“Don’t you dare touch him. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
“I already told you,” Dr. Reed said. I heard the crunch of gravel behind me, and then many feet hit the pavement. “You are not to do anything.”
I didn’t turn around when they grabbed me and started to drag me back to the truck because something in the reflection of the headlights on the pay phone glass caught my eye.
Something… impossible.
There, amidst the blond of my hair, was a single brown strand—not the color of the dye, but a different, darker color.
The color Jesse had described for Maddy 1.0.
PART TWO
Chapter Fourteen
Jesse
I WOKE to the sound of birds twittering in the nearby trees, which sent a surprising wave of happiness through my body. There were no birds in the cities, unless you counted the scavenger pigeons who covered every inch like winged rats, and certainly no beautiful music outside your window every morning. I had the sudden urge to stay this way forever, living off the land, drawing landscapes… so much for hating nature.
“Maddy,” I started to tell him, but then I realized he wasn’t lying next to me.
I slipped back into my dirty clothes and went looking for him. He wasn’t at the fire pit, nor was he standing at the edge of the lake right behind our lot, so I went to the bathrooms as the last place he could be. He wasn’t there either.
All of the nature-fueled happiness disappeared. Maddy wouldn’t have wandered off without telling me… would he? Had he woken up in the middle night disgusted by his words?
I know I want to try.
My breath quickened. My palms began to sweat. The woods around me seemed ominous, as though the trees were not just standing but leaning closer and closer to me.
Why had I pushed him?
What had I expected him to do?
He couldn’t love me—HORUS had made sure of that.
“You okay, kid?”
It was an old woman in a bathing suit. She had come to stand next to me, and I hadn’t even noticed.
“No,” I said honestly. “My friend—”
The pay phone next to me rang.
“What the hell?” the woman asked.
“No clue.”
“I haven’t seen a pay phone since… actually, I’ve never seen one, and I’m way older than you are. Should we answer it?”
I half expected her to put a hand on my arm like I was about to help her across the street. Instead, she went over to the pay phone and picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
She listened for a few seconds and then held the receiver out to me.
“It’s for you.”
“What?” I took the receiver. “Maddy?”
“Jesse?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Who is this?”
The voice on the other end sighed. I had the feeling she was trying to decide whether to hang up or not, even though she had been the one to call me.
“It’s Georgia,” she said finally.
“Who?”
“Madison’s girlfriend.”
“Oh.” Why couldn’t I speak?
“Listen, this was a bad idea, never m—”
“What was a bad idea?” Now my mouth had suddenly decided to work overtime instead of not at all. “Why did you call me? Do you have Maddy? Where is he?”
“My dad has him. He ‘discovered’ your location from your cousin’s aides after a little persuading, and all he needed was Madison’s exact location, which he got when he called me last night.”
Maddy had called Georgia? There were bigger things to worry about, yet I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. After that moment in the tent, he’d still wanted to call his girlfriend?
“Anyway, I can’t do anything. His parents are going to lock him up in his bedroom per my dad’s orders, and he assigned two guards to follow me every time I leave my house. Like, literally attend my classes and everything. I might be able to get in to see Madison, but beyond that, there’s not much I can do. We’re both stuck, but you….”
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know. If only Madison….”
I’d just had the same thought. If I’d been the one kidnapped and Maddy the one trying to rescue me, everything would have been okay. He would have thought of a plan in as much time as it had taken Georgia to fill him in on the details. But me? I hadn’t even been able to save myself.
“He writes about you,” Georgia said suddenly, surprising me.
“What?”
“Madison. He didn’t write for a long time, but when I convinced him to start again, he wrote… you. Over and over again. I don’t even know if he was aware of it, but I was.”
“Oh.” Apparently I was incapable of speaking again.
“Honestly, I was really jealous for a while. He let me read his stories, but I never showed up in them, even as a minor character—and that made me really sad. But then I realized that he wasn’t just writing you because he missed you… he was writing himself with you because he missed the old Maddy too.”
I didn’t know how the conversation had gotten here, and it was more than a little unsettling. I’d wanted to hate Georgia, but now I just felt bad for her.
“Did you know what they were going to do before they reproed him?” I asked, hoping the answer would put me back in anger mode.
“Not until after it happened. Then my dad convinced me it was better for Madison not to know about the transformation, and I can’t say he was wrong. Madison seems… confused.”
Confused was certainly one way of putting it.
“So what can I do?” I asked again.
“The only thing there is to do.”
“And that is…?”
“Plan a rescue the way Madison would.”
Even the word plan made me wince, and that was when it was attached to ideas like dates, outfits, or career choices. But a rescue? I was the last person anyone should put in charge.
“Memorize my number,” Georgia commanded, and then read the digits back to me until I could recite them. “Good. Write them down as soon as you can, and then put the paper somewhere safe. You may need me.”
“But HOR”—Georgia hung up the phone before I could say the rest. Instead, I spoke into the empty pay phone air—“US is impenetrable.”
“Did you say HORUS?” This had come from the old woman now sitting on the bench a few feet away massaging the soles of her feet one by one by slipping one out of its flip-flop and hefting it onto her knee with both hands. Her chest, supported only by the flimsy bikini top, hung almost to those same knees.
“Yes. You know it?”
“Know it? Honey, where do you think you are?”
I looked around at the trees.
“Not literally.” She released her foot to the ground and stretched her arms wide. “This is Hidden Treasure Campground.”
I stared at her blankly.
“Refuge for the weirdos. The crazies. The druggies. The dropouts. The not-quite-trainable members of society.” Spit flew from her mouth with every word.
“And…?”
“The theorists. The conspirators. The refugees.” She seemed to be on a roll with her list.
“Yes, but what’s your point?” I asked as I joined her on the bench. My conversation with Georgia had exhausted me, and the weight of my task wasn’t helping my energy level. All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head. As it was, my chin kept hitting my chest as I fought off depression and, by extension, my automatic sleep function.
“My point is that if they haven’t worked at a company like HORUS, they’ve got a theory about it. I mean, once you’ve hacked in, it’s hard not to see—”
My head bobbed up. “What did you just say?”
“They’ve got a theory about it?”
“No, the other part.”
“Oh, the hacking. They shouldn’t do it, but my Tommy in particular likes to spe
nd time in their systems poking around the new technology—”
“You’re telling me there are people here who can hack into HORUS’s system?”
“Honey, that’s what I just said.” The woman squinted at me in a way that told me I wasn’t very bright. “Hidden Treasure has more hackers than the government, and our guys are much more persistent.”
“Can you take me to them?”
“Sure, but I can’t promise they’ll help you. Tommy might, though… he’s such a good boy.”
The woman stood, causing a fireworks display of pops and cracks in her upper back, and then began the trudge down the path opposite from ours.
Maybe it was my imagination, but her flip-flops seemed to chastise me all the way with their slapping tongues, reminding me that I knew nothing of the outside world and probably still would know nothing even after this was all over.
After HORUS erased me.
Chapter Fifteen
Maddy
THE HORUS team drove me all the way home. Every two hours we stopped to switch drivers and get gas or the occasional bottle of water, but otherwise, there were no breaks. None of the men spoke, even at the stops, nor did they play music or smoke an e-cigarette or adjust their ties. They literally never moved, their bodies no different than empty suits hanging in a closet.
I didn’t care, though. I just stared out the window, watching the sky slip out of its dark shawl, thinking about Jesse and Georgia and that one strand of hair I’d tucked away the minute I sat down.
One strand.
One little sign that maybe, just maybe, my repro adjustments weren’t permanent.
But how could that be possible?
The science behind it didn’t make sense. HORUS had changed my genes and physical traits and brain, literally remade me like a mechanic would have rebuilt a car, hadn’t they? They had taken out everything, from the brown hair and excess weight to the proclivity for depressive episodes, right?
Or maybe, instead of removing them, they had only masked them. Maybe I was like a timeworn wall, and HORUS had painted over my old-fashioned wallpaper with perfect white paint.
And now that paint was peeling.
When I got back home, I would need to somehow smuggle some science books into my room. I remembered some of the basics from class—Punnett squares, BB bb for brown eyes with a recessive blue gene, black hair pigment eumelanin and red hair pigment pheomelanin—but not enough to put the pieces of this puzzle together. Maybe I could even get ahold of Landon and ask him to help me—if HORUS hadn’t already found him first.
In the meantime, what would Jesse do? I knew him, knew he would try for a romantic rescue, and I had no way of stopping him. He had always been that way, like a gecko leaping for the next forest branch, not caring whether he’d end up falling. But geckos were resilient; Jesse wasn’t.
And what of Georgia? Had she told her dad about my calls, or had he been smart enough to know I would make contact eventually? What did she think of me disappearing with Jesse? She wasn’t jealous like him, but everyone has their limits, and even Georgia had to wonder whether I would fall back in love with him eventually.
Even I was wondering that.
Finally, after the sun had gone down again, we got to our gated driveway. The HORUS guard who was driving at that point typed in the code—0829, my birthday—and the gate swung open without a sound.
Despite my disappearance, my parents had managed to keep everything in order, from the perfectly manicured grass to the spotless stoop leading to the porch and then, beyond that, the house. From our perspective, the mansion looked like a castle, completely disconnected from the city a few miles away.
Before the guard even knocked, the door swung open and my mother, clad in a pink dress and heels, answered the door. She looked as though she was about to leave for a banquet. Knowing her, she’d double-booked tonight just in case something went wrong with my “rescue.”
“Maddy!” she cried as she enveloped me in a perfumed hug. Her augmented breasts, two slabs of silicone, pressed against my chest. “We’ve been so worried.”
I almost said About what, that I’d find out the truth? but I held it in. Unless they’d actually taken Landon in for questioning, they didn’t know that he’d told me that I was a repro or that they’d changed me in the process.
“Jesse’s fine,” I said, diverting their attention. “He’s upset, of course, but who wouldn’t be in his position?”
My mother frowned, but before she could say anything else, my father rushed down the stairs and hugged me too. Sure enough, he was dressed in a suit and his best dress shoes, and his thick brown hair was slicked back with gel.
“Madison,” he said as he rocked me back and forth. “Thank God you’re okay.”
“I’m good, Dad.” I tried to make my face the epitome of goodness. “Just tired, that’s all. It was a long trip.”
“I’m sure. Listen, Madison, I’m sorry we didn’t tell you, we just didn’t want you to—”
“Fall back into old habits,” my mother butted in, as though Jesse was a cigarette or one of her scotch bottles.
“I didn’t,” I said, playing right into their hands. “In fact, being around him made me feel—how can I explain it?—sick. I’m glad to be away from him.”
“How strange,” my mom said, then gave my dad a pointed look. Subtlety had never been her strong suit. “Why don’t you go upstairs and change, and then you can tell us all about it?”
The idea of sitting on one of her uncomfortable designer couches while they grilled me on details about where Jesse had taken me or what he had told me was unbearable, so I repeated the line about how tired I was and started walking upstairs before they could stop me. My mom let it drop, mumbling something to my dad about how she’d do her makeup just in case they decided to go to the fund-raiser and then disappearing into the guest bathroom, which had a bigger mirror, but my dad paused.
“Maddy?” he called up to me as I was about to step onto the landing.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“You sure you’re okay?”
Next to me, hanging on the wall in the same place it had been since I was a kid, was a framed picture of me. My mom had been trying to dress me up in a child-sized tuxedo, but I was having none of it—instead of sticking my head through the neck of the white shirt, I had shoved my book through the top instead. There, triumphant, was the cover of Where the Sidewalk Ends, with me somewhere beneath.
I suddenly felt guilty about lying. Even though my dad had been the one to change me—to improve me, in my mother’s words whenever she referenced the old Maddy—he had also been the one to love parts of the old Maddy the most.
But Jesse had loved all of me.
Did love all of me.
“I’m fine,” I repeated and took the final step onto the second floor.
Within seconds I was safe in my room, though I didn’t turn the lights on, unable to face the fashionable gray paint I’d let my mom talk me into or the bookshelves that had been converted into cubbies for scarves and hats. A minute later I heard the front door open and close, and then the sound of gravel crunching as my parents’ driver came to pick them up. They were sure to have left guards—more of them than there were doors and windows, probably—with instructions to call them as soon as I left my room. But I had no plans to leave my room, so it didn’t matter. Where would I go?
Instead I tucked the comforter over my head and tried to cry without making any noise, finally letting out all of the stress and worry and fury that had been coursing through me since I’d talked with Dr. Reed.
I was going to make sure HORUS never changed anyone else again, I decided as I finally calmed down and removed the blanket from my head.
I was going to destroy them.
Chapter Sixteen
Jesse
DURING OUR walk, the old woman told me her name was Darlene, and that before she’d come to Hidden Treasure Campground, she had been a secretary for a man like Dr. Reed who’
d experimented on animals to train them for specific government operations. That’s how she had become so “suspicious,” a word she repeated over and over again. Apparently she’d known just enough to be dangerous, and before she left, she’d managed to set over fifty enhanced animals free.
“They’re still looking for ten of them,” she said proudly as we rounded the corner of a road dominated by trailers. “This one in particular gave them quite a chase before he found me.”
I looked where she pointed and met the eyes of a gray parrot perched on a wooden sign that said “Permanent Residences.” Most of the creature’s feathers were the color of ash, but its tail was bright red. Its head tilted as it observed me, and then it said, “Sad man.”
“Did that bird just talk?” I asked Darlene.
“Sad man. Sad man. Sad man.” Now the parrot was bobbing its head in accompaniment.
“That’s Long John,” Darlene explained. “You know, like Long John Silver? He used to have a parrot that perched on his shoulder?”
I looked at her blankly.
“Maddy would know,” Darlene said, as though she knew him personally. “It’s from Treasure Island. Anyway, most African Grey Parrots can learn up to five hundred words, but Long John here knows at least two thousand. He doesn’t talk in complete sentences, but—”
“Maddy would know. Maddy would know.” Head bob, head bob, head bob.
“There’s no need to repeat, Long John,” Darlene scolded. “You’re better than that.”
Properly chastised, Long John flapped away from us and found a new perch in a nearby tree. As we walked past a few trailers, I could still hear him mumbling to himself: “Sad man. Maddy would know. Sad man.”
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