When she woke, she was lying on her back, on something soft, and she was soaked with sweat. She jerked upward, only to find her hands and feet were stuck.
Groggily, she blinked away the static in her eyes and looked around. She was inside. In one of the rooms. The light above her hummed; it was too bright, scalding her.
She groaned, her voice sludge in her throat.
Her head was a riot of numbers and words, nothing making sense, all scrambled up, all jumbled out of order. And it hurt. Her skull throbbed, her eyes throbbed, she felt a swirling in her stomach that kept surging into her throat.
“Lux,” said a voice.
Moira Crue’s face appeared, blurry and out of focus.
“It’s okay, Lux. You’re safe.”
“Jmmm.”
“He’s okay. You did your job. You protected him.”
“Moira . . .” A different voice. Lux rolled her head to see who it was: another woman with dark hair, dark eyes, white coat.
“Her primary concern is protecting her imprintee,” Moira said. “She needs to know he is safe or she’ll go into shock. I’ve seen it happen before, when we were testing Clive.”
“She looks like she’s going to throw up.”
“It’s a combination of stress, sedatives, and overstimulation. She’s been exposed to too much too soon. They normally need several days just to acclimate to their own bodies. Lux has been forced into a maelstrom of completely new experiences and sensations. Remember, everything she is seeing and hearing, she’s seeing and hearing for the very first time, with nothing but her chip’s limited data to interpret for her. If she’d been awoken properly, she’d have plenty of time and therapy to help her along. As it is, she’s had to largely fend for herself.”
“If Strauss catches that pilot and—”
“Sh. You’ll spark another anxiety attack in her. If they catch Jim—the pilot—and . . . if that happens, we’ll have only two choices. Put her in an induced coma until we can find a way to reverse the imprinting, or . . .”
Silence fell. They both stared down at her.
Then Moira Crue said, “Let her sleep. She’ll fade in and out the next few hours. It’s best we give her time to process.”
Their faces disappeared, and for a long time, the room was silent.
Lux didn’t like being alone. To occupy herself, she replayed Moira Crue’s words in her mind, searching for answers, for understanding. There was so much, so many words that slipped through her fingers and evaporated before she knew their meaning. It was too much, all too much. She floated on a dreamy wave of warmth, her muscles limp, her mind sluggish. Eventually, she gave up on thinking and shut her eyes, losing herself in darkness.
TWENTY FIVE SOPHIE
Sophie’s shoulder, chest, and arm ached with pain that made her head swim, but she forced herself to keep moving and stay alert. When they’d reached the end of the road at the top of the north beach, Jim had used the keys to tear a strip of cloth from the bottom of Sophie’s shirt, since his was too dirty to use as a bandage. He wound it around her shoulder and under her arm to help stop the bleeding.
They left the excavator on the side of the road. Head spinning and her body protesting every step, she trudged along as Nicholas led them to the motorboat in the narrow inlet on the northwest bend of the island. The tide was low now, and they had to half drag the boat into the water; luckily it was a small outboard and floated easily in the shallows.
Nicholas steered recklessly across the channel and ran the boat aground without slowing, and the impact sent Sophie sprawling on the bottom of the boat.
“Sorry,” he muttered as he helped Sophie out. She gritted her teeth as a wave of pain washed through her.
“We could take off and let them think we’re gone,” she said, “then we can sneak back and get Lux.”
Jim shook his head as he climbed out of the boat. “Too dangerous.”
She started to protest, but bit her tongue. What right did she have to ask Jim to risk his life anymore for her sake, or even Lux’s? He had nothing to do with any of this. He looked as terrible as she felt, and she realized she had little idea what he’d been through in the past twenty-four hours.
“Come on,” he said. “The plane’s that way.”
“What happened to you?” she asked. “How did you end up with Lux?”
“Yes,” said Nicholas, slinging his backpack on. “How did you?”
“Long story.” He began telling them about how he went looking for her and found Lux, as they followed him down the beach. The sky ahead of them blazed scarlet, but the sun had already fallen beneath the horizon and the light it left behind was quickly fading. Behind them, a few stars glimmered, flecks of white against a deep blue wash. The temperature had dropped to a comfortable, balmy degree that took Sophie back ten years, to the nights when she and her parents would camp on the beaches and build little fires out of driftwood.
“Why does she listen to me?” Jim asked when his story had concluded with him losing Lux and then launching his only partially successful rescue plan. “She follows me like a puppy.”
“It’s how she’s programmed,” said Nicholas.
“What—like a robot?”
Nicholas gave a short laugh. “What an idiotic thing to say.”
Jim bristled and shoved his hands in his pockets, and Sophie said, “She’s as human as you or me, or at least she was, before Corpus got to her. They put a chip in her brain when she was still a developing fetus, and it makes her imprint on the first person she sees. She’d been sleeping for seventeen years before you woke her up.”
Jim nodded, his face pale. “I didn’t know if I could believe her when she said she was just a few hours old. So she’s like a clone or something?”
“Can you believe this guy?” Nicholas asked, pointing at Jim with his thumb and giving Sophie an eye roll. “Clones! Really!”
“Shut up, Nicholas,” Sophie sighed. “According to my mom, no. She’s my natural twin, donated to the project, I guess you could say, by my parents. I think that’s where the trouble between them began—with Lux. Anyway, they were going to wake her up, let her imprint on that Russian guy, some investor named Andreyev. But I guess I got in the way. Well, me and Nicholas.”
“Nicholas?”
Sophie told him how Nicholas had found her unconscious and tried to disguise her as one of the sleeping Vitros the scientists apparently kept somewhere in the building. “I promised I’d help him escape. It was my mom who did this to him, after all. It’s the least I can do.”
Nicholas smiled at her.
“Doesn’t make him your problem,” said Jim grumpily.
“Will you two just be nice?” she asked, exasperated. The last thing she wanted to deal with right now was their competing egos. Jim and Nicholas exchanged hostile looks, and then Jim took her arm and whispered that he wanted a private word.
“Why? What about?”
He glanced meaningfully at Nicholas, and Sophie groaned. “Fine. Whatever. Look, Nicholas, just give us a sec, will you?”
“Yeah. Sure.” He shrugged, but she noticed that his eyes followed her as Jim led her aside.
“Jim, what’s wrong? Can’t we go? They’ll be here soon!”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Nicholas? Why?”
“I think he’s the one who sabotaged my plane.”
“What? Why would he do that?”
“It’s something Mary said when she was chasing me and Lux. Something about keeping me put, and she implied Nicholas had something to do with the nails.”
“Duh! He didn’t want you taking off without him! And understandably so!”