The Almost Girl – ebook edition

by The Almost Girl (retail) (epub)

  “For parts?” he echoes vacantly. Caden’s eyes are horrified but I have to finish. I have to tell him what he is. He’ll find out sooner or later, and either way, he’ll hate me for it.

  “Body parts. You’re a clone, Caden. You’re not real.”

  CONFESSIONS

  Aurela’s incredulous laugh is long and hollow and cold at my bombshell. I push Caden off and stand slowly, dragging him up beside me. Aurela is wiping tears from her eyes, waving away the people who had rushed into the room at the crashing sound of Caden’s chair.

  Caden jerks away from me, shrugging off my arm. “What do you mean, I’m a clone?”

  But I don’t answer, my eyes still resting on Aurela, who is shaking her head with an expression of complete disbelief on her face. Caden is a clone, I’m sure of it. I’d heard it from Cale’s own mouth.

  “You’re no clone,” Aurela chokes and then looks at me, her stare discerning. “Is that what Cale told you?”

  I flinch inwardly at her words but I nod, wary, studying her face for deception. But her eyes are clear and her voice even more so. “He’s not. Caden is the real prince of Neospes.”

  “That’s impossible.” Though I think them, they’re not my words. They’re Caden’s. He sinks into the chair behind us with a stupefied expression. “I’m not… not a… prince.”

  “You’re wrong,” I say to Aurela. “He’s not. Cale is.”

  “Am I? Think back, Riven. You know I’m telling the truth.”

  Had Cale lied to me? Or is Aurela the one lying? But as quickly as I ask myself the second question, I’m replaying the events in my head, searching for anything that could have told me Cale was lying. Why should I doubt him now, if I hadn’t then?

  Unless I hadn’t seen it. I hadn’t wanted to see it.

  Cloning is an old technology, used only by the royals, and forbidden everywhere else. It has undesirable side effects – we learned the hard way that clones had odd frailties – like weakened immune systems or psychosomatic disorders. In a world rebuilt on utopian principles, genetic purity was critical to survival, and cloning was outlawed shortly after the Tech War. But clones were still commissioned as safeguards for the monarchy, an extra layer to protect the royal line from insurgents. When Cale confided that his clone had been taken, I was suitably outraged on his behalf. He said that he was sick and would die if I weren’t able to locate and bring the clone back to Neospes. I was the only one he could trust.

  After his father was murdered, I was so eager to do Cale’s bidding, so eager to save him that I agreed without a second thought. But in hindsight, I still don’t see any deception. Was I been so gullible? Am I still?

  “I’d rather be a clone,” Caden says dully to no one in particular. “I always knew I was different, but this just takes the cake.”

  “So there’s no clone?” I ask slowly, Caden’s inane words piercing the sudden fog of activity in my brain.

  “No,” Aurela says. “There is. It’s just not Caden.”

  The realization hits me through the fog like a ton of bricks to the face. I feel my feet stagger backward, and my hip braces against the side of the table. Grasping the edges with numb fingers, I hold myself from sliding down.

  “Cale’s the clone.” My voice is a monotone. Aurela nods, her expression compassionate. The realizations come more quickly after the first. I put two and two together quickly. Cale’s mother had left when he’d been four. “Their mother left to protect the prince,” I muse quietly, sparing a glance at Caden, who still looks like he’s in some kind of waking dream. I don’t blame him. My mind is spinning like an unstoppable top. I can’t imagine the confusion he’s feeling.

  Aurela nods. “She suspected Murek long before. She knew he was collaborating with your father to assassinate the king. It was only a matter of time before they came for her son.” Aurela stops, lowering her voice. “They wanted to use him. Leila knew she was in danger when she realized she was in the way. When she took him, she went to the Artok. They brought her to us, but the only real safe place for her and the prince was her world.”

  June wasn’t lying after all. Leila had always been from over there, and she took her son to the only refuge she knew. And that’s why June and Era broke all the oaths they’d taken as Guardians to protect her. The puzzle is far more intricate than I’ve ever imagined. I shake my head. “Even if she did switch them before she–”

  “She didn’t switch them,” Aurela interrupts. “That was your father’s idea after she everted. They needed a puppet, so they made up this story that his mother had died. But Cale–”

  “–told me the truth. That she’d everted with the clone. I mean, that’s what he thought. Or what he’d been told.” I pause and half stand. “By Murek and my father.”

  It all made sense. My father knew that Cale was the only person who I ever had any loyalty to, so when Cale got sick, he took the opportunity to tell him about the clone, and it was natural that Cale asked me – his most trusted confidant – to track down the clone, even if by obeying his orders in secret, it made me appear to be a defector in the eyes of everyone else.

  “I see you now understand.”

  “Why would they send me?”

  “Because you were the best,” Aurela says gently. “You are the best. The Vectors reported that Caden was with Shae in the Otherworld, and Cale knew you were the only one who could fight or beat her.”

  “So is Cale really sick, or is that all a lie, too?”

  Aurela pours something black that looks like coffee into three mugs, and sets a steaming cup in front of Caden and then in front of me. I take a gulp, and although the bitter taste overwhelms me at first, the aftertaste is thick and mellow like butterscotch.

  “No, our reports confirm that he is sick.” Her words cause the cracks inside of me to widen into furious chasms that I can feel splitting me apart. Relief seeps in to flood the fractures as I realize that Cale didn’t lie to me. He didn’t send me on some fool’s mission. He didn’t betray me to my father. He sent me to help him live, even if it were part of some misguided plot of Murek’s. I’m sure Cale would never betray me. He is as much a victim of Murek and my father as we are.

  Sighing heavily, I glance over at Caden, who hasn’t moved, sitting with his head in his hands, staring into the mug as if it holds answers only he can see. I can’t even imagine what this must be like for him.

  “You OK, Caden?” I ask.

  “What do you care?” he rasps without looking up. “You brought me here to die, didn’t you?”

  “No!” I say, pounding my fist on the table so hard that the shock runs up my arm and through my back. “I didn’t. I mean, at first you were a target, but now…” My voice trails off, caught in the turmoil of what exactly Caden has come to mean to me.

  “Now what?” he says, turning around with eyes so green, they’re like the grass in his world. It’s like they’re seeing right into me, past all the flesh and bone, deep down where there’s nothing else but truth. “Now what, Riv?” he whispers.

  I stare at Aurela, but she can’t say the words for me. Instead, her face is compassionate, as if somehow she already knows. She knows what I feel… everything I’ve kept buried under my orders. I owe Caden the truth, don’t I?

  “But now…” My throat is clogged and my eyes are smarting. “Now it’s different. You’re my friend.” I can see that those words are not enough. Caden’s gaze drops from mine to stare once more into the coffee mug.

  I’m struck dumb. My mouth won’t move. Nothing is moving. A single tear weeps out of the corner of my left eye. I leave it, feeling its hot path meandering down my cheek. My tears are the words I cannot say.

  “Come,” Aurela says gently, interrupting the heavy tension between Caden and me. “Let’s get you two settled for the night. We’ll talk more tomorrow, once you’ve had some rest.”

  The minute we leave the room, I feel disoriented again, as if I’m suffering vertigo. I take deep breaths as Aurela escorts us down some
more dark passageways. It helps. I notice that the men fall into silent step behind us, guarding their leader at every moment. Even though I know how important she is in this small community, for the first time I start to question just how important she is. She holds herself with a quiet confidence – the same self-assurance I remember as a child. But there’s no arrogance in her words or her manner. She is one of them even as she leads them.

  Caden has a room all to himself with an armed guard. Now that I know who he is, I’m not surprised. Aurela is taking no chances that word has already gotten out about Caden’s identity or that some zealous defector will try to get back into Murek’s good graces by offering up the runaway prince.

  “Cade,” I say at the entrance. “I’ll see you tomorrow. OK?”

  “Yeah.” But he doesn’t look at me at all, not even when he lies back on the cot at the far end of the room and lays his head on his palms, staring up at the ceiling. I stand there for a moment, uncomfortable, before I hear Aurela gently calling my name. “Night, Cade.”

  He doesn’t answer as I turn to follow Aurela. She stares at me with a knowing expression. “Don’t worry; we’re not far away. And he’ll be different in the morning. It’s a lot for him to have to take in; just give him some time.” I know that she’s right, but Caden’s aloofness hurts more than I ever thought it would.

  The thought of Cale pops into my brain, and I shove him away. I can’t choose. I won’t. I’ll have to find some other way around all of this… some way to save them both. I’ll give myself up to my father if I have to, if there’s anything he can do to save Cale.

  “This is where you are,” Aurela says. She points to an adjoining room. “My quarters are just over there.” Glancing around, I see that people are taking notice of where I’ve been placed – a room adjoining hers. Aurela reads my expression easily. “It’s because you’re the bigger threat,” she says smoothly.

  But inside, I know there’s more to it than that. She could have left me in the cell we’d been detained in, surrounded by armed guards. Instead, I’m like some guest in her private quarters. It’s a message.

  A message that I am important.

  For some reason, I don’t like it. I’m not sure that I’ve forgiven her for everything between us, for everything that Shae knew… that I did not. For leaving me behind with him. My voice is bitter. “I’d rather stay in the first room.”

  “Riven, that is a holding cell. None of them trust you as I do.”

  I narrow my eyes at her. “Why? Why do you trust me? You know who I am. What I do. What I’ve done.”

  “Yes, I know all of that. But I also know that you are my daughter, and there’s some of me still in there, no matter how much he’s tried to weed it out of you all those years.”

  “What do you mean?” I snap.

  Her voice is quiet. “Nothing.” Aurela stares at me for a second, her white-blonde hair curling around her shoulders. “Get some rest. Things will look better in the morning,” she says, and then, “Riven?”

  “What?”

  “I lo–”

  “Don’t say it,” I snap back, cutting her off midsentence. “You don’t even know me.” I stare with dead calm into her silver eyes. “And you’re right. He did cut every last part of you out of me. Everything human, everything that should feel something. He made me emotionless just like him. And you know what? I like it.”

  I am so proud of the strength and conviction of my voice, but her tiny smile is my undoing. She steps forward and I hold my ground. I don’t even blink when she takes a strand of hair that is stuck to my cheek and tucks it behind my ear, nor when her fingers trail over the tattoos on my neck to rest on my shoulder with a reassuring squeeze. “And yet you wouldn’t tell me this if you weren’t fighting it inside this very moment, would you? Sleep well, my little blackbird.”

  And with that, she was gone.

  I stare at the wooden door between our rooms for a long moment. She called me little blackbird. The thought draws me backward, and I’m sitting in my room, crying my eyes out.

  “Why’d you name me Riven? It’s so horrible,” I was wailing. “It’s not even pretty. It’s ugly, like me.”

  “You’re not ugly, darling,” my mother soothed. “Your name was supposed to be Raven, which is the name of a tiny blackbird that visits me from the gorge behind the house. It has the prettiest whistle. When you were born, you made that sound.”

  “Really?” I asked, still sobbing but curious.

  “Yes, but well, mistakes happen. And your name was recorded as Riven.” She kissed me on the nose then. “I have an idea. How about if I call you little blackbird, just you and me? It could be our little secret.”

  And I nodded, thrilled with having a secret name that remained a secret between us until the day she died… I mean, until now. Even Shae didn’t know. If I had any doubt that she was who she said she was – my mother – I didn’t anymore. No one would have known about that name but the two of us. It was ours alone.

  I glance around at my quarters. From force of habit, I’d already taken inventory of the small, square-shaped room the minute we’d walked in, but it looks the same as all the others – spartan, with the exception of a small table and chair on one side, next to a cot. Nothing, except its position next to Aurela’s, marks it as superior.

  The flame of a small candle dances against the wall, illuminating the white quartz and onyx colors in the rock. I stare at the rock and tilt my head to one side. I don’t feel as claustrophobic or as unbalanced in this room. It’s odd how I feel more uncomfortable in some areas of the Outer underground than I do in others, almost as if the rock composition is tied to my ability to function, like the computers. I laugh – I must be more worn out than I think.

  I glance at the cot, but I can’t sleep. Too much nervous energy is swirling inside of me. My mind still feels muddled, so I strip down to my underclothes, taking care to fold the suit over the chair. I sit cross-legged on the floor and pull energy into my center for a long period until my heartbeat is steady and my breathing full. I extend each arm forward, and then ease my legs out into a side-split, stretching my tight muscles. The sequence of calisthenics falls into place as I twist my torso over my left leg, and my mind goes blank, muscle memory kicking in.

  Nearly an hour later, my body is dripping with sweat, but I haven’t felt so alive since being underground. I’m wired, energy coursing through me and filling my cells with vibrant life. Without missing a beat, I grab my ninjata blades and start swinging them in a graceful arc, my legs extending outward at the same pace.

  The exercise starts out slow and then gradually builds in speed until I’m gasping for breath and whirling the blades with incredible swiftness. I’m moving so quickly that the glossy blades are a blur in the room, the flicker of candlelight on them almost making them look like liquid flame between my fingers.

  The swords are moving faster than I am, and my body strives to keep up, moving faster and faster and faster, until something hot nicks the back of my leg. I jerk to a halt, staring at the watery crimson trail that is welling against my skin. The voice at the corner of the room takes me by surprise.

  “Getting a little rusty?”

  “What are you doing here?” I pant, wiping the sweat off my face with my forearm. “You should be sleeping.”

  “Like you are?” Caden saunters into the room and pulls out one of the chairs at the table, straddling it with his legs on either side and his arms across the top. His dark hair is unruly as if he’s been running his hands through it one too many times in aggravation. He rests his chin across his crossed forearms staring at me through squinty eyes.

  “I need the exercise,” I say.

  “And I couldn’t sleep,” he tosses back. “You know, a boy doesn’t find out he’s a prince from the magical land of Far Far Away every day.” The sarcasm is heavy in his voice, and I bite back a smile at the reference to Shrek.

  “At least you’re not an ogre, and it’s probably a lot less m
agical than the one you were in.”

  His stare is assessing, a lock of hair curling into one eye. “So, tell me something. When you thought I was a clone, you were coming to get me to bring me back here, and Shae was protecting me from you?” I nod, uncertain of the direction of his thoughts, but continue my movements, albeit more carefully now. “So I was your target?”

  “Yes.” I slow my pace further with the swords, lunging and stretching both my arms in an arc over my head before pulling them around to the front and twisting away from him.

  “So am I still your target?” His voice is louder than it was, and I whirl around. But his voice isn’t louder, and Caden is no longer sitting. He’s right in front of me. His hands grasp my wrists, halting them mid-motion.

  He’s so close that I can feel his warm breath feathering against my cheek. In a smooth motion, he removes the ninjata from my left hand, stepping back and swinging it in a slow circle. I take a slow breath.

  “Don’t hold a weapon–”

  “–that you’re not prepared to use,” Caden finishes. “Shae told me.”

  “Cade…” I begin.

  “What? Are you so afraid to fight me?” he asks softly. There’s something in his voice that I can’t identify, something painful and aching.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I say. “These are real swords, you know. Not fencing foils.”

  “I know.”

  And before I can think, all I see is the flash of a blade curving toward me. The clash of steel in the small room is like thunder as my blade meets his in a shower of sparks, but Caden is already sidestepping and striking from the underside.

  In a few seconds, I’m aware that Caden is more than good. He’s really good.

  Shae wasn’t joking about how easily he holds a sword. I sense that most of it is instinct, but he has the basics of what we are all taught in Neospes. He’s taken that a step further with his own fencing training. Despite the fact that I’ve spent the better part of two hours practicing, Caden has me on my toes. Even though my body wants to go into full attack mode, I restrain myself.