by Peter Clines
“Speaking of looking forward,” said Max with another glance at the sky, “there are some things we need to do here if we want there to be a future.”
Christian looked ready to tear her Bible in half. St. George was sure the woman would’ve if she’d been strong enough. She glared at him for a moment.
Then the anger went out of her and she tucked the book under her arm. “We’ll discuss this more soon,” she said. “Believe it.”
She turned and marched through the crowd. Some of them followed her. Others seemed confused and drifted in the streets.
Stealth took St. George’s arm. “Ilya has tried to reach you,” she said, gesturing at the dangling earbud. “He has found three swords he believes may suit our needs.”
“That’s great,” said St. George.
“We have also received an urgent summons from Dr. Connolly. She says it cannot wait.”
“Okay. I’ll catch up with you la—”
“We, George. She wishes to speak with both of us.”
Max nodded. “Go,” he said. “I need some time to figure out a good shield spell I can paint on you instead of tattooing.”
St. George held out his hand and Stealth grabbed his wrist. They shot into the sky.
ST. GEORGE AND Stealth landed outside the hospital. The receptionist told them Connolly was in one of the small labs on the fourth floor. They walked across the lobby to the stairwell.
They were on the second landing when Stealth spoke. “In some religions,” she said, “your willingness to sacrifice yourself could be seen as making you more honorable and holy.”
He tried to smile. “That’s good. I think I’m going to need every edge I can get.”
“I would not put much trust in Maxwell’s offer to assist you.”
“Why not?”
“Despite his bravado and professed expertise, I believe he is far more an amateur than he would like to admit.”
“Ahhh.”
They passed the door for the third floor.
“Also,” she said, “he is lying to us.”
“You could’ve led with that,” said St. George. He stopped on the landing and turned to her. “Why do you think so?”
Her cloak settled around her. “I cannot say,” she admitted. “I am positive something he has said is a lie, yet I cannot confirm why. The uncertainty is frustrating.”
“What did he say?”
Stealth went up the next flight of stairs without a word.
“Well?”
“He knows Billie Carter has a dolphin tattoo.”
“Is that …” He looked up at her and cleared his throat. “Is that wrong? I mean, besides the obvious way it’s wrong he knows that?”
Stealth’s head shifted inside her hood. “No. I performed her screening when we first took survivors into the Mount. The tattoo is on her left pelvic where it would be hidden by most items of clothing or underwear. From the color bleed, I would estimate she received it close to her seventeenth birthday.”
St. George followed her up the stairs. “So what’s the problem?”
“As I said, I am unsure. Yet I am convinced Maxwell has lied to us and it ties back to that statement.”
He pulled open the fourth-floor door and held it for her. The guard in the hallway directed them a few doors down to the pathology lab. Connolly was sitting in front of a microscope attached to a battered laptop computer. She glanced up as they entered, then back at the screen, as if she was worried what she’d been looking at would vanish. Her face was a mix of emotions.
“This had best be important, doctor,” Stealth said. “We do not have much time.”
“It’s important,” said Connolly. She waved them over to the counter and tapped a few keys on the laptop. She turned it so St. George and Stealth could see better.
On the screen St. George saw a trio of delicate shapes. They looked like silver spiderwebs, or maybe simple snowflakes, set against a white background. Each arm or branch looked like it was made of short segments. They drifted in the image, like underwater plants. One of the shapes shifted and St. George realized the arms extended out in several directions, like a Christmas tree ornament.
“Are they some kind of bacteria or something?” asked St. George. “Is it the ex-virus?”
Connolly shook her head. “They’re macromolecular complexes. Those arms are nanotubes, like flagella, but they’re all composed of different chemical compounds. The center mass is a mix of proteins and DNA, like you’d find in a virus. This whole structure’s approximately forty microns across.”
St. George blinked a few times and his mouth twisted up. “None of that means anything to me.”
“They’re nanites,” she said.
“A what?”
“A piece of nanotechnology,” Stealth said. “Machinery built or grown on a cellular level. Where did you find them?”
“They came from Madelyn.”
St. George looked up from the screen. “What?”
“Yesterday morning I decided to do a straight visual inspection of her blood at a higher magnification. Since the ex-virus mimics white blood cells, I thought it might be a way to spot a possible variation. I know it’s not supposed to mutate, but it was the only thing I could think of. That’s when I realized none of her blood cells were actually blood cells.”
She tapped her keyboard and a new image came up. The nanite webs had rolled their arms into coils and wrapped themselves into double-layered discs that were thicker at the edges. “These are from another one of her blood samples.”
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “Their form now resembles erythrocytes. You are certain they are the same structures?”
Connolly nodded. “That’s why I didn’t notice them before. They were shaped like red blood cells and acting like them.” She hit a key and called up another picture. In this one dozens of webs were stretched out long and thin. The arms were gathered in parallel bundles. “These are from a tissue sample we took. Hundreds of them linked together to form bone muscle fibers.”
The doctor cycled the pictures back to the extended spiderweb and took in a controlled breath. “These things reshape themselves to mimic different cells, depending on where in the body they are. Blood cells, muscle cells, skin cells. They can even work together to imitate nerve cells.” She paused for a moment. “Do you have any idea what that means? An artificial neuron? That’s past Nobel Prize, that’s just … It’s impossible.”
“Clearly it is not,” said Stealth.
St. George tipped his head at the microscope image. “So these are in Maddy? They have something to do with her … condition?”
“They’re not in her, George,” Connolly said. “It’s all she is.”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean …” The doctor took a breath. “Okay, I’m just guessing here because this is all way, way out of my league, and at this point I haven’t slept in two days.” She looked at Stealth. “You super-genius types can do what you want with this. Maybe you’ll come up with another way to interpret all the data.”
She took another slow breath and collected her thoughts.
“I think Emil Sorensen invented something amazing,” Connolly said. “He figured out how to biochemically engineer the dream nanite sci-fi writers have been talking about since the seventies. Almost a self-guided, synthetic stem cell, if you will. And, for some reason, he used them on his daughter. Maybe she had some injury or a disease or something. I don’t know her history well enough to guess what happened. But they ended up in her body, and they started multiplying and fixing things. Maddy got older, became athletic, and they supported and enhanced her whole system. If anything went wrong—muscle tears, injuries, whatever—the nanites would zoom in, multiply, and replace it until her own systems could catch up.”
“And then she died,” said St. George.
The doctor nodded. “And then she died. And they tried to fix it.”
They looked at the spiderweb on the screen
.
“From what you and the captain have told me,” continued Connolly, “she was probably mangled, missing a lot of tissue mass. So the nanites did what they’re supposed to do. They replaced the damaged and missing sections. And they kept replicating and replacing until they made her whole again. But the body was decaying, maybe getting eaten by scavengers. It was an uphill battle, and by the time it was done … there wasn’t much left of the actual body.
“Plus they weren’t designed to do the job they were trying to do. Not something on this scale, anyway. So there were gaps. They built memories that were hardwired instead of flexible. They replicated a cardiopulmonary system, but it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t need to.
“This is also why she sleeps. After watching them for a while, I can see a regular pattern where the nanites expend all their electrochemical energy and then become dormant until a sufficient gradient rebuilds. As they start to shut down she gets tired, and then when they start back up they reset themselves.”
“And she forgets the previous day,” said Stealth.
St. George thought of the smiling girl he’d left a few hours ago. The Corpse Girl. “So you’re saying Madelyn’s … what?”
“Maddy Sorensen isn’t real,” said the doctor. “She doesn’t have any life signs because she’s a … a robot. An android. She’s a pile of nanites working together to duplicate the individual parts of a teenage girl on the cellular level, and they don’t realize there’s no actual girl left. They rebuilt a working model of a corpse.”
The spiderwebs drifted across the screen.
“Does she know?” asked St. George. “Did she see any of this?”
“No,” said Connolly. “I was working alone on this all day yesterday and she was out earlier with you, right?”
St. George nodded.
“That’s why I figured now was the best time to talk to you about this.”
“Does she pose a threat?” asked Stealth.
Connolly blinked. “How do you mean?”
“Is she a threat to the population of Los Angeles?”
The doctor shook her head. “I don’t think she has any evil programming or something, if that’s what you mean. For all intents and purposes, she’s still just a teenage girl. No stronger or faster. It seems like she’s got more endurance and her pain response is a lot lower than it should be, but I think that’s a function of her … well, not being alive.”
The cloaked woman turned her head to the image on the screen. “Could her nanites be dangerous to other individuals here in Los Angeles?”
The doctor shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She reached out and tapped the screen. “I’ve only scratched these things, granted, but it seems like they’re Madelyn-specific, designed to her DNA, and they won’t last long outside on their own.” Connolly shrugged. “Like I said, this is a little over a day’s work. There’s still so much about these things I don’t understand. I could keep a research team busy for their whole careers.”
“So,” said St. George, “now what do we do?”
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “What do you mean?”
“Do we tell her?” he said. “Do we tell her what she is? Or what she isn’t, I guess.”
“In a few hours,” said the cloaked woman, “her knowing these facts may be irrelevant.”
“She still deserves to know,” said St. George.
“That does not mean she would be better off knowing,” Stealth responded. “It is more likely such knowledge would cause her considerable mental and emotional stress.”
Connolly nodded. “When I was an intern I saw people get close to complete breakdowns over all sorts of things. Tumors. Paternity tests. STDs. This is going to be just as life-changing for her as any of those. Heck, just the philosophical angle could keep you—”
“This isn’t philosophical,” St. George said, “it’s a person. We can’t just—”
“Either way,” snapped Stealth, “this is a matter best discussed tomorrow.”
St. George took a breath, then let it drift out between his teeth. “You’re right,” he said. He glanced at Connolly. “Where is she now? Is she in her room?”
Connolly’s brow wrinkled. “No, of course not.”
“Of course not?” echoed Stealth.
The doctor looked at St. George. “I thought you had her doing something.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s why I decided to talk to you—I knew she’d be gone. She came in about two hours ago and said you’d given her a mission.”
MADELYN’S BICYCLE SKIDDED to a stop and she double-checked the address. Hector had run a piece of duct tape down the arm of her jacket and written out the street number with a fat Sharpie marker. “Don’t want you getting halfway there and forgettin’ where you’re going,” he’d said. He’d also given her a few map pages from something called a Thomas Guide that lined up to show her the route out of Hollywood and into the Valley.
It hadn’t been hard to convince him to help her. Despite her mom’s constant warnings, Madelyn was pretty sure not everyone in Los Angeles with a tattoo would slit your throat if you asked a question or flashed your headlights to remind them theirs were off. Hector de la Vega was gruff, and he stared at her boobs just a little too long for her liking, but he got the urgency of the mission a little more than St. George did. Hector had a cross on each arm, and the numbers of a Bible verse on his collarbone. She wondered if he was religious and had a better idea of what the demon represented.
By the same token, she was also pretty sure Hector wouldn’t be too broken up if she never came back. She’d seen the big man recoil when his fingers brushed the back of her hand. Nobody liked the feel of dead flesh, and he’d been one of the ones giving her looks at the big meeting.
Getting out of the Mount hadn’t been half as hard as she thought it’d be. It reminded her of a line from an old Houdini movie her mom loved—had loved. Nobody made safes to keep people from breaking out of them. She’d scaled the Wall while the guards were facing the other way and slipped down into the crowd of exes below. It’d been creepy as hell, being surrounded by them, but it wasn’t any worse than a school hallway between classes. Hundreds of people around you but not one of them seeing you while they moved. They jostled her, but none of them reacted to her.
Stepping past the seals took a little more work. She’d stood on the sidewalk with the tips of her sneakers against the invisible line for almost five minutes, staring at the circular symbol ahead and to the right. Inside the Wall it was easy to tell herself she was safe, but out here, with chunks of meat and pale limbs scattered across the ward, she’d found herself wondering what it would feel like to catch fire and explode.
It was just like a high dive, she’d told herself. Just like being on the board. A hundred things could go wrong, but none of them really would. She could do it. Her team was counting on her to do it.
“I’m the Corpse Girl,” she told the exes around her. “It can’t see me. It can’t touch me.”
She closed her eyes and took three quick steps. There’d been a brief moment of panic, the knowledge she couldn’t go back. She squeezed her hands into fists, ready to fight however she could.
Nothing happened. An ex bumped against her and wandered past, its teeth clicking away. Another one tripped over the curb in front of her and sprawled on the sidewalk.
She’d found a bike with a rattling chain a block and a half from the Big Wall. Most of the bike’s owner was a few feet away, but she’d decided to skip the helmet. It took her an hour to get to the address.
Denny Avenue looked like a pleasant place. Yeah, there were a couple of dead bodies and a burned-out pickup truck, but the houses were nice and there were lots of trees. Even the exes shuffling in the street looked a little cleaner.
Hector’s grandfather lived in a cottage behind the main house. She followed the driveway around the building and found a garage and a tall wooden fence with a matching gate. There was a mailbox
on the fence with the street number on it. She checked the address on her arm again and knocked the bike’s kickstand down.
Something thudded against the far side of the fence. It made Madelyn jump back from the gate, but she didn’t flinch at the second or third sound. She was getting into the whole “invisible to exes” thing. She stepped forward and flipped the latch.
An ex staggered out of the gate. It stumbled past her without a look and crashed into the parked bicycle. The bike fell over, but the ex managed to stay on its feet.
It had been an older man, an inch or two shorter than Madelyn. The bristly hair was the same gray as its skin. It was dried out and leathery, but still weighed twice as much as she did.
The dead thing had the same jaw and cheekbones as Hector. She decided right then to say she hadn’t seen any sign of the old man. She wouldn’t want to know her family was still walking around.
She left the ex standing in the driveway and walked through the gate. There was a flowerbed that had grown out into the small yard. A few cobblestones in the grass led up to the big wooden door. It swung open when she pushed on it.
She was looking for a wooden box three feet long and eight or nine inches square. It was padlocked shut. Hector thought it might have a little plaque on the lid, but he couldn’t remember for sure.
The cottage was small, and there weren’t too many places to hide something that size. Madelyn looked in both closets, under the bed, then went through each drawer of the dresser. She checked under the couch and behind the washer and dryer.
There was a loft above the washer, but it was just filled with dusty paperbacks. Hector’s grandfather had loved science fiction. She wondered how he’d felt when the dead started to walk.
The fridge was disgusting. The kitchen cabinets were jammed full of pots and pans of every size and a huge selection of dishes. She even looked in the dishwasher. Someone had run it before the end of the world. The glasses and silverware were still sparkling clean.
The cottage didn’t have a basement, which seemed weird to her. Growing up on the East Coast, almost everybody had a cellar. It just felt like the old man’s home was missing something important.