Jenna Black - Resistance

Agnes opened and closed her mouth a few times with false starts before she took a deep breath and shook her head. “There’s obviously been a lot of lying going on. More than you know about, apparently. Remember I said there was something fishy going on?”

She was talking to Nate—she’d had no such conversation with Nadia—but a lump of dread was steadily rising in Nadia’s throat.

Nate nodded cautiously.

“Well, the first fishy thing that happened was the announcement about the Replica program.”

Nate grinned wryly. “You mean you don’t believe my father when he says the press was exaggerating and it’s just a temporary glitch?”

Agnes shook her head. “It’s not that. At least not exactly. My father and I were sworn to secrecy—for obvious reasons—but part of the appeal of the marriage agreement was that my father and I would both have backup scans. We freaked out when we heard the news, but your father assured us the Replica program is still up and running. It’s just that he’s running low on storage space for all the backups so he’s picking and choosing who he’ll use it for.”

Nate shook his head. “That’s not true. It can’t be true.”

Nadia found she was gripping the seat in front of her so hard her fingers were going numb. She hadn’t even realized she’d reached out to grab it. “He’s just stringing you along,” she said with more hope than conviction. “After you sign the agreement, he’ll regretfully tell you—”

“My father and I had our scans done on Friday.”

“No,” Nate said again, as if denying what he didn’t want to hear could make it not true.

“Maybe it’s all a scam,” Nadia said. “Maybe he just pretended to make backups.” But she didn’t believe her own theory.

“That has to be it!” Nate said.

Somehow, without meaning for it to happen, Nadia’s hand had found Nate’s, and their fingers twined together. Whatever else kept them apart, in this they were together.

“What is it?” Agnes asked. “Why is this … upsetting you so much?”

Still holding on to Nate’s hand, Nadia let herself think back to that dreadful day when she had been arrested. Thought back to the deal she’d made with the Chairman. She remembered Thea somehow messing with the electronic lock so that they couldn’t get into her vault. Remembered the Chairman going back to the other room to retrieve a key from Dirk Mosely’s dead body. Remembered him walking back to the vault with blood on his hands.

And remembered the moment before he’d finally gotten the vault door open, when all the lights had suddenly dimmed.

Just like they did when a Replica was created.

“Thea’s not dead,” Nadia murmured in horror. “She made a Replica of herself before the Chairman destroyed her.”

And if Thea was still alive, that meant that everything Nate and Nadia had gone through had been for nothing.

Nadiahad been so shocked by the realization that Thea was still alive and kicking that she didn’t immediately realize she had spoken aloud. Not until Dante and Agnes asked, “Who’s Thea?” in concert.

Nadia blinked and shook her head as her mind continued to reel. Chairman Hayes had tricked her. All this time, she’d been comforting herself with the knowledge that no matter what bad things had happened to her, she had made a difference in the world by destroying the monstrous machine/creature that was Thea. She thought she had saved lives. She thought her own sacrifices were worth it. And all along, the Chairman had been laughing at her behind her back, biding his time until he located the blackmail recordings so he could do away with the pesky little threat she offered him and return to business as usual.

“Nadia?” Dante prompted. “Who’s Thea?”

“Someone who shouldn’t be alive,” Nate answered for her. “And that’s all we can say about the subject, so don’t ask any questions.”

“I’m the one with the car, asshole,” Dante retorted. “You in the mood for a walk?”

“Cut it out,” Agnes said to the boys before they could escalate hostilities. She turned to Nadia with both worry and sympathy in her eyes. “So this Thea person being alive is bad, isn’t it?”

Nadia nodded. “Very, very bad.”

“And you and Nate weren’t supposed to know about it, because Chairman Hayes thought you’d release your blackmail recordings if you did.”

This time, Nadia didn’t respond, as if by now going silent, she could stop Agnes’s agile mind from putting more puzzle pieces together and figuring out stuff she had no business knowing.

“And I tipped you off that she was alive by letting you know the Replica program is still active,” Agnes continued.

Nate muttered a curse under his breath. “You can shut up now, Agnes.”

But the lid was already off Pandora’s box.

“Which means the Replica program isn’t possible without Thea,” Dante said, taking over the chain of thought. “Which means Thea is the person who invented it—and she’s the only one who knows how it works.”

“But how can that be?” Agnes asked. “Surely Chairman Hayes isn’t stupid enough to let the entire program hinge on a single person. I mean, she could get hit by a bus and then poof! It’s all gone.”

Nadia’s gaze locked with Nate’s. Agnes had figured out so much already. And the truly incendiary truth about Thea, the truth that they had to keep hidden from the public if they didn’t want to risk a violent uprising, was her human experimentation—and the Chairman’s willingness to provide her with test subjects.

Nate’s mind seemed to travel the same direction as Nadia’s, for he nodded slightly, and she knew without exchanging any words that he was giving her the go-ahead to tell Dante and Agnes a little more about Thea.

“Thea’s not a person,” Nadia said. “She’s an A.I., an artificial intelligence. She’s this bizarre mixture of biological … stuff and machinery. And she’s smart enough to know that she can use her unique ability to take scans and create Replicas as leverage. I don’t know if a human mind can comprehend whatever it is she does, but she isn’t about to explain it to anyone even if it can.”

“Maybe especially if it can,” Nate said. “As long as she’s the only one who can do it, she’s invaluable, one of a kind.”

“But you think it’s better for her to be dead and the Replica program with her than for her to still be alive,” Agnes said.

“Yes,” Nate replied. “She is very, very bad news. And she has my father twisted around her little finger. Even though she doesn’t technically have a little finger.”

There was a long silence, which Agnes eventually broke with a long, low whistle.

“I knew there was some cloak-and-dagger stuff going on, but nothing like this. Wow.”

“Yeah, but as creepy and disturbing as this all is,” Dante said, glancing at them quickly in the rearview mirror, “we have a more immediate problem. Like, where the hell am I going to take you guys? I can’t just drive around indefinitely. And you can’t go home.”

“Not even me?” Agnes asked in a small voice, tears shimmering in her eyes. Her expression was bleak, suggesting she already knew the answer. Nate had explained why he’d brought Agnes along—Nadia wished she could have seen the boys’ faces when meek little Agnes had pulled a gun on them—but she wished there had been some alternative.

“I’m sorry, Agnes,” Nadia said gently. “But no, not even you.”

Agnes closed her eyes and nodded, her lower lip quivering.

“I wish you hadn’t dragged her into this,” Nadia said to Nate, though it wasn’t fair of her to blame him.