Savant

2: That Crazy Amazon Story

I should have known the woman was trouble the moment we found her. Okay, okay, so I did know she was trouble-she was from Corpus, how couldn't she be?-and besides that, Diego was strongly against our having anything to do with her. But we couldn't not seek her out. She was one of the few who'd worked for Corpus, seen their ugly side, and then walked away. Most people who did that found themselves walking into a grave, but this one, this Harriet Fields, she was different. Smart. Sneaky.

Colin found her through his network (his genius was with computers; binary code was like his first language) and mentioned she might be useful. Some of the Corpus defects had been, in the past, when we managed to find them before their pissed former employer did. There had been a few times when we burst in only to find our contact decorated with a neat bullet hole between his or her eyes.

Harriet Fields was far from dead when we found her. Colin tracked her by the fake passport she'd obtained in Brazil. She was in Nairobi of all places, had flown there straight from Rio de Janeiro, and still had mud from the Amazon jungle on her clothes. She was in a shabby hotel under a different name, laying low for a while, which was a good idea. If she was smart, she'd lay low for the rest of her life. When she'd gone missing from the secret lab in the jungle, Corpus sent out an inter-company APB for her-and a pretty nasty one, at that. They wanted her dead or alive, with a strong preference toward the former, which told us she had valuable information that might make it worth the trouble of seeking her out.

Dr. Fields had bolted the moment she saw us in the lobby of her Kenyan motel. I don't know why she thought Corpus would send a group of teenagers after her, but I guess she wasn't taking any chances. After a long and exhausting chase that ended in an alleyway behind a glittering mosque, we were finally able to explain who we were: the group of subjects known to Corpus as the Savants, kids with no memories of their previous lives, whose brains had been rearranged in order to reveal our latent, almost supernatural cognitive abilities. And now we were fighting back, searching for others like us-be they Savants or victims of other strange and cruel experiments-in hopes of eventually discovering who we were and where we'd come from.

Maybe it was our desperation which convinced her. Maybe she was just tired and in need of someone to talk to. Whatever the reason, she agreed to tell us her story. We took a room down the hall from hers and slept on the promise of hearing more about Harriet Fields the next day, but when we woke, she was gone. She left us only two things: a note that said she was sorry, but that she had to keep moving because she was afraid Corpus had tracked us there, and a phone number was scribbled at the bottom along with the words, Try not to call, which I thought was rather a mixed signal. I guess it meant she did feel kinda bad for running out on us, and here was a way we could reach her in a dire emergency. In addition to the note, she also left us a notebook, its pages wrinkled from the moisture of the rainforest and a few exotic leaves pressed in its pages.

Angry and hurt that she hadn't trusted us more (though honestly, I couldn't blame her) we looked to the notebook, which was more like a journal as it turned out. The story inside was easily the most incredible thing we'd heard and took our understanding of Corpus and its reach to whole new, terrible levels. An immortal girl hidden in the rainforest, a flower that contained both instant death and eternal life, the dark secrets Dr. Fields had discovered in the jungle and the narrow, improbable method of her escape-any sane person would have dismissed it as fiction.

But we had been created by Corpus, and we were far from sane.

We believed every word.