I thrust the knife up and feel pressure—her tough, biologically enhanced skin resisting at first—and then finally it pierces, allowing the blade to sink in deep, just beneath her rib cage. Blood drips down over the knife, winding a hot, sticky trail down my arm. Her face is right in front of mine, our noses practically touching and her strangely sweet-smelling breath washing over me.
“Why would you do that to your own body?” she asks through clenched teeth. It’s hard to tell if the look in her eyes is pain, or just insanity.
“You aren’t me,” I say, twisting the knife until she jerks away in obvious agony and I’m able to roll out from underneath her. She tries to grab me by the ankle, but I manage a well-placed kick to her face, right between her eyes. It slows her down just long enough for me to get to my feet.
I don’t stay on them long.
She’s lost her patience. That much is very obvious very quickly. With a blood-chilling scream she dives after me, and her arms wrap around my waist and drag me down. I hit the tile face-first and feel my lip split, taste the blood rising between my teeth. The knife slips out of my hand. By the time I manage to flip myself onto my back, my clone already has it in her hand. She looms over me, one impossibly strong hand pinning my chest down while the other traces the tip of its blade across my neck. My skin isn’t like hers; it’s not nearly as tough, and soon I feel little beads of blood bubbling up and spilling across it.
She pulls the blade away and leans her face closer to mine.
“Good-bye.” It’s the only thing she says, and there’s no grand flourish to it—just a simple, whispered word without malice or pain or intent. It just is. And in the split second between the word and the action, I decide that this is how I would have wanted to go, anyway; no dramatic flourishes for once. I just am, and then I just won’t be, and that’s how it should go.
She raises the knife and stabs.
My eyes are closed before the knife comes all the way down. So I don’t see the exact moment when she’s hit; but I can feel her body being knocked off me, and I can sense the sudden emptiness above; I open my eyes just as Violet gets a solid grip on my clone’s arm. She swings, sending her flying back into the kitchen island. I hear the wooden cabinets crack and split as she slams into them, and the soft groan she lets out as her body slumps against the floor. Then there’s no sound except the beating of Violet’s heart and mine, and the charging hum of the gun in her hand.
“How did you know which of us was the real me?” I ask, breathless.
“Lucky guess.” Violet shrugs. “And I figured you’d be the one losing.”
I make a face. “Thanks.” Even now, she just can’t help herself, can she?
“Welcome,” she says, and then she lifts the gun and starts to turn toward my clone. To finish this.
But she’s not fast enough.
Her face is still tilted toward mine when the shot hits her in the back of the head.
The moment unfolds the way I imagine the glass covering our family photo broke: a strike to the center, cracks slowly branching toward the edges. And then everything shatters.
Violet’s eyes blink several times, rapid and twitching. Even when they close, I can still see them moving beneath her lids, darting frantically around. Then they open and widen slowly, her irises like dark ink bleeding into a perfect circle on the page. Her body crumples, falling sideways into my arms. I push her back, hold her out in front of me and try to get her to look at me, shake her and try to get her to say something.
“Violet? Violet!”
Her body goes limp, turns to dead weight that my tired, exhausted body can hold up for only so long. My broken wrist feels like it’s on fire from the pressure. My knees start to buckle. When the gun drops from Violet’s hand, I let myself drop with it.
But my clone is already back on her feet, and she’s holding my weapon from earlier—the one I thought was broken. How did she get it to work? And how is she still standing, still walking toward me so easily? Violet couldn’t even slow her down. How am I supposed to stop her?
“Why do you look so upset?” She smiles knowingly, stepping toward me. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
I shake my head, over and over, but I can’t seem to get any words to come out of my mouth.
“You can’t hide how you feel from me, you know. Your thoughts are mine. Every single hateful thought you had about her? I have it too, stored nice and safe in this brain of mine. So I know you were jealous of all the attention she drew. I know you were disgusted by the show she put on. I know she never took the first Violet’s place.”
“Shut up.”
“We both know you never saw her as your real sister.”
“I said shut up!” I carefully push Violet’s body out of my lap, grab her gun, and jump to my feet, a mixture of rage and adrenaline fueling me.
“I know about this anger, too,” my clone says, still smiling. “I expected it. Because I know you hate this life. You hate the things your parents have done. You hate your first sister for dying, and you hated this Violet for living. You hated it all so much that you hid in the shadows and wasted every second, every breath you had, trying to pretend to be somebody else. Just like a human, to waste the gift of life.” Her smile becomes a smirk. “But don’t worry. I’m going to make up for it. I have big plans for Catelyn Benson.”
“I’ve got bigger plans,” I say.
That smirk only widens.
Because she obviously doesn’t know everything I do. She doesn’t have the moments I blocked from her. She doesn’t know about the way Jaxon held me, or about Seth’s teasing, and she doesn’t see what I’ve only just realized about Violet—that despite the storm that’s always raged between us, she’s never failed to fight her way back to my side. That she’s all wrong in so many different ways, but she’s still my sister in every way that counts.
My clone doesn’t get that.
It’s too late for her to see and understand everything I have to live for.
She lifts her gun.
I lift my sister’s gun, and I fire first.
My shot hits her directly in the stomach, just above the cut I made with the knife. She stumbles back but manages to fire at me at the same time; the shot hits my own gun and sends it flying, leaving behind a nasty-looking burn on my hand.
She’s still on the ground, which gives me enough time to run for the door. And I’ve never moved so desperately—because now I have an idea. I know exactly where and how to end this. I just have to get there first.
A red-hot bullet hits the door frame. Misses me. Barely. I’ve taken only one step into the hall, though, when the knife flies through the air and lodges deep into the back of my leg, cutting straight through my skin as easily as if it were made of air. I stumble, and my hand automatically reaches for the handle of the knife; I stop myself from pulling it out, though. I don’t remember where I heard this, or why I know it, but I know that taking the blade out will only increase the amount of blood lost if you can’t apply pressure right away—and I can’t stop to apply pressure. I have to keep moving.
Because my clone is moving too. Slowly but surely; I can hear her stumbling through the kitchen, knocking utensils and dishes from the countertops, shouting threats in between gasps for air. She sounds like she’s struggling too now, at least.
I stagger toward my room, the knife bouncing around and shooting searing pain in every direction, up and down my leg. This is where it will end, I keep telling myself. I just have to keep going a little bit longer. Because she thinks she knows everything about me. She’s so sure that she has me all figured out—so she’ll think I’m running to hide. Because that’s what Catelyn Benson was always so good at, wasn’t it? She knows all about my favorite safe, quiet place.
So that’s where I’m running to.
But I’m not going there to hide.
When I reach my room, though, that’s exactly what I try to stage. My desperate flight into hiding. I move to the closet, leaving
a bloody trail in my wake, and I push my clothes in random directions to imitate my hurried attempt to get to that safe, hidden space. When I back away, I grab a long-sleeved shirt, because I know I’m going to need it when I have to pull this knife out, and I leave the door cracked just slightly.
Then I scramble into the tiny space between my bed and the wall.
And I wait.
It isn’t long before I hear her footsteps coming up the hall. I wrap the shirt around my leg and get it ready to tie. I grab a wad of the quilt hanging off my bed and shove it in my mouth, bite down on it as hard as I can as I take the handle of the knife in my grip. My arm shakes, and the seared skin of my palm stings as I put pressure on it. My hold with this hand is unsteady and awkward, but with the other wrapped up and useless, and that wrist still burning with pain, I don’t have any choice but to use it.
I close my eyes.
I think about Jaxon pressing against my hand. I think about Violet collapsing into my arms. I think about my parents, and our shattered family portrait, and the world outside falling to ruin at the hands of Huxley. At the hands of my own clone.
Then I pull the knife out.
I manage to bite down hard enough to stop the scream, but my eyes water so much that it takes me a minute to find the ends of the shirtsleeves and get them tied into a makeshift tourniquet. After that’s done, the pain becomes a steady throb—not as bad as I was expecting, but I wonder if the true pain is only numbed from shock. Blood is already soaking through the thin cotton shirt, turning the light blue color to a dark navy.
I have a decent weapon now, though—one much sharper than the butter knife under my bed that I would have had to use otherwise.
A second later, I hear my clone walk into the room.
“Hiding again?” she says. “Do you honestly think you can hide from me?”
She wanders close—too close—to the bed. I want to crawl farther underneath it, but I’m afraid moving will pull the quilt and she’ll see it. So I just hold my breath and keep perfectly still until she finally turns around and walks back toward the closet.
“If I was Catelyn Benson, where would I hide?” she muses. “Oh, wait. I am Catelyn Benson, aren’t I? So this should be easy.”
I hear the closet door swing open. I take a deep breath. She’s still talking, but I can’t make out anything she’s saying now because her voice is muffled—both from the closet walls as she slips farther inside and from the thrumming in my own ears as my brain tries to help me not dwell on what I’m about to do.
I don’t remember moving. But suddenly I’m pressed against the wall outside the closet. And then I end up behind her the same way. Her hair—my hair—is pulled up, and I have a clear view of exactly where I need to stab. She begins to turn around.
This time, she’s the one who’s too late.
* * *
When my head stops pounding, when my eyes are able to make out distinct shapes again, I watch my clone only long enough to see that she’s not moving anymore. Then I drop the knife from my trembling hand, and I stagger back out into the bright light of my room. Except it doesn’t feel like my room anymore. Nothing feels like it’s mine anymore.
I leave the room and pull myself along the wall, down the hallway, and back to the kitchen. The shirt-tourniquet is completely soaked with blood at this point. I’ve lost the feeling in that leg, and I’m starting to lose it in the other one and in the tips of my fingers as well. My vision is past blurry. The room is spinning, careening, crashing in around me.
Somehow I find Violet, and I drop to my knees and lie down beside her. She blinks once and reaches for me.
And so this is the way my world really ends. Side by side with my sister, her hand going cold in mine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Slipping
There’s a strength inside you that exists, whether you want it to or not. It waits until you’re ready to give up, until you want nothing more than to close your eyes and never have to face the pain of sunlight again. And then it shows up.
And it makes you get to your feet.
I go to the yard. I meet the CCA people when they pull into the driveway, and I tell them where Jaxon is, and I tell them where Violet is, and I tell them the last place I saw Seth. I don’t know what to tell them about my parents.
Part of me knows it is too late for all of them. Far, far too late. I was asleep for too long. Jaxon and Violet were slipping already, and Seth . . . I never saw him after I left the basement, which makes me wonder if my clone ran into him first.
But still I tell the CCA—President Cross herself—to hurry. Maybe there’s a chance.
Hurry, hurry, hurry. Please hurry.
I watch them run into the house.
And then I lie down in my father’s perfectly manicured grass, and I stare at our perfect white house with its perfect porch and perfect windows and perfect outside everything, until my vision blurs and the darkness takes me back.
EPILOGUE
Answers
Life comes back to me slowly at first, and then all at once in an explosion of colors and sounds. When it all settles, I manage to focus on a single sensation—the feel of fingertips softly tracing my palm.
I lift my head from the pillow and see Jaxon sitting beside the bed, his eyes closed and his body leaned forward in almost-sleep. His head, his shoulder, his arm—his whole body, it seems—is covered in bandages. The skin that isn’t covered is bruised, some of it swollen. I close my hand over his tracing fingers and he jumps, his gaze snapping to mine.
Neither of us speaks. The moment lives on a breath held collectively between us, until we exhale as a single, tired being; then he stands up so quick that his chair topples behind him, and next thing I know he’s leaning over me and carefully, gently, pressing his lips to mine. He holds them there for a long time. Long enough for most of what we need to say to pass between us, so that when he finally pulls away we still don’t speak for a long time.
The first words that I find are simple, obvious. “You’re alive. You’re okay.” It’s all I can think right away, and everything after that is just question after question about how he’s alive. And how I’m alive. And I’m really alive, aren’t I? This isn’t pretend, this isn’t something I’m making up inside my head, right?
Most of Jaxon’s answers—about the CCA, about the doctors, about Huxley—he only gets halfway through before having to stop and take my face in his hands and kiss me again. It takes us a long time to make sense of everything. And even then I feel like we don’t have all the answers. Maybe we never will.
After the destruction of most of their lab, thanks largely to the quickly spreading fire that started in room B13, most of Huxley’s scientists have retreated to other divisions in other cities. They can regroup there, but Haven was their main headquarters—so running them away from here, slowing their plans . . . it should feel like a victory.
I guess I’m just not in the mood to celebrate.
I keep going back to my memory of that holding room, to the way I felt when I saw those bodies suspended there. . . . I’d thought about breaking the glass. Even if it might have killed them, I wondered if it would have been better. Is that why Violet started the fire there? To stop them from waking up, and to save them from everything she’d had to go through? Or did she wake them up and free them before she set anything on fire? Could she have managed something like that?
“And I thought that was it,” Jaxon is saying. “When I watched you walk up the basement steps. I thought that was it.”
“I didn’t want to leave you,” I say, after he’s repeated that for the fifth time, and I finally manage to stop wondering about the fate of the clones long enough to look him in the eyes. “I never wanted to leave. I went to find Seth, to find help . . .”
Seth.
“What happened to Seth?” I ask. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks to your sister.”
“My sister?”
He nods. “Apparently,
she managed to barricade him in the attic before she went after your clone. He’s pissed about missing all the action, of course, but to be honest, she . . . she probably saved his life.” His voice trails off toward the end, and his cheeks flush a bit as he fidgets with one of the bandages on his arm. “Anyway, he was in here earlier. He was worried about you, too—don’t tell him I said that—but you know how his attention span is. He went to find something to distract himself with, I think.”
I try to smile, but now my mind is slowly getting back to a functioning calmness, and I find myself with still more questions, each one more painful, more terrifying to ask, than the last. What happened to Violet? My parents? Is anything left of my home now? Where am I supposed to go?
What am I supposed to do now?
None of the questions make it to my lips. I’ll ask them soon enough, I know. I’ll have to. But right now I want to keep them close to my heart, and instead I want to focus on just this—on the sound of Jaxon’s voice, and his touch, and the way the bed sinks a little under his weight when he leans in to kiss me again.
His lips are still hovering close to mine when someone clears their throat from the doorway. Jaxon slowly leans back, and I see his mother standing in the doorway, watching us from beneath raised eyebrows.
“I see she’s doing much better,” she says. Not unkindly. She sounds relieved, almost—even if it is in a reluctant sort of way, and I’m guessing she’s actually more relieved for her son’s sake than for mine.
I sit the rest of the way up. I move as slowly as I can, but the motion still makes my head spin. Jaxon offers me his arm; I take it and he helps me to my feet and then across the room to his mother, who seems to be making a genuine attempt to smile at the two of us being so close to each other. She’s not quite pulling it off, but at least she’s making the effort. I’ll take that as hope for the future.
“There are a couple of people who wish to speak with you, Catelyn,” President Cross says.
“Who?”
“You’ll see” is all she says, and then she turns and disappears into the hall. I follow slowly, my steps shaky and my head still swimming.
Falls the Shadow Page 26