Evanescent (34 page)

“Where is the clone?” I whined.

“Here, and stop calling me
the clone
.”

I saw the murderous look directed at her in Troy’s glare.

I touched his arm. “Troy. She will help us find Ava,” I said, wishing it wasn’t the only reason stopping me from killing her.

“A clone always has an immediate connection to their prime, she can see, remember and experience everything the prime does,” Robert said. “Basic genealogy science of synthetics.”

“If Ava is medicated, I can’t find her as easily as the clone can,” I offered.

“Again, I am standing right here,” she said, arms crossed over her chest.

Troy
stalked closer. “You will undo what you have done, or so help me…”

“Fine, I’ll help you, because I can see you’ll never give up on her, and I will never be my own if we don’t.”

“You better believe it.” Robert smirked.

The seven of us stood in thick, dusty, golden sand, huge pieces of rock and debris extruding like tombstones from ash. Battered, bruised and bloody, we watched as the ship disappeared over the huge dunes, our world turning to powder, everything ready to fly away in an escaping breath.

“You should have left her there with her kind. She almost killed us!”

“She brought the entire place down, there’s nothing left to save, it will take us months before we’ll salvage anything useable from that wreck,” Robert echoed the same anger and resentment.

The clone and I sat slumped against the wall, face to face, rolling our eyes at each other. Their debates and rants had carried on for quite a while. Nobody had actually noticed us sitting in the corner of the tent sharing an orange, exhausted and complacent in our company with each other. It was no use taking it out on her, it would get us nowhere. She too deserved love, compassion and a second chance. Heaven knows we all had our faults.

“I am sorry,” she said.

I took a slice of orange and offered it to her. “We all have something to be sorry about.”

“I can’t hold it back sometimes,” she said, as she stuffed the slice into her mouth.

“You will learn to. Look at you now, totally calm and, well, you appear to be yourself.” I stuffed a wedge into the pocket of my cheek, sucked on the juice and felt it burn into my raw throat. Still, I savored each delicious tendril and tang. The storm had destroyed most of the orchids in the Zulu village, and I knew that soon our rations would grow even smaller.

“Maya?” She sounded so much like my sister it was difficult not to feel pain each time she spoke. I caught the broken glare in her eyes.

“I meant about your mother. I am sorry we couldn’t bring her body back.”

I rolled my shoulders.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I looked the other way, leaning my head against the coolness of the tent wall. The rain outside was constant and had brought the temperature down a few degrees, very welcoming in the extreme heat we had experienced recently. My eyes found Anaya’s when she looked up from scanning the broken diaries our biological mother wrote. Diaries my sister had in her possession and failed to ever let me look inside. Honestly? I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I swallowed hard, wondering if Ava would ever be purged of things that were unhealthy for her mind. So far, I had been very fortunate to have been immune to the Shadowing disease which ran beneath my skin, and we had to learn everything about how it came about, how it was triggered. How it had killed our biological mother. Anaya closed the leather bound books, and placed them on the metal fold-up bed. Bright light flickered with each hard strike of lightning outside, illuminating the foiling in everyone’s eyes.

Anaya knelt down before me, taking my hand. “It will be okay.”

I nodded, not feeling any conviction in her tone.

“Kronan will be here soon, and then we can take her to Legentium.” Her eyes moved from me to Ava’s clone, who silently sat studying the boys still bickering across the room.

My eyes met Rion’s as he smiled gently from across the room, and shyly I looked down sheepishly. I had always had a crush on him, even offered to work as a volunteer at his family’s animal shelter as a young girl. He never took notice of me until the day I had helped my brother save Ava from the Zulu’s on that bridge. I guess he saw something in me that day.

“How will we find them?” I sat back, staring straight into the light hanging overhead, our faces playing to the light and dark as it rocked from side to side.

Our fears were met when we’d discovered some survivors on that moon had been taken in the same craft as Ava. Greg, Willard, Shane; friends – all lost. And in our parts where friends were few, they were more like family. Bongi sat silently in one corner, afraid to see his queen and admit he had failed her. Thandiwe’s condition had severely worsened by then, and she refused any medication in fear that it would harm her unborn child.

“Greg will find a way to contact us,” Robert said, while staring at the floor.

I snickered. It appeared Robert was indeed talking to himself.

“You’re walking straight back into enemy hands!” David and Troy were having a total different conversation to Rob. “They are brutes, we have no way of stopping them. If you couldn’t stop Ava from turning to the dark side…”

“Don’t you talk about her like that,” Troy scolded.

Silence fell, blanketing darkness of dread and fear over everything in our large tent. Tatos’ soft snoring on the bed beside us was comforting. I closed my eyes, wishing exhaustion would claim me, too. Perhaps I could connect with my sister in another realm. I had before, but wasn’t sure I could now that she had turned.

“How can he sleep at a time like this?” the clone asked, following my gaze.

“He has to, Minoans are not like us. I am sure you should know that if you own all of Ava’s memories,” I said to her. Yeah it was a bitter taste to savor. My sister had been cloned, and the clone – instead of my sister – sat next to me, her hand resting on my left knee.

“I don’t have all her memories,” she admitted.

The storm outside started drawing back, thundering, rumbling in the far distance, the rain was now a soft patter, even the wind seemed to have quietened down. For a while, we all sat immersed in our own thoughts.

“Well, at least the outcome was in our favor. I’d say it’s a battle won,” Robert piped up suddenly. “The Shadow army was destroyed.”

Troy
stalked across the room toward him. “War never has a winner and in all we have lost, you think it matters that Enoch is dead? That we have disabled his army? At what cost do you win, Robert? What exactly have we won, Robert?”

We all turned, staring at Troy. It was unlike him to lose his temper so quickly.

“I was just saying…”

“What Robert? What were you saying? I don’t get it?”

“Just chill, Troy, I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s the problem isn’t it, no one thinks, everyone does, and look how far that’s gotten us!”

“Would you please keep it down, some of us need our beauty rest,” Tatos groaned, his eyes still shut, arms folded over his bulking chest.

Anaya stood and walked over to Troy. “I think you and I need to go for a walk.”

“Gladly!” Troy crossed his arms over his chest, turning toward her. “But I am going alone.”

“I think you need to take her with you,” Rion said, pointing to Ava’s clone.

Troy
snapped a dark stare at him.

“I will not be stuck to that thing!” But his shoulders sagged with regret the moment the words left him.

We all looked to Ava’s clone. A painful look of shock and anger turned her face scarlet. She caught my eye and looked the other way, taking her hair and throwing it over her shoulder to cover her face.

“That was uncalled for,” I said.

Troy
’s arms flung up. “This entire situation is so uncalled for!” He stalked out of the tent. A gust of wind blew in as he opened the tent’s flap, and then closed it behind him again.

The entire room stared at Robert, then at Anaya.

“He is hurt.”

“So is his ego,” I said, looking to Rion.

“He thinks he failed her,” Rion reasoned, staring at me.

Rion had felt that way when Enoch had taken Mom and me. Blamed himself for not being able to protect us.

“Things happen for a reason right?” David asked, taking a seat on one of the bunk beds, the bunk protesting under his weight. “Are we sure Enoch will stay dead this time?”

“No.” Anaya sat next to him, pulling the journals into her lap. Her slim fingers trailed the patterns on the binding.

“What I can make of this is that if you carry the Shadowing disease, its purpose is immortality – this way, the disease never dies out.”

Tatos groaned next to me, slowly sitting up and undoing his dreads.

Ava’s clone slowly stood. “I’ll help anyway I can.”

“A little late for that, don’t you think?” David stated.

Anaya shot David a look, then looked back to the clone. “I know you will.”

The clone nodded.

“Great! Now we are depending on the one thing that could kill us at any moment.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone – yet,” she retaliated in Robert’s direction, then giggled to herself. “I am joking!” she said, upon finding her joke had fallen flat on us.

“Not funny,” Robert said on a glare, stalking to the back of the tent and entering the weapons room.

“What’s different now, and why are you being so nice? How do we know you won’t turn on us the next chance you get?” David stood, walking toward her. “Just like up there when you could have stopped Enoch, stopped the droids. And when you should have found Ava,
not
tried to kill her.”

“I can control it now, Enoch’s connection to me.”

David rolled his eyes, not convinced. “It’s not about being connected, you were programmed to be his spy, his assassin, to be used – you are his will.”

She looked down, fiddling with the front of her shirt. “Do I have any choice of my own?”

“Yes, of course you do,” I said, standing and then walking over to her, laying a comforting hand on her arm. She looked up and met my gaze, tears brimming in her eyes.

“Does it say anything in those books about how long it takes for such a Shadowing to come back?” I asked Anaya.

Anaya’s long fingers gracefully flicked to one of the pages, unfolding the page she had marked earlier. “If I am interpreting it correctly, we have two days.” Her green-blue eyes meeting mine optimistically.

I walked over to her and taking the book from her lap, I read the text.

“It was harder to come back this time, but I did it, and from the pile of tablets lying on my silver tray, I’d say I was dead for almost two solid days. I guessed that, eventually, I would not come back. It hurt more this time, my mind took a while to reboot, and some parts of my memories are blank. I can’t believe they would do this to me; killing me like it was nothing, how did they know what I was? How did they know I would come back, or did they even care? I think, no, I know they are watching, monitoring, trying to find ways to harness the powers that come with the disease, but I don’t know how much longer I can stay with myself, come back to my former. It’s dark sometimes and it’s breaking me, but I have to come back, I have to record this. You have to know what not to do, you have to. I have no way of hiding them from you, soon they will see the bump. I don’t want this life for you. I need to get out. I need to find a way to control the blood-shift, it needs to get us out of here. Father is dead, they killed him right before my very eyes. He wanted to tell me something, something that was worth dying over. I have to rely on the one thing I hate being, the only thing that can save you now is my disease.”

I flipped to the next page – blank, and the next page – blank.

“That’s it?” Quickly, I flipped through the rest of the book, all the pages after that were also blank.

“Let me see that.” Robert tried to pull the book from my hands. I hesitated.

“I won’t steal it. I think…” He took the book from me, held it to the light, folding the book so the pages were exposed to it. He smiled. “There are indentations, see?” He gestured, calling us closer.

“It’s impossible to read.”

“Perhaps it’s been enchanted?” Rion came closer, his arm holding me around my waist. His warmth sent swells of hotness over my skin when I leaned my back into his chest.

“There is something else we could do. If there was once an ink of some kind, we could use a chemical reaction to bring it out again.”

“Good idea,” said David. “Now, while you all stand around figuring that out, I need food.”

“Food?” Robert repeated. “Now there is something we all could use right now.”

Tatos groaned from the bunk. “I’ll go with you. There is no way I can sleep through all of your chitter-chatter.” He swung his legs off the bed, sat up with a big yawn, and then his face went blank. “Where is she?”

We all looked around, trying to figure out what he was talking about.

“Crap!” I rubbed the space between my eyes. “We need to find her.”

“How did we not see her leave?” Tatos shot us all a horrid, solid glare.

Everyone turned to the tent’s entrance, the fold flapped in the wind.

“Why would she even leave without saying a word?”

“Who?” asked Robert.