Adaptation (34 page)

Reese’s eyes narrowed. “What? That doesn’t make any sense. My government is your government too.”

“No, it’s not. Your government did not approve what we did to you at Plato. They weren’t supposed to find out—at least, not yet. But things got messed up.
I
messed up.” Amber sounded extremely disappointed with herself, and Reese inexplicably found herself wanting to reassure her.

Irritated with herself, Reese said, “So the Plato people—they’re not with Project Blue Base, right?”

“I didn’t know you knew about that. But no, it’s not the same thing. The biotechnology being developed at Plato is not the same, but Blue Base wants it. And they think that you—and your friend David—carry that information in your DNA now.”

“How do you know all this? How do you know Dr. Brand?”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is: Your government wants to use you and David as guinea pigs. That’s why you’re here.”

Reese gave Amber a frustrated look. “But why are
you
here?”

Amber’s chest rose and fell as she took a deep breath, wrapping her hands around her knees. “Because you were being monitored by your government in San Francisco, and I wasn’t careful enough. They found out about me. The morning I came to your house—the morning you asked me about Dr. Brand—I was followed by some men in black. On my way back to where I was staying, I called in to report that you had connected me with Dr. Brand”—Amber flushed a little—“and the agents must have intercepted the call. They were waiting for me back at the flat. They kidnapped me and brought me here along with everyone else from Project Plato. They think we’re expendable now because they have you and David. They think they don’t need us
anymore. So they’re going to execute us all. It’s scheduled for the day after tomorrow.” Amber seemed strangely calm for someone who had just said that she was about to be killed.

“I don’t understand,” Reese finally managed to say. “I can’t believe the US government would execute you. What have you done? What is Plato? And why are you involved with it?”

Reese saw Amber hesitate. Her face had gone so pale. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. “Plato is a US government project that was supposed to establish diplomatic relations with my people, the Imria. We’re… not from Earth.”

Reese couldn’t absorb Amber’s words. “You’ve got to be joking.”

Amber’s face darkened. “I’ve been imprisoned in a military bunker for twenty-four hours, and I’m scheduled to be executed in two days. Why would I joke about this?”

“But—but you speak English,” Reese said, and immediately flushed.

Amber raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think we can learn foreign languages?”

“And you look exactly like us!” Reese said defensively. “How can you be a—how can you be
not from Earth
? I’m having a hard time believing you.”

Amber pushed herself to her feet. “Believe me or not, but listen to what I’m telling you. My people are coming for us. They won’t allow us to be executed. It will happen tomorrow, so you should be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?”

“We’re leaving, and we want you to come with us. For your own safety.” A drop of perspiration slid down Amber’s temple.
“The only way to get out of here is to trip the bunker’s emergency override to the security system. That means that every door will be unlocked to allow everyone out, but you’ll only have an hour to evacuate before everything here is permanently shut down. The whole place will be sealed off and destroyed automatically. So when the emergency override begins, you’ll need to get to the surface as quickly as you can. Bring David.”

Reese crossed her arms. “You sound crazy. Why would you expect me to believe you? Why should I do anything you ask me to do? You still haven’t even told me how you know Dr. Brand. You lied to me before. You could still be lying.”

Amber closed her eyes briefly, drawing in a shallow breath. When she opened her eyes again there was a hard glint in them. “The woman you know as Dr. Brand is my mother. That’s how I know her.”

Reese was stunned. “Your mother?”

“We are watching out for you—I swear. I know this is totally confusing and weird, but I asked Todd to allow me to talk to you for a reason. Because tomorrow everything in this world is going to change. You will understand it all soon enough. But right now, I can’t tell you more than this. The only thing you need to know is that if you believe what your government tells you, you will spend the rest of your life as a guinea pig.
We
want to help you. I swear you can believe me. I’ll never lie to you again.”

Before Reese could respond, the door opened. Amber moved out of the way. “Time to go,” Agent Todd said.

“Tomorrow,” Amber said. “Reese, tomorrow. When the chance comes you have to get up to the surface.”

Reese stood. “What chance? How will I even know?”

“You’ll know.”

Amber’s mouth was set in a hard line, her gray eyes trained insistently on Reese. The Amber she had known in San Francisco—the girl with the smile that made Reese’s knees weak—had disappeared. All the flirtation was gone, replaced by a fierce demand that Reese believe her.

Agent Todd touched Amber’s elbow. “Come on.” He began to leave the room.

“Agent Todd,” Reese said quickly, “I have to talk to David. If she’s telling me the truth, he needs to know it too.”

He considered her request. “All right. I have to return Miss Gray to her cell, but I’ll come back when I’m finished.” He opened the door and stepped into the hall.

Amber turned to go, but at the last moment she looked back. “Reese. I never lied to you about the way I feel about you. I swear.”

Heat shot through Reese. She remembered the first time she had seen Amber, with her pink hair and her skateboard. From the very beginning, there had been something unusually precise about her. Not a hair out of place. She knew what she was doing.

She still did.

Even beneath the unforgiving fluorescents; even dressed in that ridiculous jumpsuit; even with her face bare of makeup—or maybe because of it—she was magnetic. Reese remembered thinking that
pretty
was too bland of a word to describe Amber. And it was true; Amber wasn’t pretty. She could be cute, if she wanted. She could be beautiful too. But in her heart, she was a
chameleon. And now she presented the face that she wanted Reese to see: naked, artless.

Reese wanted to believe her. But she didn’t trust her.

Looking away was one of the hardest things she had ever done.

When Agent Todd returned twenty minutes later, Reese
was pacing in front of the one-way mirror. “I can give you fifteen minutes with David, but that’s all,” Agent Todd said. “There’s a limit to how long I can fool the security system.”

Fifteen minutes wasn’t a lot, but she would take it. “Fine.”

“Follow me.”

She stepped out of the room into the hallway. “Who are you?” she asked.

He looked at her. “Malcolm Todd.”

Reese shook her head. “You know what I mean. You’re not one of them—like Agent Forrestal—are you? A man in black.”

“I work for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations,” Todd said. He led her down the hall to another interrogation room.

“Why did you want me to talk to Amber? Whose side are you on?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I’m on your side.”

Frustration burned through her. “If you’re on my side, you’ll tell me the truth. Who—”

He cut her off. “Amber Gray has already told you the truth. All I’m here to do is make sure you’re in the right place at the right time.” He entered the code to unlock the door. “Any other questions?”

She shook her head. He opened the door.

David’s interrogation room was identical to hers. He had managed to fall asleep under the bright lights, head nodding against his chest. His feet were propped up on the second chair, which he had dragged around the table.

“David,” she said.

At the sound of her voice, he awoke with a jerk, feet falling off the chair. He squinted at Reese, and then glanced around the room. It was empty but for them. “Reese? What are you doing in here?”

“We have fifteen minutes,” she said, sitting on the edge of the table.

He rubbed a hand over his face. “What do you mean?”

“Agent Todd is giving us fifteen minutes together. I have to tell you something.”

He rubbed his eyes and sat up. “What is it?”

Reese hadn’t had much time to plan what she would tell David about Amber, but she knew there were some things she wanted to keep private. “Did they show you a bunch of mug shots today during your debriefing?”

“Yeah.”

“They showed them to me too. Agent Todd just had me talk to one of the people in the photos.” Quickly, she told him what Amber had said about Project Plato versus Blue Base. When she reached the part about the Imria, David raised his eyebrows but didn’t question her. It wasn’t until she explained the instructions to evacuate the next day that he spoke.

“You trust this person?” he asked.

She squeezed the back of her neck with her fingers, trying to loosen some of the tension. “Not entirely,” she admitted. “But if there’s a chance to get out of here, don’t you think we should take it?”

“And run straight into the arms of the—what did you call them? Imria? That was in those reports on us, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. What else are we going to do? I don’t want to wait here for who knows what. You read the reports too. They want to retain us for more tests. How long does ‘retain’ mean? And it’s not like they’ve been treating us that well.” She glanced around the locked interrogation room. “I don’t trust
them
, that’s for sure.”

“You’d rather trust Dr. Brand and these Imria from Project Plato, even though they apparently did some crazy medical procedure on us that they still haven’t fully explained?”

She sighed. “Well, when you put it that way…” Was she just being played by Amber again? Now that she wasn’t locked in the same room with her, Amber’s explanations did seem a little bizarre. More than a little.

David shifted in his seat, the chair squeaking. “Who’s Amber?”

She froze. She hadn’t mentioned Amber’s name. She had
made sure to not mention it. David was watching her calmly, though she saw the dark vein in his temple that meant he wasn’t exactly having a Zen moment. “How do you—I didn’t say that name. Did I?”

His face went pale. “You didn’t say that name out loud?”

“No.” She got up. She had to move around. She couldn’t look at David. A thousand thoughts fluttered in her mind like a flock of birds beating their wings. And then she realized what had happened. “Could you hear me thinking about her? Can you hear my thoughts?”

“No, it’s not like that,” David said, excitement rising in his voice. “Do you think that’s what’s happening when I hear those voices? Remember when I told you about that?”

“You said it was random—that it was like changing channels on the TV or something.” She ran a hand through her hair nervously. “Is that what it’s like still?”

“Yeah, it’s random. I don’t know when it’s going to happen. But that name—I heard it so clearly, and I swear I thought you said it out loud. It’s the first time that’s happened.”

Reese paced back and forth. If he was developing the ability to hear thoughts, she wouldn’t be able to hide anything from him. Panic spread through her in cold waves.

“Reese,” David said.

She didn’t know what to tell him. She didn’t know how much she wanted to tell him.

“All I heard was the name. Amber. And… you seemed kind of confused. I swear I can’t read your thoughts, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him turning to follow her
progress across the room, but she couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze. He wasn’t Julian; she couldn’t just come out to him. What if he judged her? Straight guys could be weird about bisexual girls. He might think that she’d be up for threesomes or that she’d dump him for a girl. Not that they were together, but hypothetically… How much-did he really need to know? Maybe she could tell him that Amber was some random girl, so he wouldn’t think she was—

And then she realized she was contemplating lying to him, and she was horrified at herself.

“Reese?” he said. When she didn’t answer, he got up and came to her, reaching for her arm. She pulled away, bumping into the table. His hand caught hers, holding her fast, and she had to look at him.
Snap.
She felt his heartbeat, his breath.

“What are you doing?” Her voice trembled.

“It might help if… we’re touching,” he said, and a flush crept over his face.

“It might help?” she said, and it came out with a half-choked laugh.

“So you know that you can trust me.”

The edge of the table pressed against the back of her thighs. Through the touch of his hand, with his skin against hers, she was inside him. This intimacy still frightened her, but David wouldn’t let go. And this time, his interior landscape was less foreign. She recognized the shape of him, and she realized that he was trying to show her something. It unrolled slowly at first and then more quickly as she instinctually grasped what was happening. She was seeing something inside his mind: a series of images, like an old-fashioned home movie but blurrier—more
like the images she saw when she dreamed. David, looking down at her from the top of a wall. It was the memory of the obstacle course but from his perspective. His arm extended to her. There was no doubt in his mind. He would catch her.

And she knew in her gut that he was right. She could trust him. She had known him since freshman year. He had never given her any reason to think he would laugh at her or make offensive assumptions. He was fine with Julian. He would be fine with this. She had to stop being afraid of it. She would tell him the truth.

She took a deep breath. “Amber is the person that Agent Todd took me to see just now. Amber Gray. I met her in San Francisco after we got back from the accident, and we… we had a thing.” She couldn’t bring herself to say that they had a relationship. Did one week count as a relationship? But she knew that David understood what she meant, because she was holding his hand and she could sense his comprehension as clearly as she could sense her own anxiety about it. “I didn’t know she was a—an Imria,” Reese continued. “I thought she was just a girl. And now it’s over.” She felt as if she were bracing herself for a car crash.