Stray (21 page)

Aunt. Boyfriend
.

A surge of terror and longing for both.

“Can I see my aunt?”

A troubling pause as he studies my face.

“You’re very alike.”

I want to hide myself in the mattress.

“She’s your mother’s twin sister?”

“Can I see her, please?”

“She’ll be in isolation until she has completed ReProg.”

ReProg
. The word hollows me out.

“You’re familiar with the concept?” A small smile. “In the early days of the organisation, before the reform, it was a primary tool for ensuring Asset cooperation. Persuasion, coercion, rewards. Physical and psychological.”

Torture.

My voice comes thin as a wisp. “She had nothing to do with my … actions. Neither did Jamie.”

“For their sakes, I hope not – considering the charges they’re already facing.”

I dig my fingers into the mattress. “You can’t punish them for helping me save my Spark’s life.”

“The ignorant assumptions of the uninitiated.” The hard stretch of his lips. “We are a fragile organism, Evangeline. Protocol protects us and the civilians around us.”

“Please, can I just speak to Tes – Counsellor Tesla?”

“I wouldn’t be in a hurry to see Ethan, if I were you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry.” His expression betrays a hint of pleasure in the idea. “You’ve given him only two days of usable data at an unthinkable price, the violation of our Primary Objectives. You have proven most effectively that the
benefits
of Early Detection Studies are altogether outweighed by the risks. There will be a full inquiry, but as the Chair of the Executive I cannot permit the Deactivation Program to continue, whatever the covenants of Ethan’s precious reform may dictate.”

If I wasn’t already lying down, I’d fall.

The Deactivation Program – cancelled because of me?

I know it means more than I can understand, for Tesla, for every Shield who ever fantasised about a life free of Sparks and Strays, but my only frame of reference is how it will ruin Jamie’s chance at a normal life. He had a way out and I’ve slammed the door. My head spins. My muscles spasm. A sickening pain fires through my spine. I groan through my teeth, “It’s not Tesla’s fault.”
It’s not Jamie’s fault
. “You can’t do this to him.”
You can’t do this to Jamie
.

“It’s not his fault? It’s not your aunt’s fault – not your boyfriend’s? Whose fault is it? Is it yours, Evangeline?”

“Yes!”

“Yes.” He sounds pleased if not a little bored. “That is part of the truth but not all of it. Did you make Ethan keep you from Orientation? Did you force your aunt to lie to the Warden about the Activation of your signal, your boyfriend to break the protocols he was trained in? They had no choice? They were helpless against you? Nothing is isolated. Their choices allowed your choices. All must be held to account.”

I can’t speak, dazzled by pain and the blunt-force trauma of his words.

“I see you’ve burned through the morphine. Perhaps a nurse will come soon and increase your dose. In the meantime, pain can be very … clarifying. I trust you’ll take the opportunity to reflect on your choices. I will see you in ReProg.”

He walks away, up the aisle to a sliding door at the end of the room. It whizzes open like something from
Star Trek
. He steps out into a brief glimpse of blank concrete corridor and the door closes behind him.

At the sound of it closing the girl in the bed next to mine swivels her head and opens her eyes. I jolt with fright. Large silver irises set in a pale globe of face rivet on me. I wait for her to speak. She doesn’t. Eventually her eyes close and I wonder if she was awake at all or if she opened her eyes in her sleep. Soon, I’m too weak to wonder and though my fears loop in cumbersome circles I drag them with me into an agonised sleep.

She’s gone when I wake, the silver-eyed girl, and an older woman lies in her place, headset over her temples. Somehow, I am now lying on my back and wearing a papery hospital gown. Somehow, this doesn’t feel excruciating, though there’s a lump, hard and long like a brick beneath my spine, and a small round lump at the base of my skull, the new tracker. There are sensor pads at my temples, an IV line in my arm and monitors beeping around me. I have the same tidal wave of comprehension as before: where I am, what I’ve done, what’s to come.

There’s movement beside me and I’m able to turn and look towards the other end of the ward. More beds and bodies. A windowed room, medical staff moving within.

“Excuse me,” I say to the back of the medic beside me, with a delayed realisation that she’s producing ETR, a gentle and vaguely familiar signal in the bandwidth. She taps icons on a monitor and turns at the sound of my rasping voice. It’s the woman who came to the house with Tesla. “Felicity?”

She looks different in white medical scrubs with her auburn hair pinned up. I try not to stare at her pale hand, so chalky compared to the other. Her lips form a tight purse, the worry lines around her eyes pronounced. “You may call me Counsellor Allen.”

“You’re a doctor? How long have I been out?”

“I’m a Conductor and caretaker for the Symbiosis. You’ve been asleep most of the day.” Her brow contracts to match her lips. “Counsellor Tesla
asked
me to check on you.”

Symbiosis means something but Tesla’s name pushes it aside, stirring my urgency. I push up on my elbows, wincing against the stab of pain in my back. “Is he here? I need to talk to him. Please. It’s important.”

“You’ve gone and made a dire mess of things, child.” She leans over me, peeling the sensor pads from my temples. She smells like talcum powder and peppermint, comforting smells at odds with her abrupt manner. “Counsellor Tesla is a great man. I don’t agree with everything he says but he has done a lot to improve the way things are done around here. You have no idea. Now he will lose his program and likely be stepped down from the Executive because of you.”

“I know.” I sink into my shoulders. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

She pauses over the equipment trolley, returning the pads to their container. “Who told you?”

“The Chair guy. Knox.”

“Counsellor Knox came to see you personally?”

“He woke me before.”

“What did he say?”

“Stuff about ReProg and choices and the Deactivation Program.”

“Did he mention your aunt?”

A shudder moves through me. “He said Tesla was prepping her for the hearing.”

Her eyes dart from side to side and her lips part. She takes my arm and peels back the tape from the IV line. A woozy rush to the head as she slips the long needle from beneath my skin and covers the welling site with a cotton pad. “She’s there now, in ReProg,” Felicity says, not looking at me. “She won’t yield.”

“Yield? I – I don’t know what you mean.”

“She’s resisting the Symbiosis. She has been for the last three hours. If she doesn’t yield, she’ll suffer permanent damage.”

“I don’t know what any of that means.” My voice grows shrill. “Damage? What kind of damage? I thought it was a hearing.”

“Lower your voice; you’ll disturb the Wardens.” She glances around at the other beds. “The hearing takes place in ReProg. They perform an interrogative Harvest via the Proxy.” She tilts her head forwards. “You saw the room with the black glass in my memories, and the girl in the tank?”

I think I nod, though I feel paralysed.

Felicity removes the sensor pads from my wrists as though stalling for time, considering what she should tell me next, and finally says, “Your aunt is withholding information. If she doesn’t yield, it prolongs her exposure to the Symbiosis.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I say through my teeth. It comes out like a hiss.

A pained frown bunches her face. “It’s the chemical conductor inside the glass. It boosts the Proxy’s telepathic reach and converts the Harvest into visual footage for screening. Prolonged exposure on that scale can damage the cerebral cortex.”

“Brain damage. They’re giving my aunt brain damage?”

She releases a sharp breath and reaches for the neck of my gown. I look down at a blinking sensor over my heart and slip my hand down my front before she can. I tear the pad from my chest and shove it in her hand.

“Your aunt is choosing brain damage by her non-compliance.”

“Nobody
chooses
brain damage.” I clench fistfuls of sheet and pain fires through my back. “That creepy little girl’s doing this to her from the tank?”

“Don’t speak about the Proxy like that.” She glares at me. “Her whole life is a sacrifice.”

“You have to do something. Didn’t you say you were the caretaker? Can’t you turn it off? Stop them.”

“Child, I have no authority to do anything of the sort and nor is it possible.” She taps the side of the bed and the head begins to rise with a hydraulic whirr. “Besides which, we have twenty-three Wardens here right now, going through amplification before district sweeps.”

I press back into the mattress as I’m brought upright, my skin crawling with the clearer view of the bodies in the beds all around me. I’m the only one awake. The only one not wearing a headset. Wardens, the telepaths that sweep through towns identifying active Sparks and Shields. I wonder if the woman who came to the Gallaghers’ is here. My gaze shifts to the monitors and the tubes that lead to the central pipe that runs along the ceiling. Black glass. “I can’t feel their signals.”

“Most people don’t feel signals at all,” she says with a huff. “The Symbiosis acts as a buffer.”

“It comes through the headsets?”

“The Symbiosis conducts the Proxy’s signal from the isolation tank to the ReProg room and to here.”

“I thought I was in recovery.”

“You are.” She picks up a small silver disc, like the one Tesla used in the operating room to paralyse me. I stiffen as she points it at my neck but all it does is beep and she gives a satisfied nod before returning it to her pocket. “A room of amplified signals increases your rate of recovery. They want you prepped for ReProg, now.”

“Now?” I baulk, my mind reeling. That’s what she’s doing. Taking me to ReProg.
Now
. “I can’t. I need to talk to Tesla first, it’s important.”

“He can’t leave the hearing; that’s why he sent me.” Her expression grows troubled, conflict in her eyes as she moves to the foot of the bed and slowly rolls me out into the aisle. “He wants me to tell you …”

“Tell me what?” I say, half choked.

She hesitates and drops her voice to a whisper. “He says you must keep your aunt’s secret.”

Benjamin and Davis wait beyond the sliding door. Benjamin is cool and detached, though I read tension in his clamped jaw. Davis doesn’t hide his loathing. My escorts to ReProg. I should take it as a compliment they think I’m capable of putting up a fight. Benjamin pushes my bed down the long concrete corridor, Davis in front. Felicity walks beside me, clasping the small silver disc. A deterrent – fight and she’ll zap me. The ceiling rises high above, metal vents, white lights. Narrow, windowless. The bed wheels sing on the polished floor. Felicity doesn’t look at me or speak. My heart hammers, but I’m cold like there’s no blood in my body. I can’t control my trembling or focus on a single coherent thought.

What’s my defence? My plan?
Please let Aiden be far away
. Tesla’s warning. Miriam’s secret. He must know. There is no other secret. I’m her daughter, she’s my mother.
Miriam’s my mother! She’s Aiden’s mother!
How do I keep it from a freaking super telepath when it’s right there, throbbing in the forefront of my mind?

Physical memory
.

It has to be physical, Kinetic Memory – Transfer and Harvest. She can’t just plunder my thoughts or read what I’m thinking, only things that I’ve done, places I’ve been – moments with strong emotional and physiological connections. She’ll see me Sparking at Kitty’s touch, training in Miriam’s underground room, fighting Aiden on the Gallaghers’ estate, kissing Jamie beneath the willow tree.

Jamie
.

Has he been in ReProg too? Is he hurt? Does he know I’ve ruined his chance at Deactivation – another thing to hate me for? At least Kitty must be home by now. Benjamin gave up his search for her at the 7-Eleven, in a hurry to get me to the compound. Would they have gone to the Gallaghers’ estate afterwards? Interrogated her there? The idea makes me nauseous.

Please don’t let this all be for nothing
.

If I could just speak to Tesla, explain about the sample, beg him to test it …

There’s a blank metal door at a T-section at the end of the corridor. It’s one of four in the brushed concrete wall, each illuminated by a stark pool of light, the shadows between thickly dark.

“Stay calm,” Felicity says. “Or they will pacify you.”

Before I can react the door swishes open. As I expect – as I fear – it’s the room with black glass walls, suspended chair and, like the operating room, a sloping floor and grated drain. ReProg.

As they wheel me in, the glass reflects our monochromatic procession. Benjamin and Davis in black. Felicity in white scrubs. My pale and stiffly propped body covered in a white sheet, my scraggly black crop making an erratic outline around my head. My eyes seem huge, cheekbones pronounced, lips bloodless. I look like a child. I look like a crone. My edges blur in the glass and I realise it’s my trembling and I curl my fists to quell it but can’t.

I brace, expecting a static storm like when Tesla and his team came to the house, but as Benjamin positions the bed beside the suspended chair nothing troubles the bandwidth. The only signals I sense are the three that came in with me. Unnerved, I have to force myself to exhale. The Executive must be behind the black glass opposite the chair. The observation room – I didn’t see it in Felicity’s memory but I knew through her focus and tension that it was there. I try to relax, open my senses for the sound of quiet conversation but there’s nothing.

Maybe they haven’t assembled yet. Maybe they’re still with Miriam. I no sooner form the thought than the black glass of the central wall transforms from a solid, mirror surface to liquid that drains away between thick clear panes. The process takes all of three or four seconds, leaving the glass pristine. Behind the central panel, five people stand on a metal walkway. Their signals hit me full force, a torrent. My head presses back into the inclined mattress and the muscles in my arms and legs spasm.