Chapter 11
The Person Your Sister Made
Lucy did not kneel.
Daniel repeated the order. The weapon in his hand made the room smaller, but Lucy did not look at it. She watched Claire as if Claire were the only dangerous object in the corridor.
“You know me,” Lucy said.
“I know the name Lucy Hart.”
“That is not what I said.”
Tess moved beside Claire. “You were declared dead.”
“I was made inconvenient.”
“Your family vanished.”
Lucy looked toward the monitors. “My family was moved.”
“By whom?” Daniel asked.
“By the same people who built this room.”
He kept the weapon raised. “Where are they?”
“Safe, if you have not found them.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only answer that keeps them alive.”
Claire looked at the control panels. “Why does the system call me stable?”
Lucy took one step forward. “Because you are not the first Claire Rowan.”
The sentence should have produced fear. Instead, Claire felt the return of the same blank pressure behind her eyes that had followed the message, the photograph, and the four missing hours.
“I am standing here,” she said.
“You are.”
“I was born Claire Rowan.”
“The woman in the video was not born with your face.”
Daniel glanced at Claire. “What is she talking about?”
Lucy's expression softened. “You still trust the man who helped them seal the records?”
Daniel's jaw tightened.
“I never helped them.”
“You signed the settlement.”
“I was ordered to.”
“You accepted money.”
“For a patient whose name was already protected.”
Claire turned to him. “What patient?”
Lucy answered for him. “Mara.”
Daniel lowered the weapon by an inch.
“Mara was dead,” he said.
“Mara was dying,” Lucy said. “That was different to the people who owned the program.”
Claire remembered the road. Snow. Headlights. Mara's car angled against a tree. The police officer asking whether she knew where her sister was going.
“You saw her after the accident,” Claire said.
Lucy shook her head. “I saw the file.”
“Then you do not know what happened.”
“I know what they recorded.”
Lucy reached into her coat and removed a thin envelope. She placed it on the desk beneath the monitors.
The front carried Claire's name.
“Your sister believed the program could preserve a person's decision-making after death,” Lucy said. “She was wrong. It preserved a pattern. A pattern can be trained. A pattern can be sold.”
“Why would she involve me?”
“Because she believed grief made you vulnerable. She thought they would use you either way.”
“So she made a copy of me?”
“She made a way for you to survive what they had already started.”
Claire looked at Lucy's face. The resemblance to the old photograph was exact enough to be frightening, but Lucy's expression did not match it. Lucy held her mouth differently. She watched people before she answered them.
“Who are you?” Claire asked.
Lucy touched the envelope.
“I am a model built from your sister's work, your records, and the decisions you made while you were asleep.”
Tess stepped away from her. “That is impossible.”
“No. It is expensive.”
Daniel moved toward the envelope.
Lucy raised a hand. “Do not open it here.”
“Why?”
“Because the room will know.”
The monitors clicked on.
Every screen now showed a close-up of Claire's face.
Not live. A sequence of old images: Claire laughing at a restaurant, Claire asleep in a hospital chair, Claire signing a document, Claire standing beside Mara at the lake.
The last image showed Claire in the control room.
She was wearing the same clothes she wore now.
In the image, she stood beside Lucy and held the envelope.
The timestamp was eleven minutes in the future.