Continuance (23 page)

 “I’m Special Agent Grieves.
What’s your name?” The name was already displayed inside his smartglasses, but
making her answer would be a good first step to get her talking.

Her eyes flickered to the wall
behind him and back again. “Ivory. Ivory Accardi.”

The silence broken, Lindsay found
his poise, pressing on with more confidence. “Miss Accardi, I’d like to ask you
a few questions.” He touched a control on the table, and a 3D photograph
materialized in the air between them. “Do you recognize this?”

She nodded. “It’s my school
picture. High school.”

“Yes. Nice photograph. Can you
tell me what grade you were in when it was taken?”

She seemed to hesitate. “I…I
don’t remember. Most of my pictures looked similar.”

“But that wasn’t so long ago for
you, was it? Just a few years, and you don’t remember?”

Her body tensed. “My senior
picture.”

“There. See? That wasn’t so hard.
Your senior picture – taken from the digital master of your yearbook. San
Marcos High School, class of 2085. The Excalibur Knights, right?”

The photo zoomed away, merging
neatly into a page of other senior photos, a single yearbook page. “But you
know what’s strange, Ivory?” Grieves reached into the satchel by his chair and
produced the book from San Marcos, sliding it across the table. “I paid a visit
to your old Principal Webber today. You remember him, right? He was kind enough
to loan us this hard copy of your yearbook.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t seem to
find this photo inside. I must have missed it.” Lindsay tapped a control to
deactivate the restraints on her right hand, leaving the left immobilized. “Maybe
you could you show me where it is?”

Ivory’s hand trembled as she
reached toward the book, then paused, hovering a few inches away. After a
moment, she yanked her arm back and hung her head. Sobs filled the room.

Lindsay had known she’d probably
break down. But her tears still gave him a moment’s hesitation.
She doesn’t
belong here.
He forced himself to continue. “You’d think maybe it’s a
printing error. After all, you’ve got pictures in the masters for your middle
and grade schools, too.”

Two more portraits appeared on
the photoscreen, each a younger version of her than the last. Like the first,
they zoomed away, merging into the digital pages they came from. Lindsay
reached into the satchel again. Ivory jerked as two more books landed on the
table with a double clap.

“Couldn’t find your picture in
those either,” he said. “Know why? Turns out they were inserted into the
digital masters later on. Pretty seamless work, too. Same story with your
transcripts and enrollment records.”

He had one last blow to land, a
final salvo in the assault. Another tap, and a video appeared above the table –
the same one he’d watched coming back from San Marcos. The resolution was
grainy and the perspective looked unsteady, as if taken with a handheld camera.
It showed three people seated inside a sports bar. Lindsay remembered Day and
Gallihugh from the lab. A smiling Ivory sat on their right. As the clip played,
Gallihugh rose, knocking a full glass of beer from the table. Ivory’s hand
moved in a blur, impossibly fast, catching it in midair. There was no sound
with the footage, but the others’ astonishment was clear as she set the full
glass back on the table. Lindsay killed the playback. “Impressive reflexes,
Ivory. How do you explain something like that?”

“I…I want a lawyer,” she managed
before bursting into tears.

Lindsay ignored the wetness
streaming down her cheeks. “Ordinarily – and by that, I mean ordinarily for
your time – an attorney would be just the thing to ask for right now. And
ordinarily
,
we’d be required to grant that request.” He shook his head. “The snag for you
is, things work a little differently for retreads in 2089.”

            Ivory’s mouth
hardened as she found a measure of defiance. “So I’ve got quick hands. So what?
And a few of stupid yearbooks don’t prove anything, except maybe I didn’t go to
school where I said I did.”

“True, but they do give us
probable cause to handle your case under Directive 95.”

Lindsay tapped another control,
and a pair of thin arms like white antennae folded out of the table. Near the
ends, the arms flattened to disks the size of sand dollars – neural engram
sensors. The primary tool used to verify continuance, the sensors measured
basic engram density in the brain. The results gave a crude reading of the subject’s
memories and experiences – not content, but quantity. Though not completely
precise, retreads always had decades more memories than their physiological
appearance suggested – more than enough for the sensors to make a clear
distinction. Ivory stared at them like a pair of twin vipers.

“All we need is a quick warrant to
use this. If we find out if you’re what we think you are, then it’s back on the
digital shelf. The forged records? This footage? It’s more than enough evidence
to get that warrant. In fact, we’re expecting to hear back from the judge any
time now. What do you suppose we’ll find when we look?”

Ivory’s chest heaved as she
fought back a new wave of sobs. “Don’t. Please. I don’t want to go back. I
don’t want to…end again.”

You already ended
once. How hard could it be?
Lindsay could tell she was ready now.
Time to dangle a carrot, the only one he had to offer.

“I won’t lie, Ivory. Your
situation’s not good. But if you answer a few more questions, maybe I can make
things a little easier on you.” He tried to put a measure of empathy in his
voice. “We do have some discretion here. If you cooperate, we have it in our
power to order a new biorecord for you. One that would preserve all your
post-continuance experiences.”

Trapped, she hesitated half a
second before her shoulders sagged. “What do you want to know?”

“We can start with my first
question again. What’s your name? Your real name.”

Her mouth worked silently for a
moment as if rebelling against her will to speak. “Summer. Summer Bishop.”

She could be lying, but Lindsay
knew the agents behind him would already be keying the name in, running it
through the system. It might take a while to verify, but they’d validate her
story, along with any known associates and contacts. “Okay… Summer. Who’s your
contact inside Chrysalis?”

She shook her head, talking
quickly. “I don’t know. They only use first names, and once we were oriented
for integration, they packed up the facility and moved to another location. I
never had a contact. I don’t know how to find them.”

Lindsay frowned, though he’d
expected as much. Chrysalis learned from its mistakes quickly. After the DIA
had raided a couple of their cloning centers with intel pried from captured
retreads and defectors, they’d adopted the tactic of operating out of temporary
facilities. These days, they set up shop behind some front just long enough to
turn out a crop of retreads, then disappeared. If they were lucky, she might be
able to give them a couple of clues, but for now, it was a dead-end question.
He could almost hear Costilla chuckling outside. Or yawning.

 “We’ll come back to that one,”
he said. “What’s your interest in the Chariot lab? Do you have a contact
there?”

Her mouth tightened, and she said
nothing. Lindsay considered it a promising reaction, a sign he was getting
somewhere.

“Maybe I wasn’t clear about that
biorecord,” he said. “If you’re not interested in telling us what we need to
know, we can just as easily use your existing one. The three years you’ve
borrowed here in lovely 2089 will be erased.” He snapped a finger. “Just like
that.”

His threat had the desired
effect. “Promise me you won’t…punish him,” she said. “He didn’t know.” Her
voice caught, and she swallowed. “He just thought I liked him.” The last came
out as a whisper, as if to herself.

Lindsay leaned forward. “
Who?
”

Summer’s eyes jerked toward the
engram sensors as she seemed to weigh her options. A fresh tear made a tiny
rivulet on her cheek. “His name is Stuart.”

Lindsay kept the smile he felt
from showing on his face. “The one from the video.”

Summer’s mouth dropped open before
she nodded. Clearly, she wanted to ask where they’d gotten the footage, but
Lindsay had no intention of telling her. Better to let her wonder.

 “That’s him,” she said. “I found
out he was an intern at Chariot, with access to Arkive. I followed him out to
this car race a bunch of the college kids were going to.” She hesitated again.

“And?”

She lowered her head, staring at
the table. “And I picked him up. It wasn’t hard. I let him think I was
fascinated by the work he was doing in the lab. And that I thought he was cute.
He agreed to get me in and show me around, probably to impress me. I thought he
could get me access to the data.”

Lindsay’s hands balled into fists.
Predators. Manipulators. That’s what the retreads were. Always using their
power and experience to get what they wanted, others be damned. They couldn’t
help it. This Stuart probably had no more chance of resisting her than a
schoolgirl would some sweet-talking pervert with a bag full of lollipops. And
the worst part was, she actually thought she cared about him.

She took his silence as an
invitation to say more. “Like I said, he doesn’t know about…me. He won’t be in
any trouble, right?”

“That depends.”

She had the gall to look
concerned. “On what?”

“On you. Or rather, on how much
you manipulated him. Did Mr. Gallihugh do as you asked? Did you get what you
were after?”

“No,” she said quickly, almost
before he finished. “And it was taking too long, so I started looking for
another contact. Stuart didn’t do anything.”

“We’ll be the judge of that. If
what you say is true, he may get out of anything long-term, but if we find
intent to violate security protocols, I doubt he can avoid prosecution.”

“But he didn’t
do
anything,” she pleaded.

“I can sympathize, but that’s
something you might have considered before conning him into committing a possible
crime.”

A look came into her eyes then,
angry and hard as steel. And something else, too. Dangerous? “You spiders have
them locked away in Arkive. This was the only way I could think of to get them
out. To see them again.”

People from her past, then.
Friends? Family? That was the trouble with retreads. For every one you brought
back, they wanted to bring along two or three more. And each of
them
wanted the same, a never ending chain.

“You make it sound like a
prison,” Lindsay said.

“Isn’t it? We’re inconvenient, so
you lock us away and forget about us like last year’s holiday decorations. The
difference is, no one plans to unbox them. Ever.”

Someone may, one
day.
If they’re crazy enough.
“If the people you’re interested in have their
biorecords in the system, you should know better than anyone they’re perfectly
fine. They’re not conscious. They feel no pain. They’re completely safe, and
they’ll stay that way until society finds a way to… accommodate them. And you.”

Suddenly, she shifted sideways,
balancing at an impossible angle with her feet laid out in the air beside her,
all of her weight on one arm. At the same time, she grabbed the table with her
other hand and pulled.

Her other hand.
Lindsay’s eyes
widened as he realized his mistake.
I left her wrist unbound.
Her foot
arced across the table in a blur, slamming into his temple. A second later,
something smashed into the other side of his head, hard. When it kept pressing
against his face, he realized it was the floor. The coppery taste of blood
filled his mouth.

He rolled onto his back and
gasped as something cold and unyielding pressed against his throat.
Instinctively, his hands jerked up to wrap around the chair leg she held with
steady pressure, point-down against his windpipe.
She’s deactivated the
other restraint.

“Stay out!” she screamed at the
photoscreen on the wall.

Sweat slicked his palms as he
held the leg with one hand and reached for his GLOCK with the other. The
pressure on his throat tripled as she bore down, and he jerked his hand back,
joining the other in a death grip on the chair leg, desperate to keep the metal
shaft on his windpipe from slipping any further.

“Don’t do that again,” she said
without looking at him, staring pure hatred through the hidden window in the
wall. She was a featherweight, not much over a hundred pounds, but she had
inhumanly perfect balance. Her position above him, one foot on the floor, one
knee pushing down on the seat of the chair, gave her all the leverage she
needed to keep him pinned like an insect.

“Stay out, or I’ll kill him! I
swear!” She thrust a pointed finger at Lindsay. “And I’d better not fall.”

They can’t shoot
her
,
Lindsay realized in horror. Her dead weight would skewer his throat like an apple.