Toys

Chapter 44

I yanked off the mood helmet and rolled down the pod’s window. Well, what do you know?

The real Lucy was standing there, watching me with a frown, or maybe it was a self-satisfied smirk. Humans were known to be prudish, even puritanical, after all.

“You look like you were sucking on a lemon slice,” she said. “Playdate?”

“For God’s sake, can’t anyone have some privacy around here?”

Her face turned serious. “Let’s not hate each other for the moment. We got off to a bad start, I know, but we were just doing what we had to.”

“I had to do what I did, yeah. But I don’t get why you and your thugs had to attack me.”

“Maybe we’re thugs to Elites-but to humans, we’re freedom fighters. Like I told you, we weren’t out to kill you-we just needed to make it look that way. Our object was to bring you here…”

“Well, here I am. My life is a total wasteland now. Happy?”

She sighed. “Ecstatic. I’m on my way to go fishing. Want to come?”

Fishing? How crazy was that? But I did have a few questions for Lucy. So many questions, I didn’t know where to start.

So I put away the mood helmet, climbed out of the car, and walked with her toward the beach.

“Don’t take this as a compliment, but you know more about high-level Elite operations than any other human in the world,” Lucy said. “That makes you extremely valuable to us. You’ve even been called ‘the Savior’!”

I snorted with amusement. “I’ve just found out that everything I ever believed is a lie-and that my parents are the ones who started the lie. So now I should just take your side and join the human race in oblivion? I should help to save them?”

“I certainly understand your feelings, Hays, but you’d better believe they’re getting ready to wipe us out-soon. That’s right, I said us.”

Actually, I couldn’t argue with what Lucy said. I’d heard it myself from President Jacklin.

“You’re probably angry at your mother and father,” Lucy continued. “But think about how hard it must have been for them. Performing surgery on their own little boy, then sending him away into the enemy’s camp. Maybe to die.”

Suddenly, I remembered the home movie scene of Mom weeping inside the operating room.

Then it struck me how Lucy had phrased that last sentence.

“My mother and father?” I said. “So it’s true that you’re not really my sister?”

“My own parents were their best friends. My folks died when I was a baby, and they adopted me. But you and I do have a biological connection. Your mom and dad enhanced me surgically, just like they did for you, beano. Our brains have implants from the same chip set, and some of our organ tissue is cloned from the same sources. You do the biology.”

Shaking my head in confusion, I stepped into the boathouse, which was filled with familiar old smells of fishy water and musty equipment, and started loading gear into the skiff.

“That’s terrible, losing parents so young,” I said. “Both at once? Some kind of accident?”

“No, it was totally deliberate,” she said. “The Elites declared them enemies of the state-and then executed them. Your friend Jax Moore did the job himself. Someday I’ll cut off both his murdering hands, fry ’em in bacon grease, and eat them.”

“Ah,” I said, “well put.”