Jenna Black - Replica

He looked surprisingly unalarmed when he turned back. “Let Nadia go,” he said again. “You’ve already ruined her life. You can let her go, and no one will believe her—or even care—if she starts spreading stories about you. Like that you killed me with your own hand.”

Mosely chuckled, sounding genuinely amused. “It’s amazing to me that you can make such a big show of being worldly and dissolute, and yet you remain so charmingly naive. Why should I take that chance?”

“Because I know where Bishop is. I don’t suppose you’d have Nadia strapped to that table if you’d gotten the answers to all your questions. Let her go, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Nadia made a choking sound of protest, though in truth she didn’t believe Nate was going to follow through on his promise. He would do everything he could to save her, but he wouldn’t give up Bishop. His emotions about Bishop might be pretty jumbled right now, but Nate was loyal to a fault. He just didn’t have it in him to betray anyone .

Mosely shook his head. “You’re operating on the assumption that I won’t be able to extract those answers from Miss Lake anyway.”

“Maybe you would, but she’s a lot tougher than you’ve given her credit for. Getting answers from her would take time. And you have to know that answers given under duress aren’t reliable. By the time you get what you need out of her, Bishop will have moved on.”

“You might as well save your breath, Nathaniel,” Mosely said, glancing at his watch for some reason. “You think you know so much, but you have no idea what’s going on.”

“Are you late for a meeting? Because I wouldn’t want to keep you or anything.”

Mosely smiled. “Just trying to calculate how much longer we have before your father arrives.”

“My father’s coming?”

“Yes. He insists on being here in person for … what comes next.”

Nate’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and he couldn’t hide his horror. “When you kill me, you mean. Like you did on the night of the reception.”

“Your father is a great man. He’s willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary for the greater good of his state. If it makes you feel any better, ordering your death tore him up inside, even knowing he would have you back. And he wouldn’t have insisted I wait for him if he didn’t regret what we’ll be forced to do.”

Nadia’s heart leapt as she realized that Mosely had finally said something that could get him in trouble. He had as much as admitted to killing Nate. And he’d incriminated the Chairman, too! It was a little tenuous, the admission not as clear as she’d like. But it might give her some leverage—if only she could speak to let him know his words had been captured for posterity. She pushed on the mouthpiece with her tongue, moving her head around in an attempt to loosen the strap that held it in place. But the damned thing wasn’t budging.

“Perhaps when you’re older and more mature,” Mosely went on, “your father will trust you with Thea’s secrets. But everything you’ve done since your Replica was animated proves that you can’t be trusted with them yet. You will tilt at windmills without once considering the cost.”

“And what about the cost we pay for Thea?” Nate asked. “Have you ever considered that?”

Nadia lay still. She wasn’t having any success ridding herself of the mouthpiece, and she didn’t want to risk drawing Mosely’s attention. Nate was fishing, trying to get Mosely to explain whatever the big secret about Thea was. And since Mosely thought Bishop had overheard everything and by now shared it with Nate, he didn’t know he had anything to hide.

“Only a starry-eyed idealist like you would consider a handful of hardened criminals and Basement-dwellers here and there a significant cost. Not for what Thea gives us in return.”

“Yeah, she made it possible for my dad to murder me without losing his heir. I can see how that’s a big benefit to society.”

“Do you know how much of our gross national product comes from the technology that Thea makes possible? We might not have produced many actual Replicas, but the revenue from providing backup services alone provides power and food and shelter to keep our state thriving. If we stopped feeding her, she’d refuse to make the backups and we’d be bankrupt in a matter of weeks. But of course you don’t care about that as long as we do what you think is the ‘right thing.’”

Feed Thea? Nadia remembered Mosely’s offhand comment about criminals and Basement-dwellers, and when she put the two together, she came up with a pretty revolting image. Her stomach turned over, and Nate looked a little pale. He’d come in here brimming with confidence—or at least doing a very good job of pretending—and he’d bluffed his way through the conversation so far with aplomb.

Mosely must have noticed the pallor of Nate’s face and made the correct assumption as to what it meant. He muttered something under his breath that Nadia felt sure was a curse of some kind.

“You didn’t know, did you?” he said aloud, shaking his head at Nate.

“No,” Nate admitted, his face still pale even as he tried to look triumphant. “Bishop didn’t hear anything you and the Chairman were talking about, except the name Thea.” He composed himself a little more, shaking off the horror. “So you’re actually feeding criminals and Basement-dwellers to Thea. How does that work, exactly? Thea’s just a machine.”

Mosely looked at his watch again with impatience.

“Your plan is to kill me and Nadia both, isn’t it?” Nate asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. “If that’s the case, then what’s the harm of explaining while you wait for my dad to come give you the official order?”

Mosely eyed him. “Fine. Yes, Thea is a machine, and we aren’t literally feeding her. She was developed as a research tool.” Mosely turned his back on Nate and walked over to the table on which Nadia lay. He reached above his head and flipped a switch. A low mechanical hum sounded, and Nadia’s body was suddenly bathed in spotlights. One of the spotlights shone directly in her eyes, and she had to close them.

Nate yelled, and there was the sound of scuffling. Nadia turned her head and cracked her eyes open to see Nate lying facedown on the floor while one of the security officers held him down and slapped handcuffs on him. Even with her head turned, the lights were unbearably bright and she had to close her eyes again.

“More specifically,” Mosely continued, “she was developed to research the human body.”

Nadia heard Mosely move to the head of the table and heard him flipping more switches. She tried to open her eyes to see what was happening, to see if one of those evil attachments was moving toward her, but the blinding lights wouldn’t let her.

“Don’t you dare hurt her!” Nate bellowed, but Mosely ignored him.

“Obviously, she far exceeded our expectations when she succeeded in creating exact Replicas of human beings. She can re-create a body down to the tiniest mole and scar, as you already know. But because she was developed for research, continuing to learn more has always been a driving need for her.”

“It is my raison d’être,” a female voice said from somewhere above Nadia’s head. She couldn’t open her eyes to see, but instinct told her the voice had come from the apparatus that she was currently strapped to. Thea herself.

“Indeed,” Mosely said.

“ That’s Thea?” Nate asked.

“It’s connected to her. The servers that house her are a few rooms down, but we’ve given her the connectivity she needs to operate.”

“To further my research,” Thea clarified.