A Long, Long Sleep (24 page)

“Mommy, put me in stasis,” I whimpered when she came home.

“No, dear,” she said, wiping the tears from my face. They’d been coming so long and so hard that they no longer tasted of salt. She gave me a big hug. “You did the right thing, honey. I’m very proud of you.”

I didn’t know what to say. When Xavier had said that about my artwork, I thanked him. When Mom said it about this, I wanted to die. “Please,” I begged.

“I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”

Mom frowned at me, then finally said, “For a day, if you’d like. But you’ve done the right thing, and I’m not going to let you run away from it.”

Things felt better as the stass chemicals washed away the horror of Xavier’s anguished face and the torture of my lost soul. But when Mom got me up and forced me to go to school the next day, it all came back, as bad as it had been before —probably worse, with the enhanced memory the stass had left me with.

The next month was nothing but wave upon wave of torment. I would see him, sometimes, in the halls of the condo, and turn away so he wouldn’t come up to me. But in the afternoon, when we used to walk in the gardens together, I would go to the window and watch him there, as he wandered the paths alone.

He looked so lost. My heart went out to him, as it had when he was five and had lost his stuffed rabbit. When he was seven and had fallen from his bike.

When he was thirteen and admitted to having had his heart broken by the girl I had thought was his first crush. When the desire to run out to him and apologize got too great, I’d run to Mom instead, and I’d beg her to stass me, if only for a couple of days.

And she complied.

“Until she never woke me up again,” I whispered.

All of this had poured into Otto’s mind. It hadn’t taken more than five minutes.

Somewhere during the torrent of self- blame, Otto had let go of my hand to wrap his arms around my shoulders instead, his cheek pressed against mine.

He was warm and still and his breath was heavy in my ear.

I was surprised that I wasn’t getting any thoughts from Otto. I could almost feel something in the corner of my mind, an un finished thought, quietly not touching anything. I pulled away a bit, but Otto’s hand was still around my wrist. “Why aren’t you throwing all the platitudes at me: it wasn’t your fault, you couldn’t have known, your parents forced this on you, no one deserves a slow death through stasis no matter what they’ve done, all of that?”

Otto’s eyes crinkled a bit, and I realized this was his genuine smile —not the forced one he’d cultivated for society. “You just said it all yourself,” I thought in someone else’s voice.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, you do.” Otto told me, in thoughts that were more than words. “You’ve always believed it. You’ve just hated yourself too much to admit it.”

Otto really didn’t lie. I could feel how much he meant what he said. He had felt how much I had buried beneath my self- loathing. I would have seen it myself, one day, but with Otto’s help, it all came to the surface much faster.

My parents had always been wrong. And they’d molded me in such a way as to force me to believe that they were right. It wasn’t Xavier they disapproved of; it was anyone knowing what they’d done to me. That was why I’d tried to protect Guillory by not voicing my suspicions. I was used to it. I’d been protecting Mom and Daddy from everyone, keeping secret every nasty thing they said to me, every demeaning thought they’d forced into my head, every term in stasis when they put me away so they didn’t have to deal with their daughter.

When I’d won the Young Masters Award, they’d panicked. I had freedom, just like Otto did when he won his scholarship. They wouldn’t have their perfect, brainwashed daughter anymore. So they had to take it from me in a way that made it seem as if I’d rejected it. They made me give up Xavier, so that they could lock me away without him telling anyone.

I wondered if they’d ever planned on waking me up. Maybe. It had been only a year and a half when the Dark Times came, and they could have continued to leave me in for my own safety. Perhaps they’d just forgotten about me for those last nine years, or maybe keeping me in stasis had simply become a habit with them. But I knew without a doubt that they hadn’t stassed me for my own good.

They’d kept me a child for as long as they could, for their own selfishness. So that Mom could have her live doll to dress up and play with. So that Daddy could have his little sycophant, always ready to say, “Yes, sir. You know what’s best, sir.” They’d switched me from school to school to keep me thinking I was stupid. They stassed me regularly to keep me young, and they made me believe it was what I wanted. They let me play with my paints because it was nonthreatening, harmless, and distracting . . . until I’d won the Young Masters Award. Then it became too much for them.

Had they lied? I wondered. Had they really come home to let me go to the awards ceremony? If Otto weren’t there in my mind, I might have let myself think that. But with all my self- loathing neatly cleared away, I could see my distrust of them as clear as day. They terrified me. They always had. I loved them with every atom, but they terrified me, and I did not trust them.

“Do you think they loved me?” I thought to the silent presence.

“They probably thought they did,” thought the other voice in my head. “But I don’t think they knew how.”

I sighed and tried to pull away. Otto kept firm hold of my wrist. “I’ll love you,”

he thought to me. “We can be family.” He kissed my temple very tenderly, and I surprised myself with a smile.

He let go of my wrist then, and the silent presence vanished from my mind.

“Thanks,” I whispered. “Do I still scare you?”

Otto nodded, but his eyes crinkled. He brushed his hand over my cheek and a thought of a wild briar- rose hedge surrounding a beautiful castle flashed into my mind. Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Only he didn’t see me as the cursed and passive beauty, quietly waiting to be awakened by her Prince Charming. I was the stunning rose hedge, wild and impenetrable and strong enough to withstand a hundred years of people trying to hack their way through it to the vulnerable innocents I would protect. A hedge that knew which person, which people, to let inside.

I frowned. “Who am I protecting?”

His eyes smiled, and he placed his hand over my heart. You. Then he touched his own heart. Me. He crossed his hands and gestured, indicating the whole world. He playfully touched my nose, and I got one quick flash of thought. “I trust you.” It wasn’t exactly an “I.” Nabiki was right; what he thought didn’t always translate into language. There was a “we” in it, as his family was part of it. But he was the one who knew me.

There was the sound of a cell beep. Otto reached under his shirt and pulled out his cell. “What do you have a cell for?” I asked.

He looked at me and shook his head. I realized even if he couldn’t speak over it, others could speak to him. He made a clicking sound with the side of his mouth, which obviously activated the incoming call. Bren’s face materialized in Otto’s hand. “Otto, did you get hold of Rose?”

Otto nodded, then handed me his cell.

I felt awkward. “Um, hi,” I said.

“Rose, thank God! Are you all right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Granddad celled me. The Plastine stormed the Uni Building about twenty minutes ago.”

I blinked. “It what?”

“Took out a wall and started shaking down the security checkpoint. They tried to stop it, but you just can’t stop one of those things. It did a lot of damage, and some of the people who tried to stop it are in the hospital now. When it couldn’t find you, it drove off again. The police are trying to track it, but it has some kind of stealth mode tuned to UniCorp access points. Even UniCorp’s security cameras don’t register it. UniCorp computers digitalize it out with an automatic patch. That’s how it’s been wandering around ComUnity undetected.

It is definitely acting under orders from someone inside UniCorp.”

“How’s Xavier?” I asked, and I couldn’t keep the panic from my voice.

“Granddad’s fine. He’s coming to get you. I’m on my way, too. It should take me five minutes to get across campus. You’re with Otto?”

“At the dorms, yeah. Look, I don’t think I’m ready . . .”

“We can deal with anything that isn’t your imminent demise later! For now, just ignore it!” Bren snapped, and I knew he was right.

“Okay. Has anyone found Guillory?”

Bren’s face darkened. “Yeah. We don’t think he was the one who set this thing on you.”

“Why not?”

“He was found in your hotel room, beaten to death,” Bren said. “News didn’t get to us until now because he was under the name of Jance.”

I didn’t buy it. “Then what did he mean when he said it was a shame what was going to happen to me?”

“Probably what he always means,” Bren said. “That you’re going to get old and not be so pretty. He’s said that to Hilary, too. He was drunk.”

I felt cold. The man was still an ass, and I still didn’t like him, even though he was dead. But if he hadn’t been the one who tried to kill me, I wouldn’t have wished for his death, no matter how big an ass he was, no matter what atrocious things he said or thought while he was drunk.”So who is trying to kill me?” I asked, my voice trembling.

“We still don’t know. Where’s Otto?”

Otto took his cell back.

“Otto, keep her there until I get there. I’ll only be a minute.”

That was one minute too long. A shadow filled the door-way of the waiting room. The harsh Germanic plastic voice cut through the silence. “You are Rosalinda Samantha Fitzroy. Please remain still for retinal identification.”

I didn’t have time to react. I felt myself tackled twice, first by Otto’s body and again by his mind, which was a rampant surge of defensive panic. He knocked me behind the sofa, grunting incoherently.

There were sensible undercurrents to Otto’s thoughts as he sorted through everything we knew about this creature. He knew the Plastine was methodical, easily distracted, felt no pain. I caught a very distinct, “Burn it, no paint!” as his eyes surveyed the room looking for a possible weapon. He pushed my head down. “Don’t make a sound! It can use your voiceprint to con firm its initial ID.

If it thinks you’re not you, it might give up. I’ll distract it. You head for the door.”

Before I had time to remind him what had happened to Guillory, he was gone, keeping to the corners of the room, out of the Plastine’s immediate line of sight.

As I scrambled on my stomach behind a chair, Otto shoved an end table between me and the Plastine. The Plastine plowed through it, leaving it in splinters, and grabbed for my ankles.

I shrieked and scrambled behind a second chair. With a sudden blow, the Plastine split the chair over my head. Stuffing spilled out, and the cushion flew halfway across the room. I rolled away, my stass- fatigued heart protesting the exertion. I couldn’t catch my breath, but I was able to pull myself to my feet.

The Plastine was still between me and the door. I was trapped.

Otto caught my eye as I dodged between more furniture. He had picked something up —the cushion from the demolished chair. He tore it open and pulled out the plastifoam core. He coiled like a cat, then flung himself onto the Plastine’s back. The cushion case came down over the Plastine’s head and arms, imprisoning him in the fabric. Otto looked directly at me then, jerking his head toward the door.

I didn’t need to be told twice. With my heart in my throat, I lunged past the blind assassin. As I passed, I saw his plasticized arm reach up for Otto’s.

I was nearly at the door when I heard the crunch. My heart froze. I turned just as the screaming started. It was a sound I never wanted to hear again. It was all too human, but entirely without language. Once, at a country charity banquet with my mother, I’d heard a rabbit scream as it was killed by a dog. It had chilled my blood. But Otto’s cry of pain was a hundred times worse. The sound of ripping fabric followed as the Plastine tore the cushion case off its head, and Otto with it. Otto slammed against the wall, his arm twisted at an unnatural angle, then slid down in a weakly moving heap. And Otto was still between me and the Plastine.

I couldn’t let it happen. What happened to Guillory had proven the Plastine’s lethality. As the Plastine reached down and picked Otto up by his shirt, I lunged forward and squeezed myself between them.

The Plastine’s shiny eyes searched my face once and then let Otto go. He fell to the ground with a thump that made my own head ache. The Plastine seized me by the wrist. “You are Rosalinda Samantha Fitzroy. Please remain still for retinal identification.”

I remained perfectly still and let him search my eyes with his own dead ones.

“Identification confirmed.” He lifted up the control collar and wrapped it around my neck. I didn’t struggle.

With a screech, Otto surged back up from the floor and tried, with his unbroken arm, to wrestle the collar away before it closed. The Plastine raised its hand to knock him away, likely with lethal force, but my hand was faster.

I grabbed Otto’s arm, and I did something intentionally cruel. I took all of the darkest, deepest pain I felt, the blackest and most tangled thorny corner of my psyche, combined it with the memory of the pain and fatigue I had felt getting out of stass, and thought of it so strongly that Otto gasped with shock. He cringed away instinctively, long enough for the Plastine to secure the control collar around my neck with a final click.

The first few seconds under the control collar were a shock. My mind screamed at me in panic. It was like going into stass without the soothing chemicals. My body refused to work. All of my systems were dependant upon the electrodes that had imbedded themselves into my brain. For a split second everything stopped, and in that second I was dead. Then things began to start again, but strangely, unnaturally. My heart roared back to life, my lungs stretched, seeking breath, and my muscles contracted, then relaxed as the Plastine acclimatized his processors to my natural system.

Now that he had fulfilled phase one of his programming, he began to initiate phase two.

My legs followed him as the signals from his plasticized programming poured to my brain over the net. I couldn’t look to see if Otto was all right. I could barely think. At first all I could do was follow, never mind that I hurt everywhere. The Plastine was moving my legs for me, forcing my lungs to continue breathing, forcing my heart to beat. But he did not know the best way for me to move my muscles, so I kept cramping. He did not know my body’s natural pattern, so my heart staggered arrhythmically. Every breath hurt as he sucked too much air into my lungs, and then forced it out again.

He dragged me across campus. He hadn’t accounted for my tear ducts and saline production, so my eyes were dry and smarting, and I couldn’t even blink.

Despite this, I could still see. The Plastine was headed for a skimmer. Not just any skimmer. That was Guillory’s luxurious hover yacht.

The door to the hover yacht opened, and the Plastine climbed inside. My body was forced to bend and follow. Just as I reached the door, a body hit me, hard enough to bruise. I was shocked to see Bren. I only saw what the Plastine directed me toward, so I hadn’t seen him coming over the grounds.

Bren’s fingers tried to rip the collar from my throat. The Plastine turned. No! I thought. No, Bren, run! Run! Run, run, run! As my body was twisted into the yacht, and the Plastine ducked my head, the electrodes lost contact with my brain for a millisecond. I was able to cry out — only one syllable, but it was enough.

“Run!”

Bren heard me, and to my surprise, took the warning to heart. He dropped and rolled beneath the hover yacht before the Plastine was fully able to designate him as a target.

For an eternity of a millisecond, the Plastine crouched in the door of the yacht, flipping through options in his processors. Then, the impediment gone, he climbed back into the yacht with me and we took off. I yearned to turn around and be sure Bren was okay, but my body belonged to the Plastine.

But it was a complicated body. A hundred autonomic functions, a thousand nerves containing all my motor control. There were so many systems in my natural programming that he was forced to keep running through his limited processors. It made him slow.

Slow enough that I was able to acclimatize. I tried to fig-ure out which part of my mind was still my own. There was enough of me left to hurt, so I knew there was enough to think with. Otto’s manipulation of my own electro impulses was subtle, delicate, and easily breakable. I suspected that if I wanted to force Otto from my mind, I could. The control collar’s impulses were a ham- fisted, violent seizure of control, stealing all my autonomic functions and all of my motor control.

But higher brain function was still mine.

Moreover, I wasn’t exactly alone. Like with Otto, I could sense the Plastine’s presence in the corner of my mind. He was linked to my systems, but —without his being entirely aware of it — I was also linked to his. The control was all his, but my attention could go where I wanted.

Once I tuned in to the Plastine’s processors, the echoing presence in my mind was almost overwhelming. It was a deafening roar of information, far too much for my own organic processors to encompass. If I could have shut my eyes and turned away, I would have. But it was inside me, and I couldn’t. Panic swelled, and I feared I would go insane. But then the stream of information mercifully ceased.

DATA STREAM 197 SCANNED, came the thought in my head. PRINCIPAL

UNAVAILABLE.

What? What did that mean?

BEGIN SCAN DATA STREAM 198: INITIATE.

A further string of incomprehensible information flowed past my consciousness. But I thought I recognized some of it. With a burst of understanding, I realized that the Plastine was searching through the net.

Once I knew that the stream of information was from the net, and not from the Plastine himself, I was more able to distance myself from that and focus instead on the Plastine’s programming.

At first all I caught was SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . .

SCANNING . . .

DATA STREAM 198 SCANNED. PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE.

I focused on what he meant by “principal.” It was there in his programming, a sub file connected to the word. PRIN-CIPAL: PRIMARY OPERATION

PROGRAMMER. That had to be the one who had programmed him. The one who had sent him after me. I looked more closely. The first file the primary operation program was keyed to was a retinal scan, which meant nothing to me. The second was a voice recognition program, which was nothing but wave patterns. The third was a name.

MARK ANDREW FITZROY.

Daddy.

All the functions that would have made me blanch or sob or feel nauseated were being run through the control stream of the Plastine, so all I could do was feel it burning inside my head. But it all made perfect sense.

Mom and Daddy were highly prestigious, well- known figures. They’d stressed to me a million times the dangers of being kidnapped and held hostage by people who wanted to hurt them. I’d taken the warnings to heart and feared leaving the preset patterns Mom and Daddy had set for me. School to home, home to school, otherwise never leaving Unicorn Estates, certainly never leaving ComUnity. If I wasn’t in either of those places, I was always with Mom and Daddy.

If I had been kidnapped, this plasticized horror had been programmed to rescue me. Guillory died, and Otto and Bren and Zavier were targeted, because the Plastine was programmed to disable or eliminate the kidnappers.

Terrifying, yes. Sad . . . but calculated. Because suppose I hadn’t been kidnapped. Suppose I had run away.

Suppose, just suppose, their perfect, delightful little child had decided that she didn’t want to live with them anymore. What were they to do? Allow an undisciplined child to ruin their standing in the global community? Let people know that I wasn’t the perfect plastic child they’d tried to mold me into? Allow me to possibly tell their secrets, splash to the net all their shortcomings, send all the skeletons buried in the closets on a parade down Main Street? No. That wouldn’t do.

Best to pretend, then, that I had been kidnapped. Even if I went of my own free will, the Plastine wouldn’t care what I said —he was not programmed to obey me. He was programmed to assume that anyone trying to impede his mission was an accomplice. Anyone who tried to stop him from retrieving me —friend, classmate, official — was designated a hostile target and destroyed accordingly.

With no record. No fingerprints. No way of tracing the deaths back to my parents.

DATA STREAM 199 SCANNED. PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE.

Of course the principal was unavailable. Daddy was long dead. But I couldn’t explain that to the Plastine.

I tried to look at the Plastine’s programming as a whole. Just at the top of all of his programming was the file PRIMARY DIRECTIVE. I focused in on that. I saw what I’d expected to see.

PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: RETURN TARGET TO PRINCIPAL. I was the target, and I was to be returned to Daddy.

But then there was that other directive, hidden beneath the first one.

SECONDARY DIRECTIVE, PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE: TERMINATE TARGET.

When he was completely certain that he could not get me back to my parents, he was programmed to terminate me. The full horror of my parents’ plan dawned on me. I had known that the Plastine was an assassin. That my own parents would rather have had me dead than out of their control? That was not love. That was slavery.

Already suspecting what I’d find, I turned my attention to the date of the implementation of the Plastine’s mission. This macabre thing hadn’t even been commissioned until after I’d received my Young Masters Award. Daddy, and probably Mom as well, had only decided to set this thing after me after I’d shown that I was no longer theirs. My love for them boiled into hatred as I read the precepts of the Plastine’s implanted mission.

But my attention was caught by the TARGET file. To my surprise, I saw more than one sub file there.

The first one, when I looked at it, was what I expected to see. Retinal scan, voiceprint, and my name, ROSALINDA SAMANTHA FITZROY.

The other two files also had retinal scans and voiceprints. And two names.

STEPHANO LUCIUS FITZROY. SERAPHINA ALEXANDRA FITZROY.

Both files were still active. The people whom those files represented had not been terminated.

Seraphina . . . the name rang a bell. Sarah. My little friend Sarah, back when I was so young. What if she hadn’t been the caretaker’s daughter? Seraphina Alexandra Fitzroy. Sarah was my sister! My big sister! I wasn’t alone. I had family. I had a brother and sister somewhere, probably stassed, as I had been.

I had to find them. My purposeless hatred turned into something fierce and protective, and suddenly it didn’t even matter that it was impossible.

I forced my attention back to the Plastine’s scan of the net. He was going through a systematic check of all possible net screenings. While the net seemed never ending, and was constantly fluid, it was ultimately finite. He’d find and scan his way through all data streams eventually, and when he was unable to find retinal scans, voiceprints, or a current entry for the name MARK FITZROY, he would terminate me. So where the hell was he taking me?