by Black, Jenna
“Even though you wouldn’t have needed my help if I hadn’t gotten you into trouble in the first place?” If only Nate hadn’t been so eager to give his father the virtual finger by screwing around at a state event, the two of them wouldn’t have had to go looking for privacy, and they wouldn’t have overheard what they should never have overheard.
Kurt shrugged. “It took both of us to get into that mess. So yeah, even though.”
Nate nodded. And then he told Kurt the whole story.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kurt sat on Nate’s bed, arms curled around his bent knees as he contemplated everything Nate had told him. There was a haunted, faraway look in his eyes, and Nate wondered if he might have lost anyone he knew to Thea’s experiments. The Basement was an abysmally dangerous place, and people disappeared from it on a regular basis, which was how Mosely had kept anyone from noticing his depredations. Nate didn’t have the impression that Kurt had left any good friends behind when he’d left the Basement to come work for him, but then there were a lot of things about his previous life that Kurt had failed to tell him. And that Nate had maybe been too squeamish to ask about.
“We’ve always known the government was corrupt,” Kurt finally said, his eyes still lost. “But no one imagined anything like this.”
“No, of course not. It’s … beyond comprehension. And the worst thing about it is my father still doesn’t think he and Mosely and Thea were doing anything wrong. He’d have happily killed me and produced another Replica who didn’t know the truth so he could keep right on doing what he was doing. He said it was for the greater good of Paxco, and I think he actually believed it.”
Kurt made a sound of disgust. “The greater good of the people in Paxco he thinks are worth a shit, you mean. He wouldn’t shed a tear if every man, woman, and child in Debasement dropped dead. Hell, he’d probably throw a party. More money for the people who matter. Hurray!”
Nate wished he could argue the point, but he couldn’t. His father had made it very clear that he thought the whole population of Debasement were leeches, sucking out the lifeblood of society. And he was far from the only high-ranking Paxco Executive to feel that way.
How many of Paxco’s top Executives would have objected if Thea’s experimentation had gone public? The Basement-dwellers would no doubt have risen up in violence, and much of the Employee class would probably have joined them, fueled by righteous indignation, but Nate bet many, if not most, of the Executives would have agreed with the Chairman that appeasing Thea by “sacrificing” certain unsavory elements of the population was the right thing to do. They wouldn’t have been willing to give up the money and privileges Thea provided for them by making the Replica program possible. It made Nate ashamed to be an Executive.
“We put a stop to it,” Nate said, reminding himself as much as Kurt. “Nadia and me.” He made a face. “Well, mostly Nadia. But I did what I could.”
Kurt whistled. “Kinda wish I could have been there to see it. Never thought the little mouse would have it in her.” He smiled crookedly, and there was something that looked a lot like admiration in his eyes.
“She was never a mouse,” Nate said, though he knew Kurt had always seen her that way, as someone timid and fragile and maybe even weak-willed. But then Kurt couldn’t understand the burden she’d been carrying since she was four years old and promised to him. Nate had never truly understood it, either, not until everything had started to crumble. “She was amazing. And now she’s paying for it while you and I go on with our lives.”
“Most times doing the right thing means taking risks,” Kurt said. “You gotta be prepared for those risks to turn around and bite you. If you’re not willing to face the consequences, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” He reached out and squeezed Nate’s shoulder. “I’m sorry Nadia got bit, but at least it’s not fatal. It coulda been a lot worse.”
“It still could be, if the Chairman ever finds those recordings.”
Kurt acknowledged that with a nod. Nate didn’t want to dwell on all the terrible things that could still happen, so he used the opening Kurt had inadvertently given him to broach a subject he hadn’t been sure how to broach.
“So you’re still … doing stuff for the resistance?”
Kurt gave him a puzzled look. “You know I am. I can’t be their inside man anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make myself useful.”
“Like how?”
Kurt looked even more puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘how’?”
“What kind of stuff do you do for the resistance?”
“Why do you want to know?” The puzzlement was replaced by something that looked more like suspicion.
Nate looked down at his hands, which he noticed he’d curled into tense fists. He forced his fingers to relax, not sure why he was suddenly feeling so vulnerable. “I’ve told you before I was going to change things in Paxco when I became Chairman.” He had always noticed a hint of polite skepticism in Kurt’s face when he’d done so, but he’d chosen to ignore it. “The stuff that’s happened lately has made me realize that I shouldn’t wait that long. I may be Chairman Heir, but I don’t really have any power. Even if I were the perfect heir, with a keen mind for politics and a cool head, no one would listen to me because they think I’m just a kid. And forget about anyone listening to me now, after I’ve made everyone think of me as an irresponsible playboy.”
“Where are you going with this?”
Nate cleared his throat. “I can’t make any changes through official channels, but I can’t just keep sitting on my ass and waiting for some mythical future where I have the power to make a difference. Especially since that future may no longer exist. I want to make a difference now, so I thought maybe I could do something to help out your resistance movement.”
“The resistance movement you know squat about,” Kurt pointed out.
“I know you believe in it. And I believe in you.”
Kurt cupped Nate’s face in his hands and planted a sweet, gentle kiss on his lips before shaking his head fondly.
“You know I love you, Nate,” he said with a smile that was no doubt meant to ease the sting, “but the resistance is not for you.”
Nate sat up a little straighter. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re the Chairman Heir, dumbass,” Kurt answered, still smiling, making the insult sound affectionate. “You’re the enemy.”
“I’m not—”
“Not in my eyes. I know you. But the resistance is almost all Basement-dwellers and Employees. We’re the have-nots, and you’re most definitely one of the haves. When you say you want to make a difference, I believe you. But I don’t have much more power in the resistance than you do in the government. I’m just a kid, too, and no one’s going to take my word for it that you’re one of the good guys.”
He understood Kurt’s point, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. “If every Executive in Paxco were to drop dead, would anyone in the resistance shed a tear?”
Kurt winced and drew back, answering the question without words. It seemed the resistance was every bit as class-conscious as the government they opposed. Nate shouldn’t have been surprised. His education had been heavily weighted toward economics, political science, and history. He’d never been a great student, but he hadn’t been a bad one, either.
“You know, when resistance movements like yours manage to topple the government they oppose, they tend to kill the opposition. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the French Revolution, but when the revolutionaries took over, they made being born to the aristocracy a crime punishable by death. And being seen as part of the ‘establishment’ wasn’t too good for a lot of the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, either. Is that the kind of regime change your resistance is hoping for?”
Kurt shook his head. “I don’t know anything about those revolutions. We just want a voice in our government. The way we live in Debasement … It’s not right. Not when E
xecutives have everything they want just because they were born. We want a government that gives a shit about us. That doesn’t mean we want to see a bunch of Executives’ heads on pikes.”
“And yet someone like me isn’t welcome,” Nate countered, trying not to sound bitter. His father was going to disinherit him; the resistance wanted nothing to do with him. What was he supposed to do with his life now? Go to parties and look pretty while being of absolutely no use to society?
“You’re as welcome in the resistance as I would be in the board room. It’s no lie: life sucks sometimes.”
Nate swallowed a snappish response. If the resistance wouldn’t have him, then he’d just have to find some other way to work against his father and Dorothy. He wasn’t going to lie down and let them win!
“I won’t tell anyone about Thea,” Kurt continued. “It won’t do anyone any good, and it could do a lot of harm.”
Nate couldn’t resist issuing a challenge. “If your resistance is so peaceful, what harm could it possibly do?”
Kurt met his challenging gaze head-on. “I don’t know the people who are in charge, but if they’re Basement-dwellers, they’re bound to have known and maybe even loved someone who disappeared. Probably had nothing to do with Thea. Probably they either disappeared themselves on purpose or are somewhere on the bottom of the East River. But once people get to wondering…”
Kurt let his voice trail off, and Nate couldn’t help but get the message. The subject of Thea was too incendiary, too likely to hit nerves. He relaxed his shoulders, not having realized how much he had tensed up. Kurt might not be educated, but Nate had known from the moment he’d met him that he was smart. He understood just how dangerous the information about Thea could be if released into the wrong hands.
“You’re sure Thea is dead, right?” Kurt asked with a shudder.
Nate remembered the sights and sounds and smells of his father destroying the living machine that was Thea. Remembered the shattering of the jars that had held Thea’s biological components, blood-like fluid splashing onto the floor. Remembered the lumps of what looked like brain tissue those jars had concealed. Remembered the stink of blood and chemicals and gunpowder as his father had shot the jars one by one. Remembered the lights on Thea’s nonbiological components going out as the world’s first and only true artificial intelligence gave up the ghost.
“She’s dead all right.”
“Good.”
There was a long silence as they both got lost in their own thoughts. Kurt snapped out of it first, shaking his head and blinking as if he’d just emerged from a trance. He reached out and planted a hand on the center of Nate’s chest, pushing him firmly down to the mattress.
“After all that,” Kurt said with a wicked smile, “I think we could both use some stress relief.”
Nate couldn’t have agreed more.
* * *
Nadia rarely gave in to the desire to cry, and even when she did, she usually reeled herself in quickly and efficiently. But on her first night at the Preston Sanctuary, the first night of the rest of her life, she couldn’t have stopped the tears if her life had depended on it.
Her room in the dormitory was perfectly nice, roomy and tastefully decorated with a comfortable bed and an array of lamps that would make up for the lighting deficiencies caused by the small window. There were bookshelves against one wall holding a small selection of books in case she was too lazy to walk up to the library on the third floor, and a small alcove with a coffee maker, a hot plate, and a tea kettle along with a basket of teas and prepackaged coffee.
But it might as well have been a prison cell as far as Nadia was concerned. Unlike at Tranquility, there were quite a number of rules here, so many that there was a booklet on her nightstand documenting them all. There was an eleven o’clock curfew, for one thing, and the staff checked each and every room to make sure that the inmates were accounted for. You needed a key card to open the doors at either end of the dormitory hall, and wherever you went, you had to check in and have your key card scanned. There were security cameras everywhere except inside the rooms themselves. You couldn’t take a step without being tracked and observed. And instead of having visiting hours twice a week, there was only one visiting day each month, and Nadia had just missed it.
It would be a month before Nadia could set eyes on any of her loved ones again. A month before she had any chance to warn Gerri away from the recordings. And forget about seeing Dante. There was no way an Employee would be allowed to visit her, at least not without her parents’ permission, which he’d never ask for and they’d never give. She was miserably, utterly, and truly alone.
And so she cried for everything she had lost, and she cried in fear for Gerri, and she cried because there was no one around to tell her she shouldn’t.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nadia doubted she got more than an hour or two of sleep on her first night at the Preston Sanctuary. The crying jag had exhausted her, and yet she was too worried about Gerri—and about her own bleak future locked away from public view—to fall asleep.
She rose from her bed shortly after the sun came up and tried to interest herself in one of the classic old novels on her prestocked bookshelf. She sampled four or five of them before she came to the inevitable conclusion that in her current state of mind, nothing was going to hold her attention. She felt so awful that she skipped breakfast, making do with a cup of tea and spending the morning in her room with the door closed.
By lunchtime, her stomach informed her in no uncertain terms that she had to eat, so she dressed and showered and headed down to the main dining room. There were several long tables in the center of the dining room, where the more sociable of the Sanctuary’s inmates could gather and share whatever camaraderie and gossip was available for people who had no lives, but there were also tables for two and four dotting the edges of the room. Nadia stood in the doorway for a long moment, trying to decide where to sit.
As her mother had promised, there were a handful of teens among the inmates of the Sanctuary, and Nadia quickly spotted them, clustered together at one end of one of the long tables. Of course, they were all Executives, so even if they hadn’t been seen in polite society in recent months or years, Nadia knew who they all were. There was Theresa Mallory, who was rumored to have a nasty habit of sleeping with the help—and then accusing them of rape when she got tired of them. There was Piper Cade, who was so jealous of her little brother that she’d pushed the boy down the stairs and practically killed him. That wasn’t a rumor; Nadia had been at the party where the “accident” had occurred, and though she hadn’t seen what happened, she had seen the self-satisfied look on Piper’s face while the paramedics strapped her brother to a gurney to rush him to the hospital. And last, there was Sydney Sullivan, who was rumored to be mentally ill. Nadia had never met the girl in person—Sydney had been sent to the retreat years ago—but if the company she kept was any indication, Nadia was just as happy to keep it that way.
Ignoring her supposed “peers,” Nadia chose a two-person table in the corner, her stomach tying itself in knots. Tranquility had been bad enough, but at least there hadn’t been any psychos like Theresa and Piper there. Not that she knew of, anyway. She wondered how long it would take them to notice her and start trying to make her life more miserable than it already was. They were bound to be as aggressively jealous of her as the Terrible Trio, and because they were out of the public eye, there were no rules of polite society to keep their behavior in check.
Nadia was so busy chewing her lip, worrying over this new potential problem, that she didn’t notice the older woman approaching until she pulled back the second chair at Nadia’s table and sat down without an invitation.
“You don’t have to worry about them,” the woman said as she snatched the elaborately folded napkin from her plate and smoothed it over her lap. “The staff here keep a very close eye on everyone, but particularly the known troublemakers.”
The woman smiled at her, c
reating crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out her hand for Nadia to shake, “I’ve been here so long I’ve forgotten my manners. I’m Athena Lawrence.”
“Um, pleased to meet you,” Nadia said, wondering if her own manners would disappear after she’d spent a few years here. “I’m Nadia Lake.”
“I know,” Athena said, giving her hand a mannishly hard squeeze as she shook.
“You do?” Nadia guessed Athena’s age to be mid to late forties. Nadia had never heard of her, and that meant whatever scandal had sent her to the retreat happened long ago, before Nadia’s time. Which meant Athena shouldn’t know who she was.
Athena nodded, and her smile turned sad. “Ellie Hayes was my dearest friend for many years. I wasn’t allowed to officially attend the funeral, but there were a couple of us who watched from one of the windows. I saw you with Ellie’s son and made an educated guess about who you might be. You and Nathaniel were already promised to one another before I came to the Sanctuary.”
Nadia wasn’t sure what to say, especially when Athena’s eyes misted with tears. The woman had done more than watch the funeral from a window if she had seen Nate and Nadia together. They had been indoors when they’d talked, and Nadia certainly hadn’t been aware they were being observed.
“Apologies again,” Athena said, dabbing at her eyes. “I’m afraid I was spying a bit. I hoped to find a way to have a word with Nathaniel before he left, but my keepers here found me out before I could.”
Nadia was intrigued despite herself, curiosity making her feel slightly more alive—and hungry. When a waitress came to the table, Nadia ignored the haute cuisine choices on the menu and went for a bacon cheeseburger instead. She had never eaten something so inelegant in public before, not wanting to see pictures of herself with her mouth hugely open and grease on her fingers plastered on the net, but if she had to be trapped at the retreat, the least she could do was eat what she wanted. Hell, it didn’t even matter if she got fat.