Your One & Only(5)

Carson-312 smirked. “That’s Samuel-299 who brought you, isn’t it? He’s on the Council.” He looked Jack up and down. “What’d the Council do, make a hairless monkey? Isn’t that all a human is, a bald monkey?”

“You’re humans, too,” Jack said. “You’re clones of the Originals, and they were human.”

The Samuels crowded Althea and her sisters as they gathered to watch while keeping a safe distance from Jack.

Carson-312 smirked, then casually picked up a handful of gravel from the ground, jostling it in his palm as he moved closer to Jack. “He’s not very smart, is he? He just called us clones.”

Jack licked his lips uncertainly. “Isn’t that what you are?”

A young Samuel came forward. “Don’t you know anything? We don’t say clone. We’re Homo factus.” He straightened as if proud of the title. “We’re the self-made man.”

“You,” Carson-317 said, looking Jack up and down, “you’re just some defective experiment of the Council. You’re an accident.”

The boy couldn’t be an accident. The Council didn’t make mistakes.

“I’m not an accident,” Jack said, clearly wishing he could offer more of a rationale for his existence.

“Yeah?” said another Carson. “So you want to tell us what we need a monkey-boy for, then?”

Althea could tell that Jack was trying. He wanted the other boys, and the Altheas too, to accept him. The Carsons especially were being mean, but Jack looked hopeful, as if somehow things would still be okay. Althea kept quiet. The Altheas weren’t involved in this, and there was something wrong with the boy, something much worse than a replaced hand. Whatever asthma really was, it was obviously a disease her people had spent generations eradicating. Her people didn’t suffer from disease. That Jack had a thing like asthma was terrifying. Despite what the Samuel said, human illness was contagious. It was what had killed them all. It was better to keep her distance, as the rest of her sisters were doing.

Jack’s eyes flickered between the Carsons. He looked to the Samuels for help, searching for a friendly face. While they wouldn’t join in with the Carsons, not with an elder Samuel right inside, they also wouldn’t try to stop them. A few of Althea’s sisters chewed their nails.

Carson-312 flicked a pebble at Jack’s shoulder. “Well, monkey-boy?” he said. “If you’re not an accident, what the hell are you?”

“I . . . I don’t . . .” Jack struggled, not knowing what answer to give.

“You’re not one of us,” Carson-311 said.

Carson-312 flicked another pebble, hitting Jack’s arm. “You don’t belong here.”

A third pebble immediately followed, this one striking his shoulder again. Jack backed away, his tongue pressing his teeth. The boys sniggered, and now the Samuels joined in. More of the Carsons took up handfuls of gravel.

Jack closed his eyes and pulled an unsteady breath into his chest. “Stop it,” he said, his voice thin and strained. His fingers reached into his pocket, seeking the inhaler he’d used inside. It was the asthma again. The Samuel had called it an attack, as if the boy’s own body were assaulting him just as much as the Carsons seemed ready to do. Althea shuddered. Jack finally got the inhaler out but then dropped it in the dirt. He fell to his knees, his hands scrambling for it frantically, panic etched on his face.

All ten Carsons grinned at once.

Althea’s sisters stood like her, watching. They were feeling what she was—fear, and also disgust. Carsons were confrontational. They were engineers, but also leaders. They liked being in charge, even in Vispera, where the only hierarchy was age and decisions were made by consensus. Still, the community celebrated the Carsons’ sense of leadership as much as it did the Nylas’ work in the labs or the Ingas’ paintings. The community taught the young people that they should think of the differences in the models as the various organs of the body, each with its own role, but working together for the good of the whole.

This, however, was the bad side of the Carsons.

As much as Althea didn’t like what the Carsons and Samuels were doing, it was painfully clear to everyone that Jack wasn’t Homo factus. He did mostly look like all of them, but that only made the blankness they felt from him more terrible. Everyone’s emotions were so strong. In one moment of communing, Althea could most palpably feel her sisters’ sick fear. Under that, she sensed the uneasy, excited tension of the Samuels, and then the current of gleeful anger emanating from the Carsons. Like everyone else, she felt nothing from the boy. As if he were an animal. As if he were dead.

Jack’s shoulders hunched forward. Another Carson threw a pebble at his forehead. The pebbles weren’t large enough to cause more than a brief sting, but Jack’s eyes darted from face to face as if he feared what might come next.

Althea peered toward the window of their classroom. Where was the Samuel? And then she saw him. He was watching the students through a window. He was frowning and taking notes. Why didn’t he do something?

It occurred to her then that this was the test the Council had planned. It wasn’t on history or science, or anything they’d studied for. The test was how they acted today, with this boy the Council had thrust upon them. And perhaps they were watching Jack as well, to see how he would fit in. But surely Samuel-299 wouldn’t let things go too far. Althea didn’t like the sneers growing on the Carsons’ faces.