Falls the Shadow (24 page)

Back to the lab?
So these are people from Huxley, treating a clone like this? And
dealt with
? What does she mean by that? What are they planning to do to her?

“But don't worry,” the woman continues, “we're going to find your sister, too, and bring her along so you won't be lonely. President Huxley is very,
very
interested in the relationship between the two of you.”

“There is nothing interesting about us,” Violet says, her voice sharp and afraid. I assume it's from the fear of herself being dragged back to Huxley, or at least of the gun that's pressed to her forehead now. Until, in a calmer voice, she says, “And you won't
find my sister, anyways. She was supposed to meet me here several hours ago, but she never showed up. My guess is that she's on her way back to Haven—probably already there. You'll have to face the CCA if you want her now.”

She's lying.

For me.

The fear in me tangles with confusion, into a ball that sinks deep into the pit of my stomach. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel; for the second time today, she's defying Huxley to protect me. It would make sense, maybe, if the cuts she gave me herself weren't still burning in the tiny bit of breeze slipping through the trees.

“Lying to your superiors,” says the man's voice from before. “Do you honestly think that's going to help your case, clone?”

“You are not my superior.” Violet laughs.

I hear a vicious slap, the sound like a whip cracking. I swear I feel it across my own skin. The pain is white hot, stinging through the half-healed cut on my cheek. And for the millionth time since this Violet came to live with me, I find myself silently willing her to just shut up. To just
stop
provoking everyone within a ten-foot radius of her.

At least long enough for me to take aim.

I crouch down until I'm level with a low-lying branch, then press my gun into the crook between it and the trunk to steady it. The first shot will have to be perfect, and the next two will have to be perfect
and
impossibly quick. I'm hoping this gun recharges fast and that by some other
combination of miracles I'll be able to stop all three of them before they even know where I'm coming from.

Stop them.

I have to stop them.

The words are nearly a battle cry in my thoughts, but I still find myself hesitating. How is this gun going to stop them? Is it going to be permanent? When I stop firing, will I have to avoid the dead stares of these three, the same way I tried to avoid the eyes of the man Violet killed earlier?

I'm not like her.

Am I?

I don't want to think about it. Not right now. I'm running out of time to think, anyway; because just then the communicator clipped to the woman's belt lights up, and after only a few seconds of conversation I can't hear, she angrily tosses it aside and draws some sort of skinny, cylindrical weapon in its place. It looks terrifyingly similar to that illegal gun Seth had in the graveyard the other day. The one that Jaxon said could cut a person's limb cleanly from their body.

She aims it at Violet's chest.

“This is your last chance,” she says. “All you have to do to make this stop is tell us where, exactly, your sister is—and why we haven't been able to get a clear mind upload from her for hours now.”

The terror in Violet's eyes fades, and that crazy, defiant gleam comes back to them. “If I knew where my sister was, you would be the last person I would tell,” she says.

Then she spits at the woman's feet.

All at once there's a flash of light, the smell of burning flesh, and the terrible screech of my sister's pain.

Something inside me snaps.

I fire. The gun kicks back more than I was expecting, but the recharge is even faster than I'd hoped. I take aim again. The woman is on the ground now, and my only thought is to make the other two follow her. The silent, stoic man with the gun seems like the next most important target; my first shot grazes his side. Not enough to stop him, but enough to make him trip and drop the gun. Violet grabs it. She doesn't move as quickly as she normally does, but she still manages to get the gun turned around and aimed at the last man still standing, and when he makes the mistake of turning to shout at me, she fires. His shout dies in his throat. He staggers a few more steps toward me and then falls face-first to the ground, stirring up the leaves and twigs and dust around him.

The man that my second shot hit lets out a groan. Violet lifts her gun to his head.

“Don't!” I shout, lowering my own weapon.

Her arm drops slowly, reluctantly. Even just that little bit of movement makes her eyes tighten with pain. Once she recovers from that, she lifts her uncertain gaze to me.

“He's unarmed now,” I explain. “And I want to talk to him.” I want to know exactly what's going on here, and you can't get answers from a dead man.

“He deserves to be shot,” Violet says smugly. But the strength seems to be fading from her body even as I watch;
the hand holding the gun starts to shake, and then she drops it and collapses back to the earth.

“Violet?”

She doesn't answer me.

That fear from before emerges with a whole new strength, and I rush to her side, crouch down, and lift her into my arms. It's then that I finally get a good look at her.

It's awful.

There's a bruise already forming all along the right side of her face. Blood trickles from the corner of her mouth and from the blistered, burned skin along her chest and up across her neck.

I try to remind myself that it's not as bad as it looks. That she's not human like me. Her body is different. Even as I watch, the edges of one of the deepest burns starts to glow with that strange scanning red light that eventually spreads over the entire wound. I've seen it before, and I know it's the electronic sensors in her body communicating with her supercomputer brain, surveying the damage and initiating the necessary biological reactions. Within seconds, scar tissue begins to build—the artificially engineered cells regenerating themselves at insane speeds.

But her breathing still comes in weak trembles, each one making her eyes roll a little farther back into her head.

“Violet?” I gently pull the strands of her hair away from where they've stuck to her bloody lips. My hand lingers against her cheek, and she tries, halfheartedly, to pull away from my touch.

“You shouldn't be here,” she says quietly.

“You told me to meet you here.”

“After everything I've done, you're still listening to me?” She laughs weakly. “Stupid.”

I shake my head. “Are you honestly calling me names right now?”

“I'm your sister. That's what I'm supposed to do, right?” Her eyes close again, and she's quiet for a long moment before she asks, “But I was never the same, was I?”

“Don't talk like that.” I don't like the note of finality in her voice. Or the way her skin feels cold and clammy against my hand. She's too pale. Too corpselike.

Too much like the first Violet the last time I saw her alive.

“Why do you always have to be so dramatic?” I ask, and I try to laugh too. Like this is all one big joke. It must be a joke, because the universe can't be cruel enough to make me watch my sister die twice. It can't be.

So why is her breathing getting slower and slower? Why is she so still, so silent, even as her body continues to put itself back together right before my eyes? Is there damage inside that I can't see? Damage that even the most advanced technology can't heal fast enough to save her?

“Why did they do this to you?” I whisper. Just for myself to hear, because I'm not really expecting an answer this time.

But her eyes flash open. When she tries to focus them, though, her gaze still ends up distant and hollow. “I guess I just didn't live up to their expectations either, did I?” she says.

“Forget about Huxley and their expectations.” A terrible, numbing rage courses through me. “They're going to pay for this. Me and you are both going to make them pay. So you better keep your eyes open. We have people to get even with.”

Her head shifts just slightly in my hand. She's trying to shake her head no. Eventually, she gives up, and with a feeble cough, she rolls her head away from me and spits a dark red glob of blood onto the ground.

“You should go.” She coughs. “Before . . . before . . .”

“Before what?” I ask, shaking my head. Violet doesn't answer me.

Someone else does.

“Before it's too late for you to get away,” says a voice from somewhere behind me. A voice that's so impossibly familiar, I have to turn around. There's a gun pointed at me, but my eyes linger on it only for a fraction of a second. I'm much more interested in the person who's actually holding the gun.

Because there's no mistaking it. That fierce smile. Her father's blue eyes. That white blond hair that she claims is natural but that I know for a fact she's been bleaching since she was five years old.

That's Samantha Voss staring back at me.

And she's supposed to be dead.

A million different questions and
fears and possibilities race through my head. Luckily, one single thought manages to make itself heard over all the others:
Move
.

I grab the gun from Violet's limp hand and roll out of the way just as Samantha fires a shot that burns a clean, smoky line along the forest floor. It radiates so much heat that I can feel it even as I dive aside. I'd be surprised if it didn't singe the hairs off my arms; I don't stop to check them. I sprint for the closest tree and scramble behind it. I'm not going to run from her and just leave Violet there—but I need a second outside the line of fire so I can get my body and my thoughts to stop shaking. Otherwise there's no way I'm going to win this fight.

“Come on, origin,” Samantha calls. “I'm not going to kill you. They want you brought back alive. And if you cooperate, maybe I won't even hurt you.” I hear the low hum of a weapon charging. “Maybe.”

They
want me brought back alive? Does she mean Huxley? Is she working for them, too? But that doesn't make sense. Because her father . . . her father—

The side of the tree explodes in a blast of dust and
splintered bark. My heart feels like it might explode through my chest, and my face and the back of my neck break out in a cold sweat. I take a deep breath and creep as quickly and quietly as I can to another tree, and then another, keeping to the darkest shadows in hopes that she won't be able to follow my movement. Before long, she's firing at every tree around me, clearly unsure of exactly where I'm hiding.

“You're going to make me work for this, aren't you?” She laughs. I close my eyes and focus on that mad laughter, on the trees that it's bouncing off and the direction the wind carries it from. She's to my left, I decide. And she's searching in a sweeping circle, judging by the way the laughter gets louder, then quieter, then louder again. I lift both of the guns in my hand.

I managed to hit those people earlier, but they were standing still, and I had plenty of time to aim. This is going to be a much harder shot. Not to mention that I actually
know
Samantha—obviously not as well as I thought I did, but still; the thought of shooting her makes my heart pound even faster, until every beat actually starts to hurt.

But then one of her shots hits the tree in front of me, and the reality of the situation becomes even more painfully clear: It's her or me.

It's not going to be me.

I listen for her next shout, and without hesitating I roll around the tree and toward the sound. And there she is, no more than fifteen feet away, her back to me and her body half-blocked by a thick tangle of tree limbs. My
first shot misses her but hits one of the largest of those limbs, cleanly separating it from its trunk with a quick
snap
. Samantha ducks out of the way as it falls, and as she straightens up and turns around, the shot from my second gun hits her square in the chest. She stumbles backward, trips, and falls spread-eagled to the ground.

Once on the ground, she doesn't move.

I can taste the vomit rising in the back of my throat, and I know I have to keep moving. Away from her, away from the other still bodies, away from these woods—away from all these things that will have me curled up on the ground and sobbing if I stop long enough to think about them.

I rush back to the clearing where I left Violet, and a small wave of relief washes over me when I see that she's still conscious. She's trying to climb to her feet, even. I go straight to her side and offer her my shoulder to lean on.

“Where is Samantha?” she asks, eyes wide with a terrifying, feral sort of fear that almost makes me draw away from her.

“I . . . I shot her. She's back there—” I point vaguely toward the trees. “She wasn't moving, and I just wanted to get away from—”

“Are you sure you hit her? Are you sure she wasn't moving? At all? Was she conscious?”

“I—”

“Are you sure?”

“I mean I didn't check, I—”

“Go.” She shoves me away with a ridiculous amount of force, considering her condition.
“Go!”

I start to argue but trail off at the sound of footsteps dragging through the brush. Fear grips me, stopping my heart and freezing the breath in my lungs for a long, terrifying moment.

I hit her dead on,
I try to reason with that fear.
There's no way. . . .

“New plan,” Violet says under her breath. “Don't go. Don't try to run. She'll catch you before you make it a hundred feet.”

“She . . . how can she . . .”