Replica

by Jack Heath

  ‘You forget,’ I say, trying not to sound sad. ‘I’m not alive.’

  ‘Chloe …’

  ‘I can get in and try to hack their servers, but I need a way out afterwards,’ I say. ‘Can I borrow your brother’s skateboard?’

  ~

  Ten minutes later, I’m parking the van a few houses up from Chloe’s place and hoping her immediate neighbours won’t notice it. I jog to her front door and slip inside.

  ‘Mum?’

  No answer. She’s out.

  I run into Chloe’s room, grab her backpack, and drop Thomas’s gun inside. Slinging the bag onto my shoulder, I hurry back out into the kitchen, where I tear a sheet of paper from a pad, pluck a pen from a dusty coffee mug, and write Gone for walk, back soon. Chloe.

  That should buy me enough time to do what I need to do.

  I dash to the front door and pull it open.

  Kylie is standing there with her keys in her hand and a shopping bag in the other. Dark rings circle her eyes. She’s been crying again.

  A sharp ache forms in my chest.

  ‘Mum,’ I say.

  ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Sure. I’m just going for a walk.’

  Kylie looks sceptically at the fading sky. ‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she says.

  ‘I know. I won’t be long.’

  ‘What’s in the bag?’

  I try to keep the panic out of my voice. ‘We got some mail for a neighbour. A parcel. I thought I’d drop it off on the way.’

  ‘Are you sure everything’s OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, hating myself for the lie. ‘I’ll be back soon, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  I pretend not to notice her staring as I jog away. It’s not until she’s out of sight that I start thinking about what I’m about to do.

  I wish I’d said goodbye properly. I wish I’d written Love you on the note. I probably won’t make it home.

  ~

  The last rays from the setting sun glance off the sloped wall of the glass tower, turning my windscreen an ominous orange as the van trundles up the street. The roller door—or where it used to be, before I cut it up with a helicopter—is about sixty seconds away. Sixty chances to turn back. Once I’m inside, I can’t back out.

  Fifty-nine chances. Fifty-eight.

  I don’t take any of them. Ares is a menace, and I’m the only one in a position to do something about it.

  The roller door has been replaced by a temporary boom gate, which the van could probably break through. But I want to stay unnoticed as long as possible, so I ease the van to a halt in front of the gate, and push the button on the intercom.

  ‘Powdered wood,’ the intercom says.

  ‘Stitches new,’ I reply in the soldier’s voice, hoping that they haven’t changed passwords.

  ‘Mission status?’

  ‘Successful.’

  ‘Passengers?’

  I hesitate. Once he had the QMP, was the soldier ordered to kill me, or to bring me in for interrogation?

  ‘None,’ I say.

  There’s a pause.

  The boom gate starts to rise, and fear clenches in my abdomen as I realize how close I came to being executed.

  I’m about to enter the office of a company which will try to murder me as soon as they realize I don’t have what they want. Every instinct screams to drive the van back up the alley. I don’t know how many other people they have slaughtered.

  But nor do I know how many more people will die if I don’t stop them. I put the van into first gear and roll it down the ramp.

  The car park is devoid of people, but full of vehicles. Sedans, vans, four-wheel drives, as well as the gun-mounted Jeep and assortment of bomb-disposal robots. I park the van in an empty space, climb through into the back, and roll up the carpet to reveal a spare tyre. It’s surprisingly heavy—it takes three attempts to pull it out of the space and reveal what I really want, which is the L-shaped bar used for tightening the nuts on the outside of the wheel. I drop the tyre iron into Chloe’s backpack alongside Becky’s skateboard and jump out of the van, the soldier’s Browning 9mm in my hand.

  Taking aim at the tyres of the vehicles around me, I pull the trigger. The muzzle flashes and snaps like a hammer hitting a snare drum, twice, three times, over and over until it clicks empty and stops kicking in my hand.

  The vehicles settle down on their deflated tyres. If I’m followed when I leave here, it will be on foot.

  It’s not until the deafening echoes and the hissing of punctured rubber fade away that I realize my throat has started clicking again like a broken pair of headphones. I clamp my mouth shut until the sound dissipates, wondering how much longer my mechanical body will last.

  The clicking feels like a bad omen. The first time it happened, Ares soldiers showed up at Scullin High as though summoned.

  I approach the door to the main building and try the handle. It’s locked. I hold the soldier’s access card out in front of the sensor and try again, but it doesn’t work. I hear the sound of an alarm coming faintly from somewhere inside the building

  ~

  I slam my fist against the door. The impact thrums through my titanium skeleton. I’ve only just arrived, and already the mission is a failure.

  The lift. I could try going up that way.

  I run over to it. The call button clicks uselessly. When I press my ear against the steel, there’s only silence from beyond. Perhaps the lifts are always inactive at this time of night.

  The air vent is too narrow to fit through and covered by a thin grille. But as I stare at the rusted pop rivets, an idea forms in my head.

  I belt the grille with the tyre iron until it’s loose enough to pry out of the frame, making enough room to push my backpack through into the darkness. Then I take off my clothes and tell myself that the pain I’m about to experience is an illusion.

  My arm twists around and around and around and then pops off. I toss it through the hole and then get to work on my legs.

  It feels like performing an autopsy on myself. Each thigh rotates one thousand and eighty agonising degrees before detaching from my hip joints. Lying on the floor, little more than a torso, I feed both legs into the hole.

  With only one arm, my shoulders should be narrow enough—but my hips are still too wide. Lifting them into the air with my abdominal muscles, I use my remaining arm to twist them around until they’re loose enough to be removed. I pick up my hips, turn them sideways so as they will fit, push them through the ventilation shaft and drag myself in after them, moving like a misshapen caterpillar.

  For a horrifying moment, I think I’m not going to be able to squeeze through. I’ll be stuck here as a triple amputee until Ares finds me. But my head and shoulders are just small enough to squeeze through the gap.

  When my face emerges into the lift shaft, I see movement. Rats, perhaps. But no. It’s my severed limbs, twitching like partially dissected frogs. Becky did say I had Wi-Fi—I must be controlling them remotely. Disturbing.

  It takes a few minutes to reassemble myself in the lift shaft and put my clothes back on. I waste precious seconds accidentally attaching my left leg to my right hip and then cursing as I have to unscrew it again.

  There are no lights, and no ladders. No way up, except by climbing the cables. But I have high-grip rubber hands, and a battery that hasn’t failed me yet. The soldier said the servers were on the top floor, so that’s where I’m headed.

  I glance at Chloe’s watch. Becky is parked by the sloped side of the building with her mum’s trailer. I told her to leave if I’m not out by eight o’clock. It’s six-forty now.

  I clamber warily onto the iron counterweight, remembering what Fresner said about how magnets could damage computers. Then I start climbing.

  ~

  After fifteen minutes I’m at the very top of the lift shaft. My hands and feet are burning. Before I started climbing, I kicked off my shoes and put them in my backpack so I could use my silicon
e arches. This made the ascent easier on my muscles but harder on my skin.

  I cling to the steel cables, staring at a pair of sliding doors that are slightly out of reach. No pipes to grip, no platform to stand on while I force the doors open, and it’s a long, long way down. The lift shaft is an open mouth below me, waiting to swallow my body and pulverize it when I hit the bottom.

  I try a practice swing, but the cable is too taut to move very far. While my feet can almost reach the sliding doors, my fingertips have no hope.

  The lift car itself is suspended in the gloom to my left, one floor below me. Perhaps I can swing onto the emergency access hatch on the roof. I slide about a metre down the cable to get some more slack, and then kick my legs to get momentum.

  It’s no use. My feet can’t quite reach the car. I’m going to have to jump.

  I wriggle out of my backpack and toss it across. It soars over the yawning cavern and lands on top of the car with a thunk.

  The cables creak as I swing back and forth, a little further each time. Soon I’m swaying like a pendulum, a hundred metres above certain death. At the bottom of the fifth swing I fling myself loose.

  For a heart-stopping moment I hang above the deadly pit, my legs pedalling in the empty air, and then I hit the top of the car.

  My feet skitter across the metal. Too late, I realize I’m about to pitch over into the shaft on the other side. I take a swipe at the cables connecting the car to the pulleys above, and miss. My legs step into the void, and I feel myself plunging downwards.

  Desperate, I throw out a hand, and catch the edge of the car just as I’m nearing the point of no return. My chest bashes against the side of it, and my shoulder joint nearly comes loose again, but I grab the car with my other hand and drag myself back up to safety.

  The speaker in my throat is making heavy breathing sounds, which echo all around the shaft. I silence them. Holding my breath indefinitely no longer unnerves me.

  I slide back the bolt and lift the emergency access hatch to reveal polished tiles, a thick safety bar, and mirrors on the walls to ease claustrophobia. No people, thankfully.

  I drop into the car, feeling less safe than I usually do in a lift. Having seen the steel strands that suspend the car and the deadly void below it, it’s hard not to imagine being trapped in here during a free fall.

  When I touch the button for the top floor, it starts to rise immediately. Whatever stopped me from summoning the car to the ground level, apparently it doesn’t affect commands made from inside. I can hear the whirring of the pulleys as the lift approaches the top, and the hissing of the brakes as it stops.

  The doors slide open. I listen to the silence for a moment before poking my head out into the corridor. No one is here. Only my blurred reflection moves in the brushed-steel panelling of the walls.

  My relief is tempered by unease. I’m creeping into the sleeping lion’s den, waiting to hear a roar.

  I bundle up Chloe’s jacket and jam it between the lift doors to stop them closing. Then I go left up the corridor, looking for the server room.

  A narrow door is set into the wall on my right with a keyhole but no handle. It looks like a cleaning supply cupboard, but I give it a push anyway. Locked. I could break into it with the tyre iron, but that would be noisy. If I don’t find what I’m looking for anywhere else, I’ll come back.

  The corridor dead ends up ahead with an unmarked door, bigger than the last one. Ares Security probably wouldn’t signpost their server room, so I have a good feeling about it.

  I try the handle. Unlocked. The door swings open, and I step through.

  But there are no servers in here.

  Just a teenage girl in a cage with thick bars.

  She stares at me. I stare at her.

  It’s only when she screams that I realize I’m looking at the real Chloe Zimetski.

  IMPOSTOR

  ‘What … ?’ Chloe screeches. ‘What are you?’

  She’s dressed in the same long woollen jumper and short skirt that she wore to Pete’s birthday party. Her feet are clad in a pair of slippers, which she must have put on after she got home, but before Ares took her.

  The only things in her cage are a plastic water bottle, a muesli bar wrapper, a toilet with no seat, and a thin camping mattress. The light bulb is above the top of the cage, casting zebra stripes of darkness across the floor.

  She smells terrible. Ares has fed her, but I guess a shower was out of the question.

  As the door swings closed behind me, Chloe shrinks back into the corner of the cage, still screaming.

  I shush her. ‘I’m here to help you.’

  She doesn’t look reassured. ‘Please,’ she begs, ‘I’ve already told you everything I know. Whatever this is, don’t do it.’

  I’ve been stupid. I should have been asking myself how Ares got all Chloe One’s memories into Chloe Two. If I had thought about it, I would have guessed that Ares had interrogated her before killing her. That might have led me to wonder why they would kill her at all.

  I get it now. There was no girls’ development camp. Ares made it up, to cover Chloe’s absence for a couple of days while they interrogated her. No wonder Graeme and Kylie complained that she hadn’t told them about it in advance.

  I look around the rest of the room for a camera or a microphone, but I can’t see one. A couch squats in the corner. A silent TV hangs behind thick glass on the opposite wall.

  Avenging Graeme’s death can’t take precedence over saving his daughter’s life. I have to get her out of here.

  ‘Listen to me,’ I say. ‘I’m not one of them. Ares built a copy of you. I am a copy of that copy. I’m here to help you escape.’

  ‘Please don’t kill me,’ she says.

  What can I say to make her trust me? Anything at all could be a trick. She’s told Ares every detail about her life.

  Except one.

  ‘Becky sent me,’ I say.

  Her eyes widen. ‘What?’

  ‘Becky helped me get in here. Now I’m going to get you out.’

  Hopeful tears rain down Chloe’s cheeks. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s waiting for you,’ I say, stretching the truth a bit. ‘Just tell me how to open the cage, and we’ll go.’

  ‘You, uh …’ She points to a green rubber button behind me. ‘That unlocks it.’

  I slam my palm down on the button. Something clanks inside the cage door, and Chloe pushes it. She’s so weak that it barely moves, so I grab it and swing it open.

  Chloe steps out shakily. I wonder how long she’s been in there—probably since the night of the party. Six weeks. It’s amazing that she’s not crazy.

  ‘Follow me,’ I say, and I twist the handle of the door which leads to the corridor.

  It won’t turn.

  ‘Oh no,’ Chloe says. ‘Oh no, oh no!’

  I struggle with the door. ‘Why won’t it open?’

  ‘It only opens from the outside,’ she whispers.

  There are no other doors. No windows. No tools.

  We’re stuck here.

  ~

  I try to call Becky, but my phone has no reception. I had the same problem in the basement—Ares must have some kind of blocking system in place.

  A small locker stands in the corner of the room. When I rattle the handle, Chloe says, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What’s in there?’ I ask.

  She looks away.

  It’s locked, so I don’t pursue the issue any further. She and I have been standing in silence for about three minutes when she says, ‘They killed my Dad, didn’t they?’

  I hesitate, and then nod. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  She shuts her eyes. ‘They dragged him in here so he could see me. They said they knew he was going to give something to the defence minister. Then they said they’d slit my throat in front of him if he didn’t give it to them. He said he’d do anything, but he didn’t have what they were looking for. They took him away after that.’ She grabs my arm. ‘Is Mum
OK?’

  ‘She misses Graeme,’ I say. ‘But she’s safe.’

  ‘When was the last time you talked to Dad?’

  ‘Uh, the day before yesterday.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I told him I was going to hang out with Becky. He said, “I just want you to be safe.”’

  It’s not until I see the shock in Chloe’s eyes that I realize I said this in Graeme’s voice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.

  ‘If they murdered him,’ she says, ‘then why have they kept me alive?’

  Chloe’s right. From the moment they killed Graeme, she was no longer useful as a bargaining chip. Ares must be keeping her alive for a secondary purpose.

  My guess is that once they had the QMP, they planned to dispose of me and leave Chloe’s body in my place. They would make her death look like an accident, just as they had done with Graeme.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I lie.

  ‘You were living with them,’ she says. ‘Mum and Dad, and Becky, and Henrietta.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This whole time, I thought they’d be so worried about me. But they didn’t even know I was missing.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I guess that’s good.’ A tear trickles down her cheek. ‘I don’t want them to be sad.’

  ‘They won’t be,’ I say. ‘When we get out of here …’

  ‘We’re never getting out of here,’ Chloe says. ‘Don’t kid yourself. We can’t call for help. This door only opens from the outside. And when it does, the guards will …’

  ‘Shhh.’ Footsteps. Coming closer.

  Chloe’s right. I can’t get us both out of here. But maybe I can save her.

  I step into her cage, and slam the door. She’s locked out, and I’m locked in.

  She boggles at me. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Give me your jumper.’

  ‘You can’t …’

  ‘Hide behind the couch. When the guard comes in, sneak out of the door behind him. There’s a lift further down the corridor. Take it to the basement, climb under the boom gate, and then run as fast as you can until you find the police.’

  The footsteps are almost at the door.

  ‘I can’t fool them unless I’m wearing your jumper,’ I say. ‘Hand it over.’