Mindwalker

by AJ Steiger

  He stares at me, expressionless.

  “We’ll make a run for the northern border,” I say. My head spins. Am I really saying this? Am I really considering this? “I know security is tight, but people still manage to cross over illegally, so there must be a way. IFEN has no authority in Canada.”

  “If we leave,” he says, “we can’t come back. You know that, right?”

  My breathing quickens. I have one last chance to reclaim my old life, and all I have to do is walk into IFEN headquarters. If I don’t, that chance will be lost forever. I’ll be a fugitive. There’s no guarantee that we’ll make it to the border, or that we’ll be able to get across, and even if we do, I have only the foggiest idea of what things are like in Canada, whether we’ll be welcomed or treated as criminals. Dizziness swims over me.

  Ian’s face flashes through my head. What will happen to him if Steven and I run away?

  What will happen to Steven if we don’t?

  “I know,” I whisper, and turn away. “I’m going to get packed.”

  In my bedroom, I throw some clothes into a suitcase, along with a few other essentials. I set my cell phone on my dresser. Abandoning it feels like leaving one of my arms behind, but cell phones can be tracked. Instead, I take a credit card preloaded with about five hundred Silver Units. It should be enough to last us a few days.

  Of course, they might be able to track me using the car’s GPS, too. But I’m not sure what to do about that; I know, there’s no way to remove it without destroying the vehicle’s functionality. I’ll just have to hope we can evade them.

  “Chloe,” I say.

  Her sleek black form shimmers into place on my desk. She’s sitting, tail curled around her paws, head tilted to one side. “What is it, Lain?”

  “Please clear out your memory caches for the past week. All the searches I’ve done within that time period, all the conversations we’ve had, including this one—I need it all erased. Can you do that?”

  “Of course.” She closes her eyes. Her ears twitch, then her eyes open, softly glowing orbs. “Memory caches cleared.” She smiles, showing tiny, sharp teeth. “I’ll deactivate now, if that’s all right.”

  “Thank you.”

  With a flurry of sparkles, she vanishes.

  I pause, looking at my phone, then pick it up and dial. Making a call is risky, but I can’t just leave without telling him. The phone rings and rings, then finally beeps and goes to voice mail. “Ian? I—I’m going away for a while. It might be a long time before I can get in touch with you. I won’t be able to answer if you call.” I feel like I should say something else, but I don’t know what. My thoughts are a chaotic mess. “Please take care of yourself.” It’s inadequate, I know, especially after everything he’s done for me. But it’s all I can give.

  I hang up.

  I dash downstairs, grab my Gate from the basement, and load the whole thing—the two helmets and slim hard drive—into the trunk of my car. I don’t expect to need it. I just don’t want it falling into Dr. Swan’s hands if his cronies come poking around. This Gate belonged to my father, and now it’s mine. No one will take it from me.

  I think of the compact, still in my coat pocket, with the Chinese dragon pill inside. Briefly, I consider leaving it behind. It’s dangerous. An overdose of this drug almost killed someone. I waver for a few seconds before deciding to keep it with me.

  As much as I’d like to, I can’t forget the eyes I saw in Steven’s memory. I have to know what they mean. This isn’t about finding the truth for truth’s sake anymore. Now it’s personal.

  When Steven and I leave the house, it’s dark.

  “Destination, please,” intones the computer’s clear, neutral voice.

  I can’t just tell the car to head for Canada; I need a more specific location. What pops into my mind is the town where Steven was discovered after his kidnapping, the town where Emmett Pike allegedly lived. “Wolf’s Run,” I say.

  “Calculating route. Please wait.”

  As the car pulls out of the driveway and glides down the street, Steven says, “That’s the town, isn’t it? The one near St. Mary’s?”

  I nod. “It’s at the top of the Northeast Quadrant, close to the border.”

  “There’s nothing in St. Mary’s. We saw it. It’s just ruins.”

  “I don’t intend to stop there. Our route just takes us through the area.”

  He looks at me from the corner of his eye but says nothing.

  The car heads north, toward the shining band of the Aura River, which curls around the city like a protective arm. A bridge arches over the water. It’s slender and white, and appears almost too delicate to be real, though, in actuality, it’s very sturdy. It’s also the only highway leading out of the city. There are numerous monorail tracks running out from Aura like the spokes of a wheel, carrying passengers to the other major cities, and to tourist spots, but few people travel by car outside of Aura. Using the monos is cheaper, faster, and more comfortable. But of course, there are no monorails to Wolf’s Run.

  There’s a checkpoint at the end of the bridge, a tiny station with a peaked roof. As we draw nearer, wires tighten in my chest and stomach. I remind myself that there’s nothing to worry about. Right now, I’m a Type Two, but that shouldn’t affect my ability to enter or leave the city. If I were a Three, maybe—but I can’t have been reclassified again so soon. Dr. Swan is powerful, but he’s still subject to the law, and there are rules and procedures to follow. I should be all right.

  Steven’s another matter.

  “Duck down,” I say. He does, and I pull a blanket from the backseat and throw it over him. With luck, it will be enough.

  A man with a bushy mustache and a blue uniform leans out of the station’s window. Only when I see him flicker do I realize he’s a hologram. The car slows to a stop.

  “Name?” he asks.

  “Lain Fisher.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Mindwalker. I’m a student at Greenborough High School.”

  “And your purpose for leaving the city of Aura?”

  I freeze. Steven elbows me from beneath his blanket. “Uh … recreation.”

  “Please be more specific.”

  “I’m sightseeing. You know. For fun.”

  His mustache twitches. He peers at me through small blue eyes. If I hadn’t seen that flicker, I’d swear he was real. A human might find it suspicious that a seventeen-year-old girl is sightseeing this late, and on a school night. Hopefully, a computer program won’t question the logic. “Please look into the retinal scanner,” he says.

  I do, and a green light blinks.

  “Identity verified.” There’s another pause.

  “Can I go?” I ask, trying not to sound nervous.

  “You’ve been flagged with a Special Alert. Do not be alarmed. You haven’t been charged with any crime, but a Special Alert may temporarily inhibit your ability to leave the city. Please wait a few minutes while I access my database.” He tilts his head back and places two fingers against his temple.

  This isn’t good. I gulp. Ahead of us, a lowered metal bar blocks the road. It’s thin and flimsy-looking, but that doesn’t matter; there’s no way to make the car start. It’s locked in park, its artificial intelligence obeying some signal from the checkpoint station.

  Steven mutters a curse and throws the blanket aside. He pulls a bent paper clip out of his pocket.

  I tense. “What are you—”

  He jams the end of the paper clip into a tiny hole in the dashboard. “A trick someone showed me.”

  “There is an unreported passenger in your vehicle,” the hologram says. “Please state your passenger’s name and occupation.”

  Steven jiggles the paper clip, twists it, and jams it in deeper. The car surges forward and plows through the metal gate, which rips off with an earsplitting screech. It catches on the car’s hood and drags on the pavement, trailing a shower of sparks.

  I hear the hologram’s voice: “You are no
t authorized to leave the city. Please stop your vehicle, or you may be charged with a violation of Code 47B—”

  The car shoots forward, the speedometer hovering around seventy-five miles an hour. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a car moving this fast. I press my back against the seat, heart hammering, fingers digging into the cushions.

  The gate falls off the hood and clatters to the pavement. As I watch it recede in the rearview mirror, I press a hand to my mouth. “Oh God.” A hysterical giggle bubbles up in my throat, and I choke it down. The bent paper clip is still jammed into the dashboard. “Is this—safe?”

  “Kind of,” Steven says.

  “Kind of?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for that holo to contact the police. Or IFEN.”

  Behind us, the towering city of Aura dwindles, its skyscrapers glowing softly in the darkness. The whole city radiates light. I rarely see it from a distance, and I find myself watching over my shoulder as the buildings grow smaller and smaller. All around us, cornfields sprawl, stalks waving in the breeze. Miles and miles of cornfields, broken only by occasional smooth white domes, like gigantic eggs buried upside down. Agricultural centers. In the distance, I can see the shining silver line of a monorail track, built on tall, slender trestles.

  I’ve only been outside the city once before, on a class field trip to an agricultural center. I was awed—as I am now—by the vast emptiness around me. Some of the fields have already been harvested, leaving barren patches of land.

  “Is there a way to stop the car?” I ask.

  “The emergency brake should still work. But we probably shouldn’t stop unless we have to. We need to get away from the city, fast.”

  The car still steers itself, following the slight curves of the road, and its speed remains steady. There’s nothing but open road ahead of us. I exhale and dare to relax a little. Well, the car seems to know what it’s doing. Enough not to crash, anyway. “I guess we’re criminals now.” I smile, as if that makes the words less frightening, though a panicky static is starting to creep through my thoughts.

  Steven studies my face. “You okay?”

  “Yes. I think so.” I focus on breathing for a few minutes, then turn my attention back to the view, watching the endless fields roll past. It’s strange to think that people used to live out here. Before the war, the population was spread across the whole country. It must have been … inefficient. Now over ninety-five percent of citizens live in the five major cities. Aura, the rough geographical center of the United Republic, is the nation’s capital, and each of the four quadrants has its own lesser capital.

  After the war, there was an aggressive push from both IFEN and the government to relocate people from small towns to metropolitan areas. IFEN stressed that, statistically speaking, rural areas were breeding grounds for domestic terrorists and antigovernment radicals. In response, the government offered sizable tax benefits for anyone who moved to a major city, and the exodus left huge stretches of land completely uninhabited, save for the workers tending the machinery in the agricultural centers. A handful of small towns still exist, but they’re regarded as quaint relics of a bygone age, largely cut off from the rest of the world.

  “Hey,” Steven says, “if you want to turn around, there’s still time.” He’s sitting stiffly, arms crossed over his chest like a shield.

  “What are you talking about? Didn’t we already decide we’re heading for the border?”

  “I mean … if you’re having second thoughts.”

  “I’m not. Are you?”

  He looks at me from the corner of his eye. “Only if you are.”

  I sigh, leaning back. “Don’t confuse me.” Whatever he says, it’s already too late to turn around. We made our choice.

  Our headlights slice through the darkness. Before us, the road unspools toward the horizon like a gray ribbon. The roads aren’t used much, but they’re still maintained, mostly for the work vehicles involved in food harvesting. Occasional streetlights stand along the highway like lonely sentinels.

  It hits me hard in that moment. We’re alone. From this point on, Steven and I have only each other. Yet even now, I’ve told him so little about myself, my past. Maybe this isn’t the proper time for a personal revelation. But if not now, when?

  My hands curl into fists. In my head, I can still hear my psych-ethics professor nagging, telling me not to get emotionally involved with a client. But it’s hard to follow the instruction manual once you’ve thrown it out the window. “You remember me telling you that I lost my father? I never told you how. He took his own life when I was thirteen.”

  Steven’s breathing hitches. There’s a long pause. The car sails down the road, and it feels like we’re flying, hurtling through empty space. “And your mom?” he asks, very softly.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “She died?”

  “No.” My teeth catch on my lower lip, tugging. “I just don’t have one.”

  His brow furrows. I watch the wheels turning in his head. Then his eyes widen, and there’s an almost audible click as the light goes on. “Oh.”

  I smile weakly. “My father never married. He was married to his work, you could say. He planned to adopt at first, but there are so many legal restrictions these days, it’s almost impossible. Cloning is the easiest way for a single person to have a child.”

  The muscles of his throat constrict as he swallows. “God, Lain, I’m sorry. All that stuff I said before about NewVitro …”

  “You didn’t know.” I hesitate. “Does it bother you? Me being … what I am?”

  “No. Why? Has it bothered other people?”

  I lean my forehead against the window. The glass is cool. Soothing. “I remember, when I was little, a boy at school told me that I didn’t have a soul. That I wouldn’t go to heaven when I died. I’d just disappear.” I close my eyes. “My father always said that those people were simply unenlightened and that I shouldn’t pay attention to anything they said, but I—” My voice cracks. I cover my mouth with one hand, embarrassed. I’ve managed to sound almost indifferent until now. And still, the words keep spilling out of me. “I know it’s not that uncommon. It’s not even that controversial, not anymore. They have special private schools for kids like me so we don’t have to feel like outsiders. But I didn’t want that. It didn’t seem right to hide away from the rest of the world in some privileged little bubble. I wanted to show the world that I was just like everyone else. But no matter what I did, what I said, I was always an outsider. When I came to Greenborough, I thought it would be like a fresh start, because no one knew me, but still, everyone except Ian only ignored me. Like they could feel that I was different. And I started to wonder if that boy was right and I was an abomination, nothing more than a blob of chemicals created in a laboratory, and I—”

  Steven hugs me, suddenly and fiercely. “You have a soul,” he whispers against my hair.

  I sit shock-frozen. I’ve hugged Steven before, but this is the first time he’s initiated it. It takes me a few seconds to find my voice. It’s difficult to speak through the lump filling my throat. “You think so?”

  “You have feelings, don’t you?”

  “Feelings are just chemicals.” I close my eyes. “So are memories. Maybe that’s all I am.” Why am I saying this now, to him? I don’t even believe those words, do I? “Maybe I’m nothing but a biological machine.”

  He touches a thin finger to my lips, stopping me. My breath catches. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he says, echoing my earlier words to him. His voice is low and rough, but his eyes are gentle. “You’re too smart for that.” He holds his finger against my lips for a moment—it’s firm, warm—then lowers his hand.

  My heart is beating very fast.

  “The way you were born doesn’t matter,” he says. “You’re here now. You’re just as real and just as human as anyone else. Those assholes don’t get to decide what kind of person you are or whether you’re worth
y. You decide that.”

  I try to speak, but the lump in my throat swells, cutting off air and voice. “Thank you,” I finally manage to whisper.

  He holds me a few minutes longer. At last, I pull back and draw in a shaky breath. “Sorry,” I murmur, wiping the corners of my eyes with my thumb.

  “Don’t apologize,” he says gruffly.

  A tiny smile tugs at my lips. “Okay.” The smile fades.

  I want to believe that he’s right, that my choices matter. But there’s a reason only Type Ones are allowed to clone themselves. Science has shown that genetics have a strong influence over our decisions. My father was a great man, but in the end, he collapsed in on himself like a dying star. Aside from my sex chromosomes, I have his DNA, down to the last gene.

  I find myself considering, again, the eyes in Steven’s memory. I don’t want to dwell on that. Yet now that Steven knows the truth about me, I’m sure it will occur to him as well, if it hasn’t already.

  “I want you to understand,” I say softly, “that Father was the kindest person I ever knew. He wouldn’t harm a fly. Literally—if there was a bug in the house, he would go out of his way to catch it so he could let it go instead of killing it.” I stop and take a deep breath. “I don’t believe—I know those weren’t his eyes.”

  The moon peeks out from behind a cloud, washing the fields with silver light.

  “You really loved him,” Steven says.

  “Well, of course. He’s my father.” But then, Steven never knew his parents. I look at his profile, his faraway expression, and feel a soft ache deep inside me. “Did you have anyone you were close to, growing up?”

  “I don’t actually remember my childhood. Before the kidnapping, I mean.”

  “Nothing at all?” I ask, surprised.

  He shrugs. “I know that I grew up in a state home with other orphans, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember what I was like as a kid, or what I enjoyed doing. There are little flickers here and there, but mostly it’s all a haze.” His voice is low, pensive. His eyes have lost focus, as if he’s looking deep inside himself. “The doctors told me it was because of what Pike did. Because of the trauma. But that always seemed weird to me. Why would I block the memories of what came before that?”