Replica

“Are you okay?” he called to her while Mosely picked apart her bloody earring, looking for the transmitter.

“Yeah,” she called back, though she was anything but. Her ear stung and throbbed, her head ached from when Mosely had hit it on the table, and her whole body still felt discombobulated from the electricity that had run through it. She was freezing cold, staring up into a contraption full of torture implements, and strapped to a table completely helpless. She was about as far from okay as it was possible to get, and the thrill of triumph she’d felt was long gone.

Mosely found the transmitter and let out a low curse. He dropped it to the floor and crushed it under his heel, but he had to know the damage had already been done. Always before when he’d looked at her, even when he’d been angry, Nadia had had the sense that Mosely felt he was just doing his job, that any emotion he showed was no more than skin-deep. That certainly wasn’t the case now.

“You brought her down to the heart of the Fortress, into Thea’s domain, and you didn’t check her for electronic surveillance?” the Chairman asked his favorite hatchet man in a voice that would have sane people scurrying for cover. “She was wearing a tracker and a transmitter, and you didn’t find either?”

Mosely’s hands clenched at his sides as he faced his boss. “She’s a meek little schoolgirl I dragged from her bed,” he protested. “It never occurred to me that she might be wired.”

The Chairman shook his head in disbelief. “She wasn’t so meek that she didn’t go running off on her own independent investigation in defiance of your instructions. Perhaps that should have been your first clue.”

“Why don’t you two fight about this later,” Nate suggested, now standing calm and relaxed in the security officer’s grip. He, at least, was convinced they’d won. He was even smiling, the old impish smile she’d always loved, although there were shadows in his eyes that dimmed the smile’s brightness. “Right now, you need to get those restraints off Nadia and these handcuffs off me. Then maybe we can move this party to a conference room and discuss terms.”

“Thea?” the Chairman said, ignoring Nate’s demands as if he hadn’t heard them.

“Yes, Mr. Chairman?”

“I’d like you to dissect the young lady’s brain until you find out where the signal has been sent.”

The blinding spotlights brightened to their full intensity again, forcing Nadia’s eyes closed, and there was an ominous whirring of machinery above her.

“Yes, Mr. Chairman,” Thea said.

“I’m sure you thought this operating theater was a modern-day torture chamber,” the Chairman said, and Nadia didn’t know if he was talking to her or to Nate. “But thanks to Thea’s research, it is no longer necessary to torture suspects for information. She can retrieve the information directly from the brain. Although, of course, this process is terribly unpleasant for the subject and ultimately fatal.”

“Don’t hurt her!” Nate yelled, and there was a frantic edge in his voice. From the sound of it, he was struggling again.

A high-pitched whining sound started up, and Nadia fought past her terror, fought to think coherently instead of letting herself visualize one of those drills or saws descending to cut into her head.

“It won’t work,” she said in something between a whimper and a scream. No matter how pointless it was, she struggled against the bonds that held her to the table, not caring that they dug painfully into the flesh of her wrists and ankles. “I don’t know where the data is stored.”

Dirk Mosely gave a bark of laughter. “Of course, you would never say such a thing if it weren’t true.”

The high-pitched whine was coming steadily closer.

“I’m not stupid,” she countered. “You made it clear from the beginning you were willing to torture me. Making the recordings would do me no good if you could torture the location out of me.” She couldn’t suppress a little whimper of fear, which didn’t do much to enhance the illusion that she was bargaining from a position of strength. “If you let your pet monster do this, and she finds I’m telling the truth, you’re completely screwed. This is your last chance.”

A bubble of hysterical laughter swelled in her chest. She was lying here tied to a table, about to be vivisected by a sentient machine, and she was telling the Chairman that it was his last chance. This all had to be some crazy dream, right? An epic nightmare created by her subconscious to terrify her in her sleep. It couldn’t possibly be happening in real life.

“Wait,” the Chairman said.

The whining sound continued to come closer.

“Thea, stop,” the Chairman said, more firmly.

“I can find the recordings, Mr. Chairman,” Thea protested. “Even if this subject does not know their actual location, I will discern who does know, and we can proceed from there.”

“And by the time you do, the recordings will be all over the net,” Nadia said. “What do you think would happen if everyone in Paxco, hell, everyone in the world knew what you were doing down here?”

Just saying the words made Nadia think about it herself, and she didn’t much like what came to her mind. There was already a resistance movement forming within Paxco, infiltrating the upper echelons of the state. Right now, they were biding their time, working their way more deeply into the infrastructure. She didn’t know for sure what their eventual goal was, but she’d gotten the impression they were working toward a political coup, not a violent one. But if word of what the Chairman had been doing and condoning came out, violence seemed inevitable.

“You’d risk civil war at the very least,” she said, thinking about all the states and nations that already found the ethics of the Replica technology questionable. It was outlawed entirely in many parts of the world, Replicas not even being recognized as human beings. And it was against international law to create a Replica of a living person or of a person who had died of natural causes—specifically to prevent scenarios like the one the Chairman envisioned of his eternal reign. Paxco could very well find itself under attack at the same time that its citizens were rising up against it. When Nadia had first started down this road, she had never considered that her attempts to protect herself might lead to the very brink of war.

“Thea, I’m giving you a direct order,” the Chairman said. “Do not proceed.”

The whining sound stopped, and the spotlights dimmed to a bearable level. Nadia opened her eyes, then wished she hadn’t. A circular saw, its blade still turning from leftover momentum, was bare millimeters from her forehead.

“Don’t be childish, Thea,” the Chairman said. “Move the blade. And Mr. Mosely, please release Nadia from her restraints.”

“Are you sure about this?” Mosely asked.

“Yes,” the Chairman snapped, apparently not appreciating having his order questioned.

The saw blade above Nadia’s head whirred to life briefly, nearly giving her a heart attack, but Thea withdrew the arm. Nadia swallowed hard. Thea might be a machine, but she was an AI, and had something resembling free will. Just because Chairman Hayes ordered her not to cut Nadia open didn’t mean she wouldn’t. And Nadia couldn’t help seeing that brief reactivation of the saw as a threat, and a sullen one at that. She couldn’t get off this table soon enough.

Mosely went out of his way to be rough with her as he removed the restraints, tugging on them so they dug into her already-abused flesh. But she didn’t complain, gritting her teeth against the pain. Across the room, she could see that Nate’s hands were free. One of the security officers was gone. The second stood blocking the doorway, his hand on the butt of his gun, though he kept it holstered. Nate and Nadia might be out of their restraints, but that didn’t mean they were free, and that didn’t mean this was over.

Mosely finally tugged loose the last restraint, and Nadia leapt off the table.

Or tried to. Between the fear and her recent impersonation of a lightning rod, her knees turned to jelly the moment her feet hit the floor, and she crumpled.

Mosely reached toward her, no doubt to drag her to her feet, but Nate crossed the distance between them in a few hurried strides and shouldered Mosely out of the way.

“Don’t even think about touching her again,” he spat, kneeling on the floor beside her and gathering her into his arms.

Never in her entire life had a hug felt so good, and Nadia pressed herself against him, holding on as if her