Going Grey
| Going Grey | |
| Ringer [1] | |
| Karen Traviss | |
| Karen Traviss (2014) | |
| Tags: | Fiction, science fiction |
Ian isn't crazy. Life would be a lot simpler if he was. He's eighteen, on the run, and scared – the shape-shifting delusions he's had since childhood have turned out to be real. He's the result of a dynamic mimicry project intended to help undercover agents "go grey" and blend in unnoticed.
Now the biotech company wants its property back, and the only people he can trust are two private military contractors sent to find him: Rob, a former Royal Marine who's struggling to adjust to Civvy Street, and Mike, heir to a wealthy American political dynasty, who only ever wanted to be an ordinary guy.
While the company hunts Ian, the two contractors try to help him harness his disturbing ability. But first Ian's got to work out what identity really means – and Mike and Rob have to decide how far they'll go to give him the chance of a normal life.
GOING
GREY
KAREN TRAVISS
This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, companies, locations, countries, objects, situations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental.
All rights reserved. Except for the use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means is forbidden without the express permission of the author.
Copyright 2014 by Karen Traviss
All rights reserved.
Published by Karen Traviss
www.karentraviss.com
DEDICATION
To the memory of SPC T. Jocic and SPC T. Fisher, US Army, killed in action in Zhari District, Afghanistan in 2012, and to their friend SPC J. Bakerink, who keeps their memory alive.
My grateful thanks go to Ray Ramirez, for firearms and technical advice, and for steadfast friendship; Jeanne Marie Coleman, for technical advice on police procedure; Sean Baggaley, IT genius and smart marketeer, for cover and formatting support; Anthony Serena; Jim Gilmer; Martin Welsford; Mary Pletsch; Bryan Boult, patient beta tester, for his uncanny ability to zero in on plot holes; and Alasdair McLean, inexhaustible source for perception and cognition research.
I would also like to thank those who provided technical advice but preferred not to be named for professional reasons, including private military contractors currently working in the industry, and scientists in the fields of transgenics and fertility.
I couldn't have written this book without the generous input of all those mentioned above. Any errors in this book are entirely mine.
Karen Traviss
May 2014
DUNLOP RANCH, NORTH OF ATHEL RIDGE, WASHINGTON: NOVEMBER, THREE YEARS AGO.
The world's full of mirrors.
They're everywhere. You probably don't notice, but then you're not trying to avoid them like I am.
I don't mean the regular variety. There's just two in the house and I don't use them. I mean all the shiny surfaces that spit your reflection back at you when you're not expecting it. Today it's the water trough in the top field. I need to break the ice for the sheep. I've got seconds to step back before the surface settles and shows me how I look today.
The sheep crowd around the pickup, expecting hay and pellets, so I flap the door a few times to get them to back off and give me room to climb out. They're Jacob sheep – biblical-looking, cranky, and hard to herd. The ram's got six curly horns and letterbox-slit pupils like the Devil. But his name’s Roger, not very Satanic at all. He blocks my way and stares at me, head tilted on one side.
"What's the problem, buddy?" Roger knows when I'm having a bad day. I think he can smell it, like those dogs that sense when their owner's about to have a seizure. "Come on, move it."
Roger backs off, looking baffled, but then sheep often do. When I stab my hunting knife into the ice, the chunks tilt and sink. I pull back before the water gets a chance to become another mirror.
Here's my problem. Sometimes I don't
recognise myself.
I don't mean the split second that everyone says they get now and again, when a store window catches you unaware, or that distracted second when you're brushing your teeth. I mean that I really see a
stranger
, someone else, someone
different,
and I never go back to the way I was. A week, a month, a year or two later, I risk looking in the shaving mirror, the fold-up one I've learned not to need, and I might look different again.
It's not real. It can't be. So there's only one explanation; I'm crazy.
I've looked in medical books, and all I know is that it isn't dysmorphia, and it isn't prosopagnosia. They don't fit at all. This is my own special kind of crazy. Dunlop's Syndrome. Maybe it'll get its own Latin name one day.
When I hit a bad patch, my face and scalp start to feel wind
-burned for a few moments, like the skin's pulling tight. Then I look in a mirror, and I'm not me. But what's
me,
anyway? I can't remember. I just get used to the new face and that's me until the next time it happens.
So Gran doesn't allow shiny surfaces in the house. Blinds cover the windows. There's no glass in the picture frames. The bathroom mirror folds away. Even the photo of her dad and his helicopter, the one on the bookcase, is under a sheet of matt acrylic.
The sheep seem happy, so I head back to the house. There's not a lot to do around the ranch in the winter apart from looking after Gran's rescue animals and catching up on my lessons. When I open the kitchen door, Gran's putting on her sheepskin jacket to go out. Sometimes I wonder if it bothers the sheep. Do they recognise it? Do they ask themselves why Gran looks after them like pets, but wears one of their own? Maybe they're just like humans, happy to turn a blind eye when it suits them.
"I'm off to town, Ian." Gran studies my face. She can always tell when something's wrong. "Want to come?"
When I can feel a bad patch coming, I want to hide from everyone, even Gran. "No thanks. I've got math to do. Maybe watch a DVD. I'll fix dinner."
"You okay?"
"Yeah. Sure."
"Anything you want me to fetch back?"
I get through a lot of movies on our DVD player. We've even got old video tapes. Gran doesn't trust cable and satellite companies, like she doesn't trust banks, credit cards, and the Internet. The only phone we've got is an unregistered cell, a really old one without any fancy features.
"If you're passing the thrift store, could you see if they've got any movies, please? Or documentaries."
"Which war?"
"World War One. I haven't got many on that."
Gran nods, looking off to one side for a second like she's running through a mental database of movie titles. "Okay, checklist time. Keys?"
"Gun locker, ammo store, truck." I count them off on the rack on the kitchen wall. It's our drill every time she leaves the ranch. She says Mount St. Helen made her jumpy and now she's always ready to run. "Safe. Desk."
"Folder?"
"Locked in the desk. Open it if you're not back in four hours, and follow the instructions inside."
"Emergency supplies and grab bag?"
"In the hall closet." It's like reciting my times tables, an automatic stream of sound. "And I call Joe if I need to move the animals."
"Good. We're all square, then. See you later."
Athel Ridge isn't far to drive, but it might as well be Outer Mongolia. Our nearest neighbours are a couple of miles away — Joe and a bunch of other folks who live off the grid as well. We avoid the town because every move gets seen and recorded somewhere, according to Gran. She's careful about that sort of thing. Government agencies and big business are all the same species of bastard who spy on you all the time, she says, and she said so years before everyone else found out it was all true.
But I always knew she wasn't crazy. Unusual, maybe, but not
crazy
. I know what crazy is.
I finish my chores and choose a DVD from the tight
-packed bookcase. The photo of Great-Granddad – David Dunlop, Huey pilot, the guy who did his duty in Vietnam — sits on the shelf at eye height, a reminder of what I've got in me somewhere. I never knew him. But then I never knew my parents, either. Gran never talks about them. She just says Mom was a waster, and that she doesn't know who my father was. The fact that she tells me everything about her dad and nothing about Mom says it all. Great-Granddad's the guy I need to take after. He's the one to emulate. I don't want to be a waster like my mom.
But I'm sixteen next birthday. I should be thinking about what I'm going to do with my life. One thing's for sure: the Army doesn't take crazy people.
Knowing what I see isn't real doesn't help. It's enough to fuck up your whole life. Gran says I’d end up on the streets or worse if I tried to cope in the outside world, so I'm better off on the ranch, miles from anywhere, home-schooled and out of the reach of well-meaning doctors and do-gooders from social services.
For once, I can't even wrap myself up in the movie. All I can see is David Dunlop, a man who did amazing things and put his life on the line for his buddies. Forget your flag and country, Gran says. People spat on Great
-Granddad when he came home from 'Nam. So much for a grateful nation. War brings out the best and the worst in people, she says, and the best of it is a pretty good example of how to live your life. I've only got to watch the news to see what the worst is like, or think of Great-Granddad Dunlop coming home and wondering what the hell it was all for.
It was for his buddies. That was reason enough for him. I can see that in the movies. It's the one truth that shines out of all of them.
One of Gran's greyhounds, Oatie, jumps on the sofa and puts his head in my lap. It's enough to distract me. My focus shifts from the photo to the TV screen for a second, and — damn, it's another mirror. I don't normally see the TV that way, but the light from the window's at the wrong angle. Before I can shake it off, I see myself.
Did my nose look like that yesterday? Does my hair seem lighter?
It's not real, any of it. But if you know you’re nuts, does that mean you’re not? If I
was
crazy, I'd think it was real, right?
Maybe I'll grow out of it. Maybe I'll get sane. And maybe I won't, and this is how I'll spend the rest of my life. I don't know what I look like, I don't know much about where I came from, and I don't know where I'm going.
But there's Great-Granddad. Something of him must be in me, something that made him fly that Huey into enemy fire time after time because guys were depending on him for their lives.
I just have to look for it. It's got to be there.