by M. D. Waters
I blink back at him in surprise. He is completely serious. “I am unhurt. I promise.”
He meets my eyes, then blindly lifts one of my hands. “Want to try again?”
Burn marks and bruises bracelet my wrist—wrists—from where I struggled against the bindings at the hospital. I bite my lower lip.
He lifts my left hand. “And what about this?”
He glares at my new luckenbooth, but I am confused. Why is he so angry? He gave me his blessing after the ball.
“He branded you,” he says, his voice tight.
I let out a breath, a weight lifting from my chest. “No. I did that this morning.”
The curtains part before he has a chance to respond, and Dr. Malcolm flits to my bedside, smiling and rumpled as usual. “I thought I heard your voice. Glad to see you’re finally awake, Miss Emma.” He focuses on Noah. “Everything came back negative except for what I already suspected. Someone gave her a pretty strong sedative.”
I rub my neck where Dr. Travista stabbed me with a needle.
Dr. Malcolm pats my hand. Bounces on his toes. “Other than that, she’s perfectly fine.”
You’re perfect.
Except I am not. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.
Noah lets out a long breath. “That’s a relief.”
“So I can go to my room?” I ask, and shift my legs over the side of the bed.
“Wait,” Noah begins.
“I don’t see why not,” Dr. Malcolm says over him.
I smile at Noah, who looks ready to give the doctor a million excuses why I need to stay. “Where is Adrienne?” I ask to distract him.
“Sleeping. Leigh is with her.”
At least she is with someone I trust. “We should relieve her.”
He nods but nibbles the inside of his lower lip. Rubs his chin. “I want to talk to Sonya one more time.”
“Go on, then,” I tell him. “I will be fine.”
Noah looks to Dr. Malcolm for confirmation.
“I’ll walk her back,” the doctor says.
Noah hesitates a moment longer, then presses his lips to my luckenbooth. Another kiss on the cheek ends with a whispered, “That’s what you wanted to show me at lunch?”
“Surprise.”
His answering smile melts my insides. “I love it.”
We kiss, and after another promise from Dr. Malcolm that I will not return to my room alone, he strolls from the hospital wing.
Once the doors sway shut, I meet Dr. Malcolm’s bright eyes. “Dr. Travista says I am dying. Please tell me you can fix this.”
CHAPTER 42
It is near midnight by the time I give Leigh the short version of events and see her out of Noah’s room clutching a thin book of Edgar Allan Poe poems to her chest. Noah has not returned, and Adrienne sleeps soundly.
The last thing I want to do is sleep. I am alone with my thoughts for the first time, and the day crawls along my skin like a rash. There has been no time to absorb the details. Seeing my parents for the first time since knowing who they are to me. Kissing Declan. Being so close to becoming a patient of Dr. Travista’s again.
The final punch of the day, the most devastating of them all . . . I am dying. Dr. Malcolm confirmed this was his belief as well but promised he was close to an answer. That I would not have to leave my family.
You go back now, you’ll die, Declan said.
Or desert Noah and Adrienne; live only to forget they exist. How can these possibly be my options?
I slip into the shower. Going through these motions since my long talk with Dr. Malcolm feels pointless, but I do it on automatic. Cleaning the sterile scent of hospital from my hair. Washing the taint of Declan’s touch from my body. I even take the time to shave. Maybe working this perfection on the outside will make me feel whole on the inside. But it does not work. No amount of flawlessness will halt death.
When I run out of things to do, I sit with legs folded up against my chest, the hot spray on my back. I cannot get out yet. Every move I make toward normalcy, every word uttered, is a lie.
Stay and let Arthur help you.
The process takes all of fifteen minutes.
My one lifesaving option. Taunting. Glaring. I hate that the longer time goes by, the more viable this opportunity becomes. I could save Noah and Adrienne the idea of my death by simply asking Dr. Travista for his help. With a plan, maybe I can escape afterward and return home. Or he will wipe my memory first and none of what happens after will matter.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying and failing to halt the hot tears from spilling. My throat aches as it works to contain the pain trying to unleash as sound. I told Noah I would not leave. I promised. I hate that I promised.
The shower curtain scrapes aside, drawing my attention up. My heart leaps at the sight of Noah, who kneels, his eyebrows pinched together. He must have been home for a while, because he wears nothing but pajama bottoms.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
I try to respond but cannot find the right words and only barely manage to contain the tremble in my chin.
The color drains from his face as he watches me struggle. “He hurt you, didn’t he?”
“No.”
One hand reaches out to cup the back of my neck, and the other grips the edge of the tub with white knuckles. Stray drops of water dot his arms.
“I am so sorry.” My voice breaks and I cannot look at him. I rest my forehead against my knees. A sob claws painfully out from a deep well in my chest.
He rubs my head with a shaking hand. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
I meet his bloodshot eyes, knowing he already suspects. I just have to be brave enough to tell him. “I am dying.”
His eyes widen. He releases my head in favor of cupping his mouth. Water glistens on the pale skin of his hand. What seems an eternity later, he blinks and says, “What?” His tone is thick and broken.
I cannot take another second of this, nor can I say it again. I stand for no other reason than to take away the ability to look at him. The grief on his face is too much. But he stands with me. He steps swiftly into the shower, wraps his arms around my waist, and lifts me until my feet hang limp in the air. He holds me tight, quivering against me. I wish the arms preventing me from breathing were strong enough to keep me from floating away. Maybe if I cling to him just as hard.
“No words,” he whispers in a hoarse tone.
“I know,” I say. No words for the grief or the love.
• • •
We sit propped against the bathroom wall, wrapped in every towel we could find. His soaked blue pajama bottoms lie in a heap outside the tub.
With my legs draped over Noah’s, I rest my head on his shoulder. The fingers of his right hand lace through those of my left, and his thumb rubs absently over my luckenbooth. Over the next few minutes, he alternates between kissing my forehead and kissing my hand.
Neither of us has said a word in a half hour, but the crying has finally stopped. My eyes feel hot and dry. My throat raw. He has not asked me how or why, and I have not offered the information. Several times he has taken a breath that would precede words, but he never spoke. I know he is torn between wanting and needing the details. He needs them but does not want them. I would feel the same if our roles were reversed. The facts do not matter when the result is the same.
“Dr. Travista told me,” I tell him. “Declan confirmed it. I believe this is why he has been so desperate to find me. Dr. Malcolm thinks I will pass soon unless the cause is found.”
Noah turns and rests his chin against the crown of my head. “How soon?” The words barely penetrate the suffocating space.
“He has based this on the time span between the death of host body and clone. Ruby’s and Lydia’s deaths did not happen at an exact number of days after host dea
th, but . . . Anyway, his guess is that I have a week left. Maybe two.”
“There’s no time,” he whispers, his fingers tightening around mine.
I nod against his shoulder. “You should know . . .” I almost cannot tell him about Dr. Travista’s cure. The hope comes with its own loss.
“What?”
“Dr. Travista has already found a cure.”
Noah sits back and angles my chin up. I hate the look in his eyes. The one that says he will tear down the world to find the answers we need. “Travista has a cure?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess. He’s not offering it up for free. You’d have to go back.”
“Yes.”
His lips thin into a fine line. “Over my dead body.”
“That is what I told him, but, Noah, if—”
“Don’t.” He stares at our linked hands. His fingers tighten and his chin trembles. “I’m not losing you to him again.”
I grip the back of his head and draw him close, resting my forehead to his. “It could buy us time.”
He taps my temple. “I’ll lose you anyway.”
I look down at the set of luckenbooths on our linked hands. He swipes a thumb over mine. The symbol that drew me from the dark. “I came back once.”
“You would put all your hope behind . . .” He shakes his head. “There has to be another way.”
“Listen to me.” I meet eyes that glisten back at me. “My being here now, with what little memory I have, should have been impossible. I just think that if there is a way to fix this, it is there.”
“There. With Declan.”
He never uses Declan’s given name, and I wish he had not started now. The name is a curse erecting a wall between us. The use speaks of betrayal. Of lost time. Pain. I refuse to give him that distance.
I grip his face in both hands. “This has nothing to do with him. I am scratching and clawing at any available chance to live. I do not want to leave you any more than you are willing to let me go.”
His eyes clench shut. “It can’t come to that, Emma. It just can’t. I would risk everything”—he looks unblinking into my eyes—“everything to get you back. The company and the security of this entire operation. He won’t have time to lay a single hand on you. Not again.”
We nearly lost each other for the sake of the resistance. Putting it first. He believed this battle was worth every personal risk just a few weeks ago. The fact that he says otherwise now speaks volumes. And we are not only on the same page, but on the same damn word.
Us.
Not Them.
• • •
Noah sleeps fitfully while I watch from a chair. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare sits open in my lap. I tried reading Much Ado About Nothing to take my mind off things, but not even the love-hate banter between Benedick and Beatrice can lure me out of the dark place I reside in.
My mind keeps going back to the raid. The facility bombing. In that building, with that doctor, lies my one escape from death. If we destroy it, I am most certainly dead. And so is every other clone who has not been back to see Dr. Travista. Hundreds of women could die.
Who will save them? Dr. Malcolm? If he figures out what is wrong with me. Us. But without full knowledge of how a clone works, how can anyone expect him to—?
This answer has me shooting up to my feet. The large book drops onto one of my toes. A lightning-hot pain zips up my foot and leg.
Noah bolts upright to find me bouncing on one foot, gripping my stinging toe. “What the hell?”
Adrienne stirs in her crib. Noah and I hold perfectly still until we hear the sound of her thumb sucking.
“I dropped a book on my toe,” I whisper.
He climbs out and sits in my chair, pulling me into his lap. He takes my foot and tries rubbing the pain out for me. “What are you doing up?”
“Did Sonya give you the data-slip?”
My question is apropos of nothing, and the stunned, confused look he gives me is almost comical. “The . . . what? No. She didn’t talk the entire time I was down there. I’ve had her room and office searched. No one found a data-slip.”
I sigh and set my foot on the ground. “We need her to give that slip to Dr. Malcolm. It has all of Dr. Travista’s notes. I cannot believe I did not think of this before.” Though to be fair, I have been a jumbled mess since returning.
“Up,” he says, pushing me to my feet. “Get dressed.” He stops and looks at the crib. “Shit. We can’t leave her alone.”
“I will get Leigh.”
He looks dubious. “It’s nearly four A.M.”
“She is awake. Trust me.”
Leigh is up and all too happy to watch Adrienne again, but according to the look on her face, I have a girls’ talk in my future. She knows something is wrong, especially if we need to make such an early visit to see Sonya.
The prisoner cells are on sublevel four. Our footsteps echo in the empty hallways and stairwells. It is so quiet at this hour I wonder if Noah can hear my heart beating.
Noah’s hand encases mine with a viselike grip the entire way, and he walks as if the end of time bites at our heels until we reach the door outside the cell corridor. He peers through the rectangular glass. His breath fogs the surface.
“How should we do this?” he asks. “She’s clearly not going to talk to me.”
I nearly laugh. “She hates me, but I think I know what to say.”
Muscles tick in his jaw. “This is so fucked-up.”
Beyond. The woman who hates me holds the information that will save my life.
“Okay. We’re waking her up, so she’ll be caught off guard.” He looks down at me. “I’ll hang back. She won’t even know I’m here.”
I nod, though my heart kicks with an erratic beat. How can I face her after what she has done? How can I focus on getting her to talk when all I want to do is damage her beyond recognition? I was too close to losing everything to think clearly where she is concerned.
“She’s in the third cell down on the right.” He hits the door activation button and yanks me back to kiss me the second I start forward. “Good luck.”
I take an extra second to inhale his scent and run my fingertips down the length of his sideburns. Then, turning, I face the corridor, which seems to elongate and narrow. Sonya’s cell may as well be miles away rather than mere steps.
Noah and I step across the threshold. The door slides shut and the first motion-sensor light pops on over our heads. The glow is set to dim because of the hour, but I squint as if the bulb holds the radiance of the sun. Noah stays as I move forward, lights turning on as I go.
I stop outside the third cell. The final lamp clicks on, and Sonya startles out of sleep on a cot in the far left corner. Her head lies just past the line of dark shadow.
She sits all the way up and lifts an arm to shield her eyes from the glare. “What’s going on? Who—?” Her eyes must have adjusted. Her arm drops like a weight. “They record this area.”
“Noah knows I am here.”
Her laugh is hard. “Does he, now? Send you on a little errand for information?”
“He is not the reason I am here.”
“No, of course he isn’t.”
I step close to the bars and grip the cold metal. “Why did you do it?”
Sonya stands and saunters over. She wears a pale green outfit that resembles hospital scrubs. Her white socks scuff against the concrete floor with each step. She fists the bars, hands above mine, and meets my eyes. “You won’t get me to implicate myself in this delusional fantasy of yours for the camera. What I will tell you is that”—she leans close to whisper—“not everything is about you.”
“No, you are absolutely right. This time it is about you. I am only a casualty of your selfish motivation.”
She averts her ey
es. Her jaw locks seconds before she bows her head.
“This was never about retrieving the data-slip from Declan,” I say. “As far as you know, the information will be practically useless the second we destroy the facility.”
She looks up but says nothing.
“Declan and Dr. Travista will go to jail for cloning underage girls—murdering them. What good will that data be when the government is forced to reconsider the consequences of cloning? Especially after they hear the best part . . .” I let the sentence hang open-ended, drawing on her curiosity.
Sonya’s hands fall and she steps back. Shutters slam home in her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no data-slip. You’re suffering from hallucinations.”
“I wish that were the case. The truth is too horrific to be real.”
This grabs her attention. “What truth?”
“Dr. Travista made a fatal mistake in the transference, only no one knows what that is but him. And now you, because you have every file and note he has ever taken. The only question now is, will you incriminate yourself to save hundreds of lives—including mine—or will you stand by and watch us all die?”
CHAPTER 43
Sonya laughs, but she searches for the truth behind the lie she believes I tell.
“You need to give the data-slip to Dr. Malcolm,” I tell her. “Hundreds of lives depend on that information.”
Playing on her sense of duty is the only thing that will get through to her. I know it. She is so stubborn that not even Noah could reach her. But from the moment I saw Sonya through Her eyes, I knew how seriously she took her profession. She will go to any length to save just one life. Adrienne is alive today because of her. Someone else would have just let the weeks-old fetus go.
“I don’t believe you,” she says, shaking her head.
Damn it. Why does she have to fight me every step? What will it take to get through to her? A sea of deaths? Frustration and anger burst through the calm facade I have tried maintaining.
I slam my palms against the bars. “I would not lie about this! Look at me, Sonya. Why would I be here if this were not a life-or-death situation? It took Ruby and Lydia dying for Dr. Travista to wake up and realize his precious creations were not perfect. You would doom all of us simply to save face? Would you?”