I ignored a voice in the back of my head telling me that my relief was not just because of the code. I wouldn’t let myself think that it might be something deeper, that there was something about her specifically that made me relieved she hadn’t drown, something beyond the code and my sense of responsibility for life itself.
I shoved the thought deep, deep down. Getting attached to anybody, at any time, could not happen for me. Could never happen for me. Not when I intended to follow through with my entire plan. Not when I’d be dead within the month, if possible.
As I watched her slender frame shake from the coughing, that feeling tried to push its way into my consciousness, and I resisted the urge to reach out to her. I’d never admit it, but it was that inexplicable pull making me want to touch her. I didn’t want to feel it, and the fact that I did made me angry. This was different than attraction. I’d come across plenty of attractive girls, and when I wanted to turn it off, I turned it off. I stayed in control, and I was never controlled, especially not by thoughts which came unbidden.
When Sage stopped coughing, she groaned and rolled onto her back again. She remained there for a minute before pressing herself to sitting. Sand stuck to her wet tights and shirt.
What do I say to someone who just nearly died? I wasn’t good at stuff like this, talking with people in vulnerable moments, definitely not when I felt pissy already. So I just stood slowly without saying a word, then reached my hand down, offering it to her.
She swatted it away and stood shakily to her feet. She did not look at me, did not thank me, did not curse me to the depths of hell—which I expected, kind of wanted, actually. The girl did not say anything at all, only started moving up the beach toward the building.
I picked up my boots and fatigues and followed.
11
SAGE
After just a few strides, Jack stalked past me in the sand. My body shook—from exhaustion or the shock of nearly drowning, I wasn’t sure. Either way, I didn’t trust myself to say anything to him without giving away how petrified I’d been.
As he led me up the beach toward a path that opened up on the south side of the building, my mind raced.
I’d almost died. Finn would have been here alone. My Finn. The boy who, less than a day ago, was supposed to get his grand prize ribbon at the junior high science fair.
And this guy in front of me couldn’t have cared less. He was mad—he’d stood stiff and unmoving while he watched me cough up water on the beach. Maybe he’d wanted me to die. If so, the successful rescue was a disappointment for him.
After another handful of steps, the sand slowly diminished beneath our feet, replaced by dark soil. Jack paused at a path that cut through the trees on the south side of the building.
“You okay?” he finally said. His eyebrows raised, but his face still showed irritation.
Okay? How could I possibly be okay? The question made me snap.
“I was wondering, Jack, did you enjoy watching me nearly drown?”
Jack stiffened. “My dad doesn’t want you dead yet.” He turned forward again, moving down the path through the trees. “But either way, I wouldn’t have let you drown.”
I clenched my jaw at his comment and followed him into the trees. Foliage blocked the direct sunlight, but the humidity still hung in the air. The soil felt soft beneath my shoes as I stumbled behind Jack, ducking under the low-hanging branches and giant, tropical leaves.
Somehow, even with my general mistrust of people, and though he still looked angry, something about the tone of his voice made his answer sound believable. So was it that pull blocking my ability to think clearly? Probably something implanted when they’d modified him—it would certainly be handy to have the opposite sex unequivocally attracted to you. A guaranteed preservation of your gene line.
The path in front of us opened wide to reveal a large training ring formed by chain-link fence. Outside the fence, wooden benches surrounded the entire arena. A fenced path ran to the building on the opposite side. A guard stood about fifteen feet away at the gate entrance. Inside the fence, the people in black were spread out across the dirt, training, with more guards interspersed throughout. The guard eyed us with some level of interest, but I looked past him, scanning the crowd for Finn.
“Where’s my brother?” I said. “I thought your dad said he would be here. Why isn’t he here?”
“Follow me,” Jack said, his voice low.
Jack walked along the outside of the fence, stopping about a quarter of the way around. He sat down on one of the wooden benches, looking out at the recruits. A breeze blew through his hair. “I lost my earbud in the water. I can’t get ahold of Caesar, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because he’s not on the screens for another hour. But it’s almost dinner. I’ll find out more once we’re inside.”
I nodded out at the recruits. “Why did your dad want you to bring me here?”
Jack shrugged, but the movement was stiff. “I didn’t ask. To scare you into telling us more?”
My stomach dropped. Not seeing Finn here felt like an omen of sorts. To hide the look on my face from Jack, I went to the fence and interlaced my fingers in the chain link. My attention was pulled to the recruits for the first time.
The face of every single recruit was perfect. Not plastic surgery perfect, born with it perfect, like Jack. Their skin, no matter what shade, glowed with health, their features symmetrical, their eyes alert and alive.
A girl with curly auburn hair grappled in the circle directly in front of me. Her arms were wrapped around the waist of a dark-haired boy as he struggled to circle his arms around her neck.
The guard standing with their group shouted out to the two of them, “Imogen, don’t let him get you in that position! Use your legs!”
The girl responded by shoving herself upward and breaking his hold. Then she flipped—literally flipped—out of his grasp. The boy crashed into her waist and they tumbled to the ground.
“Who are these people?” I said.
“According to the Corporation, a gigantic waste of money,” Jack said. “This was my dad’s attempt at mod code replication. Some parts worked out—their skill, obviously. But every single one of them is sterile. No sperm. No eggs.”
Jack stared ahead. A bird chirped in the trees behind us.
“I don’t understand. Are you all related? And if the Corp wants to sell the code so bad, why not just make more recruits? What does it matter if they’re sterile?” I said.
Jack frowned in disapproval.
“It’s just a question. I’m not saying I agree with it,” I replied.
Jack interlaced his hands, placed them over one of his knees and leaned back. “The code doesn’t mess with the stuff that would make us all look alike or be related. It’s about gene order not trait specificity. And about making more of the recruits, it takes a long time to arrange the code. There are bad genes to extract and good genes implanted to replace them. There are layers and layers of DNA to place in the proper order. There’s not just one gene layer like you probably learned in school.”
I glanced back at him with my eyebrows raised, surveying his body in a whole new light.
“With me being the first one,” Jack continued, “our fathers had to find specific genes buried amongst thousands of years of human genetic adaptation. The newest science proves that our genes open and close based on our environment, expressing certain genes at certain times. Humans were created to live at a more optimal level than we currently do today. In culture, you can see the hints of this—Olympians who perform amazing feats, geniuses within certain industries—they’re closer to the original code than others. In my genes, your father and my father cut away all the junk and left only what I needed in order to operate at the level I do. It took them fifteen years to arrange my code alone.”
“Wow,” I said.
“When your dad stole the code, my dad tried to figure it out again on his own, without all the notes they’d kept through the years. He th
ought he had it figured out, but even so, it was taking too long to create one embryo. Usually ten weeks for just one, even with a team helping him. Nothing countries would pay big money for, because it couldn’t be mass produced. Hypothetically, it would be much faster to match the sperm and egg of already modified humans. This was my father’s goal with the recruits.”
“Wow,” I said again, and shifted, pushing against the fence to straighten myself up. The bottom gave way as I did, exposing a loose section where someone could easily slide out. Unable to avoid my long-time counting habit, I did a quick glance around the arena. The loose section was three-hundred thirty-six links away from the center pole by the main entrance.
“Three-hundred and thirty six?” Jack said.
I frowned. Had he heard me? Had I said that out loud?
I wasn’t quick enough on my feet to make up a lie. “The fence,” I said. “It’s loose. Three-hundred thirty-six links away from that center pole.” I nodded to a point halfway around the arena.
Jack went quiet for a few minutes, then said, “You’re right. Three-hundred thirty-six.” He didn’t sound surprised, only curious. “How’d you know?”
I shrugged. “I like numbers.” I didn’t want to get into the intricacy of the counting that went on in my brain. “Can I ask you a personal question?” I said, wanting to change the subject.
“Maybe.”
“Are you sterile, too?”
“Okay, personal. You weren’t kidding.”
I waited for him to say more, tying to ignore the draw I felt toward him, and the fact that we were talking about his reproductive organs.
Jack inhaled. “Well, since you asked, and this is already awkward, they have tried to mix my guys with non-modified eggs. According to my dad, I guess it wasn’t pretty. Think Pac-Man and Pac-dots. My guys are the Pac-man and the eggs are the dots getting eaten alive.” He paused. “I think my dad was hoping some of the recruits’ eggs might be a bit more resilient.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, and I don’t think Jack really wanted me to, so I just watched the arena where the same girl, Imogen, smashed the boy’s face into the ground using her foot on the back of his neck. She finally had his arms pinned behind him.
“Better,” the guard said. He blew his whistle, and Imogen released the boy’s arms and helped him stand up.
“I used to do this.” Jack nodded toward the arena. “I trained the recruits, I mean.”
“Not anymore?”
“Recruits started listening to me too well. Dad didn’t like it. They respect me, and I refused to feed them Vasterias propaganda.”
“So now what do you do?”
“Clean.”
“Clean? As in, scrubbing toilets?”
Jack scratched the back of his neck, his eyes flickering away from my gaze. The movement felt fleetingly familiar. “Something like that.”
The collective group of guards all whistled together then. Recruits stopped their fights, moved to towel off, get drinks from jugs on the sidelines, and make their way toward the exit.
Jack took a long inhale and stood up. “Just stay alive for a few more days, and we’ll get you home.”
12
BECKETT
The GPS on my phone showed the road on my left was the private drive to the mansion. I turned onto it, and a hundred yards down, a gate swung open when my truck approached.
So, they’re expecting me.
I shifted in my seat, sitting up taller, and brushed a hand through my hair. Over the last day and a half, I’d only pulled over a couple of times. The sun had risen this morning as I wound the truck through the tree-lined back highways of western Pennsylvania up to New York. With every hour that passed, my anger and tension grew in equal amounts.
And now, finally, the property came into view down the private road. It was what I remembered from the times Jack and I came here with Dad: fountain in the middle of a wide circle drive, flanked by a giant monstrosity of a house, a castle-looking thing with high, sharp-sloped rooflines. The whole brick-and-stone display was four or five stories tall and extended across the property. From where I parked in front of the main entrance, I could barely make out the side driveway, all the way to the north, where housemaids and groundskeepers pulled around back to park.
I gave Ollie a pet on the head and stepped from the truck into crisp morning air. Birds chirped in the mature trees that spread out across the well-manicured lawn. The front door swung open before I could stretch my legs.
An older man in a suit stepped out onto the stone entrance. I circled around the truck, wary. The man wasn’t familiar, and yet, all too familiar. His buttoned suit coat fit snug around his waist, just a little too tight over his belly. He stood with an air that told me he was high-up Vasterias trash.
“Right when we expected you,” the man said, eying me as I came toward the steps. “I’m Dr. Dallamore.” It sounded like the greeting of a butler, formal and friendly. But I noted Dallamore’s stillness, the way only his eyes moved while he watched me approach. It meant he calculated things behind the serene look on his face.
I stopped directly in front of him, still on the drive five steps below. “Where did you take them Dr. Dallamore? You tell me, or I don’t cooperate with you.”
“Seems like you’re in no position to bargain, son. Not when we’ve just finished killing your aunt and uncle.”
The words stung in the deepest part of me, which was exactly what Dallamore wanted.
I stepped onto the bottom stair of the entrance and focused on keeping my face neutral when I responded. I’d had enough experience with the Corp to know they meant what they said. I also knew from family experience that the more you give, the more the Corp takes.
“You can kill me before I’ll tell you anything. Where is the girl?”
“Ah. So you did love her. The reports to headquarters were saying so. But I wasn’t quite sure myself.”
I had to work hard to conceal my surprise at Dallamore’s information. Just how long had the Corp been watching us so closely?
When I didn’t reply, Dallamore waved to the door behind him. “Come in. We mean you no harm.”
Whenever Vasterias said “we mean you no harm,” they really mean the exact opposite, but I could tell Dallamore wasn’t going to converse out here on the stoop with me. It was too easy to escape, with my truck right behind us in the drive. Not that I was going anywhere. I didn’t travel over twenty hours to leave with no answers. One way or another, this encounter was going to get me to Sage and Finn, or I was honest about what I’d said: They could kill me in the process.
“There’s a dog inside the truck. His name is Ollie.” I couldn’t look back because I knew Ollie would be watching me through the window.
“We’ll take care of him,” Dallamore replied.
I didn’t want to know exactly what that meant. I walked up the steps to Dallamore. “For the love, please don’t hurt the dog.”
“Did I say anything about hurting the dog?” he replied.
Dallamore motioned for me to lift my arms, and then proceeded to pat me down, taking my cell phone in the process.
I followed him inside. The foyer served as a grand display, a giant room in and of itself, with a three-story ceiling and a crystal chandelier hanging all the way down to the first story from the ceiling high above. Across the foyer, a marble stairway circled upward, curving elegantly to highlight the chandelier. An ornately carved marble banister encased the second floor balcony, leading to rooms I couldn’t see.
“Down here.” Dallamore motioned to the right, where the foyer opened into a long gallery, the walls lined with expensive art. With every marble archway we walked under, with every step I took deeper into the heart of the mansion, my instincts rang out in warning.
We passed two giant wooden doors standing open to reveal a ballroom. Another pair of open doors displayed a library with two stories worth of books. Further down, on the left, a great dining hall. Further still, a lounge,
then a cigar room, and then an open room full of modern art. If I hadn’t known where all the dirty money came from to build and furnish the place, I might have been impressed.
Dallamore took a left and guided me to the very end of a hall. He turned the handle of a door on our right and stepped inside, motioning me to follow. It looked like a conference room of sorts—no windows and a shining wood table for twenty flanked by leather chairs on wheels. A shiny red plate holding a pastry sat on the table next to a glass of water. Behind the table remained plenty of room for a singular folding chair in the empty space. I knew that’s where I would be sitting. So this is how it went, then. This wasn’t a conference, it was an interrogation. Was I expecting anything different?
“Please,” Dallamore waved to one of the leather chairs at the corner of the long table near the pastry. “Have a seat.”
“I think I’ll just go ahead and take the seat that will eventually be mine,” I said and strode around the table to the lone chair and sat down.
The sooner they got to the point, the sooner Dr. Dallamore would realize I wasn’t giving them anything unless they gave back in return. Not that I knew anything. I hadn’t found out a single thing from Mrs. Sallisaw, or Sage, or Finn in the whole three years we’d been there. Neither had Aunt Peg or Uncle Jeff—or at least, they hadn’t said anything to me about it. But here at headquarters, information was a valuable asset. It was the plan I formed over the last twenty-one hours of drive time. I knew I needed something to bargain with in order to get to Sage. This had to be my angle from the start. If I said I knew nothing, they eventually might believe me. If I said I knew something, and swore not to tell until they took me to Sage and Finn, then maybe I had a chance of actually getting to them. It felt flimsy, the whole ruse, but if I could be convincing enough, the Corp had no reason not to believe I knew something about Dr. Cunningham’s whereabouts.
The Mod Code Page 6