“Bears?” The guard snickered. “Kid”—and I felt the weight of his disdain all the more because he was our age—“if you manage to see more than a black squirrel, consider yourself lucky. Anything not already extinct is about to be, and bears are no exception.”
I certainly wouldn’t consider myself lucky, but his words calmed me.
We drove through the gate and down a few curving, pitch-black roads with only the two headlights to guide us, and then we came to number thirty-eight. The plot consisted of a gray gravel drive, a natural stone gravel plot, a wooden picnic table with one of the side benches missing, and a fire pit. On closer inspection, the pit was topped with an adjustable cooking grate that had been blackened and warped after years of heat. Beyond the plot was blackness interrupted by the occasional tree trunk illuminated by moonlight.
“I can’t do this,” I told Maddy as I stared at the land outside the truck.
“Sure you can.” He hopped out of the truck and began loading the tent and several bags of supplies onto his arms. “Just think of yourself as Robinson Crusoe.”
“I’ll think of myself as eaten by a bear,” I retorted, but I followed him out of the truck.
Setting up the tent was as difficult as I’d thought it would be. We started with the tarp, a crinkly plastic sheet that felt terrible on my dry hands, and stretched it between us to lay it flat on the ground like a large picnic blanket. Then we unfolded the tent and did the same, trying to match the corners of the tent with the corners of the tarp, and threaded the poles through the chutes on the very top. Unfortunately we didn’t know to stick the pin into the end of the accompanying pole, so every time we tried to get the tent to stay up, it collapsed. Then we had to figure out where the clips were, and it turned out we’d twisted the whole thing and the poles were in the wrong places.
“Almost there,” Maddy assured me as he pushed the tent up and secured the clip. “Perfect.”
After all that effort, I needed to sit, but Maddy informed me it was my job to start a fire while he unloaded the rest of the stuff from the truck. He thrust a bundle of wood and a box of matches into my arms, which I carried, with difficulty, to the fire pit.
How hard could this be? I asked myself as I dumped the wood in a pile in the pit and lit one of the matches. And another. And another. By the time I realized that wood wasn’t going to burn, I’d already used six of the twelve matches.
“How’s it coming?” Maddy asked from inside the tent.
I stared down at the unlit pile. “Fine.”
“If you’re having trouble, try a teepee.”
Of course. I’d definitely seen this in a movie somewhere. Three logs resting on their ends leaned together to become my teepee, and again, I lit a match.
Nothing.
“Any other brilliant ideas?” I asked.
Maddy went to the truck and came back with an old newspaper. This he crumpled into several small balls that could fit between the teepee logs, and with my breath held, I lit another match.
The newspaper burned fast, and then the flames licked against the wood. As the newspaper died and floated as ashes in the air, I thought it was over, but then Maddy pointed to a few loose fibers on the end of the wood that were just starting to take.
“Beautiful,” he said as the flame moved up the fibers and consumed the logs.
“Beautiful,” I agreed.
But I was looking at his face in the firelight, his expression just as determined as it had been every day since I’d met him. Maddy looked at a problem and figured out how to solve it. He never gave up—not on teepee fires or cross-country trips or people.
Or, more specifically, me.
I was the one who’d done all the giving up for both of us.
Maddy turned to look at me, but I looked back at the fire before he could catch my eye. Maybe Landon had been right and it had taken me this long to see it, I thought as I watched the fire grow.
Maybe what was best for Maddy wasn’t me.
Chapter Thirteen
Maddy
AFTER JESSE finally got the fire started, I set about unpacking the rest of the bags. Cousin Mo’s wife had packed a cooler full of food, including some cheese slices, a bag of white bread, and a cast iron skillet for cooking it all.
“Grilled cheese?” I asked Jesse as I held up the bread and cheese.
“Never had it,” Jesse said. He was sitting as close to the fire as possible and scanning the woods for signs of bear life—definitely more of a Don Quixote than a Robinson Crusoe—at every snapping twig.
“How is that possible?”
“Uh, have you heard of a quesadilla? Why would you touch white bread when you can have a corn tortilla instead?”
“Good point.” I’d eaten a lot of Mexican food at his house, and everything was far superior to the meals our housekeeper put together before she left for the night. Then again, most American meals were better than hers too. When we had dinner parties, my mom would always order from a restaurant instead of asking the housekeeper to do it; according to my mom, the key to your guests not figuring out your secret was “consistency.”
I’d loved our housekeeper anyway, more than I loved my own mother in some ways, until she’d been dragged out of our house by two guards. For stealing, my mom had said in that way she had of almost but not quite telling the truth. When I’d asked what Darlene had stolen, my mom had just shaken her head and turned away from the window.
Now I balanced the skillet on the grate and swished a little oil over it, then shook a little water onto my fingers and let the droplets fall. Tssssss, the skillet hissed, and Jesse jumped.
“Relax,” I assured him. “It’s just the scary predator called the skillet.”
“Very funny.” Jesse’s back was still straight, and his head was tilted to the right, listening. “By the way, are bears afraid of fire?”
“There are no bears!” I repeated.
“That’s not true—they’re just very, very rare.”
“As in endangered species, ‘ten thousand and dropping rapidly’ kind of rare.”
“Ten thousand! That’s so many!”
I sighed. Explaining the statistics of a bear attack to Jesse would be like telling a child that there wasn’t a monster under their bed: they’d nod and say they understood, but the minute the lights went out, you were back to square one. I still remembered the time I’d tried to explain quantum entanglement to him—generally I stayed away from science, since writing was where I’d focused my attention, but I’d seen one of my father’s whiteboards and was interested in the concept—and Jesse had literally fallen asleep, as though the pure effort of trying to conceptualize the idea had exhausted him. Then, when I’d tried to get a vague summary of quantum entanglement out of him, he’d said one word: “Telekinesis?” Needless to say, that was the last time I ever discussed my father’s work with Jesse.
Ironically, that same work was what had created this new Jesse—and Maddy 2.0, though I still had trouble wrapping my brain around that title and even more trouble accepting it as true. For now, I shoved it to the back of my mind where all the bad thoughts about this trip were mingling like vegetables floating in a soup.
The sandwiches were good, albeit oily and gooey from the cheese, and we each ate a second one. We washed them down with a jug of lukewarm water that we had to share, and though I gagged at the thought of my lips touching a place where Jesse’s had, I knew that was only the brainwashing talking and took a swig anyway.
The fire began to die out, lowering to four red coals like rubies in a black setting. Everything became even darker for a second, but then my eyes adjusted, and I could see even farther into the woods. Through the trees, a glimmer indicated we were probably right on the water.
“Should we open our second package of firewood?” Jesse asked.
“We’ll need it for breakfast tomorrow.”
“Can’t we just get another?”
“We’re broke.”
“Oh. Right.�
��
After Jesse was safe inside the tent, I poured a bit of our purified water on the fire to put it out for good. Then I unzipped the tent door just enough to creep in but not enough to let in the trail of mosquitos that were following me. I didn’t have extra clothes to sleep in, but it was dark, so I slipped out of my shirt and shorts and crawled into one of the sleeping bags I’d laid out when we first got to camp. It was way too thick a cover for a warm spring night, and when I began to sweat, I kicked the covers off. Nothing he hasn’t seen before. Jesse did the same, and then we just lay there, not saying anything.
Then Jesse whispered, “Look.”
“What?” I sat up. “Did you hear something?”
“No, that.” He reached over and found my hand, then used it to point up through the translucent section of the tent to a pinprick of light.
“That?” I laughed. “That’s a star.”
“I know. But they’re so rare and beautiful.”
“Can’t you see the stars in Boise?”
“The pollution is even worse there because they don’t have the expensive filters LA does. The only time I’ve seen stars was on the trip between the two. Have you seen one before?”
“My dad borrowed his astronomer friend’s telescope and took me somewhere near where San Francisco used to be before that big earthquake. I slept the whole way there and back, but he woke me up to look at the stars. They seemed so… magical.”
I didn’t tell Jesse about how safe I’d felt in my dad’s arms as he picked me up and carried me across the field to the telescope he’d set up in exactly the right spot. I didn’t say how proud I was that my dad had chosen me to accompany him, and that he said my mom would be “a distraction.” I didn’t explain how badly I’d wanted, in that moment, to be just like him. I could practically feel the wet grass under my palms and the cool breeze on my cheek.
But I didn’t have to tell Jesse. Even though I couldn’t love him anymore, he still loved me, and he knew me better than anyone else did.
“It’s the worst part, in some ways.”
“What is?” I asked as I brushed a tear from my eye.
“Knowing that your parents are the ones who did this to you. And that you can’t hate them for it, even if you want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because they love you. And the people who love you never stop fighting for you, no matter what.”
He made it sound so easy to forgive them, but it was more complicated than that. My dad hadn’t just paid someone to bring me back to life; he had secretly developed a technology that could have very serious, very dangerous implications. And he’d already been doing that long before Jesse committed suicide. I had built my dad up as a hero, as someone who always did the right thing, but nothing about repro technology was right.
“Do you think they’ll go public with it?” Jesse said.
“Repro tech?” I shrugged, but he couldn’t see me. “I don’t know. They were developing it for a reason, and that reason was probably a mountain of cash. I mean, think about it: if you ask everyone to pay a million dollars to bring someone—a family member or significant other or friend, or even dog, for goodness sake, if people still had dogs—back from the dead, you’ll be the richest person in America. HORUS would be able to fund every project they’ve ever dreamed of in days.”
“But they’re changing people. Who would want that?”
“That’s the beauty of repro tech.” Their plan was obvious now that I thought about it. “It’s not the person themselves requesting the repro, it’s someone else. That person gets to design the new version of their loved one, like building an outfit on your watch before you take it out of the closet. The original person is dead, so they can’t protest, and when they wake up, they won’t know what happened.”
“But don’t they have a right to know?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because they’re dead. Dead people don’t have a right to anything. They’re just skin and bones and organs at that point, prime for remodeling. Sure, they’ll probably come out with a law that says you have to sign your ‘right to live’ over to a loved one if they’re going to bring you back, but every computer these days knows how to forge a perfect signature, and every lab tech has the need for a little extra cash.”
I could see just enough of Jesse to know he was shaking his head. I didn’t know why I was saying such terrible things, yet now that the words had been spoken, I realized they were true. And my father, who was ten times smarter than I would ever be, knew they were true too.
“Well I think you’re wrong,” Jesse said. He sounded angry, though whether at me or at HORUS, I didn’t know. “I think they do have a right to choose and a right to know it’s happened. Think about you. If Landon hadn’t told you, you might have gone back to California and continued living your preselected existence. Isn’t it better that you didn’t?”
“Is it? I was enjoying my perfect, preselected existence before you showed up again.” Now I was just being mean, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to believe it was the programming talking, but how could I ever know for sure?
“Sorry I ruined your life, then,” Jesse shot back. “If you miss it so much, why don’t you just go back?”
He made a good point. If I truly loved my life back home, why was I sleeping in a tent with him? Why did I want to curl up next to him, like I used to do when we got in fights, until he wrapped his arms around me and forgot all about what I’d said?
“Maybe I will.”
I rolled over and felt around the floor for my sneakers. Then I stood and started to unzip the tent to climb through, but before I could slide through the hole, Jesse’s hand wrapped around my arm and pulled me back into the tent. My balance faltered, and then he had me in his arms, so close that I could feel the heat coming from his skin. That little voice in my head told me that I didn’t want this, that every touch made me want to gag, but for some reason, its volume seemed to be lower than before. I still heard it, but I could ignore it, at least for a little while.
“Listen to me, Madison Bentley Stone. If you tell me that you don’t love me anymore, and you truly mean it, then I will let you walk out that door and never see me again. But if you have even the slightest doubt—even the smallest feeling that maybe, someday, you could feel that way again—then tell me now so I don’t make the same mistake of letting you go again.”
His lips were so close, and I wanted to kiss them. Yet at the same time, kissing Jesse felt like it might raise the volume in my head to an unbearable decibel, and I didn’t want to hear it. Being around him made me feel like I was two people at once, and the dysphoria was unsettling to the point of being painful. Yet I couldn’t leave him, even if I wanted to.
“I don’t know if I can love you again,” I said. Everything was quiet in my head, at least for a second, which meant it was true.
Jesse’s head dropped, and his grip on my arm loosened.
“But I know that I want to try.”
He didn’t need to touch me again or say anything in order to tell me how he felt. We just stood there staring at the other person’s shadow, feeling them the way you can feel someone getting into the other end of an otherwise undisturbed pool.
His love rippled over to me, and with a nervous push, I sent a little back.
WHEN I woke up in the middle of the night, however, Jesse’s body just inches from mine, all of the dysphoria was back and then some. I felt sick to my stomach, as though I’d drunk a carton of expired milk, and I felt a strong urge to get away from him as soon as I could. Without waking him, I slowly rolled off my sleeping bag and crept out the flap of the tent, taking my shoes and the little bottle of hotel shampoo with me.
The bathroom was a good five-minute walk from our tent, but at least it was a real bathroom and not a hole in the ground. Bugs spotted the mirrors and walls, and after I flushed, a disturbed moth flew straight for my face. I didn’t have a towel, bu
t at least I could shampoo my hair and air dry my body before getting back into my dirty clothes. The dye had mostly come out in one wash, but seeing my blond hair again only made me feel sad.
I was going to walk right back to the tent, but then I noticed a pay phone and stopped dead in my tracks. Should I call her? How could I go from telling Jesse I wanted to love him to missing Georgia so strongly that I wanted to wake her up in the middle of the night just to talk to her?
As though possessed, I walked over to the pay phone and picked up the receiver. I didn’t have any money, so when the electronic operator asked how I wanted to place the call, I said “collect” and then gave her Georgia’s phone number. I expected her to be asleep, but when Georgia answered, she sounded wide awake.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, and then someone else took the phone.
“Hello, Madison.”
Despite the heat a shiver went through me. Dr. Reed had taken his daughter’s phone, and though I had always considered my father’s boss as an uncle, his voice had lost all of its comforting familiarity.
“Hello, Dr. Reed.”
“Quite a chase you’ve put us through, my dear. Over a million dollars in costs, if I’m being completely honest… but don’t worry, your father’s agreed to pay them. Can’t have our prized patient disappearing on us before the big investment day, now can we?”
The words “prized patient” brought back all of the nausea I had just fought off.
“What do you expect me to do?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice level.
“Do?” He laughed. “You’re not going to do anything. In fact, when we take you home, you’re going to specifically do nothing until after the demonstration for our investors.”
He was trying to scare me, but I wouldn’t let him. I thought hard, trying to figure out what Dr. Reed might hold over my head: Georgia? My parents? No, something more immediate.
“And if I don’t comply, what will you do to Jesse?” I asked.
“Oh, Maddy. Such a shame you decided not to follow in your father’s footsteps… you would have made such an asset to our team. You’re right, I do have my eye on the boy… and on wiping him again, but this time without any memory of you or your parents. I could turn him into a blank slate, or maybe into a lab technician at HORUS? How ironic, your little artiste in a white coat?”
Jesse 2.0 Page 7