Resist (7 page)

I nod along as Malone talks. Echoes of truth underlie his words. I'm not sure how truthful they are in sum, but I recognize authenticity in the pieces, and they match the fragments in my memories.

“We believe this boy has a duty to the human race to let us learn from him, to allow us to reverse-engineer what his mother did. The number of lives that could be saved if we did would be enormous. Unfortunately, Chen did not share our enthusiasm for helping.” Malone opens the door into the hall, beckoning me to follow. “And also unfortunately, he got into your head and convinced you that helping us was wrong.”

I flinch. Whether or not Malone speaks the truth, or whether memory-me was correct that he's my enemy, the sting hurts.

Never let the enemy or the outside world get into your head. That's when you fail. That's what will get you killed.
Four-hundred-twenty-nine variations on a theme.

“It's not entirely your fault,” Malone continues. “Your assignment was long and challenging. It was a difficult first mission for anyone, and you're young. We expect you'll make mistakes.”

Maybe he does, though I doubt it. Fitzpatrick sure doesn't. Nor, for that matter, do I. I was trained to be better than that.

“But with your programming corrupted…” Malone spreads his hands apologetically. “This is why we have to take precautions right now, but I do forgive you, Seven. You should be assured of that. Chen, on the other hand, must be treated as the threat he's proven himself to be. Believe me, I didn't want things to be like this.”

Malone throws open the door, and Kyle jerks upright as we enter the room. His dark eyes shift focus between me and Malone, wide and fearful, even though his mouth is set defiantly. I'm drawn to his lips, tormented by the thought that I must have kissed them, although I don't remember it.

My chest swells with a hundred emotions I can't place, can't sort through, can't understand. The knowledge that Kyle was important to me comes through clearly in my memory, but what that means hasn't truly been conveyed until this moment. It's like being in the same room as him, breathing in the undetectable scent of him, wakes up my body. These are not memories I can process into images. These are my cells, every one of them, waking up. Screaming at me to help Kyle.

Then Malone reaches under his suit jacket, whips out a gun and shoots him.

I manage not to cry out in surprise, but the gunshot rips through me as well. I feel the impact in my chest, stealing my breath. But it's Kyle, obviously, who suffers.

It's harder than ever to keep the horror off my face as I watch him slump in his chair. Blood spreads across his stomach, his T-shirt slickening with a red stain. Kyle's face crumples in agony, his breathing hard. It's not a wound that would kill even a normal person immediately, and presumably Malone doesn't think it will kill him at all, but watching Kyle suffer might kill
me
.

The acrid reek of gunpowder mixes with the smell of Kyle's blood, and the room is too small to contain the stench. I'm suffocating from it and from my guilt. This is another test. Malone barely looks at Kyle. His attention is focused on me. Do I cry? Do I run forward to help?

I do neither, but I hate myself for it. Heartless logic tells me there's no point. I won't figure out what's going on between me and Malone without pretending I'm fixed. Running to Kyle will not result in helping him—there's nothing I can do. And guilt is wasted because there's nothing I
can
do.

In this moment, I hate Malone and logic almost as much as I hate Fitzpatrick.

I will not cry or run, but I know I'm doing a terrible job of pretending to not be shaken.

Malone yanks up Kyle's shirt, and Kyle winces in pain. I wince with him. Fortunately, Malone's back is to me in that second.

“Observe,” Malone says.

Blood doesn't bother me. Although Kyle's stomach is a mess of raw, broken flesh, his face is far harder to look at. So I keep my gaze low. After a moment, I realize the volume of blood spilling from his wound has slowed. His gut is knitting itself back together before my eyes. The stream becomes a trickle and stops. Skin reattaches, shiny at first—fresh and raw—then smoothing out, blending in with the rest of him beneath the drying blood. It's like watching a wound heal in time-lapse photography. Only Kyle's chest rises and falls, as heavy as his breathing. He's clearly trying to hide how much the process hurts.

He lives, though not without a cost. My heart aches in sympathy with his pain. No matter if Kyle corrupted me. No matter if he's not a good person. No one deserves to suffer needlessly. But that's what this is. Malone is venting his anger. It's merely a bonus that he gets to test me at the same time.

Malone drops Kyle's shirt. “Remarkable, isn't it?”

I swallow and nod. Everything else aside, it is remarkable. Miraculous.

Malone steps back, and Kyle lets out a long breath. His face is pale and his eyes glassy. Malone's face, however, is calculating. He reaches back into his jacket, but this time when he takes out the gun, he offers it to me.

I take it. When you're in a bad situation and someone hands you a gun, you take it. I don't need Fitzpatrick's lectures to figure that out.

“We've been experimenting with Chen.” Malone seems to realize he got blood on his hands, and he wipes them on a handkerchief. “We want to see how quick his healing responses are to various stimuli. To see how badly he can be damaged and recover. Science can, regrettably, be messy and painful. But sacrifices must be made for advancing the human race.”

Kyle says nothing, but he glares at Malone with an expression of such pure loathing it could peel the paint off the walls.

I turn cold with it. Cold and terrified because I know why Malone gave me the gun.

“Aim higher,” Malone tells me. “The chest this time.”

I can't breathe. The gun weighs a thousand pounds in my hand. Anything but this. Every strand of my DNA, every byte of memory in my augmented head, rebels.

“That's an order,” Malone says.

No, it's a test. One I'm not sure I can pass or fake my way through.

“Please.”

I twitch at the sound of Kyle's voice, and I raise my gaze to meet his. Dark, pain-filled eyes bore into me. Those beautiful eyelashes. Those sharp cheekbones. Even bloody and miserable, he makes my heart beat faster. I want to throw my arms around him, use myself as a shield to block out Malone and his damn tests.

But of course, it's Kyle who'd do a better job shielding me. Kyle can take a bullet and live. The pain will probably be intense, but it will pass. He'll heal inhumanly fast.

Logic, however, is a bitch that fled when Malone put the gun in my hand. It's my emotions that rule me. Weak, dangerous, too-human emotions.

Kyle's jaw clenches. “Just do it.” It's not resignation in his voice or even anger. It's a plea, and it makes no sense.

Shit. I have too many memories missing. Too many questions that need answering. Too much I don't understand. This is what I have to do in order to figure everything out.

So I aim and pull the trigger.

Chapter Eight

Monday: Night of Escape

“I'm sorry,” I tell Kyle, and I cringe.

I'd sworn I wouldn't hurt him by apologizing again, but I can't keep my mouth shut. The musty smell, the dusty darkness and the cold weaken my resolve. Or maybe my resolve died as the result of coming so close to being captured. My guilt was reawakened by RedZone's proximity.

A tiny flashlight throws my world into an eerie, yet somehow appropriate, dungeon of shadows. The dark, colorless shapes surrounding me are unfamiliar and unfriendly. They're reminders that I don't belong here, or possibly anywhere. Only Kyle, his body pressed against me for warmth, is real and alive.

After we fled the forest of cut trees, we ran until we found the self-storage lot I'd noticed on the way into town. I navigated us through poorly angled security cameras, and Kyle picked the lock on one of the units. Someone had left boxes of clothes in this one, along with stacks of camping gear and beaten furniture. It was perfect for our needs. So now we huddle on a sofa of dubious cleanliness, a stranger's worn fleeces piled on top of us and a single flashlight casting the unit in shades of gray. As far as accommodations go, I've dealt with worse, and at least there's no more wind within the sheet-metal walls.

Kyle shifts, and his leg brushes mine. I try not to twitch, but rather than comfortably snuggling against him like I used to, our position feels unfortunately awkward. My blurted apology doesn't help.

“I forgive you,” he says after the silence has stretched for a daring minute.

I do twitch this time, startled by the simplicity of those words and the effect they have on me. “You do?”

My dark vision is good enough that I can see the emotions that war over his face. He sighs. “Yeah. Duh, Hernandez. If that's even your real name.” It's not, and he damn well knows it, but I appreciate the attempt at levity. Hearing Kyle crack a joke, even a lame joke, helps me breathe normally. “I know you didn't do any of this on purpose. You're as much a victim of these people as I am, and I don't want to be angry at you about it. I'm just not sure what that means though, so don't ask.”

I bristle at being called a victim, but Kyle's not wrong to use the word. It fits the situation well enough, even if I dislike the implications. I'm both liar and dupe. Assassin and target. Not to mention hero and villain. “What
what
means?”

He pulls his fleece up to his chin, and the movement has the sad effect of increasing the space between us. I refrain from inching closer. “What forgiving you means. What not being angry means. For us.”

“Oh.” I curl my fingers around my jacket sleeves because they're trembling. Does that mean there's still an us? Somewhere, buried among the secrets we've kept and the lies we've told, the truth that existed between us remains?

I miss that truth. I tasted it on Kyle's lips the first time we kissed, and I lost myself in it when he touched me. There was trust in those moments even if there wasn't trust beyond them. I could believe we had more and could be more. That we were more than our lies.

I still believe it, but it sounds like Kyle isn't so sure. That's no surprise, but it makes my heart swell with hope that he's entertaining the possibility at all.

“It's partly my fault, you know,” Kyle says.

“What is?”

He scowls. “Getting captured. Obviously, I knew something was up with you when you freaked out in South Station, and I didn't do a single intelligent thing about it.”

He's referring to the day my memory chip failed. I'd tried to remove RedZone's tracker so we could disappear together, and I lost a bunch of my memories in the process. Meanwhile, RedZone operatives were chasing me, and I took them down without breaking a sweat.

Yeah, no doubt Kyle figured out there was more to me than a normal college student.

He pushes hair out of his face then reburies his hands in the fleece. “I wanted to stay with you, not split up like we did. Partly, I thought I could help you, but I also hoped I might find out who you were. For real. We always knew people might track me down, and if you were the one who was sent to do it, this was my chance to get answers.”

“I
was
the one who was sent to track you down.”

He laughs humorlessly. “True enough. Anyway, after we split and you never made it back to campus, I couldn't shake my worries that something bad happened to you. Common sense told me I should stay away, that you might be an enemy, but I couldn't accept it. You were too much more. So later, when those two men who'd been chasing you showed up at RTC, I didn't run and hide. Not until I realized they were no longer looking for you, but for me.”

I close my eyes, listening to a whimper escape my throat. “I wanted to call you and tell you I was okay, but I wasn't allowed. That was before I realized what I was doing by outing you. I guess it didn't make much difference afterward.”

“No, probably not.”

We fall into silence. I wish I could tell what Kyle is thinking or experience what he's feeling. I've been taught how to read people, been trained in social graces and given years of acting lessons. I know the effect the smallest gestures or change in inflection can have when it comes to directing an interaction. “Social engineering” is what Fitzpatrick called it. “Manipulation” is what it truly is.

Apparently, I'm terrible at it when the exercise is so personal. I can't read Kyle, and if I could, I suspect I wouldn't be able to pick the right words from my brain to ease his confusion. It would be nice if I could pretend my inability is because I don't want to manipulate him, but it would be another lie. Manipulation isn't always bad. I like to think it would be for a good purpose now.

Except I'm hopelessly inept around him so it doesn't matter. My mind churns with inane questions. Do I inch closer to him? If I do, do I pretend it's just for warmth?

“Hold still,” Kyle says suddenly.

He doesn't have to tell me twice as he leans toward my face. I hold my breath, my cheeks tingling with his nearness. With his lips so close, my mouth waters with the urge to kiss him.

Then he swats me in the head. “You had a spider crawling in your hair.”

“Ew. Thanks.” I reach out and pat that area of my head, which smarts from his gentle thwack.

Kyle slumps in his seat, and my heart lets out a bitter whine. It was foolish of me to think, even for a second, that anything more might have happened.

A new sense of weirdness settles in the gap between us, as though Kyle too senses what might have occurred when he was so close. In the flashlight's glow, little white clouds of breath gather around his face. With longing, I watch him wet his lips.

I'm searching for something not stupid to say when my phone vibrates. Glad for the distraction, I retrieve it from my pocket, and Kyle shifts closer to read the screen with me.

Safe,
reads the message.
Summer with me.

Recognizing the number, I exhale some of my tension. It's from Gabe. He's the last of our unit to report in.

“Is that everyone then?” Kyle asks.

“Yes.” My freezing fingers make it difficult to type a reply.

“Now what?”

I hit send on my text and consider. “We need to regroup and clear out without being seen.”

“That's not going to be easy with your goons canvassing the town.”

I wave my finger in his face. “Hey, they're not my goons. But we have a window we can use. RedZone is going to want to keep a low profile, and that means they have a mess to clean up. If we're sneaky, we can get out of town before the reinforcements arrive.”

Kyle groans. “My luck's been left back at the motel. No, actually, my luck's back in Boston. I must have left it on my bed that day we stopped in South Station.”

I poke him in the arm. “Dork.”

“Robot.”

“Mutant.”

“Freak.” Kyle hesitates for a half second before choosing an insult, and I wonder what he almost said.

Another text arrives, this one from Cole.
Truck stop. North. One hour.

I type my acknowledgment and bring up a map in order to decipher the vague details. There's only one highway out of town that runs north, and we're about two miles east of it. I point out our path to Kyle. “Walking will keep you warm.”

Kyle snorts. “Don't worry about me. Feel bad for the poor guy whose jackets I'm stealing. Although…” He brings the fleece to his nose. “They don't smell like they've been used in a while. Maybe he won't miss them.”

“They're going to a good cause.” The first thing we did once we discovered we'd hit the jackpot of storage units was rummage through boxes until we found hats and gloves as well. The gloves were too large for me, but Kyle absconded with a pair. It's just as well. He probably needs them more.

With the flashlight as our guide, Kyle layers on an extra fleece, and I stuff my head into a knit hat of dubious cleanliness. It has a penguin on it, some kind of hockey logo. Though I don't care about the team, I adjust the hat until the logo is centered on my forehead. I'd feel off balance otherwise, and Kyle chuckles when he notices what I'm doing. I like hearing him laugh. It almost makes everything feel normal.

“Soph, can I ask a question?”

There goes normal. The Kyle I remember from a mere four days ago would never have sounded so tentative around me. “Anything.”

I'll even answer honestly.
I kill the joke on my tongue because it's hardly funny under the circumstances.

Kyle picks up the flashlight and shines it on the floor. “What's with you and Cole?”

“What's with…?” Oh. My insides constrict, as if my emotions have tangled up my organs. The harder I try to unknot them, the worse it becomes. “Nothing. I mean, Cole's like a brother. So are Gabe and Lev. We're the only family we have.”

Liar,
my conscience whispers.
You told Kyle you were done with the lies.

I swallow, glad Kyle's directed the flashlight at our feet and not my face. My conscience deserves a good punch. It's not a lie, not anymore. Once there might have been something more between me and Cole, but that ended when I met Kyle.

Cole's clearly not so certain of that.
There goes my conscience again, annoying me. After all, I can't help whatever Cole's feeling. We've been on the run. This isn't the time or place for those sorts of discussions.

Kyle stares at me like he's hearing my inner monologue. “Really? It doesn't always seem that way.”

“It is that way. I promise.”

“Good.”

I bite my lip, waiting to see what happens next, but the answer is nothing. I can't be too upset about it. He cared enough to ask. To sound concerned. Just knowing that is enough to warm me down to my toes the entire way to the truck stop.