by Debra Driza
My arm wasn’t bleeding at all. There was a huge, gaping tear in my skin, but no blood. No blood. No blood because instead of blood, a thin film of red had ruptured, allowing some disgusting milky-white liquid to leach from the wound and trickle down to my elbow.
And it got worse. Inside the cut, inside me, was this transparent tube with a minuscule jagged fissure shaped like a row of clamped teeth. And inside that? Something that looked like wires. Tiny silver wires, twisted like the double helixes we studied in biology.
No. No, no. I was hallucinating. I’d hit my head, after all, and I was hallucinating. That was the only explanation that made sense.
I snatched my arm away and glanced from Kaylee’s horrified face to Hunter’s shocked one. Of course, if I was hallucinating, so were they.
My hair whipped the air as my head shook side to side. I didn’t understand any of this. “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . this is— Kaylee?” I lifted my hand, the one attached to my good arm, toward her. Only to watch her flinch away.
“Shhh, Mila, it’s okay. Let’s get you back in the truck,” Hunter said, wrapping a tentative arm around my waist. “Can you walk if you lean on me a little?”
“Hospital,” Kaylee blurted. “She needs to go to the hospital.”
My head shook faster. “No, no hospital! How can I go to the hospital, when . . .” We all looked at my arm again, and we could all fill in the rest. How could I go to the hospital when I was such a freak? When they’d ask me questions and I’d have no answers? “No hospital,” I repeated grimly. “No, no, NO!”
“It’s okay, calm down. Kaylee? Kaylee! Could you help us out here a little? Come make sure she’s steady on her feet.”
For a second, I thought Kaylee was going to refuse. She looked ready to bolt. “Fine.”
She arranged herself flush with my side, her reluctance evident in the way her arm slipped around my waist without actually touching me.
As soon as he saw Kaylee had me, Hunter stripped off his black hoodie, revealing a thin gray shirt underneath. He carefully wrapped the hoodie around my wound. Unlike Kaylee, his hands were firm and steady. He didn’t so much as flinch.
“There you go—that should be okay for now.” He gently tugged me away from Kaylee, wrapped a firm arm around my waist, and started leading me up the hill.
The ride home was as silent as the ride out had been. The entire way, Hunter cradled my hand in his and watched me with hard-to-read eyes. Eyes that were probably trying to hide his stark horror over finding out I was some kind of freak of nature, a horror that echoed my own.
Kaylee refused to say a word. Actually, she wouldn’t even look at us.
And all I could think was: no blood.
By the time we pulled up into our driveway, I was desperate to escape, even as dread crept through my chest on spiderlike legs. Because if anyone had answers, it would be Mom. And while part of me clamored for those answers, a tiny part, deep inside, whispered that maybe I was better off not knowing.
I scrambled out the door before anyone could speak, mumbled, “See you later,” and tumbled into the late-afternoon air, a chill sweeping over me that hadn’t been present before. Because even if the tiny part of me was right, it didn’t matter. I had to know the truth.
As I rushed through the guesthouse front door, I told myself, You’re blowing it all out of proportion, Mila. Mom will explain it, and everything will be fine.
I couldn’t have been further from the truth if I’d tried.
Eight
I closed the door quietly behind me and just stood there in the entryway, staring right at the empty green-and-tan plaid couch without really seeing it. Dazed, and wishing there was a way to rewind the last hour of my life. Rewind and erase.
With a deep breath, I shoved open the white swinging door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house, to find Mom rummaging in the white walk-in pantry.
The sight of her slim, jean-clad figure, shuffling through cereal boxes and containers like today was any other day, gave me a sudden urge to shake her. My arm looked like something out of a nightmare, and she was looking for a snack?
When she turned around, a bag of her favorite dried pineapple in hand, she smiled and said, “Hey, honey. How was school today?”
I just stood, wordless, staring into Mom’s familiar face. It was so hard to wrap my mind around the fact that sometime, somewhere, she had started keeping things from me. But when? Why?
Was she sheltering me from something she didn’t think I could understand? Not that it mattered. It was like I could feel the fragile bonds of last night’s reconciliation snapping around us under the strain of her lies.
By the time I opened my mouth to ask, her astute gaze had fallen on the hoodie wrapped around my arm. Hunter’s hoodie. “Oh no,” she breathed, her eyes closing as if to block out the sight. Her sharp inhale pierced the room, a harbinger of bad things to come. But when she opened her eyes, efficient, capable Mom was back. The Mom who hunted noises in the night with flashlights. The Mom who didn’t let anything, not even the knowledge that she’d just been trapped in a lie, faze her. “Show me.”
Show me? Didn’t she know she was doing this all wrong? She was supposed to tell me everything was going to be okay.
Why wasn’t she doing that?
“Show me,” she repeated, louder, when I didn’t move.
Slowly, I reached over and untied Hunter’s hoodie with my free hand, let it collapse onto the cheerful blue-and-white tile floor. Contrary to my fervent wishing, the alien parts protruding from my arm had not disappeared. The white liquid had ceased leaking, but the twisted wires, the plastic—they were still there, like the guts of a child’s mechanical toy.
Mom gasped. “What happened? To do this kind of damage, you would have had to hit something sharp at an incredibly high velocity!”
When Mom said “something sharp,” Kaylee’s words clicked in my head.
I was sure you’d landed on that rusted hunk of metal.
“I was thrown from the back of Kaylee’s truck,” I murmured, but Mom wasn’t listening. She was too busy inspecting my arm. I scrutinized her expression, searching for even a trace of the shock I’d felt when I’d first seen my injury. The shock I still felt. But there was nothing. No exclamations of disbelief, no sobs, no cries of horror. Nothing at all to indicate that the interior makeup of my arm was news to her.
The flare of hope that maybe, somehow, Mom hadn’t known about this, known that my arm was completely freaktastic and had just failed to mention it to me, smothered to death, right there, in my chest.
Mom’s own chest rose and fell under her soft blue tee. She reached for my hands. “Mila. I know this is hard, but I need you to listen.”
I allowed her to take them. And waited. Waited for an explanation that could make sense out of this. After all, a simple, logical explanation had to exist. It had to.
Mom’s cheeks showed an uncharacteristic pallor. “How many people saw this?” she demanded. When I just stared at her, dumbfounded by her reaction, she grabbed my shoulder and actually shook me. “How many?”
“Just . . . just two. Kaylee and another friend.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! You’re starting to freak me out—please, just tell me what’s going on!”
Her grip on my shoulders eased. Resignation settled over her face. “Follow me.”
That simple command gave permission for the dam inside me to burst, unleashing wave after wave of craziness and anxiety. I followed her down the hallway, and by the time we arrived at her bedroom, it was a wonder I wasn’t shaking.
I wanted to turn and run. To tell her to forget that I’d just demanded an explanation, to forget the whole thing. We could tape some kind of permanent bandage over my arm, pretend it didn’t exist.
I wanted to run. Instead, I followed her into the master bedroom.
She headed for her antique mahogany dresser and squatted before it. The bottom drawer, always obstinate, fi
nally popped open.
I stared blankly at the assortment of colorful folded T-shirts, wondering what on earth they had to do with my alien arm. Then Mom yanked the drawer out completely, set it aside, and peered into the dresser. I squatted next to her and immediately saw her target. In the very back corner, a bit of silver gleamed under a piece of masking tape.
A key.
Once she had the key in hand, Mom led me into the laundry room, halting just in front of the door to the garage. Finally she turned, smoothing my hair away from my cheek before dropping her hand back to her side. “Mila, before we go any further, I need you to know that I really do care. In fact, I believe now, more than ever, that you’re worth all the risks.”
Those words froze me to the core.
Inside the garage, she led me to a bunch of empty moving boxes, arranged neatly against the far back wall. Or at least I’d assumed they were empty. After dragging down the top three, she reached inside the bottom one and withdrew a shiny silver metal box by its handle. An oversized toolbox.
As she turned to carry the box into the house, I flinched away to avoid touching it. My body’s reaction to knowing, without a doubt, that whatever was locked away inside that innocuous-looking container was likely to change my life forever.
When we reached the living room, Mom set the box on the coffee table and pointed to the overstuffed green couch. “Have a seat, Mila. This is going to take a while.”
I sat. The silver key headed for the lock. Three seconds until my life exploded.
The key turned. Two seconds.
The lid opened. One second.
And . . .
Whatever crazy ideas I’d had about the contents of the box, I could say with certainty that none of them involved a silver iPod and matching earbuds. Which were exactly the items Mom withdrew.
“Here. Listen to this while I fix up your arm. It will explain everything.”
Mom looked away, her strong, capable fingers brushing quickly under her eyes. Then she extended the earbuds toward me. Two round white circles, only a quarter inch in diameter each. Nestled like tiny bombs in her upturned palm.
I hesitated. Did I really want to know? Really? Because whatever was on there was bad enough to make Nicole Daily cry.
No, the truth was, I didn’t want to know. But I had to.
My fingers curled around the earbuds. I shoved them into my ears before I could change my mind. Mom withdrew more items from the box—a pen-sized laser, a pair of crazy-looking tweezers, goggles, and a tiny screwdriver—tools that seemed perfect for servicing a broken laptop. She saw me staring and managed a faint smile. “To fix your arm,” she said, sounding like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Uh-huh, I thought as I eyed a screwdriver. Totally normal.
“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”
Then she hit play on the iPod, flooding my ears with a deep male drawl, and everything else fell away. Well, everything except the lingering thought that Mom had lied. Because while there wasn’t pain in my arm, the words spewing from the stranger were another story.
They hurt. They hurt like hell.
Nine
The very first words the man with the matter-of-fact Southern drawl uttered made my entire world shatter.
“MILA, or Mobile Intel Lifelike Android, is the military’s current experiment in artificial intelligence. The MILA project is cofunded by a special top-clearance segment of the CIA and the military, so as to produce a supercovert robot spy that can infiltrate sleeper cells and then record all of their movements and intelligence.”
I groped for the pause button, pushed it. Stared into space as the words penetrated. Mobile Intel Lifelike Android. Android. My name wasn’t a shortened combination of Mia and Lana, it was an acronym. And it meant . . .
No way. There was no way. That was ridiculous, un-believable. The stupidest thing I’d ever heard.
I went to yank the earbuds out, consumed by an urge to chuck the iPod at the wall, to smash it into a million pieces . . . and then my gaze fell on my mom. My mom, who was currently using a laser to seal the tube in my arm shut.
And just like that, it hit me. Destroying the messenger would do me no good. Not when I couldn’t escape the reality unfolding right in front of my eyes.
I hit play, and the voice continued its detached monologue.
“Although the MILA 2.0—” The! THE! Like I was an object, a thing! And 2.0? What did that even mean? “—is physically indistinguishable from an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl, its brain is a reverse-engineered nanocomputer, a complex mix of transistors and live cell technology that gives it unique capabilities. These include exceptional reflexes and strength, superhuman memory skills, and the ability to hack computer systems, among many others. It can also evoke appropriate emotions, based on environmental and physical stimuli.”
I . . . what was this? A nanocomputer? Evoke appropriate emotions? Evoke? This person couldn’t possibly be trying to tell me . . . he couldn’t be saying . . . there was just no way. Of course my emotions were real. I felt things all the time.
My throat constricted, as if to confirm my belief.
“The rest of its structure is also a conglomeration of human and manmade, but mostly synthetic. Its body is comprised of cyberdermis, synthetic tissue infused with a polymer hydrogel lying just under bioengineered skin that is exceptionally strong and resistant to injury and also holds receptors to carry sensation signals to the nanobrain—though pain receptors are very sparse, only one one thousandth of the amount found in a typical human.”
I recalled the fall from the truck, my worry that I’d damaged my spinal cord. Suddenly Mom’s insistence on slow horseback rides made complete and terrible sense. She hadn’t been terrified that I’d hurt myself—on the contrary. She’d been worried that I’d fall and the whole no-pain thing would lead to questions. It was amazing it hadn’t happened before.
Wait a second. How had it not happened before? How, in sixteen years of life, had I not noticed that I had little to no pain sensation?
That’s when the brutal wave of reality really hit. The voice had said that the MILA 2.0 was physically indistinguishable from a sixteen-year-old girl. Meaning . . . he was also saying I’d never been any age other than sixteen.
Meaning . . . those memories I had of being younger? Lies. All of them.
According to him, I’d been “born” exactly as I was now.
Nausea flooded me. Which, given everything I’d just heard, made no sense. None of this did.
I was human. I was.
“Its endoskeleton mixes tightly woven braids of fiber optics encased by tubes of transparent ceramic hybrid that is very difficult to break and easy to repair, and its body utilizes a unique technology that meshes human with machine by way of embedding nanotransistors into live cell membranes. Instead of a heart, Mila has a sophisticated pump to supply energy to her partially organic cells, which can generate their own oxygen. Breathing for it is just a computer program to simulate human function.”
No heart? I had no heart? No, that was absurd. Ridiculous. I could feel it there, in my chest, beating away.
Unless . . . unless that was the “sophisticated pump” the voice was talking about. My hand flew to my chest, my fingers spreading across my shirt and pressing inward. A second passed, and then I felt the faint upward motion. Beating. Something under there was definitely beating. I hoped the action would soothe me, but instead of the fist-shaped, vein and artery-covered organ I’d seen in biology class, all I could picture was a pool pump. A bit of machinery stuck under my ribs, masquerading as life.
Of course, that was assuming I had ribs to begin with.
I hit pause again, my gaze flying to Mom, but her goggled head was bent over my arm, her focus on aiming the laser’s bright-red line at a spot within it.
It felt like no more than a tickle.
I hit play.
“In an especially exciting development, the MILA 2.0 goes one step beyond just approximat
ing feelings. By using experimental data on living girls, we were able to store the visceral and physical sensations that emotions produce and re-create them. Thus, the MILA 2.0 actually feels the same things that humans do, which we anticipate will facilitate blending in with subjects and add authenticity to her cover.”
Cover. Oh my god. Did he mean . . . my cover as a human?
“MILA contains just enough human cells to simulate biological functions, but it is in reality a machine. The launch date for this exciting project is August twenty-second.”
The recording cut off, but the ramifications of that last sentence remained. August 22. Just five days before Mom and I arrived in Clearwater.
I couldn’t even move, couldn’t breathe. Guess that not-needing-air thing really came in handy. The thought made me laugh, a gasping, hysterical gurgle that made Mom drop her tools and grasp my hand.
Mom. Just another lie in a whole string of them.
The pain in my chest, in my nonheart, was excruciating. Whoever had worked on “evoking appropriate emotional responses” had done a bang-up job.
Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe I would wake up and realize this was just a nightmare.
Maybe I’d even wake up back in Philly, with Dad still alive. A man who, if I believed the voice, had never been a part of my life.
As for “Mom”—well, according to the voice, I was more genetically related to our toaster than I was to her.
Another gurgle erupted.
“Is this all true? It can’t be, right? Please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke. Please!” But when Mom looked up from packing away the tools, all I saw was the sadness in her eyes. No matter what, I knew this was real to her.
“Mila, I’m so sorry. . . . I wish—”
“I don’t care what you wish,” I said, jumping to my feet. “Just tell me what’s going on. Where did I come from? Why am I here? And how—how could I not be real?” I whirled and faced a watercolor of a horse, wrapping my arms around my waist. I immediately wondered if that action had been programmed, too.
“You are real,” Mom said in her soothing calm-down-and-listen-to-me voice. I bet she didn’t know that, right now, it had the opposite effect. It made me want to jump up and down, scream bloody murder, and shake that poise right out of her. “That’s why I stole you from the military labs. I worked with you every day, Mila. Actually, I’m the bioengineer who helped create you. I know that you aren’t just a weapon . . . you’re too human for that. So yes, I stole you—to keep you safe. You deserved more than what the army had to offer.”
