“Sophie?” Moira asked uncertainly. “Let me look at your shoulder. Please. That bandage is done all wrong.”
Sophie sat very still as Moira unwrapped the cloth Jim had hastily tied and then bit her tongue to keep from whimpering as Moira’s fingers probed the wound. When she shut her eyes, she saw an explosion of red on the inside of her eyelids, and she felt a rising surge of panic and grief that she struggled to keep down, packing it away. She could deal with only so much at once, and she decided to deal with the easier trauma first, feeling cowardly for doing so, feeling as if she were betraying Jim by putting off the internalization of his death.
“It only clipped you,” Moira said, sounding relieved. “Let me take care of it.” She found some gauze in a drawer, and a cool cream that she gently applied before wrapping the shoulder in a quick, effective bandage. As she tied it off, she whispered, “I know you must be devastated. But I do love you.”
She loves me too, in her own way—because she created me, Nicholas had said. I’m her project; she doesn’t love me, but the reflection of herself in me.
“You have a home here, Sophie,” Moira went on. “If you want it. The reason I said no before—you must believe me that I wanted you to have a life of freedom. Yes, Corpus has been watching you your entire life, but you didn’t know that. You felt free—and so you were. But now that you know the truth, I guess it doesn’t matter. We needed you to feel that freedom, to grow up as ordinary a girl as you could be, so that we could measure the differences between you and Lux. As with all the Vitros and their Controls, we needed to know how different Lux would have been compared to a perfectly normal version of herself.”
I wasn’t even created to be Sophie—but a version of Lux. An alternative Lux leading a fake life. But even that thought didn’t weigh down the burgeoning sense of weightlessness in Sophie’s chest—and that astonished her. Why am I not angrier? Why am I not crying or yelling or demanding to know why?
“Do you hear what I’m saying, Sophie? You can stay here. There’s no point now in your going back, if you don’t want to.”
“No point.”
“No.” Moira reached out, rested her fingertips on Sophie’s knee.
Sophie drew away. “No point?”
“Sophie, what’s wrong? Talk to me, sweetheart?”
“No.” Sophie stood up, keeping the bench between them. “No,” she repeated, her voice calm. “Don’t you see?” she said, spreading her hands. “Don’t you see what this means? I can go, Mom—no, Dr. Crue. I can stop trying to impress the mother I never had. I can stop living my entire life around you, stop packing myself into little boxes just to live up to your standards. The meds they make me take, all those times Dad told me I was crazy for still loving you—I hated it. I hated myself. I thought the reason you left me was because I was broken.” Now she was crying, and she dashed the tears away angrily. “I thought that if I could just prove to you I was okay that you’d come back for me. But I’ve lived my entire life to please a lie.” Sophie pressed her hands to her temples, her breath coming in deep, heady drafts. “But not anymore. No, I won’t stay on Skin Island. I may have not known you were there, but you were pulling strings the whole time. Well, I won’t be controlled anymore.” She turned around again. “The first step toward being free is recognizing that you’re not. I’ve done that. I won’t go back now, not to what I was.”
“You can’t run. It’s not that simple. Your father can’t protect or hide you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She wasn’t happy, no. Nor sad nor angry. There would be time for that, she suspected, days when she would cry and days when she would want to scream and break things. But right now there was only an overwhelming sense of freedom, of possibility. She could be anyone, do anything at all.
“All the meds, the shrinks, the exams—you guys thought I was like Nicholas, didn’t you? You thought I was a psychopath.”
“We didn’t know what you were, or what you’d become,” Moira replied. “And I’m certain now that you’re perfectly fine. But we had to keep an eye on you, just in case. Ectogenesis was—still is, really—a very new and relatively untested technology. We didn’t know what the psychological side effects would be, so we had to monitor you closely.”
“All these years I thought I was messed up, that that’s why you stayed here and left Dad. Do you realize what that’s done to me?” She slammed her hand onto the bench, making Moira jump. “I thought I couldn’t have friends. I stayed away from people. Jim Julien was the best and last friend I ever had, did you know that? I couldn’t bear to have anyone around me after we left Guam—I thought I was a freak! And as it turns out, I was right. I may not be a psychopath like Nicholas, but I’m not normal.”
“But you are. I didn’t want to screw that up for you, Sophie, which is why I never told you. I wanted you to have a chance at a real life.”
“No, you didn’t! At least you didn’t do it for my sake. You did it because I was a better control if I was ignorant, if I lived thinking I was normal. Isn’t that it? Well, isn’t it?”
“Sophie!” But Moira’s eyes told her all she needed to know. She’d been given as normal a life as they could grant her, but it had never been for her. It all came back to Corpus.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Moira. “None of this matters anymore. After what happened today, I’ll be fired. Corpus will exterminate all the Vitros Nicholas woke, and they’ll likely kill him too. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing.” She looked drained, as if she could barely hold her head up. She slid down the wall and sat with her knees drawn up, her hands kneading her hair. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this,” she whispered. Gun still clutched in her hand, she pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Nicky may have woken them, but I destroyed them.”
Sophie thought of the bleary-eyed newborn Vitros, of their nightmarish introduction to the world. “Is there a way to reset them? Can you erase their memories or something, put them back to normal?” She didn’t want any part of it; she wanted to walk away now and never look back, to forget this woman, this place, all of it. But she was haunted by those empty faces, and she knew she would never stop hating herself if she didn’t try to help them.
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Moira. “There’s no cure. This is what they are. This is what I made them to be.”
“What about Nicholas?” Sophie threw out. “What makes him immune to imprinting? What’s the difference between him and those miserable kids out there?”
Moira looked up through a mess of hair and fingers. “I told you. He’s a psychopath. Him and Mary, Jay, and Wyatt.”
“Yes, but why? Why didn’t they imprint like all the others?”
“It was . . . there were complications.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say—that there were complications?”
Moira made no reply.
“Fine. Whatever. Keep your secrets for now.” She began pacing the length of the wall, one arm crossed over her stomach and her other hand cupping her chin. “Think, Mom—Dr. Crue. Whatever. Can’t you save them? Reverse it somehow? If they’re imprinted on Nicholas, then they’re useless to Corpus, I get that. But if they stopped being useless—don’t you see? We’ve got to make them nonexpendable. We’ve got to make them necessary.”
Moira turned the gun over in her hands, her brow knitted in thought. “We can’t undo it. Once imprinted, imprinted for life. It even extends beyond death.” Her hands froze, the gun pointed at the ceiling. “Philip Wolf—one of the doctors—he had a stroke, and there was nothing we could do to save him. But one of the Vitros, a girl named Clarissa—” Her voice choked out; she shook her head. “She was imprinted on him. It was like she just . . . crumpled. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t stand for him to be gone. She went crazy, breaking things, trying to dig up his grave . . . We had to put her down, in the end.”
“Put her down,” echoed So
phie, pausing to stare at her. “Like she was a dog.”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t see how bad off she was. We tried everything else—erasing her chip, medication, even electrotherapy. Nothing worked. Her world ended when his did. So it’s no good shooting Nicky—might as well shoot them all. Do you know what he did?” Moira’s hands trembled with anger. “He told them to jump off the cliff. He’d murder them, just to get back at me.”
Sophie’s mouth opened in horror. That sick, twisted bastard.
“Is there no way to save them?” She was thinking of Lux now as much as she was of the other Vitros. She’s the only family I have now. If there’s any chance of saving her—
“The other doctors are trying to deal with them. I came down to see if there were any left sleeping, but he got to them all. They won’t give up trying to carry out Nicholas’s orders unless he tells them to.”
“Yes—but I mean isn’t there a way to save them permanently? To un-imprint them?”
“It all comes down to the code,” said Moira, shaking her head. “The computer code on the chips—we call it the Imprima Code. We can manipulate it, but we can’t erase it—the chip is too integrated with the brain. Even if we took all the data off of it, the information would be stored in their cerebral cortex. We’d have to insert a new code, something to override it.” She shook her head. “But there’s not time. And there’s no way of knowing what that code would be. It’s like trying to invent the bicycle before the wheel. Like trying to paint something you can’t see.”
“What I don’t understand, what I’ve been trying to understand all this time—is why would you even do this to begin with?” Now Sophie was ranting, spitting out words simply because she was tired of holding them back. “How could you be so heartless as to give people life only to strip away their identities? What’s in it for you?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Moira rose quickly to her feet, her eyes burning defiantly. She slipped her gun into the deep pocket of her coat. “It wasn’t about imprinting in the beginning. That was an accident, a sort of side effect. You should have seen this place back then, when we were first getting started. Your dad and me and the others—we were so full of hope and excitement about the future. We were working to save the world, not . . . not this. The chip technology was originally intended to be a new form of psychotherapy. This technology is huge, Sophie—it’s world changing. We can influence the human mind by speaking to it through computer code. We’ve achieved a human-machine hybrid technology whose full ramifications we’re only just beginning to realize. At the beginning, the chip was meant to be a cure. We knew that if we could manipulate the psyche with the aid of the chip to translate computer code into human thought, affecting the brain in the same way you’d download a program onto your computer, we could cure almost any mental disorder and, in time, even physical ones. We could cure Alzheimer’s and bipolarity and schizophrenia and . . . and psychopathy.”
Sophie stared at Moira, her mind hardening around a new realization. “So you created test subjects. You created psychopaths so that you could try to cure them.”
“Yes,” Moira whispered, not returning her gaze. “We performed a kind of advanced lobotomy on Nicky and the other three, creating an induced psychopathy, and then we tried to cure them. But for Nicky, Mary, the other two, it was too late. By the time we administered the reversal code, they were too old, their personalities too cemented. The worst part was that we knew what they should have been like—thanks to their Controls. We’d created little monsters we couldn’t cure, and their twins are out living normal lives and reminding us every day of what we destroyed.
“We had to improvise and experiment; eventually we learned that for the cure to work, the subject had to remain unconscious throughout the entire chip procedure. If they woke, even for a moment, we’d lose them and they’d become just like the first four Vitros. So we did it all at once, without them ever gaining consciousness. And then, after the first few successful Vitros were born and Corpus decided to shift the focus of the project to simply creating more Vitros, we found we didn’t need to induce psychopathy at all—we just needed the cure.”
“The cure that became their curse,” Sophie said darkly.
“It reversed the psychopathy in the most dramatic possible way,” Moira admitted. “Psychopathy, sociopathy—they’re nearly interchangeable terms—stem from one’s inability to relate, to feel empathy, to connect with another person. When we tried to reverse it with the chip, it resulted in the subjects’ psyches overreacting, going to the other extreme—they fixated on the first person they saw, over-connecting, forming an unbreakable bond. When we realized what we’d done, it was too late—Corpus threw out all our plans of cures and therapies and instead focused on creating Vitros, and on developing the Imprima Code, which enhanced their imprinting instincts a thousandfold. Moldable, perfectly obedient workers. The code originally intended to heal people was instead turned to programming bodyguards and servants, equipping them with the skills needed to serve their masters.”
“And you just went along with it, even though Dad refused.”
“He refused to take part, threatened to out Corpus and the project to the media. I admired him for it, Sophie, and I always have, but I couldn’t break away like he did. I was too entrenched here, and I had so much still to accomplish. . . . Foster did what most of us here only dream of doing, and certainly speak of—he walked away. He turned his back on Skin Island even though it meant they might have killed him for it. But it wasn’t just out of his sense of morality—it was because of you. Before you came along, I think he might have stayed on, but you changed him. You changed us both, really, but him most of all.” Her eyes seized on Sophie’s. “You mustn’t blame him. He loves you so very deeply, and he risked everything for your sake when he left the project. Corpus let him go, but not entirely—they never let go entirely. They watch him as much as they watch me and you, and you must never think he is free of their influence. He was careful in his break with the Vitro Project. He went through all the right channels, appealed to all the right people, and in the end, he won himself more freedom than most of us here will ever know. He lied to you because he knew that he’d stretched Corpus’s mercy as far as it would go, and that if he broke away for even a second, they would have him in custody or killed within hours. He lied to you so that he could live and protect you. If you must blame anyone, blame me, blame Corpus. Your father . . .” She shut her eyes. “He was and is all of the good things I never found in myself, and the only thing I regret as much as I regret losing you is the day I lost him.”
“You could have walked away with us.” Sophie spoke in a rasp, her breath squeezing around the knot in her throat. “If he could do it, so could you.”
“I did what I thought I had to do, and even now, I’m not sure I’d have chosen any differently. It didn’t matter if I refused and walked away—they’d have kept on without me, as they kept on without Foster. At least by staying, I could help the Vitros as much as possible. I could be sure they weren’t abused to an even greater extent. At least, that’s what I thought. But then I just . . . I lost control.” Moira spoke in a hush, her eyes distant, unfocused. “It was slow, and I didn’t even know it was happening until it was too late. But my power over this project was usurped by the teaspoon until one day, it was gone. I’d lost control.”
Don’t we all, thought Sophie. She remembered what Nicholas had said to her in the salon: Take control or be controlled.
Corpus had played them all for fools.
Sophie drew a deep breath. “Then take it back.”
Moira gave her a puzzled look.
“You lost control—so get it back.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it, though? From what I can tell, this Vitro plan has crashed and burned, thanks to Nicholas. You set out to do something good, to save people, as you said.” Sop
hie planted her hands on the bench and leaned forward, her eyes intent on Moira. “So do that. Get this train back on the right track. It isn’t too late until you give up.”
Moira was staring at her searchingly, as if Sophie were a map she could not read. “Why are you so concerned about this? Why don’t you just walk away?”
The question was already in Sophie’s mind. All her life, she thought she knew who she was. I thought I was your daughter. I thought if I could only reach you, make you see me, that all the pieces of my life that didn’t make sense would magically fall together. Well, in a way that had happened, but not how she’d expected. She had found herself, but she was not who she thought she was. All her life, she’d lived in Moira’s shadow, but now the ties between them had been cut and Sophie felt almost buoyant. I don’t need her approval anymore. I can be whoever I want to be, do whatever I want to do.
She didn’t want her first deed in her new life to be a betrayal of her own. “Because Lux is my sister,” she said. “And I won’t give up on her. And I won’t let you give up on her.” She swallowed, then crossed the floor between them and stood in front of the woman who had been her mother. “Please.” She met Moira’s eyes and willed herself to stay strong, not to break, not yet. “Help me. Take back Skin Island.”
Moira said nothing for a long moment. She stood very still and did not look away. Sophie saw the torture in her eyes; how long had she been aching to do just that? How long had she chafed under Strauss’s and Corpus’s rule, hating what they made her do but lacking the courage to defy them? Sophie gazed at her intently, wishing she could channel her strength into Moira, but knowing she barely had enough for herself.
“If you ever loved me, even in the smallest way,” said Sophie softly, “if you have any love for Lux or Dad or the other Vitros, if there is a shred of love left in your body—do this. Do this for me. For Lux. For all of us, all the ones you’ve wronged. Please, Mom.” Her voice faltered on the word. “You’re the only mom I ever had. You gave me life as surely as if you’d given birth to me yourself. So be my mom—you owe me this. You owe all of us, so get out there, take back your island, and save us.”