Rift (45 page)

Spar muttered, “Am I dead, or do I just wish I was?”

“And who is this delightful gentleman?” Brecca said in a sprightly yet menacing manner.

“He insisted on coming, Ministrator,” Dooley squeaked.

She cocked her head and peered more closely at Spar. “He did, did he?” Brecca turned her gaze on Dooley, who reflexively scrambled backward. “And where is the girl?”

Dooley shaped a word with his mouth, but nothing came out. Brecca smiled an awful smile and nodded her encouragement.

“Gone,” Dooley managed to whisper.

“Gone?”
Brecca trumpeted.

“Shhhh,” Dooley said, then flinched at the expression on her face. “You said we had to be quiet.”

She bowed her head. “Well, so I did. Thank you so
much
for reminding me, Dooley.” She turned sweetly to the other two men. “Good staff are the backbone of my organization, as you can see.” She stubbed the cigarette
out into a dish with a downward twist that decimated the butt. “Dooley, kindly take the thin gentleman here into my office. Make sure the outside door is locked.” She turned to Spar. “That’s for your protection. There’s a mad priest out in these hallways who will murder you on sight. In my present mood, I don’t much care if he does.” She smiled perkily. “Off you go.”

Dooley scrambled to his feet and tugged on Spar’s arm until Spar reluctantly followed.

“I’ll be OK, Spar,” Reeve said.

“You about as OK as a fly with the legs torn off, boy,” Spar said on his way into the next room.

When the door clicked shut, Brecca turned to face Reeve. They were obviously in her bedroom. A large canopied bed occupied the center of the room, its covers rumpled.

“Dooley tells me you’re in love with this girl, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Then if you want me to save her, tell me where she is.”

“They drugged us. When we woke up, she was gone.”

She swore. “Damn Gregor to fourteen hells! He got to her first, the slimy, rat-faced pedant!” She began pacing in front of him. “And Mr. Calder here, he just threw his sweetie’s life away, by not telling Brecca all he knew.
Not telling me.”
She swung around to glare at him. “Did you think I was going to dissect her?”

“Tell you what?”

She shook her head, her ashen hair rippling about her shoulders. “No, no, no. You’re
way
beyond that maneuver.
I know
about her. I have her genetic analysis. So, you see, I know more about her than you will
ever
know about her, and your little dumb act is a dead-ass waste of time.”

“I don’t know about her.
She
doesn’t even know who she is. Brecca, tell me. Please.”

Brecca stared at him, her anger deflating and her plump face losing its high color. “Oh shit, oh dear. This is a worse mess than even I could have planned, and that’s saying something.” Then, “Turn around,” she said. When he hesitated, she said with elaborate patience: “I’m going to get dressed, young man.”

He obeyed on the instant.

Behind him, amid rustling of yards of cloth, Brecca said: “Your Loon has been modified, Mr. Calder. The techs ran the analysis well into the night. One of them managed to alert me before Gregor killed them. Now only he and I know the truth. And Loon.”

She forced him to ask, but he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to know. “What is the truth?”

Her voice was muffled as she slipped something over her head: “She isn’t human.”

Reeve turned around to stare at Brecca in consternation.

She was patting her robes into place. “She looks human, that’s the remarkable thing. No creative morphology on the outside. Robust health. But her alimentary track, her lungs, her skin—her
chemistry—
someone has altered her. Rather grandly.” She swiftly wrapped her hair up on her head, securing it with pins, then draped several ropes of necklaces around her neck and clipped on earrings the size of her fists. “Damnedest sequence I’ve ever seen, and hands down the best. Gee.” Here she screwed her mouth into an ironic pout. “I don’t know whether to celebrate or shoot myself.” She charged toward the door. “Let’s go.”

Reeve stood very still. “Not human?”

Brecca sighed hugely. “Oh please, don’t get queasy on me. It’s all a continuum, hon. The genetic overlap between humans and cows is ninety percent, for example.
The genetic distance between you and Loon is probably less than that.”

“That’s supposed to be reassuring?” He found himself wanting to throttle her.

“Her codes are … extraordinary.”

“You don’t know anything for sure!” Reeve blurted. “You call yourself a scientist, and you didn’t even notice when your research lab turned into a torture chamber!” He was in her face, but she hadn’t backed up.

“I’m
so
glad you got that off your chest,” Brecca said in her mock-friendly patter. “Feel better now, do we?”

He felt sick, actually. “Brecca … what
is
she?”

“Let’s decide that after we find out if she’s still alive, what do you say?”

Reeve followed her out of the bedroom, his mind stumbling, but disciplined enough to ask: “Why does Gregor want to hurt her?”

Spar snapped to attention and followed them as Brecca swept through the outer office to the lab corridor. “Because, my dears, when our work succeeds—or someone succeeds in our place—Gregor’s unemployed. Fallen from high priest to just a ginger-haired obsessive with pasty eyes. If he can’t justify the big doomsday religion anymore, we’re left with just the science.
Not
his strong point.”

Hurrying to keep up with Brecca, Reeve said to her, “If we find Loon, help us get out of here. It’s the right thing, Brecca. You know it.”

Her laugh came out as a snort. “Oh, to be so certain about
right
. What about our future on this delightful planet, young man? If she’s got mutations for survival, wouldn’t it be nice to share the information with the human race?”

They were bursting out of the double doors from her wing of the Labs. “You’ve got a blood sample, Brecca. That’s all you need.”

A crowd was gathering in the great atrium.

“I’ve got her genetic road map. I don’t yet know what her journey is. That’s in the whole person; ergo, I need a longitudinal study. She stays here.” She fixed him with beady eyes. “We
all
stay here.”

5

Loon backed up. The priest was very agitated, stepping forward with every step she took backward, his silver eyes stuck into his sockets like chunks of ice. She feared him, but not because of his eyes. It was the needle she feared. If that was how the change began.

“Where is the lab?” the priest asked again.

He’d said the word before:
lab
. He used many words, but never said much.

“Where are you from?”

This she would answer. “Stoneroot Clave.”

He shook his head. “We know Stoneroot Clave. You’re not from there.” His voice was quiet, but his eyes carried his unhappiness.

Though the priest spoke the truth, she would never admit it to him.

“I’ll give you chemicals. Maybe they won’t make you talk, but they could make you sick. I could make all kinds of drug mistakes with you.”

It made her sick already, to think of something trickling through her body, cutting channels, eroding. Her body was all she had. All these years she had followed what her body said. Altered, she would be like this priest—mad, unknowing.

“Outside,” she said, looking at the door.

“Outside?” He frowned. “What’s outside?”

She outwaited him.

Finally he said, “You’re saying it was
this
lab that worked on you?”

“Outside.”

He took her by the elbow and escorted her from the
room onto the long deck that looked down on the floor below.

“Show me,” the priest said. The very large guards were outside, waiting.

She looked around for Spar. Spar who had stood with her all these months with his sword. Spar who was always here. But he was not here now. And Reeve was not. Reeve who said he loved her. They had slept, slept, as she’d screamed and fought. Tears collected heavily around her eyes. She gauged her jump.

“There,” she pointed, arm stretched out down the row of doors. The priest looked that way.

In the next instant, she covered the distance to the low railing and jumped onto it, balancing on its narrow beam.

The priest turned and made a move toward her.

She stepped along the rail, avoiding him, and he froze, holding his hands out to stop the guards from approaching.

Beneath her, so very far down, people stopped to gape up at her. She could barely see them in the dim light, in the nighttime this place made for itself. She wasn’t sure why she had jumped onto the rail. It wasn’t an improvement. The priest could push her off.

“I guess I never find out where you come from then, do I?” Gregor said, placidly enough. “Before you jump, I’d just like to know: Are there more like you?”

When she’d had to confront a claver on the plains or a wolf in the Stoneroots, she’d always known what to do. She could run, she could sling rocks, she could outthink or at least outwait all the enemies she’d ever known—until now. But here in this place of metal walls and floors, she was weak from hunger and her thoughts moved sluggishly.

The priest lunged.

She jumped.

The square pictures hung from the ceiling by cords. She leapt for the nearest one and clung to its sharp
side as it swung wildly. Hoisting herself up by her arms, she clambered onto the top rail. Her swing veered close to the rail, and then away. The movement exhilarated her, like the times she had swung on rope swings so long ago.

The guards were jabbing at her with a long pole. Pulling herself to a standing position, Loon rocked back and forth on her perch until the arc of the swing brought her close enough to the next hanging frame. She leapt onto it. For good measure, she jumped to another frame.

More people stared up from below as the hall filled with Somaformers. The priest was calling to her, but she ignored him, shutting out everything except the decision before her: whether to die or not. In the framed picture below her, a woman’s eyes seemed to look up at Loon. The old woman had an interesting face, with nose and mouth combining into an odd mixture, but in her eyes dwelled the calm regard of someone who had known life and lived well. She wondered if this woman had had a lover, and the thought gave her pause. What was that like, to have a lover take you in his arms and give himself to you, as Dante had loved Isis, as her father had loved her mother, as Reeve had loved the slave girl? She pressed her cheek against the metal chain holding up her perch. She tasted it with her tongue, flooding her mouth with sharp, cold violet flavors. Closing her eyes to savor the tastes, she heard a voice speak her name: “Loon.”

6