Clone Legacy: Book 3 in the Clone Crisis Trilogy

by Melissa Faye

  No one saw her leave. She didn’t say good bye to anyone. Etta was as annoyed as I was, but for a different reason.

  “She’s so stubborn,” she said. “But she isn’t one to act rashly. She could have at least told us where she was going! And when Ann finds out she took a truck –“

  “What does it matter what the test says?” I said, flopping into a chair next to Etta in the F-Lab. The fertility researchers were bringing people in and out for more tests, and Etta and I were trying to help organize lines and keep the data straight. “I don’t care about it.”

  Etta rolled her eyes. “It’s easy for you not to care,” she said. “What you have is special and...there are so few of us who have these mutations. She has to process. She’s probably at least a little jealous, don’t you think?”

  I fiddled with a row of Petri dishes on the lab table in front of us. “Yami doesn’t get jealous,” I said with a huff.

  “Of course she does. Everyone does.” Her voice turned soft. “She’ll come back. She’ll lick her wounds and get over this and come back. I know it!”

  Etta forced me to hand over my TekCast and looked at the stream of messages I sent her best friend.

  “Stop messaging her right now,” she said. “Give her space.” She wouldn’t hand my TekCast back until I agreed.

  IT WASN’T HARD KEEPING busy at Gentle Acres. When Yami was here, I spent time in the Chancellor’s mansion helping the leadership team develop our master list of rebel communities and contacts, and improve the TekCast program that allowed us to message across communities without the government hacking in.

  “And Yami took a truck?” Ann asked me out of the blue the next day, starting a conversation without even a polite “hello” or wave. “And a weapon? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I hadn’t told her anything, but Ann had clearly just found out and was looking for someone to yell at. I waved my hands in the air – I didn’t have any way to defend Yami’s actions.

  “She didn’t tell me before she left,” I said. “I didn’t know she took a truck until Javi said he thought he saw her getting into one. And it doesn’t matter anyway; she’s gone now.”

  “The man from your old community has the truck now at least,” Ann said. She was placated, apparently, because she turned away from me to look over the shoulder of a man working on financial distributions. She didn’t notice my jaw drop open.

  “The man from my...Omer?”

  “Mhmm.” Ann leaned over the man’s shoulder and pointed out a number. “Is this right? How did you come up with this model?”

  I grabbed Ann’s arm, which earned me her attention along with a nasty glare.

  “Omer says Yami is at Young Woods?” I snapped. “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t grab me like that, Charlie, and yes, she’s at Young Woods.” Ann looked me over and pursed her lips. “I can see why you’re upset, but if that’s going to get in the way of your work here, why don’t you go make yourself useful at the Med.” She ended the conversation by turning back towards the other man and ignoring me.

  My face flushed when several people looked up. Ann’s scolding left me eager to get out of there. I hurried off to the Med, where at least I could be away from Ann and spend some time thinking about why Yami went to Young Woods. And if she’d ever come back.

  I SPENT THE NEXT FEW days working with Matana at the Med. She was the leader of the ACer camp where we lived after Etta’s daughter Hope was born, and she was recovering from a serious brain injury that had left her in a coma for two weeks. She was a better companion than Ann. She was as annoyed as I was that Yami left, but still wouldn’t let us dwell on it.

  “She is stubborn,” Matana said. I was running her through memory exercises. I would give her three words to memorize, then we’d talk about other things, then she’d repeat the words back. Sometimes we used flashcards instead of words. Thankfully, Matana didn’t seem to have any long-term damage.

  “Yami is definitely stubborn,” I said. “What were the words?”

  “Towel, ladder, peanuts,” she said with a smirk. “Did I pass?”

  I laughed. “I think you’ve made all the progress you need to make. I’ll look into getting you discharged. Maybe they can find you a better place to live.” I paused. “Unless you’re going back to the camp?”

  Matana patted my knee. “They need more help than Gentle Acres,” she said. “Without me, without Sven...” She got lost in her thoughts for a second and her eyes drifted towards the window. Sven was second-in-command at the ACer camp that Matana led, but he’d died in a raid only a few days earlier. Matana and Sven left the camp together to seek medical help for Matana. She would be the only one of them to return.

  “What’s happening with the kids at the compound? New Waves, right?”

  I nodded. New Waves was what the Chancellor named the complex where the government kept the biological children they stole from their own parents. It was also where Sven was killed.

  “They’re sending supplies back and forth,” I said. “They found a group of volunteers to run the place for the time being. And they’re slowing locating the kids’ parents to send them home to be with their families.”

  “Maybe people at the camp can help,” Matana thought aloud. “We could organize something. New Waves has much better facilities than the camp. We’d probably have many volunteers willing to take on that work.”

  My phone buzzed. A message from Breck. Something important the F-Lab, he wrote.

  AS A FORMER FERTILITY researcher, Breck jumped in to help test Gentle Acres citizens over the past few days. They hadn’t found anyone else with a mutation that would make them fertile.

  Until now, apparently. I found the researchers clustered around a young woman. Breck told me her name was Zheng, and she was fertile. They’d finished all the testing, and she and I were the only ones whose results were positive.

  “Charlie, Zheng,” Breck introduced us. I shook hands and noticed how delicate Zheng’s hand felt in mine. She was small, like Etta, with a slim frame and wide eyes. It drew attention to how long her hair was. It was deep black, maybe even darker than Yami’s, and fell straight down her back. Up close, I saw a hint of freckles across her nose and the way she was nervously biting her cheek. I understood the feeling. Finding out you’re fertile, after years of being told clones can’t reproduce, is a big shock.

  “I heard your results were positive,” I said. “Welcome to the club! Mine too.”

  Zheng’s hand lingered in mine a little too long, and I hastily pulled back. She gave me a shy smile.

  “So I hear,” she said. “The odds are what?” She turned to Breck for reassurance. “One out of 1000? One out of 2000?”

  “Something like that,” Breck said. “We don’t know for sure.”

  “We’ve finished testing here, and we’ve been sharing data across other Underground communities,” one of the researchers said, leaning into our conversation. “It looks to be 1 in 1400. So far.”

  “Not bad,” I said. “I’d win some money in the lottery, but not that much.”

  I noticed one of the other researchers frowning at me, though I couldn’t understand why. Breck pulled me aside.

  “There are plenty of people here who are unhappy with their negative test results, Charlie,” he whispered. “Why don’t you cool it with the jokes?”

  I looked back at the researcher. Her arms were folded, and she sneered at me. When we made eye contact, she looked away.

  “I do have a question for the two of you,” Zheng said, pulling our attention back. “What did you think about the Chancellor’s video? About what he wants to do with people who can have children?”

  I thought back to the video the Chancellor had broadcast to the entire country’s TekCasts. He made some threats about people living outside government-run communities. He said he was going to test everyone for fertility mutations. I didn’t remember if there were specifics about people whose test results were positive.


  “Something about...creating opportunities for us,” Breck said hesitantly. “Was that it?”

  “Yeah, that sounds like it,” Zheng said. “Creating opportunities for us to pair off amongst ourselves.”

  That was part of why Yami said she was leaving. She thought I should be with someone else who could have kids so I could be a father. It sounded like the Chancellor wanted that, too. I wondered if the Chancellor and Yami agreed on anything else. Probably not.

  “Well that’s stupid,” I said. “The government can’t sanction who I can and can’t date. Or marry.”

  “Of course they can,” said Breck. “They’re rounding up people in camps and overthrown communities. They can easily separate out people like us.”

  “Who are they rounding up?” I asked. This was news to me. It was only a few days since the Chancellor’s announcement, and I hadn’t taken the threat seriously. He couldn’t have enough manpower to track anyone down in this short a time. Unless, of course, he had already started. Yami told us that they tried to do this testing at Gentle Acres before being fought out.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Zheng whispered, avoiding the glances from nearby researchers. “It’s great that I’m fertile but...who’s coming for me now? What’s going to happen to us?”

  “I heard they’ve started going after camps,” Breck said. “No one knows what happens, but the people disappeared. Someone saw an empty camp ground. No people, just tents and damaged buildings. It could happen here next!”

  “Yeah, and maybe they’ll bring more Gray Suits this time.” I imagined what it would look like. Rows of soldiers marching towards the community. Far more than we had people. With far more guns.

  “Then what do we do?” Zheng asked. “If someone’s coming to take us away, can we run?”

  I shook my head. “No way,” I said. “We’re not safe out in the noncomm. There’s nowhere else to go. And I’d rather be here helping then fleeing into the wilderness.”

  “Maybe we should go,” Breck said. “I don’t want the government’s hands on my daughter again.”

  “No. No way. Breck, the people here won’t let anyone hurt Hope. They’ve done so much for us already. If we just disappear in the night, what does that make us?”

  “We’ll stay,” Zheng said with a laugh. It was a light-hearted, airy laugh, and one I couldn’t quite place. “For now, at least. You’re right, Charlie.”

  Breck raised his eyebrows at me but said nothing more.

  Chapter 3 – Yami

  No one could figure out exactly how job assignments should work in a new without career assignments that divided people into social classes. If we kept everyone in their assigned jobs, it would maintain the social castes we were trying to avoid. If we switched jobs, people wouldn’t have the training they needed to do the more difficult work. For now, everyone was cycling through shifts in Gray jobs – maintenance, sanitation, plumbing –along with cycling through their usual jobs. Someone was developing training plans so Grays could learn different skills.

  After my first shift in sanitation, I returned to the second job Omer had me working. I was in charge of overseeing the fertility testing in the F-Labs. I’d been a doctor in the Med only a year ago, but he wanted me to take on a bigger role now. With so many people coming in and out of the community, someone needed to keep track of who was where and whether they’d been tested. I also ended up helping assigning housing, which made me many enemies.

  There was a firm layer of tension in the air while I walked from the warehouse where I’d been scrubbing toilets all day to the Fertility Lab across town. The Chancellor’s message about coming after overthrown communities had everyone on edge. On top of the stress that came with trying to reassemble the broken jigsaw puzzle that once formed a community, we were all looking over our shoulders to see when the Gray Suits would be there to pull it all apart again.

  I found the researchers in the F-Lab to be in a slightly better mood. Because of the increased communication across Underground communities and ACer camps, we had almost as many fertility mutations identified as the Chancellor claimed to have. Testing wasn’t efficient yet because of the changing population, but it was still getting done.

  “Anything?” I asked the researcher in charge, Janna, when I entered her lab. She gestured towards the display on her TekCast. I scrolled through the data and was shocked at the results.

  “Three people?” I gasped. “In one day. Three?”

  Janna didn’t respond; she was busy looking at a different tablet of data someone else handed to her. I glanced at it over her shoulder – data from communities like ours across the country.

  “Fertility rates are still very low,” she said. “But we tested a lot of people today. It went much faster than it has over the past several days. It’s strange, but yes. Three people, all today.”

  She pointed to the lab across the hall. Through the glass walls, I saw a small crowd consisting of three citizens and several researchers. I went to check it out.

  “Are these...?” I whispered to the nearest researcher. She nodded. The three citizens looked overwhelmed. There was a young woman, probably a high class student, an older man who could have been in his sixties, and a middle aged man who looked like he was on the brink of tears.

  “What happened?” I asked, sidling over to him. He looked at me with red eyes.

  “The tests came back positive,” he said. “I have the mutation. I can have children.”

  I pursed my lips, thinking this over. I hadn’t seen many positive tests – just four, in fact – but I didn’t expect someone to be upset about a being fertile. He was a middle aged man with a pale face and very little hair. He wore a nice button-down shirt and tie. He could be in a Silver career. Finance, maybe.

  “Is that bad?” I asked. I wouldn’t be upset about it. It would mean I could be with Charlie.

  Stop thinking about that, I thought.

  “I’m married,” the man said. “My wife and I...we never would have expected this.”

  This hit me hard in the gut. That’s why I couldn’t be with Charlie. He could have kids, and I couldn’t. I had never thought about marriage, but Charlie had that kind of long-term potential. Now we’d never try it. I wouldn’t allow it. What did this man’s wife think?

  “It’s not just that,” the other man chimed in. “Did you hear what the Chancellor said? He’s looking for people who are fertile. What does he want with us? We’re in enough trouble being part of Young Woods since we separated from the UCA. What will they do if they find us here?”

  A researcher shook his head. “You don’t know how lucky you’ll have it,” he said. He folded his arms tightly. His demeanor was tense; I looked around and saw others standing the same way. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is all anyone ever wanted, and now you have it.”

  “What if they pulled you from your wife?” the man said. “What would you do?”

  I noticed the young girl wasn’t speaking. She was hunched over a table and biting her lip. She looked familiar.

  Janna came to join us. “We don’t know what the Chancellor wants with any of us,” she said. It was all matter-of-fact to her. “If you can have children, he’ll take advantage of it. The rest of us, he’ll put us to use. How? We don’t know. No use worrying over it now.”

  “Easy for you to say...” the man said. He twisted his wedding ring between his fingers.

  An hour later, after finishing checking off more testing lists, I walked back to my old apartment in the Gold commune deep in thought. I stopped short when I heard footsteps following me. I turned to see one of the fertile citizens. The teenage girl. She jumped and almost walked into me.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she stuttered. “I’m looking for – are you Yami?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure how she knew me, but she looked familiar.

  “I was – I was friends with Vonna.” She looked down at her feet.

  I was Vonna’s mentor for the last few yea
rs while she was in middle class and moved up to high class. She was like family to me, and I did everything I could to keep her out of trouble when the Underground became more active at Young Woods. She was too eager to help, and I gave in. After she picked a lock in the Chancellor’s office and took pictures of secret documents, she was banished from the community. I didn’t know where she was. And I tried not to think about it.

  I waited for the girl to say more, unable to loosen my own jaw.

  “I’m sorry for coming over here, I just thought you could be someone to talk to...”

  I looked at her more carefully. She had dark skin and beautiful bright eyes. Her hair was cut very close to her head. She wore large gold hoop earrings that brushed against her shoulders. Like most of the town, her clothes were a little more raggedy and dark than usual; I figured we were all subconsciously trying to draw less attention now that our very existence was illegal.

  I did know this girl through Vonna, though I couldn’t remember her name. And right now, she looked terrified. I brushed aside my feelings about my lost friend.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Forgive me, I can’t remember your name.”

  “Imani,” she said. She bit her lip. “I’ve seen you all over the place the last few days. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “What do you want to know about?”

  Imani paused. Her eyes darted around, avoiding mine.

  “Why don’t you come up to my place?” I said. “Do you like lemonade?”

  We walked up to my apartment and I filled the silence with questions about Imani’s studies. She was in architecture, and had a few classes with Vonna before she left. Every time I heard Vonna’s name, my heart skipped a beat. I did my best to hide it. Once I got Imani started, she went off on tangents, talking about her classes and friends and a boy she was dating before the rebellion.

  I unlocked my door and led her inside.

  “I told him, I don’t think we can date anymore!” she said. “The whole town is changing. Something big is happening. Not just here. Everywhere! I can’t worry about boyfriends while all of this is going on. My best friend Debbie said I should just get over it, but I mean it. Now the girls aren’t talking to me, and Debbie won’t answer my messages. I guess they don’t like that I’m taking things so seriously. Is that wrong?”