Quicksilver (2 page)

The relay device. The mechanical angel that had followed me all the days of my life, though until recently I’d never suspected its existence. If the liquid-metal chip in my arm was the shackle binding me to my hometown, the relay had been the ball at the end of that invisible chain. But the chip was neutralized now, its programming wiped and its quicksilver sensors disintegrated. And the relay hadn’t shown a flicker of interest in me since.

The device felt cold in my palm, dead as a fossilized egg. But there was still one taunting little light glowing deep inside. And though I’d spent my last two days in Sudbury trying to get rid of the thing, it had resisted all my attempts to destroy it. The hammer had bounced off without leaving a dent; the bonfire hadn’t even scorched its surface; and when I tried dropping it into the middle of Ramsey Lake, it simply hovered beside the canoe, dodging every swipe I aimed at it with my paddle, until I gave up in frustration and retrieved it again.

My last idea had been to lock the relay in a metal box and bury it somewhere deep. But you couldn’t dig far in Sudbury without hitting rock, and I had a bad feeling it’d Houdini itself out of there in a few minutes anyway. And as long as the relay still worked, I couldn’t just leave it behind, because if anyone stumbled across it and set it off, Alison would be the first one to suffer. So I’d given up and brought the relay with me, because if it ever woke up again, I wanted to be the first to know. I pulled out the early-warning monitor I’d kludged together from an electromagnetic field detector and my old Nokia phone, and clamped the relay into it.

“Tor—I mean, Niki!” came my dad’s muffled shout. “Pizza’s here!”

Niki.
My new name was going to take some getting used to, even though I’d picked it myself. After ruling out all my favorite female engineers and inventors—
Mildred
was out of the question, and
Marie, Grace,
and
Elizabeth
were too old-fashioned for my taste—I’d taken a different tack and settled on
Nicola
. After Nikola Tesla, of course, but a little less Serbian. Or male.

With the new name came a new identity, but I hadn’t yet figured out who Niki was. I knew how she looked on the surface, but how she dressed and behaved, who her friends were, and what she did with her spare time were still a mystery. Would she be more like the real me than Tori had been or less? Which was safer?

Or was I fooling myself to think I could ever be safe again?

I understand,
said Sebastian Faraday’s deep, rich voice in my memory,
that the data you’ve collected from her is extremely important to your research.
And suddenly I was back in that cold grey place with Sebastian and Alison by my side, confronting the man who’d abducted me…

I gave myself a mental slap, and the memory dissolved. Why was I thinking about Mathis and his stupid experiment? He was out of my life now, and I had other things to worry about.

“Niki!” yelled my father.

“Be there in a sec!” I called as I headed for the washroom. “Just putting my contacts in!”

It was the final step in my transformation—grey-tinted lenses, to dull my turquoise eyes to a more ordinary shade of blue. From Tori Beaugrand, the girl everybody wanted, to Nicola Johnson, a new and unknown element in the universe.

I told myself it felt like freedom, and it did. But deep down, it also felt like death.

I eased the contacts into my eyes, wiping the saline from my cheeks and squeezing my lids shut until the sting went away. Then I took a deep breath, forced my shoulders back, and strode out to begin my new life.

INTERLUDE: Inductive Kickback

(The rapid change in voltage across an inductor when current flow is interrupted)

(1. 1)

The day I got back to Sudbury, I’d been missing for fifteen weeks and awake for thirty-five hours straight. I was filthy, exhausted, and longing for home, but I had to take care of Alison first—the relay had overloaded her synesthesia, and she was barely holding herself together. Once I’d seen her safely down the hill and off in the ambulance, I had no strength left, and all I wanted to do was lie on the scrubby grass and breathe cool, fresh air until my parents came to get me. But the rescue workers and the police had their own ideas about what I owed them, and soon a van from the local TV station was circling the scene as well. By the time Mom and Dad arrived, I was a mess of tears and helpless rage.

Guests at my parents’ house parties often compared my mom to a butterfly, because she was beautiful, charming, and had a knack for being everywhere at once. They didn’t realize that behind the gracious smile and light, ripping laugh were sharp teeth and a will of titanium, and that anyone who messed with her family would regret it. Her eyes misted up at the sight of me, but she didn’t break down. She greeted the police officers with a frosty little speech that sent them skulking back to their cruiser, dismissed the paramedics with the assurance that my family doctor was on his way, and with one arm tight around my waist and my father lumbering ahead of us like a human shield, she hurried me past the cameras into our waiting car.

The next two days were a recurring nightmare of examinations and interviews and conversations I’d have given anything to avoid—especially the talk with my parents, when I told them how Mathis had taken me and why. Lying to them, even partially, was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. But they were so relieved to have their only daughter back alive and whole and so anxious not to hurt me any more than I’d been hurt already that they didn’t ask nearly as many questions as they could have. Their biggest fear was of losing me again, and once I’d assured them—truthfully—that Mathis had been dealt with and the chip he’d put in my arm was gone forever, they were satisfied.

And then, in true Beaugrand parental fashion, they closed ranks to protect me from the world. They shielded me from the journalists camped out at the end of our driveway, they kept the police at arm’s length until we’d worked out a statement about my tragic memory loss and inability to identify my kidnapper, and they made polite excuses to all the friends and neighbors who called to find out how I was doing. Lara came to visit on the second day, but only after promising my mother not to ask questions or say anything that might upset me, which made our conversation stilted and uncomfortable. Not quite as stilted as when I’d tried to explain to Lara why I wasn’t interested in Brendan and definitely not as uncomfortable as when she found out I was going out with him anyway, but it would be hard to top either of those.

By the third day the media were losing interest and the flood of phone calls had tapered to a trickle. Lara sent me a rambling, semi-apologetic e-mail about how she and Brendan had got together in my absence, which explained why she’d looked so uncomfortable around me. Not because she’d given me up for dead—she knew I wouldn’t blame her for that—but because I’d told her that Brendan was a manipulative dirtbag who didn’t deserve to touch anything female for the rest of his life, and obviously she’d decided that I was wrong. I was hesitating over the keyboard, wondering how to say “good luck with that” without sounding bitchy, when the house phone rang.

Mom usually answered it, but right now she was out in the backyard, raking leaves. Gardening was one of the few things that relaxed her, and when she got into the zone, she didn’t like being interrupted. So I let it ring and waited for the answering system to pick it up.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Beaugrand,” said a tinny female voice over the speaker. “This is Dr. Gervais from GeneSystem Laboratories. I’m sorry to intrude, but we have a few concerns about your daughter’s sample…”

I snapped upright, shoving my laptop aside. Sample? Laboratory? The only one who had any business asking about my health, let alone knowing anything about it, was Dr. Bowman—that was what my parents paid him the big money for. Thanks to him, I’d never done a blood or urine test, never been vaccinated, and never set foot in a hospital except as a visitor. My rare visits to the doctor’s office were recorded on paper, my file kept separate from the usual patient database. No one was allowed to touch it except Dr. Bowman’s personal secretary, and Leah had been a close friend of my mom’s for twenty years.

And besides all that, our number was unlisted. So if a strange doctor was calling, something in the system had gone badly, even disastrously wrong. I leaped off the sofa, hurtled into the kitchen, and grabbed the phone.

“Dr. Gervais?” I said breathlessly. “I’m sorry, I was outside. This is Gisele Beaugrand.” I’d always had a talent for mimicry, and when I imitated my mother’s voice on the phone, even Dad couldn’t tell the difference. So there was no reason Dr. Gervais should suspect anything—but my heart was oscillating in my rib cage, just the same. “What were you saying about Tori?”

“Oh, hello,” said the woman. Was I paranoid, or did she sound excited? “I apologize for catching you at what must be a very emotional time. But when I heard that Tori was back home, I wanted to contact you as soon as possible. Do you have a moment?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, gripping the phone tighter. “Go on. What findings?”

“Well, back in August our forensic technicians compared the follicles we’d found on your daughter’s hairbrush to the blood and tissue samples the police had given us, and as you know, they were a match. But when we did the PCR on the tissue, we found some abnormalities, so we sent a few genes for sequencing…”

My knees buckled. I clutched the edge of the sink, nausea spiraling in my stomach.

The police had my DNA.

I should have seen it coming. When I was missing, they’d needed a way to identify my body, if they ever found it, and to help bring my supposed murderer to justice. And at that point, all the evidence pointed to Alison, the strange and possibly schizophrenic girl I’d been fighting with just before I disappeared. They’d found blood on her hands and bits of tissue stuck in the ring she’d been wearing—of course they’d wanted to know if the blood and tissue were mine.

“The results were extraordinary,” Dr. Gervais went on rapidly. “None of us have seen anything like your daughter’s gene sequence before, and we can’t account for the discrepancies between her DNA and that of an average young woman. We believe…” She checked herself and continued in a graver tone, “We’re concerned that Tori may have a rare genetic disorder. One that could be harmful, or even fatal, if not treated.”

Genetic disorder—so that was what they were calling it. Maybe they even thought it was true. Maybe they were sincerely concerned for my well-being and wanted to help me out, even though it wasn’t part of their job.

Or more likely they’d known for weeks that they were sitting on the biggest scientific discovery of their careers, and now that they’d found out I was alive, they’d say anything, do anything, to get me under their microscope again.

Well, screw the advancement of science. I’d just escaped from one man who thought he owned me, and it had been the most terrifying experience of my life. I wasn’t about to become anybody else’s lab rat. Not ever.

“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” I said coldly. “Tori is perfectly normal, and we’ve never had the least concern about her health. Obviously your results were compromised, or tampered with in some way.”

“That’s a possibility, yes,” said Dr. Gervais, not missing a beat. “And we’re looking into it. But the easiest solution would be to take a scraping of cells from your daughter’s cheek or get a blood sample for comparison purposes. If you’d be willing to cooperate—”

“No,” I snapped, and slammed down the phone. With trembling fingers I erased the message and added Dr. Gervais’s number to our Blocked Callers list.

But I knew that wasn’t the end of it. Now that she and the other scientists at GeneSystem had seen how unusual my DNA was, they’d never be satisfied until they knew why. No matter how many times I said no or how hard I tried to avoid them, they’d keep hounding me until I gave in. Or until they got impatient enough to stop asking and start looking for some legal—or not so legal—way to force my hand.

And then all my dreams of living a free and happy life and becoming a successful engineer one day would be over. Because once Dr. Gervais and her people realized just how extraordinary I was, they’d never let me go.

As if to prove the point, the phone started ringing again. This time I didn’t wait for the message or even look to see who it was. I ripped the plug out of the wall and ran to find my mother.

(1.2)

The worst of it was, there was nothing
good
about my weird biology. Sure, I didn’t get sick often and when I did, the symptoms were usually mild, but Lara rarely got sick either, so I didn’t put much stock in that. I had a knack for figuring out how machines worked and making them work better, but there were plenty of engineering prodigies in the world. It wasn’t like I’d been gifted with super-hearing or X-ray vision—nothing like Alison and her synesthesia.

Yet as far as our DNA was concerned, Alison was perfectly normal. I was the freak.

“We always knew something like this might happen,” Dad told me, as we held our conference around the dining room table. He patted my mother’s shoulder—as usual she’d been calm and decisive while the crisis was fresh, but now that the shock had hit her, she was shaking. “And since Tori doesn’t have that chip in her arm anymore, there’s no reason not to use our emergency backup plan. I’d hoped it’d never come to this, but…” He opened the file folder in front of him and leafed through the stack of notes, letters, and printouts inside. “Maybe it’s time.”

“There’s no
maybe
about it,” Mom said thickly through a fistful of tissues and fumbled across the table to grip my hand. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. When they said they needed your hairbrush for the investigation, I should have guessed … but I was so afraid we’d never see you again…”