I was standing in a large atrium.
The Fire Lake town seal embedded in the floor with tiny red stones. A crystal chandelier hung from the dome high overhead. Before me, a grand staircase led up to the main council chamber, flanked by heavy wooden doors set at intervals in the atrium walls. One stood open, soft orange lamplight spilling from its cozy depths. The lintel above it was engraved.
MAYOR’S OFFICE
My skin began to crawl. I felt hot all over, a nameless pressure building inside me. My limbs felt wrong, compressed somehow, as if my bones were stuffed into a body too small to hold them. I wiped my palms on borrowed jeans. Then I slipped off my jacket and removed Noah’s Beretta from its pocket.
Deep breath. I squared my shoulders and marched through the door.
He was there.
The Guardian was sitting behind a wide mahogany desk topped by a brass lamp, a laptop, and a single manila file folder. He was tapping away at the keys, dressed in the same black suit he’d worn every time he’d murdered me as a child.
His jacket was off—a new wrinkle. I spotted it hanging from a coat stand in the corner. The ubiquitous silver sunglasses were missing as well. For the first time in my life, I could see my tormentor’s eyes.
Gray green, with flecks of gold. Hard eyes. Tired eyes. They remained glued to the laptop’s screen as I slowly crossed the room.
The mayor’s office was long and spacious, with a vaulted ceiling and wainscoted walls. Two chairs faced the desk, sandwiching a small table. A cut-stone fireplace hosted a sultry blaze, the scent of burning cedar mixing with old cigar smoke.
Without looking up, he gestured for me to sit. “Welcome. Grab a chair.”
I nearly shot him then and there. Limbs trembling. Teeth clamped as bile rose in my throat. Of all the ways I’d imagined this might go, this wasn’t one of them. My constant executioner had greeted me like a secretary called in to take a memo.
The hell I’d do as told. I stood behind a chair, keeping the Beretta out of sight. My other hand gripped its leather backing with white knuckles.
“That won’t do you any good,” the Guardian said, closing his laptop. He looked at me then, steepling his fingers before his face. “Guns don’t work inside this building. Programmer’s privilege.” He sat back in his chair and regarded me, an index finger tapping his chin. “I’m glad you’re finally here, though. I’ve been a little disappointed by how long it took.”
The gun rose and I pulled the trigger in one fluid motion.
Click.
Nothing. My jaw tightened. I pulled again. Then again, and again.
Click. Click. Click.
The Guardian sighed. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”
I tried to control the rage coursing through me. I hadn’t come here to shoot this man—I wanted answers, a way to stop the violence—but a lifetime of hatred, fear, and pain was bubbling to the surface.
Click. Click.
With a howl of frustration, I threw the gun at him. Flinched as it bounced off an invisible barrier and landed on the burgundy carpet. The Guardian’s seascape gaze never wavered. He didn’t seem to blink much.
“You can’t do that, either. This place is my . . . refuge. We won’t be disturbed.”
My fingers curled into fists, impotent fury shaking my limbs. I had to calm down. I had to think clearly. Throwing a tantrum wouldn’t get me what I wanted.
“You’re a monster.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Will you sit while we discuss it?”
I stared at the Guardian for a long moment. Then I circled the chair and sat. He opened his mouth, but I spoke first. “I want you to stop the Program.”
One coal-black eyebrow rose. “You want me to end life on Earth?”
I winced, then bit back a scathing reply. If this was to be verbal sparring, so be it.
“I want you to stop forcing people to kill each other,” I amended. “End the eliminations. Make the valley peaceful again. If this is our . . . existence now, then fine. But there’s no reason it has to be a murder-happy circle of hell. You control the variables, so you control what happens. I want you to stop being a prick.”
He surprised me by shrugging. “Actually, I don’t control the variables. Not anymore.”
My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been locked out of the system.” He smiled, unblinking, sending shivers down my spine. “Remarkable, isn’t it? A classmate of yours has actually taken control of the MegaCom’s OS. I’m powerless to do anything about it. Happily, I have no intention of trying.”
An icy spear pierced my rib cage. I swallowed. Didn’t want to ask, because I already knew the answer.
“Who?”
“Sarah Harden. The master terminal in the silo lab complex is a control portal for the Program. She’s been studying and guessed the password. Harden controls the system now, not me.”
My face burned. “She guessed the password because you made it her birthday.”
“Your birthday too, Min.”
“Why?” I slammed a fist on an armrest. “Why would you do that?”
“You haven’t guessed?” He leaned forward, placing his elbows on the desktop. “Maybe you haven’t been asking the right questions.”
I gaped, at a loss. He was hinting at something he thought I should know, but I hadn’t the faintest idea.
The Guardian cocked his head slightly. “Why were you able to enter this building? Why was Noah? Why were you able to access the lab complex? Because I designed it that way, Min. The beta codes have permissions others do not. They can even access the Program directly and adjust parameters, should they be clever enough to figure out how. It was the very least I could do after everything we put you through.”
“No,” I whispered, my feet pressing down against the floor. “No. No. No. No.”
The Guardian tilted his head again, this time in what appeared to be genuine confusion.
“Don’t you dare.” I bent closer to him, chest heaving, my anger burning hot and acrid like a lightning strike. “You don’t get to casually aside all the times you murdered me. The worst moments of my life—of anyone’s life.”
My hand rose, quivered as I ticked off fingers. “When I was eight, you pushed me off a cliff. When I was ten, you forced me into a creek to drown.” My voice inched up an octave, the words speeding in time with the blood pumping through my veins. “On my twelfth birthday you ran me over with a car. At fourteen, you smashed my head in with a rock. All leading up to my wonderful sweet sixteen: the day you shot me in my bedroom, the last safe space I had.”
Tears burned in my eyes as he watched me, stone-faced.
“I never understood what was happening, and no one believed me. I thought I was crazy for years. I had almost no friends. Zero boyfriends. Just a regular date with a pitiless murderer on my even-year birthdays. That’s what you put me through, you psychopath. Noah, too. You don’t get credit for anything with me.”
I was shaking. Could barely breathe. But I’d be damned if he was going to see me cry.
The Guardian regarded me solemnly. Then his gaze dropped. He flattened his palms on the desktop, as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands. “You’re right, Min,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. I did what was required, but what you and Noah experienced . . . it beggars the imagination.”
He pressed a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. Had that been a catch? Then the imperious green-gray eyes rose. They were misty. Regret seemed to fill them. For an instant he looked like a broken man.
Realization smacked me in the face. “It’s you,” I whispered.
“Excuse me?” He tried to pull the mask back into place, but I saw through it.
“It’s you,” I repeated. “Not an avatar. You’re the black-suited man. The real one. You’re alive inside the Program like us.”
He flinched, then smiled faintly, knowing I’d caught him out. “I thought it’d be less difficult if you all thought me a robot. Emotions can run high. But yes, I uploaded myself just before Nemesis came. In the end, I didn’t trust anyone else to complete the task.”
I half rose, then fell back into my seat. My head was spinning. I couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say. “I hate you,” was all I managed.
He chuckled without humor, fiddling with his tie. “Tough but fair. Your instincts have always been good, Melinda Juilliard Wilder. That’s why it’s been so disappointing to watch you mistrust them.” The Guardian—Black Suit—leaned forward, eyes suddenly intent. “I made you the centerpiece for a reason. You were tested hardest because you were strongest. The most capable. You can win this thing, Min. The others are sheep, but you . . . you’re indomitable. If only you’d stop resisting your abilities. Take command. Take control.”
My lips pulled back in a rictus of disgust. “I’ll never do the things you want me to do. I reject you. I reject this whole world. And I’ll fight it, no matter what the consequences are.”
The Guardian stared at me. I held his unblinking gaze, though inside I was screaming. Then he slumped back with a loud sigh. The Guardian glanced away, a finger tracing idle circles on the armrest of his chair. “Stubborn to the end.”
My turn to shrug. “I guess you bet wrong on me.”
His eyes snapped back, impaling me with a baleful glare. “To think that I expected more of my only daughter.”
Time stood still.
The Earth stopped spinning.
My heart froze, every synapse in my brain firing at once.
The album of lonely memories composing my car crash of a life all strobed at once, even as I tried to blank them from my mind. I gripped my head, denying what he’d spoken.
I couldn’t, though. It fit. Goddamn everything everywhere, but it fit.
Mom. She must’ve known.
Turns out I was going to cry after all.
“You have to understand, Min.” His voice cut like a razor blade. I stared at the floor, blubbering a watery curtain. After learning of my mother’s involvement in Project Nemesis, I’d thought nothing else could surprise me. No new secret could hurt.
I’d been wrong.
The Guardian kept on, each word an injury. “Even before you were conceived, I knew the world was doomed. Nemesis had been detected as far back as the 1960s. The news was so terrible that a decision was made to never share the information with anyone.” Leather squeaked as he shifted in his chair. “Project Nemesis investigated every method of survival conceivable, but nothing would work. We couldn’t colonize a new planet outside the grip of the dark star, and nothing human could survive on Earth once it came. When they finally hit upon the idea of digital uploads, I was brought on board.”
My head rose. Wiping away tears, I studied his face, picking out details that matched my own. This was my absentee dad. The ghost in my life. Two people I hated with every fiber of my being had suddenly combined into one.
Yet I hungered for details.
“What happened with my mother?” I choked out.
A small smile creased his lips. “I never intended to have kids, not with what I knew was coming. But the silo was about to begin construction, and I was in Fire Lake on a recon op. She was something, Virginia. I didn’t find out about you until months later, when the town was officially selected and I returned. To say I was surprised is an understatement.”
I snorted, voice thick. “So you put me in your experiment. How wonderfully insane.”
He ran a hand over his mouth, as if trying to wipe away a bad taste. “We needed test subjects to determine whether the concept could actually work. I knew the beta phase would be horrific—there was no getting around it—but if it was successful, these would be the people who survived.”
He looked at me with a fondness that made me shudder. “You’d just turned six, the apple of your mother’s eye. She loved you more than you can possibly imagine. I’d just been promoted to head of programming, and my first task was to select a target group.”
The Guardian drummed the desktop with his fingers. I listened, enraptured, all else forgotten. Secrets about my life that I’d accepted as lost forever were being laid bare by this nightmare of a man.
He chuckled darkly. “I decided to commit a tiny fraud. I had DNA testing done at your elementary school, all kinds of blood work and analysis. No one knew I had a daughter there. Then, armed with this data, I told my bosses an incredible lie. I claimed, convincingly, that the process under consideration would work only on a severe subset of individuals, all born within a twelve-month range. Your class of kindergartners. Further, I invented a specific date for an ideal electromagnetic brainwave signature in relation to Earth’s gravity and the orbit of the sun. It was perfect bullshit, but meticulously papered with reams of pseudoscience. They accepted my report without question.”
The Guardian leaned forward. “Can you guess which date I gave them?”
I swallowed, mouth gone dry. Then I nodded.
“September 17, 2001.” He laughed hysterically, his shoulders shaking in an explosion of hyena chuckles. “I spent four billion dollars of taxpayer money to get your birthday included in Project Nemesis.”
My finger shot out at him. “And then you started killing me.”
His laughter died. The green-gray eyes tightened. “It was unspeakable,” he said quietly. “I’ll never be clean of it. But making sure you were a beta patient was the only way. At the beginning, we didn’t know how many we could upload.” He glanced at the fire, orange light flicking in his irises. “In a way, Noah’s deaths were harder. He wasn’t my child. Just a scared little boy.” He paused, eyes gleaming brighter. “I insisted it be me who did the . . . the fieldwork. I couldn’t let anyone else bear that weight. I . . . I really am the monster you describe.”
My voice nearly broke. “Try it from my end sometime.”
His gaze snapped back to me, cold lines re-forming in his features. When he spoke again, his voice was clipped and emotionless—a soldier giving a report. “The murders were necessary to see if the encoding and regenerative cloning would work. There was no other way to do it. Processing the betas tested both project goals.”
“What goals?” I blurted. “What did killing me accomplish?”
The Guardian held up a finger. “Mission goal number one: develop the ability to digitally preserve a human being as an insertable line of code. We got that done rather quickly, actually. We’re all just numbers and electricity when you get down to basics.” He added a second finger. “Goal number two: perfect the capacity to fully regenerate a human being from these pure lines of data.”
He curled his fingers into a fist. Brought it crashing down on the desktop. “What I did was inhuman and miserable. I’ve paid for it. I never had a life, either. But I was saving you—one of four dozen souls who would survive the apocalypse while billions died. It nearly broke me, but I’d do it again. You’re here, and still in play.”
I launched to my feet, arms flying up. “In play for what? You keep saying you ‘saved me,’ but did you really? What about my soul? Do I even have one anymore? And if I do, why are you making me destroy it with all this . . . chaos?”
He waved a dismissive hand. “You don’t understand.”
“Why the eliminations?” I demanded, putting my knuckles on the desk and leaning forward. “What happened to those kids? Are there backups? Fail-safes? Can you bring them back?”
He didn’t answer. With a growl of aggravation, I learned forward and slapped the shield separating us. “Why the killings, Dad? Why make your precious test subjects fight like starving animals if you only wanted to save us?”
The Guardian propped his chin in the crook of one hand, two fingers pressing against his temple. True anger flashed in his eyes for the first time. “What do you want me to tell you, Min?”
I straightened. Crossed my arms. “Tell me the true purpose of the Program.”
“Fine.”
My heart skipped a beat.
The Guardian interlocked his fingers before him and spoke in a dispassionate voice. “The Program is a Darwinian evolutionary model designed to grind the preliminary subject group down to a more stable core. Its purpose is to refine the source code.”
I swallowed, still standing at the foot of his desk. “Yes. But that’s not all.”
He sniffed. “No, it’s not. And I suppose telling you now won’t make any difference. You’ve seen the clones.”
I thought of the pedestals deep in the silo. “I know that’s how you brought the betas back to life in the real world. By cloning us after each murder. But I don’t know why you abandoned that idea, or why you had clones created for the others but never used them.”
The Guardian shook his head. “We didn’t abandon anything, Melinda. We executed betas in the test phase to determine if our cloning process was viable. We had to know if we could bring raw data back to life.”
I frowned, confused. “But how is that not abandoned? You can’t bring people back to life anymore. The planet is destroyed.”
“For now.” Before I could react, he swung his arms wide, indicating the room. “Did you really think this was my endgame? An interminable existence inside a few microchips, forever roaming the hard drive as squibs of electricity?”
A well opened in my stomach. The pieces were there, but I couldn’t slot them.
The Guardian continued, relentless. “What you saw in the lab were bodies waiting to be animated, Min. In the future. The surviving codes will be inserted into living bodies. The human species will return to planet Earth.”
I swayed, fell back into my chair. All the blood in my body rushed to my head. The office pulsed in and out of focus as my vision narrowed to a point. Suddenly, everything made sense.
All things but one.
“So why make us kill each other?” I whispered, terrified that I knew the answer.
He stared at me, remorseless, a judge pronouncing sentence. “There’s a carrying capacity. The MegaCom can only safely regenerate a specific number of subjects. You must survive the cull if you want to return to life.” His shoulders rose in the slightest of shrugs. “May the best codes win.”
I covered my face with my hands. “How many?”
The Guardian shook his head. “I won’t tell you that. You might see it differently, but knowing would be a terrible burden. It’s better that you don’t.”
My mind began shutting down. I couldn’t think. It was all too much. I wanted to escape the crushing weight of what he’d told me. But another question snaked from my lips before I could stop it.
“My middle name is Juilliard. Mom said it was from you, but she never explained.”
The Guardian took a deep breath. “Virginia and I met in the Skyline Café. We were both a little tipsy that night. She asked me my name, and I told her it was Juilliard.”
I snorted, disappointed. “So, another lie then.”
He smiled. “No, actually. For a fraction of a second my guard slipped, and I told her my real name. A disastrous mistake. By protocol, I was supposed to erase her. Project Nemesis was the blackest op in human history, and didn’t tolerate loose ends. Instead, I told her everything. Every detail of the threat facing humanity, and my work to thwart it. An unconscionable breach of security. They’d have shot me on the spot, and rightly so.”
My eyes rounded. “She never told, did she? Not anyone. Not even me.”
His chin began to tremble, ever so faintly. “Never. She was my priestess, your mother. The only person I ever betrayed the project to. I left the next morning with a clear conscience and her promise.” My father looked at me then, and for the first time there was . . . something. A faint connection between us. “You were a miracle that sprang from that single night. And when she named you Melinda Juilliard, it was to remind me. I was to keep you safe.”
I stared, unable to form words. Felt a stirring of sympathy I’d thought impossible. But then reality crashed back in.
“I won’t lead a slaughter of my classmates,” I said. “There has to be a better way.”
The Guardian shook his head sadly. “When humanity returns, the Earth will be a very different place. Only the most determined—the most ruthless—will survive. There is no better way. This is the only way.”
My lips parted to challenge him, to make him see, but the words never escaped. A loud tone echoed across the office.
The Guardian’s eyes widened, then his mouth hardened into a white line. The tone sounded a second time. I realized it wasn’t confined to the room, or even the building. It was everywhere and nowhere at once. Then Sarah’s voice boomed in my eardrums.
“Hi, you guys! It’s Sarah. Big news! I’ve managed to gain access to the MegaCom—can you believe it? To celebrate, I went ahead and initiated a new command. To all the sideline-sitters out there, be warned: the meek shall not inherit this Earth. At exactly midnight tomorrow, all codes with negative kill ratios will be automatically eliminated from the Program. I figure this will speed the phase along nicely. Good luck, everyone! Bye!”
The announcement ended. My eyes shot to the Guardian, who merely shrugged.
“You’d better go,” he said. “I can’t stop it. In the end, this is probably a blessing.”
“How can you say that? I’m a negative ratio, Dad!”
I saw the slightest wince, yet his eyes became ice chips. “Then you know what you have to do. Find the will. This isn’t without purpose, Min. Reanimated codes may have to battle on a daily basis to survive. You might as well get used to it now.”
Something snapped. A switch flipped inside me, and my mind went on autopilot. Like a robot I put on my jacket, picked up my gun, then turned and stumbled into the atrium. Through the front door and outside into the frozen night.
I couldn’t focus. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t make my last words disappear.
I was a negative ratio.
If I wanted to be reborn one day, I’d have to kill to stay alive.