Chapter 2 - The Dead Man's Hands
I stumbled backward until a tank pressed cold against my shoulder.
"You're dead," I told him. "I watched them bury you."
My father raised both hands. They were the hands that had taught me to tie my shoes. They looked thirty-eight, just as they had the last time I'd seen them.
"I didn't know you were alive," he said.
"You didn't know? I've been alive every day since you vanished."
The speaker clicked again. "Touch the release switch, Elias, and I shut down the oxygen supply."
A woman in a tank opened her eyes. I recoiled. Her face was my mother's, but her terrified stare was her own.
"Who is that?" I asked.
"A person," my father answered. "Whatever you've been told, remember that."
He explained in broken sentences. After the 2004 fire, his employer had placed him in experimental metabolic suspension. He'd been awake for only nineteen days. To him, twenty-two years had passed like a long bad dream.
"That sounds impossible."
"Most of what's down here shouldn't be possible. That's the problem."
He showed me a narrow scar at his throat, a port used by the suspension chamber. When he touched my cheek, I hated that I wanted to lean into his hand.
I remembered birthday cakes without him. Aunt June working double shifts. Every school play with an empty seat.
"Where's Mom?"
His expression fell. "Miriam died trying to stop this facility. I couldn't save her."
I looked at the rows of sleeping women.
"And you brought her back?"
"No. They made people using her cells. People who never consented to any of this."
Footsteps rang above the ceiling. A lock slammed somewhere down the corridor.
The speaker returned. "Clara, your father has told you the sentimental version. Ask him who designed the first chamber."
I turned slowly.
May you like
My father lowered his eyes.
Then the door at the far end opened, and a woman with my face stepped inside carrying Marcus's pistol.
