Adaptation

by Malinda Lo

  She was clinging to him like some half-drowned helpless maiden. She pulled away, shamefaced and self-conscious. He reached for her but stopped, his hand halting in midair. On the side of the pool Agent Todd was observing them. Reese scowled, hoping that the water was so cold, she couldn’t possibly be blushing, and said, “Are we done yet?”

  Agent Todd took her snappish tone in stride. “We’re done.”

  “Thank God.” She climbed out of the pool and didn’t let David or Agent Todd give her a helping hand.

  CHAPTER 34

  Reese was still dripping when she walked into the bathroom, her duffel bag slung over her shoulder. David was right on her heels. She took the shower stall farthest from the door and pulled the plastic curtain closed behind her, the rings rattling, then turned on the water. She heard David drag the other shower curtain shut. Hastily she unzipped her duffel bag and rooted around with her wet hand until she found her jeans. She pulled out the cell phone and stepped out of her shower stall and into David’s.

  “Shh!” she warned him. She tried to ignore the fact that he had been in the process of unbuttoning his shorts.

  “What are you doing in here?” he whispered, his face flushed.

  “I had to give you this, and I didn’t know when else I would be able to.” She showed him the cell phone, and his eyes widened.

  “Does that work?”

  “No. There’s no reception. But it’s my phone, and somebody here made sure that I got it back.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a new document on the e-reader. You need to read it. I think it’s about this place.”

  He took the phone from her, and she moved to leave, but he said, “Wait.” He grabbed her shoulder, and she jerked as the connection between them surged. “We need to talk about what’s going on.”

  She didn’t have to ask him what he meant; she could feel it, the charged link that made her aware of the way he was breathing from the inside out. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. David’s wet hair sent droplets down his neck, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. Her mouth went dry. Her pulse seemed to accelerate to match his; each throb doubled, echoing in the small space between them. It was too much; she couldn’t handle this. A piercing pain shot through her skull.

  He dropped his hand from her as if he had been burned.

  The water was steaming up the shower stall, clouding the air in hot, white mist. She backed away, her hand fumbling at the edge of the shower curtain. “Read it,” she said. “It’s important.”

  She backed out and stumbled into her own shower stall. The water was too hot now, but she didn’t care. She was deeply chilled and quaking. She climbed fully dressed under the water and closed her eyes, letting the spray pelt her until she finally stopped shivering. Only then did she peel off her waterlogged clothes and drop them on the floor, shuddering as the hot water sluiced over her skin.

  We’re different, David had said to her that night after the trip to the warehouse.

  No shit, she thought.

  She wondered if the tests that Dr. Singh was running would pick up on this difference, whatever it was. Somehow, she doubted it. She was increasingly convinced that Dr. Singh and the other scientists here at Blue Base were at least three steps behind Dr. Brand and Plato. They were running all these tests because they didn’t know what Dr. Brand had done. But as far as Reese could tell, none of these tests could detect how she and David had changed. When they touched, it was as if she could cross the gulf between their two bodies and know how he was feeling. But how was that even possible? Was it some weird kind of telepathy? Reese had no idea how that could be tested. Would they bring in paranormal investigators? She had a brief vision of jumpsuited ghost hunters descending on the medical bay, carrying equipment that looked like some sort of paranormal ability-detecting seismograph.

  She heard David’s shower go off, but she continued to stand under the hot water until he left the bathroom. Her mind went back to that moment on the obstacle course after she fell into the pool with him. Her belly quivered in memory. As if that memory triggered another, just like that she was back in the Holiday Inn in Phoenix, hiding in her hotel room after that boy had egged David on. Kiss her already.

  She was so afraid of what she felt. The fear rose up in her like a clammy-fingered ghost, and she put her hands flat against the tiled wall of the shower and gasped as the water beat down on her back. She could barely even admit to herself, alone, how she felt about David. The wall she had built around those feelings, locking them inside, was so high and so strong that merely thinking about opening the door paralyzed her. And everything had a consequence. Look at what had happened with Amber—and she had barely known her. Amber had been so unexpected and so direct, like an injection of a drug straight into her veins. There had been no time for her to put up her defenses, and Amber had walked right in and turned everything upside down.

  How much worse would it be with someone like David, whom she had known for years? He could hurt her that much more. The mere thought of it—of everything going wrong, the way she knew these things inevitably did—made her want to throw up.

  But you trust him, said a voice inside her. He’s not like her.

  She slammed off the water, grabbing the towel from the hook outside the shower curtain, and rubbed it roughly over her head. It had been barely thirty-six hours since she had last talked to Amber. No wonder she was freaking the hell out. It was too damn soon. Maybe, once she and David got out of this place, she would let herself face her feelings. But for now, she had bigger problems.

  She got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and wrung out the wet clothes she had worn on the obstacle course. When she opened the shower stall door, the bathroom was full of steam. She went to the sink and wiped away the condensation on the mirror with one hand. Her face emerged from the fog, drawn and tired, and she suddenly remembered the painful descent from the climbing wall, her palms scraping open on the rope. But when she looked down at her hands, the cuts were gone already. All that remained were a few pale white lines on her skin.

  Out in the medical bay, Agent Todd was waiting outside her room.

  “What are you doing here still?” she asked. She thought he had left after bringing the two of them back to their rooms.

  “I have to take you for your debriefing.”

  “Where’s David?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “I already took him. You were in the shower a long time.” He nodded to her room. “Leave your things in there. We’re late.”

  “Nobody told me I had anything to be on time for,” she snapped. His face was expressionless. She sighed and stalked into her room to drop off the duffel. When she returned, finger-combing her wet hair away from her face, she said, “I’m ready. Take me to your leader.”

  He smirked, and for the first time, she kind of liked him.

  He led her out of the medical bay and down the long corridor, heading away from the training center. After they passed the elevator, he led her through a door into another hallway, this one much shorter and lined with more doors. He opened one, revealing a square room outfitted with a small table, two chairs, and a one-way mirror. At least, it looked just like the one-way mirrors she had seen on TV.

  Todd gestured for her to take a seat at the table facing the mirror. “I’ll be right back.”

  She sat down and looked at her reflection. Her wet hair was dripping onto the shoulders of her black SFPD T-shirt. Her mom had given her that shirt—Reese suspected it had been a freebie she got at work—but she never wore it. The sole reason she was wearing it now was because there had only been three T-shirts in her duffel. The one she had worn yesterday, this one, and a Disneyland T-shirt with a picture of Minnie Mouse on it that her grandparents had bought for her last year. Silently she cursed whoever had packed that duffel bag.

  Todd returned a few minutes later with a white man wearing black-rimmed glasses. He was wheeling a cart that had various devices on it, including a
computer. “This is John Brennan,” Todd said. “He’ll be asking you some questions this afternoon.”

  Todd began to leave the room, and Reese asked, “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be back to get you when Mr. Brennan is finished,” Todd said, and shut the door.

  Brennan uncoiled a number of wires from the computer, and as he approached her with them, she scooted away. “What are those for?” she asked.

  “Routine. We’re recording your answers but also your physical reactions. It’s not painful.”

  “I didn’t ask if it was painful,” she muttered, but she let him stick the sensors to her temples and her wrists.

  He sat down across from her and entered something into the computer. A moment later he asked, “How was your day?”

  “Are you serious?”

  He blinked. “Of course.”

  “It would’ve been better if I wasn’t trapped here against my will and being forced to do weird obstacle courses.”

  He had no reaction. “What did you eat for breakfast?”

  The change of subject startled her. “What?”

  “Breakfast,” he said again. “What did you eat for breakfast?”

  She sat up, giving him a sharp look. “Is that a lie detector test?”

  His expression didn’t change. “What did you eat for breakfast?” he asked again.

  She sighed, looking behind him at the one-way mirror. “This isn’t going to work out too well if you won’t even answer a simple question,” she said in a loud voice. She shifted her gaze back to Brennan. “Are you giving me a lie detector test?”

  He hesitated.

  She raised her eyebrows pointedly.

  “Lie detector tests are usually fairly inaccurate. This is a more sophisticated sensor. As I said, we’re recording your physical reactions as well as your vocal responses.”

  “So it’s a lie detector test.”

  “You could call it that,” he finally admitted.

  Getting the answer out of him was satisfying, but it didn’t do anything to change the situation. She clenched her fingers over the edges of her seat, shoulders tight. She said: “For breakfast today, I had a bowl of seriously bland oatmeal and a cup of disgusting coffee. But it was nice to get it delivered to my room. My mom never lets me order room service when we’re on vacation.”

  Brennan almost smiled, but he seemed to catch himself just in time to cover it with a frown.

  He asked her about where she lived in San Francisco, what grade she was in, the names of her parents—a long, boring list of facts that she knew he could look up online. She was wondering when it was going to get interesting when he finally asked her about the car accident in Nevada and what she remembered from her time at the hospital afterward.

  “Not much,” she said. Brennan asked her the same question several different ways, and then moved on to how she had felt after leaving the hospital. This made her nervous, because she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to tell these people. She didn’t trust that they would help her if she told them the truth, so she told him about having headaches but avoided describing the other experiences she’d had. She half-expected him to accuse her of lying, but he didn’t. Instead, he turned the computer around so that she could see the monitor. There was a collection of photos on the screen—a dozen in all—that looked like mug shots. They had been taken with each individual standing in front of a flat white wall, the bright light making their faces wan and grayish. Reese immediately recognized Dr. Brand, but there was another person she recognized too. In the lower right corner of the screen was a photo of Amber.

  Reese’s stomach dropped, all the color draining from her face.

  “Do you recognize anyone in these photos?” Brennan asked.

  She made a show of scanning all the images as her heart raced. There were six women and six men in total; Dr. Brand was the third photo from the left. Reese swallowed. “I recognize that woman,” she said at last.

  “Which woman?”

  Reese pointed. “Dr. Evelyn Brand. She was at the hospital after the accident.”

  “Is there anyone else you recognize?”

  “No.”

  She remembered Amber standing in her kitchen in Noe Valley, a defensive look on her face, denying that she knew who Dr. Brand was. But here she was, in a lineup of mug shots that included Dr. Brand. Amber had definitely lied to her, and Reese felt the betrayal anew like a sharp stab in her belly. So why did she want to protect Amber? Why was she lying for someone who had lied to her?

  The people in the photos were all wearing orange jumpsuits, as if they were prisoners. Some of their faces were blank, their eyes glassy as if they had been shot full of a sedative. Others, including Dr. Brand, looked directly at the camera with unmistakable anger. Reese didn’t know when they had been taken, but Amber’s hair was blond, which suggested her photo had been snapped recently, maybe even since yesterday morning. And Amber didn’t look happy. She had an expression on her face that Reese recognized instantly as fear. Her gray eyes were wide, her mouth partly open, as if someone had just said something that terrified her.

  However much the sight of her pained Reese, she didn’t like what the look on Amber’s face suggested. What if Amber was imprisoned somewhere along with Dr. Brand and these other people? What would happen to Amber if Reese admitted that she knew her?

  “Are you sure there’s no one else you recognize?” Brennan pushed.

  Reese’s mouth was dry, her tongue like sandpaper. “I’m sure,” she whispered. “There’s no one.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Reese headed straight for the restroom when she returned to the medical bay. “I have to go,” she called over her shoulder to Agent Todd, but once she was in the stall with the door locked, she simply sat down and put her head in her hands. She couldn’t bear to be in that exam room right now, where she was completely exposed behind the glass walls. She needed to be alone.

  Seeing the photo of Amber was more than unsettling. It scared her.

  There were clearly two sides to whatever she and David had stumbled into because of their car accident. On one side was Dr. Brand and all those people in the mug shots, including Amber. On the other was Dr. Singh and Project Blue Base. There were some irregularities that she still hadn’t figured out—the men in black, in particular, seemed to move between sides—but it was obvious that she and David were caught in the middle. Each side had an interest in them, but neither was telling them the whole truth. Everybody was lying, and now that she had denied knowing anyone in the photos besides Dr. Brand, she was lying too.

  The even scarier part was that she wanted to do it to protect Amber. Her brain thought that was about the stupidest move she had ever made—probably unduly influenced by memories of making out on the beach—but her brain was powerless against the stubborn, feet-planted-wide instinct inside her that said: Amber is entirely freaked out in that photo. You do not want to support anyone who did that to her.

  A Klaxon blared, the noise shattering the quiet of the bathroom. Reese jumped up, opening the stall door. People were running past the frosted glass wall, and she heard shouting. The door slid open as she walked toward it. She saw several doctors sprinting through the medical bay, grabbing supplies as they headed for the exit. Two of them pushed a stretcher between themselves as Dr. Singh came barreling out of her office and followed. One of the last remaining attendants in the room typed something rapidly into a computer until the sirens abruptly ceased, and then he hurried after Dr. Singh, the door slamming shut behind him.

  He had left the remote control that operated the exam-room doors on the U-shaped counter.

  Reese hurried out of the restroom and grabbed the device, spinning around to scan the rest of the medical bay. The only other person she saw was David, who was standing in his room with his hands pressed against the glass. It looked like he was shouting something, but she couldn’t hear him through the wall. She looked at the remote and then back at his room. There was a small pl
aque affixed to the glass that read EXAM ROOM B, and the remote had buttons from A to H, as well as Open. She pointed the remote at David and pressed Open B. The wall slid back, and David ran out into the medical bay.

  “What happened?” she asked. “When did you get back?”

  “A minute ago. I was just wondering where you were when the sirens went off and everyone started running for the exit. I think they forgot about us.”

  “They’re all gone—” she started, and as if the same idea occurred to the two of them at the same moment, they both headed for Dr. Singh’s office. Reese opened the glass door with the remote and they went inside.

  The desk, adorned by a plaque that read DR. AMELIA SINGH, was quite neat. There were two low stacks of file folders, a jar of pens, Post-it notes, a computer monitor, and a keyboard. Several tall filing cabinets lined the wall beside the desk, and behind that was a table outfitted with a printer. David went directly to the closest file cabinet and yanked open the top drawer. Reese began to sift through the files on the desk. They were labeled with patient names, but she didn’t recognize any of them. She opened one of the folders to see what it was about and found a chart listing a bunch of medical issues she did not understand.

  “Crap, why didn’t I like bio more?” she muttered. She moved on to the next stack and noticed that on the corner of each chart were the words BLUE BASE, followed by a number like a serial code. “I think these must be soldiers in that project I read about on my phone. Did you read that document yet?”

  “I only had a chance to look at it really briefly in the bathroom, but yeah, I think these files are about that too,” he said, still riffling through the cabinets. “There’s a ton of them. Like, literally, hundreds of patient files.”

  She shuffled the mouse attached to the computer, but it only turned up a login screen. Dr. Singh must have locked it before she left. Reese turned to the printer station and saw a stack of papers sitting in the output tray. When she touched them, they were still warm. She lifted them out. On the first page was her name.