Jill nodded with Clint. This type of attention made her uneasy, but there was an allure to possibly having her image broadcast to millions of people. She and Penny would be instantly famous.
“I dunno,” she said. “Isn’t it risky?”
“Everything we’re doing is risky,” Alix said. “But think about it, this is a non-violent way to sway people to our side. And all we’re using is the truth. Gray Altar can’t fight that. They’ll try to block our webcasts, but we have hackers in multiple countries that will make sure the world sees it.”
Sam knew One Nation’s strength was in cyber warfare. Propaganda and influencing major media outlets was a powerful as any bomb. “And the baby?”
Dixon returned to his sandwich as he listened.
Alix smiled. “That’s the hook. We elude to the baby throughout your mother’s interview, but we never show her. The baby’s reveal will come at the end of the series.”
“Like a show?” Dixon asked, chewing.
“It sounds a little silly, but yes, exactly like a show. We’re looking to build the most emotional attachment and impact as possible. With all the great footage we have, it’s a slam dunk.”
Sam smirked at Dixon, wanting his input. “So you have looked at the footage?”
She could see Alix weighing the consequences of her response as she paused and set down her tea. “Some of it, yes. I fast forwarded through anything really private. It’s just… what we have here.” She leaned in. “What you’ve provided for us, is the most valuable tool we have. And I needed to evaluate how valuable it is.”
Sam turned back to Dixon. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “It’s a tough call. I’d rather have the world know we’re not terrorists. If that means showing them a few days of our lives then I guess it’s okay.”
“Thank you,” Clint said, picking up a bottle of water from his lunch tray. “There’s nothing on those tapes to be ashamed of.”
“You get footage of me and Mason playing our songs?” he asked.
“Dude,” Sam sighed.
Dixon swallowed a bite of sandwich. “Just curious. That would be douce, putting those on the net.”
“Yes,” Alix said, looking at Sam and Mason and Dixon. “We got all that. There’s hours and hours of stuff to choose from, to edit down. Your mother has already sat for interviews as well as the geneticists who created the cure. All we need is you.”
Sam cringed at the word cure. There laid the ethical puzzle. The world had no idea what the cause of the Set Mutation was. Twenty years ago, the planet changed overnight. Evangelists speculated that it was a single god trying to overpopulate and punish a morally corrupt populace. Some scientists believed that radiation from space might be the cause. And of course, conspiracy theorists were convinced that the government was responsible, that even Gray Altar had a hand in the global phenomenon, and it was a way to overcrowd developing nations in order to change regimes and control markets. All of it was bullshit. Sam, like so many others, believe that the mutation was natural—that it was always meant to happen—and the word cure was far from the best label for something that could restore the world to its original order. If this were true, you couldn’t cure what had naturally occurred.
“Would you like to see that video we released last week?” Alix asked.
“They’re on the net already?” Sam said, the thought of this making her a little queazy.
Jill had turned away minutes ago, probably anticipating this reveal. And Clint stood,scratching the back of his head.
Alix nodded. The corner of her mouth smiled. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 3
Blackness upon blackness. Familiar and frightening. Bashful, trailing starlight for a few seconds and then nothing. Nothing warm and nothing cold. Sudden worms of light. Blinking. Blinking—Emmett Prince awoke in warm euphoria. His eyelids and forehead were damp as if someone had swabbed him with a compress. He was laying down. Nearly naked. A thin sheet made little hills where he knew his feet and knees and hands were. The sterile whiteness of the recovery room slowly focused as his haze lifted. Painful light. Whiteness doubling. Gray then more gray. When Prince managed to open his eyes fully, he could see the smiling face of Merrick leaning close, his perpetually tanned complexion like cracked bark.
“You’re awake,” Merrick said, raising Prince’s bed at an angle so he could sit up. “Welcome back, brother.”
Prince could already smell the chewing tobacco on his commander’s breath. “How…?” It felt like someone had balled a paper bag into his throat.
“How long?” Merrick asked before grinning wide. He lifted a straw to Prince’s lips. “A couple weeks. Nurse, alert everyone. The prince has risen!”
“Yes, sir,” a nurse said. Prince could see her now, a quick streak of white racing to the door. Pin pricks at the corners of his eyes. He kept blinking. More staff peered in, all of them happy.
“How…?” Prince said. “The girls?”
“Ha,” Merrick said. “They got you good, that’s for sure. Can’t say which one popped you in the dome, but they grazed you good. We had to patch your head up.”
Prince lifted his hand from under the sheet, noticing the I.V. dangling from his forearm, and he felt the side of his skull. He closed his eyes and inhaled so hard his chest fluttered. “I remember…”
Merrick stood. “What do you remember?”
Prince tried to concentrate, tried to recall the moments before everything had gone black, but it was like knowing the word for something—even knowing what the word sounded and looked like—without being able to say it. There was the fugitive mother, Jill Van Best, he knew that. And there was the man who helped her flee with his two boys, both of which were dangerous of course. What hadn’t been considered were the two girls, Jill Van Best’s daughters, who came out of nowhere and somehow gotten the jump on him. Rifles lifted. Both on him. Prince remembered this quick mistake and how he had tried to correct it, squeezing his trigger at the twins in hopes that both of them would fall. Apparently, that didn’t happen.
Blinking and sitting up, panic shot through him. From what Prince could see, there was no extra equipment in the room, only standard medical devices and what looked like an portable X-Ray machine folded in the corner. That meant nothing, he knew. Gray Altar was so good at hiding secrets that they deserved a new word for how untrustworthy they were. Prince gripped the railings of his bed. “I’m not… wait…”
“No,” Merrick said, grabbing Prince’s wrist. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t have let them do that.”
Prince ripped the sheet from his body, revealing the body he expected—the arms and legs and torso he relied on—the cock and balls he trusted—all of it connected into one toned mass that had been him for over forty years. He was not cloned. There was no way. “How do I know?”
“What?” Merrick said. “Because I said so. You.” He patted the bed’s steel railing. “Are you.”
Prince plucked the I.V. from his vein and strained to bend his legs. “Show me the footage. I need to see it.”
“Whoa, hoss,” Merrick said. “Slow down. You’ve been immobile for two weeks.”
Prince swatted him away. “Show it to me.” He winced as he twisted his hips and flung his feet to the floor. There, on his thigh, was the mole he had for as long as he could remember. Prince stretched out his arms and turned them, flexing and bending to inspect them from every angle. He looked down at his crotch to see the same, faithful appendage that he’d abused in his teens and relied on as a trusty radar tower in his twenties. It was intact. Maybe this was his body.
As expected, Merrick provided no emotion. “That’s going to be difficult.”
Prince didn’t look up. “Why?”
“They hacked us,” Merrick said with a suffocated sigh.
“The family? How?”
“No,” Merrick said. “One Nation. That’s who they were fleeing to. One Nation hacked our drones and killed the transmission. That’s probably how the gi
rls got a shot at you.”
With every swallow, the paper bag in his throat softened. The tingling in his ass cheeks and thighs dissipated. “Of course.”
Merrick moved to Prince’s side. “You gonna stand?”
Prince said nothing and extended his arm to his commander.
Merrick took it and hooked his arm under Prince’s armpit. “I can show you footage for the engagement and some of you and Ms. Van Best, but it ends soon after.” He heaved Prince to his feet.
Prince trembled as he strained and stiffened. “Let me see my head. The scar.”
Merrick took out his cell phone with his free hand and held it over Prince. He took a few pictures and handed it over. “They did a good job. When the swelling went down, we woke you up. Not nearly as bad as last time.”
Last time. Last coma. He didn’t want to think about it.
Prince swiped through the pictures, zooming in on the slim trench pinched by staples. They had, in fact, patched his head. That was obvious as he felt the tiny railway on his scalp with his fingertips. But nothing guaranteed they hadn’t activated a carbon copy of this body and downloaded his memories and personality into it—a perfect twin of Emmett Prince that was waiting inside some cryogenic sarcophagus for the day that he died on the battle field. Those labs were on site. Fort Walter’s freaks shop. But the clause in his contract strictly forbade this. Prince knew his father understood those special terms. No reanimation. This was a privilege that even Prince didn’t want to accept. Yet two undeniable forces contradicted this—the fact that Gray Altar needed him, he was as valuable an asset as any gunship or base—and the fact that his father, CEO and founder of Gray Altar, loved him. If there was a way to keep his son from god’s wrath, absolutely nothing could dissuade his father from playing god himself.
“If I find out you did,” Prince said, easing away from his commander.
“Please,” Merrick scoffed. “We might have our differences, but I’d never let them do that to you. How do you feel?”
Prince’s legs wobbled, but he stood unassisted. “Like two teenager girls shot me.”
Merrick laughed. “Yeah, that’s a shitty day. At least one of them missed. Little bitches.” Merrick tossed him a gown. “They’re going to want to check you out, all that.”
“After you catch me up on what happened,” he said. Prince imagined he looked like a scarecrow as he crept into the gown. Two nurses blushed from the doorway.
“Sir,” one of the nurses said, “We really need to run a few tests.”
Prince blamed the mix of pain medication and renewed appreciation for life for the vigor that vanquished post-coma rigor mortis. The only test he wanted this nurse and maybe the nurse behind her was to demonstrate if the bullet that grazed his head had compromised the functionality of his reproductive organs. He decided to keep this to himself as he approached her, eyeing her pretty face and slight frame, wondering if she was young enough to have a twin.
“Prince…” Merrick called.
“You would tell me, wouldn’t you?” he said to the young nurse.
She shied under a swoop of brown hair. “I’m sorry, sir. Tell you…?”
Prince squeezed her shoulder and locked his gaze into hers. “I’m no clone. I’m whole.” He touched his chest with his free hand. “This is me.”
“You’ve been unconscious for weeks, sir,” she said, softening her eyes at him. “You’re not going to feel like yourself for at least a few days.”
This made Prince feel somewhat ashamed for his forwardness. Here he was, half naked, touching a woman half his age. “Yes,” he said, looking to his bare feet. “You’re probably right about that.”
The nurse behind her said, “We have a room made up for you, with anything you might need.”
Prince nodded, almost meekly. “Where are we?”
“Occupied Baltimore,” Merrick said. “Fort Walters.”
“Right,” Prince said, woozy now that his adrenaline was fading. “I knew that. Yeah.” He smiled weakly and looked at each of them. “I’m craving… orange juice.”
For him, Fort Walters had been a leap pad to and from missions or meetings in D.C., rarely spending more than one night at a time on a cot in the executive wing. What were old administrative offices were now living quarters for commanders, visiting chairmen, and politicians, but Prince preferred sleeping in the museum’s old gift shop where many of the other operatives bunked. Even if he could never really be one of the regular guys, because of his pedigree and wealth, he could at least let his teams know he respected them enough to sleep among them.
Side by side, Prince and Merrick left the medical bay. They took the elevator at Merrick’s insistence. “No stairs right now. Take it easy.”
“Are they dead? The girls?” Prince asked.
Merrick cleared his throat. “From what we’ve gathered, no. You injured one of them, but she might have survived.”
Prince held his cup of orange juice and sipped from a thin straw, trying to remember why he’d aimed for one girl over the other. Was it her long hair. One of them had long…
“They were different,” Prince said.
The elevator dinged as it reached their destined floor.
“I’m sorry?” Merrick said, a palm extended to usher Prince out first.
“The two girls, they’re twins, but they looked different,” he said, denting the cup’s ridged plastic.
“Different how?”
Prince surprised himself with his hesitation. He didn’t want to tell Merrick, or anyone for that matter, what he had seen. Those two girls didn’t just have dramatically different hairstyles, they were wearing different clothes—something he hadn’t seen Sets do in his lifetime. He said, “I dunno,” without thinking and left the elevator for the even colder marble corridors.
“They’re different because they’re enemies of the state,” Merrick said from behind him. “Their mother and the child too.”
Prince didn’t have to ask if the birth had gone well or if this Singular infant was now a precious commodity—he knew by the urgency in his commander’s tone. The baby was a messiah.
“Bring me everything they own, the girls,” Prince said, tossing his cup into a trashcan.
Merrick lagged behind. “Why?”
“Have a team bag everything, every little thing, and bring it here. I need to process it.”
“What the hell for?” Merrick said.
Prince stopped. There was an off-color square where a large painting had hung, probably for decades he imagined. He closed his eyes and listened, thinking he could hear rumbling from outside, but wasn’t sure what it could be.
“Maybe you need a few days to clear your head,” Merrick said, stepping closer.
This rumbling surged and waned. Maybe it was the voice of the missing painting. Maybe nothing.
Prince kept his eyes closed. “I want to know who nearly killed me. Wouldn’t you like to know who killed you?”
Merrick laughed to himself. “Funny. I have thought about it over the years. He’s probably still out there, probably thinks I’m still dead.”
The thought disgusted Prince. Here he was, standing next to and taking orders from a fucking clone—a man that should have died years ago.
“Just bring me all their shit,” Prince said, turning. “Everything.”
“Roger,” Merrick said.
Walking with Merrick down the halls of the stone building, they passed the familiar artifacts left by the ostracized curators: marble statuettes, medieval tapestries and holy relics, displays of iron and bronze weaponry. Prince stopped at a suit of armor, studying the reflection of his gown in the steel plate chest. “What happened to my heads?”
Merrick was silent for a few seconds. “Your head is on your shoulders.”
Prince leaned in closer to the plate armor’s reflection. “My shrunken heads. Where are they?”
“We returned them to the case you stole them from,” Merrick sighed.
Prince said nothing
as he reached up and lifted the helmet off the mannequin. He turned the shiny thing in his hands, working the hinge of the faceplate. Heavy. Ancient. Fit for a king.
“Put it back,” Merrick warned.
Prince fought the urge to slip it on and tucked it under his arm before walking on. “I will.”
The nurse was right about his room. Even for an old office, it was plush. Everything he would ever want was waiting for him because Gray Altar kept a detailed profile on all of their employees, most notably the heir to the company’s legacy—Emmett Prince. Instead of a cot, there was a real mattress on an actual metal bed frame. They had taken out the overhead florescent bulbs. Lamps cast warm circles on the tiled ceiling. Helmet in hand, Prince stepped from the gray carpet to the thick Persian rug that lined most of the floor. Merrick stood behind him.
“Your father is on his way here, from the U.A.E.,” he said.
Prince took note of the brass espresso maker next to the open laptop next to the virtual reality goggles for the game console and flat screen, all new, all obviously for him. “Here?”
“You almost died, Emmett. He wants to see you.”
Prince set the helmet down on the nightstand chosen by some operative who probably swore they knew exactly the type of nightstand he would want. He felt weak then and he hid this by balancing himself with two fingers pressed to the polished wood. On the bed, new fatigues were folded and waiting for him along with a new StiffArm.
Merrick pointed at it. “I had them add a bayonet to the wrist. For when you find those girls.”
Prince snorted to himself, looking over the retractable blade tucked into the StiffArm’s frame. “The sex?” he said.
Merrick leaned against the doorframe, arms folded. “That was one thing I requested for you. The nurses, they’re probably down for it.”
Prince knew he was joking. “Of the baby. Do we know it?”
Merrick was suddenly solemn. “Not yet, but I have a feeling we might know soon.”
The wooziness faded. Prince lifted his fingers from the nightstand. “What do you mean?”
Two Girls Book 2: One Nation Page 3
