Falls the Shadow (31 page)

I had to have been in the wrong place. I'm still alive. I'm still here. They can't replace me if I'm still here.

Maybe there's another explanation for why she's gone, though. Because who knows what really goes on in this place. They could have taken my clone anywhere, they could be doing anything with her. Maybe something went wrong with her. Maybe they thought she was a mistake too, just like Violet—but an even bigger mistake. One they've decided to just get rid of before she becomes a problem.

Maybe.

“Things seem to have calmed down,” Violet says as we
step cautiously into the corridor. My thoughts are still in the room we left behind, and it takes me a couple tries to redirect them to the here, the now—and to realize that she's right: It's a lot quieter than before. It isn't a peaceful quiet, though. It's a quiet thick with unease and heavy with questions I'm afraid to ask.

“Does that mean somebody lost?” I wonder out loud. And was it the CCA? Were they really here? How many more are dead now? Is that the only reason they're silent?

“I think
we
may be about to lose,” Violet says, in that airy, distant tone she uses when she's about to start musing about something. “Because we have company.”

I turn back to her. She stopped several yards back, and now she's staring at the half-dozen people walking straight toward us. A tall woman with long, blond hair and eyes the color of gray-tinted glass is leading them. Her gaze is locked on me. I don't know her name, but I know I've seen her in the CCA crowd before. The CCA torch hangs around her neck—a shiny silver pendant flickering in the fluorescent lights. But that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean she's not working for Huxley. Voss had the same necklace. The ironic thing is, that symbol is supposed to stand for truth, for enlightenment—but truth is always a casualty of war, isn't it?

She leaves several feet between us when she and the rest of her group stop. “You're the origin that ran off with the president's son, aren't you?” she asks after a moment.

“He ran off with me, technically,” I say. And the thought of that, the memory of that night in the warehouse—of
the way he refused to let me leave without him—it makes my knees tremble. Something tells me he would have followed me anywhere that night.

Suddenly my mouth is a desert again, and I have to swallow several times before I can finish answering her. “But . . . yeah. I am. That doesn't matter right now, though. Where is the president? Is she here?”

She doesn't answer me at first; she's too busy studying Violet. “And you must be her sister's clone. The one who killed Voss's daughter.”

For once, Violet is completely silent.

The woman goes back to watching me, and I see the familiar scorn in her eyes, that contempt for me and Violet that marks her as a member of the CCA more than that little torch around her neck ever could. It's different this time, though. There's a weariness about it, an uncertainty, almost; like maybe she's not sure she wants to waste her energy on hating me when there are so many other places that hatred could go. I'd like to think that's the case, anyway. That she could move past that stupid prejudice and we could both focus on stopping Huxley before their plans escalate any further. A common enemy, almost. I've always heard that nothing brings people together like that.

But then she draws the gun from her hip and fires.

The shot misses me by no more than an inch; I instinctively cover my head, brace myself for its inevitable follow-up. But then I hear a groan, a
thump
from somewhere behind me. I turn to see a man in a Huxley lab coat collapsing to the ground.

“Nice shot,” says one of the CCA men.

“That makes lucky number seven for me,” says the woman. “I'm not sure where all of them keep coming from. I thought they had all run away by this point.”

The confusion must be evident on Violet's face and mine, because she smugly explains, “We managed to take them by surprise. Reinforcements from other CCA chapters—they had no clue what sort of numbers they were dealing with, or that we fully anticipated their attack against us. They thought they would manage to stamp us out so easily, but they made the mistake of sending far too many of their clones to our headquarters and leaving this place vulnerable in the process.”

I open my mouth to speak, but she continues in a rush, “And to answer your question, origin, I'm afraid the president is in a very important meeting at the moment. I'll have to take a message.”

“We don't have time for that,” I say. “Her son . . . he . . .” It turns out to be even harder to say these things out loud than I thought it would be. “Something is wrong,” I finally manage to whisper. “Something she should know about.”

She smiles placidly, focusing on setting her gun to recharge. “What could an origin possibly have to say that would merit the president's attention?”

I clench the fist that isn't splinted and immobile, digging my nails into the palm of my hand so I can focus on the pain it causes instead of how angry I'm getting. “If she knew about her son, if she knew what had happened at your headquarters—”

“At headquarters?” The woman's
gaze shifts abruptly back to me. “You've been there recently?”

She finally seems at least mildly interested in what I have to say, so I give her the quickest recap possible of everything that happened.

When I finish, she turns to the man on her right and says, “You were with the ones who took care of Voss's group, weren't you?”

My heart skips a beat when the man nods. “We took care of most of them, intercepted the ones who had the president's son when they were on their way back here. Both Jaxon and the other one—Seth, isn't it? They're both around here somewhere. Or they were earlier. Against the president's wishes, I believe, but . . .”

It's like mental whiplash, what those words do to my brain. Jaxon is alive. Jaxon is here. Or he was here, at least. He could still be here. He could be looking for me. That's probably why he was here in the first place, right?

At first I'm too dazed to speak, or to try to stop the CCA people when they make their way around us and continue down the hall. But soon my feet are moving automatically after them. I catch up to the blond woman, ignore the irritated glance she gives me, and cut directly into her path.

“Where is he now?” I demand. “Where are the rest of the CCA? Is that where you're going? Back to them?”

“You are annoyingly persistent, aren't you?”

“I just need to find Jaxon. I just need to see for myself that he's okay. Please. Let's just pretend we're all on the same side here for a second, and you just tell me where
you saw him last, or just point me in the right direction, or something,
anything
 . . .”

She raises both of her pencil-stroke eyebrows. “Fine. You can come with us if you can keep up.” Without another word she starts to turn around, and me and Violet both move to follow—but the woman stops Violet with a single finger against her chest. Her nails are painted the same violent red shade as her lips. “I should have been more specific,” she says with that calm smile from before. “When I said
you
, I meant her.” She nods in my direction. “If I had any sense, clone, I'd kill you right now. It's going to come to that eventually anyway. But for now I'm willing to let you walk away—so long as you aren't going the same way as me.”

“I'm not leaving her,” I say.

“Then you are not coming with us,” the woman says simply. And then she turns and continues walking away, the rest of her group falling silently in line beside her.

“Wait!”

“It's not really keeping up if I have to wait for you, is it?” she calls without looking back.

“Just go with them,” Violet says under her breath. “Don't worry about me.”

“Shut up,” I say through clenched teeth. “I've spent my entire life worrying about you. You really think I can just stop now?”

“They'll take you to Jaxon. I know you want to see that he's all right, and he's probably worried about you, too.” Her voice is quiet, and more detached than ever. I can tell
by the look in her eyes that her mind is someplace far away; I'm a little afraid to think about where it's gone, exactly.

“What about you?” I ask, my gaze jumping back and forth, from Violet's empty eyes to the CCA group. They've almost made it to the end of the hall. Almost out of sight. My heart aches at the thought of staying behind, literal pain shooting through it every time the group takes a step. I should be going with them. It isn't a want. It's a need. I need to see Jaxon, because I don't trust their words; I won't believe he's okay until I see it for myself.

“There's something I need to do, anyway,” she says. “And I'd rather not have to worry about you while I'm doing it.”

“What are you talking about?”

She smiles slyly and in typical annoying big-sister fashion informs me that it's none of my business. “Look,” she adds with a sigh, “I'll catch up with you when this is over with. I always do, don't I?”

She says it like this will all be over with tomorrow. Like somehow we'll wake up in the morning and everything will be different, and none of the things we've done or seen will still be there, weighing us down. Like we'll be normal and everyone will accept us and me and her and Mother and Father will all be one big, happy family. Complete again.

I wonder if we'll ever be complete again.

“Now get out of here before I make you,” Violet says.

I still don't budge. “You take too long, I'm coming back for you. Whether you like it or not.”

“I know you will,” she says, and then she meets my eyes—truly meets them—for
what might be the very first time in her life.

She reaches for the key cards I'd clipped to the bottom of my shirt. Her focus grows hazy again. “I'll be needing these,” she says. She looks over her shoulder, finds the door to the clone-holding room. Every second her eyes stay locked on it makes the uneasy feeling in my stomach creep a little farther up the back of my neck.

I know I can't make her come with me now any more than I could back at the graveyard, though. I've spent the past four years wishing I could control her, and letting her control my life because of that. But maybe sometimes you have to let go of people, and of all the things they do, and just hope that they'll find their way back to you if they're supposed to.

*  *  *

I catch up with the CCA group a few hallways down. At first they don't acknowledge me, but soon I guess they get tired of listening to all of my questions, and so they start answering. And they tell me why they're here: not simply to get even with Huxley for plotting against them, but also to initiate their own plot to stop the clones at their source. They tell me how successful they've been in destroying computer after computer full of vital information, in ruining the equipment responsible for transferring thoughts, images, orders—all of the things Huxley has been using to give life to their clones and their plans.

I can't help but wonder, though, what else they've destroyed in the process.

As we make our way through the halls, I see entire rooms that have been reduced to pieces of broken things: cracked computer screens, twisted, melted file cabinets, and shattered lights. The scene is almost a perfect reflection of the obliteration back at the CCA headquarters. So much destruction on both sides that it's hard to say which side won this round. Neither of them, from where I'm standing.

By the time we reach the north wing, where most of the fighting took place, I can't look anywhere without seeing signs of ruin and devastation. I was so angry with Huxley before, and so a part of me feels like I should be glad for this. But all I feel is that thick and pressing numbness of uncertainty, of a chaos so overwhelming that I don't know what to make of it.

We're almost to the entrance, to those same glass doors that I walked through four years ago, when another alarm starts to echo through the intercom system. It's different from the one before. It's higher pitched, and joined soon by a recorded voice repeating warning after warning in a stiffly urgent tone:

Security threat, holding room B13.

Contamination threat, holding room B13.

Bio threat, holding room B13.

All available personnel report.

B13. That was the number above the clone room. That's where Violet is.

Of course it is.

One by one, our group slows to a stop and looks back.
I think about saying something. About telling them what I saw in holding room B13. But for some reason I don't want to. What will happen if they all go rushing back there? Will they lose their patience with my sister this time? Will they kill her? What about the rest of the clones in there? Surely they'll kill them. While their eyes are still closed, their brains still without conscious thought.

Maybe that would be for the best, in the grand scheme of things. Because if the clones in that room wake up, how many people are they going to hurt? How many will they kill? If we can stop the possibility of Huxley turning them into monsters, shouldn't we?

If only it was that simple.

If only I could not think about how many in that room would be like my sister's clone. Maybe they wouldn't be monsters at all, despite what I know the CCA members think. Maybe they would fight for control. And even if they didn't win, how could I take away their chance? I should just keep quiet. Pretend I don't know anything about room B13 and just keep walking away.

We've started moving again, still heading for the main entrance, when another group of CCA people meet us. I don't want to talk to them. I don't want to look at any of them or have to answer any of their questions. But then I hear a familiar voice.