HASH: Human Alien Species Hybrid (8 page)

“Aric, run!”

Aric looked like he might ignore me, but then he obviously saw the security guards pouring into the shelving aisle from both sides, their tranquilizer guns raised. He ripped the vent grill from the wall in a squeal of metal and dived through as I fell to my knees.

I looked up at Professor Ahern. “What did you…?”

“Just a sedative. Nothing that will harm Startech’s investment before we can get that implant out of you. I promise you though, Jade, in the unlikely event that you survive the operation, you’ll be free to go. It’s not like anyone would believe you.”

“The doctor…” The words were hard to get out, slurring as Professor Ahern half-carried me.

“Unfortunately, people might believe her. This is a pity, because she was brilliant in her own way. But this is meant to be a secret program, so if she can’t be trusted, we have to do what’s necessary.”

Professor Ahern nodded to one of the security guards. “That wound will take a while to kill her. Speed things up, please, and then dispose of the body. I wouldn’t want things getting awkward with any of her more loyal employees. Contain and re-capture Aric.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to fight. As it was, I could barely walk. Professor Ahern and one of the guards had to carry me, my arms over both their shoulders. By the time I heard the gunshot from behind me, the sedative had taken hold and I was already falling down into blackness, far too deep to scream.

I faded in and out of blackness, voices around me coming through distorted, my occasional glimpses of the space around me tinted with a kaleidoscope of colors.

Words blurred together in slow motion. I tried to focus, tried to stop them from taking me away, cradled in the arms of a security guard.

Em flashed before me. When I saw her vibrant green eyes inches from my face, I felt a comfort that she was there. She leaned in further and whispered in my ear. It was clear as day and what she said made me grasp for her…to no avail.

I’d imagined if she were real, her words would have been soft and warm as they floated into my ear. “I’m here with you. I’m always here with you, but Aric needs me right now. He needs help to navigate through the vents and I know you’d want me to help him.”

“Don’t leave me,” my lips barely moved, the whisper was probably more of a moan or a mumble, but Em and I were connected and she heard me as clear as day.

“I’m here. Close your eyes and we’ll fight this thing together.”

I was tired. My eyelids were heavy and my body lethargic. I wanted to scream, but I also wanted to sleep and at that moment, sleep was winning the battle. I nodded to Em. She was my best friend and the sister I’d never had. She might have even been my conscience.

I heard them. The guards were following Professor Ahern’s orders. I heard the panic in her voice when she yelled, “Get her to the lab quickly. The implant will start to fight the sedative soon.”

Maybe I grinned. It felt like I did, but then, I had very little control over my body. Truthfully, it brought me pure joy to know that the implant, Em, would fight against the sedative. That might be why I was still semi-coherent.

I knew exactly when the guard placed me on my side against the hard, cold surface of a lab table. He wasn’t gentle. He treated me like the test subject Startech said I was.

My mouth was drooping and I could feel the drool run from the corner of my mouth and down my cheek. I think it mixed with the tears seeping from my eyes. I couldn’t move, talk, swallow and I could barely think, but the implant fought and I tried to help it fight by staying awake, by trying to remember my dream, my father’s adoring look toward my mother and her sweet echoing laugh.

It was such a short memory that my mind took me through the years. My unyielding will to make the doctors proud of me, the lonely days when I’d counted the lines in the grout of the tile in my room. The nights I’d cried myself to sleep, my arms tightly wound around my body, pretending it was someone who loved me. All of it and I’d still ended up here. On this table. About to be dissected.

My entire life was now on this hard table at the hands of someone named Startech, who didn’t know my name; they only knew my project name. They would rip the implant from my body and kill me in the process. And Startech would never look back.

During our escape attempt, Startech had shot Dr. Stevens, the one woman who had loved me as I imagined a mother might have. Aric—the one guy who had kissed me, held me, and understood me—as maneuvering through a ventilation system in search of his blood, the notes, his ship, or anything that would tell him more about who he was and where he came from. Em would find him. I was sure of that.

I tried to move and did. A little but.

“We’ll need a stronger sedative if we want her to keep still.” I couldn’t place that voice. Just another scientist. Of course, right then, I could barely remember who I was.

I could remember what I’d done, though. I’d hesitated. I’d been so scared, not of the guards or the guns, but simply of the outside world. Of Em. Of what might happen once we got out there. So scared that I’d let Professor Ahern do this rather than let Em join with me to open the doors.

Professor Ahern’s voice floated down to me again. There were bright lights around me now, and the surface beneath me felt different. “The survival of the subject is not the main priority. The removal of the implant is.”

The implant. Always the implant. I’d hated it for so many years. Wanted to get rid of it. I’d had nightmares about it, night after night, unable to run from the moment where Aric’s mother had embedded that intruder inside of me. I’d treated Em like a sister, but I’d wanted to get rid of her. I hadn’t trusted her. I hadn’t even trusted myself.

Now, I was on a table somewhere, and my survival wasn’t the main priority.

“A stronger sedative might make it easier to remove the implant without damaging it.”

“Do it then.”

Suddenly, I was back in the car, the familiar conversation floating around me. The familiar sense of dread rising up through me.

“Frank, what’s that?”

The dream seemed to be speeding along this time. Normally, I had minutes in which to feel the fear building up. Instead, this time, I was already tumbling as the Cerens’ ship hit the surface, already climbing from the wreckage, looking for my parents. No, not looking for them. I knew I wouldn’t find them. I was looking for the injured woman.

I found her, and again there was something wrong with the dream. She didn’t talk to me. Didn’t try to comfort me, the way she had before in my dreams of the past just before she had pressed the metal organism to my flesh.

Instead, this time, she held the implant out in her hand, the metal forming a kind of swirling sphere that seemed to shift and glow with its own light. I took a step toward her.

Pain shot through my back, sudden and agonizing. I took another step, and it only got worse. It felt like someone was peeling my flesh open, ripping through it, tearing it.

I half sank to one knee, and the alien woman, Aric’s mother, just stayed there, holding the sphere. I knew what she wanted me to do. I knew what I had to do, but I wasn’t sure if I could.

I crawled to her. I crawled because it hurt too much to walk. I crawled until I was close enough that I could have reached out and touched that steadily glowing sphere. I didn’t, though. I knew I had to, but I knew it would hurt when I did. I knew I would never be normal again if I did. Even with pain already shooting through me, I was afraid.

“Look after my son.” Aric’s mother had never said that in my dreams before. I wanted to say something, to ask something, but another stab of pain reminded me that there wasn’t enough time. I had to do this. I had to accept it. I had to accept the implant.

I reached out, and as my hand touched the implant, I expected more pain. The old, remembered pain of it sliding into my body. Joining with me. Moving from my arm into my back and wrapping itself around my spine.

Instead, I had the sensation of floating. I was hanging weightlessly in a dark, seemingly infinite space. It was a strange feeling, yet almost as soon as I registered that, it stopped. The space around me was still mostly dark, but now there were pinpricks of starlight to see by, and it was not as infinite as I had first thought. I was even standing on a kind of floor, although it was so close to being the same as the rest of it that it was hard to tell. My room. I was in my room. I knew that somehow, even though my room had never been black and filled with stars.

I wasn’t alone there. It took me a moment to notice the silvery figure standing at the other side of the room, but once I had, it was impossible to see how I could have missed her. She looked like me. She looked like Em. Except that her skin was silver, her hair was silver. Even her clothes gleamed with the sheen of the metal. I stepped toward her and she stared at me with blank silver eyes.

“Em? Is that you?”

The silvery creature hesitated for a moment before answering. “No, Jade. The entity you call Em is a part of me. A fragment. It is a strange little thing.”

“So, you’re not Em?” I stared at her. “But you’re still the implant?”

She nodded. “After the crash, I was damaged. I was placed inside a non-Ceren receptacle. Inside you. I did not know how to adapt to that. The knowledge was missing.”

A non-Ceren receptacle. That was one way of putting it. “So, you created Em?”

“
We
created Em. You could not have handled the full me. Even Ceren royalty are full grown before they receive me, normally. You were human, but a child. I gave you a version of myself that could grow with you until you were ready, and until a chance to repair the damage could be found. We found that chance when you met Aric. The doors opened for us to repair the damage.”

She was peaceful; she was familiar.

“I never thought that this other me, Em, would prove to be so…full of life.”

“Em has her moments.” I looked around. “What am I doing here? What is this? Have you decided that you’re done reorganizing yourself and that you’re going to take me over now?”

She shook her head. “That is not what I was designed for. I am a tool, not its wielder. All I can do is connect. I have never sought to hurt you, Jade.”

“Never…having you in me has cost me my whole life.” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice.

The not-Em took it as placidly as the metal from which she was made. “The scientists chose that.”

“You didn’t help me get out.”

“For a long time, I couldn’t, and at the end…I can only do what you
let
me do, Jade.”

“You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here,” I pointed out.

“You sought me out. You could have stayed where you were. You could have ignored me, but the part of you that dreams knows that it needs me.”

I’d done that? I couldn’t believe that I would do something like that. That I could. I suddenly realized that I was in charge of Em. And I had been the whole time.

“I’m a part of you,” the implant said. “You can reach me when you need me. And we do need to talk. Do you know what is going on out there, Jade?”

I shook my head, and the ghost of an image appeared between us. It looked like an image from a security camera, flickering and out of focus. It was an image of me on my side in the laboratory, the silver of the implant on my back exposed.

I was hooked up to about a dozen machines. Figures in surgical scrubs stood over me, and I recognized Professor Ahern at once. She had a scalpel in her hand, and it looked like she’d already made at least one cut close to the implant. The yellow iodine mixing with my red blood.

The implant’s avatar put a hand on my arm. “They’re going to kill you. They’re going to kill us. I cannot survive for long without a host, and you…”

“Why would you care?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure Professor Ahern would put you in someone else soon.”

She shook her head. “I have been a part of you for sixteen years, Jade. I have spent most of that with nothing but you. Of course, I care. To the fragment of me I created—Em—you are her closest friend. To me…the distinction does not exist. I am
you
. You are
me
.”

I looked at the image. At Professor Ahern working out the best places to cut into me. “Can you even do anything to stop them?”

“We could, perhaps. We have more of a chance than just waiting.”

“And once that’s done, what then? We get out of here? And…”

“I have told you. I will not take you over. I cannot.”

I shook my head. That wasn’t what I meant. “I mean, what happens then? Will I always be stuck with the implant? Will I ever be normal?”

She shook her head. “I do not know if I could be removed from you safely. You are not Ceren, Jade, and even for them, it would be dangerous unless they’re on the verge of death. Only then can they pass on their implant to another. Is that all you want? To be normal? To be only a human?”

“What else is there? I am what I am.”

The not-Em shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps we could find out together. For now…” she looked over at the image of me in the lab. “I think you need to make a choice, Jade.”

I knew that, but knowing it didn’t make things any easier. I’d spent my life trying to avoid what had happened to me. Trying to undo it. I’d spent my life trusting the scientists around me, rather than what I was. I couldn’t undo that in an instant, but I could accept one thing. The implant was a part of me, whether I wanted it or not. It wasn’t going away. It needed me, and right now, I needed it.

I didn’t know what was going to happen once we got out of the lab. It might be lying to me. It might be about to wipe away everything that I was. It might kill me. Or nothing might happen. I had no way of knowing. What I did know was that if I didn’t find a way to trust it, I would never live long enough to find out.

“All right,” I said. “How do we do this?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

I was about to say that I didn’t, when I realized that I did. I’d known it since the dream. Maybe I’d known it even longer than that. I held out my hand to the silvery version of myself, and as she took it, just for a moment, it was Em’s smile on her face.

Then I wasn’t touching anyone real. Instead, the silver was flowing into me. Over me. I let it. I let it continue even when it poured over my eyes so that I couldn’t see. Even when it seemed to fill my lungs so that I couldn’t breathe, I felt in that moment like I was sinking down and drowning, but I knew that I wasn’t.

I was waking up.