Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  The adrenaline coursing through me popped me out of the bed. I stood there in my hospital gown, my feet bare, my hands up and ready before me. If he came back at me, I was going to pound him into a pulp.

  Instead, Patrón drew his gun.

  "Get back!" he said in a scratchy voice. His eyes were watering so badly that I was surprised he could see at all. The way the barrel of his gun waved about the room told me that maybe he couldn't.

  He cocked the pistol with his thumb, and I dove behind the bed.

  "What the hell is going on in here?"

  Querer appeared in the doorway and then dove away as Patrón, startled by her appearance, snapped off a wild shot at her.

  "Hold your fire!" she shouted. "Hold your God-damned fire!"

  Patrón cursed. "Querer?" he said waving the gun back toward the bed. "Dooley's gone mad! He's trying to kill me!"

  I scrambled around the far side of the bed as fast and as quietly as I could.

  "So you shot at me?" Querer asked. I saw her peering in from the bottom of the doorframe, keeping low in the hopes that Patrón wouldn't shoot in that direction.

  He turned toward her, and that's when I launched myself at him. He heard me coming and half turned before I slammed into him. I grabbed the wrist of his gun hand as I tackled him to the tiled floor, keeping the weapon pointed well away from both Querer and me.

  I smashed Patrón's hand into the floor until he cried out and let go of the gun. He snarled at me like a cornered rat and brought his blood-coated free hand around to grab me by the throat.

  "Kill you!" he said. "Bring you back, and kill you again!"

  I brought back my fist to smash it into Patrón's nose once more. This time, I planned to hit him hard enough to drive the bits of shattered bone into his brain. If someone was going to die here, it was not going to be me.

  That's when Querer stepped back into the room and shouted, "Freeze!"

  Surprised, both Patrón and I did just that and saw that Querer had taken her sidearm out and pointed it right at us as we'd struggled on the floor. It didn't matter who she was aiming at. Tangled as we were, if she fired at one she'd hit us both.

  A squad of internal security guards appeared behind her, their weapons also drawn. They stabbed their arms into the room around Querer, making her seem like a lethal-armed goddess.

  Patrón and I glared at each other for a long, taut moment. As the adrenaline drained out of me, I felt even worse than I had when I'd awakened in that bed. With his nose bent and his face bloodied, Patrón didn't seem much better.

  "Truce?" he muttered. I nodded my assent, and we let each other go.

  The agents stood there, their guns still trained on us, as we got to our feet. As I stepped away from Patrón, back toward the bed, I saw most of the barrels follow me there. Only Querer kept her attention on Patrón as well.

  Patrón pointed at me and opened his mouth to speak.

  Something made a loud bang outside the building. It was so powerful that I felt it vibrate my bones.

  Then everything went dark.

  CHAPTER THRITY-TWO

  "What the hell?" I said. "What now?"

  My night-vision kicked in, but there was little light to see by down here in the sick bay, even magnified, just the glow from some of the medical equipment still running on battery power. I switched over to infra-red and saw that the agents behind Querer had fanned out into the hallway in the standard crouch-and-cover formation, in case we were being attacked.

  Patrón stood where he was. His nose glowed in the infrared spectrum, the injury I'd done to it causing heat to spill out of his face.

  I tried to connect to the net and see what was going on, but Eight's zapper had done a real number on my nanoserver. It still wouldn't come online. I could access the built-in controls on my optics, but that was it.

  "Damned Resurrectionists," Patrón said.

  Querer spoke up. "They set off an EMP," she said. "It's taken out everything within about three miles of the Washington Monument. Every bit of unprotected electronics is dead."

  "Where did they get something like that?" one of the agents in the hallway said.

  Patrón cursed. "What the hell's the point? What do they think they could accomplish by doing this?"

  "Other than leaving us in the dark?" I asked.

  The building's back-up generators kicked in then, and the lights came on again.

  "So much for that," Patrón said. "You'd think they'd have done better research about government defenses."

  "They're not trying to pierce our defenses," I said. "They just want to cause chaos."

  "And why would they want to do that?"

  "Because you want order."

  "What happened in here, sir?" an agent named Kim Lee asked. He still had his gun out and was pointing it at me, his hands trembling just a bit. He was speaking to Patrón though.

  Patrón looked down at his gun on the floor, then scooped it up. He weighed it in his hand as if he didn't recognize it anymore. Then he reached up with his other hand and felt his nose. He growled in pain. Then he pointed his gun at me.

  "Agent Dooley is under arrest," he said.

  "On what charges?" said one of the other agents, a woman I barely knew, although she often smiled at me in the halls. Her name was Susan Dosi.

  "Assault and battery, for sure," Patrón said. He spat blood on the room's bleached, white floor. "Perhaps attempted murder as well, and whatever else we might care to toss in after that."

  The other agents in the room blanched at his words. While Patrón might have been the director of the Secret Service – and therefore their boss – they knew me either personally or by reputation. They must have found it hard to believe that I'd turn against my old friend.

  I'd known him long enough to know better.

  Patrón unfocused his eyes for a moment and then cursed. "The White House wants all hands on deck to protect it against the riot." He glared at me. "I don't have the time for this now, Ronan, but I'm not through with you."

  "I can secure Agent Dooley, sir," Querer said. "He's supposed to be my partner, after all."

  Patrón nodded at her. "All right. You take care of him. Don't let him out of your sight. The rest of you, come with me." With that, he strode out of the room at a half-jog, the other agents in the area following in his wake.

  Querer watched after them until they disappeared down the hall. Then she turned to me. "You've looked better," she said.

  "It's not every day I crash a hovercar into a lake and survive," I said. Then I remembered that the last time I'd seen her, she'd been in a hospital. "How are you?"

  She rotated her shoulder and winced. "I'm fine, as long as the painkillers are working, which they aren't."

  "Let's get out of here," I said, rolling out of bed as gently as I could. Everything about me ached.

  "I'm supposed to be guarding you," Querer said, "not escorting you back to Blair House." Her gaze flickered up to a high corner of the room and back. I knew there was a camera there.

  "We don't have time for those games now," I said. "The fact that this riot started now is no coincidence."

  "No, I doubt that it is."

  "What's really happening out there?" I asked.

  She grunted as she came to a decision. "We can talk about it outside," she said. She reached into a wardrobe near the door and pulled out a fresh suit of clothes for me. "After you get dressed."

  I joined her in the hall a minute later, fixing my tie in place.

  "Much better," she said. "You almost look human."

  "Let's go."

  "Patrón told me not to let you out of my sight," she said, taking my arm. "And I don't plan to."

  We strode through the building, each of us trying to ignore our pains. We exited onto H Street and turned left.

  "No hovercar?" I said.

  "After that crash, I don't think I trust you in one anymore," she said. "Besides, MPD is sure to be clamping down hard on any non-emergency transports in the
area. The White House is only seven blocks from here."

  "But that's not where we're going."

  She shook her head. When we reached 10th Street, we turned south, heading for the Amortals Project, only two blocks away. I didn't know exactly what we'd find there, but I knew that's where we had to be. Eight had put his plan into motion, and although he hadn't bet on me being involved, I was determined to play a part in it.

  The streetlights were out and the various signs and ads were all gone too, which made the city much darker than usual. A pair of people down the street made their way around the place with flashlights, but otherwise, the street was deserted. I could hear the sounds of the riot going on just a block or two from here, the noise from it echoing back toward us through the labyrinthine system of wide streets buried under the never-ending buildings that sprawled above.

  "Over here," Querer said. "We need to talk."

  She hauled me across the street and ducked into the hotel that took up the entire block north of the Amortals Project. I'd protected the Prime Minister of Ireland here once, and I remembered it well.

  "It's not safe to chat here either," I said. "What about TIE?"

  "The power's out in the whole building," she said. "The hotel is private property, so its electronics weren't hardened against the EMP. Its cameras went down with everything else."

  "We don't have the time to stop in for a drink," I said. "We have places to be."

  "We have a few minutes yet," Querer said, pulling me along by my arm. "Trust me."

  I permitted myself the smallest smile as we strode into the deserted lobby. A doorman shined a flashlight at us, but I waved it off with a flash of my badge. As we sauntered over to a pair of overstuffed chairs, he went back to watching the door and hoping the rioters wouldn't make it this far away from the White House.

  "Why don't you tell me what's going on?" I said as we sat down. "Now."

  "Ronan." Querer stared into my eyes, her hands on her knees, which nearly touched mine. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then she spoke three words I never thought I'd hear from her: "I'm Arwen's clone."

  My spinal fluid turned to ice. The moment she spoke the words, I had no doubt that they were true. I had known that the two women – Querer and Arwen – were remarkably similar, but I had expected that from a mother and daughter. When Querer spoke to me there in the dim light of my monochromatic night-vision sight, though, the small, cosmetic differences in their looks could not distract me. Querer normally affected a bit of a deeper voice with a hint of the kind of gentle southern twang a kid might pick up in the Appalachians. When she let all of that go, though, you couldn't have told the difference between the two of them, even with a sonic analyzer. Their voices were identical.

  I reached out for her hand and spoke to her in a low whisper, tamping down my emotions to keep the tremor from my voice.

  "What," I asked, "have you done?"

  She leaned in closer to me, making sure the doorman couldn't hear us by chance. "The clone that Eight killed wasn't the only one that Five prepared. In fact, it wasn't even the first. The first clone Five made was of Arwen. He let it – me, I mean – grow in the cloning crèche in the Shack for nine months, and then he gave me to her to pass off as her own baby. She'd been faking the pregnancy the entire time, so no one was surprised when she left the Service to concentrate on being a good mother."

  "But why?" I asked. She raised an eyebrow at me, and I scrambled to explain myself. "Not that I'm not glad you're here right now, but why would Five do that?"

  "He knew that Eight was going to need help, preferably someone on the inside of the Secret Service. By the time the plan came together, Arwen would be too old, maybe even dead. The life expectancy for mortals drops a bit every year, you know."

  "But why not just make an adult clone of Arwen too?"

  Querer smiled again and squeezed my hand. "Five only had the one crèche."

  "So he cloned you and copied Arwen's brain into you? As a baby?" This didn't make any sense. I wondered for a moment whose side Querer might really be on. If she was about to betray me, though, it made even less sense for her to let me out of the sickbay just like that, defying Patrón's orders.

  "No. Five didn't have a good way to back up a brain. Cloning is hard enough. Do you know how the amortal backup works?"

  I nodded. "Eight explained it to me. They copy the synaptic patterns from one brain into its clone."

  "Right, but you can't do that with an immature brain. A baby's brain doesn't match up with its adult version. They wanted to try, but they had to wait."

  I gawked at her. "They had to wait until you were an adult?"

  Querer bowed her head. Her voice was so low I had to strain to hear it, even once I leaned in close. "I had no idea. Arwen raised me as her daughter, and that's just what I was – until she told me the truth on my twentieth birthday. She explained it all to me, and then she gave me a choice."

  "To become Arwen or to remain yourself?" I could barely imagine the enormity of such a decision, especially from the perspective of someone so young.

  "Here I was, faced with the fact that I'd been born – created, really – for a reason. Since the day I came home with Arwen, though, she'd always treated me as if I weren't her clone but her daughter. When it came time to tell me the news, she couldn't bring herself to do it. She'd already resigned herself to the fact that they needed to come up with some other way to help Eight."

  "But Five pressured her into it?"

  I glanced over Querer's shoulder and saw the doorman eyeing us. We couldn't stay here much longer. The last thing we needed was for him to contact the MPD or – worse – Homeland Security.

  She shook her head. "He did it himself. He found me when I was at college and told me the truth. When I confronted Arwen about it, she broke down and confessed everything."

  Querer's voice grew thick. "She didn't want me to do it, but Five got angry about it." She ran her hands through her hair. "Five had cobbled together his own equipment from blackmarket parts and plans. Couple that with the fact that twenty years of living meant that my brain wasn't a blank slate, and you had a recipe for disaster. Integrating everything clanking around in my head probably would have driven me mad."

  She looked up at me then, her eyes wide and bright. "I refused. He stormed out. None of us talked for years after that."

  She wiped her eyes. "Part of it was that Five didn't believe that I'd go through with it – that if I didn't have Arwen's memories, I couldn't possibly be dedicated enough. But he was wrong. Do you know why?"

  I shook my head. I was still trying to absorb all this.

  "Arwen had always raised me to stand up for myself and for everyone around me, to make sure the right thing got done. It didn't matter that I didn't have her memories, that I wasn't there when she saw the things she saw. She told me about it. She made sure I knew about what the amortals – especially the so-called Brain Trust – have done to our country. To our world. How they've raped us of everything that made America so great. It doesn't matter if I'm me or Arwen or something in between. Someone has to do something to tear them all back down."

  I reached out and squeezed her hand. "And now that's just what we're going to do," I said. "Tonight."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  "We've both just been in the hospital," Querer said, her voice sounding as weary and battered as I felt. "I don't know about you, but I ache all over. And the center of town is embroiled in a full-scale riot. I don't know if I'm up for this."

  "This is the time," I said. "This is the night. That riot is no coincidence. Five set this all up for us. We have to do this now, or we'll never have as good a chance again."

  "Five's dead," she said. "The Service destroyed his little cabal."

  "Not entirely. Father G got away, and from the looks of things he's been awfully busy ever since."

  Querer shook her head. "It's a shame that Patrón sent the SPAT into the National Cathedral after you. A part of me
always thought of Five as my father. He was the man who had the most to do with my birth."

  I bowed my head. "I barely knew him. The few moments we had together it seemed like he hated me."

  "He had to do that, you know. I'm sure it wasn't any fun for him either. Think about it. He reconciled with one version of you thirty years ago and then had to keep his distance from the next you for the rest of his life. Then, to try to help Eight stay free, he has to be a bastard to you again."