“I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“For what, specifically?”
She sighed that special sigh she reserved just for me. “Everything.”
My coffee cup was empty, so I held it in my hand and pressed my thumb nail into the thick insulated paper side. The chill from the metal table worked its way up my arm, but I barely felt it.
“I know you’re angry, Madison, but try to see it from our side.”
I stopped digging my nail in and just focused on my breathing. If I lose my temper now, she might not help me get out of here.
I have to get out of here.
But I couldn’t just let it go. There was something dark and disturbing deep inside of me, something that had been waiting there since I found out I was a repro, and it wanted to get out.
“I get it, Mom,” I said as I put the coffee cup back on the table. “I really do. But Jesse’s parents brought him back the way he was. Why did I get the full treatment?”
“Your father—”
“No. He might have invented this, but he didn’t design me like a remodeled bathroom. I’m not asking whether you did it or not. I’m asking why you did.”
She finally sat down, crossed her legs, and folded her hands politely on the table. She might have been interviewing for a job or eating at a fancy restaurant. “Madison, your father and I are very proud of you, and we were proud of you before your reproduction. We just thought you would be happier if you…. How can I say this? Blended in.”
“With whom? You?”
“Yes, of course, but also your father’s associates, kids like Georgia. Parents want to make life as easy as possible for their children—to give them the greatest chance at happiness—and when we got the opportunity to do it over, we thought this was your best prospect.”
A knock interrupted us, and then a female officer popped her head in and said, “Madison, you’re free to go.” She left the door open behind her.
“That all sounds good,” I said as I stood up and walked to the door, “but you’re forgetting one thing: I was already happy. This was your chance at happiness. You traded my looks and, worst of all, my personality, for a shopping partner.”
“I know, Madison, and you can hate me all you want right now.” She looked at me, full of confidence, and then added, “But eventually, you’ll realize that I’m still your mother, no matter what.”
I took a deep breath, and then I let out the dark, disturbing thing that had been trying to push its way out of my chest for so long.
“You were Madison Stone’s mother. I’m Maddy 2.0.”
Before she could speak, I slammed the door behind me.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jesse
WHEN I woke up, a soft hand was gently squeezing mine.
“Maddy?”
“Oh good, you’re awake.” The voice was definitely not Maddy’s. “We thought you weren’t going to make it there for a while.”
I opened my eyes. Georgia, looking concerned, sat next to my hospital bed. Behind her, a window displayed doctors and nurses walking hurriedly back and forth across my line of sight trailed by their robot assistants, beeping and rolling their way down the hall.
“What happened?”
“You took a good amount of debris when the bomb went off,” she said. “I think you were protecting Madison.”
I couldn’t remember a bomb or getting hurt or protecting Maddy, but it sounded like something I would do.
“Is he okay?”
“I think so. Police took him in for questioning, and that was the last I saw of him. They took my parents and the Stones as well, and I’m betting they won’t let our dads out for a long time. After all, they did do a lot of illegal testing… and then there’s the matter of us, the three clones walking around Los Angeles making a mess of things. Typical police protocol—get involved after the dust settles.”
I thought about Tommy and the others. Had they been captured? Or had their van gotten out of LA before the drones started circling like vultures looking for their next meal?
Georgia looked above me toward the window, where there was nothing except blank white sky. Perhaps she was wondering the same thing, or perhaps her mind had drifted to her own destiny, the hands of her clock now spinning backward to zero.
“You did the right thing,” I assured her. “The repro tech had to be destroyed.”
“I know.” Her hand squeezed mine, reminding me she hadn’t let go. “Doesn’t really make it any easier, though.”
“No.”
They must have had me on a lot of pain meds, because my brain felt like it was pickled in brine. My eyes drifted back to the window, where they landed on something unfamiliar diving right for the opening.
“What is that?” I asked Georgia as I pointed to the object kamikazying straight for us. “A plane?”
“Can’t be. Is that… a parrot?”
As soon as she said the word, I spotted the red tail.
“It’s Long John!” I said as I used my forearms to force my sore body into a sitting position.
“Who?”
The bird alighted on the windowsill and bobbed its head a few times. Its eyes looked crazed, though perhaps it was my imagination. “Repro! Repro!” it immediately began squealing. “Maddy would know! Maddy would know! Sad man! Sad man!”
“What’s wrong with it?” Georgia asked.
“I don’t know. He’s always been a bit… off… but this is unusual behavior, even for him.”
The head bobbing became more and more frantic, until it seemed his head might slide clean off. Then, with a sudden silence, like a record player unplugged in the middle of a song, Long John froze.
“Hello, my two fine specimens,” said someone behind me. “I’ve been waiting a very long time to meet you.”
A spasm moved through Long John, and even though I didn’t recognize the voice, I shivered too.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Maddy
“JESSE ALVAREZ,” I told the check-in computer at the front desk. Its large, blank face lit up and showed three alternating dots, indicating it was “thinking.”
“Please wait while I confirm patient ‘Jesse Alvarez.’ Confirmed. Please state your name and relationship to the patient for our records.”
“Madison Stone… boyfriend?” The answer was more of a question, but apparently this system didn’t pick up those kinds of inflections.
“Madison Stone. You are confirmed for visitation level 3.0 to Jesse Alvarez in room 410. Please take the badge printed below and attach it to your person at all times. Level 3.0 visitors are permitted to stay on the hospital premises from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Saturday and Sunday. To adjust these hours, please call help line 213-427-9191-674 to speak to a human representative.”
A badge printed and then fell into the tray below with a dull tap, and a few seconds later, an LA Hospital System lanyard followed. I attached the badge to the lanyard, then slipped it over my head.
I shared an elevator ride with a couple who stared blankly at the door, and I wondered what had happened to them or to whomever they were visiting to make them so solemn. Perhaps they had a terminally ill daughter like Georgia or an accident-prone son like Jesse. Perhaps their parents were close to death, or maybe one of them was.
We did the right thing… right? I asked Jesse in my head as I watched the couple. Technology like repro couldn’t be managed so that people like this wouldn’t have to go through so much pain and heartache… could it?
The doors opened at the third floor, and I stepped out. When I looked back into the elevators, the man had taken the woman’s hand, and she had looked up at him and smiled weakly.
I held the fate of a technology that could have ended all of this, I thought as I walked down the hall to a chorus of pained whimpers and calls for a nurse. And I chose to blow it up.
I came to room 410 and went in.
Georgia sat at Jesse’s side with h
er hand on his, but on second glance, it looked more like her fingers were clamped around his more than they were comforting him. Instead of looking at each other, they both stared into the far corner of the room at something obscured from my view.
Slowly, I turned.
“Hello, Madison.”
The man was unfamiliar. He wore an expensive gray suit with a matching gray shirt and tie, and a gray bird perched on his shoulder. Even his hair was the same bland gray, turning him into more of a shadow than a human being.
“Who are you?” I asked when no one else said anything.
“Let’s just call me the Investor.” His voice was soft and slippery, like wind through leaves. “I find ventures in need of my help and… assist them.”
“Okay.” Why weren’t Jesse and Georgia saying anything? “Are you here to invest in Jesse’s recovery?”
The Investor cracked a smile. “You always were my favorite repro. Such a witty, clever boy, your mold, with the added handsome physique your parents gifted you at my expense. Such a shame that part will fade away… but at least you’ll still have your smarts.”
If I hadn’t had a bad feeling about that guy before, I certainly did now. And the bird on his shoulder, bobbing its head frantically, was not easing my mind.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Our parents are in jail, so if you’re trying to convince them to recreate their work, you’d find more answers across town.”
“Recreate?” the man asked, his face cracking into a smile again. His smiling face was even scarier than his blank one, because the smile never traveled to his eyes. “Why would I pay for a project that I already have?”
“But you don’t already have it.”
“Not right now. But once you convince Tommy and his crew to recover the data they so kindly wiped, I’ll be able to resume business with little effect. I’d let Long John lead me to him, but I don’t want to risk losing the data in the scuffle.”
I actually snickered. “First of all, I don’t know who Tommy is, and even if I do find him, I’m sure there’s no way to convince him to give the data back—assuming he can even do that in the first place.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find you can be very persuasive.”
“But I don’t want to,” I clarified.
“You will. At least, you will if you ever want to see these two again.”
Another man in a gray suit suddenly walked into the room and, without pause, drew two guns from holsters around his waist.
Bang.
Bang.
By the time I turned around, Georgia and Jesse were dead.
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maddy
I DIDN’T move while the Investor and his men cleaned the bloody sheets off the bed and wiped the floor with a spare handkerchief reminiscent of the days before Sani-T or, long before that, Kleenex. I didn’t move while the Investor’s men came to collect the bodies and freeze them. I didn’t move while the Investor and his men left, one at a time, before the nurses realized what had happened.
I didn’t move.
I couldn’t.
“Think about my proposition,” the Investor had said before walking away. “You’re a smart man, and I know you’ll make the right decision.”
Now that he was gone, I tried to move my legs—to walk out of the hospital and call the police or my parents or anyone who could possibly help—but they were stuck to the floor. I couldn’t hear anything or smell anything or taste anything.
I couldn’t feel anything.
“Maddy?” Mrs. Alvarez stood in the doorway—or at least I thought she was Mrs. Alvarez, though the woman standing there looked older and more fatigued than Jesse’s glamorous mother. Her hair was in a ponytail, which I’m pretty sure she’d once told me was for ugly girls, and she wore mom jeans and an oversized T-shirt. In fact, now that I thought about it, that was the first time I’d ever seen Mrs. Alvarez without makeup, even in the morning. “I got here as soon as I could. Where’s Jesse? Did they move him?”
I tried to say something—anything—but no words came out.
“Maddy? Querido?”
Like a rusty machine, I slowly swiveled toward her. My mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out. I had done this before, back when I’d found Jesse dead the first time, but even then, I’d been able to speak. Now I was as blank as one of Jesse’s unused canvases.
“He…. They….” I forced air in and out of my lungs, but the room started to spin anyway.
Mrs. Alvarez put her hands on my shoulders. “Breathe, Querido. Tell me what happened. Is it Jesse? Is he okay?”
I looked past her shoulder to the bed, where just a few minutes before, Jesse and Georgia had sat holding hands while they waited for the Investor to fire his guns. They must have known, even before I’d entered the room, that they were about to die. They must have seen it coming.
A middle-aged nurse with her eyes on her clipboard came into the room, looked at the bed, and then looked back at the clipboard again.
“Where is he?” she asked when she noticed us.
“My son,” Mrs. Alvarez said, and it sounded like a question. “Is he okay? I got an automated call telling me to come right away, but then no one’s here.”
The nurse looked back at the bed, then moved her pen to her head and began to scratch nervously. “He should be here,” she said, more to herself than to us. “Why isn’t he here?”
“They…,” I started. “They….”
Mrs. Alvarez squeezed my shoulder tightly, the way Georgia had squeezed Jesse’s hand.
“They shot him.”
The nurse looked back at the bed, and then she was running, calling out to someone to call the police, telling the other patients not to panic. Her heavy footsteps moved down the hallway and disappeared, leaving Mrs. Alvarez and I to stare at the place where Jesse should have been.
“Who was it?” she asked finally. “Was it HORUS?”
“The owner, who everyone apparently calls the Investor, wants me to convince someone named Tommy to recover his technology. I don’t even know who Tommy is, let alone how to find him and ask him to recover the data he just spent the past twenty-four hours destroying. And how can I ask him to do that when I know that the Investor will just sell his cloning tech to the highest bidder, from the army wanting to clone their soldiers to little rich women wanting to clone their cats? How can I make that choice?”
Mrs. Alvarez put her arm around me. She felt warm, and I realized suddenly that the hospital was freezing and I had goose bumps all over my arms and legs.
“You can’t,” she said with certainty.
“Then what do we do?”
“We ask Tommy.”
“You know him?”
Mrs. Alvarez cracked a smile. “Oh yes. He’s not the kind of person you can easily forget.”
We left the hospital before the nurse could come back. The police would just throw us in an interrogation room again anyway, and we didn’t have that kind of time to waste.
On the way in, all I’d seen were the faces of the people who had lost their loved ones; now I only noticed the joyful smiles of those who had been reunited. Babies, swaddled and pushed in their remote-controlled strollers. Old women, recovered from surgery and finally leaving the hospital in a wheelchair with their purse politely balanced on their laps. Nothing was more beautiful than the moment when their family embraced them and kissed their cheeks—yet nothing was more depressing at the same time. What if I could never do that to Jesse or Georgia again?
“Are we going back to Hidden Treasure Campground?” I asked Mrs. Alvarez as she hailed one of the self-driving cars parked in front of the hospital.
“Unfortunately, HORUS now knows about Tommy and his crew, so they’ve probably already swarmed the camp. He told me where they were headed earlier when he dropped me off, and hopefully they haven’t already left.”
The car that picked us up was completely white, and I worried, for a s
econd, that maybe it was a HORUS car. But the inside of the car was empty, and as we took the “driver” and passenger seat, it asked us the standard question in its calm woman’s voice: “Where would you like to go? Please state your destination as clearly as possible.”
“The Hollywood sign,” Mrs. Alvarez stated.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t quite get that. Please try stating your destination as clearly as possible.”
“The Hollywood sign,” Mrs. Alvarez said again, over-enunciating every syllable.
“The Hollywood sign,” the car confirmed. “Would you like to see the old sign on Mount Lee, or the new sign at the edge of Topanga State Park?”
I looked at Mrs. Alvarez, and she shrugged. “Old?” she guessed.
“The one on Mount Lee,” I told the car.
“Great. The fare will be $200.54. Please insert your credit card or hover your smart watch over the steering wheel for payment.”
I didn’t have a smart watch anymore, so Mrs. Alvarez used hers.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sonia Alvarez. Your payment is confirmed. Please fasten your seat belts. Your estimated time of arrival is 9:05 a.m. The weather, on arrival, is ‘slightly cloudy with a chance of rain at 11:30 a.m.’ To repeat, please say ‘repeat.’ To end our conversation, please say ‘end conversation.’”
“End conversation,” Mrs. Alvarez tried.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite—”
“End conversation,” I repeated.
“Thank you. Goodbye.” The dashboard went dark, and as soon as my seat belt clicked closed, the engine started.
“I hate these things,” Mrs. Alvarez whispered now that the car had stopped talking—almost like the car was a real person and it might overhear her talking behind its back.
“Me too.”
“Back in my country, only old people used these to get places.”
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