Rush (20 page)

“Yes . . .” He hesitates, and I gasp. His scars. Those weren’t made by a shell. They were made by a Drau in the real world. My hands are shaking. He grabs one and squeezes, then lets go. “It’s our job right now to make sure they don’t get the chance to hide in these shells. So move, Miki. Get the next row.” I stand frozen, staring at him, thinking about how he once told me that I wouldn’t believe stuff he said, that I’d have to see it myself. I could have done without seeing this. “
Now
,” he orders, snapping me out of my trance.

I jog over to the next row of gurneys. From the corner of my eye, I see him pull the breathing tube from the girl’s throat. I don’t think. I just work. I turn off the next respirator, drag out the tube, and that’s when I notice the girl’s face. It’s exactly the same as the face of the girl on the gurney I just left. Light brown hair. Long lashes. High cheekbones. She’s lovely. There’s something vaguely familiar about her features. I move faster, pulling out tubes, disconnecting machines, and then I’m at the next gurney and the next, and each and every face is the same as the last.

A horrid thought hits me. I turn my head and look at Jackson. “Does it hurt them?” My question echoes through the room. His hands freeze on the tube he’s holding, but he doesn’t look up at me.

“No brain,” he says. “Nowhere to process the sensation of pain. You aren’t hurting them and you can’t kill something that isn’t alive in the first place.”

He’s right, but I feel sick anyway. I shove my emotions into a box and work my way down the line, aware of Tyrone creating a symphony of shattering glass behind me. I kill the next respirator and the next, telling myself these girls were never alive. They’re some sort of clones without brains, with machines breathing for them and feeding them. They’re shells destined to be used in a war against mankind, the ultimate spies, or maybe the ultimate stealth weapons.

I keep my breathing slow and steady, forcing myself to be calm. The smell is stronger now, antiseptic overlying something that smells sweet and foul, sort of like burning rubber mixed with raw bacon mixed with the smell of the mushroom farm Dad and I once drove past on the highway. I glance at the others and notice that Luka has the back of one hand pressed up against his nose as he moves between gurneys.

“Done,” he says a couple of minutes later. He’s reached the end of his row.

“Done,” Jackson says.

“What the hell is that smell?” Tyrone asks.

I hit the button on the last respirator and pull out the tubes and wires. “Done,” I choke out, the word catching in my throat. I force a deep breath and almost gag. I look at the body in front of me, really look, and then I see things I missed up till now because I was so focused on just getting the job done.

The skin of her feet doesn’t look right; it’s pale and shiny and there are blisters all over her toes. I move up to her calves and see more of the same. Turning, I check the next body. Her limbs are worse. There are actually chunks of skin sloughing off her feet and the blisters extend up above her knees. The next body has huge sections of skin sloughed off her hands and her arms are discolored.

The smell . . . it’s the smell of decay. The bodies are rotting, the ones at this end in worse shape than the ones at the far end of the row. I swallow against the bile that crawls up my throat.

“I think I know why security is so light,” I say. The others turn to stare at me. “There’s something wrong with them. Whatever the Drau have planned, this”—I wave my hands, searching for the right word—“
batch
failed. They’re rotting. Decaying. That’s the smell. The Drau didn’t care about them because they didn’t turn out right.” I point at the girl’s feet. “Why bother to guard something that’s broken?”

Jackson walks over and looks down at her, his expression blank.

“Good call,” he says. He doesn’t sound surprised. A crazy thought hits me: Jackson knew all along why there was light security here. He was waiting to see if I’d figure it out. I shake my head and discount that thought. Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he just tell me?

“Is this a test?” I ask so only he can hear.

He turns his face to me. “A test of what?”

“I don’t know.”

“If it were a test, you’d pass with flying colors, Miki.” So why does he sound angry about that? “Wait here,” he says, then strides across the room and pulls on a door I hadn’t even noticed before now. The handle turns, but the door doesn’t move. Jackson pulls out his weapon cylinder, touches the side, and when he fires it, the black surge isn’t greasy and oily, it’s a thin, powerful stream.

“I saw this show once about how a company in Texas uses machines that shoot water at such high pressure that it actually cuts through steel,” I say.

Jackson doesn’t answer. There really isn’t much for him to say. He turns his weapon on the row of respirators closest to him and destroys each in turn. Luka and Tyrone get to work on the other rows. But I stand frozen, watching Jackson. He puts his weapon away, taps the door handle, and it falls free. He steps into the room and makes a point of dragging the door shut behind him.

I look at Luka and Tyrone. “Does he always do this?”

“Do what?” Luka asks warily.

“Take a little personal time?” There’s a touch of venom in my tone, and I don’t really care. On the last mission he disappeared for a few moments there at the end while we were all waiting to make the jump. Now he’s done it again.

Luka hedges. “Not always.”

“Why keep any of them alive if the batch was tainted?” Tyrone asks, frowning at the nearest gurney. “Why not just destroy them all and start over?”

“Maybe they were hoping some would turn out okay,” I reply absently, still staring at the door Jackson disappeared through. “Like when you burn a tray of cookies but you let them cool and hope that maybe one or two are still”—I hesitate as I realize how inappropriate the analogy is—“edible.”

“That’s disgusting,” Luka says.

“Yeah.” I glance back at the closed door. Maybe I should do what Jackson said and wait here, but the way I see it, I’m in this nightmare through no choice of my own. I can curl up and let it happen to me, or I can do as Jackson suggested when we were alone in the tunnels: I can grab hold and steer it. If information is power, I need to find out everything I can, which includes what’s behind that door.

I take a step forward but find my way blocked by Luka’s arm. “Miki,” he warns. There’s a boatload of worry in the way he says my name, and that only makes me all the more certain that I need to see what Jackson’s hiding in there.

“Do you know what he’s doing?”

Luka and Tyrone exchange a look, which could mean either that they know or that they don’t want to know.

But I do. I duck under Luka’s arm and sprint to the door, pull it open, and freeze. The room’s the size of a large closet. It’s a lot colder than the bigger room behind me. My breath puffs little white clouds. There’s a single gurney in here, and a lone girl. She doesn’t look like the ones outside. She’s dark where they were fair, and she looks smaller, shorter, though I can’t be certain since she’s flat on her back. Hard to tell with her skin so pale and her eyes closed, but she looks older than the girls in the other room.

Jackson lifts his head. His fingers are clamped around the wires leading to her neck. His expression gives nothing away, but I don’t think he’s surprised to see me.

“You ever listen?”

I shake my head. “I’m more of a see-for-myself, think-for-myself kind of girl.”

My thoughts spin, tumbling one over the next. Why did he need to shut the door? Why is this girl isolated from the others? What doesn’t he want me to see?

And then the questions don’t matter because I see it. Her belly button. “She’s not a shell. She’s a person,” I whisper.

“She’s an original donor,” Jackson says, his tone flat.

“What does that mean? That they’ll use her to make an army like that?” I gesture toward the door behind me and the rows of shells beyond.

“Yes.”

“But the clones out there are from a different donor. . . .”

“They harvest genetic material and distribute it to growth labs all over the world.” He looks down at the body in front of him. “They’re still harvesting this one. They’ll keep her body alive until they’ve taken what they need, then ship out samples and terminate her.”

“So you’re just going to do the job for them and kill her? You can’t. Jackson, she’s not like the others. She wasn’t—” I make a futile gesture, at a loss for words. “She wasn’t grown like them. She’s
human
.”

“I’m not killing her. She’s already dead,” Jackson says.

I stare at the machines, the tubes and wires. “How do you know? She could still have a chance! She could—”

He pulls out his deadly black knife.

“No!” I lurch forward and clamp both hands around his wrist.

Tendons tighten beneath my fingers. He pulls away. His knife slashes down . . . around . . .

The top of her skull falls away. There are bloodstains inside her skull, but no brain. There’s no brain. They took her brain. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself.

“Why would they do that? Why would they take her brain?”

I think he isn’t going to answer me, and when he does, I wish he hadn’t.

“It’s a delicacy.” His tone is flat.

I stare at him openmouthed.

“They need her body, but they don’t need her brain for their purposes. So they took it.”

I press the back of my hand against my mouth, trying to hold back a howl of fear and revulsion and horror.

“She’s already dead,” Jackson says again, softer this time. He lifts his head. I desperately want to see his eyes, to know what emotions are mirrored there, to connect with him in our common humanity. But all I see is myself, pale and shaken, reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses. And suddenly it’s all too much.

Without a word, I reach up and rip the shades off. My gaze locks on his.

He stares back at me, his inhuman gray eyes beautiful and deadly and mercury bright.

I RESPAWN WITH AS MUCH GRACE AND ELEGANCE AS A PLANE crash. I’m on my driveway, facing my open front door, grocery bag in my hand, as though only two seconds, not almost two days, have passed.

The grocery bag’s handle slides down my palm, then along my fingers, impossibly slowly, just as it did before I got pulled. The world tips and tilts, and I flail for balance.

My head jerks up. My gaze collides with Luka’s. His eyes are wide and . . . brown.

I think of Jackson. His eyes. His beautiful, terrifying eyes. Confusion and panic swarm through my thoughts, spawning questions like maggots. But Jackson’s not here, and Luka isn’t the right person to ask.

The bag takes an eternity to fall to the ground, sending cans rolling in all directions. But they’re slow, too slow. I look up and see my dad coming out of the house, moving like he’s walking chest deep through a swimming pool, his expression taking forever to shift into surprise. The only things moving at regular speed are Luka and me.

There’s a throbbing behind my eyes and pressure in the joints of my jaw, then my ears pop and—as Luka said last time we respawned in real life—
bam
, we’re back. The world snaps into gear and Dad’s beside me, brow furrowed, hand extended.

Dropping to my knees, I reach for the rolling cans, glad for the excuse to avoid my father’s eyes. I don’t want to talk to him. Not right now. I can barely keep it together. The shells. The dead human girl. The machines.

Jackson’s eyes. A chill slithers along my spine. Jackson’s inhuman, mercury-bright eyes.

“Miki?” Dad says, and his feet are right there, beside me where I kneel by the fallen cans. I force myself to keep my head down. My hand is shaking. I grab a can and focus on that, only that, willing my dad not to notice my anxiety.

“Must be my day for clumsy,” I mutter, relieved when the words come out fairly steady.

From the corner of my eye, I see Luka set his bag down inside the front door and turn to watch me, his expression neutral. He’s better at the reacclimation thing than I am. No surprise. He’s had more practice. Even so, he leans one hip against the porch rail like he could use the support.

Does
he know about Jackson?
Has
he seen his eyes?

I suspect the answer to both questions is no. I can’t believe Jackson let
me
see them, and I have no doubt that he did let me. He could have stopped me from pulling his glasses off. He could have caught my wrists or turned his head, and the fact that he didn’t means he wanted me to see. Why?
Why?
I didn’t get a chance to ask. He ripped out the wires and tubes, and we made the jump while I was still gasping in shock, and I think that he planned that, too. Maybe I’m giving him too much credit, but I really believe what he said about steering his nightmare. I think he’s a master at it.

And even if I had managed to get my questions out before we got pulled, I’m skeptical he would have offered answers. He’s the king of evasion, telling me only the tidbits he wants me to know.

At least now I know why he’s always wearing shades, and the bizarre thing is, I’m shocked but not shocked. As I think about it, it’s like somewhere deep down, I knew exactly what I’d see. Didn’t he keep warning me that he isn’t a good guy?