by Malinda Lo
Amber was screaming now, loudly, cursing at them over and over. The men laughed as they pulled off her other shoe and held her legs down.
Reese took a deep breath. She opened her eyes fully, and with a groan, she lurched onto her side and scrambled to her knees. Her muscles were sluggish and she still couldn’t think clearly, but she knew she had to do something. Before she had a chance, someone came running out of nowhere and rammed into one of the soldiers.
It was David. She heard the thud of his head meeting the hard muscle of the soldier’s body, and the surprised oof as the man swayed on his feet.
“What the—”
David rammed himself into another soldier. It was like tossing pebbles at a brick wall, but the soldiers were initially so startled that he at least got them to move away from Amber.
“You awake, chinky?” one of the soldiers snarled. He grabbed David and slammed him against the wall, and Reese felt the impact like a physical blow to her stomach.
The pain seemed to clear her head—and David’s. She became briefly aware of him struggling through the remnants of the sedative to tell her something, but his thoughts slid away before she could grasp them. She saw David’s head lolling against his shoulder, his chest heaving. The soldiers turned in unison to face him. He met Reese’s gaze from across the room and shook his head slightly. She felt him urging her to stay put in a fierce wave of Don’t move. Then one of the soldiers punched him in the face. Blood spattered across the dirt floor.
“Maybe the boy just wants his turn,” said Carter.
David launched himself, battered face and all, directly at the soldier. The man caught him as if he was plucking a ball out of the air and threw him against the floor. David made a sound between a yelp and a muffled scream. Reese felt his pain burst through him like an electric shock, and then he went unconscious.
Reese got to her feet just as Amber did. They saw each other across the space of the basement, and at the same time, they both ran at the soldier who had thrown David to the floor. But it was pointless. One of the men grabbed Reese and said, “Look who’s awake.” She cried out against the tape over her mouth as he jerked her arms back. Amber shrieked as another soldier caught her.
The door at the top of the stairs crashed open. A woman’s voice called down, “What the hell is going on down there?”
The man who was holding Reese spun around to face the stairs, bringing her with him. A woman in fatigues came down. She had black hair pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck and a scowl on her face that could choke someone twenty feet away.
“The kids are awake,” said the soldier who had punched David.
“Yeah? Did you wake them by beating them up?” the woman asked.
“We were just having some fun,” said the man holding Reese.
“They’re not for your fun,” the woman said coldly. “Do you know what would happen if they got damaged?”
“They’re supposed to heal fast,” said the soldier holding Amber. “We wouldn’t hurt ’em. We were just checking out the alien chick.”
The woman glared at him. “Put them down and drug them up and don’t ever do this again. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they all said in unison.
Reese was deposited back into her corner. David was dragged over to another. Amber was taken back to her wall and she slid down to the floor. One of the soldiers opened a case that Reese hadn’t noticed before. He pulled out a hypodermic needle.
She squirmed, moaning against the tape. She didn’t want to be put under again. She didn’t know what the soldiers would do to them while they were unconscious.
The woman took the needle from the soldier and came over to Reese, squatting beside her. She had brown skin and full lips and dark eyes that seemed to burn with a frightening fever. “Shut up,” she said. And then she plunged the needle into Reese’s shoulder.
CHAPTER 36
Voices trickled through the floorboards. Reese tried to listen but her brain wouldn’t focus.
“… handoff was supposed to happen yesterday,” a man said.
“What’s the delay?” a different man asked.
“We’re waiting for Randall to make up her mind,” said the first person.
“That’s what happens when the president’s a woman. Can’t make up her fucking mind.”
“Shut up,” said a woman’s voice. A thud.
“Jesus, Torres.”
Reese blinked in the dark. She was facing the center of the basement. The slivers of light that shone through the floorboards above weren’t enough to cut the gloom, but they gave her an idea of where she was.
“They should be awake again.” The voice came from a woman, but it wasn’t the woman who had come downstairs before.
“We’ll go down and check.” That was the woman from before. It had to be Torres.
“You want me to go?” Reese thought the man speaking was Wilson.
“No,” said Torres. “You stay up here and keep an eye on the boys. I don’t want them near the kids again. Griffin and I will go.”
The door opened and Reese lay still, her pulse speeding up as Torres and Griffin came downstairs. Reese heard a clunk as a box was set on the ground. The needles. A couple more thumps sounded like plastic bottles. Reese heard the women walk away from her; they were checking on Amber or David first.
“They must have really clocked him,” Griffin said. “His face is still bruised and he’s still out.”
“We don’t know how fast they heal,” Torres said.
“I should examine him. You can’t just give a kid a concussion and then dope him up and expect him to be okay.”
“Go ahead. I’ll check the others.”
Reese listened to Torres walk across the basement. She heard a moan from Amber. “This one’s almost up,” Torres said. Her footsteps came over to Reese, and a moment later Reese felt the woman nudge her shoulder. “How about you?”
Reese held still for a moment, trying to stretch her consciousness toward Torres. But the woman was barely touching her, and Reese’s brain was still so fuzzy from the drugs that all she got was a vague sensation of hardness, like a shell. She opened her eyes. Torres was looking directly at her.
“I knew you were awake,” Torres said. “Dinnertime.” She pulled Reese up to a seated position as easily as if Reese weighed nothing. “I’m gonna take off the tape, but if you make any noise, I’ll put it right back on. Understand?”
Reese nodded, and Torres ripped off the tape. Reese let out a short cry of pain. Torres considered Reese.
“I’m gonna cut your hands free so you can feed yourself. You aren’t gonna do anything else.”
Reese shook her head. Her lips were cracked and dry. “Water?”
“I got that too.” Torres turned Reese around. Reese heard the flick of a pocketknife, and then the plastic bindings were gone.
Her arms ached as she brought her hands in front of herself. Torres opened a water bottle and held it up to Reese’s mouth. She reached for it with numb hands, trying to hold it in place. The liquid sloshed over her chin but it was the best thing she had ever tasted in her entire life. She sucked at the bottle greedily, swallowing as much as she could. When she was finished, her hands were tingling, the blood surging into her fingers.
Torres unwrapped an energy bar and handed it to her. “Eat up,” she said, and then went across the room to Amber.
Reese ate the bar. It tasted like plastic coated with peanut butter, but she wasn’t about to complain. Even though it smelled disgusting, her stomach still growled. Torres had left the water bottle with her, and when she was finished inhaling the energy bar she picked it up and drank the last few drops, holding her head back to drain it. The food and water pushed away some of the fog in her mind, and she watched as Torres gave Amber the same treatment. David was still being examined by Griffin and hadn’t moved.
Torres glanced across the basement at Reese. “You finished?”
“Yeah,” Reese sa
id hoarsely.
Amber’s face was in shadow but she said, “Reese? Are you okay?”
“Shut up,” Torres said almost automatically. “Eat your dinner.”
“I’m fine,” Reese said anyway.
Torres crossed the room in a flash, leaning over her. “I said no talking.” Torres pulled a plastic strip from a receptacle on her belt. “Hold up your hands.”
“Wait,” Reese said, desperation spiking in her. “Please. I have to—let me go to the bathroom. Please.”
Torres’s expression gave nothing away, and Reese didn’t think she would say yes. But at the last second she nodded shortly. “Fine. I’ll take you.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Griffin, you got it under control?”
“Yeah. This one’s gonna be out for a while longer. I’ll watch E.T.”
“All right.” Torres reached for Reese’s arm and hauled her to her feet. She wobbled. “No funny business, Holloway.”
The sound of her last name startled her. “I know,” she said quickly. Torres led her toward the steps, keeping a viselike grip on her arm. Reese stumbled up the stairs, nauseated from having eaten the energy bar too quickly, and Torres’s consciousness began to seep through her hand into Reese.
Torres didn’t feel exactly like the male Blue Base soldiers. Reese remembered the sensation of something being off about them, as if their brains were so wired for combat readiness that they were unable to manage ordinary thought patterns. Torres had the same dense physical interior landscape, as if her muscles were made of Kevlar and her bones out of steel, but the feeling of wrongness was different. Unlike the chaotic consciousness of the male soldiers, Torres’s brain was sharp as a blade, but it didn’t feel normal. It felt speedy. Too fast for her own good.
Reese didn’t have time to dwell on it. Torres pushed her up the stairs into the kitchen, a 1980s time warp with stained linoleum on the floor, a rickety wooden table, and appliances that didn’t look like they had worked in years. All the windows had their curtains drawn, and the lack of light behind them made Reese believe it was nighttime. Wilson, who was standing at the back door with a machine gun in his hands, was surprised to see them. Torres said nothing to him and only propelled Reese through the kitchen into a dimly lit hallway, where she nudged open a door with the toe of her boot.
Torres came into the bathroom too. She let Reese go, but stood with her back to the door. “Do your business,” Torres ordered.
Reese’s face reddened, but she didn’t bother to ask for privacy. She went to the toilet and did what she had to do. “What day is it?” she asked. “How long was I out?”
“I told you no talking,” Torres growled.
Reese flushed the toilet and glanced at Torres out of the corner of her eye. She was hardened, but she didn’t look too much older than Reese. Maybe she was in her twenties. Reese wondered how Torres had gotten to her position. The men were clearly afraid of her. Reese figured she should probably be afraid of her too, but she couldn’t forget that Torres had been the one to stop the soldiers from assaulting them.
Reese turned on the sink and found a bar of yellowing soap on the counter. She washed her hands, running her fingers tentatively over the welts from the plastic restraints. Above the sink, the mirror on the wall was cracked. Her face was sickly pale, her hair tangled, her eyes bloodshot. There was a raw red line in a rectangular shape around her mouth where the tape had been ripped off. She saw Torres watching her.
“It’s Tuesday night,” Torres said.
Reese briefly caught Torres’s eye in the mirror. Why had she answered? Reese rinsed the soap off her hands while she worked out what exactly that meant. She, David, and Amber had been taken from the UN on Monday just before noon. They had been gone for thirty-six hours by now. There was no sound of traffic outside, so Reese doubted they were still in New York City. Maybe Torres had mixed feelings about taking them—or at least about keeping them here, wherever they were. She decided to push her luck.
“Where are we?” Reese asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
There was a rusty towel ring dangling empty on the wall near the sink, but no towels in sight. Reese flicked the water from her hands. “You’re from Blue Base,” Reese said.
Torres reached for her and spun her around, her fingers digging into Reese’s shoulder bones. Reese swallowed a cry of pain as Torres glared at her. “No. Talking.”
Even though Eres Tilhar had told Reese it was against Imrian ethics to access someone else’s consciousness without their permission, she decided this situation was an exception. She kept her gaze on Torres’s face as she reached out with her mind. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she knew she had to make use of every advantage she had. Torres and the other Blue Base soldiers obviously had been genetically modified, but they hadn’t been through the Imrian adaptation chamber. Reese didn’t think that Torres would be able to sense her mental intrusion.
“So you know about Blue Base. You think you know it all, don’t you?” Torres said, considering her.
“No,” Reese said. There was definitely something different about Torres. She might not be as unhinged as the other soldiers, but she seemed more dangerous. Like a shark, all teeth and instinct.
“You tell me something, Holloway,” Torres said in a low, threatening voice. “You tell me: What did you get done to your head that I didn’t get done to mine? Why are you so precious that I have to babysit a squad of muscle heads to bring you in? What did they do to you?”
“They—the Imria adapted me,” Reese stammered. “They gave me their DNA.”
“I got that DNA too.”
“You got it from the military. Not the Imria.”
“What does that matter? Same DNA. But you’re nothing like me.” Torres sounded disgusted and let go of her, giving her a little shove.
Reese fell back against the sink. Torres’s grip had been so tight that it seemed to have left a phantom handprint on her shoulder. She reached up to rub the bruised area, wincing. Her eyes darted behind Torres to the closed door. There was no way she’d be able to get past the soldier. “Maybe it’s the same DNA, but I don’t think the military knows how to use it,” she said, trying to buy time while she figured out what to do. “You guys—you and the other soldiers—you don’t feel right.”
“We don’t feel right? We can run faster, sleep less, and shoot better than any normal human being. We don’t feel right because we’re different.” Torres leaned closer to Reese. “I know why they made me the way they did. I was recruited out of nothing. I probably would’ve been in prison by now if I hadn’t joined up. But I wasn’t born stupid. They made me into a killer, and I’m doing that fine. Way better than those dumbasses they want me to order around. I can take all of them, every single one of those shit-for-brains fucktards the military calls supersoldiers. But why do they want you? You can’t do shit. I could snap you with my little finger.”
Torres’s words were harsh, but there was an edge of desperation to her words that Reese didn’t understand. “The adaptation procedure isn’t supposed to make us into killers,” Reese said. “The point of it is to help us communicate better. To share our—our thoughts and emotions.”
Torres nodded. “That freaky mind meldy thing they talk about in the news. Yeah. What good is that?”
Reese gaped at her. “What good is it to be a killer?”
Torres’s face darkened and Reese thought she was going to hit her. Instead she grabbed a fistful of Reese’s hair, jerking her head back so she was forced to meet her gaze. “You can do that mind meld thing, can’t you?” Torres said. Tears blinded Reese’s eyes as Torres’s fingers tightened on her hair. She was so close that Reese could smell the sourness of the soldier’s breath. “So you do it. You do it and you tell me what’s the deal with me. What the fuck is going on with me? Tell me.” Torres’s dark eyes gleamed with a manic energy.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Reese choked out. “Just let me go. I can’t do it if you’re holding me like th
at.”
With a sound of disgust, Torres dropped her. Reese took a shaking, relieved breath, rubbing a damp hand over her scalp where Torres had held her motionless.
“We don’t have all night,” Torres snapped.
Reese blinked back her tears. She didn’t think Torres would be sympathetic. “I have to touch you,” she said bluntly.
Torres seemed taken aback. “Where?”
“Just give me your hand.” Torres looked at her suspiciously, and all the fear and panic inside Reese exploded into impatience. “Do you want me to do it or not?” she demanded.
Torres hesitated for a second. Then she held her hand out as if offering it to Reese to shake. “Do it.”
The soldier’s palm was calloused, her fingertips rough. Reese wasn’t sure if she’d be able to sense anything at all; Torres had been mostly unreadable before, beyond a general sensation of predatory skill. And even if she could gain access to Torres’s consciousness, that wouldn’t necessarily explain what her “deal” was. Reese only hoped she could sense something that would give her a clue about what Torres wanted to hear—and then Reese planned to tell her precisely that.
She concentrated, beginning with her sense of herself as Eres Tilhar had taught her. Those lessons seemed an eternity ago, but as she laid out the map of her consciousness, situating herself physically within her mind and within this space—this bathroom, in this house, standing a foot away from Torres—Eres’s instructions came to her clear and strong. Reese was here. She took a deep breath, grounding herself, feeling the hard edge of the sink behind her, smelling the foul scent of a bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned in forever. She was unexpectedly grateful that Torres had grabbed her hair, because the throbbing pain on her scalp showed her the precise limits of her physical self.
When she was satisfied that she knew where she was, she opened herself to Torres’s mind. The soldier was tense, and at first all Reese could feel was that tension. Muscle and bone, dense and powerful, built for exactly what Torres had said: killing. Behind that physical barrier, Torres’s consciousness confronted Reese like a blank wall. As Reese mentally circled the wall, she sensed Torres’s emotions slowly shifting like tectonic plates grinding into new positions. And as the woman’s internal landscape shifted, Reese glimpsed memories that Torres didn’t know how to conceal. They were dark and brutal, and Reese clung to her own identity, trying to shield herself from the images’ assault so they wouldn’t overwhelm her.