Chapter 5
As the teleportation haze cleared from my vision, I found myself in JB Swift's secret mad scientist's lab. I had come here once before to help him take care of Lily, who had been close to death from hypothermia at the time. It was here that we had forged our pact of mutual non-aggression: that I wouldn't intentionally kill Lily, and he wouldn't tell his Enclave masters that Trevor Chiao was Prime Blue.
Lily let go my hand and stepped away from me as soon as we arrived. The cynical side of me suggested that she was getting out of the way of some sort of death ray that JB Swift was aiming at me. The rational side reminded me that that wasn't his style; an iron pipe to the knee was more the kind of attack I could expect from him.
I looked around the room. "I'm here, Oswald," I called out. "What do you --"
In a flash of the superspeed that was his trademark, JB Swift was suddenly standing before me, all twenty-four inches of him. "-- want?" I finished.
"It's about time you showed up," he said testily. "I have had the attack doll staking out your house for weeks now. She has been watching that sister of yours take her daily strolls about the yard; had I known it would take this long, I would have ordered Lily to kidnap her days ago to get you to come here."
I shuddered. I had no doubt that Lily could take Angie in a straight-up, one-on-one fight, even if Angie had the full use of her legs. I would not have wanted to tangle with Lily myself without the added boost that my force shield gave me. My sister, though, would not have made herself easy to capture; Lily might have had to cause her some damage to bring her in.
"Well, I'm here now," I said, and residual worry for my sister made my voice a bit more gruff than usual. "What do you want?"
He wasn't even looking at me, though; his gaze had strayed to something past my left side. I turned and looked, but whatever was showing on the monitor behind me didn't make much sense; it looked like just random numbers. When I turned back, JB Swift was frowning. "Damn! They've nearly zeroed in on us," he growled. "Look, Blue Prime, there's no time to explain. Lily, front and center!"
Lily straightened and moved to stand at attention before us, her heels together and her arms at her sides. JB Swift said, "Lily, initiate new user."
There was a pause, then she murmured, "Initiating . . ."
"User name is Trevor."
Lily blinked once, twice. "User initiated. Who is Trevor?"
I looked from her to JB Swift. He made impatient motions, as if he wanted me to do something. Eventually, he flashed away at superspeed and returned a second later bearing a pad of paper and a marker. Swiftly, he wrote the words "Introduce yourself to her!", underlined it twice, and thrust it at me. The handwriting, I noted, was the same as the note that had been pinned to Lily's jumpsuit.
"Er, hello, Lily," I said uncertainly. "I'm Trevor."
She pivoted smoothly to face me, and her eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time. "Hello, Trevor," she said in her flat, unemotional voice. "Please talk to me some more so that I can learn what your voice sounds like."
I glanced over at JB Swift, who gave me an impatient "go on" motion. "Um, okay. You, uh, you probably don't recognize me, but we have met before, many times. I have --"
"Voice recognition has been achieved," she interrupted. "Trevor, please walk around so that I can become familiar with how you move."
Now I was starting to get impatient. I rounded on JB Swift. "Oswald, what is going on?" I demanded. "Why did you bring me here?"
JB Swift was looking at that monitor again. He shook his head. "There's no time. Follow me!"
"No way." I stood my ground, crossing my arms. "Not until you tell me what the hell is going on here."
"Look, Blue Prime," he snarled, "in about five minutes, this whole place is going to be swarming with whatever monsters and other alters my masters can scrape together, and every one of them will be looking to kill me and capture her. A number of things have to be accomplished before that happens. If you have any desire whatsoever to help Lily, and if you don't want to be caught in the crossfire, you'll do exactly as I say. Now follow me!" With that, he stalked off down the aisleway.
I followed; I didn't really have much choice. Until I found a teleporter of some sort, I was stuck here. I noticed Lily staring intently at me the whole time we were walking, which might have been flattering had it not also been kind of creepy.
"Movement recognition has been achieved," she said after a few seconds. "Warning: Trevor has been tentatively identified through movement recognition as the opponent known as Blue Prime. I cannot confirm this through voice recognition. Please recommend a course of action."
JB Swift chuckled as my eyes grew wide. I had known she wouldn't recognize my voice because our force shields disguise them pretty well -- they even flatten out our various accents to some degree -- but I hadn't expected her to figure out who I was based on just my body movements. "No recommended course of action, Lily," he said. "Stand by."
"Standing by . . ."
We had reached a closed door; a window in the door showed that the room beyond was in darkness. JB Swift turned to me, proud as any father. "She's really very good, isn't she?" I couldn't disagree. "Right now," he went on, "you are simply someone she knows by name. She will recognize you whenever she sees or hears you, but she won't pay any particular attention to you or follow any of your orders, not unless I tell her to." He opened the door. "Get in, you two."
Lily obediently entered the room, standing just inside the doorway. I remained where I was. "What's this all about?" I demanded. "What do you want with me? Why are all these monsters out to get you? And why do you want Lily to know who I am?"
He glared at me for a moment, probably angry that I wasn't following directions. Then he let out a breath, and he seemed to sag. "I need your help," he said. "It seems that you and your fellow Primes have become a little too adept at destroying the monsters I have been creating. My masters believe I can be of no further use to them and have decided to cut their losses and destroy me."
I nodded slowly. Lily had mentioned something like that to me once, back in Guangzhou. So what do you say when an old enemy tells you he's under a death sentence from the real bad guys? "I'm, uh, sorry to hear it?"
A ghost of a smile flickered across his face. "I'm sure that's just a polite lie, but thank you for the effort, at least. If true, then you may be the only person in the world who would mourn my passing. Besides her, that is." He nodded at Lily, who was standing with her hands clasped behind her back, staring into nothing.
"Again, what do you want from me? Do you want me to persuade my teammates not to attack the monsters you send out? Because that's not going to happen, even for Lily's sake."
JB Swift snorted. "Of course not. I know what's at stake for you Primes. You might have all the sympathy in the world for me and yet feel compelled to destroy everything I could send at you."
I nodded. "So . . . what, then?"
He hesitated; I had a feeling that asking for help was not something that came easily to him. "Personally," he finally said, "I'm both willing and able to fight my own battles. I don't need anyone's help for that. I will take care of this matter myself, one way or another. I will be considerably hampered, though, if I have to see to her well-being as well as my own. Above all, I need to keep her out of their hands."
I frowned; all this use of pronouns was starting to confuse me. "Just so I'm clear," I said, "whose hands are we talking about that we need to keep Lily out of?"
"My former masters'," he said grimly. "I was to have been killed months ago, after that fiasco in Guangzhou. The only reason I wasn't was because they wanted her." Lily stared blankly ahead, seemingly unaware that she was the subject of our conversation. "The attack doll -- my masterpiece, my magnum opus -- and they wanted her only because she was good at distracting you Primes." He made a sound of disgust. "Afte
r they finally took her from me, I would have been killed immediately had I not fled to a safe place."
"After they took her from you?" I repeated. "Then you didn't send her on that last mission, the one in Hawaii?"
"No. I would never have sent her out in attacker mode that way. Those idiots have no idea how to use her," he snarled. "I understand I have you to thank for returning her to me, by the way. If you had called the other number on her cell, the one marked 'Home', I would never have seen her again, and she would not be alive today."
"Why is she alive?" I asked him. "I was sure she had drowned. Nobody could survive being underwater that long."
He grinned devilishly. "Four words: the mammalian diving reflex." He said it with evident pride. "In mammals which possess it, it greatly slows the heart rate and restricts blood flow to the extremities when the mammal finds itself submerged in water. It's relatively weak in humans, but under the right circumstances, it can allow a person to remain underwater without drowning for a surprising amount of time."
"I think I've heard of it," I said tentatively, "but I thought it worked only for very cold water. The water she was in wasn't cold at all."
His grin grew broader. "She is a thing of beauty, isn't she?" he said fondly. "I have honed her survival instincts to the point where that reflex takes over any time she is in danger of drowning. Of course, since she was underwater for such a long time, she had to be revived very carefully afterwards; only I could have done it." He gave me a little bow. "As I said, you did well to call me rather than them."
"Great," I muttered. "So her survival instincts are top-notch. What does that have to do with me? What do you want, Oswald?"
His grin faded. "I should have thought that was obvious," he said, the grimness back again. "She needs a guardian; she needs someone to take care of her while I am . . . otherwise occupied."
I stared at him. I hadn't expected this. "You're . . . you're going to give her to me?" I asked hoarsely.
He nodded. "You can put it that way if you like," he said. "I prefer to think of it as finding her a new home with someone who will treat her more humanely than my former masters. Her lifespan with them would be measured in days, perhaps weeks. With you, it may well be decades." His eyes bored into me. "Despite our enmity, Blue Prime, I can think of no one else to whom I would entrust her."
I hesitated. "I, uh, that is, I don't know . . ."
I don't know how he interpreted my reluctance. Heck, I'm not even sure why I hesitated, except that the idea of accepting complete responsibility for the life of another human being gave me chills. Regardless, he said impatiently, "This is no Herculean task I'm giving you. Lily is completely self-documenting, and she knows how to operate every machine here."
His gaze flicked to one of the ever-present monitors, and he started violently. "We have been talking for too long," he said roughly. "We're nearly out of time. Lily, grant Trevor all access to everything."
She blinked twice in quick succession. "Please confirm."
"Lily, grant Trevor all access to everything."
"Granting . . ." She drew in a long, slow breath and let it out; then she blinked.
"The two of you will stay in here while I lead our group of gate-crashers on a merry chase," he told me. "Come out only when they are all gone. There is a teleporter two doors down from here. I assume you can use it? God help you if you can't!"
"I know how to operate some of the basic Enclave models," I replied. I watched Lily intently as I spoke; she was still inhaling, exhaling, and blinking.
"Good," he said. "Take her out of here to someplace safe. In a day or so, take her to our rendezvous point. Its coordinates are known only to Lily and me; just have her tell you where her new home is. I will meet you there if I can."
While we had been speaking, I had counted ten Lily-blinks. Now, she announced, "Trevor has been granted all access to everything. Trevor is now a completely trusted user."
JB Swift nodded with satisfaction. "There! Now you have as much control over her as I do, Blue Prime."
"Why don't you come with us?" I asked him. "We could all go to your rendezvous point together. You would be safe there, wouldn't you?"
He shook his head. "Not for long. I can't hide from them forever. It's my enhancements; wherever I go, my masters will find me, no matter how well I am cloaked. Four times already, they have discovered a refuge I had made for myself and destroyed it. The one before this, she and I escaped with only seconds to spare. The facility to which I am sending you is the only one left with the equipment to properly care for the attack doll."
He glanced over past the door at something I couldn't see. "Get inside! Now!" he hissed.
I stepped quickly into the room, and JB Swift closed it swiftly and silently. Through the window I could see flashes of light -- teleportation flashes. JB Swift's gate-crashers were starting to appear. Lily stood quietly beside me in the shadows of the darkened room, and the two of us listened to the pandemonium that began breaking out in the main area then. I heard smashing, crashing, and howls of pain. JB Swift, I imagined, had gotten hold of one of his iron pipes and was engaged in kneecapping every single Enclave agent that had been sent down.
Above all the noise, I could heard the muted tones of a speaker calmly counting down the seconds until teleportation would commence. All Enclave teleporters had a built-in countdown mechanism, I knew. JB Swift must have turned up the volume on this one so that he could hear it over the commotion he was making. I guessed that now he was just marking time until the timer approached zero, whereupon he would zoom over to it at superspeed and let it whisk him away. The monsters would follow, and then Lily and I would be free to leave.
As I stood there listening, a thought struck me, and I silently mouthed a very bad word. I had suddenly realized that JB Swift never told me how to get Lily to go to sleep.
Attack Doll 5: The End of Lily Lee Page 5
