Intrepid Page 14

  So I pulled up a forum about the Humanitarian Project Trials. There had to be a clue in there, and I clicked on the vid of Dr. Anastasia Einstein. She was in the Seventieth Generation from Dr. Alberta Einstein’s genetic line, and her role as the High Chancellor of the Shadow Boxers made her a voice that was always heard. Her face was plump, and her hair was so tightly pulled into a bun that it made it difficult for her to blink. Nobu was the one who pointed it out to me the first time I saw the vid. He of course waited for me to take a big gulp of orange juice before he said it, and I ended up feeling the acidic liquid torch through my nostrils.

  But her tightly wound bun didn’t stop her from having a point.

  “With knowledge comes responsibility. With responsibility comes the necessity to do that which we dislike.

  “For the Calvary to believe in their right to redefine humanity is a crime against humanity itself. It is our duty to remember that these creations are not human. Even the Calvary’s scientists label them as subjects, and therefore we must look at them as such. Just as we would destroy rabid puppies that had been experimented on, as is the policy of any lab after the experiment is finished, we must do so in this case.

  “Just because these subjects share our faces does not mean they share our humanity.

  “In this, we must be Intrepid.

  “It is our duty and responsibility to preserve what it means to be human, even if what I suggest seems inhumane. We must remember that things aren’t always as they seem. These are not children. They are failed experiments that are dangerous and therefore must be disposed of.”

  This was the speech that almost swayed the Gaian Order to destroy the subjects. I hated to admit that the few times I listened to it, I was inclined to believe her.

  Corbin never let us speak of her as Texi around him. “Subject, boy. She’s a subject,” he always said when I’d misstep. Whenever he was gone, Nobu and I tried our best to follow his reasoning. These are not children, but Texi was once. I witnessed nearly every painful moment of her childhood. It made me drift back and forth with what I ended up calling her. “Subject” on documents or in earshot of Corbin, and “Texi” in open conversations with Nobu. I could never understand how Corbin could act so scientific around us about Texi, only to go back to Geronimo and put her on his knee. I’d seen the past vids of Corbin wearing a tiara at a table of stuffed animals drinking invisible tea. I’d seen him teach her how to cast a line at the river and clean up a scraped knee. I’d watched him kiss her on the forehead with love in his eyes and kindness on his face. But when he was with us, he wore a sturdy mask of duty.

  It was a lesson in objectivity, and Corbin tried to make sure we saw Texi for what she was behind those ringlets and that doe-eyed wonder. She was an experimental weapon and a danger to us all.

  Dr. Anastasia Einstein had a irrefutable point, and when the verdict came down after the vote, it sent shockwaves through the Gaian Order.

  I swiped my fingers through the air in front of the screen and pulled up the last speech in the long line of testimonies. Marcos Ortiz pounded his gavel, and there was the sound of moving chairs as the Gaian Order rose from the elongated desk in front of the podium.

  Then, Marcus Ortiz read the verdict:

  “The Gaian Order wishes to show moderation. Is this so hard to conceive?

  “Our esteemed colleagues on all sides use examples from the Manifesto and the Giants to explain their logic. They all try to justify the unjustifiable. They all say that we must preserve humanity. Yet they forget the other teachings of the Manifesto and the Giants.

  “We are taught from an early age to question every truth. Is it possible that we need more time to do so?

  “Am I saying that what the Shadow Boxers suggest should never be considered?

  “No.

  “I am merely suggesting that we take a pause and truly consider what we have before us—that we refrain from extremes and absolutes.

  “Therefore, we will investigate this matter further before we decide. Like it or not, these subjects have life, and that is something we cannot take away in such a flippant manner. The subjects are officially under the protection of the Gaian Order until we revisit the matter in one year’s time.”

  But two months later, every subject, except for Texi, was dead.

  The Gaian Order attempted balance, and Marcus Ortiz cautioned us from acting in haste. Acting in haste was what created Texi in the first place. Sure, it was a slow haste a couple generations in the making, but the Calvary should have shown patience in the search for the Optimal Path. In their rush to find it, they committed crimes against humanity. On the alternative end of the spectrum, the Shadow Boxers wanted to destroy things they didn’t understand, and they did in a fast haste. Had they just followed the mandates of the verdict and given the Gaian Order time to explore, maybe we could have discovered more about what we were dealing with. The side effects of both types of haste were so even they were uneven.

  Now, the only subject left was Texi, and so far she has done nothing severely extraordinary besides survive fifteen Texas summers.

  I always wondered, what if there was more to the story than what was on the vids? This issue obviously wasn’t over because Texi was still alive. Yet the trials were never revisited, and the people who disposed of the subjects were never arrested. Most Gaians wanted to move on from the stain on our history, and most did.

  Except we didn’t.

  Why did we keep Texi alive? Fairness was the most logical answer. She’d never done anything to warrant an execution, unless you counted being born as a crime. There was a balance that needed to be struck. We needed to give Texi a chance to prove us wrong, but what happens if she becomes our worst fear? The part of the Ortiz speech that made sense to me most was: Am I saying that what they suggest should never be considered?—No. He still admitted there could be cause for disposing of the subjects.

  My whole life, I assumed that I was never meant to meet Texi. I was never meant to have this responsibility. “Why me?” I asked again. Then the answer settled into place, but it didn’t comfort me the way I wanted it to. The others? Ringo. Corbin. Iago. The Ortizes. They were her family. As much as they tried to distance themselves from loving her, they couldn’t help it. Some loves become unconditional.

  But Corbin’s voice was always stern, almost angry, when I’d call her Texi in front of him. “Subject. She’s a subject,” I whispered.

  Why me?

  Objectivity.

  If it came down to it, I was supposed to treat Texi like a Subject.

  If it became necessary, I should be able dispose of her.

  Texi

  The Humanitarian Project Trials

  Those who refuse to see the tragic within the comic fail to see the dark within the light. They neglect to notice that you cannot have one without the other and therefore miss out on the nuances of life’s greatest jokes.

  But this is no joking matter.

  These past months, we’ve heard the extremes. We’ve heard of Creation and Destruction, but not of the possibilities that lie in between.

  What of those, I ask you?

  —Genissa Newtonian, President of the Gaian Order.

  —Sixtieth Generation of Madame Isaac Newtonian,

  —S-1, V-1.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I stepped to the side and adjusted my body so I could run from them both, but Sully seemed to exist everywhere I wanted to go. How could he Jump so easily? Didn’t he need to enter coordinates into a bracelet? Was he like me?

  The last question stilled me, and I squared my body to face Sully. Pausing to look at his face was a mistake because he looked exactly the same. Same softness in his lips. Same crunchy, brown eyes. Same moppy mess of black hair. But things with us weren’t the same, and they’d never be the same again. “How are you doing that without entering stuff in the bracelet?” I asked.

  Iago stepped between us so that I couldn’t see Sully anymore from behind Iago’s bulking sha
pe. “He’s not like you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Anyone can Hop within a five mile radius without entering new coordinates. As long as he has the bracelet on and activated, he just has to think of where he wants to go.”

  The information settled into my ears, like he was trying to tell me how we’d get out of this situation. Hopping by thinking? I could do that, right? I’d done it before, and without an activated bracelet.

  Did Iago mean to give me an escape? Why would he tell me this if he was bringing me right to Sully?

  I backed away from Iago and closed my eyes. “Think, Texi. Think,” I whispered to myself. If Iago wanted me dead, why didn’t he do it last night? Iago had plenty of chances to finish what Sully started. Sully? There was no doubting it. He’d tried to kill me. The memory jumpstarted the fear in my heart, because with everything that had happened I’d forgotten to fear what that meant. Everything happened too fast to have any room for considering how much it hurt. It was a pain that was as vivid as the Change, and now that I discovered it, it catapulted me into a different type of action.

  I opened my eyes and felt the tingle of swirls blooming inside of them. They burned hot against the thick tears that escaped out of them.

  “Let me talk to her,” Sully said.

  “No.” Iago’s stance adjusted as he pulled his fist into a swing. It landed hard against Sully’s jaw and knocked him back. Iago grabbed my arm and we entered into the Nothing, then out again. We were under a hallway that looked like a wave made of stones. Curved pillars opened out to the world on one side, while an equally curved wall sheilded us on the other.

  “See? Activated,” he pointed to the bracelet.

  I backed away and shivered. Iago was safe, and I’d misunderstood his intentions. Relief bubbled up a new feeling of calm. “I thought you were bringing me to him.”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Texi.” He shook his head in frustration. “How could we have missed him on Geronimo? All this time? He was right under our noses!” Iago said to himself and pulled up his screen. “How did find he us?”

  As an answer, Sully appeared out of the Nothing in front of us, and I backed into the curved wall behind me.

  “Texi. You don’t understan—” he tried to say, but Iago leapt between us again and pulled out his pistol.

  Iago aimed it at Sully’s chest. “Back away.”

  “Let me talk to her.” I closed my eyes to the sound of Sully’s voice. It was the one I’d heard a million times in the hallways and on the phone. I wanted to snuggle up in the feeling it gave me, but instead it twisted my heart into uncomfortable positions.

  I opened my eyes when I heard the subtle click. There’s a moment before you fire a gun, when the trigger feels the tension of the pull and warns your finger that if you put just a bit more pressure on it, it’ll force that hammer down. It’ll release. All Iago had to do was put that tiny bit of extra pressure down, and a bullet would tear through Sully.

  “Don’t!” I yelled as I wrapped my arms around Iago from behind and yanked his arm up. I tightened my grip and felt my eyes burn and swirl, and I wished to be elsewhere. Anywhere but in this moment and in this place.

  Before I blinked, we were in front of Sully, and after I blinked, we were in a sea of spires and pillars. Sully followed us within the beat of a heart, and I knew we wouldn’t escape in this way. How was he following us so quickly?

  “Texi, it’s not what you think. I was just trying to activate—” Sully tried again, but whatever he was trying to tell me, I wasn’t hearing it. I kept my arms around Iago, and there was no thought involved in what I did next. In less than a second, space expanded and Creation crashed into me. It pulled me out like a current and was even faster than the Nothing. So much chaos existed within me, and I lived in moments faster than the speed of light. Creation was infinitely small, infinitely hot, infinitely violent, and infinitely necessary. The purples of my irises bled into the whites of my eyes, and I felt them grow deeper and darker. That was when the universe shook. It shook and shook four times total in the the shake of divergence—the universal split. The Knowing, as Iago called it, told me I’d Created that which shouldn’t exist, and a strange sense of understanding settled in my heart where confusion should have been. It was terrifying and sweet and real and impossibly possible.

  We were in the same location, but Sully was gone. I knew it’d take him some time to figure out what had happened.

  “What did you do?” Iago yelled and pulled me behind a pillar.

  I gasped in air, but there wasn’t enough to drink.

  “What did you do?” he repeated.

  The pillars looked almost natural, but I knew they were born out of someone’s brain. I knew things about Creation now, and it was so intoxicating that I could only see the art within everything invented around me. My eyes fixated on the art pillars, and the concept became insatiably funny. Art pillars. Art pillars. Art pillars. I clung to the stupid concept as my eyes began to equalize. I giggled and giggled until I could only hold my side from the laughter pains and gasp out dehydrated giggles.

  “It’s not funny!” Iago shook me by the shoulders. “We were on a Stagnant planet! You could have killed us all!”

  Art pillars. Art pillars. Art pillars.

  “Damn it to hell. What were you thinking? Did you hear me? You could have collapsed this entire Vein of the Multiverse with us in it.”

  The giggles came to an abrupt stop. “No. I couldn’t have.” The Knowing was a strange feeling. It was like a heightened instinct that shed light on hidden truths within myself. Iago was afraid of me, and, if I was honest, I shared his fear. But Splicing felt so right to do. I knew without knowing (in my old definition of the word) that Creation was the only way to escape because Sully could not exist in multiple places at once.

  “How do you know that?” Iago asked.

  “How do you know that breathing won’t kill you?” And that was the truth of it. I saw the Paths clearly, and I knew just which ones to take to safety. It was just that simple. I took a deep breath to calm the urge I still had to giggle. The Vein had a new vibrancy about it, like it’d just woken up from a bad dream, and a hopeful feeling bubbled up from my toes.

  Iago shook his head in disbelief. “Sully? He’s a Shadow Boxer?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Shit. Are you wearing anything he might have given you?” He checked one arm, then the next. My fingers went to the necklace Papa gave me, and Iago yanked it off. The chain was too small to take the pressure and crumbled into several pieces.

  “No! Papa—”

  “Gave you this? Or was it one of those windowsill gifts?” He threw the pendant to the ground and crushed it with his boot.

  I let out a soft whimper. “You knew about that?”

  “We know everything, Texi. We’ve been watching you your entire life. Anyone could have left this, including Sully.” I thought about Rebecca telling me about Sully’s visit, and how Sully’d clammed up when I mentioned it. Did he leave me the necklace as a way to track me? It felt like an even bigger betrayal than the botched attempt to strangle me because if it was true, he’d taken something special between Papa and me and twisted it to suit whatever messed up plan he had.

  Iago grabbed my bracelet and pulled out the screen. “We have to hurry,” he said as he entered new coordinates. We entered into the Nothing, and when we came out of it, we were in a city of ruins. We landed on top of the roof of a building attempting to become rubble, and I saw a road that meandered through the broken concrete. If people existed in this universe, they didn’t live here.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “It’s an extremely Stagnant planet,” Iago said. “One where humans have been wiped clean from it.”

  It was a statement that should have made me sad. I’d never considered before that there were worlds where no one existed. That meant Iago and I were the only humans on Earth in this reality, and it left a starched feeling of loneliness in my veins.

  Iago c
ontinued with his explanation: “These planets used to be really rare, but they are happening more and more often. On this one, the polar ice caps melted and covered everything. No one survived, and eventually, the water receded back into the ocean and refroze back into caps so that patches of land have pulled themselves out of the water.”

  I could see the edges of ocean in the short distance as it wrapped around the rubble like a blanket of empty.

  “It’s a good reminder that everything is cyclical, and every end is really the beginning of something different.”

  “Okay, Yoda.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Yoda, I may be. Skywalker, you are not.” He managed to laugh at his own joke, and it echoed off the emptiness before it filled my ears.

  My body adjusted to the lack of Energy on the planet, and I shuddered. “You’re right though—about new beginnings. There’s still life here, but it’s evolved differently.”

  Iago stretched his arms and his back as if he’d just woken up from a nap. I heard the crackle of bones as he adjusted. “You’re quick to pick that up. It took me months to figure out how Evolution Nuances worked.”

  I ignored the new term he threw out. Evolution Nuances? I was curious, but there were other questions pressing on my brain I needed to get to first. “I’m still not sure how Sully Jumped back there without entering coordinates into his bracelet. I thought you said I was the only one you knew of who could—”