False Memory (18 page)

“Don’t come any closer,” I say.

Because it’s Miranda, she ignores my request and moves closer. Soon she’s right in front of me. My resolve crumbles as she pushes my gun away and wraps her arms around me. Her body trembles against mine.

Afraid of me.

“Come back with me,” she says against my shoulder. “Come home.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m sorry, Rhys.” She pulls the knife off her back and pushes off me, slashing sideways at my throat. I block it with my forearm; the blade pierces my suit and flesh, clicks off the bone. Pure, hot pain. I put the gun against her breastbone and pull the trigger. She gasps. I pull the knife from my arm and catch her as she falls into me. I hold her upright and she stares into my eyes.

“I hope you’re right,” she whispers. “I don’t believe you are, but I hope. I hope you...”

“I am,” I say.

“Then kill them all.” She rests her forehead against my chest and dies.

Now I’m truly alone, but it doesn’t make me sad. There are no tears because they’ve been boiled away by rage. With shaking hands I lay her in the grass, next to the only family I’ve ever known.

They created us to be weapons, and I’m going to show them what happens when you don’t use one responsibly.

I’m going to kill them all, like Miranda said to.

Slowly, I make my way out of the woods.

I open my eyes and burst into tears. Sobs rack my body. The sight of Rhys stirs something within me. I reach for him and he reaches for me. I bury my face in his shoulder and cry and cry and cry. And not because of the residual pain in my head, the throbbing needlepoints wherever the band touched my skin. It’s because the horror he felt is now my own. I still feel the weight of the trigger, the spike in his gut with each one he killed. The loss dwarfs anything I’ve felt so far. That pain is the only reason I haven’t run screaming from the apartment, why I haven’t pushed him away in disgust. As impossible as it seems, I understand what he did, and why.

“Now you see,” he says.

“You killed them,” I say.

“Yes. I did.”

“You would’ve killed us...”

“If you hadn’t found out the truth on your own, or I couldn’t

His memories stay with me, but the vividness fades until I can breathe normally again. Rhys holds me the whole time. I want to ask where Noah is, but I know he’s not here. Otherwise he’d be beside me. Outside, noon has become afternoon. I check the stove—3:47. I spent hours in his memories, though it felt like minutes.

“Why are we different?” I say.

His breath tickles my ear when he talks. “Your team was the first one raised outside of our ‘parents’ influence. You came a year behind us, and the current Beta team a year behind you. Maybe it was the creators’ influence that kept my team from seeing the truth, something you never had growing up.” He pulls back. I want to hide my puffy wet face, but he puts a firm hand along my cheek.

“Your team never knew me,” he says. “If there were other versions of me, I’ve never found them. Maybe I’m special. Or maybe they removed my clone from your memories.”

He pauses, blond brows furrowing. “But that doesn’t explain why you’ve used the memory band, and the others haven’t...” He shakes his head and sighs through his nose. “I just don’t know. What I do know is the tattoo for the Betas came shortly after I left. It was only a matter of time before they controlled you, too.”

I wipe my nose on my armored forearm, which works as well as you’d expect. “And then we wouldn’t be here to fight.”

“Exactly.” He waits while I take a moment to pull myself together, sniffling and rubbing the tears off my cheeks. “Do you hate me?” he says.

The question startles me. “No.” I swing my legs over the side of the couch. He stands up. “Where’s Noah and Olive?” I say.

“I sent them to recover my cache of H9 and memory shots. I stole enough to last.”

“H9,” I say.

“The stuff we’ll use to destroy their labs. You’re already familiar with it.”

The fires that consumed my home. Yes, I’m familiar.

He doesn’t try to hide the pain in his eyes. Maybe he doesn’t care if I see. I can’t imagine what it’s like to meet us, an almost exact copy of his team. The team he murdered, to save them from the fate of monsters. I can’t wrap my head around it; there
had 
to be another way. It only makes sense he would kill us, too, before letting us be captured.

“Where did you get the memory band?” I say, pushing the horrible thoughts aside.

“I stole it. You saw, in Mrs. North’s office. Along with a good supply of the memory serum. And some weapons and H9 from the Beta team armory. I’ve been watching you ever since, both teams, waiting to make my move, seeing who I could trust.”

Trust. The concept sounds funny when it’s reversed. The whole time my instincts have been screaming not to trust him, simply because I don’t know him. I didn’t stop to consider that maybe we have to earn his trust too. I want to fight this strange bond I feel toward him now. But I don’t think I can do that any more than I can fight being me. I have a piece of him inside me now. There is no going back, no way to erase the shared memory.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he says. “But the redness of your eyes has deepened. The machine works by...”

“How?”

“It pierces your skull with microscopic needles, I think, much too fine to see. Once it’s jacked into your entire brain, it can recreate the memory as if it’s actually happening. I’m guessing this includes the eyes.”

The thought of needles in my eyes doesn’t do much for my stomach. “And they built it to create more versions of us. To store our identities.”

“I can’t think of anything else it would be used for.”

Oh, I’m sure there’s all manner of nefarious uses for it, ones we can’t even think of. “Will you show this to the others?”

He shakes his head and sits down on the couch again. “No. I won’t tell them, either. Not until this is finished.”

“Just show them. You showed me.”

He shakes his head while I speak. “It’s too painful the first time. Physically. Or it was for me. If we’re going after Peter tonight, they need to be ready. And I don’t want to distract them. They may not take it as well as you have.”

“I’m taking it well?”

He shrugs. “You’re still here.”

I nod. It’s suddenly awkward here on the couch, alone. His emotions for the other Miranda flood through me as I remember them. How much he cared for her, like a sister.

He must see this. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I know you’re not the Miranda I knew. I know that.”

“Okay,” I say. Something occurs to me. “What’s your name?”

“Rhys...”

“Your last name,” I say.

His mouth grows tight. “My father’s last name was Noble. The silly compass thing was from a training mission when we were kids. I guess your team did the same mission, the one where you each start in a different place on the map? I never got a direction. I’m just Rhys.”

I don’t remember the mission. “And Mrs. North?”

He almost smiles. “That’s what the creators had us call them. Mrs. North, Mr. West. Guess they didn’t trust us with real names. I only found out my dad’s real name because he told me the night before he disappeared.”

“What happened?”

“He was gone in the morning. Just gone. They told us he died. No other explanation.”

The apartment door opens; Rhys has the revolver in his hand a half-second later. Seeing the gun again makes me sick. I’ve never touched it, but I know exactly what it feels like.

It’s only Noah and Olive, carrying enormous black duffel bags. Noah sees me and drops the bag on his way over.

“Are you okay?” he says, stopping at a distance. He glares at Rhys. “I didn’t want to leave you.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’m fine.” But I’m not.

“What did you see?” Noah asks.

I shake my head. “Later. We have to focus.”

“Miranda—”

“I need you to trust me, Noah. Please.”

He’s about to say more when Rhys claps his hands and says, “That’s more like it.” He stands up and walks back to the kitchen table, where Olive is counting out bricks of H9. “I hope you’re all familiar with climbing.”

Rhys wants to burn the building to the ground, hoping that will get the creators off his back for good.

Olive pretty much wants the same, so nothing like this can ever happen to her again.

Noah wants Peter free, and more answers about where we came from and what we’re made for, since Dr. Conlin made it seem like we have uses that aren’t yet apparent.

I want it all. I want to be free. But most of all I want Peter back where he belongs, with us. If I have to level a skyscraper and kill the creators to make that happen, so be it. Peter should be good through the night, but we agree they’ll deprive him of shots to wipe him clean, reuse him. I pull Olive aside while Rhys and Noah argue over entry plans.

“How are you holding up?” I say. I grab a bottle of water from the refrigerator and take a sip.

She shrugs. “Fine, I guess. I remember snippets. I remember you. Noah seems familiar. What can I do but go with it, you know?”

I smile. “I know. That’s how it was for me in the beginning.”

“I guess it’s not hard because I have nothing to compare it to. This seems...normal. But more is coming back. Maybe because I didn’t go without a shot for too long, you know? I remember Dr. Tycast and I remember riding a pair of black motorcycles with you on a winding road. Do you remember?”

“I do. That was a fun day.” In truth, I don’t remember, and I want to so bad it hurts.

She doesn’t seem to believe me. “We’ll do it again when this is over, yeah?”

“Deal.”

I walk back to the table, where Noah is shaking his head.

“We’ll be exhausted after the climb. There’s no way we can break in, plant the charges, and get out undetected.”

“You have another idea?” Rhys says, sitting back in his chair and folding his arms across his chest.

“Yeah. We go up from the inside, blast our way in. Use the stairs like sane individuals would.”

Rhys shakes his head. “You don’t know the security like I do. We climb up the side of the building, or we don’t go at all. We don’t have to climb the
whole
way, Noah, just high enough. They’ll obviously be watching the lobby.”

Noah says, “Well I don’t like being exposed on the side of a building like that, darkness or not.”

Rhys shrugs. “There are other entrances, sure. All of them watched by cameras.”

I sit down at the table. “And how do we get out?” I say.

“Parachutes,” Rhys says. He might as well have added
Duh
.

Noah says, “How do you know they do the cloning there? They could have a separate facility.”

“I
don’t 
know,” Rhys says, “but the mothers and fathers are there. It’s where they do their research. There might be more of their labs in the basement. I remember them going down there when I was a child.”

He doesn’t have to explain it—
mothers and fathers
.

Our “parents.”

Olive says, “I like the idea of destroying what we can while searching for Peter, but maybe we don’t stick around afterward and tempt fate. What does a wolf do? Cripple the prey then wait for it to weaken before moving in for the kill.”

“Wolves do that?” Noah says.

“Actually, I may have made that up. The point is, blowing off the top of the building will get noticed. Being greedy might hurt us in the end.”

“Noted,” Rhys says, picking up a marker. His tone says we won’t be going anywhere until the job is done, which is fine with me. He walks to the big window overlooking the city. I see emergency lights flashing in the distance, a few camouflaged Humvees rolling down the road. On the glass, he draws a horizontal line where the Tower ends and the cap begins. “The base is from here up. The first level was our living area. The second was a laboratory. The third was where we trained.” He draws a vertical line from the cap to below the building. “And here is the basement. I don’t know what happens here, but I know they have an elevator running to it. One the rest of the building can’t use.”

“Will using H9 destroy the entire building?” I say.

Rhys caps the marker, taps it against his lips. “It shouldn’t. But their real estate front owns it anyway, so who gives a shit. If we do this right, it should only melt the cap. They’ll have a hell of a cleanup job, but the building will remain structurally intact.”

He smears the marker on the window with his hand, turning away.

The Tower looms in the distance, hazed by smoke from fires still burning. Waiting for us.