The Rising(55)

What didn’t make sense was whatever had transpired in the boy’s house.

Marsh had provided no details on the subject. His quantum computer had pinged, because the circumstances of the Chins’ murders, coupled with their son gone missing from a hospital where his doctor had been killed, raised flags. But the machine couldn’t tell Rathman what those flags were.

He needed Alex Chin to tell him that. Now, while the scene was contained and under his control.

His phone rang.





56

THE IMPOSSIBLE

YOU’RE NOT HUMAN, ALEX.…

Alex and Sam continued to stare at the screen, at An Chin’s frozen image.

Her words made no sense and perfect sense at the same time.

“Just like the CAT scan,” Alex muttered.

“What? Huh?”

“The doctor ordered another one, because he must’ve seen something that made no sense, either—that shadow, maybe more. Just like the blood tests Dr. Chu kept doing. Oh, man…”

Alex dropped his face into his hands, covering it as if everything might be different as soon as he took them away. But the words, his mother’s message, wasn’t about to change.

You’re not human, Alex.

“Guess I’m an illegal,” he tried to joke. “The mother of all illegal aliens. Jesus Christ, what does it all mean?”

He started the video running again, hoping his mother would tell him.

*

That’s why we never let you have another blood test. Your father and I made up the excuse that our Buddhist religion forbade it. Never an X-ray, either, because we didn’t know what that might show. Your father and I should have known better than to let you play football. But you loved the game so much and were so good at it. We wanted you to fit in, to blend. Bad enough you were the English son of Chinese parents, but if those Chinese meddled in your life it would be even worse. We wanted you to be happy. That’s all we ever wanted.

We never ceased to acknowledge that you were different and we didn’t care. You are our son and you’ll always be our son, no matter what the DNA says. You wouldn’t have been ours if you were human, would you? So what was the difference?

You need to know that Dr. Chu’s words made us love you no less. It made us love you even more, in fact. Because you were truly a gift, a miracle, given us by some cosmic force we could never purport to comprehend. The heavens have a strange way of doing things sometimes, and if they heard my prayers and delivered you to us, who were we to think different of you because your blood was different?

But you need to hear what Dr. Chu said.…

*

Alex swiped the tears from his face with a sleeve and sniffled. All his parents had done for him, never stopped loving him even after learning he wasn’t human. And his last memory, the thing he would always take away, would be an argument.

And yet, and yet …

Who am I?

The most clichéd question ever posed, but so appropriate right now because Alex had absolutely no idea.

“Alex,” Sam prodded, fidgeting in her chair. “We’ve been here too long. We need to hurry.”

So he turned back to the screen and listened to his mother again.





57

DR. CHU

HE WAS A SAINTLY man with hair the color of birch bark. An immigrant who’d earned his medical degree and settled amid his familiar native populace clustered around the San Francisco area. That sense of comfort providing the strongest rationale for your father and I to remain in the area even after slowly coming to grips with the truth about you. At least here we’d be able to blend in better; then again, being the Chinese parents of a Caucasian child would stand out anywhere we went.

The day of the “explanation,” as I would come to call it, or jiěshì, in Chinese, Dr. Chu asked me to return with your father after office hours. The fog had rolled in off the bay, a perfect complement for the thoughts clouding my mind. I had prepared myself to make a stand, to argue at wits’ end for a rational explanation for what we were facing here. Chinese history was full of mysticism, jam-packed with it, but Dr. Chu’s claims about you stretched way, way beyond that into a new scientific realm that challenged the very nature of reality as it was currently perceived.

Because if you really weren’t human, then what were you?

I clutched your father’s hand as we walked up from the parking lot through the fog, with you tucked into your car seat, sleeping soundly. My mind suddenly felt cluttered with thoughts of Laboratory Z. That was the missing piece, whatever the mysterious experiments being conducted there had unleashed, what doorways they had opened. I had never been told a thing about it. As I was part of the maintenance staff, though, people talked around me like I wasn’t even there. I melted into the scenery and they spoke in my presence as if I were no more than a wall or a chair. Only one word that made any sense, recalled from half-heard conversations:

Doorways.

Whatever that meant. I have no more idea today than I did eighteen years ago. And from the moment I found you, all that seemed inconsequential. Bringing you home was day one in the rest of my life, all that came before dissipating into memories that were as obscure as any other sight gleaned through the fog wafting over Dr. Chu’s office.

He was waiting at the door when we arrived, drawing it open before your father could even ring the bell. The waiting room beyond was empty, a single table lamp illuminating a colorfully painted wall dominated by smiling animal figures with tools in their hands.