Mel was too busy tickling Li Li to hear.
“We’ll be fine, Em,” replied Wendy. “You better give your moms a breather. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Andie smiled at this, since she actually did think of herself as Emily’s other mother.
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Chapter 28
Another Video
Emily sat in the back seat of the family car. It was more like a truck, roomy and enormous. The children were strapped into car seats, resisting strenuously being placed on opposite sides of the back seat. Until Emily sat between them. Then they were quiet, at last, fully pleased with the arrangement, as long as they got to touch her, hold her hand or even just look at her. They were yawning before the car made it out of the mall parking lot, and sound asleep a few minutes later.
“Look at that, will you,” said Andie peering over the back of the front seat at a stop light. “I think your daughter is getting a very distorted impression of what life with these two is really like.”
Yuki laughed when she saw what Andie was looking at.
“They could pass for angels when they’re asleep.”
“I’m sorry to have dumped such a burden on you.”
“Li Li’s no trouble,” said Andie. “Or at least she wouldn’t be if not for Stone. But she gets so worked up around him. And he has so much energy. He never seems to tire… except when he’s around you. Then he’s suddenly calm and collected.”
“I just couldn’t leave him there with nobody to look after him. Not after…”
She didn’t have it in her to finish that sentence. The thought was painful: after she had destroyed his whole world. And worse, it was only a half truth. She couldn’t leave him behind because of what he might be.
~~~~~~~
Michael asked Emily to come into his study once the kids were settled in for a longer nap in the nursery. He had something important to show her.
“This video was smuggled out of the Chinese intelligence services. It’s a physical copy, not a wireless intercept, which means it didn’t come through NSA. If it had, Meacham would have it already. As it is, he may not find out about it for a few weeks.”
When he played it for her, it was all too familiar. It showed excerpts from her stay in the Korean compound in Kamchatka. It surprised her to see how indifferent it all seemed to her now.
“What about Burzynski? Will he have seen it already?”
“I suspect it hardly matters. Connie identified the man Ethan and Danny killed as one of his agents. It seems unlikely that he doesn’t know why they wanted you.”
The final few minutes showed the fight with Ba We. But the significance was lost on Michael.
“What happened at the end there? How did you turn him?”
“Have you shown this to anyone else?” she asked, to change the subject.
“No, just you. We can try to keep it under wraps for a little while. But it may be wiser to show it to our people. Secrecy may not be in your best interest.”
Emily was not entirely convinced of this, but she felt the force of his concern.
“I want my mother to see it. It may also be good to show it to Ethan and Connie later. Andie should probably see it now, if you think she can stomach it.”
The women watched the video in abject terror. The first part, taken from the cell, showed her in her underwear fighting off the initial team and culminating with the death of the one Russian and the crippling of the other. Andie was white as a sheet and utterly incapable of speech. Michael paused the video.
“Did they… were you…” Yuki stammered out a question she couldn’t finish.
“No, Mom. I don’t think so. I’m okay.”
When the video resumed, and she was in the ring, they were relieved to see she had found some clothes. The first fight seemed less menacing. She was in control. When Miss Park shot the two men, Andie shrieked and the illusion of control was shattered. The second fight was oddly even less menacing. More men, a greater challenge, but Emily’s mastery was so much more apparent. It was almost comforting. When she sat down and closed her eyes, they could see her power.
The worst was yet to come. Ba We entered the ring. He seemed gigantic, so much larger than her. They couldn’t see his blank, lifeless eyes because of the camera angle. But the sheer immensity of his strength was unmistakable. The first time he managed to strike her, sending her sprawling across the ring, Andie screamed. Yuki was standing behind her, clutching the back of her chair. She was staggered by the sight of her child being assaulted. Her knees buckled.
“Please, stop it,” she cried. “I can’t take any more.”
“No,” said Emily firmly. “There’s only a little more, and I need you to see how it ends.”
Both women wept openly when she was struck again, and when Ba We leapt across the ring at her Andie looked faint. Then everything changed. Somehow Emily got the upper hand. She had her legs locked around his neck and was twisting the wrist of his free hand. He was helpless. She slowly squeezed and twisted. Would she really kill him? Did she have a choice?
Suddenly, inexplicably, she released him, disentangled herself and whispered something to him. Then all hell broke loose. Armed men rushed in, and he unleashed on them the savagery that just a few moments earlier had been directed at her. The last image on the video was of Emily dispatching a man wearing body armor, stabbing him in the armpit with his own knife, and in a single smooth spinning motion, slashing his throat and throwing the knife at someone off camera.
“Oh, Emily,” Andie sobbed. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry. How can we ever....”
“It’s okay,” Emily said, cutting her off. “We really are a family.”
She squeezed Andie’s hand and looked at her wordlessly for a few seconds, letting her see the depth of compassion in her eyes.
Andie and Yuki were clearly overwhelmed by what they had just seen. There was no way for them to take the true measure of what she had endured, and nothing would be gained by trying to force it on them.
Perhaps Yuki bore the heavier burden. She saw on the video what she probably had only suspected, or perhaps even feared, namely the degree of violence Emily was capable of, what she had to be capable of just to survive. This is what Emily tried to tell her weeks earlier. It’s why she wanted her to see the video in the first place.
“Now, tell me, what happened at the end?” asked Michael. “You had him at your mercy, and then you released him.”
“It’s complicated. It has to do with me, with who I am. Dad knew all about it, Sensei, too. I know how to fight, how to win, because I sense what other people are feeling. I can see it in their eyes, even hear it in their breathing. But that guy, I couldn’t get a read on him. He seemed practically lifeless. His eyes were almost entirely glazed over. I got lucky at the end. I managed to scissor my legs over his head. I was going to snap his neck, and he knew it. There was nothing he could do.”
She paused to take a breath, and to let the others catch theirs.
“Then why did you let him go?” asked Andie.
“I heard something. I think it came from him. It was a voice in my head. It was unmistakable. His eyes cleared and I could finally see him, you know, really see who he was. He was like a small child, and he was frightened. The voice calling to me, he called me “Oonni.” It was uncanny, but I knew exactly what he meant. He recognized me as his sister.”
She paused again to let it all soak in.
“What do you mean, he recognized you?” demanded Yuki, who clearly found this thought disturbing.
“There’s no other way to describe it. You saw what happened on the video. One minute he’s trying to kill me, and the next he’s fighting to protect me. He recognized me.”
“Who was he?” asked Michael.
“I’m not sure how secret this information needs to be. Since the Chinese must know, and probably Burzynski too, I might as well tell you. We can decide who else can know in a minute. His name was Ba We. It means rock. He was a cl
one, a product of the Koreans’ genetics research. He was a genetically engineered soldier.”
“What happened to him?”
“He’s dead. He died a little later of gunshot wounds trying to protect me. I buried him in a secret grave so no one could find his remains and reconstruct their research. Whatever else might happen, I don’t want anyone ever to find his grave.”
“Oh, Emily,” Andie wailed. “It all sounds so horrible.”
“I’m sure his entire life was horrible. He was bred for a single purpose, and never allowed to know anything else. Until he met me. Think about that for a moment. He recognized me,” she said looking directly at her mom. “I heard his voice in my head, calling out to me. Am I his sister, Mom?”
“No, sweetheart. You have no connection to him or anyone like him,” she said in a reassuring tone. “But perhaps I need to tell you something else.”
Yuki fidgeted for a moment before continuing. It was clear she wished this day had never come. But now it was here, as unexpected as it inevitably had to be. She swallowed and took a breath.
“My father’s research never led to anything. But not because he failed.”
She paused again to gather herself. Emily was all attention.
“I tried to discourage him at every turn, tried to make him see how wrong it all was. But he finally managed to isolate the relevant gene sequences. He saw how to accomplish everything, the enhanced neural sensitivity and aggressiveness, reduced pain sensitivity. There would be other effects, paranoid delusions, of course, as well as a tendency to mineral deficiency and rapid bone regeneration, which could lead to bone density problems.”
They looked at her in disbelief, Emily most of all. Everything they had been convinced was false, the foolish dream of the people who shattered their lives, it all turned out to be true.
“Just before he died, he isolated an RNA sequence that could produce the changes in a human subject. He ignored all my objections, and designed a virus containing the sequence. And then something neither of us expected happened,” she said, turning to Emily. “We were arguing, your grandfather and I, yelling at each other actually, and I broke the sample vial by accident. I infected myself with the virus... while I was pregnant with you.”
The three of them listened in stunned silence. Emily stared at her darkly.
“Why didn’t it affect you?” she asked.
“It doesn’t work that way. The virus is dormant until it’s triggered by an actuating event. It could be a second virus that wakes the first one up, or perhaps another immunological event.”
“So the virus is dormant in you even now?”
“Probably not. I’m sure it was eventually destroyed by my immune system.”
“But it could still be dormant in me?” Emily asked, though her real concern was not with a dormant virus.
“It’s likely it never passed through the placenta. You were a perfectly normal baby.”
“Nothing at all abnormal?” Emily pressed.
She looked directly into her mother’s eyes, raked in her heart for the truth.
“In the third trimester, we, well mainly you, developed a fever. The obstetrician was completely mystified by it. Your father and I were very worried. There was the risk of brain damage or other developmental problems if it went too high. Thank goodness it passed within a day. And when you were born we watched you closely for anything out of the ordinary. But there was nothing. You were perfectly, beautifully normal.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary! Mom, he knew me! Something inside Ba We reached out to me. That’s not normal.” Emily became quite exercised by this thought. “And Dad lied to me. He told me there was no reason to think there was anything unusual about me.”
“He didn’t know, sweetheart,” said Yuki, trying to reduce her daughter’s obvious distress. “I never told him about the accident. I was too frightened to say anything.”
Emily mulled this last remark over before responding.
“Oh, I saw Dr. Tarleton the other day. She said I have a stress fracture of the tibia, but the good news is it’s almost completely healed… after five days.”
“I don’t know what to say. Just don’t jump to conclusions. It may mean nothing.”
“Or it may mean everything,” said Emily, angrily. “And don’t get me started about paranoid delusions, Mom.”
“What are you talking about, Chi-chan? You’re not paranoid. There really are people plotting against you.”
“I suppose. But if you could see some of my dreams. Well, they’re pretty intense sometimes, and not only when I’m asleep.”
“Oh, no, sweetheart,” Yuki said. “I’m sure you’re making too much out of this.”
“There’s one other thing I should tell all of you,” Emily continued. “And this really can’t be shared with anyone. Not Connie, not Ethan, not anyone.”
They stared at her silently, afraid to refuse her and more afraid even to hear what she would say next.
“You know how I heard a voice in my head calling out to me? Well, it wasn’t just one voice.”
“What are you getting at?” asked Michael.
“They made lots of clones. Most of ‘em died young, that’s what Colonel Park told me before she died. Only Ba We seems to have survived to adulthood. But I think one other clone survived. He was the only other thing left alive there besides Anthony, Li Li, Rhee Sung and me. I found him hiding in the debris. Li Li showed me where. I think he had been her imaginary playmate, the only shiny bit of joy for a lonely, terrified child. Except he wasn’t imaginary, and neither was she.”
The silence that followed pressed down on everything in the room like a great weight. The sense of her words slowly dawned on them. Could it really be? Emily described his hiding place. Somehow he got out of his cage. The guards must have given up on finding him, assumed he died like all the others. But Li Li knew where he was, and when no one was around he must have come out to play with her. Finally Michael spoke.
“You think Stone is another clone?”
“Yes. The name Li Li called him, Dol Swae, she probably heard the guards call him that. It means slave. That’s not a name any parent would give a child. The first character, Dol, means stone.”
“He does have some sort of special bond with you, I suppose. That’s pretty clear,” conceded Andie. “Is that how you felt about Ba We?”
“No. I don’t feel anything special from Stone. But he seems to feel something when he’s around me.”
“He seems to have some sort of language disability. It could be a developmental problem,” Yuki suggested.
“Ba We didn’t speak either. I never heard him utter a single word. But he responded to his name, and to Colonel Park’s commands.”
Yuki’s eyes brightened as she digested this news. She had analyzed the collection of pills Emily brought home from Kamchatka, and now its significance seemed clear.
“Those pills were mainly growth hormones and powerful anti-oxidants, as well as various concoctions that seemed designed to speed up the maturation process and protect against related mineral deficiencies,” Yuki said. “Ba We may not have been very old, perhaps no more than eight or nine years. The accelerated growth might well have aphasia as a side effect.”
“Then how old do you think Stone is?” asked Emily.
“It’s impossible to say. But I can’t imagine they would have begun something so risky on a child younger than four or five.”
“Mom, those people were capable of anything. No cruelty was beyond them. Colonel Park claimed we wouldn’t be able to keep him alive. I bet that’s a result of their hormone treatment too.”
Andie’s view of Stone seemed to undergo a stark revision during this conversation. The duty to stand by him now presented itself to her in the brightest colors.
“Can we keep him alive, Mom?”
“Of course we can,” Andie asserted defiantly. “He’s our little boy now.”
“If there’s no catastrophic flaw in his genome,
and he’s not dependent on the hormones, there may be a way,” Yuki conjectured.
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Chapter 29
The Prom
Connie and Ethan sat in the front seat of an enormous stretch-SUV limousine Michael arranged to take Emily and her friends to the prom.
“It’s like trying to steer a battleship. The signal from the wheel takes a little while to make it all the way to the rudder,” he joked.
They could see the kids through the living room picture window. Melanie’s parents were gushing over their fancy clothes, snapping pictures. Connie looked on admiringly, maybe even a little enviously. Innocent childhood joys shimmered before her eyes like an oasis in the desert. She was thirsty.
Other eyes watched the same scene with somewhat different emotions. Connie might have seen her if she turned her head. From an upstairs window in a darkened room Amanda drank in her old friend’s pleasure from an estranged distance, a bitter cup tasted alone. She could exchange it for a sweeter one if only she could bring herself to cross the street. But somehow it was not possible to start her steps in that direction. She waited for her date in the dark.
~~~~~~~
“Why isn’t Amanda going with you?” asked Mrs. Birdwell. “She hasn’t been by in… well it seems like forever.”
“That’s not true, Mom,” replied Melanie, affecting preoccupation to deflect the inquiry from a sore spot. “She came by yesterday after school. We did homework together.”
“Who’s her date?” asked Mr. Birdwell.
“Steve, of course,” she replied in mock exasperation, as if her dad ought to know the minute details of everyone’s social calendar.
“Well, I think it’s a shame that she’s not going with you kids. It looks like there’s plenty of room in that limo,” her mom continued.
“It’s probably my fault,” Emily piped up. “I don’t think she entirely approves of me.” Mrs. Birdwell looked exceedingly puzzled by this remark. Why wouldn’t she approve? “But she’s welcome to join us, if she’d like.”
“You hear that, Melanie? Why don’t you run across and ask her? She’s probably waiting for you over there.”
Girl Punches Out Page 24
