I don’t want to feel sympathy for the Proxy. Everything about her repels me, her creepy irises, her corpse skin, the off way she smirks and laughs, the cruelty in her mouth, but the idea of being kept by Affinity, used over and over to dredge the crap from people’s memories, submerged in a tank for hours at a time … It’s unthinkable.

“Your mother did the right thing, keeping you a secret. Mine, whoever she was, wasn’t as well connected. Though it might have been nice to have another playmate. You’re strong. I can tell you would have survived. Or maybe I could have had more fun with your brother.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Synergist offspring, we make the strongest telepaths. That’s why they claim us from birth. But the survival rate is low. Often our bodies are too immature to cope with having our ETR artificially triggered. I was strong. They triggered me when I was five. I did my first Harvest when I was seven. By ten I could do it without killing the subject.”

“Your parents … they were Synergists.”

“Like yours. I’ll keep your secret if you help me.”

My head rings, hollow as a shell, and I stare at her in uncomprehending silence. A weight slides into my belly. I want to sit down. Lie down. Curl up. I can’t think straight. This is what Miriam has worked so hard to keep from Affinity … that Aiden and I are the children of her Synergist relationship. I picture my skin and hair bleached of colour, my eyes pale, sunless hours, claustrophobia in a tank. I don’t even wonder why Miriam didn’t tell me. Like Tesla said before, she wouldn’t want the knowledge in my head for them to Harvest and use against me. “You – you think I can bust you out of Affinity?”

“It won’t be a prison break. They’ll let me go with you.”

“With me?”

“I’ll tell them that I felt the Deactivation. Tesla will convince the Executive to test Aiden. A research opportunity. Robert will be against it but the Executive will overrule him. I know these people. I know how it will play out. They’ll give you forty-eight hours to locate your brother and bring him in. I know you don’t know where he is, but you know where you sent him and you can track signals.”

“Not at that distance!”

“That’s why you’ll need me to go with you, to boost your telepathic reach.”

“I won’t give him up. They don’t give a damn if he’s deactivated. They’ll kill him.”

“Ethan won’t let them.”

I shake my head. “Tesla’s one of them.”

“He’ll protect Aiden. He’ll protect you. You know why.”

I blink. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Close your eyes. I won’t put it on the screen.”

“What?” But my eyes grow heavy.

“Du bist genau wie deine Mutter,” she chuckles. “Isn’t that what he said? You’re just like your mother.”

I’m in the bandwidth and the burst of colour is immediate and the perspective disorienting, like it was in the memory of Jamie and me, seen from the point of view of an outsider rather than one of the participants. Long dark hair spills down a slender, pale back, strong tanned arms surround her. They are young and naked to the waist, fused at the mouth, chest, hip. Miriam and Tesla.

MANIPULATION

I jolt on my side in the dim light, a sharp crack then fire in the back of my skull. A cry of pain behind me. A muttered curse above me. I sit up, gasping. Instantly awake, eyes watering from the pain of whatever I smacked my head on.

Tesla swears again, hovering by the surgical bed. He drops an empty syringe into a kidney-shaped bowl and presses a cotton swab to my bicep. “Adrenaline,” he says, his eyes gouged by dark shadows. “I gave you as long as I could but we are out of time. You told them nothing about where Aiden is, but the Proxy confirmed she felt the Deactivation and that you know Aiden’s first stop. They will let me test him but we must hurry.”

Behind me, a groan and the shifting weight of a heavy body makes the narrow bed wobble. I look back at the same time as I become conscious of Jamie’s signal, shocked to find him so near and shirtless. Propped on his elbow, one hand pressed to a rising welt on his cheekbone, the other gripping his forehead as though resisting a migraine, he peers through his fingers and rasps, “What the hell?”

A split-second image flashes in my mind. Jamie and I curled on the tiny mattress, the back of my gown laid open, my bandaged spine pressed to his warm chest, his arm around my waist, hidden beneath the front of my gown, his hand limp in sleep sandwiched between my breast and the bed, his legs tucked up beneath mine. The flash goes, but the remembered heat of his body tingles through me and the air on my exposed back tells me the memory is real.

I stagger to my feet, almost toppling into Tesla, who steadies me. Twisting away, I reach to close the back of my gown from Jamie’s sight. Shame, more for my wounds than my nakedness, like I can’t bear for him to know about my scars. “What is this?”

“Expedience.” Tesla rubs his face. “Your Synergist link accelerates healing and we are on a tight schedule. Thank you, Jamie. At least she did not break your nose. You can get dressed.”

Jamie rises gingerly, finding his balance. The skin has split over the welt beneath his eye. It adds to the brutality of his appearance – shorn head and stubble shading his jaw. I don’t look at his chest, or the slope of his stomach or the sharp V of pelvic muscle plunging into the waistband of his scrubs. Heat flames in my cheeks, awareness of my body, of Jamie, of Tesla next to me, watching my face burn and probably knowing precisely why it burns.

The benefits of Synergist Coding can’t be denied. My pain is greatly reduced; I have more freedom of movement, strength in my joints. Pity it does nothing for my internal bleeding. The image of Helena’s upturned face, Jamie touching her neck, the murmur of the Proxy, the words of the sanction – bruises for a lifetime.

“It wasn’t my idea.” He stops by the end of the bed, a hard line drawn between his eyebrows, his dark eyes indicating me and the bed. There’s no malice in it, no bitter inflection, but all my heat goes. We may have slept in each other’s arms, signals resonating, but the distance between us is a chasm wide with betrayal and blame and things that cannot be unspoken or unseen. He steps past me, not meeting my gaze, making his way to the room in the back where he closes the door, leaving Tesla and me alone.

There’s a moment where we’re both just staring at the closed door then finally Tesla moves. He reaches for a brown paper bag and tips my clothes, freshly laundered, onto the bed. “Get dressed.”

I’m sweating by the time I get my jeans on, the effort of bending, the stiffness in my muscles from hours of ReProg followed by hours of lying on my side. The insistence of pins and needles in my spine tells me I am long overdue for a run. Beyond the curtain, Tesla clatters through the lab, riffling through cupboard doors.

Say something. Confront him. Make him admit who he is. But it’s too huge to get my head around. Ethan Tesla, my father. That void in my history now filled with a name, a person, living, breathing, solid, separate from myself. Instead I say, “Forty-eight hours isn’t a lot of time.”

The rustling and banging stops. “They would not allow the Proxy to be away from the compound any longer than that.”

“She says you won’t let them kill Aiden. Or not till you’re sure.”

There’s a pause then he says, “That is correct.”

“I told her I would refuse to go after him.”

Another pause. “You will not.”

I pull my shirt over my head, a slow wrestle of cotton and reluctant muscle. The unsaid flutters in my chest. “I don’t care if she tells them what I am.”

Silence. “She told you.”

“She showed me.”

A long pause. “You should care.”

The tape on my spine pulls at my skin as I twist and tug the shirt into place. It almost chokes me to ask, “Would you get in trouble if they knew you were my–?”