The Vanishing Girl (16 page)

Chapter 25

“
You can teleport
?” I asked, my voice hushed.

He shook his head. “No. I was never a part of the project. I
—
I was the son he always wanted.”

I picked up the photo I dropped. I studied the image. The man in the photo was old and pockmarked. Small teeth poked out between thin lips. He had the misfortune of having both an overbite and a weak chin. “Is this your father?” I didn’t bother to look up.

“Yes. And the boy is me.”

Unlike his father, Adrian had perfect features, even as a child. Green eyes framed by long lashes, a heart-shaped face, and a sweet smile.

“You two don’t look
—
”

“Alike?” he finished for me. “I know. Although it might surprise you to know that I do share his same genetics; he just played extensively with mine.”

“What else did he do to you?” I asked.

“He made sure I was highly intelligent, and that I’d be kind and empathetic in nature.”

“He might’ve messed that one up,” I said.

“Very funny,” he said, smiling sadly at the photo in my hands. “I miss him. He died a few months ago. He really was a great guy.”

“Uh huh.” I knew my response was somewhat rude, but I mean, the man had played God and ruined my life in the process.

“He knew what he did was wrong,” Adrian said, his eyes gliding up to meet mine. “Which is why he created you.”

All was quiet
for a few seconds. I cleared my throat. “Now I really don’t understand what you’re talking about.” I put the picture back on the shelf and folded my arms protectively in front of me.

“In his notes my father left a list of the teleporters he altered slightly differently from the rest. These individuals were coded to be defiant, curious, and mistrustful by nature.

He came over to me and wrapped his hands around my forearms. The feel of his touch made me start. “Ember, you’re on that list.”

My eyes widened. I wasn’t exactly surprised that someone did this to me, just that out of all the teleporters created, I was one of the few who’d been coded to cause trouble.

“The project wanted these types of traits to be extinguished from their teleporters. I mean, what use is a good weapon if you can’t control it?” Adrian’s eyes began to sparkle with excitement, and I took a step back, my lips turning down at the corners.

“So my father studied the couples participating, read their files, and after picking out a few of them, he went in and tweaked additional genes in these couples’ future children.

“He altered only the subtlest of genes
—
genes that helped nudge personality traits in one direction or another. The project screened against the main genes that coded for character traits, so he stuck to ones that, with the right combination of nature and nurture, could be influenced.”

I raised my eyebrows at this.

“He’d chosen couples that appeared to be the most likely to nurture these traits in the right direction.”

I thought of my own parents. They’d always allowed me to be my own person and always encouraged me to ask questions; they’d been the perfect candidate for his father’s little side project.

“It was a gamble whether the whole thing would work or not. But now I know it did
—
your actions are proof.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to process this information. The thought that my genes had been toyed with a little more than the others made me feel worse rather than better. Sure, it explained some things, but sometimes ignorance was blissful.

“If you really think I’m proof that your father’s little experiment worked, then why did you only just decide to fully trust me?” I asked.

He folded his arms and gave me a look. “Please, I wasn’t born yesterday. Self-preservation can trump even the most defiant behavior. I had to assume that if a teleporter like you survived this long, you’d have a strong sense of self-preservation. But now that you’ve realized just how dire your situation currently is, I figured I could finally trust you.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said sarcastically, mostly to cover how much his words had shaken me. How much this whole conversation had shaken me.

“So,” I said, “what happened to the others?” I asked.

“You mean the others whose genes were altered like yours?”

I nodded.

He shrugged. “Perhaps some died. The traits probably never expressed themselves in others. There might be more out there who are also defiant, but you’re the one living at the facility, so you tell me: have you noticed any other teleporters expressing insubordinate behavior?”

I shook my head. No, I hadn’t noticed. Not that it meant anything. Survival, after all, did trump disobedience.

I rubbed my forehead. “What was your father hoping to accomplish by altering me and the others on that list?”

“I told you
—
he developed a conscience somewhere along the way. He wanted the program to self-destruct, and he wanted one of you to do it.”

As soon as
I woke up the next morning, I snatched up an old notebook and began to scribble down everything I could remember about my conversation with Adrian the night before. When I was done, I rubbed my hand and thought over all I’d learned.

What was more amazing than the idea that a scientist had plotted this all out nearly two decades ago was that, somehow, his vision was going according to plan.

I didn’t know how much nature and nurture each affected who we became, but it appeared that, if the right combo occurred, it might actually account for a lot. After all, I seemed to not be fitting in the same way the other teleporters were. I was the loner, the one who asked too many questions. The others
—
even Caden
—
truly had the ideal soldier mentality: they worked together, defended each other with their lives, and didn’t question orders.

On a whim I booted up my computer to do a little research on Adrian’s father. While I waited for my computer to start up, I chewed on my pen.

It was awfully convenient that I’d happened to meet Adrian
—
the girl who questioned orders hand delivered the scientist’s son his father’s work. That was way too remote a possibility to be a coincidence.

But if it wasn’t a coincidence, then what exactly was going on?

Once my computer
turned on, I opened up a browser. I first searched for Adrian Sumner, remembering his last name from that first note I’d received weeks ago. I was only researching him to find information on his father, but as soon as I Googled Adrian Sumner, the results were too interesting not to read.

He’d had several pieces written on him in famous publications, such as the
Huffington Post
,
Men’s Health
, and
Scientific American
.

Adrian was a Yale graduate who’d gone on to work with computers, rather than genes like his father. He’d designed and patented several innovations that big name tech industries had bought off, and according to the
Huffington Post
, he was making astounding progress in the field of artificial intelligence.

When he wasn’t pushing his technology in Silicon Valley, he was living the high life as a New York socialite
—
whatever the hell that meant. The photos of him were glamorous, one sleek shot of him in a suit was followed by another of him reclining on a yacht with a famous actor. I didn’t know which disgusted me more
—
his yuppie life or that I’d ruined it.

I opened another tab and located an article on Adrian that linked him to his father, Dr. Brent Sumner. Bingo.

I typed his father’s name into the search bar and hit
Enter
. For the next fifteen minutes, I flipped through page after page on the good ol’ doctor.

I chewed my lip as I read through all he’d done. His fame came from not just understanding human genes, but how they each affected one another. In addition, he’d spent a great deal of his time working with dark matter, sections of DNA that did not contain genes, but were triggers for expressing genes.

Triggers for expressing genes. That sounded frighteningly similar to what Adrian had told me last night. I might’ve just found the smoking gun behind my temperament.

I blinked and focused my gaze once more on the search results. Not too surprisingly the only mention of Dr. Sumner’s work within the Prometheus Project was from an obscure source that mentioned in the most vague of terms Dr. Brent Sumner’s time working for the government. Instead, the bulk of the articles lauded him for his role in gene therapy, especially his humanitarian efforts in Nigeria and South Africa, where he helped treat patients with HIV.

I went back to the images of Adrian and shook my head.

If Adrian was telling the truth and his dad had been the lead scientist on the project, then a couple things seemed apparent. One, someone had gone to great lengths to disassociate Sumner from the Prometheus Project. No big surprise there. If the government didn’t want the program to be public knowledge, then it wouldn’t be.

Two, Dr. Sumner did in fact appear to have had a change of heart when it came to genomics, if his humanitarian efforts were anything to go by. Which meant Adrian might be telling the truth.

But did it matter? My one greatest ally, the good doctor, had pulled the ultimate vanishing act
—
death.

A knock on
my door interrupted my musings.

“Come in!” I yelled.

Caden sauntered in with a banana and toast. “You weren’t at breakfast this morning, so I thought I’d bring you some food.” He came over to where I sat and dropped the breakfast food in front of me.

My face slowly broke out into a grin. “That was so nice of you,” I said, grabbing the banana.

He leaned in so close that I could feel his cool breath against my skin. “
Nice
wouldn’t be the word I’d use.
Excuse
is far more accurate. I got you breakfast as an excuse to come visit you and kiss those lips of yours a few times before class starts.”

I put the banana down and let him pull me to my feet. His arms slipped around me, and I wrapped mine around his neck as I tilted my head back to kiss him.

Soft lips met mine, and I began to get lost in the taste of Caden when his body stilled and he broke off the kiss.

“Why are you looking at photos of Adrian Sumner?” Caden’s voice sounded funny.

I glanced up at Caden sharply. “You
know
him?”

“Do
you
?” he asked, turning my question back on me.

I didn’t immediately answer. While I wanted to confide in Caden, I knew his loyalties lay with the project. And I knew mine lay elsewhere.

I sighed. “Yes.”

Caden waited for me to say more. When I didn’t he asked, “How?”

I shrugged. “He bought me a drink at a party once. We’ve been reluctant friends ever since.”

“Did you know that he’s wanted for treason? That we’ve been attempting to capture him for weeks?”

I hadn’t known about the treason charge, but I had known that he was on the run from the government.

When my expression didn’t change, Caden’s eyes hardened. “That doesn’t bother you?”

“Oh, a whole lot of things about Adrian’s situation bother me, but if you knew what I did you probably wouldn’t have the same opinion about him.”

“I seriously doubt that.” He studied me. “What do you know about him?” From the tone of his voice, that wasn’t the question Caden wanted an answer to. No, if I read him right, then he wanted to know what Adrian meant to me.

I glanced at the clock. We had thirty minutes before our first class started. Enough time to let Caden in and tell him everything.

I chewed on my lip. My self-preservation warred with my need for companionship. I wanted to tell him what was going on, but I didn’t know how much of Caden was dedicated to me and how much was dedicated to the government.

Faith
—
I’d never had much of this. Maybe now was the time to learn how to have faith in another human being.

I took a deep breath. “The first time I met Adrian was the day after my eighteenth birthday, and a week before I came here. I showed up to a party of his carrying a gun and a note to kill him.”

Caden looked affronted by this. “Do you think … ?”

“That it was the project? I don’t know
—
probably.” Now that I’d reflected on it, that first encounter felt awfully serendipitous. “Who else could it be?”

Caden’s brow furrowed, and I continued. “The next time I saw Adrian, I had just teleported into his study with another set of instructions
—
a series of cryptic numbers that ended up being the combination for a safe embedded in the wall. The safe contained journals and several dark gray stones. Adrian came in shortly after I’d opened the safe.”

I spent the next twenty minutes explaining the rest of my visits with Adrian and his link to the Prometheus Project. The only thing I left out was my genetically altered personality traits and my plan to expose the project.

While I spoke, I kept waiting for Caden’s eyes to soften and the severe set of his mouth to smooth out. They didn’t.

Even after my explanation, Caden remained unconvinced. “Ember, Adrian Sumners is wanted for treason. He’s a bad guy. If he could two-time a nation, why couldn’t he be two-timing you?”

So much for faith. “Why is it so hard to believe that he might be telling the truth? That there might be a dark side to the project we’re a part of?”

Caden gave me an incredulous look. “I know there’s a dark side to the project. There are plenty of things that are not right about our situation, but think about the bigger picture here. We protect American civilians
—
millions of lives
—
through our actions.”

He brushed aside a lock of my hair; the sweet gesture was ruined by the hardness in Caden’s eyes. “If what you’re saying is true, and he has the notes on how we were created, then he is a threat to national security. He can sell those notes to the highest bidder
—
and don’t think he won’t. Even decent people will deceive others to save their necks.” Ironic that Adrian had said almost exactly the same thing about me last night.

“Ember, this is bigger than us. Our situation may be unfair, but it helps the greater good. That’s worth something, right?” Caden’s raised his eyebrows.

I blew out a breath and shook my head. “But don’t you think there might be a conflict of interest here?”

Caden sighed as though I hadn’t even understood the point he made. I had, I was just a little more mistrustful of the project’s altruistic aims when it came to us.

“Just hear me out,” I said. “Saying this is a national security issue is one way to look at it, but here’s another way: whatever is in those notes is highly incriminating. If it’s exposed, the world will see that our gene code was messed with. And if anyone does a little more digging, they’ll find that our parents didn’t consent to that.

“They might also uncover the fact that the project trains minors to be soldiers, that we’re prisoners here, and our military contract isn’t for two years, it’s for life.

“My point is, those notes may or may not be a threat to national security, but they are absolutely a threat to the project.”