Read Acid for Free Online

lace at the hems and a tie at the waist. Then she leaves the room so I can change. I quickly take off the pyjamas and pull the clothes on. The top’s the sort of thing I used to wear before I went to jail, but now, after two years in a prison uniform, it feels way too feminine. The tops of my arms are so muscular that the sleeves cut into them, and even in a bra I don’t exactly have cleavage any more.
    ‘You look lovely,’ Mel says, smiling, when I call her back in.
    I scowl.
    Mel ducks out of the room and comes back with an airchair, which looks like an ordinary soft chair, but with hoverpads underneath it. I scowl again, but she insists I use it. As I sit down, a thrum goes through it as the hoverpads power up, adjusting to my weight and keeping the chair a couple of centimetres above the floor. Mel shows me which buttons to press to turn left or right, or to keep the chair moving straight ahead, then tells me to follow her.
    The building’s much busier now, men and women in white coats like the one Jon wears bustling to and fro. They all seem to know Mel, and they don’t seem surprised to see me with her. Through an open door, I catch a glimpse of what looks like a lab: rows of benches with complicated-looking equipment set up on them.
    ‘OK, so if this place isn’t a medicentre, what
is
it?’ I ask Mel.
    ‘A food research and testing centre,’ she replies.
    I see a tall man with rimless glasses and a shaved head walking along the corridor towards us.
    ‘Felix,’ Mel says as he reaches us.
    Felix, who I guess to be in his early fifties, looks at me down the bridge of his nose. ‘So this is the girl,’ he says to Mel. His voice is deep with just a hint of an accent, and even though he’s only wearing a shirt and jeans under his lab coat, there’s an unmistakable air of authority about him. ‘How is she doing?’
    ‘She’s adjusting as well as can be expected,’ Mel says. ‘She only woke up a couple of days ago. We’re going to see Steve now about her new identity.’
    Um, excuse me, I’m right here
, I want to say. Felix nods. ‘Good, good. Well, I won’t keep you.’
    ‘Who was that?’ I say as he walks away.
    ‘The boss,’ Mel says.
    ‘The boss here, or your boss?’
    ‘Both.’
    ‘Is this
really
a research centre?’ I say.
    ‘Of course,’ Mel says. But she won’t quite look me in the eye.
Aha
, I think. Finally, I have an answer to one of my questions. This place might well be what Mel says it is – the lab I saw looked too elaborate to be a setup – but behind the scenes, it’s something else. A place where people like me and this fake LifePartner I’m going to have are given new identities by whoever’s in charge – whoever Mel and Jon work for. And whoever they work for uses this place as a front, to hide what’s really going on.
    Although who
they
are, I still have no clue, of course.
    Mel takes me to a little room next to another lab, this one full of people looking into microscopes and speaking data into their komms. ‘Does everyone here know what’s going on?’ I ask her. ‘I mean, with me, and—’
    ‘Yes,’ she says without looking at me.
    She knocks on the door, opens it and motions for me to go in. ‘Here she is, Steve,’ she says. A short, pot-bellied man with long hair tied back in a ponytail, a sandy-coloured goatee and glasses, who’s sitting behind a little desk with a holocom in front of him, looks up as I manoeuvre the airchair into the room.
    ‘Ah, Mia,’ he says as the door clicks shut behind me and I switch the airchair off and get out.
    I stare at him. ‘What?’
    ‘Mia Richardson,’ he says. ‘That’s what we’re going to be calling you from now on.’ The screen is angled sideways, and I catch a glimpse of the word FREE and a graphic of a butterfly. Steve sees me looking at it and taps the screen so that the image disappears.
    ‘Take a seat, and we can start going over things,’ he says smoothly, pushing his glasses up his nose.
    I do