Braden nodded. He didn’t look convinced.
Kim opened the lid to the cedar chest and lifted out the blankets. Below those was a false bottom that hid the trapdoor. “You know what to do. There’s enough down there to keep you for a week. Just eat one packet per meal—”
Outside, a voice boomed from a loudspeaker.
“Dr. Hara,” said the female voice. “Ms. Hara. This is the Department of Homeland Security. We have reason to believe there is an illegal child on these premises, and we have a warrant to search the house.”
“Get in there now!” said Val.
Braden climbed into the chest and down the ladder until his head was level with the trapdoor. He looked up at them. “I don’t want to go down there alone.”
“Be brave,” said Kim. “Turn on the light. It’s going to be okay. If something happens, don’t trust anybody, just—”
The voice again: “Dr. Hara, Ms. Hara, please come outside. This is the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Go on,” said Val, reaching down to touch Braden’s face one more time. “I love you.” She brushed his cheek and then pushed his head down through the opening. Her stomach lurched as he disappeared into the blackness below. Kim closed the trapdoor, and Val replaced the false bottom and blankets.
“How the hell did we ever think this would work?” Val said, anger rising in her chest. The Friday Foundation and its bullshit promises. So full of optimism and friendship and high principles. But one by one, every family had met the same fate: military aircraft sweeping in to arrest them, to steal their children away, to make them disappear forever.
And now it was Val’s turn.
“We’re going to be fine,” said Kim, closing the cedar chest lid. But he wouldn’t look at her, and the eyes of her usually confident husband showed a fear that she had never seen. He knew, just like she knew: they were going to lose this one.
A fist pounded on the front door. Kim and Val stood looking at one another on either side of the cedar chest, almost as if they were daring one another to be the first to go to the door.
“Dr. Hara!” said a woman at the door. Muffled voices. The sound of a Dragonfly’s engines whirring to a stop as it landed.
“Come on,” said Val, taking his hand and starting toward the door. She could feel his pulse through his sweaty palm.
But before they could reach the door, it burst open with a crash that made Val yelp. Men in black SWAT gear with rifles swarmed through the door, their bodies silhouetted by the blinding glare of a Dragonfly’s spotlight. They spread out through the house, running around and past Val and Kim like they weren’t even there, and behind them came a woman who walked straight down the hall toward Val.
“Secure every room and find the door to the basement,” the woman said.
She wore the same gear as the SWAT team, except she had no helmet or goggles and carried no rifle. Her hair was long but tied in a ponytail, but what was most striking about her was her eyes, which were a dull orange-red—the color of dying coals.
“Dr. Hara, Ms. Hara,” she said. She offered her hand to Val, who ignored it.
“What the hell is this?” said Kim. He was trying to sound strong, but his voice quavered.
The woman took a small tablet from her back pocket and turned it on to reveal an official-looking document marked with two seals. One of them was the DHS seal. Val didn’t know the other one.
Suddenly the air started to feel tense again, like it had in the kitchen before the Dragonflies came. A sick feeling passed through Val, starting in her stomach and running right up into her head.
“I’m Lieutenant Virginia Steiskal,” said the woman. Her face had high cheekbones and a strong jaw, but she was still pretty in a severe sort of way. “We have a warrant to search your house and property for a possible violation of federal law.”
That’s what my son is? Val thought. A “possible violation”?
Kim snorted. “What are you talking about?” he said. Val wanted to tell him to calm down. “We live here alone. We already told a man earlier that—”
A man in SWAT gear came through the front door and cut him off.
“There’s a second bedroom upstairs,” he said. He stood next to the lieutenant and ignored Val and Kim.
“It’s a guest room,” said Val. They kept all of Braden’s belongings hidden in a chest under the floor.
Steiskal looked at Val, cocking her head slightly like a curious bird.
“There’s a basement entrance outside, but there’s no one down there,” said another man from the front door. “But the back wall sounds hollow. No dirt behind it. There’s another room down there, so there’s got to be another entrance inside the house.”
“Where is it?” said Steiskal.
“I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about,” said Kim, pointing right at her nose. Kim was a head taller than the lieutenant, and at first Val thought she looked intimidated. But then another wave of nausea passed through her, and she realized Steiskal wasn’t intimidated by anybody. This was Braden.
Steiskal shook her head as if to shoo away a gnat and looked up at Kim.
“We know there is a third person here,” she said. “And we know that he or she is in the basement. You can make my job easier, or we can tear this house apart—”
“Right here, Lieutenant,” said someone behind them, and suddenly Val tasted metal.
Braden, she thought, as she turned toward the hall. If you can hear me, get under the bed down there and be still. Oh, God, be still.
“This chest won’t move,” said a SWAT officer, who stood with his boot on the lid of the cedar box, pushing on it to demonstrate that it was fixed to the floor.
“Open it up,” said Steiskal.
But as the man reached down to grasp the lid, a bright ringing like a high-pitched bell filled Val’s head. Behind her, Steiskal let out a low moan as if she were about to vomit. Kim yelled something and started down the hall toward the man. But the man immediately jerked as if shocked with electricity and began to scream.
“Stop!” he yelled. “Get out, get out, getoutgetout!”
Val tried to reach out and grab Kim’s shirt as he ran toward the screaming man, but then a bright point of light exploded in her head. She threw her hands over her face as if to shield her eyes from something.
Braden! she thought, trying to reach out to him, willing him to hear her.
But if her son responded, she couldn’t tell. Behind her, Steiskal and the other man began to scream, and then screaming seemed to come from everywhere, even from below the floor. Braden was screaming, too.
She forced herself to stagger down the hall with heavy feet. She saw the SWAT officer drop his rifle onto the floor and draw a pistol from his side. He was still yelling for someone to stay out of his head, but instead of looking under the floor, he was looking right at Kim. Val screamed as he raised the gun to Kim’s chest. She jumped forward, trying to grasp his arm and pull him down to the ground, but her legs felt like water as she tumbled to the floor.
She felt the gun shatter the air almost as much as she heard the explosion of powder, and with its sound all the other noises in the house died. Kim dropped to the floor next to her, and for a few interminable seconds there was nothing except silence.
Then Braden was screaming again, and a new ringing pierced her brain like a dagger. She struggled to roll over and grope toward Kim, but something wet poured suddenly from her nose. Above and around her, people began to scream again, and then she heard the thumps of people falling to the floor. Steiskal was yelling something, but Val just needed to see Kim’s face. He had to live. He had to live.
She found his hair with her hand and tried to drag herself closer so that she could look at his eyes. She just needed to see his eyes. But the more she tried to move, the dimmer her own eyes became.
15
After shooing the senator and the general off to their rooms, Bowen went
back to his own suite and poured a glass of bourbon. He sat in his study, looking out the window at the mountains. At night, they were just shadows that loomed in the darkness, their slopes dotted with the lights of electrical towers and signal-blocking towers.
Lifting his glass to his lips, his hand shook. Not much, just slightly. Just enough to remind him that at thirty-nine years old, his body was beginning to break down.
He put the glass down, crossed the room to his dresser, and opened the top drawer. Moving a stack of undershirts, he uncovered the small safe and pressed his thumb to the fingerprint scanner to open it. The lid opened to reveal several medicine bottles. At the bottom of the pile, he found the one his doctor had prescribed for the tremors. The effort it took to open the cap made his arms shake all the way to his shoulders.
June seventeenth.
Less than a year away. He’d scheduled it for next year because he wanted to get it over with before his memory started to slip. Before he began to have any hallucinations.
When he had the pill, he closed the safe and the drawer and returned to his chair. Picking up his glass, he looked across the room at Morgan, who stood in her charging station.
“Cheers,” he said to her. He downed the pill with a swallow of bourbon.
Strings of lights were blinking under Morgan’s translucent white skin, which was dotted with florescent green motion capture markers. Behind her on the wall hung several interchangeable hair and groin pieces to match whichever Skin that Bowen requested. In resting mode, the robot had a spindly shape. But when he wanted to use her, the charging station would pump up her body with a silicone gel so that she could take on the shape of whatever Skin he wanted her to have. And when he looked at her through his VR headset, she could look convincingly like any persona that she took on. She could even be Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo.
God, he loved technology.
He thought of Morgan as female, of course, but the robot could just as easily take on the shape of a man as of a woman. All he had to do was to install one of the male groin pieces. She had come with three penis sizes. More than once Bowen had enjoyed some of the male Skins that had come preprogrammed into Morgan. He had especially enjoyed the Gene Kelly and Sean Connery Skins. He wasn’t actually gay, but he could appreciate a good man every now and then.
The Skins that Bowen liked to use the most, though, were of the people he knew personally. Just after he bought the Morgan robot a couple of years ago (upgrading from the outdated Yuki model he’d had before), Paige, one of the nurses, had asked him if she could try out the Clark Gable skin. Bowen had agreed—but only if Paige would let him do a full scan of her and use it to make a Skin. Paige had let him, and he had spent his first several months with the robot enjoying the Paige Skin every night. The nurse had thought this hilarious, of course. She’d often asked Bowen, “So, did we have fun last night?” When, on occasion, he told her that he had used some other Skin, Paige would feign jealousy. It was a fun game.
But from the beginning what Bowen had really wanted was to get scans of Savannah, Theresa, and Celina. Savannah was difficult. He wasn’t exactly afraid of her, but he could never work up the courage to ask her directly. What would he say? “Hey, can I scan your naked body so that I can screw a Skin of you every night with my sex robot?” He’d basically done that with Paige, but Savannah was different, less approachable.
But then Daniel, the Institute’s head of IT, had given him the holy grail: a software patch that let the user feed video footage of a subject into Morgan’s control module and use the footage to create a Skin. Mike had assumed Bowen would want to use footage of celebrities, but Bowen wasn’t interested in screwing actresses. He wanted Savannah, Theresa, and Celina. So he’d managed to copy some security footage of the three of them and used it to create his favorite Skins. He mostly used the Savannah Skin when he woke up in the morning and wanted good slow sex. He had programmed her to speak softly to him and to whisper how much she wanted him. But in the evening, especially after long days that ended with disappointing test results, he usually needed to work out frustration. That was when he liked the Celina Skin the most.
But he had never once used the Theresa Skin for sex. He’d programmed it with the correct demeanor and the kinds of things he wanted her to say, but he could never bring himself to actually use the Skin. He didn’t know why, exactly. He supposed her age was part of it.
He finished his drink and poured another one, thinking about the day’s tests, which had gone exactly as Bowen expected. Celina, Francis, and Theresa had all made their way through the maze without any problems, telepathically gathering information from the volunteers stationed throughout the building without alerting any of them to their presence. Francis and Celina had easily used the information to proceed to the goal room in less than fifteen minutes, and Theresa had only taken twenty-two. They had all retrieved their target (a teddy bear), and both Francis and Celina had been able to bring the bear back to Jones-McMartin without being seen. Theresa made it halfway back through the maze before one of the volunteers saw her.
Even with that failure, the test had been a rousing success. But it hadn’t given them any new information. Only more confirmation of what they had already known.
Bowen didn’t give a damn about training spies for the U.S. government. The Anomalies were the greatest finding in science since... hell, since the beginning. The work he did at the Institute would change the world forever, and yet people like Jones-McMartin and Tolbert could think of nothing more creative than espionage. A waste. A tragedy.
Given enough time and funding, Bowen knew that he and Simmons could crack the biological mechanics behind the telepathy.
But time was the one thing he didn’t have.
Bowen let his head rest on the back of his chair and thought of Celina doing pushups in her underwear earlier that day, about the smooth muscle lines in her shoulders, the arch of her back, the swell of her ass and her chest. Feeling his groin stir, he reached into his side table drawer and took out VR goggles, which he slipped over his head and turned on.
“Hello, Morgan,” he said.
The robot beeped and activated, the lights under its pale skin turning green.
“I want you to be Celina tonight.”
16
Braden was calling to her from far away. No, he was close. Right over her face. But now he was far away again. She lay on something hard, like smooth stone. Wood. Somebody nearby was breathing in short, irregular hitches. He was in distress.
“Mom?”
Her body shook.
Mom?
He was speaking in her head. But she heard him with her ears, too.
“Wake up!”
A hand shook her by the shoulder.
She opened her eyes and looked up at a brass chandelier hovering several feet above her. The hallway. The panic room. The Dragonflies and the SWAT team and Steiskal. Braden. Where...?
“Mom,” he said. “Get up. Please.”
His face hovered over hers, his eyes shining with tears.
“Please,” he said.
She sat up too quickly. Her head pounded and her stomach turned. Bodies lay on the floor: two of the SWAT members and Steiskal. And Kim. He lay on his back next to her, his chest rising and falling in gasps.
“Oh, God,” she said, turning toward him. A large bloodstain surrounded a hole in his shirt between his sternum and his left shoulder.
God, it’s so close to his heart, she thought.
“Go. You’ve got… to go,” he rasped, his body twitching. His eyes turned toward her, but his head didn’t move.
“Dad,” sobbed Braden.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” said Val, grasping his hand. She didn’t know why she thought of it now, but she remembered the first time they had talked in POLS 110. Kim had been having trouble understanding something in Hayek or Keynes, and Val had offered to study with him.
“No,”
he said, gasping. “Get... Get Braden out. It’s going to be too hard for me to move. Got the lung.”
“Dad,” said Braden. “We won’t leave you.”
A strange look crossed Kim’s face, a strained expression. It took Val a second to understand he was trying to smile at their son. “I think it missed the artery, but... probably bleed out... if you move me,” he said. It clearly hurt him to speak. His eyes and his wincing half-smile turned to his wife. “You can’t get me to medical help. But they can... when... they wake up...” He closed his eyes, gasping and hitching. “Leave me. Get him... away.”
He was right, but Val couldn’t make herself let go of his hand. She’d always believed she’d be able to make the tough choices for her family, but now, staring one in the face, she couldn’t move. She held on to her husband’s hand—his surgeon’s hand. Those hands had healed many people’s bodies. Had removed her contraceptive implant. Had delivered Braden when he was born. But they couldn’t do anything for her or for him now.
“I...” he said, giving her hand another squeeze and looking right into her face. “I love... you. Both of you.” He turned his eyes on Braden. “And I’ll see you again soon.”
“You can’t lie to me,” said Braden, the words coming through hitches. “You don’t believe that.”
“Braden,” said Val, touching his arm. The air around the boy seemed electric.
“Look... look in my head,” he said. “Take... a good... look.”
Braden closed his eyes.
“Don’t know that I’ll see you... again soon,” said Kim. “But you see something else there, too... right?”
Braden listened silently for a minute, and Val watched his face. Then he nodded slowly.
“You hope that you will,” he said finally. “But that’s not the same.”
“It’s what... we’ve got,” said Kim. “Sometimes you just... hope. Even when you don’t know. When things look... bad.”
The Way Out Page 8
