Blaze

by Mara, Alex

  She kissed me intensely, desperately, her breath pouring into my mouth before it was buffeted by my own sharp exhale. For a moment, I forgot my body.

  And as an infiltrator, that was a very difficult thing to do.

  Only my mouth, her mouth, those impossibly smooth lips. Her fingers pressing into my jaw and cheek like she would pull me closer, closer.

  And I would have come closer, would have crushed her to me if I weren't bound so well. I wanted nothing less than every part of her touching me.

  After a second or an hour, she pressed herself away with a small noise. She breathed hard, in small, visible puffs. "I'll come back for you tonight."

  I just stared at her, my lips still parted as though I had forgotten what I was going to say. And then I remembered it: "Be safe."

  Pain and pleasure touched her face in equal measure. "You too."

  No promises.

  She stepped to the console, pressed the button, and a faint humming started in the tube across the room. I watched an turquoise liquid ooze through the cable toward me. The capsule lid closed on the room, and her petrified face was the last thing I saw before the ice hit my veins like pure, white-hot fire.

  She really was a terrible liar.

  Fifteen

  Thursday, May 7, 2053

  2:21 p.m.

  Darcy

  I was either killing him or saving him. I still didn't know which.

  The last thing I saw as I pressed the activation key on the console was Blaze's face looking back at me, those trusting green eyes. Those just-kissed lips coming together one more time.

  I could have sworn he winked at me. I held back a sob; he was trying to make me feel better.

  A blast of cool air surged from the capsule as it pressurized, and I watched on the console as the temperature flooded down, down. 72F—60F—48F—32F.

  On the small screen, a tiny representation of his body's circulatory system shifted from red to blue as the cryoprotectant filled his veins.

  His heart rate shot upward before it stopped. I stared at the line of it on the monitor as though I could will it to keep rising and dipping, rising and dipping. Don't stop, you bastard, I thought. Keep going.

  And for a moment, I heard only silence where a beep should have greeted me.

  "You promised me," I whispered, and a half-second later his heart resumed its symphonic, now achingly slow beat.

  8024—Blaze, my infiltrator—was alive.

  "Cryostasis achieved," the console chirped.

  I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding and wiped the tears from my eyes.

  Not killing him. Saving him.

  The quick-cryo process had worked after all; the cryoprotectant and the temperature change had hit at the same time.

  The result had been a single shock through his system, but he hadn't been awake for any of it after the first second or two.

  A second or two of blistering pain. That much was obvious as I activated the transparency feature on the capsule lid, stepped with raised, shaking fingers toward a frozen Blaze.

  Frozen alive, his face a rictus of suppressed pain. But alive, still in there.

  Just like every one of the hundreds of nascent infiltrators around us, each of them waiting to be awoken, to have their turn on the Ides merry-go-round.

  It had only taken one particularly enlightened clone to remind me of my long-buried ethics. Of what was right.

  I pressed my hand to the lid while the console sounded his heartbeat in audible beeps. I hated that I'd had to do it this way, but it was his best chance of survival.

  The slow-cool process was arcane, involved a series of checks the body had to bypass in order to proceed to hypothermic levels.

  This way included only a single check. One shock that would have instantly killed him—or not. And I'd known if any of them could have survived it, it would have been him. Blaze. The key to saving all our asses.

  Or at least, my sister's. And the rest who were innocent in all of this, just trying to scrape by a couple thousand feet above us. Trying to keep the human race from going extinct.

  As I stared at Blaze, a new question speared me so hard I nearly flinched. Why did we deserve to avoid extinction? Before all this, we'd already sent thousands of species to the graveyard.

  I couldn't answer it. Not then, with everything happening around me. I would later, after we'd lived—or died. Lived, I hoped.

  So I focused on the questions I could answer. My hand slid down the capsule lid. "I'll be back," I whispered. "Just hang here a while."

  * * *

  3:01 p.m.

  I'd only just started to knock when Terrell's cabin door opened and a hand yanked me inside in one smooth motion.

  "Hell, Mike," I gasped in the darkness. "Why are the lights off?"

  He waited until the door had resumed its seal before he clapped twice, activating the fluorescents. His curly red hair came illuminated in an instant. "I prefer darkness when I'm nervous. And right now, I'm really, really nervous, Darcy."

  As if the soaked pits of his t-shirt hadn't given him away. I grabbed his desk chair, slid it toward me and slumped into its molded seat. "Well, I haven't got good news."

  He groaned. "Don't tell me: Blaze has gone full drake."

  I shook my head. "He didn't even get past his seduction training, Mike."

  Terrell's hands went up with his shrug. "What am I supposed to think? The guy sprouted claws during his first obstacle training."

  "Touche," I said, my eyes unfocusing on the dull gray of the wall beside him. He had done that—somehow. They weren't supposed to be able to manage that kind of shift until we trained them, but Blaze had surprised me every day of his life. I glanced to Terrell. "There's a new wrinkle."

  He let a deeper groan. "Tell me." His hand went up. "No, don't tell me—I need a drink first."

  I set a hand to my mouth, hiding my smile. Terrell's "need a drink" was every other adult's equivalent of proper hydration. The man hadn't touched alcohol the entire three years I'd known him.

  "Is everything in order with the drug?" I asked.

  He stood at the small sink, the water filling his glass. "On the desk next to you."

  I glanced over. There on Terrell's desk sat a tiny oblong pill, the white casing gleaming in the light. I lifted it between my thumb and forefinger, held it aloft. "It's very small."

  "With that kind of potency, anything more would put him out for a long, long time.”

  My eyes flicked to Terrell's back. “All night with just this?"

  He turned around to face me. "Are you questioning the chemist, Darcy?"

  "Never."

  Terrell was good at what he did; I had no doubt when he said all night, he meant it.

  He took a long sip, and with an ahh he pulled the glass from his lips and stared at me. "Now tell me how deep this wrinkle is."

  So I told Terrell about the arbitration, cryostasis, and the fact that we now needed Ides's fingerprint in order to de-activate the capsule and get Blaze out of the facility. The last part I said so quickly my words almost slurred, as though by speeding it up I could make it less bad.

  "No," Terrell said, spilling a little water as he raised a point-making finger, dashing it through the air. "That's not how cryostasis works, Darcy. We freeze and de-freeze them all the time and we never need Luther-goddamn-Ides's print."

  "'Never' isn't quite accurate," I said, raising a reluctant finger. "Remember that time a few years ago when one of the females killed another one and we put her into cryostasis as a protective measure until we woke her for examination?"

  He took a long sip, emptying half his glass. At the end, he lowered it with a crisp inhale. "No."

  "Well, it happened. And when they're hyper-aggressive and completely out of control like that, there's only one person in this whole place who can bring them out. It's a safeguard."

  "Safeguard my ass. I don't feel safe or guarded right now."

  He had a point; between Blaze and
his Scarlet and 8013, the ship was rocking a bit too hard. We were all beginning to lose our balance.

  "Which is why we need to get Blaze and get the hell out." And when Terrell didn't respond except to take another long, long sip of water, I added: "Right?"

  He lowered the glass with another sharp inhale, as though he'd been drowning. "Darcy, it was one thing to engineer a jailbreak of a clone who isn't frozen alive. But this..."

  The silence dropped between us like a balloon full of ice water. He was going to back out.

  And the thought of Blaze being moved straight from cryostasis into the recycling room—never seeing or thinking or feeling or speaking again—brought me right out of my seat. I pushed out of the chair so hard it scraped across the floor.

  No, I thought. No, no, no.

  "You were the one," I said. My heart had started its wild beating again, but I forced my voice to remain steady and compelling. "You were the one who told me we needed to do this. That this one could be the key."

  "I know," Terrell said. I heard the plug of regret in his voice. "But that was before we needed our Monster-in-Residence's fingerprint."

  "About that. I have an idea, Mike. It's a good idea. Will you just hear me out?"

  His mouth opened, but when he saw those lines between my eyes, nothing came out. I knew which Darcy West he'd seen in that moment: the one with the secrets. The one with ardor. The one who wouldn't back down.

  After a pause, he leaned against the sink and gestured for me to continue.

  So I did. I told him my idea, drawing lines in the air, making points with one finger in the palm of my opposite hand, and by the end, Mike Terrell stared at me with wide, disbelieving eyes.

  "You're way crazier than I'd ever given you credit for, West."

  "Maybe. Do you think it can work?"

  He nodded, eyes drifting to the ground almost as though he was surprised by his own assent. "Yeah. I think it could."

  * * *

  6:53 p.m.

  One meeting and two impossibly long observation sessions later, I stood in my cabin before the open mouth of a small backpack. It waited patiently for me to deposit whatever I considered necessary in my new life into it.

  My new life.

  Around me, fresh snowfall. This holographic forest had seen a blizzard since the last time I'd visited; the snow lay fat and white and untouched on the ground, following the articulations of the branches. The sun—orb glowing behind the clouds—had nearly fallen to the treeline.

  It was getting to night. And with night would come a different sort of light.

  I straightened, watching the sun dip, reach between the branches in shafts of gold. And when I closed my eyes, I could almost feel it. Could almost remember.

  This part of the Earth hadn't known a treeline in so long they had almost become myth to me, their distinctness housed in a database until the moment I clicked a button to bring them to life in my tiny hole in the ground.

  Three nights a week for five years I'd picked the forest scene. I knew as much because the data was recorded in my file, a sort of psych-evaluation-lite, if someone were so inclined.

  Darcy West, 27 years old. Both parents deceased. One sister living in Beacon. Trained as a geneticist and general practitioner of medicine. Opts for forest setting 43% of nights.

  And after five years, I was going back up.

  I clicked off the projection, and the walls resumed their infuratingly gray smoothness.

  Turning a circle in my cabin, I realized how little I had that actually mattered to me. I'd slid in my stenopad with years of research and results on the infiltrator model, the portrait of Zara, water tablets and rations enough for a few days. A small water purification system. A flashlight. One of the little prods the interrogators used on infiltrators who acted out (not that I had ever used one).

  My father's pistol. Six bullets loaded, not one shot in over twenty years.

  I set it in the backpack, zipped it up, and tucked one of the straps inside so it hung over one shoulder like a purse. That wasn't atypical, for the women in this facility to sometimes carry their belongings over one shoulder.

  But as I stepped to the mirror and stared at myself, I couldn't see anything but atypical. I didn't look any different: average height, light hair, blue eyes. A constellation of freckles that dipped beneath one eye and on over to the other.

  But I was different. I was changed.

  Maybe Terrell was right. I might be crazier than I'd ever thought. Between Zara and me, I had always been the steady, protective sister. The one who got us the food, who assessed the illnesses, who kept us both off the ground at night.

  Zara had sometimes lovingly and sometimes tauntingly called me "the star." Steady. Ever-present. Bringing light.

  Not the one who abandoned everything because of a clone and a dream.

  I pressed my blonde hair back into a bun at my nape. Ides would only see the length of my neck, the spot where my collarbones came together and where it ended at my jawline.

  He'd never think of it as a good style for running, for evading—if it came to that, because no one expected Dr. West to run on anything except a treadmill.

  Steady, steady, steady. For five years, I'd been Darcy "Steady" West.

  But steady wasn't working fast enough. Steady wasn't saving Zara.

  Even if we got out of the facility, Blaze might still kill me. If I was being scientific about it, the chances were probably high that he would.

  Why not? I was weak. I'd slow him down, and I was one of the doctors who had created him, facilitated his indoctrination. He had every reason to cleave me away like deadwood.

  I stood, grabbed the last bottle of crème de menthe off the liquor shelf. Uncorked, it only took one upturn to send the whole contents burning down my throat. Burning like the cryo-protectant had done. I coughed, wiped my mouth, steadied my gaze on the mirror again.

  Finally I grabbed the lipstick from the vanity. Opened it with a crisp pop, spun out the stick of red. I set it to the corner of my mouth, started it across to the other side.

  At the end, I pushed my lips together, wiped at a corner with my finger. I'd never been good with makeup, but Ides wouldn't care; he'd see a pair of red lips.

  The woman looking back at me didn't have the same docility as the one I used to know. Her eyes held a secret, an ardor that brought her eyebrows together. Two vertical lines had formed there in the center.

  "He's counting on you," that woman murmured at me. "Don't let him down, West."

  For better or for worse, he was counting on me.

  I tossed the bottle into the trash, where it clanged home. I grabbed my white coat from the hook, swept it on. Finally, I scooped the handle of my backpack and slung it over my shoulder.

  When the cabin door slid open, my face was a mask of docility. Of steadiness. Of professional decorum.

  I stepped out and didn't look back.

  Sixteen

  Thursday, May 7, 2053

  10:02 p.m.

  Darcy

  I stood outside Luther Ides' cabin door for a full five minutes, my fist hovering an inch from the metal.

  When it became clear my body wouldn't allow me to knock, I started my pacing. "Come on, Darcy," I whispered, flicking my hands to settle my nervousness. "Just do it."

  Terrell's pill sat in the deep pocket of my jacket. An hour ago, he'd held it up to the light, white and smaller than my fingernail. "Will it be enough?" I'd asked.

  "Oh Darcy, you sweet geneticist." Terrell laughed. "This is enough to lay him so flat he'll forget what 'vertical' means."

  All I had to do now was get it into Ides's system and he'd be done until tomorrow. But I didn't even want to be near his system, much less get anything into it. I'd been wracked with involuntary shudders all afternoon and evening just imagining what I had to do now.

  Or what he might do to me.

  I set my hands at either side of my upturned face, pulling them down with a slow and agonizing groan.


  And that was how Ides found me whent he cabin door hissed open: staring at the ceiling, moaning, pulling the sides of my face down as though melting my own cheeks off.

  "Dr. West. Is something wrong?"

  I jerked upright, spun toward him. He looked like a ghost in the doorway, dressed down, his long white hair as wild as ever. "No. Nothing—just a little bit of stress, you know. I've just arrived to give you my report." I pulled my coat close to my body.

  One of his fat eyebrows went up, even as his eyes dropped to my red lips. "Report?"

  My eyes found the floor, and I cursed my own hesitance. "You requested I meet with you in my cabin this evening to provide an updated report on infiltrator model 8024."

  His gaze dropped lower, tracing the outlines of my body from neck to shoulder to chest to hips to legs. I felt so exposed, and all I could do was stand there and wait to be let in.

  "I knew you were coming, Darcy." He stepped aside, revealing a dimly lit cabin behind him. "I'd forgotten about the report, though."

  I hesitated, but Blaze's frozen face appeared in my mind, and I knew I had the easier part to uphold. I bent, scooped up my backpack and stepped through the doorway.

  Ides, nearly a foot taller, didn't move back at all as I entered; he watched me step through the doorway, our bodies lightly brushing. "What's the backpack for?"

  "I came straight from the gym," I said, surveying his space. It was the largest cabin I'd seen in the facility, and in fact, we only stood in what appeared to be the study.

  A long desk, stacks of papers piled and strewn across. A wall of books sat behind the wingback leather chair, and a small, single-bulb reading lamp provided the room's only light.

  "The gym?" Ides was saying. "I didn't know anyone still used it."

  I turned toward him, angled my face up. "I do."

  He smiled a little. "I can tell." He turned me around with light fingertips, tugged the shoulders of my lab coat. I realized he wanted me to take it off. I reached into the pocket, lifted the pill into my fist.