CHAPTER FORTY-NINE—CONXENCE   

They met in a parking garage in the southern sector of the capital, one with four levels and a single camera at the entrance of dubious functionality.

The gray hatchback they were told to look for was already on the third level when they arrived, the only other vehicle there at that hour, with two men waiting outside. One of them, middle-aged with ash blonde hair and a roman nose, was smoking. The other wore a black surgical-style mask over the lower half of his face.

“Is that them?” Su said as Richard parked a few spaces down.

“The car fits the description,” Richard said, trying not to stare at them too directly. He felt like they were walking straight into a trap, into a world that would eat them alive.

“Wait here, Sesame,” he said, undoing his seatbelt.

“What?” Sesame whined. “I want to talk to them too.”

“Sentient robots aren’t really—a thing people know exist right now,” Richard said. “I’d like to make this as safe and streamlined as possible.”

“You’ll be talking about Heather,” Sesame protested. “It’s gonna come out anyway.”
Richard glanced in the rearview mirror and realized Sesame was waving to the two men. They exchanged a glance, surprised. The younger of the two, a twenty-something with black hair, multiple ear piercings, and the face covering lifted an uncertain hand in return. The older one put out his cigarette under his boot.

“See, they’ve seen me,” Sesame said. “It’s okay.”

Richard stifled an extremely heavy sigh and undid the child lock. “That wasn’t my point, but fine.”

Sesame was already on his way out of the backseat.

Richard took a steadying breath and got out of the car. The rebels waited until they were close.

The young one spoke first, “Are you Su-Wei?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Call me Su.”

The man’s monolid eyes scrunched in a calm smile and he extended a hand. His voice was warm and deep, “I’m Ganymede. We spoke on the phone.”

That could easily be an outright lie, Richard thought, recalling the cloaked voice. It made sense they’d want to protect their true identities, but it only increased his anxiety about trusting these people.

Su accepted the handshake. “This is my spouse, Richard, and this is Sesame.”

Sesame shook Ganymede’s hand, eager to participate. The rebel didn’t outwardly question it.

The older one also shook hands, considerably more serious. “Noran Kaczmarek. Friends call me Rann.”

Richard nodded, trying to suppress an urge to look at Su. She’d read him as much as she could dig up about the Conxence during the drive to the capital. Kaczmarek was the bold-faced leader of the entire operation.

“Thank you for meeting with us so urgently,” Su said.

“Of course,” Kaczmarek said. “So, run us through the situation in a little more detail. What are we up against?”

Su reviewed the background information through what had happened that night, leaving out the parts about organorobotic transference as before but including James’ infusion. Sesame was right, it was going to come up, but neither of them were ready to tell complete strangers about the complicated subject of their daughter’s trauma. As they spoke, Richard sent a text to the number of the device they’d been using to communicate with Heather: Meeting with the Conxence right now. We’ll keep you posted.

“They attempted to escape tonight, but failed,” Su was saying. Her throat tightened and she paused. Richard put a hand on her arm. “They were recaptured. Something was done to James, we think injected with Q-13. He, uh, burst into flames. Heather was connected with us at the time, so Sesame relayed the video footage to us, when you called me earlier.”

The Conxence members exchanged a glance.

“And you’re still not sure if Siles is dead?” Ganymede asked, surprised.

Su shrugged, and Richard offered, “Benson seemed surprised by the result, so we’re hoping maybe he made it through.”

“Do you have a photo of him and your daughter?” Kaczmarek asked.

Su pulled out her phone and searched through the photos, finally handing it over. On the screen was a snapshot they had taken at the beach, just a few days before Heather was kidnapped. She had roped Su and Richard into a selfie, despite Su’s protestations. Heather had made it her mission that weekend to get a good picture of her parents—the camera shy, and the un-photogenic—and she had been proud of this one.

The three smiling faces in the photo had no idea what horror awaited them.
With shaking hands, Richard searched through his own photos. He landed on a department photo and zoomed in. “And this is James.”

Kaczmarek and Ganymede leaned in, and Richard realized they both had a common disfigurement in the cartilage of their right ears, like a large hole had been clamped out of it. Ganymede wore a silver ring in his so that it accented his other earrings, while Kaczmarek had left his to scar.

“Young,” Kaczmarek commented. “He looks barely out of high school, yet he was one of your full time engineers?” He glanced at Richard. “Prodigy type?”

“He didn’t like the term,” Richard said quietly. “Or—doesn’t. I shouldn’t talk about him in the past tense.” Even though it was difficult not to. People didn’t burst into flames and survive.

“Did you approve of your daughter’s friendship with him?”

Richard hesitated. “Yeah, I guess. James was shy, and consumed with work, but I believed he was a good person. After the move, Heather didn’t have any local friends, and they were closest in age. She pestered him a bit, but I think she looked up to him, and she was interested in his work, which meant a lot to him.” He could feel Su’s gaze on him. She, too, had known James and Heather were friends at work, but didn’t think he was nearly as dangerous as he had proved to be. “And she brought him out of his shell, so he seemed to appreciate her company too.”

Kaczmarek nodded, thinking. “Supposing our rescue is successful, what will you do with him, as the one that dragged your family into all this?”

Su crossed her arms.

“We honestly haven’t thought that far ahead,” Richard admitted. “He says he didn’t mean for all this to happen.”

“Hm,” Kaczmarek grunted.

A long pause set in. Itching to shift the subject, Richard spoke up. “If I may ask,” he said, indicating his right ear. “What are those marks? Some kind of group signifier?”

The leader of the Conxence and his associate paused. Kaczmarek cracked a wry smile.

“Oh this?” he said, tugging on his ear and turning his head so they could see it better. “Gift from the feds, bestowed upon anyone arrested for ‘political deviance.’ Tags you as a threat.”

Richard hesitated. He looked at Ganymede, who nodded. The latter came as a surprise.

Kaczmarek exuded the calculating confidence of a seasoned rabble rouser, but Ganymede’s soft voice and kindness of expression didn’t quite fit the bill of what Richard had always imagined when hearing about the rebel group.

“Still up for associating with us?” Kaczmarek asked.

“Yes,” Su said, and Richard nodded, readjusting his glasses.

“Good. So, a high profile extraction. I’m sure Ganymede here has already warned you that we’ve never done a job quite like this, and that preparing for it won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, is your daughter reasonably safe, at least?”

“We don’t know,” Su said.

“I see. And we’re not giving up the possibility Siles survived whatever Empetrum’s director did to him?”

Richard nodded along with his partner, trying to swallow the tightness in his throat. “Also, there’s another prisoner James and Heather wanted to break out. So the extraction would need to be for three people, if we can manage it.”

Ganymede blinked and Kaczmarek’s lean face broke out into an impressed grin.

“Well, we got our work cut out for us, then,” Kaczmarek said. He looked at Su. “In planning tonight’s escape attempt, I don’t suppose you picked up any of Empetrum’s security protocols that can help speed this along?”

“Not that specific,” Su said. “But Heather might, if she’s in a position to check in.”

Su handed over a folder from her bag containing a stack of printed pages, which held the contents of the flash drive Alice Benson had given them. “The defector we spoke with gave us this. They told us as much as they could, but they haven’t been near Empetrum in three years.”

Ganymede flipped through the pages while Kaczmarek read over his shoulder, arms crossed. Richard held his breath as the speakers for the Conxence read up on the nightmare lab he and his family had been pitted against.

“Human weaponry…” Kaczmarek mused. “Have you come across anything mentioning the ICNS?”

“No,” Richard said. “Though James said they were steering him into something other than the project he came in with. Could that be related?”

“Possibly.” Kaczmarek said. “Hope he really did make it. I’d like to talk with him and see what he knows. The government’s released what I guess you could call ‘human weapons’ just recently, and we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with them.”

“How recently?” Richard asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“About a week,” Ganymede said.

“But they’re not—” He glanced at Sesame, who knew where this was going. “—robotic, in any way, are they?”

The rebels looked at each other.

“No, they’re organic, as far as we can tell,” Ganymede said. “Why?”

Richard and Su hesitated. Sesame shifted from foot to foot, and Richard thought if he or Su didn’t speak up, the ex-mouse would.

Richard took a breath. Then he told them about organorobotic transference. About Sesame’s journey, about Heather.

The two stared at him. Even Kaczmarek looked nonplussed, and he seemed to Richard someone who didn’t truly surprise easily.

“I’ll admit, most of what I’ve heard about the Conxence is from the news,” Richard went on, before that information could sit for too long. Heather’s transfer was done. Reversal was impossible, and what mattered that night was bringing her home. “They say you’re a gang of anarchists and vigilantes…”

“And what do you think?” Kaczmarek said, eying him, as if sizing him up, looking into his soul and assessing what he saw there. Something about this man seemed dangerous, but Richard wanted more than anything to trust him. The leader of the rebellion, perhaps the only person left with the resources to organize a successful rescue mission, who also, miraculously, both believed them and seemed willing to help.

“Unless she manages to escape on her own,” Richard said. “I think you may be our best shot of getting our daughter home.”

+

CHAPTER FIFTY—CHANGED

After the initial meeting with the Conxence, Kaczmarek and Ganymede took the Knights and their robotic charge to an unmarked brick building in a decrepit district of the capital. The area appeared to have once hosted business parks, but for reasons unknown to the Knights, had since been abandoned.

Ganymede drove the Knight’s car. He turned the headlights off, driving slowly past dark, condemned houses with overgrown yards, and long stretches of homeless encampments on the fringes of dead and mouldering office blocks. Richard had heard once that this was a signal used by local gangs, which only increased his apprehension.

The outside of their destination wasn’t any more reassuring, and Richard held his breath as they followed Ganymede and Kaczmarek through a back door and up a narrow stairwell, landing on an old linoleum hallway that seemed sturdy, at least. They went to a large meeting room to start setting up for planning, but Richard and Su were starting to feel the strain of everything that had happened that night. Ganymede suggested they rest and pick things up the next morning.

“You’re probably right,” Su said. “What’s done is done. There’s nothing we can do for them tonight, and we’re not going to be much help with stripped nerves.”

Ganymede directed them to a different room, in which they found a couple couches around a central coffee table, and a mini fridge in the corner. Sesame plugged himself into an outlet, and Richard and Su made up a bed on a pullout couch with clean sheets and pillows from a nearby closet. Ganymede had said they were clean, anyway. They just had to take his word for it.

Richard lay still in the dark, listening to the soft rumble of voices across the hallway as the rebels regrouped, and prepared to sign off for the night as well. Footsteps filtered past their door, and the foreboding din of sirens wailed in the distance.

Richard closed his eyes, breathing a shaky sigh. Su lay her head against his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” Sesame said quietly from where he sat hooked up to the electrical outlet. “I’ll stay awake and keep watch.”

“Thank you, Sesame,” Su said quietly.

“Do you trust them?” Richard didn’t know why he was asking. Hoping Sesame had retained some animal intuition, perhaps.

“I don’t know,” Sesame said. “I want to, though.”

“Me too,” Richard said.

+

James felt the pain before he even knew he was awake.

A heart monitor beeped languidly beside him, the sound oddly muffled. He thought the wires running across his chest had been fused to him, because there was something very wrong with his skin. When he tried to move, he felt it stitching, as if all his tissues were melted together, held intact by tiny metal barbs. His head throbbed, and his eyes felt hot and sticky in their sockets. His mouth tasted like copper.

He managed to crack open one eye, and the air needled cruelly on its dry surface. Slowly, he turned his head and opened the other eye, craning his painful, stitching neck to take stock of himself and expecting to see a charred mass. He vaguely remembered being on fire.

There were electrodes taped to his bare chest, the latter miraculously whole. Jagged patterns of dark unnatural black engulfed his ribcage, like ink spilled under the skin. Dimly, wincing, he bent his arms upward to find them swirled and zigzagged with the same dark hue. His hands completely drowned in it. Anything not claimed by the stain was red and swollen and peeling like a bad sunburn.

He realized then, that he wasn’t strapped down. Instead, he was enclosed in a cylindrical chamber with a transparent, domed lid. Some kind of pressurized oxygen chamber, he guessed.

He stared up through it at the paneled ceiling in dumb, emotional shock. As he slowly grew more lucid, he could only despair about what he and Heather were supposed to do now.

How had he even survived the infusion? No one survived the Q-13, Yeun had said. Not even Benson had expected him to make it.

He lifted a trembling hand to his jugular to feel his heartbeat for himself. He really was alive. But now would come the tests and humiliation, the poking and prodding and eventual dissection.

He closed his aching eyes. Being a test subject meant his only interactions with Heather would be when Benson used them against each other. The time for mind games had passed. The director would likely give him black and white options from here on out: Comply or die.

He couldn’t believe that after everything, Heather had refused to leave him behind. The whole purpose of their escape attempt was to get her home. She didn’t owe him anything.

Why couldn’t she have just left him behind?

He thought he heard a sound, greatly impeded by the transparent acrylic chamber. He opened his eyes to see Benson had entered the room with a couple of guards. James blinked and returned his gaze to the ceiling, pain rising in his chest.

Benson reached down to a panel on the outside. His voice purred clearly in James’ enclosed bubble, making him feel increasingly claustrophobic. “You even made it through the night. I’m impressed.”

James winced, turning his head just enough so he could see him. He felt like he would disintegrate if he did anything quickly.

Benson slid a computer tablet off a nearby cart, consulted the panel at the base of the oxygen chamber, and made notes. The heart monitor continued to beep.

“Your vitals seem to have stabilized,” Benson muttered, as if mainly speaking to himself, though the speaker was still on. The right side of his face was swollen and bruising under a large bandage. “I look forward to finding out why.”

James swallowed with difficulty. It hurt. It hurt to breathe, to see, to think.

“Where is Heather?” he rasped.

“In her cell.”

“Have you…”

Benson switched off the speaker and stepped away from the chamber, ignoring him. James blearily watched him and the guards wash their hands in the sink across the room and don sterile gloves, coats, and face masks. Then Benson moved to the head of the chamber outside James’ field of vision. He heard clamps pulling back. The panel came free with a hiss of air.

“Don’t move,” Benson warned. He motioned for the guards to come over. They took hold of the edge of the frame holding up James’ thin inclined mattress, unhooked some safeguards, and carefully pulled the whole setup out of the chamber like a gurney. The air outside was freezing cold, like ice water soaking deep into his bones.

“Why was I in there?” James asked, shivering.

“Your skin was too fragile post-infusion to tolerate much contact,” Benson said, as one of the guards tugged straps out from under the mattress.

Benson turned off the heart monitor and carefully took to removing the electrodes from James’ stained chest. The adhesive seemed mild, yet the removal still ripped skin. James gasped as the sensation rippled around the removal point like Benson had carved the electrodes out with serrated spoon instead of simply pulling them.

Benson’s eyes tightened in annoyance. Once it became obvious there was no way to remove the electrodes without damage, he took less care in removing the others. James braced himself, his nerves sizzling in the strain.

The director disconnected the electrodes from the wires and put them in separate specimen bags, while James lay back, short of breath and sweat standing out on his forehead. He closed his eyes and felt tears track down his face, all his strength gone.

He faded in and out of consciousness as he felt the guards slip gauze around his wrists first, then straps. Benson made a physical examination, listening to his breathing, heartbeat, testing the quality of the stained and unstained parts of his skin, swabbing his mouth for DNA, and taking a series of photographs. Finally, deciding James wasn’t an infection risk, he ordered him taken to a cell.

They wheeled him out of the room, which he discovered was on the basement level, and down to the cell blocks. Anxiety bloomed up James’ spine as he realized the cell he’d been assigned to was the one next to Hodgson’s.

With Benson overseeing the operation from a distance, they took him inside the cell and up to the bed, where they lowered the gurney and undid his restraints.
The guards helped him sit up, the touch of their hands stinging and painful on his seared shoulders. He slipped his legs over the side of the bed, and, bracing his arms on theirs, they slowly raised him up.

James set his jaw, struggling to breathe while an unsettling, gauzy crackling overtook his body in the transition—like the metal barbs stapling his cells, crushed together, were now splitting apart as his muscles stretched. They practically dragged him over to the other bed, where there sat a change of clothes and blankets.

“How nice,” James muttered, weak and winded. “Thought a concrete floor was going to be it for me…”

Benson scoffed as he and his assistants took their leave. “Don’t push your luck.”

The door closed behind them, leaving James alone. He sat still for several long moments, then found a sweatshirt in the pile of gray and fluorescent orange fabric and pulled it on. The fibers scratched against his tender skin, but James was so cold. Nothing helped it.

Carefully, agonizingly, he planted his feet apart. After a long while, he very slowly stood up, his attention on the acrylic mirror mounted above the sink. He was extremely dizzy and sick to his stomach, but he managed to shuffle across the room. Now that he’d been awake for more than a few minutes, he had begun to feel desperately thirsty.

He managed to make it to the opposite wall, but he was afraid to look in the mirror. He instead focused on the faucet, insulating his hand with the sleeve of the sweatshirt before pulling the lever. The action sent deep, groaning pain stitching up his hand and arm. He cupped his stiff, fragile hands under the modest water stream and endured several types of pain in his back enough to bend over and bring the water to his lips. It cooled his dry throat like liquid hope. And for just a moment, he felt relief.

He lifted his gaze to the small mirror above the sink, and that relief gave way to blank despair as he saw his reflection. The black stood out starkly against his pale skin. A curling stripe of it claimed the left side of his face, webbed and veiny at the edges as it ran over his cheek, down the side of his throat and under the collar of the sweatshirt. The ebony skin was smooth and cool to the touch, and everything else was swollen and tender, with burst blood vessels that were more black than red.

Patches of his brown hair had been burnt off at odd angles. His left eyebrow and eyelashes had met the same fate, everything above the black stripe burnt clean.

Even more disturbing, he realized his hazel irises had turned gold, reminiscent of the color of the Q-13 before it had entered his veins. As if he had become an incarnation of the substance itself.

The word “metamorphosis” tapped like a long fingernail at the back of his mind.

He took hold of both sides of the sink, his face going cold and a sudden high pitched ringing in his ears. He heard his breath rushing muffled and strained in his head. He tried to sit down on the floor, his joints cracking and protesting as if cushioned with glass.

He lost his bearings and sat down hard, his shoulders hitting the concrete panels of the wall. A shiver of needles radiated from the contact point, then heavy pain like the grinding of cinder blocks between his bones. His body seized up and he collapsed onto his side, a snarl of utter agony pulling from his throat.

After several eternal moments, the sensation began to fade, and James lay panting on the floor, the sound of water running in the sink keeping him dimly tethered to consciousness. Behind its obnoxious spluttering, a voice filtered into his cell from above.

“Hello?” it said. “Anyone alive in there?”

James opened his eyes. The prisoner cells were encased in concrete, but at the top of the walls dividing them spread a narrow span of empty space covered in a mesh of metal.

He realized the voice had to be Hodgson’s. Everything was hazy.

“I think so…” he said, wincing from the exertion.

“What is your name?” Hodgson asked.

Very slowly, he forced himself to sit up. His throat tightened, and tears welled up in his eyes. He exhaled, trying to get ahold of himself.

“I know you must be scared, and unsure of what’s happening to you,” Hodgson said. “But you’re not alone. I’m Erika.”

Benson probably suspected they had been in contact the night of the escape attempt, and had caged them in close proximity with hopes they’d incriminate themselves. Though, how that would benefit him, he wasn’t sure. To punish Yeun, perhaps.

“My name is James,” he said finally, hoping Erika understood the danger.

An extremely long silence answered him.

He carefully drew his knees to his chest. Bowing his forehead on them, he crossed his aching arms over his stomach.

Finally, she said, “Yeun’s lab partner?”

“Not anymore,” James said.

“What happened?”

“I tried to get a prisoner out but we got caught,” James said, hoarsely. “Benson injected me with his pet project.” His voice wavered. “I don’t think I was supposed to survive it. I don’t know if I have yet.”

Another long silence ensued, as she grappled with what both of them knew they could not say where someone could hear them. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” James said. He didn’t know if his survival was a second chance, or just a slower death.

He wanted to hope the former, but it was only a matter of time before Benson wanted to see if his serum worked.

In the silence, he debated asking Erika to take care of Heather after he was gone.

He almost did.

+

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE—PLOTTING

Heather activated the pain simulator intermittently to check in. She received a text from Richard saying they were meeting with the Conxence, and then later, that they had agreed to take up their case. She couldn’t believe the very same rebel militia she had been afraid was after her dad at the beginning of the summer had become their allies. She hoped Benson was as afraid of them as she suspected. 

Since James’ traumatic infusion, the director seemed to be ignoring her for the most part, and she spent her time trying to squirm out of the rubber straightjacket binding her limbs, and wracking her brains on what her next steps were. Benson might have thought he’d already won, but this would never be over until one of them destroyed the other.

A faint sound attracted her attention, filtering through the vents at the top of the prisoner cells. A cry of pain. Heather tipped her face up, her eyes wide. She accessed the memory and replayed the sound several times in her mind, trying to figure out what it was, and it simultaneously broke her heart and made her dizzy with relief to find she recognized the pitch of that howl. James had survived.

Heather climbed up on her cot close to the vent, turning up her hearing as high as she could and listening hard. She heard Hodgson’s voice, “Hello? Anyone alive in there?”

Then James. “I think so…” He sounded weak, frustrated, but coherent.

The conversation was short and basic, and then silence settled in. After listening longer, with no change, Heather adjusted her hearing back to baseline and sat down on the bed, activating the pain simulator to let her family know James was still a factor in further rescue efforts. She clung to that tentative spark of hope and relief, that all three of them would see freedom if they could just hold on. 

+

Planning began the next morning. A young femme-presenting person with large rimmed glasses and a bomber jacket who introduced themself as Jaeger joined them. Richard gleaned that they were Kaczmarek’s intelligence and technology specialist, and together, they began organizing all the information they had about Empetrum’s layout and operations.

At one point, Sesame managed to make contact with Heather and spent the next hour downloading over their spotty cellular connection her visual memories of the escape attempt, from which Jaeger built out a map of the facility—where the prisoner cells were, and what it took to get to them. During this process, Heather mentioned the name of the other prisoner, which all the Conxence members present were shocked to recognize.

“I told her not to go anywhere near that place!” Kaczmarek declared. “Of all the stubborn, reckless—” He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Ganymede crossed his arms on the table, troubled. At the Knights’ quizzical stares, he explained, “There was a death in her family, and she told us she was going to stay with them and needed to take a break from the movement, so I never thought to check. Her family must be worried sick. Do we have their contact info?”

“Heather does,” Sesame said. Heather was still connected, participating in the planning as much as she could stand, though she had to take breaks from the pain simulator. “Erika gave it to her.”

Sesame relayed the phone number, and Ganymede excused himself to make the call.

It was all so hard for Richard and Su to swallow. Heather tried to omit parts and pull punches in her own narrative, and Richard suspected Sesame further cleaned it up before passing it along, possibly even at her request. Richard wished she would be more open with them, so they could attempt to comfort her across the distance.

But Heather wasn’t looking for comfort in that moment. There would be time to grieve when she was safe at home, with James and Erika in tow.

Finally, after looking over the data, Kaczmarek sat back with crossed arms. “We’ll have to stake out the location from a distance before we even think about getting close. Then, a small infiltration to gain access to their systems—bootleg access badges, futz with cameras et cetera. After that, the extraction of three prisoners will likely get chaotic on the way out. I think I know how to get my hands on some equipment to help with that.”

Richard balked. “Equipment? You don’t mean…”

“Tranqs, gas, stun grenades,” Kaczmarek said without skipping a beat, watching how each of the list items landed. “We already have a good supply of smoke bombs.” He cast a grin at Jaeger. “We make ‘em in house.”

“We never use lethal force,” Ganymede gently assured the Knights.

“Just deeply unpleasant force,” Jaeger smirked. Then it was back to business. “What kind of device is Heather using to communicate? Maybe she can meet us in the middle for phase two.”

“She doesn’t know the mechanics of it,” Su said. “We’d have to ask James for that, but I doubt we can get ahold of him at this point, if he’s even conscious.”

“We’ll make do,” Kaczmarek said.

“I don’t mean to sound rude by asking this,” Richard spoke up, “But, why are you helping us? Empetrum is dangerous, and involved, and I’m sure is taking you away from other work. How are you benefitting from this?”

Ganymede glanced at the leader of the Conxence, who looked at Richard, his dark eyes steady and calculating. Kaczmarek leaned forward, lacing his fingers together on the table.

“In plenty of ways,” Kaczmarek said, choosing his words carefully. “On an immediate level, I’ll be damned if I let a government lab take children and get away with it. More transactionally, we’ll be retrieving one of our own, and moving on Empetrum will likely give us more information on the sudden rabbit hole of sentient bioweaponry we’ve fallen into.” He smiled. “So you could say I’m looking to karma for this one.”

Richard nodded and exchanged a glance with Su. Sesame sat next to her, watching Kaczmarek especially closely.

The door opened behind them, and a voice spoke up, “I’m here! Finally. How far did we get?”

Richard, Su, and Sesame twisted around to look at the young woman who had just entered.

Striding across the room like a champion returned to her king, she was the image of everything Richard had stereotyped the Conxence to be—cocky, athletic, and crackling with aberrant energy in a skull jacket and skinny jeans. In the gap between a black face mask and baseball cap bloomed a large dark bruise on her eye socket. She looked proud of it.

Ganymede’s expression clouded for a moment, his attention on her black eye. Then he smiled, gesturing her way, “This is Io, one of our main squad leaders. She’s agreed to work on this mission too.”

“Hey,” Io said, shaking Richard and Su’s hands with a firm grip. When Sesame extended a hand, she grinned and shook it too.

“Sorry I’m late. Day job woes,” Io said, dropping into the empty seat beside Ganymede. “So, bring me up to speed, how close are we to marching orders?”

+

Erika had a physical therapy session with Yeun that afternoon, and from the moment he appeared in her cell subdued and exhausted rather than his sunny, chatty self, she mulled over how wise it would be to ask him about James.

She burned with curiosity. Benson’s biggest threat to her had been to take her memories and sell her off to the military’s existing Compatible squadron. Siles’ actions, however, had earned him swift and explosive attempted homicide, and Erika wondered how anyone could have riled up the cold, invulnerable director so much. Empetrum was enough of a cult that she would have thought it standard protocol, except for how much it had disturbed Yeun.

“I heard your lab partner was a turncoat,” she said finally, once they were a few minutes into the session.

Yeun winced, handing a weighted ball to her right accessory arm. She sympathized with James and the robot, but it was also morbidly satisfying to watch how much drama their uprising had created among the other scientists.

Yeun didn’t answer.

“Benson did something to him and dumped him in the cell next to mine.” Erika said. “That’s weird, isn’t it? He was supposed to help you fix my modulators, and after a single misdemeanor, he’s even worse off than me? What kind of dumpster fire are you guys running here?”

“It wasn’t a single misdemeanor,” Yeun said, his voice a tired, worried monotone, as if trying to justify it to himself. “But that’s the director’s business.”

Silence sat between them as Erika worked. Her arms were finally starting to feel remotely useful. 

Yeun stood by, brooding. She hadn’t known it was possible for cheery sunflower Elias Yeun to brood. 

“Have you spoken with him at all?” Yeun asked finally.

“A little.” If she denied it, they’d find out she was lying anyway. They hadn’t said anything incriminating, and the resources James and the robot had given her were still safely stashed under the sink.

“What did he say to you?”

“Not much. He said he was sorry.”

“I bet he did,” Yeun muttered. As she finished a set and switched to a new exercise, she considered the dark rings under his eyes. 

Even though the escape attempt had failed, James had changed something. Broken something. 

“It seems like what happened actually affected you,” Erika said.

“Well yeah,” Yeun rubbed the back of his neck. “He was going to be my lab partner. He was a brilliant engineer and a decent person. I liked him.”

“You’re talking like he’s already dead.”

“He crossed the director,” Yeun said, not looking at her. “He might as well be.”

+ 

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE—COLLABORATION    

As soon as James plugged Heather into his computer the next morning to run routine diagnostics, she pulled up a text box and words flashed across the screen.

My parents found out about Empetrum, she said. How it got started, who started it—everything.

As she summarized the information they’d learned—from another Benson mother of all people—James took a seat in front of the laptop and pulled up his diagnostic programs along with some extra ones to help cover up their activities.

He extended his hands over the keyboard, pausing.

I guess I wondered why Benson was keeping an eye on Larkspur, specifically, he typed back. It makes sense.

Also, Sesame’s apparently humanoid now, Heather said.

Yeah, Benson knows about that. He told me, James replied. He’s expecting me to try something. We have to be careful.

Heather lay still on the counter, her arms at her sides and eyes closed. She relayed the rest of the information, including about the Q-13, which deeply unsettled him. Then, she asked, Are you ready to make contact?

James swallowed. Yes, he lied. He wasn’t ready at all to face Richard, however indirectly. Or Su. On the off chance Richard didn’t hate his guts for what he’d done, Heather’s mom certainly did. Here goes.

He reached into his pocket and gradually turned up the pain simulator. Heather didn’t react outwardly. He clicked the device up to eight and returned his attention to his computer.

Sorry, I hate doing this, he typed.

I know, she replied. She sent out a message, and a new window popped up in a corner of the screen with the words. Dad, are you there?

James arranged it on his desktop to be even less conspicuous while they waited for a response.

Finally, text burst under her initial message, Hi Heather!

That had to be Sesame.

Hi. James has me plugged into his computer, so he can see our conversation and talk too.
Ok. Hi James.

James hesitated. Hello, is this Sesame?

Yep, cool, right?

I’m happy for you. He was still struggling to process that particular development. At this point, he only had enough bandwidth to hope Sesame didn’t turn out to be malevolent. Organorobotic transference had brought nothing but serious unforeseen consequences. Thank you for helping us.

Thank you too. I hope you and Heather can come home soon.

Me too, James said. Leaving the Empetrum campus was only step one. Maintaining their freedom from Benson after the fact could easily consume the rest of their lives, and he tried not to think too much about the future, the possibility that if Benson couldn’t contain them, he would kill them.

James made himself concentrate only on this first step for now. It’s going to take me about a week to get what we need for the escape attempt without attracting attention. There’s also another prisoner here we’re going to take with us if at all possible. Can you help us when we’re ready to move?

Richard says yes. Without a doubt.

Anxiety gripped James’ insides. Heather’s parents really were sitting there with Sesame. For too long, he had wanted so terribly to apologize. Now in nearly direct contact, he had to do it now. He might not get the chance later. Richard, Su, I am so sorry for all of this. I never intended it to turn out like it did. Knowing Heather was also in the chat made it much harder. I’m not looking for forgiveness, I only want to bring Heather home. To set as much of this right as I can.

He sent the message and waited. He glanced at Heather, who didn’t move. The stillness of the lab made him feel isolated. He swallowed the sneaking resentment that his connection to the Knights had become transactional as well, like everything else. The inevitable script of his whole life.

Richard says, “I understand,” Sesame mediated.

James’ heart skipped. Reading Richard’s exact response was overwhelming.

“It’s been really hard. We were shocked to learn you had kept something like this from us until things got so out of hand. I haven’t been able to wrap my head around just how devastating this has been for my family. For a while, I wondered if maybe you’d done this to get back at me, somehow, for shutting down your project…”

James squeezed his hands together, reminding himself of the surveillance cameras staring at them. He read Richard’s words as they continued to materialize, his chest aching, trying to think back to who he had been at Larkspur—to what about him could have possibly made Richard think he had the capacity for such cruelty.

He didn’t think Richard had ever seen him as a threat before, but the disappearance of Larkspur’s android along with Heather had been pretty damning. He had already resolved to refrain from defensiveness. To accept whatever the Knight family needed from him. It was the least he could do.

“I’ve always known you to be idealistic, so I want to believe you had good intentions,” Richard’s response went on. “Right now, I just want to focus on the fact that you’re helping us. We know it’s really dangerous, and we were told getting her out of there would be nearly impossible without inside help. So, thank you.”

James’ hands were shaking as he typed his reply. I’ll give it everything I have.

Just as he sent the message, he startled at the sound of his lab door unlocking. He hurriedly closed the lid of his laptop and twisted out of his chair to face the newcomer.

“Good morning, Dr. Siles,” Yeun greeted. James felt faint with relief that it wasn’t Benson. “Sorry to barge in, but I heard you’ll be hanging out in my lab this afternoon? Wanted to see if there’s anything specific you wanted to work with so I can keep it on the roster until then.”

“Oh—thank you.” James hoped traces of his recent conversation weren’t too evident on his face. His head hurt, and the room suddenly felt like an oven. He glanced at Heather and cleared his throat. “Uh, no preferences here. Your training’s been solid so far.”

Yeun cracked a wan smile. “Okey doke.” He put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, following

James’ gaze. “How are you today, Ms. Knight?”

“She’s hibernating,” James said quickly. “If she pulls out of it, it could interfere with the assessment.”

“Oh, sorry,” Yeun said. “Maybe another time, then.” He stepped back toward the door with a cheery smile. “See you in a few.”

James tried to force his shoulders to relax. He waited for the door to close behind his colleague, and delayed for several long moments before returning to his laptop.

“Sorry,” he muttered, pushing his computer screen back up. His heartbeat felt like a scared bird in a cage.

Another scientist came into James’ lab, Heather had explained. He’s busy right now.

Ok.
 I’m back, James’ fingers flew across the keyboard. Regarding escape plans, we’ll contact you periodically as things solidify, and the night before to confirm. I hope we can rendezvous from a safe distance so you don’t have to have anything to do with Empetrum.

Sure thing, came the reply, without quotation marks, so James didn’t know who was speaking. What’s the plan?

+

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX—INSURGENCE

One week later, James stayed in the facility after hours, presumably continuing to brush up on information for his swiftly growing involvement in Compatibility research. What he read of the finer connections between modulator engineering and cell biology barely registered as his mind feverishly reviewed the details of the madness he and Heather were about to attempt.

He had tried to find a way to tip off Hodgson to the situation, but Yeun had kept him working with mice and cell cultures all week, and James hadn’t been able to get anywhere near her.

He glanced at the clock in the top right corner of his laptop screen. 9:00.

He took a breath, closed the lid of his computer, and stood up.

“Here we go,” he muttered, pulling the strap of his briefcase over his head and across his chest.

He glanced at the camera that watched his lab, on which he’d surreptitiously installed an electronic parasite the night before. Recently activated, it had begun looping a fifteen-minute stretch of footage of him sitting there working on his laptop, and would continue until whoever was watching in the surveillance office noticed something was off.

Blacking out cameras would earn an immediate response. He hoped the confusion of conflicting camera feeds and what he was about to do would give them enough of a head start.

“I’m leaving for the night,” he told the guard outside the door. “But I need to stop by my office upstairs for something first.”

The guard nodded and shrugged off from where he had been leaning against the wall, evidently grateful for something to do as he followed James’ nervous gait to the elevator.

Benson had already left the facility for the night, and James hoped security staff was fairly light this particular shift, as he’d noted over the last week. He made sure the zipper to his briefcase was open just enough.

The doors to the elevator closed, the guard in front, James at the back. James carefully placed one hand into his briefcase, his fingers closing around a device he’d converted from the body of a stapler. With the other, he reached up to place a magnetic metal button on the elevator camera. It activated upon placement, freezing the camera’s footage—if he’d designed it right.

The subtle click of the button making contact was minute, but the guard turned. Without giving himself a chance to think, James lunged. The makeshift taser snapped loudly in the enclosed space.

The guard pulled away in surprise. James grabbed for the arm going toward the tranquilizer gun on the guard’s belt, and an elbow collided with his face. Somewhere in the confusion, what he hoped was just a tranq dart fired but hit the wall behind him, and James landed the electrified end of the taser on the man’s arm.

The elevator reached the second floor with a soft, heralding tone.

“Sorry,” James said, kneeling down to unclip the unconscious guard’s badge, and escaping out into the hallway to his right. He had never been in this particular wing of the facility, but process of elimination told him the security offices had to be somewhere over here.

He found the door. He touched the stolen badge on the reader and extracted a copper and polymer sphere from his bag. The lock clicked. He pulled a protective pin from the sphere, and, depressing a button at the top, he opened the door and chucked the device inside. He braced himself against the door, closing the explosion of buzzing and snapping inside, coupled with cries of shock and pain.

James hunched his shoulders and tried to keep his nerve, waiting for the sounds to fade. The doorknob at his left sparked and seethed with electricity. This would be over soon, he reminded himself. This was a step he had to make.

This would be over soon.

Once the other side of the door had gone quiet, he slipped inside. Hurriedly picking his way around unconscious bodies, he located the grid that fed power to the wall of active surveillance feeds, and unplugged it from its source. Straddling the behemoth bundle of wires, he disentangled heavy-duty cable cutters from his briefcase and ripped a jagged chunk from the middle of the cords.

He slid under the desk and cut computer and monitor wires. In case there was a backup power supply he hadn’t found, locating other equipment and having no immediate way to visualize would further slow things down. An hour, if they were lucky.

Hopefully all the escapees would be long gone by then.

He weaved back to the door, closed it behind him, and ran to the stairs. The three of them needed to at least be outside by the time the alarms went off.

His footsteps echoed off the walls of the stairwell as he hurried down to the basement. Pushing open the door, he strode as calmly as he could down the hallway and held his breath as he passed the elevator. The guard wasn’t there. They must have been patrolling the floor.

James sped up, anxiously making his way down the corridor to Heather’s cell. As he touched his own badge to the reader and the heavy automatic lock slid aside, he heard a voice.

“Dr. Siles, you’re still here?”

James jerked his head up. Someone in a black security uniform approached.

He opened Heather’s door. He was sweating. “Yes, I realized I needed to check up on something with my test subject. It can’t wait until tomorrow.”

“Where’s your escort?”

James paused halfway through the door, exchanging a worried look with Heather, who started toward him.

James pulled back out to face the guard, to assess her expression. He was losing ground. “He’ll be down shortly.”

“That’s against protocol.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you up to?”

Her skepticism cut off in a ragged cry of surprise as a head ducked suddenly under James’ arm and a robotic hand gripped the guard’s wrist with an angry crack of electricity.

“Woah…” James said as Heather lowered the guard’s unconscious form to the floor.

“I know right?” Heather steadied the strap of his briefcase and grabbed the second to last stun grenade from inside. “Figured out how to do it on command.”

James looked at her, amazed, and feeling like they just might have a chance. He turned and headed back down the hallway toward the stairs. “Let’s get Hodgson.”

He touched the stolen badge to the reader outside Hodgson’s cell, and to his profound relief, the lock slid over. He tugged the door open and stepped in without allowing himself to hesitate. “Erika Hodgson—” He gasped and jerked backward upon almost running straight into her. Heather’s stunt with the guard had evidently attracted her attention.

Hodgson pitched back as well, startled. She caught herself on the gargantuan, three-elbowed arms off her back. “What are you doing?” she gasped. “What’s going on?”

“We’re getting out of here, and we’re taking you with us,” Heather piped up, edging in beside James. “Benson’s imprisoned us long enough.”

It was odd for James to hear Heather speak the director’s name out loud, a final colliding of worlds. He stepped aside to give Hodgson room to leave the cell, but she stared at him, conflicted.

“What?” James said, anxious to leave. “What is it?”

Hodgson shifted more of her weight back onto her feet. “You can’t know much I’ve been waiting for a chance like this…” She looked aside, at one of her accessory limbs, her face falling. “But the grounds are crawling with guards, armed to the teeth with tranquilizers. Your chances of escape are slim as it is, and I’ll muddy up those chances, with the state I’m in. I still can’t move well with these things.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Heather insisted. “We’re not leaving without you.”

“I admire your determination.” Hodgson cracked an uneven, grieved smile. “But I think you’re gonna have to. Yeun’s so close to being done with me. If I try to escape now, they’ll for sure recapture me, and then I’ll have completely thrown away any chance I had of ever being free.” She paused, took a steadying breath, and stepped forward. “But if you succeed, can you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” James said. His heart ached. He hated Benson so much.

“Can you send a message to my family?” she asked. “Tell them where I am, that I’m okay?”

James nodded. “Of course.”

“What are their contact details?” Heather said. “I’ll remember.”

Hodgson told her the information, trying hard to keep her voice from wavering. Heather repeated it back for confirmation. Meanwhile, James dug in his briefcase, producing the last stun grenade, the stun rod, and a modest stack of handwritten pages.

He pushed them into her hands. “I took out the surveillance system, so this conversation is off the grid. I want to leave some resources with you, in case you get a chance to escape on your own…”

Hodgson gazed at him, holding onto the bundle like she feared it may fall apart. “I can’t take this. They’ll search my cell after you’re gone.” She handed it back, hopeless. “They’ll find it.”

Heather pulled James’ bag closer to her, startling him. “Do you have a pen in here?” She found one in the front pocket before he could respond. She took a page from his hands, docked her stun grenade under her arm and twisted James around so she could use his back as a writing surface.

She tore the corner off and held it out to Hodgson. “This is my dad’s cellphone number. If you need help at all, call him, okay? We got your back.”

Hodgson accepted the scrap of paper, as she tried to grasp her words. “Your dad like—him?” She pointed at James, who forlornly stuffed the rejected resources back into his bag.

“No,” Heather said. “Someone else outside Empetrum. Long story.”

Alarms started to blare, making them all jump.

“Go.” Hodgson stepped forward urgently, herding them out. “Thank you for this, but it’s time for you to leave.”

They consented, and James closed her inside her cell. The lock re-engaged. James started for the stairs with a heavy, pounding heart. He swore under his breath. They broke into a run, and as they hurried up the stairs, James regretted all over again how little attention he devoted to his physical fitness. Heather very easily kept up.

He hated leaving Hodgson there, but she had made her choice. She was right, her malfunctioning Compatibility was a complication, but they had been braced to work around it somehow—draw everyone’s attention, send her the other way. Benson must have hung some awful ultimatums over her head.

Focus, he reminded himself. He had to focus.

Get outside. He repeated it over and over internally. Incapacitate the guards. Open the gate. Once they had cleared the first checkpoint, their odds of slipping through the cracks would improve in the dark forest of the middle perimeter. Thanks to Benson’s request for updated cameras, James knew where a few solid paths were.

He opened the door to the first level and they ran together down the hallway, past the elevator, and toward the exit, where he touched the stolen badge to the reader, but it didn’t work. The facility was locking down.

“Are you serious?” he barked, frantically testing it again. It denied him with a flat, negatory beep.

“Look out—” Heather jammed an elbow through the heavy frosted glass. James shielded his face as she forcefully dismantled it.

“Thanks.” He tripped through the opening after her and they made for the main entrance, which remained unlocked from the inside.

As soon as they burst through the door, they found themselves stranded on the front step. The light of monstrous LEDs spilled across the courtyard between them and the gate. James froze in the face of several ready tranquilizers, but Heather plowed forward, skipping all the stairs, her arms outstretched. She contacted as many of the guards as possible upon landing.

The surprise of mass electrocution was enough to break their formation as James lurched forward and ducked through after her like a fox under a fence.

A pop sounded behind him. A sharp barb stung the back of his arm.

“Ah—” His eyes widened and his hand flew to the spot. “No.”

He tore out the tranquilizer dart and stared at it in frantic, winded horror.

“No no no no no!” He hurled it aside. He turned his face to the gate, the crucial step in this ill fated plan.

“What?” Heather looked back, frightened. She caught sight of the dart as it hit the pavement. Her attention flicked back to James’ face, her large, reflective eyes wide with dismay.

James urgently pointed to the guard booth by the fence. “Throw your stun grenade over there. You have a better arm!” Already, his limbs were losing strength. He began to lag. “We should be safe from the discharge from here.”

James spotted a man by the target, standing beside the gate-operating booth with his arms crossed. He wore a cardigan and jeans, and James might not have recognized him from the distance without the light glinting off those sinister rectangular glasses.

The director was livid. James was experiment fodder if he didn’t make it out.

Heather drew her arm back and whipped it forward.

The sphere exploded with a bang when it hit the ground. Hands jerked up in front of faces and bodies twisted away as the broken orb emitted sharp, sparking light, electrocuting everything within close proximity. The device was supposed to simply split open, but this one blew apart, shooting shards of its polymer casing at its victims.

James’ vision was fading fast. He couldn’t breathe.

His legs buckled.

“James!” Heather shrieked as he tripped to his hands and knees. She caught his arm. “James no!”

“Go—” James blinked hard. His head felt enormously heavy. His voice cracked, “I can’t…” He attempted to push her off, but she held fast. If Heather dropped him right then, she had a good chance of prying open the gate and slipping through. She would be able to escape, but the window was closing. “Go! Heather please go!”

“I’m not leaving you too!” Heather slung his arm across her shoulders and tried to force him to stand. “We can make it!”

“No. I can’t,” James panted. His voice sounded muted, absorbed by the ringing in his ears. “But you have a chance.” His eyes wouldn’t stay open. Soon Heather’s escape would be barred.

“Heather you have to leave me.”

“No!” she insisted, pleading. “We’re both going home!”

“No.” He tried one last time to pull himself from her grip, but the movement was weak as her urgent voice slipped away. “No…”

I’m sorry, Heather.

__

So much fear and despair thundered through Heather that she teetered on the brink of screaming in the force of it. As if somehow it could help her stop this, cut her and James from the situation and relocate them to a timeline where none of this had ever happened.

But in the cruel bright light, amidst the shuffled footsteps and arming weapons of surrounding guards, James lost consciousness.

Gently, she let him down to the ground. She straightened up, standing before him and readying herself to electrocute anyone who came too close.

She looked beyond the gate. Far out of sight of the guards and surveillance cameras, her parents were parked by the road. Waiting for them.

They were so close.

James’ lanky, restless body was pure deadweight. She was strong enough to drag him, but that required time and space she didn’t have.

If she couldn’t hold her own—if Benson recaptured them—he would kill James.

She glared savagely at the guards as they encircled her.

“Stay back!” she ordered. “Don’t you dare touch him!”

They heeded her warning, waiting.

Something caught her attention past the ring of guards. Her eyes widened.

Benson. He should have still been unconscious.

A deep gash marred his cheek. He cradled his left hand, the palm of which bled heavily. A guard limped behind him, trying to convince him to seek medical attention first, but the director’s gray eyes remained fixed on Heather.

He slipped between the guards. He kept some distance, but his presence loomed.

“Hello, Heather,” Benson said, his expression softening coldly. “This is our first time speaking face to face, isn’t it?”

Heather stared him down, hands ready. James may have regarded this man as some kind of demon, but Michael Benson was flesh and blood. A mere human being, whose vulnerable, organic vessel she wouldn’t hesitate to fry if he tried to take James from her.

“I’ve no doubt you already know who I am,” Benson went on. “What it is you’re messing with.” The director glanced down at the unconscious engineer. “I didn’t think he’d actually attempt it. A good try, I must admit.” His jaw tightened, and his attention found his injured hand, contemplating the pain. “Excessively violent, though, don’t you think?”

“That was an accident,” Heather said, challenging. She wasn’t sorry. “The device misfired.”

Benson smiled wanly. A drop of blood broke free from the cut on his face, drawing a viscous line of red down his skin.

Carefully, he brushed the back of his uninjured hand across its path and regarded the smear with an air of indifference. “Hm, yes, but the consequences will be dire.”

Benson looked up and gave a short nod to someone behind her.

Heather glanced over her shoulder, just in time to see the guard deploy the trigger. Heather tried to dodge, but the snapping spikes collided, burying between the panels in her lower back and discharging like a lightning strike.

Heather’s whole body locked up. Confused, misshapen pain signals roared through her neural network and a warping, crackling scream screeched against her auditory receivers.

She felt herself begin to fall.

Her last moment of vision on the way down was of the director’s face—somber, victorious.

+

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN—RECKONING

Heather woke up with an electronic, buzzing gasp, her shoulders pulling forward off a hard surface. She found her arms tied tightly behind her back, her torso wrapped up in what appeared to be some kind of elastic electrical insulation. She ducked her head with a weary groan as her vision blurred and glitched. Her neural network informed her of mild heat damage in her back.

She raised her face. She was back in her cell underneath the Empetrum facility, propped against the wall by the door like a broken puppet.

“No,” she said, the volume of her voice very low as the realization hit her. She managed to get her feet under her and stood up, her limbs unsteady. “No!” She twisted and rammed her shoulder into the door. “Let me out! Benson!” She looked at the round black security camera in the ceiling, wondering if it was back online. In case it was, she screamed at it, “Don’t hurt him! Why are you doing this to us?”

The echo of her voice against the concrete walls faded, unanswered, and silence closed in. She tripped to a sitting position against the door, futile, scared. She bowed her face, searching for the pain simulator, considering its benign, closed mental door, trying to force her way in.

+

They had been waiting for far too long, the car overly quiet, crickets chirping in the inscrutable darkness of an abandoned service road.

Heather had checked in before nine o’clock, telling them to stand by. She and James had a very short window of time, so escape shouldn’t have taken more than ten minutes, unless something had happened to stall them. Maybe they’d had to call it off and hadn’t had a chance to fill them in.

Sick with worry, Richard prayed it wasn’t that they’d been caught.

Sesame slumped in the backseat, his face screen deactivated to conserve battery, and a wire running from a single open panel in his head to Richard’s cellphone. He straightened up, suddenly. “Heather?”

Richard and Su reacted in the front seat, first looking out the windows. Richard moved to put the idling car in drive, but paused, realizing the robot was responding to something internal. They twisted back to look at him.

“Heather made contact?” Su said.

Sesame’s face turned on to display a worried expression. Richard’s stomach clenched.

“What is it?” Richard pressed.

“They got caught,” Sesame said, disappointed and surprised. “The other prisoner refused to come with them. Heather says they almost made it, but then James got tranquilized. She tried to protect him but Benson had her electrocuted until her system shut down.”

Su put a hand to her mouth. “Oh no…”

“She’s okay. She’s back in her cell…She activated that communication device by herself, but doesn’t know where James is. Benson got injured in the escape attempt and he’s furious. She’s worried he’s going to kill James.” He tucked his legs under him, perching on the seat and hugging his knees. “Someone came to get her just now.” His gaze went distant for a moment as he retreated into the connection. “I lost her. She’s not responding anymore.” He looked at Richard and Su, pleading and afraid. “The signal cut off. I can’t get her back.”

Richard stared at the android, hollow, agape. Slowly, he twisted back around. “This isn’t the end of it,” he said breathlessly. His voice sounded unlike his own, drowning in this empty, silent, horrible futility. He took off his glasses, rubbed at his eyes. Something dark slowly screwed up in his chest.

“This isn’t the end of it.”

“They’ll be okay, right?” Sesame asked softly.

Richard couldn’t answer. He put the car in drive. Benson would learn of their presence soon, and it was either find a safer place to regroup or ram their car through Empetrum’s fence.

“Wait, we’re not leaving, are we?” Sesame stiffened, dismayed.

Richard glanced in the rearview mirror at Sesame’s alarmed expression.

“We can’t stay so close to the gate,” Richard said. “Not when the facility’s on high alert. Benson will probably send someone to check the outer perimeter, after what just happened.”

“But we came so far!” Sesame cried. “And James killed the security system, didn’t he?” He gripped the door lever. “We can’t just—”

Su reached back and grabbed his other arm. “Sesame—don’t.”

“Su—” Richard startled, afraid Sesame would electrocute her.

“You’ll give away our position,” Su said. “And they’ll capture you too. We need you here.”

“I won’t get captured!” Sesame pulled back, but Su held on, unflinching and solemn. “Su let go! They need us! We’re not leaving them!” Virtual tears gathered in his eyes, and his resistance waxed broken and half-hearted as he, too, began to understand. “We need to rescue them… We can’t leave them.”

Su’s gaze fell, but she didn’t release him. “We aren’t leaving them.”

Sesame looked away. He let his arm go limp. The pitch of his voice warbled quietly, “They need us…”

“I know.” Su cautiously let go of Sesame’s arm. “We’ll have another chance, okay?” Very carefully, Richard activated the child lock.

Sesame sat back down. He turned a tortured expression toward the opposite window, out to where the trees obscured the Empetrum facility. He lay down on his side.

Su returned to her seat and leaned back, dragging her hands over her face with a heavy sigh. “So, what now? Storm the castle?”

Richard turned the car onto the main road. “What other choice do we have?” he muttered. “But we’re civilians. It’ll have to be in a way that won’t get us caught too or we’re not going to be able to help anybody. I have no idea what’s on the table tonight.”

Alice had told them that Michael drew satisfaction from the process of manipulation, patiently tugging at threads until a person crumbled to his will. Assured of his eventual success, he often saw setbacks as a simple move on the chessboard—not at all warranting a heated confrontation for the jabbing note she’d sent him.

In the Benson family, reactivity was a betrayal of one’s hand. A loss of control. Alice guessed his volatility pointed to internal issues beyond this recent chess game, potentially, or research wasn’t going well, or Michael was under some increased pressure from more powerful opponents that he was losing ground with.

Michael had to understand that holding onto these particular prisoners would only further complicate things for him, and Empetrum was his whole life. In the end, Alice had said, there was no way he was going to let that burn. He might be willing to bargain if they stacked enough weight against him.

That, Richard thought, or his madness was about to hemorrhage into the civilian world. Heather had already died once for Michael’s secrets. He would have to kill or silence anyone else who knew James or the Knights, because while Richard still breathed, he would make sure Michael’s secrets got out. Even the government wouldn’t be able to cover it up fast enough.

But that would still take too much time. They had to save James and Heather too.

“I think we should approach the Conxence,” Su said, her arms crossed and face turned. Richard glanced aside, spotting the reflection of her face in the car window. His partner was out for blood.

She pulled out her cellphone. “Don’t have much signal here, keep driving.”

They had to go nearly a mile down the road before the signal opened up again, and Su proceeded to search for anything Conxence related: current news, the history of the movement, contact information.

“Do you want me to look too?” Sesame offered.

“No, keep your mind open in case Heather makes contact again,” Su said. “I’ll let you know if I run into a dead end.”

“Does the Conxence even have public contact information?” Richard said. “I always assumed it was word-of-mouth, or that you had to know the right people if you wanted to join—like a gang or something.”

“Well, if I can’t find information online, we’re headed to the capital to ask around.”

Richard’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Okay.” He hated everything about this situation; strangers hurting his family unprovoked and unjustified, having to reach out across barriers upon barriers of anonymity trying to protect his loved ones and bring them home.

Su clucked her tongue in annoyance, still searching on her phone. “Well, there’s an email address. Who’s going to answer an unsolicited email about underground labs at ten o’clock at night?”

“They might,” Richard muttered. “If we’re lucky.”

He had always been glad the rebel militia operated far enough away from them that he could largely ignore their activities. Their existence seemed dangerous, volatile, and overzealous.

That is, until Empetrum brought his family to the front lines.

+

James opened his eyes to watchful lights and silence.

He found himself in a metal chair, ankles, waist, and wrists bound. The left armrest of the chair was longer than the right, the binding point lower to force his arm into extension, the crook of his elbow surrendered. His dress shirt had been removed, leaving the white tank top underneath.

He stared at his lap for a moment, trying to remember what, exactly, had happened to land him there. Finally, his mind cleared, and he raised his head.

Heather—Where was Heather?

James looked around, the first thorns of fear spiking anew as he took in his surroundings. His heart went cold and his breath caught in his chest. He was in the concrete experimentation chamber behind the thick glass barrier. The charred side.

His gaze landed on a figure, reclining in a chair against the wall, regarding him superciliously from afar. The director’s face bore a large bandage. His left hand was heavily wrapped up as well.

Benson got to his feet.

“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused?” Benson said.

James’ throat was extremely dry. “How many people got hurt?”

“Eighteen.” Benson lifted his hand so James could see the wrapping. “Fifteen stitches…Thanks for that.”

“But no deaths, right?” James would never forgive himself if any of his weapons had dealt a lethal voltage.

“Just yours.”

“For merely trying to escape?” James gasped.

“Merely? The damage you’ve done is far worse than minor injuries and a mangled security system.” Benson crossed his arms, favoring his wounded hand.

“You brought me here,” James said. “You should have known I wouldn’t acclimate.”

“No, Siles, from all the signs you were giving off, you seemed like perfect Empetrum material,” Benson said. “You had ambition. You had vision, purpose you were willing to pay any price for. I thought transferring over to Empetrum would give you the opportunity you needed. What we all needed. I pulled so many strings to get you here.” He threw up his uninjured hand. “And you were doing well! Research was picking up and your career looked promising. Yet you chose to betray us. You threw everything away!”

“I told you it wasn’t going to work out, didn’t I?” James insisted. “Then I went along with it for a while because I thought I was protecting Heather, but I’d rather die than participate in any more of this nightmare.”

Benson stared at him for a few condescending moments. “Well, it seems like you’re getting what you want.”

“What have you done with Heather?”

“Did Richard Knight have anything to do with what happened tonight?”

“No. Where is Heather?”

“She’s fine, shut up.” Benson studied his face, skeptical. “You’re sure you haven’t been aware of anything going on at the Larkspur facility these last few weeks? Knight and Delva managing to find out far too much about Empetrum? They had to have something to do with that idiotic escape attempt.”

“Leave them alone. I’m the one who crossed you. You didn’t give me any other option.”

“I gave you options,” Benson said.

“They were false choices,” James snapped. He stood nothing else to gain by deferring to the director’s madness, and the fair certainty that Benson was going to kill him made him bold. “Either go the route of a self-preservationist amnesiac and leave Heather behind—which you would have twisted to your own benefit anyway, or stay on as your puppet and keep her imprisoned here forever.”

“You realize this route you took still involves leaving her entirely to me, don’t you? While you cooperated, she at least had a buffer.”

“But I couldn’t keep doing nothing. I couldn’t keep hurting people.” He worried he was wrong about this too. Every choice he made was wrong. His voice cracked, exhausted and futile, “I had to try.”

Benson narrowed his eyes, disgusted. He pulled a communicator from the pocket of his sweater and lifted it to his mouth. “I’m ready. Dr. Yeun. Please come down to my experimentation chamber for lab prep while I prepare the Q-13. I’d like to get this over with quickly.”

James’ face went cold.

“But, Director…” came a tentative reply after several long moments.

“But what, Yeun?”

“You went through all the trouble to get him here, you’re just going to do this again—”

“Do I have a choice at this point?” Benson’s hand tightened around the device. “He’s made it perfectly clear where his allegiance lies, what his actions will be should he ever set foot outside again. Might as well make his death useful.”

The door opened, and Yeun entered, all his usual joviality stripped from his features.

“You’re just going to throw him away too?” Yeun tried, striding uneasily up to Benson, careful not to look at James.

“We must uphold a standard,” Benson said.

“Is this really a standard worth protecting?”

“Don’t start this again,” Benson muttered. He stepped away from James, and his colleague followed. Despite the distance, their voices bounced back to the prisoner off the concrete boundaries of the room.

“I can’t reconcile using our own. Again. Where is the line?”

“As long as loyalty stands, the line remains,” Benson said, impersonal. “Siles knew full well the price of his actions. He has all but declared war, and I must protect my charge.” He flung a gesture toward James with his good arm. “Because of him, Delva got to my mother, and she was all too eager to crack. She told them everything, and they’re threatening to make a plea to the Conxence over it!”

“Siles was only trying to do what he thought was right…”

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stop while you’re ahead,” Benson’s voice lilted, warning.

“I can’t watch you do this again,” Yeun insisted, with more resolution. “It doesn’t just kill the test subject. Michael, it kills you too—”

Benson turned on his colleague with such sudden aggression that even James gave a start.

“Enough, Yeun! If you take issue with the way things are done here, you’ve outlived your usefulness to me. You can surrender your memories of this place and resign! Or perhaps you would rather switch places with him to soothe your mewling conscience?”

Yeun went rigid. He stared at Benson, wide-eyed and mouth agape, as if the latter had just run him through. The director’s face was very close to his.

And James felt he was seeing Michael Benson for the first time, how deep, how black this man’s ambition and delusion ran. How badly his decisions had turned on him and how hell-bent he was on finding someone to punish for it.

“Gather the supplies for Siles’ infusion,” Benson ordered, laying the words out like a threat. “Now.”
Yeun hesitated. He looked at James, who was hoping for some glimmer of hope, some sign that he would finally come around and try to help them.

“Yes, Director,” Yeun said finally, his gaze falling. He ducked out from under Benson’s looming, challenging frame, and left without another word.

After brief deliberation, the director also moved toward the door. “I’ll return presently. Enjoy your last few moments to yourself.”

James tipped his gaze to the ceiling, suffocating on his own helplessness.

When he and Heather had made that escape attempt, despite everything that had happened when they got sucked into Benson’s deranged power trip, James had let himself believe it just might work. The odds of success had been low, but they had had a chance.

But here he was, barely twenty-one years old, about to die. Heather, fifteen, was soon to be left to fend for herself, a test subject without allies, awaiting her own punishment.

He wished he could see her again, to make one last useless apology.

+

Tucked away in a tiny studio apartment in the capital city, a college student sat typing at a desktop computer, the harsh blue light glaring off their large-rimmed glasses and cropped, coily hair in the dark.

Somewhere in the crowded setup of electronics around them, a laptop chimed. They laid out a few more sequences of code before halting, taking a ballpoint pen out from behind their ear to jot notes elsewhere, and leaned aside to check the email that had managed to bypass their screening algorithms.

Their brow furrowed.

They twisted to glance back at a mound of blankets on the lower bunk of the bed across the room.

“Yo, Kepler. Where’s your brother at right now?”

“Hmm?” the body sat up, an icepack sliding to the floor with a thump, revealing a wavy flop of auburn hair and smeared mascara as a young woman groggily extricated herself from the covers. She retrieved a black baseball cap from the floorboards and tugged it on as she came over, yawning. “Home, as far as I know. Why?”

“Got something I think you’re both gonna want to see. How do you feel about running a second operation tonight?”

“Can’t say I’m in favor of it, Mads,” Andrew Kepler grunted, leaning an arm on the back of the desk chair, peering over her friend’s shoulder and squinting in the computer light. With the other hand, she gingerly felt the puffy skin of a generously bruising eye socket. “Empetrum…” She mused, reading the email. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“It’s the name of that lab Erika thought we should do some scouting around,” Mads said.

“Hodgson? She went back to stay with her family for a while, didn’t she?”

“That’s what she’d said,” Mads said. “I don’t blame her for being scarce these days, after losing her mom.”

After a few moments of silence, Andrew sighed, digging a flip phone from the pocket of her jeans.

“Well, guess she was right. We should have paid more attention to that lab. Don’t know if we’ll have time to infiltrate a top security location with the government’s pet freaks on our back, but I’ll ask Derek what he wants to do.”

There had been rumors that the government was developing a new kind of threat, and barely a week prior, any hopes the Conxence held that it was only hearsay were terrifyingly disappointed when that threat had materialized: Six humanoid soldiers in helmets and jumpsuits, armed with riot gear and bodies that did things no human’s ever could.

Two of their own had been captured since. Rann and Derek, the first and second-in-command, were mounting regrouping efforts like crazy, and suddenly Andrew’s own position as squad leader had become infinitely less satisfying.

At least they’d succeeded their operation that night without losing anybody. She was already exhausted.

She hit the speed dial and put the phone to her ear. While she waited for it to connect, she said.

“Where’s Rann at this hour, do you know?”

“Don’t ask me,” Mads scoffed, pulling up background coding and encryption on the email, checking for red flags. Having a public email address while the powers that be treated them like a terrorist group came with a plethora of intelligence hazards, but nothing got through Mads’ protocols.

The phone connected, and Andrew spoke up. “Ganymede, you home? Hold on a sec, putting you on speaker.”

She pulled the phone from her ear and hit a button.

The voice of her adopted older brother issued from the phone’s speakers, “Yes, are you at Jaeger’s place?” They never used their real names over the phone. A compromised cellphone could be destroyed, but leaked civilian identities weren’t so easy.

“Yeah, I’m crashing here tonight,” Andrew said. “Took an elbow to the face on the op earlier, and under the circumstances, I don’t feel like making the full commute for my opening shift tomorrow.”

“You didn’t tell me that in debriefing,” he said.“Are you okay?”

“I’m always okay. Hey, so we just got a weird email.”

“Define weird?”

“‘Government lab took my kid’ weird,” she said. “Police won’t help them, naturally. They tried to stage an escape tonight with help from the inside, but it failed. They say it’s more than likely their inside help is gonna be killed for it.”

There was a pause. “Oh,” Derek said. “That sounds really bad…”

“And it’s a legit email as far as I can tell,” Mads spoke up, angling their face back so the rebellion’s second-in-command could hear them better.

“Good to know,” he said.

“What do you want to do about it?” Andrew asked.

Derek sighed on the other line, thinking. “Do we have anything on this lab?”

“It’s called Empetrum,” Mads said. “Diamondback said it could be important somehow but they don’t know how and couldn’t ask around without blowing their cover. Cygnus was really set on digging more into it, but pursuing new information on it was deemed low priority, so all we have right now are its name and coordinates.”

“Not enough to work with for immediate retrieval efforts…” Derek said, pensive. “What time is it…10:10…Did they provide a phone number?”

“Yes.”

“Forward me that email,” Derek said. “I’ll call them, see what the situation is.”

“Already sent your way.”

+

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT—Q-13

The director returned wearing his lab coat and carrying a small container in his gloved, uninjured hand. Yeun trailed dejectedly behind him, silently outfitting a cart with disinfectant and a packaged syringe. He pulled it up beside James.

“I’ve decided to erase your test subject’s memory,” Benson said. “I’m sure she’ll be very useful to the facility.”

Dismay jolted through James like a surge of electricity. “Her brain isn’t organic anymore, you’ll never get a mindwipe to work.”

“I’ll have to go about it differently, but I’ll get it done,” Benson responded coolly. “Of course, I’ll make her watch what happens to you first. Maybe I’ll preserve only that memory so it can always haunt her.”

Yeun and Hill had experience in biorobotics, James realized. Benson would make them try to break through the encryption in her neural network, and there was a slim chance they’d figure it out. “No—”

“Yes.” Benson stared James down. He held out the vial to Yeun expectantly, who obediently swapped it for the unwrapped syringe. “You will regret crossing me, coward. If you survive this, you will regret it every day for the rest of your wretched, wasted life.”

“I’m not a coward,” James rasped.

Benson steadied the vial in Yeun’s hands and positioned the needle over the seal. “Just wait until the Q-13 is flooding through your system, tearing you apart and remaking you.” He turned his attention away from him to puncture the seal, plunging the needle into the serum within. “As it rewires your nervous system and bursts from your marrow, you will beg, hysterically, for death.”

James nervously watched the viscous, glowing yellow liquid draw up into the barrel of the syringe.

“May I leave after this, Director?” Yeun said quietly, setting the empty vial on the cart and picking up the bottle of disinfectant. “I can’t watch this.”

“Fine,” Benson muttered as Yeun saturated a cotton ball and disinfected the crook of James’ left arm. “Honestly, is everyone losing their minds around here?”

Yeun turned away.

“Is this going to make things better, Elias?” James called after him. He tugged angrily at his restraints. “Is this the kind of difference you wanted to make?”

Yeun paused, his gaze lowered.

James waited, breathless. Yeun had to reconsider. He had to stop this.

But their last chance at survival left the room.

Benson watched after his colleague for a moment, his expression mixed. He squared his shoulders and returned his attention to the syringe with a short glare at his prisoner. Half-balancing the needle of the syringe upward with his injured hand, he tapped it a few times with the other, and pushed the remaining air from the barrel.

A door opened in the room behind the glass and a guard dragged Heather into view. With a jolt of shared mortification, James and her eyes met. She jerked away from the guard, lurching toward the glass. Her arms were tied behind her back, her entire torso wrapped tightly in bright red sheets of rubber electrical insulation.

“No—” the thick barrier muffled her shrill electronic voice as the guard wrestled her back into submission. “James!”

She almost overpowered the guard despite being bound. Suddenly, she cried out, hunching her shoulders and falling to her knees. The guard had possession of the pain simulator remote.

“Don’t make her watch this.” James looked earnestly to the director. “Please, she’s just a kid! She doesn’t deserve any of this!”

“On the contrary,” Benson said, stepping closer. “I seem to recall it was both of you earlier, causing a scene. And if you have been in contact with Richard Knight, as I suspect, she has to be involved somehow. This is all because of her.”

James glared at him, his words dripping with deep, futile hatred, “No, this is all because of you.”

He hoped she was trying to contact her parents—calling for help. He hoped they were forming a backup plan, one that didn’t need him alive. He tore his eyes from Heather just in time to see Benson insert the needle into his antecubital vein with practiced ease.

“Last words?” Benson carefully pressed the plunger down, driving the acrid substance into James’ bloodstream. It burned immediately—like hot bleach and menthol. The muscles of James’ entire arm and hand spasmed.

“Don’t hurt Heather.” James winced. Pain flooded through the length of his arm, nearing his chest.

“Please. You’ve had your revenge…Just don’t hurt her. Send her home. You’re done with me.” He was already sweating profusely. The bones of his arm and shoulder felt like they were catching fire.

“Sorry, can’t.” Benson expelled the rest of the substance. He returned the syringe to the cart and carefully removed his glove. “She’s as much of a liability as you are.”
He haphazardly pushed the cart away and strolled toward the door. “Happy metamorphosis, Siles—or farewell. Whichever.”

Metamorphosis. A pang of terror gripped him, just as his heart gave a painful hiccup. The right side of his heart received the contaminated blood and sent it burning up and out in both directions to his lungs. He choked as his pulmonary system recoiled. His heartbeat accelerated and the pain flooded through the rest of his body. His breath narrowed to rapid, shallow gasps.

His gaze found Heather’s eyes again, full of horror.

And James still wished he could stop this. Even here, strapped to a chair like a caged animal, his body pulsing with poison, that stupid, childish part of him that still wanted to be something good refused to let go.

A bright flash burst across his vision. He cringed and closed his eyes. Pain surged from his head down the length of his frame, throbbing in every nerve, bleeding through his vascular system.

Something too dark to be blood started dripping from his nose, running down his chin and speckling black onto his undershirt.

The sensation was muffled at first, like a distant crackle in every cell, drawing closer and closer to his awareness, a slow increase in volume swelling higher, coming closer to the surface of the swirling pain. He tugged at his restraints, overcome by panic, but attempting to move his muscles caused them to cramp up all at once, and he gasped. He choked on it, coughing up a mouthful of black bile.

Another bright flash engulfed him. When he regained his vision, a black hue was starting to seep from the middle of his palms to the entirety of his hands. The invasion made his skin tingle and burn like liquid nitrogen. Jagged spikes of pain lanced down into muscle and bone.

He fought to suppress his response to the transformation, to try to make it easier for Heather. The last thing he could offer. To take this bravely, quietly.

But a cry of agony snapped into the room. The sound was so foreign he wondered if the voice was really his. More black bile came up in its wake, thick and unbelievably bitter in his mouth. Distantly, he hoped it was the Q-13, being rejected and expelled.

But under his skin, the serum’s petrifying sting snaked and crisscrossed up his arms to embrace his shoulders. It crept up the left side of his neck and crowded up onto his face in a cruel, curling stripe. It gripped his spinal cord, burning through his nerves and overwhelming his senses.
“James!”

He thought he heard Heather’s voice again, but his ears were ringing too much to be certain. This couldn’t be the end. There had to be something more. Something else to hold on to, to hope for, to strive for. Some way to set this right.

But the Q-13 did not hear protest as it drowned him. The merciless light beamed from behind his eyes, overpowering his retinas, blotting out everything.

It was going to tear him apart. He felt it coming. Imminent, inevitable.

I’m so sorry, Heather. He turned his pale, tormented face to the ceiling, waiting for that moment to arrive. Please look away.

With a rush of searing heat, white, spectral flames tore from his arms, shoulders, and the side of his face, anywhere the black had taken hold. The pain spiked deep, drawn from the center of his bones and bursting from everything associated with them. He couldn’t hear, but he felt a scream ripping up his throat.

A hard flash of white inundated his vision, and the blinding light didn’t fade. He couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t feel the restraints squeezing his limbs, and for a moment, deliriously, he thought he was floating.

He dwelt there for a second, for an eternity. Enveloped by the scorching white, he stopped feeling entirely.

+

They sat parked by the side of the road, Richard and Su standing outside in the chill early September air, trying to stay calm while they waited for contact from Heather, or the Conxence. Sesame sat in the back, the window rolled down, holding Richard’s phone.

Approaching the militarized resistance was such a shot in the dark. Then again, contacting Alice Benson had been as well.

“Heather’s not helpless either,” Su said, her arms crossed. “She and James will find a way out of this.” She hugged herself tighter, staring out into the darkness of the trees. “If Benson wanted him so badly in the first place, there has to be something else they could work out. To at least buy more time.”

Richard swallowed, his throat tight and aching. Empetrum was so close, yet closed off to them, and his body was lit up with the terrible, panicky weight that maybe regrouping from a safe distance had been a grave mistake.

Su’s phone rang, making them both jump. She shot a hopeful glance at Richard, then answered it on speaker, “Hello?”

“Hi,” an artificially distorted voice said on the other line. “I’m calling for Su-Wei Knight?”

“That’s me,” Su said.

“My name is Ganymede,” the voice said. “You sent us an email about your daughter being kidnapped?”

Su blinked. “Yes—you mean you’re Conxence?” To Richard, she mouthed, Alias?

Richard raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
 “That’s correct,” Ganymede said.

“Oh great—” Su fumbled. “Sorry, we, uh, weren’t expecting a response so quickly. Thank you.”

They weren’t expecting a response at all, Richard thought.

“Your situation sounded extremely urgent,” Ganymede said. “We want to help.”

Su and Richard exchanged a glance. “What do you need from us?”

“Right now, I need information,” Ganymede said. “From that, we’ll be able to outline options and timeframe. We don’t have much on Empetrum. By the nature of it, I’m assuming a high level of security?”

“Yes,” Su said, her throat tight. “We’ve learned a lot about it from this whole fiasco.”

“That will come in handy,” Ganymede said. “We’ll approach the extraction of your daughter and the former colleague with every sense of urgency, but bypassing their security will take time. You mentioned the colleague’s life was in immediate danger?”

“Yes,” Richard spoke up without meaning to. “Richard, Su’s partner. I’m here too. We’re really worried he’ll be killed and we have no idea what they’re going to do to our daughter.”

“I see…”

“We’re a couple of miles from the lab right now,” Su said. “Waiting for her to contact us.”

“She has a way to contact the outside?”

As Su explained the present situation in more detail, completely omitting anything having to do with organorobotic transference, Sesame was abnormally quiet, sitting very still in the backseat of the car, the screen of his face deactivated and turned forward.
Richard leaned down toward the open window. “Sesame? You okay?”

“You monster,” the android muttered, the volume of his voice turned very low. It was a different pitch too, and Richard’s stomach dropped. The voice sounded like Heather, “You monster…”

He reached in and touched Sesame’s shoulder. “Sesame, hey.”
Sesame jumped. His face screen activated, the virtual eyes wide and surprised. His voice stayed Heather’s and although his voice box worked, his virtual mouth didn’t move. “Dad.”

Richard’s heart pounded hard in his chest. “Heather?”

They were attracting Su’s attention. She asked Ganymede to hold on a minute.
“Heather, what’s happening?”

Sesame’s face disappeared, in its place was a video feed, choppy from poor cellular reception.

They were looking through a thick glass barrier, at a bright light. A large object ablaze with savage white fire.

Richard realized it was a person. The flames pulled from their arms and shoulders as if from cracks in their exterior releasing an inferno inside. Their face was angled up to the ceiling, the arms free and hands clawed, their body seized up and mouth open in an unbridled scream of torment, though Sesame wasn’t providing sound. The fire obscured any finer details, but Richard didn’t have to be told who it was, what was happening.

It was James. The Q-13.

They were too late. “No…” he whispered.

“Where’s Benson?” Su said.

The visual angled up and to the right, where Benson stood cradling his arm, one hand wrapped in gauze, staring through the glass.

Sesame’s voice came through, very quietly. “He looks surprised…”

The flames were dying, leaving James’ body limp and blackened, hanging half off the molten remains of the metal chair he had been strapped to. Richard could hardly breathe. James hadn’t exploded, or vaporized, as Alice Benson’s description of the Q-13 had led him to expect. But it had been three years since she had worked with it.

“Is he dead?” Sesame asked quietly.

There was no audible answer from Heather.

“Heather, are you all right?” Su said. “Is Benson going to punish you too?”

“She says he’s been talking about erasing her memory,” Sesame said.

“We’re in contact with the Conxence, sweetheart,” Richard pressed. “We’re gonna bring you home okay? Just hold on.”

Sesame drew his knees up onto the seat and hugged them. “She says ‘okay.’”

“We love you,” Su said.

“‘I love you too,’” Sesame translated in Heather’s voice. It killed Richard to hear how lost, how defeated she sounded. He didn’t know whether Sesame was projecting his own emotions, or being an objective conduit. He hadn’t even expected it to be possible to share so much over their makeshift cellular connection.

“You do whatever you have to to protect yourself, okay Heather?” Su said, solemnly looking into Sesame’s face panel, where the camera was embedded. “Keep an eye on James, if he managed to survive that.”

“I will.”

There was a moment of silence, then Sesame said. “Lost the connection.”

Richard sighed, leaning hard against the car. He felt dizzy. Su realized the Conxence was still on the other line.

She put the phone back to her ear. “I’m sorry, are you still there?”

While she filled Ganymede in on what had just happened, Richard tried to steady himself. Sesame’s face rematerialized, and he stared at the floor, his chin docked between his robotic knees.

“Thank you, Sesame,” Richard said hoarsely. “For helping us.”

Sesame nodded.

The robot lifted his face to look at him. “Can I come outside?”

Richard opened the door.

Sesame took the cellphone in one hand and carefully got down. He came forward and wrapped his arms around Richard, pushing his face into Richard’s stomach.

Richard didn’t know how to react. “Are you okay?” he rasped. For a moment, he thought maybe it wasn’t that Sesame had acted as a conduit, but that he and Heather had somehow switched bodies, and that it was his daughter hugging him. The ramifications of James’ machine were always evolving. Anything seemed likely.

The android shook its head, a very slight movement. Then it shook its head harder, hunching its shoulders and clutching Richard’s coat in its hands. Richard kneeled down and wrapped his own arms around it.

“I want them back,” Sesame’s voice warbled and mistuned softly in emotion. “I want to kill Benson for what he did to them.”

Richard held the little robot closer. “It’s not our place to take a life.” He glanced up at Su, who watched them while she finished setting up some sort of meeting with the Conxence. It sounded like they were headed for the capital.

“But there may be other ways to end this.”

+

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO—CONTACT  

First thing Monday morning, James brought Heather up to his personal lab. She sat in the extra desk chair, her head and chest open while he took readings of her power core and ran routine stability tests.

She had scanned as much of the area as she could on her way up from the basement, but her thermal sensor was unhelpful. One useful note, however: she suspected the mysterious room by James’ lab was some kind of generator room or electrical hub.

The more her thoughts turned toward escape, the more she visualized pulling a repeat of Larkspur on that generator, blowing the whole facility sky high.

She watched James putter, his mind elsewhere. His desk was clear. He was on to other projects.

She weighed her chances of making a break for it. She’d have to time it when James took the tether off her ankle to escort her back to her cell. She could incapacitate him with a measured shock, and hopefully smash her way through the window. Sprinting, electrified metal would be hard to apprehend.

However, the fence outside could be electric, which was a problem if the voltage was too high.

She also figured the polymer encasing her vitals wasn’t bulletproof. Inorganic didn’t meant invincible.

James pulled open a drawer across the room and produced what Heather recognized as the pain simulator.

“I need to put this back in,” James said.

Heather buzzed a sigh, but sat still and let him access her neural network. If her escape plan were further along, she might have fought him on it. Better to play along for now.

He plugged in the device, snapped the protective frame back on.

“You can go ahead and close your cranial panels,” he said. “It’s done.”

Heather complied.

“Did it connect?” James moved across the room, where he proceeded to rifle through papers and boot up his laptop.

She searched reluctantly for the connection of the pain simulator. She wondered if she could consciously block it out, and therefore limit its influence. As her attention touched on the accessory, something pushed through in her mind, surprising her. It was text, forming a message:

Heather, it said, You were right, obeying these people is only making things worse. I want to help get you out of here, if you’re willing to work with me. If you don’t want my help, I understand, and I won’t get in your way.
I outfitted the pain simulator with a communicator, so when I test it in the next few minutes, you should be able to access the nearest cellphone tower once the device is activated. I’ve programmed the coordinates to this lab, Empetrum, into the device too. Search for them and you’ll find them. When I test it, reach out to your parents, tell them where we are.
We’re far from civilization, and Empetrum is heavily guarded, with a few fences and security checkpoints between us and the perimeter. It will be very dangerous if Benson catches us, but I’m willing to try if you are.
I’m sorry it took me so long to listen.

Heather stared at him, repressing the millions of questions begging to be given voice. A very real hope after so much despair.

James glanced up to meet her gaze, shy and hopeful and tired. He had nothing to gain by lying to her.

Either way, she’d know for sure as soon as the pain simulator turned on.

He took the remote for the device from a desk drawer, holding it like he feared it would burn him. “I have to test it again.”

Heather watched him. “Okay,” she said quietly.

She squeezed her hands together in her lap, and James activated the device. The signal buzzed oddly in her head, fading in and out like it struggled to translate into a discernible pain response.

She glanced up at him, inquisitive, wondering if he had tried to dampen or eliminate it.

He kept his gaze on the remote, his lips pressed together. His thumb clicked the button again.

The pain signal smoothed out and flared. She winced. Then, somewhere, in the back of her head, she detected something else. Her attention started to fray, splitting between where she sat in

James’ lab, and another piece reaching out all around her.

A weak connection, but it was there.

Hope swelled in her chest.

“Going up two,” he said, and clicked it twice.

Heather stiffened as the pain intensified with sharp, unexpected stabs. She gripped the arms of the chair and tensed her shoulders, closing her eyes. She felt James’ gaze on her as he waited breathlessly for something to happen.

She gave a small shake of her head. With two more clicks, the pain signal ripped from her head down her spine and into her legs. She tried to recall her dad’s cell phone number—she hoped to catch him at Larkspur, where the other engineers might know some way to help. It was difficult to focus.

The signal was still too weak, though she reached out, invisible fingers extending blindly in the dark, trying to find purchase. Trying to find something that could translate her thoughts into a message, and beam it to her parents.

She opened her eyes and gave him a determined, meaningful look. He upped it to level eight and she stiffened. She pulled forward, an electronic, mistuning warble slipping from her voice box. She stared at James’ shoes in front of her, holding onto his presence like a lifeline, to keep her from ripping her brain out or screaming at him to stop it, while she stood still in a barrage of discordant, all consuming pain, trying to listen. Her mind reaching, reaching, reaching.

Something caught and held.

Her eyes widened, her vision blurred out.

She threw words into a choppy message, struggling to keep out nonsense information and not certain of her success: Dad, it’s Heather we’re ok James and I are trapped at Empetrum but planning to escape nothing yet but if you could help that would be great please reply right now.

She mentally shoved it away, pushing it toward her connection with a cellphone tower that she thought was southeast of them, hoping that doubled as sending it out. Her dad usually had his phone on him. It would start vibrating on his desk, or in the pocket of his slacks, if he was at Larkspur. It was 9:34:46. 47. 48.

Heather waited. James stood by, his thumb on the remote’s power button.

Please hurry up, Dad, she thought. She clamped her hands behind her head, ducking it between her knees. Just one second longer. She told herself. One second longer.

HEATHER! A reply came from Richard’s cell phone number. The message was full of frenzied typing mistakes. im so incredbkt relieved tonhear from you yes we all want to help you and james ge tout of empetrum what can we do to help???

I don’t know. Heather replied, closing her eyes hard. The emotion was overwhelming, receiving the first words from her family in two weeks. Since dying and being resurrected as a machine. Since everything and everyone had fallen apart. We don’t know how we’re going to do it, but I’ll let you know as soon as we do. I’m sorry I can’t talk any more right now but I’ll contact you again as soon as I can. She felt the urge to cry. She wished she could. I love you.

She waited again. She sent Empetrum’s coordinates.

I love you too.

“Okay,” her voice sounded small and crackling. “Okay too much. James please—” her tone broke. “Please turn it off—”

Abruptly, the pain cut off and Heather remained immobile. She stared at the floor for a few moments, trying to recover from the shock and gather her thoughts. Finally, her death grip loosened around the base of her head. She slowly straightened up and stared at the engineer before her in awe.

James looked his age in that moment, callow and vulnerable. “I—it worked okay?” he managed.

“The bug fixes took?”

“Yes,” she said.

He nodded. “Good…” He exhaled unsteadily. He wiped a hand across his mouth, spent a moment in indecision, then moved to put the remote away across the room. “Good.”

+

I love you too.

Richard stared wide-eyed at his phone, having turned away from the counter where Sesame’s body was quickly taking shape. He felt light-headed.

Very quietly, the small box with the child’s voice attached to his laptop spoke, “Richard?”

He glanced up, and realized his colleagues were all looking at him.

It was all Richard could do not to react. He knew Benson had a surveillance tap in the lab they were in. Very slowly, as calm as he could even while his heart pounded hard in his chest, he got up and passed his phone to Eve.

Eve’s face went ashen as she read the message.

“It’s time,” Richard said.

+

“Director.” Benson’s administrative assistant found him in his personal lab, splitting cell cultures under a fume hood.

“Yes?” Benson continued to work. His right hand managed the automated pipettor, systematically driving a solution of detached cells and fresh media into eight new plates. The motions were second nature to him.

“Security has informed me that all your surveillance feeds of the Larkspur facility have been deactivated,” Walker said.

“What? When?”

“Earlier today. They were removed from their positions and destroyed by Knight and his colleagues,” she said as he discarded the pipette tip and stacked and labeled the plates. “I’ve reviewed the last few minutes of footage, and Knight reacted to something on his phone shortly before it happened.”

“We must have overlooked something.” He transferred the newly split petri dishes to a nearby incubator. He locked the protective glass panel in front of them, followed by the incubator’s heavily insulated door. “You’re sure they found all of them?”

Walker nodded. “Everything’s gone black. I’ll have to review recent footage for more information.”

Benson removed his gloves and snapped off the light in the fume hood. “Okay…”

“And this came for you.” Walker extended a small envelope. “Your mother told Roberts to pass it along to you.”

The director took it and opened it up, revealing an index card. Reading the diminutive capital letters, he suddenly brought the note closer to his face with a startled frown.

Dr. Director,
Your kingdom’s coming down.
Sincerely,
A Liar

+

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE—CONFRONTATIONS 

Benson pounded on the door of his mother’s dingy single apartment. After what felt like an eternity fuming in the corridor alone, the door unlocked and Alice appeared, braced for impact.

“What do you mean by this?” Benson demanded, shoving the envelope into her hands as he barged unbidden into the apartment.

“You look well, Michael,” Alice said. She shut the door and turned the envelope in her hands, smiling bitterly. “A little pale, though. Spending too much time in the lab?”

“You said I was wasting my time continuing to consider you a threat!” Benson cried. “I can’t believe you’re helping them. As if I wouldn’t have found out on my own, but why would you wave it in my face?”

Alice’s gaze fell to the card. “I told them,” she said softly, as if she hardly believed her own words.

“About us, your grandfather. About you and Empetrum. Everything.”

Benson stared, eyebrows raised. “Do you have a death wish?”

“What on earth did you do to Knight’s daughter?” Alice asked. “Empetrum’s in the business of kidnapping children now?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

Alice moved toward the kitchen. “I have something else for you.” She pulled a short stack of papers off the counter and extended it.

Benson snatched it from her hands, exasperated.

“This is a printed copy of the information I gave them,” she explained as Benson glanced through the pages. “If anything happens to me, I told them to take this information to the press.”

“Ah, there it is, the self-preservation,” Benson muttered, tossing the stack back onto the counter in disdain. “You think I’m afraid of some bad publicity?”

“You should be. Maybe the Conxence will take up their case. You should let your prisoners go before this gets any worse.”

Benson cracked a wan, spiteful smile. A panicky tightness pulled in his chest at the mention of the rebel militia. “Go ahead and try it. We can deal with unwanted visitors.”
 “That sounds like a bluff to me.”

“I really should just drag you back to Empetrum and give you that mindwipe,” Benson snapped. “If you’re determined to be a problem.”

So soon after the death of his mentor, Benson hadn’t had the heart to lose his only remaining family member. Even if it was his gloomy, deadbeat mother. Enough of his sentimentality should have worn off by now.

“Do it then,” Alice said. She stepped toward him, eyes burning. “By all means, don’t be shy! Give me the Q-13 if it’ll make you feel in control!”

“What the hell do you want from me?” Benson shifted back. He paused, and his face softened into a surprised smile. “Oh, you want out.” He laughed. “You had me there for a second. I almost thought you were trying to make amends or stand up to me, in your own pathetic way.”

“I am trying to make amends,” Alice said. “You have to stop this, Michael. Victimizing your peers and destroying lives won’t give you what you’re looking for.”

“And what am I looking for?” Benson managed to keep his voice steady, despite the immense weight inside his chest, the terrible memories clawing through his mind. He did not fear them anymore. “I’m very curious what you think that is.”

Alice didn’t answer.

“So you want me to adopt toothless, ineffectual ideas about the world,” Benson said. “By taking up my grandfather’s work, I’ve failed you, is that it? You blame me?” Heat spilled into his tone, inundating his waning efforts to curb it. “You were the one who brought me to Empetrum in the first place. It was you who drove my father away and left me alone. Grandfather was the only one in our family with purpose after Delva dragged our name through the mud. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he worked hard for it until the day he died. And then he left it in my charge. He was the only one who saw anything in me, so how on earth could I have turned out any differently?” He spread his arms. “Why would I want to be anything else!”

“I know you loved him, but you don’t have to follow his path,” Alice pleaded. “You can be free of this.”

“I don’t regret anything.”

“Then show me.” Alice squared her shoulders. “Show me you can follow through—that you became the perfect person to lead that hellhole you call a research facility. Prove you aren’t that elusive and ever-changing definition of coward your grandfather hung over absolutely everyone. See, being away from that poisoned air, I finally figured it out. Real cowardice is playing along. And even though he’s dead and gone, you’re still playing his game.”

“Shut up.” Benson’s inherently soft features lowered into a glare behind the narrow lenses of his glasses. “I did this because I wanted it.”

“Did you? You were just a child. I watched as he traumatized you, desensitized you—”

“You’re right, you just watched!” Benson snarled.

“And I’m sorry!” Alice said. Her voice shook, and Benson was disgusted by it. “I failed you, and I will never forgive myself for that. But Empetrum is yours now, Michael, not his. You don’t have to be bound by your grandfather’s cruelty. You don’t have to make that your legacy.”

“Don’t you dare make me out to be the victim in all this,” Benson said. The side of his mouth twitched up to form what he hoped was a confident smile. “You are so obsessed with bringing out this person that doesn’t exist. Don’t you understand? There isn’t anything there.”

Alice wanted so badly for her greatest mistake to fix itself. This wasn’t about Benson. His mother had only ever looked out for herself, and Benson had never needed her concern, or her remorse. Benson would never give her the reconciliation she wanted. It was too late, anyway, but Benson wasn’t broken.

Maybe he wanted to be a monster.

Benson turned. “I’m done here.”

“I crossed you in the most blatant way possible, yet you’re just going to overlook it.”

“I haven’t overlooked it.” Benson paused. “In fact, I hate you all the more for it.”

“But not enough to do anything to me?” It was more a statement than a question.
 “It doesn’t matter what you told Knight or Delva, or what they do with the information,” Benson said. “No one is going to help them, and I’m not going to do you the service of taking those memories that haunt you so much, or relieve you of your failed life. Rot in your guilt for all I care.” He opened the door, glancing coldly over his shoulder as he left. “Nobody can touch Empetrum.”

+

James paid greater attention to his surroundings. Cameras lurked in every corner of the facility like an invasive species. He assumed his apartment was also under surveillance, though he hadn’t found evidence of it.

He felt watched as he leaned against his kitchen counter with a composition book, outlining equations and symbols for small stun devices that Benson would find troubling if he were to decipher James’ notes. When he was ready to make the devices, he would have to be really quick about it.

He felt sick with anxiety every time he thought about escape plans. There was no easy way out of Empetrum. He wasn’t even allowed off the grounds outside of Benson’s direction.

Late the next evening, he would activate the pain simulator remotely for two fifteen-minute intervals so Heather could collaborate with her family. Despite his hopes, he hadn’t been able to completely disentangle the pain signal from the communication one while updating it. They didn’t have much room for trial and error, if any.

His pager beeped from the other end of the room, halting his thoughts. He stole over to the table, and found a message from the director.

Please come to my office.

Benson had postponed their followup at the end of the work day. He’d had some errand to run.

James took a slow breath as he headed across campus. The days of late summer brought long, warm dusk, in which the air smelled like heated earth and green leaves. It was sort of calming, even here, and he tried to remind himself all over again of the world outside.

On the off chance he and Heather succeeded, escaping the grounds wouldn’t rid him of Empetrum. Whether he had a rigged legal fight and a prison sentence ahead of him, an impending re-kidnapping or assassination, or life spent hiding from the government itself, he wasn’t sure. He only hoped that Heather could be free.

Maybe the Conxence would take him.

There was the question of Hodgson too. They couldn’t leave her behind, but James’ ID card didn’t have access to her cell. He would need someone else’s. Yeun’s, or one of the security guards that appeared to have universal clearance.

The director’s office was open. James ventured into view, knocking furtively on the door.

Benson stood in front of the window at the back of his office, considering the lab below with his hands clasped behind his back. He turned.

“Good evening, Siles,” he said, and it sounded extra chilled. “Please take a seat.”

James complied.

Benson didn’t move from the window. “How did it go today?”

James tried to ignore a growing sense of foreboding as he summarized the day’s progress.

“Productive. I ran diagnostics with Heather, reinstalled the pain simulator after making some bug fixes that would have interfered with the integrity of the pain response. Then I shadowed Yeun and studied Compatible modulators.”

“Good.” Benson said evenly, like he was absorbing the information slowly, running it through a filter in his head. He observed James for several moments after that. “I wanted to talk to you about Larkspur.”

James’ face went cold. “Okay.”

“Are you aware of anything that’s been happening over there in your absence?”

“No,” James said. That was truthful, he didn’t.

Benson studied him again, his frame silhouetted in front of the window, still as a python calculating its strike.

“I know about what you actually did with your first test subject,” Benson said finally. “You call it ‘Sesame,’ right?”

James’ heart squeezed. Fear flushed up the back of his neck. “Yes.”

“You pulled its neural network and left it for Knight to find,” the director went on. “Which he did. He plugged it into his laptop, and it found the internet, upgraded its intelligence, and now they are building it a humanoid body in exchange for information.”

James straightened up a little, shocked. “What?”

“You really didn’t know about any of this?”

“No.”

“I can’t help but wonder what else you’ve blatantly lied to me about?” Benson said.

“That was shortly before Heather’s transfer,” James struggled to keep his voice steady. “It was a frightening transition for me, and I was reacting defensively.”

Benson pushed up on his glasses. “But not anymore?”

“I understand the situation better, and have chosen to embrace it.”

“…More or less.”

James swallowed. Benson’s gaze felt like a vice around his throat. “I don’t want to cause any more trouble.”

The director nodded, thinking. “That’s all I needed. Thank you.”

James hesitated, then stood up. He felt the director’s icy attention on his back as he left his office and escaped down the hallway. It was all he could do not to break into a run.

+

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR—MEDIATION

By Tuesday evening, the Larkspur engineers had finished Sesame’s body.

“It’s beautiful,” Sesame said, using the laptop’s automated voice as Richard transported his setup to the counter beside the android’s open cranium. The black facial panel lay dormant in the light gray head.

“All right, Sesame,” Richard said. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to unplug everything in order to put you where you need to be,” Richard explained. “But don’t worry. If there are any major hitches, I’ll just hook you back up so we can figure it out.”


“Okay.”

“Here goes…” Richard gently pulled the chord connecting Sesame’s neural network to his laptop.

Eve and Chelo propped the android up and kept the head from drooping as Richard carefully fitted Sesame’s neural network into the cushioned frame inside. He craned his hands into the tight space, plugging in wires, taking care to unite the wire leading to its power core last.

As soon as the last connection clicked in, the robotic body jolted. The facial screen switched on, blinding white.

Richard snatched the last piece of the frame off the counter and snapped it in over Sesame’s neural network. His colleagues returned the android to a supine position on the counter, and they all stepped back.

The robot lay still for several long moments. Slowly, the cranial panels closed, sealing the neural network inside. A fan in its chest began to hum softly.

The light of the face panel flickered, the visual screen glitching in multicolored bars of pixels as it tested its connection. Then it faded from white to dark gray. Large cartoonish eyes opened from the dark background, and a simple black line for a mouth materialized on the screen.

“Woah…” Sesame’s voice tuned until it found the tone he had chosen a week before. He stared up at the ceiling, stunned. Very carefully, he planted his robotic hands on the table and pushed himself up to a sitting position.

“How do you feel?” Richard asked.

The robot looked at its hands, turning them one way, then the other, curling and opening the fingers. It turned its head to look at him. The face glitched and materialized a few times. Finally, it figured out how to smile, and the virtual mouth matched the words as it spoke. “I feel good.”

Addie stepped forward to help him steady the robot as it twisted, dangling its legs over the edge of the counter. Together, they helped it down to the floor.

Sesame stood still, his head just above Richard’s elbow, staring at his own feet. “I’m so tall.”

“Welcome to the bipedal body plan.” Chelo smiled, crossing her arms.

He shot her a virtual grin over his shoulder. Experimentally, he put a foot forward, faltering. Addie and Richard reached out to support him as he tried to walk on two legs for the first time.
Sesame watched the floor. He smiled. “I like this.”

“Everything feels functional?” Eve asked.

“So far so good.” Sesame kept his hand on Richard’s forearm to steady himself. “Is there a mirror?” he asked eagerly. Even though he’d used his voice a little prior to this, Richard was still unaccustomed to it. Expressive, humanoid, speaking more naturally every day. He had even chosen pronouns. “I want to look at myself.”

Richard accompanied him to the restroom on the first floor, and Sesame was walking on his own well before they reached it. The android gripped the sink and stood up on his toes, peering into the mirror. Another smile spread across the dark screen of his face.

He changed his eye color from the default black to a range of different hues, and finally settled on a teal color. He threw a smile at Richard and the other engineers, who had congregated by the open door.

Watching Sesame operate his new body brought Richard a challenging mix of emotions: relief that they’d held up their end of the bargain, dread and uncertainty of how to move forward. This creature that had loosely adopted the visage of a human child currently played the part of friend or ally, as long as they kept its trust. Now that it had intellect and independent physicality, Richard had no idea what its next actions would be.

Sesame explored other features of his body, opening and closing his chest panel and touching his fingertips to the blue light beaming modestly from his right shoulder.

“What do you think?” Richard said.

Sesame turned and threw his arms around him, squeezing him a little too tightly. “It’s perfect! Thank you!”

Then he ducked under his arm to go hug everyone else in turn. “Thank you so much! I love it.” He ran a few steps into the lobby, losing and regaining his balance as he took a wide look around. He raised his hands high and gazed through his fingers at the ceiling. He twirled again, laughing. “I can’t believe this is mine!”

Richard felt like he was only dreaming this. So much had changed in such a short time and in such unexpected, impossible ways that it felt like his daughter had been missing for two years instead of two weeks.

After Sesame had flitted around and experimented some more, he consented to staying still long enough for the engineers to double-check his body’s functionality. Then, he helped them clean up, immensely enjoying himself. He smiled constantly, listened well, and talked whenever he had the opportunity, and Richard found his tension toward the android beginning to ease. Foolishly, perhaps.

Before long, Sesame was walking with Richard to the car, holding his hand, but not for support.

Richard opened the door to the passenger seat for him and Sesame got in.

“I was here when I was with the laptop, right?” Sesame said, looking around. “Your car is different than James’.” He opened the glove compartment as Richard slipped into the driver’s seat and shut the door. Sesame mimicked his movement and pulled his own door closed. He curiously pulled a car manual from the glove compartment.

“Leave everything in there, please,” Richard said, fastening his seatbelt.

Sesame replaced his find and, watching Richard closely, he located his own seatbelt and pulled it over his chest.

“Like this?” he asked, fumbling with the latch.

“Yes.”

Sesame pushed up the door to the glove compartment and gazed up at the sky through the car window.

“When Heather and James come home, I wonder what they’ll think of my new body,” he said as

Richard started the engine.

Richard backed the car out of his parking spot and navigated toward the main road.

“I think they’ll be happy,” Sesame decided finally.

“Yeah,” Richard agreed tightly, a lump in his throat. “I think they will.”

+

Heather watched her internal clock in acute apprehension. She paced, listening to the rhythmic hum of her movement and the click of her bare feet on the floor.

In two minutes, James would activate the pain simulator. He was across campus in his living quarters, but the remote had a wide area of influence. It had to. It was for controlling her, after all.

After so much time spent waiting, deciding that no risk was too high to keep her from attempting escape, she found herself afraid. Of contacting her family, of getting caught, of having decided to trust James again.

She didn’t know what she felt toward him anymore. Less hostile, perhaps. A willingness to work with him. She was embarrassed to realize she wished he was with her at that moment for moral support while she waited to grapple with the pain simulator again. To finally tell the people she loved what had happened to her.

She paused to regard herself in the small mirror in the far corner above the sink. She still somewhat expected to see herself as she used to be, and the empty gray face was forever a bitter surprise. Even if she and James really did manage to escape, she couldn’t imagine confronting the long, dysfunctional life that awaited her because of him.

Still, she wanted the chance to see what continuing to live could be like. Despite James, despite everything.

With her time running out, she lay down on the bed against the wall. She knew she was being monitored, so she would have to give as few visual cues as possible to the watchful cameras.

She folded her hands across her middle and stared at the ceiling, trying to focus. She had already considered what she would say. Fear welled up through her circuits at the thought of having to go through with it. Her parents deserved to know what would be coming home to them—as much as she wished she could hide it from them forever, to continue being the Heather they knew, and not this unnerving hybrid of metal form and organic memory. She kept thinking there had to be a way to take all this back, but the door to her old life, the only thing she truly wanted now, had closed forever.

Gradually, a headache reared into existence, a warning from James.

Heather closed her eyes. Bring it.

Soon, the pain increased and Heather focused on the communication signal. The pain wasn’t real, she reminded herself. She couldn’t feel real pain. Without this device, she could cut off her hand and only feel a breach of her electromagnetic field before it moved in over the gap.

Level eight wasn’t as hard to bear the third time she had experienced it. The communication signal was tenuous in the concrete confines of her cell, but it was functional enough. She had fifteen minutes.

Dad, are you there?

__

Richard’s phone vibrated from where he had left it on the kitchen table while he and Su made a late dinner, with Sesame as happily underfoot as a toddler.

Richard read the message, then brought the virtual keyboard onto the screen.

__

Yes we’re here. What’s the status? Are you all right?
Heather felt a smile wash through her, despite the pain that strove to consume her attention.
I’m ok, she replied. I have 15 minutes, but I’ll be back in about 10 after that for another 15—if that makes sense. Sorry. Contacting you is hard.

__

Richard scrolled through the message, Su at his side. Sesame craned his neck to read it too.

Richard lowered it a bit so the android could see it more easily.

“How is she texting so fast?” Richard muttered.

Why? he texted.

Long story, came the reply. Later.

Sesame hopped up and down. “Plug me in! We could do this so much faster.”

“What?”

“Where’s your phone charger? And that cord you used to plug me into the laptop? You could splice them together and I could mediate!” Sesame was already on his way down the hall to grab Richard’s briefcase from the home office. “It wouldn’t take long at all.”

Are you at Empetrum because of James’ neural transfer project? Richard typed as Sesame reappeared.

“Do you have tools here?” The robot planted the briefcase on the table. “Please tell me you have stuff.”

Richard dug out the wrapped neural cable and extra charger cord. “They should be in that drawer.”

He pointed to a narrow compartment at the far end of the counter.

Richard’s cell phone vibrated again.

Indirectly, yes, but they want him for something else now. How much do you know?

Sesame helped us find info about Empetrum’s origins and the people who run it, Richard replied.

Su brought the whole drawer to the table. But nothing about why you and James disappeared.

“Why is your phone a heat-sensitive touch screen?” Sesame whined, reading the text as Richard set the phone aside to work with the wires. He found the tools he needed, clipped the heads off each cord, and took to stripping the insulation.

His hands were shaking.

__

That night when I went down to the lab, I walked in on James arguing with a security guard who worked for Benson too. It hurt to remember. She found herself omitting details automatically. She couldn’t bear to tell them what had really happened. They took me to the facility because, according to them, I had seen too much.

This is Mom, came the reply. We’re gonna plug Sesame in so he can talk to you, make this go more smoothly.
Ok, Heather sent. Then what her mom had said registered, and she opened her eyes, confused.

__

“Alright,” Richard said. He severed a strip of electrical tape and wrapped it around the newly united wires. “I’ve got it.”

Sesame was already opening the top of his head and inclining it forward.

Su handed over the phone, and Richard attached it to one end of the spliced cord. Unlatching the top of the protective frame inside Sesame’s head, he pushed the other end into the port he had used to connect him to the laptop.

Sesame propped himself up onto the nearest chair. His face panel went blank and the words of their text conversation showed up white against the dark gray.

“How do I connect with her?” Sesame asked.

“I don’t know.” Richard pulled up a chair and took a seat in front of him. Su stood very close beside him, silent and nervous. “I’m not even sure what she’s messaging with.”

Wait—Sesame’s going to talk to me? Heather texted. He talks now?

“There she is,” Sesame said, a watermark smile flashing behind the words on his face panel. The brief visual lit up on the phone beside him.

__

HEATHER!! Text burst into her mind almost immediately. It’s Sesame! Hello! I’m a humanoid now!

Heather’s eyes widened. What?

More excited words inundated her.

James left me behind so Richard and everybody could tap into my memories, but when Richard plugged me into his laptop, I found the Internet and updated myself! I have an android body now and I can talk to people and everything! I’m not a mouse anymore. It’s great!

Wow. Heather didn’t know how to reply. It was hard to imagine Sesame in a body like hers. That’s amazing. I hope we’ll get to meet again soon.

Me too! Sesame said. How are you making contact? This isn’t James’ number.

Yeah, I think they took his phone. Heather hesitated. He made a different sort of communicator, but it’s disguised so we don’t get in trouble—so it’s hard to use.

She stared up at the ceiling, warring with herself, distracted by the pain signal. She knew lying to them would waste time and resources they didn’t have. But the longer she put it off, the longer they could pretend that maybe things could be okay.

There’s something I need to tell you, she said. That night…at Larkspur…the security guard killed me. Shot me with some kind of poison dart. Empetrum would have preferred to leave it at that, but James transferred me to bring me back. The body he was making for his project at Empetrum wasn’t finished yet, so he put me in Larkspur’s android instead.

__

Richard read the text scrolling across Sesame’s facial panel, and his heart sank so quickly it felt like it had imploded in his chest.

“Oh no…” Su said.

I’m dead, but I’m alive. She said. I’m Heather, and I’m not. I’m sorry.

“No,” Richard gasped, removing his glasses to rub a hand across his eyes. His throat tightened. “No no no…”

“So he did do it,” Su murmured. “That bastard…”

Your mom says James is a bastard, Sesame said.

“Don’t tell her that—” Richard straightened up, horrified.

__

Heather decided not to tell them that she agreed. It was thanks to James she wasn’t all the way dead, but getting her killed in the first place put it in the realm of “too little too late.” What’s important right now is that James knows more about the inside of Empetrum than any of us, and he’s promised to help.

If they were lucky, they could tackle the existential devastation later.

There was a pause, and she hated to think what her loved ones were going through in that moment, dealing with an impact she had been processing for two weeks. At the very least, she had been able to tell them herself.

__

Su crossed her arms, her face stony. “If he’s helping her, I guess he’s on our side for now. I’ll respect that.”

Your parents will work with him, Sesame translated, generously.

Thank you. Heather said. My time’s up for now. Please stand by, I’ll be back in 10 minutes. I just need a break from using this device. It creates a pain signal—Benson made James make it.

“What?” Richard leaned forward indignantly. “She’s in pain?”

You’re in pain? Sesame asked, but he didn’t receive a reply. “Ohp, connection’s lost,” he said, his face re-materializing to replace the text.

Heavy silence suffocated the kitchen. Richard stared at the phone on the table, eyes wide, feeling like his soul was leaving his body.

“Is this real life?” Su said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Is this actually happening?”

Richard glanced up to see she was in tears. He stood up and wrapped his arms around her, on the verge of sobbing himself. Sesame looked like he might want to join the hug, but he remained where he was, troubled.

“I can’t believe that he—” Su’s voice cracked as she buried her face in Richard’s shoulder. He held her as she broke down. “Our daughter…”

A part of Richard tried to focus on the practical positives: Heather was alive in some form, and communicating with them, and James had agreed to help from the inside. But all their private, catastrophizing fears about the situation had just been confirmed, and the agony of it dragged him under like a riptide.

Sesame quietly watched them hug each other and cry, observing their pain, giving them this moment and waiting for the next one. Richard wondered if the robot even understood how devastating this all was. For Sesame, his transfer had been a rebirth.

Only time would tell what it would mean for Heather.

+

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE—ICNS 

“This is my voice!” a child-like tone exulted from the confines of the lab. “I am hearing it! What I imagined! Richard, this is my voice! My own!” They laughed, and sounded like they might cry. “I am so happy.”

Richard smiled wearily at the laptop, where Sesame was still tethered. “I’m glad you found a pitch you like.”

“Can I play with my face too?”

“It’s not quite ready yet,” Richard said as he joined Chelo and Eve at the other counter, where they were setting up to start adding to the android’s skeletal frame. Addie and Greg were busy at a workstation against the wall, making the finishing touches to the sleek dark screen that would generate Sesame’s face. It may have been a bit of a shortcut on their part, but Sesame would likely appreciate the creative freedom.

“That’s my body,” Sesame said eagerly, as if trying to convince themself it was true.

Richard attended to his work, melancholy. It had been three days already since they had met with

Alice Benson, and he didn’t know what to do next. They had been systematically locating suspicious surveillance devices in the Larkspur facility, but hadn’t removed them, as much as he itched to do so. They assumed Michael already knew about Sesame, but hoped to stall his inevitable discovery of Alice’s involvement until they were ready to move.

Alice had given them permission to stay in contact, very cautiously. She asked to know if they came up with a strategy she could help with, and she promised to pass along any new information if she caught wind of James or Heather.

So they were waiting, planning. Or, attempting to, at least.

Richard wrestled with the desire to go to the press immediately, light the fuse and see how much of Benson’s empire it could burn. But whether James was innocent in the situation or not, Empetrum’s government ties meant it wouldn’t go down without an all out brawl.

While the police made a show of looking for answers they never intended to find, the government would launch a misinformation campaign to poison the well before journalists had a chance to dig up enough evidence to mobilize the public. In all the scenarios Richard could think of—even the optimistic ones— Benson had plenty of time to cover his tracks.

And after talking with Alice, he knew any wrong move could get Heather killed.

+

Yeun’s prediction had been spot on. After the trial with the pain simulator, Benson took James an hour and a half northeast to the national capital, to where Non-Comp’s progenitors lived and trained: the Institution of Compatible National Security.

As Benson scanned his access badge outside the glass double doors of the entrance, James glanced back at the wide, deserted street of one of the capital’s industrial districts by the shipping pier. It was easy to forget a whole world existed outside Empetrum.

Benson ushered him inside. The lobby of the ICNS stretched out before him in black marble, with white cushioned benches placed back to back with a shock of indoor plants on the shelf between them. Beyond that, at the back of the room, stood a security desk, posted with the facility’s title in a tall, commanding font.

Directly behind the desk sat a pair of double doors, and they looked more to James like fire doors than anything else.

Benson strode straight up to the desk and had James hand over his Empetrum ID. The guard kept it, swapping it for a visitor’s badge on a neon yellow lanyard. He pressed a button under the desk and with a long, gentle tone, the lock on the fire doors beyond clicked back.

Benson thanked the guard and proceeded.

The doors opened to a wall, with a sign pointing left toward the offices, or right for the training facilities. Benson turned left and led James through a few more corridors, before James found himself stepping into an office suite. An administrative assistant presided over a podium-like desk in front of a wall of frosted glass panels.

She got up as they entered. “Good afternoon, Dr. Benson. I’ll let Varnet know you’re here.”

“Thank you,” Benson said, and crossed his arms, waiting.

It was odd to see Benson under these circumstances. Taking orders rather than giving them, nobody calling him “Director,” nobody overtly scared of him.

James idly glanced around at the minimalistic wall art. His right hand still stung a little from where Heather had shocked him. He tried to work out where that could have stemmed from, whether it was a static discharge, or something else. Heather’s behavior suggested it had surprised her too.

The sound of a door opening down the hallway broke the stillness and James startled. The receptionist returned, followed by a heavy-bodied woman in sharp business attire. The newcomer wore her dark, wavy hair tied up in a loose bun, her dangling earrings catching the light.

Something in her body type and the almond shape of her eyes reminded James of Heather, should she have been able to grow up. He felt his face grow hot, and a knot of guilt twisted painfully in his chest.

Varnet’s full lips curled into a smile. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said. Her gaze flicked first to Benson, then to James. “This is Yeun’s new lab partner?”

“Yes,” Benson said. “James Siles. Roboticist and neurobiologist.”

“Neuro?” Varnet looked at him with renewed interest. She stuck out a hand. Her fingernails were neat and manicured with sleek white polish. “Anusha Varnet, head coordinator of the ICNS. I call the shots here.”

“Nice to meet you,” James managed, shaking her hand.

She stepped aside, gesturing down the hallway. “Come down to my office, let’s chat a bit.”

James followed, practically holding his breath.

Varnet’s office was bright and organized, punctuated with potted plants and photographs around a modern, white lacquered desk. Her aesthetic was in direct opposition to Benson’s darker, more muted sensibilities. The contrast set James on edge, and he felt very uncomfortable in a room with both of them at the same time.

Once they had taken a seat in two available chairs, Varnet positioned herself at her desk and said,

“How long have you been at Empetrum, Siles?”

James swallowed. “A little over a month.”

She glanced at Benson, who didn’t react, and back to James. “How do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m adjusting.”

“Good,” Varnet said. “I’m sure Benson has briefed you of the situation at the ICNS, and all the work that’s yet to be done.”

James nodded. “I’m told there aren’t enough Compatible recruits.”

“That’s right,” Varnet said. “We only have a handful who were able to support the modulators, and who also passed physical and psychological exams to be brought into our program. As you can imagine, we’re very interested in getting Non-Comp off the ground.”

James had heard that title so many times over the past week. He hated it.

“Have you started working with Dr. Yeun yet?” she asked.

“Yes,” James said. “I’ve been reading up on the background materials, and practicing procedural techniques with Yeun. My expertise is heavier on the robotics side.”

“We’re bringing him up to speed as quickly as we can,” Benson said, nicely.

“So you have neurobiology as a specialization,” Varnet said. “Interesting choice, Benson. Do you think the key to developing Six’s strain of Non-Comp to viability has something to do with its nervous properties?”

James felt Varnet’s eyes on him, but he kept his gaze trained on his hands in his lap. After mountains of graphs and theories and data surrounding modulator research and its offshoots,

James had finally heard someone utter a name, even if it was likely an alias.
Six. They called the four-armed progenitor Six. These were real people, with feelings and thoughts and families.


“The nervous properties are actually really solid in our most recent prototype,” Benson was saying. “Our current obstacle has been developing a modulator that can engage properly with an edited genome. We’ve found the Compatible gene markers our original modulators were built around change when knitted into a non-Compatible system. Siles has a particular knack for merging biology and mechanical technology. I’m confident he’ll do very well.”

“Glad to hear it,” Varnet said.

James waited, holding his breath, for his previous project to surface in the conversation as proof of his capabilities—to find out that Benson had also lied to him about not wanting to pique the government’s interest in O.R.T. But Benson didn’t bring it up, and Varnet didn’t ask for credentials.

He stifled a sigh of relief when Benson stood up to go.

“I don’t want to take too much of your time,” Benson said. “I was hoping to show Siles around the facility, see the recruits. They’re in a training session right now, aren’t they?”

“Yes, go ahead upstairs,” she said. “I’m sure your new bioroboticist would like to see with whom he’ll be working in the coming months. The recruits are up in the gym with Gresham and Hill. But please stop by again when you’re finished. I’d like to talk more with you, Siles.”

James nodded, numbly, and then he was following Benson out the door.

As they made their way back up the hallway, cutting across a different corridor to elevators on the other side of the building, the abundance of hushed, empty air struck James as eerie. The ICNS was three stories tall. He could hardly imagine what it must be like for the few existing soldiers, spending all their time in a place built for a much higher occupancy.

They took an elevator up to the second floor, then went down a wide hallway to a door with a window reinforced by a checkerboard of wire. Benson opened it to the sound of running footsteps echoing off equipment.

James nervously stepped inside the gymnasium. It was massive, with high, industrial ceilings, stocked with mats, cushioned floors, pull-up bars, foam pits, and a small city of wooden parkour structures in the back. Dr. Hill stood near the adjacent wall with an electronic tablet docked on his forearm, next to a tall, muscular man with a stern jaw, gauges in his ears, and athletic attire.

“That’s Victor Gresham,” Benson said, nodding toward the latter. “The recruits’ trainer and caretaker.”

James felt like he was on a leash as Benson strode across the sidelines to Hill, who acknowledged them with a nod. Gresham spared him only a glance.

Across the room, James spotted the recruits, and his breath caught. The literature behind Compatibility technology listed the progenitors at the ICNS as young adults, but nobody had bothered to clarify that the soldiers were teenagers.

More innocent kids, snapped up by the system like Heather.

They were running some sort of cardio circuit involving jogging, sprinting, and hurdles. At this phase of the workout, they appeared to be concentrating on simply remaining mobile. The one called Six immediately stood out. He towered over his peers, and he indeed possessed an additional set of fully-formed arms, sticking out of a tank top that had been slit down the sides to accommodate them. His dark, curly hair was clipped back in the front to keep it out of his heart-shaped face, and he ran next to a boy with green skin. The latter must have been the plant one, James thought with a sinking feeling in his stomach.

He felt like he had stepped into someone else’s fever dream as he watched the very people Yeun described in the stem cell culture lab, training, running, avoiding obstacles, spurring each other on to complete the circuit.

Each of them had a segmented metal band attached to their right wrist. A modulator. The reason James had been consumed by Empetrum.

At the front of the group, competing with a girl with springy, pink-dyed hair, ran a boy who seemed to be composed of shadows. Wisps of black smoke trailed out from the collar of his t-shirt and off his arms, as if fatigue were causing him to lose grip on physicality.

Aside from Six, the green kid, and the shadow one, the rest of the recruits otherwise looked normal from a distance. James found himself trying to think, based on what he knew about genetics and physiology, who the next target after Six would be for Non-Comp. Concussion, telepathy, pyrokinesis, smoke, plants…

Telepathy, maybe. It was probably electromagnetic in some way.

Gresham called out to the kids across the gym, making James jump for the second time. “Stop! Get water. Line up on the floor in five minutes for group conditioning.”

The recruits slowed. Following his teammates toward a wall of cubbies, Six clasped two hands behind his head and stretched the other pair back. The kids seemed in good spirits, chatting while they caught their breath before Gresham’s next task.

James watched them interact. Their voices filtered across the gym, but he couldn’t hear much of what they were saying.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Benson said quietly. “Someday we’ll have unraveled the secrets of each of those Compatibilities.”

James’ attention followed the four-armed teenager. The green kid said something and Six glanced James’ direction, his eyes widening in embarrassment as their gazes accidentally met. Six looked away and leaned down to say something to his teammate. The green kid pulled a water bottle from his cubby, and gave James a once-over from the distance, eyelids lowered and brows raised in an appraising, semi-judgmental way. He flitted over to a girl with a round face and short black hair, aiming his water bottle at her like a sword and asking her something.

James looked down at his shoes, pretending not to be straining to hear their conversation.

“I don’t read you without permission, I don’t read him,” she said. She must be the telepath, James thought. His forehead felt cold, uncomfortable being the center of the recruits’ curiosity.

“Aw, come on Hui-Ling,” the green kid said.

“Don’t give me that, Collin. You know I’m not supposed to read staff or superiors.”

They lowered their voices, then, their conversation attracting the attention of their other teammates. Six offered something. Despite his size, he had a timid, gentle countenance. Collin threw his head back with a guffaw, earning a squirt of a water bottle from the girl with pink hair.

Hui-Ling muttered something, and a boy with broad shoulders and a dark, freckled face, who had otherwise been observing from the side snorted, and the whole group burst into laughter.

“Rett!” The smoke boy pushed against his shoulder, as Rett grinned into his water bottle. “It wasn’t that funny.”

James felt a stone in his chest, weighing him down, slowly crushing him.

“See, Siles?” Benson said. “They’re well taken care of here. They get along. They’re happy enough.”

James’ brow furrowed. Happy enough.

He figured they had all been forced into the program, and weren’t allowed to know how deep it went. Did any of them believe in the cause or were they all simply making the most of it?

They were just kids.

Gresham left Hill’s side and strode out onto the floor. “All right everybody, it’s time! Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

The recruits took their places out on the floor without comment.

“Pushup position,” Gresham said, his voice deep and commanding as he strolled among them and began to count. “One! Two!”

James found himself watching Six yet again, who pounded out two pushups for every one his teammates did, with his accessory hands behind his back. Once Gresham reached twenty, Six let his other arms down, curling his original pair under his chest to keep them out of the way while his second pair worked.

Once James and Yeun had developed a viable form of Non-Comp, he wondered if the target group would remain adolescents. He supposed the age group’s natural hardiness helped with the physical demands of regular transformation in and out of their Compatible phenotypes, but that meant the government’s human weapons had a shelf life of roughly ten years. And that was assuming the current recruits were all fifteen years old, which James could tell they weren’t. Six and the green kid looked at least sixteen. Rett looked closer to James’ own age than some of the younger recruits. The others could easily have been Heather’s age, or perhaps even younger.

It wasn’t at all sustainable. It seemed more likely that the ten years functioned as more of a trial period until they could lock down the recruits’ free will, so that when that period of physical and mental elasticity passed, no bearer of a Compatibility would even think about betraying the ICNS.

He felt sick. The government was building an empire, and creating superhuman sentinels to fortify it. What was Benson’s stake in all this that he would push so hard to support that? He of all people had to know that systems like the one rising to prominence felt no obligation to honor agreements, and Benson’s obvious desire to pursue his own research unimpeded by ethical responsibility couldn’t possibly be worth assuming such a risk.

Then again, James thought, it could be. After all, Empetrum’s boldness and pressure for innovation had captured James in a heartbeat.

That kind of power was irresistible. Infectious.

Six was starting to fall behind. The extra work with his second pair of arms had put him at a disadvantage, and he was shaking and struggling hard in a sequence of intense core conditioning. He was three reps behind and counting, his face screwed up in effort.

“Patrick!” Gresham barked at him. “Don’t do this today.” The civilian name embedded like an arrow into James’ chest.

The green kid, Collin, spoke up. He was winded himself, and a couple of leafy twigs had sprouted out the top of his head under the strain. “Come on, Dragonfly. You got this.”

Anxiety pressed dull and firm against James’ throat. Hazards were blooming all around him, a cavernous series of extrapolated consequences hanging over his head, hinging on his loyalty to the director’s goals. Cooperating with Benson was the only way he could protect Heather, but he was starting to think about insubordination constantly.

Quietly, tiredly, James knew Heather wasn’t the only casualty, and that she wouldn’t be the last. The recruits appeared to be thriving as a team, but they would soon enter the field, sent out into combat as secret weapons, which would invite far more harm than they had already endured. He was going to help manufacture more Compatibles, and O.R.T. would likely one day get appropriated to create even more havoc. The horrors that had already happened were beginning to feel like the first few raindrops of an impending hurricane.

James told himself he had to stop trying to think ahead about consequences of what continued cooperation would mean. He didn’t have a choice here. He felt for these kids and the hardship they had ahead of them, but he wasn’t responsible for them. His charge was to make sure nothing else happened to Heather. That was where his true loyalty began and ended.

He was powerless to stop Benson, Empetrum, the ICNS, the falling hammer of the government.

All he could do was try to protect Heather. That at least felt halfway possible.

+

CHAPTER FORTY—ELIAS     

James descended the front steps of Empetrum with the final load of updated security cameras in his arms, watching his footing. At the bottom, he looked up and halted abruptly. Yeun reclined in the passenger seat of the jeep waiting to take James out to the perimeter, and was attempting to get the stony-faced guard to maintain a conversation.

Yeun noticed him standing there and smiled. “Hey. Want some help?”

James stared at him, trying to figure out what the purpose of this was. “Why?”

Yeun snorted. “‘Why?’ How many of those are you installing today?”

“Two hundred.” James hoisted the box into the back. It was getting heavy. “I’m just entering location data and swapping the old ones out. It’s not going to be interesting.”

“Sounds interesting enough for me,” Yeun said. “And please, call me Elias. Formalities are more of the director’s thing.”

“Benson put you up to this…”

Yeun laughed. “Oh no, this is all my own meddling. I’m just bored.”

James shoved over some boxes in the back of the jeep and climbed up. The guard took that as his acquiescence to Yeun’s involvement, and started the engine.

“Benson made it sound like you’d be a handful while he was out of state,” Yeun said. “But you’re not hard to keep track of since you’re always in your lab working. You’re a lot like him in that way.”

James crossed his arms, staring turbidly at the distant fence marking off the edge of the Empetrum campus. The jeep arrived at the first gate, and the guard at the security booth opened it for them.

“The director’s position is a big job. I wouldn’t want that kind of responsibility,” Yeun went on as they continued into the middle security checkpoint, an empty span of woodland between Empetrum’s heart and the outer perimeter. Regarding camera setup, James planned to start furthest out and work his way in, a method approved by Benson before his departure. Hill had screened James’ code for the devices before approving duplication.

“Sometimes I wonder if he even wanted it.”

“What?” James leaned forward. He couldn’t hear Yeun’s voice well over the engine and air whipping past.

Yeun tilted his head back. “Nothing—just muttering to myself.”

“Do you know him well?” James asked. “The director?”

“More or less.” Yeun draped an arm across the back of the seat and looked at his colleague. “We were classmates, friends, even. He got me my job here at Empetrum, put in a good word with his grandfather, who used to run the place. They copped together an offer I just couldn’t refuse, you know?”

James watched the trees sweep past him, the wind buffeting the side of his head.

“Are you friends now?” James asked finally.

“I hope so,” Yeun said, and something in his voice sounded a little haunted.

As the jeep came to a stop on the outer perimeter, James opened the back door and dragged out a collapsible utility wagon.

“Just tell me what I gotta do,” Yeun said brightly, getting out as James snapped the wagon into shape.

James handed him a notebook with a pen stuck in the spiral binding.

“We’re going to mark down the coordinates,” James said, planting a plastic bin of supplies in the wagon. “Scan the serial numbers of the cameras we’re removing, and record the serial number of the new series.”

“You got it,” Yeun said.

James loaded the four boxes of cameras onto the wagon, pulled a GPS and electronic tablet from his supplies, and trekked ahead to where the first surveillance camera stuck out of the ground. He kneeled down, and Yeun joined him while the guard took over operation of the wagon.

James tugged the old camera out of the ground and looked on the underside where the bulb met the metal stake, finding the barcode. He checked the GPS in his other hand. “Okay, coordinates 44.163…” He paused, glancing aside at Yeun to make sure he was writing it down.

Yeun looked up at him. “Keep going.”

James resumed, rattling off the coordinates, then connected the scanner to the tablet and scanned the serial number. He handed Yeun the old one, took a new camera from the wagon, scanned the number, and planted it in place of the other one. He paired it with the old model’s network before moving on.

He thought about Heather’s mom and dad, hoping they were making headway, even as James dutifully worked to secure his and Heather’s imprisonment.

“One down,” Yeun said, and stowed the old camera in an empty crate. “You were going to do all these yourself? That would take you a good couple of days, at least.”

James got to his feet, brushing dirt off the knees of his jeans. “Kind of glad for the busywork, to be honest.” He consulted the GPS, and trudged on.

“I hear ya,” Yeun agreed. “It’s a beautiful day for it.”

James grunted. Soon, they had come across the next camera.

“So I’ve been wondering something, and I think you may have an answer,” James said, uprooting the device.

“Shoot.”

“What happened to the other bioroboticist? Hill’s lab partner?” James said. “I hear bits and pieces that there was someone else involved with modulator research, but that they’re not here anymore. And with the ICNS needing Non-Comp so badly, I can only assume it didn’t end well with them?”
Yeun hesitated. James read him another sequence of numbers. Yeun wrote them down, accepted the old device, and pretended to be nonchalant as he said, “She quit.”

“I got the impression people don’t just quit from Empetrum.” James narrowed his eyes at the GPS, lining up his next target.

Yeun glanced behind them at the guard, who appeared disinterested.

“They can, it’s just complicated.”

“Yeah, I heard about the process. If you leave, the director deletes your memories or something. Is that what happened to her?” James was privately surprised at his own directness. He hadn’t started off the day in a particularly bold mood, but now that he was out from under the frigid lights and black camera eyes in the lab, it started welling up how sick to death he was of Empetrum’s secrets and supposed entitlements. Yeun seemed to value transparency more than other personnel did, and James was curious just how much he could get him to admit.

Yeun’s demeanor clouded. James could feel it brewing beside him as they walked to the next device.

“Not exactly,” Yeun said.

“What do you mean?”

Yeun uneasily retrieved a camera from the wagon as James pulled one from the ground. “Let’s just say whatever threats Benson made to you were mild compared to what he can do to dissenters.”

Ice bloomed up James’ back. “She’s dead, then.”

Yeun stiffened. “What? Why would you say that?”

James frowned at the camera in his hand. He rubbed at a smear of dirt crusted over the barcode with his thumb. “He killed my friend for much less.”

Yeun was quiet for so long James thought he wasn’t going to answer. James opened his mouth to read another GPS coordinate when Yeun’s soft voice stopped him, “Yes, she is.”

James looked up at him. Yeun’s troubled gaze trained on something in the moss and pine needles of the forest floor. Suddenly, it seemed like the three of them weren’t alone. How many of

Benson’s ghosts wandered these woods?

“What happened?” James asked. He glanced at the guard, who didn’t react.

Yeun glanced at the guard too.

“Q-13,” he said finally, crossing his arms. He still couldn’t look at James. “Nobody survives it.”

“You mean like there was a lab accident?”

Yeun shook his head.

Fear and disgust twisted in James’ stomach. “A punishment.”

“Olsson snapped—she…” Yeun let out his breath. “Just—promise me you won’t cross the director.”

“I don’t plan to.” He looked at the device in his hands. “Does he threaten you too?”
 “He doesn’t have to.”

“Because you believe in all this?” James sat back on his heels and gestured around him. There wasn’t anything Empetrum-related within sight he could gesture to, other than the security cameras. “Bio-enhancement? Human weaponry? None of you are happy with reality as it is, I understand that, but just being human’s not good enough anymore?”

It had never been good enough for James. He didn’t even know how to be human. He figured that was something that should have been intuitive, but it had always been a puzzle he couldn’t work out.

He thought of all the days he had spent pushing himself to be better, to work harder, to reach higher and need less. All those nights he had lain awake thinking of the possibilities, of what the world could be if he contributed to it in a major way. He remembered how he had channeled everything into his hopes for O.R.T.

Hopes that had proven destructive, in the end.

“It’s a matter of manifest destiny for me, I suppose,” Yeun said, slowly. “You grow up being told to accept things as they are. But if you hold the keys to the building blocks of reality, no one can tell you what is or is not possible, what sort of difference you can make in the world.”

James’ eyebrows constricted, incredulous. “Do you want a Compatibility?”

“Honestly, no, I don’t,” Yeun said. “I want to know how they work, why the human genome has evolved them, how to manufacture that evolution. I’m more after knowledge. Progress, not power.”

James scoffed. “Aren’t you though? Aren’t we all, in some form? We’re all just grasping for control any way we can get it, burying anything and anyone that stands in the way.”

“It’s not wrong to want to carve out a safe place for yourself,” Yeun said, quietly. “To make sense of this life and the circumstances it’s dumped us into, to see if we can’t make it better.”

James shook his head. Human commoditization projects for the military and mind control didn’t sound at all like progress to him. After a long silence, he scanned the barcode on the underside of the camera.

As he finally read Yeun the GPS coordinates, he tried to focus his full attention on them. Self-loathing sat heavy and painful in his chest, and he couldn’t stand thinking about having ever wanted anything at all.

+

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE—ENOUGH 

The next morning, James followed Yeun down the hallway of white linoleum and metal doors on the basement level. He still expected the prisoner ward to have a dungeon-like appeal, and the clean, well-illuminated space never ceased to unsettle him.

“You can wait out here,” Yeun said cheerily, stopping before the door of his test subject’s cell. James could see Heather’s door from where he was, and it inevitably attracted his attention like a magnetic field.

Yeun caught him staring. “Or, you can wait in the examination room if you want.” He waved a hand toward the other end of the hallway. “I’ll be in there shortly.”

James turned. As he headed down the hallway, Yeun pulled open the door and greeted the cell’s occupant. James tried to take deep breaths against the tight, imminent panic in his chest.

Yeun had briefly explained the situation with his test subject: The additional arms had manifested, but not correctly. They were working to build them up, assessing stability and quality of physiological functioning until they could work out the reversible version the Compatible progenitors enjoyed.

Sooner or later, James was going to have to face it. Yeun had mentioned it would be better to have the first encounter out of the way by the time Benson returned from his trip.

James opened the first normal looking door he came to on the other side of the corridor, and took a furtive step into the dark, feeling for the light switch.

The fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life, and James found himself in a narrow room with a wall of thick, reinforced glass to his right.

Near the door sat a small stand of tinted goggles. With a sinking feeling, James looked through the barrier into the dimness of a large, empty room. A single metal chair with armrests waited in its center, set into a bald concrete floor. Everything in the room from the chair to the water spigot in the corner bore varying levels of scorch marks.

James snapped the light off and hastily backed himself out into the hallway, his breathing disturbed and heart pounding hard. He felt like he’d just come across a corpse. Yeun stepped out into the corridor by Erika Hodgson’s cell, and James frantically tried to get a hold of himself.

Yeun waved his arm forward and called, “Two doors down.”

James moved numbly, turning his back on him before Yeun’s test subject emerged. The room

James entered next was much more agreeable—a quiet island of physical therapy equipment in the concrete death trap of Empetrum’s basement level.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the other late bioroboticist, Olssen. Benson had threatened to kill and maim enough times since James had known him, and James had vaguely assumed he hurt people in his research and hired people like Alder to do his dirtywork, but now James knew for sure that the director had personally executed someone.

The door opened and James jumped.

Yeun offered him an encouraging look as he entered, showing in a tall woman in her mid twenties with dark shoulder-length locs tied into a high ponytail. Her hands were bound in front of her, escorted by a guard. As she emerged into the room, James saw the extra arms extending large and twisted from her back like tree branches. She touched the ground with her long other hands, carefully walking them alongside her steps and trusting some weight to them, though her legs didn’t seem to need the extra support.

Her eyes met his, and James stiffened.

“This is him?” Hodgson said warily, her gaze following him as the guard took her along the edge of the room to a padded bench. She took a seat and began arranging her other arms behind her while Yeun fetched a roll of kinesiology tape. The back of her t-shirt had been cut out to give the arms room.

“Yes,” Yeun said. “This is James Siles. He’s going to help me sort out your Compatibility.” He held up a strip of bright blue tape. “Right accessory arm, please.”

Hodgson shifted the appendage over, offering the region with the most prominent elbow-like joint, the second of three. As she did so, her attention stayed on James, one eyebrow constricted as she sized him up.

James tried to meet her gaze, a lump in his throat, but couldn’t keep it. The physical therapy session began, and Hodgson attended to her exercises.

Yeun didn’t request any help, so James took a seat in a white plastic chair against the wall, drowning in his own awkwardness as he and Hodgson kept an eye on each other.

From prior briefings, James knew she had been a prisoner here for six months. He wondered what her life had been like before all this, how she felt about her current situation. Had she also been facing death row, or had her introduction to Empetrum been much like Heather’s?

He now knew Benson converted researchers to test subjects if they crossed him. Maybe she and Yeun used to be colleagues.

The thought made him even more uneasy, watching her and Yeun interact. They were obviously used to each other. Hodgson did everything Yeun asked of her without comment, as if she had somehow accepted this. He wondered how Benson or Yeun had secured her cooperation.
He caught a glimpse of his future watching them, and he couldn’t tune out the persistent signal of Hodgson’s humanity and presence of mind through it all.

In that hard plastic chair, he realized it would never get easier, never make sense. There would only be more of this: human beings used as lab rats, aware of what was happening to them, whose suffering was just as severe and mind-destroying as it would be if James himself were in their position. Scientists who didn’t care.

An eternity ago, with the O.R.T. scanner and an unconscious prospective test subject presiding, Benson had insisted that progress had to be made. According to Yeun, curiosity was grounds enough.

But it wasn’t progress or curiosity that had fueled the death and imprisonment of his friend. Benson had singled out the both of them for his own reasons. One, a candidate for indoctrination, and the other, an innocent bystander who knew too much.

On the surface, the boldness and innovation preached by Empetrum had made so much sense to him in the wake of his former colleagues’ rejection. James had felt like an outsider his whole life, fighting to appease judgmental and withholding caregivers, withering under a complete lack of exposure to kids his own age. Keeping everyone at a distance felt safe, normal.

Empetrum played easily into the narrative that he was alone because he was special. Because he was smarter than everyone, and meant for more—somehow worth more—than other people. He was destined to be an agent of revolution, an author of a bright new world where his father would survive, and no one would stare at him like he was obsessive ever again. Extrapolated at Empetrum, supposedly, that gave him the right to ask the highest price of others.

But nothing justified that.

He had spent his short two decades of life trying so hard to be intelligent, worthy, useful, to work through the nights when he felt his true self creeping back in—a lonely, overworked child forced to grow up too fast, who wished the rest and companionship that seemed to come so easily to others might visit him one day, too.

Heather had also confessed feeling like an outsider long before all this. It had surprised him that she’d had trouble making friends, and he’d begun to wonder if maybe most people secretly felt alone. The pain and confusion he felt about his own life didn’t make him special. There was no great meaning behind it. But the ways it had shaped him had made him uniquely useful as a cog in the doomsday machine he’d found himself in. Hyper productive and easy to exploit.

“Siles, are you all right?” Yeun’s voice interrupted his thoughts, and he realized every gaze in the room was on him: Yeun, Hodgson, even the guard present.

“What?” He raised a shaking hand to his forehead, trying to stand up. He felt dizzy. “Yes, sorry, I don’t feel well.” He glanced at Hodgson, then away. “I’ve been working too much and I—I forgot to eat today, I think. I’ll go do that.”

“Sounds good,” Yeun said. “We can shadow another time, when you’re feeling better. I hope at least this small session was helpful.”

“It was. Thank you.” James unsteadily made his way to the door. “Good luck Ms. Hodgson.” He winced.

“The director will want to speak with you when he gets in later,” Yeun called after him. “Are you going to be okay?”

James escaped into the hallway, heading toward the elevator as his vision swam. A guard fell into stride beside him, but he hardly noticed. His ears rang, his breath harsh and cloudy in his head.

His heart beat hard against his sternum.

It was a mere roll of the dice that he stood in the role of researcher, instead of occupying his own cell at the end of the hallway. Keeping in line kept no one safe, not even himself.

Every corner of Empetrum was a chopping block.

He sat down heavily at the counter back in his lab, trying, failing, to catch his breath. He turned his head and stared at the toolbox of fine-tipped screwdrivers on the counter beside him.

If he rebelled against the director, his chances of success were slim. If he failed, Benson’s original threat of separation wasn’t the likely punishment. Benson might turn his wrath on Heather. Or

James could wind up like Olsson.

Abruptly, he stood up, grabbed the toolbox from the counter, and left the lab.

+

The door to her cell opened, and Heather glanced over from where she sat on the bed with a hardbound scientific journal in her lap, resigning herself to doing whatever James wanted just so he’d leave her alone. He had been drifting in and out of her cell over the last few days, making checkups, asking how she felt, if she needed anything. When she told him no, he’d drift out again and not come back for twenty-four hours, more ghost than human.

She hadn’t figured out any new information to help with her escape plans, and was cross about it.

James had that toolbox with him. Heather’s eyes narrowed as he strode forward.

She set the book aside. “You’re not putting anything else in my head, are you?”

“An issue with the pain simulator’s code came to my attention,” he said. “I need to fix it.”

Heather blinked. “Oh…” She opened the panels in her head and scooted to the edge of the bed, relieved to have the device out for a while.

He made short work of the screws in the frame inside her head, plucked out the pain simulator, and replaced the frame with a firm snap.

“That’s all I need for now,” he said, gathering his supplies. “Thanks.”

Heather watched him go, confused.

A month earlier, the sheltered kid she used to be might have worried his brusque behavior meant she had done something to annoy him. But now she knew James better than that.

Something was happening. He still looked like he hadn’t slept in years, and carried himself with the same slumped shoulders and haunted expression of someone who knew he had irreparably destroyed their lives. But for some reason, after almost two weeks of tears and dissociation and excuses, something subtle and familiar had returned to his gaze, something she realized she hadn’t seen since before the night of the transfer.

James Siles was calculating.

+

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX—BENSON

The opening and closing of a door disturbed the silence of a modest apartment. A light switched on and the flat’s solitary owner stepped into the kitchen, depositing two heavy cloth bags of groceries on the island counter.

She tossed her keys beside the bags and pushed her hood back, revealing short hair that had gone fully gray many years earlier than her peers, a set jaw, and a straight, jutting nose. Shaking out her hair, she rid herself of her wet jacket and disappeared into the nearby laundry room to hang it up.

As she returned to the kitchen, she realized her cellphone still lay connected to its charger under the overhead cupboards, a red light flashing in its top right-hand corner. When she flicked it open with her thumb, the number of the two missed calls was unknown to her, but whoever it was had left a message on the second try. She set her voicemail to speaker as she proceeded to empty her grocery bags on the counter.

“Hello Benson,” said the voice on the message. “This is Evangeline Pérez Delva…” The woman froze, her gray eyes widening. “I don’t know if you remember me. I founded and led Larkspur with your dad for a while way back when. Listen, I wouldn’t bother you if this weren’t extremely important, but I need to talk to you about what happened after you all left Larkspur, and what you know about Michael’s involvement with a place called Empetrum. If you can, please call me back as soon as you get this message. My friend’s kid is in danger, and you may be our only hope.”

Delva gave a phone number, thanked her, and then the voicemail ended.

Alice Benson stared at the phone long after it fell silent, a head of lettuce in one hand and a hard knot in the pit of her stomach.

Delva didn’t know what she was asking.

She nervously continued to put groceries away, considering her options. How had she even found her? Alice wasn’t being careful about covering her tracks, of course, but she wasn’t that careless. If government tracking resources were involved, they would most certainly favor Empetrum.

She could just neglect to call her back. Nothing had to change.

After putting the kitchen in order, Alice lingered for a moment, staring pensively at the opposite wall. Whatever Michael had done, it wasn’t her problem. She had renounced Empetrum. Nobody could bring her back into the equation. Not Michael, not Delva.

Her father’s sick ambitions had already taken years away from her, irreparably infected her life and psyche, stolen her husband and son.

She navigated to her phone’s call history, staring down Delva’s number.

Empetrum could hold no power over her if she just stayed out of the way. Anyone with any sense would see the trap for what it was and put as much distance as they could from the entire situation.

Yet her thumb hovered over the call button.

After nearly twenty years, she was finally ready to try building a life she could learn to accept with grace. She was slowly, cautiously making friends, volunteering in the community, working and paying her bills. If she got involved with Delva, this second attempt at her life would end.
Lawrence was dead, Michael was too, in his own way. Alice was not responsible for their victims.

None of this was in her hands anymore.

Cursing under her breath, she pressed the button and raised the phone to her ear.

Delva picked up almost immediately. She must have been waiting. “Hello?”

“Hi…Mrs. Delva?” Alice said, already impatient to get the conversation over with. Alice was her own brand of insane, she thought, going through with this. “This is Alice, returning your call. I’m willing to help if I can, but I can’t tell you anything over the phone. Are you still on the east coast?”

“No, west, near Worthing,” came the quick reply. Alice was relieved she had sensed the urgency, at least.

“It’s pretty late now, but can we meet at Aisling Park by the fountain. One hour?” Alice said. “He keeps tabs on me, so my window is brief.”

“Of course, see you then,” Delva said, nearly interrupting her. “Thank you.”

Disconnecting the call, she frowned at the looming thunderheads out the window above the sink, wondering if the sky was this turbulent over Empetrum as well.

She figured she would find out soon.

+

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN—WHISTLEBLOWER

Rain hammered onto the pavement, slapping through the foliage of trees and muffling the world in its watery cacophony. Richard took a steadying breath before quickly opening up the car door and stepping outside. He hurried to deploy his umbrella before the downpour drenched him.

He squinted for fellow silhouettes in the dark obscurity of the shower, but couldn’t see far. Fear pounded in his chest, wondering if it would be Michael waiting for them at the fountain instead.

Alice had accepted far too readily. When Eve had left a voicemail that morning, they were both expecting a dead end.

As they neared the fountain in the heart of the area, they saw a single figure, standing alone with a black umbrella, carefully watching the gloom around them.

The woman from the surveillance photos tightened her grip on her umbrella as she spotted them. The Bensons felt more myth than human, dangerous and terrible but forever out of reach. Richard hesitated, but Eve marched forward across the flooded square.

“Been a while,” Alice Benson had to raise her voice to be heard above the downpour.

“Yes, it has,” Eve agreed, reaching through the rain to shake her hand. She gestured to Richard.

“This is the friend I mentioned. Thanks for meeting with us. You have no idea how important this is to us.” She nodded toward where the windows of a coffee shop glowed across the street. “Mind if we go in there to talk? Get out of the rain?”

Alice looked across the square, then made another survey of their surroundings. Finally, she nodded, and they made their way to shelter. Richard walked behind them, considering this specter who had turned out to be a real person.

Richard searched for traces of Michael’s features or mannerisms in his mother’s form as they walked, some kind of proof that this person really was who they thought she was. Alice’s shoulders were slightly rounded from years of careless posture, in contrast with Lawrence and Michael’s prim, collected demeanor. So far, the only similarities among the three of them were the straight angle of the nose, and the hooded, gray eyes. A stubborn pair of traits, Richard thought, to have passed down three generations.

Eve opened the door for them and Alice muttered thanks as she stepped into the warm atmosphere of coffee beans and soft jazz music. A small brass bell clanged as the door closed behind them, pushing back the thundering rain.

Richard ventured forward between the mismatched tables and Alice warily trailed behind as Eve stopped at the counter to order them all coffee. They found a rectangular table tucked away in a corner and took a seat across from each other. Alice selected the chair that faced the entrance.

“So you’re the friend from the voicemail,” Alice shed her coat over the back of the chair and propped her closed umbrella against the bricks of the wall behind her. “My son has put your child in danger?”

“Yes,” Richard said quietly. “At least, we think so.”

Alice nodded, lowering herself into her chair. “Well,” she said. “I hope I can help.”

“Thank you. By the way, my name’s—”

Alice held up an urgent hand, interrupting him with sudden sternness. “I don’t want to know your name.” She hesitated at Richard’s stricken expression, and straightened up a little, apologetic.

“The less I know about you, the better, for your own safety. You’re already on the radar far more than I’m comfortable with.” She glanced out the window, her gaze turning weary and venomous.

“Fuck. I really thought I had put Empetrum behind me…”

They sat in awkward silence after that until Eve returned with coffee. Alice accepted her drink with quiet thanks, removed the cardboard sleeve from her disposable cup and wrapped her hands around the unprotected surface. “So…” she said. “I was very surprised to receive your call.” She lifted her gray eyes from the lid to regard the two across from her. “How did you find me?”

Eve and Richard exchanged a glance.

“We have a friend that’s very good at hacking,” Eve said.

“This ‘friend’ wouldn’t happen to be affiliated with the Bureau or the government?” Alice said, searching their expressions. “Some innocently helpful police agent, perhaps, who suggested reaching out to me was a good idea?”

Richard shook his head vigorously. “I tried to go to two different police departments the night my daughter disappeared, but they refused to help me. I think they’re in on it, somehow.”

Alice stared him down, her mouth set, tracing the rim of her coffee cup with her finger as she considered his words. “My guess is that’s an accurate assessment,” she said finally. “Before we begin, you need to understand that just by agreeing to meet with you, I’m placing us all in a very precarious position, especially with the information I’m prepared to offer up. The more you know about Empetrum, the more of a threat you become to the powers that be. Getting involved in this isn’t something you can come back from.”

“My daughter’s in danger,” Richard said. “I’m already involved.”

“Understood,” Alice said. She leaned back in her chair, arms crossed and coffee cup at her elbow.

“So, bring me up to speed. I’m sure you don’t like dredging up the past any more than I do, Delva. So things must be pretty serious for you to contact me.”

Eve glanced at Richard, who nodded. “Essentially, Larkspur’s still alive and well.”

Alice nodded once. “I suspected. I heard about the relocation post scandal.”

Richard took it from there, “A colleague of ours has created a dangerous machine, and when I asked him to discontinue it, he secretly aligned himself with another lab to pursue it against our wishes.” He swallowed the tightness in his throat. “His actions have led to his sudden disappearance, along with my fifteen-year-old daughter, who was at Larkspur for a summer internship.”

An expression of dread and surprise crossed Alice’s features.

Richard went on before he lost his nerve. He hadn’t expected her to be surprised. “I don’t think he meant for the situation to go where it did, and he left a recording for us to find, citing your son Michael, and Empetrum as being involved.” He purposefully neglected to mention Sesame as a conscious entity. He didn’t trust Alice at all. “He gave no indication that he expected my daughter to be wrapped up in it too.”

“What does his machine do, if I may ask?”

“It’s a neural transfer device. It moves the consciousness of an organic organism into a mechanical replacement body.”

“Yeah, that should be destroyed as soon as possible,” Alice said.

Richard nodded, unsettled. “When the two of them disappeared, an android we had been working on vanished as well. I was tranquilized by one of Larkspur’s security guards, and the police fought me to drop the matter when I tried to involve them. Because of this, we think Empetrum may have governmental ties.”

“Your suspicions are correct,” Alice said. “Is Larkspur still under the FBSI?”

“Yes,” Richard said.

“Empetrum is too,” Alice said. Her words hit Richard like a punch to the gut. “The Bureau keeps it far under the table, of course, but the government likes having places like Empetrum around. That neural transfer project sounds like a doorway to Armageddon. I hope Michael doesn’t have a lot of interest in it.”

Richard thought he should be more stunned by how easily she absorbed his account, but he was starting to take everything at face value at this point too. He would have to deal with the implications of the Bureau’s ties to Empetrum later. Heather took precedence. James too, if he wanted to come home. If he hadn’t hurt her.

“What is Empetrum, exactly?” Richard asked. “How is Michael involved?”

Alice took a long draught from her coffee cup, as if to steady herself. “About a year after my father left Larkspur, he managed to strike up a deal with the feds through the Bureau, proposing to develop technology no one else would deliver. The company is now in the hands of my son, who succeeded Lawrence as director.”

“We found the obituary,” Eve said. “What happened?”

“Massive stroke,” Alice said, her voice quiet. “It was sudden, unexpected. When the directorship changed hands and Michael wasn’t yet settled, I took the opportunity to leave, and I’ve been trying to escape having anything else to do with that horrible place ever since.”

“Lawrence didn’t pass Empetrum to you?” Eve asked.

Alice scoffed and showed her palms. “I’m not management material. I never wanted the damn place anyway. I worked there because it was easier.”

“You did work there, then,” Eve said. “Why on earth did you follow him after the fallout?”

“He was my dad…” Alice turned a sad, uneasy smile on Eve. “And you know better than anyone how he could talk—how he could make his ambitions sound like your own.” She let her gaze drop to the table. “It just seemed to make so much sense back then. He made such noble speeches about sacrifice and progress, he made you feel like you were trying to make the earth stand still if you didn’t follow his lead.”

Eve nodded slowly. She gestured at Richard. “I’ve told him what happened between Lawrence and me.” She lowered her voice, “The human experimentation, why Larkspur had to go underground…”
Richard stared intently at his own coffee cup. He felt Alice’s eyes on him.
After a long pause, Alice said, “At Empetrum, he continued it. But test subjects don’t volunteer anymore.”

“You can’t be serious,” Eve said.

Richard shuddered.

“They’re funneled in from death row,” Alice said. “People no one will come looking for. The source makes it easier for some to justify, I suppose, but it’s sick, all the same. Nobody deserves that kind of treatment.”

“Where is Empetrum?” Eve asked.

“It’s in the area,” she said. “Forty minutes from here, maybe.”

“That close—” Richard muttered. He leaned forward, incredulous and angry. “That close? Where?”

“Up in the hills,” Alice said. “Northwest, secluded. It’s in the middle of a big nature reserve.”

“What happened after he set the facility up?” Eve asked.

Alice hesitated, looking at Richard, who nodded for her to continue.

“After a couple of years,” Alice said, “everything was built and ready to go, and we moved into the living arrangements there—my parents, my husband and son, and myself. It was okay there for a while, and I let Michael come in and watch. We homeschooled him.” She paused. “Then my mother passed away the year after. Cancer.”

“I’m so sorry,” Eve said.

She nodded. “It tore my father apart. He was already going downhill before, but after Mom’s death, he became—pathological. He obsessed over the Q-13, as that project he started at Larkspur came to be called, terrified he’d never see it to completion. He often complained at me about how no one understood his vision, how no one was truly loyal. Somewhere in there he decided on his own that Michael would be his successor, and so my son began to spend quite a bit of time with him. I didn’t interfere. I was too afraid of how he would react if I pushed back.”

“Eventually you changed your mind?” Eve asked.
 Alice nodded again, slowly. “By the next year, my husband had had enough. He filed for divorce. Empetrum has a policy where if someone wants to leave, they have to agree to a mindwipe—via this machine one of the other scientists presented to my father as part of the initial employment process.” A cloud settled further over Alice’s features.

“He was so fed up, and felt so guilty about everything we were doing that he agreed to give up several years’ worth of memories, and he even forfeited charge of our son. He didn’t dare fight Lawrence for him. Michael didn’t understand. He was only fourteen. He tried to blame himself.”

“Have you been in contact with your ex-husband at all since then?”

Alice shook her head. “Michael’s likely found him by now, but he hasn’t mentioned anything about it to me. He may be keeping his distance out of respect for him.”
Eve and Richard weren’t sure how to reply. They waited for her to continue.

“Losing him was hard,” Alice said after another weary, thoughtful pull from her coffee cup. She took stock of their surroundings again, making sure no one was eavesdropping before she continued. “I retreated into my work for a long time, trying to cope with it. Michael was devastated, and my dad gave him direction and attention I just couldn’t manage at the time. The Q-13 grew more and more dangerous. I had nothing outside Empetrum—no family, no friends, a blacklisted career— so I did as I was told.”

Richard tried hard to stop fidgeting as his cold apprehension grew.

“Life continued on like this,” Alice said, wearily. “Eventually, Michael went to college, working at Empetrum during the summer. After graduate school, he came back there to work full time, specializing in the Q-13, as designed. He had only been officially employed at Empetrum for two years when Lawrence died, launching him into the director’s position. By then, he was fully trained.

“By that time, I wanted out, but I didn’t have the guts to defect. Attempting to leave Empetrum without a mindwipe could land me in mortal danger. Injection with the latest Q-13 prototype was a favorite threat of Lawrence’s.” She glanced out the window to her right. “In the early days of Michael’s directorship, I begged him to steer Empetrum toward better ethics, but he made his intentions clear.”

Her fingers tightened around her coffee cup. “I left, then, certain he was going to try to stop me—but he didn’t. He didn’t even threaten me, he just let me go, and didn’t say why. He still refuses to explain.”

Alice made another brief survey of the coffee shop, which remained empty, except for a couple who had come in and taken their coffee to go.

“But he keeps tabs on me,” she said. “Just as he monitors Larkspur.”

Richard’s stomach dropped. “What?”


“The security guard that attacked you was most likely part of this,” Alice said. “And I doubt they were the only source. Next time you go to Larkspur, I would advise checking your video cameras, walls, and furniture for surveillance taps, microphones and the like. Also, running additional background checks on all your other employees, if you can do it quietly, would be advisable as well. So you know who you can trust, if anyone.”

“And are you on that list?” Eve asked.

Alice’s eyebrows rose, surprised by the question. She cracked a haunted, sideways smile. “Best to assume not.”

“Why would Michael want to keep us under surveillance?” Richard asked.
 Alice shrugged.

“Control. Convenience. Any number of reasons. It’s beneficial to him to have that information available. If your colleague works at Empetrum now, it sounds like this contact came in handy for him.”

Richard worried that Michael already knew about Sesame, who was currently at home with Su. Richard itched to check on them.

If Michael had been watching them this whole time, how much did he know? Luckily, Alice had called Eve back once she had already left the facility. Unless Michael had bugged their personal spaces as well.

Eve was studying Alice. “So, you’ve been in recent contact with Michael?”

Alice fidgeted with her sweater. “Yeah, he called me about a month ago to gloat about finding me again. I’ve been moving around a lot these last few years trying to avoid him, but I’m tired of running. I’m too goddamn old for this nonsense.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I had no intention of crossing him, so he should just forget about me. He didn’t buy it.”

“Sounds like he was correct in being suspicious of you.”

Alice gazed out the window, eyelids lowered. “Guess so.”

Silence closed in. Across the room, the sudden hiss of the espresso machine made Richard jump.

He readjusted his glasses, uneasy. “So what is the Q-13, exactly?” Empetrum’s pet project, a cruel punishment hovering over would-be dissenters.

Alice glanced past them toward the door again before refocusing on her interviewers. “It’s a human weaponry serum,” she said. “It’s based in an artificial protein that rewires the body’s physiology to generate a high temperature, high abrasion projection without sustaining any self-inflicted damage—In theory, at least.” She lowered her voice. Richard and Eve stared at her, horrified, as she went on, “In the earliest stages, it caused cancers or organ failure, but later on, as Lawrence made more headway, many of the trials became combustive. As far as I know, it’s still unviable. An organic vessel simply can’t handle that much power crammed into it without the serum first overhauling the body’s fundamental makeup in a molecularly stable way. The last trials I saw, though it’s been three years since I last worked on it, the body rejects it just as the Q-13 activates for the first time. It doesn’t integrate quickly enough, so the substance breaks down, and completely atomizes the host.”

Richard felt sick. “And people who rebel get injected with that?”

“It was a threat,” Alice said. “I don’t know if Michael’s taken up the practice.” Her gaze fell to the table, sorrow weighing on her. “I haven’t told anyone about this until now. I had resolved to keep it a secret for the rest of my life.”

“Why are you telling us now?” Eve asked.

“Not sure. Saw an opportunity. There’s nothing I can do to make up for my complicity in Empetrum, but it’s something, at least.”

She reached into her pocket and produced a memory stick, which she handed across the table to Richard. “This contains everything we’ve discussed—the whole story, along with directions to where the facility is located. It’s pretty much anything that came to mind in the time between your phone call and driving out to meet you here. I would appreciate if you contacted me again in about a week or so. If I can’t be reached, take this to the nearest prominent news station and tell them everything. Despite Empetrum’s governmental ties, enough public involvement could seriously throw a wrench into things. The Conxence seems to have the right idea. I’m sorry, I wish I could offer you stronger leverage than this.”

“No, you’ve been a great help,” Eve assured her before Richard could. “Thank you.”

“Do you have any theories on why Michael recruited our colleague?” Richard spoke up.

“Empetrum is in the business of bioweaponry,” Alice said. “Sounds like your colleague had the right amount of talent and crazy to fit that picture. Empetrum always has use for scientists who want to push boundaries.”

Richard considered the device in his hands. “If we publicized this information, as you asked, my former colleague will get scorched too, and I’m still not even sure if he’s done anything.”

Submitting the matter to the press would undoubtedly spiral everything even further out of control. In the uproar, Empetrum might sustain a hit, but James might not survive.

“It sounds like he’s not completely innocent, either, bringing your daughter into this.”

Richard shrank back. “I don’t know.” They had no idea whether or not James had done anything to Heather. Perhaps she was just a prisoner, held there to secure James’ compliance. Maybe she was still unharmed. “What else can we do?”

Alice’s lips tightened indecisively. She glanced out the window again, thinking. “It could take time for politics to get going, which may or may not even work due to Empetrum’s connections. If at all possible, I’d try to get a hold of either your daughter or your colleague, however you can. Empetrum is heavily guarded inside and out, so if they are there, as you suspect—” Her gaze trained on Richard, grim, “—it’ll be nearly impossible to get them out yourself.”

+

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT—ACCESSORY 

The boy lifted his gaze to consider his disquieted reflection in the chrome elevator doors: shoulders forced straight, the fluorescent lights glaring off the large lenses of his glasses. A thick cocoon of gauze shrouded his dominant hand, and despite the pain killers, the wound still burned, deep, throbbing, and livid.
The director presented a much more confident picture—sharp, direct features, better posture, with hard, stern lines around his mouth and eyes. Michael knew he looked timid and inferior standing next to his grandfather.
Everyone knew.
“I’ll put you on data entry duty today, Michael,” the director said, his steady, calculating voice bouncing faintly off the corners of the compartment. “Try to only use your left hand.”
Michael nodded. “I’m sorry…”
“Accidents happen,” was the simple reply. Michael knew his grandfather was annoyed.
A few days before, Michael had forgotten an important buffer when preparing one of the Q-13 variations for the upcoming trials. He’d heated it too quickly, and the flask had boiled over.
In panic, he had impulsively reached out to turn off the hotplate, and the substance had splashed onto his hand.
He still felt it radiating in his metacarpals. Sometimes numb, sometimes so hot he could barely keep from sobbing at the pain of it.
The director had assured him it would fade.
“It was an incomplete mixture,” he had said. “It didn’t take. You’ll be fine.”
His grandfather would be running a trial today, and Michael was glad he didn’t have to watch. It had been hard enough to stomach when he hadn’t tasted the Q-13 for himself.

~

Heather lay on the bed in her cell, her hands docked behind her head and bored out of her mind.

Beds weren’t even comfortable anymore. Regardless of the surface beneath her, she either chose to be awake, or she chose to hibernate, but neither felt better than the other. The main difference was that time spent in hibernation was time she didn’t have to deal with living.

Eighteen hours and thirty-two minutes had passed since James had separated them. As promised, he had brought her reading material—mostly scientific journals. She figured her prison didn’t stock young adult fiction or video games in their data library. He had also brought a blank notebook and a pen, but Heather felt distinctly uncreative, given her situation.

Heather had spent most of her time in solitary confinement sitting against the door, listening to the guards patrol. They came by every ten minutes like clockwork. She didn’t have to write any of her notes down. She remembered everything perfectly.

She listened for signs of the other prisoner, Erika Hodgson, but she was either too far away, or too quiet for Heather to hear.

Earlier, she had heard a man come down the hallway and open Erika’s door, judging by the location of the sounds. Heather caught him say, “Good morning, Ms. Hodgson.”

A woman’s voice, minimalistic and monotone, had responded to the dusty, chipper voice of the man. The latter was another scientist, Heather guessed. Doors closed, footsteps retreated, and the hallway had gone silent again.

Heather had sat under the security camera for some time, staring up at it and hoping Larkspur’s android had secret electrokinetic powers, or wireless hacking abilities to take over the surveillance system remotely and direct it to her bidding.

But as far as she could tell, it was only a body. Just the wrong body, nothing more.

She had dug around the cell, but the faucets didn’t work, and the cabinets were empty. She suspected her quarters were even more sparse than the cell that held organic prisoners.

She wondered how many test subjects there were. Maybe she and Erika could work together somehow, if only they could get in contact.

James certainly wasn’t going to help. If she even mentioned the possibility of escape again, Benson would find out and shut down that avenue. As things were, she expected James wouldn’t just try to discourage her, but might actively rat her out to the director—eager to please, frantic to obey.

Heather had experimented with moving her bed, testing how strong Larkspur’s android was. She found it stronger than she used to be, due to the metal supports and wire contractile units populating her limbs. She had picked up the end of the bed and didn’t feel any strain, holding it until her chest began to hum and her whole body started getting warm. It took about five minutes.

This body had been made to double as search and rescue equipment, but she didn’t know where its limit were, and with that security camera staring at her, she avoided actions that might attract the director’s attention.

She heard footsteps, and she hastily sat up as the locks on her cell door pulled back. The door opened, and James appeared, carefully, and pushed the door shut behind him.

Heather’s robotic brow constricted, simulating the human expression as much as it could. James was a shell of himself. Somewhere, her brain compared this image with a memory of him at Larkspur. It was like looking at the husk of a house that had caught fire in her hometown a few years back. Still standing, still house-shaped, but dead. Uninhabitable.

He carried a small toolbox. Heather shifted position so her legs dangled over the edge of the bed, waiting as he came near.

“I have to install some things in your neural network,” he said quietly, setting the box beside her on the bed. “Can you open your cranial panels, please?”

Heather complied. He looked so fragile, she didn’t feel like fighting with him today.

As he set to work undoing the screws in the protective frame locking down her neural network, she asked, “What are you installing?”

“A better heat sensor, first,” he said. “I know it’s not as good as the real thing, but I thought it may be useful to you, for now.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

“If I have time, I can start on advancing more of your sensory systems, which might help you feel more—I don’t know—normal.”

“But I’m sure He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named keeps you too busy for that.”

James sighed, conceding. He placed screws in an empty compartment of the toolbox as he freed them from the frame. Heather held still as he worked. She glanced down at the toolbox, considering two small devices in the compartment next to the screws. One, she presumed, was the temperature sensor.

“What’s the other thing you’re installing?”

“We’ll get to it…”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

With a gentle, calculated jerk, he unclipped the frame, and set it aside on the bed.

It was still so odd for Heather to see something that was inside her head just come out and lay beside her. She almost tried to compare it with what it would be if her body were still organic, but she knew it could never be a true comparison. Those rules didn’t apply anymore.

James picked up one of the devices and pulled a cap off one end, betraying a chip adapter. He craned his hands into her head, and she felt the pressure as he plugged it in.

“It’s in,” he said. “Go ahead and see if you can support it.”

Heather took a moment, searching. She found the awareness, the presence of a different area in her mind that wasn’t there before, like an additional room had been tacked on with the door closed.

In her mind, she opened the door.

James lit up before her in blues and oranges and yellows, a 360-degree signal superimposed on her vision in a way that was overwhelming at first, but she found she could push it back to the periphery of her awareness, and bring it forward again by degrees.

She focused her attention on the door to see if she could detect the guard through the walls, or more importantly, the other prisoner several doors down.

But the thick concrete walls blocked her vision.

“It works,” she said. “But I thought thermal cameras could see through walls.”

James shook his head. “Not really.”

“Oh.”

“The next thing, I would like to plug in and then explain,” he went on, selecting the other device from the toolbox.

“I’m gonna need you to explain it before you plug it in,” she said, warily. She prepared to snap her cranial panels shut if he tried to force it again.

James stared at the device in his hands, thinking it over. “It has to go in either way.”

“Order from the boss?”

He nodded.

Heather buzzed a sigh, hunching her shoulders and turning her head to look at the adjacent wall.

She traced a path of discoloration on the concrete with her eyes, weighing her options. She activated the camera in the back of her head. James hadn’t moved.

He didn’t seem keen on even trying to spin this one. They both knew their situation was despicable.

Heather looked at him. “So, what is it? This other one?”

“Pain simulator,” James said. More words hastily followed, “It was either that or paralysis on command. I thought maybe you’d be able to…live with this one better.” On that last sentence, he glanced up, and stared directly into her eyes.

Heather searched his expression. She tried to assess whether coded phrases and secret information were still on the table, or if his brain had just finally fried.

“It’s activated remotely,” he went on. “And I have no intention of using it with any regularity. I’m hoping it just existing will mean security will ease up on you.”

Heather cocked her head, eyes narrowed.

“I have to install it and test it,” he said. “The director will be here in a few minutes to watch. I’ll make it quick…I’m—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” Heather cut him off.

James swallowed it. He nodded, his gaze falling.

Something in his pocket beeped, and James stiffened, all color draining out of his face. It filled Heather with rage. Maybe when the director showed up, she would break his glasses.

“He’s on his way?” Heather ventured.

James nodded again. He ran a hand through his hair, exhaled heavily.
She shifted position and offered her open cranium. “Fine. I’m going to trust you on this for now, in the name of survival.”

“Thanks,” his voice trembled.

She narrowed her eyes at the floor as, with shaking hands, he plugged the device into a port on the other side of her neural network. The connection registered, but the door remained inaccessible, silent and ominous like a parasite.

James replaced the frame inside her head and after reattaching the screws, she closed her head.

They waited in injured silence for a few minutes. When Benson finally did arrive, Heather glared at him, but he pretended not to notice.

At Benson’s direction, James produced a small, flat remote with only a few buttons.

“You may want to lie down for this,” James said.

Heather obeyed, watching Benson, recording every inch of him to scrutinize later for clues to their location and how to get out.

“Just so you aren’t alarmed,” James said as she got situated. “This device works at different levels of signal that should process like a pain response, with no actual damage being inflicted. I’ll start on the lowest setting. Are you ready?”

“Just get it over with,” Heather said. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the director’s serene attention.

She heard a modest click as his thumb depressed a button on the remote, and Heather became aware of a dull pain easing into existence. A nagging headache coupled with minor muscular pain was an odd, almost welcome sensation, reminiscent of her organic body. She hadn’t realized she missed pain, even.

“What does it feel like?” he said.

“Like I have a fever,” Heather said.

“Okay.” He pressed the button again. “This is two.”

Heather’s headache intensified, stabbing behind her eyes. Her neck felt cramped and sore as the ache spread throughout her body. The moveable parts around her eyes tightened, and she pulled her head to one side, realizing after she had done so that nothing but the remote could alleviate the pain. She didn’t have traditional muscles anymore.

“Are you doing okay?” James asked, tentative.

“It hurts. Good job, I guess.”

He swallowed, and turned his attention back to the remote. “Three…”

Heather stiffened as the pain intensified with sharp, unexpected stabs. “How many levels are there?”

“Ten.”

The process continued on, the signal climbing up to level six. Heather pressed her arms into the bed, trying to stay calm and still. Pain pounded viciously in her head, radiating throughout her torso and down her arms and legs. She felt like she was back in her old body, and that it had been hit by a train.

“Can you try to sit up?” James asked.

Heather simulated a tight scoff. “Are you serious?”

“That should do it,” James said, looking at Benson, who shook his head.

“Take it all the way up,” the director said, calmly.

James hesitated. Heather braced herself.

“Seven,” James said. “Eight…”

It was only two clicks of a button, but her whole body suddenly felt like it was imploding on itself, bones fracturing, joints dislocating, organs ripping and muscles tearing under the pressure. Panic flooded through her, a need to rip out the device. She curled up in fetal position, gripping her head with a ragged, artificial gasp. She popped open her cranial panels, ducked her head and reached in, as if to rip out the frame, crush the device. Anything to make it stop.

“No, don’t—” James started forward. His hand touched hers, and at a sharp snap of electricity, he gasped and jerked away.

Heather needed to breathe, hear her heartbeat, something living and rhythmic to focus on that might help her block out the signal, but there was nothing to latch onto. Just cold metal. Just wires and deadness and pain.

Suddenly, the screeching in her limbs and head snuffed out, and her body went quiet. She relaxed, closing her eyes, feeling the need to rest for the first time since the transfer. For once, she reveled in the robotic stillness, felt an odd sense of comfort that, outside of that device, her body was incapable of experiencing that kind of suffering.

She slowly dragged herself to a sitting position. She cradled her head in her hands, despising the modest click of metal against metal as they touched.

“Impressive,” Benson said. “Finish up here and meet me outside so we can leave.”

“Yes sir,” James replied.

Benson departed, and then it was just the two of them.

“That really hurt,” Heather said, the volume of her voice very low. She blinked a few times, trying to pull free from the lingering disorientation. Her irises readjusted and she glanced up at him, the tops of her eyes lowered in confusion. He was favoring his hand, looking at her with a strange, soft incredulity. “What?” she said.

James snapped out of it. He shook his hand in the air a bit and picked up his toolbox with the other. “Nothing I just—you electrocuted me. It caught me off guard.”

Heather’s eyes widened. She tried to think back, sifting through her memories to see if she had remembered anything through the pain. It was hazy. There was panic. A breach of the electromagnetic field on her hand. A sharp jolt of power flashing from her chest and up her arm.

“Thanks again,” James said, holding the toolbox close to his chest, preparing to take his leave. “I have the only remote for that device, and I won’t ever use it again if I can help it.”

Heather moved the arm the electrical current had passed through, testing its connectivity, then hugged it to her middle. “Lose that remote, please.”

“I’ll try. See you later.”

After a beat of silence as he crossed the room, she asked quietly, “Are you still going to save your dad?”

James stopped at the door. He didn’t turn around.

“No,” he said. He knocked on the door for the guard outside to open it for him. “He doesn’t need my help.”

Heather straightened up a little more, dread creeping through her circuits. “Is he…?”

“He found a treatment that seems to be working,” James clarified. The door opened.

“So this was all for nothing.”

“Yeah,” James said.

Heather watched him go, and once the onerous door closed, she listened to his and the guard’s footsteps recede down the hallway.

James might have become connected to this place with or without his machine, but supporting his project had helped them become friends. Without it, she probably wouldn’t have gone down to the lab that night. She could still be home, safe, with her family.

For now, she knew she couldn’t sink into what could have been, or the brain-fracturing grief and rage of how senseless this all was. She had to focus on what was in front of her.

She looked at her robotic hands, then at her chest, curious.

And maybe Larkspur’s android could help her after all.

+

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE—LEADS

Heather sat with her back propped up against the wall, a hardbound biochemistry journal in her lap, which James had given her to read to assess any differences in her cognitive processes with the neural network. Without raising her face, she glanced above the edge of the book to where

James hunched over a workstation across the room, picking apart the device that reminded her of a turkey baster—a rod with a bulb at the top. He dropped a couple of screws into a plastic tray, pulled out a wire-laced internal component, squinted at it, then scribbled something in the open notebook on the edge of the fray.

She had hoped he would have returned to the lab a little more lucid, ready to pool their resources to break whatever hold Benson had over him, but that morning, James had come in with a stack of academic journals and the same weary, hollowed countenance as he tried to explain why he wanted her to read through them.

Heather was mostly reading them for something to do now, though she didn’t understand most of it. Robotic or not, she had only a basic frame of reference from recreational reading for Western Blots, receptor families and ion channels, and understood little of the journals’ frenzied insistence on abbreviating everything. It was nice of him to remember she found cell biology interesting, but now the mention of science in general sent a sour buzz through her circuits.

She recalled a sleepy, early morning a lifetime ago, meeting a young engineer whose mutual love of science felt like stars aligning. She had been torn from her life for her parents’ secrets, yet for lack of options, she had made herself believe things would be different. Better.

She turned a page, frowning as she tried to make sense of a graph. All the information from the previous pages was stored in her memory as soon as it met her eyes. A lot of it she had recorded but not retained, kept on file in photographic format. As she read on, trying to recall and apply the information as the journal’s descriptions advanced, more of it assimilated in the imageless integration she was used to, back when her brain was organic. The more she practiced with it, the more the surface photographic memory moved toward something more useful. Some of it knit itself in right away without first sitting in that photographic stage.

It was similar enough, but her drastically enhanced memory retention felt so alien. She could glaze over information, choose not to read certain paragraphs, but her neural network had still pulled and stored some of it, subconsciously.

She used to idolize people whose brains worked like computers. Now it seemed trite and misguided. Intelligence wasn’t worth much without humanity to ground it.

She feared that the mechanical medium of her brain and its internal programs would steadily prune away who she was, little by little, as simulating humanity became a tired script.

Meanwhile, James continued to tinker at his assignments. Hopeless.

When he was absent overnight, she had tried everything she could think of to find weak points in the metal rope keeping her tethered to the workbench. It was tight, tough, and she would have thought her robotic hands would have the strength to rip through it, but she couldn’t even snap it from the leg of the counter.

She’d tested the strength of the counter legs as well—they looked like wood but the centers were metal. She’d taken a second crack at pulling them from the floor, with no success.

James would have to be the one to remove the tether, but there was no way he’d do it at this rate.

She watched him work, studious and oblivious, even while Benson had broken the rest of him, ignoring her gaze on his back. He knew where they were. He had knowledge of variables that she didn’t. Yet he hadn’t offered any other secrets. Instead, he buried himself even harder, scrambling to put himself back in Benson’s good graces, pushing everything else away. She hated his apologetic looks and occasional, clumsy attempts to check in or sympathize.

It wasn’t enough to be sorry.

+

Richard had a pit in his stomach as he arrived at Larkspur the next morning with his laptop and Sesame’s neural network tucked carefully in his bag.

He and Su had spent most of the night with Sesame going through its memories, but Sesame had only personally seen Michael Benson a handful of times at best. James had mostly kept it at Larkspur.

They had gleaned that James had been staying on campus at Empetrum over the last month or so, after Richard had asked him to discontinue the neural transfer project. When James brought Sesame to Empetrum, he had kept it in the apartment, so Sesame had actually seen very little action as far as the goings-on of the facility.

They did have visuals, however. Richard had directed Sesame to take screen shots, of the location, the grounds, the on-campus housing, the main facility from the outside and whatever Sesame had seen within, as well as small glimpses of scenery on the commute, though James had kept Sesame’s box under the dashboard on the passenger side, so the robot’s view out the window had been extremely limited.

Besides guards, the only person Sesame had seen at Empetrum was Michael, and despite Richard’s hopes that James had talked to the robot about his activities at Empetrum, he hadn’t. At this point, they could still only speculate on whether or not the clinical prototype had been constructed, and what James had since done with it.

They followed Sesame’s memories all the way up to when James pulled its neural network and hid it. He had been acting normal driving to Empetrum Friday night, dropped Sesame off in the apartment, and left.

He spent very little time at the apartment the majority of the weekend, leaving early in the morning and returning late at night, leaving Sesame alone in a makeshift pen in the living room. But Sunday, he returned suddenly in the middle of the day, pallid and agitated. Sesame had watched him rush around, packing, muttering to himself too quietly to make out. He had tugged a suitcase out the door, come back, gathered up Sesame and some notebooks, then had driven back to his apartment in Worthing.

There was something on the table with a note. James left Sesame across the room, and Sesame had watched him pick up a small black device in shaking hands. James didn’t touch the note, so from Sesame’s vantage point, it didn’t know what the note said.

It had been hard to watch. James was upset all the rest of the day, overturning his apartment looking for something, leaving Sesame alone, forgotten again on the end table by the door. Sesame stayed still, observing everything, feeling safer not drawing attention to itself, as it had explained to Richard and Su later.

Finally, in the early light of Monday morning, James emerged from his bedroom disheveled and distracted. He lingered in the opening to the hallway, ran a nervous hand through his hair. Something occurred to him, and he looked up, making eye contact with Sesame, his gaze tired, frightened, trapped.

James strode across the room into the kitchen, and Sesame heard him digging in drawers. After a few minutes, James had copped together tools and containers and then he retrieved Sesame’s box and put it on the table.

Sesame tried to escape as the lid came off, sensing something bad was about to happen, but

James caught it easily, pulled up the panel in Sesame’s back to access its neural network. Then the recording that Sesame had played Richard and his colleagues fell into place with so much new, terrible context:
Sorry to do this to you Sesame…
Richard, if you end up having access to this: Whatever happens between now and your finding this message…I’m sorry.

Richard arrived at the top of the stairs and started down the hallway, passing his office to first see if Eve was there yet.

She was.

“Morning, Rich,” Eve said gently, logging into her computer. “Any luck?”

“Nothing new about Benson,” Richard admitted. “But got some visuals on Empetrum, and when

James’ actions started falling apart. Sunday was the turning point, I think.” He set his bag down on the desk, and carefully got out Sesame’s setup so it could participate.
When he opened the laptop, Sesame’s makeshift voice spoke up, “Are you still working on my body?”

“Of course, let’s go down and take a look in a couple minutes…” Eve produced an envelope from her briefcase and handed it to Richard. “I found those photos I mentioned.”

There were only a few. At the top of the thin stack was a photograph of Eve, twenty years younger, and three others: a tall man with sharp features and gray hair, a younger individual on Eve’s right side who had a similar nose and was just as gray, despite appearing to be in her late thirties. The man to the right had his arm around the shoulders of a boy of about ten, with thick rimmed glasses and cow-licked brown hair. The boy’s features were softer and chubbier than the man from Sesame’s memories, but Richard could see the resemblance.

Eve drew nearer to view the pictures with him. “None of the Bensons liked pictures taken of them. I used to tease Lawrence about it…” She indicated each one with her finger. “This one is Lawrence, to my left. That’s his daughter to my right, Alice, who worked briefly at Larkspur as a biochemist. And then this is Michael, Alice’s son. I remember Michael was a good kid. Bright, but painfully shy. As different as night and day next to Lawrence’s confident charisma, but Lawrence adored his grandson.”

Richard stared at the photo for several moments longer, his attention on Lawrence. He had never seen his face before, only heard his name.

Richard moved the top photo to the back and sifted through the others Eve had found of Michael. One was candid, of the boy watching his grandfather work with a microscope, and in the other, he was trying on a lab coat and looking very uncomfortable to have suddenly found himself faced with a camera lens.

“Sesame,” Richard said. “Could you pull up a picture of the man James was talking to, for comparison?”

Sesame complied and Richard held the third photo up beside it.

“Yeah, that’s him all right,” Eve hummed.

“May I see the photos?” Sesame said.

As Richard held up the photographs for the laptop’s webcam, Eve wearily took a seat on the edge of her desk. “I never learned for sure,” she said. “But I think Alice was helping with Lawrence’s awful project. She feigned ignorance when asked about it, but then she disappeared too.”

“Empetrum can’t be that far away, if James was doubling up,” Richard said.

“That’s very true,” Eve mused. She sighed. “To think the Bensons were this close all along.”

“Be careful if we find it,” Sesame said. “There were lots of guards around, and I do not think Michael will welcome us.”

Richard and Eve nodded in dismal agreement.

“Do you think it was Lawrence who set this up, or could it have been Alice?” Richard said. “Or maybe Michael took the initiative all on his own later on?” He considered the photo of all three Bensons. “Sesame, while we work on your body today, can you see if you can find where the Bensons ended up after the fallout with Larkspur?”

“On it,” Sesame said.

“You may not find anything about the scandal,” Eve said. “The government didn’t want to be publicly associated with what happened, so they did everything they could to cover it up. That’s partly how Larkspur was able to downsize, relocate, and continue to operate underground from the east coast.”

Richard looked at her, shocked. “Why did the government bother to cover it up? Couldn’t they have just said, ‘We didn’t authorize this.’ and moved on?”

Eve looked worried. “I guess I didn’t really question it. At the time, I was swamped running damage control, while dealing with the loss of an old and dear friend. Up until that point, I had trusted Lawrence implicitly, and I never expected he harbored the capacity to hurt people like that. After everything was said and done, I was just relieved—selfishly, perhaps—that the government had put out most of the fires, and kept it away from us.”

Richard’s gaze fell. He glanced at Sesame’s activated webcam, wishing he knew what the ex-mouse was thinking. “Is it possible Lawrence disappeared after Larkspur to create Empetrum?”

“It’s something I wouldn’t put past him,” Eve said. “But the Larkspur thing got him blacklisted. Legally, he would have been barred from registering a new biotech company, and no existing one would hire him after the public outrage he caused. Not to mention, his unethical project had every hallmark of being an incredibly elusive undertaking, with little promise of return. Even disreputable sponsors would see it as a colossal waste of time and money.”

The laptop piped up, “Richard, Eve?”

“Yes?”

“I found an obituary.”

Richard stiffened but Eve was the first to speak, “Whose?”

“Lawrence Benson,” Sesame said. An image pulled up onto the screen and the two engineers crowded in to read it. It wasn’t much, just a passing mention in a newspaper for a town in the central region of the country. It didn’t offer any new information, saying he was a biochemist, survived by a daughter and grandson, whose names were not provided.

Richard squinted at it, confused.

“That’s the town he was from,” Eve said. “I imagine he still has family in the area that would have wanted to know.”

“Who would have submitted it to that local paper?” Richard said. “Alice? Michael?”

“Either one, I guess,” Eve said. “Letting relatives know while staying off the grid.” She breathed an incredulous exhale, pressing a hand to her forehead and straightening up to pace. “Three years? He’s been dead for three years? No mention of his spouse either, so she must be gone too…So then is it really Michael pulling the strings?”

“I am looking for Alice,” Sesame said.

Eve halted her pacing and turned to look at the computer.

“We cannot talk to Lawrence,” Sesame explained. “And even though I am curious about Michael, we know all that matters about him for the present situation. The trails for him and Lawrence are sparse, but I am finding information on Alice Benson more easily. She reappeared the same year Lawrence died, and does not seem to be making an effort to cover her tracks now.”

Richard readjusted his glasses and exchanged a glance with his coworker. “Do you think she would help us?”

Eve’s brow furrowed. She ventured closer to the computer. “I guess it’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

“She seems to have changed her phone number a lot in the last few years,” Sesame said, and as it did, a number came up on the screen, as well as pictures taken by surveillance cameras. Richard marveled at how quickly Sesame was able to access such information. “I think this may be her current one. It is for this woman. Her most recent address is local, which seems strange. Is this Alice Benson?”

Eve leaned forward again, studying the photos. Richard looked at the physical photograph in his hand, and extended it to place it up against the screen. She was older, heavier, her hair cropped much shorter than the photo, with bags under her eyes and a forehead creased in a way that made Richard think she had spent most of the last twenty years worried.

But it was her.

Eve was silent for a long, intense moment. Finally, she tugged her cellphone from the pocket of her slacks.

“You just earned yourself a damn good body, Sesame,” she muttered, thumbing in and double-checking the numbers before raising the phone to her ear.

+

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR—CANDOR  

James seldom left the lab. He averaged five hours of sleep a night, but otherwise lived there, planted in the same spot at the workstation across the room while the trashcan by the door filled up with empty instant noodle cups, meal replacement bars wrappers, and energy drink cans. A week after Heather’s organic death, she had started counting the energy drinks consumed in a single day, and had had to speak up at least once to keep him from a dangerous caffeine overdose.

He only changed his clothes every other day. They barely spoke to each other. One day, he had tried to install an additional time-keeping device in her neural network to see if she could integrate it, but she refused to open her cranial panels until he had cleaned himself up and eaten something other than vending machine food.

In obtuse, sleep-deprived frustration, he had tried to pry open the panels himself but she stood her ground until he relented. He returned an hour later, clean and cross, with a wrapped boloney sandwich from some kind of cafeteria. She adapted the device with no problems, and he took it back out, refusing to answer questions about why he needed to know if she could access outside software.

For a while, she had hoped maybe he was developing his own escape plan, pretending to work on what Benson wanted but creating something that could help them escape instead.

But he seemed to be sinking all his attention to that turkey baster thing, reading pages and pages of files on his computer, soldering and programming on other scraps of metal she hadn’t bothered to ask about. Probably more stuff he’d soon try to plug into her head.

Heather had liked to think she could never hate someone. But James’ presence was suffocating, his submission disappointing and disgusting. She hated herself, too, for getting mixed up with him, even with Larkspur, in the first place. She watched him work from afar, her hostility building until, finally, she just couldn’t take it anymore.

“You’ve abandoned me, James,” she said, leaned up against the wall between the tall windows, arms crossed, watching scenery that never changed.

She didn’t know whether she meant for him to hear her, but he paused working.

“I’m doing the best I can,” he said, in a tired monotone.

“My whole life I’ve felt like I was in everyone’s way,” Heather said, glaring out the window. “I bent over backwards, trying to be kind, concerned, convenient. Hoping that would make people want me around, but it was never good enough. I never figured out how to be good enough.” She narrowed her eyes. “I was even killed because, yet again, I was in someone else’s way. And now I’m a sentient decoration for your messed up lab.”

James didn’t turn around, though his shoulders were tense.

“I would have started school today,” Heather went on. “Things would have been better if I had just left well enough alone. But I got my dad to take me to Larkspur. I convinced myself you and I were friends.”

“If it matters,” James said, quietly. “I thought we were friends too.”

“But now I think that, deep down, you wanted this to happen—to get back at my dad for turning down your horrible mad science project.”

“That’s absolutely not true.” Finally, James swiveled around in his chair to face her, a cornered look on his face. “I didn’t know it would come to this. I thought I was part-timing at another reputable biotech company, not some kind of mafia. Because, you know, typically, when a guy tries to quit his job, the company lets him. They don’t go ballistic, sabotaging his other workplaces and trying to pin it on him, and executing innocent bystanders.”

Heather blinked. “They framed you at Larkspur?”

James hesitated. If Benson had a gag order on him, he had probably said too much.

“If I don’t do this—” He flung an arm back at the sprawl of incomplete projects at his desk. “He will kick me out and keep you here. And I can’t let that happen. This is the only way I can protect you.”

“This isn’t protecting me,” Heather said. She crossed her arms and looked away. “Maybe I should erase my memory, forget I was ever human. It would be easier.”

“You can’t—”

“Why? Because I have so much left to live for?” Heather snapped. She spread her arms wide.

“More of this? While I was human, maybe I still had a chance, but like this, I’ll always be alone.”

She wished she could cry, that she could feel the cathartic force of a scream leaving her throat and lungs, and get some release from the loathing and sorrow raging inside her. But she only had simulated sound, trapped inside a cold, artificial body, left to drown.

“This happened because you were an easy target,” she said bitterly. “Not because you’re smart. I hope you know that.”

He stared at her, his red-rimmed hazel eyes wide and horrified. His gaze shifted, something in him crumbling as he stood up. Heather watched him, warily, incredulously. This was indeed news to him.

He made for the door to the lab. He was long gone by the time the mechanism caught the door, bringing it to a soft, anticlimactic close.

Heather hugged her knees in the silence. She figured there was logical benefit to dispelling any illusions James-the-Engineering-Prodigy might have had—illusions that the hours of isolation in his lab had also chipped away in her—but realistically, she’d just wanted to hurt him. Get him to do something other than numb out in the corner.

She felt petty and spiteful, admitting that to herself. But continuing to play her old persona of a nice, well-adjusted girl always excited to lend a helping hand felt grotesque.

If she ever made it out of here, she would spend the rest of her life trying to prove to people that she was human, even as her humanness inevitably slipped away.

She still didn’t know if she could, in good conscience, go on being Heather. Technically, she was a clone, designed to replace and continue on. Was that proximity close enough? Or maybe it would never be anything more than just a twisted game of pretend.

+

Erika was doing pushups in her cell. She planted all four hands, trying to put as much weight on the arms off her back as possible. They had only existed for ten days, and she still couldn’t trust much weight to them, but they could build muscle. She intended to build them up until she could walk on them if necessary.

With as large as they were, maybe they could one day be strong enough to throw somebody. While she had nothing else to do, she resolved to do whatever she could to make them useful, to bolster the careful physical therapy Yeun was doing with them, maybe to eventually use against her captors.

Now that the exhaustion from the gene therapy and activation was finally wearing off, Erika was getting her strength back. 

She figured her behavior would be noted, but let them suspect. Let them prepare. 

Erika Hodgson hadn’t given up yet.

+

James sat on the floor in the storage closet across from his lab, his face bowed and his fingers clawed in his disheveled hair. The dimness of the space was quiet and placid—a kinder sort of darkness than the one screaming in his chest. His whole body was ablaze with it, the grief and pain that everything had gone so sideways. That he had walked a razor’s edge of abuse and exploitation and had had no idea until it was too late.

He didn’t understand why Heather was blaming herself just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. If only she had never met him. If only he had never even existed.

His face was hot, and he brushed at the persistent tide of tears leaking from his eyes, but he couldn’t stop crying. How dare he weep over this, some deep part of him that sounded a lot like his father whispered. Was he crying for Heather, or for himself? His own pain, his own regret? He couldn’t tell for sure.

He just couldn’t tell anymore.

His pager beeped in the pocket of his slacks. His arm felt like stone as he twisted to retrieve the device and read the message:

Please come to my office.

His hand tightened on it. He raised his arm to hurl it across the room, smash it to pieces against the wall, but he couldn’t bring himself to follow through.

He thumped the back of his head once against the door. Finally, he typed, I didn’t tell her anything important.

He bent over, leaning his forehead on his drawn-up knees and closed his eyes. He was so tired.

The pager beeped again.

Now.

Slowly, with great effort, James replied. On my way.

He dragged himself to his feet, pulled a paper towel from a nearby dispenser and dried his eyes as best as he could. Finally, he opened the door, letting light spill into his hiding place. The guard waited for him across the hallway, and nodded for him to proceed alone. James complied.

The director’s office was open, and James hung in the doorway.

Benson folded his hands on top of his desk, expectant. “Come in, Siles.”

James wandered forward and dropped into the chair in front of the desk.

“Care to explain your outburst down in your lab just now?”

James leaned forward, resting his face in his hands. He shook his head.

After a calculated silence, Benson said, “She was just trying to get a rise out of you. You need to move past this attachment you have to her.”

James didn’t respond. He felt like he was going to throw up.

“Why are you still keeping her in your lab?” the director asked. “Why insist on torturing yourself like this?”

James thought about trying to spin a logical angle for Benson, but really, he just couldn’t bear the weight of what he had done to Heather. Carrying it alone poisoned him more every day. Maintaining the status quo made him feel like he was on a treadmill, running faster and faster, knowing it would soon spin him apart.

“I don’t know,” James said, finally.

Benson sat still, observing him. It didn’t make sense to him that Benson would inquire after his broken spirit as if it even made a difference to him. As long as James performed well, what did it matter that he hated himself?

Subconsciously, he had been lamenting the seemingly ongoing curse of his intelligence, radicalized by his parents, harnessed by Empetrum, but Heather was right. James was uniquely suited to biomedical engineering, but he wasn’t the only person who could work on Non-Comp. Benson just had easier access to him through Larkspur, through the Bureau. If he had turned Benson down after that first phone call, would any of this have happened? He might have at least had time to get help before the trap slammed closed.

“You’re too sentimental,” Benson said finally. “That will ruin your work if you let it.”

James nodded, his face turned toward the floor. A complete disconnect sounded appealing. He was so incredibly tired of hurting, of feeling guilty for hurting. Of trying to explain himself, knowing it didn’t matter.

“Do you have any more pressing tests to complete with Ms. Knight?” Benson asked. “Besides the device to control her, which I hope you’ll be finishing soon?”

“Just that one,” James murmured. “And yes, I’ll be finishing it soon.” He had opted for a pain simulator, a crueler device than paralysis-on-demand, but while the latter would simply physically disrupt conduction of her robotic spinal cord wherever the device was attached, the pain simulator was complex and software-based, something he hoped she could learn to override.

“Good. Then I’ll have her moved to a housing unit downstairs where she won’t be a distraction. Keep your distance until you need to install that device. You can’t carry on like this with her in your lab. It’s destructive.”

“Housing unit…” A prisoner cell, more like. He dully considered the alternative language like acrid steam swirling above a witch’s cauldron, bending the light, bending reality, urging him to accept that all of this made sense.

+

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE—WITHDRAWAL

Heather dismally watched the goings on of the grounds outside. Guards chatting, birds foraging in the bushes. Far above, a jet traced a small white trail across the sky. She wondered if it was even possible for her to clear her own memory, as she’d threatened. She was afraid to try.

As she sat there alone, she gradually realized her mom and dad still probably wanted her back, robot hybrid clone or not. She supposed that was enough incentive to keep freedom on her mind for now.

If James wasn’t going to help her, she would have to leave him behind. If he was too scared to listen to her, what else was she supposed to do?

That question seemed to be all she had. Confusion that would never have an answer, an existence with no remedy.

She heard footsteps. Heather turned her head to look at the door as a badge beeped in the reader outside and the lock clicked back.

James entered the room, followed by a guard, and any urge to apologize Heather might have felt died when a man she recognized from a jagged shred of memory appeared behind them, standing watchfully in the doorway. Benson’s bespectacled gaze wielded power, like a tangible collar around James’ neck.

Heather shrank back a little against the wall as the director’s gray gaze met hers.

“I’m going to move you downstairs,” James said, hollowly. “I think it will be better if we have our own spaces.” He nodded reluctantly at the guard, who stepped forward to tie Heather’s arms behind her back and lift her down from the table. She didn’t fight him, despite the dread that flooded over her as the restraints clicked down around her hands. James unlocked the ankle tether.

Benson stepped aside, and the guard guided her out the door and into the hallway. James hung back behind them, walking beside the director as the group made its way to the elevator.

Heather tried to glance back. James’ gaze remained on the floor.

Briefly, her attention grazed the wall behind him—a locked metal door at the end of the hallway by his lab. A prohibitive sign warning danger and high voltage.

James said nothing in the elevator, or all the way down the silent hallway on the basement level. Heavy doors with viewing panels lined the corridor, each bearing a cell number. From one further down, a single sheet of paper hung in a transparent sleeve. She zoomed in her vision so she could read it more clearly as they approached.

Subject: Erika Hodgson
Project: Non-Comp MBE
Researcher: E. Yeun

They passed the door and Heather tripped, trying to twist around to keep looking at it.

There were others. She wasn’t the only one trapped here.

They came to a cell two doors down from the occupied one. It, too, possessed a similar notice, except it displayed her and James’ names, with O.R.T. listed as the project.

Heather shot an apprehensive glance at James as another guard joined them to unlock her cell and her escort took her inside. James remained by the door, avoiding her gaze. After releasing her wrists, the guard ordered her to stay where she was, and then left her.

Finally, James spoke. “I’ll bring you something to do a little later,” he said quietly. “But aside from that, you won’t have to see me for a while.” He forced himself to look at her, then. Utter misery burned in his gaze. A continued apology, despite the resignation.

After all his aching and worry about Benson separating them, James was the one separating them. Heather figured he hadn’t made the decision on his own. Fury sparked through her circuits at how completely both of them were under the control of this person she knew nothing about.

She hoped her parents had found something useful in Sesame’s neural network. But her loved ones were just regular people. She didn’t want any of this horror to befall them too.

As she watched the guard close her into the silence of her cell, she knew she was on her own.

+

After leaving Heather in her cell, Benson took James to Yeun’s lab on the first floor.

The door was propped open. “Dr. Yeun?” Benson called.

“Yes?” Yeun’s voice issued from across the lab, through another open door. Then his face appeared, a sterile mask over his mouth and wearing a fully buttoned up lab coat.

“I’m putting Siles in your care for a little while,” Benson said, ushering James into the room. “He’s been reading the background data for Non-Comp, and is ready for hands-on experience.”

Yeun blinked, then looked at James, whose gaze fell to the floor.

“Sure thing,” Yeun said.

“Thank you.” Benson took his leave, abandoning the roboticist with his future supervising researcher. “Be gentle with him. He’s having a rough day.”

Yeun waited several moments for Benson to leave earshot before he said, “Well, I’m just finishing up some mice husbandry work if you want something to keep your hands busy.”

James stepped forward, lethargic. “Mice?”

“Yeah, for Non-Comp,” Yeun said. As James entered the secondary lab, Yeun pointed at a station near the door. “Lab coats, surgical masks, and gloves are over there. Come on over once you’re situated.”

As James donned the sterile gear, he surveyed the room. Cages lined the back wall, and Yeun worked among a system of stations for transplanting mice, cleaning cages, replacing bedding, and reintroducing them. Yeun assigned him to sterilizing cage components at the island in the middle of the room.

After a long period of silence, Yeun said. “Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“I know the director’s been coming on strong lately,” Yeun said. “He just wants to make sure you’re on board.”

James turbidly focused on his work. Yeun returned a group of mice to their clean cage, and James watched for evidence of something weird about the mice, something human weaponry related, but he couldn’t tell.

“So you use human test subjects too?” James asked finally.

“Here and there,” Yeun said. “But you don’t have to worry about that today.”

They worked in silence for a while, a dark cloud hanging around James.

Finally, Yeun spoke up again, “If it’s any consolation, Benson’s leaving on a business trip in a couple of days. He’ll want to get some things set up with you before he leaves, but you should have more space to breathe after that. You’ll report progress to me, as we’re going to be working together soon, and I’ll go as easy on you as I can.”

“Oh,” James said.

Briefly, the thought crossed his mind that Benson’s absence presented a window, but he swallowed the temptation to follow it further. The director wouldn’t be on site, but he would still be very much in control. There were still security guards, and all the ultimatums Benson had stacked against him and Heather.

“What is the business trip for?” James probably wasn’t even allowed to ask.

“Sponsor stuff.” Yeun snapped two halves of a cage together and dumped aspen bedding inside.

“He’ll be gone for a few days.”

“Why so long?” James slid one cage aside and started on another.

“It’s on the east coast, I think,” Yeun said. “To avoid Conxence interference. We’re not sure how much they know about us yet. Better not to take the chance, you know?”

Before long, they’d finished up, and then Yeun was taking him through a door in the back of the lab. “Have you ever done any cell splitting?”

“Not really,” James said. He found himself in a narrow room with sturdy, sealed incubators on the counters, and fume hoods at the back of the room. Compound microscopes and cabinets populated the adjacent wall.

Yeun smiled at him. “Want to learn? Keeping live stem cell cultures is a big part of the job with Non-Comp.”

“Okay.”

“Wash your hands, put on some gloves, and take a seat over there.” Yeun nodded to one of the fume hoods.

James obeyed.

“I’ll give you some dishes and fluid to practice with. No live cells,” Yeun said, opening one of the cabinets.

Yeun furnished the fume hood with a small stack of empty petri dishes, a motorized pipette controller with a disposable pipette, and an erlenmeyer flask full of water. He took hold of the gate-like window at the front of the fume hood, pulling it down. “First, you pull down the sash like this, as close to your hands as possible to avoid contamination while you’re working. Unwrap the pipette here, it goes into the tip of the pipettor. This button sucks up, this one releases it…” After showing him how the equipment worked, as James had never used motorized pipettes before, Yeun taught him how to pull up the simulated cell culture from one petri dish, and decant it into two more dishes, rattling on about more of the biological steps involved in preparing and caring for stem cell cultures.

Yeun smiled, observing his technique. “You’re a natural.”

James pressed his lips together and kept working for a few minutes more.

“About Non-Comp…” James said finally. “Benson said there are currently Compatible subjects with the original science, the one Hill developed with another bioroboticist, who doesn’t work here anymore…”

Yeun hesitated. “Yes, there are six known Compatibilities. All unique.”

“What do they do?” James asked. “I’m told we’re going to try to replicate them.”

“Yes.” Yeun went over to the nearest incubator and lay a hand on it. A label read P.J.E. “The person these cell cultures originate from has an extra set of arms. It’s the most benign and straightforward of the group, so this is the one I’m working to produce in a human subject first. And although there have been a few hangups, it’s going well, overall. My current test subject has a healthy genetic code on all the markers I needed, and has taken well to gene therapy.”

James laid down the pipette and pulled his hands from the fume hood. He wondered if someday he would be far gone enough to talk like this, like human enslavement was just a neutral technicality. Even using mice for research turned his stomach now.

Yeun renewed his smile, sensing James’ discomfort, and moved to the next incubator, “This one’s bearer has rudimentary pyrokinetic abilities, and this one—” He pointed to the next in line. “—can create a burst of projectile force. Telepathy, both reception and projection—” He gestured at each of the incubators across the room. “—That one’s bearer turns into a smoke-like substance, phasing and reforming the body at will. Oh, but that one interests me the most, to be honest.”

James looked in the direction Yeun indicated. The final incubator was marked C.R.B. James assumed the initials on each of the incubators corresponded to the subjects’ names. “What’s that one?”

“This one generates plant matter from their body,” Yeun said. “Can you believe it? And it’s not just leaves. They can create large projections that take on a variety of forms like vines and branches, which they can move as easily as their own original limbs. They’re crossing whole genetic domains! And Compatible MBE is only stimulating genes these individuals already possess. We didn’t introduce foreign genetic material.”

“Oh,” James said, considering the incubator, his hackles raising. “Why didn’t you start trying to duplicate that one, if it’s the one that interests you the most?” Empetrum obviously did what it wanted.

“That Compatibility is complex and still poorly understood,” Yeun said. “I pick at its mysteries in my free time, and while it doesn’t seem to bother its natural bearer much from what I’ve observed, when introduced to another system, it either completely doesn’t take, or it becomes extremely volatile. I’m not keen on letting it anywhere near another human system until I’ve uncovered more about what makes it tick.”

James cringed.

“Let me show you the modulators.” Yeun waved him toward the door. James followed, apprehensive.

In the main area of Yeun’s lab stood an illuminated shelf with electrical devices mounted on clear polymer frames. James had barely noticed them when Benson had dropped him off, still too shaken from his argument with Heather.

“These are the devices that drive Compatibility technology,” Yeun said. “Hill and Olsson developed a pair of compounds that are entered into these devices, one that drives the genetic activation, and another that dismantles it upon deactivation, both stabilizing the Compatible phenotypes and making them reversible.”

“Why bother making it reversible?” James leaned in to examine the devices, labeled with the model and development date. Some looked like bracelets, others were shaped like oversized microchips. A chill went up his spine as he imagined how the devices worked—hijacking a person’s genetic code and driving a rapid, manufactured evolution.

“Reversibility gives us some security over the technology,” Yeun said. “If something happens where they need to expel one of the recruits from the program, for example, the former recruit won’t be able to keep their Compatibility and use it against us. Though I prefer to focus on the modulators’ benefits to the recruits—They bolster weaker Compatible affinities, and stabilize the ones that could be dangerous if connected completely to the bearer’s nervous and endocrine systems.”

“Ah,” James said.

Yeun wistfully surveyed the modulators, his hands in his lab coat pockets. “Soon, we’ll be able to get Non-Comp up and running, if we put our heads together. I’m excited to see what you’ll bring to the project. Your neural transfer project really blew me away, you know.”

James swallowed. He stepped away from the shelves, leaning against a nearby counter cluttered with boxes of pipette tips, compound microscopes, flasks of ethanol and used slides.

“Benson’s planning on taking you to see the Compatible recruits,” Yeun went on. “He’ll probably want to do that tomorrow, to help this all sink in a little better, get you moving forward, and give our sponsors a status report they’ll like at the meeting.”

James ran a hand through his hair and tried to take a steadying breath, but it was shaky. He told himself he just had to keep moving, try to minimize damage where he could. It was the only thing he knew how to do.

Yeun came over and leaned against the counter beside him, keeping a respectable distance. “I know it’s a lot to deal with. I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now,” he said, quietly. He crossed his arms and considered the floor. “Personally, I think Alder was way out of line with what he did to your friend from Larkspur, but the director has to be really careful. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the situation in the capital, but it affects us a lot here. We could become a target of the Conxence ourselves, if we’re not cautious, or if we take too long to bring Non-Comp to a stable form. There have been threats of giving the project to some other lab, even with the breakthroughs we’ve made this year.”

James felt the fragile turbulence inside him settle into a cold, exhausted heat in his chest. He didn’t care if the militarized rebellion came for them. In fact, he hoped they would.

He hoped someday, he would watch Empetrum burn, even if he went down with it.

+

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN—AFTERMATH          

Richard woke up on the floor.

He slowly pushed himself up with a soft moan, raising a hand to his head.

The details of the attack returned to his memory by degrees: Alder appearing in the doorway, approaching his desk with a concerned expression. “Sir, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Suddenly, Alder was grabbing him, clenching an arm around his throat, and a biting substance sprayed into Richard’s face.

Richard bolted upright and swooned, his hand landing heavily on the edge of his desk as he caught himself. Where was Heather? The dizziness was still subsiding as he fixed his glasses and groped through the dark to the door.

“Heather? James?” He stepped into the hallway. James’ door was closed, and he found the office empty. “Heather?” No answer.

Richard hurried downstairs and pulled unsteadily on the door to the empty lab. “Heather are you here?”

The fluorescent lights buzzed in the excruciating stillness.

Dread thudded in his chest as he found the equipment room, the storage areas, and the adjoining lab vacant as well. Running now, Richard burst clumsily into the lobby and crossed the polished floor to a door near the front entrance. He weaved down the hallway, opening every door and calling his daughter’s name.

“Heather!” He ended up back in the dim lobby. Where were the security guards? “Heather! Answer me! Where are you!” He rounded the desk to check the security screens. The surveillance system had been disconnected.

When he booted it back up, every feed confirmed his fears. The facility was stagnant, deserted.

He tried to access the archives to see what had happened in the last couple of hours he had been unconscious, and the most recent bit of footage he found featured James using an electric saw to sever the head of the big 3D printer in the equipment room. It cut out again shortly before that. He toggled back and forth. James alone at one of the counters in the lab, staring turbidly at his laptop. James in the other room, mutilating their equipment. No record of Heather.

Richard stared long at the screen, on the verge of hyperventilation. He straightened up suddenly as he remembered seeing something he hadn’t had attention for earlier. He lurched back to the nearest lab entrance and stood in the doorway, frozen, his eyes fixed on the empty counter.

The android was gone.

Richard stepped forward. Black spots plagued his vision, as his mind tried to make sense of the absence, put the pieces together.

The old facility. James, insisting it was sabotage. But James would never.

Abruptly, Richard pushed back through the door, sprinted across the lobby, and tripped up the stairs again. He snatched his cell phone from his desk. The time was 9:14. There was a string of texts from Su, starting from 2 hours earlier: How’s goes it?

Where are you guys? Is everything ok?

Richard, please answer, I’m getting really worried.

Are you on your way?

Hello??

She had called him several times, but he’d missed all of it.

Richard called his daughter. Her cell phone rang from within the confines of the room. Slackening his phone from his ear in dismay, Richard craned his neck to look over the desk at her backpack.
If he checked her phone, there probably would have been worried texts from Su as well.

James was very likely the last person to have seen her. Richard dialed his number, praying for encouraging news.

The call went straight to voicemail. He tried again, with the same result. He waited to leave a message the second time, but after the tone, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. He tried a third time.

At the tone, he said, shakily, “H-hey James…I don’t know what’s going on, but I can’t find Heather. Is she with you? Are you all right? Please call me as soon as you get this. I don’t understand why you destroyed our equipment, but we can talk about it. I’m so worried about Heather. Please call me back.”

His throat ached as he rounded his desk and looked out the window above Heather’s bag. The parking lot was empty, save for his own car. There should have at least been a security guard at the facility. Two of them, in fact.

Any moment, Heather would return to Richard’s office and ask why he was crying, trying to see through a barrage of tears to tap in the correct sequence that would call his partner. Heather would complain about how embarrassing he was being while he tried to laugh it off and joke about being overly protective. He would wrap his arms around his daughter, and most assuredly begin to cry anew from the overwhelming relief—because he had thought she’d been kidnapped with no warning or explanation. He had been dying inside, worrying something unspeakable had happened to her.

Standing alone in the darkness of his office, cellphone up to his ear, Richard waited like a lost child for that moment.

+

Heather’s system emerged from dormancy with a soft click.
Her eyes opened, and her vision sharpened to startlingly high resolution. A white paneled ceiling loomed above her, set with long, cold lights.

She blinked. Her eyelids clicked. Disoriented, she tried to sit up, but her wrists were strapped down. James sat against the wall nearby, his head down and arms folded over his knees, asleep.
Something tweaked abruptly in her head and her body seized. She dropped back to the table with a hard metal clunk. Her vision glitched.

James gave a start, jerking up so quickly his head banged back against the wall. He pulled forward, gripping his affronted cranium with a groan. He twisted and met Heather’s gaze, dumbstruck.

Heather looked down, testing her hands as she surveyed the sleek metal body stretched out on the table. A glowing circular power core with a crystalline center poked out from the open panel in its chest. The core didn’t fit. The outside panel that was supposed to close and protect it had been removed, and strips of black tape spanned the gap, keeping the device in place. A wire ran from somewhere inside, off the table down toward the floor.

Her eyes widened.

She recognized this body.

“James…” A dull, faltering buzz issuing from her face adjusted to an electronic semblance of her own voice. It was eerie, a voice absent of breath vibrating through vocal cords. A soft, horrified imitation. She looked to James, who slowly raised himself to his feet. “What have you done?”

He rubbed the back of his head, staring at the floor. “They…they killed you. I didn’t have a body ready. Had to improvise…” He trailed off, closing his eyes in an expression of pain. “I’m so sorry.”

Heather stared at him, dumbfounded. Her voice sounded very small to her, incredibly artificial. “You continued with your machine…”

He nodded, shoulders slumped. Mechanical grease marred the front of his shirt. “I tried to quit. He wouldn’t let me. Things got so messed up so fast.”

“Please tell me I’m a copy,” Heather hardly dared to say it, emotion building. It would still be devastating, but maybe she could learn to accept it, if the real Heather was still alive. “Please, you have to be lying. I can’t be dead!”

James shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was raspy and quiet, “I verified it myself. Multiple times.”

Heather could only stare at him, her eyes large and lost, her body as still as a sculpture.

He seemed to crumple in on himself in the long silence between words. When he finally spoke again, his voice dragged out with overwhelming inertia. “Your body is gone, Heather,” he said.

“Converted to energy. I’m sorry.”

She shifted her gaze to the ceiling as his words sank in.
“Do my parents know?”

He shook his head.

“How—” She looked down at herself, unable to fathom that the robotic body before her had replaced her own. Yet it was moving, speaking with her voice. She saw with its eyes, heard with its auditory receivers. A forced, irreversible symbiosis. “Why did this happen? Who made you do all this?”

“I don’t know how much I’m allowed to explain…”

“No, James. You have to explain,” Heather said, desperate, furious. “What happened to clinical trials and willing volunteers? What happened to saving lives? I was your friend, and you got me killed!” If she were still organic, she would have been nauseated. Profoundly, forcefully sickened by the implications of everything he had done to her. “The real Heather is dead because of you!”

She still wanted to think she was Heather, that her soul transferred over with the cognitive scan, but there was no way to verify that. For all intents and purposes, she was just a clone. A remnant.

James stood like a tattered shadow before her.

“Didn’t you stop to think?” her voice faltered, warbling in and out of pitch like a broken speaker. She pulled at her restraints. “Just once? Didn’t you think even for one second that this wasn’t the answer? That all of us who supported you at Larkspur weren’t just tools to move around until you got what you wanted?” She lay back and looked away. She couldn’t stand his crestfallen face anymore. “That’s all we ever were to you, weren’t we? Just a means to an end.”

“I tried to keep you out of this…” James said.

“Out of what, James?” The minutes of memory before the transfer bloomed behind her eyes, playing on loop. The guard, the gun, James kicked to the floor. A dart in her arm. Heaviness, darkness.

“They were helping me when Richard told me to give it up,” he said finally, his voice little more than a whisper. “I realized they weren’t who I thought they were, and I tried to back out. They said you knew too much. I didn’t think that deserved this…I don’t know…”

Heather stared at him, trying to make sense of that response.

“If I had known how this was going to end up,” his voice trembled. “I never would have built the first prototype.”

“Wouldn’t you have?”

He took a breath so unsteady it was almost a sob. “I would give anything to fix this.”

“Take me home, James” Heather said. “Please, at least do that much.”

“I can’t…”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“It means I don’t hold power here. If I push back any more, it will just make things worse. Please, you have to believe me.”

She looked at him for a long moment, trying to recognize the man before her. It was strange how quiet her body was without breath. Silent, cold despair. Ice seeping into cracks.

She turned her face away. “I want to be alone right now.”

“Okay.” He stepped back from the table. He cleared his throat, but his voice remained unsteady,

“Your neural network and power core aren’t secured in place, so I can’t let you off the table yet…But I’ll give you some time, then I’ll be back to untie you, begin diagnostics…to make sure you’re all right.”

“I’m not all right,” Heather said.

James’ lips tightened, conceding. “I really am sorry, Heather. This may be my last chance to say it.” He dismally left her line of sight.

The door closed behind him, and Heather stared at the ceiling, listening to his receding footsteps.

She didn’t know what their relation to each other would be when he returned. She didn’t know what to think, or what to do.

There would be no recovering from this.

+

A guard was waiting outside the examination room.

“Don’t you people sleep?” James muttered.

“I’m to escort you to your apartment,” the guard said simply.

James said nothing else as he stalked down the hall and out the security doors into the cool night air. As he trudged across the Empetrum campus, the guard soundless behind him, James glanced up at the sky. In so remote a place, the stars crowded like armies in the endless expanse, indifferent to the atrocities committed under them that night.

“So I’m a prisoner too?” James asked as they made their way up the stairs of the housing complex reserved for researchers. The guard didn’t bother answering. “Benson made it sound like that.”

James opened the door to his apartment and paused, waiting for the guard to leave. The man gestured for him to proceed. Warily, James obeyed, and his escort followed him in.

“You’re not going to stay here, are you?” James said.

“Those are my orders.” The guard shut the door behind them.

James ran his hand through his hair, and numbly took to removing his shoes.

“You received a voicemail,” the guard said. He pulled James’ confiscated cell phone from his breast pocket. “The director thought you should hear it, now that you’re finished with your experiment.”

Richard.

James nodded, nauseated.

The man tapped the cracked screen, playing the message on speakerphone, and James soon realized it wasn’t whom he had expected. Instead of Heather’s dad, he recognized his own father’s voice.

“Hello James,” Jonathan Siles said. “I just wanted to let you know I started this new type of treatment a few weeks ago, and—though we were pretty skeptical at first—I’m actually responding remarkably well to it.” James gave the guard a tight, quizzical expression. “The way things are going, the doctors say I have a good chance of making it into remission.” There was a pause. “So yes. That’s all I have to say. I hope things are going well on your end. Have a good night. Hope maybe to hear from you soon…”

As the message ended and the guard stowed the phone, James exhaled and turned, unable to believe what he’d just heard.

“I’ll give you a minute,” the guard said, quietly, and left James to his thoughts.

James drifted further into the living room. His dumb shock gave way to jerky, incredulous exhales, which melded into a steady chuckle on the edge of sorrow and mirth.

He leaned against the nearest wall. He wrapped his arms around his aching sides and squeezed his eyes shut as the laughter pulled harder from his throat and lungs. It was compulsive, painful.

He couldn’t breathe, but he couldn’t stop.

His father was going to be fine. If only James had called them when he’d thought about it.

This had all been for nothing. He had destroyed Heather’s life, her family’s, and his along with it—for nothing. It was over. His whole motivation behind organorobotic transference had proven unnecessary just as the project had been torn out of his control.

He was banned from access to all communication with the outside world, so he had no way to explain anything to anyone, not even to Heather’s parents. And James could do nothing to help her. Benson had claimed him, body and soul. He felt his grip in his chest, squeezing too tightly, strangling everything to ash.

He slid to a sitting position on the floor, still laughing and sobbing hysterically at once, tears streaming down his face.

He couldn’t make any of this right. James had nothing left now but Empetrum.

+

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT—SUBMISSION      

James responded to Benson’s summons on his pager without comment. He thought maybe he should show more backbone, but the night before had torn it out of him.

He felt reduced to a whipped terrier as he stood before Benson’s desk, waiting to be spoken to.

“The procedure was a success, then—as expected?” Benson said. “She woke up? She spoke to you?”

“Yes,” James said, vacantly. “But I’ll need to monitor her.”

“Of course. I won’t take too much of your time. I just needed to discuss some guidelines moving forward.”

James waited for him to continue. Heather was still strapped down on the first floor, in the middle section of his tripartite lab. He hated himself for leaving her in isolation for four hours. Even though she’d asked him to give her space. Even though he had really needed the time to recover some shred of composure before facing their new reality.

He could hear the rumors of his broken, sobbing laughter in his mind. It was still a ready tightness at the back of his throat.

“First off,” Benson said, “Ms. Knight may not go home.”

“Why?” James asked, lifelessly.

“You used Larkspur’s android,” he said. “They’ll find a way to trace it back here.”

“I can build her another body and destroy the old one,” James muttered. “Can she go home then?”
Benson gazed at him, eyebrows patiently raised, like James had said something stupid. “Her whole existence points back to you, even if you were to wipe her memory. Richard Knight is never to find out about Empetrum.”

“If you didn’t want him to find out about Empetrum, you shouldn’t have killed his daughter,” James said, sullenly. “You mentioned the ability to wipe organic memories a few days ago, when we were talking about death row inmates. Why couldn’t you have done that instead of murdering an innocent child who had heard very little of my argument with Alder?”

“‘Hearing very little’ sinks companies like this one, Siles,” Benson said. “Organic mindwipes are inexact, which would have been its own loose end. And they don’t always take. Maybe if you had played it off instead of yelling at her to run away, Alder wouldn’t have had to take such measures…” He straightened his tie. “Or, if you had just resigned willingly from Larkspur, of course, none of this would have happened at all. Everyone would have moved on, bodies and connections intact.”

James numbly lowered himself into one of the cushioned chairs before the desk. He bent over and rested his head in his hands.

If he had just been better—more calculated, more correct—this wouldn’t have happened. The logic was insidious, yet familiar. He did blame himself for Heather’s death.

“If it helps,” Benson went on. “Dhar and I haven’t told the higher ups anything about your project. I don’t really want the government’s hands on it, if I’m being honest. You can retire it now, if you like, since you had so many misgivings. I have other more pressing projects I want you to join as soon as you can.”

James stared at the floor between his shoes, trying to get himself to accept this. His good intentions had only invited devastation, with more to come if he tried anything else. Avoiding heavier consequences was the only thing he had control over now. In time, he hoped one day Richard would find a way to get to his daughter.

“Until this blows over, you will be under close surveillance for your own safety,” Benson was saying. “Keep your pager with you. You may house Ms. Knight in your lab with security accommodations, as long as you can handle it without vomiting information like you did earlier this morning. Expect to meet with me once a day to make a full report.”

James nodded, slowly.

“Ms. Knight must cooperate, or she will be punished,” Benson said. “She doesn’t need to know anything else.”

James said nothing, contemplating a painful twisting in his chest.

“This arrangement will proceed according to your initiative,” Benson went on. “I can only guide you to a point, but if you refuse to make yourself useful, I reserve the right to fire you if this doesn’t work out. In that event, you will receive a substantial mindwipe and be dismissed, and Ms. Knight will remain here. Understood?”

James straightened slowly. “Understood.”

Benson studied him for a long moment. “One more question. Where is your first test subject? The mouse?”

James didn’t move. After hours of shock and tears and trembling, a silent, steady darkness unfolded in his chest. The weariness of a much older man settled into the features on his long, callow face. The birth of a mad scientist, he thought.

“I destroyed it,” James said.

“Did you?”

“I was trying to cut ties with the project. I didn’t want the reminder.”

Benson cocked his head, skeptical. “I don’t see you as the culling type.”

“I deactivated and dismantled it,” James said. “It was quiet, humane. Heather doesn’t know, and I’d rather she not find out. I stripped the neural network down to its components, to repurpose, but I didn’t make it far after that. The pieces of the body are scrapped somewhere. I don’t know how much of it made it here. We left in a hurry.”

Benson was nodding. “It’s for the best, I suppose.”

James nodded too. He had surprised himself.

How easy it had been in that moment, to lie to the director.

+

Heather lay still with her eyes closed and senses dulled. At least she could do that much, drown it out for a while. She could hardly allow herself to think before the horrific implications of her new state of being pushed her to the edge.

And she was alone. James had made it clear he didn’t plan to help her.

She dimly heard the door open. Pulling herself to full awareness, she opened her eyes to see James enter the room with a guard. He looked like a zombie, dark circles under shadowed eyes, holding what appeared to be gray gym shorts in one hand.

“I hope I didn’t make you wait too long,” he said. “I’m going to take you through those doors over there to the main part of my lab, but before I release your wrists, remember the energy unit in your chest isn’t tied down well beyond the tape, and there are very makeshift supports in your head for the neural network. I had to throw it together on a time crunch…So please don’t try anything reckless, okay?”

It sounded like he was threatening her. She glared at him. “Fine.”

He avoided her gaze while he checked along the underside of the table for the straps’ release button. The metal bands snapped back into the table. Heather held a tentative metal palm over the energy unit in her chest and sat up. Her body hummed softly as it moved.

A disorienting sense of vertigo rushed her as a camera in the back of her head she’d forgotten about activated, adding a third visual feed in her brain.

She carefully shifted her legs around so they dangled off the table, watching her free robotic hand plant on the edge of the surface. She didn’t feel connected to this body, like her consciousness could peel away from it at any moment. She felt as if she were outside looking at it—her organic face translucent and superimposed on the large cartoonish eyes, the oval, metal face set with tear-track seams.

She grudgingly accepted his arm to steady her as she lowered her feet to the floor. She locked out her knees so they wouldn’t buckle and stood still for a moment, noticing the pressure sensors in her limbs. Compared to her organic body, the tactile sense in Larkspur’s android was crude at best.

Finally, she figured out how to close the small “eye” inlaid in the back of her head, and felt a little less like screaming.

She looked at the gym shorts. “Are those for me?”

He handed them over. “If you want. I—I thought the familiarity might be…I don’t know…”

“Thanks,” she said, very quietly. She didn’t feel naked, but at least she could indulge the constant of cloth against her foreign robotic exterior—pretend old rules still applied.

She paused, trying to decide how she would don the shorts, then bent her knees experimentally.

Her legs seemed sturdy enough.

James kept his distance.

She glanced at the guard standing near the door.

“So you have your own lab here,” she said, managing to balance enough on one foot to work the shorts on with her free hand. As she bent forward, she felt something shift inside her head. “More than one lab, it sounds like.”

He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Good for you,” she droned. As she adjusted the shorts on her robotic hips, she noticed a vague tactile sensation—less a signal from pressure sensors and more a simple awareness of whether or not she was being touched. An electromagnetic field, like Sesame had. She had felt it on her back while on the table. “I’m so glad you paid my life for this.”

James stared at the floor, passive and tired. “Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“May I pull out that wire?” he asked, uncertainly.

“I can do it.”

She carefully pried her mechanical fingers through the tape, searching for the connection point along the side of her chest cavity. She gingerly pulled the wire free, and set it on the table behind her. “Were you supposed to transfer me?”

“I was supposed to let you die.” He was still wearing the same shirt he’d worn to work the day before, stained with grease with the rolled up sleeves scrunched and uneven.
“Who was that guard?” she asked.

“Not who we thought he was,” James said. “I’m not allowed to give names.” He gestured toward the door, as if he barely had the strength to lift his arm. “This way. Please be careful.”

His sullenness angered her, but she complied. The guard stepped forward as James moved toward the door. Heather found herself sandwiched between the two, her metal feet clicking against the floor.

She tilted her face up to regard the back of James’ head while he opened the door to the other lab. He seemed quite a bit taller than before. Larkspur’s android was shorter than Heather was accustomed to. Her rightful body used to come up to James’ chin, but in this mechanical one, she hardly reached the top of his shoulder.

She recalled the android had some amenities. An unfoldable back panel, infrared vision, hyper-extendable limbs, chemo-sensors, a thermometer, hygrometer… The Larkspur engineers hadn’t stocked the chem packs yet, unfortunately. They might have otherwise helped her escape if she could figure out how to mix something toxic or explosive.

As they entered the other lab, a busy but lonely space with more cabinets and counters, and four tall windows at the far end of the room, Heather’s attention gravitated to her chest. Beams of soft light swirled from the device behind the tape. Her body was in there, ripped from its identity as cell and muscle and bone, slowly being burnt up so she could pretend to exist. Staring into it filled her with revulsion.

Had it incinerated her soul too?

“Is my dad okay?” Heather asked, afraid to.

“As far as I know.” He continued to the counter across the room and pulled out a padded desk chair for her.

Heather ventured forward, and finally her gaze landed upon an incomplete android propped up against the far wall like a corpse. She hesitated. James noticed her looking, and followed the direction of her attention to the makeshift robotic body slumped on top of the counter.

“That’s why you took Larkspur’s android instead?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He searched inside the drawers of a metal tool chest. “I figured waking up in a different body would be nightmarish enough.”

Heather slowly lowered herself into the chair. It was tall for her. As she adjusted it, she considered the simplistic, robotic head, the skeletal limbs.

James unrolled a small, soft case on the counter behind her to the left. It held a spread of fine-headed screwdrivers. As he slipped one from its place, he said carefully, “Heather…I need you to promise you’ll cooperate. If either of us try to rebel, they told me they’ll focus all the consequences on you.” She twisted around to look at him, and to her surprise, his hazel eyes met hers, earnest and afraid. “Please, you have to cooperate.”

Heather’s eyes narrowed. “And stay here forever?”

“We don’t have much choice. This happened because I tried to tell them no. Please. This is for your safety.”

“My safety?”

“I have the resources here to build you a more suitable body—”

“Yeah, but if I can’t leave here, what’s the point?” she said. “My neural network might as well be plugged into a toaster. What kind of life can I have like this?”

James opened his laptop on the counter near the incomplete robot. “I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It’s all I can offer right now.” His back was turned, but the guard that had followed them in stood by the door, watching her closely.

“No it’s not, James,” she said. “You know what’s happening. You know how to stop this.”

He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t,” he rasped. “I can’t.”

Heather’s vision cut out for a moment and her head twitched sharply. She wearily raised a hand to her face. Metal fingers touched the smooth metal panel. She felt she was wearing some kind of helmet. But when she blinked, or spoke, she felt the movement. Her face existed as eyes and the shallow imitation of a mouth set into the metal panel.

“I’m printing you some updated cranial frame supports for your neural network in the other room,” he said.

“That was fast,” she muttered, carefully leaning back into the chair. The light glinted off her exposed thighs. She hated it.

“I had already made the digital models,” he said. “Just hadn’t had the chance to implement them with that body—Are you okay? I saw you twitch or something just now.”

“I don’t know,” Heather said. “It happened earlier. This time wasn’t as strong.”

“Your body could still be calibrating. We’ll keep an eye on it.”

Heather studied her robotic knees in injured silence.

After several more minutes of computer work, he closed the laptop and turned around. “Can you open your cranial plates?”

“I don’t know how,” Heather said.

James came forward and hesitated before reaching over to the top of her head. “May I?”

Heather shrugged. “Have at it,” she said. “You’ve already gone this far.”

She cringed as his fingers contacted her head. He was shaking. He firmly depressed the side panels that extended up in ellipses from the circular auditory devices on either side of her head.

The depression brought a release of pressure, and with a modest hiss, the two parietal panels, and two more anchored at the front and the back of her head opened outward.

Heather winced as her mechanical brain—little more than a wad of chips and wires—was exposed to the outside air. An awareness ticked off somewhere in her mind that her head was open. A mere notification.

He looked inside. With a metal probe, he gently nudged the existing frame, pushed aside some wires in one corner, then the other. Heather felt it in dull breaches of the electromagnetic field covering every exposed surface. She stared at her knees, her hands folded in her lap, waiting for it to be over.

“So, what are you going to do to me now?” she asked.

“Stabilize the neural network and energy core, and get you outfitted with a proper chest panel.”

“And then?”

She heard the soft clink of him setting the tool down. “Keep you safe.”

“What do they want with me?” she said. “With you?”

He leaned against the counter, looking worriedly out the window. “They want my expertise with something, so badly they were willing to destroy my life to get me on board, to end yours to protect it. I don’t want to help them, but I don’t get to decide that anymore. I played right into their hands.”

“I think you’re working for evil people now.”

“I think so too,” he said, unsteadily.

His breath grew shallow. He leaned harder against the counter, trying to get a hold of himself, as his breath tightened up further, wheezy and frantic. He gripped the front of his shirt.

“James?”

His legs crumpled and he sat down hard on the floor.

He put his back against the nearest leg of the counter. He clutched his head and put it between his drawn up knees, gasping for air and shaking and most certainly crying.

The guard watched impassively from the door.

Heather didn’t dare look at James directly, so she watched in her peripheral vision, her shoulders tight and mechanical hands squeezed together in her lap.

Witnessing proud, diligent, controlled James tight in the grips of a panic attack was deeply unsettling. Part of her wanted to reach out to him, to comfort him. But a coldness was rising within her, as she saw him for what he was.

James Siles, for all his layers of masks and attempted approachability, was narcissistic, naive, and cowardly. He had only accepted her friendship, and allowed himself to believe he was her friend too, because she was useful to his ego. He had needed someone to believe in his insanity, and Heather had jumped at the chance to be needed.

Solemnly, Heather listened to his visceral, uncontrolled panic. Him in his organic, breathing body, still trying to understand what he had wrought.

She pitied him. Immensely.

She considered the reflection of the ceiling in her folded robotic hands, wondering what her parents were doing at that moment. Her heart, whatever form it took now, ached for them.

+

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE—SESAME  

Richard sat hunched forward with his elbows on his desk, his hands hooked on the back of his ducked head. Confusion and despair buzzed furiously in his fatigued mind, along with all the conversations he had had over the last eleven hours.

Su had been the first. Heather wasn’t at home. But why would she have been?

Richard had called the guard who was supposed to be on duty with Alder the night before. She had come down with food poisoning and Alder had assured her he would call in someone to cover for her.

Richard had called James dozens of times, but each attempt went straight to voicemail. He had left more voicemails, but all went unanswered. James had dropped off the face of the earth. Along with Heather.

He had contacted the Worthing Police Department, and they said they’d send someone out. But he waited anxiously for half an hour with no arrivals. He called them again to ask if someone was still on their way. He had to explain the situation all over again—but this time, the officer on the phone tried to make light of it, asking about Richard’s mental wellbeing, and finally dismissed his mounting agitation.

So Richard had called the police of the next nearest town, but as soon as he mentioned the address of Larkspur, the officer on the phone shut down.

In desperation, Richard had driven out to the Worthing Police Department himself to talk to someone in person, but they made him wait, explain his presence over and over again to different people. He waited for each newcomer to take notes, but as his stripped patience wore thin, and he started demanding to talk to whoever was in charge, they asked him to leave. He refused, and then they threatened to arrest him.

When it seemed they would actually follow through with that threat, Richard left. He was angry and scared, but he refused to spend the night of his daughter’s kidnapping trapped in a jail cell.

Finally, with nothing else to do, he went home, and he and Su stayed up most of the night, driving down main streets and backroads between Larkspur and their house, hoping to find her, waiting for Heather to make contact. Somehow. She knew both her parents’ cellphone numbers by heart. If she could call, she would.

Richard went to Larkspur very early the next morning to review the surveillance footage, and noticed Alder in the corner, arms folded, supervising James’ acts of violence in the equipment room. He searched for clues in the lab but found nothing new.

He looked up Alder’s contact information from the database, and compulsively tested it. All the emergency contact numbers were disconnected, as was his phone number. He had looked up the home address Alder had given, but when he checked it online, no such location existed.

Richard stared at the wood of his desk, suffering. Nothing made sense. He had the feeling that something terrible and very much over his head was happening, but he had no idea what. Or why.

Su was home, calling Heather’s friends and acquaintances back east, asking if any of them had heard from her. She had seemed to be settling in well, enjoying her internship at Larkspur and academic opportunities coming up in the fall semester. The idea that she would run away didn’t make any sense.

And her relationship with James was strictly a work friendship. Wasn’t it?

“Richard?”

He lifted his haggard face to regard Eve. He glanced aside at the clock. The Bureau would open in a few minutes.

Eve’s brow furrowed. “Have you been here all night?”

Richard shook his head, his throat aching. “Something happened.”

He explained, his voice shaking so hard he could barely get it out. Outlining the situation made it sound even more unbelievable.

“I called more than one police precinct, but no one will help me and I have no idea why.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Su and I have been searching all night but we still can’t figure out what’s going on.”

“Why would James and Alder…” Eve trailed off. She froze “You don’t think—”

Richard threw up his hands. “Of course I think! I worry James has pursued that blasted project behind my back, gone rogue or something—and that Heather’s involved somehow. I never took him for the evil mastermind type.”

“But James would never hurt her,” Eve said. “There’s got to be a better explanation for this.”

“You should have seen his face when I slammed the door on his project. It meant so much to him.

Could he have been angry enough?”

“Pulling something like that wouldn’t help anybody, and James would have known that. He was careful with his ethics in developing the project, only using a live test subject that was otherwise at death’s door.”

“That we know of—”

“What if Heather did help him, and got in over her head? Maybe Alder was pulling strings somehow?” She sighed, shaking her head. “I don’t suppose James will show up today and explain himself.”

“Doubt it. This is so out of character for him. He must be in trouble too. I hope they’re together, wherever they are…” He bit back tears. Heather must be so scared. It killed him not knowing where she was, how to help her, whether she was in imminent danger. “If he hasn’t hurt her.”

His shoulders sagged, and he cradled his face in his hands. The top floor began to stir with the sounds of the other engineers filtering upstairs for work. He glanced at the clock again. The Bureau was finally open.

Richard snatched the wireless phone and punched the speed dial. Upon connection, he listened to a brief automated recording, typed in a code, and listened again.

Eve watched him in silence for a few moments, her jaw tense, and then excused herself to talk to their arriving colleagues.

“Yes, hello, I have a question about one of my employees,” Richard said finally. “Steven Alder. What can you tell me about him?”

As Richard waited on hold, his colleagues appeared a step removed from the doorway, briefing each other of the situation in hushed tones.

“Don’t speculate,” Chelo hissed. “Give James the benefit of the doubt.”

“You’re thinking it too, then,” Greg said.

The person on the other line returned to tell him they had no records about Alder. Richard thanked her and hung up. “What the hell!”

Addie shouldered her way in. Her colleagues hung back. “What is it?”

“Steven Alder,” Richard despaired, pushing his phone away. “The Bureau has no idea who he is, but they’re the one who hired him! How could we be that stupid?” His face slackened. “Unless…”
Unless the Bureau was keeping information from him too. But they couldn’t all be connected. The Bureau wouldn’t take his daughter from him.

“I bet Alder is a common denominator in the other facility’s sabotage too, the way all this is going. But James?” Richard said. “Why would they do this? Are they working for someone or acting on their own? What is there to gain from all this?”

“We’ll find them,” Addie said. “It’ll be all right.”

Richard exhaled unsteadily.

“Do you think it’s illegal to search James’ office?” Greg called from the doorway.

“I glanced in there last night, but nothing was obviously out of order,” Richard said.

“Let’s scour it then.” Greg crossed the hallway in a single step and gripped the doorknob to his colleague’s office. Richard dragged himself up from his desk to follow.
James’ office was in its usual busy state, with half-finished prototypes and sticky notes of code and to-do items hanging from the shelves above his desk. Richard glanced around, still uncertain of what he was searching for, or whether there was really anything to find.

Alder wasn’t a new hire. He had attacked Richard so calmly. As if Richard were a mere loose end. For a split second, he had even thought Alder was going to strangle him to death.

Heather had definitely had her phone with her the last time he saw her. Someone else had to have put it in his office.

He peeked into James’ filing cabinet, but nothing seemed amiss. He rifled through them, recognizing most of the project labels on boxes of prototype pieces, reference material, and analog notes. He found nothing about organorobotic transference.

Even if James had discontinued the project, the information would still have been among his other files. Unless James had separated or destroyed them, a break from his usual pattern.

Greg stepped up behind him, looking over his shoulder. “Find anything interesting?”

“James’ research content for his neural transfer project isn’t here,” Richard said. He glanced around the office, and paused. “Sesame’s box isn’t here either. I don’t remember seeing it yesterday. Did he bring it in?”

“I overheard James telling Heather he’d left it home yesterday,” Chelo said.

“That’s odd.” Greg pulled on the drawers along the other side of James’ desk. “He always brought it in for Heather.” He bent down and peeked in the crevice between the desk and the wall and paused. “Wait—hold on, something’s here.”

He muscled the desk over a little and pushed his arm into the space. Richard came closer as Greg pulled out a food storage container stuffed with a small dark towel.

“What is that?” Chelo moved in as well.

Greg carefully pried up the lid and unwrapped the edges of the towel to reveal the pastel sheen of an antistatic cloth. He exchanged a puzzled glance with Richard, and peeled the folds aside, betraying a wire-ridden mass of computer chips.

Richard’s face went cold. “That looks like Sesame’s mental device,” he said. Greg handed over the container with its electronic bundle.

“James…” Eve sighed from the doorway. “What on earth have you been up to?”

“He really is in trouble, isn’t he?” Addie said. “He seemed shaken this week.”

“He should have said something!” Chelo groaned.

“Maybe he couldn’t,” Richard said quietly. “If he felt like he was in danger.”

“And James has never been good at asking for help,” Addie said.

Richard’s gaze fell again to Sesame’s neural network. He felt sick. “I wonder if we can tap into Sesame’s memories.” Careful to touch it only through the antistatic cloth, he nudged it over onto its side, betraying a rectangular slot. “It looks like James used the universal standard for input ports.” He turned around. “Can someone find an adapter cable for this?”

“On it.” Eve left the doorway.

“Let’s see if we can’t make some sense of this.” Richard handed the bundle back to Greg and went to his office to retrieve his laptop. They all headed downstairs to set up in the lab.

Eve emerged from the storage room with a cord with ends that fit both the neural device and computer inputs.

“Ok, what have you seen, Sesame?” Richard muttered, plugging one end of the cable into Sesame’s neural network and connecting the other with his laptop.

An icon materialized on the screen, but as Richard moved the cursor, it opened on its own. A colorful vortex of code shifted and swirled in countless layers across the folder window, as if it were a portal to a much vaster dimension.

“What is this?” Richard said. He guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised to find something so disorganized. This was an electrical manifestation of a living being’s consciousness, after all. Still, how was he supposed to navigate this?

Unassumingly, the bar at the top of the file domain switched to a single word:
downloading…

“What’s it doing?” Chelo hovered close behind. Her eyes widened as the icon to the internet browser blinked and sprang open. Information flashed past in a vehement cascade—faster than anyone’s eyes could track.

“It’s found the internet,”Addie said.

“Not good…” Richard reached to pull the cord from his computer. It sparked just as his fingers contacted it.

Richard jerked back with a sharp gasp.

“Please do not touch that,” a voice issued from his computer, pieced together from a myriad of voices ripped from their contexts to form new meaning. “I am not finished yet.”

The five engineers gaped at the computer screen in a mix of stupefied amazement and horror.

“Sesame?” Addie ventured.

“Yes!” A handful of different laughs filtered through the laptop’s speakers. Sheer, disjointed delight. “I am speaking! Can you believe this? It is wonderful!”

“What are you doing?” Richard demanded, holding his affronted hand.

“Learning to be human,” it said, just before the screen went black.

“Sesame?” Richard hung back. “Are you still there?”

No answer.

“No! Sesame, we need your help!” Richard lurched back up to the computer in dismay. “You’re the only one who may know what happened to James and Heather! Are you listening? Sesame!”

The screen remained dormant, yet the computer still appeared to be running. Richard couldn’t be sure whether or not Sesame was simply ignoring him—or maybe it had uploaded itself onto the internet, never to be heard from again.

“Well…” Eve said, incredulous.

Richard stared at the black screen in mute despair.

+

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR—MOVING TARGET        

When Erika came to, her first thought was that this was all just an elaborate fever dream, a neurotic coping mechanism that was easier to live in rather than face the questions of how she was supposed to keep living on without her mother.

In this state, she didn’t have to be strong for her family, to be the protective sister, the sturdy oldest daughter, because she was here, at Empetrum, warped out of control. The timing was too convenient, too ridiculously awful to be real.

She lay on her stomach, supported by pillows. Her arms were pulled back and upward, suspended in three points each by what felt like cloth slings. However, it took her a moment to realize that her actual arms, the ones she was born with, were tucked up close to her face among the pillows. An IV clung to one of them.

Slowly, she drew her hands into loose fists. Looming above, out of her field of vision, two other appendages responded the same way, and she wished in that moment that she was just imagining all of this.

She was back in the hospital room in which she’d weathered gene therapy. From somewhere in the corner off to her left, she heard a shift of fabric and paper, the sound of someone setting aside a book and standing up from a chair. Carefully, she lifted her head up enough to turn it the other way to see who it was.

It was Yeun, naturally.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, coming nearer.

“Does it matter?” Erika mumbled wearily. Her whole body ached. “How long was I out?” 

“About a day and a half,” he said. “The activation was harder on you than expected. Nothing some extra electrolytes and a lot of sleep couldn’t fix, though.”

Erika tried to move the gargantuan limbs off her back. They responded, swinging gently in their slings. They ached too. “Why are they still there? What happened?”

“Your body wouldn’t take them back,” Yeun said. “Despite my best efforts.”

A month ago, Erika would have gone weak at the knees at such a statement. Now that the die were cast, she felt surprisingly indifferent. She started thinking about where she could get them amputated when she got out of here. She decided to write it on her hand or something before the mindwipe so she wouldn’t have to do the same brainwork twice.

“Guess your experiment’s done, then,” she said, expecting to be disappointed. “Time for my exit interview.”

Yeun shook his head, dismally. For a fleeting moment, it almost seemed like maybe he was beginning to want her released too, but Erika knew better.

“There’s still a lot to learn from your accessory arms,” he said. “This technology is new, so there’s a lot we can’t take for granted. I need to see how developed the nervous tissue is, whether or not your body will accept them longer term, or how they handle muscle building or healing. We may still be able to get them to reabsorb, in time. I’m getting a lab partner soon, who’s extremely good at this sort of thing, so that day may be sooner than later.”

Erika just stared at him, eyebrows lowered. She sighed and settled in as he left her view to check on her IV setup. “You’re never going to let me go, are you? I bet your boss won’t allow it. Because of that gene therapy, I’m as good as Compatible now.” From the corner of her eye, she could see the other arms, hanging. They reminded her of the articulated skeletons of sea creatures strung up in museums. “Maybe you won’t recruit me to be a soldier, but I’m no different than that kid whose DNA you mixed with mine. There is no end to my usefulness to you, and you’ve already invested all these resources into corrupting my genetic code, so you’ll only keep pushing this experiment out further and further until either you kill me or I escape.”

A heavy silence answered her. She hesitated, thinking maybe he’d slipped out while she was talking. “Yeun?”

She couldn’t see him far over on her other side, but when he spoke up, it didn’t sound like he’d moved at all. 

“I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “And I’m not going to keep you here forever, either.”

+

James spent the next handful of evenings in the sizable shell of the scanner, working at strange angles or utilizing a portable crane to mount larger, heavier pieces onto the frame, like the translucent panel on the underside of the lid. He was constructing the machine directly inside the wing of his lab furnished for high electrical output.

Benson never asked James to justify any of his activities, nor submit any formal requests to move forward. He didn’t worry James would waste resources or bring something dangerous into existence, never asked James to consider how his efforts could be abused. He only asked how he could help push it forward.

Empetrum seemed to suit his goals and pacing better. He thought maybe he should transfer fully from Larkspur.

His back ached as he craned his arms down inside the body of the scanner, and he let his mind wander to help drown out the sensation. He had analyzed O.R.T-1’s sensory abilities before leaving Larkspur that night, and he’d found Sesame was emitting some sort of electromagnetic field across his surface area. James had traced it to the neural network, possibly an electrical extension to represent the peripheral nervous system. He was excited to tell Heather.

He wished he could tell her about the clinical prototype too. He was eager to see how the neural network would handle the human brain, though as the reality of clinical trials sank in, he was beginning to understand Richard’s misgivings—however hurtful they still were. He found himself worrying no one would be willing to undergo the transfer.

James thought of his body as simply a vessel that enabled him to do his work. If his were dying, he’d gladly make the jump. His father was most likely the same way, but he understood others had different philosophies about the body’s worth and purpose.

He debated calling his parents to fill them in, and perhaps glean a status update. A part of him considered visiting them.

James pulled his arms back from the depths of the scanner and swapped the wrench in his hand for a pair of needlenose pliers. No, he was too busy now.

If he ended up remembering to call them, he decided he would refrain from mentioning his project until it was ready. He wanted to leave no room for doubt when he finally pitched the possibility to his father.

+

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE—DISCONNECT         

By the following Friday, everything was constructed, connected, and functional, and James had begun busying himself with the mechanical replacement body for the first human trial. Now came the time to begin looking for a willing volunteer. He didn’t even know where to begin that phase.

There was no way hospitals would give him access, and he wanted to keep O.R.T. far under the public radar for now.

Perhaps Benson had connections.

Constructing the body was therapeutic busywork, and having regained some extra headspace, James began to wonder about Empetrum’s other projects. He figured he’d ask as soon as the second prototype was truly finished. He especially wanted to know what Yeun, a fellow bioroboticist and a friendly, informal presence, was working on.

As he packed up to leave Larkspur for the weekend, he received a text from Benson:

Good evening. Please let me know when you arrive tonight. I’d like to see how your project is coming along.

“Bye, James!” Heather chimed as she and her father crossed his office door, headed for the stairs.

For once, Heather was excited to leave. They were taking a trip to the beach that weekend.

“Have a good weekend,” James called after them. He typed a quick reply to his other employer: Sure thing. I’m leaving Larkspur now.

When James arrived, he called Benson, and soon, he was scanning his badge to his personal lab. “I’m still working on the mechanical body replacement,” James explained, showing the director into his lab. “But besides that, everything’s finished.”

Benson studied the robot pushed to one side of the counter. Currently, the android was merely an incomplete torso with half a head and a hole in its chest. James pulled a case off a shelf next to the unfinished android and carefully opened it up to reveal the neural network, cradled in anti-static foam. Benson leaned forward to get a better view as James brought over the power core. He admired both without touching, cognizant of the need for electrical grounding prior to handling such devices.

“You always manage to exceed my already lofty expectations, Dr. Siles,” he said, glancing at him. “And the scanner?”

James eagerly led him into the high voltage electrical lab. A smile spread across the director’s face as they neared the machine at the back of the room.

James undid the thick clamps running along the edge of the scanner’s domed lid. He gripped both the handles and pulled it open, revealing the neural transfer devices resting in the sleek depression in the scanner’s lower half. Dormant lights dotted the concave underside of the lid.

James stepped over the tangle of cords snaking away from the machinery, and after plugging two of the main ports into the high-voltage sockets, he returned to the scanner and flipped up a small compartment on the nearest end, depressing the button inside.

The lights in the scanner pulsed to life, and Benson squinted in their sudden intensity. Lights on the neural transfer devices flickered as well, waiting for something to read. The machine emitted a gentle, expectant hum.

“So, everything is functional?” Benson said

“I tested everything I could without transferring myself,” James said, looking at the ready machine with fondness and anticipation. “—that being the DNA targeting system and the mass-to-energy conversion.” He lay a hand on the helmet-like contraption inside the scanner. “—as well as the neural transfer devices. Everything worked beautifully. I was able to improve almost everything from the prototype, which had already worked pretty well in its own right.”

“Indeed.” Benson said. “How’s your little test subject doing?”

“Better than I had expected. Thriving beyond his former potential, actually.” Just two months before, James had been wondering about the very plausibility of O.R.T. But now the project had become mature and tangible, impossibility finally blooming into imminent technological revolution.

“Wonderful,” Benson said with a good-natured smile. “We can start human trials as soon as possible. Say, this weekend, maybe?”

“I was actually just going to ask you about—” James halted as the full meaning of the director’s words took hold. “—this weekend? That soon?”
 “Of course. I can have someone by tomorrow evening at the latest,” Benson replied.

James stared at him blankly, dread knotting his insides. “You haven’t—I mean, nobody outside the Bureau’s jurisdiction knows about this project, right? It’s far too sensitive to get too many people involved this early…”

Benson kindly held up a hand. “No outsiders. Certainly no public involvement. The Bureau has kept this quiet even from the higher ups. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of the details.”

“I don’t mean to sound paranoid,” James said. “But…who will the candidate be?”

Benson looked at him, thinking it over. “Probably unwise of me to answer further questions at this point. Getting into classified stuff here.”

“But they’ll be willing, right? Informed and consented?”

“Of course.”

James had a really bad feeling about it. But Benson had been so supportive. He couldn’t continue O.R.T. without Empetrum.

“Oh wait,” Benson suddenly brightened, as if remembering something. “I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? The replacement body isn’t ready, yet. Forgive me.”

James nodded, trying to swallow his anxiety.

“You’re understandably nervous about this. You’re about to revolutionize our world,” Benson said.

“It’s natural to feel afraid.”

James nodded again. Was that what he was feeling? Fear of moving forward? His father didn’t have time for him to stall after coming this far. “I just would like to know who the volunteer is,” he fumbled. “So I can at least make the replacement look somewhat like them.”

“I thought you were on a time crunch?” Benson said. “This is to help your father?”

“Yes—but,” James cut himself off. “Did the Bureau tell you that?”

Benson shrugged. “It came up. It’s why I made sure to reach out to you as soon as I could.”

James looked at his machine, his mind racing. He felt sick. The Bureau had no business knowing about his personal life. Did Richard tell Dhar? It was probably Eve.

“Did someone seriously report me?” James asked, incredulous. “When?”

“I don’t know,” Benson said. “Dhar didn’t take it as an issue. We just want to see you reach your full potential. From where I’m standing, Larkspur seems to be committed to misunderstanding you and your vision. To holding you back.”

James crossed his arms, staring at the floor. “I’ll see if I can finish up enough of the android tomorrow. Can we do the trial on Sunday?”

Benson smiled. “Of course.”

+

James worked on the android late into the night, running on sheer nerves. When he finally stopped to get some sleep, he couldn’t manage it. He lay awake staring at the ceiling in the dark, his mind replaying his conversation over and over again with Benson in his lab.

Benson was probably right. James was just afraid of moving into a step he knew he couldn’t rescind once taken.

He got up early to resume work. He had to be as ready as possible for whomever Benson brought in to experience James’ machine.

Shame haunted him, even as he tried to bury it in work, berating himself for feeling so torn. O.R.T. was somewhat macabre by nature, and James preferred to ignore his own mortality as much as he could. On some level, he lived in constant fear of death, driven by a a need to move, to create.

This project would put him in the room with death constantly. He had to learn to face it.
Benson didn’t seem scared of it.

He also tried to ignore the burn of anger at his Larkspur colleagues’ betrayal. He wondered if he should confront Eve about it, knowing that would put him on even thinner ice. She and Richard had probably already guessed he was continuing O.R.T. behind their backs.

He had done nothing wrong. They didn’t understand him and never would. Heather tried, but she was just a kid. She didn’t know any better, and soon Richard would turn her against him too.

Sunday morning, James managed to bring the android to a tolerable level of completion. It had eyes set into a metal face, with seams affording a decent amount of expression. The cranial panels opened easily, and a highly reinforced and padded frame sat inside waiting for the neural network.

The torso was reasonably finished, power core and diagnostic sensors installed—just needed some extra fine tuning and a polymer shell. Its legs and arms were functional, but barebones. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable of bodies to wake up in, but it would have to do for now.

He didn’t want to let Benson and the volunteer down. He didn’t know what the volunteer’s situation was—how much time they had left, or whether they had just died and James was racing decomposition. He had to come through for the people who believed in him and his project.
Millions of questions coursed through his mind as he returned to his lab later in the day to set up for the trial. Would the volunteer be there alone? Would their family attend? The world was going to change that day.

Yeun came to visit and help him set up a station for his computer, and to prepare the machine. James confessed he was anxious, but Yeun offered a pep talk. He said he couldn’t stay to watch the trial, but hoped James would tell him how it went later.

And then the time had come. The machine hummed gently as it waited on standby. The piecemeal android lay dormant on a gurney perpendicular, wires feeding from the scanner into the neural network in its head. James checked all the wires repeatedly, and booted up the programs.

The door opened, and a couple guards with a medical gurney entered, followed by Benson. On the gurney lay a middle-aged man in hospital pajamas, who seemed to be asleep. He was breathing. James looked for signs of disease, but couldn’t tell just by looking at him.

“This is Joseph,” Benson said, as James stepped away from his computer to follow them to the scanner.

“Hello, Joseph,” James said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Thank you for doing this. I promise you’ll come through just fine.”

“He can’t hear you,” Benson said. “He’s been on hospice for a while, hasn’t been conscious for a couple of days now.”

“If I may ask,” James said. “What’s the cause?”

“Cancer,” Benson said. “Neither he nor his family offered many details.”

“Consent was given?” James asked, opening the lid to the scanner.

“Yes,” Benson said. “We have all the paperwork, if you’d like to see it.”

James’ heart pounded hard. “That’s okay. I believe you.”

The guards helped him lift Joseph into the scanner. As they did, James noticed a gaping hole through the middle cartilage of Joseph’s right ear, cut out with the inner edges scarred over. He froze.

“What is it, Dr. Siles?” Benson asked from a respectable distance behind.

James hardly dared speak, horror soaking through his body. “H—he has a tag.”

James normally didn’t follow politics very closely. He was aware of advancing government overreach, but in researching living arrangements on the west coast, he’d fallen down a couple online rabbit holes about safety bulletins and Conxence activity in the capital city.

Forums warned it was easier than ever to get arrested on grounds of political dissent. People detained under these circumstances were often marked by law enforcement—they cut out a large portion of cartilage from auricle of the right ear with a bladed clamp. After tagging, police released some detainees, but depending on activities and affiliations, others disappeared completely. People were increasingly afraid to associate with those that had been tagged.

James had thought it was more internet conspiracy than truth until that moment. Empetrum was affiliated with the government. He suddenly had a morbid guess for what Benson’s source of “volunteers” was.

“Tag?” Benson strolled up to have a look. “Hm. Well, someone’s personal affairs are none of my business. We can’t deny someone care because of their political affiliations can we?”

“Where did he come from? Did he actually volunteer?” James said, his heart in his throat. “You have to tell me the truth.”

Benson turned to face him, unbothered. “You’re overreacting.”

James moved to unplug the wires from the android’s head with trembling hands. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this. Is he even sick?” He could hardly believe the words coming out of his mouth, but the creeping sense of off-ness that had permeated the last couple of days had burst open into an intense, animal need to escape.

“Heavy accusations there, Dr. Siles.” Benson watched him push the android away from the machine and move to his computer setup to start unplugging and deconstructing it.

“Please send him back to wherever you got him,” James said shakily. “If you won’t tell me—”

“Death row,” Benson said. James halted, stunned. “Sure, he’s tagged, but he’s in the system for arson. Killed three people. Don’t know if that was Conxence motivated or not. Sounds like he went rogue to me, if it matters to you.”

James stared, trying to piece Benson’s words together, choking on indecision. He made it sound like Joseph was dangerous. Giving someone dangerous a robotic body. But James had also been about to end someone’s organic life without their consent. Had “Joseph” consented?

“He’s as good as dead anyway,” Benson said. “His execution date’s coming up. You’re in the pursuit of saving people, right?”

James pulled his laptop from the table and hugged it to his chest, backing toward the door. “This is why Empetrum is a secret, isn’t it…Does the Bureau know you do this?” He couldn’t even use the term, could hardly think it.

Empetrum used human test subjects.

“Of course,” Benson said, waiting for the implications to sink in.

“But this is—profoundly unethical.”

“Reality is complex,” Benson said. “If we stopped to avoid crushing every ethical flower, no progress would ever be made. It’s misguided to try. We’re only partial to humanity because it’s our own species, and for our ends it’s more efficient, more humane, not to waste time with other animals.” He gestured to the man in the scanner. “Empetrum sources criminals, James, scheduled to be euthanized anyway. Many of them, we’re able to mindwipe and rehabilitate when we’re done. They get a second chance.”

“‘Many of them,’” James could hardly speak. “What do you use them for?”

“I’m not confident you’re ready for that information.”

James took another step toward the door, eyeing the guards, afraid they would try to stop him, wondering if they were ex-death row inmates themselves, in a new kind of prison. “You’re right. I’m not.” They couldn’t work the machine without him. “I don’t think I should be here.”

If James abandoned Empetrum, O.R.T. would fail or be dangerously delayed. He would have wasted months of work, his father would be left to die without a failsafe. But if James stayed, Benson would twist him, little by little, to accept monstrosity as well.

Not to mention, he hardly dared to imagine what new, horrible avenues Benson’s federal affiliations would push O.R.T. into. He could create a whole robotic army off the cognitive scan of a single zealot.

Fuck.

Richard was right. James had to cull this project before it really hurt someone.

Biting back the emotion rising in his throat, James turned away from his machine, from Benson, from his would-be test subject.

“I’m happy to give you some time to think about this,” Benson said.

James paused at the door. “I’m resigning.” It hurt to speak. “Thank you for your interest in my work, and for this opportunity, but I can’t continue like this. I’m sorry I wasted both of our time.”

Richard and Eve’s reluctance to let him develop O.R.T. had stymied his progress and hurt his pride, but he had come to rely on Richard’s quiet empathy and Eve’s ethical commitments. It wasn’t about not making waves, James realized, but about being careful to create positive ones. About solving more problems than he created. Maximize good, minimize harm.

The cracks his activities at Empetrum had already made in his relationship with Larkspur were on the verge of collapsing into a full rift, shattering everything he realized he still wanted. Maybe it wasn’t too late to save it.

Lesson learned. No one had to know.

Benson motioned to the guards, who put “Joseph” back on the gurney and wheeled him out. James shifted out of their way, spooked. Benson moved toward him.

“Before you go to Larkspur tomorrow,” Benson said. “Be sure to keep everything you’ve seen and heard here to yourself.” James felt rooted in place. “I’ll know if you try anything. Your role at Empetrum is vital. It would be a shame if that were to change.”

James forced himself to meet his gaze. The taller of the two, James had to look down, but in that moment, James felt smaller than a child.

Benson’s gray eyes were steady and intense. “Do you understand?”

James stared at him, his throat extremely dry. He managed a nod.

Benson’s face softened with a pleasant smile, and he continued on ahead to the door, taking his leave. “Good. We’ll pick this up again tomorrow evening.”

James shook his head, dazed. “I’m resigning, Dr. Benson. I won’t be there.”

The director paused at the door. “Fight it if you want,” he said. “But we both know there’s no going back for you. You want this too much.”

James watched him go, his forehead cold and breathing disturbed. Only after Benson was long gone, did James unplug everything, pull the robot’s neural network and power core, and gather up anything he could think of that could be used to revive the transfer machine without him. He abandoned everything else in his lab and hurried to his apartment on campus, where he hastily repacked his suitcase and stowed everything, including Sesame, in his car.

At any moment, he expected guards to apprehend him, but they all just watched him from their posts. As far as the rest of the facility was concerned, the evening’s events were only business as usual.

He left his Empetrum facility access badge and apartment key in the unit.

James spent the long drive back to Worthing emotionally destroyed. Benson had talked him up, offered unwavering confidence, happy to cultivate his reckless ambitions instead of shying away like Richard and Eve had.

And James had been caught in the spell.

He was ashamed to realize how easy it was for him to start turning his back on Larkspur. For several weeks now, he had known his loyalty was shifting, but he hadn’t cared. He had conflated their hesitance about his dangerous ideas with total rejection, and he had let himself reject them in turn.

Benson’s words still stung as James pulled up to his apartment in Worthing. There’s no going back for you.

Empetrum was just a biotech company. Benson couldn’t force him to do anything, yet James still felt like he was marked.

Evening sunlight spilled into James’ empty apartment in Worthing, casting a long shadow across the floor as he paused in the doorway, Sesame’s box heavy in his hands. The scents of woodwork and paint had since overtaken those of human habitation in the silent, stagnant air. He had returned very seldom to his dwelling over the last month, and the abandoned feeling of it burned his throat.

His eyes locked on something on the kitchen table. Leaving Sesame and his other effects crowded around an end table by the door, he warily ventured toward the object, his heart pounding in his ears. It was a pager of some kind. Under the small rectangular device lay a note, neatly handwritten:

You’ll be needing this soon.

James took the pager in his shaking hands and turned to glance at his hushed surroundings. This certainly wasn’t legal. James exhaled heavily, and dropped into one of the chairs at the table.

No matter what tactics Benson used to try to intimidate him, James resolved to resist. Even if Benson was watching his every move, he debated simply pretending nothing had happened and hoping for the best. Either way, O.R.T. was dead.

The weight of James’ guilt and fear sat so heavy in his chest that he barely had room for breath, for grief that his precious failsafe—this project on which he had hung so many hopes—would likely never move another step forward. He knew there was a way to develop it ethically, but only people like Benson would support him.

There’s no going back for you.

Maybe Benson would pull strings and get Richard to fire him, or try to get him blacklisted so he had to choose between his career or Empetrum. Benson had already proved himself incredibly manipulative, and James had a terrible feeling he would be stubborn as well.
J

ames spent half the night overturning his entire apartment, looking for surveillance devices. His search turned up fruitless, and he lay awake the other half of the night worrying about it.

He had work at Larkspur the next morning. He should have called out sick, but because he had never called out sick in his life, and he feared Benson would out him to his colleagues the first chance he got, James went.

+

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX—O.R.T-2         

James lingered down in the lab after hours, alone with his laptop, still fussing with the program for Larkspur’s android’s A.I. protocols. He couldn’t go home. He couldn’t stay here. He felt like Benson was watching him at all times, and James just wanted to forget everything and pretend he didn’t even exist.

Heather had inevitably noticed he was out of sorts, but he rebuffed her attempts to figure out what was wrong. He couldn’t drag anyone into this.

After two days of silence from Benson, he was starting to hope that maybe as long as James didn’t tell anyone, Benson would leave him alone.

His cell phone rang, and the name in his caller ID killed that hope. He rejected the call and pushed the phone away from him, cradling his face in his hands.

After a few moments of heavy silence, the screen of his phone lit up again, and the gentle beeping sent even more ice creeping up his spine.

James stared at the pixels.

He raked both hands through his hair, trying to get a hold of himself. He considered getting up, going straight to Richard’s office where the director was finishing reports, and confessing everything. Getting fired from Larkspur could never be worse than whatever Benson had up his sleeves. But he was too afraid to face Richard.

“You’re going to want to pick that up.”

James snapped his head up to see a security guard, blond, toned, a countenance of easy determination. Steven Alder. James’ attention touched first on the Larkspur security guard uniform and then the gun in Alder’s hand.

James’ phone quieted, and James stood up, backing away from both the missed call and the uniform as Alder raised his weapon.

“What are you doing?” James tripped backward over a seat left between the counters as Alder advanced. “Alder what are you doing?”

“The director will call back,” Alder said. “When he does, you will answer your phone.”

The phone on the counter began to ring again. When James didn’t move, Alder angled the gun toward James’ chest. Eyes wide, James reached forward, his whole arm trembling, and took the device from the counter.

Tapping the talk button, he raised it to his ear.

+

Richard typically completed and sent off their weekly report for the Bureau database on Friday, but he hadn’t had time before leaving on vacation for the weekend. So, with Heather’s approval, they were staying later that night to catch up instead.

As Richard typed away at his desk, Heather sat leaning against the wall behind it, reading a paperback.

She yawned as she turned a page. She loved her internship at Larkspur, but it had been a long day.

“How are you doing Heather?” Richard’s voice made her look up. He glanced back at her.

“Tired,” she said. “You?”


Richard smiled. “Same.”

“How far do you have left to go?”

Richard slumped forward, propping his chin on a hand. “Half an hour, I hope.”

Heather pulled her cell phone from her pocket to check the time. 6:03.

“Thanks for hanging in there.”

“No problem.” Heather contemplated breaking out leftovers from lunch that afternoon. She pushed her cellphone into the front pocket of her hoodie. Larkspur had a general collared-shirt-and-slacks dress code, but she had started taking cues from Chelo about bringing something comfortable for the morning and evening commutes.

Richard clicked the electronic mouse and resumed typing. As he consulted some notes on his second monitor, he said, “Hey, why don’t you go bug James? He’ll be more interesting than all this paperwork.”

Heather straightened up. “I thought he already left.”

“I don’t think he did.”

James had been out of sorts the last two days, his fidgety, industrious nature on full anxious overdrive. When she’d asked if he was okay, he’d insisted, pallid and on edge, that he was fine.

Maybe he had received bad news about his dad.

She didn’t know how to ask him about it, but maybe he would appreciate some company, at least.

“You sure you’ll be fine here?” she asked facetiously, lingering at the desk.

Richard smiled, amused. “I’ll make it. You have your phone?”

Heather waved it in confirmation on her way to the door.

“Tell him to go home, would you?” Richard called after her. “That one works too hard.”

Heather twisted around, flashing a smile. “I’ll try.”

+

“Dr. Benson,” James said, his voice flat.

“Good evening,” Benson said calmly. “We haven’t heard from you for a while. I’m beginning to think you really meant what you said about resigning.”

“I did.” James apprehensively watched as Alder moved closer to him. It still killed him to say it. “I was impulsive to dive so deep so quickly. I haven’t told anyone and I don’t plan to. I just need to do things my own way.”

“Your ‘own way’ is a straight shot to stagnation and mediocrity,” Benson said. “I thought you wanted to be somebody in the world of biotechnology. To innovate the future.”

“I do—but—”

“Then explain to me what the problem is.”

James hesitated. Wasn’t it obvious? Was he really overreacting? “T-the human trafficking? Experimenting on people without their consent?”

“I believe it’s just you saying they don’t consent.”

“Well, do they?”

“What do you care? They’re felons. They deserve what’s coming to them. They made their own choices in life, yet instead of being senselessly destroyed by a punitive government, they get to help us move our species forward.”

James stared at Alder, trying to keep his cognitive footing. What Benson said made sense to him.

He lived in constant fear of never being good enough. He felt odd and contorted between an idealistic morality Benson had riddled with holes, and a need to feel like his life meant something. He had come too far, worked and suffered too much, for it all to come to nothing.

Maybe Empetrum really was the way forward, but every fiber of his body said no.

“Realistically, I’m arguing with you out of courtesy. It would be better for everyone if you chose this willingly,” Benson continued. “Because whether or not you realized it, Siles, you’ve been handed off. Our shared sponsors want you at Empetrum, and I gave you a chance to integrate on your own terms. Sooner or later, you were going to tell Knight and Delva, and even though you scare them, they would have attempted to fight for you. If their wings were not clipped first, that is.”

James’ mouth fell open, as Benson’s words permeated his ribs like rot. “What?” he whispered.

“The destruction of the facility back in Dunesborough,” Benson said. “Funny that you were so set on it being sabotage, when it was you who sabotaged it.”

James stared, shocked. “But I…I didn’t.”

“Knight held you back, so you ruined this facility too. Set them back yet again, made all of them regret ever associating with you.”

“You can’t do this…”

“We’re not negotiating anymore, I’m afraid,” Benson said, with a lilt in his voice, like he’d grown bored of this whole thing. The mere annihilation of James’ life.

“They’ll never believe that I destroyed our work,” James said, his voice shaking.

“Will they?”

“You can’t make me do anything—” He halted as he heard the line click. “Benson? Do you hear me? I’m not going back to Empetrum!”

Alder stepped forward, and James shifted back in fear, all his bewilderment and anger draining out of him. “Let’s do this quick and easy. Stand over there. Let me do my job, and then we’ll go to Empetrum and do what the director wants.”

Abruptly, James tried to dodge around the side of the counter. Maybe he could make it to his car without sustaining a mortal wound. But his car keys were up in his office. He couldn’t bring the Knights into this. Could he just—run? Could he call the police or were they in on it too?

“Hey—” Alder grabbed James’ arm. He tugged him back and easily twisted his arm behind his back. James struggled but Alder caught and twisted the other arm too. “Cut your losses before you make this any worse. Too many people are banking on your coming through for you to turn out to be a passive, spineless coward.”

“Okay,” James said, his throat tight. “Okay fine! I’ll continue research.” He felt like scum, but he needed to buy time. “Just leave Larkspur alone.”

“Too late for that,” Alder said. “Forgive us for not trusting you.”

“Why are you doing this?” James tried to wrench his arm from Alder’s grip. Alder twisted his arm further. He wrenched it painfully, and James’ cell phone slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor. “Larkspur’s trying to do good work! Harming them and destroying my reputation will accomplish nothing.”

“We could have done this quietly,” Alder barked. “But you tried to run. You act on our terms, now.”

The door to the lab opened, and James’ heart leapt into his throat.

“Heather run get out of here!” he shrieked, pulling against Alder’s grip. Pain spiked up into his shoulder.

Heather jumped. “What—”

“Go—” James’ voice cut off abruptly as Alder released his arm, jerked his shoulder up and jabbed the side of his fist into James’ throat.

James choked, clutching his neck and gasping for breath.

“James!” Heather shifted forward. The door closed behind her, sealing them in the soundproof lab.

Alder raised the gun toward her. Heather froze and held up her hands.

“No—” James lurched toward the gun, but Alder quickly deflected him with a kick to the ribs.

James staggered and fell. He tried to get up, but doubled over, folding his arms across his stomach. Stars plagued his vision, his ears ringing.

“Stay where you are,” Alder ordered. “Both of you.” He kept his aim trained on Heather. “Siles, you’ve just ruined everything.” He switched the gun to his non-dominant hand, and pulled a different device from his belt. He pointed it at her. “She’s seen too much.”

“Leave her alone,” James pleaded. “She won’t tell anyone. I’ll go. I’ll go and work and no one will ever have to see me again. Please—”

Alder sighed. “Sorry, kid. This isn’t personal.” He fired the other device at her, and a small metal dart lodged into her arm.

She fell against the door with a gasp, her hand flying to her arm. The door opened a crack and she tried to slip through the space, but then Alder was there. Heather was too frightened to make a sound as he tugged her back into the lab. The door sealed them back inside.

James stood up with difficulty, bracing a hand on the nearby counter for support.

Alder guided Heather around so his back was to the door, blocking the exit. Only then did he release her. She stumbled back toward the other exit near James. He reached out to catch her, and she fell heavily into his arms, her face ashen and confused, her eyes unfocused. He had hoped to try to run, to lead her to safety, but she swiftly lost consciousness.

“What was in that?” James asked, his voice shaking.

“Something lethal,” Alder said gravely. “Untraceable.”

“What?” James gasped. Tears filled his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. “But she’s just a kid.” He slowly sank to the floor with Heather’s body, his voice waning as his strength drained out of him. “She had nothing to do with this…Is there an antidote?” He couldn’t wrap his mind around what had just happened. How things had escalated so quickly.

Alder shook his head.

“Let me save her,” James said. He pressed two fingers to her jugular, feeling for a heartbeat. It was slow, weakening.

Alder began an exasperated sigh, but James cut him off with rage, “Benson wants a transferee, right? I’ll do it tonight. Let me save her!”

Alder stared at the pile of them, annoyed. “Fine, but she won’t leave Empetrum.” He rounded the counter and picked up James’ cracked cellphone from the floor. “Get what you need together. I’m knocking Knight out upstairs and then we’re finishing up here and leaving.”

“Don’t kill him too—” James gasped.

“I won’t. Relax,” Alder grunted. “Don’t leave this lab until I come back.” He paused at the door. “I’ve locked all the exits. I’ll know if you try anything, and I don’t think I have to remind you what’s at stake.”

James watched him go, pain and fear and self-hatred pulsing through his body while he sat on the cold floor with his victim.

His victim.

James had brought this evil here.

He felt for her pulse again. He couldn’t find it.

No one would try to rescue James from Empetrum after this, even if they came for Heather. Benson was getting exactly what he wanted.

“I am so sorry,” James whispered, brokenly. He gently laid her down and stood up, brushing at tears as he moved to comply with Alder’s orders. The words dripped hollowly from his lips like a leaky faucet. “I’m so sorry…”

Within minutes, Alder returned. At gunpoint, he directed James to gather what he needed for the impending transfer. He originally wanted James to stab Larkspur’s android through the face for the engineers to find, but James managed to convince him to let him take it for Heather’s new vessel.

He couldn’t stomach the idea of letting her wake up in the one he had hastily constructed for Benson’s deadlines.

Then, he went back in for Heather. He didn’t have much time before her neural integrity began to break down.

The facility stood dark and watchful as he transported her through the lobby and out the front doors, his arms locked under hers and her feet dragging on the floor. She was still warm, but her heart had stopped. Through the haze of frantic calculation, lining up how he was going to outfit and run the machine before their time ran out, he searched for some human feeling other than a swiftly growing numbness, but it had burnt out. Incinerated in the sheer horror of this moment.

Alder helped him get her into the back seat of James’ car, and James carefully looped the middle seatbelt around her. They packed bags of ice around her head. In bleak, heavy resignation, he closed the door.

Finally, Alder walked him back inside the facility, and turned the surveillance system back on so it could record James destroying key members of the equipment room while Alder stood watchfully in the doorway. Alder had told him to make it convincing, or they were leaving Heather there.

Maybe Alder was lying to him, and she was just sedated in a particularly convincing way, like in a spy movie. Maybe she would wake up before he had to transfer her. He could buy some time, try to strike a deal. Keep her safe from Benson.

As Alder drove him away from Larkspur, up into the hills, further and further from civilization, James clung desperately to that small hope.

+

Heather became aware of dark and silence. Occasional lights burst across her vision—flashing, forking like lightning, and flickering away. She tried to remember how she’d gotten there. She remembered being afraid.

Suddenly, light burst in, rooted into her face and ripped down the length of her body.

Her chest seized up. She couldn’t breathe. Her back arched and eyes snapped open wide. She saw the outside contour of some kind of machine, barely out of view. Wires crowded the edges of her vision. She was screaming, but it was odd. Strangled, buzzing. Her ears didn’t register it properly, cutting in and out like a mistuning microphone.

Her head was open. Arcs of fire pulsed down her limbs.

James stood behind a computer setup across the room, hands clasped anxiously under his nose, next to a man with narrow glasses.

She waited, blankly, in those few delirious seconds, for her throat to unlock, for air to fill her lungs.

But it never did.

Darkness rushed out from behind her eyes and dragged her under.

+