Soul Finder (The Immortal Gene Book 2)

by Jacinta Maree

  “Sounds complicated.” Hiro sighed.

  “We have the easy job, find out where McKinnon is hiding. We’re not actually meant to converse with any of the Elite or those from the first class. We both may be wanted lab rats but McKinnon knows my face.”

  “Err…I think everyone knows your face.” Hiro pointed out the window. I turned to see a large monitor on a tower face starting the six o’clock news. My face popped up followed by ten-second footage of me back at our hideout before we found the mall. I remember the moment clearly, but seeing it from a different angle felt like I was watching a stranger. I had just grabbed the man by the backpack and forced him to the ground. I was so mad. So violent. The camera watched from over my shoulder, angled down from a house rooftop. I couldn’t turn away as I watched myself punch the back of his head before ripping the backpack off and tossing it over my shoulder. I then pulled the gun out and aimed it against the back of his skull. I quickly turned away, knowing what I did next.

  I hit the button to drop the blinds, turning the windows into mirrors. “We’re wasting time. We have work to do.”

  Hiro didn’t say anything for the next few hours. As we worked, poring through folders and data on Fitzgerald’s old tablets, I could feel Hiro’s attention on my back. I shrugged it off. He had no right to judge me.

  Night shifted across the sky, but the darkness was overlooked thanks to the city’s constant activity. We asked Eve to deliver some food to the apartment as it was our safest option not to go out onto the streets. Especially if my violent murder was the six o’clock news. They’ll have every right to blacklist me now. Maybe I do belong in a cage.

  Two large silver-domed trays arrived through a chute in the wall, along with a hologram with a welcome message from the kitchen staff. We ate it quickly and sent the trays back. It was the early hours of the morning when we finished searching through everything in Fitzgerald’s apartment.

  “I’m exhausted. Can’t we continue looking tomorrow?” Hiro moaned. I slumped back from pulling all of Fitzgerald’s books from the shelves. Behind his wall of leather encyclopaedias was a small bar and wine rack. He had a nice alcohol selection, I’ll give him that.

  “You know, the longer we stay here the higher the risk is of us getting caught. We have to get the information and go.”

  “What’s the harm? Everyone thinks I’m Fitzgerald, even the AI thinks I’m him. As long as we don’t leave the room we’ll be fine. Plus, it’s you they are looking for. Not me.”

  “Your face may not be on the screens but they are definitely looking for you.” I sighed and rubbed my pounding head. “Okay. A few hours’ sleep and then we report to Diesel. Tell him about the fundraising foundation where Swoon will be. Maybe it will help.”

  “Yes! Thank God.” Hiro slumped toward Fitzgerald’s bedroom to sleep.

  Even though there were other beds to choose from, I took the couch, turning one of the mirrors back into a window and opening up the view of the rainbow lights. I curled up and settled against the soft cushions. As I shifted into sleep, I couldn’t help but think how strange this world is. The movement. The energy. The divide so clear I could paint it with a brush. The powerless and the powerful, clashing at corners. Part of me wished to be able to live here forever. I would bring Annie in here with me, live in this room and eat food delivered to us through the wall. We could watch the world from a safe distance. Untouched. My mind buzzed fantasizing about this foreign city. Perhaps others had come here to dream too. The city felt like a temptation, a taste of greater things. It had a strange beauty to it. A perfect beauty I will never have.

  The clink of metal woke me. My ears prickled at the noise and my eyes snapped opened. Nothing seemed to move. The city lights peeled back the shadows. Gentle chatter hummed from outside. Despite my exhaustion, I sat up. Another clink. This time closer, in the room. I spun around and searched the darkness. Nothing. Maybe Hiro was walking about?

  The blanket fell off me as I rose from the couch. I had lived too long in a violent world to ignore my instincts.

  “Hiro?” I called and hit the button for the blinds. The windows shuddered, drawing upwards and illuminating the room in the neon lights. A woman stood in the middle of the kitchen with her gun aimed at me.

  “You should have stayed asleep.” She fired and the bullet hit my side. It clipped me, drawing out red and pain. I dropped to the ground, breathless as the hot bullet tore open my skin. Splitting hot pain cramped my muscles. I quickly grabbed the wound, assessing it. Nothing fatal, just fucking hurts. Shot to disable me, not kill me. The woman stepped around the kitchen bench, the clink of metal following her. “But I’m not here for you.”

  I crawled around the couch, one arm clutching my abdomen. I caught sight of one steel-capped boot. A curved metal stilt balanced on a flat spring replaced her right leg. Metal plates curved along her hands and wrists and disappeared beneath her black leather jacket. I rolled myself toward the coffee table and slammed my hand on the panic button. The bedroom door crashed down, securing Hiro’s room.

  “Hiro, don’t come out,” I screamed. I ran into the main entrance, my body slanted off balanced. Footsteps followed. I gripped my damp shirt and ran toward Eve’s control panel. “Eve? Eve, we’re under attack! I’ve been shot!”

  The dark screen turned on. Eve’s image flickered. “Ap-ap-ap-apolo…gies.” Its voice stuttered and strained.

  “Eve!”

  “My systems se-see…ms to be malfunctioning—”

  “Open manual controls!” A small pocket in the wall opened up to a keypad. My vision blurred, the stinging ache pulled my legs in, buckling my knees. Blood wept in between my fingers. I didn’t have time to read what all of the buttons were for. Unstable, I slumped against the wall, one arm cradling my stomach, the other trying to hold me up. I glanced sideways at the approach of a shadow. An arm shot out. Grabbed me. Cold, steel fingers ringed my throat. I gripped her wrist and pulled. Grey eyes burrowed into my face. Calculated. Inhuman. I slammed my blood-covered hand down onto the control panel. Bright red lasers shot across the door panel and through her reaching arm. The weight shifted and pulled my head forward. I caught myself on the wall and tore the detached arm off.

  I shoved away from her, tripping and landing on the carpet. Blood freckled the ground. She didn’t flinch as she looked down at the wires dangling like veins from the bend in her elbow. Glints of silver appeared beneath torn skin. The red laser bars shuttered and suddenly turned off. She stepped forward. Perhaps to retrieve her arm or perhaps to kill me. My energy pooled with my blood, pulling my weary eyes close.

  “I’m not here to kill you.” Her words echoed in the space above my head. A heavy thump knocked her sideways to the ground. Hiro emerged from behind, the neck of a shattered wine bottle still gripped in his hand. Darkness pulled me under.

  Chapter Nineteen:

  “Nadia? Nadia?”

  I jerked awake.

  I sat up. Pain clawed my stomach.

  I fell back down.

  “Whoa! Take it easy. Are you trying to get me killed as well?” My senses rolled. Pain burned. Hiro’s voice sliced through the disorientation. It hurt to listen to him. “You really scared me there. I thought I lost you.”

  I gently touched the bandage along my stomach. Stabbed. Beaten. Drugged. Shot. Drowned. Choked. My will to survive continues to surprise even myself. My eyes fluttered opened. I was still on the lounge floor with my shirt lifted to my ribs. I tried to sit up but shuddered under the discomfort.

  “What happened? Where’s the shooter?”

  “Here. She’s been knocked out.” Hiro motioned sideways. The mechanical woman remained slumped against the wall with a sheet tied around her calves and torso, restricting her remaining arm behind her back.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t kill her.” I looked at him. “It hurts y
ou too much.”

  I suddenly couldn’t look at him anymore. Her warning shot to my side stung with reminder of her mercy. But it was a mercy I couldn’t replicate. “She will try to kill us if I don’t.”

  “She won’t. She came to kill Fitzgerald, not me.”

  “Hiro, she thinks that you are Fitzgerald.”

  “I’ll tell her about the fake imprints.”

  “She won’t believe you. Argh!” My stomach clenched again in sharp, hot bites. I felt around the bandage. It wrapped all the way around my torso and onto my back. “How did you do all of this?”

  “I had help.” He motioned over his head. Above us hovered a medical droid. Its flat disc shape and two small jets made it possible for it to slip underneath doors. It signalled at us and took its leave, disappearing under the door again and into the hallway. “Eve called it once her system rebooted.” At its mention, Eve appeared on the dark screen, the image cleared and working.

  “Greetings, senator. I must apologise for my earlier malfunction. My signals appeared to have been jammed by magnetic interferences.”

  “She came back online when the woman passed out,” Hiro added.

  I dropped my head back down to rest. It hurt less. Whatever Hiro had done actually helped with the pain. In a moment of peace, something hot stung my wound. I clenched and snatched Hiro’s hovering hand where he had pulled the bandage back. He ceased pouring the water on me.

  “Sorry, the medical drone said it was a good idea to pour salt water on your injury. In case of infection. It also left us with some pain killers.”

  My eyes trailed down where the water left a wet gleam over my blood-soaked stomach. The stitched wound swelled pink like chewed lips. The water broke apart the blood into cracked balls, lifting the droplets up. My eyes softened at the rising beads.

  Hiro smiled. “You really are a Soulless.”

  I quickly pulled my top down. “You should use alcohol sterilization, Hiro. Only the pure spirits. And give me those painkillers. I feel like I’ll need them.”

  Hiro handed me the pills before fetching the alcohol. It lashed me with running pain.

  “What do you suppose we do with our guest? We can’t arrest a machine… I don’t think.” I glanced down at the slumped woman. A spot of red caught my eye. “Hang on… is she bleeding?” Sure enough, there was a trail of blood following the curve of her neck before disappearing into the black of her leather. Humph! I grinned. Not so inhuman after all.

  Machines are tough, their will unbreakable. Humans, though, didn’t abide by an unfaltering code. If the winds were rough enough, they would bend. I set myself up opposite her. We had to find which part of her was machine and which part was human. Her arms, completely steel. Her chest to the bend of her last rib, human. Neck, human. Steel jaw but human mouth. Human nose. Human cheeks. One human leg but the other from her thigh down sharpened into a steel stilt with a loaded spring locked to her calf. I took her gun and poked her with an electric prong. She woke with a sharp breath. One human eye, one machine.

  I held the gun up, pointing it at her kneecap. “Who sent you?”

  The girl’s eyes narrowed. Within moments of looking up at me, at my tired face, my fingers clenched white around the gun where I sat out of reach of her, the girl grinned. She could tell I was inexperienced. She could see it in the way I held my body, slanted but stiff, that I had never tortured information out of someone before. And she, perhaps, had lived through many.

  She didn’t speak. I nervously shifted my position. “Do you think I’m fucking around? Speak or I will kill you!”

  She was quiet for a while longer. Her facial muscles tensed, but I put that down to the cold, hard plate of metallic bone. Her smile stiffened. “You are not the senator.”

  I don’t know if it was in the way my eyes widened or the clench in my jaw but something gave me away. “But I am the one holding the gun.”

  She looked away. “So… he is not the doctor. I have wasted my time.”

  “You’re about to lose more than your time. How did you know we were here?”

  Her face seemed to hit on a different thought, recognising something about me she overlooked. “Five million is a lot of money. However, I’m more interested in knowing how someone is worth that much. Could it be because of a Soulless, as you said?”

  My finger shifted to the trigger. “You better check your hearing, because there’s no such thing.”

  “No, of course not.” She was quiet once more, letting the awkwardness of her silence shift me around. “How about you give me my arm back and I will leave.”

  “No,” I answered sharply.

  “Why not kill me then?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I want my arm back.”

  “How about we trade? Information for your arm?”

  She considered it for a moment. “What do you want to know?”

  “Who sent you?”

  “No one.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “It matters a lot. Answer me properly!” She grinned at my frustration, pissing me off even further. “Fine, have it your way. It’ll be fun finding where the machine parts stop and the human begins.”

  “I’m here to find my creator. He goes by the name Fitzgerald now,” she answered, but I doubt it was fear that made her speak.

  “Well, you may have to wait another ten years as I already put him through the furnace.” I didn’t catch her expression as she quickly turned her head away.

  “He wasn’t yours to kill.”

  “I guess accidents happen—”

  “How did you get into the room?” She surprised me with her own question.

  “I’m not the one being interrogated here.”

  “No, you’re meant to give me my arm, but seeing as you’re not, I’ll ask some of my own. How did you get into this room? It’s only accessible with retina scanners.”

  “I hacked into the security system.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  I tilted my hand, changing my angle. “How did you get inside then?” She didn’t speak. Obviously, this conversation was going nowhere. “Well, I hope you are comfortable. I’m keeping your arm until you give me something worthy of returning it. Who knows, may even make a great cup holder.” I stood up and walked into the kitchen. Hiro leapt away from the wall.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know what else we can do. I’m worried she’ll tell someone we are here. She knows about the bounty.”

  Hiro made an irritated tsk sound. “Maybe she knows something about McKinnon as well?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, she clearly knows Fitzgerald and how to get into his secure apartment. Maybe she can help us with McKinnon.”

  I laughed and glanced in her direction again. “I doubt she’s the charitable one. If she does know anything, she’s not talking.”

  “Maybe we can persuade her. After all, you do have something in common.”

  “She hates Fitzgerald, not McKinnon. She said he was her creator, or something.”

  “She must be talking about this.” He walked off and returned with paperwork detailing experiments into the human brain. The word Mao marked the corner. “A real Frankenstein.”

  “A what?”

  “Rebecca said it to me once, means to create a weapon that backfires. Or something like that.”

  “A personal bodyguard gone rogue maybe?” I ran my fingers across the blue prints. “There’s no information here on why the mechanic replacements. Even so, why keep the human element? Why not make it completely machine?”

  “Machines can be pretty cold. Maybe he wanted company?”

  I snorted at the idea. “Or maybe he kept the human side for other sadistic reasons.”

  Hiro squirmed. “Was he really that much of a monster?”

  I thought about it, and the scary thing is, I don’t think he was. Fitzgerald wasn’t anything out of the or
dinary. Not the cruellest man nor the most sadistic I had heard of.

  Sun light shifted outside, creating a faint morning blue fog over the city. I sighed and hanged my head. “I’m going to call Diesel.”

  “He said to call if it’s an emergency.”

  “This is an emergency.” In the other room, I found the house phone and punched in his number but paused before hitting the last digit. He would instruct me to kill her. I was certain of it. Or he, perhaps, would try to find a way into the city and kill her himself. Leave no loose ends. We would have to leave the city and everything we worked for would be for nothing. I quickly hit the end call. In the silence, I heard Hiro speak.

  “Hey. I’m sorry about before.”

  I turned around. “Huh? What did you say?” I limped back into the kitchen to find it empty. “Hiro?”

  “Are you in pain?” His voice came from the other room, speaking to her. Shit! I rounded the corner to yank him out, but curiousity slowed me. I hesitated by the doorframe, just out of sight.

  “So, are you the good cop then?” she asked.

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Hiro.”

  “I don’t care for your name.”

  “But you asked.” Hiro’s voice quieted. “I would like to know your name.”

  A moment of silence passed before the woman spoke. “How did you get inside the apartment?”

  “Through the front door.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You must really think I’m an idiot.”

  “I don’t think that—”

  “Cut the bullshit, kid. There’s nothing to steal here. No cash stuffed inside the walls. No D400. Not even the doctor bothers to return to this dump. So, why are you here?”

  I stepped forward to intervene, but found myself surprised by Hiro’s answer. “To save humanity.”

  She laughed unkindly. “And how do you plan on doing that?”