Vitro (16 page)

They were going to shoot Jim. Her brain churned with words and images, things she’d never seen but were in her mind anyway: guns have bullets and bullets kill. Kill means dead—they will make Jim dead.

Dead.
Dead.
Dead.
This was intolerable.
Her blood roared in her veins. She trembled with anger,

with fury at the ones who would make her Jim dead, who would dare hurt him.
This time, she let her body do all the thinking.
And she became powerful.
She moved with speed and grace she’d never felt before. Heady with her own strength, she marveled at how easy it was to make them fall, to drop them one by one.
Chop.
Kick.
Duck.
Sprint.
Her brain picked out target points: this chin, that stomach, this chest. Her body followed through with deadly precision. She melted from one attack to the next, flowing across the grass, her muscles hardening into steel at the right moments, then relaxing so she could spin away and pursue the next target.
Eliminate the threat.
And there were so many threats.
She kept an eye on Jim. He and Sophie were running away—good. Go, she thought. Get away.
She’d identified the leader: the woman in white. Much like the girl Mary on the beach, this one gave orders. She was the most important threat, and Lux had to eliminate her.
She sprinted across the grass, leaped for the woman’s throat.
But then the woman was gone. Lux hit the ground hard and rolled, landing in a crouch. The woman was quick; she had stepped aside just in time to avoid having her throat punched. Lux tightened her fist and tensed, but before she could spring again, she felt a sharp jab of pain in her neck: Moira Crue and her needle.
Immediately a warm sensation spread up her neck and enveloped her skull. She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts, but her vision blurred and darkened. She lurched forward blindly, reaching for the woman in white, but she was helpless and weak. Her strength melted away, abandoning her; she landed in a crumple on the grass, tried to crawl, couldn’t find the strength.
As she lay there, fading from the world, one last thought managed to surface and swirl across her mind before she lost her grip on consciousness:
Jim said don’t fight them.
But I fought them anyway.
0111011101101000011000010111010000001101000010 10 Drowning water all around no air cannot breathe Jim where are you help me please oh what what what am I? What is happening to me please stop stop stop! Falling darkness must protect must protect011101110110I must protect1000011000010 111010000100000I must01100001011011010010000001001 001 . . .
When she woke, she was lying on her back, on something soft, and she was soaked with sweat. She jerked upward, only to find her hands and feet were stuck.
Groggily, she blinked away the static in her eyes and looked around. She was inside. In one of the rooms. The light above her hummed; it was too bright, scalding her.
She groaned, her voice sludge in her throat.
Her head was a riot of numbers and words, nothing making sense, all scrambled up, all jumbled out of order. And it hurt. Her skull throbbed, her eyes throbbed, she felt a swirling in her stomach that kept surging into her throat.
“Lux,” said a voice.
Moira Crue’s face appeared, blurry and out of focus.
“It’s okay, Lux. You’re safe.”
“Jmmm.”
“He’s okay. You did your job. You protected him.”
“Moira . . .” A different voice. Lux rolled her head to see who it was: another woman with dark hair, dark eyes, white coat.
“Her primary concern is protecting her imprintee,” Moira said. “She needs to know he is safe or she’ll go into shock. I’ve seen it happen before, when we were testing Clive.”
“She looks like she’s going to throw up.”
“It’s a combination of stress, sedatives, and overstimulation. She’s been exposed to too much too soon. They normally need several days just to acclimate to their own bodies. Lux has been forced into a maelstrom of completely new experiences and sensations. Remember, everything she is seeing and hearing, she’s seeing and hearing for the very first time, with nothing but her chip’s limited data to interpret for her. If she’d been awoken properly, she’d have plenty of time and therapy to help her along. As it is, she’s had to largely fend for herself.”
“If Strauss catches that pilot and—”
“Sh. You’ll spark another anxiety attack in her. If they catch Jim—the pilot—and . . . if that happens, we’ll have only two choices. Put her in an induced coma until we can find a way to reverse the imprinting, or . . .”
Silence fell. They both stared down at her.
Then Moira Crue said, “Let her sleep. She’ll fade in and out the next few hours. It’s best we give her time to process.”
Their faces disappeared, and for a long time, the room was silent.
Lux didn’t like being alone. To occupy herself, she replayed Moira Crue’s words in her mind, searching for answers, for understanding. There was so much, so many words that slipped through her fingers and evaporated before she knew their meaning. It was too much, all too much. She floated on a dreamy wave of warmth, her muscles limp, her mind sluggish. Eventually, she gave up on thinking and shut her eyes, losing herself in darkness.

They left the excavator on the side of the road. Head spinning and her body protesting every step, she trudged along as Nicholas led them to the motorboat in the narrow inlet on the northwest bend of the island. The tide was low now, and they had to half drag the boat into the water; luckily it was a small outboard and floated easily in the shallows.

Nicholas steered recklessly across the channel and ran the boat aground without slowing, and the impact sent Sophie sprawling on the bottom of the boat.

“Sorry,” he muttered as he helped Sophie out. She gritted her teeth as a wave of pain washed through her.
“We could take off and let them think we’re gone,” she said, “then we can sneak back and get Lux.”
Jim shook his head as he climbed out of the boat. “Too dangerous.”
She started to protest, but bit her tongue. What right did she have to ask Jim to risk his life anymore for her sake, or even Lux’s? He had nothing to do with any of this. He looked as terrible as she felt, and she realized she had little idea what he’d been through in the past twenty-four hours.
“Come on,” he said. “The plane’s that way.”
“What happened to you?” she asked. “How did you end up with Lux?”
“Yes,” said Nicholas, slinging his backpack on. “How did you?”
“Long story.” He began telling them about how he went looking for her and found Lux, as they followed him down the beach. The sky ahead of them blazed scarlet, but the sun had already fallen beneath the horizon and the light it left behind was quickly fading. Behind them, a few stars glimmered, flecks of white against a deep blue wash. The temperature had dropped to a comfortable, balmy degree that took Sophie back ten years, to the nights when she and her parents would camp on the beaches and build little fires out of driftwood.
“Why does she listen to me?” Jim asked when his story had concluded with him losing Lux and then launching his only partially successful rescue plan. “She follows me like a puppy.”
“It’s how she’s programmed,” said Nicholas.
“What—like a robot?”
Nicholas gave a short laugh. “What an idiotic thing to say.”
Jim bristled and shoved his hands in his pockets, and Sophie said, “She’s as human as you or me, or at least she was, before Corpus got to her. They put a chip in her brain when she was still a developing fetus, and it makes her imprint on the first person she sees. She’d been sleeping for seventeen years before you woke her up.”
Jim nodded, his face pale. “I didn’t know if I could believe her when she said she was just a few hours old. So she’s like a clone or something?”
“Can you believe this guy?” Nicholas asked, pointing at Jim with his thumb and giving Sophie an eye roll. “Clones! Really!”
“Shut up, Nicholas,” Sophie sighed. “According to my mom, no. She’s my natural twin, donated to the project, I guess you could say, by my parents. I think that’s where the trouble between them began—with Lux. Anyway, they were going to wake her up, let her imprint on that Russian guy, some investor named Andreyev. But I guess I got in the way. Well, me and Nicholas.”
“Nicholas?”
Sophie told him how Nicholas had found her unconscious and tried to disguise her as one of the sleeping Vitros the scientists apparently kept somewhere in the building. “I promised I’d help him escape. It was my mom who did this to him, after all. It’s the least I can do.”
Nicholas smiled at her.
“Doesn’t make him your problem,” said Jim grumpily.
“Will you two just be nice?” she asked, exasperated. The last thing she wanted to deal with right now was their competing egos. Jim and Nicholas exchanged hostile looks, and then Jim took her arm and whispered that he wanted a private word.
“Why? What about?”
He glanced meaningfully at Nicholas, and Sophie groaned. “Fine. Whatever. Look, Nicholas, just give us a sec, will you?”
“Yeah. Sure.” He shrugged, but she noticed that his eyes followed her as Jim led her aside.
“Jim, what’s wrong? Can’t we go? They’ll be here soon!”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Nicholas? Why?”
“I think he’s the one who sabotaged my plane.”
“What? Why would he do that?”
“It’s something Mary said when she was chasing me and Lux. Something about keeping me put, and she implied Nicholas had something to do with the nails.”
“Duh! He didn’t want you taking off without him! And understandably so!”
Jim shook his head. “You’re not getting it! If he put down the nails before we landed, that means he wanted me—well, you, really—stuck here from the beginning. See?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. . . . I mean, you don’t know it was him who sabotaged the plane. Maybe he just meant to keep you here after you’d landed. Why would he sabotage his chance of escape?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t trust him.”
“Well.” She was getting angrier with him by the moment. First he didn’t want to go back for Lux, and now he wanted to leave Nicholas behind too? “Why don’t we ask him, then?”
“Ask him?”
“If it was him who sabotaged the plane.”
“As if he’d admit to it!”
She looked at Nicholas. He was scuffing the sand with his shoe and watching them, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t look dangerous or untrustworthy. He looked . . . lost. Alone. Desperate.
“Just . . .” Jim stopped, ruffled his hair, started over. “Come with me. Just you.”
“Jim! I have to help them!”
“And you can help them, I promise! But after we leave this place.”
She ran her teeth over her lower lip as she stared at him, his eyes wild and imploring, then nodded slowly, swayed by his intensity.
He looked relieved. “Thank you. You tell him. I’ll get the plane ready.”
When she walked back to Nicholas and told him, her eyes downcast, that she and Jim were going without him, he went very still and his eyes flickered to Jim. “Oh?” he said simply, his hand tightening on his backpack.
“I’m sorry. I am. But I’ll come back soon, I swear, with help.”
“And who will help us?” he asked. “Who will care?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I’ll find someone.”
He shook his head and lowered his backpack to the ground, looking for all the world like a little boy who’s was promised a trip to Disney World and then told the trip was canceled. Her heart ached. She didn’t think he was the kind

of person Jim thought he was. Even if his friends had roughed Jim up, that didn’t mean it was Nicholas’s fault. He hadn’t been there. Whatever Mary’s problem was—she’s a psychopath, after all—they couldn’t blame Nicholas for it.

“Don’t go,” said Nicholas suddenly. He grabbed her hand. “Stay with me. We’ll take the chopper. You and me and Lux. We’ll go back and get her and fly out of here.”

“Nicholas . . .” She watched Jim, who was prepping the plane for takeoff.
“Sophie, please.” He shifted so that he interrupted her view of Jim, his eyes wide and his brows drawn together. “Please help me. I need you. All these years, it was you who kept me going. It was the thought of you, out there, that made me believe escape was possible. That another life was possible. You came all this way to what? Just leave? Just walk out on us?”
She wanted to yell in frustration. Decisions warred one another in her mind, the voices of Jim and Nicholas and Moira all clashing together, pulling her in different directions, until she felt she would snap into three separate pieces.
“I . . .”
“Sophie!” Jim called. He was wading ashore, the spray of the surf drenching him and plastering his hair to his forehead. “We’re ready!”
She turned to Nicholas, biting her lip. “I have to . . . I just . . .”
She turned and ran, clutching her arm painfully, toward Jim. A wave of dizziness swept over her and she nearly fell headfirst into the sand, but he caught her and steadied her.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Plane’s waiting.”
The Cessna bobbed on the surf, tethered by a long cord to a nearly horizontal palm. The beach bowed inward, creating a small, shallow bay; Sophie could see bright yellow and blue schools of fish darting in complex patterns over the white sand, and further out, a cluster of pink and white coral formed a kind of underwater city, bristling with anemones and long, stringy seaweed. The water cast pale, undulating reflections on the trunks of the palms and across her and Jim’s skin, giving the impression that they too were underwater.
“We’ll have to swim out,” he said apologetically. “I checked her over, ran the engines. She should fly, but there’s no guarantee.”
“Right.”
He looked at her sharply, his amber eyes filled with concern. “You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah? Because you lost a lot of blood.”
“I’m okay!”
“Geez. All right.” He backed away.
Sophie felt bad for snapping at him after all the trouble he’d gone to in helping her, but her thoughts were racing and she was having difficulty focusing on what he was saying.
“Sophie, come on!” He’d gone several steps ahead, but she remained fixed in one place, her feet sinking into the sand.
Slowly, she shook her head. “You go. I’m going back.”
“What?” He gripped his hair, a gesture she was beginning to understand was his token expression of exasperation. “But—no! I can’t let you! It’s too dangerous.”
“Since when do you let me do anything, Jim Julien?” she replied hotly. “Lux is my sister and Dr. Crue is my mom. If I run away now when they need me the most—what does that say about me?”
“If this is about trying to fix the mess your mom made—”
“Yes, it is about that! But it’s also about doing what is right! It’s about family, Jim.” She forced herself to relax a little, and unclenched her fists. “I know you don’t want to get involved here, and I don’t want you to. Go home, Jim. Send someone to help. But I can’t do that. I can’t walk away. Because when you love someone, that’s what you do—you get involved. You get so involved that their pain becomes your pain. You get involved to the point where there’s no getting uninvolved because that’s what love is, and that’s what family is. Don’t you get that? Can’t you understand it? The Jim I knew ten years ago would have understood!”
He stared at her for a moment, his form a dark silhouette against the wisps of pale pink light on the far horizon. “Don’t tell me about getting involved,” he said darkly. “I know all about getting involved. Getting involved means getting hurt, and I don’t want you to get hurt, Sophie. You mean . . . you mean a lot to me, and God knows I can count the number of people I care about on one hand, so how can I let you go back?”
“I told you I would pay you to bring me here,” she said, her tone flat. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can, I swear. I’m good for it. But I no longer require your services.”
“That’s all this is?” he asked, spreading his hands. “A service? A job? I’m just the pilot to you? A nameless cab driver that you can shut the door on and forget ever existed? Are you telling me that I mean nothing to you, after all these years?”
“Jim, I didn’t mean—”
“Look, I did get involved, Sophie, the moment I decided to go back for you. I risked my neck to save yours and now you just want to go throw all of that away. Well, fine. If I’m just the guy you paid for a service, if that’s all I am—then fine. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Jim!”
“Go on. Go back. Try to save your sister and your mom and get yourself shot or whatever. I don’t care. I’m just the pilot, and you’re just another client.”
“I didn’t—” She groaned in frustration; she didn’t want him to be angry at her. She didn’t want to part like this. He had risked his life for hers and she felt like an ungrateful jerk for blowing him off, but she realized she couldn’t have it both ways—she couldn’t have Jim and save her family. She’d have to just let him think she didn’t care, or he’d never let her go. “You’re right,” she whispered. “That’s all this is. Sure, we had fun a long time ago, but now . . . I paid you to do your job, no more than that, and now I—I’m done with you. Go home and don’t try to stop me.”
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
Nicholas came running up then, and he slipped an arm around Sophie. “Everything okay? I heard you two shouting.”
“We’re fine!” Jim and Sophie snapped in unison.
“Is this about him?” Jim asked, pointing at Nicholas.
“Hey, buddy,” said Nicholas, “if you’ve got a problem with me—”
“Maybe I do! It was you who put the nails down on the runway, wasn’t it?”
“Jim—” Sophie started, but he ignored her and stepped toward Nicholas, who took a step back.
“What’s your game, man?” Jim asked, spreading his arms. “What do you really want with her?”
“Hey. Come on. I don’t want trouble.” Nicholas brushed his hair behind his ears and swallowed, his eyes darting about nervously.
“Did you do it? Answer me straight! Did you sabotage my plane?”
“Jim, stop!” Sophie yelled. “Leave him alone! This isn’t about him! I made my decision, now just go!”
He turned, his wet hair flinging droplets of water, and for a moment they glared at each other. Then the fight went out of him and his shoulders dropped. “Fine. Whatever. Goodbye, Sophie.”
He turned and walked toward the surf. Sophie stared after him, the anger melting from her eyes as she realized their fight had left a hollow ache in her chest. She didn’t want him to go. She needed him, more than she’d realized. But she also couldn’t let him get hurt, and she knew that letting him go was the right thing to do. She looked away, forcing herself to stay strong and not beg him to turn around. When she did, she caught Nicholas staring at her, his eyes hard.
“Hey,” said Nicholas, calling to Jim. “Wait up.” He dropped to his knees, zipped open his backpack, and fiddled with its contents. Then he ran down the beach, making Jim flinch when he drew close. “Easy. I just—here. Take this. It’s mostly food and stuff, but there are some documents that might help you convince someone out there that this place is real. Information on the project, Corpus, you know.” He shrugged. “Just take it.”
Jim glanced at Sophie, who nodded, and he grabbed the backpack without a word, then he turned and stalked away. Sophie realized she was shaking, and drew a deep breath to calm herself. She watched as he swam out to the plane, then turned and headed back to the boat with Nicholas, her arm throbbing.
The outboard whined as she and Nicholas sped across the channel. Her face burned with shame for debasing Jim the way she had, but she didn’t know of any other way to convince him to go on without her. It’s not like we’re friends anymore, she thought. It’s like I said. That was a long time ago. We’ve both changed. But it didn’t feel that way. She felt as if the ten years they’d been separated had never happened. Sure, at first she’d felt awkward, unsure what to make of this nearly adult version of her old Jim, but that had quickly passed. His friendship was so easy and natural, and gave her a warmth under her skin that she suspected, with some degree of surprise and wonder, went even beyond mere friendship. She did care about Jim— perhaps more deeply than she’d even realized. She wanted to tell him that. She wanted to rearrange reality, make it so that Skin Island and Lux and Nicholas and all of this had never happened, so that she could rediscover Jim properly, focusing all her attention on him and who he had become, somehow making up for the years they had lost.
But now she’d ruined the relationship they had, and likely all potential they’d had of deepening it.
Just let him go, she told herself. You didn’t come here for him. She had to help Nicholas and Lux, and maybe even her mother, if she could.
When Nicholas slid the boat onto the sand and helped her out, Jim was beginning to start up the plane. She could hear the engine cough and then growl to life, even over the surf. The prop begin to spin, faster and faster until it was a blur. She stood on the beach and watched as the lights on the tail and the wingtips blinked on, red and white, and then the plane turned and began taxiing across the water like a jet ski. Then it lifted in a white spray of water and climbed into the sky. She felt a sense of relief; there had been a possibility it wouldn’t fly after their rough landing.
“Finally.” Nicholas’s voice rose above the surf, and she turned to see him rolling his shoulders as if he’d just finished running a race.
“What?”
“I mean that idiot of a pilot is finally out of the way. God, he was grating on my nerves.”
She frowned. “Out of the way? Out of whose way?”
A change swept across Nicholas’s features, a change so uncannily physical that she blinked to see if her eyes were being tricked. All of the imploring, the desperation, the pitifulness drained away like a mask of smoke and in its place spread a look so smug and crafty that he didn’t even look like the same person he’d been ten seconds earlier. A smile, thin and leonine, squirmed across his lips as if drawn with a fine point pen.
“On Skin Island,” said Nicholas, “there is only one way. And it’s mine.”
“What?”
“I almost let him go, you know. I almost did. I could have let him soar off into the blue, and I would have too, if he hadn’t . . . ergh.” He grimaced, stretching his lips outward and down, into an expression that would have been comical if not for the way it made Sophie’s heartbeat accelerate with apprehension. “He just had to go and pick a fight, didn’t he? Well. He who laughs last. Am I right?”
“What are you talking about?” What had happened to him? Who was this strange new Nicholas with these cold eyes and haughty tone? She realized she already knew, and that perhaps she’d known all along, and goose bumps marched up her arms. “Nicholas—”
“Watch. Here it comes.”
Something in his voice made a chill slither down Sophie’s spine. She opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but her throat clogged with dread. She turned around and found the Cessna, no more than a rising shadow in the sky. Jim was leaving, he was safe—wasn’t he? Why, then, did Nicholas’s words strike her heart like a hammer driving in a nail, sending a jolt of apprehension through her?
“Nicholas,” she whispered. “What do you mean?”
He pointed at the plane, his index finger extended and thumb vertical in the shape of a gun. He shut one eye, as if aiming at the Cessna, and then clicked his tongue and lowered his thumb.
Jim’s plane burst into a ball of flame, lighting the sky like a thousand fireworks. Flaming debris shot in every direction, fireballs trailing sparks to land, hissing in the ocean. Like a horrible burning flower the explosion continued to blossom, getting bigger and brighter, casting red light over the palms and the water, the flames reflecting on the undulating surface of the ocean.
Sophie heard a violent scream and realized it came from her own throat. She was on her knees, her hands digging into the sand. “NO!”
Nicholas stood over her, his hands still in his pockets, his eyes glinting orange with the explosion as if the fire burned inside him. And he laughed, a low chuckle of delight, and he all but rubbed his hands together in glee.
“You did this?” she howled, and she lunged at him nails first, going after his eyes, but he caught her wrists and held her off. She screamed wordlessly, kicking and writhing, but he pushed her into the sand onto her back and pinned her down.
“Sh,” he said soothingly. “It’s better this way. You’ll see. He was just getting in my way, always interfering. See? Things are simpler now. Hush. Stop that!”
She twisted beneath him, nearly blacking out from the pain in her shoulder, but he pressed his weight on top of her and grinned, his teeth glowing white.
“I like you when you fight,” he whispered.
She struggled for several more minutes, her rage mingling with horror. The explosion faded from the sky but the image of the plane bursting apart was still burned to the undersides of her eyelids. When she closed her eyes she saw the flames. She saw the pain in Jim’s eyes as he turned away, cut to the heart by her cold dismissal.
Nicholas kept shushing her until she lay quiet, her heart pounding, her lips crusted with sand. When she was too exhausted to fight anymore, he relaxed his grip on her wrists. He was straddling her, his weight too much for her to throw him off.
“What was in that backpack?” she howled. “What did you give him?”
He snorted. “Well, it wasn’t Twinkies and documents, I’ll tell you that much. It’s amazing, you know, the chemicals you can find in the average laboratory. Put them together in just the right way, toss in an alarm clock . . . Kapow! It was supposed to go in the Vitro building. I had it timed beautifully too. It would’ve been the perfect distraction while we took the chopper—but oh, Jim. Stupid Jim had to run off with you— well, I couldn’t have that, could I? And now I don’t have my lovely little bomb anymore. Still, it was worth it.” He looked up at the sky, at the dissipating cloud of smoke that was all that remained of Jim Julien and his plane. Turning back to her, he sighed, then smiled. “Well. I can always come up with something.”
“Why?” she asked, her voice a low croak. “What is wrong with you?”
“Don’t you know?” he asked. “I thought surely you’d have figured it out by now. I all but told you myself.”
“What? What are you talking about? You’re one of them, a Vitro, except . . . except something went wrong . . .” She couldn’t focus on him, could barely comprehend what he had done. Her mind was filled with Jim, seven-year-old Jim and eighteen-year-old Jim blurring together until her mind was filled with a red miasma of pain and shock.