“They’re going to use him as a model to show off to potential customers if we don’t rescue him. And then they’re going to start cloning people and turning them into ‘better’ versions of themselves. We can’t let that happen, Mom.”
She frowned, and I imagined her weighing the options. She didn’t want to lose me again, but after the way the Stones and HORUS in general had treated our family, she probably wanted revenge too.
“Better versions of themselves… as if what they have isn’t enough,” she said, more to herself than to me. “They need to be more skinny, more wealthy, more smart.”
I decided now was not the time to correct her grammar.
“You know, principito, all my life, I’ve been saying that nothing changes. That forty years ago we were flipping burgers, and now—”
“—we’re fixing the machines that flip ’em,” I finished for her.
“Exactly. We’re not even the help, we’re the help that fixes the help. But not today.”
“Really? You’re going to let me go?”
“Do I have a choice?” she asked as she messed up my hair.
I forced myself out of bed and stood up. My legs felt shaky, as though I’d been lying down for days, but my mom took my arm and led me out of the tent. Even though I’d been furious at them for keeping me in our house in Idaho like a rat in a cage, now that I saw her again, I felt guilty for being such a problem child for the last few months.
Then I started walking toward the trailers, and my mom followed me.
“Oh,” I said, my voice rising, “I’m actually going to meet with the hackers who are going to help me break into HORUS. Should I just call you when we’re done, or… what?”
“When we’re done?” my mom asked, her voice on what I liked to call FMS level: Full Mexican Sass. “You think that after all of this, I’m going to leave you for a second?”
“Mom, you can’t—”
“Tell me what I can’t do, Jesse.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Oh. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just—”
“It’s just that you thought I was going to leave you in the middle of a forest to fight a battle with the largest tech company in the United States while I went home to Idaho and made tamales? What kind of mother would that make me?”
She was right; I should have seen this coming. My mother didn’t even let me go trick-or-treating unchaperoned—she claimed some evil man or woman might put razors in my candy or lure me into their basement, though really, I think she liked the excuse to wear her black flapper costume with the bright red fringe and red feather for her hair.
That was it.
I had to play to her ego.
“Listen, Mom, you haven’t met these guys… I think you would be a distraction.”
“Really? Me? At my age?” She unconsciously ran a hand through her long brown hair and smiled.
“Absolutely.”
“Are you trying to flatter me so I don’t come with you?” she asked, her eyes squinted.
“Trust me. No, in fact, don’t trust me. You meet them for yourself. If they seem… distracted… you can wait with Tommy’s grandma, Darlene, in her trailer.”
Watching my mom walk the few hundred feet to Tommy’s trailer was hard enough. Her shoes slipped on all of the small pebbles, and bugs kept landing in her hair, prompting an “Ay!” and a series of vicious swats. My mom was tough, but she was a city girl through and through; even in Mexico, my family had lived in the heart of Guadalajara, the capital of Mexico after Mexico City’s 2087 earthquake collapsed all of the major government buildings. She didn’t belong in this scene, constantly in danger of breaking a heel or ruining her blowout.
When we got back to Tommy’s trailer, we found that all of the other hackers I’d met earlier had moved their computer stations into that one in order to bounce ideas off each other. Various windows filled with codes covered their screens, quickly replaced by new windows when they couldn’t find a way in.
“Hey, guys,” I said, and everyone said hey back without looking up from their computers. “I want to introduce you to my mom.”
The man with the red hat, who was closest to us, looked up… and didn’t look back down. His eyes seemed stuck on my mother, an effect she had on customers, bosses, teachers, strangers, and anyone else she encountered. The man with the beard got sucked in next, and soon the clicking from all of the keyboards but Tommy’s had ceased.
“What the hell, guys?” Tommy called into the silence before turning around to see what had gotten everyone’s attention. “Whoa. Who are you?”
“My mom,” I repeated, but no one paid any attention to me.
“I’m Jesse’s mom,” my mom said, as though this was new information. All of the men nodded.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Tommy said, his charm on full throttle. “May we get you some water or a beer, perhaps?”
The corner of her mouth twitched, and I knew she was holding back a laugh.
“No, gracias.” She winked at me and then asked, “Where’s your grandmother, Tommy? I think I’ll visit with her for a while.”
I thought the men would follow her to Darlene’s—and they almost did—but as soon as my mother was out of view, they returned to their keyboards as though nothing had happened. I felt useless just standing there, so I took the empty station set up on the trailer’s kitchen table and checked my email. A few bills from Pleasant Springs requesting payment for my forceful capture, ads for self-driving nail and hair machines that could appear right at my door in an hour, a note from my dad.
I paused at the last one and then double clicked.
Mijo,
By now your mother has probably found your camp, and you’ve probably convinced her to let you stay. Well done. Your mother and I love you, and we just want you to be happy.
But if you’re preparing to save Maddy, which I’m guessing you might be, there’s one other thing you should know. I never told your mother this, but when the doctors brought you back to life, they mentioned that they’d seen something unusual in the animal test subjects of the reproduction process.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of telomeres, but basically, they sit at the end of our DNA and get shorter as we age. I don’t really get the science behind it, but some animals who were cloned in the very beginning, before scientists had experimented with teleportation, ended up having longer telomeres and living longer, while other animals developed shorter telomeres and had shorter lifespans.
Anyway, you’re not a clone, you’re a reproduction. Instead of being grown, you were simply copied by a machine, with a few adjustments along the way. Unfortunately, that machine wasn’t perfect, and it caused some issues with your DNA… more specifically, your telomeres.
What I’m trying to tell you is that you have shorter telomeres than you should, and therefore, you’ll have less cell divisions than you should.
I’m not making myself clear….
Jesse, you’re going to die. Not now or tomorrow, but sooner than you should. Twenty years from now, at the maximum. And if they reproduce you again, as I’m sure they will if they ever catch you again, that number will get cut in half.
Don’t let them catch you, Jesse.
That was it. No “I love you,” not even his name. Just that one order, Don’t let them catch you, floating on the screen in front of me.
The trailer door opened behind me, and then a familiar voice asked, “You okay, principito?”
Quickly, I exited the window and turned around. The woman I saw before me was my mom, and yet she wasn’t my mom at the same time. Darlene must have lent her some clothes, because my mom was covered head to foot in “old lady” attire that consisted of an oversized T-shirt, tropical print shorts, and grungy flip-flips. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, though she had told me once that ponytails were for girls with bad hair, and her face was undecorated by foundation, eye shadow, or blush.
“What happened to you?” I asked.<
br />
“Is that any way to talk to your mother?” she asked, fiddling with her ponytail.
“I’m not even sure if you are my mother,” I teased. “My mother wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit.”
She laughed and played with my hair. “I wanted to come with you without being ‘a distraction.’ Darlene was on a phone call in her trailer and then just rushed off, so I took the liberty….” She stretched her arms out. “You think I’d let my only child go into the lion’s den without me?”
“Apparently not. But I’ll be fine, Mom. I’ll be in and out before HORUS realizes I’m there.”
“Uh,” interrupted Tommy, who had turned from his computer at that moment and was looking at me with a mixture of admiration and pity, “that’s not entirely true.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re going into the lion’s den.”
“I am?”
“You have to let HORUS catch you.”
Chapter Nineteen
Maddy
I WOKE at noon to the smell and sound of bacon sizzling on a pan. My dad would already be at work by now, and my mom usually took supplemental meal pills in the morning, so I couldn’t imagine who would be cooking anything of substance in our house.
Quietly, I pushed the sheets off and slipped into a pair of jeans and a fresh T-shirt with the original cover of 1984 on it that I’d purchased along with Jesse’s Handmaid’s Tale hoodie and about a million other T-shirts for me. In fact, all my T-shirts either had books or quotes from books on them, like “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe,” one of my favorite H. G. Wells quotes.
As I crept down the hallway and then the stairs, I could hear humming, hmm, hmm, hmm-hmm-hmm, accompanied by the clatter of metal spoon on skillet.
“Hello?” I asked. The humming and clattering stopped, leaving only the bacon hissing like a snake about to strike, but no one answered. “Who’s there?”
When I rounded the corner, I saw the person I least expected. Even though her hair had gone gray, her breasts had sagged, and her apron couldn’t quite tie around her waist the way it used to, I recognized her immediately as the housekeeper my parents had fired so long ago.
“Darlene?”
“Hi, honey.” Darlene wrapped her arms around me in a big hug. “My, you’ve gotten big and handsome!”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m as surprised as you are. I got a call yesterday saying you needed someone to ‘keep an eye on you,’ and that your parents had decided I was the best person to do it, so I flew out here as soon as I could.”
Now I knew something was wrong. My parents knew I’d loved Darlene, but that wouldn’t have made them rehire her. Then again, maybe they were stacking up their wall of pawns—Darlene, Jesse, Georgia—so that when I moved my queen, I’d have to destroy them first to get to HORUS.
“Darlene,” I said carefully, “I don’t know if this is the right time for you to come back—”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Darlene interrupted. She wiped her greasy hands on her apron and then picked up a book on the counter. “I accidentally took this home right before I got fired. I figured you’d want it back.”
I stared, confused, at the cover: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I had an eye for covers, and I had definitely never seen this one before.
“Darlene, I don’t think—” I started to say as I held the book out to her, but she pushed it back toward me forcefully.
“Please forgive me for taking it.”
Then suddenly all her force was gone; she turned back to her skillet and began removing and blotting the bacon.
“Sure,” I said as I pressed the book to my chest. “I forgive you.”
Darlene busied herself with making me a plate of bacon, scrambled eggs, and hash browns—the kind of breakfast my mother wouldn’t even let me look at, let alone eat, before my reproduction—and said I could take it upstairs if I wanted to read it.
“Thanks,” I said and did as she suggested. This new Darlene was creeping me out, but now that I had the book in my hands, I was curious. The dark sky and red buildings on the cover conveyed a sense of The Big Barrio, even though they looked nothing alike, and the BB reminded me of Jesse.
Back on my bed, I opened the first page and brought a bite of eggs to my lips, but before I could even put the bite in my mouth, my hand dropped quickly back to the plate. There, on the page, so thin and light that they were barely visible, were underlined letters scattered throughout the text.
My eyes moved from row to row, gathering the letters in their order. T-H-E-Y / A-R-E / W-A-T-C-H-I-N-G / U-S.
My heart pounded faster as I turned to the next page.
D-O-N-T / D-O / A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G / D-O-N-T / R-U-N.
Turn.
J-E-S-S-E / I-S / C-O-M-I-N-G.
I forced my eyes to stay on the page and turned it so any cameras in my room would simply see me reading a book, but on the inside, I was panicking.
Jesse was coming to rescue me, to unknowingly get wiped again, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.
Chapter Twenty
Jesse
“SO EXPLAIN this to me again,” I said as I stared at a bunch of numbers on Tommy’s screen, which might as well have been another language for all I could understand them, and the small chip lying next to it.
“Okay. In order for you to get the worm into the HORUS mainframe, you need to either go to HORUS headquarters or use Dr. Stone’s lab connection. We thought just hanging around outside would work, but the more we looked at the HORUS internet security system, the more we realized it wouldn’t. You need to get captured, and while HORUS figures out what to do with you, the worm will do its work and stealthily attack them.”
I couldn’t get my dad’s words out of my head. But what choice did I have?
“And how are you looking at the HORUS security system without their knowing it?” I asked, trying to make sense of at least the concrete thing in front of me.
Tommy looked up from his keyboard. “Oh. Right. Forgot to tell you, my grandma was Maddy’s housekeeper for years. She got let go for ‘conspiring,’ but nothing was ever proven. Apparently, at a time like this, they’ll take the devil they know—or rather, the devil that Maddy knows.”
“Wait, Darlene couldn’t have been….”
Then I remembered.
I had invited Maddy to our house for dinner one Saturday soon after we met. I still hadn’t met his parents, but after everything he’d told me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I knew they would look at me the way my mom complained that her boss looked at her—like I was beneath them—and I was afraid that, even though I knew he didn’t feel that way, their condescension would somehow color my feelings for Maddy.
Or, just as likely, his feelings for me.
My mom had been preparing the meal all day, from toasting the dried chiles to make salsa de chipotle quemado to mixing the masa harina and water to make corn tortillas from scratch. Though she called Maddy “the nerd,” I could tell he had already won her over because my mom only cooked for people she really liked.
“Take his coat,” my mom chastised as Maddy came in the door.
“Calm down, Mamá, he just got here.”
Maddy shrugged his coat into my hands and handed my mom a plate of unappetizing cupcakes covered in gray frosting that someone had wrapped in plastic wrap.
“Oh, how nice,” my mom said, her polite smile barely disguising her confusion. “They’re… uh….”
“They’re Earl Grey Lavender Cupcakes,” Maddy explained as he looked down at the cupcakes in dismay. “My….” He trailed off, and then his eyes teared up like he was about to cry.
“Are they special cupcakes, cariño?” my mom asked.
“She used to call them her Alice in Wonderland cupcakes,” Maddy said as a single tear ran down his cheek. I fought the urge to brush it off—we weren’t there yet. “You know, because of the tea?”
/> My mom looked at me, and I shrugged. This wasn’t a translation issue; I just had no idea what he was talking about.
“Who called them that?” my mom asked, trying to be helpful. “Your mother?”
Maddy laughed even as another tear fell. “My mom couldn’t make cupcake mix, let alone something as intricate as this. Do you see the Italian meringue buttercream?”
Again, my mom and I looked down at the ruffles of icing, which seemed to be drooping more and more by the second.
“It was Darlene,” Maddy said, as though this explained everything.
“And Darlene is your…?” my mom asked.
“Housekeeper. Well, she was until my parents fired her. Stealing!” Maddy looked at us for support, as though we should have been just as appalled. “Can you believe it?”
Before we could answer, Maddy shuffled into the living room and collapsed onto the couch as though he lived there.
“Tu novio está loco,” my mom whispered as soon as he was out of earshot. Perhaps she regretted all the hours she had just wasted on a boy who’d turned out to be crazy.
“I know,” I said as I secured Maddy’s coat on a metal hanger in the hallway closet. “That’s why I like him.”
“GRANDMA WILL try to help you once the worm starts working,” Tommy was saying, “but we can’t make any promises. The worm will work without HORUS figuring out it’s even there and force a restart, but they may figure out what you’ve done. HORUS won’t be happy when we take away their favorite toys, and they may retaliate against you personally. Are you willing to take that risk?”
I looked at my mom. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t say anything to stop me—maybe she knew it wouldn’t do any good.
“More than willing,” I said as I picked up the chip and examined it.
The piece of metal and plastic was as small as a fruit fly. Once I got to the Stones’ house or Dr. Reed’s—wherever HORUS took me once they found me—all I would need to do was insert the chip into one of their computers and wait.
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