Falls the Shadow (30 page)

But just like before, Violet's fit of rage is over as quickly as it came. She slinks away from me and starts to ramble again, words that I can understand this time but that don't make any sense.

“Dust to death, today or to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow,” she chants to herself as she sinks down into the corner, “to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.”

“Knock it off,” I say, crossing the room and cautiously lowering myself down beside her.

She stops chanting. I brace myself for another outburst, but it doesn't come. Instead, she just glances silently around the room, eyes searching for rest but not finding it. We're close, so close, but somehow it feels like there's an infinite amount of space between us.

“Come on Violet,” I say softly. “Please snap out of it. Look at me. Talk to me.”

She doesn't do either of those things for a long time. I'm not sure she can anymore. Her rantings are becoming more and more incoherent.

I don't know what to do. I'm too angry, too tired, to
think. I have to get out of here, I know—we both do. And Violet could probably help me with that, but not as long as she's like this. I feel weak, so unbearably weak, with nothing to do but lean my head next to her on the wall and try to find the words to bring her back to me.

Eventually, I give up on words and just start to hum, first whatever random song comes to mind, and then finally what I remember of a song my grandmother taught me. Violet closes her eyes and falls completely silent then, focusing on the tune.

“It has words, Birdy,” she interrupts after a few minutes. And I don't even care that she's using that stupid nickname again. She can call me whatever she likes, as long as she keeps talking to me. As long as she keeps making sense. “I remember words,” she goes on, and it's startling how normal her voice suddenly sounds. “And I remember you singing as we fell asleep.”

My stomach clenches at the memory. Because I can see it in painfully vivid detail: the first night after we found out the old Violet was sick, I'd heard her crying, slipped into her room, and curled up in the bed beside her. I hadn't known what to say then any more than I do now, and so I'd just sung her to sleep with that song Grandma sang whenever we had a cold or a stomach bug or something. Like that song was what healed us of those things and if I hit all the notes right, then maybe I could have healed Violet of whatever was killing her, too.

Obviously, it didn't work.

“I don't want to sing the words,” I say.

She gives me a sideways glance but doesn't say anything to that. Her gaze seems more focused now. Her body, less tense.

I hold in my questions until I'm sure she's snapped completely out of her trance. When she starts to get up and wander away from me, though, I can't take it anymore. “What are they doing to you?” I ask. “Why would they try to take your memories? How can they get away with something like that?”

“Get away with it?” She laughs. “Easy. Huxley created me. They created my brain. And eventually, all things must return to their creators, yes? All these lingering feelings, these memories of you and me—in the end they're only in the way of their plans. So they want them gone. Erased. How else would they manage to build their army of complacent little slaves? I've been more resistant than most, but . . .”

I push off the wall and stagger forward. I don't want to stay another second in this room, surrounded by the evidence of all the terrible things Huxley is doing. And I'm not going to let them do those things to us.

My gaze finds the observation window on the far wall again. I know there's a room behind it; I don't know if we'll be able to get out of it any better than we can this one, but it's worth a try.

“We're getting out of here,” I say, nodding to the window. “And we're going through there.”

I rip the computer monitor from its place on the wall, hand it to Violet, and stand back as she hurls it at the
glass. I half expected her to hit people on the other side of it in the process, but the room behind it turns out to be empty. There are signs of recent activity, though—a half-full coffee mug, a laptop that's still almost fully charged, with various programs open on the screen. It looks like whoever
was
here left in a hurry; the door is still slightly ajar, there's a chair toppled over on its side, and a stack of files that looks like it might have been knocked over in the midst of a scramble. And, fortunately for us, there's also a lab coat still draped over the counter—and it has a set of ID key cards clipped to its front pocket. I pick it up and shake off the bits and pieces of broken glass.

The thought of putting on a Huxley uniform disgusts me a little. But I figure it will help us draw less attention to ourselves, so I brush the last bits of glass dust off and slip it on.

The hallway is mostly empty, aside from a few people shuffling in and out of the doors lining it. Most of them are focused on computers in their hands, or on the conversations they're having with each other. Me and Violet walk side by side, my hand on her arm like I'm an employee of Huxley leading her purposely forward.

A few people nod in our direction as we move through the hall, but most of their gazes don't linger. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like there's a nervous energy in the air, like people are moving more quickly than normal, like their whispers are too urgent, their thoughts too far off to focus on us. I should be grateful for that last part, I guess. But it just makes me uneasy.

“Something is happening,” Violet says, giving voice to my own thoughts. “Something has them in a panic. It must be happening somewhere else in the lab, though; this wing is normally much more crowded. At least, it was earlier.”

“Those sirens that have been going on and off,” I think aloud, “I wonder if they have anything to do with whatever's going on? With whatever made the person in that room abandon their observation in such a hurry?”

Less than ten steps later, we hear shouting. It's far off, little more than a vague echo by the time it reaches our hallway—but soon other voices join in, and then I hear what has to be gunfire. I slow almost to a stop. Violet keeps marching forward, and I have to hurry after her, afraid of pausing too long, of doing anything that might make us look suspicious. The hall seems to be getting emptier and emptier, though; so when I catch up with her I'm feeling confident enough to whisper, “Do you think the CCA is here?”

“Only one way to know for sure,” Violet says. She turns down the next corridor and heads toward the noise, her step getting quicker with every shout. I cast a hasty glance around, making sure no one's watching us, then jerk her to a stop.

“What, by running straight toward the people with guns? I feel like we can come up with a better plan than that.”

“Don't you want to help your CCA friends?”

I frown. “ ‘Friends' might be pushing it.” More than
pushing it, actually. If it wasn't for Jaxon and Seth, I'd find my way to the nearest exit and maybe just let the CCA and Huxley finish each other off.

But if there's a chance that Jaxon is still alive, then I know I'm going to need help finding him. And who better to ask for help than his mother? If she's here, I have to find her. I have to tell her what happened.

“Okay, fine,” I say, moving past Violet and continuing down the hall. “If those are CCA people out there, then hopefully the president is with them. She'll be able to tell us what's going on.”

I'm running by the time we reach the end of the hall. The lab coat flutters around me; it's too long, and it twists around my legs and almost trips me several times until I just shrug out of it midstride and carry it instead. Keeping up this disguise suddenly seems less important than being able to move as fast as possible. I don't know how many people it's actually fooling, anyway.

A door no more than twenty feet ahead flings open, and several men in Huxley uniforms step out. I grab Violet's arm and pull her against the door closest to us, pressing as far as possible into the recess around it, praying the men walk the other way.

They don't.

I fumble with the lab coat draped over my arm, desperately searching for the set of key cards. There are four of them altogether, and I swipe them all. Of course it's the fourth and final one that finally makes the door open. Violet and I stumble into the dimly lit room behind it.

It smells like almost every other one we've passed through—a combination of disinfectant and formaldehyde that's borderline nauseating—but other than that I don't pay much attention to my surroundings. I just keep moving, as far away from the door as I can, around desks and shelves and anything else in my path. The room stretches on and on, and the farther we get, the colder it becomes; the frigid air burns down my throat and grabs at my hands and feet until they're numb and every step starts to hurt.

We reach the foot of a massive staircase, and suddenly I can't run anymore. I collapse on the bottom step, head spinning, body shaking from cold and exhaustion. Violet reaches my side a second later. Her breathing is normal, relaxed. She wanders around me like someone who's lost and is trying too hard to convince anyone who sees her that she knows exactly where she is.

“Maybe we should find someplace to hide for a few minutes,” she says. “Just until we're sure no one's followed us in here.”

I don't like the idea of sitting around with only Violet and my thoughts for company, but it's better than being found and ending up locked in another room. I tilt my head back so I can see what's upstairs, hoping it might lead to another way out, or at least to a good hiding place.

I stare for a long time, trying to make sense of what I'm seeing.

The staircase spirals up, up, up—so high that I can't see the ceiling. And about ten feet above us, the glass boxes start. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of them, wrapped
around the steps, each one emitting a soft blue glow from the rectangular computer displays across their tops. Most of the boxes are empty.

Some of them still have bodies in them.

Some are relaxed and still; others are moving in place. Walking, running, reaching blindly for whatever their origin is reaching for right now.

I rise slowly to my feet, mouth still hanging open and refusing to close. One by one, I climb the steps to the closest holding box with a body in it. It's floating, suspended in a thick, sea green liquid. Its eyes are closed, its skin a pale, ghastly white. There are tubes inserted in its throat and nose. Pumping oxygen, I assume, judging by the way its chest rises and falls with disturbingly normal-looking breaths. Its arms are stretched out in front of it, hands wide and opening toward me. It looks like it's sleeping. I press my own hand to the warm glass, splay my fingers across it and swallow hard to try to combat the sudden dryness in my throat.

I knew this was here—knew that they had to grow the clones somewhere, somehow; and I knew that they moved like this, thanks to the neural chip that links them with their origin's movements. But seeing it is different. All of this is a footnote in Huxley's propaganda videos. They never show it or dwell on the details, and now it's obvious why they wouldn't. Because this body floating in front of me looks completely human. All too human. And there is something beyond unsettling about the way it's confined in this little box. Something that makes me want to break the glass and set it free.

Would it live if I broke the glass?

Would death be so much worse than whatever Huxley has planned for it?

This is what Violet meant earlier. To be created, life emerging out of a glass box—given her very breath by Huxley. But seeing it in front of me is so much worse. How could our parents have agreed to something so sick?

How could
anybody
agree to this?

I turn to where I left Violet at the foot of the stairs and see her backing away, her eyes focused on me and me alone. She's not looking at the body next to me. She's not looking at any of the dozens of empty boxes—one of which might have been hers only a few years ago. How could she stand to look at that? How could anyone in her place?

My eyes drift back to the clone in front of me, and then to the computer display above his container: 0627. A number. No name.

My number is here too, I realize suddenly.

Without thinking I'm running up the stairs, the cold and exhaustion in my muscles forgotten. The ID numbers rush by, into the seven hundreds, the eight hundreds, the nine hundreds—the closer I get to one thousand, the more often the boxes have bodies in them, and the slower I get. Because what will I do, when I'm face to face with clone number 1001? What am I supposed to do? She's only my copy, right? A potentially dangerous copy that I don't want anywhere near my family, or anyone else I care about—but is she alive like 0627? Is she breathing, like he is?
Can she see me, hear me? If I could reach in and take her hand, what would she do? If she replaces me, will she be like Violet, fighting the control Huxley has over her?

Fighting to be human?

The higher nine hundreds start at the top of the stairs, and from there the boxes branch off into a long hallway. I find number 1001 tucked in the corner of that hallway, right where it curves and splits into two separate paths. My eyes almost jump right over it, because the display above is flickering, and so faint it's barely readable.

And because the box itself is empty.

By the time we make
it back to the hallway outside the cloneroom, I still haven't found the words to tell Violet what I saw.

Or what I didn't see, I guess.

I stared at that display for longer than I should have. I wasted too much time there, reading the number on it. Checking the boxes on either side of my clone's, searching for a break in the pattern, desperate to convince myself that I had the wrong place, that I was reading the wrong display.