Unchanged Page 30

  He bursts through the doors of the Health Center a few minutes later, drenched and panting. He skids to a stop when he sees the crowd of people gathered around the gurney parked in the lobby.

  The body it’s supporting is covered in a pristine white sheet. The shape is too small to be a scientist. Too narrow and slender to be an adult.

  Why are they just standing there? he thinks, pushing through the small swarm.

  Why aren’t they doing anything?

  Upon seeing his face, the people surrounding the gurney disperse. Breaking apart for him. Clearing a path to the worst sight his eyes will ever be forced to take in.

  It’s not her, he thinks as he peels back the sheet and takes in the child’s freckled face, light brown hair, and thick eyelashes. She’s too small. Too fragile. Too …

  Still.

  Then his brain gets a precious moment to catch up. His brilliant mind slowly processes the data. The details. The facts.

  And then he’s screaming. “What the glitch is the matter with you? Why are you all standing there? Get me a resuscitation pack NOW!” He leans close to her breathless lips. “Sari,” he pleads. “Can you hear me? Sari?”

  He winces as his cheek brushes against hers and he feels the coldness of her skin.

  When he stands up, no one has moved.

  “Flux!” he shouts. “Get out of my way! I’ll get it myself.”

  Dr. Alixter is the one who catches him as he shoves his way through the crowd. Dr. Alixter is the one who holds him as he thrashes. “She’s gone,” he says, his voice gentler than Dr. Rio has ever heard it. Gentler than anyone has. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  But Rio won’t hear that. Can’t hear that. He breaks free. “Like hell there isn’t.”

  He sprints down the hall, returning a moment later with a small, unmarked box. He rips off the sheet, exposing all of the girl’s frail body. That’s when he sees what they’ve already seen. That’s when he knows what they already know.

  The unnatural angle of her neck. The slight protrusion of bone.

  “She fell,” the familiar voice narrates from a safe distance behind him. “From a tree. It happened instantly. She felt no pain. I’m sorry, Havin.”

  The world starts to turn an angry shade of red. The temperature of the planet rises until he swears he lives on a furious, bitter sun. The same sun that invited him to play only moments ago.

  Someone pulls him away, trying to shield his eyes.

  Someone else mumbles illogical ramblings into his ear. Nonsense about how life is a mystery, and we can’t always understand the deeper meaning.

  He breaks from the feeble grasp and suddenly he’s running again.

  Lies, he thinks as more sweat pours down his face.

  All lies.

  He won’t stand for them. Not when rational things can be done. Things that make sense. Problems don’t get solved by tricking yourself into thinking they don’t exist. By believing in manipulative malarkey.

  Problems get solved by logic and reason and hard work.

  And he knows, better than anyone, that science can fix everything.

  66

  CONVERTED

  His fingers fly over the surface of his desk. He moves so fast, his brain can barely keep up. It’s his anger at the universe that powers him now.

  I will show you who’s in control, he wants to shout at the sky.

  You can’t make these kinds of decisions for me!

  With a swoop of his hand, S:E/R:A is pushed from the screen. Her DNA will receive no more real estate in his mind—or his processor—today.

  He pulls the single strand of hair from his pocket. The one he took from his daughter’s head as he bent down close and whispered to her. The one they didn’t see him steal.

  He inserts it in the sequencer and the code of her life appears on the screen. All three billion lines of it. He wastes no time or thought or consideration. His finger doesn’t hover or tremble or hesitate.

  This is what needs to be done.

  He encodes the age. Eight years, three months, eleven days, and twelve hours.

  She won’t have to miss a second.

  His finger slams down on the initiation button. The sequencer rumbles to life. Building, coding, resurrecting. In a few short hours, the stems will be complete. In less than a day, the cells will be implanted. Tomorrow her body will begin to grow.

  And in thirty-seven days, she will be here again.

  In thirty-seven days, he will leave this place with her in his arms and never look back.

  He watches the sequencer work. He can almost see her crimson-brown eyes and honey hair reflected in the endless patterns of genes. He can almost hear her laughter echo in the biopolymers. Smell the sweet scent of her skin in the nucleotides.

  But no matter how hard he focuses on the maze of genetic code streaming like rain before him, no matter how many times he orders himself not to think about it, the image of her motionless body—her deoxygenated lips, her slender, fractured neck—penetrates his mind every time he blinks.

  He is haunted by her vulnerability.

  He is plagued by how quickly her fragile life was stolen from her. From him.

  As he stares at the endless rush of data on his screen, he can no longer see her. Hear her. Smell her.

  All he can see are her weaknesses.

  Rippable skin and crushable bones. Collapsible lungs and a stoppable heart. Feeble, slow muscles. Fallible health. A mind too quickly fatigued.

  A body too easily broken.

  And he knows it’s not enough. It will never be enough. Not until she’s protected from this cruel and unforgiving world.

  Swiftly, he aborts the procedure, which has barely reached the 2 percent mark. The overworked sequencer whines to a stop. He reopens the uninitiated code for S:E/R:A, the girl who will show that same cruel and unforgiving world what indestructibility looks like.

  He’s never believed in the existence of a soul. It requires too much faith and offers not enough proof. But as he carefully extracts portions of his daughter’s DNA—the very pieces that make her her—and inserts them into the awaiting sequence, he prays that he’s been wrong all along.

  He prays for that miracle.

  67

  HER

  Time is a funny thing.

  I’ve traveled within it so many times. I’ve disappeared into the past, I’ve returned to the future. I’ve lingered in so many precious present moments.

  To most people, I imagine time is like a highway, stretched out before you and behind you. You can only see so far ahead, you can only remember where you’ve been. Someday you may reach those faraway signposts in the distance, but you’ll never return to those ever-shrinking landmarks of the past.

  To me, however, time is happening all at once. It’s not linear. It’s everywhere I look.

  Somewhere out there, right now, a seventeen-year-old boy is climbing a concrete wall that was meant to keep him out. A girl with no memories is waking up in a vast ocean, surrounded by the wreckage of a plane that was never meant to crash. A thirteen-year-old boy with curly blond hair is lying in his bed, reading Popular Science, dreaming of amnesiac supermodels. A seventeenth-century farmer and his wife are welcoming a young couple into their home. A silver-haired physicist is injecting herself with a gene that will allow her to travel through time.

  And right now, somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert, hidden deep within a top-secret research compound, a brilliant scientist is watching the most perfect human being emerge from an artificial womb and take her very first breath of air.

  That girl is me.

  And also her.

  Sariana, the eight-year-old daughter of Dr. Havin Rio, was taken from this earth too early.

  And she was returned to this earth thirty-seven days later.

  She was the missing piece. The reason so many dead ExGens were pulled from that chamber was because they were lacking the one thing Dr. Rio could never manufacture in his lab.

&n
bsp; Humanity.

  Sariana is the reason I am here. Her death is the reason I live and breathe now. Without ever knowing it, I stole life from her. I claimed it as my own. I pranced around the compound and the past and the nation, pretending it was me. But it was never me.

  The body may belong to Diotech.

  But I belong to her.

  I always will.

  Rio wanted me to know. He wanted me to find the answer if I ever knew to ask the question. I wonder how long that memory has been buried inside me. I have a feeling it’s been there from the very beginning.

  * * *

  I know exactly what needs to be done.

  I work quickly, accessing the memory servers from Rio’s screens. I’m now extremely grateful that the server bunker wasn’t destroyed. That the heart of Diotech is still intact. Because that’s how you take down a beast. You aim for the heart.

  I find the memory files I need and upload them onto a public pod on the SkyServer. Then I dig the cube drive out of my pocket. The same one that Zen buried for me in the Restricted Sector. It’s saved me more than once. Now I hope it can save me one last time. I place it on Rio’s desk, swipe it on, and initiate the connection.

  I erase everything that’s stored on it. There’s only one memory that will help me now.

  The memory of what I’m about to do.

  My hands don’t shake or tremble as I work. My mind isn’t full of doubt or reservation. My breath remains steady and rhythmic. My heart certain. For the first time in a long time, I know I am doing the right thing.

  When I leave Rio’s lab two hours later, the clock on his screen has already started ticking. Counting down the seconds until a new beginning.

  “I wish I could have fallen in love with you in a different world.”

  In the end, this will be my legacy.

  In the end, this is how I will be remembered.

  68

  SOMEWHERE

  The sun is just beginning to appear over the horizon when I transesse into the boy’s tent. I sit on the edge of his creaky, metal bed and stare at his beautiful face. The one I’ve fallen in love with so many times I’ve lost count.

  Or maybe it was her who fell in love with him.

  Maybe it was her heart guiding me all along.

  He’s no longer a boy. He’s a man now. Time stole his childhood from him. Then it turned around and stole his love, too.

  He doesn’t wake when the weight of my body presses down on the thin mattress. Or when I brush his dark hair from his sleeping eyes.

  It’s not until I bend down and touch my lips to his that he stirs.

  At first he returns my kiss, his body stepping in to respond while his mind is still waking up. His arms wrap around my neck. His hands compel me closer.

  But then panic overtakes him. He pushes me away and sits up, blinking against the vanishing darkness to make out my features. To confirm it’s really me.

  “You can’t be here,” he whispers hoarsely. “They know you sabotaged the attack. They’ll kill you if they find you here.”

  “I’m not staying,” I tell him. I reach out to touch his lips. They’re so warm. Just as I remember. “I can’t stay.”

  My fingers find his. I tangle them together in no particular order. A clutter of thumbs and pinkies. I hold on tight. Then I close my eyes and transport us far, far away. To another place. Another time.

  A time where Diotech doesn’t exist.

  Where the stars aren’t crossed.

  Where wood is wood. Glass is glass. And people fall in love with people. Not synthetic hybrids.

  We land on a soft bed of leaves. The change in the air is the first thing I notice. There’s a chill. A sweet humidity that the desert can never provide. Zen fights against the wooziness that accompanies such a long journey and glances around, recognizing our destination immediately. The tall trees, the supple moss, the smell of embers burning on a stove somewhere in the distance.

  “Our woods,” he says in astonishment.

  “Our time,” I answer.

  I smile and lace my fingers through his. This time lining them up properly. His thumb, my thumb, his index finger, my index finger. His heartbeat, my heartbeat.

  Nearly five hundred years before Diotech was built, Zen and I lived in a tiny farmhouse not far from this very spot. We worked the land and fed chickens and darned socks. And every night, we retreated to these woods to be alone. Zen taught me how to fight. How to overcome the instincts programmed into my DNA. Just in case they ever found us here.

  In these woods, I defeated an imaginary Diotech.

  In these woods, we lived out a promise we made to each other.

  But it wasn’t long before the world surrounding these woods closed in on us and stole that promise away.

  I take a deep breath. There is so much to say and yet there is so much I would rather leave unsaid. Saved for another time. Another world. Another me.

  But I know there are things that can’t be set aside. Apologies that can’t wait. Truths that must be stated.

  “I don’t blame you for hating me,” I tell him.

  “Sera—”

  “I don’t blame you for your anger,” I go on. “Toward me, toward Diotech, toward the world. I’m sorry for what they did to you. For what they did to us. I’m sorry for letting them do it so many times. For not being stronger. I want so badly to be the person you think I am. But—”

  My voice begins to crumble. Zen places a hand on my cheek, quieting me.

  “I never hated you. I tried. God knows I tried so many times. Three years is a long time to hold on to something that slips farther away every day. Hating you would have been the easier thing to do. Would have been such a beautiful release. But I could never do it.”

  “Until you saw me with Kaelen?”

  He shakes his head. “Even then.”

  “Until I betrayed you and Paddok’s entire team?”

  “Seraphina.” He says the name so delicately. Like it might shatter between his lips. “When are you going to understand? When are you going to get it? Diotech is the monster here. Not you. Every time you hurt me was when they were controlling you. Every time you loved me, was when you managed to break free.”

  “No!” I push his hand away from my cheek. “I can’t keep blaming them for my mistakes. I have to take responsibility for the things I’ve done. For the things I’ve made you feel. For the agony I’ve put you through.” I stop. Because I’m crying now. Because the words are caught in my throat. Somehow, I still manage to choke them out. “I have to let you go.”

  The tears are falling down my face like fat drops of rain. Zen leans forward and carefully kisses each one of them, absorbing them into his lips until my skin is dry.

  “You can’t let go of someone who won’t stop holding on,” he whispers into my ear.

  I melt into him. He wraps his arms around me and draws me to him. His heart pounds against my cheek. So strong. So steady. So unwavering.

  “What I said yesterday,” I murmur into his chest. “When I told you I couldn’t love you…”

  “I know you didn’t mean it.”

  I close my eyes and draw strength from the parts of me I never knew existed until just a few hours ago. “I did,” I whisper. “I meant it. I can’t love you. The girl you fell in love with—the girl you climbed walls for, and traveled through time for, and nearly died for—she’s not me. She’s a ghost living inside me. Who never deserved to die. She fell in love with you, too. But it’s not me. It’s never been me. I am just an empty vessel with bones that can’t break and lungs that don’t tire and eyes that see in the dark.”

  Zen pulls away from me so that he can look into my eyes. Her eyes.

  He doesn’t know what I know. What I’ve seen in Rio’s memories. Yet somehow he understands.

  “Sera,” he says intensely. “I fell in love with you. I climbed that wall over and over again for you. I came back for you. Whoever you think you are, or think you’re not, it’s all the same
to me. It’s always been you.”

  His words sink deep into me. Like boulders settling to the bottom of a lake. At first they don’t fit. They feel out of place. They feel like strangers. But slowly, the water begins to welcome them. The moss grows up around them, embracing them, rooting them to the ground. Making them feel like maybe they’ve never been anywhere else.

  Maybe they’ve never not been true.

  Sariana may be the life that breathes inside me, but I’ve kept her alive these past few years. I’ve allowed her to run faster than she’s ever run, travel farther than she’s ever gone, fall in love deeper than she’ll ever know.

  Maybe that’s worth something.

  Zen slips his hand into my hair and guides my mouth to his. The kiss is unlike any of the thousand kisses that live in our past. It isn’t angry or desperate. It doesn’t scream goodbye or murmur hello. It isn’t searching for something missing or recovering something lost.

  Science brought us together. Science kept us apart. And this is the kiss that unchains us both.

  Somewhere out there, right now, two business partners are preparing to build a corporation that will one day dominate the world. A Jamaican nurse in a hospital is tending to a plane-crash survivor with no memories. A fire is burning the skin of a convicted witch. A pastor is telling stories about monsters. A child is falling from a tree.

  And on the soft, mossy floor of a forest in the English countryside, a girl who has finally discovered the truth is kissing a boy who has known it from the very beginning.

  And that brings them closer together than they’ve ever been.

  69

  NOW

  I lie beneath the canopy of trees and listen to the forest breathing. The sun will be rising soon. Zen is fast asleep by my side, his arm draped over me, just as we used to sleep when we lived here. When this forest was our backyard and that sunrise was our morning ritual. At one time it seemed like we could live forever here. Peaceful, undisturbed, far away from the horrors that brought us together.