The Body Electric - Special Edition (38 page)

“Ella, wake up, please, please, wake up.”
His voice is softer now, almost gone.

And then one last whisper wraps around me.

“I need you.”

I open my eyes.

I expected the first thing I’d see to be Jack, but he’s not beside me. He’s broken a piece off the reverie chair—one of the arms, the one not connected to my cuff, and he’s ramming it into the control panel by the door. I rip the electrodes off my skin and leap up from the chair.

“What’s happening?” I gasp. I clutch my head, momentarily overwhelmed with dizziness.

“I heard a gunshot,” Jack says. “I went across the hall and I saw—” He turns then, and sees me. “Are you okay?”

I wave him aside and stand. “I’m fine. I—that’s never happened before.” When I saw the last spark of life in my mother fade, that was different from this tsunami of pain and regret, this sudden flash of darkness and death.

The sliding door that leads into the reverie chamber creaks as the mechanics try to open it. Jack curses, driving the bit of the chair deep into the electronic tap-lock. I hear the heavy thud of bolts shooting down into the floor, sealing the door closed.

Jack whirls around. “It was a trap. All of this—it was a trap.”

I stumble again, and sit back down on the reverie chair.

“The Prime Administrator was here. She killed Representative Belles,” Jack says. His eyes are wild, panicked. “I saw—I saw the gun in her hand. The bullet hole…”

“He had a son,” is all I can think to say.

“Ella!” I can hear her now, PA Young, calling to us from the other side of the door Jack’s sealed closed. “Open the door, please, dear.”

I hear the echo of Representative Belles’s voice, pleading for me to understand. He was scared. He didn’t want to betray us… but he did. He had to. PA Young forced him to bring us right here, right to the exact place where she had control, and then she killed him. Because he had a son, the last of the family she’d already nearly destroyed.

“I couldn’t wake you,” Jack says. “I couldn’t get you out.” He sounds defeated, as if he’s doomed us all.

I look around the room wildly. The things that were all designed to provide us comfort—the chair, now broken, the walls of sensory screens and soothing lights—it’s all just the trappings of a prison.

He couldn’t wake me, so he locked us in here.

“There’s no other door,” I say, turning to Jack. “That’s the only way in or out.”

Jack’s jaw hardens.

The door echoes with a thud.

I raise my wrist, my fingers sliding across the screen of my cuff, hoping to call for help. But nothing happens.

“I tried that already,” Jack says, nodding at my cuff. “But we got that from Representative Belles.”

“And he got it from Young,” I say.

Jack nods once, strained. “It was all a setup.”

The door shudders. It’s made of solid steel and reinforced with lockdown rods.

Then silence.

Then soft clicks of metal-on-metal. PA Young is attaching something to the steel doors.

Jack whirls around and grabs me by the shoulders, yanking both of us to the corner, as far away from the door as possible. “Ella,” he says, more emotion in that one word than I’ve ever heard before. “Ella, the door won’t hold. She’s going to get in. She’s going to get us.”

His fingers dig into my shoulder, and while it’s painful, I relish the sensation. As long as he’s holding on to me, he’s here, and that’s enough.

“They might kill me.”

“No!” I say. The word rips out of me with a force I didn’t know I have. The idea of Jack, dead, Jack, gone—it fills me up with the same sort of darkness as I felt when I was lost in Representative Belles’s empty shell of a body.

“I’m not important,” Jack says. “They don’t need me. They’ll probably—”

“
No!
” I scream the word, shutting my eyes and shaking my head.

“Listen,” Jack hisses, pulling me closer, his fingers tightening even more on my shoulders. “Listen, Ella. No matter what happens to me,
you have to escape
. You hear me? You have to escape.”

Now I hear soft beeps.

A countdown clock to whatever explosives have been strapped to the door.

“Your father knew,” Jack says. My focus whips back to him. “He knew something was wrong, and they killed him for it. You have to figure it out, Ella. You have to stop them. You are the key.”

“I’m not, I’m nothing, I’m not,” I say, tears burning my eyes.

The world rips open.

The flash of light is so bright that I’m momentarily blinded. All I can do is clutch Jack as we both scream over the sound of the metal wall disintegrating—the solid steel door with bolts in the floor that is supposed to be impenetrable. The metal at the edges glows orange-red.

As the smoke clears, PA Young’s image appears. And behind her—

Androids. Of course, androids. At least these are true robots, without the face of anyone I know or love. But still, she controls them. She controls everything.

“Ella, you are the key,” Jack says urgently, forcing my attention back on him. “Your father knew he was being targeted. He told me before he died; he told me he would hide the information
inside
of you. I didn’t understand that before, but now I do. That’s why I came back to warn you; you’re the key, you’re the key to it all.”

I nod, tears dripping down my nose.

“He hid information for you, I’m sure of it, something only you can find.
Find it.
Whatever happens to me, don’t give up. Ella, I believe in you. I know you can finish what your father started. I—”

The androids move closer, their footsteps heavy on the tiled floor.

Jack wraps his arms around me, pulling me close and whirling me away, protecting me with his body.

For one brief moment, it is only him and me as the world falls apart around us.

His head dips close. “Don’t forget, Ella,” he says in a low voice, only for my ears. And then his mouth comes crashing down against mine, his kiss panic driven and desperate, his arms clutching me against his rock-hard body, supporting me as my own legs turn to jelly. He holds me as if he wants to crush our bodies together, but his grip isn’t strong enough, and silicone-covered metal fingers worm their way between us, and Jack is yanked back, thrown against the floor so violently that his body bounces.

“Really, we don’t have time for this,” PA Young says dispassionately as two androids hold Jack against the ground. I stumble away, my body confused by his sudden absence. Jack bucks against the floor, trying to throw the androids off, but PA Young swoops down.

And then I see what’s in her hand.

A small spray bottle, filled with bright green liquid.

I try to twist away, but she’s too quick. The reverie drug puffs into my eyes. The last thing I see before being enveloped in darkness is Jack’s still body being dragged away.

sixty-eight

My eyes fly open, and I’m awake.

And alone.

In the reverie chamber. Why did they leave me here? How long have I been out?

My first thought is of Jack. I scramble up from the wreckage of the reverie chamber and look frantically around. But he’s gone. And so is PA Young and the androids.

They left me.

But then, why did they drug me? Maybe I’ve only been passed out a few seconds—maybe my inhuman body found a way to bypass the drug.

My mind races. Julie can’t be far away; if I could find her, we could perhaps save Jack. Save him from a megalomaniac who rules the entire civilized world and an army of androids.

Shit.

I creep deliberately over the debris, careful to make no sound. I slink to the doorway, peering outside, but there’s no one there.

The door to the other reverie chamber, the one where Representative Belles was, is open. A light is on.

I see a shadow.

I move forward. All the monitors along the control room show nothing but blackness and static. There is no sound, outside of my thudding heart.

I peer into the other reverie chamber.

The first thing I see is the chair, and the blood. It leaks through a hole in the center of the headrest, a thick, viscous liquid that moves slowly, like syrup, but I know what it is.

A fat bumblebee meanders across my vision. I snatch it from the air, crushing its fuzzy, crunching body between my fingers. I do not have time to hallucinate right now.

“Ella!” a voice gasps, and on the other side of the room, I see Ms. White. We rush to each other, both babbling in frantic relief.

“We have to get out of here,” I say as she glances around wildly, telling me how she escaped PA Young.

“There are guards everywhere. Why are you here?” Ms. White gasps.

I think of what Jack said. “It was a trap.”

Ms. White clutches me harder. “I was trying to get out—they locked me in your mother’s room, hoping you’d return and they could use me against you. Some androids brought a boy about your age into your apartment to lock him up, and I used their distraction to get out. But there’s a whole army of androids blocking the exits. And then I came down here, and I saw… and I thought…” Her voice is choked with unshed sobs as her eyes skim from me to the bloodstained reverie chair.

“We have to get out,” I repeat, only half-listening to her. My mind is racing, trying to figure out an escape plan.

“And Hwa,” Ms. White continues, her eyes distant as she talks about PA Young. “I thought she was my friend. Oh, God, Ella—I used to think… some people contacted me, a few weeks ago, with information about Hwa’s method of ruling… and Ella… she’s a tyrant, she’s nothing like what I thought, and I tried to get out, to get both of us out, but she must have guessed, she must have realized…”

“This isn’t your fault,” I say, grabbing Ms. White’s arm. “It’s mine. I found the Zunzana, the group that’s been fighting PA Young here in Malta. Everything we thought about PA Young and my father’s research… it was all wrong.”

Ms. White grows very still. Then she tilts her head, staring into my eyes. “Your father’s research,” she says. “Do you know… what does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I say. “But PA Young somehow combined Dad’s research in cybernetics and Mom’s research with reveries to make… these things. They’re called cy-clones. Cyborg-clones. Part machine, part person. As strong as an android, but with human intelligence.”

And I’m one
, I think, but do not say.

Ms. White starts pacing.

“I can see how that would work…” she says. “Your father had long been experimenting with bio-engineering and cybernetics. But
—
” She turns to face me. “You said ‘clone.’ To make a clone, you need a person to be cloned. And to make a thinking robot, you need…” She gasps. “They use your mother’s reveries, don’t they? They make a body, then use the reveries to transfer a person’s soul from their human body into the engineered one.”

I nod silently.

“But that means…” Ms. White pales. “The person who is transferred dies, doesn’t she?”

I try to speak, but I can’t—my mouth is full of honey. I smack my lips, trying to eviscerate the sweet taste. I focus on Ms. White, still marching around the room. I
cannot
go crazy, not now, not with so much on the line.

“Akilah…,” I manage to say, barely able to spit out the words. “Mom…”
Me.

Ms. White’s face is pale, her eyes unfocused as she thinks. She hasn’t noticed my struggle to speak. “I suspect that the government’s been able to figure out at least a rudimentary method of creating cy-clones. It makes sense—they’ve figured out an alternative formula for your mother’s reverie drug, and patched together at least some of your father’s lost research. That’s what I could piece together from what I overheard while being held prisoner, at least.”

“They have?” I gasp, shocked.

Ms. White nods absent-mindedly. “So now the government’s figured out a way to copy some of what your father developed. But copies and imitations are never as good as the original version.”

Version.

I blink, and for just that moment—the space between shutting my eyes and opening them again—I’m back in the labs where my father was killed, where my mother died, where I saw three little icy morgue doors, each labeled.

Ella Shepherd, Vers. 1

Ella Shepherd, Vers. 2

Ella Shepherd, Vers. 3

And then my heart slams into my chest with the force of a defibrillator bringing it back to life, and I’m back in the reverie chamber with Ms. White.

“Are you okay?” she asks. She’s stopped pacing. She’s right in front of me, even though less than a second ago she was on the other side of the room.

“Fine,” I say, over the sound of buzzing.

Her mouth moves, but I cannot hear whatever she’s saying.

I can only hear the bees.

“STOP!”
I scream

Silence.

Ms. White stares at me, worry etched into each line of her face.

“Are you okay?” she asks again.

“No,” I whisper.

I’m going mad, I’m going mad,

I’m