Replica

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“You know you sound like a raving lunatic, right?” Nate asked his father, echoing Nadia’s thoughts.

The Chairman shrugged. “Spoken like an eighteen-year-old who thinks he’s going to live forever anyway.”

“Hey, unlike you, I’ve died once already.” Nate’s voice got a little thick, and though he was trying to sound angry, Nadia heard the pain beneath the anger. “And I think if I manage to survive another hour today, it’ll be a miracle.”

The lights above Nadia dimmed, so she was finally able to open her eyes again and see. Nate’s hands were cuffed behind his back. One of the security officers was holding his arm, and the other was pointing a gun at him. The Chairman had come close enough to put his hand on Nate’s shoulder, and either he was a really good actor or there was genuine sorrow on his face.

“I’m truly sorry, Nate. I don’t want to hurt you, but you’ve made it necessary. I can’t trust you to keep this knowledge to yourself.”

Nadia struggled against her bonds and screamed as best she could around the mouthpiece. The Chairman was going to kill Nate right here in front of her. She had the means to stop him, if only she could talk. But the bindings weren’t getting any looser, no matter how hard she struggled, and the mouthpiece wouldn’t budge, and no one was paying any attention to her.

The Chairman reached out and slid the second officer’s gun out of its holster. “At least this time I’ll take care of you myself,” he said. “I’ll make sure you don’t suffer.”

Nate locked gazes with his father as the Chairman started to lift the gun. He had to be terrified, but it didn’t show. He didn’t wince, didn’t look away, didn’t try to escape.

“Hey, Nadia,” he called, gaze still locked on his father’s, “are those the earrings you were telling us about?”

Nadia’s eyes widened, and she stopped struggling. She’d forgotten that Nate knew about the earrings, but even if she’d remembered, she probably wouldn’t have expected him to realize she was wearing them. She nodded as emphatically as her bonds would allow, and Nate smiled.

The Chairman’s hand slowed in raising the gun.

“I think you might want to take that gag off Nadia and hear what she has to say before you go and do anything irreversible,” Nate said. “Unless you want the world to hear the conversation we’ve just had, that is.”

Chairman Hayes froze with the gun only halfway up. He looked over his shoulder at Mosely. “Do it.”

For the first time she could remember, Mosely actually looked … apprehensive, and she figured he had a good idea what Nate’s statement meant. He tore out some of her hair in his efforts to get the mouthpiece off her, but she didn’t mind a bit. The movement so near her throat made her gag, even though Mosely was taking the damn thing out, and Nadia had to swallow convulsively a few times to get the gag reflex under control so she could talk.

“Check my left earring,” she told Mosely. “You’ll find there’s a transmitter in it. I’ve arranged for whatever I’ve recorded to be sent out wide in the event of my unfortunate death or disappearance.”

Mosely’s eyes glowed with an emotion Nadia thought came very close to hatred. She felt a thrill of triumph.

“Just think of all the things the world will know if that recording gets out,” she said. She was trying to sound brave and victorious, but the quaver in her voice ruined the effect. It was certainly possible that Mosely and the Chairman were arrogant enough to think they could find the stored recording before anyone knew she was dead or “missing.”

Nadia cried out as Mosely ripped the earring straight out of her ear. Little droplets of blood splashed her face, and Nate roared in outrage.

“Don’t be an idiot,” the Chairman said, and when Nadia blinked away her tears of pain, she saw that he was now holding the gun firmly to Nate’s head. Any hesitancy he might have felt earlier about the prospect of shooting his own son seemed to have vanished. His aim was steady, his face wiped clean of emotion. Nate stopped struggling against the officer who held him.

“Are you okay?” he called to her while Mosely picked apart her bloody earring, looking for the transmitter.

“Yeah,” she called back, though she was anything but. Her ear stung and throbbed, her head ached from when Mosely had hit it on the table, and her whole body still felt discombobulated from the electricity that had run through it. She was freezing cold, staring up into a contraption full of torture implements, and strapped to a table completely helpless. She was about as far from okay as it was possible to get, and the thrill of triumph she’d felt was long gone.

Mosely found the transmitter and let out a low curse. He dropped it to the floor and crushed it under his heel, but he had to know the damage had already been done. Always before when he’d looked at her, even when he’d been angry, Nadia had had the sense that Mosely felt he was just doing his job, that any emotion he showed was no more than skin-deep. That certainly wasn’t the case now.

“You brought her down to the heart of the Fortress, into Thea’s domain, and you didn’t check her for electronic surveillance?” the Chairman asked his favorite hatchet man in a voice that would have sane people scurrying for cover. “She was wearing a tracker and a transmitter, and you didn’t find either?”

Mosely’s hands clenched at his sides as he faced his boss. “She’s a meek little schoolgirl I dragged from her bed,” he protested. “It never occurred to me that she might be wired.”

The Chairman shook his head in disbelief. “She wasn’t so meek that she didn’t go running off on her own independent investigation in defiance of your instructions. Perhaps that should have been your first clue.”

“Why don’t you two fight about this later,” Nate suggested, now standing calm and relaxed in the security officer’s grip. He, at least, was convinced they’d won. He was even smiling, the old impish smile she’d always loved, although there were shadows in his eyes that dimmed the smile’s brightness. “Right now, you need to get those restraints off Nadia and these handcuffs off me. Then maybe we can move this party to a conference room and discuss terms.”

“Thea?” the Chairman said, ignoring Nate’s demands as if he hadn’t heard them.

“Yes, Mr. Chairman?”

“I’d like you to dissect the young lady’s brain until you find out where the signal has been sent.”

The blinding spotlights brightened to their full intensity again, forcing Nadia’s eyes closed, and there was an ominous whirring of machinery above her.

“Yes, Mr. Chairman,” Thea said.

“I’m sure you thought this operating theater was a modern-day torture chamber,” the Chairman said, and Nadia didn’t know if he was talking to her or to Nate. “But thanks to Thea’s research, it is no longer necessary to torture suspects for information. She can retrieve the information directly from the brain. Although, of course, this process is terribly unpleasant for the subject and ultimately fatal.”

“Don’t hurt her!” Nate yelled, and there was a frantic edge in his voice. From the sound of it, he was struggling again.

A high-pitched whining sound started up, and Nadia fought past her terror, fought to think coherently instead of letting herself visualize one of those drills or saws descending to cut into her head.

“It won’t work,” she said in something between a whimper and a scream. No matter how pointless it was, she struggled against the bonds that held her to the table, not caring that they dug painfully into the flesh of her wrists and ankles. “I don’t know where the data is stored.”

Dirk Mosely gave a bark of laughter. “Of course, you would never say such a thing if it weren’t true.”

The high-pitched whine was coming steadily closer.

“I’m not stupid,” she countered. “You made it clear from the beginning you were willing to torture me. Making the recordings would do me no good if you could torture the location out of me.” She couldn’t suppress a little whimper of fear, which didn’t do much to enhance the illusion that she was bargaining from a position of strength. “If you let your pet monster do this, and she finds I’m telling the truth, you’re completely screwed. This is your last chance.”

A bubble of hysterical laughter swelled in her chest. She was lying here tied to a table, about to be vivisected by a sentient machine, and she was telling the Chairman that it was his last chance. This all had to be some crazy dream, right? An epic nightmare created by her subconscious to terrify her in her sleep. It couldn’t possibly be happening in real life.

“Wait,” the Chairman said.

The whining sound continued to come closer.

“Thea, stop,” the Chairman said, more firmly.

“I can find the recordings, Mr. Chairman,” Thea protested. “Even if this subject does not know their actual location, I will discern who does know, and we can proceed from there.”

“And by the time you do, the recordings will be all over the net,” Nadia said. “What do you think would happen if everyone in Paxco, hell, everyone in the world knew what you were doing down here?”

Just saying the words made Nadia think about it herself, and she didn’t much like what came to her mind. There was already a resistance movement forming within Paxco, infiltrating the upper echelons of the state. Right now, they were biding their time, working their way more deeply into the infrastructure. She didn’t know for sure what their eventual goal was, but she’d gotten the impression they were working toward a political coup, not a violent one. But if word of what the Chairman had been doing and condoning came out, violence seemed inevitable.

“You’d risk civil war at the very least,” she said, thinking about all the states and nations that already found the ethics of the Replica technology questionable. It was outlawed entirely in many parts of the world, Replicas not even being recognized as human beings. And it was against international law to create a Replica of a living person or of a person who had died of natural causes—specifically to prevent scenarios like the one the Chairman envisioned of his eternal reign. Paxco could very well find itself under attack at the same time that its citizens were rising up against it. When Nadia had first started down this road, she had never considered that her attempts to protect herself might lead to the very brink of war.

“Thea, I’m giving you a direct order,” the Chairman said. “Do not proceed.”

The whining sound stopped, and the spotlights dimmed to a bearable level. Nadia opened her eyes, then wished she hadn’t. A circular saw, its blade still turning from leftover momentum, was bare millimeters from her forehead.

“Don’t be childish, Thea,” the Chairman said. “Move the blade. And Mr. Mosely, please release Nadia from her restraints.”

“Are you sure about this?” Mosely asked.

“Yes,” the Chairman snapped, apparently not appreciating having his order questioned.

The saw blade above Nadia’s head whirred to life briefly, nearly giving her a heart attack, but Thea withdrew the arm. Nadia swallowed hard. Thea might be a machine, but she was an AI, and had something resembling free will. Just because Chairman Hayes ordered her not to cut Nadia open didn’t mean she wouldn’t. And Nadia couldn’t help seeing that brief reactivation of the saw as a threat, and a sullen one at that. She couldn’t get off this table soon enough.

Mosely went out of his way to be rough with her as he removed the restraints, tugging on them so they dug into her already-abused flesh. But she didn’t complain, gritting her teeth against the pain. Across the room, she could see that Nate’s hands were free. One of the security officers was gone. The second stood blocking the doorway, his hand on the butt of his gun, though he kept it holstered. Nate and Nadia might be out of their restraints, but that didn’t mean they were free, and that didn’t mean this was over.

Mosely finally tugged loose the last restraint, and Nadia leapt off the table.

Or tried to. Between the fear and her recent impersonation of a lightning rod, her knees turned to jelly the moment her feet hit the floor, and she crumpled.

Mosely reached toward her, no doubt to drag her to her feet, but Nate crossed the distance between them in a few hurried strides and shouldered Mosely out of the way.

“Don’t even think about touching her again,” he spat, kneeling on the floor beside her and gathering her into his arms.

Never in her entire life had a hug felt so good, and Nadia pressed herself against him, holding on as if her life depended on it.

The second officer returned to the room, carrying another plastic chair. He set that chair down on the prisoners’ side of the interrogation table, then stepped aside so that he and his buddy could flank the door. Chairman Hayes walked over to the single chair on the other side of the table, pulling it back and sitting down.

“I’m ready to discuss terms when you are,” he said, folding his hands on the table.

“Can you walk?” Nate asked, still holding her against him.

Nadia wanted to stay in Nate’s arms for the foreseeable future. The scent of his skin soothed her, and she was so tired of being scared. But the sooner they got started, the sooner she’d get out of here, and she wanted that more than anything in the world.

“I can walk,” she said, reluctantly sitting up straight. “If you’ll give me a hand up.”

She met Nate’s intense blue eyes. There was so much she wanted to say to him, so many things she needed to apologize for—it was amazing how a near-death experience could change a girl’s perspective. She promised herself she would say everything that needed saying, just as soon as they had secured their freedom.

Nadia allowed him to help her up. This time, her knees held.