Falls the Shadow (7 page)

I pick up my computer tablet. Or me and Violet's computer tablet, rather—because we share most things like this. I think my mother believes that forcing us to share will equal obligatory closeness. When this Violet first came to live with us, my mother even tried to force me to share my room with her. Just until she felt “at home.” That wasn't happening. It was one of the only times I actually managed to stand up to my parents with any sort of success.

But me and Violet still share the same computer, the same clothes, the same everything else. We even shared the same phone for a while, as impractical as that was. And when things like the computer are taken away from one of us (usually Violet), it's taken away from the other, because when you're family, you don't get to pick and choose what losses you suffer alongside each other. My sister's pain is my pain, and her punishment is my punishment.

So I'm not supposed to be using the computer now. Because three weeks ago, Violet got detention for the third time this year and had her computer privileges revoked. My father even went so far as to install a program to lock the whole thing down, preventing any sort of access to the Network.

That's not fair, though. Which is why I figured out a long time ago how to get around stuff like this. I rebel in little ways—it helps me keep my sanity. And it's made me really good with computers, at least.

Now if I could just focus on what I need to find.

The thought of talking to Jaxon again doesn't make
that especially easy, though. I run my nervous fingers over the virtual keyboard, swipe through the images on the monitor until I come to one of him. Smiling. Of course. Is he ever
not
smiling?

I hesitate. What if he thinks I'm needy or clingy or just plain annoying for doing this? We haven't even gone on a date, and I'm already asking for favors. Maybe there's someone else I could call? Or maybe I should just suck it up and tell my parents?

Except, just then, I hear my father raise his voice. They're still arguing. And I know it's gotten serious, because he almost never yells.

There's no way I can give them something else to fight about.

So I take a deep breath and dial the number on the screen.

At precisely seven o'clock the
next morning, Jaxon knocks on the front door. Twenty minutes later, we're outside, and I'm still trying to figure out if this is really happening, or if I just haven't woken up yet.

Then the camera flashes start.

And then I know I'm awake, because even pinching myself as hard as I can doesn't make this nightmare go away.

“What are you doing?” Jaxon laughs, glancing down at the red mark I pinched into my skin.

“Nothing.” I rub my arm furiously. “And I'm sorry about this,” I add, motioning to the small crowd that's following us. “I thought more of them would be gone by now.” I also half expected my parents to have bodyguards assigned to escort me to school. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I slipped their minds, since I don't think either of them got much sleep last night.

At least it will be easier to skip school without extra people following us.

Jaxon shrugs, looks back at the crowd, and flashes them a smile. I grab his shoulder and jerk him back around. “You really shouldn't do that,” I say, voice
perfectly deadpan. “At least make them work for the shot.”

He keeps making charming faces and posing for the cameras, while I focus on getting to his car as quickly as possible. His car that is a different color today, I notice. Now it's a shiny black that clearly reflects everything against its surface—both Jaxon and me and the crowd of camera-faced people behind us.

“I liked the blue better,” I say conversationally.

“Really? I'm sort of partial to the black myself. Feels more manly.”

“Tint adjustor?”

He nods. “It has an opacity adjustor, too.”

“Isn't that illegal?”

Before he can answer, one of the paparazzi gets brave and falls into step right beside us, his recorder lifted shamelessly into Jaxon's face. He must have heard me say “illegal.” The press loves buzzwords like that.

Jaxon patiently grabs the man's wrist and shoves the recorder away. Then his hand finds the small of my back and he urges me a little faster, until we've put enough space between us and the recorder man that he can tilt his head close and safely whisper, “Almost as illegal as driving without a cleared gas permit.”

I can't help but laugh, shaking my head at him.

“What?” he asks with a grin.

“You just don't strike me as someone who would break a law. Any law.”

“I break all kinds of laws,” he says matter-of-factly. “I drink and smoke, and I run with a tough crowd when I'm
not at school. I'd tell you about all our nefarious deeds, but I don't want to scare you away.”

I raise an eyebrow. Did he just say “nefarious”? Who uses that word in a conversation?

He sighs. “Okay,” he says. “Maybe those last few things weren't true. I'm not that cool. Sorry.” He flashes me another grin, and at least for the moment, I forget all about those people behind us. “But I'll try to be cooler,” he adds, opening the door for me as we reach the car.

“Please do. I can only handle so much lameness.”

“Point taken.” He closes the door, and I watch him move to the driver's side. It's not really on purpose; my eyes just sort of follow him. Naturally. This all feels a lot more natural than I was expecting it to. At least until he drops down into his seat and looks over to find me still staring at him. Our eyes meet, and we both look away, embarrassed.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Nothing. I was just thinking.”

“About?”

“This is . . . You just seemed a lot different from a distance, I guess.”

“Doesn't everybody?”

“I guess so,” I say.

He hesitates. “Different in a bad way?”

“No.” Definitely no.

He looks like he's about to say something else, but just then a reporter appears next to my window, camera raised and ready. I grab a notebook lying on the floorboard and
press it against the glass, hiding as much of my face as I can.

“I bet that gets old,” Jaxon says offhandedly as he digs the car keys out of his pocket. I still can't get over the fact that they're actual, honest-to-god metal keys. What if they get lost or stolen? Our driver starts our cars with just a touch of his hand against the bioignition panel; that just seems a lot more practical to me.

“Having to hide like that, I mean,” Jaxon goes on.

“I don't normally bother to hide from them like this. I just pretend I'm invisible or something. But today I just—” My eyes fall back to the keys. The shiny brass flashes in the sunlight flitting through the car as we drive; it reminds me of a tiny fire flickering to life.

Today I just what? Why do I feel so different today?

I never really fell asleep last night. Instead, I lay awake thinking, thinking about how wonderful it would be if I really could hide. Not forever, necessarily. Just long enough for everyone to forget about Catelyn Benson, and then I could reemerge, reinvent myself as someone else. Someone who didn't have to try to sleep while people whispered outside her window. Someone who didn't have to push and shove her way through those people just to get to the car.

Someone who didn't belong to my family.

“Have they heard anything from your sister?”

Speak of the devil.

I don't answer right away, and Jaxon tightens his grip on the steering wheel and clears his throat uncomfortably. “You don't have to answer that,” he says.

“I haven't heard anything,” I tell him. Not a word.

I have ideas about where she could be, of course—because it's not like this is the first time she's disappeared on us. It
is
the first time she's left without telling me where she was going, though. Normally when she decides to run away, I'm the person she tells about it. I don't know why. Maybe because she wants someone to know where she went, just in case—and because she knows I won't tell on her. She goes to a handful of the same places every time, stays in one of them just long enough to cause a scene. Then she always comes back.

I'm not sure what I would do if she didn't.

“Seth told me why you punched him,” Jaxon says. He's trying really hard to keep the conversation going; I get the impression he's not as content with silence as I am.

“I didn't mean to punch him, exactly,” I remind him.

“Well, he told me what happened with Lacey. What she said about your sister.”

I shrug, trying to roll away the anxiety that's tensing up my shoulders. I don't really want to relive yesterday any more than I have to.

Jaxon mimics my motion. “I just think that's really cool, what you did.”

“What, punching people?”

He laughs. “No. Standing up for your sister like that. I feel like you do that a lot, don't you?”

Now I think I know where he's really going with this: back to four years ago, right after the new Violet first started school. Or
descended
on the school more like, in a swoop of
gale-force winds striking through the halls, drawing stares the way a tornado draws debris and dust. She wasn't the first clone to assimilate into Haven High School, no. There were dozens who came before her, and dozens more after, but she easily made the loudest entrance. Most slipped quietly, gently into their life, seamlessly carrying on the one they had replaced. And Violet started out doing that too. True, there had always been that quiet, smoldering chaos surrounding the first Violet—our grandmother had warned my parents about it—but just as the first Violet had always done, for the most part her clone kept it perfectly in check. There was something wild there, you could tell; but you could only see it in certain lighting, or maybe in quick glimpses out of the corner of your eye.

By the end of that first summer, though, I feel like something must have short-circuited in her brain. Whatever code or file she had that reminded her she was supposed to control that wild part got rewritten somehow, and she's spent practically every day since transforming into someone I recognize a little less every day.

Maybe because of all that, it took less than a month for Lacey and her minions to start bullying her. Because Violet wasn't just a clone. She was a
weird
clone. Different. Unstable. She was unpredictable, and she didn't care what others thought about anything she said or did. She didn't care about acting like the one she'd replaced. If she had been born a natural human, then maybe people would have just called it a phase. Maybe they would have just called her weird—like they do that senior girl who dyes
her hair a different neon color every week—and left it at that. People change. They do strange things, but so what?

But I never heard anyone, except maybe my mother, suggest Violet was going through a phase. Mostly they repeated the things Lacey said, claiming in frightened whispers that my sister was a prime example of a Huxley experiment gone wrong. And then they stood back, or looked the other way, when she was bullied—even when Lacey and her friends used to take Violet's food at lunch, claiming that she wasn't a real person, or even a proper copy of a person, so she didn't need to eat, did she?

But of course, I stood up for her back then, too. Which resulted in them bullying me and taking my food instead, because if I starved to death, I could just be replaced—and then I could become a freak just like her. One big happy family of freaks.

Jaxon knows all about these incidents, because he's the one who ended up getting them to finally leave me alone. He even tried to give me his lunch on a few of those days when mine ended up getting “accidentally” knocked on the floor. I was too embarrassed to take it.

And I'm embarrassed now, just thinking about it.

“You and your sister are close?” Jaxon asks. Except it sounds more like a statement than a question. And I don't know why, but for some reason that bugs me a little.

“We're sisters,” I answer, voice calm and calculated. “Family. Which is why I had to stand up for her.”

He considers my words for a second. “Had to? Or wanted to?”

What the hell kind of a question is that?

“Why does it matter?” I ask with a frown. “Can we just drop it? Talk about something normal? Like school or sports or philosophy, or—”

“Philosophy?” He cuts me a sidelong glance.

“Okay, maybe not philosophy. But something else. Anything.”
Except Violet.

“Okay, okay. Sorry. Just curious.”

I sink back against the seat and close my eyes for a second. “Yeah, you and the rest of the world,” I mutter.

“Well, let's focus on where we're going, then. And maybe on what we're going to do about those guys.”

“What guys?” My eyes flash open, and I follow Jaxon's gaze to the rearview mirror. There are three trucks behind us. The one in front is close enough that I can see the tiny silver torch—one of the many symbols the CCA proudly uses—swinging above the dash. I curse under my breath.

I wonder how long it will be before one of them reports that I'm not at school?

How suspicious will they decide that makes me? They're going to accuse me of trying to hide, and my hands start to shake at the thought of being caught, of being dragged in for more police questioning. I grab the corner of the seat, trying to steady them, while my lips silently recite lines from
Much Ado About Nothing
; it's a nervous habit I've developed, performing plays and songs in my mind when I want to slip away from the moment I've found myself in. It normally calms me down. Today it doesn't seem to be working, though, and I've made it
through almost all of act five, scene two, before Jaxon interrupts.