Oliver was right.
Yes, everything he’d said was true. Sam slumped back against the cushions. He wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy.He had nothing. Nothing but pain.
Oliver’s face softened. “You can redeem yourself, though.”
Oh God.Sam put his head in his hands. He was quivering, out of control. He couldn’t think straight. He only wanted to be delivered. Hedidwant to be redeemed. No matter what it took.
“Sam?”
He lifted his gaze.
Oliver pulled a slender cell phone from his suit pocket and held it out to Sam. In Sam’s hazy, uncertain state it looked almost like a peace offering, a palm leaf.
“Make the call,” Oliver urged.
Sam hesitated. If he made the call, then he would have one last chance to warn Gaia. One last chance to save her—and himself in the process. So he nodded.
Only then did the tears begin to flow.
“Okay,” he wept. “Okay.”
GAIA
Here’s a profound question: Why do people send around spam e-mails?
More specifically, why do people forward you those stupid spam e-mails in an effort to cheer you up when all they do is piss you off?
Today I got an e-mail (from some meathead at school I don’t even know) about some person who had no arms or legs and yet still managed to paint landscapes onto teacups. Yesterday I got one about a woman who bought herself a beautiful dress but kept waiting for a special occasion to wear it, then got run over by a bus. Needless to say, that special occasion never arose.
These messages don’t touch my heart or make me think profound thoughts. They make me want to barf. For starters, half of them are made up. Also, they always end with random clichés like
“live each day to the fullest” and “be grateful for yourhealth.” Does that compel me to thank God that I have all four limbs or vow not to save my dresses (as if I even own any beautiful ones) for special occasions?
Actually, they do compel me to do something. They compel me to send one out on my own. It would go like this:
Once upon a time there was a girl with four limbs (limbs that were hideous and bulging with muscles), a slightly surly disposition, and a penchant for kicking the asses of scumbags. Her mother was murdered. Her father abandoned her. Twice. Her uncle was just plain weird. Still, she survived. She even fell in love. Her boyfriend seemed like a great guy, but it turned out that he had multiple personality disorder. She never once sent him a spam e-mail. In fact, she recently sent him a conciliatory e-mail of sorts,to which he failed to respond.
The End
P.S. If you don’t forward this to at least twenty people, I will find you and kick your ass.
Okay, maybe there would be another postscript, too. It would not, however, consist of an inspirational homily. It would be a reality check. Something along the lines of how misfortune, misery, and loneliness are the guiding forces of the universe. The world is a freaky, hard-core place. Bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. All the time.
Oh, yeah—and here’s the kicker. You know that old saying: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”? Well, that’s a lie. What doesn’t kill you definitelydoesn’tmake you stronger. What doesn’t kill you hurts a lot and scars you for life.
That’s my final message.
ED
Women. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without ’em.
Why do clichés get such a bad rap, anyway? They’retrue,aren’t they? Otherwise they wouldn’t have become clichés in the first place.
Not that Gaia Moore is just any woman. But I’m trying to figure out why she blew off our lunch date. We were all set for meatball heroes. Shelikes
meatball heroes. Besides, it’s not like her to stand me up. Okay, okay—I know I’m contradicting myself. The fact is, I don’t know what’s “like” her and what’s not “like” her anymore. But I thought things were improving. Wrong again. The old emotional barometer is clearly still dipping and diving. One minute she’s desperate to hang with me, the next she ditches me.
Then again, lunch is hardly a priority when your whole world has gone to pieces.
I know I should be mad at her.In fact, it kind of makes me mad that I’mnotmad at her. But somehow, even when Gaia screws up, I don’t feel put off. I just want to help. I want to volunteer for the Gaia Moore disaster relief initiative.
And why is it that when you’re desperate to help somebody, somebodyelseis always desperate for help that they really don’t need? That somebody else being a certain Heather Gannis?
Whoops. I’m not going to think about Heather anymore. Right. That’s my new resolution. Not until we can be the same old nonfriends we were before I met Gaia. After all, you know what they say. Two’s company. Three’s a crowd.
an army
She’d get her ass whipped and go home feeling even lower than she already did.
Optimal Operative
THE AGENCY SAFE HOUSE IN DOWNTOWN Brussels dated to just after the World War II—a nondescript building on a narrow lane, not far from the café where Tom had first met
“Henrik.” It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned or maintained since the fifties. The interior was a ramshackle collage of peeling paint, stained rugs, and chipped fixtures; the stale odor of old cigarette smoke clung to the shadowy walls. But decrepitude was fine with Tom. An intruder would be a lot less likely to suspect that the darkened top floor had been equipped with a state-of-the-art computer system or that a member of the Agency was hiding up here.
Tom rubbed his exhausted eyes and studied the screen once more.
He’d researched the list of names and discovered that Loki had employed a large number of molecular biologists from top biomedical institutes in Europe and the United States. There were other files on the disk as well: a profile of several money launderers, a detailed portfolio of accounts in various banks in the Middle East and South America, and another list of names that Tom didn’t recognize—all accompanied by the titleSurrogate.The word was chilling in its ambiguity.
What’s the connection?How are these files linked?
Even after two hours, Tom was no closer to finding any answers.
He clicked the mouse and shifted to the one untitled document on the disk. It was encrypted text, gibberish—except for one word at the top: CLOFAZE. His eyes narrowed, and he quickly opened the decoding program. The computer whirred and clicked. An hourglass appeared in place of the mouse icon. Tom leaned back in the chair. This could take some time. He stretched and yawned. His stomach growled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten or slept—
Bingo.
This computer was fast—much faster than he’d expected. The unreadable symbols vanished, instantly replaced by a series of diagrams: segments of the double helix of a DNA strand. The segments began to divide and duplicate themselves. There was no explanatory text, but Tom didn’t need any. One word instantly leapt to mind: cloning.
He held his breath as the animation abruptly switched to various pie charts, graphs—and finally what appeared to be a kind of tree. Each branch featured one of the names of the people or organizations Tom had seen in the previous files.
He shook his head, frowning. So. All the evidence seemed to indicate Loki was putting together some kind of cloning project. But why? Cloning was hardly a moneymaker. Aside from universities, there weren’tthat many people in the world willing to pay for a replica of an organism—
Humans.
Of course. Loki didn’t intend to clone any organism. He intended to clone a human being. Himself, probably. Yes. Tom almost laughed. This was just the project for a narcissistic sociopath like Loki. Straight out of a B science fiction movie. And it was ironic, in a way, because such a clone already existed. Tom saw him every time he looked in the mirror.
He jiggled his leg, scratched his chin. This didn’t make sense. People had been talking about cloning human beings for years and years—first in fiction, then after D
olly the lamb—but the scientific community had always decried it. There were the obvious moral implications, of course, but also, nobody believed that it could be successfully done, at least not for a while. There were too many unknowns. Of course, Loki had always been ambitious. And he’d never lacked hubris.
Maybe this was another decoy.
Tom groaned. He’d been dupedagain.Somehow that woman must have—
The screen suddenly cleared.
The wordsOptimal Operativeappeared, accompanied by a faceless, featureless, three-dimensional woman’s figure. The figure began to rotate, and a detailed cross section of her brain blinked into a window in the upperright corner. A magnification process began until a singlebrain cell filled the small frame. The cell then morphed into a strand of DNA.
The figure froze, instantaneously replaced with a recognizable human being.
Tom stopped breathing.
His insides turned to stone.No. No.
He knew then that he hadn’t been duped at all. This was no decoy. This was the real thing. The missing piece of the puzzle. And until that moment he had believed he had experienced every possible horror: torture of the most brutal kind, the decimation of entire populations, murder in every conceivable form. . . but in a flash, all those atrocities were somehow made insignificant. Nothing could compare to the blank face that was staring back at him from the screen.
It belonged to Gaia.
Gaia.
Tom gripped the sides of the desk. He was dizzy, listing to one side. The animation resumed. Gaia’s figure began to move—to jump, to kick. All the while her face remained flat. Windows opened beside her.
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 145 pounds
IQ: 165
Languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, some German
Martial arts: kung fu, karate, judo, jujitsu,muay thai
This was Gaia’s life. It included every vital statistic. Every detail.
A final window opened at the top of the screen.
Greatest asset,Tom read in disbelief. He inhaled sharply as the blinking cursor spelled a single word below it: Fearlessness.
“No.” This time he whispered the word out loud.
Gaia’s figure began to replicate.
The screen divided in half, then into quarters, then into sixteenths—
Tom squeezed his eyes shut. The universe spun and did a nosedive. Loki wanted to mass-produce his own niece. He wanted to replicate everything about her: the physical strength, the cognitive abilities—and most of all, that one fatal flaw: the inability to feel fear. It was beyond evil. There was no word for it. Tom had struggled his entire life to protect Gaia from herself, to make sure that this genetic anomaly could never cause her harm.Thatwas why he had taken the time to train her in kung fu, jujitsu, and karate, why he had taken the time to nurture her intellect. He couldn’t bear the thought of her putting herself into danger without recognizing its consequences.
Optimal Operative.
Oh, yes. It was all very clear now. The phrase burrowed into Tom’s brain, gnawed at his insides. Loki saw fearlessness as a strength. And it was, for an elite fighting force. For an army. An army of Gaias. In asense, Loki’s planwasbiological warfare, after all. But not the way Tom had envisioned it.
He had to warn her. He had to get back to the States. Nothing else mattered. Anxiety gripped him so tightly that he couldn’t move; it strapped him to his chair. He saw everything so clearly in that moment; he’d been so consumed with Gaia’s safety that he’d completely neglected it—
The door crashed open.
“Hey!”
Before Tom could turn or even open his eyes, there was a sharp crack at the base of his skull. He saw a flash of white lightning. It was the last thing he remembered.
Solitaire
GAIA WALKED ANOTHER AIMLESS circle around Washington Square Park. What was that? Lap number twelve? Laps weren’t working. Nothing was working. She couldn’t quiet the dialogue in her head.Living with Oliver would be the best thing for me. No, it wouldn’t. Yes, it would. No, it wouldn’t—Why wasn’t there a pill to stop thought? Gaia wasn’t one for drugs, but she vowed then and there that if she could find anythingto turn off her brain, she would.The worst kind of overthinking was the kind that didn’t get you anywhere.And you knew it, but you couldn’t help it, anyway. You were just left with an endless replay of the same fruitless questions—ones to which you could never hope to supply the answers.
What fun.
She glanced over to the chess tables. Zolov was finishing off Renny. Funny, she’d seen this same scene a hundred times. Usually it made her smile. Not this afternoon. She felt like she was looking at two people from another lifetime.
Zolov raised his eyes and smiled, somehow sensing her gaze. “Ceendy? You vill play chess today?”
“No.” She shook her head.“Not today.”
Before either of them could engage her any further, she turned abruptly and trudged away. Why had she even come here? She didn’t want to be rude, but chess would only make things worse. She’d get her ass whipped and go home feeling even lower than she already did. No. There was only one way to restore self-esteem today.Kicking someone else’s ass.Finding some creep, some wife-beating lowlife or child-raping scuzzbag and helping to introduce their front teeth to the sidewalk.
But Murphy’s Law prevailed. It always did, as far as she was concerned. You drop a piece of pizza; italways lands cheese-side down. You look for trouble; Washington Square Park is as peaceful as a nursery.
Out of nowhere a wave of extreme sadness washed over her, so forceful, it almost took her breath away. And with it came a string of mental Polaroids: images of all the times Gaia and Sam had played chess together. All the times they’d sat on the benches. Loafed on the lawns.
The park was the backdrop to their history.
She paused at the Arc de Triomphe and peeked behind her. Zolov and Renny were already back at their game. A few homeless people shuffled down the gravel paths, jostling oblivious NYU students.The air was still, stagnant. The sky was like faded denim.Right now the park looked like some old beat-up set from a movie long over and long forgotten, littered with discarded napkins and empty Snapple bottles.
Gaia shook her head. It was time to get out of here. Find a new park. Some new hangout for all the good times with great new people that lay ahead.Oh, happy day.Maybe it was time to find a new game, too. How about solitaire? Sure. Perfect. She turned her back and kept walking, under the arch and up Fifth Avenue. Yes, she’d just reached an important decision. She picked up her pace. She’d overstayed her welcome. It was time to move on. And maybe she could—
“Leave me the hell alone!”
The shout came from her right, from a little alley tucked in between two historic NYU administration buildings. The voice was female. Somehow, amidst all the traffic and random bits of conversation, Gaia had honed in on the tone, almost unconsciously.There was fear in it.She peered down the narrow passage. A slender African American girl—decked out in bell-bottom jeans, sandals half a foot high, and one of those painfully hip baby T-shirts—was backing away from an older white guy with a beard and a wool hat. He’d practically pinned her against the brick wall.
“I don’t want any!” the girl shouted. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
A drug sale.
Gaia’s jaw tightened.
Of course. Only a dealer would be brazen (or idiotic) enough to threaten a girl in broad daylight, in such close proximity to so many people. The girl’s eyes flashed to the street, briefly connecting with Gaia’s own. Judging from the girl’s face, she was about Gaia’s age, maybe a little older, a college student, no doubt.
She was afraid.
Gaia stormed into the alley.Her luck had changed. Shehadfound a lowlife to pummel.Her entire body was an engine, pumping with fiery gasoline. But this wasn’t the usual precombat rush. This was pure rage. The scene was too familiar, too much like the first time Gaia ha
d ever metMary. . . Mary, trapped in an alley—helpless, alone. Trapped by scum like this guy. For all Gaia knew, this sleazebag might be Skizz’s replacement. He probably was, in fact. He was working Skizz’s old turf.
“What are you looking at?” the guy demanded.
“Not much,” Gaia mumbled under her breath.
He laughed. “Good one. I haven’t heard that since the fifth grade.”
The girl backed away from him.
“What’s going on here?” Gaia asked.
“None of your goddamned business,” he shot back.
“Fine.”
Gaia’s legs were in motion before he saw anything coming. This was a tactic she’d learned from some of the darker passages of theGo Rin No Sho,the ancient book of martial arts philosophy her dad had forced her to read all those years ago. It was a cheap shot, at least by the standards of honorable combat—by holding her enemy’s gaze, she’d drawn his attention away from the impending kick.Even as she leaped into the air, her limbs a whirl of focused power, she kept staring at him. . . staring and staring untilcrack!—her left foot connected with his temple.
He collapsed to the ground.
“No!” the girl shrieked.
Stunned, Gaia regained her balance. The girl fell at the guy’s side. She slapped his pale cheeks, franticallytrying to revive him, then shot Gaia a furious glare.
“What did you dothatfor?” she barked.
“I, uh—I thought. . . .” Gaia had no idea what to say. Something was very wrong here. She swallowed, breathing heavily. Blackness hovered at the edges of her vision. She felt faint, the way she always did after battle, but she didn’t think she’d exerted herself enough to warrant passing out. That would be all she needed right now.
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