MILA 2.0

by Debra Driza

  I yanked the wheel left, narrowly missing a shocked motorcyclist. I tuned out Mom’s harsh gasp, tuned out my own doubts, and pushed the car onward.

  We were three-quarters of the way across the bridge when an Explorer and a truck sped by, swerving wildly. I made a last desperate grab for my waning courage.

  Here went everything.

  “Mila, now!” Mom yelled, right as I yelled, “Hold on!”

  I grabbed the power brake to slide into a one-eighty-degree turn. The Camaro’s tail swooped in a wild arc behind us, brakes squealing; ours, and the cars heading our way. My head roared. As soon as we straightened, I hit the gas.

  Everything happened so fast, even I could barely discern the individual parts. Us, heading dead-on for Holland’s Suburban, seeing the shock on his face. Veering to the left at the last possible moment, the Camaro’s driver side mirror smacking the barrier. Three’s crash into the opposite barrier, as she tried to turn sharply and failed.

  The back passenger window bursting inward, raining shards of glass everywhere. Shattered by a gunshot from the soldier in Holland’s passenger seat. Right before they took the turn too fast in a horrible screech of tires and tipped over, the Suburban crunching against the ground.

  My victorious shout, my hand pumping in the air. Right before I noticed Mom’s gasp as she clutched her side. Before I noticed the red liquid already pooling on her shirt.

  Thirty-Eight

  I fought off a sickening wave of dizziness—yet another physical response to emotions that I really questioned the necessity of—and tried to stem the panic shuddering through me like an earthquake.

  Bleeding. Mom was bleeding.

  “Mom! Are you okay?”

  I yanked the wheel to the side, ready to pull off the street right there.

  “I’ll be fine, Mila,” she gasped. “Just get us out of here.”

  Just get us out of here.

  Her labored breathing sent a reaction right down my leg, shoved my foot harder on the pedal. We’d get out of here.

  If only I knew where to go.

  Already, sirens wailed in the not-too-far-off distance. Where would they not think to look?

  An image of the green river we’d passed earlier appeared in my head.

  The Potomac. A dead end, and therefore the last place someone with half a brain on the run would want to go. My android logic insisted I avoid it at all costs.

  That was our spot.

  “Still okay?” I said, sparing a quick glance for Mom as the Camaro tore down the street.

  I swerved, and the car’s front passenger tire veered off the road, just for a second. She didn’t look okay, not at all. Her face was pale, and her teeth ground into her lower lip. As if she were biting back a scream.

  “I’m okay . . . just keep going.” But she didn’t sound okay, either. Her voice sounded strained, exhausted, the way it did after she’d stayed up all night bringing a new foal into the world.

  I steadied my hands on the wheel before turning to face her. My eyes scanned her body, and in front of me, a shimmering 3-D replica appeared, just like with the man back in the motel room. Only this wasn’t some stranger bent on capturing me . . . this was a replica of Mom.

  I inhaled deeply, felt my chest rise and fall, let the motion steady me before I focused.

  On the green image, the two bullet holes pulsed red, both on her left side. Mentally I pulled back layers of skin and muscle to expose the location of the organs beneath. The first thing I noticed was that based on the entry wounds, the curved model of the kidney and the much smaller gall-bladder were too low to have been hit. They were safe.

  Then my gaze traveled upward, and my gasp ricocheted through the car.

  The upper portion of her liver. Her liver, and no—no, no. Her lung. Her heart.

  “Hospital, where’s the hospital?”

  “Mila, no. No hospital, it’s not safe. Just . . . go.”

  “What? No! You need help!”

  Mom clutched my arm again, with surprising strength. But her skin—did it feel a little cooler? “Listen,” she said fiercely. “When we made you, we crossed a line . . . and created a miracle. I knew the risks when I stole you, and I took them anyway. Willingly. Happily. If you want to help me, you know what you can do? Live.”

  Her grip slackened, and my heart froze. “Mom?”

  “Keep . . . keep driving.”

  And so I did. Around every turn I tensed, anticipating another shattering window, another gunshot streaking its way to Mom, who stayed huddled as close to the floorboards as she could.

  We finally made it to the river, racing across an old abandoned construction site that led to an abandoned pier. I parked the car behind a rusting metal shed.

  “Mom, we’re here. You can sit up now.”

  Nothing. “Mom?”

  Mom slowly hoisted herself back into the seat. Crimson soaked her entire shirt now.

  No. Oh, no.

  Just then, Mom’s eyelashes fluttered and I heard a low moan. Deciding it was kinder to move her without warning, I counted to three, then picked her up and lifted her out of the car. She screamed, and my echoing sob clogged in my throat.

  I laid her on the ground before flipping her partway onto her stomach. Her shirt back was soaked in blood. I pushed it up, then had to wipe the area near the wounds clean with my shirt just to see. And there they were, two dime-sized holes.

  Wiping my finger as clean as possible—when we got out of here, the first thing we’d need to do was find some antiseptics and antibiotics— I gingerly slipped it into the more concerning hole, the one that tunneled toward her heart.

  Mom jerked, but I steadied her with my free hand and pushed on. Metal. I just needed to hit metal. Find the tiny ball being held at bay by the bony cage of her ribs.

  As I probed, the 3-D image appeared again, showing me every layer I passed even as I felt it. The easy yielding of skin, the tougher striation of torn muscle. And then my finger slid between two solid, slick surfaces, while the image flashed in front of me. Ribs.

  No bullet, and the tunnel went deeper—to the heart. I didn’t dare press farther.

  My feet started shaking first. Then my legs. I barely had time to pull my fingers away from her body before my hands started spasming, too. There had to be a solution for this. Somewhere, somehow.

  The bullet was obviously lodged somewhere deep inside Mom. And I had no way to dig it out. No tools at all, unless . . .

  “Mom, was there anything else in the glove box?” I yelled, giving her shoulders a swift shake when her eyelashes barely fluttered. Or maybe the trunk. Maybe Lucas kept supplies in the trunk.

  If I could get to the damn trunk. I tore off her shirt and bunched it up against the holes, which were hemorrhaging blood way too fast.

  Mom finally spoke. “Mila, stop. It’s . . . over.”

  No. I refused to accept that. “I’m a machine, remember? I can fix anything.”

  “You can’t fix . . . what’s unfixable.”

  “Don’t say that,” I whispered fiercely. The need to look in the trunk, to find tools, burned brightly, but right now, I was too scared of her bleeding out. “Can you hold this shirt? Just for a few seconds?”

  “Mila, you know better.” She lapsed into a coughing spasm before continuing. “We need to think about you.”

  About me? No, us. We needed to think about us. This whole thing, from the beginning, had been the two of us, against all odds. She couldn’t just ditch everything now—I wouldn’t let her.

  If it weren’t for me . . .

  “You should have just left me there to begin with. Then none of this would have happened.”

  Her pale blue eyes burned with a feverish light. “Do you think I regret any of this? Do you? Because I don’t. Not for a second. I wasn’t sure I could at first, I didn’t . . . but I was wrong.”

  The words both warmed me and chilled me to the core. Because this person spouting gibberish, this wasn’t my mom. My calm, practical mom.
Which could only mean . . .

  With a rapidly expanding knot sealing off my throat, I turned to stare into the dark depths of the Potomac. Furious at my lack of control. How useless, programming a droid with tears. With a violent flick of my hand, I swiped at the liquid that spilled down my cheeks.

  Mom heaved a big, ragged sigh. I whirled to her, in time to see her pale eyelids flutter closed.

  “No—don’t close your eyes!”

  Her fingers, once so strong and warm, chilled on my arm.

  Critical blood loss: Probable.

  Heart failure: Probable.

  Organ failure: Probable.

  This time, the voice was anything but a comfort. I got it, I did. The clinical explanation was blood loss, robbing her muscles of the oxygen they needed to sustain forceful contractions until they finally stopped altogether. But there was another, more lyrical explanation: her soul was fading, drifting away to some better place.

  While logic insisted the former was correct, I desperately wanted to believe in the latter.

  “Mila,” Mom said, her voice soft, a faint smile on her pale, pale face. “I know you worry that you experience the world differently than regular people. But . . .” She paused, panting for a moment before gritting her teeth. “No two people ever view the world from exactly the same perspective, understand things the same way, human or not. The best . . . the best . . .” Her voice petered out, her eyelashes fluttered shut. Her chest expanded with the force of her next inhalation, an exertion that turned the red stream seeping from her wound into a river. The rest of her sentence slurred together. “The best we can ever do is try.”

  With her eyes closed, her hand fluttered toward her throat and closed around her oval pendant. My phony birthstone. She yanked, but with so little strength that the necklace refused to give.

  “Here.” I reached up, cupped my hand around hers, and pulled. The necklace tore free as easily as a sheet of paper.

  Mom pushed the pendant into my hand. Her voice lowered to a raspy whisper. “Find Rich—Richard Grady. He knows . . .”

  The last word drifted out on a sigh. After she uttered it, her head lolled to the side. Her hand went limp, and in that moment, I felt something deep inside me die, too.

  Overhead, birds squawked to herald that dawn was just around the corner. The Potomac rushed past. The smell of doughnuts wafted from a bakery somewhere in the distance. And here, on the dirty asphalt, my mom’s all-too-human heart stopped beating.

  “We were supposed to be a team, remember?” But of course my choked whisper fell on ears that could no longer hear.

  A hole ripped open in my chest, spilling a corrosive mixture of darkness and pain and loss, one that filled me until I thought my skin would explode from the terrible pressure. My throat clogged again, and it ached, oh, god, it ached, in a way that made me think I would never swallow or talk, laugh or sing, or utter a single sound ever again. And why would I want to? It had always been Mom and me, yet now, suddenly, it wasn’t.

  I was alone in a world I’d barely experienced, one that looked stark and empty.

  Without her, everything seemed stark and empty.

  I didn’t bother feeling for a pulse I knew wasn’t there, or trying frantic CPR, or throwing her into the car and rushing her to a hospital.

  None of those things would bring her back.

  Instead I smoothed her hair away from her forehead. Her beautiful hair. Then I curled up next to her. I slid one arm around her waist, pressed my cheek against hers. Her skin still smelled of rosemary lotion.

  I closed my eyes. Tried to imagine we were just back in Clearwater, snuggled on the couch. Watching some ridiculous show on TV. She’d ask me if everything at school was okay, and I’d say yes.

  If only I could will it into reality, make it true.

  But I couldn’t pretend. This was wrong, wrong, all wrong. Mom’s skin was still warm, but there was no gentle stirring to indicate breathing, no faint thrum of a pulse. No movement inside her at all. Nothing to contradict the chilling reality.

  In death, Mom was more like me than in life.

  I shot up, a horrifying thought tearing through me. I couldn’t leave her here. They’d find her, and what if . . . what if they harvested her cells, or whatever they’d done to make me?

  Mom might want me to live, might have died giving me the chance, but I couldn’t believe she’d want this to happen to anyone else. And I refused to allow it to happen. Not to her.

  If it were up to me, I’d stay here, with Mom’s body, and wait for them to find me. The thought of leaving her behind felt so wrong, so traitorous. Yet I knew the last thing Mom would have wanted me to do was stay. She’d made that more than clear. She’d risked everything to bring me freedom, and if I squandered that, it was like I was squandering her life all over again.

  Mom wanted me to fight.

  To live.

  I’d just never dreamed that I’d have to do it alone.

  A sharp honk in the distance reminded me that it wasn’t safe here. This tiny, run-down area that edged the Potomac appeared secluded, but it was literally minutes from downtown D.C. Holland and his underlings could stumble upon me at any time. Or for all I knew, even the Vita Obscura. To honor Mom’s last wish, I needed to run. But to honor her, there was something else I had to do first.

  I looked at Mom’s still body for a moment, watched her hair flutter gently in the breeze. I smoothed it off her pale face, bleakness threatening to overwhelm me. Then I hurried into the shed.

  A few minutes later, I’d tied the rusty old anchor I’d found to Mom’s body with the jumper cables in Lucas’s trunk. After scooping her into my arms in one efficient motion, I carried her toward the river. Away from the buildings looming behind us, away from D.C. Away from Holland’s reach.

  I carried her to the edge of the river, watched the water churn below.

  I hated the thought that the briny liquid would swallow her rosemary scent once and for all. Cradle her blue eyes, her soft hair, her thin yet steely body within its depths, where I could no longer see. I knew she was dead, that whatever had made her alive was gone from the shell in my arms. I knew it, but still I whispered, “Good-bye, Mom.”

  I looked at the dark, opaque water again, and my hands clenched on her skin. How could I do it? Just toss her into the water like so much unwanted garbage? She deserved better than this. A real funeral, with mourners and flowers and a priest to say last words, the kind of funeral she’d implanted in my head for “Dad.”

  Then I pictured Holland finding her, taking her back into the depths of that hellish place, and I shuddered. I couldn’t let that happen. A proper funeral would be just one more thing he’d stolen from us.

  I inhaled deeply. And then I tossed her ruined body into the greedy water below, and it was like I’d ripped out my heart and tossed it in with her, because surely nothing less could cause that kind of pain. But at least Holland could never have her now.

  I turned away before her body disappeared, trying to accept what my logic was telling me. Right now, letting the complete android in me take over was a blessing—anything to help stem the pain. Mom was gone, and staring at the river wouldn’t bring me any closer to her last request. I had to get out of here.

  And I needed help.

  Thirty-Nine

  After stuffing the money into my pocket, I headed away from the Camaro. With its blown-out glass and license plate and make probably known to every official with clearance in the state by now, it was a moving trap.

  I tacked “new car” onto the mental list of things I owed Lucas. Not that I’d ever see him again. I jogged past the Camaro and back toward the streets, keeping my eyes open for any black Suburbans. Every step hurt, like I was abandoning Mom. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d failed, and that Mom had paid for that failure with her life, no matter how much she’d tried to convince me otherwise. And now I was leaving her behind. Forever.

  But I made my feet keep moving, and I didn’t allow myself to lo
ok back. The only way to honor her now was to fulfill her dreams for me. If I got caught, everything she’d sacrificed would be for nothing. That was the only thought propelling me forward, but for now, it was enough.

  If finding this Richard Grady was what Mom wanted me to do, then I’d find a way.

  I couldn’t fail again.

  I needed a phone, but first, I needed new clothes. Along the way, we’d passed a huddle of homeless people staking out a spare patch of grass. I retraced our path until I found them.

  They turned to look up at me from their dirty blankets, huddled against the cold. A couple of faces were blank, others bright with curiosity. I studied their group before finding an older woman close to my size who wore a thin hooded jacket.

  I dug into my shoe and extracted two twenties and a ten. “I’ll give you fifty dollars for your clothes. You can have my clothes, too.” I glanced down. Bright-red spots stained the front of my shirt.

  Mom’s blood.

  My throat tightened again, and in my head, I saw an image of her face. Her pale, unmoving face, with her blue eyes closed for good. How could she expect me to do this, how?

  I reached up, and my fingers curled around the emerald pendant that had rested around Mom’s neck until recently. I could picture Mom doing the same, and somehow, the coolness of the gem soothed me. “The shirt’s a little stained, but—”

  I didn’t even get to finish before the woman stood up and started unbuttoning her dirty beige jacket. Her gaze clung to the money in my hand like it was her salvation.

  “You got more money, girlie?” A thirtyish man sidled up to me, one of his teeth rotting in his mouth, fingers trembling and stained from nicotine.

  I grabbed his hand just as it reached for the money, squeezing hard enough to let him know I meant business but not hard enough to do any real damage. “The money isn’t for you.” I didn’t even bother glancing at his face.

  He gasped in pain and lurched back when I released him. The others around him muttered, but no one approached. Good. I didn’t have the time or inclination to fend off a desperate crowd.

  The woman tossed me her jacket. A brown stain streaked the front, and it smelled like stale sweat. Still, my choices at the moment were limited, and the hood would come in handy. Every single thing brought me a little closer to achieving my—Mom’s—goal.