Rootless - Howard Chris. Страница 41

“No,” I kept whispering. But then I was off the trail, surrounded by agents, and Zee was kneeling above me as I curled up and shook.

I threw up then. Like something had popped. But it made things no clearer. It just made me more cold.

Zee took my head in her lap, and her hands were wrapped in the same fuzzy stuff as the rest of her. I seemed to sink inside her clothes.

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t.

I wanted to tell her about Alpha. And Crow.

“Bring him inside,” Zee said. She took her coat off and wrapped it around me. Then the agents lifted me up and they began carrying me, Zee telling them what to do, and them doing just as they were told.

I slept long and deep, but woke with a start. My plastic sheet was gone, replaced by a set of soft purple robes and even softer blankets that I’d twisted all around me. I unwound myself from the bed and pried my head off the pillow. Then I sat up and stared around the room.

No windows. Nothing to see. Just my bed with a chair beside it. A pair of fuzzy boots on the floor. I slid off the bed and slipped my feet inside the boots. I ran my fingers at my face and scratched at the stubble on my head. Then I stepped to the door and shoved it open.

The next room was a whole lot bigger and a whole lot brighter. Whole lot more busy, too. Desks and tables and gizmos and gadgets. Neon lamps. Cables in bunches. There were consoles flashing numbers, and tiny glass tubes hung like decorations across the walls. I blinked at the confusion, the mess. GenTech’s logo was everywhere, but this hardly looked like their usual neatness. There was none of the cold precision that seemed to work for them so well.

“You look more like him,” a voice said. “Now that you’re awake.”

It was a woman that spoke. And at first I thought it was Zee’s voice. But it wasn’t.

It was Hina’s.

I steadied myself against a desk, knocking a rack of plastic vials to the floor, where they burst and splintered. Then it was silent again but for the soft hum of electricity that filled the room.

“I saw you die,” I whispered.

She was hunched in a plastic chair, her face caught in the glow of a monitor screen. Her hair was long and silver, and her brown skin was creased and saggy.

But it was her, all right.

“So,” she said, her gray eyes fixed on me. “How did I die?”

“You were eaten.”

“Eaten?”

“Locusts.”

“Sounds horrible.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

“Well, we mustn’t dwell on such things, Banyan.” It caught me off guard, her using my name. And her voice was different. Strong sounding. More smart with her words.

“Come closer,” she said.

“No,” I said, just staring at her. “No. You go to hell.”

“Be nice.”

“Where’s Zee?”

“She’s where she always is.”

I just shook my head like it might make her vanish. I glanced around the room for an exit.

“Come sit with me,” the woman said. “Please.”

“What is this place?”

“It’s my laboratory.”

“So which one was real? You or the other?”

“Real?”

“You’re older, so I guess you were the first, right? The other was just a copy. That it? Like the Harvesters.”

“You mustn’t try to simplify things just to make it easier.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what the hell’s going on?”

I started across the room but she was up out of her chair and bearing down on me. I was slow and she wrapped her arms around my waist, wrestling me against her. I was still weak. Too weak to fight.

“Where’s Zee? I whispered, my face pressed in the woman’s purple shirt.

“She’ll be back.”

“My head hurts.”

“I’m sorry.”

I turned to look at her. She was squeezing the daylights out of me.

“It’s hard for me not to be angry,” she said, her voice calm but her eyes wild. “You don’t even know who I am.”

“Sure I do,” I said. “You’re Hina.”

“No.”

“Her copy.”

She shook her head.

“Her sister, then. Her mother.”

There was a moment before the woman spoke again, when she just held on to me, and it was somehow as if I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

“I’m not Hina’s mother,” the woman whispered as she bent against me. “I’m yours.”

It wasn’t true. That’s what I told myself. Tried to tell her that, too. My mother was dead. Always had been. She’d starved to death. Starved. But I was having trouble focusing now. I couldn’t think straight.

“Don’t make it harder,” the woman said. We were still wrapped together in the middle of the room.

I shrugged her arms off me. “You’re full of shit.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“You can’t know. How could you know?”

“I don’t need to know,” she said “The science knows for me.”

“Science?”

“Your genes.”

“My what?”

“They’re a perfect match to my DNA,” the woman said. “And your father’s.”

“My father?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s here.”

“He’s what?” My fists were clenched. My heart had shot into my throat.

My old man. Here.

“I’ll take you to him,” the woman said. “When you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now.” I started to shake.

“No, Banyan. You’re not.”

“Take me now,” I screamed. I seized a glass monitor and rammed it at the wall, smashing it into shiny pieces on the floor.

The woman tried grabbing at me but I slipped past her, making for a door on the far side of the room. I had her beat, but when I reached the door it came swinging wide open and Zee was bustling toward me, all wrapped in purple, big grin on her face. She started to say something but I cut her off.

“What the hell?” I said. “Get me out of here. Get me out.”

“I got you out,” she whispered, her smile vanishing like a sun gone down. I tried to push past, but she was all rammed up against me and I was suddenly so damn tired and my legs wouldn’t move.

“Take it easy,” Zee said, then she stared into the room. “What did you tell him?”

I felt the woman loom up close. “That he’s my son.”

“And his father?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You’ve seen him?” I said to Zee, but I was staggering now, slurring my words.

“Get him down,” one of them said. And everything turned to sludge.

When my mind came back, I was back in the bed and all the lights had been cut. I tried moving my limbs and each one was sore. I felt something pressed against my thigh, pinning the sheets, and I squirmed my hands free to grab it.

Metal. Cold and jagged. I felt at the metal. The ridges and curves. I drew blood as my skin snagged on thorny steel.

“It’s called a rose,” Zee said from the corner of the room. I looked for her, but she was all shadowed and black.

“He made it,” she said.

“Pop?”

“Yeah.” Zee shuffled closer and lit a low orange globe on the floor beside me. “Our father.”

“Ours?”

She nodded, but I looked away. My brain wouldn’t go there.

I tugged the flower to the light and studied the craftsmanship — barbed wire that had rusted purple, woven into a long stem and bunched into a ball of leaves. My blood was smeared upon the petals.

“He gave this to you?” I said, and it made Zee smile the way you do at something sad.

“No,” she said. “He made it for her. Your mother.”

“My mother’s dead. I don’t know that woman.”

“People here call her the Creator.”

“I think crazy is what she is. Besides, she looks more like your momma than mine.” I set the spiky flower on the bed and turned to Zee. She’d been dead enough to haunt my dreams, but now here she was, flesh and bones and GenTech purple.

“My mother was a replicant of yours,” she said.