“Oh, come on,” Dr. Rogers said impatiently. “We don’t expect her to be Bruce Lee—not yet, anyway. We just want a little demonstration. For our esteemed investor.”
“Fine,” sighed Dr. Hashimoto. She muttered so that only Sophie heard her, “Anything to please the investors.”
“Gary,” said Dr. Rogers, his eyes following Sophie’s progression across the room. She tried to keep her steps as clumsy as she could without falling onto her face, hoping that if she proved to them she was barely capable of standing he might let up. “See how you fare against Mr. Andreyev’s Vitro.”
Andreyev’s eyes slipped to the door, as if he were trying to gauge how quickly he could reach it. Odd, Sophie thought. For someone investing in these Vitros, he doesn’t seem to want much to do with them.
Dr. Hashimoto left her standing in the middle of the room, and Sophie, feeling abandoned and in way over her head, faced Gary uncertainly, her back to Andreyev. Dr. Hashimoto slipped out of the room, muttering some vague excuse, and Sophie hoped she was going to get Moira and Strauss. Check that. Just get Mom. Strauss seemed even more bloodthirsty than Dr. Rogers and Sophie wasn’t at all sure she could count on her to intervene.
“Well, get on with it,” said Dr. Rogers, waving a hand impatiently.
Sophie couldn’t hold her vacant expression. She stared at Gary with open desperation. The guard was thickset and tall, with an Italian complexion and thick eyebrows that gave him a permanent scowl. He seemed unsure what to make of her, whether to expect a female version of Clive or a helpless wisp of a girl who’d been “born” just an hour ago. Sophie didn’t know which part to play. This was a bad idea, she thought. A really bad idea. I should have run when we were in the hallway. I should have told my mom who I was the minute I saw her. I should have—
She didn’t have time to add to her regret, because Gary lunged at her. His swing was halfhearted, but it still caught Sophie in the stomach with all the force of a brick. She dropped to her knees, doubled over and gasping. There was no acting about it. The air had been punched from her lungs and she saw stars.
“Stop this!” Andreyev said, stepping back with a stricken look. “It’s insanity!”
Dr. Rogers was suddenly in front of her, crouching down to meet her eyes. “Get up, Lux.”
“Uhn . . .” she moaned.
“Get up.” His eyes flickered to Andreyev. “You tell her, sir, she has to listen to you.”
Give it up, Sophie told herself. Before you get yourself killed.
“I think not,” said Andreyev, his voice suddenly taking a sharp tone. “That is quite enough, Dr. Rogers. Let her be.”
A look of uncertainty crackled over Dr. Roger’s features, as if he regretted what he’d done. Sophie couldn’t bear it any longer. She had to tell them the truth, and then trust her mother to back her up.
“I—” She winced. Speaking made her chest hurt. “I’m not—”
The door slammed open and Moira burst into the room. “What’s going on here?”
Sophie groaned and climbed unsteadily to her feet as Moira rushed toward her. Her mother held her tightly and glared around at the others, waiting for an explanation.
“It was my idea,” Dr. Rogers said tightly.
“Well, it was a foolish one,” Moira snapped, and she looked as if she wished they were alone so she could unleash stronger vocabulary on Dr. Rogers. “She needs to be monitored and fed, not punched.” She turned a withering glare on Gary, who looked as if he wanted to crawl under the couch.
Moira helped Sophie across the room, and Sophie cast a curious look back at Andreyev before her mother pulled her into the hallway and slammed the door shut, leaving them alone. Then she turned to Sophie and ran her hands over her hair, her eyes brimming with wrath.
“Sophie Jane Crue,” she hissed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
FIFTEEN LUX
Where is she?” he asked.
And she had no answer.
“Who are you?” he asked.
And she had no answer.
It pained her that she could not tell him the things hewanted to know. Why didn’t she know the answers? What was wrong with her?
Even when she tried to obey him, to swim across and get the plane, she did it wrong. She fell under the water and couldn’t get up again. She felt angry that she couldn’t do what he asked.
There was just so much happening. The words were like the waves, sucking her down and overwhelming her until she couldn’t breathe. She was trying to understand him but he moved so fast that trying to keep up with him was like drowning. She felt the same way when he asked her questions she could not answer: suffocating, choking, falling beneath the water. . . .
When the feelings of inadequacy surged through her, her brain served up only the words I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry but they weren’t enough weren’t nearly enough to release what she felt she would bust if she couldn’t give him the answers!
But then he moved on, talking and walking and looking all around and she could only watch and struggle to follow. He walked up and down and she walked behind him, stepping where he stepped, matching her footprints in his.
The world tugged at her. So much to take in, too much to see. Shells and birds and leaves and rocks and water and sand and she wanted to touch it all, smell it, understand it. The things which had terrified her at first now fascinated her. She wanted to hold it all in her hands but when she tried she only dropped things, the shells and the rocks and the little white crab she found in a little sand hole.
But more fascinating than sand and shells and crabs was Jim: how he moved and talked, how he turned and ran his fingers through his hair, how his face changed and his voice rose and fell like the water, how his shadow slid across the sand. She watched him and she learned. She did what he did, stepped where he stepped. When he scratched his ear so did she. When he stopped and looked up at the sky so did she. When he spoke she moved her lips.
Every time he looked at her she felt brighter inside, and she yearned to keep his attention, to hold his gaze.
This was her world, her world of sand and sea and the boy named Jim, and she was content.
SIXTEEN JIM
He decided to go for the police. Or possibly even the navy. This was beyond him, well and above his reach, and he hadn’t the slightest clue what else he could do. At the least, he could find some way to reach Mr. Crue, to let him know Sophie could be in trouble.
He paced up and down the beach, and the girl watched him. She knelt in the sand, staying still, as he had told her to do. At first, she’d tried following him, dogging his steps like a second shadow, and it drove him crazy. At last he snapped at her to stay still, and she’d immediately gone rigid.
He muttered to himself and kicked the sand up as he walked, and his hands worried at his hair and his face in agitation. The girl copied him, her hands matching his movements with eerie exactness. It made him so uncomfortable that he forced himself to keep his hands at his sides.
Whatever she was, this not-Sophie, it seemed that he’d stolen her. They would notice she was missing and they would come after him. Mary and her friends already were after him. He couldn’t fend them all off, and he doubted he’d be able to go back for Sophie. Her look-alike was no help at all. She seemed to know nothing about the island, the doctors, Sophie, Nicholas, any of it. His questions only got him traumatized looks, as if she wanted to give him answers but simply couldn’t. She was a conflict of appearances and behavior. A child in a nearly full-grown body. She might have looked identical to Sophie on the outward, but she wasn’t like Sophie at all, unless, perhaps, he compared her to Sophie as he’d known her a decade ago.