Into the Abyss

by Stefanie Gaither

  The clones are so centered on Emily at this point—each of their steps focused and deliberate, their gazes locked on her cowering figure—that I wonder how soon they will notice the firing squad sneaking toward them.

  The door is shut, the CCA members and their guns are lost in the darkness of the room, and suddenly I have forgotten, again, how I ended up on this bridge.

  And so with nowhere else to go, I jump down.

  I don’t bother to land quietly. Both clones snap their heads toward me as I circle around, positioning myself between the two of them and Emily, so that the clones have no choice but to take their attention from her. They fall silent again. Emily does too. And it’s quiet enough now that the soft echoing of footsteps from the approaching CCA can be heard.

  The female glances back over her shoulder. Her partner’s eyes slide to Emily’s for a moment before darting back to mine, and then he takes a step toward me. Challenging, almost. But I don’t budge. The faint hum of charged weapons joins the oncoming footsteps, and I can almost see the calculations both of the clones are making, their stares cold and unblinking as they compute their next move.

  And then, with one last curious look in my direction, they leap past both Emily and me, and they run. They head straight toward a door that I know leads to an exit hallway. I don’t know if they know this—if they plan to escape, or whether or not they actually stand a chance of making it out.

  “Why did you do that?”

  Emily shrinks back as I turn to look at her. Before I can answer her question, though, the other CCA members emerge from the shadows with their guns lifted, their appraising glares training on me. Emily looks at them. For a moment I think she might step back and let them draw whatever conclusions they want about what’s happened, and let them deal with it however they want to.

  But then she surprises me by stepping closer instead.

  “Why did you protect me from them?” Her voice is oddly strangled sounding. Angry, almost. “Why would you do that for me?”

  I keep my eyes on hers, but I can hear and sense movement around me; a few of those guns being lowered, uncertain glances being exchanged. I should be relieved by this, I know.

  The only thing I can think, though, is: Wrong.

  Emily is wrong.

  I understand how it might have looked from her angle. Looks can be deceiving, though. And I could pretend that she was right, because it would make things easier for me—or at the very least, lower a few more guns. But I am growing tired of pretending. So, instead, I shake my head, and I tell her: “I didn’t do it for you.”

  I am not entirely sure who I did it for, or why, but it doesn’t matter.

  It’s done now, and I am leaving, and they are all too slow and too stunned to stop me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  No more detours, is the mantra I keep repeating to myself as I walk the rest of the way to Catelyn’s room. Over and over. Because I can still hear the sound of clones and CCA members violently crashing together in the distance, and my mind keeps threatening to crash with them. My thoughts flicker in and out, the same way they did while I watched the CCA members from the bridge. And I still feel the same as I did while standing between Emily and those clones. Still caught in between them, even as I move alone through these hallways.

  I pause midstep, my eyes clenching shut and my hands moving to my aching head again.

  No more, no more, no more. . . .

  When I finally look up again, I am no longer alone.

  Catelyn is in front of me, and the first thing my little sister does is grab my hands, pull them from my head, and hold them still.

  “Where have you been? And why the heck didn’t you answer the messages I sent you?”

  “I didn’t see them,” I say, sliding my hands from hers and taking a step back. “I was . . . distracted.”

  “Distracted by what, exactly?” Jaxon asks as he catches up with Catelyn.

  “By a terrible headache,” I answer without looking at him.

  After a few more unsuccessful interrogation attempts from Jaxon, Catelyn insists I need someplace safer and quieter if my head is hurting. And that is how I end up standing in the doorway of Jaxon’s room, wishing I had simply stayed in my own bed and slept through all of this.

  This is only the second time I have been in his room, and I feel every bit as out of place as I did the last time I was in here. Maybe it’s because the room itself feels out of place—a soft spot in the middle of the hard, practical world all around it. Where outside there are gleaming metal walls and sensible fluorescent lights, this room is one of the few exceptions to the mood that permeates most of the base: This room feels like a home. Not my home, of course, but Jaxon has had plenty of time to make it feel like his. He and his mother have a house in the city that serves as their official address, but from what I have seen and understand, they’re almost never there. It’s easier just to stay here, I suppose. More comfortable. You spend enough time in a place, and pieces of your life start to rub off on it, and suddenly leaving means abandoning all of those pieces along with the place.

  Maybe that’s part of why I am still here too.

  Besides that, looking around I can understand why Jaxon stays. Why Catelyn spends so much time in here. Even I find something warmly alluring about the soft-piled rug and butterscotch-colored walls. And I appreciate the posters and pictures he has covering those walls too—prints of cars, mostly, and a few framed photos of him with his mother and Seth—because they give me something to focus on instead of having to talk to him or Catelyn.

  I sit at Jaxon’s desk because it’s in the corner farthest from his bed, where the two of them are huddled together with a laptop between them. They have been talking in hushed voices ever since we came back here. Not to try to keep me out of the conversation, I don’t think—because they both know I could easily hear every word if I cared enough to pay attention. I don’t, though. I’m much more interested in the wall decor, and in pushing the slider on the base of this desk lamp up and down, up and down, repeatedly dimming and brightening its light. I’m considering taking it apart, to see how it works, when Catelyn walks over to me and puts a hand on my arm.

  “We’ve messaged the president and told her you’re with us,” she says. “But she, um . . . When things have settled down outside, she wants to talk to you in private.”

  I stop messing with the dimmer, leaving it halfway between the lightest and darkest settings, and wait for Catelyn to elaborate. I can tell, just by glancing at her face, that there is more she could say. That she knows exactly what the president wants to talk to me about. But she doesn’t go on.

  I wonder if I am as easy to read as she is.

  I hope not.

  “She wants to know where you were when all of this started,” Jaxon says from his place on the bed.

  “I was in my room,” I say evenly.

  “By yourself?”

  I don’t answer. President’s son or not, he has no business interrogating me. Catelyn frowns in his direction, but it doesn’t stop him from adding: “And she wants to know exactly what happened in that training session earlier today too.”

  Catelyn’s hand is still on my arm, and she must feel it tense. “She just wants your side of things,” she says in her best peacekeeping voice.

  My eyes, eager for more distraction, slide to the picture nearest to me. It’s a family portrait, with both Jaxon and his mother looking stiff and posed, and Seth looking like they only woke him up and informed him they were taking the picture maybe thirty seconds before it happened. They all look much younger. Seth’s hair is longer, dreadlocked and very different from the short-cropped style he wears it in now. His eyes seem lighter too. I study them, trying to determine whether or not this is just a trick of the camera, and his name slips out of my mouth before I can stop it.

  “Tell her to ask Seth, then,” I say to Catelyn.

  “Seth?”

  She gives me a strange look, and I remember instantly why
I didn’t bring up Seth’s name in my room earlier: because I still can’t make any sense of his odd behavior today. And I don’t like talking about things I can’t make sense of.

  Jaxon is on his feet now, though, and wearing the same look as Catelyn. “Have you talked to Seth recently?” His question catches me off guard. Or maybe it’s the demanding way he asks it. He seems much more on edge than usual.

  My eyes drift back to the portrait. “Maybe I have. So what?”

  “We haven’t seen Seth for hours,” Catelyn says. “And he isn’t answering Jaxon’s calls or messages—or anybody else’s, as far as we know.”

  So he was lying, earlier, when he said he’d just talked to them. Did he really know if they were both fine? Or was he just trying to convince me to leave with him? And if so, why? Why does he care about getting me out of here, enough that he would lie to do it?

  Whatever the reason, this is precisely why I don’t trust words.

  “If you’ve seen him, or talked to him . . . ,” Jaxon begins. He seems to be making an effort to soften the edge from his voice. And between that and the hopeful look Catelyn is giving me, I decide it’s easier just to tell them the truth.

  If it makes Jaxon pissed at Seth, all the better. That’s what he gets for lying to me.

  “He was in the training room earlier,” I say, “and we walked part of the way back to my room together, and I saw him again on the way here. He was on his way out, though. Probably running away from everything going on.” I shrug. “He asked me to leave with him, but I told him no.”

  “Why would he ask you to go anywhere?”

  “I don’t know, nor do I care.” The last part is a half lie, of course, but I manage to hold my trademark blank stare this time, keeping my curiosity to myself.

  “I don’t understand why the idiot won’t answer me,” Jaxon says. “He always has his phone on him.” He moves to the door, apparently already giving up on the possibility of forcing anything else out of me. “I’m going to go look for him.”

  But Catelyn steps in front of him. “Your mother already has people out looking for him. And she told us both to stay in here until everything calms down, remember?”

  They keep arguing. I tune them out by spinning back and forth in the desk chair and focusing on the creaks and whirs of its wheeled base instead of on their voices. Creak. Whir. Click. Whir. The mechanical sounds are predictable, soothing. Empty sounds, empty motion. And my mind circles wonderfully, emptily, with them.

  But my eyes keep drifting back to the family portrait on the wall, and every time they do, my mind threatens to stop. To focus, and to reopen all the thoughts from tonight that I have so carefully filed away.

  Those bodies in the security room.

  How quickly, how anxiously Seth confronted me.

  Those clones staring at me.

  Emily staring at me.

  Why hadn’t I simply stayed on that bridge and let whatever was going to happen below happen?

  I only left my room to find Catelyn. I never wanted to be in the middle of all these other things, or to care, or even think, about anything or anyone else. And I am so used to not having to care about things I don’t want to that for a moment I actually feel my awareness slipping, my computer-brain apparently freezing in its attempt to process all these unwanted things.

  I close my eyes.

  Reboot, reboot, reboot. . . .

  Open my eyes and look away from the portrait.

  No. I won’t think about any of this. Only emptiness. Empty creaks. Whirs. Click click clicks—

  “Let me see your phone.”

  Jaxon and Catelyn both turn to me, and I realize then that I’ve said this aloud, and that my hand is outstretched and waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

  “Why?” Jaxon finally asks.

  A good question. And one I don’t have an answer to, despite all my brain’s eagerness to fill my mouth with other words without my say-so. Fortunately for me, though, Jaxon seems distracted enough by his argument with my sister that he doesn’t bother pressing his question. I just stare expectantly at him until he silently tosses me the phone.

  I don’t know why I am doing it, but as soon as it hits my hands, I pull up his recent calls and I dial Seth. After four rings, I am greeted by a recorded message of his voice, telling me to “leave it.”

  All I leave for him is a number—mine. A number I have given to almost nobody else, and that I forget I have most of the time, even though the communication device that it goes to is always around my wrist. It’s another condition of my living here: The president wants to be sure I am always reachable.

  I’m sure Catelyn recognizes the number too, though she only watches me curiously as I hang up the phone. I can tell she is dying to press me for more answers and explanations. But she knows it’s useless too. Maybe once I understand Seth better—if I ever do—I will try to explain today to her, if I can.

  Or maybe not. In a way I am starting to feel possessive of my strange conversations with Seth, feeling that need to guard them the same way I protect everything Catelyn tells me, whether she wants me to or not. I am a hoarder of words and secrets. I suppose because most girls with bodies as old as mine have plenty of secret things of their own by this time: moments that only they know about, things given to them in confidence to keep for themselves. But I have precious little that feels like it is only mine. Six months is not much time to collect a life of your own.

  So I turn around and I keep to myself, pulling the scraps of my life that I do have around me like a thin and ragged cloak, and I leave Jaxon and Cate to their own hushed conversations and secrets.

  • • •

  An hour and a half later, the communicator around my wrist beeps.

  Catelyn lifts her head from the pillow in Jaxon’s lap and blinks sleepily at me. “Who . . . ?”

  I glance down at the number that has never flashed on this tiny screen before, and I almost want to laugh, though I am not sure why. Catelyn has told me several times now that my sense of humor needs work. And she is clearly right, because both she and Jaxon are wide awake now, and watching me with decidedly grim, less-than-amused expressions.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  I pop the earpiece from the screen’s edge and slip it into my ear, then tap the answer button—which responds only to my individual fingerprint—on the device’s other side. But I don’t lift it to my mouth to say anything. Not even hello.

  I don’t have to, though, because Seth is quick to speak first: “Are you alone now?”

  Why does it matter? I want to ask. But then I glance up and meet Jaxon’s eyes, and think of his earlier frustration when Seth wouldn’t answer him. Clearly, for whatever reason, Seth doesn’t want his brother to be able to contact him. If he knows I am still this close to Jaxon, he is likely to hang up on me.

  “Yes,” I lie. “I’m in my room.”

  “Good.” Silence, then the sound of his breathing, quickening as if he’s suddenly started walking fast. “Stay away from Jaxon. And Cate, too.”

  “Why?”

  “You need to get out of the CCA headquarters.”

  I spin around in the chair, hoping once more for the empty motion to lift emptiness into my thoughts—this time so I can be sure to sound as detached as I want to when I answer him. “You know, I was hoping you would have something more interesting to say this time.”

  I don’t hear his reply to this, because at that moment I sense movement. I jerk around just as Jaxon reaches for the earpiece. I twist so fiercely up and away from his touch that the chair skids out from under me and hurtles into him.

  “That’s Seth,” he says, knocking the chair away and ignoring it as it totters on half its wheels for a few seconds before crashing to the floor. “Let me talk to him.” His voice is even, but loud. Loud enough that Seth hears him.

  “Liar,” he breathes into my ear, sounding almost amused.

  “Given that you haven’t been exactly forthcoming with me,” I say, backing a
way from Jaxon, “I assumed lying was just part of the game.”

  He laughs darkly on the other side. A tiny black hole of sound, one that feels like it is swallowing up everything between us until he says, “We’re not playing a game here—we could call it that if you like, but I’m not sure it’s possible for either of us to win. Just so you know.”

  I don’t know if he is trying to intimidate me with this last part, but if he is, he is wasting his time. “Impossible games are my favorite kind,” I say. And then I mean to hang up, because I am finished with his evasiveness and with trying to carry on a conversation while both Jaxon and Cate are trying to wrestle me away from it. My hand is slow to find the end button, though, slow enough that Seth manages to leave me with a few last words:

  “Perfect. Then you should meet me downtown, at the statue in the center of Market Square, around dawn.”

  Click.

  Found the end button, finally.

  I pull the earpiece out and snap it back into its place. “I seem to have lost the connection,” I say in response to Jaxon’s incredulous look.

  “Call him back,” he says. “Give me that earpiece, and call him back.”

  Catelyn sighs in a way that clearly tells me she is too tired for this argument. I can’t do what Jaxon asks, though. I won’t. Not even for a second do I want Seth thinking I am calling him back, or that he has any of that sort of control over me. I have to maintain some sort of command over whatever is happening tonight.

  “You know he’s alive at least,” I say, picking up the chair and pushing it back under the desk.

  “Why is he answering you and ignoring me?” Jaxon’s face seems perfectly impassive when he says it. But Catelyn must see something in his eyes that I don’t; her body language and expressions are more familiar and easy to read, and I’ve memorized that look she is giving him now—the way she bites her lip and tilts her head to the side like that, the way her body sinks deeper into her seat, bit by tiny bit, as if absorbing whatever perceived hurt she senses rolling off someone.

  Empathy. I know the word for it. And Catelyn has tried, several times, to explain when I need to put myself in someone else’s shoes, so to speak. It’s difficult, though. Maybe the shortness of a six-month life is to blame again; it seems as if it would be easier to sense someone else’s hurt if you had spent a lifetime collecting and recognizing pain for yourself.