Your One & Only(28)

Halfway to the cottage, the sky broke. Rain poured down, thrummed against his skin. As if the rain gave him energy, he ran faster, slipping again and again on the muddy path up through the trees and over the wall. He tore open the door of the cottage. It’d been abandoned after his mother’s death. No one else had use for it. Only Sam knew that Jack still came here; the others never left the confines of town.

The air inside swelled with the dampness outside. The windows, covered in thick drapes, trapped the dust in the dark house. The rooms smelled of animals nesting in the shadowed corners. Jack collapsed on his bed and pulled the quilted blanket over his shoulders. He willed his muscles to relax as he listened to the rain sweeping through the trees and to distant peals of thunder. He’d fallen asleep to this countless times, hearing those identical sounds in thunderstorms. This storm felt different. He wasn’t the same person he’d been when he slept in this bed as a child.

The clones would come looking for him in the morning, after they found the Nyla. He had until then to gather what he’d need and escape to the jungle. How could he stay? What Sam had done, and the Nyla too, felt worse than any of the pranks or taunts he’d endured before. There was something wrong with them, with all of them. His mother must have thought so.

Jack wished she were still alive to tell him what to do.

He was tired, bone-tired, in mind and body. He lit a candle against the dark, then curled on his side. He felt betrayed, but he would still miss Sam. Sam was the one person who at least tried to care for him, who halfway understood him. Sam hadn’t been much of a father, but it wasn’t his fault. For all Jack knew, human fathers had also failed their sons at times. And as much as Jack resented Sam sending the Nylas to his room—and his face burned with anger when he thought about the conversations they must have had about him—he knew Sam well enough to know what he’d been thinking. In his own way, Sam was trying to make Jack part of the community—to socialize him.

Even the Nylas hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. What she’d done with him—what they had done with him—that was how the clones Paired. It’d been his own fault for thinking she was different.

The rain would stop soon enough, and when it did he would leave. Jack closed his eyes, wanting sleep to claim him, just for a few minutes.

He’d only just drifted off when he heard the front door creak open. They’d tracked him down quickly. But it wouldn’t have been hard. He’d figured he had until morning, but of course Sam would have told them to look in the cottage.

Then he heard a quiet, familiar voice calling, “Hello?”





Chapter Nine


ALTHEA


Althea had seen Jack run from the labs. She’d been heading there to apologize when he burst through the doors. He’d pulled a hand through his hair, his head bent low as if distraught, then in a single, unexpected movement, he’d run full force, past the banana trees shaking in the night air, a bag slung over his shoulder. Something had dropped from the bag though, and when she went to pick it up, she found it was his inhaler. So she followed him. She’d barely kept up, watching through the leaves for glimpses of his hair, flashing silver-white in the moonlit clouds. By the time the rain started, she’d already followed him halfway up the hill, to the wall of the town that appeared through the sheets of rain on the steep side of the slope.

Hidden among vines was a makeshift ladder leaning against the wall, and she climbed it, only to find no such ladder on the other side. She had to jump from the top to the ground, which Jack probably found simple enough, but her dress tore, and she rolled her ankle and skinned her knee while awkwardly trying to lower herself down the stone barrier. It would have been easier to go through the gated bridge by the river, but by then she would have lost him, and at some point in all the difficulty, she became determined to deliver the inhaler. Once over the wall, she discovered the ramshackle house with loose shutters, its front door hanging open. Althea stood for a moment, breathing hard. She felt exposed outside the safety of Vispera. She stood in the shelter of the porch for a few moments, then went inside.

“Hello?” she said, following the muddy footsteps that headed upstairs. She’d never seen a place like it before. Dusty and damp, it was so unlike the clean, well-ordered dorms she grew up in.

The door to the room upstairs was closed. She raised her arm to knock, paused, then simply opened it.

Jack was sitting on the bed. He must have heard her come in, because he didn’t act surprised to see her.

“Jack?” she said, feeling strange about being there. She suddenly felt like a trespasser.

He absently twirled a white ball sewn with fraying red thread in his hands. His hair, dark with rain, fell across his eyes, but he seemed not to notice or care. When he looked up, his eyes weren’t as gray as she remembered. They seemed almost blue, even in the dim room. A candle glowed in a narrow circle of light on the desk. The reflection of water from the windows cast broken paths on the striped wallpaper, drops of rain spilling down.

Jack tossed the ball next to him on the bed. “You followed me,” he said, his voice flat. It wasn’t a question.

The room was sparsely furnished. There was a chair by the desk, but she didn’t feel like sitting down. He didn’t seem to want her there, just like when she’d showed up in the labs with Carson. He scanned her briefly, taking in her wet clothes, her skinned knees, the hair sticking to her neck in damp strings. Her hands folded and unfolded.