Into the Abyss

by Stefanie Gaither

  “Can I ask you something?”

  I sigh, because short of ripping out his vocal cords, I doubt there is much I can do to stop him from talking. I never can stop him. It didn’t take me long to realize this—or that, unlike most of the people in here, he is indifferent to my glaring and oblivious to the fact that I could break him in half without breaking a sweat. Nothing I do, and no rumor that has started about me yet, seems to have made him afraid to follow me around and annoy me like this.

  Which makes him a bit of an idiot, maybe, but it also may be the real reason I find him a bit more tolerable than most.

  I don’t intend to answer whatever his question may be, but I stop all the same, and without turning around, I wait for him to finish. It takes him a moment. And then finally, in a voice not as obnoxiously loud as normal, he asks, “Do you ever wonder why she brought you back? Just so everyone here could hate you?”

  The only part of me that I can manage to move right away is my head, and just barely; I tilt my face back so I can see his in the corner of my vision. He is still smiling, but it’s less arrogant than usual, and more . . . haunted. A ghost of his normal grin. This is far worse than the arrogance I have come to expect from him. I don’t like the way it makes me feel, and I don’t want to look at it anymore.

  So I lie.

  “No,” I say. “I never have.”

  And then I turn and I walk straight to my room and shut the door, locking it behind me—something I never bothered to do before. I’ve always thought that trying to lock things out was a sign of fear. I have no use for fear. I have absorbed everything from the moment I woke up. All the dark and monstrous things in the world outside these headquarters, all the hateful words and unfair expectations inside of them—all of it. And I am afraid of none of it.

  Do you ever wonder why . . . ?

  I back up against the door and slide down it, onto the cold faux-marble floor. How could such a simple question turn me into a liar and door locker?

  Just so everyone here could hate you?

  The room in front of me is dark. Simple. Everything is clean lines and function. Bed, desk, chair, closet. It has all been designed with a purpose, just as I have been designed with a purpose.

  And as confusing and chaotic as it may feel right now, I am still reluctant to give that purpose up.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There is only one person who knows the code to my locked room—aside from perhaps President Cross, who knows everything that happens around here. Only one other person. And I should have known that she would show up before the night was over, and that no matter how many times I told her to leave, she would still insist on staying. On battering me with an endless barrage of pointless questions.

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me what happened,” Catelyn says again. She sits cross-legged on my bed, staring at me. Her eyes are far too full of spark and defiance for this time of night. We ate breakfast together at eight o’clock this morning—more than fifteen hours ago. How is she still so wide awake? I can stay awake for days on end, but she isn’t like me. In many ways, really, but the most noticeable of which is that she is completely human. All normal flesh and blood, and a brain and body that function best with regular, plentiful amounts of sleep.

  But from moments like these, you would never know it.

  “Violet,” she presses. “Seriously. Tell me.”

  I finish wiping away the last of the blood from my neck, using one of the more ragged shirts from my closet, which I’ve dipped in the medical alcohol Catelyn brought. The disinfecting alcohol wasn’t really necessary; once I’ve cleaned away the blood, there is nothing to see except pale, smooth skin that looks as though it was never damaged in the first place. There is no scar to even face the possibility of infection. My skin cells are much more advanced than a normal human’s, and controlled by a brain that drives them to reproduce at lightning speeds in the case of minor injuries like this. Which is why I am not worried about it—and even less willing to talk about it. With the blood washed away, all signs of that training session are already gone. There is no point in carrying on about it.

  But out of all the people here, Catelyn seems to have the most trouble remembering that I am not human.

  Which is why she is still looking at me worriedly. Expectantly. “That looked like a lot of blood,” she says.

  “And now it’s all gone, just like that,” I muse. “I’m truly a marvel of modern science.”

  “I heard Emily talking in the hall a few minutes ago,” she continues as if I haven’t spoken. “She was talking about you, about your training session earlier and how you’d . . . I don’t know, gone crazy or something. That you tried to break her arm off after everyone else had already stopped fighting.”

  My fingers clench around the bloodstained cloth I’m holding. “If you already heard what happened, then why on earth do you need to hear it from me, too?”

  I’ve gotten better at reading tones since that first day she spoke to me, and I can almost hear the frown in her voice when she replies: “Because I thought your version of the story might be different.”

  Of course it’s different. It’s less trouble, though, to simply let her take Emily’s word for things. So I shrug. “No. That’s essentially how it happened.” I reach for a clean sleeping gown and change into it before I turn back to her. “I am crazy. Completely outside my strange little mind. You should probably escape now, while you still have both your arms.”

  “Shut up, idiot.”

  “Don’t call me names. Name-calling is one of my triggers.”

  “I’m serious, Violet. Stop being dumb.”

  “I feel another violent rage com—” She flings the bed pillow in my direction, forcing me to cut off midsentence and block it. I throw it back. Harder than I meant to, maybe. She manages to catch it, but the force almost sends her toppling backward off the bed. There is a long, uncomfortable silence as she rights herself and places the pillow back at the headboard, taking the time to smooth out every wrinkle on its case before turning and doing the same thing with the sheets along the edge of the bed.

  “Didn’t you stay at headquarters last night too?” I ask. “Isn’t your father going to wonder if you don’t come home tonight?”

  “Our father,” she corrects, that wide-awake defiance from before flickering back into her eyes. It’s weaker than earlier, though; or perhaps now it’s just dimmed with grief. She tends to get emotional when the subject of her parents comes up.

  I still can’t think of them as anything other than her parents either; though once upon a time, they really were both of our parents. And apparently we lived in our house on a beautiful tree-lined street, and we did all the things that real and perfect families do: birthday parties and dinners and picnics and after-school plays—things I have seen pictures of, things that Catelyn has told me about. She took me to that house once too, a week or so after I first woke up here with no memories of it all. It’s nice enough, I suppose. All white and grand and tall. It looks like the sort of house the now-resigned mayor of Haven would live in.

  But it is not my home.

  And the now-resigned mayor of Haven is not my father.

  I have to credit him for attempting to be though. In the beginning of my short life, he was there soon after my awakening, and he insisted that I come home, back to stay in that grand white house that still has a room filled with all the things I used to call mine. All those things, though, are just dust-collecting reminders of how I am a stranger in my own skin. I don’t remember them. They don’t belong to me. I don’t know what does belong to me, but it is not that house, or that man Catelyn calls Father, or the woman she calls Mother, either.

  That woman was there in the very beginning too. But she was quiet and fading into the background as I stepped forward, and now that single memory I have of Natalie Benson is the same way—so washed out I can hardly picture it. And there has been no chance of building bolder memories of her; she left months ago, off to l
ive with distant family in Germany. To escape the violence, she claimed, between the CCA and Huxley, both of whose operations are focused mainly along the Atlantic Seaboard, here in this city and beyond. After everything I’ve been told “our” family went through because of these two companies, I guess it makes sense that she would want to get away from this place. To try to find peace somewhere else. Germany is a long way from Haven, North Carolina, though, and sometimes I wonder why she went so far.

  I wonder what else—or who else—she may have been trying to escape from.

  Do you ever wonder why . . . ? Why you were brought back? Just so all the people here could hate you?

  I give my head a little shake, trying to spill Seth’s words from my brain. I can feel Catelyn staring at me, and I imagine she is thinking about the same thing I am now: what a strange pair the two of us are. And maybe wondering why she didn’t get on that same plane and escape with her mother to Germany, away from all of this. Away from the whispers and hateful words that follow me through the halls of this place. Away from me and the blood on my strange skin.

  I can’t escape my own skin, though.

  Yet another difference between us. Because Catelyn could escape me. I don’t know if I will ever understand why she hasn’t, particularly when I start thinking about her mother and all the ways I’m certain I am the one who drove her away, and about all the cracks my existence has cut into the foundation of that grand white house we all used to live in. But whatever the reason, Catelyn is still here. Still trying to rebuild what we were, as though that foundation could never be broken beyond repair.

  The more I think about it, the more desperate I am to at least redirect the conversation away from me, if I can’t get rid of her altogether.

  “I know why you’re staying.” I focus on trying to buff out a scratch in the metal closet door as I speak, though it’s obvious the scratch is going nowhere. I’m trying to appear nonchalant with my words.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He doesn’t want you to go home, does he?” I know she knows who I mean by “he”: Jaxon Cross, the president’s biological son, the adoptive brother of Seth—and the best chance I have at distracting her. Because when she isn’t bugging me, she is usually with him. And maybe at her insistence, he has always been much nicer to me than most of the other CCA members our age. Even if it is a wary sort of niceness, full of almost-but-not-quite-eye-contact and the timid sort of smiles one might give a dog he was afraid could be rabid. But he seems to be trying, at least.

  And I would much rather it be Jaxon she stayed here for. Not me.

  “He suggested I stay, maybe. Yes.” She pulls up a corner of the sheet she so painstakingly smoothed only moments ago, starts twisting it around and through her fingers.

  I watch her hands, thinking maybe these are the things we would talk about if we were normal sisters: these simple things, like this boy who makes her fidget and makes her voice go shy. These are the things I would tease her about, maybe.

  But there is little that I would call normal or simple about our lives, which is why I’m not surprised when she stops fidgeting and follows up her statement with: “It’s mostly because it’s gotten so late, though, and because there have been several more . . . incidents in the city today. Father doesn’t want me going anywhere either—not without a few dozen bodyguards, at least. Not worth the trouble. So here I am.” She shrugs. “But for the record? As soon as I heard you were fighting again, I planned on staying until I could see you. You know, you don’t have to prove anything to those jerks. I’ve told you before that Josh is bad news. You’re better off just walking away from him.”

  I ignore this last part, determined not to get back on that subject. “What sort of incidents?” I ask. She looks reluctant to go into details, so I have to guess. “More deaths?”

  Her lips remain pursed, unwilling, but eventually she shakes her head and explains: “Two houses in the Magnolia District burned to the ground earlier today. The families got out, but now a member of each of them is missing. A child from each family—Catherine Robinson and Rachel Davis. They’re best friends, and your age, and they used to hang out with—” She catches herself. “Well, I know you don’t remember them now, but you would if . . . you know. They went to high school with us.”

  “They’re clones?”

  “Not registered, but yeah. The CCA members who’ve investigated think so. This makes too many incidents like this in the past couple of weeks for it to be coincidental; they think it’s Huxley again, just adding two more to their army and continuing their string of activations.”

  “Activated” is the word the CCA uses when a clone goes from the normal replacement it was supposed to be—the one that families were promised when they agreed to clone the original loved one—to the brainwashed, potentially deadly machine that Huxley intended it to be all along. Those activations slowed, at least in the city of Haven, about seven months ago—part of the aftermath of a battle that left both of the organizations’ headquarters heavily damaged. Huxley’s damage was far worse, though. I’ve never been, not during any of my rare trips outside the CCA, but I’ve been told that the once massive laboratory compound suffered the same fate as those houses in the Magnolia District—burned by fire, choked by smoke. The hollowed shell is still standing, but most of what remained inside has been stripped out and carried to other operating facilities.

  It’s strange to think that I was there while it was burning. Like everything else that happened before I woke up, though, I have no memory of any of it. It was actually during that same battle that the brain Huxley had given me was damaged beyond repair, taking every uploaded piece of the old Violet Benson with it.

  But at least that blank-slated mind means that Huxley can’t touch me anymore. Can’t control me. I won’t be burning down any houses to make any statements for them. Because that’s what this most likely is: activations increasing again, coupled with acts of violence to remind the CCA that Huxley is still around, that it still has a presence in Haven and clones who are ready to fight for it. Clones that I don’t want to believe are anything like me.

  But I can’t help feeling that this girl sitting on my bed isn’t anything like me either.

  So what am I, exactly?

  “Are you okay?” Catelyn asks.

  “Tired,” I lie, and she frowns, I assume because she knows I’m lying. But all the same, she finally stands and walks toward the door.

  “Fine, I get it. Leaving now.” She’s halfway outside before she pauses, glances up and down the hallway a few times before looking back over her shoulder at me. “Just promise me something, all right?”

  “What?”

  “Just . . . lie low for a while.”

  “I have scheduled training sessions I have to participate in.”

  “I know that. But the other ones, the unmonitored ones, like with Emily and Josh and all of them—seriously. Ignore them. Everyone’s acting crazy because of all these activations and stuff going on in the city, and they’re just eager and out for blood.” She doesn’t say it, but I know what she really means: They’re out for blood like mine. Clone blood.

  “I’m not like the activated clones that burned down those houses.”

  “I know you’re not,” she tells me. But she doesn’t meet my eyes when she says it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I fall asleep still picturing Catelyn in my doorway, almost hoping she might come back just to look me in the eyes one more time.

  Hours later I wake to an empty doorway and the sound of gunfire and shouting outside it.

  Lie low for a while, Catelyn’s voice hisses in my ear as I jump to my feet, grab a pair of sweatpants, and jerk them on. I wish I could listen to that voice. But by the time I reach the door and fling it open, her plea is already nothing but static in the back of my mind.

  Once outside, it’s easier to tell where most of the noise is coming from: near the south wing, where the main computer systems—the ner
ve center of these headquarters—are located. It’s also where the president’s living quarters are—including the spare bedroom that Catelyn usually sleeps in when she stays here.

  I run.

  My mind may have been free of memories six months ago, but nearly everything that’s happened since then is a permanent file, fixed and clear and easy to open the instant I want it. So I have no trouble finding my way through these halls even at blurring speed. Even with the distraction of those shouts getting louder as I get closer, and with the pungent scent of metal seared by gunfire growing stronger by the step. Left, right, right, left, right, and then I’ve reached a small room that serves as a security entry point, protecting that central nerve center on the other side. There are two computers in here, each with its screen smashed, one on either side of a far door that looks like it’s been peeled back and pinned open as easily as if it were made of paper.

  The same strange tingling I felt in my scalp earlier comes rushing back. I don’t want my eyes to keep searching this room, but they do it anyway. And they fall on the two bodies—one operator for each of those destroyed computers—crumpled together in the dark corner. Neither of them looks like he’s breathing. I step closer. There’s bruising around the necks, but no burns or bullet holes that I can see. Just like the broken door, this was clearly done with bare hands. Which further confirms my worst fear: This looks like it was done by a clone. Because we don’t need weapons.

  They, not we.

  You are not the same as them.

  “Not the same, not the same . . .” I keep chanting that under my breath as I stumble back and turn toward the makeshift opening in the door, bracing myself for whatever’s on the other side of it. I’m not the same. And I have to help Catelyn—

  I burst through the opening.

  And I collide with a solid body. A pair of strong hands grab me, shove me back into the security room, and my instincts react before I manage to get a good look at the person trying to stop me. Instincts that say fight and we need to free ourselves, and that yank my right arm free, swing my fist and connect it with a jaw. That solid body staggers into the wall, and the room fills with curse words a second later. So many colorful and elaborate curse words, and some that I’m almost certain are made up, and for the second time today I recognize Seth’s voice over the chaos around me and in my head.