Going Grey

by Karen Traviss

So that was Livvie. She looked much more glamorous than Rob's ex-wife. It was another facet of life from the TV screen that was mirrored in the real world: rich men had wives befitting their status in life. Ian wondered what kind of girl would be right for someone like him.

  Livvie intercepted him as he edged towards the front door and put her arm around his shoulders. He didn't get a chance to work out how he was supposed to shake her hand.

  "Make yourself at home, Ian," she said. "I'm very sorry about your gran."

  "Thank you for letting me stay, ma'am."

  Livvie gave him a pat on the back. Everybody seemed to touch him. "We love having guests," she said. "Plenty of room. And this is Oatie, huh? We'll have to get him a basket."

  The house was like a mansion in some glossy magazine, miles of plain maple, slate floors, and grey carpet. It even smelled expensive. Ian's room was a suite with its own sitting room, bathroom, and TV. He couldn't believe how neat and perfect it looked. He was almost too scared to mess it up by breathing.

  But it was all mirrors – mirrors on the dressing table, a full- length mirror on a stand in the corner, and a wall of mirrors in the bathroom. A month ago, it would have sent him into a panic. Now he felt he could cope with it.

  "Okay, take your time." Rob put the bags by the window. "Come downstairs whenever you're ready. Yell if you need anything."

  Ian unpacked and took a quick shower, trying not to let the welter of reflections distract him. He'd never really used a full-length mirror. He'd caught his fleeting reflection in shop windows, but that had been a rare event anyway. He couldn't remember studying the entirety of himself from the outside before.

  Damn. I'm skinny. I don't look like Rob or Mike, that's for sure.

  Bewildering, painful thoughts sat uncomfortably with a strange sense of excitement: he'd never had the chance to remind Gran how much he loved her, he'd been told lies all his life, he'd been whisked away in a private jet, and he was the guest of complete strangers. And he'd just realised how skinny he was.

  And I'm not like any other human in the world.

  It was still too much to take in. He put it out of his mind for the moment and went downstairs with Gran's folder, coughing a few times to warn everyone that he was coming. He was uncertain how to intrude politely but he was pretty sure that it didn't play out the way in did on TV, where all the stuff the hero wasn't supposed to know was conveniently revealed to him when he blundered into a conversation.

  "It's okay, honey," Livvie was saying. "We can put it on hold. You're home for a few months, so there's no rush."

  "Zombie, I can keep him occupied. There's plenty I can do with him."

  Ian took a breath and walked in. Everyone looked sheepish and caught in the act, including Oatie, stretched out by the back door on a folded picnic blanket. Livvie poured a coffee.

  "Sorry about the mirrors," she said, handing him the cup. She didn't explain what they'd had to put on hold, but it was obviously because of him. "I didn't think. There's another suite without mirrors, but it's smaller"

  "It's fine," Ian said. Really, it was. He just realised that he was skinny, which he knew was a dumb thing to worry about when he could look like a different person every day. "It's a lovely room. Thank you."

  Mike pulled up a chair for him. "Let's sort out your documentation. What have you got?"

  Ian opened the bulging manila folder and spread the contents on the table. "I don't have a driving licence. Okay, so I broke the law a few times. I've got a social security number. I got my high school diploma at sixteen, too."

  Livvie picked up some papers and read them. "Home-schooled. But not totally cut off from the outside world, then."

  "No, ma'am. Gran believed in just enough contact with the state to keep them from poking their noses in. Shots and tests, that's what she said."

  "Please. Not ma'am. Livvie."

  "Sorry." Ian knew now that Livvie was the boss. That was the natural order of things. "Okay, Livvie."

  Rob leaned on the table and raised his eyebrows at her. "He's carrying more cash than a crack dealer. He needs a safe."

  Mike took the Ringer papers out of the envelope and looked through them. He had a habit of chewing his lip when something worried him. Ian had known him less than two full days and he'd already worked out how to read his reactions. Rob was going to take a little longer.

  Mike slipped the papers back in the envelope. "Your gran certainly kept thorough notes. Is this a copy of the document you gave Zoe Murray?"

  "Yes. Are you going to show it to your dad?"

  Mike was still chewing his lip. "He needs to know what's out there."

  "He's got to tell the government, though, hasn't he? He is the government."

  "If he'd wanted to tell anybody, he wouldn't have sent us." Mike stood up, patting his pockets to locate his phone. "I'm going to call him now."

  "What are you going to say?"

  "That Kinnery was telling the truth. That's all I can say on the phone. He'll want to meet you. Are you okay with that?"

  Ian had never been asked to make so many decisions in his life. It was Mike's house: how could he refuse?

  "Sure. He didn't believe I was real either, did he?"

  "Probably not."

  "Who knows about me, then?"

  "Me, Rob, Livvie, Kinnery, and Dad." Mike shrugged awkwardly. "Not even my mom. Dad needs to work out his cover story for her."

  Everybody lied to their loved ones, then. Gran was no different. But there was no reason for Mrs Brayne to be told, Ian supposed, because he was just another classified government project like a jet or a missile, and she probably didn't get told anything about those, either.

  "I ought to walk Oatie," Ian said. "He's used to being loose all day. Is that okay?"

  "I'll show you around after I've called Dad. It's a lot of ground to get lost in."

  Ian went to gather his cash and counted out five thousand in hundred dollar bills to pack into the inside pockets of his jacket, just in case he needed to run for it again. He took the rest downstairs in a grocery bag. Rob was making sandwiches while Livvie fussed over Oatie.

  "We need to get this little guy some toys to make him feel at home," she said. "I'll pick up some stuff at the mall. You want to come, Ian?"

  Ian couldn't face another onslaught of strangers just yet. He handed her the bag. "Maybe later. But I can pay."

  "Wow." She hefted the bag as if she was weighing it. "All random numbers, huh?"

  Rob made a hah noise without looking up from the pile of sandwiches. "Kinnery's guilt money. Did your gran keep a little black book?"

  "She got regular payments. I never knew where they came from." Now the reality had sunk in, Ian was feeling more hurt than angry about Kinnery. He didn't even want an apology. Just telling him the truth would have been enough. How could anyone live with a lie that big? How could Gran? "She just said someone owed her for a big favour."

  "Are you okay, Ian?" Livvie asked.

  "I'm fine. Why?"

  "You've just gone darker."

  Rob paused to look. He didn't seem so surprised this time. Ian was reassured to see them react it to it as if it was just interesting, not something that made them recoil.

  "So he has," Rob said. "Fast, isn't it?"

  Ian put his hand to his face. He hadn't even felt himself morph. "Is anything else different?"

  "No. Just your colouring."

  "Okay, here's the plan." Livvie moved on instantly as if it hadn't been a big deal at all. Nothing seemed to faze her. It was almost unnatural. "Mike's going to look after the paperwork. He'll get you an accountant and an attorney so that you're set up properly. Rob's going to put a training schedule together and make you a badass like him. And I'm going to teach you how to control your morphing."

  She sounded confident, as if it was just like riding a bike. Ian's disbelief must have shown on his face. She cocked her head to one side.

  "You don't think it's doable?" she asked.

  "It's not l
ike anyone's ever done it before."

  "Come on, people learn to control all kinds of automatic reactions." Livvie made it sound as if everything was possible if you just wanted it to be. "Buddhist monks can lower their heart rate. Sportsmen improve their performance. Patients control their own pain. It's proven. You can learn meditation techniques to control your body."

  "There," Rob said, sawing through the stack of sandwiches. "Mrs Mike hath spoken. We'll get you totally sorted. Like one of those makeover shows, but with firearms."

  Totally sorted. Ian didn't need that translated. Rob and Mike seemed to be the most sorted guys in the world. Ian was desperate for solid ground in his life, and these people knew exactly where to find it.

  Mike wandered back into the kitchen and took a sandwich off Rob's plate. "I wouldn't want to be Kinnery now."

  "Leo gone nuclear, eh?"

  "Dad's more of an angry glacier. You just hear the gravelly rumble and you've got a million tons of implacable freezing wrath coming your way."

  "So he really was giving Kinnery the benefit of the doubt."

  "Just like he said." Mike reached out and patted Ian's shoulder. "He's going to call in a favour to identify that withheld number. Then he's going to visit as soon as he can get away."

  Mike seemed remarkably forgiving. Twenty-four hours ago, Ian had nearly run him down. Now the guy had given him sanctuary.

  "I know I've messed up your schedule," Ian said. "You've had to put something on hold. I'm sorry."

  Rob glanced at Mike for a second with an expression Ian couldn't quite pin down. He probably thought that Ian hadn't noticed, but whatever had been postponed seemed to be significant.

  "It's nothing that won't wait," Mike said. "Let's get you straight first." He clapped his hands together, making Oatie jump. "Come on, Oatie. Walkies. Rabbits."

  Ian went upstairs to get his hiking boots. He hadn't unpacked the boxes yet, but there was something he had to do right away. He needed the comfort of familiar things in this luxurious but strange world.

  He dug out the photo of David Dunlop at the door of his Huey, wondered again what the man had been thinking about when the photo was taken, and stood it carefully on the windowsill.

  SEVEN

  No, Jerry, I don't think anyone believes we really created a military werewolf. But every time we spend taxpayers' money studying how to terminate future rogue androids and God knows what else, I get voters on my back. Someone's talked about Ringer, and you know Ringer went nowhere – like a lot of other projects. Let's change the subject before they start asking what else we burned their dollars on. Maybe it was someone on your side of the fence who talked. Best we all shut up and move on.

  Leo Brayne, to a reliable contact in the Department of Defense, on the wisdom of letting sleeping dogs lie.

  KWA, LANSING, MICHIGAN

  FIRST WEEK OF AUGUST.

  Dru couldn't get the voice out of her head.

  She pushed the open files across her desk to clear some space and took another look at the burner phone's outgoing call log. She knew exactly what was there, because she'd checked it a dozen times. Now she was starting to doubt herself.

  She'd definitely dialled correctly. She took another look at the stolen phone records to confirm it really was the Seattle number that the British guy had answered, a number so important to Kinnery that he kept a phone solely for it.

  Why would he bother to keep a dedicated landline?

  If he was worried about being tapped by the authorities, it wasn't any more secure than a cell call or an e-mail. Unless he knew he'd be home when it rang, it wasn't a priority number for some urgent message, either. He'd have to forward the number, and that would be another weak link in the security chain.

  The only possible answer was that he had to keep the number restricted because he needed to be absolutely certain who he was calling, and who was calling him. Caller ID on another line was no guarantee. Dru would have been prepared to believe it was a text phone for a deaf friend or relative if she hadn't heard that English guy pick up.

  Maybe Kinnery's done nothing wrong. Humans find patterns to recognise, even if there isn't one. But the British guy doesn't quite fit.

  Had the number been reallocated? No, it didn't happen that fast. Maybe someone had moved out and left the phone line. Dru stirred her coffee while she waited for the next report from Grant. She was so engrossed that she didn't care if it was cold by now.

  So who's this Brit?

  The guy didn't have any of the British accents she was used to hearing in movies, and he was automatically cagey. Dru's theory was that people over thirty tended to answer a landline in a different way to a cell, and the more she heard, the more she believed it. On a landline, they'd often give a name or a number, maybe because they felt secure in their home or office, but usually because they'd been taught to identify themselves. On a cell phone, though, answered anywhere and often in public, the response to an unidentified caller was usually just "Hello." Maybe this Brit was innocent, simply wary because he'd seen the number was withheld, or maybe the number was a cell.

  But the guy revealed nothing, he sounded like a wise-ass, and his tone was all wrong. A cell could have been stolen, of course. But the voice – thirties or forties, cocky, controlled – didn't sound the stolen phone type. He wasn't a kid. Dru wondered if he was Kinnery's accomplice or even the mule himself. He sounded too old to be the shape-shifter created for Project Ringer, but a creature like that couldn't exist anyway.

  This guy's connected somehow.

  Dru tried to fit him and the hotline phone into some sort of scenario. She wrote the words on sticky notes and moved them around her desk, waiting for some connection to strike sparks: Brit, hotline, Kinnery. But no matter how she arranged them, nothing jumped out. She carried on sifting through files until the e-mail arrived from Grant.

  This was the legitimately acquired stuff, a list of nearly sixty names and phone numbers. Grant was cryptic and sparing in his notes. He'd added only one comment: 'Graduates, CK's year, from college records and reunion sites. Current contact shown where available.'

  Dru was looking for names that might have had a Seattle connection. But the only way to ring all those numbers without raising suspicion was to have a credible reason for calling. Some of those people might still be in contact and compare notes.

  Hi, I'm looking for someone who trusted Charles Kinnery enough to let him shoot them full of stolen genetic material. Would that be you?

  She resigned herself to deception again. Lying became easy if you did it often enough, then it became a habit, and then you didn't even know you were doing it. She didn't want to step onto that precarious slope. It wasn't the same as other irregular things, like acquiring call logs she shouldn't have had. That was outside of her, illegal but not untrue. But lying was within her skin, an assault on reality that she had to create, a different kind of wrong; it would be polluting, distorting, eventually destroying the anchors and fixed points within her that were the foundations of memory and principle. That was the nature of the human mind, malleable and interested only in recognising patterns that meant survival. All humans lied, whether it was the self-deception of being over-optimistic or outright, full-blown fraud.

  Dru reached in her purse for a snack bar. She found her Chanel powder compact instead, the only luxury that she'd treated herself to in years. But fancy compact or not, the mirror could only show her what was actually there, and it showed her forty years.

  Forty, Dru. Forty. Greying. Looking old enough to remember Kinnery. Weaver said so, as good as. This is where I disappear. I'll metamorphose into a grey, transparent thing with my mind trapped inside, tapping at the window to try to make someone see that I'm still in there. Who needs private investigators? Just hire a few middle-aged women. We move unseen.

  It was an incentive to get on with making the calls. Dru fidgeted with the burner phone and wondered whether to simply call Kinnery and ask to see him. He was probably expecting someone t
o do just that. But she couldn't short-circuit this yet.

  What do I need to ask? I'm looking for someone with a Seattle connection. I don't have a name. If it's a cell, the area code needn't even be where the subscriber lives. It might be forwarded. It might even be spoofed.

  But it was all she had to go with, and every day that passed made it potentially harder. She rehearsed her lines, reverse engineering the information she wanted, without adding detail that anyone might feel the need to check.

  Okay, she was trying to track down someone whose name she didn't know, on behalf of a third party that none of these alumni would know, and who might have a Seattle connection. That didn't sound unreasonable. But who should she claim to be? Officialdom might seem intimidating, and it was too easily checked.

  While she psyched herself up to make the first call, she looked through the rest of the list. Grant had cross-checked all the names to see if any had been at conferences or institutions that Kinnery had mentioned in his online biographical details and CV. This was the inevitable nakedness of being an academic. He had to reveal information, because nobody would want to be taught by a man who wouldn't say where he'd studied or worked. There were a couple of names who'd had recent professional contact, but none of the numbers that Grant had turned up matched any of those on Kinnery's recent call log. It didn't rule them out. But if Kinnery had called someone about Project Ringer, then it would have been very recent, triggered by The Slide's article or whatever event had resurrected the whole thing after so many years.

  Okay. I'm trying to find someone who might have been at university with you in the early Seventies, maybe someone who moved to the Seattle area, because ...

  Dru's momentum stalled. It required an absolute lie and the creation of people who didn't exist. Her first idea was to claim she was tracking down an old friend of her late mother and that she had very few details. Her actual mother was very much alive, though. Dru found she had an uncharacteristically superstitious fear that she'd be punished somehow if she tempted fate that much. And wouldn't she know the gender of the friend, at very least?