Chapter 18
The Quiet Witness
They left the courthouse through the basement loading bay.
Daniel drove without the lights on until they reached the edge of town. The first dawn was beginning behind the trees, gray and thin.
“Where are we going?” Tess asked.
“A woman who worked at the clinic,” Daniel said.
Claire turned in the passenger seat. “You know where she is?”
“I know where she was sent.”
The address belonged to a small assisted-living home beside the river. Daniel parked beneath a maple tree and led them through the rear entrance. The receptionist looked at his badge and pointed toward a room at the end of the hall.
The woman inside was in her seventies. Her name was Nora Pike. A blanket covered her knees. A television played silently in front of her.
When she saw Claire, she turned the television off.
“You brought her back,” Nora said.
“She came back herself,” Daniel answered.
Nora looked at the envelope in Claire's hand. “That is not what I meant.”
Claire sat opposite her. “Did you work at Bellwether Clinic?”
Nora's fingers closed over the blanket.
“I was a nurse.”
“Did you know Mara Rowan?”
“Everyone knew Mara.”
“Did she create the models?”
“She created the language. Owen created the business.”
“And Dr. Sen?”
“She tried to stop it.”
“Lucy says children were involved.”
Nora looked at Daniel. “You should have told her before you brought her here.”
“I did not know.”
“You knew enough.”
Nora reached beneath the blanket and removed a small cassette recorder. She placed it on the table.
“The machines stored a patient's voice before the program stored anything else,” she said. “Voice was considered the safest entry point. People obeyed themselves more easily than they obeyed doctors.”
Claire remembered her own voice telling her to sleep.
“Why did Mara use my voice?”
“She did not. The clinic did.”
Nora pressed play.
A younger Claire spoke from the recorder.
“You can rest now. The room is safe.”
Then another voice answered.
“The room is not safe.”
Mara.
The recording continued beneath the sound of machinery.
Mara said, “Claire, do not answer the question they ask you. Answer the question they are avoiding.”
The younger Claire began to cry.
Owen's voice entered the room.
“We need a stable response.”
Mara said, “You need an obedient one.”
The tape stopped.
Nora looked at Claire. “Your sister did not build the replacement to control you. She built it to keep the clinic from using your body as the original.”
“Then why does it look like me?”
“Because the program could not move a memory without a familiar shape.”
“Who is the replacement?”
Nora's face changed.
“You have already met her.”
Claire thought of the woman in the control room.
“C-12.”
“No,” Nora said. “C-12 is not the woman. It is the room where they stored the first successful transfer.”
“Then who is she?”
Nora looked at the dark television screen.
“The woman who remembers being Claire.”