Your One & Only(80)

The door to the room opened, and a Samuel came in pushing a metal cart. He peered at Jack with a mixture of confusion and suspicion. It was the Samuel from the Tunnels, Samuel-297. A bandage on his forehead covered the wound he’d suffered in the explosion. Jack watched for the Viktors to enter as well, but they didn’t appear. It was just the Samuel. Jack remained still, but inside he was alert and calculating.

The doctor continued to eye Jack as he readied a needle.

“What’s that for?” Jack asked.

The man’s fingers fumbled with the syringe. The skin around his nails was torn and raw.

“I’m taking a blood sample.”

“The hell you are.”

The Samuel didn’t pause in his task. “Take a seat.” He indicated a chair next to the bed. When Jack didn’t move, he said, “If you’d rather, I can bring the Viktors in. They’d be happy to hold you down.”

Jack glared at the man, but moved from the floor to the chair and held out his arm. He needed to find Althea, and this was the best opportunity he’d gotten to fight his way out. He couldn’t afford to have the Viktors showing up.

The needle punctured his skin, and the Samuel attached a tube to the syringe. Jack watched his blood stream into it.

“Samuel-299 said we needed new DNA to fill in the weaknesses of ours. With the Sample Room gone, yours is all we have now.”

The vial filled. The Samuel plugged the cap and attached another tube.

“Tell me where Althea is,” Jack said.

The man frowned uncertainly.

“Althea-310,” Jack clarified.

“Ah. I don’t know. Gone, I think.”

Jack grasped the Samuel’s lab coat, and the needle twisted sickeningly in his arm as he wrenched the man toward him.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Calm down, Jack,” the man said. “You’ll have an attack.”

Jack dropped his hold on the coat. He slumped back in the chair, feeling as if he’d been punched in the gut. It wasn’t only that the man’s voice was familiar, or even the words, which Jack must have heard a thousand times before. There was something in the man’s expression, too. Jack shook his head. It didn’t mean anything. He was just missing Sam.

“I suggest you hold still now.” Samuel-297 detached the second full vial and connected a third.

Jack could barely shape the words. “Was there a Binding Ceremony? For Althea-310?”

“There have been a lot of Binding Ceremonies in the past couple days.”

“If anyone hurt her—”

“We’re almost done here,” Samuel said brusquely. “You’ll know more soon enough.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

The man glanced up, considering Jack. “You must know the Council can’t let you leave.”

“So what, they’ll lock me in a cage? Like Jonah in Copan?”

“Probably.”

“It’s not what Sam wanted.”

Samuel-297 capped the last tube and meticulously collected all three from the metal tray. “Samuel-299 wanted to die, and in the process, he released chaos on us. That’s what this is, you realize. Chaos. The Council is split; brothers and sisters are divided. There’ve been more fractures in the past two days than in the past ten years. We’re falling apart.”

“I won’t let them keep me. They can try, but I’ll escape.”

“I know,” the man said.

He slid the tubes of blood into the pocket of his lab coat. They clinked together, the noise muffled by the fabric of the coat. His gaze rested for a long moment on Jack before he turned his back and wordlessly left, leaving the door behind him unlocked and swinging wide on its hinges.



It took only a second for Jack to get over his shock at the Samuel letting him go. He cautiously entered the hallway and edged down its length, still prepared to fight his way out, but every clone he saw was a Samuel, and they all turned their backs when they sighted him, suddenly focused on whatever task they had in hand.

He’d barely taken a breath of fresh air outside when a hand slipped into his and pulled him into a cluster of bushes. Thinking it was Althea, a tight coil inside him released.

“You—”

A finger pressed to his lips, and a Gen-310 Nyla’s deep brown eyes held his.

“Hush,” she said.

“Nyla,” Jack whispered, “where’s Althea? Is she okay?”

“We have to hurry,” she said, exasperated. “Keep up.”

Nyla peered through the branches. There was no one on the lawn in front of the clinic, and Remembrance Hall was dark. The sun was all the way down, but the last rays lingered over the spire of the building and the stained glass glowed in the fading light. Nyla’s fingers were still twined with his, and crouching low, they ran across the stretch of grass. Remembrance Hall was to their right, but they went straight on until they were covered in the broad branches of the banana grove. They paused behind an enclosure of trees a few yards off the path.

“If we stay away from open spaces we should be okay. The Viktors don’t know we left yet, but there are still patrols out searching for Jonah.”

“Nyla, please,” Jack said, pulling his hand from hers. “I’m not leaving without Althea.”