Inheritance (43 page)

“Wait,” Reese said, desperation spiking in her. “Please. I have to—let me go to the bathroom. Please.”

Torres’s expression gave nothing away, and Reese didn’t think she would say yes. But at the last second she nodded shortly. “Fine. I’ll take you.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Griffin, you got it under control?”

“Yeah. This one’s gonna be out for a while longer. I’ll watch E.T.”

“All right.” Torres reached for Reese’s arm and hauled her to her feet. She wobbled. “No funny business, Holloway.”

The sound of her last name startled her. “I know,” she said quickly. Torres led her toward the steps, keeping a viselike grip on her arm. Reese stumbled up the stairs, nauseated from having eaten the energy bar too quickly, and Torres’s consciousness began to seep through her hand into Reese.

Torres didn’t feel exactly like the male Blue Base soldiers. Reese remembered the sensation of something being off about them, as if their brains were so wired for combat readiness that they were unable to manage ordinary thought patterns. Torres had the same dense physical interior landscape, as if her muscles
were made of Kevlar and her bones out of steel, but the feeling of wrongness was different. Unlike the chaotic consciousness of the male soldiers, Torres’s brain was sharp as a blade, but it didn’t feel normal. It felt speedy. Too fast for her own good.

Reese didn’t have time to dwell on it. Torres pushed her up the stairs into the kitchen, a 1980s time warp with stained linoleum on the floor, a rickety wooden table, and appliances that didn’t look like they had worked in years. All the windows had their curtains drawn, and the lack of light behind them made Reese believe it was nighttime. Wilson, who was standing at the back door with a machine gun in his hands, was surprised to see them. Torres said nothing to him and only propelled Reese through the kitchen into a dimly lit hallway, where she nudged open a door with the toe of her boot.

Torres came into the bathroom too. She let Reese go, but stood with her back to the door. “Do your business,” Torres ordered.

Reese’s face reddened, but she didn’t bother to ask for privacy. She went to the toilet and did what she had to do. “What day is it?” she asked. “How long was I out?”

“I told you no talking,” Torres growled.

Reese flushed the toilet and glanced at Torres out of the corner of her eye. She was hardened, but she didn’t look too much older than Reese. Maybe she was in her twenties. Reese wondered how Torres had gotten to her position. The men were clearly afraid of her. Reese figured she should probably be afraid of her too, but she couldn’t forget that Torres had been the one to stop the soldiers from assaulting them.

Reese turned on the sink and found a bar of yellowing soap
on the counter. She washed her hands, running her fingers tentatively over the welts from the plastic restraints. Above the sink, the mirror on the wall was cracked. Her face was sickly pale, her hair tangled, her eyes bloodshot. There was a raw red line in a rectangular shape around her mouth where the tape had been ripped off. She saw Torres watching her.

“It’s Tuesday night,” Torres said.

Reese briefly caught Torres’s eye in the mirror. Why had she answered? Reese rinsed the soap off her hands while she worked out what exactly that meant. She, David, and Amber had been taken from the UN on Monday just before noon. They had been gone for thirty-six hours by now. There was no sound of traffic outside, so Reese doubted they were still in New York City. Maybe Torres had mixed feelings about taking them—or at least about keeping them here, wherever they were. She decided to push her luck.

“Where are we?” Reese asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

There was a rusty towel ring dangling empty on the wall near the sink, but no towels in sight. Reese flicked the water from her hands. “You’re from Blue Base,” Reese said.

Torres reached for her and spun her around, her fingers digging into Reese’s shoulder bones. Reese swallowed a cry of pain as Torres glared at her. “No. Talking.”

Even though Eres Tilhar had told Reese it was against Imrian ethics to access someone else’s consciousness without their permission, she decided this situation was an exception. She kept her gaze on Torres’s face as she reached out with her mind. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she knew she had to
make use of every advantage she had. Torres and the other Blue Base soldiers obviously had been genetically modified, but they hadn’t been through the Imrian adaptation chamber. Reese didn’t think that Torres would be able to sense her mental intrusion.

“So you know about Blue Base. You think you know it all, don’t you?” Torres said, considering her.

“No,” Reese said. There was definitely something different about Torres. She might not be as unhinged as the other soldiers, but she seemed more dangerous. Like a shark, all teeth and instinct.

“You tell me something, Holloway,” Torres said in a low, threatening voice. “You tell me: What did you get done to your head that I didn’t get done to mine? Why are you so precious that I have to babysit a squad of muscle heads to bring you in? What did they do to you?”

“They—the Imria adapted me,” Reese stammered. “They gave me their DNA.”

“I got that DNA too.”

“You got it from the military. Not the Imria.”

“What does that matter? Same DNA. But you’re nothing like me.” Torres sounded disgusted and let go of her, giving her a little shove.

Reese fell back against the sink. Torres’s grip had been so tight that it seemed to have left a phantom handprint on her shoulder. She reached up to rub the bruised area, wincing. Her eyes darted behind Torres to the closed door. There was no way she’d be able to get past the soldier. “Maybe it’s the same DNA, but I don’t think the military knows how to use it,” she said, trying to
buy time while she figured out what to do. “You guys—you and the other soldiers—you don’t feel right.”

“We don’t
feel right
? We can run faster, sleep less, and shoot better than any
normal
human being. We don’t
feel right
because we’re different.” Torres leaned closer to Reese. “I know why they made me the way they did. I was recruited out of nothing. I probably would’ve been in prison by now if I hadn’t joined up. But I wasn’t born stupid. They made me into a killer, and I’m doing that fine. Way better than those dumbasses they want me to order around. I can take all of them, every single one of those shit-for-brains fucktards the military calls supersoldiers. But why do they want you? You can’t do shit. I could snap you with my little finger.”

Torres’s words were harsh, but there was an edge of desperation to her words that Reese didn’t understand. “The adaptation procedure isn’t supposed to make us into killers,” Reese said. “The point of it is to help us communicate better. To share our—our thoughts and emotions.”

Torres nodded. “That freaky mind meldy thing they talk about in the news. Yeah. What good is that?”

Reese gaped at her. “What good is it to be a killer?”

Torres’s face darkened and Reese thought she was going to hit her. Instead she grabbed a fistful of Reese’s hair, jerking her head back so she was forced to meet her gaze. “You can do that mind meld thing, can’t you?” Torres said. Tears blinded Reese’s eyes as Torres’s fingers tightened on her hair. She was so close that Reese could smell the sourness of the soldier’s breath. “So you do it. You do it and you tell me what’s the deal with me. What the fuck is going on with me? Tell me.” Torres’s dark eyes gleamed with a manic energy.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Reese choked out. “Just let me go. I can’t do it if you’re holding me like that.”

With a sound of disgust, Torres dropped her. Reese took a shaking, relieved breath, rubbing a damp hand over her scalp where Torres had held her motionless.

“We don’t have all night,” Torres snapped.

Reese blinked back her tears. She didn’t think Torres would be sympathetic. “I have to touch you,” she said bluntly.

Torres seemed taken aback. “Where?”

“Just give me your hand.” Torres looked at her suspiciously, and all the fear and panic inside Reese exploded into impatience. “Do you want me to do it or not?” she demanded.

Torres hesitated for a second. Then she held her hand out as if offering it to Reese to shake. “Do it.”

The soldier’s palm was calloused, her fingertips rough. Reese wasn’t sure if she’d be able to sense anything at all; Torres had been mostly unreadable before, beyond a general sensation of predatory skill. And even if she could gain access to Torres’s consciousness, that wouldn’t necessarily explain what her “deal” was. Reese only hoped she could sense something that would give her a clue about what Torres wanted to hear—and then Reese planned to tell her precisely that.

She concentrated, beginning with her sense of herself as Eres Tilhar had taught her. Those lessons seemed an eternity ago, but as she laid out the map of her consciousness, situating herself physically within her mind and within this space—this bathroom, in this house, standing a foot away from Torres—Eres’s instructions came to her clear and strong. Reese was
here
. She took a deep breath, grounding herself, feeling the hard edge of
the sink behind her, smelling the foul scent of a bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned in forever. She was unexpectedly grateful that Torres had grabbed her hair, because the throbbing pain on her scalp showed her the precise limits of her physical self.

When she was satisfied that she knew where she was, she opened herself to Torres’s mind. The soldier was tense, and at first all Reese could feel was that tension. Muscle and bone, dense and powerful, built for exactly what Torres had said: killing. Behind that physical barrier, Torres’s consciousness confronted Reese like a blank wall. As Reese mentally circled the wall, she sensed Torres’s emotions slowly shifting like tectonic plates grinding into new positions. And as the woman’s internal landscape shifted, Reese glimpsed memories that Torres didn’t know how to conceal. They were dark and brutal, and Reese clung to her own identity, trying to shield herself from the images’ assault so they wouldn’t overwhelm her.

The dirty line where a wall met the filthy floor. The flickering light of a television casting shadows over something she didn’t want to see. The recoil of a gun in her hand as tin cans flew off the edge of a fence. Someone’s birthday. Off-key singing, a candle that wouldn’t blow out. A dusty backyard at midnight, yellow light leaching out from a curtained window. A boy. A little boy with a bruised face and a cut lip, who said,
Don’t go
.

Then Reese recognized the Nevada desert: hot sun on brown dirt and rocks. Running for miles with nowhere to go. Men and women beside her in matching fatigues, every one of them watching her warily as she sprinted, one foot after the other, wishing she could outrun this place, this thing they had done to her. The memory skipped, and Reese saw Torres’s hands holding
a soldier down beneath muddy water, cutting off the pulse in his throat. His esophagus collapsed beneath Torres’s fingers, and she rocked back on her heels, feeling as if an animal had clawed its way out of her body.

Reese recoiled from Torres’s consciousness. In front of her Torres was watching her intently, hopefully, and Reese said, “Wait. Almost.” She forced herself to go back in because she knew she was close. It was there, nearly buried beneath all those black memories, beneath the armor of Torres’s anger and cunning. It was in the rapid pulse of her heart, the speed with which her blood pumped through her body, the iron of her muscles and sinews. Reese understood her deal.

“You’re dying, aren’t you?” Reese whispered. Torres’s body was burning up her physical energy at a rate that Reese couldn’t believe. She couldn’t replenish herself fast enough. Inside Torres’s body, Reese felt the decay eating away at her, like a corpse rotting into the ground.

Torres’s face was grim. She didn’t seem surprised. “This thing they did to me is going to kill me?”

Cold sweat trickled down Reese’s back. “You don’t have to die,” she said, grasping at straws. “The Imria—they can save you.” She had no idea if it was true or not, but it was the only thing she could think of.

Reese sensed a spark of hope flare within the soldier, but it was extinguished before it had a chance to burst into flame. Torres jerked her hand away from Reese. “You’re lying. Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” Reese insisted. “Help us get back to the Imria and we’ll ask them. They have really advanced science—”

“As advanced as the shit the military stole to fix me up? I don’t think I want any more of that science.”

“The military screwed up. The Imria won’t. I swear. They didn’t screw up with me.” For the first time since she had woken up in that hospital after the car accident, Reese realized it was true. The Imria hadn’t screwed up with her. The thought was so startling that it sent a shudder through her body.

Torres stared at her long and hard. Her face was expressionless, but Reese knew the soldier was spinning through every possible option to keep herself alive. Finally she leaned close, her breath hot on Reese’s ear. “If I leave, they’ll take my kid. It’s too late for me. I’m in too deep. You better not say shit about what you just told me. You say anything and I’ll come and kill you myself.”

Ice went down Reese’s back. “I won’t say anything, I swear.”

Torres drew back. “Give me your hands.”

Her heart pounding, Reese held them out, wondering if Torres was going to ask her to look again, but instead Torres pulled out a plastic restraint. The efficient jerk of the plastic against her already sore wrists drove a gasp out of Reese.

“Back downstairs,” Torres said, opening the door. “No funny business, Holloway.”

Reese didn’t resist as Torres pushed her out of the bathroom. At least her hands were in front of her this time.

Griffin was a medic. Reese couldn’t tell whether she
had been genetically modified like the other soldiers because she didn’t touch Reese, but there was something horribly wrong with Griffin’s right hand. It looked as if it had been cut off, leaving the blunt stump of her forearm behind. Out of that stump grew three fingers, nailless and limp. Griffin used her left hand to raise the needle to Reese’s shoulder and caught Reese’s eye.