Binary

by Stephanie Saulter

  As they moved Ellyn from her bed onto the gurney and covered her up again, Zavcka Klist started to speak. Her head was still down but she was looking up through her lashes at Aryel Morningstar; a pose that, bizarrely, reminded Eli of Herran.

  ‘You unnatural, unholy bitch.’ Her voice was low, and thick with hate. ‘You think I don’t know who you are? What you’ve done? You think I won’t tell them?’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’

  ‘No one, no one, needed to get hurt here. If you’d all just stayed out of my way, let me have what I wanted, no one would have got hurt. You think I’m the one who damaged that girl? She’s an imbecile, none of this matters to her, she doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. I didn’t do that to her. You did.’

  ‘Ms Klist,’ Sharon said sharply, ‘I’ve arrested you for kidnapping, forced surrogacy, attempted murder and a whole lot more.

  Defamation of character might not seem like much in comparison, but I’ll happily add it to the list.’

  ‘I wish she were lying,’ Aryel said quietly. ‘For once, she’s not.’ Her voice was heavy with sorrow, and she ran her own small hand up the blanketed ridge of Ellyn’s arm, brushed the melted skin along the jaw, then touched her fingers to her own lips and pressed them gently against the sleeping girl’s cheek. Eli glanced at Zavcka Klist, and for the first time he thought he saw the fight go out of her.

  The paramedics took up position at either end of the gurney, moving with a suggestive briskness, and Aryel stepped back to let them wheel it away. She looked across the blanketed mound of pregnant belly at Sharon. ‘In a way I am just as responsible for what’s happened here as Zavcka Klist is, and I’m done with keeping secrets. I have another story to tell you, Inspector Varsi, and there are a lot more dead people in it.’

  SCORCHED

  Nothing is left.

  The scars lap up to her feet, shockwaves of soot and debris in spreading semicircles, as though discarded by a retreating tide. The eruption point is a jagged, blackened hole in what remains of the front façade of the building. The explosion must have blown out the main entrance, she guesses, judging from the broad tier of steps that lead up to the mouth of the cavity. Their surface is pitted and buckled, and the firefighters and police who swarm up and down them do so carefully, for the too-white brightness of the emergency lights casts harsh shadows, concealing as many hazards as it reveals. The starkness of that glare has the contradictory effect of making it harder, instead of easier, to identify what it illuminates. In front of the steps she notes two similar, oddly sculptural masses of twisted metal slats, spears of glass dangling haphazardly from their grooved edges, and wonders briefly what they were, before her mind draws the tortured shapes into perspective.

  The doors.

  She remembers her own fierce imaginings as she waited out the obfuscations of Panborn and Owen, of simply blowing the doors off this place and taking control, and her shock is replaced by anger. Someone else had the will, the invention, the audacity to do what she only dreamt. And not in order to take possession, but to leave it.

  A small sound like a sob from the functionary who accompanied them. She looks around, wrinkling her nose at the heavy smell of burning – burnt plastic, burnt wood, burnt flesh – and notes with disapproval the traces of tears on the young man’s face. He touches her arm wordlessly, gestures towards shapes laid out on the grass, clear of the furthest traces of the blast. Light pours onto them from even more high-lux lamps, their spindly frames telescoped tall, square heads lowered as though in prayer, beaming down an indictment.

  Beyond all is dark, dark. The night-time forest reaches up almost to the very edge of the primly paved, neatly trimmed square that lies before the burnt-out shell. Outside this blasted oasis the silhouettes of trees march away in every direction, dense and impenetrable, towering. It seems to her that they lean in, as though to reclaim it already.

  Between the drawn lines of trees and trauma the bodies lie side by side by side, some already in bags, most only hastily covered by a sheet. She counts twelve, fifteen, twenty. Some of the mounds look too small, incomplete, but then she recalls there were children here too.

  Jonah trudges back towards them, carefully skirting the edge of the blast radius. Beyond him men and women in uniform shift and murmur and stare, and then go back to the hurrying business of interview and investigation. She sees the orange flight suits and green camouflage of the retrieval teams, corralled behind police vehicles and barricades, and thinks that steps must be taken to ensure the tale of this disaster does not spread.

  Jonah stops in front of her, face a mask of bitter disbelief.

  ‘Survivors?’

  ‘Not as such. They say one of the juveniles is still hanging on.’

  ‘I want it kept alive. Whatever it takes. What about the staff? Panborn?’

  Jonah shakes his head.

  ‘Are all the gems accounted for?’

  ‘They’re not sure. The … the one we came to see … they think she’s dead, but they haven’t found a body. The others…’ He gestures wordlessly at the shrouded piles behind him. ‘It’s hard to say. And none of them are certain how many were here to begin with.’

  She pushes back another surge of irritation at the unprofessionalism, the cobbled-together unaccountability of it all. ‘If they didn’t manage to retrieve her why do they think she’s dead?’

  ‘They tracked her to the edge of some kind of cliff, a river gorge. No way down.’ They exchange glances, the thought flashing unspoken between them, and Jonah shrugs. ‘No reason to think that … She never had before, and the physics of it… it just doesn’t work. The retrieval team believes she must have thrown herself off rather than be captured. Not that they know exactly what they were hunting… they’d never seen—’

  He breaks off at the look on her face. She breathes deeply, controlling her temper. No point taking it out on Jonah.

  ‘The explosion was secondary to the fire?’

  ‘Apparently there were two. The first one was small, contained within the underground facility. They’re still not sure how she caused it, but the way she used the chaos to get out… it’s clear it wasn’t an accident, she must have had a plan. She released the others and led them outside but she didn’t stay with them, she headed off on her own.’

  She nods, picturing the disoriented gems stumbling through the forest in every direction, delaying and misdirecting the trackers while their liberator pursued her own escape. She appreciates the ruthlessness of it. ‘So the retrieval team went after them.’

  ‘Yes. They say Panborn ordered them to go, said rounding up the gems – especially her – was top priority, not to worry about the fire, they had it under control. They picked up the others fairly quickly – seems they were mostly quite young – and returned them here, then went back out to support the unit on her trail. So the helicopter and foot squads were all miles away, the other side of the hills, when they heard the second explosion. By the time they got back—’ Jonah breaks off again, surveying the destruction.

  ‘So what caused it? The second explosion?’

  ‘Nobody’s sure yet. The pilot says there was a fuel dump down there, in one of the old mine chambers. His theory is that the fire must have burned through.’

  She thinks through the unfolding stages of crisis, understands how it could have happened. There is one small mercy, at least: that she already knew about this place, was already on her way here with Jonah, has already used the hours they spent halted by flashing lights and barricades further down the mountain to begin to manage the disaster. There will be no leadership gap within which rumours can circulate, no delay in the actions she must take. The damage can be limited, contained.

  How fortunate.

  A thought strikes her. ‘Did she know?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The gem girl, the prototype. Did she know I was coming today?’

  ‘What? I don’t know. Why would she? But they might have told her, I suppose…’

/>   She feels her jaw tighten as she files the question away. One more piece of a puzzle she senses she may never solve. It hardly matters, not any more. Time to get to work.

  She steps well inside the damage zone and turns in a cool, deliberate circle, making it plain she is watching as the heads of assembled officialdom snap round. To her left a big man in a soot-stained firefighter’s rig with a badge on the chest, to her right a small woman with a police captain’s epaulettes. As one they break off their conferences with subordinates and stride determinedly in her direction, a pincer movement. Good.

  Let them come to her, the better to understand who is now in charge here.

  She strolls a few steps forward and stops to wait, ignoring first the murmur and then the hush, glancing around at the wasteland as though conducting her own investigation.

  Near her feet, more twisted metal. Gold this time, bright lights picking out the gleam through the rust-rainbow patina left by the explosion. Letters, a sign still legible despite the damage. From the size and where it has come to rest she surmises it must have hung above the shattered doors; an announcement, a proclamation. A mockery.

  Phoenix.

  REMNANT

  31

  ‘When I was a child,’ Aryel said, ‘I used to hear the researchers talk about the “fertility problem”. Sometimes they called it the Phoenix problem. It was something they said I had inherited. A lot of the tests they did on me when I was little had to do with it, but as the years went by they talked about it less and less. When I was older and broke into my own files, I found out that I’d been born without ova, although I didn’t really understand what that meant at the time. But it wasn’t until Eli found the memos that I put two and two together. You see, I also knew that they’d tried to clone me, over and over, and always failed. They’d make it through the first few hundred cell divisions, and then …’ She blew a raspberry.

  Eli found the crude expression out of keeping with her usual grace, and thoroughly endearing.

  They were in her vertiginous living room, himself and Mikal and Reginald and Herran and Gwen, draped over the furniture in the exhausted sprawl of puppets who have had their strings cut. Even Herran was sitting back a bit, tablet largely dormant on his lap. Midnight had come, and long since gone. From where he sat, slumped with his head tipped back on a sofa, Eli could see shreds of cloud whip by on the dying eddies of the storm, dark and ragged against the night sky.

  ‘And that was the same story with Zavcka?’ Mikal asked. His arms were extended along the back of another sofa, hands drooping over the ends, and his legs stuck so far out in front of him that they were almost hanging off the edge of the drop. ‘So much for engineering out imperfections.’

  ‘You have to remember what an early stage gemtech science was at. The clock was ticking for Jarek and his wife: she had the Syndrome, they knew she only had a few years left to live. Whether he intentionally tampered with the embryo beyond what was necessary to try to make their child Syndrome-safe or whether it was just an accident of the early technology, I don’t think we’ll ever know. But at some point Jarek and Zavcka discovered that she had come with two extra features: she couldn’t conceive, and she didn’t age. They may have believed she was literally immortal. Can you imagine? The holy grail of human desire: never to age and never to die. Only if you can’t have children you can’t pass that gift on, and if you can’t clone yourself you can’t even create another you for company. There’s no one to live forever with. I’m not sure that’s ever bothered Zavcka as much as it bothered Jarek, but I think it consumed him. One of his reasons for creating Phoenix was to try to solve the problem.’

  ‘And Phoenix created you.’

  ‘And Phoenix created me. Not on purpose, I hasten to add. They were experimenting with cross-species splicing, seeing how far the reparative aspects of the mutation could be pushed. They didn’t expect the batch to be viable.’

  ‘It worked, though, didn’t it?’

  ‘What worked?’

  ‘Jarek’s plan.’ He rolled his head towards her, his tone droll. ‘Phoenix created you, and you have fulfilled his mission. Zavcka’s going to have company for the rest of her life, however long that is. Granted, it’s probably not quite what he had in mind …’

  She chuckled wearily. ‘No, I’m sure it’s not. She’s already begging them not to make her own story public, to keep pretending she’s Zavcka the Second. Got her lawyers all over it.’

  ‘Why care?’

  ‘I think there are a few reasons, Herran. One, she’s spent a long time being afraid of what would happen if people found out: of how they might try to take advantage of her, not to mention uncovering all the ways she’s used it to take advantage of others. Two, she would have had to do a lot of manipulation of the family assets to remove them from the identity she was leaving behind, and transfer them into the identity she was creating. If Zavcka the Second is acknowledged not to exist, she risks losing control of a vast fortune. It’s still hers, remember, even though she’ll be in prison, and she might yet outlive whatever sentence they give her. And three, to admit it means admitting she is highly engineered, that she is the thing she’s spent her entire life looking down on.’

  ‘Gem.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What’ll happen now?’ asked Gwen. She was uncharacteristically subdued, though Eli supposed it was understandable under the circumstances. ‘To Bel’Natur? The research they were doing with Herran, and – and everything else?’

  Aryel raised an eyebrow at Eli, a gentle hint that he had managed to sink himself into the cushions and avoid being part of the conversation for quite long enough. He pushed himself wearily upright.

  ‘The company will continue,’ he said. ‘She’s a major shareholder, but not the only one. And we want it to, because the deal Herran made with them still stands. The infotech programme has real potential, but it’ll need very stringent public oversight. Now that we know what her intentions were, the gatekeepers need to be on guard. Complete transparency.’ He shifted, trying to get comfortable again, and jerked his chin at Mikal. ‘That’s your area, Councillor.’

  ‘Indeed. All that time I spent in their ethics committee meetings might not be wasted after all. Of course,’ he mused, staring at the ceiling, snapping his fingers with both thumbs in a softly syncopated quadruple beat, ‘pimping myself, my wife, an oblique promise to divert a police investigation and a truly daft scheme to bring back gemtech may not be the best advertisement of my fitness for the role.’

  Weary laughter from everyone but Herran, who blinked his grey eyes solemnly at them.

  ‘I’m not sure it was that daft,’ Aryel murmured. ‘What did Masoud say?’

  ‘Masoud was apoplectic. I think it’s his reaction to a tactic that he can’t possibly approve of, even though he thinks it’s really, really cool.’

  ‘Is Sharon going to be in trouble, do you think?’

  ‘What, for drafting in two civilians, one a seriously ill young man with no experience of police work and an inclination to go off-piste, and the other an unorthodox city councillor to whom she just happens to be married? She’s already offered him her warrant tab. He asked what the hell he was supposed to do with it.’

  ‘I have another question, Ari,’ said Gwen, though she sounded hesitant. Her tablet was also on her knee, inactive but near to hand. She trailed a thoughtful finger over the blank surface.

  ‘You can have as many as you like. What is it?’

  ‘I’m not going to shout at you and Da for letting us think you were with him for years and years before he rescued us. Not yet. I’m too tired and there’s too much going on. But I want to know something.’

  ‘Thank you for not shouting. Yet. What do you want to know?’

  ‘What were we for?’

  An expectant quiet then. It was, Eli realised, one of the few remaining mysteries. For some. He saw Reginald close his eyes and shake his head a little, as though in resignation.

  ‘What do you
think, Gwennie?’

  ‘I think a lot of things. I want you to tell me.’

  Aryel sighed, and pushed back her hair. She had loosened it again and it fell heavy around her shoulders and over the arches of her wings. Eli saw the metal clasp glint in her fingers as she gestured helplessly at the air.

  ‘You were meant to be combat models,’ she said. ‘Soldiers. I’ve thought so for some time, and I suspect we’ll find confirmation in the Phoenix archive once Herran finishes resurrecting it. It was the big thing around twentyfive years ago – there were endless, nasty wars all across North Africa and the Middle East, all the tribal factions trying to secure what was left of their fossil fuel reserves. Plus flare-ups in South America and Southeast Asia that looked as though they might go the same way. The military focus was cybernetics, and they tried that too, but I think Panborn was clever enough to realise that if no one could make mechanical grafts work then whoever turned out a literal super-human – speed, strength, agility, night vision, acute hearing, proximity awareness, high operational IQ, all the things you and Rhys have – could make a killing.’ She heard herself, and winced. ‘Sorry. Poor choice of word.’

  ‘It’s okay. That’s … that’s kind of what I thought.’ She was silent for a moment, picking at a pillow on her lap, the waiting tablet still on her knee. ‘It doesn’t matter if that’s what they meant us for, as long as it’s not what we are. It’s just … as long as nobody thinks that’s what we are. What Rhys did …’

  ‘What Rhys did saved his and Callan’s lives, and quite possibly Ellyn’s as well. It’s a miracle he was able to do it at all, the effort must have been …’ Aryel trailed off, shaking her head. ‘There’s no way he could have controlled his own strength, not in that state. The doctors will confirm it. There’ll be an investigation, there has to be, but don’t worry about it. No one will hold it against him, or you.’