Chapter 19: The Choice Rebecca Left Behind
Maya pressed both hands against the empty chamber.
Images flooded her mind.
She saw Redwater before the fire.
Rebecca Cross stood in a laboratory surrounded by eight children.
She wore Maya’s adult face.
Not merely similar.
Identical.
The memory shifted.
Adrian argued with her beside the central chamber.
“You are not transferring yourself into that child.”
“My body is dying,” Rebecca said.
“You created them to preserve Lucas.”
“I created them to preserve possibility.”
“They are children.”
“They are vessels.”
Adrian reached for the control panel.
Rebecca raised a gun.
A small girl stood behind the doorway watching them.
Subject 01.
The child who would become Maya.
The memory broke apart.
Maya staggered backward.
Lucas caught her.
“What did you see?”
“She chose me because I looked like her.”
Subject 08 shook her head.
“No. You look like her because you were made from her.”
Alarms sounded throughout the vault.
Elias inspected a terminal.
“The archive is uploading.”
“To where?” Rafe asked.
“Multiple Helix facilities.”
Rebecca was spreading herself beyond Redwater.
Maya searched the controls.
“There must be a way to stop it.”
Elias pointed toward three switches.
“One erases the archive.”
Lucas looked at his cylinders.
“That kills every host.”
“The second isolates Redwater,” Elias continued. “But anyone carrying an active partition will remain vulnerable to Rebecca.”
Rafe glanced at the implant removed from his shoulder.
“And the third?”
Elias hesitated.
“It transfers control of the network to a new primary consciousness.”
Everyone looked at Maya.
“No,” Lucas said.
Maya studied the central chair beneath the chamber.
“If I take control, can I stop Rebecca?”
“You may become Rebecca,” Elias replied.
Subject 08 approached the chair.
“That is what she wants.”
“Then why give us the option?”
“Because she believes you’ll choose power.”
Maya heard Rebecca inside her thoughts.
They will never trust you now.
She looked at Lucas.
He had learned she was not his biological sister.
Rafe carried pieces of Daniel Mercer.
Elias was only a host carrying the memories of a dead father.
None of them knew where their true identities ended and borrowed memories began.
Rebecca whispered again.
I can make them whole.
Maya stepped away from the chair.
“No.”
The upload reached forty percent.
Lucas aimed his weapon at the archive controls.
“If we destroy it, Helix loses everything.”
“So do the innocent hosts,” Maya said.
“They may already be lost.”
Rafe grabbed Lucas’s gun.
“They’re still people.”
The two struggled.
A shot struck one of the cylinders.
Glass shattered.
Clear fluid poured across the floor.
Lucas collapsed to his knees as though he had been hit.
The broken cylinder carried his name.
He clutched his head.
A memory partition had been destroyed.
“Lucas!” Maya shouted.
He looked up.
His expression was empty.
“Who are you?”
Maya realized the archive was not only storing copies.
It was actively maintaining the identities of the hosts.
Elias helped Lucas stand.
“We are out of time.”
The upload reached sixty percent.
Subject 08 climbed into the central chair.
“What are you doing?” Maya asked.
“Finishing what you started fifteen years ago.”
Mechanical arms lowered around the child.
Maya tried to pull her free.
Subject 08 grabbed her hand.
“When the fire began, you promised to save all of us.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You can now.”
The chair activated.
Data moved from Subject 08 into the central chamber.
Rebecca’s voice screamed inside Maya’s head.
STOP HER.
Maya realized Subject 08 carried the one thing Rebecca had never been able to recover.
The original shutdown code.
The upload dropped to fifty-nine percent.
Then fifty-eight.
Subject 08 began convulsing.
“She’ll die,” Elias warned.
Maya searched the terminal.
“There has to be another way.”
“There is,” the child gasped.
She looked toward the second chair beside her.
“You have to connect with me.”
Maya understood.
The shutdown code had been divided between them.
If Maya joined Subject 08, they might stop Rebecca.
Or they might complete her.
Rafe caught Maya’s arm.
“You don’t know what you’ll become.”
Maya looked at Lucas.
He no longer remembered her.
She looked at Elias, who remembered being her father but had never truly raised her.
Then she looked at Subject 08, the only other survivor of the life Rebecca had created.
Maya sat in the second chair.
The restraints locked around her wrists.
Rebecca’s voice filled the vault.
“You finally came home.”
The machinery activated.
Maya felt another consciousness touch hers.
But it was not Rebecca.
It was the voice of the real Maya Cross.
May you like
And she whispered:
I didn’t die in the fire.
