The Bionics, no. 1, page 17
To the untrained eye, the gleaming white buildings and towers surrounding millennia-old national monuments are beautiful, sparkling white tributes to America’s greatness. When I look at them, all I see are cracks, deep, dark, and oozing putrid sludge out into the streets. Our monuments are bathed in blood and that sludge surrounds the dazed citizens on the sidewalks without their knowledge. The mire pulls at their feet, sucking, draining the very souls from once good men. Yet they continue on blindly, believing in a man who elevated himself to the position of most powerful man in the world during our country’s most devastating event in history. What a joke.
The streets are well lit and heavy with traffic as the sun rises, more so than usual on a weekend. But this is no ordinary day, and the people out on the street aren’t just going about their daily lives. They are hungry for blood, Olivia’s blood, and they lust for the stench of death. The public execution is set for four hours from now, and already the twisted and convoluted streets are filled with people making their way to the lawn of the nation’s capital building, where Olivia and several others will be executed by firing squad. The event will be televised live, and all over the nation, people will cheer and celebrate her death.
As Jenica lands the craft on the outskirts of the city, I am reminded of my adolescence and my time spent living the same lie as so many of the people here. I was just as blind to the injustices, just as oblivious to the lies and propaganda being fed to a frightened nation. At least, I was until the nuclear bombs destroyed our country—and the perfectly laid out path of my life—forever.
* * *
Four years earlier…
Tamryn Bell is a sweet pixie of a girl, no taller than five feet, with a waif’s frame and a short haircut, boyishly cute and blonde. Blue eyes portray an air of innocence and a cherry-red mouth brims with unwitting seduction and promise. She is from a prestigious family, which makes my mother happy, and everyone assumes that we will get married someday. I am in no hurry to take that step, but I am not exactly intimidated at the thought either. At this time in my life, a future with Tamryn seems like a no-brainer. It is just one of many steps in my life plan, just after getting a degree in law and securing a job at a prominent firm. With my father’s influence, I am sure to land that dream job with enough money to place a golf ball-sized diamond on Tamryn’s finger. When I picture a life with her, it is filled with sweetness and comfort, possibly made all the better by the pitter-patter of little feet and a white picket fence.
Of course, all of this changes on the day of the attacks. I am fortunate enough to be thousands of feet in the air on a flight back from a trip with my parents to Hawaii—which is now no more than a series of charred lumps surrounded by an ocean long depleted of its wildlife and stripped of its sapphire hue, the results of another, unrelated and completely heinous attack that followed a few years later.
My sister and Agata are crush victims, their home in Seattle collapsing on top of them. My brother-in-law is killed, and Agata nearly goes with him. It is the Restoration Project that will give her a second chance when her injuries turn her into a vegetable. Her bionic cerebrum also makes her smarter than the average four-year-old child.
Tamryn is given a second chance as well. Although, I will always remember the day of the blasts as the day our relationship died. Coincidence—or fate if you believe in that sort of thing—has her square in the center of Los Angeles on that day. She is found beneath a pylon and, a few weeks later, declared a paraplegic by the doctors. There is no hope that she’ll ever walk again. But even then, I stand by her. I sit beside her hospital bed and hold her hand, praying especially hard in those first days that she will live and then, in the days that follow, that she will regain the use of her legs. I can’t imagine her confined to a wheelchair. Tamryn loves to dance. She loves to run, jump, and twirl girlishly down the sidewalk everywhere we go. Like some kind of fairy, she is constantly in motion, her hands and face full of animation and vivacity. Life without her legs will be worse than death for Tamryn.
She begs me to go, says she is no good to me with a broken body, but I won’t abandon her. Guilt over having avoided the tragic day mixes in my gut to do battle with my relief that I’ve been spared.
The road to recovery for her is full of hardships, and mirrors what is happening across the rest of the country as we struggle to move past what has happened. Even then, I believe it all, believe my parents when they tell me about the Restoration Project and the Healing Hands initiative and how it will change so many lives. Believe them when they tell me it is our government’s way of trying to piece our broken country back together.
She wants nothing to do with the project, nervous about being labeled as a freak. She is scared but I urge her on, telling her everything will be all right. ‘Don’t you want to walk again?’ I ask her, knowing the answer will be yes and that she’ll trust me just because I’m telling her it will all be okay. Tamryn, despite what she’s been through, is still as naïve and innocent as ever. It is one of the things I liked most about her.
The procedure is a success and, after a few weeks’ recovery, Tamryn walks out of the hospital with a bionic spinal cord and a new set of legs. Around the same time, my sister, Trista, makes the heart-wrenching decision to put Agata’s life in the Restoration doctors’ hands. Before her bionic cerebrum, she is well on her way to becoming a vegetable for life, a possibility that leaves us all paralyzed with grief. A few months after Tamryn, Agata is released as well, better than she had been when she was brought in.
It does not take long for the hate speech against Bionics to begin. On the airwaves, the media fills television screens with images of the Bios looting, rioting, stealing, and committing violent crimes. To be fair, there are just as many non-bionic perpetrators—our history has shown these crimes to be a natural side effect of disaster—but fair and balanced reporting has never been a strong suit of the American media. The Bionics are painted as villains with mutations—as if they’d been born that way, not created by doctors and scientists working for the government.
This is all it takes for the politicians to start weighing in. Soon, every campaign from mayor to senator to president becomes about the Bionics and their place in society. They are vilified and persecuted in the media. It is right around this time that I feel a deep rift develop between Tamryn and me. She will never say it out loud, but I know she resents me for pushing her to enroll in the Healing Hands project. She hates her bionic additions and fears the day when the Bionics will be rounded up and… well, at this point, we have no way of knowing what the government will do. But Tamryn just knows it would be awful.
It’s funny that I have always thought of her as the naïve one. But just now, our roles are reversed. I keep my faith in our government and the project. After all, it is doing so much good for our society. Each division is responsible for rebuilding and reshaping our world in different ways. Our citizens are getting their lives and their health back. Our cities are being rebuilt and are now bigger, brighter, and more beautiful than before. What evil is there to be found?
Even when the MPs start storming the city, rounding up all Bionics with an unsavory past, I believe that Tamryn is safe. After all, she comes from a good family, a well-known family. She can be protected by her father’s name, just as Agata is protected by mine, her grandfather’s. It isn’t until the day she goes missing that I realize how stupid I’ve been. Her mother shows up at my parents’ house, tears in her eyes, begging to see my father, wanting his help in getting her little girl back. I watch from a darkened hallway as she is turned away, the hard set of my father’s jaw revealing the nature of his resolve. He can help her… but he won’t.
Nothing that I say will change his mind, not when he has invested so much into his image. He can’t be seen as siding with the enemy. ‘Not even your niece’, he says in that cold tone of his. In that moment, I realize just how sheltered I have been and how it has crippled me. I am completely incapable of understanding this new world, where the rich and entitled aren’t protected by their bank accounts or prominent names. I realize how spoiled I’ve been, how blind I am to the plight of the Bionics, as well as anyone less fortunate than I am.
I’m not a bad person, I know that deep down. But having the blinders ripped off, and the true nature of society shoved in my face, has left me angry and filled with purpose.
Within a few weeks, it becomes increasingly clear that my father will force my sister to turn Agata over to the authorities. Even though I’m the younger brother, I immediately take charge of the situation. I won’t lose her like I did Tamryn. My guilt over not doing more to save her is a deep and raw ache, but there is nothing I can do for her now. In Agata, I can find my redemption.
Rumors of a secret Resistance led by Professor Neville Hinkley himself seem too good to be true. Yet, I know firsthand how the government turned on him when he opposed the mutilation of those he’d fought to save. When the government declared that all Bionics would be stripped of their prostheses, the Professor objected strongly. It cost him his job, his life, and got him branded as a terrorist.
It took a lot of digging around, but I eventually found an underground railroad of sorts, a chain of people who would send you on the right path to the Resistance for little or nothing. Some would take food, some money, and others wanted nothing at all. It seemed enough for them to be able to stick it to the MPs, even if it could cost them their lives. In their faces, I see all the horror and hardship that I’ve been saved from by the coincidence of my last name.
By taking Agata and running away with her, I have made us both fugitives. But the alternative is simply unthinkable. I am now one of these people—an outcast, running from the enemy and fighting for a cause. I can never truly be one of them—my organs are all original parts of my body and I’d never known a day’s hardship before running away with my niece—but losing Tamryn taught me a very valuable lesson.
Injustice is as blind as justice, and no one is safe. And if injustice can pick and choose who it targets, then I am free to choose which side I stand on.
Chapter 17
Gage Bronson, Dax Janner, Blythe Sol, Jenica Swan, Sayer Strom, Laura Rosenberg and Professor Neville Hinkley
Stonehead Prison Facility
Washington D.C.
August 18, 4010
4:00 a.m.
Jerking myself from my wandering thoughts and shaking off the dark mood my memories have brought on, I stand and mutter to no one in particular that I’m going to the bathroom. The tiny, tube-shaped room at the back of the craft is small and cramped, with hardly any room for a guy with shoulders as broad as mine to turn one way or the other, but it’ll do. I handle my business and leave, ready to take my seat again, when the rumble of voices speaking in hushed tones stops me in my tracks. I pause in the doorway, cracking it just enough to find the Professor and Jenica standing to the left of the aisle, in a darkened corner. I realize that we’ve stopped, the craft hovering several thousand feet above our destination. Toward the front of the craft, I can see Dax, Blythe, and the rest of our crew standing to stretch and prepare for the next phase of our plan.
It makes sense that these two would want a quiet moment to go over any last minute details of our mission, yet something about this feels wrong. I feel like a voyeur watching them, and I don’t really know why until the Professor reaches out to clasp Jenica’s hand. The touch is not one of friendship, or even camaraderie and reassurance. There is more there, and as I watch the human side of Jenica Swan’s face soften—an expression I would have never thought her capable of—I understand what I am seeing. Between these two, who fight at the forefront of the Resistance, there is more than friendship and respect.
There is love.
“Stop it, Neville.”
My eyebrows shoot up at Jenica’s gentle tone, as well as the fact that I’ve never heard anyone refer to the Professor by his first name before. With all her formality and hardness, she’s the last person I would have expected to hear it from.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly, his voice quavering in the darkness between them. “I just thought it might be worth trying to convince you one last time.”
“I won’t stay behind. You can’t ask that of me.”
He smiles, his eyes crinkling at the corners behind wire-rimmed frames. “I know. You are loyal to your crew and to the cause and I love that about you. But this isn’t about you or me, it’s about—”
“Don’t!” she interjects, a bit of her usual harshness pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Don’t you dare try to use that to make me feel guilty!”
The Professor sighs, his shoulders sagging. “It’s not just you and me anymore, Jen. We have to think about it, even if you don’t want to. At some point, you’re going to have to face it.”
“I will,” she insists, her voice dropping even lower as her gaze darts about the craft as if afraid the walls will overhear them. “Just not right now. This mission—Olivia—it’s all too important.”
The Professor nods but I can tell, even in the darkness, that he’s not happy about letting her off the hook. “Just be careful,” he says, grasping her slim waist and pulling her in toward him. “If something were to happen to you…”
He doesn’t finish, his words screeching to a trembling halt as if he’s afraid of what he’ll say.
Jenica exhales noisily and lays her head on his chest. “I will, I promise.”
After a few quiet moments, the two leave the back of the aircraft and return to where the others have gathered. I count to thirty slowly before emerging from the bathroom and making my way up the aisle to where everyone is receiving last-minute instructions. When I come up on the back of the group, I feel Jenica’s narrowed gaze on me. I meet her eyes and try to smile, but my lips are frozen. Her cold, dark eye—the human one—appears to be boring into me. The other one, a piece of machinery built into the metal covering half her face like an opera mask, whizzes and whirs as she watches me. She knows that I spied on her. She knows that I heard them.
As I tear my gaze away and try to refocus on the task at hand, I can’t help but wonder how a love affair between the Professor and Jenica Swan came to be. They seem like a very unlikely pair, but then, so are Blythe and I. In fact, I know if we ever crossed paths in our previous lives, we would probably have never noticed each other. The same has to be true for them, but I can see how desperate times have caused them to cling to each other. I can also see that I’m not the only one around here with secrets.
We have three and a half hours to infiltrate Stonehead, locate Olivia, and break her out of there as safely as possible. It seems like an infinite amount of time, but when you factor in all that could go wrong, it feels more like three and a half minutes. Each of us has our roles to play, but the pressure is on for Dax and me. Our disguises aren’t enough to get us through. It’s going to take a lot of bluffing and confidence to take on the roles of officers Knightly and Barnes.
One thing that will help is the bait we’ve brought. The Professor and Jenica have been at the top of the most wanted list for years. Throw in a few of the Resistance’s key players and it makes for one very tasty treat the officers at Stonehead will be salivating for. They are our ticket in. Balls and firepower will have to be enough to get us out.
Our first move is getting our prisoners looking like actual captives. They already appear exhausted, which they are, and with Blythe’s fresh bruises and Laura’s burn from the fight in Memphis, they look as if they’ve been in a struggle. We ruffle the Professor’s hair and then bend his glasses a bit before lining them up one behind the other and chaining them together using an intricate system of cuffs used by the MPs for transporting multiple prisoners. Each pair of cuffs is attached to the other by ionized chains. The negative ions of the chain are attracted to the positive ions of the cuffs, causing them to fuse together in a bond that can only be broken by a special device, a remote of sorts, which Dax now has control of. Once each of them is cuffed, he links them together in a straight line, hands behind their backs, with the Professor in front followed by Jenica, Blythe, Sayer, and Laura.
In the massive storage hold beneath our feet is a Military Police vehicle that is small but fast. It is what we will use to gain entrance to Stonehead, leaving our own hovercraft right where it is, masked by the clouds until we can return. We form a procession and take the stairs down to the storage hatch in silence, each of us sinking into our roles before we are even seen. I try to mimic the stiff cadence of an MP’s steps and notice that Dax has done the same. In my hands, I clutch the same CBX laser weapon I carried for the rescue mission in Memphis. I shoot Dax a frown lined in jealousy. His automatic ARX is far superior, but a gun is a gun. At the end of the day, I’m grateful not to be empty-handed.
Dax has some rudimentary piloting skills, which is enough to get us to the landing strip at Stonehead quickly and safely. As we land, a ground crew dressed in white flight suits comes racing toward us. They are probably surprised to see the craft, as Sergeant Barnes and Captain Knightly were no doubt presumed dead when they didn’t return from Memphis. Dax brings us in for a shaky landing and, within moments, we and our ‘prisoners’ are standing on the paved landing strip, surrounded by the curious employees of the facility.
“Is that who I think it is?” one of them asks, his wide brown eyes fixed on the Professor. “And you got his partner too?”
The Professor lowers his eyes, playing the perfect role of the frightened prisoner. Or, maybe he is scared. Jenica simply raises her chin, staring down the gathered men with an air of arrogant superiority. It’s no act; Jenica is above these men and she knows it.
