I don’t find that hard to believe. I can think of several things that probably keep her up at night.
The source of the whistling turns out to be a kettle. Angie is taking it off the stove when I walk in, and she doesn’t let my sudden appearance interrupt her tea making. She only smiles a greeting at me—as if she fully expected me to walk in on her at one in the morning for an impromptu meeting—and offers me a cup. I decline, even though it smells wonderful. Like vanilla, and the spoonfuls of honey she is tipping into the cracked teacup. It’s the same scent I first noticed back at the warehouse.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” She takes a seat at a small, rickety-looking table, and uses her foot to push out a second chair for me. “Very homey, much cozier than that warehouse—I think they did good picking this new place out. I’m crossing my fingers that it lasts.”
“You have to move often?”
“I enjoy a change of scenery now and again, anyway.”
“Doesn’t it get tiring? Not having an actual home?”
She shrugs. “Home is something you carry with you, I think.” She takes a sip of her tea, closes her eyes, and breathes in the steam rising from it. “A house—or a warehouse, or whatever the case may be—is just a shell. It’s the people and things inside it that count. Like tea, for example. I can be at home anywhere as long as I have a good cup of tea.”
This isn’t really what I wanted to talk to her about, but her words make me think of the time I spent with Seth in that train car the other night. He’d seemed so angry then, about the way Angie had reappeared so abruptly and confusingly into his life. And it’s not like me to be angry on other people’s behalf, but my hands are suddenly shaking all the same. “And the people?” I ask. “Seth is one of those that count for you now?”
“He’s always counted,” she says quietly.
“Then why did President Cross find him alone and abandoned and have to take him in herself?”
“He was never alone. I was always watching from a distance, and I made sure that Jacqueline found him, because I knew she would take care of him. She had growing power with the CCA, more ability to protect him from the past we were both trying to escape . . . and who would think to look for a clone anywhere close to her? I thought he could be overlooked there. Forgotten about.”
I move to the chair she pushed out for me, and I sink slowly down into it.
Could he have continued to have been overlooked, I wonder, if I hadn’t been brought back there? If the president’s decision about me hadn’t made people start questioning her, and all the other decisions she’d made—including the one to take Seth in?
“Things are much more dangerous there now,” she says, as if reading my thoughts, “but at the time, I thought his life would be more stable with her. I didn’t want this for him—this running and hiding constantly, and having to worry about me.”
“But how did you know you could trust her?”
“I would trust her with my own life.” She takes another slow sip of her tea. “We were very close, once upon a time. She was with me when I first found Seth, when he truly was alone and abandoned, and a very sick orphan.”
“So you’re not actually his mother either?”
“I didn’t carry him inside of me, if that’s what you’re asking.” She looks up from her cup and fixes me with a hard look. “There would be no Seth without me, though. Because his origin was nearly dead by the time we brought him back to the lab. And there was no one else who cared enough about him to try to keep his life going. Even at the lab, everyone else was afraid to do what I did so aggressively—we hadn’t perfected the cloning procedure at that point, and there was still a lot we didn’t understand. But I had to take a chance on him.”
“And he was the perfect candidate to take chances with, wasn’t he?” I say stiffly. “A dying orphan who no one would miss.”
“I didn’t see it that way. Neither did Jacqueline. She was one of the few people who supported my growing attachment to him, and she helped me push our team to do what we had to do to create a new, healthy and thriving version of Seth. This was a different Jacqueline Cross from the one you know, of course. This was back when she believed she still had her own personal stake in making cloning successful.”
“Because she was sick.”
If she’s surprised that I know this, she doesn’t show it the way Seth did. “Yes. Sick, and a new mother to a son whose father made it all the way to the last days of the war only to die in a plane crash on his way home. So the future was more than a little uncertain for her. Cloning offered her control that none of us seemed to have back in those days.”
“What happened to make her change her mind, though? Why did she start the CCA?”
Her eyes, so open and warm up until now, cloud with sudden reluctance. “Well, we didn’t really have the control over cloning that we thought we did, did we?” She is staring at the cup in her hands, as if she expects it to answer her. “We thought we’d worked everything out, and she was more desperate than most for that certainty that we wanted cloning to offer. So Jaxon was part of the group of newborns that we used to create what should have been the first successful ‘batch’ of clones. That was our idea of success, you know: to be able to create a clone who started life and grew with its origin, so that they would be a truly interchangeable copy.”
“Well? What happened? Why did you say this group ‘should have been’ successful?”
She grips the cup more tightly. “There are differences, complications, when you try to clone a baby that has yet to be born, as we did with Jaxon’s group. Complications that you don’t encounter when taking your ‘materials’—if you’ll forgive my use of that word—from an older child such as Seth’s origin. The clones we made of these newborns didn’t develop the way their origin counterparts did. They mutated strangely, and their bodies rejected the artificial minds we’d built them. . . .”
She trails off, and every other noise in the room—the humming from the ancient refrigerator in the corner, the wind gently rattling the screen of the window, the steady rise and fall of Angie’s heel in a slow, rhythmic tapping against the floor—sounds infinitely louder.
“So what happened to them?” I ask, even though I know I won’t like the answer.
Her eyes are shining when they meet mine. “Gone, now,” she says.
I squirm uncomfortably under her gaze.
“And losing your child in the horrific way we had to lose those children—even if they were only copies—is enough to make anyone start rethinking their choices. To drive them to some extreme reactions. So let’s not judge her too harshly for the choices she’s made or the things she’s created since then.” She rises to her feet, starts to clean up the mess she made from brewing her tea. “I went to my own extremes after that too. It was after that when I began to work obsessively on perfecting the programs that I hoped would give us the control over any new clones that we didn’t have with that first group. And Seth doesn’t remember all the ways I used him to help my research, but that doesn’t change the fact that I did it. It doesn’t change the fact that the boy you know is yet another version of Seth’s origin, another new body ‘born’ after that horrific incident with the first group of newborns. I could have left him alone. He was developing well enough at that point; there was no reason to recreate him—except to benefit my own obsessive research. I wanted to study his early development again. I told myself I could create a more perfect clone, that I was pursuing something bigger, something that would benefit so many, and I—”
“The clone that was already developed ‘well enough’,” I interrupt. “What happened to him?”
“Stasis.” She says the word very carefully, as though she might break herself getting it out. “And then I don’t know. I heard a rumor that the body was destroyed some years later.”
It was more than a body, I want to say.
But I can’t find my voice. Not as I am sitting here in the third version of my own body.
She finishes washing her cup and the teakettle in the sink but keeps the water running, staring absently at it long after she’s put the dishes aside to dry.
“Seth told me you thought he was being stupid for helping me, for trusting me,” she finally says, walking back and sitting down across from me again. “And so I’m glad you came to talk to me—I hoped you would, and I thought explaining all of this might help you understand why he does trust me, but you know what? Honestly, I think I agree with you. I only came out of hiding to make sure he was okay, and I guess because some selfish part of me wanted him to know I existed. I had this idea that maybe he would leave with me, and we could go someplace far away, start over someplace new. But I forgot, somehow, that he already had a home here. He doesn’t need to start over. He doesn’t need me.”
“You were right about him needing to leave the CCA, though. Whether to run away with you or someone else.”
“I appreciate you saying that.”
“I’m not saying it for your sake,” I assure her. “Only stating facts.”
She laughs softly. “Fair enough,” she says. “I’m not sure I’ve made things any better for him; he won’t leave the city, and as long as they know I’m here, Huxley is going to keep after me. And for reasons I’m not quite sure I understand, Seth has decided he needs to stick around to protect me.”
“Because you’re his family,” I say, surprising myself. “The reason he’s alive, at least. For better or worse.” It sounds like something Catelyn would say, not me.
I am still carrying pieces of her with me, it seems, even though I never really meant to.
“For better or worse,” Angie repeats slowly. She doesn’t look like she quite believes the words, and I’m not sure I do either, but neither of us tries to take them back. We sit in silence and give them a chance to sink in instead. I let my mind shift back to Catelyn. I know she would readily believe the silly, sentimental thing I just said. It’s why I had to contact her, after all—because I would never be able to convince her, I don’t think, that I am not her family, regardless of how I got here. So she will always worry, just as Seth worries about Angie.
Family is a messy thing no matter how it’s put together, I suppose.
And she may not be Seth’s actual mother, but I’m still convinced, now, that the messy bond between the two of them is reason enough for me to trust her.
“I need your help with something,” I say.
“Oh?”
“I had an idea. But it is . . . it won’t be easy. Impossible, maybe.”
“They told us the same thing about cloning,” she says with a little smile. “And then about the mind-control program I was writing, and then—”
“That program is what I wanted to ask you about, actually.”
Her smile disappears.
I hurry on before she can try to derail the subject. “Would it be possible to create something that . . . rewrote it, somehow?”
“Like a virus, you mean?”
“Something like that, yes. One that disables the program, maybe, the way you disabled the program in Seth, and the way it’s been disabled in me, so that Huxley can’t control us anymore. It would have to be something that acted on its own once it was introduced into the host brain of the other clones we were trying to free, but that should be doable, right?”
She considers it for a long moment. “Theoretically? Yes. Between me and Leah, we could likely manage to write something like that.” She still looks skeptical, though—as if she is waiting for me to tell her I am kidding about all of this.
Instead I ask, “But would you?” That excitement that was humming in my veins earlier is filling my voice now, almost overwhelming it to the point that my words tremble. I can’t remember ever feeling anything like this before.
And Angie looks cautiously intrigued at least, if not entirely optimistic. “I don’t know, Violet,” she says quietly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like that. A lot of sleepless nights wondering how things would have been different if I never had.”
“But if it’s for the right reasons—”
“That’s the difficult thing, though, isn’t it?” Her fingers are splayed out on the table in front of her, and all of her focus seems to be on the spaces between them. “We can’t see the future, how the choices we make will eventually play out. So how do we know what’s right and wrong?”
It is the exact same uneasiness that has made me so unsure of myself since the moment I decided to confront President Cross. An uncertainty that I thought was thanks to my short life and strange beginning, but now I’m not so sure, because here is a woman who has had at least fifty years to overcome this uneasiness but hasn’t managed it yet.
So maybe it never goes away, and maybe part of being human is doing things even in spite of uncertainty.
“You regret what you did, don’t you?”
She doesn’t take her eyes off her hands.
“This could be your chance to undo it. To undo Huxley, the CCA—all of it.”
The last part makes her look up at me, at least. “You weren’t joking when you said this idea was likely impossible, were you?”
“I’m not really the joking type.” She chuckles a bit, nods, and then starts to stand. But she freezes halfway up. She braces her arms against the edge of the table, and with her eyes staring straight ahead, she says, “You would have to find a way to upload this hypothetical virus into each of the clones’ brain.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m working on it. I have ideas.”
She nods again but doesn’t press me for details.
I don’t know if that means she is agreeing to my plan or not, but I remind myself that there is a limit to how much a human brain can absorb at once; I’ve seen it with Catelyn, who is stronger under pressure than most, I think, but who would likely still look just as overwhelmed in thought as Angie does right now. So I don’t say anything else. She hasn’t really agreed to help me, maybe, but for now, the fact that she is clearly thinking about it is close enough.
And there is one more person I need to focus on convincing, anyway.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
At the edge of the woods, sitting in the shadow of an oak tree with my back against its trunk, I am waiting.
And in my peripheral vision, I see him arrive within an hour of my being out here: a lone figure in the almost-twilight, walking toward the house. A dense fog rolled in earlier, following a late afternoon thunderstorm. It lingers now and obscures his features, but I don’t need to see his face to recognize him. My brain has memorized the way Seth moves, the same way it has memorized every other detail about him.
He left sometime in the night, before I had a chance to talk to him about everything I discussed with Angie, and he told nobody where he was going—so I have been waiting all day for him to come back, mind racing, body teeming with anxious energy.
Twenty minutes after he disappears into the house, it’s started to drizzle. My eyes are closed—helping me focus more completely on the calming sensation of the fine mist stinging my skin—so I hear Seth before I see him, in slow footsteps sucking in and out of the mud until they finally come to a stop a few feet away from me.
“Leah said you were waiting to talk to me?” He sounds more tired than I expected. For a moment I consider waiting until later to attempt to test my blackouts, and letting him be for now. But then I look up. I see him staring down at me through eyes wide awake, and wearing his usual half grin. “Also, I don’t know if you noticed,” he says, “but it’s raining. You probably could have waited inside.”
I stand and stretch. “Not enough room inside.”
His head tilts sideways, questioning.
I answer by launching myself at him, my fist drawing back and punching. He catches it just centimeters from his face, but the force of it is still strong enough to send him sliding and stumbling backward in the mud.
“What in the actual hell do you think you’re doing?” he de
mands, shoving my fist from his face and then twisting just in time to avoid my follow-up swing.
“I want to test something.”
“Are you testing to see if you’re insane? Because if so, congratulations”—he grabs both my arms, clenches them in a bracing, stopping grip—“you are. You pass with flying colors.”
I jerk out of his grip with some difficulty, back off, and narrow my eyes at him. It looks as if this might be harder than I thought. He glances toward the house. I step around him and block his line of sight to it. And then, because I know he’s no better at turning down a challenge than I am, I say, “Afraid to fight me, Seth?”
His smile is as relaxed as ever, but the muscles in his arms and chest—more visible thanks to the rain soaking his shirt against them—tense, just slightly. “I don’t hit girls,” he says.
“I suppose I’ll just have to kill you, then.”
“Are you flirting with me?” He cocks an eyebrow. “Casual death threats . . . it’s a bold strategy, but I think I like it.”
My fist connects this time. It just grazes his jaw as he attempts to roll out of my path, not a hard hit, but he’s still holding the side of his face when I dive after him again, and maybe he’s still stunned, too, because this hit also lands: a solid punch straight into his stomach.
His smile looks a lot more strained all of a sudden, and a dark, dangerous irritation flashes in his eyes.
Perfect.
Because if this is going to work, I need to convince my mind that he poses some sort of threat.
When I dive at him this time, he’s more prepared. He catches me by the arms as before, only this time, he holds tighter when I try to break free. We push against each other, a deadlocked struggle of inhuman strength, feet scrambling for traction and kicking up flecks of mud.
We’re evenly matched enough that this pushing could go on indefinitely.
It doesn’t, though.
Because he flinches.
Just a split second—but it’s long enough.
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