Continuance (38 page)

“Oriole is my
operation, Neal.” She heard Gray’s own voice this time as her mind supplied the
rich baritone from memory. “You cleaned out the retreads and scored us the equipment.
Thanks. But your defection’s still pretty recent, and Central put me in charge
here. Besides, I didn’t hear your team saying anything about the damn butterfly
pictures either. How were we supposed to know she’d be some kind of entomology
nerd? Anyway, I don’t think she suspects anything. We’re still on track.”

“How are the
overlays coming along?” asked the generic voice – Neal. “Are we online with her
yet?”

“The surgical
team says her retinas are accepting the transceivers just fine. We’ve already
got live feed capability and can see what she sees. Resolution isn’t that great
yet, but it’ll sharpen as the overlays finish binding.”

Chaela craned
her neck forward, struggling to make out every movement of their lips.
They’ve
put something in my eyes.
Sweat slicked her palms and she strained forward,
afraid to miss a single word.

“Then what’s the
problem?” Neal asked.

“I’m worried
about this synesthesia thing. She’s definitely cross-linking visual and
auditory input.”

“To what
effect?”

“Who knows these
with these retreads?” Gray shook his head. “It might just turn out to be a sensory
annoyance for her. The results are unpredictable.” He hesitated. “But most of
the time, residual vectoring effects like this assimilate into enhanced neural
capabilities.”

“A perk?”

“Could be. We’ll
need to watch her closely. If it seems like she starts to suspect, I may have
to reintegrate her.”

“Like hell. The
retreads left her genome behind after the raid.” Neal pointed at Gray’s feet. “One
of them dropped the opdisk with it right where you’re standing. We know Chrysalis
is interested in her. No way I’m losing the best lead we have.”

“This
is
a cloning facility, Neal. We’ve got her biorecord. We can always start again.”

Gray turned
slightly, obscuring her view of his mouth. She craned her neck further, but
felt a moment of vertigo as a gust of wind buffeted her. The thousand-foot drop
below seemed to rise up beneath her. She tightened her grip, hands locked on
the rail as she turned back to Gray and Neal.

“…lose six
months while you grow us a new one?” Neal was becoming agitated, and the
generic voice in her mind took on an angry tone. “Screw that. The trail’s
already going cold. I need her in play now.”

“If she finds
out about Oriole – what she is – I’ll have no choice.” Gray seemed unruffled by
Neal’s bluntness. “A contaminated asset won’t do you any good.”

Neal closed the
space between them. “I’ll be the judge of that. This may be your gig until she’s
in the field, but you can’t make a call on reintegrating an asset without
approval. So I assume you’ll be checking with Cavanaugh before making any final
decisions?”

Gray gave a
gracious nod. “Of course.”

With a moan,
Chaela jerked her hands over both ears. Gray’s final words ricocheted in a riot
of dissonance, like a single-note melody accompanied by a hundred fists pounding
a piano.

When she looked
back, Gray and Neal had gone. She stood there, staring at the drop beneath her,
wondering if they could see it too – if someone was watching through her eyes
right then. She stared for a long time before taking the elevator back down.

2089

 “I was afraid they already knew.”
Chaela stared at the ground in that all-too-familiar way. Her face looked distant
and intent – much the same as Jason imagined she must have looked staring down
from the Spire that day.

She and Jason had strolled toward
campus as she told the story, eventually reaching the plaza in front of the
Novella building. Jason felt numb as they sat beside the fountain, just as they
had years ago. Moonlight played off the water in the pool as he plucked a
smooth stone from the bottom and flicked it across the surface. Chaela sat
angled the other away, keeping him out of her field of view. Now Jason knew why
she’d met his eyes so rarely, and he wondered if she’d ever be able to without risking
his life. His hand closed around another stone, this time clenching in a fist
as he thought about what Neal had done to her.

We’ll find a way
to fix it. We have to.

 “I was terrified,” she said. “I thought
they were already watching through the implants, that maybe they’d seen me
watching Gray and Neal. Going back down that elevator was the hardest thing I
ever did.”

She shook her head at the memory.
“But nothing happened. They didn’t have a team monitoring my feed yet. I played
dumb from then on, acting like the synesthesia faded away over the next few
days.” She reached behind, finding his hand with her own. “But I learned a lot
while I was there. You’d be amazed what you can infer from lies. They expected
me to lead them to whoever had left my genome behind. I never knew who it was.”
She let out quiet laugh. “They assumed it would be some top dog inside
Chrysalis.”

A breeze kicked up, rustling the
leaves of the trees around the plaza. “Neal would chew nails if he knew it was
me.” Jason said. “A nobody for their efforts.”

She half turned as if to look at
him, then stopped herself. “Even if you were a nobody, that’s not true. If I
hadn’t figured them out, I’d have led them right where they wanted.” Her voice
quieted, and she shook her head. “As it is, I risked more than I should have. But
I had to see her.”

“See who?” But Jason grasped the
answer before she could reply. “Mandy. You tracked her down?” His eyes widened,
and he wondered if he’d told a joke as Chaela laughed so hard she doubled over.

After a few seconds, she caught
her breath well enough to speak again. “I did more than that. I needed to be
close to her, to see the woman she’d grown into. But I had to do it without
contacting her directly. The DIA would have been suspicious, or used it as a
pretense to harass her.” She shook with another bout of silent laughter. “So…I
became her student.”

My God.
Realization hit
Jason like ice water. Everything made sense. Chaela’s choice to apply for Chariot
with almost no experience in neurobiology. Her hatred of him and Stuart that
first day. He thought back to that first SLIDe hit he’d gotten. 71%
probability
–
a weak match to have come from the target genome, but strong enough to be
from a close relative. He’d assumed the bioprint had been Michelle’s, when it
had always been her daughter’s.

“Dr. Amanda Fairchild,” he
breathed. “Holy shit. She’s your Mandy!”

“My Mandy, yes.” Chaela’s voice
quavered as she exhaled a shaky breath. “And yours.”

The ice water had been nothing.
This was an ocean of bone shattering cold, deep beyond all comprehension. And
he was sinking to the bottom. Chest suddenly tight, he lurched to his feet,
steadying himself with his hands on his hips. He opened his mouth to ask her to
repeat herself, just to be sure, but the words wouldn’t come. He knew he’d
heard right the first time.

Chaela squared her shoulders to
face him, keeping her eyes pointed at the pool of water beside her. She was
crying. “I was going to tell you that night. Everything was so wrong, so messed
up. I always told myself I’d let you know when the time was right. But I should
have told you from the beginning. Once I finally realized that, it was too
late. I’m so sorry.”

He looked at her now, seeing
Chaela, not Michelle – a foreign face and voice that had nothing to do with his
past, a stranger he didn’t really know. How could she have done this? How could
she have kept his own daughter from him? Did she expect him to understand? All
he understood was that the woman he cared about most in the world – the one
he’d spend years of his life trying to find – had betrayed him in the most
hurtful way imaginable. He felt pain in his hand as he squeezed the stone he’d
plucked from the pool so hard he thought it would break in two.

He gave a bitter laugh as he
realized this was why she’d switched out her genome in the classroom. To keep
Amanda from checking, maybe seeing the resemblance to her own. He understood
why she’d want to stay anonymous, to keep Amanda from being guilty of association
with a retread. But that didn’t explain why she’d kept the secret from him.

“Why?” His voice cracked like a
whip, making her flinch.

Chaela pinched the bridge of her
nose between her thumb and forefinger as she hung her head. “She was going to
need a father. Someone to help her grow up. And you were…” She trailed off,
unable to finish.

Dying.

But he hadn’t. In his fight with
the cancer, she’d bet against him, losing the wager. But had she really stacked
her chips against him? Or had she just stacked them in Mandy’s favor? Was there
a difference?

“Jason? Say something.” Her voice
sounded heavy, crushed by worry. “I know I should have…”

He shook his head, ready to cut
her off so he could give voice to the bitterness boiling within. But a sound
drew his attention, and a dingy white Hyundai glided to a stop at the curb
nearby. Jason’s stomach sank as the driver emerged on the far side. He wore a
dark suit and smartglasses, already fixed on him and Chaela.

“Shit,” Jason breathed.

Agent Grieves rounded the hood of
the car, revealing a gun held low in his hands. “Don’t do anything stupid, Day,”
Grieves warned. The man looked…wary. He held the gun in a double grip, barrel
down, closing the distance in slow, measured steps.

“Run!” Chaela hissed at Jason with
a shove. “Go!”

For an instant, he considered it.
But he crushed the idea as soon as it formed. He might feel bitter at her for
keeping the truth from him, but that didn’t mean she deserved to be Arkived. Jason
eyed the gun, realizing a fatal wound now meant death. Permanent death, with no
hope of continuance.

Earlier, he’d been willing to use
the inhibitor evidence to blackmail the spiders – a risk, but one he’d been
ready to accept. Now that he’d found Chaela, along with a daughter he hadn’t
known he had, he wasn’t so ready to take reckless gambles. He wouldn’t let
himself be Arkived.

He tore his eyes from the gun,
grabbing Chaela by the arm and pulling her back a few steps. He searched the
area for a place for them to run, some means of escape. But the plaza was too
open, and he’d left the car at the apartment. There was nowhere to go. Grieves
stopped a couple of dozen feet away, well out of reach.

It didn’t matter. Jason felt the weight
of the stone in his palm and took the only chance he had. His hand shot forward
in a blur.

 “Wait…” Grieves began, but he
was too late.

As the stone left Jason’s hand,
he
felt
the path it would take. He didn’t need to watch to see the arc
it travelled while Grieves raised the gun. Jason was already sprinting forward,
closing the distance. He heard a smack as the stone connected with the gun, diving
for a specific place on the ground. By the time he reached it, the gun was already
lying there on the concrete. As he landed, his hand closed around the weapon,
and he came out of the roll onto his feet, barrel aimed at Grieves.

“Get out of here, Chaela.” Jason
said. “I’ll deal with him.”

“You don’t understand, Jason. I
can’t run. Not with the implants. They’ll just track me down.”

“She’s right,” Grieves said. If
he was worried about the gun pointed at him, he didn’t show it. “But not for
long.”

Jason felt his finger tighten on
the trigger as Grieves drew
another
gun from inside his jacket. This
time he didn’t bother keeping the barrel pointed at the ground, aiming it
straight at Jason’s chest.

Jason fired.

Or rather, he tried to, but where
he’d expected a gunshot, he heard only the click of the hammer falling on an
empty chamber.
No!
He looked at the gun in his hands. With his perks focused
on the weapon, he realized it felt too light for its size and shape. He looked
at Grieves. “It wasn’t even loaded?”

Anger smoldered in the spider’s
eyes. “Let’s just say I was afraid something like that might happen.” He took a
breath, seeming to calm himself. “Now. I’ll try to ignore the fact you just
tried to kill me. But if you try anything else, I’ll need to return the favor.”

Jason looked at Grieves’s gun
again. No doubt this one was loaded. “You had me at the race. Why let me leave
just to track me down here? Last time I checked, the DIA loved busting retreads
in the open. Great publicity.”

Grieves raised an eyebrow. “So
maybe I’m not here to bust you. But my team will be. Soon. They’re already on
their way.”

“Of course,” Chaela spat the
words. “You’re here to let us go. At gunpoint.”

“For my protection. Your friend Accardi
taught me never to underestimate you guys. Especially when you’re cornered. I’m
lucky she didn’t put a hole in my throat.”

Jason lowered his empty gun, let
it drop to the ground. “She wouldn’t have had to try if you’d warned her too. Why
stick your neck out for us? Why now?”