Blaze

by Mara, Alex

  None of those sounded like responsible reasons. Finally, I said: “Do you want the Dr. West answer, or the Darcy answer?”

  His head inclined a notch. “You already know which one I want to hear.”

  My mouth opened. I knew what I felt. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t make the words come out. I’d lived as Dr. West for so long, so fully, that I couldn’t make myself be simply Darcy.

  And I still wasn't sure if all of this was an illusion, a trick of the stress and his seduction training. He might kill me once I'd helped him escape.

  So I just looked at him, practically trembling in my chair, unable to answer. We stared at each other for a long time—too long—and when he finally straightened, I backed my chair from the desk and turned to look up at him.

  I’d never wanted and feared someone so much.

  He rose like a tree above me, his angular face haloed by the light. "What happens now?"

  "I'm going to call for arbitration," I said.

  "On who?"

  I forced myself to meet those green eyes. "On you."

  * * *

  12:14 p.m.

  Ten hours. In ten hours, everything would change.

  I reminded myself of that truth again as the door slid open and I stepped into the arbitration room for the second time in a week. Through the glass, strapped to a chair and staring back at us, sat Blaze.

  This was my doing.

  "Welcome, Dr. West," said Mullins, tapping his pen on the long table. "You called this one, right?"

  My eyes flicked to Mullins, to that white puff of hair. I wanted to ask him how all his work on genetics hadn't resulted in discovering the ability to regenerate the follicles on his scalp.

  Instead, I smiled. "Yes. I'm sorry—this day has been crazy." And it'll only get crazier from here.

  Alman was already speaking by the time I sat. "This case seems fairly clear, Doctor." He surveyed his stenopad, set it on the table. "Hyper-aggression. He stabbed another iteration right in the side, just missed his kidney. There's even an early mark on 8024's file about termination after five days."

  "That's all true, and I agree with your assessment, Doctor," I said. I tried to keep my eyes on Alman instead of staring through the glass. As though by looking at Blaze, I'd give everything away. "But I'd like the opportunity to question him before recycling. He's uncommonly self-aware, and has behaved with unprecedented autonomy. I believe we could learn a great deal from 8024's behavior."

  Mullins's pen kept tapping. His gaze shifted to the glass. "He sounds dangerous. To us, even."

  "I agree," I said, "and we can keep him restrained at all times. We'll ensure his capsule retains an exterior seal during the night."

  "Doctor, to speak bluntly: if we let him hang around another day, we're not putting him back in the capsule room with the others," said Alman.

  Mullins nodded. “We should put him in one of the cryo-capsules at night, at the least."

  I sucked in air. The cryo-capsules were a living death, a reduction of the body's core temperature to such a degree that we had a facility rule: we only put the clones through one cryo-sleep, and that occurred right after the iterations had been cultivated and prepared.

  When they were ready to be woken, we brought them out of that sleep. Some didn't make it.

  This would be Blaze's second cryo-sleep.

  "No!" I wanted to shout, but that wouldn't have been very doctorly of me. As it was, I managed to keep my face straight. "The cryo-capsule seems a bit excessive. Can we just keep him in one of the interrogation rooms? He’ll be totally solitary.”

  I stared between them in the silence that followed, and I finally got it: they didn’t care if Blaze survived the freezing. To them, this was just another one of Dr. West’s episodes. She was putting too much stock in a single iteration again, just like with 8017 and 8018.

  After all, why save the defective ones when they could just be recycled down and new clones woken in their place?

  On the other side of the glass, Blaze sat with uncanny calmness, his gaze set somewhere above and beyond our heads. His arms and legs had been strapped to the chair, his forehead and chin arrested by the head restraint.

  He'd been reduced once again, I thought, to a half-man—an object.

  The very objectification he'd spent the past week trying to escape.

  My throat started to close, my eyes stinging. Even if he survived the cryo-sleep, we'd still need Ides's fingerprint authorization to wake him again. It was all beginning to seem as ephemeral as the cabin, the snow, the forest.

  I shook my head. “I won’t allow it.”

  Alman shrugged, a single lift of his narrow shoulders. "I believe you're overruled on that one, Dr. West. If you want 8024 to remain alive during this questioning, Dr. Mullins and I are in agreement on the overnight cryo-capsule treatment."

  I stared at Blaze through the glass. They were taking his well-being out of my hands.

  Fourteen

  Thursday, May 7, 2053

  1:27pm

  Blaze

  I stutter-walked through the arbitration room door, my wrists and ankles pressing against the short leads of the bindings. At the small of my back, the hard, cylindrical muzzle of a Gale's semiautomatic.

  I could only imagine the pleasure a Gale took in finally drawing his gun, the feeling of escorting an anomalous malcontent. It was probably an uncommon treat.

  Both the gun, and the feeling.

  Ahead, Darcy stood in the hallway with two older men—doctors, judging by their flowing white coats—the three of them holding those stenopads to their chests like they provided shielding. And I'd seen Darcy so often that way over the past week, maybe her stenopad did act as a buffer of sorts.

  On her stenopad she kept her notes, her thoughts. Her sense of control.

  They doctors had been in casual conversation, like they were deciding on the hour for a lunch tête-à-tête. Like all of these proceedings and the man with his legs and hands bound coming down the hallway toward them were the status quo.

  The hell of my life: this was the status quo.

  My ankle bindings were of clinking chain-metal. Darcy turned when I neared, and she'd never looked so horrified to see me.

  The conclusion of the arbitration session must not have gone in my favor, but I couldn't speak to ask. They'd set a mask over my face; I guess they thought I was as dangerous with my mouth as with a tanto.

  And seeing the way I'd influenced Darcy West's behavior—a veteran doctor of the facility—in just six days, maybe they were right.

  But they didn't know the way my heart pressed hard when I saw her. They didn't know my truth.

  I smiled at her beneath the mask anyway. Maybe she would see my eyes crinkle.

  She stared at me for too long before she stepped forward. "Escort him to the cryostasis chamber," she said to the Gale behind me. "I'll meet you there in ten minutes." And when the Gale started me down the hallway, she stood aside with that same look. Except horror had dissolved into something like pity.

  Don't feel sorry for me, I thought. I've lived by my truths all along. Have you?

  But I could only transmit so much with my eyes, and that gun sat at the seat of my spine again, a reminder that I could only go forward.

  Cryostasis. I knew what the word meant, the concept. Freezing—preservation. Was this some kind of pre-recycling torture?

  In that case, arbitration really hadn't gone in my favor. But if it meant Darcy had bought more time for us, then I would endure whatever lay ahead.

  And right now, what lay ahead was the long hallway and about a million tiny steps between here and wherever cryostasis was housed.

  Along the way, the Gale talked to me. We passed the weapons training room, and he must have sensed my eyes flicking toward the viewing window.

  Inside, two of the newest iterations sparred in white. "You really fucked up, 8024," he said. This Gale wasn't one I'd met, but apparently he knew me.

  I said nothin
g; I couldn't speak. But I slowed my steps, and the muzzle drove into my back with a sharp thrust. "Don't even think about stopping," he said.

  So I stopped hard, spun around with flashing eyes. I was never very good at obeying instructions. When I lifted my chin at the Gale, his eyes—my eyes—narrowed. Somehow he'd acquired an angry necklace of a scar right at the hilt of his throat. A garrote?

  He stepped forward, unclipped one side of my mask so my face came uncovered. "If you have something to say, now you can say it."

  We stared at one another for a moment.

  "That's a pretty necklace," I said, surveying his scar. "Where'd you get it?"

  "From your dad's jewelry box. Anything else?"

  I snorted. "I like you."

  His expression didn't change, but something flickered in his eyes. "Don't get any ideas, 8024. I'm not like that."

  "Everyone here's such a square." I turned back around.

  "Not like you, Blaze." He started me down the hallway again. "Where did you get that name, anyway?"

  I shrugged, and everything clinked. "I ran fast on a treadmill once."

  "That's all?"

  We were passing through the depths of the infiltrator wing now, past the capsule room for the females. The waking room, where I'd first encountered the world. The seduction room.

  "That's all," I said.

  "And how'd you get from there to here?"

  He meant arbitration, cryostasis. Certain death.

  "You don't know?"

  "We're Gales. We know more than you, but not much."

  "It's a long story, but the short version is: I kissed someone and tried to kill someone."

  "That'll do it," he said.

  I smiled. "What's your number?"

  But he didn't answer. We were trained to be lone wolves here, to distrust and keep to ourselves. That didn't serve us, I realized in an instant—it served the facility. It kept us distant from one another.

  We walked in silence down the long infiltrator corridor until we reached a door with a keypad. He turned me away as he entered the numbers—four button presses—and we passed through into a section of the facility I had never been in before.

  I smelled ozone.

  The rooms off this hallway didn't have viewing windows, only blank-faced doors. We walked four hundred and eighty-eight steps, passed nine doors—three on the left, six on the right—and the muzzle left my back when we reached the ninth. The Gale took hold of my arm and turned me left.

  We stood for a beat too long before the Gale stepped forward and touched the numbers on the keypad right in front of me. 2-8-6-4.

  I repeated the sequence in my head once, twice, three times.

  Three repetitions was all it took for an infiltrator's mind. Actually, we had eidetic memories, so once was enough. Anything we repeated three times to ourselves we were storing for instant recall.

  The door slid open and a chill slid out from the room; ahead, what appeared to be a massive, cavernous closet full of giant-sized clothes on hangers stretching down massive aisles so long I couldn't see their end.

  No, I realized as I stood squinting in the doorway, those weren't clothes.

  When the Gale straightened from the keypad, his gaze caught mine. "7950 was my number." And then he nodded me through the door and into the room. "Wait inside until Dr. West arrives."

  I stepped in, turned as he disappeared from the doorway to stand outside with his gun at his hip, and the door slid shut.

  I didn't want to look at what was behind me. I knew exactly what those "clothes" were.

  Bodies. Frozen bodies hanging in sleeves.

  * * *

  1:48 p.m.

  "Wait here," Darcy West said as she entered the chamber. That damned stenopad was still pressed to her chest, and she was talking to the Gale at the door, not to me.

  It was only when the door shut behind her that she stopped sudden and stared at me under the blue-white fluorescents of the cryostasis chamber. After a beat, she burst into tears, dropped the stenopad on the floor. "I'm so sorry."

  This place must not have been bugged. I came toward her, my bound hands going out to her and jerking to a stop at the end of their lead, which was all of about six inches from my waist.

  I shook my head, and she put her hand in mine, squeezed my fingers. The other hand unlatched the mask from my face. "What is this place?" I said as soon as my mouth came free.

  "Cryostasis."

  "Why are there so many bodies? Who are they?"

  "This is where we keep the clones before we wake them. We grow them, freeze them, keep them dormant until they're ready—"

  "Darcy," I said, squeezing her hand, "I was in this room before?"

  She swallowed, nodded. A pair of tears pressed from her eyes in perfect synchrony, and I could tell by the constriction of her chest, her shuddering breaths, that she felt that sorrow.

  She really felt it.

  My gaze drifted to the nearest body, darted back before I could see too much, comprehend too much. "How long was I in this room?"

  "It doesn't matter," she said. She didn't want to meet my eyes. Her eyelashes, dotted with moisture, appeared impossibly long.

  "It matters to me."

  Her eyes lifted, flitted over the cavern of bodies in sleeves, the outlines of their legs and arms in those bags. "I don't know exactly, but probably about two years."

  I stepped to the wall, leaned against it with my eyes unfocused on the bare floor. "I was in this room for two years."

  She followed, her hand landing on my face. "I'm so sorry."

  For the first time, a spike of anger intermixed with the softness I felt for Darcy West. It burnt hot, and I stood there with it, letting myself feel what I felt. Dozens—hundreds—thousands?—of people were being kept in here like objects, like parts.

  And she'd engineered their growth, their freezing, their captivity.

  "I was in the world for two years, alive but not living. That's more than wrong."

  I heard her sob, and the toes of her shoes peeked into my vision. She reached out to my arm, and it took all the willpower in me to move ever so slightly just outside her touch.

  "How many of them are there in here?" I asked. My eyes remained fixed, my mouth a line.

  "I don't know—"

  "Take a moment."

  My voice had assumed a tenor it didn't normally possess, and she must have known I was serious because she sucked in air, a small gasp in her crying. She was sorry, but if we did nothing to correct this, sorrow didn't mean a damned thing.

  Finally, she said: "I think about four thousand."

  If I wasn't already supported by the wall, I would have needed it then. Four thousand minds. Four thousand people left to the devices of these abusive handlers and this legion of brutalized soldiers. I stared across the sea of them, frozen and unaware, and I made a promise to end this.

  Whatever it took. Skill, swords, or blood. Someday I would end this.

  Which meant I had to survive the freezing, the de-freezing, and getting out of this damned place. Well, better to start sooner than later. My hands folded to fists, and I shifted my eyes to Darcy. "Let's do this."

  * * *

  As it turned out, cryostasis—like most things, I was learning—was scariest before it was real. Terrifying in anticipation.

  Five minutes later, I stepped into the upright cryo-capsule, and I no longer felt fear. I felt many things, but not that.

  I felt a strange and wrought protectiveness over the woman who might inadvertently kill me in freezing me. Even as she stood at the console doing it, her tears rivulets down those soft cheeks. That spike of hot anger still resided in me, but I knew she was better than the choices she had made here.

  We all deserve redemption. Darcy was earning hers.

  I felt sorry for the Scarlets and the Gales and the infiltrators—men and women—who had lived and died in this sanitized place with a criminal, tragic lack of ceremony.

  Most of them even beli
eved the propaganda: that their emotions weren't real, only imitations. At least 8017 and 8018 had known better before they died.

  Mostly I burned with anger that this facility was allowed to exist, persisted, still stood around me. This anger filled me end to end, seethed in my veins so hard I was surprised I didn't glow red.

  I could almost feel those claws reemerging.

  And I knew with the same intensity that I was meant to protect the woman before me that I was also meant to end the Ides facility.

  Which meant ending Luther Ides. Maybe not today or tomorrow or for weeks or months, but it was an inevitability. I would come here—come back.

  "This is going to feel strange," Darcy said, stepping forward with a needle attached to a long cable that ran snakelike over to a massive upright tube. "But it won't hurt."

  "You're a terrible liar, Darcy West," I breathed.

  Her face half-crumpled before she caught herself, pressed her tears away. For a moment she stood there contemplating the needle in her hand like she didn't know what to do with it.

  My hand went out, touched her wrist. "I know you won't let me die."

  "I can't promise that," she whispered.

  "Then how about this," I said, stroking the fine hairs on the back of her hand. "I won't let myself die."

  Her eyes lifted, crystalline with tears. "You can't promise that, either."

  "Maybe I need another round of subterfuge training."

  She laughed, a single warble in the room of bodies, and then she lifted the needle with sudden seriousness. "This is cryoprotectant. It's to prevent the water in your body from crystallizing."

  "Don't explain. Just do it."

  She inserted the needle into the vein in the crook of my elbow, reached back to press a button on the console. But I held onto her wrist, and she turned back around to face me.

  And then, because the room wasn't bugged and because there was nothing else to say, she pressed her body against mine and her hand came to my face with the kind of grip I didn't know she was capable of.