ll see you in a few,” and left the bathroom. As soon as the glass doors slid shut, she hightailed it into the stall, dragging her duffel bag with her.

After using the toilet, she took off her clothes, taking care to conceal her cell phone in the pocket of her jeans and folding them so that the phone wouldn’t fall out. The new clothes did fit, sort of, but she was sure the getup made her look like a complete frump. Whoever had packed her duffel bag must have had a twisted sense of humor, because even though they had seen fit to throw in a sports bra, they had only included black socks. She clumped out of the stall in the heavy new shoes and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She did look frumpy, not to mention possibly crazy, what with her long, tangled hair and eyes bruised from a fitful night’s sleep.
Great
, she thought sourly, and resigned herself to looking like a dork.

Out in the medical bay, Agent Todd was standing by the
U-shaped counter with David. The clothes that made her look awful made David look good—in an I’m-training-with-the-military kind of way, at least. On her, the T-shirt was too big in the wrong places and made her look pudgy in others; on him, it emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. Plus he had white socks. David noticed her staring at him and said, “Hey. You ready?”

She colored. “I have to put this bag back in my room.”

“Go ahead,” Agent Todd said.

When she returned a moment later, Dr. Singh was coming out of her office pushing a cart with a computer on it. “I’m going to attach these to your chest and temples,” she said to David, holding out what looked like shiny metallic stickers.

“What are those?” David asked.

“Sensors to measure your heart rate and other physical reactions.” She pushed up David’s shirt and stuck one over his heart and two on his temples. Then Dr. Singh came toward Reese and said, “Now you.” Once Reese was similarly outfitted, Dr. Singh went back to the cart and typed something into the computer. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”