Quicksilver (29 page)

(3.1)

“So that’s it?” I asked in disbelief, as Sebastian turned off the quantum impulse generator, and its low throb of power died down. “We’re just giving up?”

We were standing in the main control room of the spacelab, where Sebastian, Alison, and I had first met Mathis nearly five hours ago. Only it was just Sebastian and me at the moment, because Alison was resting in another room, and we’d locked Mathis up in his quarters so he couldn’t interfere with our attempt to escape.

An attempt which had, apparently, failed.

Sebastian braced his hands on the console and bowed his head as though it was too heavy for him. “You built that generator perfectly, Tori,” he said. “Thanks to you, we can open a wormhole again. The problem is, there’s no way to tell whether it’s the right wormhole to get you home. I thought I could compensate for the loss of the long-range sensors, but…” His shoulders slumped. “It’s not going to work. I’m sorry.”

A laugh broke out of me, so sharp it hurt my throat. “Sorry? You think that’s going to make me feel better about being stuck here for the rest of my life?”

“No.” Sebastian’s long face was sober. “But right now, it’s the only thing I can give you.”

I couldn’t look at him anymore. Swiping angrily at my eyes, I spun around and walked to the center of the room. Above me the domed viewscreen displayed a dazzling view of the stars, clearer and brighter than I’d ever seen them on Earth, but all the constellations were unfamiliar. Maybe I’d get used to that eventually, but I didn’t want to.

I wanted to go home.

“I should talk to Alison,” Sebastian murmured, sounding almost as lost as I felt. Then he walked out.

I sank onto one of the benches, numb to the core. I knew Sebastian was right about the long-range sensors, but part of me still couldn’t believe it was over. I’d worked so hard to build that wormhole generator, reaching deep into myself to draw on instincts I’d barely known I had, and when it was done, I’d felt like a technological goddess. But it had all been for nothing in the end.

I stared at the floor for a few seconds, and then I got up again. I’d already had more than my share of emotional outbursts today, and I didn’t have enough energy left for another one. I walked back to the console where Sebastian had been working, and looked at the cluster of touch panels and windows he’d left behind.

Most of the readouts were impossible for me to decipher, since they were in whatever language people spoke here. But in the top left-hand corner were a couple of tiny, colorful rectangles with moving shapes inside them. I touched the closest one and dragged it, and it expanded to show me a view of the room where Alison had been resting. She wasn’t lying down now, though. She was sitting up, leaning against Sebastian as he sat on the bed beside her and told her the bad news.

I touched the window again and gave it a flick upward, splashing it onto the viewscreen in front of me. It expanded to fill the whole panel. Now the two of them looked almost as big as I was, the picture so clear and lifelike that I felt like I could have reached right into it and tapped Sebastian’s shoulder or brushed back the tangled strands of Alison’s hair. But if they knew I was watching, they gave no sign of it.

“… Even if we could rig up a replacement,” Sebastian was saying, his arm around Alison’s waist, “it would take days to calibrate. Days we don’t have. I’m sorry.”

Alison didn’t say anything. She just gazed at the wall until Sebastian said again, “I’m sorry,” and then she turned to him and hid her face against his chest.

Well, at least Sebastian had been straight with her, painful as the news must have been for her to hear. But then, she had told me that he’d never lied to her yet—though how he’d managed to pull that one off I couldn’t imagine…

And now he was kissing Alison, and she was kissing him back. Not a gentle let-me-comfort-you kiss, either. It was the kind of kiss that looked like it was going to end up horizontal, and Sebastian didn’t seem to have any reservations about going there.

So obviously my apathy toward sex wasn’t an Alien Thing, any more than it had been a Chip-in-the-Arm thing. It was just me.

Well, if making out made Sebastian and Alison feel better, I wasn’t going to interrupt. But the idea of watching it happen was a definite Do Not Want. I swiped the image back down onto the console and squeezed it as small as it would go. Then I pulled the second window on top of it and opened that one up instead.

Mathis was sitting on the sofa in his quarters, dabbing dried blood from his nose. He looked disheveled and slightly dazed, as though the sedative had only just worn off. “Serves you right,” I said aloud, knowing he couldn’t hear—

But as I spoke, he looked around. Apparently he could. And when he touched something on the arm of the sofa and his eyes focused on mine, I realized he could see me too.

My heart rate jumped twenty beats a minute, but I told myself it didn’t matter. Mathis and I had changed places: now he was the prisoner, while I was the one in control. “Sleep well?” I asked tartly.

Mathis stood up, smoothing back his brassy hair and tugging his crumpled tunic back into place. “Astin. Where is he?”

“He’s busy,” I said. “And even if he wasn’t, I don’t think he has anything to say to you at the moment. I, on the other hand, have plenty.” I leaned closer, hoping to intimidate him. “What were you planning to do with me, before Sebastian stopped you?”

“If you thought he’d really stopped me, little girl,” said Mathis, walking forward until his head and shoulders filled the screen, “you wouldn’t need to ask.”

Little girl.
That was a laugh, coming from someone who looked a lot closer to my age than he did to Sebastian’s. Just a junior scientist with big ambitions, so desperate to make a name for himself that he’d been willing to torture a baby and beam her through a wormhole to get the results he wanted. And so scared of competition, apparently, that he’d faked a relay malfunction and left Sebastian stranded on Earth for fifteen years.

“I’m asking,” I told him, “because we outnumber you three to one. And if I were you, I’d be rethinking my original plans and trying to negotiate.”

Mathis twitched a half-smile. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Because if you were me, you’d remember that before long the military will be arriving to take over this station. And if I’m not there to greet their commander and speak up for you and Astin and the Earth girl, you’ll be identified as rebel intruders and shot on sight.”

With sinking dread, I realized he had a point. I hadn’t thought of that. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

“Sebastian can speak for himself,” I said. “If he was such a brilliant student, I’m sure at least some of your fellow scientists remember his name. And after what you did to him, maybe you should be more worried about whether he’ll speak up for you.”

Mathis laughed. “You’re a clever one,” he said, but in the same superior tone as a trainer might say
good dog.
I clenched my fists behind my back, resisting the urge to reach through the screen and throttle him.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” I said.

“That’s because I don’t know all the details myself. My intent was to keep you in isolation until the shuttle arrived, then take you back to the planet and turn you over to the senior scientists. What happens to you after that…” He tipped his head to one side in a shrug-like gesture. “They may decide to question you and keep you for further study. They may want to do their own experiments on you—to see how you react to certain bacteria and toxins unique to our world, for instance.”

I had a sudden, vivid image of being trapped in a glass cylinder, choking and clawing at my throat as green fumes swirled around me. Of being naked and bound to a table, writhing as red welts and blisters erupted all over my skin. And as I screamed for mercy, men and women in neat grey uniforms watched me from a professional distance and took notes.

“At the least,” Mathis went on blithely, “they’ll take blood and tissue samples for further study. Likely they’ll do a full brain probe and some stimulus tests as well.”

I’d thought talking to Mathis might make him reconsider his attitude toward me, especially now that he’d had a literal taste of his own medicine. I’d hoped that my first impression of him had been wrong and that somewhere behind that smug facade he still had some sense of compassion, or at least shame.

But nothing had changed. In Mathis’s eyes, I was only a worthless half-breed slave, a piece of biological rubbish he’d picked up cheap and had every right to use as he pleased. And now I realized, with sick certainty, that his fellow scientists felt the same way.

“And after that?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“Oh,” said Mathis, “if you’re still alive by then, we’ll probably terminate you.”

PART FOUR: Manual Override

(The process by which an automated system is suspended, modified, or otherwise put under the operator’s direct control)

Ten

“Niki! Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

I’d come into the house quietly, hoping to wash my dirt-smeared face and put on some makeup before I talked to my parents. I hadn’t wanted them to see me like this. But Crackers burst into excited barks as soon as he caught my scent, and before I could bolt, my mother came flying out of the kitchen to meet me.

“You look like a ghost,” she breathed, catching my face between her hands. “Oh, honey! Who did this to you? Are you hurt?”

“I’ll live,” I said roughly, ducking away from her. I kicked off my shoes and went into the living room, throwing myself down on the sofa and dropping my forearm across my burning eyes. The arm with the quicksilver in it—the chip Sebastian had put there. But why had he done it?
Why?

Mom took a hesitant step toward me. “Do you want me to get your father? Or—is there something we should talk about first?”

I heard the catch in her voice, and I knew what it meant: she was trying to be calm and reassuring, because she thought that was what I needed. But inside she was terrified.

“Mom,” I said hollowly, “I haven’t been assaulted.” Or at least, not in the way she thought. “Milo and I broke up this afternoon. But he didn’t even touch me. He just … left.”

“Oh.” She exhaled the word, sad and slow. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s a bigger problem.” I made myself sit up again. “Mom, I have something to tell you and Dad, and I need to say it quickly. Because…” I swallowed. “I’m going to disappear soon, the way I did last summer. And this time, I won’t be coming back.”

Nine

In the end, telling my parents wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. I was still in shock over Sebastian’s betrayal, and my initial hysteria had given way to a numb, fuzzy state where nothing seemed entirely real. Even as I talked, I felt like I was floating above myself, surveying the scene in the living room as a detached observer. Noticing odd little details like the dead fly on the coffee table and the flecks of toothpaste in my father’s beard—things I would have dismissed or overlooked in the past but which held a strange fascination for me now. Maybe because I knew that whatever I set my eyes on, I might well be seeing for the last time.

But I couldn’t forget how I’d got here or why I was telling this story. I needed my parents to know not only what was about to happen to me but what kind of person their daughter really was. All the secrets I’d kept from them, all the lies I’d told. How I’d taken my mother’s painstaking lessons in kindness and courtesy and turned them into an operating manual for the human race, treating people like machines because that was the only way I could understand them or make myself care. How every relationship I’d ever had was an illusion, including my relationship with them. Because I’d been genetically programmed to submit to whoever owned me, so the choices I’d made to respect and obey my parents hadn’t been choices at all.

“I don’t belong on this world,” I said finally. “I was never meant to be part of it. I know you wanted me to get married and have a family of my own someday. But I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, even if I could stay.” I gave a pained shrug. “I’m just too … alien.”

Tears had welled up in Mom’s eyes, and now they spilled over. She buried her face in her hands, and Dad put an arm around her. Neither one looked at me or spoke. I might as well have been dead to them already.

Well, wasn’t that how I’d wanted it? Now they knew I wasn’t Their Kind after all, they wouldn’t mourn me any more than they should. Maybe they’d even adopt another child to replace me. A nice, ordinary child who could fill the empty space I’d left in their hearts and give them the grandchildren they longed for. And in the end, they’d come to believe that my going away had been the best thing for all of us.

Or at least I hoped so, and I’d done everything I could to make that possible. Because the only thing I hadn’t told them, the one secret I’d kept to myself, was what Mathis planned to do to me when he got me back. They didn’t know—they didn’t need to know—that all I could look forward to was a few weeks or months of captivity, before even that pathetic excuse for a life was taken away.

I got up quietly and began to leave.

“Tori!” Dad sounded hoarse, and his voice broke on the second syllable. He heaved himself up from the sofa to intercept me. “Don’t. Don’t you go anywhere.”

And with that he threw his arms around me and hugged me so hard I felt like my heart would crack. I stood wooden in his embrace, too stunned to speak—and then I felt Mom reaching around me from the other side, stroking back my hair and pressing a kiss to my temple.

“You’re our daughter,” she whispered. “Always. No matter where you came from. Don’t leave us, sweetheart.”

I bowed my head against Dad’s chest, swallowing tears. I felt ashamed of myself for not giving them more credit, for not realizing that their love for me really was as deep and lasting as it seemed. That it had never been about me being Their Kind, only about me being
theirs.