The Change (Unbounded) (4 page)

I had noticed, but I thought it was because of the biking and boating with Tom and Justine. Dancing into the early morning after a long day at work. A good diet.

“We keep an eye on all potential Unbounded in our blood lines,” Ava continued in her sedate voice. “Generally, that means those closely enough related. But unlike some who regrow lost fingers or suddenly stop limping, there was nothing to make your Change noticeable. The accident was unfortunate, but at least it revealed that you have the active gene. If we’d realized before, we would have contacted you and maybe the accident never would have happened.”

“Why is it so important that you find Unbounded? What do you get out of it?” There had to be a motive I wasn’t seeing, something she wanted from me. I was certain she hadn’t been blowing off steam at the hospital when she’d told Dimitri that I must cooperate.

Her eyes widened, whether in surprise or offense, I couldn’t tell. “We have a need for every Unbounded, but our primary goal is to teach them what they are. They have a right to the protection we can offer. The right not to be studied in a lab because of their abilities.” She leaned back in the chair behind the desk, now completely relaxed, not seeming to mind that on my feet I towered over her. “Can you imagine what happens when a new Unbounded suddenly regrows a missing hand? When they come back to life from an accident like yours? Or begin to be noticeably younger than their aging spouse? We want to make transition as easy as possible. Usually we must fake their deaths and obtain new identities.”

“What about their families?”

Her expression softened as though she knew I was thinking of my parents and my brothers. My grandmother. “We have a different view of family than mortals. We value them every bit as much, but we recognize that sometimes the best thing we can do for them is to let go.”

I could not imagine a world where I would ever walk away from my family, despite some of the problems we’d had. “I can’t do that. I won’t.” My eyes felt drawn to the cell phone on the desk, but I didn’t give in to the urge to look at it. A plan formed in my mind.

She sighed. “You are much like me in that. Unfortunately, even if you could convince everyone that you hadn’t been burned so badly and your arm hadn’t been amputated, the Jane Doe we put in your place at the hospital took a turn for the worse yesterday and died. I’m sorry, but there’s no going back as yourself.”

The fact left me numb. “Jane Doe?”

“An unidentified victim of a forest fire. Believe me, we had to scramble to find someone who was a close enough match.”

“My family thinks I’m dead?” The words hurt.

She nodded.

It was all wrong—both that a stranger would be buried as me and that moving her might have hastened her death. “What about her family?”

“The clinic we supposedly transferred you to will officially record that she died there and will file her records in case her family is ever found. Don’t feel bad, Erin. There was no way she’d survive in any case. For the two days she was you, she had the absolute best care. After your funeral, we’ll make sure her body is returned to its proper place.”

I clenched and unclenched my fists at my sides. “And Tom? I suppose he thinks I’m dead, too? I have to see him.”

“I’m sorry, but the one thing you can’t do is contact Tom or your family right now.”

“Why?” I demanded. “Because it would cause problems for you? That’s the real issue here, isn’t it? All that forging of documents and transfers.”

She stood abruptly, finally meeting my anger with her own. “You aren’t getting the whole picture. You have a destiny, Erin. Inside you is a power far greater than you can even begin to comprehend. It’s a priceless gift, or a great curse—make of it what you will.”

Before either of us could speak again, there was a rap on the door and a brief pause before it flung open to reveal Dimitri. For a moment, I felt a silly rush of gratitude toward the broad man who’d given me the IV bags and comforted me in the ambulance.

I fought the feeling. I wasn’t grateful. He was a part of why I was here. If Ava was telling the truth, they hadn’t saved my life at all, but were the reason my family was mourning my death.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he said to Ava. Though he didn’t acknowledge me, his dark eyes rested briefly on my face, the act as solid as any greeting. “Stella has identified signs of Emporium presence at the burn unit.”

Ava’s face went rigid. “Does she suspect pursuit?”

“We’re not sure. I’ve put security on alert, but we need to do an on-site check.”

Ava opened the desk and withdrew a handgun. My stomach twisted when I saw how casually she checked the chamber before shoving in a magazine. Whoever these folks were, they meant business.

She walked past me, as graceful as ever. “Come. You’ll wait with the others.”

“Who’s the Emporium?” I reached out to the desk, presumably to steady myself, but I made sure it was near the black cell phone. My heart pounded, but I didn’t allow my mind to dwell on even the shape of the phone touching my fingers. I was too afraid my intentions would show in my expression.

“The Emporium is who you really need to be afraid of, Erin.” Ava’s gravestone eyes locked onto mine with an intensity I couldn’t escape. “If they’ve been to the burn unit, make no mistake—they are looking for you. If they find you, you’ll wish you really had died in that accident.”

It was no answer, but all I was going to get from her. I followed her to the door, the tiny cell phone a slight bulge in the narrow pocket of my black pants.

“U
NBOUNDED AGE AT THE AVERAGE
rate of two biological years for every hundred years,” Stella explained.

I sat on a chair near her in front of the computer screens. Dimitri and Ava had disappeared a half hour ago, but they’d left Cort and Stella with orders to answer my questions. More likely, they were supposed to keep an eye on me. I had no idea how long I’d be kept in the warehouse, but I was definitely a prisoner. For now, I would play along because I wanted to discover everything I could about what had happened to me.

Or what I’d supposedly become.

“Two years for every hundred?” I repeated. “Impossible.”

On the chair next to me, Cort cleared his throat as he always seemed to do before speaking. “Nevertheless, it’s true. In about two thousand years, you’ll die from old age.”

“Yippee for me. What’s the drawback?”

“You’ll watch everyone you ever loved die.” This from Stella, uttered with a gravity too real to be faked.

My levity vanished, leaving me feeling like an idiot. “I see.”

Without my family, the appeal of near immortality lessened considerably. Sure, I’d disappointed my father by dropping out of law school to work a dead-end job, and my mother with my obsession for old jeans and for failing to provide her with grandchildren, but in the end none of that was important. They still loved me. Yes, my much older brother, Chris, was busy with his family, and my younger brother, Jace, was off on his own now, and neither of them needed me on a daily basis. But they were still my brothers, a permanent part of me. I needed them.

And Tom. What would it be like to live without him? Of course there was always the chance he wouldn’t want me when he discovered what I was. I couldn’t believe that, though. Tom was solid, and he was mine. It was always me who wasn’t quite sure.

I rubbed my finger over the place on my thumb where I’d once had the scar from opening the tuna can. It felt absurd to be upset that it was gone, but it had been with me for so long, a part of who I was. Who I’d been.

Cort cleared his throat and scooted closer to me. His leg touched mine in a way that seemed accidental but I knew wasn’t. This was the first human contact I’d had in days, and the sensation startled me. It also comforted me, and I let several long seconds pass before I moved away.

“One of the first things you might have noticed,” he said, “is that you don’t feel hunger anymore. Your body will absorb sustenance from the world around you. Like you did with my curequick in the coffin.”

So much for thinking my lack of appetite these past months was because I was too busy with Tom and Justine to care about food. “Obnoxious name,” I said. “Curequick.”

He laughed. “You name it then.”

“Maybe I will. So are you saying we don’t eat?”

“Oh, we eat.” Cort looked amused. “When we do, our bodies absorb less around us. But we don’t
need
to eat. Of course, that doesn’t stop some of us from overeating anyway.”

“He’s talking about Laurence,” Stella said, glancing at me before typing something on her keyboard. Her woven metal crown lay discarded on the desk, and I could see tiny metal probes jutting wickedly from nearly the entire inner circumference. Definitely not a sound device. Maybe it recorded brain waves.

I glanced at what she’d written but it was in some kind of computer code and didn’t mean anything to me. “Who’s Laurence?”

“Laurence is one of us—the newest besides you.” She looked around the warehouse. “Most of these crates are for his paper business.”

“He hates that being Unbounded messes up his eating urges,” Cort added. “So he pretends it doesn’t. On the bright side, he’s an excellent cook.”

“Ah, an overweight stepbrother,” I said. “But still family.”

Cort nodded. “Something like that.”

“Maybe he’s happy the way he is.” I’d always been a sucker for the underdog. Maybe I felt an affinity with them because I was there so often myself.

Stella smiled and the effect was powerful. Even with minimal makeup, every feature was perfect, from her wide brown eyes and high cheek bones to her sculptured eyebrows and smooth golden skin. She had good genes, or maybe an excellent plastic surgeon. “Laurence is happy. Besides, it’s not as if the weight is physically unhealthy for him, though the extra pounds would make him vulnerable in an attack.”

“Attack?”

“From the Emporium.”

“Ava was talking about them earlier. Sounds like some kind of retail conglomerate.”

She shook her head. “They own a slew of retail businesses, to be sure, but they’re a group of Unbounded like us, except they have a completely different agenda.”

“They’re bad guys.” Cort leaned forward, resting his elbows on the armrests of his chair and rubbing his hands together as if anticipating his tale. “Basically there are two types of Unbounded—our people and the Emporium. We allow regular humans—mortals—to live their lives as they choose, interfering only to make their lives better. Almost every medical and technological advance since the Renaissance can be traced to our Unbounded. On the other hand, the Emporium doesn’t share what it learns. Their people use medicine and technology to gain money and power. They meddle constantly in politics and aren’t above making certain people disappear—permanently. Their stated goal is to create a utopia for all humans, mortal and Unbounded.”

“Utopia doesn’t sound bad,” I ventured.

Stella snorted and even that was attractive in her. “They can succeed only by severely limiting freedom, and that is never justifiable.”

“Yet Emporium Unbounded would say they protect more people than we do.” Cort pierced me with his blue eyes, as if challenging me to make a judgment call.

“They want to set themselves up as gods,” Stella retorted.

Cort shrugged. “You have to admit that living so long does make us seem almost like deity. People have worshipped far worse.”

“The Emporium will do anything to control the world,” Stella said, ignoring Cort’s last comment, “and they almost succeeded with the Greeks and Romans. Basically our job is to block their politics where we can and give the world technology and advances so they can better protect themselves.”

I took my time to digest this information. The idea of two secret groups battling under the uncomprehending noses of ordinary mortals seemed a bit farfetched—unless I considered it in the light of my miraculous recovery. “What’s your group called?”

“Renegades,” Cort said. “A name the Emporium gave us. Meant to be derogatory, of course, but it sort of stuck. We like it.”

“I see.” For me, the title Renegades said a great deal about their ideology. I’d never been considered a renegade until I was forced to quit law school, and even that had been only a matter of self-preservation. Regrouping. Escaping the stares and embarrassment.

For a while no one spoke. Stella stared at her computer where the figure of a gymnast now flipped gracefully from side to side. Cort studied me instead of Stella, which I found unnerving. He was probably immune to her beauty by long association.

“Stella, how old are you?” I asked, more to distract Cort than from curiosity.

Her eyes left the computer and found mine, a tiny smile on her lips. “I discovered I was Unbounded earlier than most. I was twenty-eight. That was about two hundred years ago.”

I gaped but felt none of the indignation I’d experienced when Ava shared her story. Perhaps because I’d actually begun accepting this whole idea of immortality. In my mind, Stella looked barely twenty-eight, though at the two for one hundred rate, her body would now be approaching thirty-two.