Clone Crisis: Book 1 in the Clone Crisis Trilogy

by Melissa Faye

  I looked at Vonna, then looked at the ground where a ripped flyer was crumpled up at our feet. I couldn’t tell Vonna about the symbol, just like Alexis hid the real truth from me. As I suspected, Alexis was a part of the Underground before she vanished. It made perfect sense given everything she talked to me about and what she found out before she disappeared. It still didn’t explain how the ACers were involved, though. One more thing Alexis probably knew and couldn’t tell me.

  “I’m not having this conversation with you again, Vonna,” I said. We walked past groups of people with Gold and Silver insignias in similarly muffled conversations. Clearly, people knew they shouldn’t be talking about the flyers and the F-Lab, but it was still a matter of great interest.

  “I think it’s true,” Vonna continued. “I think they found out something real, and want people to know. And I think it’s horrible. This is all we’re working towards! And now it’s fake?”

  I stopped in my tracks. I felt like we were stuck in a loop. I was replaying my memory of Alexis and the owl; it felt like I was in two places at once. “I can’t stop you from talking to Breck or joining the Underground. But I’m not going to keep arguing with you about your involvement.”

  Vonna’s face fell. “The Underground?” She stared at me, waiting for a response, but I turned and walked off. She didn’t follow, and I didn’t turn back.

  I HAD A FEW MESSAGES on my TekCast from Etta.

  “What’s going on??”

  “Is this related to what’s happening to me?”

  “What will happen if someone finds out?”

  I messaged back. “No one will find out if you stay away from the Med.”

  “Breck and Ben are doing research.”

  “That’s good,” I responded. “Keep me posted.”

  “Come over?” she messaged.

  I didn’t want to see Etta. I had the medical text from Ben on my kitchen table and was planning on poring over it. Seeing Etta meant worrying about her and the baby. I would help her, but I wasn’t ready to confront it again. I didn’t write back to her, and instead settled in for a long night of studying.

  Chapter Eight

  There wasn’t as much information in my text as I had hoped. I read a little bit about conception, but that wasn’t helpful at this point. There was some information about labor and birth. I couldn’t imagine us getting to the point of labor, but if we did, I needed to be ready. The missing part was what we should be doing right now. What should Etta eat? What should she do to stay healthy?

  Sprain Week was less exciting than we had expected. I tried to partner with Charlie as much as possible since he was the least annoying intern and one of the most talented. He was having the time of his life chatting with patients, running x-rays, and using the casting machines. I received an urgent message on my TekCast from Breck about an hour after the day started.

  “ETTA WENT TO THE HOSPITAL. FAINTED AT WORK, THEY INSISTED ON IT.”

  I felt that nervousness that was becoming too familiar to me rise up in my stomach. I looked up from the message to see Charlie standing right next to me, reading over my shoulder. We were working with a kid who had fallen from a tree, and Charlie raised his eyebrows when he saw my face drop. I excused myself and stepped out into the hallway. I swiped through the medical records on the TekCast to see if Etta had been admitted. Nothing yet.

  I was about to run down to the lobby when Charlie snuck out of the door behind me and grabbed my elbow.

  “What is going on with you?” he snapped. “You’ve been on edge for a week. You just walked out on a patient. Why did your friend faint?” I couldn’t speak. Charlie’s face was hard and impatient, but the little crinkles around his eyes gave away his softness.

  “Come on, Yami. You have to tell me what’s going on.”

  “My friend is – she fainted at work, so she’s coming to see a doctor.”

  “I saw,” Charlie said. “That’s probably nothing. Maybe she skipped breakfast.”

  I stared into his bright blue eyes and said nothing.

  “What are you not telling me?” A tiny twitch in his lips revealed his frustration. He was still holding my arm. I shook him off. I turned and started off to the lobby with Charlie right on my heels.

  In a few minutes, Etta arrived with a coworker. She was hysterical. The coworker was looking around for someone to help them, frantically trying to hold Etta’s shoulder while looking for a receptionist.

  “Etta!” I cried. She turned and ran towards me.

  “They made me come,” she whispered in my ear. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.”

  Etta gestured for her coworker to leave. I stayed with her while another intern came to get her checked in. He looked at me questionably, but didn’t say anything when I followed them to a room. Charlie was right behind us. I glared at him, but he didn’t back down.

  Once we were in the room, the intern gave Etta a gown to wear and excused himself. Charlie stood in the corner, his eyes stormy and his jaw clenched.

  “Charlie, go,” I ordered. He stared at me without moving. “Fine! Stay. But if you’re staying, I need your help.”

  The thought occurred to me right in the moment. We couldn’t change Etta’s test results, and if I had so easily diagnosed her, certainly any fully trained doctor could as well. But if Charlie could hack into the medical records system, he could adjust Etta’s test data and hide symptoms that aligned too well with her pregnancy.

  “Great! What do you need me to do?” Charlie asked, stepping forward. Etta tapped her feet nervously on the ground while we spoke.

  “A doctor is going to come in here and run some tests on Etta,” I said. “I need you to alter the test results as quickly as you can. Make it look like...something else. I don’t know. Low blood sugar, like you said?”

  “What am I changing? What will the test results say?” Charlie looked between Etta and myself nervously.

  I didn’t answer. Etta piped in quietly. “I’m pregnant.” She whispered and fiddled with her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry, Yami. I know this was exactly what you told me not to do...”

  “Charlie, can you do this? We don’t have a lot of time.”

  Charlie pulled out his TekCast. “I’ll start right now. I don’t know if I can do it, but I’ll try. I know a guy in technological services who I can work with. He should be able to help me remotely.” Charlie leaned over a counter and began furiously typing away on his holoscreen keyboard. I watched characters fly across the screen.

  “We can’t be seen in here,” I said. “Charlie, can you work on this from the intern room? I can stay as a concerned friend, but I’ll be shooed away eventually. Can I meet you down there?”

  Charlie hustled out of the room without question. I sat next to Etta on the Care Unit. We waited in silence until the doorknob turned. Soo Yen strode in, pulling up something on her TekCast without even looking at Etta.

  “What are you doing here, Yami?” she asked. She had a strange knack for knowing who was in a room without looking up from her screen.

  “Etta is a friend of mine,” I said. “I wanted to make sure she’s ok.”

  “Don’t you need to be working on the broken leg down the hall?”

  “Yes, sorry,” I said. I squeezed Etta’s shoulder, hopped off the table, and scurried out the door. When the door to Etta’s room closed, I took off in a sprint to meet Charlie downstairs.

  I found Charlie at my desk, leaning over his TekCast. “Pass me yours,” he said without explanation. I handed him my TekCast and flicked it on for him.

  “My friend is helping. I’ll type faster if I can read his messages on my screen and type on yours.” I watched him worked and read messages over his shoulder. His friend was Tomas, from the Underground.

  “How do you know Tomas?” I hissed in Charlie’s ear. He grunted in response and kept looking back and forth between the holoscreens. Another intern entered the room and I used som
e unfound charisma of my own to ward her off.

  “Hi, Leanne!” I said cheerfully. “We’re working on a broken leg. You?”

  Leanne froze in her tracks. I had hardly ever spoken directly to her before.

  “Um...I had two sprains this morning. I think the man I’m meeting with next has a broken arm. That’s what Phil is saying...”

  “Great!” I said. Leanne skittered away, still confused.

  Charlie chuckled to himself. “You nearly gave Leanne a heart attack at the young age of twenty,” he said.

  I looked at Charlie’s typing. The coding part didn’t make any sense, but I could track his conversation with Tomas. He hadn’t told Tomas why he was doing what he was doing, but Tomas was managing most of the code from his own TekCast using information Charlie had from the Med database. They didn’t mention the Underground directly, but the way they were writing made it obvious that Tomas knew this wasn’t merely a thought experiment.

  Finally, Charlie looked up. “Soo Yen sent Etta’s Care Unit data downstairs to the lab. She’s entering the symptoms, but I’m going to change them as soon as she’s done.”

  “What about the lab data?” I asked. “There’s a hormone the Care Unit may identify that’s uniquely associated with pregnancy. Can we get rid of that information completely?”

  “Not exactly,” said Charlie. He typed while he spoke. “Tomas helped me write a piece of code to replace the information, but it’s not going to delete it completely. It’ll be more like the data is hidden under a blanket of some other data.”

  “What if someone finds it?” I mumbled. “I thought you were going to –“

  Charlie turned towards me and shot back. “This is what I can do right now on short notice,” he said. “Maybe Tomas will have other ideas, but this is all I have.”

  “I’m sorry. Thank you.” Charlie wrote a few more messages to Tomas. Finally, I got my TekCast back from Charlie and pulled open Etta’s file. As he promised, there was no record of any abnormal test data. The diagnosis would be low blood sugar. “I’ll need to check in on her to let her know what happened.”

  “You can’t!” said Charlie, suddenly in a panic. “Come with me to talk to that boy we saw earlier. We left him waiting way too long.” He was right. I wanted to see Etta, but it would raise red flags if the time logs showed we left that patient alone and untreated for such a long time. “Let’s go!” he whispered.

  I messaged Etta. “Heard you just have low blood sugar. Glad you’re ok!” I trotted out of the lab and Charlie and I headed back to our patient.

  IT WAS HARD TO FOCUS, but Charlie pushed me along through our work that morning. Occasionally that meant actual pushing – he would poke and prod on the small of my back to keep me moving. It helped; it gave us both a laugh. When we finally took a break for lunch, we found a dozen doctors and interns gossiping in the break room. There was a new and different nervous energy in the air.

  “What’s going on?” Charlie asked an intern at a table near the door. I listened carefully while I got us each a protein bar from the vending cylinder in the corner.

  “The Chancellor is coming this afternoon!” the girl said to Charlie. “Everyone is nervous about it. I guess he’s been visiting buildings to talk to people about what happened yesterday with all those posters. I’ve never talked to him, have you?”

  “Nope,” said Charlie. I passed him his bar and he sat down casually next to the intern. I sat on his other side. I looked around the room. There were two other groups of people talking with each other, and I heard the Chancellor’s name mentioned. People’s faces were a mixture of confusion and excitement.

  “He’s intimidating, isn’t he?” the intern said. “The way he walks around even. Those dark eyes. I don’t know. I hope he doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Yeah, he’s intimidating,” Charlie said. He looked my way, but I was too busy thinking about Etta to manage a polite conversation. “Still, it would be interesting to actually speak with him. Or even just to see him up close.”

  I definitely did not want to talk to the Chancellor. He was probably a better mind-reader than Soo Yen. I tapped Charlie’s shoulder and gestured to the door. He followed me out of the room, saying goodbye politely before we left. I gave the intern one of my weaker smiles – the best I could do given the circumstances.

  “What are you going to do if he talks to us?” Charlie whispered to me as we hustled down the hallway and back towards the lab area. I didn’t answer, but picked up my pace. “Of all the days...”

  “He won’t talk to us,” I said. “We’re interns.”

  “Yami, we just did something – no, I just did something – illegal. Your friend is upstairs resting from ‘low blood sugar,’ but if my program doesn’t run correctly, someone will find out very fast that it’s not her blood sugar that made her faint. I didn’t even tell you, but my friend who sent me the code? He’s part of the group that put up the posters.” I snickered.

  “You knew that, didn’t you?” Charlie said, turning to stare directly at me. He gripped my forearm tightly. “You asked how I knew Tomas. You’ve met.”

  “Yes!” I said through my teeth. “How do you know about that group?”

  “I know people,” Charlie said. “What about you?”

  “I know people.”

  So Charlie knew that Etta was pregnant. And he knew about the Underground. And he knew the Underground put up those stupid flyers. Charlie, who was always loud and overly chatty, knew much more than I would have guessed.

  I felt Charlie’s fingers tense up as he stared at something behind me. I sucked in my breath and turned to see what he was looking at.

  It was Chancellor Lorenzo standing in the hallway about twenty feet away from us, quietly watching our exchange. He wore his usual black suit and plastered on smile. He was even taller than I imagined up close.

  “Are you interns?” he asked us as he approached. I nodded. Something about his gold insignia looked different from mine and Charlie’s. It was a little bigger, or maybe it shined more brightly against his dark jacket. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Charlie reached out his hand to shake.

  “Thank you for the work you do,” the Chancellor said. “I’m sure you’re working long hours to keep our community members safe and healthy.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Charlie. We were frozen in place, or at least we would be until the Chancellor decided our conversation was over.

  “What is your name?” Chancellor Lorenzo said, now looking me over. I felt naked under his lingering glance, and would have forgotten to answer if Charlie hadn’t pinched me.

  “Yami,” I said. “And this is Charlie.”

  The Chancellor glanced back at Charlie then returned his attention to me. My breath caught – did he know what happened with Etta this morning? Of course not, I thought. There was no way anyone could have heard our conversations or figured out Charlie’s technology solution.

  “Yami, do you know anything about the posters that someone left around the community yesterday?” he asked. His brazenness terrified me. I tightened my ponytail.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” he repeated. He inched towards me, now standing a little closer than he should. “Of course, if you knew something, you would have stepped forward, wouldn’t you?” I nodded blankly.

  “I’m sure you would have as well,” the Chancellor said, nodding at Charlie. Charlie shook his head up and down quickly.

  “That’s my problem, you see,” the Chancellor continued. “Everyone is reporting that they don’t know anything. And that they would say something if they did. But someone must be lying, isn’t that right?” I stared at his eyes but didn’t budge. “I’m sure you’d agree. The community functions perfectly exactly how it is now.” I sucked in my breath. What did “perfect” really mean to this man?

  “Everyone is healthy and safe. That’s the idea, isn’t it?” He was continuing as if Charlie and I were a part of this conversation, as
if it wasn’t just him pontificating threateningly. “When everyone stays out of trouble, the community works like clockwork. We have medical personnel, like yourselves, to see to the physical wellbeing of citizens. But as you know, it’s through research of laboratories such as the F-Lab that we have all but wiped out diseases that impact our youth. There’s no rational reason why we would ever stop our fertility research. Isn’t that right?” He paused again, searching our faces. And again, we said nothing.

  “Well, I hope, as I’m sure you do as well, that these instigators don’t continue to threaten the safety of our citizens in Young Woods.” The Chancellor continued to look us over. “It was nice to meet you, Yami and Charlie.” He reached out to shake our hands, and with a final ogling glance, he walked away.

  I finally let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding and heard Charlie do the same. Did the Chancellor know when he talked to us that we were the guilty ones? That we knew something and weren’t saying it? And how many other guilty parties would he talk to today?

  I had to get to Etta.

  Chapter Nine

  As soon as the Chancellor left our sight, I started running in the other direction. I was halfway down a flight of stairs before I realized Charlie was still beside me. I needed to check on Etta, and it was nice having a partner.

  We found Etta laying in the Care Unit, asleep. I shook her awake.

  “Are you ok?” I said as I shook her by her shoulders. “Etta! Has anyone talked to you?” Charlie pulled me back as he saw Etta was awake and cowering. It took me a moment to calm down, and took Etta a moment to realize who was waking her.

  “I’m ok!” Etta said. “I thought everything was ok!” Her eyes moved from my face to Charlie’s. “You did it, right? You fixed the data? Thank you!”

  “Don’t mention it,” Charlie said. “We wanted to make sure you were okay. Chancellor Lorenzo is in the building. He...he sort of questioned us.”

  Etta sat upright in a flash. “He questioned you? What happened?”