Your One & Only(20)

Althea couldn’t remember if the Council had said what year Jack’s sample was from. If it was a few decades before the Slow Plague, that would put his original’s birth around A.D. 2000. She studied his belongings, trying to remember what she knew of humans. Human history was impossible to keep straight. It had, after all, lasted thousands of years. So many of the records had been lost, whether because of the Slow Plague or the carelessness of her own people in the three hundred years since they’d been created.

Jack’s room was littered with stacks of human books, a few games. Jack picked up his book from the floor and sat back on the bed. Instead of reading it, however, he dropped his head in his hands. Althea found herself wanting to touch his arm, to comfort him the way the brothers and sisters would do with each other.

He had hair, she noticed suddenly, on his arms and chest. She could see it peeking from the V of his shirt, soft and pale like a fine down. There was even a shadow of hair on his face. The male bodies in Vispera were bare except for the hair on their heads. As he sat under the fluorescent bulbs, the hair on his arm caught the light like glints of gold.

“Damn it!” Jack said, hurling his book away. Althea jumped to her feet, all thoughts of going anywhere near him flying from her mind. He looked at her for the first time since Carson had left and then shook his head.

Althea sat on the floor again, keeping a cautious eye on Jack. “You shouldn’t have mentioned his scar,” she said.

His lip curled. “Yeah? Well, what’d you ever do to him? I wasn’t the only target here.”

Althea pressed her lips together. She had no desire to talk with this boy about the Pairing. “He’s always had it in for you. You shouldn’t have attacked him that time in school.”

Jack laughed, his eyes cold. “I’ll be sure to make better choices next time someone’s trying to kill me.”

“Don’t be an idiot—he wouldn’t have killed you.”

“Why don’t you tell me how you react next time it’s thirty kids against you?”

“The Altheas weren’t part of what happened. We didn’t do anything.”

Jack leveled his gaze at her, his eyes clear and accusatory. “Exactly.”

Althea realized what he was saying and felt her face flush. “There was nothing we could do.”

“Listen, don’t talk to me. I don’t need you feeling sorry for me. Someone will figure out you’re gone soon enough. Just wait till they show up.”

She did feel bad for Jack, though why that should upset him was a mystery. She hadn’t been aware her feelings surrounding him were palpable to the others, but they must be if Carson had picked up on them so easily.

Althea had no idea how long it would take for someone to find her. The situation, it seemed, was perfect for her to be stuck all night. She’d felt her sisters’ irritation and anxiety earlier. They would probably conclude she was avoiding them after the disaster of the Pairing Ceremony. In any case, they’d be asleep by now. They wouldn’t be looking for her tonight.

Althea felt jumpy. Jack must have noticed how wary she was, because he rolled his eyes.

“Settle down, would you?” He collected his book from where he’d tossed it and then sat on the floor, leaving her the bed. “I’m going to read, which is what I was doing before your friend ruined my night.”

“He’s not my friend. And what am I supposed to do?”

“Take the bed. Sleep or something—I don’t care.”

“Don’t you sleep?”

“Of course I sleep. Do you think I don’t sleep? You people—you clones—why do you think I’m so different from you?”

Althea didn’t like the way he said clones, as if it was something bad.

“But you are different. Aren’t you?”

“No,” he said, though Althea suspected he had his own doubt on the issue. He settled into his book, disregarding her.

There was no way she was going to fall asleep while locked in a room with the human. She took a book from the bookshelf. Silas Marner, the cover read. It had a picture of a human man holding a yellow-haired child.

Jack gave an exasperated sigh.

“Not that one,” he said, snatching Silas Marner from her hand.

He handed her the book he’d been reading, The Call of the Wild. He went back to his spot after selecting a new book for himself, seemingly at random. He didn’t look at her again. Althea took the book and gingerly sat on the edge of the cot.

Jack spent the next long hours apparently content to turn pages, barely shifting position. Althea had a harder time. She started the book, but none of it made sense. It took ages before she realized that the story wasn’t even about a human. It was about a dog. But that was such nonsense. She wasn’t a complete idiot about human history; she knew back then they didn’t have dogs with human thoughts and feelings. The further she read, the worse it became, with page after page about clubs, fangs, blood, and wild animals in ice-frozen forests.

Of course the human read such things.

He was mastered, she read, by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars—

Flying? The dog was supposed to be flying?