The seconds crawl by. I take Jaxon’s hand, focus on the warmth and weight of it, and slowly, slowly force my breathing back to something like normal. Seth starts to speak several times—probably to try and break the tension with a joke—but stops. He settles instead for just passing the minutes by tap, tap, tapping them out with his fingers against the desk. The computer fans kick on, whirring faintly in the darkness.
Someone pounds on the door.
I bite back a scream. I don’t know why I bother, though—because there are so many voices talking and laughing outside now that they probably wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
It sounds like there are even more than I counted on the screen.
I rush to turn off those screens now, unplugging them along with the computer—trying to hide every sign that anyone is in here. Without them on, the room is almost pitch black. The three of us scramble blindly for some sort of cover; Jaxon and I end up underneath his mother’s desk just as there’s another pound against the door and the ear-splitting sound of steel peeling away from steel. A jagged ribbon of light appears on the back wall, and with a sick twist in my gut I realize: they’re punching a hole through the solid metal door.
“Knock, knock . . . anybody home?” Lacey’s voice is as sickeningly sweet as ever, and crystal clear now that there’s less and less door separating us. Someone punches the door again, and the spot of light against the back wall grows wider.
Jaxon’s arm brushes mine, and I glance over and see him swiping the safety off the gun in his hands. Wherever Seth ended up hiding, I imagine he’s doing the same thing. So I do too, even though I can’t help feeling that it’s pointless now.
There’s another slam against the door; it sounds like someone threw their whole body against it this time, judging by the way the steel screeches and groans under the weight. I shut my eyes and try to imagine I’m anywhere else, but open them a second later when I feel Jaxon move past me. He’s inching his way out from underneath the desk, getting dangerously close to the light flooding in from the hole in the door. I grab his arm just as he lifts his gun.
“What are you doing?” I whisper, jerking him back.
“They just know that someone’s in here,” he says. “They don’t know how many. So if they find me—”
“Don’t be stupid.”
He turns and presses me into the back corner of the desk. “They don’t know you’re here,” he whispers, a forced calmness in his voice that terrifies me. “And you are going to stay right here, and you are not going to make a sound, or do anything that lets them know otherwise.”
I want to argue. But I don’t want to make any more noise—because he’s right; it would be stupid to let them all know we’re both in here. I can’t seem to find my voice, anyway, so instead I just stare at him and silently shake my head. He gently pries my hand, finger by finger, from his arm and starts to pull away again.
He freezes at the edge of the desk, at the exact moment I think we both notice how quiet it’s suddenly become. No one’s pounding on the door. The voices outside have stopped. We hold our breath and listen for a minute, two minutes. . . .
The footsteps that break the silence are impossibly close. A shadow blots out the light on the wall a second later, and Jaxon dives around the corner of the desk, gun raised, in the same instant Seth says, “They’re gone.”
I let out the breath I’ve been holding and crawl out from underneath the desk to find Seth with his hands in the air and Jaxon slowly lowering the gun.
“I almost shot you, idiot.”
“I know,” Seth says, still eying the gun nervously, “I was there. Saw the whole thing, complete with my life flashing before my eyes.”
“Why would they just leave?” I ask, my voice still not rising above a whisper.
“Because they want us to follow them for some reason?” Jaxon says. “I’m pretty sure this is a trap.”
It’s obvious now that he says it. And it’s also obvious that we don’t have any choice but to walk straight into that trap—because it’s not like we can stay in this room forever.
The closest exit, Jaxon and Seth decide after a bit of arguing, is a set of elevators on the other side of the main meeting room. It’s a straight-enough shot from here to there, but it’s still not exactly close.
Every hallway we have to turn and walk down seems narrower than the last. Soon it starts to feel as if the building itself is closing in on us, but there’s nothing to do but keep moving. I hold my breath around every corner, expecting each one to be the last we ever turn, and Lacey’s terrible smile to be among the last things I ever see.
We make it to the main room without encountering anyone.
I’m about to sigh with relief when I notice the first body.
Seth almost trips over it. He mutters several curse words as he tries to regain his balance, and I cover my mouth and turn away, even though the corpse’s charred, twisted face is already burned into my mind. I stumble a few feet before I dare to turn back, making sure I don’t look down at the body. It’s then that I take my first good look at the room—and the aftermath of what was obviously a horrible fight.
There are burn marks all over the walls and the steel rafters above us. Light fixtures are dangling, and almost all of the bulbs themselves are shattered, leaving the room bathed in a hazy half darkness. From what I can see, most of the computers and other equipment is lying in melted, twisted pieces on the floor. Half of the desks are over on their sides—used as makeshift bunkers, judging by the gunfire scars and warped metal across their tops. The pungent scent of burnt flesh and blood saturates the air, and scattered in between all the destruction is the occasional still body. I don’t get too close to any of them, but Jaxon and Seth are already racing through the room, checking pulses and identifying the ones that haven’t been burnt past recognition.
My knees feel weak. Seth pointed out the exit elevators the second we stepped into this room, and my gaze drifts back toward them now. The lighted panel above them is like a beacon cutting through the darkness, and suddenly I’m walking across the room, thinking only about how badly I need to get far, far away from this place.
I’m in such a trance that I don’t realize Jaxon and Seth aren’t following me, not until I’ve made it almost all the way to the elevators. They’re still behind me, still moving through the bodies. Still searching. Because they knew these people, of course. And because the president is still missing.
I don’t want them to find her. Not here. Not like this.
“I should have come back sooner,” Jaxon says, walking up beside me.
I look at him but don’t say anything. I’m not sure there’s anything I could say that would make any of this any better.
“If I’d been here, my mom—”
“Wherever she is now, I’m sure she’s glad you weren’t here when this happened.”
He shakes his head, shoves past me, and rejoins Seth on the other side of the room.
“We can’t keep searching forever,” I call after him, my voice breaking. “You know we can’t.”
He doesn’t look back.
I hug my arms against my chest and wander closer to the elevators. We’ve been here too long already. I don’t know what we’re going to do about his mother, but I do know we need to figure it out somewhere else. Somewhere safer. Somewhere less . . . creepy. The room seemed so deathly silent at first, but the longer I stand there, shifting my weight from foot to foot and begging the guys to hurry up, the louder everything around me becomes. Distant whispers of voices, the metal creaks and groans of the structure settling around us, the hiss of the ancient heating and air unit. And with the noise, I see faces blurring through my mind now—the familiar faces of Lacey. Of Brittany. Of so many other Haven High School students. I knew Brittany was an origin, and same goes for most of the others we saw on the monitors. Lacey was a surprise, though. I’ve never seen her name listed in any of the databases Huxley has available to the public—and those are suppose
d to be thorough. Complete. It’s against the law for them not to be.
How many other clones don’t we know about?
Movement. Somewhere to my right. I jerk around, and out of the corner of my eye I see the shadows shifting, the light changing. I take a deep breath, smooth a hand over the chilled skin on my arms. It’s nothing but my mind playing tricks on me, I know. Jaxon and Seth are both to my left, and the only other people in here are all dead. And dead people don’t move.
But something above us is moving. Something smacks against the exposed ceiling beams and sets off a metallic ringing that bounces around the room and sinks straight into my bones. And it isn’t just in my mind this time, because Jaxon and Seth are both frozen in place too, their eyes wide and gazing toward the darkest corner of the ceiling. It’s too dark to see anything, though.
They slowly inch their way back toward me and the elevators, and the three of us reach them just as the screen above lights up with the number of our floor. A high-pitched ding fills the air. The doors open and Dr. Atticus Voss steps out, flanked on either side by several armed men.
There are so many people, but Voss is the only one I can look at.
Samantha had her father’s eyes.
Does he know what happened to her clone? Does he know she’s gone forever now?
I spin around, thinking about running back the way we came. But Lacey and the rest of the clones from earlier are blocking the path. And still more of them are stealing silently into the room, out of every adjacent hallway and door, and dropping from the shadows above—until we’re so far past outnumbered that it’s almost laughable.
Voss orders us to lower our weapons, and the tightness in my throat grows worse. I can’t swallow. I can’t speak. I can’t even move, until someone grabs my arm from behind and rips the gun from my hand. I draw back my fist, turn, and swing, but I’m met by two men twice my size; one of them easily catches my clenched hand and twists it—along with my other arm—behind my back, while the other one jabs a syringe filled with some sort of clear liquid into the side of my neck.
I hear Jaxon shout my name. My vision is starting to blur already, and my body feels strangely heavy—but I manage to fight my way to where I can meet his eyes.
And then he’s throwing himself against the arms of the people holding him back, over and over, and he’s desperately shouting my name again, shouting at them to let me go.
Somehow, he gets away.
He makes it all the way across the room before Voss fires the first shot. Jaxon trips, catches himself against the ground, and then pushes back to his feet. He stumbles the short distance left between us, grabs my arm with trembling fingers. That touch is all I feel. His labored, heavy breathing is all that I hear. His eyes are all I see, each one a calm blue oasis in all of the chaos around us. And then they close.
He falls at my feet, and I’m still screaming when they drag me away from him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Experiments
When I open my eyes, I’m blinded by cold, white light. An alarm is sounding somewhere close by. A steady siren pulsing louder, softer, louder again. On and on and on.
The signal jammer on my left wrist is gone, and my right one has been wrapped up and properly splintered. There’s a dry, cottony taste in my mouth. A strange pins-and-needles sensation in my fingers and toes. My head throbs along with the pulsing alarm, and I have to close my eyes to focus, to try and remember what happened.
How did I get here? Where is here?
And then, bit by bit, things start to come back to me. The CCA headquarters. The clones. The scientists. Voss. The gun in Voss’s hand.
Jaxon.
I bolt upright. Too fast; the room sways, and my stomach churns. I grab the edge of the metal bed I’m lying on and lean over the side, thinking I’m going to throw up. My last conscious moment at the CCA headquarters keeps replaying itself over and over in my thoughts: Jaxon’s face going pale, his body collapsing to the floor . . . and what happened then? And since then? How long have I been out for?
Calm. I have to stay calm.
I recite the first half of the lines from a monologue I performed last year—from Dido, Queen of Carthage—focusing on remembering each word to take my mind off the nausea I’m feeling. As it settles, I ease back upright, taking in the large room around me. It’s obvious that I’ve ended up somewhere in Huxley’s lab, because the intricate H of their logo is on almost everything in here—from the computers to the door to the glass vials and containers that line every shelf along the wall. That doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that I’m not alone.
In the opposite corner of the room is another bed, and Violet is lying on it. I look away quickly, as if I can somehow pretend she’s not there.
Like if I’m fast enough, I can somehow get away from all of this.
But there’s nowhere to go. The steel door looming in front of me is like most of the doors in the lab, and the only way through it is via a card key. A single horizontal window breaks up the drab gray walls, but I see no obvious way to open it; I can’t even tell what’s on the other side of it, because it’s an observation window—similar to the one in our science classroom at school. The glass is tinted, its surface so dark that I hardly recognize myself in it. If there’s anyone on the other side, they can see me, but I can’t see them.
I hear mumbling behind me, and turn toward Violet’s still body.
Why is she here? What happened to her grand plan to run away and leave all of this—and me—behind? I wasn’t expecting to see her again. Especially not this soon. And I don’t know that I wanted to see her again, because her being here only complicates things even more, just like it always does. I should be focused on getting myself out of this place, on finding out what happened to Jaxon and Seth, on finding my parents, and figuring out what the hell is going on in the city.
But as I cross the room, my own thoughts betray me, slipping away from all the things I’m trying to focus on and fighting their way back to Violet. To all the things I want to be mad at, but can’t. Not when I see her like this.
She’s still mumbling when I reach her side. Her eyes are half-shut, and there are wires attached to several electric nodes on her scalp, a tangle of blue snakes twisting into the computer beside us. Metal cuffs arching up out of the bed bind her arms and legs to it. I can tell she’s been struggling against the restraints, because the skin all around her wrists and ankles is covered in bruises of different colors, all at different stages of healing. I make the mistake of softly saying her name, which only makes her lunge wildly away.
Anger wells in my chest, and my gaze jerks toward that window. Are there people behind it? Just watching, waiting to see what I’ll do about this?
I know what I want to do. I want to grab everything within arm’s reach and throw it as hard as I can at the glass, to break it down and reveal the monsters inside. I want to know how long they’ve been watching, and what they’ve seen, and what they were doing to us while we slept—even though part of me is afraid to find out.
President Huxley is very, very interested in the relationship between the two of you. The memory of that woman’s voice, of her words, sends an uneasy feeling creeping through me.
And they have both of us now. They went after her, caught her, and dragged her back here because they had a bunch of sick experiments in mind for the two of us. And those things attached to Violet’s head . . . they must be part of them.
I follow the trail of wires to the computer, slide my fingers across the screen to wake it from sleep mode. As it slowly fades back to life, I find myself staring at an intricate three-dimensional model of a brain—Violet’s, I’m guessing. The diagram is divided into six sections, one for each of the nodes stuck to her head. Curious, I start clicking around on the screen, trying to find notes, documents—anything to help me understand exactly what I’m seeing.
The clicking noise upsets Violet. She throws herself against her restraints again, shouting a
t me to stop. They’re mine, she keeps saying, over and over and over, until the words lose their meaning and her voice eventually fades back to quiet mumblings. She stops struggling and sinks back down onto the bed. I leave the computer alone for the moment and just watch her lying there, her eyelids fluttering open and closed and her lips still moving, still muttering things I can’t understand.
And then her eyes flash wide open so suddenly, it actually makes me jump. She stops muttering. She stares straight ahead, and in a voice that’s perfectly clear, she says, “They’re mine. And you can’t take her from me.”
I’m afraid to say anything, afraid to upset her again, though I desperately want to ask her what she’s talking about. What’s hers? What does she mean, they “can’t take her”?
I turn the words over in my mind, until I finally remember the last time I heard her say things like this: in the hotel room. When we fought that night, when the cut on my cheek reminded her of one of the old Violet’s memories of us. What was it she said? No matter how many times they try taking it away, it keeps coming back.
She was talking about Huxley then. She has to have been. And she’s talking about them now, and those memories must have been what they were trying to take—the same ones they uploaded into her brain. The same ones that they control. And they would have to take them, wouldn’t they? Because the old Violet would never have hurt me. Not after everything we’d been through together.
One by one, they’ve been transforming her into a monster, trying to leave her with only the things they want her to know and think.
So where does that leave the two of us?
I jerk the wires out of the computer, too angry to look at it anymore. Error messages flash and beep at me. I ignore them and crawl underneath Violet’s bed, searching for the buttons to release the metal cuffs holding her down. Once I release them, I slowly climb back up to her side, trying not to startle her.
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