“You running away from something or toward something?”
With something, I thought, but I shrugged instead of answering.
“That means ‘away from.’ I figured as much after I saw your picture on TV.”
Even though her eyes were down, I felt her watching me. Her and everyone else in the room, who had probably recognized me the minute I walked in.
“What’d they say?” I asked as casually as I could.
“Missing boy. Million-dollar reward. Picture of your face. The usual stuff, although even criminals aren’t worth a million dollars. What’d you do?”
Now everyone was listening. Not a single spoon touched ceramic; not a single mug left or landed on a table. They were probably all waiting for me to leave the room so they could race to call in the reward and collect on me.
In order to busy my hands, which felt suddenly numb, I brought the egg sandwich to my mouth and took a bite. Ugh. The muffin was stale, and the egg was so overcooked it could have doubled as a shoe sole.
“Fine, I’ll tell you,” I said, tossing the muffin onto the plate and dropping it on a nearby table. “But I’m doing it while I cook us a frittata.”
BY THE time I served the seventh slice, I had told them everything I knew, from the moment I met Jesse until the moment we arrived there, together, the night before, including my call with Georgia. As they took slow, careful bites, then voracious gobbles, I felt them weighing my story against the reward my parents had offered.
“That’s just awful,” Dolores said finally from the seat she’d taken on the other side of the counter. “I don’t believe in suicide, but I sure as hell don’t believe in cloning children either.”
Once she’d spoken her pronouncement, the others jumped on board. “Outrageous,” the mother of the little girl said with a shake of her head. “Unnatural,” the man on the other side agreed. “Imagine doing these experiments on children.”
“What are you going to do now?” Dolores asked.
“I don’t know. We’re just driving.” I didn’t mention Miami. “But after that, no clue.”
“What about telling the news your side of the story?” the mother asked, her head still bobbling from side to side.
“Would they even believe us? Besides, HORUS has their hand in so many pockets that they’d probably kill the story before it aired. Then they’d find us, bring us back, and do who knows what to us to make us stay quiet. I’d probably never see Jesse again. Not that I’m even sure I want to, after everything that’s happened.”
Dolores clicked her tongue.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She made the sound again before getting up and walking back into the kitchen. “You just remind me of the city kid from every romance novel, and Jesse’s the country boy you left behind. He’s still in love with you, just like he always was, and you’re trying to decide between him and some new person you found to take his place.”
“Left behind?” I couldn’t help laughing, her analysis was so preposterous. “That’s ridiculous! He’s the one who left me, remember?”
“I know, dear,” Dolores said as she patted my arm. “But you’re the one who’s changed.”
Before I could answer, Jesse ran into the dining room with a frantic, desperate look on his face and a bag tucked under his arm. I thought he was looking for me, but he merely nodded as though he’d known I would be there all along and then said, “They found us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“One of them must have called.”
I slowly turned from Jesse and swiveled to stare at the two families. “You turned us in?”
“Sorry, dear.” The voice was Dolores’s. When I turned to face her, she looked me unabashedly in the eyes. “Even love isn’t worth a million dollars.”
I dropped the spatula I’d been using to cut up the second frittata on the floor, and flecks of egg and potato went all over my legs. I didn’t care; my mind was already too busy racing through its encyclopedias for a solution. Through the kitchen door’s window, I could see the three HORUS vans perched and waiting to attack.
“What can we do?” Jesse asked me. Like usual, I would need to be the one to get us out of this.
“I don’t know. I’m sure they’re preparing the tranquilizers, and then they’ll come barging in here to use them.”
“What about the VW? Can we get in it before they get us?”
I pictured the location of the VW and then worked through the case scientifically, like Sherlock Holmes might have. Probably thirty feet away, in the opposite direction. If they were sixty feet away, then the hypotenuse between our van and theirs was about sixty-seven feet; if the average man ran 100 meters in twenty-seven seconds, and sixty-seven feet was 20.4 meters, that meant
27/100 = x/20.4
and x was 5.5 seconds.
Apparently I’d been mumbling math out loud, because when I turned to Jesse, he was staring at me like I was the one who belonged in a psychiatric hospital.
“What? Just because I want to be a writer doesn’t mean I can’t also like math.”
“Oh, I know. I was in your precalc class, remember?”
“How could I forget? You got the lowest final grade in SATY history.”
“Two percent, and I’m pretty sure those two points were for writing my name at the top. But no time to reminisce about my many failures, how are we going to get out of here without being shot?”
Right. The tranquilizers. I hadn’t factored them into my plan.
“They won’t work right away anyway, so if only one of us gets shot, we should be okay.”
“True, but these are trained HORUS guards, so they’re going to have pretty good aim.”
I looked around the kitchen for something to use as armor. On the wall were several pans, and these I took down and distributed between Jesse and me One pan went in the front of our pants under our shirts, while the other went in the back.
“And if they aim for our leg or arm?” he asked as he patted his protruding pan belly.
We didn’t have time to discuss it. The HORUS guards closed the doors to their vans, which meant they would walk to the motel any second and close the gap between our van’s distance and theirs. Jesse took out his keys and waved them, and then we opened the kitchen door and began to run.
Even though it was only a few seconds, the time it took to run to the van felt instantaneous. Everything was a blur, and the guards’ voices seemed like one muffled shout. They must have stopped to shoot, because tranquilizers whizzed by us as we unlocked the door and scooted inside. Both of our locks clicked closed.
“Drive!” I screamed at Jesse.
Then he was peeling out of the motel parking lot faster than the guards could even get back to their cars, and we were leaving that terrible place behind.
Chapter Ten
Jesse
IT WAS all just a show. I knew it—I’d been through it many times before—but I didn’t have the heart to tell Maddy. HORUS had a fleet of vans, helicopters, and squads of men trained to find us, and we had a giant cream puff on wheels. At least their newer cars had the required speed regulators, but even with that small advantage, they would chase this car down until it ran out of gas, like a human hunter tiring an antelope. There was no way out.
I drove for a while anyway, twenty minutes or so, until we had a significant lead on the other vans. Then, as soon as I saw the first bus depot going east, I pulled over and stared at Maddy expectantly.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m letting you out.”
“Uh, no you’re not.”
I took his hand, still sweaty from the run and shaking from adrenaline, just like mine. Behind him, I watched one of the enormous silver bullets filled with travelers pull out and start the long trek across country.
“Listen to me, Maddy. I’ve done this before. I’ve… tried to escape. As precious scientific evidence, they kept surveillance on me all the time. This
last time was my twelfth attempt, and I only got to you by stealing a tranquilizer and shooting all of the guards who would have called for backup. This time we don’t have that option. They will find this bus, no matter where it is, and there’s no way we can stop them.”
“Then let me take the VW instead. You know they won’t do anything to me.”
I knew he was right, yet for some reason, I couldn’t let him go instead of me. It went beyond a hero complex—I just had this terrible feeling in my stomach whenever I thought about watching him drive away from me.
Suddenly, Maddy noticed something behind me. He squinted his eyes, and then they got all wide, as though recognizing someone.
“That man.” He pointed, and when I looked, I saw a young man in a button-up shirt and old-fashioned glasses that sat crooked on his face. He had bright red hair that was wavy and thick in a way mine would never be.
“Yeah?”
“He used to work for my dad. I’m talking in-his-lab, as-his-assistant kind of working for him. I actually think he had a crush on… oh God, he’s coming this way.”
We slouched all the way down in our seats, but he had already seen us. He shuffled over to our car, dropped his duffel bag on the ground, and tapped on our window. I rolled mine down slightly, just enough to talk but not enough that he could fit a tranquilizer gun through, but he didn’t say anything. Strangely, he didn’t even seem interested in me—Maddy was the one who captured his stare.
“Maddy?” he finally asked. “Is that you?”
“Hey, Landon,” Maddy said. I could tell he was nervous, even though he was playing it cool. “How have you been?”
“You look so… so….” Landon was not playing it cool at all. In fact, he seemed a little… scared? His eyes were wide, and he kept playing with his top shirt button. Maybe he knew Dr. Stone was looking for us and he was debating whether to turn us in or not? Either way, I almost felt bad for the guy.
“Different?” Maddy volunteered. “I know, my mom put me on this diet, and I changed my hair too—”
“You don’t know, do you?” Landon looked between us. His hands worked his button over and over again, and I half expected it to fall off. “Your father didn’t tell you—”
“I know about Jesse, if that’s what you mean. And I know you were part of that project. I don’t blame you, Landon… you were just doing your job. Besides, Jesse 2.0 is just like the old Jesse, so whatever your goal was, you succeeded.”
“I told you, I’m not Jesse 2.0,” I corrected.
“No, you’re not,” Landon agreed. His eyes had not moved from Maddy once. “But Maddy is.”
Maddy laughed and said something about how his makeover wasn’t that dramatic, but I saw something in Landon’s eyes that made me stop and wonder. I’d been drawing people’s eyes all my life, and this was not the gaze of a man making a joke. In fact, I had never seen someone so serious.
“What do you mean?” I asked Landon. “Did they do something to him?”
“Do something?” Landon finally laughed, but it sounded hollow and maybe even sad. “Look at him. New hair. New weight. Slight adjustments to his attitude. Even his laugh is different. Remember how Maddy had that loud, almost booming laugh?”
“What are you talking about?” Maddy’s tone was defensive and almost mean. “I did all of this after Jesse died, in order to start over.”
Landon shook his head. “That’s just the memory they gave you to replace the other one.”
“What other one?”
“From when you died.”
I looked at Maddy, but he didn’t say or do anything, and his face was blank.
“It was right after Jesse,” Landon continued. I wanted to tell him to stop, to tell him Maddy wasn’t ready to hear what he was about to say, but I couldn’t speak either—or I didn’t want to. “You tried to hold it together, and your parents had people watching you twenty-four seven, but eventually, you outsmarted them. Somehow you hid all of the happy pills they were feeding you constantly, and then one day…. Anyway, I was there. Me and one other lab tech were working the night shift when your father and mother brought you down, and they asked us to do what we’d done to Jesse to you. Dr. Stone said that no one but us would know. ‘Spare no expense,’ he told us. I helped for a while, but when they started erasing memories and messing with physical traits, I quit. I liked the old Maddy just the way he was.”
The old Maddy.
Maddy 1.0.
Maddy’s eyes were vacant, as though his body was there next to me in the car but his spirit had drifted away. He didn’t respond when Landon asked him if he was okay—I didn’t bother because I knew he wasn’t—and he didn’t get out of the car. He just sat there, mute, in the most un-Maddy-like way imaginable.
“They’re chasing us,” I told him. I had to think of a way to get us out of there, quick. “Do you know somewhere we can hide?”
“Hide from HORUS? Good luck. I’m sure they already grabbed your license plate and tracked you here in this… unique vehicle. The only way to get them off your scent would be…. Wait. I’ve got it. Give me your keys.”
“What? No way, man.”
Sure, he didn’t work for HORUS anymore, but that didn’t mean I trusted him, especially because he’d had a thing for Maddy. For all I knew, he wanted to get Maddy captured, erase his memories, and try to win his heart again.
“I’m not going to strand you here. I’m going to save you. If you give me the keys, I can drive this car as far as it’ll go. By the time they realize it’s not you in the car, you’ll be on your way out of here.”
He had a good point. I looked at Maddy, but if he had an opinion about Landon’s plan, he didn’t voice it. At least when I climbed out of the car and reluctantly handed Landon the keys, Maddy slid off the seat and began trudging toward the buses, so I took that as a yes.
“Thanks, man,” I said to Landon through the open window as I pounded his fist. “You’re a cool guy.”
“No, I’m not.” Landon looked past me toward Maddy. “If I was a cool guy, I wouldn’t have helped do this to him in the first place.”
“You were just doing your job.” To my surprise, I added, “I’m glad you did.”
“Really?”
The poor guy looked pitiful.
“Really. I would do anything for Maddy—even living. Now I get the chance to prove that.”
I started to walk away, but Landon called me back.
“Jesse, there’s something else you should know.”
If I’d had a bad feeling in my stomach when we first spotted Landon, now I had a full-on ache. This guy just seemed to share bad news whenever he opened his mouth, and this would probably be no exception.
“What is it?”
“Those changes we did? To Maddy?”
“Yeah?”
“They included you. He can’t fall in love with you. His dad decided that was best—for him.”
Without another word Landon drove off. For a minute I watched the VW bounce its way down the highway, its rear like that of an oversized sow meandering toward a trough, and then I turned to look for Maddy. Like a lost little boy, he stood near the bus depot waiting for me to tell him what to do.
Love me, I wanted to tell him.
But what good would it do?
Chapter Eleven
Maddy
MY MIND just shut off.
That’s the only way I can describe what happened when Landon told me about what they’d done to me. One second my body was pumped full of adrenaline and my mind was racing, and the next, everything just slowed to a halt. I was a computer, and he was the finger on my power switch.
I don’t remember getting out of the car. I don’t remember Jesse buying us two tickets to get on the Florida-bound bus, and I don’t remember taking our seats in the back row. Perhaps the conductor called out our destination in his bored, distant tone; perhaps he simply shut the door and took off on his way.
I do remember that field after field flew by
my window, as blurry as an impressionist painting. Since most of the population lived in the city, the farmlands had kept their quaint qualities—run-down farms, fruit stands, bicycles abandoned on the edges of lawns—and these kept my unfocused gaze. All I wanted was to disappear into their safe simplicity, but even though I tried to voice the thought to Jesse, my mouth wouldn’t move.
“Maddy?” he would ask occasionally, but I didn’t answer.
Memories flooded my brain. Not memories of Jesse this time, but of my parents, of their smiling faces every time they looked at me over the past few months.
I looked down at my hands and noticed the clear nail polish that had begun to chip at the edges. My mom had taken me out for a mother-son field trip that past weekend, a new tradition since Jesse’s death that I found weirdly enjoyable, and she’d typed “fuchsia” into her machine before settling into her massage chair and closing her eyes. Instantly, the whole booth smelled like paint fumes, though she probably couldn’t smell much because of her nose job.
“Isn’t this nice?” she had asked me as the chair worked its mechanical hands over the knots in her back. She was so skinny that the hands lifted her several inches away from the chair every time they pushed. “Just us doing whatever we feel like doing.”
I didn’t mention that my mom always did exactly what she felt like. That was something the old Maddy would have said, back when I would have rather done homework for five hours than spend alone time with my mom.
Instead of retorting, I relaxed into my own chair and set the massage on “neck and shoulders” before sticking my hands on the imprints on the mechanical nail technician’s table. The brush moved slowly over each nail while cameras fed the computer information about their surface, curve, and shape.
“Have you given any more thought to college?” my mom had asked me in her version of nonchalance—which was to say that she was careful not to sound as nagging as usual.
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