Revive

by Tracey Martin

  “I thought first stop should be the mess. Lunch is almost over.”

  “Ah. Good plan.” Now that he mentions it, I’m starting to get hungry. And that’s not my only bodily need. I was in the scanner for hours.

  Three point eight hours.

  I have an internal clock. Convenient. What else do I have that I’ve forgotten about?

  “Can we start my tour with the nearest restroom?” I ask Cole.

  He leads me there, and when I finish using it, I stare at my reflection in the mirror. My face is no longer a stranger’s, and yet it’s startlingly different than I recall. Logically, I know the changes are all internal. Neither my features nor my coloring nor my hair are different.

  It’s something about me. Is it my attitude toward this place? Has my time away altered the way I view it?

  Something like that. Yet not.

  The pain in my neck burns like fire. Hot blood drips down it, contrasting with the cool steel of the knife. I feel so much…so much of everything. I might burst with the intensity. But all I see is gray.

  And I’m falling. Spinning.

  They’ve killed me. I should have known there would be a trap.

  I grasp the sink. The bathroom switches between browns and grays. Noisy and silent. Warm and cool. Past and present.

  When I look in the mirror again, it’s just me. Normal. But my heart races. I run my hand over the cut on the back of my neck, and it stings, but the bandage is solid and new. I put a fresh one on this morning. I’m not bleeding again.

  Right. Just a memory. Just another one I could have lived without. I straighten my shoulders and meet Cole in the corridor.

  “What is it?” he asks. “You look dazed.”

  I draw him aside as a line of HYCs march past. Great. I’m barely holding myself together as is, and their eerily similar faces threaten to pull me apart once more. All eight years old, they’re not identical, but several of them are close enough.

  Outside the camp, people wrongly believe that clones would look exactly the same. Outside the camp, people believe we don’t clone humans at all.

  It’s not that it’s illegal, because it’s not. No one’s bothered to make laws about it yet because no one—so the majority of the public believes—has mastered the technique. Clones would be physiologically and mentally unstable. Or they would be if they were fully human.

  HYs are another matter. Our implants can regulate many processes, or so the theory goes. HYCs are an experimental group. None of us are sure how long they’ll last or how well they’ll do, and the bioengineers who created them haven’t shared their theories with the likes of us.

  And I’d bet my left foot that the HYCs would be illegal if anyone knew about them.

  But that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? RedZone black ops goes where the government can’t go. Does what the government can’t officially condone. Gets caught and the government denies all sanctioning of their business. Our business. My business.

  RedZone—giving me a headache with every new-old memory.

  Cole waves a hand in my face, but I sense he’d rather touch me. “You okay?”

  I rub my temples. “Yeah, I’m experiencing memory overload is all. Sometimes it gets hard to tell where I am, or when I am. Everything merges together. And…”

  “And?”

  I dig my heel into the floor. “And nothing that’s come back so far has been useful.”

  “It’s all useful, Sev.”

  “No, it’s not. I had a mission, and I failed. At least I think I did. I can’t be sure because I can’t remember.”

  Cole takes my arm and walks me outside. The moist, chilly air settles around me. I start to ask where we’re going, but he’s heading in the same direction as last night.

  After we clear the buildings, he speaks again. “Don’t beat yourself up about this. You’ll get your memories back, and if you have to return to RTC to finish what you started, you will. You haven’t failed. You had a setback. That’s all.”

  “But I think I knew.” The words tumble from my mouth, way out of my control. They surprise me as much as Cole.

  He turns his face toward the sky, and a single snowflake lands on his nose. “You probably didn’t find X’s identity yet, otherwise you’d have told Malone. You were supposed to inform him as soon as you uncovered it.”

  “I know that, but then I keep thinking—why was I attacked and my tracker removed?” For that matter, why was I sneaking off with Kyle unless he was the one who did it? But I’m not ready to bring that up. “What if I figured out who X is, and before I could report in, someone did this to me? Malone said there were others after the information. What if I screwed up so badly that they got it out of me and…”

  Cole moves toward the woods again. The lone snowflake has no companions yet, but I can tell they’re coming. “It doesn’t add up.”

  “Nothing adds up. The more I remember, the less I understand. Shouldn’t it be the opposite?”

  “Sometimes everything is the most muddled before it can make sense. Come on.”

  I follow him down the path. In the daylight, I can see the security cameras hidden among the trees and also small metal boxes outfitted every fifty meters. I wonder what they do but don’t feel like asking. More security—that’s all I need to remember. If I ever knew more.

  We emerge from the trees onto the banks of the lake. It’s dull and gray, but darker than the sky. Not frozen yet, but not inviting. This is the lake Fitzpatrick made us freeze in. That memory gives me the chills, and I actually shiver.

  Circling around, I search the trees for more cameras.

  “There aren’t any pointed here,” Cole says, following my movements. “Go two hundred feet that way and they’ll pick you up, or fifteen feet that way.” He points left and right. “Not every inch of the camp is covered. Just enough inches.”

  “That’s why we came here that morning.” I close my eyes, trying to bring the full scene into focus, but I have no images of it. Just knowledge. Just words. They’re true, but the memory is incomplete.

  Cole’s whole body seems to brighten. He looks taller. “Do you remember what I told you?”

  I’m trembling. Too many emotions fight for control of my body—shame, hope, fear.

  Mostly fear.

  “You told me you believed in me. That I could do this—the mission.”

  “I still do.”

  I can’t look at him. I can barely talk, and I fumble for words. “Malone says they have a technique—a way they could pull the memories from me if they need to. But it could damage my brain.”

  I don’t know why those are the words I settle on. They have nothing to do with the reason Cole brought me here. But I think it’s because I need an explanation for my fear, one that has nothing to do with the truth.

  “That sounds ominous,” Cole says.

  “No kidding.” I raise my head at last, hoping I’ve derailed the conversation. Derailed the truth. I can’t stand anything else being out of my control.

  Cole scratches his head. “Look at it this way, your mission was to find and protect X. If you found them, and the others looking for X tried to capture them before we could get them out of there, would you risk your life defending them?”

  “That goes with the job.”

  “Right. So then?” He raises an eyebrow. “How is this different?”

  “Yeah, well, when you put it like that, I feel kind of stupid and selfish for worrying. Why do you have to be so much smarter than me?” I punch his chest lightly.

  He pretends to punch me back. “That’s why I’m your unit leader. I’m here to talk sense into the rest of you. But you’re not stupid, Sev. You’re just dealing with a lot right now, but you’re going to be okay. Trust me.”

  “I always trust you, fearless leader.” It’s true.

  “Good.
” Then he puts his hand on my cheek and kisses me, just like he did the morning before I left. And like I did that morning, I panic all over again.

  Cole’s hand on my face is firm, but I’m not. I’m breaking in two. If he wasn’t holding me up, I’d collapse to the dirt. Sev severed. How fitting.

  The taste of his lips is slightly salty but in a pleasant way, and he slides his left arm around me, pulling me close. I can feel every contour of his body against mine, and it feels so good. So right yet so very wrong. I want to press myself closer, and I want to run away.

  “I missed you so much while you were gone,” Cole murmurs into my skin. His hand caresses my cheek, and he drapes his kisses lower. Slow but hungry, like he’s holding back because he knows how fragile I am.

  He brushes my chin, my throat. I hold my breath.

  My eyes close, and every muscle in me tenses with anticipation. I wrap my hands around his shirt, but I can’t do more because I remember pulling off Kyle’s shirt the same way. Lying on his bed, my hands running down his naked back. His lips trailing over my stomach.

  My heart pounds with fear and guilt. I love Cole, but not like this. Not like Kyle. Even though my body responds to Cole’s touch in defiance of my heart, it’s wrong. So wrong I could cry because I shouldn’t care about either of them this way. I shouldn’t have kissed either of them.

  “We can’t do this.” Gasping, I pull away, hating that Cole’s warmed me from head to feet. Hating that I want him to refuse to let go, to keep kissing me and make me give in. “It’s not right.”

  Cole catches his breath, nose pressed to my forehead, dividing my face down the center and pushing open the rift I feel. His exhale hangs in the air between us like smoke. “No, it’s not.”

  Then he kisses me again with more urgency. Because he doesn’t understand. And it’s unfair to expect him to when I don’t dare explain.

  Chapter Twenty

  One Week Ago

  “I’m good.” I turn on the lamp over my bed.

  Across the room, Audrey points to the clock and silently giggles. Every Sunday at eight my “dad” calls. Like clockwork. Like the meeting it is.

  “We need to discuss your next phase,” Malone says in my ear.

  “Okay, but I really need to work on this philosophy paper tonight. I’m drowning in work.”

  I’m drowning in work. That’s code for: roommate present. Usually Audrey spends Sunday evening in the floor lounge where she can collaborate on homework with others. But tonight, she has to listen to recordings for French class, and she said it was too noisy.

  This is a problem.

  “Can you leave the room?”

  “Not easily.” The lounge is crowded too, and I can’t go anywhere else at this time of night. The library closes early on Sunday evening, and a cold rain is falling outside.

  “All right. I’ll text you instead.”

  I flop on my pillow and boot my laptop. “Yes, Dad… I’ll email you this week instead… Uh-huh. Love you too.” I hang up and open the mission database on my laptop, wondering what the next phase is going to entail.

  “He’s so cute,” Audrey says, taking out one of her earbuds. “My dad never wants to talk to me. Only my mom.”

  I roll my eyes. “He’s so punctual, you mean.”

  Audrey giggles and puts the earbud back in. I chew on a pen cap because I’m jealous that Audrey has a mom who likes to talk to her. When she turned twenty last week, her mom sent her a cheesecake in the mail.

  A cheesecake!

  Audrey shared it with me and a couple other people. It was the first time I’d had cheesecake, which no one could believe, and when I discovered that was strange, I made up some excuse about my parents being lactose intolerant.

  The point is: it made me more jealous than ever of Audrey’s family. Her normality. She has two parents, divorced; two stepparents, neither one evil; one sister and one brother, twins, still in high school; a dog; two cats; and a huge extended family.

  I have one fake dad, who’s actually the man in charge of RedZone, a private intelligence training and research company. I also have a unit. And though my unit members are like brothers and sisters—Cole’s feelings for me aside—I sometimes wonder what a normal family would be like. It’s strange to think about all the things I’ve been denied. I thought everyone else in the world was weird until this mission required I live among everyone else.

  That made me realize I’m weird.

  Actually, no. It made me realize how incredibly screwed up I am. Screwed up in ways that are going to haunt me for the rest of my life, the duration of which I’ve probably made shorter than ever by my recent actions.

  My phone jingles with a text. Good work narrowing the list down to 46.

  Audrey laughs. “You’re not going to get any work done tonight, are you?”

  I groan and open my philosophy notes. “Doesn’t look that way.” When she goes back to her French homework, I turn my phone’s volume to silent.

  You have the dance coming up on Friday, correct?

  Y

  There might be an opportunity there. A lot of the names on your list cross-check with those who you think are going.

  I frown, hoping Audrey assumes my paper is troubling me. Opportunity? That doesn’t sound good.

  It would be an ideal time to cause another accident and observe the effects. You could eliminate a good part of the list in one night.

  My neck prickles. An accident? What does Malone want me to do—set off a bomb in the hotel? That’s not a rhetorical question. Unfortunately for Malone, I’m not hurting any more innocent people.

  I don’t have any more AC.

  Like that’s an issue if AnChlor is what he’s thinking. He’ll simply have some delivered to me this week. So I add to my excuse: Not sure anything’s feasible. Too risky. What if X not attending? What if parents freak and pull kids from school? Have seen no evidence of X being in imminent danger. Best to continue as is.

  I glance at Audrey as I hit “send”, but she’s engrossed in her work, transcribing whatever French phrases she’s listening to.

  Malone writes back a moment later: We received new intel. Threat to X might be closer than we thought. This is taking too long. I indulged your conscience once, but we’re running out of time.

  I read this a couple times, my stomach knotting. My fingers shake as I type my response. What intel? What should I be aware of?

  Good thing I have my secondary plan already in place. In theory, Malone should be proud of my ingenuity, although that seems unlikely under the circumstances.

  I’ll send report later. Remember, this is an issue of national security. Sometimes we must make sacrifices to save many. If this group gets their hands on X, it won’t just be his or her life in danger.

  What’s crazy is that before I spent three months at RTC, I wouldn’t have thought twice about any of this. People were targets or objectives or enemies or obstacles. I believed in my higher purpose unquestionably. If Malone told me to bomb an athletic team’s formal for the greater good, I’d have done it.

  No wonder Fitzpatrick threatened to wipe my memories. She called me corrupted, but I think it’s more like my brain’s been infected. The real world is a virus overwriting all my programming. What’s even crazier is that I used to wish I were more CY than HY. Before I came here, I had no idea just how CY I really was.

  Oh what a tangled web we weave

  When first we practice to deceive.

  Not only do poor Sir Walter Scott’s lines often get misattributed to Shakespeare, but they weren’t even that brilliant to begin with. But then, Sir Walter Scott never worked for RedZone.

  What I’ve discovered since coming to RTC: lies can make things simple.

  Another text from Malone: Gas explosions happen.

  Yeah, and gas explosions aren’t the only things
that happen. My Sophia life is imploding around me. I need to step up my plan before Malone decides to blow away discretion—literally—and tells me to go on a shooting rampage on campus.

  Understood. Will consider all options.

  Good. We’re all counting on you.

  I fight the instinct to toss my phone, which would garner me unwanted attention from Audrey, and instead place it gently on my pillow as if it’s an explosive device itself. Before I can turn my attention back to my database, however, another text from Malone arrives.

  Don’t forget to send pics in your dress. Your unit will love to see them.

  I fall back against the wall and my head bangs the wood. It takes me a few minutes before I can respond to Malone. Sometimes, there are no appropriate words.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Friday Night: Two Days Ago

  December it might be, but with the men’s and women’s track teams, the soccer team, and a few other teams contributing for good measure—plus their dates—all packed into the hotel ballroom, the temperature is sweltering. I’m not too bad off in my strapless dress, but the guys are dying. Every chair in the room is covered in a sports coat, each tossed on whichever one was the most convenient at the time because close to half the crowd is drunk. Most illegally. I wonder if Kyle will ever be able to find his jacket again.

  The current song ends, and the DJ morphs the final note into some new techno-ish mix. I wrinkle my nose, which, apparently, is the sign Kyle’s been waiting for.

  “Drink?” he asks.

  Nodding, I pull loose strands of hair off my neck and follow him.

  We look like we belong together. He wears this pale green dress shirt that complements my peach dress, and a tie with green, peach and black in it. Normally, Kyle’s favorite clothes include jeans with ripped knees and T-shirts layered over thermals. I had no idea how well he could clean up.

  Cute, smart, funny and mine. Well, Sophia’s. And I am not Sophia, no matter how much I want to be. I’m a lie, and Kyle deserves better.

  It hits me every now and then. Hits like a punch in the gut, the kind I’m not ready for when my stomach muscles are loose and the wind gets knocked from my lungs. Then, like a good punch in the gut should, it makes me want to crumple into a ball and cry.