Continuance (44 page)

A shorter girl with raven hair and
cream-colored skin looked on, running a hand over knee-high grass as she craned
her neck. Looking oddly out of place, the final member of the group was older
than the rest. Slightly overweight, with a ponytail and a long coat, he stood
to one side keying something on the AP in his hands.

Stuart came to a stop beside her.
“I’ll be damned.”

“Still think I’m punishing you?” Raising
her voice, Chaela shouted across the clearing. “I told you they were
magnificent!”

Her voice echoed from the trees,
and the meadow burst to life. The orangey-brown leaves in the surrounding
oyamels spilled into the air in a blizzard of brilliant orange and black. Butterflies
– monarchs numbering in the millions. Even having been to this sanctuary before,
the sight still took her breath away. There were so many in the air she lost
sight of the group on the far side. Grabbing Stuart by the arm, she strode into
midst of them, smiling as they lighted on her body, only to flutter away again.
Soon, she saw the others again, their forms materializing from the swirls and
eddies of tiny wings. She ran.

Meeting him amid the amber grass
of the meadow, Jason’s embrace blanketed her in joy.

“You did tell me,” he murmured in
her ear. I thought I believed you, but this is amazing.” He pulled back but
didn’t let go, smiling in wonder at the spectacle around them.

“It is,” she said, not taking her
eyes off his – the same as before, kind as springtime and green as emeralds. Everything
about him was just as it had been.

A few feet away, Stuart had
Ivory’s hands in his own, staring like a lovesick schoolboy. The two spoke in
hushed voices, barely audible above the tiny wing beats of the butterflies.

“Mom.”

Chaela turned, overwhelmed to
find her daughter’s dazzling smile waiting. “Mandy,” she breathed. Releasing Jason,
she crushed her in a hug, burying her face against her shoulder. Her long blond
hair smelled of citrus and cherry blossoms.

And she was so beautiful. A perfect
vision of the daughter she remembered from the hospital – her Mandy as a young woman.
But the wisdom in her eyes still spoke of Amanda Fairchild, the professor. In
some ways, looking at this woman who’d taught her so much, who’d had the
foresight to scan her own biorecord as the spiders closed in, Chaela felt more
like the daughter than the mother. “I tried to get you out of there, that day. I’m
sorry.”

“You did get me out, Mom. All of
us. Without you, we wouldn’t be here.”

Jason shook his head. “Still hard
to believe we really are. For me, it’s only been a few days since I watched you
disappear into that shaft. I can’t imagine how hard the last year must have
been for you.”

“So you remember?” Chaela asked. “That
day in the lab? How?” She’d been afraid they’d have to catch up all over again,
assumed he would have been continued from his original Arkive record.

“Chariot,” he said. “It ran
through the imaging sequence while I was on the platform with Neal. It scanned
us both. I think our daughter undersold it to the DIA.”

“Of course I did,” Mandy said. “I
told you the prototype worked flawlessly from the beginning.”

“Agent Grieves found the data and
got it into Arkive,” Jason said. “Then he adjusted the security so it could be…selectively
downloaded by Alex, here.”

“You mean hacked,” the man with
the ponytail said. “Still wasn’t easy, but I guess he had to make it look
good.”

“You’re just getting rusty, old man,”
Jason said.

Alex raised an eyebrow. “Some of
us don’t have the luxury of slipping into a fresh body like changing underwear.

Chaela’s heart swelled as she saw
the group gathered around her. At Stuart and Ivory, at Mandy, at Jason. Even
the man Alex, who’d helped make this moment real.

“Are you okay?” Jason asked.

She realized she was crying.
Brushing her cheek with the back of a hand, she nodded. “You could have even
gotten your old face again. Patrick’s face. Are you disappointed to get this
one back?”

Jason smiled at her, shaking his
head. “No. In some ways I lived as much during those two years as Jason as I
did the forty-five as Patrick. I think Darren understood that. Patrick’s only a
fragment of my life now. A big one, yes, but Jason is the whole. He’s who I am
now.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, caressing her cheek with a
thumb.

“So, yay.” Alex frowned at his
AP. “Happy ending. Can we head back down now?” He flicked a finger at the
screen in frustration. “I’m ready to get back to an altitude with some decent bandwidth.
My AP’s crawling up here.”

Jason turned to her, the unspoken
question on his face. She looked around as sunlight shown down on the meadow,
illuminating dandelion seeds in the breeze. They floated like tiny embers among
the butterflies in a kind of aerial ballet, ever chaotic, ever changing.

Jason saw the answer in her eyes.
“I think we’ll stay a while,” he said. “After all, we’ve got time.”

…to
be continued.