Your One & Only(40)

“Right. Some animal,” Jack said, just loud enough for Carson to hear.



That night, Jack didn’t even have the energy left to shiver. He drifted in and out of sleep. His tongue felt swollen, his mouth dry. The drops of water he’d gotten from Carson’s bottle were gone in seconds, and he was only left wanting more. Streams of blood dried down to his elbow from where the shackles’ metal edge had cut his skin when he’d tried and failed to reach the parcel.

Jack felt half dead, but he could see the cornfields through the barn door that Carson had left open. They swayed with the gentle wind as if they were breathing. The sound of the breeze mingled with the buzz of insects and croak of frogs. Jack heard the music of it, felt it deep in the earth at the same time as he felt it in the bones and blood of his body.

The Council wanted a tenth clone. Nine was an odd number, and the clones had never been much for odd numbers. Was that what his mother had meant when she said they needed him? That they needed future generations of Jacks, all polished and perfected like the others, refined for useful traits and cleansed of anything undesirable?

No, his mother wouldn’t want that. She’d fought the Council, fought the clones. She wanted him to be human, not another one of them.

Whatever the Council may once have planned, Jack found he was glad he’d failed their audition. There was something wrong with the clones. Maybe they didn’t have things like bad eyesight, or deformities and diseases, things like his asthma, but three centuries ago they had murdered 120 humans they’d promised to keep safe.

They’d killed his mother for no reason he would ever understand.

Jack drew himself upright on the wall, listening harder for the night’s music. The clones would say the night was silent, and perhaps it really was. Perhaps he was still dreaming, and it was only a human dream.

Jack’s leg brushed something at his side. The parcel, the one Carson threw into the cage; it was next to him now, several feet closer than where it had landed. Beside that was the water bottle, full and glistening, cool condensation dripping down its side. Jack lifted it, held it in his trembling hands as he pulled the top. He drank until the liquid dripped down his chin, his neck, his chest. He tore his mouth away from the opening, knowing he shouldn’t drink it all at once, but relishing the cold sweetness. He put it down, breathing deeply, then searched through the parcel. In it he found a pair of drawstring pants like the scrubs the Samuels wore in the clinic, some bandages, an inhaler, and a long iron key. The key opened the cuffs around his wrists. His numb fingers fumbled with it until it turned and the manacles released. He clenched his teeth to stifle a sob as they dropped, the pain and stiffness stabbing into his joints.

After searching the bag, Jack listened intently to the noises from outside. Someone had been here. They’d filled the water bottle and reached from outside the bars while he slept and pushed the parcel to where he could reach it. Maybe Sam, though surely Sam would have woken him, talked to him. Was it Althea? She would try to help him, he knew, even if it got her in trouble. The thought of her being close gave him the first sense of warmth he’d felt in days.

There was a rustle, and a hint of movement outside. Jack narrowed his eyes into the night, staring at the moonlit shadows through the thin crack between the wooden boards of the barn.

Hidden in the fields of corn, on the edge of the wavering stalks, he saw motion, then stillness. The crack darkened, and his view of the field was blocked by something—a body, and then a face.

And then, mere inches away on the other side of the wall, Jack saw his own pale eyes, glimmering and laughing in the darkness.





Chapter Thirteen


ALTHEA


There’d been no Council meetings since the disaster of the last one, and Althea hadn’t once been able to corner Samuel-299. She’d resorted to planting herself outside the clinic for the past three days, watching the Samuels come and go, the Gen-300s, Gen-290s, 280s, 270s, all of them, including those from Gen-310, but Samuel-299 never appeared. He was avoiding her. Though she knew, when he saw her, he wouldn’t be able to hide his reaction. He would know what she wanted. They’d taken Jack away, and she had no idea where he was or what was happening to him. The only other person who would care was Samuel-299. She’d seen his face when the Council had used the word elimination. So she waited.

The nights had been cold, but the day was warm, and the space outside the clinic wasn’t shaded. In the weed-filled ditch near the path, flowering amaranth drooped low in bright bursts of rosy color, drying in the heat. The red dirt in the clearing seemed to have absorbed the air, and it crunched hot under her feet. She would rather be with her sisters in the cool shade of the wide-leafed trees, chasing the tetras that flickered in Blue River, but she felt helpless. She had to do something.

Nyla-313 came up the path. The hem of her blue dress floated in the hot breeze, brushing the tops of her sandals.

“I thought you might be here again,” Nyla said. “You’re still trying to find Samuel-299?”

“He knows where they took Jack,” Althea said, squinting up at Nyla, a dark silhouette against the sun.

“Why do you care so much?” Nyla said, sitting down.

“The Carsons were lying. It’s not right.”

“Do you think I’m lying?”

Althea took Nyla’s hand, and in touching her for the first time since everything had happened, she felt a stir of doubt in Nyla.