Your One & Only

by Adrianne Finlay

  The steady eyes glinted, and the straight nose and smooth brow, brought into relief by the angular shadows of the trees, sharpened darkly.

  “They’ll be busy for a while yet.” Jonah stood from the rock, and his feet sank into the loamy soil, lifting from the ground the aroma of crushed heliconia leaves and fallen fruit tangy with rot.

  The sweet smell made Jack’s stomach turn. He swallowed stiffly. “What you’re doing, Jonah, it isn’t right. You have to stop.”

  “You think I should leave? Is that what you want?”

  Of course he should leave, Jack thought. If they caught him, for Jonah there’d be no clean lab room or locked barn. He’d be dead within hours. But Jack said nothing.

  Jonah’s lip moved, twitching as if on a thread, like he could read the conflict on Jack’s face. “I’m not going anywhere, brother. I haven’t even begun.”

  “And what happens when you’re done? If you destroy Vispera like you did Copan, where will you go then? Crooked Falls? Where’s it end?”

  “I have supplies. It’s all there, waiting for me. It’s waiting for us, Jack. We’ll get a boat and go together, as soon as we’re done here.”

  Again, Jack didn’t answer. He had no answer to give. Were those really his choices? Help Jonah destroy the clones, or help the clones destroy Jonah?

  “You don’t hate them,” Jonah said softly, contemplating him. “After everything they’ve done. Is it because of that Althea?”

  “Don’t talk about her. You know nothing about her.”

  “I know a lot, Jack. More than any of the clones realize. I’ve been watching, and waiting. I’m good at that.”

  Jack ran his fingers through his hair, damp with sweat. A cloud of bats flitted through the trees, rustling the fanning leaves. Jack looked up, his strained attention on Jonah faltering abruptly, allowing him to realize only then how hot he was. He’d spent two days in a hospital bed, and he’d done too much since then. It was catching up with him. He swayed on his feet.

  “You going to faint?” Jonah said. Jack shook his head, but Jonah took his arm anyway and clapped him on the back. “It’s a good thing we’re not like them, or we’d both be on the ground.”

  “I just have to sit for a minute,” Jack said.

  “Sorry, brother. Fall over later. There’s something you need to see first.”

  Jack followed Jonah to the other side of town at the West Lab. The ground where North Lab had stood, the building that held Jack’s room, was a charred ruin. They passed the empty space without comment, Jonah leading the way to the second floor of the building next door, with its orderly rows of bright, fluorescent-lit rooms.

  “Where are we going?” Jack asked, each step feeling as if he were walking against a current.

  Jonah moved easily and silently through the building, crouched low, his body aware of every sound and movement. Observing him, Jack could understand how he’d made his way through town unseen for so long, learning everything about the clones, waiting to make himself known by violence and chaos. Jonah’s hair, disordered and sun-bleached, was at the moment lighter than Jack’s, which was darkened with sweat and falling in his eyes. Jack brushed it away, aware of the heat radiating from his skin.

  Jonah stopped at an unmarked door and produced a key. “Not all the clones went to the river.” He unlocked the door and held it open for Jack.

  The room was like one of the medical bays in the clinic. It was long and narrow, with cabinets along one wall filled with drug vials, and along the other, hanging from hooks, a row of lab coats like Sam and the other doctors wore. In the center of the room, however, was a ring of chairs connected by wires and electrodes emitting a muted electric buzz. In the chairs, reclined back and held down by buckled straps, were Althea’s nine sisters. Their eyes were closed, their faces tense but asleep—​or more likely unconscious. No blankets covered them, and their yellow medical gowns left their legs and feet uncovered. The pale soles of their bare feet contrasted with the tan skin of their legs, and that sight alone made them seem pitifully vulnerable.

  Jack crossed the room and placed his hand on an Althea’s shoulder, then jerked it back quickly. Something had shocked him. A current coming from the girl’s skin. He realized then that the chairs weren’t connected by wires, the Altheas were. And the wires were embedded in their skin, pulsing electric currents through their bodies.

  “What is this?” Jack said, his voice harsh.

  “The clone doctors invented it. It’s called Bonding. It’s what they do when a clone fractures. The siblings are at risk. They figure the bond is made stronger if they all feel pain at the same time. At least I think that’s the idea.”

  Jack’s muscles went rigid as Jonah slipped an arrow from the quiver on his back, but then he used the blunt end to lift an Althea’s hand and drop it down again, limp and heavy.

  “There might be drugs involved,” he said.

  Jack surveyed the tools and instruments on a nearby table—​syringes, vials of liquid, bandages, and a few scalpels.

  “It’s torture.”

  “Your Althea was supposed to be here, you know. She didn’t show, so I guess they went ahead anyway.”

  It was then Jack saw the tenth chair shoved into a corner, cords and wires dangling off the edge.

  “This is wrong. We have to help them.”

  Jonah propped himself on one of the countertops, one knee casually pulled up. “By all means, play the hero.”

  Jack looked up sharply, but the lazy amusement that colored Jonah’s voice didn’t reach the ice in his eyes.

  Jack turned to the chair nearest him. The girl in it looked identical to the others; the flat, serious mouth, slightly parted, the creased brow, the smooth skin. It took his breath away, to be so close to her and know she wasn’t Althea. That she wasn’t his Althea.

  He searched the sides and underneath the chair, looking for a power source feeding the current. Not seeing one, he clenched his teeth and gripped the main cord leading to the cluster of wires under the Althea’s skin. A searing jolt shot through him as he ripped it from the other wires. That Althea’s sisters should suffer in this way—​it was unbearable.

  As gently as he could, he plucked each humming wire from her arms. Pinpricks of blood seeped from where they’d been. As a group, the nine girls let out a half sigh, half moan when the current broke. With some difficulty because of his cast, Jack lifted the girl he’d unhooked and settled with her on the floor. Her skin was too warm, and her head dropped lifelessly from his arm. He glanced up at Jonah, who watched with impassive eyes.

  “She’s not waking up.” With effort, Jack steadied his hand as it passed through the girl’s hair. “What do I do? She’s not waking up.”

  Jonah shrugged, running the arrow tip under his fingernails. “Give it a minute.”

  Even as Jonah spoke, her head lolled to the side and she groaned softly.

  “Althea?” Jack said. He didn’t know what number she was, but it didn’t matter. He felt as if he were holding his own Althea in his arms.

  The girl’s eyes fluttered open, and her gaze traveled questioningly over him.

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” she murmured drowsily. Then something sharpened in her face. She gasped, and every muscle in her body stiffened against him as she fought the hold of his arms. She scrambled across the floor, ending in a crouch against the wall. Her hands rubbed her skin where he’d held her, as if she’d been touched by something cold and unpleasant. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s okay,” Jack said, his palms held out placatingly. “It’s going to be okay. I’m going to help.”

  “You?” She looked frantically over the room, taking in Jonah and her still-unconscious sisters, and then her gaze settled back to Jack. “What have you done?”

  “It’s okay,” he said again, hoping to calm her.

  “You said you’re going to help?” Her eyes narrowed, suddenly less scared. “You can’t help me. We’re here because of you. This is you
r fault!”

  Jack shook his head. “What?”

  “You’re the reason our sister fractured. You made Inga-296 fracture, and the Samuel too. You’re why we’re here, and now you want to ruin the Bonding?”

  “Ruin? I thought—”

  “Get away from me. Get away from all of us,” she yelled, standing on shaky legs and moving protectively between her sisters and Jack.

  “But . . .” Jack stammered. Jonah was behind him then, lifting him up from where he knelt.

  “Come on, brother. Time to go.”

  The other Altheas were stirring, moaning in their sleep, communing and picking up the emotion of the Althea who stood glaring at him.

  “Get out,” she said viciously, the echo of her words muttered on the half-sleeping tongues of the other eight Altheas. The chorus of their voices surrounded him, suffocated him. He heard them still while Jonah dragged him down the stairs and outside, until he realized finally he was only hearing them in his head. Get out, get out, get out.

  Jack looked up at the sky, breathing heavily, instinctively searching his lungs for any sign they were about to betray him. Jonah stood next to him, his light head flung back.

  “You needed to see that, Jack,” he said coolly. “They’ll have a Binding Ceremony for the Althea. Your Althea. They’ll kill her. They want her dead—​even her sisters do. They have to be stopped. We can take them down, all of them. Help me, and then we’ll leave this place together.”

  Jack stared into the night sky and felt it closing in on him. “Do what you want,” he said finally. “I won’t stop you. I won’t help, but I won’t stop you.”

  Jack couldn’t face Jonah. He couldn’t bear to see in his brother’s eyes the same hatred he felt. He stumbled away, then braced his hands against the side of West Lab and was sick in the squat juniper shrubs at the base of the building. By the time that was finished, Jonah was gone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Althea

  The night had been terrifying, but they were safe now.

  Althea could still feel the heat from the flames on her face. She could smell the burning wood and chemicals on her skin. The boats were lost. The initial blast had destroyed them, polluting the water and leaving burning debris strewn everywhere. They’d tried to salvage the supplies that were to go to Copan that very day at dawn. Vispera was already facing shortages from the ruined fields, and they couldn’t afford to lose more, but what few boxes they were able to pull from the wreckage had already been rifled through, the contents taken. Althea knew by whom.

  Those who’d been at the boats, preparing last-minute supplies when the explosion erupted, made up the injured who now filled the clinic. It was mostly Gen-300s and 290s. Althea herself had pulled Althea-307 from the banks of Blue River. She’d been face-down in the mud. Althea couldn’t tell how badly she was injured, but blood covered the front of her dress. The other Gen-300 Altheas stood to the side, their faces white as paper. They didn’t move to touch Althea-307, making Althea wonder if their connection with Althea-307 had already been broken by death.

  Althea’s sisters hadn’t been at the explosion, but when she returned from the wreckage, they’d all climbed from their beds, and now they were sitting up together in a circle, holding hands. After the horrifying night and her last conversation with Jack, the comfort of her sisters was like a warm, familiar blanket.

  Sitting in a circle in the dorms, her hands twined with those of her sisters, she felt calm. Like the other times she communed with them, the warm liquid filled her limbs. She’d been close, but she wouldn’t fracture. They welcomed her back, and they were here, together, out of harm’s way. They needed her. Vispera needed her. She was one of them, and nothing else mattered.

  The Altheas had put on the necklaces that had been a gift from the Gen-300 Altheas on the occasion of the Gen-310s’ first Pairing Ceremony. With Althea-307 in the clinic and close to death, it seemed fitting to wear them. They were made of pale, lustrous pearls that glistened in the light of the candles next to each Althea’s bed. The pearls warmed against Althea’s skin. If they had a Ceremony of Loss, which they would hold for Althea-307’s accidental death, as they did for any untimely death, they would wear them to that, too. The pearls had been collected from oysters off the coast a day’s journey away. Smooth and iridescent, they shivered along her sisters’ necks, picking up different colors from the candlelight; silver and gold, pink and blue. Althea focused her eyes on the colors. They came and went in the flickering light, swimming on the creamy surface of the beads like shimmering, silver-lipped oyster shells and the ocean from which they’d come.

  Althea could picture the ocean. The colorless gray mingled with the warm liquid calm from communing with her sisters, until that calm retreated slightly, a tide going out. Then, like rustling pebbles pulled by a receding wave, the ocean gray she’d imagined turned into the gray of Jack’s eyes.

  Althea’s eyes snapped open at the same moment all nine faces of her sisters turned toward her. Their sharp anger engulfed her, and she dropped their hands with a gasp.

  “It’s been a long night,” Althea-316 said tersely. “We should go to bed.”

  With weighty tension in the room, they changed silently into their nightgowns, and Althea climbed into her bed, the last in the row of ten Althea beds.

  Althea waited until her sisters’ breathing deepened, and then dressed and slipped quietly out, clutching the box holding the two books she and Jack had found.

  She needed to escape the suffocating room, her sisters, and the frightening accusation she’d seen in their eyes. She didn’t know if they were already planning a Bonding Ceremony for her, but even if they were, she had some time before it happened. She’d get away before then somehow. She just wasn’t sure how yet.

  Jack was probably asleep at the clinic. He’d looked ready to collapse before, worn down with exhaustion and also, she knew, with the strain that had developed between them. She crept down the stairs of the Althea dorm to the common sitting room in the foyer. She found a chair in the corner and settled into the soft cushions. She’d been unable to look at the books until now. When she touched the cover of the book titled The Ark Project, shreds of cloth sprinkled onto her hand. She flipped through it. The type inside was minuscule, and none of it looked like it would be useful in figuring out what Jonah had planned. It was a sort of textbook compiled by something called the Global Health Initiative, and it was full of lists and numbers, all of them mystifying. The book actually referred to the Original Ten. She turned the pages quickly.

  Most of what she found in the book was familiar. It told the story of the scientists who created the original models. It related how those scientists traveled from places all over the globe, forgotten places with names like Bali, Saint Petersburg, Patagonia, Sweden, and the Marquesas Islands, and how they’d gathered together for the final phase of their work in what would eventually be known as Vispera.

  The book also narrated the advance of the Slow Plague over three decades, from the time the scientists had seen the first hints of something wrong, the first clues that pointed to the inescapable deterioration of the human immune system. The Plague manifested in myriad diseases, lethal allergies, and physiological disorders that made the human species unable to carry on. The world itself had turned deadly, as if the very air they breathed and the food they ate had turned to poison.

  The book set forth tables and charts that displayed the death toll. A million here, a billion there. It included lists of hospitals shut down, government budgets for medicine running empty, names of city parks appropriated for cemeteries. Some human interest stories were recounted amid the numbers, lending a living reality to the awful census of doom. By the time twenty years or so had passed, there were just pockets of humans left in remote Pacific islands and out-of-the-way highland regions of Central America.

  The scientists had three decades to build a new world, one that wouldn’t die out the way their own had. In thirty years, they themselves wou
ld be dead, and only their legacy would live on.

  The narrative of the Slow Plague came to an end, and the remainder of the book contained a series of words in lists followed by seemingly endless numbers. At first it looked like gibberish to Althea, but then she realized that she didn’t recognize the words because they were actually names of people according to the human custom in which everyone had a distinct name rather than the designation and number of a particular Gen model. The humans always had more than one name, and sometimes three or even four. There were thousands of names in the book, running down to the final page.

  She closed the volume and sat back. Something niggled at the back of her mind. She felt there was something familiar about the list.

  She picked up the second, unmarked book, and was surprised to find close lines of handwriting covering each page. The first page read: The Journal of Althea Lane, 2068. Althea had never heard of any journals or diaries from the Original Nine. If they existed, surely they’d have been on display in a special place, maybe in Remembrance Hall. If the date was right, the book was old, but it hadn’t disintegrated with age. That meant it must have been in the climate-controlled environment of the Tunnels at some point, and Inga-296 had taken it. Althea turned the pages to read.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF ALTHEA LANE

  Costa Rica

  2068–2107

  (Excerpts)

  February 3, 2068

  When Hassan and I were flown to San Francisco from Burlington for interviews, the executives at Global Health Initiative showed us the model of the community they were building. The cluster of labs with state-of-the-art technology, vast storage caverns, dining halls, warehouses, residences. They said much of it hadn’t been built yet, and that was only five months ago. Now that we’ve arrived in Costa Rica, I see a whole community risen up as if out of thin air. I walk through this town they’ve built, and if it weren’t for the humidity of Central America, not to mention the toucans and howling monkeys, I’d think we were still in Vermont.