the end of the game, we’d both done more laughing and fabricating than anything else.
“Wow, I haven’t played that since I was a kid,” Hunter said, once we’d finally settled down.
“Did your parents teach you?”
A pause. “No, my friends’ parents did on the way to soccer meets.” A lengthier pause, and then, “do you ever wish you had a brother? Or a sister?”
I stole a glance at his profile while he drove, but his eyes remained intent on the road.
Images flashed in my head. My face, only not mine, staring me down right before we had to race through an obstacle course designed by a madman. Her quizzical expression when I tried to talk about Mom. Her insistence that we were sisters of sorts. Sisters who competed to see if one would have her entire existence erased, with the push of a few buttons.
A chill wrapped around me like a night breeze. “No,” I said. “Not really. Why? Do you?”
A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw, a stiffness echoed in the way his shoulders squared against the seat back and the curl of his fingers on the wheel. He waited a tick, then deflated. “Yeah, I do. Mainly just to have someone to talk to at home. My parents come and go a lot, and they’re … well, let’s just say they’re all over the place with their attention. One minute they’re all in my business like I’m ten or something, but the other fifty-nine, they act like I’m forty and don’t need anything from them. Sometimes I pretend that I have a brother, and we make fun of how weird they are while we hole up in my room and watch really shitty TV.”
The tiny lump that had started forming in my throat grew in thickness, but I swallowed it away. I’d give anything to have Hunter’s dysfunctional little family.
At least he knew them. At least they were alive.
“Do you ever feel like that? Like you just wish you could rewrite history, somehow, to make it play out more in your favor?”
I reached across the seat and rested my hand lightly on his cheek. He leaned into my palm, and my heart swelled. “Every day,” I whispered. “I wish I could change the past, every single day.”
His eyes met mine, and something flared between us. My heart catapulted in my chest, while suddenly I became aware of how close his thigh was to mine, and of his scent, and the thrum of his pulse beneath my fingers, speeding up its pace.
I let my hand fall away, coughed to clear my confusion. Car. Driving. Not crashing, really important. “None of us gets to decide where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there.”
I wasn’t sure where the words had originated, but once I uttered them, they felt right. I couldn’t allow the circumstances of my creation to drag me down. Nothing could change that. But that didn’t mean my entire life was predetermined. I had choices, beyond what Holland envisioned for me.
And I’d be damned if I let him steal my life from me, like he had Mom’s.
“You think so?” he said, his lower lip caught between his teeth.
“I do. I also think that your parents suck, if they don’t realize what an amazing person you are.” He didn’t say anything, but the right side of his mouth turned up. “And, for the record—I’m always available to watch bad TV. In fact, hold that thought …”
I rummaged through my bag, pulling out the pen and paper I’d taken from the motel. I scribbled on the top sheet, tore it off, and handed it over. “Here you go.”
He unfolded it on the steering wheel and read, his smile turning into a full-fledged chuckle.
I owe you one entire day of room holing-up and all the shitty-TV watching your alphabet-game-cheating brain can handle.
Mila
“So I might get another day with you, huh?”
I stared at the stretch of road ahead through the windshield and beyond, avoiding the traveled road in the rearview mirror. “I’m thinking about it.”
Later, we switched positions. I could tell Hunter was getting tired as the sun lowered in the sky, because he talked less and instead zoned out to whatever song was playing on the radio, his eyelids slowly lowering. Finally, the steady hum of the tires must have lulled him, because his eyes closed and his face turned soft with sleep.
As I stared at the long, monotonous road ahead, I quickly realized that I didn’t like it when Hunter slept. It left me with too much time alone with my thoughts.
Way too much time. Enough time for me to replay images from the past that I’d happily erase from my memory for good.
Android parts, everywhere. Me, wading through piles of discarded arms and legs and other bits of machinery masquerading as human, their skin dry and lifeless under my hands. Flames, roaring in my ears, red-orange waves licking the floor by Mom’s bound feet—and the impact my shoulder made when I hit the glass separating us. Lucas’s body, crumpling when I struck him in the kidney with my fist—even though it was the last thing I’d wanted to do.
All part of Holland’s sick, sadistic tests. All for nothing when he ordered me terminated anyway.
Remembered terror tore through my body—the horror of not knowing what was happening to Mom while I was locked away in the tiny, barren cell in Holland’s compound … and the never-ending heart stab of realizing that now, she was gone. Was that pain ever—ever—going to go away?
Mom had told me I was brave, only she had called me Sarah. A part of me was so determined to figure out who this mystery girl was, and the other part didn’t want to know. What I knew now was horrifying enough.
As the tires rolled on and Hunter slept, I played our escape scene, over and over again. What could I have done differently? If I’d taken a different route through D.C.? Not made that desperate, wrong-way turn on the Kutz Bridge?
The road blurred before me and I took a vicious swipe at my eyes.
If you want to help me, you know what you can do? Live.
Mom’s voice, already losing strength then but filled with a surprising ferocity.
Live.
I straightened in the seat, pushed my shoulders back. Everything Mom had done had been for me. To give me a chance to really live—in whatever capacity that meant.
I wasn’t about to let her down.
I pushed the button on the door, and the window whirred. The fresh air whipped me in the face, full of damp earth and, yes, some smoky car exhaust, but mostly the slightly sweet decay of leaves falling from trees. Crisp—chillier than I’d expected.
Ambient temperature: 49.5 degrees F.
Instead of refreshing me, though, my body stiffened as Holland’s wrinkled, smug face swam in my mind, accompanied by the scream of bullets. The explosive shatter of glass.
In my head, I saw flames licking high, but this time he was the one bound to a chair. His sun-weathered face glistened as the heat
