Renegade (18 page)

His callused fingers gripped mine, firm but gentle . . . and I was instantly transported back. To memories, of him holding my hand crossing a street, helping me with a baseball mitt. Ghostly memories bringing with them a sense of love, of belonging . . . something that I practically ached for.

But what was real? And what was programmed? Had I finally found someone who could tell me the truth? And maybe truth went beyond words, sometimes. Maybe truth could reside in something as simple as a touch. Because while words could lie, surely a true connection was harder to fabricate.

He flipped my hand, palm up.

Pulling back the skin on my index finger with one hand, he lowered the syringe with the other. As we watched, a tiny drop bubbled to the end of the needle. He touched it to the underside of my nail. A thin, barely visible line emerged in my nail bed, allowing the medicine to seep inside.

Warmth blossomed in my finger, then my hand, before traveling up my arm in that all-too-familiar electric surge. A blink later, red words glowed in front of me, accompanied by a smooth, digitized voice. My voice, only the robot version.

All of that info, in the blink of an eye. From one tiny drop of solution under my nail.

I realized that Jensen still grasped my hand. Gripped my fingers tightly, just this side of a true squeeze, as if he couldn’t bear to let me go. And once again he stared at my face, drinking in every detail, his expression rotating between wonder and maybe even hope. And then, an odd twitch of his lips. Indicating . . . disgust?

Screw him.

I yanked my hand away and he averted his gaze. “Do it, already,” I snapped.

His face whipped up, brows lowered, lips parted. For an instant, I braced myself, getting this weird sensation that I was about to be reprimanded like a child. Instead he shook his head and flipped me a half-assed salute. Then, he turned his back, cleaned a spot on Hunter’s good arm, right over the bulk of his bicep, and inserted the needle into his skin.

Hunter’s upper body flinched. His eyes shot open suddenly. “Sorry,” I said, grabbing his free hand with mine. He looked so frail, lying there with his blood seeping away.

He rolled his head toward me and attempted a weak smile. “S’okay. Can’t have you thinking I’m a big wimp.”

“How can you possibly believe . . .” I glanced away, closed my eyes. Fumbling for the strength not to cry. “Never. I’d never think that.”

Jensen hovered near Hunter’s injured shoulder, pressing a clean towel to the wound. “That should kick in within a minute or so. Afterward, your . . . boyfriend should be feeling pretty good. Groggy, but good.”

“Are you sure we should wait?” I asked, desperate for reassurance even though my sensors assured me he was stable.

“Yes, unless you want to hear him scream when I stitch him up.”

My gaze flew to Hunter. He frowned, but squeezed my hand encouragingly. “
I’m sorry
,” he mouthed.

All this, and he still was trying to apologize. For something that wasn’t really his fault.

“Just rest,” I murmured.

“Ask your dad why he’s so knife happy,” he said, his words already starting to slur. Behind me, I heard something smack the floor, but I didn’t turn around, desperately hoping that Jensen wouldn’t give anything away. I clung to Hunter’s hand and waited, urged him to fall asleep. He was out less than a minute later, his breathing slow and steady.

I felt a presence behind me. “He’s ready.”

Jensen appeared in my line of vision. He dropped the first aid box, then paused, his hands curled around the edges of the table, white-knuckled. He kept his gaze cast downward, at Hunter, but when he spoke, his words were slow and tense. “You told him I was your dad?”

His voice cracked on
dad
. Everything about his posture screamed imminent explosion, like the sliver of control he grasped was about to slide free, but the way he said
dad
. . . it was like grief and hope and disbelief and terror, all rolled into one.

“I had to tell him something to explain why I needed to find you.” God, even to my own ears, the excuse sounded awful, weak. Selfish. “He doesn’t know . . .”

The way Jensen’s face crumpled, even briefly—I could only describe as anguished. For one horror-struck moment, I was sure he would burst into tears. He bowed his head. But when he straightened, he’d regained his composure.

He cleared his throat. “He doesn’t know what you are.” That was all he said, before he returned to the box and, over the next few minutes, busied himself by tending to Hunter’s wounds. Soon the garage was filled with the pungent reek of Betadine and the crinkle of gauze pads being opened. He swiped the wound with the dark liquid, then carefully wiped the excess away. So far, so good, I thought, until I saw him withdraw a needle.

He glanced up at me when I scooted closer. “Hate to stitch it because of the infection risk, but I’m afraid of the skin tearing more.”

With precision that seemed at odds with his large hands, he carefully threaded the needle and sewed up the wound, his tiny stitches almost seamstress perfect.

Odd, his precision and neatness, given his appearance. Here the man looked like he barely remembered to shower, and if he owned a hairbrush I would have been stunned. His jaw was grizzled with an emerging beard, but it was darker on one side than the other. Like he’d forgotten to shave half of his face. And yet the house, his possessions—everything was so tidy.

It occurred to me, then, that this was a man who had either been on his own way too long, or one who no longer cared about himself at all.

“He’ll still have a scar, but it won’t be nearly as bad.”

After assuring myself that Hunter was fine, I let go of his hand. With the anger pulsing through my body, I was afraid I might inadvertently squeeze too hard. Really, what I wanted to squeeze was Jensen’s neck again. If I didn’t need him—

“Relax, he’s going to be fine.” Jensen’s voice penetrated my haze, but his words had the opposite effect of soothing me.

“You could have killed him!”

“Yes, I could have—if I’d been trying. But I wasn’t,” he said, curtly. Then he sighed, wiping a towel across his brow. “That probably sounds harsh. Look, I don’t take kindly to strangers breaking into my home and pulling guns on me. Priority one is
survival
. That’s what’s kept me safe. You should have thought of that before you brought a civilian into this.”

“I’m a civilian,” I whispered.

He leaned over to toss the towel into a basket on the floor, but I still caught the sorrow that flickered across his features. “No, you’re not.” He replaced the unused supplies in the box and turned, resting his hips against the computer table, crossing his arms until his biceps bulged from under his short sleeves. “Now, do you want to keep wasting time with the blame game, or tell me what you came here for?”

I wanted to hold on to the anger, I really did. But as I stared into his weather-beaten face, that wave of familiarity enveloped me again.

Was it possible to ever know the truth, when even your memories were lies?

The anger drained, leaving behind a string of questions, and a weary hope that maybe, once I had all the answers, the promise of a real life would quit hovering just outside of my grasp, quit being this imaginary thing that I dreamed of but could never really touch.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Then I braced myself for the answer.

S
tiff legs carried Jensen two steps to a swivel chair, which he dropped into with a thud. His eyes roved over my features while his mouth shifted into a humorless smile.

“You really don’t know, do you?”

Then he cocked his head in a way that triggered an echo inside my head, a ghost of the past. Except that ghost only existed in my implanted memories, and this was a real man.

Who had a picture of my mom and me—or was it Sarah?

“No, I don’t.”

He rubbed his bare ring finger and exhaled loudly. “Right. Well, grab one of those camping chairs and take a seat then—this might take a while.”

I skirted the table to grab a chair, then paused, stopping to brush a strand of hair that dangled over Hunter’s eye. His chest lifted and lowered with ease now, and his bandage didn’t show any new bleeding, but what if—

“I told you, he’ll be fine.”

I shouldn’t trust Jensen—no, I didn’t trust him. Still, something in the quiet confidence of his voice propelled me to approach. With trepidation, I lowered myself into an empty chair. He rested his hands on his knees and leaned forward. As I waited for him to speak, my memory whirred.

Dad, leaning forward toward the TV in our townhouse. “C’mon—strike him out!”

The Dad from my past and Jensen superimposed, until the two images blended into one. Disconcerted, I covered my eyes while evicting the old image from my head. No. I needed to focus, and this wasn’t helping.

“I was serving time in the army when Nicole Laurent was first recruited. Right away there was a buzz about her. She had a medical and computer science background—was a prodigy. God, she was young back then,” he added, his gaze now sliding beyond me, into a past that only he could see. “I’d been assigned to the special division your mom was part of—that’s how we met.”

I watched him, riveted. Finally. I was finally going to hear the whole story. Learn about Mom’s past—
my
past. “And you two were a couple?” I prodded.

“Yes. Nicole and I were together, for many years . . .” He coughed and looked down at the ground. “Until we had a difference of opinion. One that we just couldn’t get past.”

He paused again, and it was all I could do not to shake him. I uncurled my toes, told myself to be patient. I’d been waiting for answers for a long time now. A few more minutes wouldn’t hurt me.

“So I took a dishonorable discharge and got the hell out of there. Months later, this guy knocks on my door in the middle of the night. He’s been watching me, keeping track of my workout schedule. He tells me he’s with a company called the Vita Obscura, and they’d like to hire me away from my crap job. Great pay, great hours—all I’d have to do is share a little classified info—no big deal.”

His exhalation was a sharp rattle while he shoved his hands into his pockets. “Of course, I told him to screw off. Why would I risk a cold, dark military prison just for the sake of a few bucks?”

“So what changed your mind?” I asked, enrapt.

His lip curled, and suddenly, I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“Holland.”

Holland. Of course. Why did it not surprise me that he was at the root of everything bad?

“A woman came to see me next—Quinn. The head of the Vita Obscura. She told me things—suggested things—I knew Holland was an egotistical bastard, but I never believed that he would be so cruel, that he could—” He pressed a fist to his mouth and sagged into the chair, his eyes squeezed shut.

I reached over to comfort him before I even realized what I was doing. Startled, I snatched my hand away. This made no sense. I didn’t know this man, not really. But for some reason, confusion blurred the edges of my logic, dampened my certainty. There was no denying it; the sight of his distress triggered a wave of sympathy inside me. I wanted to soothe his pain.

Ridiculous. He’d hurt Hunter, I reminded myself grimly, so why did I feel this compassion for him?

When I saw a tear trickle a wet path down his scruffy cheek, my heart twisted again. I’d experienced firsthand Holland’s brand of pain. “So, you went to work for the Vita Obscura?” I prodded, when he remained speechless a minute later.

“Yes. Quinn said it was the only way to keep
you
safe.”

The way he said
you
was like a blessing and a curse, both reverent and repulsed. It made no sense.

“Quinn said all they wanted to do was figure out your technology, without hurt—damaging you at all. She also sold me on my suspicions about Holland, and I saw red. I wanted revenge. She promised—well, never mind what she promised.”

He kicked the desk leg, then had to let the resulting clang die before he continued. “They were lying. I was leery, of course, so I did a little snooping. I hacked into their computer, read one of their emails. They had no plans to keep you safe at all. So I snuck away.”

The photograph flashed before my eyes—Mom, Jensen, and the girl who looked just like me.

“The photograph on the fridge, the one of you, Mom, and a girl who looks like me. Who is she? An earlier version of me?”

He made a choking sound, deep in his throat. When he met my eyes, his own were haunted. “The girl in the photo is Sarah, but she’s not an earlier version, not in the way that you mean. She was human.”

Real?
The girl in the photo was real? The truth seemed to hinge on the mystery of a girl named Sarah. A girl who looked just like me—a girl who inspired profound emotion, in both my mom and this man who had once masqueraded for a short while as my dad.

“Who is Sarah?” I whispered, as a horrible suspicion took root and sprouted, embedding my body in a mass of thorny doubts. My fake heart pounded, then slowed.

“Sarah was my daughter. Mine and Nicole’s.”

His voice was rough and raw, like the answer had been ripped from somewhere deep inside him.

Thump. Thump.

Thump.

I staggered to my feet. Terror. Need. Terror. They fought for supremacy as I groped for the courage to ask another question. Daughter. That girl who looked exactly like me was their daughter. Human. Blood and bones and all the things that made someone real. But if Mom had a real daughter out there, why had she been hiding out with me?

But I knew. After all, Jensen didn’t say “is” my daughter. He said
was.
“Where is she now?”

“She’s dead.” A shuddering exhale, and then, “You, the rest of the Milas—you were all made in her image.”

Thump.

My pseudo heart froze in place with a painful shudder. A bubble of hysteria rose in my throat, choking me, drenching my tongue with a bitterness I’d never experienced before. But maybe Sarah had.

Nicole Laurent/Daily. Closer to being my mom than I’d ever realized. And yet further, too. Because, once upon a time, the woman I’d thought of as Mom had a real daughter. But she’d died and somehow, someway, Mom had re-created a machine in her image.

Or more precisely, she’d created
me.
In that crazy, overwhelming instant, I felt a terrible, hateful jealousy. I was jealous of a dead girl—the human version that I’d so longed to be.

I bolted out of the chair. “What—what kind of people would do that? I can’t believe Mom would be so cold—”

His hand shot out to grab my wrist. “Don’t talk about Nicole that way,” he growled.

I yanked my arm free. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s right—Nicole. Not Mom. Not Dad. Silly me—I’m just the freakish machine you two created to look like a dead girl!”

“Goddamn—” He smashed his fist into the table, causing the computer and everything on it to jump. So the opposite of Mom. Her voice had barely ever risen, and taking her anger out on inanimate objects? Not likely.

So the opposite of Mom . . . but so like me. A creature of my emotions, though I hoped to remedy that.

I bit my lip, to keep it from trembling. Or maybe it wasn’t really going to tremble, but just felt that way—an emotional programming system gone haywire.

His cheeks lost some of their reddish hue. “You don’t understand. We thought we were doing the right thing.”

“And now?”

Painful silence, which told me all I needed to know. A mistake. A billion-dollar mistake, that’s what the man who was almost—but not quite—my dad thought. And I shouldn’t care, but I did. The rejection crushed me until I wanted to collapse in a ruined heap.

“You’re not a complete machine. Not all of you.”

“What do you mean?” But I was afraid I knew.

“Sarah was a very special girl. She was brilliant, not just normal brilliance, but brilliant in a unique way. Almost like a savant, but not, because she didn’t have any of the disorders that sometimes accompany that. Because of our positions, and because of what she was, we had people clamoring to study her. To keep her out of the limelight, we agreed to do it ourselves.”

He hesitated, then continued. He clutched his thighs, as if bracing himself. “When she died, unexpectedly in a fire from smoke inhalation, we recovered her body. The MILA project had always called for human brain tissue, and we just . . . knew.”

“I don’t—I don’t—” I tried to speak, but couldn’t force my tongue to function.

“They used parts of Sarah’s brain in all three versions of you.”

I sat there, stunned, unable to move and unable to feel anything beyond my own fake pulse, enveloping me with staccato accusation.

All three versions.

Subject died.

Fire.

Three.

No!
I shrieked. Or thought I did. It must have been silent, because no sound erupted from my throat. I bowed my head into my hands, trying to shut out everything I’d just heard. But I couldn’t. I could no more forget than I could summon Mom from the dead. A piece of Sarah’s brain, inside my head. A piece of Sarah’s brain, in Three.

Not sisters, like Three had claimed. But part of the same whole.

Three’s head, melting until it was nothing. With part of Sarah inside.

Inconceivably horrifying, and yet, based on the sadness pulling at Jensen’s features, incontrovertible. Finally, I had the truth I’d been so desperately seeking. But living with it—how, how?

Sarah. Sarah.
Sarah.

The memory rushed me.
Waves crashing, Dad’s rumbling laugh. Mom and Dad, twirling in the sand. A seagull crying. Feeling warm, so warm, and then suddenly, smothered.

Trapped inside my bedroom, the doorknob hot to the touch. Escaping out a window, gasping for fresh air, relief flooding me—then spotting Mom and Dad’s car, in the driveway.

The words pulsed into my head, trying to obliterate the images.
No. Mine.

With a surge of energy, I grabbed them, crushed the words into a fine powder, shoved them away. No. They would not steal this from me. I grasped for the images, a fist clutching my throat when I couldn’t find them at first. Then, in a shadowy pathway, I found them hidden in the darkness, and gently coaxed them out.

A desperate scramble over the roof, fighting my way back into the house. Falling, falling, down to the first floor. Dad’s face, there in the flames. His voice, calling for me.

“Sarah!”

“Dad?” I whispered, just before the pain struck, burning red hot through my skin. Then . . . nothing.

I opened my eyes, and the images faded. But there, before me, sat Jensen. “The truth is complicated,” he said softly. “But I can tell you this—Nicole never regretted a thing. Not when it came to you.”

Tears burned in my eyes, and in my heart, a bittersweet ache. Mom hadn’t regretted my existence. Deep down, I’d known that all along.

What I hadn’t known was that inside me, I housed a piece of a girl I’d never met. A girl who’d been stolen from this world far too quickly.

A girl who had been Mom’s true daughter.

I traced my fingers over my scalp, through my hair. As though maybe I could find the parts of Sarah that lay underneath.

I wasn’t fully a machine, but I also wasn’t fully human.

I was something in between. A hybrid.

Bitterness sucked me down into a deep, dark abyss. I’d just been coming to accept myself as an android, and now . . . after all this, I really was some kind of freak.

I gave us both time to gather ourselves before asking a question that had bubbled to the surface. “Do I remind you of Sarah? I mean, apart from how I look?”

He flinched, like just her name held a power over him. Such a large man, so strong, and yet so easily wounded. He was turning out to be nothing like Holland at all.

“Why don’t you ask Nicole?”

An agonizing lurch in my chest; a sharp ache beneath my ribs. My pseudo heart, about to burst from sorrow. He didn’t know. He was looking at me, those expectant brown eyes from my memories demanding an answer, and he didn’t know.

“Don’t you watch the news?” I said, trying to buy myself some time.

His eyes narrowed. “Usually, but I’ve been busy with a . . . project. What is it? Is it Holland? Did he catch her?”

I braced my hands on my thighs and drew in a deep, shaky breath. There was no easy way to say this. There was nothing easy about this at all.

I forced myself to meet his eyes. “She’s dead,” I said, simply.

For an instant, the expressionless mask remained in place on Jensen’s face, and I wondered if I’d somehow miscalculated. Maybe he didn’t care about Mom at all—maybe I’d been projecting. Or hoping.

But then it cracked—no, exploded—shattered by a whirlwind of emotions. Wide eyes and parted lips, followed by his entire body sagging. As if someone had sucked every bit of energy from him. He turned away, ducking his head, his hand covering his eyes. Then, I saw his shoulders shake.

I felt helpless—even more so because his sadness spurred my own. Reminded me that Mom was gone. Forever.

Watching him felt a little too invasive, so I turned to check on Hunter. His chest rose and fell in a steady, easy pattern, and while the bandage showed a few signs of seepage, overall it remained clean.