Your One & Only(6)
“Look at you,” Carson-312 said, taking a step forward. “You think you’re not an accident? You’re so defective you can’t even breathe right.”
Jack flinched as another pebble hit him. He clutched the retrieved inhaler close to his chest, and the students closed in.
Althea didn’t know what to do. Her sisters didn’t know what to do. They met each other’s eyes, silently communing with the same feeling. This had to stop.
Althea-313 said, far too softly, “Quit it, you guys.”
It was as if she’d said nothing. The boys paid no attention.
The Carsons continued throwing the pebbles while Carson-318 tore a narrow switch from a nearby patch of brush and handed it to Carson-312, who whipped it back and forth, testing its heft. It hissed as it cut the air. Standing over Jack, Carson-312 snapped it against Jack’s arm, leaving a thin welt. The brothers continued to jeer and gather more pebbles. Carson-312 swung again, striking Jack’s back.
Althea couldn’t see Jack’s face, but his limbs tightened with each snap of the switch, and she saw his shivering, barely contained control. There was a rigidity in his muscles, like his entire body was a spring straining for release.
He was using all his will to hold himself back. He was still hoping they’d stop.
It was too much to watch. Althea broke away from her sisters and grabbed Carson-312’s arm as it rose up again. His elbow hit her eye, and she fell to the ground. Her sisters ran to her, closing her in their protective circle, touching her face.
Althea cupped her aching eye. Her sisters held their own eyes, feeling the burgeoning pain themselves. Carson-312 hadn’t even paused, had probably hardly noticed her near him. The whip slashed across Jack’s back until specks of red dotted the fabric of his shirt like a string of beads. Carson-312 licked his lips and aimed for those lines of red, a glint in his eye. He’s enjoying it, Althea thought. Seeing Jack recoil at the targeted strikes, Carson-312 quickened his swings. Breathless with exertion, he muttered, “Go back to whatever lab they’ve been keeping you in, human. You don’t belong here.”
As the switch came down once again, Jack’s hand shot out and caught it. It sliced into the flesh of his palm as he yanked it from Carson-312. He launched himself off the wall, a yell wrenched from his throat, and flew at Carson-312 faster than Althea thought possible. Jack tackled him to the ground and straddled his chest, striking him over and over. The other Carsons didn’t dare touch him, even to protect their own brother. They’d never seen such fury.
Jack slammed his fist into Carson-312’s face, and blood poured from his nose. Jack’s wild hits landed again and again. The Carson brothers began to collapse on the ground, moaning and clutching their heads, the sound and pain of the blows echoing in their own skulls. One of Althea’s sisters clutched her stomach, and at the same time, Althea felt sick too, all the Altheas did.
The class looked on in horror as Jack pummeled Carson-312 until his face was swollen and bloody. Only a few moments had passed, but to Althea it felt like an eternity before Samuel-299 finally ran outside. He hauled Jack off Carson-312. Jack fought, heedless and wild, as Samuel-299 dragged him across the yard and through the school doors.
The class stood silent and motionless, like a held breath, the only sound in the yard Carson-312’s wet, snuffling moans. Althea felt everyone’s anger and alarm slowly recede like a tide. The Carsons gathered around Carson-312, ghosts of his pain stirring in their own bodies.
A couple of them pressed their white shirts to Carson-312’s face, and the cotton bloomed red. Eventually, the Samuels came and took Carson-312 away to the clinic. By the time the students filed back into the school, Jack was nowhere to be seen, and a Hassan was at the front of the room.
Once more the faces in the painting of the Original Nine stared down at Althea and the rest of the class, their expressions as placid and confident as ever, as if nothing at all had happened.
Chapter Two
JACK
TWO YEARS LATER
Jack sat in the grass on the steep side of the hill, knocking a ball against the side of the white-boarded cottage. He heard Sam’s heavy breathing from climbing the steep rise, and he didn’t need to turn around to know he’d find the man standing over him, wearing his white lab coat and disapproving frown.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Sam finally said.
“I should be dead,” Jack said. Although if he thought about it, that wasn’t really true. It wasn’t that he should be dead, but that he should never have been born. He should be extinct, like all the other humans.
High on the slope, Jack could see the entire wall encircling the town, six feet high and broad enough to walk on; a double-winged gate of wrought iron faced Blue River. Within, the school sat on one end, where the Gen-320 children played in the gravel-covered yard, the same one where, two years ago, he’d attacked the Carson; next to that was the cluster of labs where the clones conducted their experiments and grew the new Gens in their tanks. On the other end stood the stout line of nine dorms, one building for every model, a separate room inside for every Gen, each with its own row of ten beds. In the middle of the dorms was the dining hall, a circular, two-story building of limestone quarried from the distant cliffs. All the clones gathered there for meals at wooden banquet tables, at least when they weren’t outside celebrating one of their seemingly incessant rituals. In the center of everything stood Remembrance Hall and the Commons, an expanse of lawn around a large kapok tree where the clones held their ceremonies and parties. Sometimes Jack watched at night from a distance while they danced and lights twinkled in the lanky branches of the huge tree.