She doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t speak. She’s just there, with barely a breath of space between us, and she’s just watching me with that familiar frenzy of a smile on her face.
But then her eyes drift to the cut. To the blood drying against my cheek. To my shaking fingers. That smile twitches a little, and she slowly lifts a hand and presses it to the back of her head. Something like pain spasms across her face.
“You were six,” she says suddenly. “You were six, and Mother told you not to climb on the slide like that, but you did it anyway.”
At first I think I must have hit my head harder than I realized, because I can’t pull any sort of significance from her words. But then I see the way she’s still watching the blood winding its way down my face; our eyes meet, and I slowly start to understand, to relive the same memory that this moment must be reminding her of.
“You fell off,” she says.
“And hit my head on a rock.” There was blood everywhere then, just like now. I ended up needing ten stitches.
“And you blamed me for pushing you.” She takes a step back, talking more to herself now. “But I never touched you.”
“I didn’t blame you.” My voice is sharper than I intended; the exhaustion, the confusion, the pain—I’m tired of all of it. I just want this conversation to be over. I want to go back to sleep, and to wake up and find that everything that’s happened today was only a nightmare. “It wasn’t you,” I say, quieter. “That memory doesn’t belong to you.”
“But I have it all the same.” Her eyes are vacant, staring at me and straight through me at the same time. “No matter how many times they try taking it away, it keeps coming back.” She’s whispering now, and her lips are trembling in a way that almost makes me think she might cry. Except I don’t think I’ve ever seen this Violet cry before—I’m not sure she even knows how. The thought of it happening stuns me into a silence that stretches at least a full minute before she interrupts it.
“Samantha wasn’t supposed to die,” she mumbles. “Not that night.”
Her voice was so quiet that I’m almost sure I’ve misheard her. And she refuses to repeat it. To explain herself any better, no matter how many times I ask or beg or plead. Soon I can sense tension coiling up around her again, frustrated aggression that I’m afraid may snap into action if I keep pushing her. I press slowly back against the wall, as far away from her as I can get without making any sudden motions. Maybe if I just wait. Maybe if I just let her calm down again . . .
Except then I hear him.
Jaxon. Calling my name.
The corner of Violet’s mouth quirks. “Take care, then, little sister,” she says. Without looking back, she turns and bolts into the hallway.
I grab the nearest gun and take off after her.
I’m never going to catch her, I know. I won’t beat her to Jaxon. I can only hope I get there in time again. That I can somehow stop her again. But all too soon my body is screaming at me, reminding me of how much blood I’ve lost today, and how deep the cuts in my arms and face are. Wind rushes into those cuts as I run, and the burning it sends through my skin is almost as unbearable as the fire in my lungs; all the adrenaline in the world couldn’t make me oblivious to that. I don’t know how I keep my legs moving. I just do. I pump them harder and harder, until I lose the feeling in my feet, until I’ve run up and down so many hallways that they all start to look the same, and I’m sure that this place is a maze built to torture and confuse me.
I take a sharp left, and I see Jaxon walking toward me, see the way his eyes widen at the sight of me. I’m going too fast to keep from slamming into him. We fall back, and both our guns and the bags of whatever he’d been carrying go tumbling over the floor.
“Catelyn? What are you—”
I throw myself over my gun, draw it, and climb to my knees. I don’t trust myself to stand all the way up. Now that I’ve stopped moving, the pain threatens to overwhelm. Everything has started to spin and stir viciously around me. But I have to focus. She’s here somewhere, she’s close, I can feel it—
“Why were you yelling like that?” I pant, swiveling in every direction, the gun leveled and ready. “What is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” Jaxon says. “I got turned around. All these rooms look the same. Plus I didn’t want to sneak up on you guys and freak anyone out, and I—”
“Where is she? Did she come by here? Is she—”
“Where is who? Your sister? What’s going on?” He appears beside me, his own weapon back at his side, and I turn so he can’t see the bloody side of my face. When he speaks again, it’s in that same cold voice he used by the pool—the one that makes me afraid for Violet even now. Even after what she did. “Catelyn? I swear, if she tried to hurt you again—”
“She didn’t,” I say quickly. Why am I still protecting her? Am I really that stupid? “No, I mean, we fought, but then she ran off, and I thought . . . I just thought . . .”
I thought she was coming after him. I thought I was going to be too late. That’s exactly what she wanted me to think. She could have found Jaxon before I did, I know. She probably could have killed him just as easily, too. As easily as she could have killed Samantha. As easily as she could have killed me in the room. But she didn’t.
Why?
I want to think it’s because she still feels something for me. That she hasn’t forgotten all of the times I’ve stood up for her. Or how I’ve tried so hard to look at her and see only my sister, and not my sister’s replacement.
More likely, though, it’s because there’s no fun in killing us now. Why not drag it out and make me squirm with fear and confusion? This Violet has always loved a show, after all. And right now? She’s messing with me. She has to be. For all I know, she’s watching from someplace nearby, someplace safe, and waiting with that mischievous smile on her face.
She probably thinks this is hilarious.
“You fought in the room, you mean?” Jaxon’s words are heavy with dread, and I can guess his next question before he even asks it: “What about Seth? Where is he?”
“He’s fine.” Okay, maybe “fine” isn’t the best choice of words here—but he could be worse. And I’m afraid that if I tell Jaxon what Violet did, there’s a good chance he’ll take that gun in his hand and go after her, no questions asked. I don’t want it to come to that. Not as long as I can help it.
I expect him to press me for more details, but his phone rings before he can, the shrill noise making me jump.
I don’t ask him who’s calling. But when I glance back at him and watch him silence it without answering, I can’t help but wonder: Is any of what Violet said true? Am I a fool for still being with him? For wanting to trust him? He said he wanted to find out the truth about what happened to Samantha that night—but what if he already knows the truth and he’s only trying to keep me and everyone else from figuring it out? Is that his mother calling again, giving him more orders?
“We should go back.” I want to ask him all of those things, but I can’t. Not right here, not right now. If Violet’s watching me, I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing the fear and confusion she’s caused.
Because I do know one thing for sure now: I’m not playing her games anymore.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Reasons
“I was gone for like thirty minutes,” Jaxon says, voice still full of disbelief as he picks up Seth and lays him on the bed. I don’t say anything; I just watch silently as he pulls the sheet up around Seth’s shoulders, and a strange longing fills my gut.
Before the old Violet decided she wanted to be an astronaut, she used to tell everyone who would listen that she was going to be a doctor. She would make me pretend to be her patient, tuck me into bed the way Jaxon is doing now and take my temperature, treat my invisible wounds with bandages and hand sanitizer that she swiped from Mother’s purse. I never really liked that game; the bandages hurt to pull off, the sanitizer stung my eyes, and I didn’t like
all of the gruesome diseases she would diagnose me with.
But it was still a lot better than the game we’re playing now.
Jaxon goes on, “She was out cold. As many tranq darts as Seth pumped into her . . . she should have been dead to the world for twenty-four hours at least.”
“She’s not like us,” I remind him. Saying it out loud twists my longing into something even more painfully fierce.
She’s not the old Violet. She never will be. Why can’t I just accept that?
I force myself back to what I was doing, and cringe as I press the alcohol-soaked gauze to the cut on my cheek. Medical supplies—that’s what Jaxon had been carrying, and the only place he claims to have gone was an abandoned clinic a few miles into town; he went to raid it for whatever remained in its storage closets. Bandages, gauze, alcohol—all of it’s spread out on the dresser in front of me now; there are even a couple bottles of painkillers. They’re way past the expiration date stamped on the lid, and they probably won’t work, but I swallow a couple anyway as Jaxon walks back to me. He picks up a wad of gauze and douses it in the alcohol.
“May I?” he asks, his fingertips resting light against my arm. “That cut along your cheek . . . it doesn’t look so good.”
“Knock yourself out,” I say.
He works quickly and carefully, dabbing at the cut and apologizing every time I suck in a deep breath in response to the stinging pain. It’s not until he starts to push strands of hair aside, trying to get to a cut along the side of my neck, that it occurs to me how uncomfortably close his fingertips are to the scar Huxley left back there. My body tenses automatically.
“Does that hurt?” he asks, hesitating.
I don’t say anything. I just reach up, take his hand, and pull it down. I have every intention of letting go of it then, but somehow our fingers end up loosely intertwined. I didn’t realize my hands were shaking so bad until I felt them against the stillness of his.
“There’s a number over an older scar back there,” he says suddenly. “That’s the one from Huxley, isn’t it? From where they linked you to your clone?”
I freeze.
“I saw it when you were unconscious by the pool,” he adds quickly, sounding almost embarrassed. “I mean, I wasn’t looking for it or anything, but there was all that blood, and I was trying to clean it up and make sure there weren’t any more cuts . . . and I couldn’t help but notice it. Sorry. I was curious.”
I flatten my hair over the back of my neck, trying to hide it even now. Even though he knows it’s there, I still don’t want him to look at it. I don’t want him to look at me and see a number. I don’t want him to think about my clone. I just want to be Cate right now. Not origin Cate. And I just want Violet to be Violet, not clone-Violet, and I want to forget about the CCA and Huxley and all this mess between them that we’ve gotten caught up in.
But Jaxon’s still watching me, still waiting for me to answer him.
I guess we’re way past the point of pretending that none of this is happening.
“Sometimes I wonder,” he says, “about half of the stuff my mom’s told me about Huxley—about whether all if it’s true or not. The whole mind-uploading thing, especially. It sounds too crazy. And it doesn’t seem right, does it? For them to have such free access to your thoughts and stuff like that. I mean, your . . . your clone, her brain is essentially just a computer that all that stuff goes to, right? Doesn’t that weird you out at all?”
Free access to your thoughts.
I let out a curse.
“What?”
“Huxley knows where we are.” I reach up and dig my fingertips into the scar on my neck. A crawling spreads from underneath my touch, all the way up over my scalp. It takes Jaxon a few seconds, but then his face lights with the same understanding.
“They’re using your memory transfers to follow you?”
“And they’re going to realize I’m with you, and then . . .” I trail off, thinking of what Violet said earlier. How long will it be before they come for me, once they realize I’m out here road-tripping with their enemy? I know they can see the things I’m seeing, that they can use them to track me down—because they’ve done it before. A few years ago, a young origin boy went missing from the ETS station in Westside, and his parents went to Huxley for help. It was all over the news, the way they downloaded his most recent memory transfers to help find him, and pro-cloning advocates had a field day celebrating what they saw as an obvious benefit of Huxley’s work. But the skeptics all wondered the same thing that I’m wondering now: How easy was it to access such transfers? And just how much detail could they see from them? Just the simple visual things—or all the thoughts that went with them? Does Huxley see my doubts about them now? Is someone sitting at the lab right this moment and taking every single feeling I’ve ever had about Jaxon apart, picking through it like lines of code and searching for errors?
Suddenly, I want to rake my nails across the scar, to open it up and rip out that stupid chip so I can crush it in my hand. I don’t want to give anything to Huxley right now. Or maybe ever again. Because even after everything Violet gave her clone, she’s still turned all wrong, and this is all wrong, and all I want to do is just end the cycle somehow—I don’t care if it means I’ll only have one life to live. Maybe that’s how it should be anyway.
I think about the knife Seth had earlier, and I wonder if I’d have the stomach to cut out Huxley’s access to my mind. Probably not. I dart around the room all the same, searching through all of the bags and in the pockets of the jacket Seth was wearing, trying to find it.
“What are you looking for?” Jaxon asks.
“Nothing,” I lie. But only because I realize that it probably wouldn’t work; I’ve seen the diagrams on their stupid videos. The chip is so deeply embedded that I’d probably cause irreversible brain damage before I even managed to cut my way anywhere close to it.
I fling the jacket onto the bed with a frustrated sigh and watch as Jaxon walks over and picks it up, then folds it and lays it back by the nightstand. He seems entirely too calm about everything. “What exactly are we going to do about this?” I ask.
He’s thoughtful for a moment, and then he says, “Given Seth’s affinity for illegal things, I have a feeling there might be something we can use in the stuff he brought.” He goes to the bags I’ve already made a mess of and starts rifling further through them, using his phone as a flashlight to check all of the zippered pouches.
“Aha,” he says after a bit of searching, drawing out a small black object with two pronglike antennae. He holds it up to me.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“It’s exactly what you think it is.”
A signal jammer. The fine for getting caught with one of these kinds of devices is more than even my father makes in a year.
“I have no idea how it works,” he says, “but you’re good with this sort of thing, right?”
I frown. “Not with doing illegal things, no.”
“You hacked the CCA’s computer system, didn’t you?”
“That was different. And they started it, anyway.”
He gives me an incredulous look. “And Huxley didn’t start something, using your mind uploads without permission like this?”
“Assuming they are—we don’t really have any proof of that.” He doesn’t argue back, but I can tell he wants to. Not that I really blame him. I know I’m only making excuses now. Because that desire to disconnect from my clone is new, and it’s strange, and in a way it’s like admitting that I didn’t know the truth about even one of the most routine and basic parts of my life. This chip in the back of my head was always a bit unsettling, but it was ultimately supposed to be a good thing. It was supposed to make it all worth it—all of those judgmental stares, all of that hate mail my father got; none of that mattered when I thought about what had happened to Violet. About how it could happen to me, too, and how that chip was the only thing that could undo it.
B
ut now, even though I’m scared to think about it, I can’t stop wondering what the actual cost of cloning is.
And more importantly, how is Huxley planning to collect their dues?
“Give it here,” I say, crossing to Jaxon and holding out my hand. I don’t want to admit it to myself, but I know he’s right: We need to block any information the chip is transmitting, and then hurry up and get away from here. The brain uploads aren’t continuous; they’re scheduled and usually only occur once a day. So with any luck, Huxley won’t learn—at least not from me—exactly what’s happened, or where we’re going from here. They’ll realize something is up when my clone’s memories for the past hours turn up as nothing except static, of course, but this might buy us some time at least.
While I work on trying to figure out how the tiny jamming device works, Jaxon finds Seth’s knife. He cuts strips from one of the ragged pillowcases and twists them together into a sort of bracelet, fitting it around my wrist and leaving enough length to tie around the jammer’s prongs.
“So,” he says as he works, “you have that chip, and Violet has something like that too, right?”
“Hers is a lot more complex,” I say offhandedly. “Her entire brain is a supercomputer, basically.”
The rest of a clone’s body grows completely from cells taken from their origins. However those cells are manipulated and redesigned, they’re still essentially human—superpowered or not. But the brain proved too complex an organ for Huxley to grow properly, especially given the advanced-human-clone body that it needed to exert control over. Building a computer with the necessary functionality had simply been easier.
And Huxley freely explains this in all of those videos and brochures and information files that they give prospective origin families, all of which my father keeps in a messy folder on his personal computer. Transparency and trust, that’s what the scientist in Mother’s favorite video insists they are all about. Because nothing about this science—these advancements with such possibility to change the world—should remain a secret.
Falls the Shadow Page 14