by Debra Driza
Fake warmth that felt so amazingly real.
“Um, thanks, but I don’t think my mom would approve.” On so many levels.
His tentative smile vanished. “Your mom? How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
Now his cheeks were the ones blotchy with embarrassment. He lurched several hasty steps back and held his hands out in front of him, as if they could protect him from his own disastrous thoughts. “Oh . . . ah . . . I had no idea. I figured, with you walking by yourself at night . . .” He kept glancing back over his shoulder at the mini-mart, like the cashier might dash out and save him.
“Just grabbing a snack and heading back to the hotel room,” I said, shaking my bag and biting back a smile. “Have a good night.”
Once he slouched his way back into the mini-mart, I scurried across the street for Room 33.
I immediately crossed to the bed and sat, digging the phone out of the plastic bag so I could activate it and begin punching in his number.
Security mode: On.
The voice command startled me so much, I almost dropped the phone. Security mode, what did that even mean? Was I going to be tracing this call somehow, or even recording it? Hastily I hit the disconnect button.
I stared at the way my fingers tightened around the phone. All I’d wanted to do was hear Hunter’s voice, just for a few minutes, and now even that had been taken from me. But I couldn’t risk his safety, or Mom finding out.
I turned off the phone to preserve the battery and shoved it into my bag while cold seeped into the ever-widening void inside me. Then I slumped onto my back on the bed and stared at the small black beetle that crawled across the yellowing ceiling with no apparent urgency or concern, wondering if emotions were a little overrated.
Forty minutes later, I sat in a stiff-backed chair in front of the wobbly motel mirror. With one hand, Mom deftly pulled a comb through my hair, stopping about halfway down.
“Shorter,” I said.
Blue eyes met my green ones in the mirror. “Are you sure?”
No. “Yes. Besides, it’s shorter in the passport photo.”
A pause. “You realize it won’t grow back.”
I froze, transfixed by the chin-length strands in the mirror. Actually, I hadn’t realized, but it made sense. Of course my hair couldn’t grow. Why would it? Hair growth implied human hair follicles. Live ones. Such a stupid little thing, and yet as my gaze swept the discarded, curling strands that littered the brown carpet, my eyes burned.
“Shorter,” I repeated stubbornly. “Anyway, why do you care so much about my hair? It’s not like it matters.”
In fact, Mom hadn’t been thrilled with this whole experience. She’d immediately turned away when I’d first emerged from the bathroom with my hair jet-black, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me, and the first snip had been especially hard for her, based on the way her fingers trembled while holding the scissors.
She tugged the comb back through, stopping just below my ears this time. She lifted the scissors.
Snip, snip.
Pieces of black hair scattered onto the white towel wrapped around my neck and onto the floor, triggering a memory of a different mirror, a different haircut. That same little girl I’d remembered before, sitting in front of Mom with a towel blanketing her, holding out a hand for a lollipop while Mom snipped away.
I frowned. The memory was still fuzzy, vague. The little girl’s face was impossible to see.
I pushed to retrieve the image, to focus in, but the memory disintegrated into nothingness, leaving behind a residue of longing that I didn’t understand.
That longing vanished as another memory surfaced.
White walls, white lights. The smell of bleach. A man in a lab coat, powering a drill to life . . .
I shook my head and, ignoring Mom’s sound of protest, bolted out of the chair. No. I didn’t want to experience that, not again. I raised my hands to my cheeks and focused on the mirror. I saw a girl with short, choppy black hair, a girl who looked dangerous and edgy. Much more fitting than the innocent schoolgirl look the U.S. military had chosen for me.
Much less like the version of me from that awful memory.
“Are you okay?”
I caught Mom’s gaze in the reflection again, saw the way her hand hovered halfway to my arm, like she wanted to comfort me but realized her touch wouldn’t be welcome. I sidled away out of reach, in case she overcame her reservations.
Should I ask her about the memory? Demand an explanation? Or was it another one of the things I’d be happier not knowing?
I chose the latter and instead asked a different question that had just occurred to me. “Who chose how I look?” I asked, turning to face Mom in time to watch her fumble the scissors in an uncharacteristically clumsy act. She stooped to the ground, pausing there for a few heartbeats longer than necessary. I wondered if something in my question had upset her, but by the time she rose, her face was a poised mask. Still, something tight grabbed at her mouth, thinned it.
“Not me” was all she said, before turning and disappearing into the bathroom.
When she reemerged later, her hair fell to the same spot inches past her shoulders, but the familiar blond color was gone, replaced by a reddish brown to match her phony passport photo. This was not the Mom from Clearwater, from my programmed memories, and just like that, I felt another tether to my past tear free.
My hair was still scattered across the stained carpet like the dandelion seeds I’d seen a toddler blow back in Clearwater, walking with his mom down our street. I leaned over and rescued a few silky strands, only to let them slip between my fingers, to watch them float back to the floor. Hair, weeds, life—all of them transient.
Shaking off the melancholy, I started picking up the hair in earnest.
“Here, let me help.” Mom squatted down to scoop up pieces, too.
“No, thanks, I’ve got it.”
She remained in a squat, balancing her hands on her thighs. “Mila, I realize that you’re angry, but we have to be able to work together.”
The darker hair gave her skin a porcelain glow, adding a hint of fragility to her face. But I knew it was just an illusion, in much the same way that my appearance was. No one would look at her long-legged, slender beauty and suspect the mental and physical strength that lurked beneath. Just like no one would look at me and suspect I was anything other than a normal teenage girl.
It made me wonder how many other people out there hid behind their outer shells.
“Fine. But only if you drop the Mom act completely, and treat me like an equal. Deal?”
She stared at me for several long seconds, her eyes roving over my face almost as if she were memorizing the contours, while her hand clutched the phony birthstone charm. For a moment I thought she might argue. Beg me to believe that, despite everything, she felt like a real mom, that she hadn’t faked that part. And before I could help it, that same crazy hope spiraled through me.
It died a second later, when she agreed, in an oh-so-soft voice: “Deal.”
I immediately went back to collecting hair off the floor, all the while trying to convince myself that that’s exactly what I’d wanted her to say.
Seventeen
The room was dark and still except for the soft rhythmic sound of Mom’s breathing when I bolted upright into alertness. The bedsprings squeaked loudly in the quiet room. I glanced at the digital clock bolted to the nightstand. Three twenty-five a.m.
A strange scuffling noise had roused me from sleep, or my resting state, or whatever the hell I did when I lay in bed. Not a topic to investigate now, not when I heard the sound again, like a shoe scraping concrete.
Someone was outside.
I slid to the floor and leaned over Mom’s sleeping form, jumping back when her eyes flew open and she sat up abruptly.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. Nothing Mom did should surprise me anymore.
“Is someone here?” she mouthed. I nodded and jerked my head t
oward the door.
Mom slid out of bed, fully clothed, like me. She snagged her glasses off the nightstand and fixed her gaze on the door.
A knock. “Maintenance,” a gruff male voice called.
I took a step forward, but Mom’s outstretched arm held me back. “Wait here,” she whispered. She crept toward the door and looked out the peephole. “What do you need?”
“Sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am, but there’s been some complaints of power outages in some of the rooms and the front office. Unfortunately, the fuse box is in there. We just need to come in to check it out.” His voice was just loud enough to be heard through the door.
Fuse box? In our room? Mom’s gaze sought mine in the dark, and I could tell we shared the same thought.
Not very probable.
“Just a minute while I put on some clothes.”
She hurried back over, pushing her mouth close to my ear. “Run a scan. Find the precise location of any nearby electrical circuits.”
“But I don’t know how—”
Her fingers dug into my shoulders. “You do know how. You just don’t know you do—just like the GPS. Focus, and turn a slow circle. The current is detected through a sensor behind your eyes.”
My hands flew to the sides of my face. Like maybe I could somehow feel the sensor there.
“Hurry, Mila,” she whispered. “We need to know if there’s anything near this room.”
It was the “hurry” that did it. Though my stomach churned and my fists balled, I turned a slow circle and issued the mental command.
Circuits.
As if by magic, a digital green map blossomed in front of me. It fizzled into tiny dots of static an instant later.
Circuits scan: Blocked.
An icy-cold sensation trickled down my back. “It’s blocked.”
Mom blanched. “If they knew to bring an interference device, it must be Holland’s men. They’ve found us.”
They’d found us, and we were trapped.
Mom burst into motion. She swept into the bathroom and turned on the light. The sound of the shower beating against the wall followed. She closed the door before hurrying back. “We only have one chance at this. We need to get them inside, close the door, and subdue them before anyone else notices. You ready?”
Something metal scraped against the deadbolt while I stood frozen.
Mom must have sensed my fear, because she squeezed my shoulders and whispered, “A team, remember? I can’t do this without you.”
The chill spread from my back to the rest of my body. She wanted me to help take these guys down, like I had back at the ranch. She wanted me to be an android, when right now all I wanted was for her to protect me, like I was an actual daughter and she was an actual mom.
But I was the one who’d asked for it. I was the one who’d said “team.” I couldn’t back out now.
I scanned the room, searching for a potential weapon. My gaze returned to the dresser. I hesitated over the scissors before shoving them in my pocket, the man back in Clearwater still too fresh in my mind. Team or no team, android or human, I wouldn’t let anyone turn me into a killer. Instead, I grabbed the hair dryer and the heavy round hairbrush.
“Ready.”
I vaulted the bed and dropped to all fours behind the fabric chair near the window, from where I’d have a direct line to the door. Up close, the chair smelled like spoiled milk, and dust erupted when I brushed it with my forehead.
As Mom clicked the deadbolt, every bit of my focus switched to her. We’d only have one shot. If they held a gun to Mom’s head before I could get to them, it was all over. I couldn’t risk her getting hurt.
Mom opened the door, feigning a yawn. “Are you sure you can’t wait until morning?”
A sturdy dark-haired man I didn’t recognize shoved his way into the room, followed by a shorter man with a navy-blue hat. He ducked his head, but I could still see the swollen nose and purpling eye. He was one of the men I’d taken down in the Greenwood Ranch driveway.
Mom stepped back, continuing with the charade. “Okay . . . but if the fuses are in the bathroom, you’ll have to wait a few minutes. My daughter was in the shower when you knocked.”
Both men’s gazes swept the empty beds before focusing on the bathroom door. My hands clenched on the hair dryer and brush. Wait. Wait. Too soon could bring unwanted attention. Too late could bring much, much worse.
And then the second man walked all the way into the room, carrying a silver toolbox. As the door clattered shut, everything happened at once. Mom’s foot whipped out, slamming into the back of the second man’s knees. The dark-haired man reached into the toolbox, pulling out a black gun.
And I leaped up from behind the chair, took aim, and threw.
The hairbrush cracked the dark-haired man in the wrist, making his gun clunk to the floor. Mom kicked it toward the bathroom before turning back to the man from Clearwater, who’d pitched forward onto his hands and knees. His hat catapulted off his head.
The dark-haired man recovered more quickly than I’d anticipated. He dived for the floor, for the gun. He was going to reach it before me.
Incapacitate gun hand.
The command drove me into action. I launched myself after him while, right before my eyes, his arm turned into a 3-D graph of internal anatomy. Pulsing green lights accentuated the most vulnerable points.
Accessible targets.
Midair, I yanked the plug away from the hair dryer. He’d already grabbed the gun with his right hand and was rolling onto his side, sweeping the weapon in an arc that would reach Mom.
Now.
I landed beside him, hip first, taking aim as I slid across the carpet. Then I shoved the plug into the mass of nerves in his armpit, the brachial plexus.
Target: Immobilized.
The unreality of the situation flashed through me as the metal prongs sank deep into his flesh, but I had to stay focused. Until I was sure I had him subdued.
His entire arm went slack and his scream pierced the room before I stifled it by clamping my hand over his mouth. A quick jab to the trachea would silence him, but I didn’t want to hit him again, not unless absolutely necessary.
Suitcase. On the dresser.
Keeping my left hand over his mouth, I used my right to rummage through the unzipped bag. I grabbed the first wad of soft cotton my fingers touched. A few seconds later, the man was sporting one of Mom’s favorite gray tank tops in a way the manufacturer had never intended. Now I just needed something to secure his hands.
And then I paused. I’d just stabbed some guy, an utter and complete stranger, in the armpit with a hair-dryer plug.
And I’d done it well.
Unreal. “You okay?” I asked, glancing Mom’s way. The other man was stomach down on the floor and unmoving, and from the slackened look of his jaw, out cold. Still, Mom had one knee lodged against his spine, just in case.
“Got anything to tie him up with?”
Her free hand reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of multicolored zip ties. I caught the two she tossed at me. “Use these.” Her voice sounded as capable and calm as ever, even with a large red spot on her left cheek. Obviously her captive had gotten in a punch before she’d taken him down.
I went to grab my guy to flip him onto his stomach but hesitated with my hand on his shoulder. His eyes were glazed with pain, and his good hand wrapped protectively around his injured arm. A sharp pang hit me.
I’d known right where to strike and had done so without conscious thought. Without even bothering to consider if I’d do any permanent damage.
. . . a fighting machine.
“Mila, it’s okay,” Mom said, summing up my predicament with one quick glance. “I know how you’re feeling, but remember—he would have had no problem shooting me. And what he has planned for you . . . it’s much worse than what you did to him.”
Maybe so, but I didn’t want to be this Mila, the one they’d created in the lab, who maimed and hurt
and one day, possibly, even killed people.
But for now, I had to forget all that and tie this man up.
I moved efficiently. When I rolled the man onto his stomach, he groaned but didn’t protest or open his eyes. He was barely conscious. Hopefully that meant this would hurt less. Still, I kept my hands gentle when I bound his wrists with the pink zip tie. The green one I used on his ankles.
Mom’s guy was similarly bound, with a pair of socks stuffed into his mouth. She rose, taking two steps over to the bed before sinking onto the edge. The only indication of nerves was the way she fiddled with the nosepiece of her glasses.
“Now what?” I asked, looking at the two prone men, the tightness building in my chest. I tried to will it away by reminding myself it wasn’t real, that according to Mom, the tightness was merely a re-creation of someone else’s emotional reactions. Like an emotional residue.
Mom eyed the two men, who were just starting to stir. “Get our stuff out of the bathroom and wipe the room down for prints. By the time you’re done, they should be able to answer a few questions.”
I grabbed our suitcase, carried it into the bathroom. I shoved everything off the counter into the bag, then did a sweep of the rest of the room. In the trash can I spotted our empty boxes of hair color, and I fished them out to throw away in a more secure location.
Fingerprints. I yanked down a towel, dampened it under the faucet, and wiped everything we might have touched clean.
When I walked out, the two men were still on the ground, but the one closest to Mom had started struggling against his restraints.
Mom glanced up at me, her lips thin and determined. “Ready?”
Before I could answer, she dropped next to the man and rolled him over, onto his bound hands. Then she pressed the gun against his temple.
“We already know you’re working for General Holland. Tell us how much he knows.”
He didn’t attempt to make a sound against his impromptu gag, and even though Mom held the gun, his glaring eyes stayed glued to me. I saw her hand tremble slightly before she whipped the gun down and cracked it against his knee.
