True North

by L. E. Sterling

  “Lucy.” Jared sighs.

  “I don’t know yet,” I finally answer. When I turn, he’s too close. Always too close. His skin heats me from a foot away, and I tingle with awareness from head to foot. I inhale his dark-and-spice scent that somehow comforts me even when it’s been dipped in someone else’s blood. His eyes are blue now, like a deep sky you’d see in those OldenTimes films. Yet so intense it feels like he’s pulling all the oxygen from the room.

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?” I snap, earning a slight smile.

  “This isn’t my call.”

  “I know that,” I say, looking down at my hands.

  “So why are you freezing me out?”

  But what else can I say that he doesn’t already know? When I think of leaving my sister to her fate, I feel sick. I can’t stay here if Storm won’t help me. If Jared won’t. I can’t answer Jared. The words won’t form. Ever so slowly, I turn my back to him. Feel his heat seep and comfort me there, though I want none. He doesn’t touch me, though I can feel his hot breath on the top of my head, tickling my hair.

  He says my name once more, so softly. Calls me by Margot’s nickname for me. “Lu.” Tears prickle and burn my eyes and the back of my throat. He doesn’t say anything more. And maybe I imagine that I can feel Jared raising a finger, ready to trace the fine skin on my neck. Without warning, he jumps back as though he’s been torched. An icy-cold pocket fills the space between us. Back to normal, then.

  “Good, you’re here.”

  Dorian is geared up in what I call her Splicer gear. An earth-toned blouse covered by a white lab coat, a set of hyper-loops scooping the curls from her face like a jeweled hair band. When she smiles briefly at me, fine lines crinkle around her eyes. She could be my mother’s age. She could be twenty years younger than that. Dorian Raines is not the sort of woman who leaves the Splicer Clinics augmented with more than a shiny new set of modified genes.

  “Come over here, will you, Lucy? I have something to show you.”

  I follow the doctor as she pulls up the sleeves of her lab coat and strides over to the workbench. She motions to the loops around my neck. I pull them up and over my eyes. The world turns a deep, vibrant green, like being underwater. Dorian flicks a couple of switches. A machine hums. A screen blinks on like a bright eye.

  “Look,” she says. A white sleeve swims in front of my eyes, and I pull my attention to the small dish she indicates. Dirt. And trees. And maybe a leaf mixed in there. I touch the controls on the sides of the loops and instantly I’m looking at the specimens at a microscopic level. Fine lines, veins, and apartment-like blocks fill my sightline.

  “What am I looking at here?” I ask.

  Bright metallic particles swim like exotic goldfish close to the cellulose bricks of the leaf. I watch as those goldfish nibble on the walls. The walls suddenly split in an act of mitosis so explosive I jump back. Jared’s hand burns my skin where he’s crept up beside me.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Doc?” Jared asks from just behind me. But I can’t wrest my eyes from the sight before me. The small, darting things eating, or maybe feeding, the cells. Blooming like time-lapsed flowers. My stomach sinks. I know what this is.

  Nanotech. Magic bombs.

  “How did you get it to work?”

  The doc pulls off her loops and bobs forward. “Once I realized that the nanotech deactivated without the presence of organic matter, it was fairly simple. This phenotype of leaf can survive without nutrients for days.”

  “What’s it doing, Doc?” Jared asks. I jump as his hand comes up and grazes my arm.

  The doc expels a breath and her unruly lock tosses up. “What it was programmed to do, I fear. It accelerates growth exponentially.”

  My mind leaps to all sorts of horrible conclusions. “What if it hits a human?”

  The doc just shakes her head. “I don’t know. It could be that the nanotech is designed specifically to act on cellulose-based organic material. But we just don’t know enough about this yet. We’ll need to be extremely cautious with the experiments. It will take a few days before I can set up proper containment protocols.”

  Containment protocols. Meaning that there’s a chance that whatever the nanotech in the dish touches could be dangerous. Ravenous nanotech, eating its way through organic matter with synthetic gold-coated teeth. When I think of it that way, it sounds far too close for comfort to that other monster, eating its way through the citizens of Dominion and the rest of the planet. I want to ask. It’s there on the tip of my tongue.

  “Do you think…” I start, but a lump rises up in my throat, too thick to speak through. Doesn’t matter—the doc knows. She shrugs and looks away, appearing far more helpless than I have ever seen her.

  Dominion used to be a bustling megacity of twenty million. Today there are just less than three million souls surviving.

  “I haven’t a clue,” she answers. “We’ll keep working on it. Just know for now that it’s extremely unlikely that the Plague is anything but a natural evolution rather than something brought on by nano. I don’t want this keeping you up at night.”

  We stand there for a moment in silence until I’m brought back to Jared’s heat burning at my back. I want to step away, but if I move even an inch it will be proof that he bothers me. I remain still and try to unclench my fists. I am a Fox, I remind myself. I can handle one guy.

  “There’s something else you need to see, Lucy,” the doc tells me. I don’t miss the dark note threaded in her voice. “Come around here, please.”

  As I slowly follow Doc Raines around the counter to a second bench, Jared threads his arm over my back. I pretend not to notice, though my body hums at his nearness.

  “Keep the loops on,” the doc instructs, flipping on another screen. Little pink spinning globules fill the display. Blood cells.

  “Now watch,” the doc says.

  She pulls a small wire pipette and zaps the molecules. “Magnify the right side to nano,” the doc orders. I touch the sides of the loops. The image breaks into a series of three-dimensional geometric shapes, line drawings and dots you’d never imagine. DNA. The doc drops a molecule of blood next to the magnified DNA. I expect the two to shimmy about in their separate places—that’s what should happen.

  Instead, the blood molecules slide over to the lone DNA strand. I watch as a fat blood molecule transforms into a series of twisting ladders as it moves closer to the nano-magnified sample on the right. The blood ladder gloms onto the strand until it’s completely hidden, completely overcome. I pull the loops up off my face.

  “What is it doing? I’ve never seen anything like that.” Beside me, Jared takes the loops from my hands and slips them on to get his own look. The doc switches her loops off. I don’t like the look in her eyes, halfway between a revelation and something I know I’m not going to like. “Nanotech?” I point to the monstrosity on the screen. Because this is not normal. This is not human.

  “No, not quite,” Dorian Raines says, looking at me quiet-quiet. I glance back over at the action unfolding in the oval petri dish. “Notice how the stained DNA strands seems to magnetically attract the blood molecules? I’ve tried it again and again. It’s only blood that it pulls. My hypothesis is that it’s calling out to certain proteins in the blood.”

  Jared blinks owlishly through the magnified eyes of the loops. “Like a homing signal?”

  “You could say that.”

  “But DNA doesn’t do that. DNA switches things on and off. What the hell have you got in there?”

  “And this one does. Absolutely.” She winces, answering only his first question.

  “But it’s active…” When she says nothing, I prod harder. “It acts like the nano in the bombs.” I look up, bewildered, as another thought occurs to me. “What does it switch on and off?”

  Feeling faint, my knees start to shake, as though I’ve just been waiting for the bad news I knew was on its way. Because I do know. Even bef
ore the doc says it.

  “Lucy.” She pulls up her loops to study me. “This DNA is yours. The blood—well, I’ve been using some of the samples we have of your sister’s blood.”

  Feeling faint, my knees start to shake. Jared’s hands grip me. Hard, harder, like he can keep me standing if he just holds me tight enough.

  But it’s too late to turn back the clock. Far too late to pretend I don’t see.

  I watch as my own sample pulls Margot’s blood to it like it’s a starving baby at a three-course dinner. A roaring sound fills my ears, and I reckon Jared has the right of it to hold on tight, because I consider sliding down to the floor in a puddle of limbs as the truth of what’s just been revealed crashes over me.

  My blood acts like nanotech? For what purpose? And how?

  Amid the torrent of questions surfaces the mother of them all.

  “Am I even human?”

  The image on the screen blurs around the edges, then goes hazy and flat.

  “Wait a nano—you’re cracking up, Deep,” I say to the dark-haired wonder on the screen. Deepika Manda, another diplomat’s daughter, was at Grayguard Academy with Margot and me until three years ago when her family moved back to Asia Major. Asia Major isn’t falling apart as quickly as Dominion is. Then again, it was never that stable to begin with.

  Deepika’s form turns into a wave before going solid again, then blinks on and off. Her Feed tech tells the story of Asia Major better than I could. Developed in black market labs, most of Asia Major runs on tech pilfered and set up outside any regulated government channels, which, to hear Deepika speak of it, works so slowly they were still using dial-up while the rest of us had holographic systems. Still, Margot and I connect with her when we can.

  Used to connect with her, I correct myself.

  Deepika tosses a mass of shiny black hair over one shoulder. Smart, bright brown eyes fill the screen as she leans in closer to her face cam. “You really ought to speak with the Thorntons,” she continues. “You know they are connected to everyone in the Upper Russian,” she says, speaking in our society’s short code.

  Deepika’s father works for the president of Upper Major—which means she’s about as connected as a person can be on the other side of the ocean. And that’s despite low-tech, faulty communications systems, and a population rapidly being wasted by Plague. If anyone would hear about the whereabouts of my parents, I’d reckoned it would be her. It seems I reckoned wrong.

  It’s not like our parents to stay out of touch so long. Then again, since the destruction of our house and Margot’s kidnapping, I no longer have faith that I know our parents at all. Are they even coming back? A sharp pain jabs me in the chest as I realize I may actually have been abandoned. My parents may have made my life hard, but it would have been much worse without them. Family is family, and without them, I stand alone.

  “Yes, good idea, thanks.” I bite my lip, worrying the situation over. “But I can’t call them myself. They’ll know I’m fishing. I need to keep a low profile.”

  Maybe I need to keep my profile lower than low, given Doc Raines’s discovery the other day. If the Upper Circle knew my blood acts more like nanotech than organic matter…? They have a saying among Dominion’s elite. The only thing worse than being Revealed a True Born is being dead. So what would they say about me? I shiver in dread at the thought.

  “You know,” Deepika continues, “it’s very strange the way it happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why would such prolific figures disappear? Your parents have spent a lifetime building their position in society. Why have they let a bunch of rabble scare them away?”

  Deepika’s logic buzzes through me. She’s right. Why have they? Why go underground?

  Concern mars my friend’s perfect, round face. I must look aghast. “I don’t think you should be alone right now. I will get Father to—”

  “No!” I shout before lowering my voice. “Thank you, Deep,” I say with all the elegance I can muster. “I’m not alone. I’m safe where I am—safer than I would be anywhere else. Honestly, the last thing I would want is to drag your family into this mess. But…” I hesitate, biting my lip.

  I don’t like asking for things, let alone something that would put my friend in an awkward position. Still, I need the information. “I—I need to ask you to call the Thorntons for me. This needs to be discreet. Make up a story. Pretend like you haven’t heard.”

  “Pfft!” Deepika blows out air in annoyance. “Who needs to pretend? This town is about as far from civilization as an outpost can get.”

  “Thank you.” I sigh, sagging as relief floods my bones.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I have some news,” she says, fading once again.

  “Great—I’ll be here,” I tell her as we sign off.

  I wish to Holy Plague fire that isn’t true. I need to get out of here. I need to start searching for Margot.

  I quickly erase the call history but wonder, not for the first time, whether Storm tracks my phone. According to Jared, the tides of information are at the heart of good security intel… Which leads me to question yet again how it is that a man like Nolan Storm can claim to have no idea where my parents have gone, dragging my sister with them.

  Can I really trust Storm and his agenda?

  A few moments later, I slide onto the soft, buttery leather of the couch in the den. Beside me, Kira lounges in an overstuffed easy chair, her hair a glorious red mop on her head. I can tell she’s been working out from the fine sheen of sweat on her skin and a faint smudge of blood under her nostril.

  “Penny kick your ass again?”

  Kira sneers. “Funny. Especially coming from a girl I could smear under my heel like a bug.”

  I smile prettily at her. “Which is why I’m smart enough to hire you for security rather than fight you.”

  “You’re not paying us any longer, though, are you?” she mutters.

  It hurts, another icy jab of truth. I’m here, a ward of Nolan Storm, who insists on acting like my de facto guardian since my family home was blown to smithereens. Yet, despite Storm’s claims that Margot and I are some different breed of True Born, after the “incident” in the lab, Dorian Raines insists that we’re not—can’t be. Something different, all right. Freaks within freaks. A category only my twin and I can occupy.

  Something dark must have come across my face, because Kira kicks her legs over the side of the chair. “Hey, listen, I’m just messing with you. Relax.”

  She flicks on the NewsFeed. A pretty blonde with wide blue eyes blinks as she delivers a grim headline. “Mmm. Pretty,” Kira says, sitting up a little straighter. “Listen, do you know her?” she asks.

  I ignore her as the woman’s image is quickly replaced by empty, rubble-lined streets filling the screen. The volume is off and yet, the grim city in ruins speaks as loud as thunder. I try not to watch the drone-fed images, but I can’t seem to tear my eyes away.

  The burned-out husk of my former home flickers onto the screen. It’s raining. Even on the screen, I can make out the slanted hands of the rain slapping at the ruins of my former life. The front of the house has disintegrated. A forest grows straight out of the holes in the third floor. The gates are shut, locking in the destruction and waste. The wood could make fires for a dozen Laster families over the dark months. Doesn’t matter, though. Even with no one shotgunning the gate, none will cross over to where magic bombs have fallen.

  When I can finally speak, I ask, “Why is my house on the NewsFeed?”

  Kira doesn’t answer directly, muttering darkly instead. “You ask me, waste of a good mansion.”

  “Kira.”

  “They’re going to tear it down. Apparently with the forest growing out of control on the second floor, they’re worried about stability. Go figure.”

  I slump back on the couch, deflated. A pang of grief threatens to swamp me. I didn’t love our life, but it was all I knew. Now my former home will become just another mess of t
hings to mourn. I’m still coming to terms with the news as a pin-neat, dark-haired woman walks in the room and crosses over to me.

  Alma is still a mystery to me: Part caretaker, part secretary, she stands outside the pecking order of the True Borns. I’ve often wondered whether she’s somehow a relation of Nolan Storm’s—not that I can trace a resemblance between this woman and my so-called guardian.

  “There you are.” Alma brushes a hand across her hair, pulled into a severe bun at the nape of her neck. “Thought you’d sprung free.”

  Kira lets out an unladylike snort. “We’d be so lucky.”

  Alma gives Kira a hard look. “Nolan has a job for you.”

  Putting two hands on either side of her head, Kira launches herself, catlike, into the air as she finds her feet. Alma tidies for a moment before she pulls a beaten and worn letter from her pocket and hands it to me. She looks at me softly, maybe even a bit sad. “Thought you’d like to be alone when I gave this to you,” she says.

  And the second I see the rolling, looping slant of the handwriting, I understand why. Because I’m crying like a baby.

  And I’m trying not to imagine what it took for Margot to get a letter to me.

  8

  Dearest little sister.

  I sink down on the rug, hands shaking. It’s not so much the words she uses that tip me off—though calling me her little sister does it, since we were born scant minutes apart. It’s her tone, as though she’s living some idyllic high life.

  For Margot and me, life without the other is a half life at best. Torture at worst.

  The mere fact that she’s sent a letter, and on paper no less, is by far the biggest tip-off. Real letters are the work of the rich, the Upper Circle—and not the kind who live here. Margot’s letter is an Upper Circle post from another world. Somewhere where they haven’t burned down all the trees and haven’t enough tech to get everyone circuited. Set down on creased and crackled linen, I notice the telltale sign that someone had already carefully pulled away the glue from its lips before regluing it. Maybe more than one someone.