She wiped her eyes.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of the upgrade dying on the one-yard line, so I did something drastic. Kara, I hired a man to deliver a drone to your cabin, loaded with my upgrade. Logan, as I’m sure you know by now, I hired Henrik Soren to lure you to that house in Denver. There was no one else in my life I could trust but the two of you. I hope this trust hasn’t been misplaced. I hope the upgrade worked. I hope you aren’t too angry with me.
“So, my children, if you’re watching this, know that you are the next step in human evolution. As the only two people on this planet to receive my upgrade, you hold the fate of our species in your hands. In the hardcase containing the laptop you’re watching this on, you’ll find phase memory drives with the mark I novel upgrade sequences and function. Consider this your inheritance. What you do with it now is up to you.”
Despite the cold, I was sweating.
Trying to wrap my mind around the magnitude of what this hardcase contained.
“I’m sorry about the way you had to find me. I never wanted to hurt you. I never meant to hurt all those people. I think about those who died every day. I think about both of you. And Max. And my sweet Haz. I know I wasn’t the mother you wanted, but I loved you in the only way I knew how.”
Our mother stood.
The early light hit her face.
She looked out across the desert.
“It’s so lovely here. I wish you could see it with me.”
And then she came toward the camera.
“Goodbye, Kara. Goodbye, Logan.”
Her voice broke.
“Now save our species.”
She reached toward the camera.
The screen turned briefly to the sky and then went black.
Kara and I were still kneeling in the snow before the hardcase.
I hadn’t looked at her while the video played, but now I did.
Her face was blank. No tears. No anger. She simply looked elsewhere.
I closed the laptop.
I looked at the six phase memory drives held securely in foam, each one about the size of my hand. Kara pried one out. She felt the weight of it, then put it carefully back and latched the case.
Wind pushed through the tops of the trees—a lonely, sustained whoosh.
She looked at me. Well?
“I think we should douse this hardcase with gasoline and light a match.”
Her eyes narrowed.
I said, “Mom tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people.”
“What she did to us was successful,” Kara said. “It worked.”
“On two people. That’s hardly conclusive evidence that this upgrade is safe for every human being on the planet.”
“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.