by Mara, Alex
"I know," I said, snapping my fingers. Terrell worked in the greenhouse. “The orchid."
"The orchid?"
"The orchid," I said.
"What are you talking about?"
"There's a specially engineered orchid in the greenhouse. Ides showed it off to me the other day—some kind of pet project. If it was ground up into a pill, it’d lay him flat all night. Long enough for us to run.”
Terrell nodded slowly. “I know which one you’re talking about. But how do we get it into him?"
I swallowed, and my stomach twisted as I stared down at my mashed potatoes. "I think I know a way."
* * *
6:08 p.m.
Outside the infiltrators' mess, he was waiting for me.
8024.
He was just leaning against the wall, arms folded like he belonged there.
A thrill ran up my body as he watched me approach, and I felt a mixture of fury and terror. Did he want to get recycled? We were just lucky no one had passed by in...however long he'd been standing there.
I came to him, leant there in the hallway, with my anger so obvious he raised an eyebrow. "What—" he began, but I grabbed him by the arm and yanked him through the first doorway I could find.
When the door slid shut behind us and the lights flicked on, I spun on him. His scent had already filled my nostrils. "What the hell are you doing? How did you even know I'd be here?"
8024's eyes took in the space around us. "A storage closet. This wasn't exactly how I'd expected to have this talk, but it'll do." His eyes met mine. "I knew you'd be here because you're here every night. You observe the infiltrators at dinner."
That was true, but I didn't acknowledge it. "What 'talk'? What are you even doing here? You should be eating with the others. I'm going to have to escort you back before—"
"Wait," he said, his fingers just barely touching my arm. His warmth felt like a brand. "Just a minute."
My mouth closed, and I stared at him. I was still trying to process the sensation of his fingers on me—it had felt just like in my office during his psych evaluation—and I couldn't believe, seeing him under the single fluorescent light, how perfectly I had managed to create this man.
And I could tell by the way his green eyes flicked between mine that he had something urgent to say.
"What is it?" I asked.
"8013 has been made into a Gale. Did you authorize that?"
I shook my head. "No—it's not my purview. But I'm not surprised...he's one of the hot ones."
"The 'hot ones'?"
"Aggressive. The Scarlets often recommend his type for Galeship."
"You ain't kidding. As it turns out, 8013 takes 'hot' to a new level. And his promotion has added another wrinkle to my ability to survive this place."
That made sense. 8024 was different—dominant, and not in the traditional sense. He existed outside the pecking order. An iteration like 8013 would feel threatened by that kind of thing. "Has he attacked you?"
He shrugged. "It's complicated. Suffice it to say, we've been at each other's throats a few times. And from what you've told me, my fate's a little bit singular either way..."
I swallowed. I wanted to tell him about the plan I'd come up with, but I didn't know if I should. In the end, he was an agent of the facility, and he was chipped. "That's not for sure. You just need to pass the seduction module."
"By sleeping with one of the Scarlets?"
Even hearing him ask that question hurt. I didn't want him to sleep with a Scarlet. I wanted him to sleep with—
"I can't do it," he said. "I can't sleep with her."
My heart had already been beating too fast, but now it barreled into overdrive. "You have to."
"I can't."
"Why?" I asked.
One of his hands came out between us, and his fingers touched mine. "Don't you know?"
Right then he'd crossed an inviolable line. I should have moved my hand. I should have stepped back. I should have done a lot of boring, professional things.
I was trembling, but I didn't move. We stood silent, and his forefinger traced the back of my hand with shiver-inducing lightness. That same hand was capable of terrible violence, of killing me in an instant.
And yet he chose this. It's an imitation, Darcy. He's just using you to leverage himself out of a bad spot. He doesn't really want you.
And to that inner voice, I thought: Shut up.
For one moment, I would enjoy this. I closed my eyes, every nerve in me thrilling to the sensation of that single fingertip. I couldn't tell whether I was shaking so much because I was aroused or terrified. Maybe both.
He stepped closer.
"Don't," I whispered, even as my chin lifted a degree.
"Darcy West," he murmured, "you don't like to meet eyes."
And when my eyes opened, his face was right above mine, his lips parted just a hair. I could feel his breath on my face, and it was glorious and sweet.
He came forward with aching slowness, every moment a reminder that I could step back, leave this closet. But I didn't move at all except when his fingertips brushed my cheek. Then my breath caught, and I stared at him with wide eyes.
"You've felt this between us since the first day," he whispered.
"I don't know what you're—"
But his lips met mine, a feather touch, and I inhaled sharply before every part of me seemed unconsciously to sigh toward him. The pads of our lips came together, brushing over one another, and all the nerves in my mouth lit at the same time.
This will get you both killed.
That thought brought my hand up between us, and I pushed myself back. When our lips parted, he looked at me like I'd slapped him.
"I have to take you back to the mess," I said breathily, "right now."
He stepped forward again. "Let's leave this place."
"Let's," as though we would go together. "What are you talking about?" I whispered. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I'd just been planning to help him escape, but I couldn't have him knowing that. Not yet—not when I didn't know if I could trust him.
"I can see what it does to you. And you know what it's going to do to me. Whatever's on the surface, I don't care—I just want to live out my life. And I think you do, too."
He's using you, Darcy.
"That's crazy," I said, barely audible. And it's not as simple as "living out my life."
But he'd heard me. "Is this sane? All of this?" One hand swept through the thick air of the storage closet.
He had a point. Everything was beginning to feel a little bit insane in this facility...or at least, they had since he'd woken. Maybe things had been like this for a while, and 8024 had just given me perspective.
And Ides had unwittingly given us an option. The flower, the meeting in his cabin. There was a way. It might not hurt to give 8024 just a hint, a little hope.
But in telling him, I'd make it all real. I'd be committing to that course. My life, for better or worse—worse, most likely—would never be the same.
With his eyes on me, I could hardly think. I stared at the floor, balling my hands to keep them from shaking. I felt his warmth just a half-step away, and I wanted nothing but to feel his fingers on me again.
If I was wrong to trust him—if one of the other clones or the Gales or Ides himself ever got wind of what I was planning, then we were all dead.
I couldn't. I couldn't. I couldn't.
My face lifted. "I can't," I said. And before he could respond, I turned and passed through the door and waited for him in the—thankfully—empty hallway. My lips were still tingling.
As I walked him to the mess, the last words that passed between us were mine. "Just complete the seduction module," I whispered.
I knew he'd heard me, but he didn't acknowledge it. Instead, he waited for the door to slide open for him, and he crossed into that room full of copies without a backward glance.
* * *
Footsteps in the snow. I stood at the doorwa
y to the cabin, the blanket pulled around me, listening.
Ahead, white earth and black space met as a line—the far horizon. The moon sat round and orange in the sky, what was once called “harvest.” Beneath, forest. Trees upon trees, their branches spread out and upward, silver-tipped.
White feathers fell from the sky. Snowfall. I reached out, caught one at the center of my palm. My eyes wouldn’t focus, but I knew it was achingly symmetrical, even as it shrunk in the heat of my hand.
Darcy. A form approached, a long shadow on the ice, the soft and sure footfall. I knew that step, that face, and my chest warmed. I stepped barefoot into the night and I didn’t know cold—I only knew I was there to meet him.
I ran, light-footed, the blanket trailing over my shoulders. From a distance, I could see myself: white doe under the moon, running, running.
We met with our mouths, my body reshaping itself to his heat. My legs wrapped around his torso, and he lifted me, carried me toward the cabin as I gripped the sides of his head with my hands, my lips pressed to his.
This was not the first time I’d had the thought: How right. Kissing him was all I was meant to do.
We stepped through the cabin doorway, fell onto a soft bed with an animal’s coat laid atop it—brown bear’s fur. His body was twice my size, his great arms enveloping me as he delivered kisses to my cheeks, my neck, made me gasp when he sucked there.
Some part of me hovered in the corner of the cabin, watching. I thought: All of this is my imagination. I knew the motions from watching the infiltrators mate, but I didn’t know the tactile sensations.
What should a man feel? What should a woman do? Was this how kissing should taste? Was this sense—that we haven’t chosen to be together, but have always been, will always be, a given—what I should have felt?
But I knew if there was any magic in the world, it lay in the way his fingers gripped mine, both our arms thrown over my head. A second language: of comfort, of warmth, of oneness.
The primary language was of need, of his searching lips trailing off my face and my willing chest arching up toward them.
We had left the door open. The moonlight made a rectangle in the doorway, and over his shoulder I saw it broken.
Someone’s here. I jerked up, my face over his shoulder, my hands gripping his back in a frisson of pleasure and fear. Another face in the night, so shadowed I couldn’t make out the mouth or nose, only the eyes.
Slitted eyes.
The irises of those eyes shone like a blue marble. I’ve found you, they said from around the corner, and hands—claws, really—edged around the frame.
And then, because the man above me was still unaware, those perfect lips found my nipple, and an electric jolt trailed straight from my chest to the untouched space between my legs.
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. It was all right and all wrong at once.
My heart woke me, rattling in my chest like a bird.
My eyes opened. Above, the filtration system whirred. One hand went over my chest, where my heart thundered as if I’d been sprinting, my chest sticky with fear and adrenaline. The thought was like a hammerfall in my mind: Save him, save him, save him.
It persisted as I pulled on my robe, as I washed my face in the sink. Only when I found the tiny bottle of crème de menthe, let it burn down my throat until the bottle was empty, did it fade.
I stared at myself in the mirror. "You're a crazy woman." Even my voice betrayed me by cracking.
This was real life—not the cabin, not that man above me, and not those blue, slitted eyes.
I tossed the bottle into the bin, stared at my face in the mirror. Dr. Darcy West, twenty-seven years of age, a geneticist at the Ides facility. No cabin, no trees, no one to save except Zara West, my sister in Beacon who relied on my monthly pay and my ability to engineer the perfect assassin.
But something else persisted as I slid back under my sheets, as I slept without dream: that first feeling of fullness in my heart, the thought that everything between us had been real. Was that possible? Could anything be real with an infiltrator?
And if they were, I had told him unequivocally to sleep with his Scarlet. Something he'd said he couldn't do.
The thought came to me again: Save him, Darcy.
And this time I didn't tell it to be quiet.
Ten
Thursday, May 7, 2053
2:42am
Blaze
I’d nearly arrived.
I stood in a pine forest, snow settling on the branches above. It flurried between the trees, melted on my cheeks and chin.
Above, a moon broke the clouds for the first time in an hour, so round it sat like an unreal orange in the sky.
I lowered my eyes, continued my slog through the snow. My boots sank deep, pulling me back, but I didn’t have time to rest.
I needed to get to the cabin.
I’d nearly reached the end of it, of this forest. I’d traveled through it for so long I hardly knew what the unbroken sky looked like anymore, the moon and stars behind the clouds.
There were many clouds, thick and bulbous like cotton, and the snow had driven hard for a time. Now it was just a taper.
That was how I spotted the cabin: thick wood set horizontal, the roof cast white by the snowfall. I came into the clearing, and the door had already opened for me.
She stepped out wrapped in a blanket, her feet bare. And I wanted to say: “Don’t—not for me. Not without shoes.” But she’d already set into a run across the snow, fair hair streaming behind her.
What could I do? I went to her. I needed to feel her body against mine, to remember the curves and warmth of it. She was the only thing that brought heat in this place.
She came to me with feather steps, pooled into my arms. With her came a perfect pleasure, the blanket opening wide, her small hands sliding around my neck, her slender legs around my body.
I gripped her at the waist, held her to me, her bare warmth pressed against my belly. So smooth, so radiant in this stark place. My face went to her neck, and I remembered again her smell. How could I have forgotten it? Impossible, intoxicating.
I was already hard.
I hitched her high on my torso, carried her into the cabin. Inside lay the wide bed with the brown bear’s fur coverlet, and I laid her on it, settled my body atop her.
She must have been half my size, but the way she held me—her arms and legs wrapped around, refusing to come unglued—I felt enclosed by her.
We kissed, and the moment surged, unspooled long and infinite. Our fingers interlaced, and I pressed her arm above her head, I had a pure thought: it was always her. Even before I knew her, it was her, would always be. No other mouth would fit the shape of mine so exactly; the two of us poured together into one.
Her lips pressed full and warm against mine, her encouraging tongue sliding between them. Her free arm pulled me closer—how did she have such strength?—and I sank to her and all of her unclothed beauty.
My lips explored her eyelids and her pink cheeks, her heart of a chin, the long canvas of her neck.
I found her pulse, the swift and birdlike press against her delicate skin. By instinct, my lips parted. I sucked lightly and at once she arched against me, the hard pebbles of her nipples pressing up against my chest.
They urged me lower.
My mouth trailed down her décolletage to the mountainous rise of her chest, and she gripped me harder, her face in my hair.
Her body language had changed, shifted: she bore a tenseness she didn’t carry before, a certain fear. Worry. Anxiety.
"This is right," I wanted to say, but I couldn’t speak except with my body. That was what infiltrators did best. I was an exception to my model, but not in that way: I would assuage her with my hands and mouth, pleasure away the fear.
Whatever it was, I could take care of her. I could keep her safe.
Her hands went to my back, clinging there. The nails pressed divots in my skin on the border of pleasure and p
ain, and I understood she wanted me to turn my face. To look behind.
At what? What was the matter? Some force prevented me from turning my head to find out. I could only remain atop her, my mouth on her skin, exploring the swell of her breast, my mouth finding the sweet hardness of her nipple.
She gasped, pressed herself to me. That wasn’t just pleasure in her voice—it was fear, too. She’d seen something behind us that had surprised her. And not in a good way.
Then I remembered: I had left the cabin door open. I had left it wide to the snow and the forest.
And I knew what lived in the forest.
My eyes opened, and inside the capsule my breath came fast and ragged. I knew what lived in the forest.
I had to protect her. I had to keep her safe. But I was alone in the tight sleeping space, and she was elsewhere.
I was Blaze—#8024 of the infiltrator model—in the Ides Facility. What lay around me seemed less of a reality than the world I’d just inhabited, than the cabin in the snow. Than the warm body beneath me, that smooth skin and those full lips. But there was something else.
Fear and certain knowledge of what lived in the forest hung with me, set a sweat down the length of my back.
Inside the capsule, my memory of the place trailed away, even as I tried to pin it down. I shut my eyes, attempted to brand the images into my long-term memory: the forest, the snow, the cabin, the woman.
The woman. I couldn’t even remember her face except in broad swaths. She’d been beautiful, petite, passionate, and completely mine. She smelled irresistible. But the details lay in the ether of my subconscious.
Only two certainties remained with me.
One: that woman was it. Now, always, for as long as I should live.
Two: I knew what lived in the forest.
Except, prone in the capsule, I had no idea where the forest and the cabin were, or what actually lived there. It was all a fading dream, and I didn’t know the specifics so much as the conviction I felt.
Whatever it was, it sent fear through her. It was something I needed to keep her safe from.