Mirror X

by Karri Thompson

  “That’s not the point. They kept information from us. How are we supposed to trust them if they’re not honest with us?”

  “I trust them.”

  “Well, I don’t. I don’t think I ever will.” I blinked away a tear.

  “Come on, Cass. It will be okay,” he whispered, his voice soft and melodic. Pulling me into a loose hug, his chin resting on my shoulder, he proceeded to sing me a song of hope, a song of love, a lullaby paying tribute to the gift of life. Singing me a song was something I could never imagine David Casper doing.

  “That was beautiful, Travel,” I said as we parted.

  “My mom used to sing that song to me when I was little. She died last year from liver and kidney failure right here in this hospital. Her last transplants didn’t take.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. What about your father? Does he live near here?”

  “Not anymore. He died when I was twelve.” Travel dropped his head.

  “From what?”

  “Bad genes. You name it—he had it. He was sick for a really long time, so sick that when my parents applied for a second child, they were almost denied because of my father’s health.”

  “So you have a—”

  “Brother. His name is Trail. He doesn’t live in this region. He’s in Region Three, Sector Nine. That’s where we were born and raised.”

  “Region Three, Sector Nine. That has to be Australia. I recognize your accent.”

  “I don’t have an accent.”

  “Yeah, you do.” I smiled, walking to the couch and sitting down.

  “After my father died, I was really depressed,” he said, taking a seat across from me. “I hated the world and got into a lot of trouble at home and at school. I should have been there for Trail. I should have been the responsible older brother, but I wasn’t. He had a hard time growing up under my bad reputation. Anyway, once Mom died, we just kind of stopped calling each other. I should call him, though. He’s probably pretty lonely. He’s not married and doesn’t have any kids. The last I heard, his dog was his best friend.”

  No bloodlines, no bond. For the pre-plague world, genetic lines established royalty and leadership. They designated heirs and guided wills. They predicted appearance, intelligence, and athletic ability. A pregnant woman wondered if her baby was going to have her own delicate features or get stuck with Uncle Bob’s large nose. Everything was different for a clone, but now that I was here, Travel was going to experience those things.

  As much as I loathed what was happening to me, I was happy for him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My belly looked a little bigger today. This morning, Dr. Stanley Leo, the project’s official ob-gyn, told me I was in my fourteenth week and then spent the next two hours educating me on the stages of pregnancy, labor, and delivery.

  Other than an increase in my appetite, I still didn’t feel any different. Knowing there was a little being inside of me wasn’t enough to seal the hollow pit in my stomach from missing my world and knowing the duty I was supposed to fulfill during my second chance at life.

  Though in the last two weeks I’d appeared more complacent, my role as a brood mare accepted, inside I was burning for justice and trying to kindle a love for the baby I didn’t want. The only thing I could do was accept my responsibility to my unborn child and try to be a good mother during and then after my pregnancy. I had to keep myself as physically healthy and emotionally intact as possible—if not for me, then for my baby.

  As the days passed, Travel and I spent a fair amount of time together hanging out in each other’s apartments, eating meals we ordered from Bon Appetite or listening to music, and every day, we’d take an A.G.-lift to the GenH1 Café.

  “Ready?” he asked one early morning through a yawn.

  “Ready.”

  Still a bit groggy, he leaned against the inside of the lift and crossed his arms.

  “After you.” He gestured.

  The café was crowded as always, but we managed to find a small table in the center of the room and place our order within minutes. “Caramel berry latte and a caffeine-free mocha,” repeated the SERVE.

  While we waited for our coffees, he leaned his elbow on the table, rested his head in his palm, and a strand of his wavy hair fell across his nose to dance in time with his silent breathing.

  Our drinks arrived, but Travel didn’t stir, and when I moved his latte closer so he could smell it, he remained still while the rising stream left a damp spot on his cheek.

  “Wake up,” I said playfully, scooping a dab of whipped cream from my coffee and dotting it on the end of his nose.

  His eyes jerked open, and he sat up. “Hey, what are you doing?” He laughed, grabbed a napkin, and before I could dodge it, a smear of whipped cream met its target on the point of my chin.

  “You brat,” I said, giving him a happy punch on the shoulder.

  “Hey, you started it.”

  The hard scrape of chair legs broke my laughter, and when I turned, I saw Michael, alone, pushing up from a table in the corner. His eyes shifted from mine, his face like stone, and he turned his body sideways to avoid our table and exit out an opposite door.

  Outside of the brief meeting in the hall, it was the first time I’d seen him since our argument in my apartment. His cold stare and jealous eyes rekindled my anger. I didn’t expect him to be waiting outside the café for me.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked, catching my upper arm with his hand. Travel, standing there oblivious with a welcoming grin on his face, was the only thing that kept me from jerking my arm away and shouting “no.”

  “Alone?” he added, and let go of me.

  “Sure, um, I’ll catch up with you later,” I said to Travel, smiling to hide my nerves.

  “What do you want?” I asked sternly after we walked to an empty corner in the hospital’s atrium.

  “I need to talk to you. I need to tell you how sorry I am.”

  “I know you’re sorry,” I snapped. “And that doesn’t change anything.”

  He shook his head. “You have no idea how I feel about you, do you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Seeing you two together kills me. I can’t stand it.” The arch of his eyebrows disappeared and his forehead wrinkled.

  “Then you shouldn’t have impregnated me with his baby,” I said in a cold whisper.

  “That’s something I wanted before you were awakened, not something I want now. You’re making a family with him. Do you really think I want that?”

  His misty eyes stopped me from rolling mine, but at the same time, his words worked their way into my heart.

  “I’m not ready to talk about this. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. Right now I need to focus on her,” I said, dropping my eyes to my stomach. “Please, I need to go.”

  I walked forward, but he took a sidestep, blocking me, his shoulder at my chest. On his next breath, we were touching. “Not yet, please. Just give me a chance,” he said softly. He set one hand against the side of my face. His gentle touch was enough to slow the momentum of my anger. “Please,” he urged.

  “I—” But his lips stopped my words.

  “No,” I said, backing away. “You can’t keep doing this to me. Please, just leave me alone. There’s nothing more to talk about.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw his head drop as I dashed away to find Travel in his apartment.

  I enjoyed spending time with Travel, but most of the time all I wanted was to be alone exploring in the botanical garden. The garden rescued me from the artificial light of my apartment, and the ridiculous, government-produced sitcoms he liked to watch with me. Working on my “dig” kept my mind focused on a specific task and kept away memories of my family and friends from the twenty-first century.

  There was only one thing it couldn’t do—make me temporarily forget there was a little person growing inside of me, especially when I’d sit to take a break and find myself relaxing with my palms against the barely not
iceable bulge of my stomach.

  One afternoon when I couldn’t stand to watch one more episode of “Life is Precious,” I grabbed a sweatshirt and headed to the botanical garden for some special me time.It was the perfect day to dig. The sun was high in the sky, poking its warm rays into the building and as the wind picked up, it whistled through the building’s slats like a whimsical chorus of birds.

  “Hi, Cassie,” came a voice when I was in the middle of exposing another layer of adobe.

  “Hey, I never expected to see you here.”

  “Why?” asked Magnum. His biceps flexed as he set down a large cardboard box.

  “Because no one ever comes here. I invited Ella once, but she said being here would make her relive what happened to her all over again. Dr. Love, Kale, and Travel keep telling me they want to see my dig, but so far my only company has been these two.” I pointed to the SEC and GROW, who was pulling weeds from a hanging planter.

  “Well, I like it here. I mean, I’ve never seen a stubby little palm like that one before.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s a sago palm, although it really isn’t a palm. It’s in the cycad family, cycas revoluta. Cycads flourished through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.”

  “Wow, that’s cool.” He laughed. “Did I use the word correctly?”

  “Yeah, cycads are cool. At least they are to me.”

  “I brought you something.” Kicking the box with his toe, he popped open the lid. He lifted a small pickax out of the box and handed it to me, followed by a camping shovel and a thick-bristled paintbrush.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked, fingering the tip of the pickax.

  “You know me. I have my ways.” He smiled and his face dimpled.

  “Now, you do know that I’m not allowed to have these, right? Dr. Little doesn’t want me to overexert myself before, during, or even after my pregnancy. GROW wouldn’t even lend me a hand trowel, and yesterday when I tried to break into the tool shed, that stupid SEC stopped me and even told him about it. So basically, I’ve had to resort to what I can find in my kitchen.” I lifted a dull spoon.

  “You won’t have to worry about a SEC taking away any of these tools. I’ve changed their codes. Bots recognize objects through the item’s engrained code rather than sensory means such as shape, size, and color. To that SEC and GROW over there, that pickax is an L-Pen, and that shovel is a fork—two items you’re allowed to have.” His dimples grew.

  “Thank you so much. You’re awesome,” I said, tossing the pickax to the ground and throwing my arms around his neck and shoulders.

  “You’re welcome.” We held on to each other for so long that letting go was a little awkward.

  “Show me what you do out here all day.”

  Pulling him by the hand, I led him to my makeshift “dig,” a twelve by eight section of earth with four rows of stacked brick sticking out from it.

  “These bricks are handmade from sand, clay, and straw. They were shaped using a frame and then set out to dry in the sun. This is part of a wall from a small dwelling, and look what I’ve found,” I said, picking up a piece of broken pottery. “It’s from a clay pot. I’m hoping to find the rest of it. It’s a good thing this building was constructed before obscuras were mandatory, or I wouldn’t have gotten this far with the excavation.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be a while before Dr. Little finds out what you’re doing. He sent the order for a technology upgrade the day you requested unlimited access to this building, but I keep finding reasons to put it off. You know how busy I am.” He grinned.

  “Thanks. I really appreciate that.”

  He found a spot next to me on a patch of fresh dirt and watched as I tried out my new tool by hacking away at the base of the adobe brick.

  “I’m so glad you’re here and that we’re friends. You’re like the brother I never had.”

  “Thanks. Like a brother, I’ll always be there for you, you know that, right?”

  “Yeah, I do.” That was Magnum, true blue and always with a trick up his sleeve.

  He lifted the empty box, folding and flattening it until it was easily held in one hand.

  “Thanks again for the equipment,” I called out as he made his way to the door.

  “No problem. That’s what brothers do.” Through the lath, I watched him trot back into GenH1 and disappear behind a sliding door.

  He was cute, cool, dashing, and daring. He was James Dean, but my love for him was sisterly, built on a foundation of trust and respect for one another.

  I was so lonely. I wanted somebody. I needed somebody to love and love me back, but at this point, Michael couldn’t be that person—not with all of his deceptions. Even if we made up, it was against protocol.

  I sank to my knees and used the brush Magnum brought me to sweep the dirt away from a piece of adobe.

  “Hey, Cass,” came a voice from over my shoulder. It was Travel.

  “What are you doing here?” I teased.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every time I ask you if you want to join me, you come up with some kind of lame excuse why you can’t,” I said, giving his arm a playful punch.

  “Oh.” He laughed. “Actually, I’ve wanted to come every time, but I know you come here when you want to be alone, so, you know, I wanted to give you that space.”

  “Thanks, that’s really sweet of you.”

  He smiled like he was embarrassed by my compliment.

  “So, um, what’s made today any different?”

  “Today I have something for you, something for your dig.” From behind his back, he produced a small shovel and pickax made from kitchen utensils. “I converted the laser burner on my stove into a welder and cutter, so I could machine and then connect the parts. Then I turned one of JAN’s spare rotary brushes into a grinder and smoothed all of the rough edges. Since they’re made from objects you’re allowed to have, the bots won’t recognize them and take them away.”

  “That’s amazing. How did you know how to do that?”

  “I was going to school to be a mechanical engineer before I joined the project.”

  Travel’s life of clone normalcy, a life full of goals and dreams, was taken away from him, too. But at least his was replaced with something he wanted.

  I took the pickax first and examined every detail, how each weld was ground flush to its counterpart, how much care was taken to shape the pick at both ends.

  “These are incredible. This must have taken you forever to make.”

  “Not quite.” He chuckled. “But it did take…” His smile died as he peeked over my shoulder. “Oh, I guess you already have real tools.”

  Magnum’s presents were visible despite a camouflage of dust and dirt. “Yeah, um, Magnum came across those somewhere and brought them to me…” He dropped his head. “But they’re actually too big for most jobs. These will be perfect for tight areas. This was so thoughtful of you. I’m trying to reconstruct the remains of a clay jar that I found. These tools will help me do that.”

  But the flicker of happiness didn’t return to his eyes. I set down the pick and pushed his fallen hair away from his forehead. “The fact that you made them makes them even more special.” I pulled him in for a deep hug. Surrounded by conifers, ginkgophytes, and ferns, we held each other until my eyes were moist, and I drew away. “You’re a good friend. I’m glad you’re my baby’s father,” I said. And I was.

  All smells bothered me, but the smell that offended my pregnant body the most was the one coming from that old factory behind the botanical garden.

  …

  With a gust of wind on an afternoon a week later, the building’s slats rattled, and the strange odor wafted by me again, sharp and pungent, a combination of motor oil and something else, something familiar, but I couldn’t place it. After I uncovered another square foot of my dig, the smell re-entered the building on a billowing breeze and lingered. Ella said that place contained some kind of pit, and with that memory, I recognized the dull stench�
��something like a house being reroofed on a hot summer’s day. Tar. A pit of tar?

  My heart hoppity-hopped as I pulled my Liaison from my back pocket and hit the screen with my fingertips, bringing up a map of the area to the east of the botanical garden. Another series of taps produced an identical map from my century. A last hit superimposed one map upon the other.

  Oh my God! No wonder why it was still there. It was a natural phenomenon impossible to destroy.

  I dropped my pickax and stood, wiping my hands on the butt of my jeans. I had to see it. Why not? It was part of the compound. I was allowed anywhere in the compound as long as a bot followed. My SEC escort turned toward me, and its glass eyes flashed.

  The sun was high in the sky. I shaded my eyes with my hand and glared at the long, metal fence. Yup, if the gate was locked, I could easily give it a climb, even in my fourth month.

  Sweat formed as I strode forward, picking up into a light jog the closer I got. Catching a strong whiff of oily tar, I coughed and met the fence.

  The enclosed land was riddled with several large pits, one as big as a medium-sized pond. A thick grate of thatched wire stretched across each ditch like the lid of a pot as the tar below bubbled, a black stew of dust, twigs, and dead leaves.

  La Brea Tar Pits, something I’d studied back in 2022, but had never seen due to my mother’s work schedule. Who’d guess that here, in the heart of L.A., mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves, and the saber-toothed cat, met their demise in a well of sticky asphalt.

  The SEC followed as I walked the perimeter of the fence, eyeing the ooze below the grates, before finding the gate. My L-Band wouldn’t open it, but it didn’t matter. Hanging loosely at its hinge, it was ajar from its frame just enough for me to squeeze through. Knowing the bot would sound a silent alarm because we were separated, I held the wobbly gate as the SEC pushed through behind me.

  Dashing from pit to pit, I hoped to see a fragment of bone or wolf fang poking through a bubbling pool. But I knew the fossils had settled deep within the littered pitch and despite their cold boil, a treasure from the past would never push to the surface on its own.