Her voice came out scratchy and strained. ‘How do you know these things about me?’
‘Here.’ The man reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a silver USB memory stick that looked like an old-fashioned cigarette lighter. ‘Look at this after I’ve gone. It will give you more clarity on the details. You’re unique. But the important thing to understand is that there’s nothing wrong with you, Ella. Your brain was simply designed differently to other people’s.’
‘Brains aren’t “designed”,’ murmured Ella, gazing at the stick in her palm and talking as much to herself as to him.
‘Yours was,’ said the man. ‘In vitro. Your parents were pioneers in gene editing. As individual scientists they were each brilliant, but as a team they pushed boundaries that none of their contemporaries dared even approach.’
‘Wait.’ Ella held up a hand. ‘My parents were both doctors. Medical doctors.’
‘That is not accurate,’ said the man.
‘Yes it is accurate,’ insisted Ella, angrily. ‘My grandmother told me—’
‘Is this the same grandmother who told you that they’d died in a car crash?’ The man gave her a pitying look. ‘Surely you’ve realized by now, Ella, that your grandmother lied to you. Repeatedly. About many things.’
Ella bit her lip. She wanted him to be wrong, wanted to be able to leap to Mimi’s defense. But she couldn’t.
‘What I’m telling you now is the truth,’ said the man. ‘Whether you choose to believe it or not. Your parents were not doctors, they were research scientists. Your mother was a neurologist and your father a geneticist, and they were two of the most brilliant minds of their generation. You were their greatest achievement.’
Ella waited for him to go on.
‘The voices and messages you’ve been hearing aren’t auditory hallucinations. They’re all real,’ he explained. ‘They’re electronic signals – emails, texts, data and voice transmissions. You were genetically modified before birth to be able to receive and, theoretically at least, to unscramble them. We believe you have visual capabilities too, but we won’t know the full extent of your gifts until we get you into the lab. It’s really quite exciting,’ he added cheerfully.
Exciting? To be told that your own parents had conceived you as some sort of experiment? The words ‘genetically modified’ made Ella think of those perfectly round, red tomatoes that looked pretty on supermarket shelves but that tasted like tennis balls when you bit into them. Fake. Ruined.
‘You’re saying my parents caused the problems with my brain?’ she reiterated slowly. ‘On purpose?’
‘Not problems. Abilities,’ said the man. ‘You’re looking at this all wrong, Ella. Just imagine the possibilities. You’re gifted. You can access the unknown. You’re like a … a human receiver.’
‘Well if I am, I’m a broken one,’ Ella snapped. ‘I can’t “unscramble” anything. All I hear is white noise until my head feels like it’s going to explode. I’m sick, all the time. That’s the only “gift” they gave me. The only “ability”.’
There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. The anger.
‘I understand it’s a shock,’ said the man, with an attempt at empathy that clearly did not come naturally to him. ‘But those things will all improve. With training. Once you’ve learned how to master your abilities, we hope they will prove to be an invaluable asset to The Group, and to the greater good. Just as your parents intended.’
He stood up, pushing back his chair and straightening his silk tie with a perfectly manicured hand. ‘I know it’s a lot to take in. Download the information on the memory stick. Try to focus when you do, because once viewed it will automatically and permanently delete. I’ll be in touch in the coming days about next steps.’
Ella stood up too. She couldn’t just let him leave. She no longer thought he was deranged, but at the same time none of this made the remotest bit of sense. How dare this man, this stranger, walk into her life and drop bomb after bomb after bomb, refuse to answer her questions, then saunter off, leaving Ella to pick up the pieces?
Reaching out, she put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Wait! Hold on. Please.’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, shrugging off her hand and heading for the door.
‘You know what? Don’t bother!’ Ella yelled after him defiantly as he started down the stairs. ‘Because I’m not joining any stupid Group. Not for you or my parents or anyone else. So don’t come back here!’
The man kept walking.
‘I have a life of my own, you know,’ shouted Ella.
He stopped and turned to look up at her, his expression curious rather than angry.
‘Do you? No job. No family. No friends. No real purpose.’ He counted off Ella’s deficiencies on his fingers, not spitefully but in a matter-of-fact way, like a scientist letting the data speak for itself. ‘That’s not what I would call a life,’ he concluded. ‘But perhaps we have different standards?’
Ella spluttered furiously, trying to think of a suitable comeback, but by the time it came to her the man had gone. She stood alone at the top of the stairs, the silver USB stick clutched in her hand, feeling as if a tornado had just swept into her life and upended every single thing in it. If the man had still been in range, she would have hurled the stick at his head and hoped she knocked him out cold. Smug bastard.
Well, if he thought he was going to determine her future, he had another think coming. Ella wasn’t Frankenstein’s monster, whatever her parents might have intended. The man could take his stupid Group and his training and his missions and stick them where the sun didn’t shine.
I’ll show you, Mr ‘perhaps we have different standards’? Mr …?
It dawned on Ella in that moment that this man who claimed to know so much about her and her parents; this stranger who’d unlocked the mystery of her secret voices and solved the riddle of her past, hadn’t told Ella a single thing about himself.
She didn’t know how he’d come to join The Group, or what he did for them.
She didn’t know how old he was, or where he lived.
She didn’t even know his name.
Helen Martindale pushed her greying hair back from her doughy, round face and fixed it back in place with a bobby pin. She smiled patiently at the young woman opposite her, who hadn’t looked up from the single-page contract Helen had handed her more than six minutes ago, reading and re-reading every line of text as if it held the answer to the meaning of life.
‘It’s just our standard vendor’s agreement,’ Helen explained. ‘Shouldn’t be any surprises in there.’
The young woman kept reading.
‘We’ll
