Except, after having seen all of them, from Washington on, I knew the line on my face stood for every last one of them.
I wanted to stop, to tell Johnson I was sorry, and I was going to end this.
But hesitating again might only make it impossible for me to do that. I had to keep going, pretending to be unaffected. I could do it. If not for myself, Ford, Nixon, and Carter, then all the ones who’d come before us. Including the 106 who’d lived, however briefly, at GTX before me.
But even with that edict in mind, the very last display case caused me to stumble. There was a long stretch of unbroken wall ahead of it, so I almost missed it, thinking the gallery had (finally) ended. But there was one last tank. Empty, but that didn’t matter. It was the sign beneath it that caught my attention.
“Ford,” it read in that mesmerizingly bright white text.
The birth date was filled in with an ominous hyphen pointing the way to her unknown-for-the-moment death date. Ford. Not Carter, not Nixon.
Carter reached out and tugged me along as he passed.
Keep going, keep going, was the unspoken message. Of course, he couldn’t say that to me. The real Ford would have understood him in her mind, no words needed.
Ahead of us, Nixon sped up, like a lost dog that finally recognizes home, and I realized we’d reached the end of our journey. The gray hallway dead-ended into a final set of glass doors. They opened into a large room with dark green walls and faux skylights—revealing an artificial night-time sky, complete with fake constellations—set into a high ceiling. An oversize structure dominated the back wall. It looked like a cross-section of a beehive but without the natural irregularity found there. This was made of plastic and precise. Four large tubes enclosed in a larger plastic box. Like the bottom side of a giant LEGO piece.
Each tube was big enough to crawl inside, and watching Nixon, I saw that was exactly what he did. He took the lower opening, leaving three cubbies open. Upon closer inspection, I saw bedding and clothing in several of them. One of them—Carter’s, I’d bet—had been papered with clippings from magazines and catalogues. A white iPad charger dangled from the opening.
That was evidently where they slept and spent time when they were at “home.” The only bit of seclusion they seemed to have. In the corner was a bathroom area: toilet, shower, sink. But there was no curtain, no door, no illusion of privacy whatsoever.
And with cameras likely tracking our every move, no place for a private conversation and the questions now burning a hole in my brain. Why did Ford have a tank and not Nixon? If the tanks were prepped in advance, which would make sort of a sick sense, then why weren’t there three empty ones waiting? Or, at least two, designated for the ones who were not going to the trials. Instead, it was just Ford’s. Which would imply that Laughlin had no intention of sending her to the trials.
I glared at Carter, who either in genuine ignorance or deliberate misunderstanding, nodded toward the upper tube on the left side, diagonal from Nixon.
Yeah, I was asking which cubby was supposed to be mine/Ford’s. That’s what I wanted to know at this exact moment. Right.
He raised an eyebrow in an Are you stupid? look he could have only learned from Ford.
With an effort, I hauled myself into the tiny bed tube/room that belonged to Ford, worrying a little about how strange it would look for me to struggle at this when Ford obviously managed it nightly.
Ford’s chamber was nearly as stark as Nixon’s. I crawled past a pile of clothes near the opening. At the far end, I found bedding wound in a heap with a pillow. When I moved the pillow and sheets, feeling too warm and closed in, paper rasped. Upon closer inspection, I found two small pages glued or somehow stuck to the bottom of the tube. One appeared to be some kind of diagram of a portion of the night sky, with the stars named. Someone, Ford, presumably, had circled a few of them in red. The other was a glossy page that appeared to have been torn out of a larger work, like a travel guide. It was a picture of purplish mountains surrounding a lake so blue it had to be Photoshopped. I didn’t recognize the location, but—
A faint tapping sounded to my right suddenly, startling me. I sat back and listened for a moment before picking out the pattern. Morse code? Really? Well, better than attempting a conversation that would be picked up by the cameras. I doubted that Carter and Ford ever talked aloud here. Why would they when they can communicate telepathically and not risk being overheard? “Change now for training.” That was Carter’s message?
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I tapped in a manner that, I hoped, conveyed my pissed-off-ness. I’d been led to believe that Ford was the one chosen for the trials. The empty tank said otherwise. “Why didn’t you?”
The long delay before his response seemed to indicate a level of discomfort or perhaps, oh, God, uncertainty. “Laughlin does not understand us. He is reminding Ford that she is not irreplaceable, and that if she’s gone, there will be no one to protect Nixon and me. That’s all.”
Except it was more than a threat.
Clambering around in the tube so I was facing out again, I could see the empty display with Ford’s name. It was set apart from the others, an expanse of unbroken wall between it and Johnson’s tank. Why? Perhaps to leave room for Nixon, or to make sure that Ford saw it every morning when she sat up.
That? That was a promise.
And it was proof of a lie. A lie that Ford had told.
According to that gallery and the last display, Nixon and Carter weren’t in danger of being “discontinued” in advance of the trials, as Ford had implied; she was.
I’d been counting on her loyalty to Nixon and Carter to keep me safe while I was in here and to make her play her part in this scheme.
But how could I know for sure what was going on in her head? Could even Carter and Nixon know for certain? They clearly believed that she wouldn’t abandon them, or else they would have spoken up. Right?
Plus, leaving now didn’t even make sense. If Ford took off, that would only guarantee her a slow and painful death from a lack of Quorosene. Unless she had some kind of workaround for that. Maybe she’d weaned herself without the others knowing.
I glanced down at the picture on the bottom of her cubby again, the mountains, the lake, the trees. It looked peaceful, safe, and a little lonely. Like an end.
That was another possibility: maybe Ford didn’t care. Maybe she’d had enough of trying to take care of the others. And maybe the chance to die on her own terms was worth more to her than living on someone else’s. I wouldn’t put it past her. Stubbornness was strong in both sides of our heritage.
And I’d just given her the opportunity and the ability to walk away from her fate, from that box with her name on it, for good.
20
FORD RAISED HER EYEBROWS, SURPRISED, evidently, that I’d figured out her identity so quickly. It wasn’t that hard, if you knew there were two of them and what to watch for.
No matter how similar they looked, Ford had a harshness about her that Ariane did not. It just took an extra second or two of observation to see it. Ford’s hair was lighter too, if you were looking for it.
“Perhaps you are not nearly as intellectually deficient as I originally thought,” Ford said. “Congratulations.”
For someone not particularly fluent in human, Ford certainly had a fine grasp on sarcasm. Or maybe she was being sincere. Either was possible.
“Though,” she continued, rubbing her wrists, which were strangely red and raw-looking beneath the cuffs of her shirt, “running through the halls and attracting attention to yourself by shouting for someone who isn’t even a student here might contradict that idea. I rescind my congratulations.”