Upgrade(46)

“Why does it have to be safe for all? Why is that the threshold?”

“Are you seriously considering this?” I asked.

“If she’s not wrong about our impending extinction, what do we have to lose?”

I stood and looked down at my sister.

“Everything it means to be human.”

Kara rose to her feet. “I know you were there on the day Mom released her locusts into the fields, and I can’t pretend to know what it feels like to walk around with that. But what if this moment—you and me in these woods—is the crossroads for our species? We need to face it with cold reason, not sentiment. Not nostalgia for a doomed species. We do nothing,” she said, “and humanity is gone in a hundred and fifty years. We could lead our species into the future. You and me.”

“God, you sound as arrogant as Mom.”

“Is that supposed to hurt me?”

“You’re making the same mistake she did. Being smart doesn’t make people infallible. It just makes them more dangerous.”

Kara studied me for a moment.

It was a small thing.

The smallest of things.

But her jaw lifted imperceptibly, and the inner corners of her eyebrows drew in and then up—a microexpression of sadness flashing in and out of existence in less than a quarter of a second.

As if she were trying to hide it.

A voice in my head inquired: Why would she try to hide that she was sad?

Because she was sad about something she didn’t want me to know.

What wouldn’t she want me to know?

The answer came quietly, effortlessly, as if on a gentle breeze.

That she sees this moment for what it is. Two people in the wilderness of New Mexico holding humanity’s future in their hands. She thinks I’m wrong and she’s right, and because the stakes are extinction, she’s willing to do something unthinkable.

I reached down, grabbed the hardcase handle.

“What are you doing?” Kara asked.

“We can’t leave it out here. Should we head back?”

She stared at me for a moment. “All right.”

It was all I could do not to look at the trench knife sheathed on her right hip, the Glock holstered on her left.

Turning quickly, I flipped up the collar of my jacket so she couldn’t see my carotid artery pounding away.

My pulse rate had spiked to 144. While I was getting better at controlling it, I didn’t have the mastery to throttle back into the range of normal fast enough to elude Kara. And I feared that if she noticed my elevated pulse rate, it would clue her in to my suspicion of what she was thinking, which could escalate this situation before I had a chance to think my way out of it.

Had I made the adjustment in time? Had she already noticed? Were there other tells that might alert her to my nervous system shifting into fight-or-flight? Dilated pupils? Muscle tension?

The hardcase had wheels, but they didn’t roll in the old snow. I dragged the case behind me, heading back down the hill across the 36°33′45″N, 106°13′04″W grid.

I felt lightheaded, dizzy.

Was I insane?

Of course my sister who I loved and who loved me, who I’d lived with under the same roof for sixteen years, didn’t want to kill me. That was actually true. She didn’t want to. She’d been convinced by our mother of the importance of this upgrade and knew she had to make a decision here and now.

Her mistake wasn’t showing her sadness—she could’ve easily lied her way through some other explanation, like finding our mother dead in a truck just down the hill.

Her mistake was the attempted subterfuge. The suppression of the sadness.

I reached down and grabbed the Garmin as I passed it.

Kara’s footsteps were behind me in the snow—nine feet back.

We crossed onto dry ground, the hardcase wheels rolling nicely downhill now, bumping along over root and rock.

I needed to look back at her, gather more data, but I was afraid she would read the fear in my face and decide that— “Maybe you’re right, Logan.”

There was a flatness to her tone that struck me as both a shield and a snare. If I responded, my tone and speech pattern would likely reveal my inner state.

I wiped a line of sweat off my brow before it could burn my eyes, my pulse rate skyrocketing to 165. Blood pressure through the roof.

Calm. Down.

I took a breath as we emerged into the sunny glade.

She’s going to kill me in these woods. It makes no sense for her to wait. This is the perfect place to do it. She’ll just leave me with our mother.

And still—I wasn’t anywhere close to certain. I could be imagining all of this. Basing it on a single microexpression I’d seen for a fraction of a second.

I thought back to how Kara had handled herself at the farm. She’d killed three men in three seconds. While I was definitely stronger and faster than I’d ever been in my life, I doubted I could match her speed, control, and physical prescience. She was a fighting virtuoso before the upgrade. I was not. I suspected the gap between my physical abilities and hers was still just as wide. Plus, I was unarmed, and she was walking behind me with a trench knife and a Glock and her innate, finely tuned, genetically enhanced lethality.

I saw Mom’s truck in the distance, eighty-five yards away.

Kara had left her shotgun leaning against the tree near the truck. I saw a route toward it, where the pines grew close together. They might provide me a modicum of cover. But first I’d have to break Kara’s defenses, blunt her cognitive processing and reaction times. Make her think like she used to, and give my outmatched self a fighting chance.