Page 7 of Ringer
“We get the contract. Simple enough.” Through the shelves, Gemma caught only quick glimpses of her father, still wearing his party outfit, his colorful Hawaiian shirt. All show. “Triple the size and change the objective, at least in part. There will be a medical aspect, sure. That’s where Miller and our friends in Congress come in. But there’s a bigger endgame, too, to get costs down and make mass production viable. Saperstein bled money out of that place for a decade. His focus was too narrow and his production was too small.”
“We got functional variants. We got real-world observation.”
“You’ve got billions of dollars sunk into that shithole, a containment mission on your hands, and a PR shitstorm that will take a quarter of Washington. Come on, Allen. You know as well as I do that Saperstein’s interest was ideological, not functional. He just wanted to prove he could make test subjects from scratch.”
From scratch.Gemma felt like she was going to throw up.From scratch.Like pancake batter, or Lego kingdoms.
After a pause, Fortner cleared his throat. “Keep talking.”
“I’ll give you the location. Everyone feels good. The mess is cleaned up, no one’s in trouble, we move on.” Geoff leaned on the TV console that had once been upstairs. He looked almost bored. “It’s like making toy soldiers,” headded. “Think of how many lives we’ll save.”
Fortner was quiet again. Gemma’s heart was emptying and filling, turning over like a bucket. She felt as if she might drown.
“You said you promised your daughter,” he said finally, and just hearing the word made her body go tight. “What made you change your mind?”
“I kept my promise. I won’t be the one collecting. Besides”—he threw up his hands, a gesture Gemma knew well, like,what does it matter, Kristina, kale salad or arugula, it’s all a bunch of rabbit food—“what would it have done before now? I knew Saperstein would hang himself by his own rope. The Haven team has proved its own incompetence. Billions of dollars down the drain, and enough cleanup to keep a thousand crisis managers employed for a decade.”
“Where?” Fortner asked finally. For a split second, Gemma still held out hope that her dad would lie.
“I put them up in a trailer on one of my investment lots. Winston-Able, right off Interstate 40. Lot sixteen, a double-wide. Not far from Knoxville. Didn’t even remember I owned the damn thing until the federal government reminded me in April.” This made Fortner laugh. It sounded like a cat trying to bring up a hairball. “Pulled some strings and got her dad working at Formacine Plastics out there. You know it?”
Fortner sighed. “I’ll talk to my guys about Philly. See what strings I can pull.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Saperstein shot himself in the dick. He doesn’t listen. This is a new age, Allen. We got the chance to change the world here. ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, you name it—they don’t follow the old rules.”
“You’re preaching to the choir.”
“They’re gonna brainwash their army of human IEDs, no reason we can’tmakeours.”
“Like I said, preaching to the choir. But I’m going to have to go up the chain on this one.”
“I believe in you,” Geoff said, sounding faintly sarcastic.
Gemma had lost the thread of the conversation, but it no longer mattered. She understood everything that mattered: her father had betrayed Lyra and Caelum. He’d betrayed her, and his promise. She should have known he would.
Finally, Fortner and Geoff moved toward the stairs together. She could have cried from relief. Gemma’s feet and legs had gone numb.
But at the last second, Fortner hesitated. When he turned back to Geoff, Gemma saw his face—cold and long and narrow, like an exclamation point—before he passed once again out of view.
“Your daughter,” he said, and Gemma’s blood turned thick and heavy. “She was made at Haven. One of the first.” It wasn’t a question, but Gemma could hear a question layered beneath the words, like a knife angled up through a fist.
“She was born there, yes,” Geoff said, and Gemma heard the importance of the correction—born, notmade. But did it matter? Made, spliced, implanted—she might as well have been a fast-growing variety of bean sprout.
Fortner coughed. “You ever wonder what makes the difference?” When Geoff said nothing, he went on, “You want to put the replicas to good use, and I’m with you. But what makes them any different from your girl?”
“What do you think makes them different?” Geoff’s voice had turned cold. “Someone wanted her.”
Someone. Gemma noticed that he did not sayI.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Lyra’s story.
FOUR
THE PARTY WAS STILL GOING. Of course it was. They’d been in the basement for probably an hour. And yet somehow Gemma had expected to resurface and find the whole party incinerated, like Pompeii, vaporized in just a few seconds of suffocating ash. She wouldn’t have been surprised to walk through empty rooms filled with cast-off trash, to find everything grayed with decay, to see her parents’ friends transformed by the alchemical power of disaster into skeletons.
Now she saw the party for what it was: packaging. Pretty lies packed, beveled, and neatly shaped together, like an intricate sand castle, teetering at the edge of a creeping tide. The leis, the guests, the vivid cocktails colored like drowning sunsets: all of it an excuse for her father to see Allen Fortner, to negotiate with him. Even the cake was bullshit. When was the last time her momhad eaten cake, let herself consume a single thing that wasn’t low-calorie, high-protein, grass-fed, non-GMO?
They were only playing parts, and Gemma had been playing right along with them.
