They each made their opinion known by the expressions on their faces.
It was either raised eyebrows in surprise or a scowl with disbelief.
Wren was completely quiet and unmoving.
George fell into the shocked category but Joseph didn’t believe me. He stood up. “Everybody settle down. Thompson, how can you be so sure of this? The books all say clones are created by the scientists and brought to life in the labs. They don’t mention anything about human mothers.”
“When we broke into Lab Delta we met the mothers. We spoke with them. There had to be a dozen, all at varying stages in their pregnancy. They spoke the truth in their own words. The government have been lying to us and covering up the truth so everyone would have a distorted view that clones are nowhere close to being human.”
“These women were reliable?” Joseph asked. He was coming around, I could tell he was starting to change categories.
“They had no reason to lie.”
Joseph’s gaze travelled from me to Wren. “And you? Did you see this?”
All eyes followed suit and were now looking at the startled girl. Her cheeks flushed pink as she tried to shrink into herself and turn invisible. With this many people looking at her, that was never going to happen.
I gave her a nod of reassurance, hoping that would offer her some comfort. She didn’t stand but she did sit up until her spine was as straight as a stick. She took a breath and licked her lips until she couldn’t delay any longer.
“Everything Reece said is true,” she said with a strong voice before slumping back and indicating she would not be contributing anything further to the discussion.
“This doesn’t change anything,” George interrupted. “Our plans are in place, we cannot change them in case there are a few that might be sacrificed along with the others.”
“Every life has value,” I argued, refusing to sit down and be quiet. Now might be my only chance to stop their ridiculous plans. “You have to get the innocent out first if you’re going to do this at all.”
Joseph arched at eyebrow. “You don’t think we should target the lab at all?”
“No, I don’t. The labs are the process but they aren’t the instigators. You have to cut off the head of the snake to stop it biting. The government needs to be stopped or the labs never will. Blowing up one won’t do a thing, especially when there are so many of them in the city.”
He pursed his lips while George fumed beside him. He was about to completely blow his top. I got the feeling he wasn’t the kind of man who was spoken against very often. He was probably someone in the government before turning to the Resistance. It would explain why he now dedicated all his time to it.
“We still must proceed with our plans,” Joseph decided, earning a smug smile from George.
They quickly changed topics, leaving me no room to protest further. I would have to do it again in private, make Joseph listen when we didn’t have such an audience between us. I couldn’t let them blow up a lab, not when it would cost innocent lives. That wasn’t what we were about, we didn’t murder people caught up in a war that wasn’t theirs.
I flopped down onto my seat and ground my teeth together until they hurt. Wren shot me an unreadable look. If I could have walked out on the meeting, I would have.
It was all bullshit.
I’d worked too hard for this organization to have them throw away the mission with one stupid mistake. I’d risked my life, betrayed my comrades, and threw away my career for this. Because I believed in the fight. What George was proposing was not something I could ever believe in.
While I was still seething, the meeting proceeded. When I calmed down enough to tune into what they were talking about, a screen was lit up behind the panel of speakers. A series of five photographs were splashed across the screen. They were headshots of three men and two woman.
I recognized a few as politicians in Stone’s government. They were a mixture of higher and lower ranking parliamentarians. I’d guarded them all at some point in my career.
A man at the end of the panel was speaking. “These are the key people we believe are our lynchpins. If we can take these people down, it will put a major dent in Stone’s party. These five have a significant following, each winning their electorate in record numbers. We will be targeting them for either assassination or capture for information in the next few months.”
Wren tugged on my arm, trying to get my attention. When I looked at her, she flicked her gaze to the screen. I didn’t know which one she was indicating to or why she was so startled by it.
I leaned over so my mouth was close to her ear. “What’s wrong?”
“I know the middle one,” she whispered. “He’s Rocky’s Maker.”
Chapter 13: Wren
Seeing Rocky’s face on the screen was unnerving. It made my heart so heavy and numb that it felt like a block of ice sitting in my chest. It was going to freeze my whole body until I was nothing but an ice sculpture.
Maybe that would be better.
It wasn’t the Rocky I knew staring back at me on the oversized screen, of course. The man was about thirty years older than my best friend, but I would recognize him anywhere. The eyes never aged and that beautiful chocolate brown color could never be replicated.
Rocky never knew who his Maker was. Some Defective Clones went out of their way to find out so they knew who the enemy was and could avoid them at all costs.
Not Rocky.
He never wanted to know his Maker, he said he didn’t want to set eyes on the man who had paid for him to be made and then threw him out with the trash as soon as he was born – all because of his deformed arm.
I always understood his stance on the subject and I agreed with him, too. I just didn’t get the same luxury of never knowing. From the day I was born, everyone knew who had paid for me to be made.
According to the man standing at the end of the panel, he was planning on targeting the people on the screen. He said he would try to turn them and bring them into the Resistance. I don’t think he fooled anyone in the room.
He was going to kill them all.
They would be assassinated before they got a chance to listen to the cause. I should have felt sorry for them, considering they had a target on their backs now like I had lived with my whole life. I should have felt some empathy for them.
I didn’t.
They all helped Stone.
They were all guilty with more than their fair share of blood on their hands.
Still, it was difficult seeing the man Rocky would grow to resemble and knowing his life was going to be cut short. If they only injured him instead of stopping his heart completely, would they seek out Rocky for his organs?
That assumed Rocky was still alive, of course. I couldn’t believe he was dead already. I couldn’t abandon the hope that he was still living in the lab while his Maker ignored him and didn’t issue the order to have his organs removed.
Whatever happened, Rocky’s time was limited in any case. My time for saving him was racing toward the finish line and I couldn’t let it slip through my fingers.
I stopped listening to what the panel were saying in the meeting. I didn’t much care and they wouldn’t listen to my opinion anyway. At the end of the day they were going to do whatever they wanted, just like Stone and her parliament.
Reece had tried to make them listen and it hadn’t worked, proof of my theory. And he was a former guard. I was nothing more than a lowly Def, the absolute useless member of society. I wasn’t made for my brain.
I had to stop my foot tapping incessantly while the meeting progressed. I was restless and impatient, I wanted to be out of there so I could tell Reece about everything I knew. More than that, I wanted to get to Rocky before anything happened to his Maker.
Time seemed to stand still, moving slower than it ever had before. It was like they discovered a way to stop time all together in their underground bunker.
I was disturbing Reece as he sat besid
e me but I just couldn’t find a way to sit still. We were wasting so much time in the meeting, minutes and hours we would never be able to get back. Now wasn’t a time for sitting around and talking. Now was a time for action and doing things.
But they went on and on.
For another three hours.
Finally, Joseph called closure to the meeting and everyone shuffled out. Of course, they moved slowly too, making it impossible to make a quick getaway.
I grabbed the hem of Reece’s shirt and dragged him to a quiet corner. “That is Rocky’s Maker they are planning on killing,” I blurted out before he had a chance to speak. “We have to save him before they do.”
“You want to save his Maker?” Reece asked, his forehead wrinkled in confusion.
“No, Rocky. They are going to need his organs if something goes wrong. They’ll kill him anyway if he no longer has a Maker. We have to save him. Now.”
Understanding relaxed his features. “Wren, we tried that already and we didn’t find him. We have no idea where he is and I don’t have my trooper contacts anymore.”
“So we find him. We work out a way.”
He looked to the ceiling for the answers, found none, and gazed back at me. “We’re having enough problems saving our own lives right now. Going after Rocky would be too dangerous. Especially now.”
Anger was making my hands curl into fists. He didn’t understand and I didn’t know how to explain it in a way that he would. “If the situation was reversed and I was the one missing, Rocky would do everything he possibly could until he breathed his last breath to find me.”
“Wren, we have done everything,” Reece said, his voice gentle. He was trying hard not to upset me but it wasn’t working. Everything about this was upsetting.
“There has to be more we can do.”
“You almost died once doing it.”
Tears started to sting my eyes, more out of frustration than anything else. I hated the world we lived in. I hated that Stone and everyone else in Aria took my best friend away from me when he was a much better person than all of them.
I hated that I was so powerless.
I hated that I was so insignificant while others made all the decisions for me.
I hated being a Def.
Reece held onto my shoulders until I looked him in the eyes. There was sadness there too, a silent partner to frustration. “I’m sorry, I really am. The whole thing absolutely sucks. If we can think of something we can do for your friend, then we’ll do it. But running off to the labs to search for him isn’t going to work. We have to be smarter than all of them now.”
Everything he was saying was sensible and true. I knew that, I really did. But with every beat of my heart I also knew that I couldn’t give up on Rocky. For eighteen years we had nobody but each other. If I abandoned him now a part of me would die too.
A large part.
But he was right about needing to be smarter. Rocky’s life depended on it.
I nodded and he relaxed his grip on my shoulders as people walked past the hallway around us. We waited until they passed before resuming the conversation.
“What did you think of the meeting?” Reece asked, subtly changing the subject.
I remembered that I needed to tell him something, the memory flashing back into my mind. “The meeting was a waste of time. But they said something at the beginning, something about Stone being ill.”
“Yeah. Did you see any traces of an illness when you saw her in the complex?”
“She had a cough, there was blood,” I replied, seeing her hacking up a lung as the vision swam in front of my eyes. “She couldn’t get her breath and then I was taken from the room while Doctor Wagstaff attended to her.”
“Was it life threatening?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure. She didn’t seem very well but it could have been anything from a cold upwards. Although…”
“What? What do you think?” Reece prompted, the eagerness clear in his voice.
“There used to be a woman in the village with the same kind of cough. She didn’t last very long. Sunny found her in the field, covered in blood only a few weeks later.” The memory was vivid, even after so many years.
I was only a kid at the time and didn’t really understand how someone could die of a cough but the woman had. Rocky and I used to be kept awake all night by her hacking. We brought her food every day to try to help her.
“So Stone’s dying,” Reece concluded. “You know what this means.”
“She’s going to need me more than ever,” I finished his thought so he didn’t have to say it out loud. “They’re going to come for me harder to save her.”
Reece nodded, he didn’t have to say anything to confirm it. We both knew that if Stone’s life really was under threat from an illness, she would tear the city apart until she found me. There would be no way to get away from her a second time. A Def only had so many lives and I’d used up more than my fair share.
My organs would be removed, they would go straight into her while still warm so they could save her life. The countdown clock sitting over my head rushed forward until it was spinning out of control.
There wasn’t much time left for me.
Unless we got to Stone first.
It was her or me, we couldn’t exist in the city at the same time anymore. One of our lives was going to expire first and I was determined that it wouldn’t be me.
I had to find Rocky and I had to take down Stone.
Easy.
Impossible.
I had to find a way to make it possible. This life was the only one I had and I wasn’t going to readily give it up for a tyrant that cared nothing for lives – both human and cloned.
“We have—” My words were cut off by the sound of an explosion shattering through the underground bunker system. Reece and I exchanged a panicked glance before hurrying out of the corridor and into the main area.
Another loud blast rocked through the area, echoing down the hallways until it reached every set of ears. I had to clutch onto the wall to steady myself before I could move any further. It felt like the whole place was being shaken and rocked from its foundations.
Reece grabbed my hand and pulled me close to him, so near I could smell the scent of soap on his chest. Even his strong arm around me couldn’t quell the rising panic set to burst inside me.
Something was happening and it scared me to the core. Had Stone found me already? Did she bring the entire army to the bunker to retrieve me? This wasn’t just a small rumbling of the earth settling on the other side of the walls, this was akin to being picked up and shaken.
Screams rang out with the next rumble. Bodies crushed against each other as they scrambled to reach the central hub. Nobody seemed to know what was happening, only that they couldn’t stay where they were.
I knew the feeling.
An explosion rocked us again, not as big as the first one had been but still enough to elicit more screams and pandemonium. I worried about the ceiling and whether it would be strong enough to hold up to the assaults. Even though everything shook from ceiling to floor, the banging had to be coming from up above. The earth below wouldn’t suddenly start exploding beneath us.
We crushed into the central hub with the others. I didn’t remember the room being that small or cramped before. There were definitely more people than there had been at breakfast. More children and more frightened faces huddled with the rest of us.
We waited for one of the leaders to step forward, to tell us what was going on so we could either run for our lives or pray for our deaths. But it seemed like nobody would take that responsibility. The people that had sat on the panel that morning and asked us to trust them were nowhere to be seen. They had abandoned us when it was the time for them to truly lead.
Cowards.
I knew I didn’t trust them for a reason.
If the underground bunker was about to implode, I didn’t plan on sticking around and being buried alive. In all the w
ays I’d imagined my life would end, death by suffocation was never one of them.
“Everyone go back to your rooms and wait there for further instructions,” a woman yelled out over the rumblings. It took a few moments for me to find her in the crush of people. It was the woman from the panel, I guessed she hadn’t abandoned us after all.
A few people moved but the rest remained unconvinced. She waved her arms around in the air, trying to get more people’s attention. “Go to your rooms! Our bunker is safe and will hold. We will give you updates over the speakers in your rooms. Go, now!”
More people followed her instructions and the room started to thin out as she repeated herself again and again. I looked at Reece. “I’m not going back to our room without knowing what’s going on first,” I stated bluntly.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Reece replied.
We inched out of the central hub and headed straight for Joseph’s office, thankful we had been summoned there the previous night so we could find our way back again. The place was a maze and none of the doors were signposted.
Joseph’s door was slightly ajar when we reached it. We barged in without knocking. He wasn’t alone. A few of the panel were milling around, each wore the same look of concern on their faces. If they had a reason to be worried, then all of us did too.
“What’s going on?” Reece demanded, grabbing their attention.
Joseph didn’t show any surprise to see us, he only sighed with resignation. “You should see this.” He waved us over to look at the images on his computer monitor. It was split into several screens, each separated by a thin white line.
As soon as I realized what I was looking at, I wanted to be one of the oblivious who had obediently returned to their room without question.
The views of his monitor were from security cameras, all aboveground and fixed on the Defective Clones’ village. It had to be just above the bunker, it was the only explanation for us being able to feel the effects of what was going on up there.
Hundred Stolen Breaths Page 14