Human Error

BOOK 2 // ONE: Play by the Rules

"Sorry," I whispered, "I didn't mean to scare you."

His hand reached for the bedside unit, searching for his glasses. "What are you doing?"

"You were yelling," I said. "I wanted to check if you were okay."

For a moment, he didn't say anything, his eyes darting around the room as if trying to make sense of the surroundings. The room had been assigned to him just hours ago, and it looked like he was having trouble making the association. "It was just a nightmare," he said eventually, the words coming out in a single rushed breath. "I'm fine."

"You don't look fine." A sheen of sweat on his face was visible in the light from the window – misplaced on a cold night, especially in a room that struggled to keep hold of any heat.

"Well, I am."

The insistence was firm, setting a boundary not to be breached, but I wasn't going to give up so easily.

"You know," I said gently, "if you're struggling, you can tell me. It's been a rough couple of days. I'm not going to think any less of you."

Anybody who could endure what we had without wanting to break down a few times wasn't human. To say it been a whirlwind was accurate to some degree, but that also made it seem like some kind of fun adventure, which couldn't have been further from the truth. I could barely process the events between breaking into the Darnell Facility and this sudden new existence. Each mile we'd travelled from the capital had caused another piece of me to vanish, and I couldn't work out what I'd been left with.

The assurance was meant to make him feel better, but ended up having the opposite effect, which I realise when Jace's expression hardened. "I'm not struggling," he said, with force that made me want to shrink backward. "Besides, what does it matter if I was? It's not like my feeling are real, are they?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, after the big news," he said, the sarcasm venomous, lashing right out at me. "Now I know I've got all these great big chunks of fake DNA. How am I supposed to tell what I'm actually feeling, and what some maniac with a syringe has made me feel?"

"That's not true. You can't engineer emotion." I thought I sounded convincing, but I didn't know for certain. Who could tell how far BioPlus' experiments had progressed since we'd been born? "Whatever you feel, it's still you. It's all you."

"Really? You want to bet on that?" His voice raised in volume, backed up by an anger that seemed to intensify by the minute. We were almost certainly being too loud, but in that moment, it seemed like nothing would calm Jace down. "How can I trust anything? My whole life has been a lie. Take my eyesight, for example. All these years, I've been convinced I needed glasses. They did the tests – or so they said. I've heard so many times that I'm blind without them – from my dad, mostly – that my eyes seemed to blur themselves. Only since finding out did I think about it. Why would you modify your kid to be as blind as a bat? For the first time, I took them off and really looked. Paid attention to what I hadn't before. And what do you know? I've got fucking perfect vision."

"Jace..."

"No," he said, cutting me off. "Don't tell me it's still me. It's not. Me has been a fucking lie, all this time."

He reached up and snatched his glasses off his nose. Without them, his face looked eerily different, like having his features unobscured and in such clear focus changed the whole picture. The transformation only took seconds.