ARC: The Almost Girl

by Amalie Howard

  I walk over to the cot and sit on it. Sauer, to his credit, hasn’t moved an inch. “Let’s assume you’ve been telling me the truth all along,” I begin. “Why are we in Sector Seven now?”

  “That’s for Aurela to explain.”

  “OK. So where is Aurela?”

  “She’s… engaged at the moment.” His evasive answer irritates me.

  “OK. So where is Caden?” My tone is patronizing, my anger under tight control but simmering just below the surface. I cock my head to one side and lean back on my arms, waiting. I am deliberately trying to provoke him, goading him into an answer. He is obviously under orders.

  Sauer smiles tightly. “In a room just like this one. Resting.” His emphasis on the last word is clear, and I almost grin at his blatant suggestion that I should be doing the same.

  “I want to see him.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  My eyes narrow. “You do know that I can leave this room at any point with or without your consent? And I can find Caden myself if I have to.”

  Sauer shrugs and nods. He knows exactly what I’m capable of. I showed him that clearly when he’d entered. He walks over to the chair on the side of the room and slides it out.

  “May I?” he asks politely, and then sits, crossing his ankle over the opposite knee. His eyes are penetrating, staring right through me. I don’t say anything caustic at his expression, because I’m a little intrigued by him myself. The more I stare at him, the more I see the resemblance to Aurela’s people, and the marks of the Artok tribe. Apart from his hair, which is the same distinctive silvery white, they have a similar angularity in their faces. Despite my caution, I’m fascinated by any connections to Aurela’s past… to my past.

  Sauer’s voice is soft, interrupting my thoughts. “I’ve always wanted to meet you, you know. My entire division recounted accounts of your fearlessness, of soldiers who cowered at the sight of you. A girl, far younger than I was, leading the Vectors. The Lord King’s private guard.” I hold Sauer’s gaze without responding. “Impressive record for one so young.”

  “If you say so,” I return in an inflectionless voice.

  “But of course, your father engineered you to be that way,” Sauer muses. I frown, but remain silent. “He built you to be the perfect soldier. What made you defect?”

  “I don’t know that I have,” I say carefully, my brain firing at his provocative words. I am no one’s puppet, far less my father’s. “I was following orders from my king. My loyalty lies and will always lie with him.” Sauer looks like he has something more to say, but doesn’t. A sour expression crosses his face for an instant as he leans back in his chair. It fades after a moment, replaced by his former thoughtful expression.

  “I knew Shae,” he says. The mere mention of her name sends my stomach into a tailspin. I feel the tide of emotion surge inside of me. It’s all still there, simmering. I shove the thoughts away, but my fingers clench into fists at my sides. “She often told me that I would like you.”

  “Well, she was wrong. And she’s dead.”

  I’m unprepared for the naked ache that slashes across his eyes. My normally acute ability to read people has taken a beating over the last few weeks, but even Sauer can’t conceal his feelings for my sister from me. Sauer has just gotten a lot more interesting.

  “You were the reason she kept everting back here,” I say slowly. Sauer doesn’t answer, but his clear eyes are so pain-ridden that it’s obvious. “I knew it wasn’t just to provide updates to Aurela or throw the Vectors off Caden’s trail. He was safe. The Vectors tracked me there, not them. So she was coming back here for you?”

  “Yes. We were… in love.”

  I laugh, and the sound in the room is ugly, echoing emptily against the stark walls. I can barely get my mind around it. My mother had been paired with my father because of their combined brilliance and what they could contribute together to the monarchy. People didn’t fall in love. They didn’t get to choose who they wanted to be with. Partnerships were allocated based on what was best for Neospes. I laugh again emptily. In the end, love had killed Shae.

  “Love?” I spit in his direction, launching to my feet. “Do you know what you did to her? Did you see what you were doing to her? She was dead on her feet, but she still came back here for you!” I’m in Sauer’s face now, not even bothering to control the violence of my rage. “You. Killed. Her.” My finger jabs into his chest with each word. “You made her weak.”

  Sauer doesn’t even respond to my vitriolic words. Instead, he watches me with those same heavy eyes. I can see the regret – and his love for Shae – in them, but I don’t want to see either. I don’t want to see anything that reflects the feelings inside my own heart. I don’t want to admit that somehow, somewhere, I’d let compassion or love weaken me, too. So I let my anger take over. I let my fury fuel me. They are the things I know, the mindsets I understand.

  “Get up,” I rage at him. I slap him across the face, and then a second time. “Get up and face me like a man. She deserved that much, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not going to fight you, Riven,” Sauer says. His face is bright red from where I’ve struck him, but his voice is even. “You’re right. I failed her. I let her die. I deserve everything and more that you say, but she wouldn’t want this. She loved you, too.”

  Something hot and responsive rushes inside of me at his soft words, and then something cold immediately floods my veins, suppressing it in seconds. I step back and then back again, until I feel the bed against the backs of my legs. My mind is clear one minute, and then fogged the next. Once more, the feeling of being two different people threatens to tear me apart.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I say, clutching my head in my hands. “What’s happening? Every time I think about her, it hurts. I’m splitting in two.”

  “It’s the programming,” Sauer says gently, walking forward to fold me into his arms. I let him, shivering so hard that my teeth are rattling. Sauer’s words sink in slowly.

  “The what?” I whisper.

  “The programming,” Aurela says from the doorway. I hadn’t even noticed her there. “I see you’ve meet Sauer. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up, but I had to take care of something. How are you feeling?” She tips my head back gently to peer at my face.

  My brain is spinning, but somehow I already know. A hazy memory of the pale blue fluid combined with the blood on my wrist in the operating room fills my eyes. “What programming?”

  “There’s no easy way to–”

  “Just say it,” I whisper. “Say it.”

  Aurela’s face is tormented, her hands fluttering against my head like protective mother birds trying to safeguard their young. But she can’t protect me anymore. The damage has already been done. She didn’t protect me then… and she can’t protect me now. Sauer’s words fill my head: he built you to be the perfect soldier…

  “I want to hear you say it,” I repeat doggedly.

  She nods, just once. “Your programming. To control the nanoplasm inside of you.”

  ON THE BRINK

  “So I’m a Vector?”

  I’m amazed at how calm my voice is, but the truth is, somewhere deep down, I’ve always known that I was like them. There were too many inconsistencies, things that made me better than everyone else… things that made me less human. I could run faster, react more quickly, heal miraculously when injured. There’s no way I could have been normal. I don’t even feel any sense of violation that my own father experimented on me without my knowledge. Yet.

  “I’m an android,” I say.

  “No,” Aurela says. “You’re… a hybrid. Your father experimented with nanoplasm before the early success of the Vectors. He experimented on himself and then you when you were little.” Aurela holds my face in her hands, but my eyes are unseeing. “I never knew, but when I found out, that’s when I knew I had to leave. I had to find a way to stop him.”

  What kind of man experiments with an unp
roven technology on his own child? I feel the hate inside of me boil and metamorphose into something large and ugly. I’m not even human. No wonder he’d loved that I’d chosen to lead the Vectors. I’m one of them. Controlled, just as they are. Built. Engineered. A thing, like them.

  Dead, just like them.

  The self-disgust must be evident on my face, because Sauer’s arms tighten around me. I’ve forgotten that I’m still caught in his grip. “Let go of me,” I tell him. “I’m fine.”

  But he doesn’t, so I shove him away easily. So easily, like his arms are nothing but string. I stare at my curled fists, for the first time aware of the tensile power in them… power that isn’t mine. It’s fake, engineered strength, driven by the robots in my blood. My hands drop to my sides in revulsion.

  “Riven,” Aurela says, and I jerk at the sound of my name. So apt, I think. My name means broken… it’s a perfect name, after all. I raise burning eyes to hers. “You’re nothing like them,” she says, correctly reading the thoughts rising to suffocate me with their poisonous intensity. “You’re different.”

  I shake my head, struggling to reconcile everything I know about the Vectors and everything I know about myself. I’m not just different… what my father has done is impossible. I’m a live person made of flesh and blood and bone.

  “I’m missing something,” I say to Aurela. “How is this even possible? I thought you couldn’t combine nanoplasm with human DNA?”

  “I believe your father experimented on himself before you were conceived.” Aurela pauses, as if thinking to herself. “He planned it all from the beginning. His body eventually rejected the nanobes, but yours didn’t, because your DNA had already transmutated as a result of his earlier testing. When you were conceived, the law of natural selection made your cells adapt. He’d hoped all along that they would have some sort of genetomorhic effect.”

  “Did you know?”

  “Not at first,” she says, running a hand through her hair tiredly and sitting in the seat that Sauer vacated. “But he would take you to the lab with him, even when I insisted that you didn’t have to go. After a while, I started to suspect something untoward, but he denied it.” Aurela stops, her face wet. “Then I found contaminated blood samples he’d hidden. Yours. And I knew for sure. That was when I told him I was leaving with you and Shae. My mistake, of course, was to tell him at all.”

  “I thought you were fighting about the Vector tech?”

  “No, my darling, it was always about you. Then you had your first training op, and he was so proud that you, the youngest of all your peers, had finished way ahead of everyone else. Way ahead. You were a prodigy. His prodigy. After that, he never let you out of his sight.”

  Aurela is talking about the placement trials. At four, we are put through a rigorous series of mental and physical exercises to determine when we start our training and instructor assignments. I was placed in the elite section with children far older than I. My father was so proud. I bite my lip so hard that it bleeds, a metallic sourness filling my mouth.

  Of course he was proud – his creation, his abomination was a smashing success.

  But even in his jubilation, he had to keep it all a secret, because what he’d done went against all our laws. After the War, any combination of human genetics and android technology had been forbidden. But my father had flaunted the laws, driven by his own pride.

  “And the Vectors? Was it his plan that they’d be his own private army? Loyal to him because they were loyal to me? Was that in my programming?” My sarcasm is acidic.

  Aurela sighs. “Only your father knows what he intended to create. Even now, we don’t know where his loyalties truly lie.” She glances at Sauer and then me, as if working out something in her head, something more that she has to tell me. “So many things have changed since you left, Riven. The monarchy is unstable. Murek and your father have spies everywhere. The Vectors are stationed in every sector, even here.”

  The thought of the Vectors leaves a sour taste in my mouth. My stomach heaves nauseatedly. I don’t want to be anything like them. The big Commander from the Otherworld fills my visions, and I remember the sound of my father’s voice coming from its mouth.

  “They’re thinking now,” I say, remembering the chilling words of the Vector that it was more alive than the others but less alive than me. Even it had known what I was … what I am. “The Vectors. There was one in the Otherworld that spoke with his voice. He wants me back. Badly. I don’t know for what but he does.”

  Aurela’s face blanches at my quiet words. Understanding is in her eyes as she nods. “He wants to replicate your genetic code.”

  I feel a hot tear slide down my cheek, and I swipe it away viciously, furious at myself for even shedding a single tear for the monster that was my father. “I’m just a thing to him. An experiment. A Vector.”

  “No,” Aurela insists. “You’re not.”

  “Barely. I’m half-alive, and they’re dead. But I’m the same… a thing.” My voice is as lifeless as the words coming out of my mouth.

  “No, Riven, you’re alive. You control the nanobes, not the other way around.”

  But a troubling thought occurs to me as Aurela says those words. If I do control them, why is everything within me suddenly shutting down? Has something set them off within the parameters of their code? I frown, confused. “So, what happened before? You know, with Caden, before Sector Seven, when I blacked out? What caused it?”

  “My guess is that it was some kind of failsafe in your father’s programming, a phrase or something,” Aurela says, and I feel myself flush, knowing instantly the phrase that had caused it all – Caden said he loved me and I returned the sentiment. It makes sense. My father despised weakness and anything that caused it, especially love. “Whatever it was caused the nanoplasm to reboot, restoring a set of baseline defaults, which is why you were so confused about who you were and couldn’t remember everything.”

  “Will it happen again?” My question flies through gritted teeth. The last thing I need is anyone using some programming catch phrase that will stop me from doing what every bone in my body wants to do – make my father pay for what he did to me.

  “I don’t think so,” Aurela says. “I worked with my engineers to erase and rewrite the default programming. We backdoored all the code. It’s clear.”

  “Thank you.” It’s the least I can offer. “Did Shae know?” I ask after several minutes of silence. So many things are falling into place… all of Shae’s sidelong glances, her pointed questions about my healing ability, other things she wanted to say to me in the Otherworld and couldn’t. She wanted to tell me; I see that now. But the sad truth was that I never would have believed her and she probably knew that, which was why she always stopped herself.

  Aurela nods. “That’s why she tried so hard to get you to leave with her, but she knew that a part of you would want to stay with him. She was so afraid that you would tell him about her… about me, in spite of yourself. You were a risk, and one we didn’t fully understand.” She pauses, her face earnest. “We didn’t know how deep the programming went or whether it undermined your own thought.”

  “Does it?” I blurt out.

  “No, it’s built to obey your commands.”

  The knowledge is overwhelming, but things are starting to come together in my head, like migrant puzzle pieces. “So that’s why I felt so sick in the Peaks. Because I have machines inside of me,” I say. “I should have known.” I gesture at my body. “You know why I used to feel so comfortable leading the Vectors? It was because deep down, I felt just like them. And I followed orders just like a good soldier, just like a good little reptile.” I swing around to stare at Sauer who is standing near the far side of the room. “Now you know why I was so good, because I was one of them.”

  Sauer shakes his head, a small smile darting around the corners of his mouth. “No, Riven,” he says in that soft drawl of his. “You’re better than they are. You’re super strong, you heal quic
ker than any of us could ever hope to heal, you can think more quickly. And you’re alive. You’re still you. That has to count for something.”

  His words strike a chord inside of me, and realization dawns slowly but surely. As brilliant as my father is, he isn’t a genetic scientist. I stare at Aurela. “It was your genetic coding that made this possible, wasn’t it?” I say to her. “You were the only one who could have found a way to string nanoplasm with live human DNA.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I developed the bio-gen coding,” she confesses sadly. “He was working on a project to test the nanoplasm on live creatures and convinced me that he needed to test to see if it could operate within a live host.” Aurela grabs my shoulders. “I never would have done it had I known that he was going to use it on himself or you; you have to believe that!”

  I nod, because I can’t speak. My tongue is bonded to the roof of my mouth. I swallow painfully. “So can you take them out? The nanobes?”

  “No,” she says, “they’re part of you. Unlike the nanoplasm for the Vectors, which fire off a lithia core, yours are linked to your body. They fuel from food just like your blood does because they’re tied in to your DNA. If we even tried to separate the strands, you would die. Your body has already adapted to coexist with them. You’re unique, Riven. That’s probably why he wants you so badly. You’re the experiment that went viral. His biggest triumph.”

  I’m at a loss. I don’t even know what to think, far less say. I have live microscopic robots inside of me that can never be taken out. I can never be fully human, never be normal. Everything inside funnels into a tornado of fury against the man responsible for making me into a freak. The man who thought himself some sort of god. His arrogance would be his destruction.