Upgrade(33)

We piled into the Google Roadster coupe.

As the doors closed, the stranger finally pulled off their mask, tossing it and the voice modulator into the back seat.

I stared across the center console at my sister.





IT HAD BEEN THREE years since I’d last seen Kara.

Six months since we’d last spoken.

Although we called each other on birthdays and at Christmas, she was usually overseas, on active duty.

She looked harder than I remembered, and there was a new scar across her face that I had never seen in person. I knew she’d been captured a couple of years back during one of her tours in Myanmar and held as a POW for several weeks before a rescue mission freed her, but that was the extent of my knowledge of what had happened. We’d never really talked about it.

We were suddenly moving over the shoulder and onto the road.

Kara toggled the accelerator.

Wild, rushing speed.

We raced through the countryside without headlights.

Though my night vision was vastly improved, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable driving as fast as Kara was on these winding roads, guided only by moonlight. But she seemed perfectly adept.

I looked over at my sister, and anticipating my question, she launched in.

“Last summer, on the porch of my Montana cabin, a bee stung me.” She took a hairpin curve so fast we must have pulled a couple of g’s. “Pain was brief, no swelling, but two nights later, I woke with the worst fever I’d ever had—drenched sheets, delirium. After three days in the hospital, I stabilized.”

She spoke blazingly fast.

I said, “They ran tests, nothing conclusive?”

She nodded.

“Decided you’d caught some strain of influenza and recovered?”

“Exactly.”

Kara slowed as we entered Luray, Virginia, a sleepy town at the foot of the mountains. Main Street was dead at this hour. Traffic signals blinking yellow at the intersections and the moon bright enough to light the sky and reveal a black wall to the west—the escarpment of Shenandoah.

“Sixteen days later,” Kara said, “this woman I’d picked up the night before was getting orange juice from the fridge. The tablet on the island was showing the news, which she was partially watching. Between her divided attention and the drinking glass she’d set on the edge of the island, I saw how she was going to close the refrigerator door, turn, and with the arm that was holding the juice, knock the glass off with her elbow. This wasn’t a suspicion. It was like a physics equation written across the surface of reality just for me. All these variables pointing toward an inevitable outcome. I see these equations everywhere now. This entire thought process unfolded as I flipped a pancake and saw her reach into the fridge in the reflection of the window over the kitchen sink. The pancake hit the pan; I dropped the spatula, reached down, caught the glass mid-fall, a split second before it would have exploded on the tile.”

“When did you notice all the other changes?”

“Before, it had been a slowly warming awareness. But in that moment, they all screamed out at me in unison. Better concentration, night vision, memory, less sleep, increased muscle mass, higher pain tolerance.”

“Reading people in a way you never could before?”

She nodded.

“The bee was a drone,” I said.

Kara smiled. “It hadn’t decomposed at all.”

After twenty-five days of interacting with—what to call them? Normals?—it was glorious to converse with someone whose mind moved as swiftly as mine.

We reached the crest of the Blue Ridge as dawn exhaled a lavender breath across the sky. The light came, views lengthening toward horizons. I saw the next valley over cloaked in a shallow layer of mist. The lights of towns and cities glowing in the distance.

Kara said, “Figured I’d been targeted for some kind of genetic alteration. I headed for you.”

“Why?”

“I knew whoever was behind this, there was no way they chose me by coincidence. It was because I’m a Ramsay—because of Mom. So either you had something to do with it or you’d be on their list too.”

“So you put me under surveillance.”

“I needed to understand your pressure points in case you didn’t want to help or tried to arrest me. That’s how I learned you’d been targeted just like me, and that your employer was watching you.”

“What tipped you off that I was changing?”

“Chess.”

“You texted that the GPA was onto me?”

“It was apparent to me you were changing. I knew they’d catch on soon enough. Sorry. I should’ve reached out to you sooner.”

“Mom did this to us,” I said.

It became very quiet in the car.

Kara looked at me, and I swatted down what she was thinking.

“She’s not dead,” I said. “She wants to unleash a major genomic upgrade.”

“On whom?”

“The human race.”

And then I told her everything.



* * *



—

At 7:30 A.M., Kara pulled into the parking lot of the Maple Leaf Motel in Kingwood, West Virginia.

It was flurrying snow, the roads just beginning to frost over.

We both donned balaclavas to shield our faces as we made the short jog to our room, painfully aware that there was CCTV everywhere.