Luca Read online

  And when they refuse to listen, yes, we beat them without mercy.

  Luca’s eyes jump open at the sound of Cat’s voice in her mind.

  “What about the low-calorie diet? These girls look like starving pigeons. How is that helping?”

  “Hunger keeps them focused. We feed them enough to keep them healthy, but not enough to interfere with the treatments.”

  When they’re starving, they don’t have the energy to resist or even think.

  The woman fumbles with a jax in her pocket. “We don’t have much time, so let’s jump to the bottom line. Why should the central government continue to fund your program? Many other needs press upon us. Too many mouths to feed in this country of yours.” Her gaze wanders to the waiting transport.

  Because I need the money to pay off my luxury condo on the Izu Peninsula. Not to mention Maui.

  “We are producing results.” Cat lifts her slate. “These are not the only children in Japan who suffer the severe effects of radiation poisoning. Thousands of them wander the streets, orphaned or abandoned. Many end up in camps or overstrained mental institutions. They swell the ranks of the homeless, and chaos follows in their wake. They are a plague on society. The problem is only growing. We are on the verge of finding a solution. You need what we have to offer. Surely you know this.”

  “The more I see,” the woman scans the courtyard, “the more I think you’re bluffing. But I’m no expert. Just a cog in the machine, sent here to decide whether to pull the plug on you.”

  “Regardless of whether you agree with our results or our methods, you have seen the brain scans, I presume.” Cat swipes a finger across her slate. A holo jumps out of it. “This is from one of our star subjects. Her brain clearly demonstrates the new neuronal structures I mentioned in my report. All the girls have them, but none as pronounced as this.”

  The woman draws closer. “What is her name?”

  “Luca.”

  “Strange. How did she end up with an Italian boy’s name?”

  “According to the files, her father was half Italian.”

  “Is she here?”

  “Yes,” Cat says. “Right over there.” She walks down the line, bringing the woman with her and stopping in front of Luca.

  The holo floats in the air above the slate, a rotating image of a multicolored human brain. The faint outline of a narrow spiral, six inches long, appears imbedded in the tissue.

  “We’re all familiar with the revolutionary new organ, as you call it.”

  “I was the first to identify it and publish my results.”

  “It is interesting, but I doubt it will get you the Mao Prize you covet.” The woman reaches into the holo as if to touch the spiral. “Now that we know what to look for, variations of it have been found in other children suffering from schizophrenia. But experts disagree as to its function. Or whether it even has a function. At most, it’s a genetic mutation stimulated by excessive exposure to radiation in utero. Perhaps no more than an anomaly.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong.” Cat’s gaze moves back to Luca. "It’s more than a simple genetic mutation. Or an anomaly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Cat points at the structure in the holo. “It acts as a radiation sink, drawing poisons out of the tissues of the body.”

  “Yes, we know.”

  “The spiral seems to want more radiation, taking it from the air. Sometimes I wonder if it’s alive on its own. Our scans indicate that neurons within the spiral are most active when the subjects are experiencing auditory hallucinations.”

  “Hearing voices?”

  “Yes.” Cat takes a step closer to Luca. “And this girl is our prime specimen. The one with the most active spiral.” Cat runs her fingers through Luca’s long hair.

  “So, she still hears voices? Perhaps your treatments are not as effective as you have represented.”

  “She hears the voices, but it’s painful. She will learn not to respond.”

  “Why do your work here, in the heart of an international toxic dump?”

  “Because these girls can’t be moved. No other institution will accept them with the perceived radiation risk in their brain tissues. Dead or alive, they are pariahs in a country with a mortal fear of toxins. We are the only ones that can take care of them and study them. The only ones that can unlock the secrets inside their heads. For the good of all.”

  “And that is why we must continue to fund your Institution?” The woman nods her head as if answering her own question, turns and walks toward the transport across the courtyard, casting a backward glance. “I will present your arguments to the Minister in Beijing. She will make the final decision.”

  Cat walks quickly alongside the woman. “What do you think she will say?”

  “Depends on her mood, which isn’t often good. Be prepared to shut down the entire project.”

  “And what will happen to the children?”

  The woman stops and turns. “Are you really so concerned about the children? Open their cells and abandon them to the wild they came from. Back into the Death Grid. Tell the world they escaped.”

  “How could you even suggest such a thing?”

  “I’ve been monitoring your accounts. The monthly siphoning of funds. That’s the real reason the children are starving. You've worked hard to hide it. Even taught me a few tricks. Being from the Mainland, I’m used to it, but it pains me to see some of our comrades in Japan have acquired the same tastes. The real question is, what will happen to your mansion in the Izu Peninsula when they come to arrest you for embezzlement of state funds? To borrow an old Chinese proverb, we must kill a few chickens now and then to scare the monkeys, mustn’t we? I’m sure you understand.” She smiles and walks back to the transport.

  Cat turns back to the line of girls. The hard soles of her carbon shoes click crisply on the concrete. Passing close to the girls, her fingers stretch out to brush their faces. She stops in front of Luca.

  “Look at me,” Cat says.

  Luca stares forward.

  Cat slaps Luca’s face, drawing blood with her fingernails. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? To get away from the Institution. From me. To escape into the world. You may just get your wish.” Cat walks to the open door on the opposite end of the courtyard, her thoughts booming in Luca’s head.

  Time to leave. Destroy the records. Empty the accounts. Let them all die.

  Zero emerges from the door and walks to Cat, head lowered. “What did the officials from Tokyo say?”

  “There will be no additional funding,” Cat says.

  “What does that mean?” Zero frowns. “Am I out of a job?”

  “Tomorrow you’re out of a job.” Cat walks away. “Today you still work for me. Help me gather my things. I’m leaving within the hour.” Her gaze sweeps along the line of girls. “Put them back in their cages. I leave them in your hands. Do whatever you want.”

  14

  DESTROYER OF WORLDS

  Mercer turns from the wall to face Qaara.

  “You don’t know anything about this data sniffer, do you?” Mercer spits a couple of lemon seeds out the corner of his mouth.

  “Nothing.” Qaara doesn’t make eye contact. “The office is swept for snoops every morning. I have no idea where it came from.”

  “What about this guy? Look familiar?” As Mercer lifts his jax, a holo jumps above it with a headshot of a man. “He’s an employee of Genesis Corporation. Or was. One of the guys in blue overalls. A mere sweeper from the Fringe. Came in from the Zone ten years ago. Zero upgrades. Multicolored eyes. A real genetic freak. Ring any bells?”

  “No . . . wait a minute.” Qaara sees an image in her mind of a man leaning against the door, chatting with her earlier in the day. Something about a coffee stain on the floor. And she doesn’t drink coffee.

  “What?”

  “He came by earlier today.” Qaara remembers the tight footballer’s body. The biceps. One eye blue. One eye brown. “To clean a stain on
the carpet. Told me his name was Jedd.”

  “Jedd Dexter,” Mercer says. “Part of our Fringe employment campaign. A leg up for the less fortunate. A brilliant PR move. But not to worry. He won't bother you anymore. He’s dead by now.”

  Qaara looks up, unable to suppress the horror she feels, face locked in a grimace. “Dead?”

  “Absolutely.” Mercer stares at the image of the disembodied head rotating above his jax. “My people are good at what they do. They just sent visual confirmation. See for yourself." He brushes the side of the jax with his finger. “Here’s what’s left of his house."

  A full color holo of a burning pit stands out in contrast to the neighboring buildings.

  Qaara can tell with one glance it’s in the Fringe. “But isn’t that—”

  “Illegal?”

  Her gut fills with revulsion for Mercer. Words tumble out. “I was thinking more along the lines of . . . murder.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t use such a harsh word. It’s nothing more than payback. It’s only murder if the police come after you, and I can assure you they won’t. No one cares about the Fringe. I’ve seen Mesh-films on the people who live there, if you can call them that. Back alley bio-grafts run amok. Women warriors that blur the line between human and beast. Chemlabs on every corner hawking homemade mind-narcs. Horrifying and disgusting. A world you and I will never be a part of, thankfully.” Mercer turns to leave. “I’ve given you a lot to digest. Take your time. Go over the materials on the memory cube. Get some rest. Our flight leaves in twelve hours. My men will stay outside your office to . . . protect you from any more mischief. See you in the morning.”

  Mercer walks out the door and shuts it.

  Qaara sinks into her chair, still stunned by Jedd’s murder, her gaze fixed on the multicolored molecule floating in the holo.

  She knew that Mercer was capable of treachery. And then he’d boasted about accidental deaths. But now she had seen it for herself. A deliberate murder.

  Why had Jedd planted the micro-cam in her office? Did he know about the Cloud? Was he trying to protect her? Or harm her?

  One thing’s for sure. Mercer has plans for her. She’s just another toy in his collection. The more she thinks about it, nothing has changed. She’s always been his prisoner. Ever since she arrived at Genesis Corporation.

  She wants to fight back.

  But logic forces its way in. Mercer won’t hesitate to kill her, her family, anyone she’s ever known. Then again, they’ll be dead soon no matter what.

  Confusion roils in her mind. What should she do?

  Get back to work.

  Without thinking, her fingers wander into the holo and probe the molecule, destroyer of worlds.

  Could it be true?

  With Mercer gone, she has time to digest all he’s revealed. Her hand slips into the pocket of her lab coat and closes around the memory cube. The one Mercer gave her.

  He said it would verify his claims. Obviously, he wants her to view it. She better do what he says. For now.

  Rising to her feet, she walks to a counter and drops the cube into the holo machine. A bluescreen pops up, floating in air.

  The holo goes into auto-execution mode.

  There’s grainy footage of a massive drill rig in Transvaal, South Africa. Each shot has a date and time in the lower left corner. Workers pull up the drill bit only to find it’s been sheared into pieces. They try again. The bit breaks over and over. More heavy equipment is brought in. A robot mole digs down thousands of meters, following the drill. Robot hands reach out into a dim-lit cavern and retrieve a chunk of rock.

  A five-year-old boy carefully balances the slippery chunk in his hand. Qaara recognizes the rock immediately. It’s the same black chunk Mercer brought into her office.

  A young Mercer smiles for the camera.

  The next scene unfolds in a laboratory. The rock chunk is subjected to multiple tests. Titanium presses, industrial saws, boulder crushers. Time after time, the chunk emerges unscathed and unscratched. Drill bits and diamond blades snap in an effort to breach the surface. Brows furrow and heads shake under the glare of the lights. The videos continue year after year with no progress.

  The little boy becomes a teenager and then a man.

  Shots of a rainy day in a graveyard. Black umbrellas gather around a black monument that rises like a needle in the sky.

  Mercer’s father is dead.

  Mercer stands in the laboratory, alone. He opens the door of an electronic safe and wearing carbon gloves, takes out the chunk of rock and places it on a white cloth in the middle of a large table.

  His eyes find the camera.

  “A rock this hard must be hiding something. For thirty years, we’ve tried to open it with power tools, diamond saws and mining equipment. I know it sounds crazy, but maybe it’s time for a lighter touch.”

  The table is strewn with feathers, pieces of wool, cotton swabs, raw watermelon, grapes, a slice of bright red fish. Random objects one might find around the house.

  Qaara stares into the holo.

  Mercer picks up the pink feather and holds it like a butcher knife, poised over the rock. Bringing it down, he presses the frilly edges into the black surface.

  Bending closer, he observes the result.

  Nothing.

  He takes another object from the table and brushes it against the rock multiple times from numerous angles. Again, no result. He repeats the procedure with each object on the table. Each one fails. The rock remains unmoved, a solid mass that can’t be opened.

  Mercer glances at the camera and raises his hand. “I admit it. That was stupid. But I had to know.”

  Balancing the rock carefully on his palm, he brings his hand up close to his eye. “I wonder what this is. Definitely not of this world.” He examines the side. Carefully placing the rock on a white cloth on the table, he aims his index finger at a particular spot and presses.

  The instant Mercer touches the mark, a black, rectangular piece slides out, like a miniature drawer.

  Qaara stares at the holo; Mercer stares at the rock.

  “Incredible,” the younger Mercer says.

  For the next minute, Qaara watches as he frantically searches every cupboard and drawer in the laboratory, scattering stainless steel utensils and glass containers across the floor. Then he finds what he’s looking for: tweezers.

  He dips the tip of the tweezers inside the small opening in the side of the rock and extracts a tiny jewel, a green crescent moon.

  The same one he showed Qaara.

  A mass of images flow by as the jewel is placed in machine after machine. Mass spectrometers. Quantum microscopes and scanners. Men and women in lab coats hover over it with transparent slates in their hands. Bluescreens fill with rivers of data. Mathematicians and cryptographers try to decipher the result.

  As Qaara watches the holo, she knows what will happen next. Mercer will be sure to have included the moment of discovery.

  “Wait!” A lab technician stares into a slate. “The algorithm found a pattern. It almost looks . . . genetic.”

  Brushing a finger across the holo machine, Qaara fast- forwards through a series of images from a bio-lab. Large white vats line the walls. Technicians work on enormous bluescreens, moving data back and forth with their hands, tapping, swiping. Intuition tells her when to slow down the playback.

  Another technician leans over a slate in the bio-lab. “We’ve synthesized the DNA fragment based on the genetic data from the green jewel.”

  “The question is, have you synthesized enough of it?” Mercer moves into the picture, standing behind the technician.

  “We have enough to produce a large sample. It’s in the bio-vat now with a few hundred gallons of host cells.” The technician motions to a white tank on the right. "The host cells will absorb the DNA frag and churn out the result.”

  Mercer leans in. “How long until we know?”

  “Two or three days.”

  At last, Qaara is to the part of t
he holo she’s been waiting for. The part where she meets the molecule she’s labored over for six months.

  The image blurs and then comes into focus.

  The lab is engulfed in mist. Fumes rise from the floor. Red lights flash on and off.

  “Tank breach!”

  A lab tech scoops up his slate and moves back.

  Fluid rushes out the bottom of the vat, spreading across the floor. It washes toward the lab tech, steam rising from whatever it touches.

  “I’m not sure what’s—”

  All at once, the walls of the tank rupture, sending waves of dark liquid rushing across the floor of the lab. It washes over the feet of the lab tech.

  For an instant, he looks down at his feet. Mist rises around them.

  And then his feet are gone.

  Shrieks of terror burst from his lungs just before he collapses and disappears into the dark liquid.

  It eats away the floor, carving out a hole. Stacks of equipment and shelves collapse.

  The image switches to an outside view of a three-story concrete building. Half of it is melted away, as if a flame slashed through a wax sculptor.

  Mercer walks into the holo frame. “How far down did it go?”

  “It completely dissolved three floors, a twenty-foot concrete foundation and a few hundred feet of bedrock before it stabilized. Tests indicate that it seeped through and destroyed all organic life to at least a depth of five miles. That is as far as we searched.” A woman in a hardhat and white lab coat waits for Mercer’s reaction.

  “And then it stopped?” Mercer says.

  “Exactly forty hours after the tank breach.”

  “What about the liquid? Is it still there, in the hole?”

  The woman nods. “We dropped in sensors and found a pool at the bottom.”

  “And your analysis?”

  “The prior acidic material is gone. Its molecular structure has changed, or I should say, is changing.”