And it’s the last challenge I can take.
I charge toward him, reckless, mind abandoned by any thought other than the need to knock him down hard enough to keep him down, and then to get out of this place. To find a way to contact Catelyn, to go back to her and something I recognize. I refuse to believe that I can’t go back to her.
Seth manages to catch hold of me, to keep himself from falling all the way back, though the momentum of me is still strong enough that we slam into a table and send it—and everything on it—toppling to the floor. His arms brace against mine. I manage to heave him away from me, but it takes more effort than I expected. It throws me off balance. I fall sideways, awkwardly catching myself on one hand and hitting hard on my right knee. I recover quickly, bouncing up onto the balls of my feet. The muscles in my legs tense, preparing to spring.
My eyes lock on to his.
They’re the last thing I see before a rush of heat consumes me, and everything flashes to black.
• • •
This time, when I feel my senses coming back to me, I open my eyes immediately. I see Seth a few feet away, holding the side of his head. I wonder what I’ve done. What I don’t remember.
How those flecks of blood got on the floor between us.
I look up, and we stare at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment.
“You should have just moved,” I say. “I could have killed you.”
“Not swinging like that you couldn’t have,” he replies. “Maybe I should teach you how to fight while you’re here.”
My mouth opens to snap back at him, but then I see those dots of blood on the floor again, and I stay quiet. I move to shove myself back to my feet instead, and my fingers land on the edge of a handheld computer that fell from the knocked-over table.
It’s coincidence, really, that I happen to look down at this computer. And only for a split second—just long enough to see the symbol branded in the corner of its lid. An intricate, partially encircled letter H.
Huxley’s symbol.
I grab the computer and stand the rest of the way up. My blackout is forgotten for the moment, because at my feet are more of those Hs, emblazoned on folders and on the letterheads of papers spilling from them.
“What is this place?” I ask, eyes wide and more closely searching the hoard around me.
Before Seth can reply, the woman from earlier appears in the doorway opposite my escape route, looking slightly frazzled. “What in the world was all that commotion? I told you to . . .” Her eyes light up as they fall on me. “Oh! I thought I heard an extra voice in here—and you’re up and moving around, too. Good.” Her smile is warm.
But this room seemed that way at first too.
I take a backward step toward the door, not taking my gaze off her.
“Wait a second,” she says, lifting her hands as if in surrender. “Before you leave—I know you have to have questions. At least give me a chance to introduce myself, how about?”
She moves closer, hands still raised slightly. Her step is careful, body bracing a little with each movement, as if she is trying to hide a limping injury, or maybe battling the stiffness of arthritis. Probably the latter, I decide after glancing over her gray-streaked hair, which is pulled loosely back from a face grooved with wrinkles and laugh lines.
Not much of a threat either way, my brain decides as she reaches me. Though the way she is studying me so closely, so openly, is making me increasingly uncertain.
“He’s told me a lot about you, Violet,” she says with a nod at Seth. “All good stuff, don’t worry.”
Should I have been worried?
She extends a hand, and I cautiously take it. It feels like soft, well-worn leather. “My name is Angela,” she says, and then her eyes drift back to Seth. “He probably hasn’t told you much about me, but I’m his mother. And it’s nice to meet you.”
CHAPTER TEN
The door seems closer. More inviting than ever before. Because it feels as if I’ve stumbled into yet one more thing that makes no sense—or been carried into it, rather. And my carrier is uncharacteristically silent.
“I didn’t think you had a mother,” I say to him, still edging toward the door and thinking of bolting. “Other than President Cross.”
“It’s complicated.”
“And not especially important at the moment, in light of other things,” says the woman who introduced herself as Angela. “I only mention it because I thought it might make you more comfortable.”
I keep my focus on Seth. “Why did you bring me here?”
He hesitates, picking up the table and straightening a stack of folders against its top. “Because I knew Angie would be able to help you.”
“Because she knows about clones.” I gather some of the scattered papers and hand them over, my eyes lingering on one of the letterhead logos. “Because she works for Huxley.”
“Worked for, rather,” Angie corrects, kindly but firmly. “But you’re right about the other part—I’m no stranger to cloning technology. Which is a good thing, because it looks like you smacked the back of your head pretty hard on something during that fight. And a bit too close to your sensitive brain-hardware stuff for comfort, at that.”
Sensitive brain-hardware stuff?
That hardly sounds like the technical term for it.
My gaze finally shifts to her. Who is this woman, truly? How much does she honestly know about Huxley? About cloning? She isn’t how I pictured a Huxley employee looking; not that I have encountered or personally seen many, but for some reason I already had an image of them all in my head: scientists in stiff white lab coats, their expressions sterile and postures proper. But when I look at this woman—with her bright aqua-colored glasses and hair consisting mostly of flyaways—“proper” is the last word that comes to mind.
I realize that I am staring and quickly look away. The jerk causes a sharp, pulling pain along the back of my head, and when I lift a hand to it, I feel a layer of gauze taped there. I peel it off in annoyance. Underneath it is a tiny, clean-edged cut. Surgically precise.
“I did that,” Angie says. “So I could get a scope in there to check for possible driver damage that might end up causing memory loss. A bit of a primitive method for checking that sort of thing, but as you can probably tell”—she gestures at that messy hoard around us—“this isn’t exactly my former laboratory. Proper equipment’s a little scarce around here.”
My body tenses, and skepticism floods my voice. “You cut me open just so you could have a look?” There are plenty of advantages to having what is essentially a supercomputer for a brain; having to worry about whether or not people have hacked or reprogrammed it is not one of them.
“Exactly,” she says. “There was no funny business. Promise. You’re still the same Violet you were when you came in here. I briefly overrode the autohealing program so I could keep things open to enable me to poke around in there, but it’s been rebooted and should be taking care of that cut and any pain it might be causing soon.”
I’ve been only vaguely aware of that pain since I woke up, but now that she mentions it, it’s all I can think about for a moment. My eyes close as I feel it radiate from the base of my skull, around and up into my jawbone.
“Give it a few minutes,” Angie says, voice softening. She starts to reach forward, hand half raised as if to comfort. But thankfully she thinks better of it. “The program is working. Just a little slower than you’re used to, probably.”
“It . . . aches.” And it’s strange. I know what pain feels like, but I’m used to quick sparks of it, lasting only as long as it takes the simulated pain receptors in my brain to recognize and respond to its cause.
“Well, healing and aching can feel a lot alike sometimes.” She leaves the room and reappears a minute later with a bowl of water and a washrag, the latter of which she hands to me. “Part of the normal human experience,” she says.
“I’m not human.” I don’t know what makes me so quick to
say it, just that with every piece of the past forty-eight hours that flashes through my rebooting brain—from the fighting, to the faces of those clones on the bridge, to the way Emily looked at me as I stood between her and them—this part of my reality, at least, feels more and more clear. I’m not human, and not even a normal clone, either, between the blackouts and everything else.
Angie nods toward me and the rag, but touches a hand to the back of her own head. So she is observant enough to have noticed that I don’t like being touched, at least. “Looks like human blood to me,” she says. I absently copy her hand’s movement with my own. The rag comes away from my skin tinted lightly with red. Blood.
Human blood, clone blood . . . She’s right, I suppose, in that they both look the same. But what about how they’re made? I know basic human anatomy. I have what a lot of people would see as a strange fascination with it, really—a fascination that has led to me pouring over encyclopedia files and diagrams late into the nights when I can’t sleep. So I know about platelets and plasma, about bone marrow and all the ways bodies like Angie’s continuously create and pump blood cells through her body. But as for my own blood? I am not sure how the ones who created me managed to simulate the process. All I know is that it’s simulated. An imitation of the real thing. My blood may technically be the same in the end, but I can’t ignore where it came from.
We’re different.
And more and more I find myself wondering what that means. How I could ever fit in, anywhere, and what I would have to do to make that happen.
I finish cleaning the blood from my skin as my eyes find Seth. He’s abandoned our conversation and moved instead to a computer station set up in the corner with several mismatched monitors, one of which he is studying intently.
Speaking of things that are different from what I thought at first.
He is still more silent than I thought he was even capable of being. What is that silence hiding? If this woman is truly his mother, what does that mean? Who is he, really?
“I need you to explain some things.” I don’t realize I’ve vocalized the thought until he throws a quick, expectant glance my way, and I have no choice but to continue. “You brought me here so she could help me, but why do you care? Why did you interfere with Josh and the others? Why did you care so much about making me leave the CCA the other night?” I’ve forgotten about the door for the moment and moved toward him, instead. “And if you dare answer me with ‘It’s complicated’ again, I will make you sorry for it.”
The last part causes an almost-grin to twitch his lips. “Well,” he says without taking his eyes off the largest of the monitors in front of him, “it is complicated.” My face flushes with anger as his hands fly over the computer’s keyboard, filling the room with a clicking and clacking that drowns out all of my hanging questions. “And it’s about to get a lot more complicated,” he adds after a moment. His attention darts to Angie. He says nothing, but the look in his eyes must mean something to her, because she nods in an understanding way and then rushes to my side.
“I need you to come with me,” she says. And I may not be particularly good at reading people, but it’s obvious that something has changed. Dramatically.
“Come with you to where?”
“We need to hide. Quickly.” I can tell she’s struggling to keep her voice reasonably calm.
“I’m not hiding from any—”
“Just go already!” Seth seems to care less about appearing calm as he jumps up from the computer and rushes around cutting off all the lights, until the only thing illuminating the room is the soft whitish-blue glow of the computer screen. He goes to the cabinet beside the computers next, and starts jerking an assortment of other electronic equipment from it. I’m so busy watching him, trying to figure out what purpose each piece of that equipment might serve, that when Angie grabs my arm it actually makes me jump. I stare at her in stunned silence as she drags me toward the other room. I realize how easily I could jerk free of her grip, but for some reason it doesn’t occur to me to actually do it.
Once in the next room, Angie lets go of my arm and—with the aid of a small flashlight—kneels down beside one of several faded throw rugs tossed over the floor. She flops a corner of it back and reveals a metal hatch that was hidden beneath. I stand in the doorway looking back and forth, between her as she pries the hatch open, and then Seth as he finishes collecting things from the cabinet and heads for the exit.
“Where is he going?” I ask.
And for once, I get a straightforward answer. “Those computers are part of a makeshift security system we set up. We’ve been fortunate to have this safe place for most of the past few months, but we’ve had a few . . . incidents lately, with some of the people who would like to interrupt my nice and quiet little existence here.” She gets the hatch open and lowers herself down into the floor. I have no idea what the space might have originally been used for, but it is deep enough that once her feet have thunked against its bottom, only her shoulders and head are left sticking out. “I’m going to have to find a new hideaway soon. But for now, at least this old warehouse has several of these stowaway spaces. An old friend of mine—his father owned this place, and he created these spaces during the war. Just in case. I think his paranoia was a little over the top, but then, I’m benefitting from it, aren’t I?”
“Who are you hiding from?”
She doesn’t answer right away, focusing instead on resituating the hatch and its concealing rug. I almost think she hasn’t heard the question, but then I take a step toward her and she looks up at me with a small, weak sort of smile. “Just some old demons,” she says.
“But not demons that you’re afraid to let Seth face alone.”
“You already have me figured out, do you?” The question is challenging, but not especially unkind; I am starting to think she might not actually know how to inject anything like harshness into her voice. “But you apparently don’t know him as well as you think you do, because if you did, you’d know it’s useless to try to talk him into just hiding with me.” Her smile wilts even further. “He can take care of himself, at least. Even if I don’t especially want to think about that.”
Doubt gnawing at me, I turn to look at the screen Seth had been monitoring. From this distance it’s hard to see what’s on display, but it looks like a large, open room, with several bay doors lining the wall the camera is facing. The room is empty now. But who did he see before?
He can take care of himself.
Just like he took care of himself before, when he was outnumbered by Josh and his gang. And just like he took care of me, even though I never asked him to and never would have. If anything, it should be the other way around right now—between the three of us, it should be me who is rushing off to secure this hiding spot, to protect it from whatever intruders may be out there. Even as I’m recovering, I am still a superhuman compared to them. Still stronger. Faster. Smarter.
Right?
I keep going back to that moment at the CCA. To how easily he caught me. Stopped me. Maybe he can take care of himself. Maybe . . .
“You said you used to work for Huxley, didn’t you?” A rush comes over me as my mind starts to pull up impossible possibilities and explanations. But Angie is much slower to answer.
“Years and years ago,” she finally says.
“What did you do for them, exactly?”
“. . . I’m afraid that’s what we call classified information.”
“But Seth knows, doesn’t he?” I ask, looking back to her.
“He knows most of it now. I’ve made sure of that.”
“Now? What about before now? As long as I’ve known him, President Cross has been his mother, and he was a member of the CCA. This?” I thrust a hand toward her hiding spot, and then sweep it back to the mess of Huxley-labeled folders and equipment in this front room. “This is all wrong. This is not who he is.”
These are not the facts my brain assigned to him. Not the files it saved for me
to so easily access when I needed a picture, an understanding, of Seth. Angie swears there was no funny business, but it still feels as though someone has gone in and deleted and rearranged that vital information, replacing it with broken images and corrupted data. Because it must be corrupted. The only explanation for the strange thoughts and conclusions my brain is racing to is that something has glitched.
Something is rewriting my truths into lies.
“Maybe you should talk to Seth directly about this when he comes back,” Angie says, the corners of her mouth finally giving in and falling into a frown. “As far as who he is . . . Well, his life is his own. It’s not for me to give away.” I start to argue, but just then we hear voices, echoes of shouts in the distance. We listen for a moment.
They sound like they’re moving closer.
The computer screen goes black. Slipping into sleep mode, I guess. As my eyes adjust to the room’s deepening darkness and the voices grow louder, I find myself wishing I had stayed asleep.
“Come here.” For the first time since I met her, there is a sharpness to Angie’s words—enough of a razor edge that I consider listening to them. I could hide with her. Maybe she could shut my brain down somehow. Wake me up again when this is all over. That might be nice.
I would never let her do it though.
I know too much to sleep soundly anymore. And I have much more to find out—which is why I ignore Angie’s pleas to join her in the shadows beneath the floor, and instead set off in the same direction Seth disappeared in.
Outside, I find myself facing down a long hallway, which is lit only at the far end by a flickering emergency light. Its weak blue beams barely reach me. There are several doors along the hall—or rust-framed empty spaces where I assume doors used to be, at least—and the rooms behind them are as dark as everywhere else. No signs of life. The voices from earlier are no longer shouting, either. I still hear them, but they sound much farther away. Distant and ghostlike. I wonder if I made them up. If I’m making all of these things up inside of a mind I no longer trust.
Into the Abyss Page 9