Or it could have been Zollers. Maybe he had planted these Adelaide memories in my head. As fun as it was to glimpse into the past, I could do without the severe nausea.
I hoped that it was more the latter. Part of me worried it was the possibility of pregnancy, which would be … well, I didn’t know quite what it would be. I hesitated to say disastrous, but on a gut level, that’s how it felt.
You don’t want to be a mother? Zack’s voice asked me.
I looked at Breandan out of the corner of my eyes as he drove down the road I’d pointed him toward. I had sifted directions out of McClaren’s memory and was letting him know every few minutes when he’d have to make a turn. “Not sure I’m ready,” I said quietly, without opening my mouth, and hoped Breandan couldn’t hear it. “Not in the world we’re living in now, with my kind being hunted to extinction.”
I could hear the sadness in Zack’s reply. It’d be the only thing left of me in the world. The only sign that I was ever in the world, that baby. If there is a baby.
“Try to imagine me explaining to him or her how their father is still watching them,” I said, looking at Breandan for any sign that he was hearing me. He appeared edgy, nervous, naturally, but he kept his eyes on the road. “This is not the preferred method for raising a child.”
But we could—
“Let’s talk about it later,” I said, and threw up again into the depths of the pail. “Take a left turn up ahead,” I said as I came up again and pointed at the approaching cross street.
Breandan glanced sideways at me. “Finished talking to yourself?”
I glared at him. “I wasn’t talking to myself. I was talking to …” I let my voice trail off.
“You hear voices?” Breandan said as he guided the van into a turn. It was a bleary day, and the dark sky above us looked ready to rain down at any moment. “Normally I’d say that’s a sign of being crazy.”
I kept my calm as I favored him with a bleak smile. “But in my case, it’s not?”
“There are plenty of other signs that you’re crazy,” he said, shaking his head as he straightened out the wheel. “Besides, I think the voices in your head are actually real.”
“They are.” I used a hand to smooth out the shirt I wore under my tactical vest. It was the same one I’d been wearing for over a day, without bothering to change. I glanced into the back of the van, where my bag waited, along with the MP5 submachine guns I’d taken from the hit squad. “I know the rest of the story sounds crazy. But in the last six months, almost a third of our kind has been wiped out globally.”
He looked at me seriously and gave me a brief nod. “I believe you. Even if we left aside the fact that in the last sixty minutes, almost all of me was wiped out,” he said with a calm he couldn’t have produced only twenty minutes ago, “I get the feeling you’re in the middle of some things I would have preferred to remain out of if I’d had my druthers. Unfortunately,” he said ruefully, “it would appear that my druthers are well nigh irrelevant since you’re the only reason I’m presently alive.”
“You didn’t have to come with me,” I said. “This is going to be dangerous. Could be deadly. I have no idea what kind of powers this Weissman has at his disposal. You could have run, gone to ground. They might not have found you.”
“They shouldn’t have been able to find me this time,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “But since they already want me dead anyway and have shown an apparent talent for making it happen, absent your help, I don’t think me sticking about and trying to hide is going to do me much good.” He shook his head. “No, I think my best bet is to cling to someone who actually knows how to fight these bastards off.” He looked over at me with a grim smile. “That means I’m going to be stuck with you for quite some time yet, methinks.”
“Oh, yay.”
“You could act a little happier. I did give you a place to stay in your hour of need, after all.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t do well in groups.” Because I was already a group, all by my lonesome, just me and the ghosts of the people I’d killed.
The van bumped along as we went, the smell of gun oil strong in the air as we slid through the streets of South London. I considered briefly the idea that Breandan could be right, that I could be a mother. It wasn’t a fun thought. I had a house, true, but it wasn’t much of a home. After all, there was still very obvious proof in the basement of how my mother had raised me there, a steel box designed to keep me confined. The world around us was going to hell, and if I went back to live in Minneapolis to raise a child, would I be very smart if I didn’t try to keep us on a low profile the way my mother had? After all, someone was trying very hard to wipe out every last member of our species at the moment and they were making a damned good show of it. If I didn’t want to be another body on the floor of a church basement somewhere, I’d need to keep out of their sight. Or at least out of the range of the telepaths they were apparently using to track us.