The Fox Inheritance (15 page)

"Sounds like you knew way more about what was going on than you admitted."

There's a long pause as she assesses the bitterness in my voice. She pulls the floppy hat from her head and stuffs it between our seats. "Okay. I knew more. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

I look away, but she grabs my arm, forcing me to look back at her.

"Locke, it's not what you think."

"I don't know what I think, Miesha. How could I? I'm not sure I've gotten a straight answer from anyone since Gatsbro flipped the switch on his little Frankensteins."

Her shoulders sag, and she lets go of my arm. She leans back in her seat, shaking her head almost imperceptibly. "I didn't know his plans. Not at first. And that's a straight answer. When Gatsbro hired me, he just told me he had made a scientific breakthrough that required complete confidentiality. You see, I had ... a past. He knew that. I think he thought it gave him something over me, and maybe it did. I knew about the mind uploads and your new bodies, but I didn't know what his real intentions were until just a few months ago. By then I--" She stops and squints. "Let's just say, I was invested. But I had no resources. So I've been saving, and planning, and waiting for just the right timing to get you out of there. But you and Kara had different timing, and I had to go to plan B--also known as Plan Half-Assed-Backward."

She was planning to get us out? "Why didn't you just tell me?"

"So you could do what? Something impulsive? You have no resources, either. And I knew you would go straight to Kara and tell her, and that would lead to disaster--and in that regard, I was dead right."

"I didn't figure it out. She's the one who told me. Jafari was looking at us like we were diamonds he was going to wear on his fingers."

"Well, he won't be wearing them now. He's probably halfway back to Tunisar already." She hesitates, then leans closer to me and whispers, "That's what we should be doing, Locke. Going somewhere far and remote. It's not a smart idea to go see your friend Jenna. What good will it do? Sometimes the past needs to stay in the past."

I look into her eyes without blinking. "It's where Kara is going, so that means it's where I'm going. No matter what. I'm not changing my mind on that. And Jenna's not just my past, Miesha. She's my present too. Not a day goes by that I don't think about her and wonder. She and Kara are the only two people on the face of this planet who remember the old Locke. Without my past, all I am is a clever creation cooked up in Gatsbro's lab. I have to hold on to the past--even if you choose not to."

I watch her pupils contract, knowing her heart is beating faster, knowing she is considering her own past and weighing the risk of sharing it. It's still a barrier between us. I see the faint twitches around her lips, the strain in her eyes. In just a split second, I see the slow-motion unveiling of something I didn't expect to see--pain as raw as my own. I look away, feeling like a peeping Tom, like my BioPerfect has revealed something to me that I had no right to see.

She clears her throat. I hear her breaths, deep and heavy, like she is pushing at a barrier that's heavier than she can bear, and finally her voice, slow and deliberate.

"Karden Sanders was a leader in the underground Non-pact Resistance. Not just a leader.
The
leader. He became a symbol of hope for those who were forced to live on the fringes with no rights and no future. He gave them hope for a future. His methods were forceful and clever and all illegal. Money would disappear from corporate accounts and appear on money cards that were distributed to Non-pacts. Strategic bridges were exploded as messages that the Fancy Pants could be isolated too. They could be forced to live on the margins of society, scrabbling for every morsel that came to them." Her voice is flat, rehearsed, like she is repeating a long-forgotten mission statement. "The human race has always found a group to marginalize--every culture, every time, every race. Karden Sanders took up the cause of the disenfranchised who were shunted off to the side like garbage and labeled as Non-pacts."

"And he was your husband. So you're Miesha Sanders?"

"No. Miesha Derring. I kept my surname. Most women do, not to mention that citizens aren't allowed to take the names of Non-pacts. But I wanted to take his name. I wanted to take in everything about him."

Her eyes narrow like she is focusing on an image of him. "I was only eighteen when I met him. He was dark and dangerous and committed. My parents were people of position, and when I ran off with him, they disowned me. Marrying a Non-pact was unthinkable, especially one with a price on his head. I learned about the Resistance and helped with organizing efforts, but it wasn't long before I was pregnant. Our little girl was born just a year after we married. We had to move often, assuming new identities and always trying to stay ahead of authorities."

"But they caught up with you."

"It was summer. We had been in Cambridge for two months, almost living a normal life. Karden was busy planning his next maneuver but staying close to home. Our little girl had just turned one. It was so hot." She looks at me and explains like it just happened, "It was summer, you know? August. The baby was sleeping, and Karden was working on plans, and I said, 'Wouldn't a dish of ice cream be nice?' He nodded and said he'd keep an eye on Rebecca if I wanted to go get some. I was walking back from the market when I heard the shots and explosions. The front door was open and bursting with flames. The windows were glowing with orange light and smoke. I ran, screaming, breaking a window with my bare arms, reaching, trying to get in to save them, but something pulled me back."

She looks down at her arms and lightly traces one scar. "I thrashed, desperate to get to them, and then I felt a tazegun at my neck, and I knew they had found us. When I woke, I was in prison, and they told me my husband and daughter were both dead--all for a cause that in an instant didn't matter to me anymore. They wouldn't even let me make any kind of arrangements for their funerals. I never saw them again. As far as I know, their remains were shoveled up along with the burned rubble of the house. I spent the next eleven years in prison. They let me out early when my father died and my mother was breathing her last breaths--it was called an act of clemency. For the next few years, I tried to figure out if there was any life left for me, if there was anyone or anything worth living for."

She pauses, her fingers nervously weaving together. "I did some searching, looking for leads to family--anyone I might be connected to--but my parents were only children, and so was I. It appeared we came from a long line of dead-ends. The searching became an obsession, and I kept going back farther and farther, learning a lot about my ancestors. I stumbled on a few things that surprised me, especially one ancestor who left an educational trust for our family. He appeared to be a dead-end too, but there was one unusual entry of his name in the search records that--" She looks sideways at me. "I'm rambling. The long and short of it is, in the meantime, I had to get a job, which wasn't easy for someone with my past. I finally got a tip from a small research facility in Boston about the position with Gatsbro. I thought that maybe..." Her brows pull together and she momentarily shuts her eyes.

She turns abruptly and looks at me. "Those are plenty of straight answers. Now, will you give me one?"

She's earned it. I nod.

"You've never talked about your family."

My family. She's going for the jugular. But then, so did I.

"Your brother, for instance, tell me about him."

My brother?

It's as if she can read my thoughts, and she adds, "I was just wondering if he was anything like you."

I shake my head. "No, nothing like me. He was wild. He had a mind of his own and hated anyone telling him what to do with it. He moved out when I was just twelve, so we never got to be close."

"You didn't like him?"

I think about it. I resented him in so many ways. The way he ignored me. The way pressure was put on me because of him. The way he just left us and only came back when he needed something. But I never stopped hoping he would care. I heard him when I was in the hospital. I couldn't talk or see, but I could hear him. I heard him hovering near my bed, shoes scuffling, feet kicking the wall in his trademark angry way. He called me stupid, but he said it through tears and in the way I had always hoped he would, like a brother who cared. And even though it was what I had always wanted to hear, I thought, Too little, too late. You're too late,
brother
--

Miesha touches my arm. "Locke?"

I startle and try to cover my lapse with a quick response. "No, I didn't like him. I didn't want anything to do with him. He was a lowlife." Her face is dark, disturbed. How long had I been staring into the past? When I lose track of time, I don't know if it's seconds, minutes, or even longer. I am just gone. Kara warned me not to wander off into la-la land, but for the first time, I'm wondering if it is more than that. Maybe my BioPerfect isn't so perfect after all. What if some memories that were scraped, pulled, and wrung from my brain, then stuffed back into froggy blue gel, don't know they're obsolete. Maybe--

"
Locke.
"

I focus again. "I'm sorry."

"You've been doing so well, but you have to try harder. You have to watch your lapses. In just a few seconds of checking out, something serious could happen."

I nod. She doesn't have to elaborate on what the something might be. We both know that this world is not like Gatsbro's secluded estate, where I was a baby in a well-padded pram. Out here I'm an underage illegal creation, running with a fake ID, with a desperate and angry scientist after me.

"I'll be careful, Miesha. As careful as I can. I don't know why--"

"Refreshments?"

Miesha and I are both surprised by the hanging Bot that has come up behind us. She swivels to face us. As with Dot, the Council on National Aesthetics has decided she has no need for legs, or maybe legs would just get in the way of her servicing the human population. I try not to stare, not knowing if it is even impolite to stare at a Bot, but her face is so human that I still avert my eyes from the thick bar protruding from the top of her head and attached to an overhead rail. A passenger coming down the aisle grumbles at her, and she folds her body up flat against the ceiling until he passes.

"We should get something," Miesha says to me. "It's going to be a long night, and who knows when we'll get another chance." She looks up at the Bot. "Two energy waters and two protein cakes." The drinks and cakes are dispensed from the bottom of her torso stump. I can't help but wonder how that design made it past the aesthetics council.

"Two hundred duros, please."

Miesha pulls her money card from her pocket and waves it over the Bot's extended palm. A bar of lights blinks across the stump of the Bot's torso as the money is accepted and approved. "Thank you," she says, and she hands us our order and moves on to the next car.

Miesha begins to slip her card back into her pocket, then stops. She looks at it like she has never seen her own card before, turning it over to examine both sides.

"What's wrong?"

"My card."

I watch her eyes dart back and forth like she's retracing some sort of sequence, and with each darting pass, her face grows darker.

"
Miesha
, what is it? Tell me!"

Her jaw drops. "It's my card. That's how he knew. I gave it to Dot to use for our food when we were back at the warehouse outside of Boston. I used it again when we refueled before the transgrid, and then again at the diner. And just now. He's accessed my account and is tracking our purchases. He'll know we're on this train, and we're creating a straight line pointing to San Diego."

"Are you sure? How could he access your account?"

"He directly deposits my wages into my repository account. I never gave him my passcode, but I've used the estate network to access my account. It probably wasn't secure. I should have known."

I sit back in my seat, running my hands through my hair. Think, Locke.
Think
. What should we do? "He's going to be right behind us on the next train. It won't take much for him to connect the dots. He'll know just where we're going once we reach San Diego and--"

"Unless we don't go. There's a stop in Albuquerque."

I shake my head, annoyed that Miesha keeps returning to the same solution. "We already talked about this.
I'm going
. I can't--"

"I'm not talking about you." Miesha glances at Dot, who is still mesmerized by the world passing by, and then leans closer to me. "Shut up and listen. We don't have a lot of time. And then we'll tell Dot. She isn't going to like this."

Chapter 37

I take off my shirt and look in the mirror, fingering the bandage that still wraps around my middle. The white gauze reveals a small oozing spot of blue. Dot's doctor may have stopped the bleeding, but it looks like I could have used a stitch or two. How much blue gel can I afford to lose? I pull the new shirt that Miesha bought me over my head and comb my hair with my fingers. I'm alone now.

Miesha said going to a foreign country would appear logical to Gatsbro, so she and Dot are on a train to the Republic of Texas now. Before she left, she bought me a pack and a few supplies at the Albuquerque station to hold me over, since I won't have any money of my own. The purchases will also begin a new trail for Gatsbro to follow. From here she and Dot will go on a fast-moving spending spree, leaving a trail all the way to Mexico. She'll try to exchange her money card for a new nontraceable foreign currency card when she gets there. "Then we'll double back and find you in San Diego."

"We'll
try
," Dot added, seeming to understand all that could go wrong. She took the news better than Miesha expected, saying that helping an Escapee sometimes means parting ways. It was all for the cause. I didn't really understand what she meant, and there wasn't time for her to explain, but she does tell me that the Network that helped us in Boston is in San Diego too. She doesn't know the contacts there, but she said to fish outside the station among the CabBots and ask if they know a Mr. F. If I found the right one, they would help me--for a favor. I would be worried about how many favors I may end up owing if I didn't already have bigger problems.