“So, where exactly are we heading with this virus?” I ask.
Leah moves, somewhat reluctantly, to my side. “Let’s see. . . .” Her finger slides along the screen. “I would try here first. It was a small computer lab, just used for minor record keeping and such; the information will have been backed up to some sort of remote server, of course, so they’ll already have it—but this sort of thing wouldn’t have been as vital for them to physically secure as, say, the original memory files for their clones. So they might not have moved the computers yet, and they’ll likely still be wired into Huxley’s closed network. Of course, that’s also assuming that said computers weren’t destroyed when so much of the building was.”
“So, basically, there’s like a five percent chance of us uploading and unleashing the virus this way?” Seth asks.
“More like a one percent chance, when you consider the number of people from Huxley still swarming around that place, the surveillance cameras they’ve set up, the teams they’re sending in to retrieve and secure this stuff. . . . The building’s not exactly what I’d call abandoned, no matter what the city officials are saying.” She laughs humorlessly. “Oh, and there are those city officials to worry about too. They’ve marked the site as hazardous—got all their pretty and bright little no-trespassing signs stuck up all over the place, as I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’ve been by there.”
“So, essentially, this is next to impossible?” I ask. Leah shrugs, that light her eyes held earlier diminished a bit. But Seth flashes me a small smile.
“Impossible games are my favorite kind,” he says.
• • •
We wait until it is almost dark before we say our good-byes to the rest of the house. Or until Seth says his good-byes, at least. I just stand in the corner watching. He brings a blanket to Angela, where she sits on a beat-up old sofa in the corner, and reassures her one last time that we can do this. That he and I, with the help of the team back here and the loads of equipment they have set us up with, are more than capable of doing this.
She says she believes him, but even from my distant corner I can see the worry lining her brow, and the way she wrings the blanket over and over in her hands, unwrapping herself every time Seth tries to cover her up and make her comfortable. With my perfect hearing, I have heard every one of the five times that Seth has told her we have to go. And when she looks in my direction, and very quietly asks me to come here, I hear that, too.
I wish I hadn’t.
I can’t ignore her now, though. So while Seth double-checks our equipment one last time, I move to her side.
“Promise me you’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid to get himself killed, will you?” she says. “I want you both back here alive.”
I nod.
“Violet?”
“Yes?” I’ve already started to turn around, hoping I can escape before she asks me to make any more promises I am not sure I can keep.
“Both of you,” she says.
• • •
Outside, the bitterly cold night air stings my cheeks and nose.
“What did she want to say to you?” Seth asks.
I shake my head, but he keeps talking anyway as we climb into the car Tori is loaning us.
“She thinks I’m going to get myself killed,” Seth says as I pull the door shut. “The woman has no faith in me, I swear.”
“She’s just worried. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right?” I have never known anyone I felt like I could call mother, whether by blood or otherwise, but I still understand the concept. And after spending the past two months with Seth and Angie, I can see that however they got here, however unorthodox their circumstances, mother is exactly what they both see her as. For better or worse.
Which may be why I still feel the weight of her words, draped like a heavy chain around my neck, as we drive through the city.
I wonder how she would handle it if something really did happen to him?
I am glad, at least for a moment, that I don’t have anyone to call mother. It’s bad enough that I have to consider the weight of Catelyn’s worry whenever I do anything; if I cared anything about the ones she calls “our” parents, then I think the weight might be enough to crush me into never doing anything at all. How do humans survive with all these ties to each other, tangling them up and tying them down? I’m better off with only eight months’ worth of those ties, maybe.
For a moment I think that. And then it passes, and I hear Angie’s voice in my head again.
Both of you.
It took far less than eight months for her to decide that I was worth worrying about. And the thought of that makes my stomach twist, because I don’t know how I should have reacted to it, even after all these weeks I’ve spent living under the same roof as her. Because it calls for a human response, maybe—not one of those cold calculations that I remain undeniably better at, no matter how much I interact with the “real people,” as Seth jokingly calls them.
So many cloning opponents call us machines that can’t be trusted, that could not possibly understand the intricacies and complexities that come with being truly alive. The truth, though, is that right now I wish I were a machine. I wish I could have stayed where I was during my first months, in my cave in the dark underground of the CCA, where I thought of no one but me and my days were more simple, mechanical.
But humans have this tendency to reach toward light, toward answers, and to those intricate and complex things. And for something created in a laboratory, I lately feel all too human.
We park a few miles from the burned-out Huxley compound, in the near-empty parking lot of an old elementary school, and walk the rest of the way. Even along this dark, poorly lit street, I’m still worried that someone might recognize me, so we move slowly, as casually as possible; as long as we don’t draw any second glances, we hope anybody who sees us will dismiss Seth and me as two perfectly normal people, on our way home from dinner or shopping or whatever other perfectly-normal-people thing we might have been out doing.
We continue to look normal, right up until we reach the department store adjacent to the old Huxley compound. I’ve purposely stopped short of the front of the building, well out of sight of the main gate, where Josh stood that night, and Seth doesn’t question it. There might be an easier way in on the other side, but we won’t be going around to check.
The moment the sidewalk and street are clear of possible prying eyes, we jump to a window ledge, to a brightly striped awning, and then finally to the rooftop. We move on crouched legs across it until we find the vantage point that Leah pointed out to us on the old aerial photographs she pulled from a public data website before we left. Between that and the diagrams of the interior we viewed on the laptop, we have a clear idea of where the records room should be, and with the aid of night-vision binoculars, we can see it from here.
“It looks like it’s still somewhat intact,” Seth says.
He’s right; the bricks around the record room’s windows are a darker, burned-out shade of black, but compared to many of the other wings we can see from here—which range from only skeletal interior support beams, to some corners that have been completely demolished into nothing but ash and rubble—our target corner looks like it could be part of a brand-new building.
“Hopefully Leah was right about where we needed to go,” I say.
Seth nods. “And hopefully they haven’t moved things around since she left.”
We determine that staying low along the rooftops is our best chance of going undetected, and will make for the best head start if we need to make a quick escape. The distance between the two buildings is too far for even us to jump, though, so we find a portion of the department store’s overgrown rooftop garden area that looms above a reasonably stable-looking portion of Huxley’s roof. While I keep watch for people in the dark alley between the buildings below, Seth digs out the specially designed grappling hook we packed. He aims it at a recess against Huxley’s roof th
at, judging by the shattered glass around it, used to be either a skylight or some sort of solar-energy panel.
The gun fires and releases the cable coiled within it surprisingly quietly—which is a good thing, because it takes three tries before Seth manages to latch securely enough onto the recess. Once he’s managed that, I cut and tie the loose end of the cable around the metal guardrail along this rooftop’s edge, pulling it taut. We hook on and zipline across, two dark blurs descending silently onto what’s left of the once-grand Huxley laboratory compound.
“This thing is cool,” Seth says, pushing the gun farther back into his pack, better securing it. “It makes me feel like a spy.” He then grabs a pair of cutters from the side pouch and snips the cable that carried us down here, letting it fall back against the department store and out of plain sight. The slap of it against one of the lower windows echoes through the alley and makes me wince.
“The world’s loudest spy, apparently,” I say.
We’re both deathly quietly from that moment on, except for the words we risk to warn each other of dangerous bits of the path beneath us. There are places where the scorch-marked roof has started collapsing in on itself, where it looks as though one misstep might finish the job and take us with it. Other places have already been cleared, and these open spaces of the building are even more nerve racking because I keep expecting to see people in them, where all they would have to do is look up and they would have a clear shot at Seth and me. And while we see no people, at least for now, we do see the occasional camera that has obviously been installed to provide functioning security for the contents of the defunct building. We expected this—and so we have the transmission-jamming equipment to give us at least brief protection from it—but it still slows us down, because we have to make sure we see the cameras before they see us.
It takes an agonizingly long, tense amount of time to pick our way back to the room we came for. When we finally reach it, things don’t look as promising as they did from the distance; the skylight above the room is blown out, scorch marks smudged on the roof around the rectangular recess. When we shine a flashlight into the space below, we see a soot-colored, alien landscape filled with hollowed and burnt and melted things.
It takes some searching, but eventually our light falls on a couple of computers in the corner that look like they have escaped most of the damage. Just two, in a room scattered with the remains of what looks like dozens.
We drop down through the opening. It’s a high enough fall that we probably should have used a cable to climb down; my legs jar for a moment when they slam into the concrete slab flooring. Now that we’re here in this concentrated space, the smells are almost overwhelming: acrid chemicals, old smoke. The lingering scent of burnt plastic and fried electrical wires. And all of it wrapped in a damp mustiness from recent rains and the lack of a proper roof above.
I give my head a small shake, as if I could shake all these scents out of my nose. As if I could throw off the eerie feeling that being in this burned-out shell, kicking my way through the ashes of things unrecognizable, brings with it.
There is something so . . . final about those ashes. A destruction so total that whatever it was can’t be put back together again. Not even the way I was.
Fire would be a complete, uncomplicated way to go, at least.
“This is weird,” Seth says, opening one of the two bags Tori packed for us and starting to pull things out of it.
“What is?”
“Being back here. Especially after what happened the last time we were in this place.”
I pull my own pack from my shoulder and drop it at his feet. “You know I’ll have to take your word for that.”
“I know. And that makes it even weirder,” he says. “That there’s nothing, right? You don’t remember a single thing about this place or what happened here.”
The question annoys me—it always has, every time he or Catelyn or anybody else has asked it, thinking that maybe if they just kept prying, then maybe they could uncover my long-lost memories. As though I have never tried to do it myself. I am tired of explaining to people that the old Violet is just not there. That she never will be.
So I don’t answer him this time; I just pull out the power-generating device that was in my bag, take it to the more intact-looking of the two computers left in the room, and start trying to turn that computer on. It takes switching out its power cord—which looks like it’s been chewed in half by some sort of rodent—with another from an otherwise completely destroyed computer, and then wrapping that new power cord over several times with electrical tape, but then it finally happens: The small LED bulb beneath the monitor turns a faint, welcome shade of green. The top left half of the screen is cracked, and the display in that section is jumpy and covered in strange blots and lines of color. Other than that, though, it all works much better than we could have hoped for.
I take the video communicator out next, and Seth and I crouch down and position the camera so that Leah and Angela will have a clear view of the screen. I let him work out how to establish the connection back to them. He works at it in silence for a minute, but it’s clear by the foggy look in his eyes that his concentration isn’t fully on it.
“It’s weird that you don’t remember anything that happened here,” he says, once he notices me staring impatiently at him.
“Yes. We’ve established that.”
“But better, maybe.” The words escape slowly from his mouth, as if he tried to hang on to them but didn’t quite manage it.
Shock makes my words come even slower than his. “What did you just say?”
I don’t think I have ever seen anything like regret on Seth’s face, but the look in his eyes now comes close. They are filled with silent apologies, and I don’t understand them any more than I understand what he said, and it makes me shake with anger and disgust.
“You think this is better?” I say. “My eight-month life, instead of everything I had before? Everything I lost?”
“You might not want some of those things, is all I meant.”
“Well, lucky me then, right?”
“I never said you were lucky,” he says softly, and those apology-eyes meet mine, and suddenly I can’t stand to be so close to him anymore.
I rise up, brush the ashes from my knees and feet.
“Sometimes,” he calls to my retreating back, “I think it would have been easier if all the stuff with Angie had never happened, if everything about me from before the president found me had been lost and stayed lost. I know it would have been easier, actually.”
I don’t want to, but I look back. “But would it have been better?” I ask.
And he has nothing to say to that.
“We are not the same,” I say.
No one is the same as me, and no one ever will be.
Not even him.
“I’m going to go keep watch,” I say, and then point him back to the computer. “Don’t take all night about this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It does take practically all night.
It takes so long, in fact, that several times I think I doze off without realizing it, because I keep snapping to attention and turning to see Seth in a different position, working on a different screen from the one I swear he was just at. It took hours to simply break our way into the computer. And now that he’s in, with the guidance of Angie’s and Leah’s crackling voices over the old video communicator, Seth has already spent several more trying to bypass security walls that are keeping him from running our virus-containing program.
But finally, just after daylight breaks through the tiny opening in the ceiling above, Seth finally stops cursing at the computer. With a note of disbelief in his voice, I hear him tell the communicator: “It’s installing.”
“Perfect,” Angie says. “Once it’s done, you’ll have to run it manually, but then you get the hell out of there. It should do the rest on its own.”
He nods.
Things h
ave gone much more smoothly than I thought they would.
I move to pack up the gear as Seth finishes with it, still not looking at him. I haven’t looked at him, or spoken more than a handful of words to him, since last night. I just want to pretend that conversation between us never happened. I just want to finish this, and get on with my plan, and then maybe cut ties with Seth and everyone else as much as possible, once this is all over.
Because I think I am better off alone.
I always was, and I am not sure what made me forget that. Life is so much less confusing alone.
My hand is reaching for my backpack when an electronic screech—one so loud I swear I feel it rattling my teeth—comes over the communicator. I jerk my eyes toward the screen.
Angie and Leah are both still there, but they aren’t looking into the camera anymore.
Then something knocks the camera over.
Another squeal, and I decide it sounds like some sort of audio interference. Once my ears stop ringing from it, I hear their voices still, even though we can’t see them anymore. They sound like they’re getting farther away.
And I could swear I hear other voices too. Ones I don’t recognize.
“What’s going on?” Seth demands, picking up the communicator and pulling it right up to his face, as if it might bring their voices closer to him again. A jumble of voices and static is the only reply at first. Then a few words break through: his name, first. And then what sounds like, “Don’t come back.”
We both stare at the screen for a moment, holding our breath. The audio goes silent. No voices. No static. No anything. Seth’s fingers fly frantically over his own personal communicator, calling first Angie and then Leah. Neither answers.
“We need to get back.” He starts shoving everything around him into his pack, not taking the time to look at any of it. “Now. We can try this again later, once—”
“Did you not hear what I did just now? They said don’t come back. Are you just going to ignore that?”
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