Peter Clines - Ex-Communication

“Maddy Sorensen isn’t real,” said the doctor. “She doesn’t have any life signs because she’s a … a robot. An android. She’s a pile of nanites working together to duplicate the individual parts of a teenage girl on the cellular level, and they don’t realize there’s no actual girl left. They rebuilt a working model of a corpse.”

The spiderwebs drifted across the screen.

“Does she know?” asked St. George. “Did she see any of this?”

“No,” said Connolly. “I was working alone on this all day yesterday and she was out earlier with you, right?”

St. George nodded.

“That’s why I figured now was the best time to talk to you about this.”

“Does she pose a threat?” asked Stealth.

Connolly blinked. “How do you mean?”

“Is she a threat to the population of Los Angeles?”

The doctor shook her head. “I don’t think she has any evil programming or something, if that’s what you mean. For all intents and purposes, she’s still just a teenage girl. No stronger or faster. It seems like she’s got more endurance and her pain response is a lot lower than it should be, but I think that’s a function of her … well, not being alive.”

The cloaked woman turned her head to the image on the screen. “Could her nanites be dangerous to other individuals here in Los Angeles?”

The doctor shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She reached out and tapped the screen. “I’ve only scratched these things, granted, but it seems like they’re Madelyn-specific, designed to her DNA, and they won’t last long outside on their own.” Connolly shrugged. “Like I said, this is a little over a day’s work. There’s still so much about these things I don’t understand. I could keep a research team busy for their whole careers.”

“So,” said St. George, “now what do we do?”

Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “What do you mean?”

“Do we tell her?” he said. “Do we tell her what she is? Or what she isn’t, I guess.”

“In a few hours,” said the cloaked woman, “her knowing these facts may be irrelevant.”

“She still deserves to know,” said St. George.

“That does not mean she would be better off knowing,” Stealth responded. “It is more likely such knowledge would cause her considerable mental and emotional stress.”

Connolly nodded. “When I was an intern I saw people get close to complete breakdowns over all sorts of things. Tumors. Paternity tests. STDs. This is going to be just as life-changing for her as any of those. Heck, just the philosophical angle could keep you—”

“This isn’t philosophical,” St. George said, “it’s a person. We can’t just—”

“Either way,” snapped Stealth, “this is a matter best discussed tomorrow.”

St. George took a breath, then let it drift out between his teeth. “You’re right,” he said. He glanced at Connolly. “Where is she now? Is she in her room?”

Connolly’s brow wrinkled. “No, of course not.”

“Of course not?” echoed Stealth.

The doctor looked at St. George. “I thought you had her doing something.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s why I decided to talk to you—I knew she’d be gone. She came in about two hours ago and said you’d given her a mission.”

MADELYN’S BICYCLE SKIDDEDto a stop and she double-checked the address. Hector had run a piece of duct tape down the arm of her jacket and written out the street number with a fat Sharpie marker. “Don’t want you getting halfway there and forgettin’ where you’re going,” he’d said. He’d also given her a few map pages from something called a Thomas Guide that lined up to show her the route out of Hollywood and into the Valley.

It hadn’t been hard to convince him to help her. Despite her mom’s constant warnings, Madelyn was pretty sure not everyone in Los Angeles with a tattoo would slit your throat if you asked a question or flashed your headlights to remind them theirs were off. Hector de la Vega was gruff, and he stared at her boobs just a little too long for her liking, but he got the urgency of the mission a little more than St. George did. Hector had a cross on each arm, and the numbers of a Bible verse on his collarbone. She wondered if he was religious and had a better idea of what the demon represented.

By the same token, she was also pretty sure Hector wouldn’t be too broken up if she never came back. She’d seen the big man recoil when his fingers brushed the back of her hand. Nobody liked the feel of dead flesh, and he’d been one of the ones giving her looks at the big meeting.

Getting out of the Mount hadn’t been half as hard as she thought it’d be. It reminded her of a line from an old Houdini movie her mom loved—had loved. Nobody made safes to keep people from breaking out of them. She’d scaled the Wall while the guards were facing the other way and slipped down into the crowd of exes below. It’d been creepy as hell, being surrounded by them, but it wasn’t any worse than a school hallway between classes. Hundreds of people around you but not one of them seeing you while they moved. They jostled her, but none of them reacted to her.

Stepping past the seals took a little more work. She’d stood on the sidewalk with the tips of her sneakers against the invisible line for almost five minutes, staring at the circular symbol ahead and to the right. Inside the Wall it was easy to tell herself she was safe, but out here, with chunks of meat and pale limbs scattered across the ward, she’d found herself wondering what it would feel like to catch fire and explode.

It was just like a high dive, she’d told herself. Just like being on the board. A hundred things could go wrong, but none of them really would. She could do it. Her team was counting on her to do it.

“I’m the Corpse Girl,” she told the exes around her. “It can’t see me. It can’t touch me.”

She closed her eyes and took three quick steps. There’d been a brief moment of panic, the knowledge she couldn’t go back. She squeezed her hands into fists, ready to fight however she could.

Nothing happened. An ex bumped against her and wandered past, its teeth clicking away. Another one tripped over the curb in front of her and sprawled on the sidewalk.

She’d found a bike with a rattling chain a block and a half from the Big Wall. Most of the bike’s owner was a few feet away, but she’d decided to skip the helmet. It took her an hour to get to the address.

Denny Avenue looked like a pleasant place. Yeah, there were a couple of dead bodies and a burned-out pickup truck, but the houses were nice and there were lots of trees. Even the exes shuffling in the street looked a little cleaner.

Hector’s grandfather lived in a cottage behind the main house. She followed the driveway around the building and found a garage and a tall wooden fence with a matching gate. There was a mailbox on the fence with the street number on it. She checked the address on her arm again and knocked the bike’s kickstand down.

Something thudded against the far side of the fence. It made Madelyn jump back from the gate, but she didn’t flinch at the second or third sound. She was getting into the whole “invisible to exes” thing. She stepped forward and flipped the latch.

An ex staggered out of the gate. It stumbled past her without a look and crashed into the parked bicycle. The bike fell over, but the ex managed to stay on its feet.

It had been an older man, an inch or two shorter than Madelyn. The bristly hair was the same gray as its skin. It was dried out and leathery, but still weighed twice as much as she did.