He was trying to kill time.
“Madison,” his mother finally butted in, “I don’t know if this is the time—”
“But then, of course, Hermia accuses Helena of taking her man—”
“Madison, honey,” his father said, “maybe we can continue this lesson—”
“But who could predict that Oberon would release everyone from the charm and have Puck convince them that they’ve been dreaming? It’s absolutely—”
“Silence!” Dr. Reed roared.
Everyone went quiet.
“Thank you. Now, if we could get back to the matter at hand, I—”
“Sir?” one of the guards asked. He had come in and watched the spectacle for a few seconds, and I’d merely shrugged at him. “Our system at HORUS headquarters just shut down.”
“What?” Dr. Reed looked at Maddy’s dad and then, as though he could read my mind, whipped his head toward me. In the background the house phone rang. “This is all your fault, isn’t it? I’m going to kill you, I swear to—”
He never got to finish his sentence. The alarm blared, and then a sprinkler popped out of the ceiling and sprayed water all over Mrs. Stone’s carefully arranged food. Water fell on my head in fat droplets, and I couldn’t help laughing.
As everyone ran out of the room, their heads covered by their napkins, I counted in my head. We had two minutes between the sprinkler and the bomb, and I needed to make sure everyone made it as far away from the house as possible by then. Luckily, the water did most of the work for me, and a minute later, both families and the guards had already made it across the front yard.
“Get back!” I called out to the Reeds and Stones, who had instinctively gathered inside the gate. “Go to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Farther, if you can.”
“Why?” Mrs. Stone asked, but she was already following my directions. Maddy, on the other hand, suddenly turned back toward the house and began to run.
As if I could read his mind, I realized he was going back for Darlene.
“Maddy, no!” I yelled. Darlene would have planned a different way out; she didn’t need saving, but a few steps closer and Maddy might.
Ten.
Nine.
I caught up to Maddy and grabbed his arm.
“The house is going to blow!” I yelled. His eyes widened.
Six.
Five.
“Blow?” He looked back at the house. “But Darlene—”
“She’s fine!”
Two.
I pushed Maddy in front of me so that I blocked his view of the house.
One.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Maddy
THE WALL on the left part of the house exploded, sending up a small cloud of smoke. Some debris rained down on the yard and hit Jesse instead of me as it fell. I tried to fight my way out of his grip, but he held me tight, even as bits of glass embedded themselves in his skin.
“Madison? Are you okay?” Georgia called out as soon as some of the pieces had settled. She, her parents, my parents, and the guards had all made it past the wall to the other side of the street before the blast, and they seemed relatively unharmed outside a few scratches to their arms and faces.
“What the hell just happened?” my dad asked.
“I think it’s obvious our little friend didn’t come alone,” Dr. Reed said. His voice was calm—too calm—and it sent a chill down my spine.
“Is that true?” my mother cried. Her eyes were glued to her beautiful—and now ruined—home. “Madison, did you help with this?”
I tuned them out as I inspected Jesse. Blood covered his arms and face, but most of the wounds seemed superficial, like small pinpricks from a sewing needle, except for a large piece of wood that had lodged itself in his right arm.
“We need to get you to a hospital,” I said as I put his left arm around me for support.
“I’m fine,” he said, but he didn’t sound fine.
We took a few steps before Dr. Reed caught up to us and pulled Jesse’s injured arm to wrest him away from me. Jesse cried out from the pain, and his body pressed into me.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Dr. Reed said, “except maybe a prison cell—”
Another explosion came in the distance.
“What was that?” Georgia asked.
Dr. Reed took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his clenched teeth. “I don’t know, but I can take a wild guess.”
Before I could do anything, Dr. Reed signaled to one of the guards from the gate, who punched Jesse in the stomach. He went down without even a stagger and stayed there, face-first.
I felt myself scream even though I didn’t mean to.
“I said I was going to kill you, and I meant it,” Dr. Reed said as he motioned to the guard, who kicked Jesse while he was still on the ground.
“Stop it, Dad!” Georgia yelled.
“Oh please,” I said, “you don’t need to pretend anymore.”
Georgia turned toward me and feigned surprise. She had a few cuts too, though they were nothing a few stitches from a mechanical nurse couldn’t fix, and she’d lost her headband somewhere along the way.
“What are you talking about?”
“I saw your hair. You’re a repro.”
“No, I’m not.”
She was an incredible actress—after all, she’d had a lot of practice—and I almost believed her. As evidence I walked over and pulled the strand of brown hair out and showed her.
“So? My hair’s weird.”
I pulled mine out and held it up to hers.
“The show’s over, Georgia. Did you even really like me?”
Instead of answering, Georgia looked at Dr. Reed, who looked away.
“Dad?”
Oh my God, I thought as I looked back and forth between them. She didn’t know.
He dragged his eyes back toward hers. “Don’t be ridiculous, Georgia. Of course you’re not a repro.”
Georgia’s face froze. “You’re lying,” she said. “I can tell that you’re lying.” She turned to her mom, who hadn’t said anything since the alarms had gone off. In fact, I hadn’t really ever heard her speak. “Mom, am I a repro?”
Mrs. Reed looked down at her hands and fiddled with her jeweled rings. “Darling, you have to understand—”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” Georgia put her hands to her mouth. “What happened? Did I kill myself?”
“You got sick, okay?” Dr. Reed’s voice was angry, and he didn’t even notice when Jesse got to his knees and then stood. “We didn’t have a choice. You were the reason we started this whole repro project in the first place, all right? You were never supposed to find out.”
“Sick? What do you mean sick?”
“You had melanoma, sweetie,” Georgia’s mom said. “With all of the ozone layer depletion, it’s becoming more and more common, and we didn’t catch it until it was too late and it had spread to your organs. This was the only way to try to cure you.”
“Try?” I asked when it seemed like Georgia wasn’t going to. “What do you mean ‘try’?” Then I answered my own question. “It’s her body, isn’t it? It’s reverting back to its original state.”
“So it would seem, if Madison is correct.” Dr. Reed clenched his fists. “We thought changing some of your DNA, the parts we adjusted, would work, but apparently we needed to change all of it. Over time, the parts we hadn’t changed must have overtaken the parts we had. Plus, the telomeres—”
“The pieces that sit at the end of our DNA and get shorter as we get older,” Jesse interrupted. “For some reason reproduced humans have shorter ones. That means—”
“I know.” I’d read about the historic study years before in one of my dad’s biology textbooks. “It means we’re going to die sooner.”
“Much sooner,” my dad said.
“And you thought that if you fixed the reproduction process and increased the funding, you’d be able to reproduce us again, only this time, the
change would be permanent?” The pieces fit together all at once. “You did this all to save her.”
Georgia started crying, and Dr. Reed put his arms around her to calm her down. While they whispered to each other, Jesse rapidly tapped a phone number into his watch, and a young voice answered on the other end.
“Hello?”
“Tommy, it’s Jesse. You’ve got to stop the third bomb.”
“What?”
“The third bomb. The one at HORUS headquarters. Don’t set it off!”
“Did they catch you?” the boy asked suspiciously. “Did Dr. Reed torture you into giving him my phone number?”
“He didn’t, I swear. It turns out that this whole thing was to develop a technology to save his daughter, Georgia. You know… the girl Maddy’s in love with. Anyway, you need to stop—”
“No.” The word had come from Georgia, and when she lifted her head off her father’s chest, her tears had stopped. “You still need to set it off.”
“What are you talking about?” Dr. Reed asked. “We just told you that you’ll all—”
“I heard you. So hear me: the bomb goes off. If it doesn’t, then this technology gets into the hands of the government, the private sector, the general public… anyone and everyone can clone whomever they want, whenever they want. We can’t let that happen. Right, Jesse? Madison?”
I held my hand out, and Georgia took it. Jesse found my other hand, and we all faced Dr. Reed together. I had never loved either of them more.
“Right,” Jesse and I agreed at once. “Set it off.”
“No—” Dr. Reed started to argue, but it was too late.
Far in the distance, where the HORUS tower extended into the clouds, there was a violent explosion.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jesse
THE GRAY press drones showed up two minutes later, and the police drones two minutes after that, followed by a slew of cars carrying the drones’ operators and a lot of men in blue suits with stun guns holstered at their hips. Perhaps they’d expected to find Dr. Reed and Dr. Stone lamenting their fallen company, but they certainly hadn’t expected to find their houses in ruins. The police quarantined the area, but every few seconds a drone would make the risky flight over the yellow laser lights and set the alarms off.
“Dr. Reed,” one of the drones emitted, and I thought I recognized the voice from Channel 3333 news, “do you have any leads on who the terrorists might be?”
“Don’t answer her,” a blue drone barked. “We need to bring you in for questioning before you make an official statement.”
“Can you speak to the technology that might have been lost?” the gray drone requested.
“Don’t answer that either,” the blue drone yelled. “The official response is that this case is currently under investigation!”
Perhaps it was the blood loss, but all of the drones floating above me started to blend in the sky, becoming a mass of blue sky and gray clouds undulating like the sea used to look before it turned brown. I put my hand up, as though to run my fingers through the water, and then everything started to spin.
“He’s going down!” someone called, and on cue, a team of men and women in red suits rushed onto the scene and helped me onto a stretcher they would helicopter out of there as soon as the self-steering chopper could make it to the scene.
“You’re going to be fine,” a woman’s voice told me as someone else shot something into my arm that immediately stopped the pain.
“Jesse?” Maddy’s voice called from behind the wall of red. “Jesse, are you okay?”
“Sir, I’m going to need you to step back,” the woman’s voice ordered. “This area is about to become a landing strip, and unless you want your pretty little head cut off, I suggest you give the computer space to make a clean arrival. The margin of error may only be two feet, but that’s just enough when you’re standing there.”
“Maddy?” I mumbled, but the drugs must have gone into effect, because I couldn’t tell if I had managed to say his name or only thought it.
The helicopter arrived a few minutes later, like a furious bee buzzing far above my head. Then closer. Closer. Its propellers slowed down, then stopped altogether, so that my blue-sea sky reappeared with its gray whale clouds. The drugs worked their way into my blood, and suddenly I felt like I was floating in the sea instead of looking at it.
After they loaded me on head-first, one of the nurses followed me on and tied me to the side so that I wouldn’t slide out. Then she strapped herself into a chair next to me and spoke into her watch: “Ready.”
“Where’s the ocean?” I asked her.
“What, honey?”
“The whales. Where are the whales?”
The sound of the propellers drowned me out, and though I couldn’t be sure, it felt like we were flying.
“Maddy?” I tried to lift my head, but I couldn’t.
The metal around me began to melt away. The ocean was back, only this time it started to lap at my feet and then inch its way up my body. My knees. My thighs. My chest.
“Hold on,” a woman’s voice called, but I knew that when the waves reached my ears, I wouldn’t be able to hear her anymore.
“Maddy!”
“MADDY! WHAT are you doing?”
There’d been an acid rain warning that morning, and yet, when the drops started falling on our way to the bus, Maddy had stopped, tilted his head up, and opened his mouth.
“Stop that,” I said, nudging him with my shoulder.
“It’s not acid rain that’s dangerous,” he said after he looked down. “It’s the sulfate and nitrate particles in the atmosphere.”
“Then why are there acid rain warnings?” I asked.
“Because people are afraid of the things they don’t understand.”
Even though I thought it might kill me, I stuck out my tongue.
“MADDY!” I called out from across the street. I’d skipped school again—we need to change your meds, my mom said as she left for work—but I’d still come to see him.
“Jesse?” After looking both ways, he carefully crossed the pickup circle. His arms were filled with library books even though the school had paid for e-book readers for everyone. How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. Bird by Bird. On Writing.
“Where were you?” he asked, worried.
That was the first time I lied.
“MADDY!” MY hand had painted with the thick-bristled brush. His name, right in the center of the sun on the far side of my bedroom. A reminder that even when things got dark, he was always there.
“Why don’t you call him?” my mom asked from the other side of the locked door.
“I can’t,” I said as I dipped my paintbrush in the black paint and began to slowly cross out the letters. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”
Somehow, he’d come anyway.
“Jesse?” he whispered through the door as my parents pretended to make conversation in the living room while they waited to see whether I would listen to him or not. “Let me in.”
I lifted my head off my pillow.
Even with the black hole at the center of the sun, it still lit up the room.
“MADDY!” I screamed, but the scream was inside my head. The pills went down, and this time they didn’t come back up. I wanted him there, and yet I couldn’t bear the thought of him seeing me like this.
I wrote my note.
I locked the door.
Maddy.
Maddy.
Maddy.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Maddy
“BACK UP a second,” said the cop, Officer Connor, who sat on the other side of the metal table. “You’re telling me you’re a clone?”
I glanced to my left at the glass wall, behind which I knew there were other officers listening in, and nodded. “Right. A repro.”
“And was this project sanctioned by the government?”
“I doubt it. Honestly, sir, I’m not really sure about the detail
s… all I know is that Dr. Reed and my dad wanted to keep Georgia alive, and then they used that technology to bring Jesse and me back after we died.”
“Just to have you die again,” the cop added.
“We’re all going to die. The three of us are just going to die sooner. Maybe twenty years from now—five for Georgia—and we’re back where we started.”
The cop rubbed his forehead with his pointer and middle fingers, the thick, pale hand painting red streaks across his skin. He had brought a cup of coffee for each of us, but he hadn’t touched his. I drank mine now while I watched him take it all in, and the hot liquid felt good on my sore throat. Maybe I’d been screaming as the bombs went off? I couldn’t remember.
“How about the hackers who got into the HORUS system. Any idea who they are or where they might be?”
“No clue.” I didn’t mention Darlene, even though she was probably long gone by then. “Jesse might know. Have you talked to him? Is he okay?”
It was the cop’s turn to look at the glass. In the mirror image, he looked worried, his portly shoulders hunched and his face scrunched like kneaded dough.
“He’s still unconscious, isn’t he?” I asked when he didn’t say anything.
“Yeah.”
“He protected me. That’s why he didn’t get far enough away….” I trailed off.
“I know. He seems like a good kid, even if he did help blow up three buildings. What you young people won’t do for love, eh?”
I didn’t say anything for a while after that. Eventually Officer Connor left me alone, and then a few minutes later, my mom came in. She looked awful—she had prune-sized circles under her eyes, her makeup was flaking off, and her dress had dirt and ash all over it—but she had somehow kept her pointy-toed pumps flawless. Apparently even in a crisis, designer shoes were designer shoes.
She didn’t sit down, and I didn’t get up. We just looked at each other, the way Officer Connor and I had stared at each other, waiting for the other person to break the silence.
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