“Funny,” Strauss replied, “I was going to ask you the same question.”
Moira’s hand flinched, as if she were going to take Sophie’s hand, but then she thrust it into her pocket. Her pale face belied her steady tone. “What on earth do you mean?”
“What I mean, Moira, is that your associates here have been informing me of some . . . what did you call them, Dr. Rogers?”
He cleared his throat. “Irregularities.”
“Ah. Of course. Apparently there have been some irregularities with your Vitro.” Her gaze shifted to Sophie, who could feel the coldness of it on her skin. “Irregularities of which you have failed to apprise me. Please, Dr. Michalski, will you tell Moira the interesting theory which you just told me?”
Dr. Michalski looked as if he’d rather wrestle a shark, but he swallowed and nodded. “It’s just that . . . her muscle development, her complexion, even her fingernails . . .”
“What about them?” Moira said lightly. Too lightly.
It was Dr. Rogers who answered, rolling his eyes at his hesitant colleague. “This isn’t Lux, is it, Moira? Which means she can only be—”
“All right!” This time, Moira did grab Sophie’s hand. Her voice hissed through her teeth. “I can explain.”
Very slowly, Strauss unwound the tea bag from her finger and dropped it into a trash receptacle. She then set the mug on the counter, matched up the fingertips of her hands, and finally lifted her eyes to Sophie. You wouldn’t be the first threat Strauss has had eliminated, her mother’s voice echoed in her head. Sophie swallowed, her throat suddenly dry.
“Michalski, Rogers,” Strauss said evenly, and though her voice betrayed no emotion, it nonetheless made the hairs on Sophie’s arms stand on end. “Leave us.” They scrambled out, followed by Dr. Hashimoto.
“Victoria, let me—” Moira began, but Strauss cut her off with a flick of her hand.
“I’m speaking with the girl. Sophie, is it?” Strauss said, not even looking at Moira. “Tell me everything.”
Sophie felt as if she were filled with helium she was so light-headed. She looked at Moira, who nodded. “I wanted to see my mom, so I paid someone to fly me here. I was curious about Skin Island and wanted to see it for myself. I . . . I fell asleep in one of the rooms and I guess someone mistook me for Lux. When I woke up and saw all of you, I just went along with it.”
“Hm.” Strauss pulled out a chair and sat, her hands perched primly on the edge of the table. “Why are you lying to me, Sophie?”
“What? I’m not!” She heard Moira make a soft sound behind her, like a strangled warning, but she shook her head stubbornly. “That’s the whole story. I swear.”
“Who brought you here?”
“Just a pilot. But he’s gone now, back to Guam.” Her mother glanced at her, her lips twitching, but she said nothing.
Strauss sniffed. “Dobbs, take your men and head north to the airstrip.” Sophie turned; she hadn’t even heard the guards arrive. One of the doctors must have gone to alert them. “If you find a plane, it means the pilot is here somewhere. Find him and kill him.”
“No!” Sophie cried. “Please—he isn’t part of this!”
The guards ran off, their boots squeaking on the tile. Strauss’s calmness was deadly. “Moira, where is Lux? The real Lux?”
Her mother stepped forward. “I’m working on that. She’s on the island, I know that much. Nicholas might be able to help us, if I can just find him.”
“Your incompetence astounds me. How did the girl find this place, anyway?”
“I’m not stupid,” Sophie said. “I went to Guam and asked around.”
“You can’t keep this place hidden from the entire world,” said Moira.
“I can damn well try,” said Strauss. “But you are the one who should be outraged right now, not me. This project was conceived by my father—I just inherited it. I’ll do what I must to make it successful, but if it fails, the failure is yours and not mine.”
“We can fix this. Yes, Sophie is here, but no irreparable damage has been done. We have other Vitros we can show Andreyev.”
“Ah. Andreyev.” Strauss leaned back. “He will not be amused by this, Moira. If he withdraws his support—”
“He won’t,” Moira snapped. “This is just a misunderstanding. The Vitros are no less viable than they were yesterday. He’ll see that.”
“For your sake,” said Strauss, “I should hope so. Take this girl and hold her somewhere. I want her locked away until this is cleared up.”
“She’s no threat to us. She’s my daughter.”
Strauss tilted her head forward; her glare could cut diamond. “Now, Moira.”
Moira stiffened, then reached out and took Sophie by the arm. “I’ll take care of it.”
“See that she is contained.”
“I will.”
Strauss nodded and gave Sophie a brief, disdainful look. “If I find out any part of your story is false, or that you’ve left out anything, I’ll have you shot. Are we clear?”
“That’s a bit dramatic,” said Moira through clenched teeth.
“I understand,” Sophie whispered, and her mother marched her away.
TWENTY JIM
There was no chance of swimming the channel now. He didn’t have the strength. Nor could he risk trekking back to the resort, at least not until nightfall, when the darkness could compensate for his lack of energy to run away. The morning had left him exhausted and ravenous. From the sun’s glaring position overhead, he judged he’d already missed both breakfast and lunch. When he asked Lux if she was hungry, she just gave him a confused look, as if she didn’t know.
He decided to wait out the day and make one final attempt to rescue Sophie. After what Mary had said, he couldn’t pretend that Sophie was all right.
“Don’t get involved,” he muttered as he trudged into the palms, looking for a shady spot to sit. “Brilliant plan. Perfect execution. I’m an idiot, Lux. What do you want to follow an idiot for?”
But follow him she did, with unwavering doggedness. He watched her warily, his mind replaying what he’d seen: Lux spinning into action with almost cartoonlike speed, laying all three of Jim’s attackers out without breaking a sweat. She’d seemed perfectly at ease, unsurprised at her own skill, as if she were peeling a banana instead of channeling some kind of ninja warrior. And yet she still moved unsteadily, her body at odds with itself, though he noticed she was gradually getting more stable, like someone adjusting to solid land after spending a week on a boat in rough seas.
Mary had called her a “bodyguard model” after Lux had gone all Chuck Norris on them. He imagined, for some reason, a conveyor belt transporting boxes of girls identical to Lux, like giant Barbies, with Bodyguard Model! stamped on them in swooshy pink letters. He shook his head and grunted, disturbed by the image.
He found a flat space of sand between three tall palms and made a kind of mat out of dried fronds, within view of the beach but obscured by a thicket of low-growing, broad-leaved shrubs, so that anyone searching for them from the shore wouldn’t spot them unless they stumbled upon their exact location. Then he gathered an armful of coconuts and hunted for a rock to open them with. He found a nicely sized boulder deeper into the trees, and, Lux looking on, he smacked the first coconut against the rock. It split neatly in half. He grinned and extended a half to Lux.
“Learned that from a bum named Nico,” he said. “He lived off coconuts and shellfish he pried off the docks. Guy was crazy as a bag of cats, but he knew how to crack a coconut.”Lux blinked at him, then looked down at the coconut. He held up his half. “You do know how to eat a coconut, right?” He slurped up the milk, then used his nails to scrape out the white meat. It curled up easily, the smell making his mouth water and reminding him of the Chamorro women in his neighborhood back home when they gathered during fiestas with their special coconut-grating benches to make fresh coconut shavings. He and Sophie used to sit at their feet and catch shavings in their hands; he remembered that he used to pretend the soft curls of coconut were snow, which he still had never seen with his own eyes. Like an echo from across the sea, he could still hear the rhythmic scraping as the women shaved the coconut meat, and their husky, soothing voices as they sang and gossiped.