by Keith Thomas
Rade runs with the ID badge to the first in a series of locked doors. He swipes the badge, and the door opens. He’s not thinking while he does this. He’s not wondering when they’re going to shut the whole place down, maybe pull the plug on the power, or set off the sprinkler system, or just shoot up the hallways. Rade moves on instinct, driven by more than a million years of neural activity surging through his brain. He isn’t running down these hallways, leaving bloody soldiers and doctors in his wake, as a boy—he’s doing it as everyone who came before him. He’s killing as Darya. He’s running as a Trojan warrior. This moment, this bloodthirsty now, is the first time that Rade recognizes his own ascendancy. He knows he is better than every throat he cuts.
As Rade and Forty run through the third set of doors, they pass a room where Janelle lies bruised and bloodied on a folding cot. Rade stops and helps her up. She’s barely conscious, her left eye bruised shut. Dorothy has been frustrated. She’s lashed out at Janelle but never struck her directly. Apparently, Rade thinks, that has changed.
“We need to go now!” Forty yells.
Rade helps Janelle navigate a series of stairs and narrow hallways before they are joined by a mob of the Null subjects on the ground floor of the facility. Twenty strong, they kick down a supply room door and grab every available coat, hat, and pair of gloves that they can find. Someone, maybe Sixteen, tells the group that there are rafts with outboard motors a half mile from the facility. She overheard two soldiers say they’re moored to a dock and never guarded.
The mob, dressed for the cold, streams through the final set of doors. Morton and Phillips are waiting there, guns at the ready. They don’t warn the orphans that they’re going to open fire. They just do. The guns chatter, and their bullets rip through the first five Null subjects. Blood sprays across Janelle’s face. She tastes it. But the group surges forward, unstoppable. Morton goes down first and is torn apart. Phillips, mercifully, takes an ax to the neck. In the chaos, Seven, one of the oldest Null boys, a Hmong kid everyone calls Vang, though no one knows if that’s his actual name, is hit in the face with the butt of a rifle. It’s an accident. He’s delirious and blood oozes from his nose. Twenty-Two grabs him and helps him up.
The door to the outside is opened and snow blasts inside. It swirls in blinding clouds across the faces of the Null subjects. They run into it, gleeful, laughing. Yards from freedom, Forty is shot in the leg. She falls. Rade runs back to her. Janelle stops and yells for Rade to get up. “Come on! We have to go now. This is our only chance!”
Rade glances back at Forty, struggling to stanch the wound in her calf.
He turns and looks past Janelle at the night landscape behind her. The snowdrifts as tall as houses, the towering pine trees bent near sideways. He drops the gun in his hand. He drops the needle in the other. Janelle shakes her head before she’s pulled out into the night by one of the other escapees. She vanishes into the winter blur.
Rade spins around to help Forty up but one of the soldiers is already there. He shoots her in the forehead and Forty’s blood sprays in a perfect arc across Rade’s bare feet. The warm blood drenches his toes and makes it look like he’s wearing red socks.
That is when the memory fades.
It disassembles like wet gauze. Rade watches as Forty’s body dissolves into the floor and then the floor dissolves as well. He is suddenly no longer in the HED facility but in a street.
There are people marching around him, waving banners, lit by torchlight. They are washed away, fading like overexposed photographs. The marchers step into shadows and never reappear. . . .
The memory is gone.
Rade is in Russia, he sees himself in a mirror. He is Darya, but only for a second. Her face fades away. The mirror becomes shadow. . . .
The memory is lost.
Rade is in a forest, drinking from a stream, his hands chapped and the sound of fire rushing overhead. It goes too. . . .
A thousand lives slip past him.
A thousand lives evaporate until . . .
63
9:39 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
JESSE BROWN VA MEDICAL CENTER
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
RADE WOKE UP to find he was bound with computer cable.
Kojo stood over him, the Sig Sauer in his right hand.
Only a few minutes had passed.
Rade said, “It worked.”
He heard the words come out of his mouth, but he wasn’t certain what exactly he meant by them. Rade searched his mind, gathering up crumbling lumps of memory, but they fell apart before he could get a clear look at them.
All that was left were sensations . . . running . . . hurting . . . fear . . .
Now, the furthest back his memory went was a decade. But instead of being filtered through the rage and pain, it was focused. Like a spotlight tightened down to a pinpoint. It was just as bright. Just as powerful. But not burdened by all the residue of the past. Rade had been working his way toward ascension, pulling every hair from his body, scrubbing his skin free of useless cells, and clearing his mind of base contemplations. He had been engaged in a never-ending series of skirmishes; taking ground slowly, inch by neural inch. Up until that moment, staring up at Kojo’s fierce eyes, Rade was ready to continue that fight and win on his own personal terms. But the solution gave him a weapon he never could have imagined: an atomic bomb of simplicity. Erasing his mind, breaking the bonds of all those other lives, finally, truly made him perfect.
“They’re gone,” Rade said. “You understand?”
Rade rolled onto his side and looked over at Ashanique.
“It worked. The memories are gone. Let me go now.”
“Why?”
“I can stop the HED. I know where they are.”
Ashanique turned to Kojo.
“Fuck that,” Kojo said.
He glanced across the room at Matilda. She sat beside Brandon. He was calm but clearly desperate to leave.
“We need to hurry, Ashanique,” Dr. Song said. “The machine is ready.”
“Ashanique . . .” Matilda took the girl’s hand.
“I’m not like the others,” Ashanique said. “I don’t need the capsules.”
“You’ve been so sick. The meds work.”
“They don’t. I’ve been pretending to take them. I put them in my mouth and leave them behind my teeth. Then, when no one’s looking, I spit them out. Usually into my hand where they crumble and I just drop the dust.”
“Why? Dr. Song says—”
Rade laughed.
“Dr. Song is wrong, Matilda. I’m different. The machine only fixes people damaged by the tests, by the experiments. Not me. I was born this way. If I just have the time, I can integrate the memories. Maybe my mother, maybe Rade, they weren’t ready. But I’m ready. Don’t you see what this is . . . ?”
Matilda shook her head.
Ashanique said, “I am everyone who came before me, just like all of us are. Only, I’ve been given a gift, a way to see into those souls. Please, Matilda, let me use this gift. I can change the world with it. If I go into that machine, it ends.”
• • •
Matilda read Ashanique’s face, her eyes.
Every microexpression—the lifting of her eyebrows, the curl of her lips—told Matilda that Ashanique was in complete and utter control, all of the subconscious tells had been erased. Matilda had never seen a face as perfectly at peace. There was no internal conflict, no suppression of emotion.
“Do you believe me?” the girl asked.
Matilda could see Ashanique was reading as well. Matilda felt naked, her soul exposed. There was nothing she could hide from Ashanique’s eyes.
Matilda simply nodded.
Ashanique turned to Kojo. “Untie him.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. . . . He’s a killer.”
Rade scooted closer to Kojo so that he was at the detective’s feet.
Kojo backed up and put both hands on the gun.
&n
bsp; “No one else can stop this,” Rade said. “You have no idea how much money and power are wrapped up in this thing. If a single document leaks, entire branches of government will be wiped out overnight. If you bring it to the press, if you drag the machine out of this room and have Ashanique and me testify, nothing happens. There will be no investigation because there can be no investigation. Let me be your tool. Let me be your weapon.”
Ashanique pushed Kojo’s gun down. He let her.
“This is crazy,” Kojo said.
“This ends tonight,” Ashanique replied.
She pulled the scalpel from Childers’s dead grip and used it to cut through the ties on Rade’s hands. As he sat up, rubbing the chafed skin on his wrists, Ashanique placed a hand on his shoulder.
He shuddered under her touch.
“It isn’t true,” she said. “My mom would never have abandoned you or Forty.”
Rade looked up at her confused.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
64
11:04 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT HOMICIDE DIVISION
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
MATILDA SAT ALONE in an interview room.
It was small, with a little half desk that was stuck to one wall. The walls themselves were pale yellow in color, and the overhead lighting made everything look washed-out, like the tanned paper around the pictures in Lucy’s photo albums. Matilda had been in this room for over an hour. She knew Ashanique was in another room. Dr. Song in a third.
When they’d first arrived at the station, there was a brief interview with a detective. He mentioned he was a friend of Kojo’s but walked that back a few seconds later, realizing he’d made a mistake.
No one else had come in since.
Matilda noticed a bruise on her right arm. It was in the shape of a human hand, fingers outstretched. She’d gotten it at the VA hospital.
Seconds after Rade slipped out of the LINAC room, the door was kicked open and SWAT officers stormed in. Matilda held hands with Ashanique and they both got down on their knees; she didn’t hear the shouted orders, at least not that she could remember. But her body heard. Letting go of Ashanique’s hand, Matilda threaded her fingers over her head. She closed her eyes and loosened her limbs as the cuffs went on. The half hour that followed was a tumult—she’d been pushed into the back of a squad car, dragged back out, and then hustled into the department before being tossed into the interview room. Alone with herself for the first time in days, Matilda was desperate for another person’s presence.
Eight minutes later, Kojo walked in.
Matilda couldn’t help but jump up and hug him. She felt her eyes tear over and wiped them prophylactically. Kojo felt so solid, the weight of him grounding her. She never wanted to let him go.
“It’s okay,” Kojo said. “We’re okay. I had a friend switch the cameras off before I came in here. We have a couple of minutes before they figure it out and my ass is hauled out. So let me talk first, and then you can ask me a question if there’s time.”
Matilda nodded.
“These people Rade worked for, the HED, they’re going to try and bury us. We’ve got to go underground. FBI is already here; I can’t trust anyone in the department, we already know that. I can get you and Ashanique out, though. But you can’t go home. Ever. Understand?”
Matilda nodded again, tears rolling down her face to her chin.
“I have a place for you to go. It’s not long-term but it’ll be safe for a while. You’ll fly out tonight.”
“How is Brandon?”
Kojo said, “He’s all right. Gonna take a long time to recover from this, though. There are a couple of psychologists in with him. They haven’t told him about . . . Ah, man. Officers found Ophelia at my place. She survived but she’s gonna have a long road to recovery. I’m not sure when Brandon can know that. He’s a strong kid, though. You saw it. You know.”
“He is, like his dad. How’s Ashanique?”
“You’re not going to be shocked to hear this but she’s doing surprisingly well. They have a few people in there, people that I know. Psychologists walk out shaking their heads, can’t believe how smart she is. How tough. I think she’s going to be fine.”
Kojo held Matilda in silence for a second.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend that I get exactly what went down. Dr. Song can show me papers and explain it all till he’s out of breath, but there’s one thing that I can’t make sense of. I get the genetic memory piece. I get the experiment. What I don’t get is how Ashanique remembers that World War One—”
“George.”
“Yes, George. How can she remember his death?”
Matilda wiped her nose and pulled far enough away to look Kojo in the eyes. She did not, however, let go. “I’ve been thinking about that too,” she said. “I think Ashanique already told us the answer. We just— Well, I just didn’t want to hear it. Maybe I’m shell-shocked, definitely sleep-deprived. Beyond exhausted, really. But I think it’s that we’re all one. All part of a single— Goddamn, this sounds silly.”
“Go on. Nothing else makes sense.”
Matilda said, “There’s this thing I remember from college. They say that all matter can’t ever be truly destroyed. Every particle that exists has always existed. It takes on new forms, passing from one to the other. It’s a plant, then inside a cow, then a person, then back to the soil. What if human consciousness can affect that process? What if . . . what if we can influence it? We know Ashanique and the other Null can remember their ancestors’ lives. It’s coded in their bodies. But maybe they can also remember other people’s lives.”
“Okay. How?”
Matilda thought back to when she and Ashanique were in the cab. Ashanique had cried, thinking of the beauty she’d seen, the splendor at the heart of being Null.
“The collective unconscious is real. I don’t know how they’re stored; I don’t know how they’re transferred, but George’s memories, his very last moments, wound up inside Ashanique. They’re probably inside all of us. She and the other Null can access them. Maybe it’s something quantum. But the only way it makes sense is if we’re just like she said: We’re more than disparate individuals. We’re all connected in a collective and shared neural history. Humanity has a source code and Ashanique’s found a way to tap into it.”
Matilda took Kojo’s hands and held them tight.
“She’s the first,” Matilda said, her voice charged with astonishment.
Kojo whispered, feeling a sudden solemnity.
“First of what?”
“Something remarkable.”
65
11:16 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
HUMAN ECOLOGY DIVISION INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS
OSWEGO, ILLINOIS
RADE PULLED A new hoodie over a bulletproof vest.
Standing outside his rental car in the HED parking lot, he laced up the Nike Blazers he’d picked up at a mall in Aurora. They looked good in the sodium lights. It was late on a Thursday night and there were only seventeen cars in the lot.
Rade knew each and every one.
He was there to kill their owners.
As Rade crossed the lot, he slipped on his wireless headphones. He’d already prepped Philip Glass’s “Island” and turned it up as loud as it would go. The song was his driving music. When he listened to it, he saw all sorts of swirling colors in the corner of his vision—ribbon-thin spirals of red and gold slowly unwinding, spinning out into infinity. He considered the synesthesia just another manifestation of his perfection—a sign that his brain had moved into a different gear. Despite what he’d read online in New Agey scientific journals with names like Advancements in Human Achievement and Journal of the Mind-Boxy Praxis, he did not consider himself a more advanced human. In Rade’s mind, there was no further evolution to be had in the human form—he was greater because he simply wasn’t human.
/> And the HED was where he would demonstrate it.
You are finally ready now.
The Human Ecology Division building was a low-slung, two-level brick affair that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the pages of a magazine extolling the virtues of midcentury modern architecture. It was built in the midfifties and intended to be utilitarian—originally purposed as a school, it was remodeled in the 1970s as a research facility for the Army Corps of Engineers. The Human Ecology Division, flush with renewed CIA funds, moved into the building in 1985. Though the organization’s various bureaucrats had all tried to put their mark on the place—breaking up the floors and adding a spiral staircase in 1990, installing a sleek, modern lobby in 2006—the building had never lost its rather banal, practical look.
Rade walked into that sleek lobby and tossed a grenade.
It bounced behind the receptionist’s desk and rolled to the older man’s feet before it exploded in a tarry fireball. The alarms went off, sprinklers followed. Rade pulled both of his Glocks from his track pants and started shooting.
The first people he encountered were the three security guards on duty. Though they had nothing to do with Project Clarity, likely hadn’t even been born when he escaped the facility, he knew they’d die. If he didn’t kill them here, quickly, they would die when the CIA’s sweeper unit came through. Even though it had a building and a parking lot, the HED was a place that didn’t technically exist. When it burned, everyone in it would burn too.
He shot the men as they rounded a corner, radios squawking in panic.
Rade had brought fifteen grenades.
He tossed one into each lab he passed.
By the time he was on the second floor, he’d thrown ten grenades and, despite the sprinkler system, smoke choked the hallways. Rade had killed eight scientists. Some of them were new, some he’d seen in videoconferences. Two of them, assistants to Dr. Sykes in the late 1970s, actually recognized him. They were smart enough to know not to try and fight back; both of them closed their eyes before he put an 8mm round in their heads.
At the north end of the building, Rade tossed two grenades on the spiral staircase after he ascended it. He actually waited to see the damage they did. The staircase shuddered, its lower half falling away first. He was coated in drywall dust and wondered how many carcinogens he’d inhaled. As the last pieces of shattered, steaming-hot metal pinged against the linoleum floor, Rade took a long, deep breath. The smell reminded him of something, though he wasn’t sure what it was. A memory teasingly played its fingers along the base of his brain, tickling like a failing sparkler.