Chapter 16: Play It Again

The cable clicked into my phone, and the crash photograph shrank to a gray square and disappeared.

"Mrs. Lathrop," Gerald said into the microphone. "That's enough."

I pressed play.

The sound came out of the ceiling speakers in the dark, and it was the clink of a bar and a man laughing too hard.

"Say it back to me, Beth," Colby's voice said. "Say what I told you."

"Colby, you're drunk," Bethany's voice said, small and careful.

"I'm honest. It's different. I drove."

Nobody in the hall moved.

"I drove the car. I'd been drinking since four. I hit the rail on the passenger side and she was just gone."

His voice broke on the last word.

"And Nate was in the back, out cold, and I was sitting in the road with glass in my arm."

"Colby, stop."

"Dad pulled up before the cops. He took the keys out of my hand and gave me a clean shirt."

A pause, and a swallow.

"He said, you were never in this car. He said, your brother will believe me. And he did."

The laugh again, wet and ugly.

"Four years I've kept it, Beth. Tonight is the first time I've said it out loud."

I stopped the file.

The silence in the Foundation hall was so complete that I could hear the screen humming.

Then someone near the front said, very softly, "Oh, my God."

A glass broke.

Colby shot up out of his chair.

"It's fake," he said. "It's AI. She did it before, she can do anything with a laptop."

"That's your voice," a woman said from the second table.

"Anyone can clone a voice!"

"Colby." Nathaniel had risen.

He said it quietly, but it carried to the walls.

"Say it to my face. Tell me you didn't drive."

Colby looked at his brother.

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

His eyes went to the screen, where the gray square sat, and then to the board table, where nobody was meeting them.

Then he turned on Bethany.

He covered the distance between their chairs in two steps, and his hand came up.

Nathaniel got there first.

He caught Colby by the wrist, and the two of them stood chest to chest for one long second.

"Let go of me," Colby hissed.

"Touch her again and I'll break the arm," Nathaniel said, in the same low voice.

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