I walk toward the light, my footsteps lonely and eerie against the smooth floor.
From the end of the hallway, I can see them in the room beyond: the group those voices belong to. Four people huddled together, their faces partially lit by the communicator one of the women is holding to her lips. I make myself as small as possible against the hallway wall.
“Target number two has been spotted,” I hear the woman say. “Building has been secured to prevent escape. We’re about to begin the search and sweep of the east wing. All teams should—”
A high-pitched crack! interrupts, and in the same instant the woman convulses, grabs her throat, and falls to the ground. The other three spin around, weapons drawn. Their guns are equipped with scope lights that they circle with, illuminating every corner of the vast room. But there is no one for the light to find.
Another crack!
Only two of them are left standing, now.
The gun lights bounce more frantically. They dart to the high ceiling, searching the lofted storage spaces and thick metal beams for hiding places. There’s an abrupt exchange over a communicator.
A cry for backup.
A confirmation.
Things begin to happen impossibly fast after that. The called backup floods into the room. More and more lights bouncing around, and then one finally finding what they were all looking for: Seth, armed and perched in the clawlike apparatus of some sort of machine attached to the warehouse’s ceiling.
The shots, from seemingly every direction at once.
But when Seth falls to the ground, I would swear the world slows back down, all the way to a crawl.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He didn’t fall.
He jumped.
From what must have been at least twenty feet up.
As the world quickens again to its normal pace, I realize that almost instantly—in the same moment that he jumps again, only forward this time, and lunges straight at the person nearest him. And the next thing I realize is that he didn’t even need the gun that is now strapped to his back. Because all it takes is one hit from his fist—one so fast that Seth is literally a blur as he makes it—and that first person is down. Not moving.
The other two of the backup group try to aim their guns, but Seth doesn’t hesitate long enough for them to manage a single shot. In a few more wickedly quick flashes of movement, he disposes of them the same way he did the first.
It would all be very impressive, except for one thing: He’s forgotten about the original group. The two of whom are still standing a safe distance away, their guns still at the ready. With the others down, they now have a clear shot at him and him alone, and they have plenty of time to take it. Even he isn’t fast enough to cross this huge room in time to stop them from shooting.
I am much closer than he is, though—and I owe him for saving me after that fall, even if I didn’t ask him to.
And unfortunately for the two in front of me, I hate owing people.
I focus on the one on the left first. Her grip on her gun seems much less secure. Like a dart launching, I fly across the room and slam an elbow into her lower back, while my other arm reaches for and wraps around her gun. I jerk it out of her grip, and in the same motion shove her toward her companion. She collides hard enough with him to knock him partway to the ground. Shoving my newly acquired gun into his face makes him drop the rest of the way down, his hands lifting into the air.
“How many more of you are there?” I demand.
He laughs weakly. “This building is surrounded—you aren’t going to make it out of here. And the one you’re trying to hide? We’ll find her, too.”
“Let me clear this up for you.” I press the muzzle of the gun deep into his chest. Just in case he isn’t taking me seriously enough yet. “I am not hiding anybody. I have nothing to do with anybody in this building—I’m only passing through, and I’ll be leaving soon, so I need you to tell me the quickest way out of here and to see to it that your friends don’t interrupt my exit.”
He opens his mouth to answer, just as I feel a gush of wind pass between us. An actual dart this time. It lodges in his chest, just above the tip of my gun. He chokes on his words, swallows hard, and starts to sway as a thin trickle of drool escapes the corner of his mouth. I pull away and let him fall to the ground. Still breathing—as are all of the others, however slow and shallow they’re doing it. Tranquilizer darts, I realize. I’m not surprised. Seth never struck me as the killing type.
He is next to me a moment later, gathering the weapons of the unconscious and slinging them into the collection already across his back.
“I was having a conversation with him,” I say.
“Well, wait here then,” he says, walking away. “He’ll be coming around in about twelve hours or so, and you guys can pick up where you left off.”
“Where are you going?”
“To lock these up somewhere,” he says, giving the bundle of weapons a little shake, “and then to figure out how to get rid of the rest of our intruders.”
“Or to get killed by them? Like you almost did just now?”
He glances back at me with a smirk. “Key word there is ‘almost.’ Nothing wrong with almost dying. I do it all the time here lately.”
“Then I should have just let you carry on and not interfered.”
“Yeah, but thanks for interfering all the same,” he says, and then—of all the things he could do as we’re standing here in this cold, dark room, surrounded by unconscious bodies—he actually winks at me.
Idiot.
“I only did it so we would be even,” I say. “And because I still want answers from you, which I won’t be able to get if you’re dead, now will I?”
Those are the only reasons, right? The cold, calculated, and logical reasons. It used to be the only kind of reasoning I was capable of, once upon a time.
I wish it still was.
He is still walking away, and typing something into a small scanner device, when he calls back: “That’s a good point.”
He’s hardly paying me any attention, in other words. And I am finished with being ignored. I wait until he reaches the small door in the corner, pries it open, and starts unloading the guns into the room behind it.
Then I move.
He turns as I reach him, but not quickly enough; I grab him by the arm and pin him roughly against the wall.
“Violence is not the answer,” he says.
“Then what is the answer to this?” I ask. “To you? Who are you, exactly?”
“You really did hit your head hard during that fight with Josh, didn’t you? You know who I am.”
I shake my head. “You aren’t the Seth Lancaster I thought I knew. Not the same one that Cate and Jaxon and everyone else at the CCA knew. You . . . I don’t know who you are. All I know is that you shouldn’t be able to do the things I’ve seen you do.”
I feel his body stiffen in my grip, and he does his best to avoid my prying gaze as he says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Just now. You fought how many people at once? And how many of Josh’s gang at once?”
“So I know a thing or two about hand-to-hand combat.”
“You fell at least twenty feet down from the ceiling without getting hurt.”
“Acrobat skills. When I was younger, I ran away and joined the circus for a while—that’s where I learned that.”
I tighten my grip on his arm, fingernails digging into his skin.
“Um, ow?”
“That didn’t hurt you. If a fall from twenty feet didn’t hurt you, neither did that.”
“You are an incredibly violent person,” he says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“I can be much more violent than anything you’ve seen so far. Trust me.”
“I do trust you. Still, though, at least this is how I wanted to go.”
“What?”
“Death by beautiful girl. Somehow I always knew this is how it would happen,
too.”
“This really is all a big joke to you, isn’t it?”
He doesn’t answer right away. We’re both silent for a moment instead, listening to the sudden hiss of a voice over one of the communicators, which is still lying beside its unconscious owner. “No,” he says with a sigh, finally turning to look me directly in the eyes. “This is very serious, all right? More of them will be coming soon. You need to let me go.”
“Not until you tell me who you are. What you are.”
He laughs softly, shaking his head. “Come on, Violet,” he says. “We both already know, don’t we? You just don’t trust yourself enough to believe you’re right.”
I don’t know what to say to that. He takes advantage of my stunned silence to work one of his arms free, and then reaches into his pocket, pulls out a knife, and flips it open. Before I can protest, he jerks the blade across his face, leaving a shallow gash that quickly wells up with blood.
But the blood hasn’t even dripped past his chin before the cut starts to heal itself, his dark skin knitting back together as I watch.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Healing technology.
Clone. Healing. Technology.
“Satisfied now?” he asks.
“You . . . you are not the real Seth Lancaster.”
“I am the only Seth Lancaster, as far as I know. Have been. For years.”
I loosen my grip on his arm and sink back a step. “I thought I was the only one at the CCA. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“I haven’t told anyone else. President Cross—and now you—are the only ones from there who know for sure. Not even Jaxon knows. Although, after everything with Josh and them, that might change soon. We’ll see if they’re smart enough to figure it out.”
“The president knows? But how—”
Voices over the communicator interrupt us again, and Seth’s next words are more urgent. “I can’t explain all of this right now. Just . . . listen: All these people? They’re from Huxley, and they’re looking for Angie, and I can’t let them find her, all right?” He pushes me away, and I’m still too shocked to put up much of a fight. “So I can’t do this right now. Maybe later. This is more than they’ve ever sent before, though, and I don’t know how things are going to go down, but if—”
“If I help you, will you tell me the truth? About everything?” I don’t know what makes me say it. Because even if he agrees to it, I don’t trust him to tell me anything. Yet I still find myself holding my breath. Hoping. Even though I’ve never been the hopeful type.
“Help me how, exactly?” he asks, closing and resecuring the door that he’s hidden the weapons behind. “No offense, but I’m used to being a one-man show. I’d rather you just go back and hide with Angie.”
“Give me your jacket.”
“What? Why?”
“It has a hood. I’ll pull it over myself, hide my face, move a little more clumsily—they only know you and Angie are here, correct? So we’ll trick the ones still conscious into thinking I’m her, and lead them away from here. And we’ll have to hide the bodies of the unconscious ones so the others don’t find them, of course.”
“I should have known I’d end up hiding bodies when I started hanging out with you.”
“You don’t want the others to linger here, right? So we’ll lock them up somewhere. Steal their communicators, send a message that makes the others think they’ve already moved out. And then come back for Angie before they wake up.”
“That will never work.” He starts to jog away from me. “You look nothing like her. You’re taller than her, you—”
“I’m five foot eight inches. She’s approximately five foot seven.” I may not be able to read people’s emotions very well, but I have a talent for memorizing what Catelyn would probably call useless details: physical characteristics, mannerisms, faces. . . . I never forget what people look like. And I know my body could pass for Angie’s—at least from a distance.
“So you’re similar heights. That’s hardly enough.”
“And what’s the alternative, then?” I ask, catching up and grabbing him by the sleeve. “I’m happy to fight and be as violent as you would like to be, but you have no idea how many more we might be facing once we’re outside.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve done this by myself. She’s been staying here for months.”
“I am not going back and hiding.”
“Then go somewhere else. I don’t need your help.” He pulls himself free of my grip. Easily. I wasn’t prepared for that strength—somehow I have already forgotten he isn’t as human as I thought he was, and that he isn’t trying to hide it anymore. Maybe because it all still seems impossible.
“If you don’t let me help, then I will go find as many of Huxley’s people as I can, and I will lead them all directly to you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes.” I run in front of him, cutting off his path to the nearby door. “I will.”
“You’re an awful person.”
“Blame it on the programming.”
“Fine,” he says with a humorless snort. “Whatever. I don’t have time to argue about this anymore.” His eyes still watching the door, he jerks the weapons from his back, strips off his coat, and tosses it over my head. I scramble to get it situated, pulling the hood over me and tucking my hair into it, then shifting the whole thing up as high as it will go—until only the bridge of my nose and my eyes are visible—and securing it with the hood’s drawstrings. I take a deep breath and inhale the crisp, clean smell of soap with a hint of something woodsy; I’ve never bothered to notice his scent before, but now that it is quite literally suffocating me, I can hardly help it. So at least it’s a nice smell. Kind of.
We make quick work of hiding the bodies, and then he hands me a gun and motions for me to follow him toward the exit. “You’ll have to watch how you move once they’ve spotted us,” he says, “but for now, try to keep up.”
He races into the next room, which is long and narrow, full of conveyer equipment and more claw apparatuses like the one hanging from the ceiling in the room we left behind. But the ceiling here is too shadowy and high to see where those claws attach. What I do see is a supervisor’s catwalk stretched over the center of the room, a metal-grate pathway leading to a window-lined alcove on the second floor. Seth leaps from one piece of equipment to the next until he reaches it. He makes it look easy, not even hesitating between jumps—like he is intimately familiar with every inch of this building and doesn’t have to think about it. Like he’s done this before.
In the recess, he moves to a square of the window that’s obviously been cleaned recently, and motions for me to join him.
“I don’t see anybody yet,” he says, eyes scanning the ground below, “but this is the main entrance that most of them will probably come through. They’ll be wondering about the others who disappeared this way.” He points at a patch of roof one story down, diagonal from us and about fifteen feet away. “We should be able to get their attention from there while still keeping enough distance to get away. But we need to get there before they’re here to see us make this jump, which Angie wouldn’t be able to do.”
“Through the window?”
“Through the window. We need both of these panes out of the way—”
He swings for the top. I hit the bottom. Glass shatters around us, tiny shards of it slicing into my fist and arm. The pieces of it crunch beneath my feet as I get a running start and leap into the cool night air. We both hit the roof and roll to the edge in one fluid motion, staying low as we scan the path leading to the rusted bay door below, which we now have a direct line of sight to. I can’t help but take a quick glance at Seth’s hand. Streaked with blood, but, like mine, the skin is already smooth again. It’s strange. Almost as strange as the fact that he isn’t even winded from the jump, either.
He told me to keep up with him.
But I’m still not used to anyone being able t
o keep up with me. I don’t know how it makes me feel; all this time I thought I was alone—that there were no other clones outside of Huxley’s control—but now here he is, and he’s been here all along. I was just too blind to see it.
What else have I missed?
“There they are,” he says suddenly.
I give my head a little shake, reminding myself that now isn’t the time to try to make sense of this strangeness; there will be answers at the end. Assuming, of course, that we manage to pull this off.
I shift my gaze to the group gathered near the door below. “We have to make it seem like an accident, or they’ll know we’re baiting them.”
“Over here.” I turn, and he is crouched beside a steel utility ladder that’s hooked over the edge of the roof. “This thing is barely hanging on to the building,” he says.
I nod, understanding. We drop the ten feet or so to the ground, and together pull the rickety ladder down with us, making sure it slams—as noisily as possible—into the pavement. Into plain view of the group by the door. And then, just to be on the safe side, I make a show of pretending to have gotten caught up in the falling ladder. Once I’m certain they’ve seen me, I duck around the corner and out of sight. Seth follows a second later, and we both press against the wall and listen.
There is dead silence for a moment. Then the whole group starts talking at once. The beeping of communicators follows, and then another hush. Then footsteps.
We run.
Although it feels more like crawling, since I have to move slowly enough to make them believe I’m Angie. And that is almost maddening, when all I can think about is how easily I could lose this group.
This group that feels close enough now that I am surprised I don’t feel their breath warming the back of my neck.
To keep one step ahead of them at this slow pace, we weave the most confusing trail we can away from the warehouse. Every other block or so, we pause to make sure they’re still following, and to “accidentally” let them catch a glimpse of our retreat. I don’t know where we’re running to, or how far Seth plans on going, but I can’t see much with this hood pulled up so tightly around me. So I have little choice but to trust his sense of direction.
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