Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2)

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  An impossible coolness kissed her fingers, and she kicked hard, letting it consume her. The chill engulfed her with a spreading wetness, pulling her under, and she couldn’t breathe. Still, her lungs ached, and she fought to rise. Then her face broke through the rough surface of the river. Gasping for air, she swallowed dirty water then threw it back up, her stomach a blistering sore. Feeling punished all over, she kicked, trying to find solid land and trying not to panic. Then her swimming lessons took over. The water was unreasonably cold, and she let herself go limp, allowing herself to float. The current wasn’t as strong as she had thought. Her fear had given it fuel and momentum.

  In the distance, the firelight bloomed against the night, and she let herself relax for a moment. The river carried her farther away, then her arms moved with all the ease of leaden weights, forcing her toward the banks and onto land.

  Mesa couldn’t even begin to take account of all the aches and pains, or decide where to start. She was too tired to deal with the first-aid kit in her sodden, waterlogged bag, and she desperately needed a moment to rest.

  But that dark, slithery voice wormed through her mind and demanded that she get up.

  “Who are you?” Mesa asked, her voice quiet against the cool evening air. Her skin turned into gooseflesh, and she rubbed her arms with her hands, trying to salvage some warmth.

  That voice was there, though, lurking. She felt her world tip and topple. She thought she was going mad, her mind dropping into an abyss.

  She asked again, out loud despite the voice being locked inside her own mind, her voice raspy, “Who are you?”

  My name is Alice Xie. It’s time we spoke.

  Chapter 11

  Jade held the small porcelain cup, inhaling the steam and letting the heat warm her hands. She breathed deeply, enjoying the scent of the jasmine tea and cloying sweetness of agave nectar. She wished she could drink it.

  The warmth felt nice against her bandaged fingers. The index and middle fingers of her left hand jutted forward. They’d been broken, reset, and splinted together. Gauze was wrapped around each fingertip, covering the tender, delicate skin that had been exposed after they’d pried off each nail with pliers.

  She set the cup aside and reached for a glass of ice water beside the tea pot. She winced slightly as the rim met her swollen lips then took a careful sip. She swallowed, unable to remove the taste of copper from her gums, and kept the fluid to the undamaged side of her mouth.

  “How is it?” Maxwell Schaeffer asked, nodding at the tea.

  “Fine,” she said, the word bulkier than it should have been. “Smells nice.”

  Schaeffer was a handsome man. In any other context, he would have been downright doable. He had thick, wavy brown hair and eyes that reminded her of melted fudge. The expensive mocha-colored tan played nicely with his blue pinstripe suit and crisp white shirt. The platinum cufflinks were the shape of a hollow triangle, the Greek letter delta, the symbol of Daedalus, an ancient mythological craftsman. Daedalus was also the name of the technology firm Schaeffer worked for.

  The company had begun as a cutting-edge fertility treatment center before expanding into other medical avenues and winning several important government research contracts. More than a decade ago, they’d unveiled medichines and offered the nano-devices to the public as a free booster shot. This selfless act had made the company a public darling, and despite controversial maneuvers that had, at the time, allied them with the US industrial-military complex, they’d largely been given a free pass to operate without restriction. Buying politicians in bulk had certainly aided the company’s executives’ ambitions of expansion.

  Overnight, they had altered Jade’s opinion on the integrity of the company. They’d gorged on her memories and peeled her like an onion, simply because they could. By breaking her down physically, they could wear out any mental blocks she might have in place. For Schaeffer, her memories hadn’t been enough. He had needed to hear her confess and make it clear that he was the one in control. All of the power in their new dynamic rested solely with him.

  The experience had been unpleasant, to say the least.

  “I can get you some food,” he said. “A smoothie, maybe?”

  “This is fine,” she said, holding the glass of cold water, her jaw wired shut. The wires made speaking difficult, but given how raw her throat felt from the hours of endless agony and screaming, speaking wasn’t high on her list of things to do.

  She gazed out over the railing at the city below. The airship had been making a lazy route across the Western Seaboard, and the buildings and vehicles below were small and insignificant. Fortunately, the arc of clear Dura-Plastic kept the wind down but not enough to prevent a chill.

  Schaeffer offered her a large smile, shining his perfectly straight pearly whites at her. She hated that smile.

  “Why don’t you tell me about Mesa Everitt?” he asked.

  Ah, finally, the nice approach. They’d softened her up with hellish torment, asking the same questions over and over, cross-referencing her answers with the memories they’d pulled from her skull before plumbing deeper through the mnemonic layers.

  Of course, she’d lied to her inquisitors, mostly out of fear but also to protect her friend, hoping she could call their bluff by lying. Her days as pickpocket, a thief, and a memorialist had put her on the receiving end of interrogations multiple times. Corporate, private police, the Catholic parishioners she had been entrusted to as a teen back in London—they were all the same. All she had to do was stonewall them and not give them any extra rope to hang her with. Schaeffer’s methods had been different, though, and the first nervy spikes of fear punched into her heart when his guys had showed her the cold metal tools of her interrogation. That was when the pliers came out, and one by one, they tore away her resolve, asking the same questions in between each yanked nail. The pain and the promise that things would go easier on her if she told the truth brought forth a flood of honesty that made her hate herself.

  Then muscled hands gripped the sides of her face while her mouth was pried open, and cold metal instruments slid against her tongue. A clamp encircled her rear right molar, and it wiggled painfully. The gurgled scream felt rough in the back of her throat. A brittle crackling noise shot her eyes wide, then a shooting lancet of pain was followed by a fresh hollow void and a coppery-iron tang trickling down the back of her mouth. She cried freely. They’d held the grisly tooth before her, allowing her a moment to study it through the fog of tears before discarding it. The dentist tore loose another molar before the questioning resumed. Schaeffer had stood beside her the entire time, leering, clearly enjoying her agony. They pried away at her mind and her body until all of her answers verified what they seemed to already know.

  Once her hands and mouth were ruined, the guards had returned her to the sterile white room, dumping her inside the door in silence. She mewed like a wounded animal until exhaustion claimed her. Through it all, there had been no indications of time, no sunlight, no stars, no windows. Nothing more than sleek whiteness. When they’d collected her an hour ago and brought her outside to the airship’s lido deck, she was surprised to see the sun and more surprised to find herself in flight. The ship was so quiet and smooth that discerning their travel was impossible.

  “Earth to Jade,” Schaeffer said, drawing her attention away from the Dura-Plast screen with the snap of his fingers.

  Condescending fuck. She hated when men snapped their fingers at her, as if she were a pet they could summon.

  “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be. You’ve been through a lot already. Don’t think for a single minute that you’ve been through the worst of it. Do you understand me?”

  “Yeah.” The word was hoarse and felt confessional despite its brevity. It carried the rankness of defeat.

  “Ah! Good!” A large parody of a sm
ile was plastered across his face as he clapped in good cheer. She was disappointed they’d taken away the silverware. She wanted to pluck his eye out with a butter knife.

  “Now, tell me about Mesa Everitt,” he said again.

  All he wanted was to hear her say the words. It didn’t matter that he could go right into her skull and suss out the truth. She had to speak it to him. Resigned, it took her a long time to force out the words.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What does she know of her time in LA?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “You’d have to ask her.”

  “Jade,” he said, “I’m asking you. Now, before we go any further with this, with your tough-gal act, I want to remind you that we stopped with breaking two of your fingers and your jaw. OK? We took two of your teeth. We tore off all your fingernails. You know this, right? I mean, that’s just where we stopped. There’s all kinds of ground we could still cover.

  “Now, I’m being pleasant here, yeah? Making conversation. Giving you tea. It doesn’t have to be difficult anymore, unless you make it difficult. How about I quit with the monologue and you answer my fucking questions?”

  It didn’t even matter at all that she couldn’t drink the tea. He hunched over the small art deco table, forcing her to meet his eyes. With his eyebrows raised, he seemed entirely earnest.

  “I don’t know what she knows of LA,” Jade said. Her cheeks burning, she added a contrite “That’s all I meant.”

  “OK. OK, see? Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “I don’t think she remembers anything. Whatever was done to her, it fried her brain pretty good.”

  “Have you ever noticed her engage in odd behaviors? Say anything weird?”

  “No,” Jade said, thoroughly confused. This wasn’t the first time they had asked that question, but no one had ever clarified what it was supposed to mean or why it was being asked.

  “How much of her memory did she recover? Artificially, I mean, like by mems.”

  Jade shrugged, not sure how to quantify it. “Bits and pieces. Not much. She’s always looking for more.”

  Schaeffer sat back in the chair, chewing the inside of his cheek. It made his lips purse in a prissy way, and she averted her eyes.

  “How long did you work for Alice Xie?”

  Jade canted her head, thrown by the question. That was the first time Xie had been brought up. “A few years.”

  “As a memorialist?”

  Jade nodded.

  “Before that?”

  “Odd jobs here and there.”

  “Aw, c’mon now. No need to be shy. I’ve been through all your mems, darling.”

  “Pickpocket jobs. B&Es.”

  “What a waste,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Why all the questions?”

  “Baseline test,” he said, without any hesitation.

  She screwed up her face in confusion, at least as much as she could tolerate, but he pressed on.

  “When Alice died, you received a data packet. Tell me about it.”

  “It went out to multiple memorialists,” she said, tripping her way through the syllables.

  He shrugged. “I know. Don’t worry, though. You’re the last one still alive. You should be honored and grateful we’re having this conversation.”

  She rocked back in her chair, surprised at his forthrightness. She hated how he constantly had the upper hand. She hated going through all of his questions when he plainly knew the answers. And “baseline test”? What the hell’s he mean by that? “It was a bunch of research jargon. Didn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Unfortunately, Jade, it meant a hell of a lot to Alice Xie. And it meant a hell of a lot to us at Daedalus. You see, Alice was passing along company secrets that she really had no right to. And when each of you received that data packet, you unfortunately all became accomplices. It’s my job to clean up these kinds of messes.”

  “No, wait,” Jade began, but she didn’t know where to go from there. The words unraveled and withered away. She’d expected a greater level of brashness from Schaeffer, but instead he sat there, calmly, still.

  He stared at her blankly then cracked a smile. “Huh? Had you there, right?” He pointed his index finger at her, thumb cocked in the air. He dropped the thumb and said, “Pew, pew pew.” He laughed.

  Then his face screwed up into seriousness. “How’d you get to know Mesa, anyway?”

  Jade closed her eyes, her cheeks burning with shame. “Alice,” she whispered, the name burning her raw throat. “Those were my instructions—to keep an eye on her.”

  “Were you supposed to do anything with the information Alice had sent you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said glumly. “It’s not as if I could ask her. She was dead, remember?”

  “But still, you went to Washington. Joined the enclave there. Why?”

  “What else was I supposed to do?”

  “You must have been very loyal to Alice. What did she ever do to earn that?”

  A pain pierced Jade. She hadn’t felt it during the day previously, that stabbing, gut-deep wound. “She was a friend. She was nice to me.”

  Schaeffer seemed to consider the words then nodded. “And Mesa? You’ve very loyal to her, too. She’s lucky to have you.”

  “I love her,” Jade blurted.

  “Maybe you recognize a little bit of Alice in her, huh? What do you think?”

  Jade’s eyes glazed over. “No,” she said, spitting the word out, hard. “They’re nothing alike.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘nothing,’ but whatever.”

  “What’s the point of all this, huh?” Jade asked. “Why all the questions? You already cleaved my mems apart. You know all the answers. What’s the fucking point?”

  “You talk a lot for a girl with a busted-up mouth. You know that?”

  He sighed and scratched at his forehead. “Look, we’re just talking here. Just trying to get a baseline.”

  “You said that before. Why? A baseline for what?”

  Instead of answering, he took a slow sip of tea, appraising her while he drank. “How much do you know about body-shifting?”

  The question knocked her off balance. She batted her eyes in confusion. She tried to speak, but he held up his hand, shushing her. He spoke for a while, and the bottom of her stomach fell open. She thought of Mesa and reflected on Schaeffer’s earlier words regarding her friend and Alice Xie.

  “What do you need me for?” she asked. The words came slowly and painfully. “What do you need a baseline for?”

  He rocked his head side to side, equivocating on the answer. Finally, he said, “For a proof of concept.”

  Chapter 12

  Cold, her back caked in river mud, Mesa tore loose a stretch of medical tape and pressed it against the gash across her belly. The shallow cut grew progressively deeper as it wended across her stomach and became a bone-deep mouth over her hip bone. Her lips pressed into a fine line as the tape pulled the skin together.

  She had to get the blood loss under control. The medichines coursing through her system could only do so much, and the collective nano machines were busy dealing with the damage to her leg. That wound screamed with protestations. The little healing bots were triaging broken vessels, repairing tissue, and breaking down the bullet into atomic base components for recycling or waste. Their artificial intelligence prioritized injuries, doling out work orders. The gunshot wound was their number-one task. The cuts across her midriff and face were low priority and presented minimal immediate danger.

  Still, bleeding was bleeding. And if the medichines were coldly calculating and assessing severity, she was on her own to stop it. She tore off another strip of tape then glued it over her nose and across her cheek. The top part of the
tape upset her vision like a dark ghostly image along the lower edge of her sightline, but she could deal with it.

  Every part of her body ached. She lay back down, resting against the silt of the riverbank, letting the thin grassland tickle her burnt arms. The sensation was unpleasant, but she couldn’t compel herself to move.

  Get up.

  And then there was that. That fucking voice in her head.

  I’m going insane, Mesa thought.

  You’re not. Now, get up. We have to go.

  I don’t need this right now. This fucking nervous breakdown. Not now.

  That’s not what this is. Trust me. You’ll die if you do not move right now.

  What are you?

  I told you, my name is Alice Xie.

  That’s who, not what.

  Semantics. Get up.

  No.

  Goddamnit, get up!

  If I don’t?

  I told you. You will die. They’re coming for you.

  Mesa laughed, a sudden insight hitting her. She had no idea if Alice was correct or not, but what the hell, right? No, Mesa said. They’re coming for you.

  The voice grew silent, caught off guard, maybe. Mesa smiled in spite of herself. Still, she thought Alice had a point.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, huh?

  She practically felt the curl of a smile growing in her mind and saw it with her mind’s eye. She could sense the edge of a foreign thought, which she could not quite grasp, and she probed deeper for it, knowing that she was wandering into the dark, dangerous waters of this other being.

  You’re much like your father, you know, Alice said, rocking Mesa into silence.

  Fuck yourself, Mesa said. She worked her good leg under herself and stood clumsily. The world canted for an instant before righting itself. She took a tentative step forward, limping up the river bank. Her clothes were sodden, and she stank of polluted water. As the earth gave up the ghost of its heat and the air grew colder, she wondered if she wouldn’t still die out here. Exposure, hypothermia—both were good options.