West nodded, adjusting his grip on his handgun. Bill unslung his assault rifle from his shoulder.
“I know this building better than anyone,” Dr. Evans said, standing a little straighter. “Come on.”
We carefully searched through every single apartment, finding each and every one empty. All of them were in the state West had described. Ripped apart, a mess, torn to shambles.
The offices on the main floor were empty as well and we quietly descended into the lower first floor.
The first and second underground floors were clear. We told Avian to lock himself and Creed in a room until we gave the all-clear.
I had hoped to avoid the lower floors all together. I’d accepted my past—and the fact that I couldn’t remember it. I didn’t need to have the memories stirred up when I had moved on. But as we descended a floor lower, flashes of memory danced just under the surface of my conscious.
We checked the room that held the treadmills. I had spent hours and hours here. A window faced the line of three treadmills, where long ago chocolaty brown eyes had watched me.
We checked a weight training room where I lifted amounts a person three times my size couldn’t have handled.
Still, we descended another floor lower and I knew exactly where my room was from the time I stepped out of the stairwell.
“Familiar?” West asked, his eyes flickering from the line of his handgun to my face.
“More than a little,” I said between clenched teeth.
We passed the playroom, the one where West and I fought, the one where he and my sister spent hours bonding.
“I hate that room,” I said. My past feelings crept up inside of me, whispering to my memory like a ghost.
West chuckled.
“This was her room,” I said as we stepped inside a simple room that contained a narrow bed, a dresser, and a nightstand with a cracked lamp. “Right?”
West nodded.
It was empty.
She really wasn’t here. And it looked like she hadn’t been here in a very long time. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.
“Let’s keep moving,” Dr. Evans said. His voice sounded tight and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
We dropped down the hall, checking doors as we moved. All empty.
And I knew this was my room when I stepped into it.
Exactly like my sister’s room was, this one was covered in dust and forgotten. No longer needed.
I ran my fingers along the gouge mark in the wall where I had thrown a lamp just before I had gone in for surgery to get my chip. The lamp had shattered and scraped the paint and drywall off.
“This is still too weird to accept the truth that you aren’t her,” West said, shaking his head as he looked around. “I avoided the girl from this room as much as humanly possible.”
“Still wise advice sometimes,” I said, trying to make a joke.
It wasn’t a good one, but West smiled anyway.
“Let’s keep moving,” Bill encouraged. He fidgeted in the doorway, not wanting to step into my past when he couldn’t even dwell in his own.
The rest of the fourth floor was clear and it would be difficult to tell if the fifth and final was hiding anyone. It was packed full of storage supplies. Someone could hide there and we would have a very difficult time ever finding them. We even checked the back elevator and found no traces of anyone.
“Maybe they moved on,” I said, knowing any number of possibilities could be viable.
“Maybe,” West said, looking around one more time before he and Bill headed back up.
I was just about to start up the stairs after them, when Dr. Evans called out to me from behind. I turned to see him walking toward me, a box in his hands.
“What is that?” I asked.
But he didn’t have to answer the question before I read the single word written on the front of it.
Emma.
“My mom?” I asked. My eyes darted up to Dr. Evans, questions and uncertainty in them.
Dr. Evans nodded. “Any of her research, files, scientific notes were taken by NovaTor, but she left behind some personal effects when she…” his voice cut out once again, just briefly, like it had before. I wasn’t sure if it was pain in saying what happened to her, or if his voice simply failed. “I boxed her things up myself and brought them down here.”
Considering my purpose before the Evolution, I was quite certain I was never intended to inherit this box. But the world had changed. Now the contents of that box would matter to me.
“It belongs to you now,” he said, extending it toward me. “If you want it.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice coming out breathy. “Thank you.”
In a way, it felt like reading his notebook all over again. There were secrets within this box, secrets to my past and my origins. Secrets to a woman I had never been able to meet.
Secrets to my mother.
NINETEEN
As badly as I wanted to immediately tear into that box, I couldn’t abandon my duties. Undeniably there was someone else around. We hadn’t seen them yet, but they were toying with us. West and I kept constant watch the rest of that day.
Creed got her third dosage of TorBane just before bed. Very slowly, her vitals were stabilizing.
Finally, the evening fell into night and I asked Bill to keep watch. It was a selfish move. But he agreed without hesitation.
Eagerly, I went into Creed’s room, where Avian checked her tubes and wires one last time before we let her settle for the night.
He met my eyes as soon as I walked in and then they quickly fell to the box on the floor, right next to the door.
“Is that…” he hesitantly asked.
I stood stiff and nervous in the doorway and nodded.
“Do you want to do this alone?” he asked. “Or would you like some company?”
A small smile tugged in the corner of my mouth. “You’re my family, Avian. Of course I want you here.”
A crooked smile crept onto Avian’s face and his eyes seemed to brighten.
I stepped in the room and quietly closed the door behind me. I scooped the box up and went to sit on the sleeping bag that was rolled out along the far wall. Avian sank down next to me, his shoulder barely brushing mine.
Avian handed me a scalpel which I used to cut the tape. Taking a deep breath, I pulled the flaps open.
There wasn’t much inside the box. Two leather bound books, an envelope, and two framed photographs.
The first framed picture showed a snowy black and white image. I could make out a few shapes, an oval here, a circle there.
“It’s an ultrasound,” Avian said quietly. “It’s a picture taken of the inside of a womb.”
“Me and my sister?” I breathed. I ran a finger over the image as I started making sense of the shapes. A tiny arm. Three visible feet. Two round heads. The shape of a spine.
“I would guess your mother was about half way through her pregnancy when this was taken,” Avian said.
I nodded, simply staring at it. It was eerie, all that was tied to this image. A sister I hoped to find, knowing I was a different kind of creature when this was taken—fully human. Knowing the woman whose stomach I resided in would die just a few short weeks later. The fact that this image had been taken in this very building.
Blinking hard several times, I set the photograph aside and picked up the next.
The girl in the picture looked just like me. I would have thought it was me, except for the pre-Evolution world around her, and the bronze colored glasses perched on her nose.
My mother held some kind of certificate in her hands with scrawling print on it. On either side of her stood two people who both resembled her. They all bore smiles. Emma wore an odd set of robes and a square hat on her head. Draped around her shoulders was a golden scarf.