Incineration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  “Play it.”

  The lights dim and suddenly we’re inside the RESCO. It’s dark. A figure I realize is me is wheeling a bed across an open expanse, headed for a high, glass-topped fence. The image is jerky and incomplete, without sound, and yet it jounces me back to that fearful night when I was trying to save Halla from a life of surrogate slavery. In my mind, I hear the blasts, the siren, and the shouts, feel the tension and adrenaline. I unconsciously grip my hands together. Blurry figures appear at the top of the wall and drop into the compound. Idris and Wyck, although they’re not recognizable. I grab something—a beamer, I know, but it’s fuzzy in the holo-image—and hold it in firing position. A man-sized blur—unidentifiable—moves toward me. There’s a flare of light beyond me—the fire Jariah started—and the holo-image slews and then shuts down. Someone took out the microdrone.

  There’s silence in the courtroom and I draw in a shallow breath, lightheaded. Excited conversation springs up in the gallery and Judge Tysseling raps his gavel once, commanding, “Silence.”

  The drone didn’t record the shot that hit the soldier, a shot that came not from my beamer, but from Idris, sitting on the fence. I glance at Vestor but he’s examining his nails. “That’s it?” he asks, raising his head and peering at the prosecutor with faux concern. “That’s all you have? An incomplete holo image that shows my client pushing a bed? Hardly a crime!”

  Prosecutor Babbage glares at him, finally needled into responding. “It shows her blasting an IPF soldier while trying to steal the government zygote implanted earlier that day, as witnesses will testify.”

  Vestor puts two fingers beside his left eye. “I must need vision implants, then, because I didn’t even see a soldier. How about you?” He turns to the gallery. “Did you see the invisible soldier?”

  A spattering of laughter makes me feel infinitesimally more hopeful.

  The judge’s voice cuts through the chuckles. “Call your first witness.”

  Prosecutor Babbage brings a succession of medical personnel from the RESCO to testify about the details of the implantation process, showing the jurors that I was indeed impregnated with a government zygote. She then calls an IPF commander who testifies about finding the body of one of his men with multiple beamer wounds in exactly the area where the holo-image showed me with the approaching blur. He insists, of course, that the blur was the soldier, a Private Dunn.

  I grow wearier and less hopeful with each revelation. My feet ache from standing in the polyglass dock and I surprise myself by thinking I’d be twenty weeks away from delivering the baby if Fiere hadn’t terminated that pregnancy by tricking me into drinking tea laced with an abortant. Would it have been a boy or a girl? I bite my lip and force the thoughts from my head. Pointless. To distract myself, I look into the gallery, scanning faces. There’s a woman with curly blond hair, a bald man, a tall youth leaning so far over the rail I’m afraid he’s going to plummet to the marble floor. There’s—

  I catch my breath. It can’t be. Joy swells within me for the briefest of moments. It’s a man of medium height, strongly built. For a moment, he looks directly at me and I see the tell-tale geneborn eyes. Saben. The helmet hides his hair, but it can’t disguise the broad shoulders, the straight way he holds himself. My lips tremble as I look at him. He holds my gaze for a second and then someone pushes in front of him, cutting off my view. I put a hand against the cool polyglass, but then jerk it back as if burned. I can’t betray myself.

  The helmet, the uniform. Saben’s an IPF officer. That fact reverberates in my head. He’s the traitor, the one who betrayed Bulrush. My initial instincts were right. No geneborn would really be working with Bulrush. He was a plant, a spy. Angry tears threaten to spill over and I blink furiously. He tricked me into liking him, with his undoubtedly false story of being an artist. The albatross picture he supposedly drew me? I don’t know where he got it; his superiors probably supplied it so he could gain my trust. I’m embarrassed by my gullibility. Underneath my embarrassment, though, is an ache I can’t probe right now.

  “—reconvene at fourteen hundred hours.” The bailiff’s voice dismisses us for lunch. I’ve missed at least twenty minutes of testimony obsessing about Saben. My polyglass defendant’s stall descends and Vestor helps me out.

  “The tears! I didn’t know you had it in you.” He claps lightly, simulating applause. “Most convincing.”

  I don’t explain that they were tears of anger, not acting.

  Dismissing the approaching bailiff with a shooing motion, Vestor takes my elbow and steers me out of the courtroom. Dodging Zestina Pye who is waiting to intercept us, he ushers me into a small room and shuts the door. His assistant is there, laying out lunch. Taking a slurp of fish soup, Vestor urges me, “Eat.”

  I shake my head.

  Putting his spoon down with an exaggerated sigh, Vestor says, “You must keep up your strength. Really, Everly, it is going well. The prosecutor has presented nothing I didn’t expect, nothing I can’t refute when I put on our case. The prosecutor has not been born who can out-strategize Loránd Vestor.”

  I cock a skeptical brow.

  He sighs, pretending dismay at my lack of faith. “I really am worth the outrageous fees I charge,” he says, returning to his soup.

  After a moment, I pick up my spoon and barely dip it into the soup. The first taste ignites my hunger and I finish it all, looking up to find Vestor beaming at me. “Why are the jurors hooded?” I ask.

  “There have been reprisals,” he says. He steeples his fingers. “The law was changed, oh, five years back to protect jurors’ identities.”

  “Who are they?”

  “All well-connected professionals, educated citizens, government officials. More often lately, most are geneborns bred for analytical abilities, at least in part. Specific names?” He shrugs. “If you know the right people, that information is available—for a steep price—but I don’t need it this time. When I’m done presenting my—our—case, no one in Amerada would vote to convict you. I always have an ace in the hole.”

  I’m caught between hoping his confidence is justified and wondering at his near-admission that he would bribe or threaten jurors. Vestor is all bonhomie and bombast on the surface, but I get glimpses of incisive intelligence and ruthlessness that give me pause and, paradoxically, hope.

  Chapter Four

  The trial re-convenes precisely on time. I ascend again in my polyglass bell, feeling like a specimen skewered in a display case. I can’t help scanning the gallery for Saben, but I don’t see him. I can’t imagine why he was here at all. I hope, oh how I hope, that seeing me like this makes him the tiniest bit sorry for his betrayal. I hope he’s not one of the mob chanting for my execution. The same players are all assembled as Vestor begins to mount a defense. He spins the tale of my escape from the Kube as my eagerness to work on locust eradication for the Ministry of Science and Food Production. He plays up my youth, my innocence. I concentrate on looking meek and confused. He holds the crowd enthralled with his tale of how Halla, Wyck, and I were captured by outlaws—he doesn’t name them as Bulrush—and held against our will.

  “At her first opportunity—her very first opportunity,” he says, turning 180-degrees to include the gallery, “she escaped and found her way to a RESCO where she immediately volunteered to serve as a surrogate. Is this the action of a murderer? No! It’s the action of a patriot, a girl determined to serve her country. I call Dr. Vandani Malabar to the stand.”

  The statuesque doctor with the ebony skin strides in and seats herself on the narrow chair to the left of the judge. The sight of her takes me back to the RESCO and I feel again the apprehension that dogged me every minute I was there. Her deep-set amber-gold eyes survey the courtroom calmly. I lean forward, but she doesn’t look up at me. I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one. She gets sworn in, and Vestor leads her through some preliminaries to establish her credentials: she is the Chief Medical Officer and Director of Implantations at the Atlanta RESC
O.

  “Do you remember meeting Everly Jax?” Vestor asks.

  “I do.” Her voice is rich as molasses, slow and sure. She tells the court how I appeared one day at the RESCO, asking to be a surrogate. She details the medical tests I submitted to and says I was an excellent, healthy candidate for surrogacy.

  “What was Everly’s attitude toward surrogacy?” Vestor asks.

  “She was eager to be a surrogate. She told me several times she ‘couldn’t wait’ for the procedure, that she was honored at the prospect of bearing a child for Amerada.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Did you at any time feel she was plotting to steal the zygote?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Dr. Malabar’s calm delivery bears weight. My shoulders sag a half-inch; I hadn’t realized they were so tense.

  Prosecutor Babbage pops out from behind her podium. “What else can you say? If you had, and you continued with the implantation anyway, that would point toward criminal negligence, if not collusion on your part, wouldn’t it?”

  Vestor looks outraged. “Your Honor, the prosecution is trying to testify by—”

  It is Dr. Malabar who stops him with an upheld hand. Her eyes narrow as she studies the prosecutor who has resumed her place with a satisfied air. “No one has ever questioned my integrity or my medical skills. I have more than a decade of experience dealing with young women about to embark on surrogacy and I know which ones are sincere in their desire to serve the nation, which ones are using surrogacy as a means of escaping a situation they find intolerable, and which ones have, let us say, ‘emotional issues.’ Everly Jax belonged in the former group.”

  After the briefest of pauses, she adds, “May I ask how many babies you’ve borne for Amerada, Prosecutor? What part you’ve played in reestablishing our population?”

  Prosecutor Babbage’s mouth falls open and then she gobbles, “I’m not—I haven’t—” Finally, she spits out, “I’m not on trial here!”

  “Perhaps you ought to be,” Dr. Malabar says in the same calm voice. She rises. “If the court will excuse me, I’ve got vital work waiting.”

  She manages to make it sound like this trial is a waste of time. It’s all I can do not to cheer. I’m not sure why she’s come down so heavily in my favor, but I’m grateful. Maybe I was a better actor than I realized, and my performance at the RESCO was truly convincing.

  Vestor graciously thanks Dr. Malabar for her time and then calls a Seraph Jones to the stand. It’s another name I don’t recognize and I watch as a slight woman with ginger hair and a prominent baby bump approaches the seat vacated by Dr. Malabar. When she sits and faces me, I realize it’s one of the women I shared a room with at the RESCO.

  Vestor establishes that and says gently, “Tell us what happened the night of May second.”

  Seraph’s gaze flits to me and then back to Vestor. “Well, I was sleeping . . . I’d undergone the implantation procedure earlier that day and it makes you tired, you know?”

  “I can’t say I do,” Vestor quips, “but I’ll take your word for it.”

  The crowd laughs and the judge frowns at Vestor. “My courtroom is not the place for levity.”

  Vestor acknowledges him with a slight bow that makes the ends of his wig bobble, and turns back to Seraph. “Continue, please.”

  “Anyway, I was sleeping, when she starts moaning.” She nods slightly upward, to indicate me. “I turned on the light and she was hunched over in bed, in mortal pain. I pulled the sheet back, thinking I would help her get to the clinic, and that’s when I saw the blood.”

  “Blood?” Vestor enquires.

  Seraph nods and wrings her hands. “Lots of it. From down there. I sent someone for help. I was afraid she was going to bleed to death.”

  Gouging my thighs to generate enough blood to get myself moved to the medical wing had obviously been worth it.

  “What happened then?”

  “A technician came and escorted her to the medical building. I never saw her again.”

  Vestor thanks her and hands her down from the witness chair and she scurries up the aisle.

  Prosecutor Babbage leans forward, hands flat on her podium. “I assume you’re now going to call the technician who escorted Prisoner Jax to the medical facilities?” Her tone is sly.

  Fear tingles through me. If that technician is called, she’ll tell the court about how I attacked her and stole her uniform and identification card.

  “You assume incorrectly,” Vestor says, managing to make it sound like the prosecutor is habitually wrong. “That poor woman had the misfortune to fall in the hygiene facility and has not—despite memory stimulation treatment—regained her memories surrounding the day of the mishap. Tragic.”

  “Fell?” Babbage’s tone is outraged. “Was attacked and left for dead by your client, you mean.”

  Vestor blinks at her, apparently confused. “You have holo-images of this alleged attack? A witness, perhaps?”

  She makes a frustrated noise. “She was smart enough to stage the attack in the hyfac. There were no imagers in there, or witnesses. But—”

  “Thank you,” Vestor interrupts. “If Dr. Malabar would be kind enough to take the stand again?”

  After apologizing for keeping her from her work, he gets Dr. Malabar to state that the amount of blood found on my bedding was enough to suggest that the implantation procedure had not taken.

  “Unfortunately,” the doctor says, “even with extensive pre-procedure testing for compatibility and other factors, the procedure does not always succeed. Roughly twenty-eight point two percent of the time, the implantation fails.”

  “Aah.” Vestor weights the syllable with significance. “So. Let me see if I’ve got this right. If the implantation failed, then Everly Jax was not carrying a government zygote when she left the RESCO the night of May second.”

  “That is correct.”

  “She could not, therefore, be guilty of theft of said zygote, as the prosecutor assumed—I mean alleges.”

  “I would say not.”

  Vestor looks around triumphantly, all but throwing up his arms to milk the room for applause. He sends me a hint of a wink. I want to give him the ovation he deserves, but I settle for trying to look humble and vindicated. The gallery erupts in astonished exclamations and babblings that bounce off the marble and metal, loud and distorted.

  Judge Tysseling bangs his gavel three times to restore order, looking grim. “Order! Quiet! The original charges as outlined by the prosecution remain. Jurors will disregard the witness’s last statement and draw their own conclusions from the evidence. Court is recessed for the day. We will resume tomorrow at nine hundred hours.”

  It’s late afternoon and the mugginess wraps around me like a wet blanket when Vestor and I emerge from the cool justice building. The crowd is larger than earlier, and surly, calling me names, and accusing me of filthy crimes. I cringe, but Vestor keeps me moving forward. A cordon of IPF soldiers holds the crowd at bay. How can so many people have so little to do that they can spend the day at the courthouse being ugly to someone they’ve never met? Zestina Pye is interviewing members of the mob, getting their take on the day’s testimony, I assume. As I watch, she flits in the direction of Prosecutor Babbage who has appeared at the top of the steps. The sight of Zestina makes me wonder what’s already been broadcast about me, what these people have heard that motivates them to yell, “You need to die!” and “Traitor!”

  I expect Vestor to escort me back to the prison, but he doesn’t. He walks me to the curb where the armored ACV is waiting, and hands me off to the guards.

  “Details to attend to, my dear,” Vestor says in response to my obviously dismayed expression. “I’ll see you here tomorrow morning. I’ll be calling a witness I think you’ll recognize.”

  He hushes me and looks mysterious when I try to find out who. “Enjoy what I’m sure will be your last night in your present accommodations.”

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nbsp; “I believe in you,” I whisper.

  He beams. “Of course you do!”

  The ACV pulls away and I’m on my way back to prison.

  The first thing I do when I’m back in my cell is pick up the albatross drawing. I grasp it in both hands, hesitate, then rip it in half. I tear it in half again, and continue shredding it until a small pile of confetti lies at my feet. There. I have torn Saben—our friendship—out of me. If I get the chance to do to him what I did to the drawing, I will. I am limp, exhausted. All that standing at the trial, I tell myself. Kicking at the shredded paper so it flies around the cell, I collapse onto the bed.

  Chapter Five

  The courtroom is packed the next morning, despite a drizzly gray day I thought might keep people home. There’s an indefinable feeling of menace in the gallery crowd and I swallow hard as my polyglass capsule rises. I tell myself I don’t want to see Saben—the traitor—but I look for him anyway and feel a pang when I don’t spot him. Annoyed at my weakness, I chew my lower lip. Prosecutor Babbage is at her place and the bailiff is positioned to announce Judge Tysseling before Vestor makes his entrance, buttoning his robe as he comes down the aisle. He doesn’t look at me and my skin prickles with unease. With his usual air of affability, he greets Prosecutor Babbage and gestures for the bailiff to proceed. Once the judge is installed at his bench, Vestor proclaims, “I call Oliver Fonner.”