Gillian laughs, a hoarse, unhinged sound. “Model One A is already obsolete. My father needs him just to tide him over until we can make the next generation of mechs.”
“The next generation?” Noemi asks.
“Organic. But they’re so much more than merely organic. They’re Inheritors.” Slowly Gillian sits up, wincing as she touches the side of her head. “That’s the brand name our marketers came up with.”
“Inheritors?” Delphine comes closer; her tear-streaked face is clouded with confusion.
“This doesn’t concern you,” Mansfield snaps. He’s managed to push his hoverchair level again, though it must have taken some of the last strength he has. “The rest of you, get away from here.”
The other passengers scurry to the far corners to take stock of their cuts and bruises. Noemi doesn’t budge. Apparently neither Mansfield nor Gillian expects her to; she already knows too much.
“We need more time to perfect the technology.” Gillian puts out a hand in the universal gesture for slow down. “So much more time. I wasn’t going to transfer Simon until we’d triple-checked everything—made sure we had backup storage—but the tank cracked in the crash, and I wasn’t going to have a chance to draw a full genetic backup from his bone marrow. I had to do something.” Her lower lip trembles. “Now he’s out there. He must be terrified, and Remedy could go after him at any moment.”
They put a soul into a mech’s body. They’ve actually made it happen. Noemi doesn’t feel outraged the way she does whenever they threaten to do this to Abel. The mech Gillian made for Simon hadn’t finished growing; it had no soul of its own to be displaced. But just knowing that it’s possible—that they really could’ve done this to Abel, if this hijacking hadn’t separated them forever—sends a shiver down her spine. “So it wasn’t just about Mansfield,” Noemi says. “You planned to make the whole family immortal.”
“We could’ve shared this with the entire galaxy eventually.” Gillian pulls herself together. “We intended to do our final experiments here, on Haven. My father would’ve been able to get used to his new body without others asking difficult questions. We wouldn’t have had the same… let’s call them, regulatory concerns. We could’ve emerged through the Haven Gate with news of Inheritors for all the greatest minds of the galaxy—with the promise of immortality for the best and brightest. Now it’s all in ruins, like this damned ship.”
Noemi’s head reels from the possibilities. “If you can make other, uh, Inheritors, why did you bother going after Abel?”
It’s Mansfield who answers. “For the consciousness to transfer, you need a genetic link,” he rasps. “We’ve yet to prove precisely why—one body ought to be as good as another—but we’ve demonstrated it in the lab twenty times over.”
Twenty consciousnesses, lost to experimentation. Lost to Burton Mansfield’s fear of death.
He continues, “And it turns out, you need young genetic material to build an Inheritor. Abel is one—the most primitive Inheritor, but still, he counts. I built him when I was forty-nine years old, and he came out perfect on the first try. So I didn’t bother trying to create another until Abel was lost. By then, I’d aged too much. My genetic structures weren’t as strong. Honestly, it’s a miracle I was even able to make him at forty-nine—the cutoff would be closer to forty, for most. So he’s my only chance.” His voice cracks. “Was my only chance. Lost now.”
Noemi feels exactly zero pity.
He pulls himself together and speaks to his daughter. “You jumped the gun, Gillian. You have to have nerve for this business. You can’t panic the first time things go wrong.”
Gillian bows her head, ashamed to have been found wanting. Noemi can’t believe he’s talking like that about his daughter’s fear for his grandson’s soul.
Mansfield takes a deep breath, then coughs. “Get Simon back. Recopy the data and sample the marrow. Then do what you can with the version we’ve got.”
“Yes, Father.” Restored to a sense of purpose, Gillian lifts her head and squares her shoulders. Mansfield has given her permission to think of this replica of her son as something less than human. Is that all there is to it, for her?
Noemi turns to Gillian and pitches her voice for her alone to hear. “I realize this is a weird time, but we have to reestablish our base on this ship. There might be some localized emergency force fields we could use to seal our area off. And if we set up force fields, that would keep Simon close to us instead of exposing him to Remedy.”
Hope animates Gillian’s face. Regardless of what her father said, she still holds on to some belief that Simon might be saved. “Yes, we have to do that. We should get started.”
Some of the passengers have already brushed themselves off, getting ready for action; these few are hardier than their privileged lifestyles would suggest. They’re ready to follow as soon as they have a leader—and somehow, that leader is Noemi.
“Abel might still make it,” Mansfield murmurs. “He’s smart enough. Curious enough.”
Noemi shakes her head.
“That’s what you want to believe, I’m sure. But Abel has a fate,” Mansfield says, maddeningly calm again. “I know that. I designed his fate for him, wove it into his very DNA. His fate is in every strand of his hair and every cell of his skin. His fate is fixed. In the end, he’ll always return to me.”
“Like he always obeys your orders?” The last direct order Mansfield gave Abel was a command to shoot Noemi in the chest. She’s still alive and well.
“If he won’t come for me,” Mansfield says, “he’ll come for you.”
“He’s not coming.” Not even Abel could follow a trail this obscure.
“Miss Vidal,” Mansfield rasps. “You’re giving up hope. I haven’t.”
“You’d better.” She says it savagely, to herself as much as to him.
Gillian puts one hand on Mansfield’s forehead. “Father, don’t strain yourself.”
“I’m all right.” His eyes, frosted
