“How come the Purples didn’t catch you?” asks Amber.
“I ran into the woods and climbed a tree. They searched like crazy, but they never looked up. I could have spit down on them a couple of times. I heard them talking. They were pretty sure we all died in the wreck. I guess traffic cones burn really slow, because the flames went on for days, and they couldn’t get close enough to figure out we weren’t there.”
“Yeah, okay,” says Malik. “But how did you get here?”
“Don’t rush me. I’m telling the story. So I stay in the woods as long as I can, thinking maybe you guys will come back for me.” He shakes his head. “Maybe some people can survive in the wild, but not me. You swallow ten million berries and all you get is a stomachache. Once I chased this rabbit for hours, but when I finally caught him, I couldn’t figure out how to make him die. So I let him go. I’d barely eaten in days. And I thought, whatever they do to me in Serenity, it can’t be as bad as starving to death. So I walked back into town. But you’re never going to believe this: Nobody was there.”
Eli nods. “We escaped with their secret, and they ran away.”
“What could I do?” Hector continues. “I went home. At least there was food. I ate everything. I was spooning cold peas out of the can. I poked around, looking for clues about where everybody went, and I found my mom’s private diary. This name kept coming up—C. J. Rackoff. She compared me to this guy in at least a dozen places. I remembered there’s real internet near the factory, so I took our laptop over there. He’s a big-time crook—famous, even. And you know what? I think he’s the guy I’m cloned from.”
Eli, the girls, and I exchange meaningful glances. Say what you want about Hector—and I do—nobody can deny that he’s smart. Our paths were totally different and still the facts led the five of us to the exact same place. Surely that means we’re on the right track.
“Anyway,” Hector concludes. “The website said C. J. Rackoff was in jail here, so I gathered up all the loose money I could find and walked out of town.”
“Three hundred miles?” Tori challenges.
“Of course not. I hitchhiked. At first, people thought I was running away, so I had this idea. I started saying I was already away, and was trying to get home. Who wouldn’t help a kid get home? Whatever the next town on the sign was, that’s where I pretended to live. It takes a long time, but eventually you get where you’re going.”
“How did you find us?” Eli probes.
Hector shrugs. “You can’t just knock on the front gate of a prison. This hotel is the only place around here. I swear, when I saw you guys, I thought it was a hallucination.”
Crazy story? Sure. But it’s a lot easier to swallow than the series of events that brought us four to the Tumbleweed Inn.
His eyes grow wider and wider as we fill him in on what we’ve been through since the breakout. It spills out of us in bits and pieces like we barely believe it ourselves. We do barely believe it ourselves.
When we get to the part in Jackson Hole, and how we cut out our neck implants, he looks squeamish and feels for his own. There’s no bump like Amber’s, but upon closer inspection of his skin, we find the telltale scar, long healed, in exactly the right spot.
Hector is confused. “If I still have the chip, why didn’t the barrier get me?”
Eli shrugs. “They would have had to turn it off when they took the other clones out of Serenity. Or maybe they never fixed it after we wrecked it when we broke out.”
That annoys me. “Are you saying I went through that torture for nothing?”
Amber rolls her eyes. “We all went through ‘that torture,’ not just you.”
“Which doesn’t change the fact that I went through torture! I was bleeding, you know!”
Hector grins. “I see leaving Serenity hasn’t changed what a big baby you are.”
I glare at him. “Real funny coming from a kid who can’t even get killed and make it stick.”
“Hector, we’re so glad that you’re okay,” Tori tells him. “It was agony to go on without you, and we thought about you every minute—especially Malik.”
You know what? I’m actually grateful to her for that. Somebody had to say it. I never would have.
It strikes a note with Hector, who flushes. “I thought about you guys a lot too,” he mumbles uncomfortably.
“Right,” I dig at him. “You thought about how we abandoned you, how everything bad that happened was our fault. We were basically starring in another exciting episode of your favorite show, Oh, Poor Me.”
“Yeah, but it worked out okay, right? We’re all together again.”
“The freak show’s back in business,” I agree.
Here we are, five escaped clones huddled in a cheap motel room outside Haddonfield, Texas. Less than a quarter mile away, behind high walls, barbed wire, and iron bars is a connection to the sinister experiment that’s responsible for our existence.
The truth is very close. We can almost taste it.
23
HECTOR AMANI
I remember it like it just happened five minutes ago. Serenity Day. The escape. The speeding cone transport. And then darkness.
I woke up to a splitting headache. Not the sickness and pain of the invisible barrier. My head was just killing me. I put my hand up to my temple, and it came away bloody. What did I expect after jumping off a runaway truck?
I struggled to my feet—and very nearly keeled over and rolled down a steep embankment. At the last second, I flailed my arms and grabbed onto a tree trunk—probably the same one that did a number on my skull. In a wild moment of vertigo, I pieced together what must have happened. I got off the truck at the last second, tumbled over the side, and whacked my head on this tree. It hurt like crazy, but it was a blessing. It was the only thing that kept me from rolling all the way to the bottom. With my luck, the truck would have landed right on top of me. It was down in the valley, shooting flames thirty feet in the air—thus explaining why the barrier was gone.
Where were the others? Dead in the fire? For a moment I panicked. Then it came back to me. They all got off the truck. I was the last one.
“Malik!” I called. “Eli! Tori! Amber!”
I got no answer.
It was too steep to walk, so I got down on all fours and crawled back up to the road. “Malik!”
They couldn’t all be dead! If I made it, they made it. I shouted at the top of my lungs, which sent me into coughing fits. I must have swallowed a lot of dirt before the tree coldcocked me.
“Come on, you guys! Don’t do this to me!”
My pleas echoed in the night.
I recall my exact logic that night: If they survived the crash, there can be only one possible explanation for what’s happening. They’ve abandoned me.
It was the loneliest, emptiest, most awful feeling I’ve ever known.
And then: Why are you so shocked? You’ve always sort of known that the only person who cares about you is you. Even among the Serenity “parents,” yours were the only ones who couldn’t manage to work up any affection for the baby clone they were given to raise!
I was absolutely convinced that my one miscalculation was allowing myself to believe that the others were my real friends.
Yet here they are with me now, sitting on hard chairs in the visiting room inside Kefauver prison. They say they were sad when they thought I was dead. According to Tori, Malik even cried. I want to believe that so much.
I’m grateful to them for this, though: I would never have the guts to face C. J. Rackoff alone. They’re the only people in the world with a hope of understanding. They have their own C. J. Rackoffs out there somewhere—criminals just as sleazy, and scary, and horrible. Maybe more. They told me about Bartholomew Glen. Poor Eli.
A key jiggles in a lock at the back of the room. That’s one thing there’s no shortage of in jail—locks. It’s easy to get on the visitors list at Kefauver. You just tell them how to spell your name. But that’s the last easy thing
about it. We must have passed through ten layers of security to get this far. That plus a metal detector and a personal search that was not pleasant. I’m ticklish. And this is only medium security, where they put the swindlers and embezzlers. What have they got at maximum? A moat with hungry piranhas?
The door swings open, hinges squeaking. Tori grabs my shoulder and gives me a comforting squeeze.
I see the guard first, and then he walks in. He’s old and bald and not very tall, with glasses and a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair around stick-out ears. My first thought is: There must be some mistake. This guy looks nothing like me. There’s no way I’m cloned from him. We couldn’t even be distant cousins, much less identical people.
He pans the room, his eyes magnified behind Coke-bottle glasses. His expression remains bland until the supersize eyes land on me. All at once, he breaks into a big grin and laughs out loud.
“Would you look at that? They did it. Those crazy fools went ahead and did it!”
“What do you mean?” I quaver, even though I know exactly what he means. He recognizes me, all right. He’s been me.
So this is it—the source of what I’m made of, my “parent” more fully than any biological mother or father. It could be a warm, completing moment, but I just feel like a freak, and even more alone than before.
Rackoff turns to the guard. “Haven’t you got a date?”
The guard seems uncertain.
“These kids are my spiritual advisors. You’re interfering with my freedom of religion.”
“I’ll be right outside,” the man tells us with a meaningful look. “All you have to do is holler.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Rackoff?” Eli asks as soon as the door shuts behind the guard.
“Let me tell you kids a story. Years ago, the powers that be tell me I’ve got a visitor. Felix Somebody. I don’t know any Felix, but I’ve got no plans that day, or any day, as you can see.” He indicates the prison setting around us. “Very interesting man. He’s got some billionaire backing him, and he says he can cut off a little piece of skin and make a whole new me for an experiment he’s got going on. He offers me money. Like there’s anything to spend it on in here. Besides, I’ve got enough stashed away in secret bank accounts to buy and sell his billionaire. So he tries another approach, tells me I’ll be passing on my genes to future generations. So I point out, in case he hasn’t noticed, that I’m a sawed-off little wing nut, and people hate me on sight.” He turns to me. “Sorry, kid.”
“I’m used to it,” I tell him in resignation.
Malik opens his mouth to protest, but shuts it again.
Amber speaks up. “What made you decide to go along with Project Osiris?”
Rackoff brightens. “That’s right. He said something about Osiris. Anyway, I did it for the brownies.”
We all stare at him.
“You can’t put a million bucks in the soda machine. But brownies—from a real New York bakery—that’s something to look forward to in a place where there’s nothing to look forward to. Twice a week, someone ships me a care package from Sarabeth’s in Chelsea Market. Pure heaven. They make these double chocolate brownies to die for.”
Malik goes into a coughing spasm, and I know he’s thinking of his mom’s chocolate brownies, which I used to love. As mean as he could sometimes be, he always invited me over when Mrs. Bruder was baking.
“They’re my favorite too,” I volunteer timidly.
“No kidding.” It’s not exactly a chip-off-the-old-block moment, but he seems pleased we have this tiny random thing in common. “So, as I was saying, those shipments came like clockwork, until about a week ago. Felix reneged on our deal.”
Eli clears his throat. “I don’t think you’re going to get any more brownies from Project Osiris. What they did was very illegal. When we escaped, they had to go into hiding.”
The eyes—my eyes—narrow. Do I really look like that?
He says, “I always figured I couldn’t be the only one. So you’re all—like him?” Meaning me.
“The word is clones,” Amber tells him. “No point trying to sugarcoat it.”
Rackoff takes it all in. “So after this Felix was done with me, he had some other stops to make. All convicts like me?”
“They wanted criminal masterminds,” Eli supplies.
“Masterminds,” he repeats. “Never thought of myself as a mastermind. I’m just someone with a knack for reading the wind, and positioning myself so money blows in my direction.”
I’ve been pretty quiet in the presence of the person I was cloned from, but something about his casual attitude bugs me. “It’s not funny, you know. How’d you like to discover your whole life is a lie, the people you thought were your parents are mad scientists, and you only exist to be part of some experiment?”
He looks at me with a little more respect. “I guess that would be a downer. Then again, I’m in a cage, so I’m living proof that bad things happen to people. Is there a purpose to this visit, or is it just supposed to be a family reunion?”
He’s a jerk, I think to myself. Which might actually mean that I’m a jerk. That wouldn’t surprise me.
“Mr. Rackoff,” Eli begins, “cloning criminals is more than just a crime. It’s cruel. There are eleven of us; we have no parents, and maybe we’re not a hundred percent human. We don’t want to be part of their experiment anymore, but there’s nothing else for us. We need your help.”
“My help?” he echoes, looking interested.
“No one’s ever going to believe our story without proof,” Eli goes on. “We tried once, and ended up having to escape from the police. And without protection from the authorities, it’s only a matter of time before Project Osiris tracks us down. But you can prove our case. You and Hector have the same DNA—that can be confirmed in a lab. Add to that what you know about Felix and the beginning of Osiris, and they’d have to listen to us then.”
Rackoff takes all this in. “They would at that,” he says, impressed.
“So you’ll help us?” Tori prompts.
“No.”
“Why not?” I wail, so loudly that I see the guard peeking in to make sure we’re okay.
“I’m just asking myself: How does this make my life better? Does it shorten my sentence? Does it move me to a better cell? Does it keep me off the work detail here, making mailbags, stitching canvas till my fingers bleed? It doesn’t even bring back my brownies. I’ll bet none of you kids has so much as a credit card.”
“What about justice?” Amber demands.
He shrugs. “That’s what makes your life better. Me, I’m not too thrilled with justice.”
I have one last trump card, and I play it. “Can’t you do it for me? I know you’re not my dad, but you’re the nearest thing I’ve got. In a way, it’s even closer, because we’re identical.”
“Right,” Rackoff approves. “We are identical. So you should already know what I’d need to cooperate with you on this deal.”
“Come off it!” Malik protests on my behalf. “Hector can’t read minds.”
C. J. Rackoff is right, though. I’m not sure if it’s mind reading, or having the same genes, but I know what he wants. He wants out of this place.
“It’s not possible,” I barely whisper.
He shrugs. “Suit yourselves. If you can break me out of jail, you can have my DNA, and my testimony, and my undying gratitude. If you can’t, we’ve got nothing left to talk about.”
“You’re crazy!” Malik exclaims. “How are we going to get you out of here? We’re just kids!”
“You’re not just kids,” he amends in a pleasant tone. “You’re masterminds. I know what I’m capable of. The rest of you must be spliced off some heavy hitters too. You need my help? First I need yours.”
It’s shocking but, on second thought, it’s pretty much exactly what I would have said.
24
TORI PRITEL
They all look at me when it’s time to come up with a plan. I have no idea
why. I’m an artist. I’m observant, and I have a good memory for detail. That’s it. I don’t know anything about prison breaks (and I’m proud of that).
“First of all, why are we even considering doing this?” I ask them. “If anybody ever belonged behind bars, it’s C. J. Rackoff. We already know he’s a criminal. But even worse, he’s a terrible person!”
“He’s the only one who can help us,” Eli reasons.
“Not true,” I point out. “What about Yvonne-Marie Delacroix? Or Mickey Seven? Or Gus Alabaster?” I stop short at mentioning Bartholomew Glen, because I can’t imagine him helping us to anything other than an early death.
“All those guys are hundreds of miles away—maybe thousands,” Eli points out. “We could cross the whole country only to be told they refuse to see us, or they’re not allowed visitors. And they’re all in maximum security as dangerous offenders. It’s Rackoff or nobody.”
“I know he’s a bad guy,” Hector tells me. “But if he’s me—well, I can’t explain it, but there’s nothing inside me that anyone would have to be afraid of.”
“He’s a saint,” agrees Malik. “Unless you’ve got twenty-five cents in your pocket, and then he won’t rest until he’s got it.”
As usual, Amber is the one who boils our choice down to the simplest possible terms. “Rackoff deserves to stay in jail. But if we’ve got any chance at a future, we have to get him out. It’s that simple.”
“Can we get him out?” asks Hector nervously. “That’s a real prison, with high walls and armed guards. It’s impossible.”
But when I run my mind over the information Rackoff gave us about Kefauver, I don’t see impossibilities; I see challenges. And the tougher the challenges, the more I want to find a way to beat them. I know it comes from Yvonne-Marie Delacroix, but I don’t care. It’s more than simple determination; it’s almost an itch I have to scratch.
“Almost impossible,” I amend. “Everything seems too hard when you look at the whole operation. The trick is to break it down into individual parts. The big picture can’t be impossible if none of the little parts are. You just have to do everything exactly right, in exactly the right order.”
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