by T. R. Graves
I wasn't a cyber-junkie like Isaiah, but I knew what it meant when Access Denied flashed before my eyes for the fifth time. Isaiah cursed under his breath while he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. An hour later, he still hadn't been able to gain admission to the database that would tell us how long this baby would live. Somehow I knew the date of her death was significant. Special.
The missing information and Selma's and Sam's heroic efforts at hiding it told me this baby was the one I needed. The one who would change things in ways only I could envision.
I'm willing to bet everything I own that this baby isn't just the nation's Firstborn, but that she's the special girl I've been searching for.
Chapter 1
Chemically Altered
Carles "Carlie" Anise Enoche
"Sweetie…" My mother's singsong words came to me in my sleep as she smoothed back my hair and rubbed her thumb over my forehead.
Because she was a devoted scientist, the pads of her fingers were soft and soothing. I, on the other hand, was a part-time lab assistant, working only as many hours as required. I spent my free time in combat training. Those drills left my hands and fingers calloused and my body covered in injuries.
I may have been a few days shy of my seventeenth birthday and as narcissistic as any other girl my age, but nothing about those imperfections mattered to me. I considered them badges of honor, ones I planned to offer up to Jayden St. Romaine as visible proof that I'd won our bet.
It had been six months since I'd laid eyes on Jayden, the most dedicated Surrogate Soldier I knew. He and I had grown up together and, until our forced separation, had trained with each other almost every single day since we'd met. Ask anyone and they'd tell you we fought like siblings and acted as though anything could be turned into a competition as intense as those associated with gold medals.
Settling for silver is never an option for either of us.
Jayden's parting challenge, one meant to keep me working out and training, had been, "When I see you again, princess, you'll be fat, lazy, and slow, and I'll bet you a week's worth of back rubs I'll be able to outrun, out spar, and outshoot you."
I'd rolled my eyes like I always had when he taunted me, and my retort had been simple. "You wish. I'll be in the same shape I am today, and you'll have to read Tawney's favorite romance novel aloud to me every night until it's finished."
Jayden had known me well enough to know his goad hadn't been one I'd resist. I'd instantly become interested in winning the challenge. I hadn't cared if the training killed me, and it had almost done just that on a few occasions. All I cared about was the satisfaction of proving him wrong.
On that last day together, Jayden and I acted as if snarky comments and shallow bets had been all that existed between us. Instead of telling me good-bye, casually mentioning he might miss me, or—better yet—giving me the courtesy of explaining why he'd chosen not to come with my family and me when we left on what was supposed to be a month-long mental health vacation for Mom, he'd uttered dares meant to keep me motivated. And alive. He thought I needed them more than his kindness… or maybe they'd been easier to hear than anything else.
Maybe they were.
"Sweetie, I need you to wake up," Mom hummed, interrupting my thoughts of Jayden, the ones that seemed to haunt me anytime I was away from the lab and not involved in training.
I missed him terribly and would have given almost anything if I'd insisted we put an end to our bickering long enough to talk, really talk, before we left.
Surrogates, by definition, were conceived in a lab, carried by a surrogate mother, and delivered in an exchange nursery where they were raised until they were old enough to be chosen by a family or accepted into Elite, a school designed to train the best Surrogates, molding them into the soldiers they were born to become.
Jayden was an orphan, and my family had been the only one he had. The only one he'd ever have. It had been my responsibility to remind him there were people who cared for him. I'd watched him stand by and stare on as we drove away. The words had been on the tip of my tongue. I'd just not been able to make myself roll down my window and say them.
I just couldn't.
Dragging me back to the here and now was the reality that there was something urgent, nervous, and frightened all at the same time behind the way Mom was stroking my forehead. Everything felt disconcerting. My eyes popped open, and I realized it was still pitch black inside and outside my room. The crickets chirped, the toads croaked, and the owls hooted in a way that told me the hour was more midnight than dawn, and it was nowhere near time to get up.
"What's going on, Mom?" I asked, jerking up and looking around.
It was too dark for me to make out anything more than a shadow pluming over the exact spot beside me where I knew my mother was sitting. Before she could answer my question, fight-or-flight chemicals surged through me and made my hands shake. My instincts whispered, It is time. My logic overwhelmed the whispers and screamed, It can't be. I'm not yet seventeen. I still have a few weeks.
My mother took my trembling hands in hers and squeezed them as if she could osmotically force what little strength she possessed into me.
"Give it a second, sweetie. The medicine'll kick in. It'll slow your heart and calm your nerves. Just like it's supposed to," she assured me tenderly while waiting with me for my tremors to quiet.
There was no reason to doubt what Mom was saying. Every Aspect's citizen knew she topped the list of worldwide entrepreneurs and inventors—beating out Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for top spot—after she started MicroCorporation, a company geared toward developing and designing the future. Among MicroCorp's most important successes were the MicroTracker and MicroPharm chips, which Mom intellectually combined into one device and distributed, effectively changing Aspect Nation and its landscape forever.
After years of running the company and more stressed than I'd ever seen her, Mom had an all-out nervous breakdown on the first day of our vacation, ending our once-in-a-lifetime family road trip and preventing us from traveling back to our home in the nation's capital. Still, no matter how feeble she now sometimes seemed and how immobilized she became with even the tiniest amount of strain, there wasn't a soul in the world who'd ever be able to take her accomplishments away from her.
"Mom, I don't want the MicroPharm to sedate me. I don't want to be so robotic that I can't show the first emotion," I moaned, rolling my head around on my shoulders and trying to shake off the medicine.
For us, this was an old argument. I knew before I uttered the words they were useless.
"You know it doesn't work like that. It stabilizes. It doesn't sedate," she defended.
The MicroTracker may have been an advanced version of the tracking chips that had been around for decades, but the MicroPharm was unlike anything ever invented, created, or contemplated. The simplest way to describe the MicroPharm was to say it was a micropharmaceutical device implanted within the hearts of every one of our nation's newborns within hours of their birth.
According to Mom, she'd begun envisioning it and conceptualizing it as a way to spend time with Peter Panzali, her grandfather, a man who—like my mother—lived eighteen hours a day in his lab, searching for ways to improve people's health, their life, and our world.
Mom idolized Gran. Elevating the pedestal she held him up on was the fact that he'd still been a teenager when he discovered by analyzing a tiny drop of a newborn's cord blood, the baby's life expectancy could promptly be calculated down to the date of death.
According to Gran's Theory of Longevity, there were just a few minutes after the delivery within which a complicated genetic algorithm could be applied to the baby's blood. If done timely and accurately, Gran could tell any parent or doctor how long the baby would live.
How many days.
How many months.
How many years.
More incredible was the accuracy of his predictions. According to Mom, Gran was as much actuary as he was scientis
t; therefore, he was able to calculate the impact of future medical advances as well as environmental stresses on the babies' lifespans. From there, he was able to assign the exact date of the infant's natural death, and that date could be calculated years before anyone considered the newborn's fate.
With my great-grandfather's discovery, he'd unlocked the future in a way that could be scientifically proven. The last thing he wanted was for his information to be used to decide who lived and who died, who was born and who was aborted, who received healthcare and who got kicked to the curb.
To prevent that, he kept his findings a secret. At least he had until Mom followed his footsteps, joined his research team, and convinced him that good could come from the knowledge as long as the date of every baby's death was embedded within the baby's MicroPharm's data chip, used only by scientists for their research, and kept secret from the person and his or her family.
"Better?" Mom asked a few minutes later, sensing I'd calmed.
Just like she'd said, just like she'd known, the tremors subsided and a sense of tranquility washed over me. She was the inventor of the MicroPharm so she understood exactly how it worked and how long it would take to see a change.
"Yeah," I whispered begrudgingly. My words may have been serene, but deep down, I wanted to scream for her to stop pretending as if my world wasn't about to end or that I wasn't about to be taken from her and forced to go to the preparatory academy, the secondary institution where every Procreate kid ended up as soon as they turned seventeen.
Even if their mothers still need them, I thought sarcastically.
"Are they here for me?" I asked when it dawned on me that Mom was going out of her way to avoid telling me why she had me up in the middle of the night.
Deep down, I assumed the midnight secrecy had something to do with the Scholastic Law, a decree written to force every child to college and away from the family who loved them, but I wanted to hear it from her.
Needed to hear it from her.
It was nothing short of a miracle that I could be pacified knowing I was about to have to leave my mother when she was still so terribly fragile. The fact that I wasn't wrapped around her and refusing to go was one more reminder of just how effective the MicroPharm was and how good Mom was at her job.
The MicroPharm was her device, and it was meticulously precise when it came to sensing my body's chemicals. If for any reason the chemicals and hormones maintaining my body became unbalanced, the MicroPharm went to work compounding drugs and normalizing my physiological makeup.
In much the same way, the MicroPharm proactively prevented childhood diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, etc.) and treated benign illnesses (allergies, colds, flu, etc.) long before I experienced even the first symptom. The device's ability to stabilize and cure was one of the many reasons Mom's invention had made her rock star famous and Rockefeller rich.
Finally, I took a deep, relaxing breath. I couldn't see Mom, but I could feel the anxiety and tension rolling off her lessen in correlation with my mood change.
"Not yet," she finally answered me. I sank into her as she leaned over, kissed my hair, and shoved a small stack of what felt like clothes into my arms. "Now get dressed," she whispered.
I might not have been able to see anything, but I felt the bed move as she got up, and I made out her footsteps as she left my bedside. The unspoken truth between us—they may not be here, but they're coming—was as thick, heavy, and suffocating as a room filled with deadly smoke.
I heard the creaking of the door hinge right before Mom quietly said, "Carlie, everyone's in the barn waiting for you. Even Jayden. Don't take too long."
Jayden! Holy heck! Jayden's here!
Chapter 2
Reunited
Carlie
"What?" I asked.
Other than shushing me, Mom ignored my question and shut the door, leaving me to do as I was told, a million thoughts pinging through my head.
The earlier surge of adrenaline was back with a vengeance. Jayden's here. For all practical purposes, it had just been Mom, Dad, Gran, and my cousin, Tawney, for the last six months. I'd met lots of people since we'd left on our failed attempt at a vacation. Almost every one of them had thought they knew who my family was—who I was—but none of them really knew me.
No one would ever know me like Jayden.
My mind raced as I jumped from the bed. Even without Mom's express order against it, I knew she didn't want me to turn on any lights. She wanted everything we were doing to be kept from the Coxes, the couple who'd been hosting us since we'd left the capital.
If I had to describe the Coxes' farm, the place we now generously called home, and its efforts—besides growing fresh vegetables and raising farm animals as a front—I'd describe a situation similar to the Underground Railroad. The Safe Passage Network, SNP, members—led by the Coxes—designed and developed ingenious escape routes, recruited thousands of secret members, and had at their disposal hundreds of undisclosed safe houses.
Based on the secrets I'd learned through eavesdropping, everyone within the SNP network had a single purpose and a common goal for what they did. The single purpose being that of providing a safe passage for MicroPharm separatists as they traveled toward the nation's border with every intention of defecting. The common goal was that of saving the lives of the MicroPharm separatists' families as they made their way toward a different kind of life.
The Coxes' farmhouse was old, and its walls were thin. Since my room was right above the house's main room and there was a vent that acted as a microphone connecting the two, there were few living room conversations I missed if I listened hard enough. I wasn't proud of myself for eavesdropping, but my family's safety was in jeopardy. Because of that, I made it my business to know as much as possible about the Coxes, their farm, and anything that happened there.
Listening in was merely a means to an end because I'd known as soon as we arrived there was something significant going on… something that made listening to private conversations more important than the rules of etiquette that said I should respect the owners' and my parents' privacy.
"Every last SNP resource is used to provide the food, shelter, and passages that keep the separatists and their families under the DOA's radar," Mac Cox had told Mom and Dad one night after they thought everyone else was asleep.
If I'd not been up wondering what Jayden was doing without me, I'd have never overheard anything about Safe Passage Network, and I'd still be as clueless as Gran and Tawney still were about the farmhouse, its owners (Mac and Elle Cox), and their roles in the network. Since I was morbidly fascinated by the DOA, I'd been all ears the minute Mac mentioned the organization.
I'd heard of the DOA before that night. The first time had been at school, and as soon as the teachers who'd been talking about it noticed me and my interest, their gossiping had stopped and they scattered like the cockroaches I'd always been sure they'd been spawned from. That night, I asked Dad about them. The way he'd very noticeably blew me off and claimed he had a call to make had only made me more curious.
A few minutes after that, I stalked Jayden, found him in his room, and asked him the same thing.
"What makes you ask about the DOA, princess?" he'd asked, clearly hedging and obviously looking around for his own escape route.
"That doesn't matter. I want to know," I'd insisted, blocking the way to his door.
He'd run his hands through his hair and sighed heavily. He knew as well as me that I'd never stop asking. After a final deep breath, he'd said, "The DOA, Department of Aberrant, is the enforcement agency charged with hunting down and killing MicroPharm separatists."
"What the hell is a MicroPharm separatist?" I'd asked.
Jayden rolled his eyes, acting as if he thought I were an irritating child whose one question and one answer was sure to lead to many, many more.
He'd been right!
"All you need to know, Carlie, is they are people who dislike you. They equate you with the MicroPha
rm, and they hate everything that has anything to do with the device. You. Your parents. Your whole family," he'd blurted before turning me toward the door of his room, ushering me out to the hall, and leaving me speechless after he closed the door in my face.
Hearing the Coxes talk about the DOA, suspecting through eavesdropping I'd find out more about the organization than anyone else had ever willingly shared, I'd kept listening. I stood up on the bed and craned my ear until I was as close to the vent as I could get, assuming the closer I got to the echoed conversation, the less I'd miss of it.
Soon, I'd found that standing up or sitting down made little difference when it came to what I heard. Dad's and Mom's responses as they talked to the Coxes had been whispered, meaning it hadn't been nearly as easy for me to hear what they'd been asking and saying as it had been for me to hear the Coxes' comments. It was as if Mom and Dad knew the house's weakness and suspected I'd been up and listening.
In response to one of my parents' many whispers that night, Mac had said, "If these people make it through the mile-high laser fence separating Aspect Nation from the Shadow World, they're no longer Aspect residents. They instantly become Citizens of Shadow."
The mere mention of the Shadow World, one despised by Dad and completely opposite of that we lived in, had caused a slew of vulgar words to fly from my father's mouth. I jumped because my father rarely got angry and almost never cursed.
One of the last times I'd seen Dad remotely like that was when he threatened to ban a thirteen-year-old Jayden from the training room. The two of them had been in the middle of combat training when Dad swiped his hands low and near Jayden's feet. The move had been unexpected by Jayden, and before any of us knew what happened, Jayden had landed on his back and had Dad's foot sitting on his chest.
"Dammit!" Jayden had sworn, slamming his head back on the mat.
