Into the Abyss (17 page)

Something about the way his tone changes toward the
end makes it impossible for me to let the statement be, even though Seth suddenly looks as if he's ready to turn the computer off.

“What else did you hear?” I ask. But Jaxon doesn't answer. He just keeps staring at his adopted brother, waiting. Seth is suddenly the king of silence, though, and when Jaxon finally breaks that silence, he still doesn't look at me, or acknowledge that I've asked anything at all.

“You should come home,” he says to Seth. “I don't want to talk about this stuff over a stupid screen.”

“I'm going to,” Seth replies slowly, carefully. “I just . . . I can't yet. I have to figure some things out first.” His voice wavers a bit when he says it, and I wonder if it was the word “home” that did it. Because where is home for him now? Is it the place where he's lived the longest? Or is it here with Angie, where he doesn't have to keep such impossibly big secrets?

“You both need to come home,” Catelyn says, interrupting the uncomfortable quiet that's threatening to settle. I need to come back to her, is what she means. As though home could be a person as easily as it could be a place.

And for a moment I am tempted to tell her I will come back, because that aching in my chest isn't going away. It's only getting worse, the longer I look at her, and the deeper this conversation sinks into its permanent place among my memories.

There was another attack.

Is she safe there, without me?

Home should mean safe
, I think.

“Violet?”

I meet her eyes again but I can only shake my head. I say nothing. Because I can't go back there. Not now.

She refuses to take a simple “no” for an answer. Nothing surprising about that.

“Why didn't you come back to my room that night?” she presses. “What exactly happened in that meeting with President Cross, anyway?”

I am still silent to this, but mostly because, with everything between now and then, I'd almost forgotten I even had that meeting. What did happen in that room? What has happened to the president since then? I try to think back, and all I remember, at first, is how tired and strange she seemed when I cornered her in her room. How she admitted that she didn't want to talk to the other CCA members. And those marks on her shoulders, her back. . . .

“She seemed . . . strange,” I think aloud. I haven't forgotten the way she insisted I keep quiet about her scars. But I am sure Jaxon must know about them—and if he knows, then Catelyn most likely does too. I never asked to be the president's secret keeper, anyway. And I would much rather talk about her, because it steers the conversation away from all the questions surrounding Seth and me.

“Strange?” Jaxon repeats.

“Strange and tired. And I saw marks on her back, ones she didn't want me to tell anyone about.” Jaxon recoils a bit, but I was right—he doesn't look especially surprised;
it's more as if I've poked at a sore memory that he would rather have kept covered.

“Virus scars, right?” Catelyn asks quietly.

“She said not everyone knew about them,” I say, nodding, “and that she wanted to keep it that way. And something else . . . something about how they had to do with why she was involved with Huxley in the first place.”

This last part does make Jaxon's eyebrows lift a little. “She talked to you about her time at Huxley?”

“Not in detail.” I frown, thinking about the way the president had avoided giving me any real answers that night. It was remarkably similar to the vague way Angie had answered my questions back at the warehouse. No wonder they were—as Seth put it—BFFs. “Dodging questions seems to be a skill of all former Huxley employees,” I say. And then, without really thinking about it, I glance at Seth and add, “Angie did the same thing.”

I realize my mistake even before Catelyn asks: “Who?”

“Should I know who that is?” Jaxon asks.

Instead of answering him, Seth reaches for the computer's power button, and the screen collapses to black with a high-pitched click.

“What do you think you're doing?” I reach for the computer, but he slams it shut and jerks it back, tucking it securely under his arm before dancing back out of range of my fists.

“Seriously,” he says, shaking his head at me. “You had one job.”

“It was just a name! It means nothing to them, and I wasn't going to say anything else.”

“When did you see those scars, anyway?” he demands. “How did you see them? As long as I've known her, Cross has been going to ridiculous lengths to make sure they stayed covered up.”

“I broke into her room. Caught her off guard, I think.”

“You did what?”

“Get Catelyn on that computer again, and give it back to me.”

“Not happening.”

“What exactly did you think you were going to do, anyway? Did you plan on keeping Jaxon in the dark about all of this forever?”

“No.” The word is clipped with annoyance. “But it would have been nice if I could have kept him in it a little longer, until I actually figured out how to answer anything he might have asked, and—”

“He already knows more than you want him to. Those strange things he mentioned hearing? How much would you like to bet that they're rumors about you? Because what did you think was going to happen after you fought with Josh's gang? Did you think they would keep your secret? Tell everyone that a normal human managed to deal with all six of them single-handedly? There is no telling what sort of things Jaxon has been hearing about you, you know.”

“I don't care what he's heard.”

“Liar.”

He walks over to the bed in the corner and slams the computer down onto the foot of the mattress. And without another word, he collapses back on the bed himself, grabs a pillow, and folds it over his face.

“The least you could do is admit why you can't go back,” I push. “Tell him at least one truth: You're a clone, things are even worse for our kind back there as long as Iverson is stirring things up, and so you're afraid—”

“You think that's what this is about?” He lifts the pillow off his face just enough so that his glare can meet mine. “Seriously? You think I'm afraid of Josh or any of those other idiots?”

“I suppose something about the way you're hiding under a pillow strikes me as cowardly.”

He flings the pillow aside. “I'm not afraid,” he says, sitting up. “I'm pissed. I can't go back and see the president, because she didn't tell me about Angie, and now all I can think about when I see her is what else she hasn't told me about my own life. And now—you're right—there is no way Jaxon hasn't figured out the truth about me, and I wish I'd never agreed to tell him such a huge lie in the first place, because what do we do now? I can't just go back and act like everything's the same. Even if things weren't getting so crazy there, I still couldn't do that.”

“You could at least tell him all this,” I say, frowning, “instead of telling me.”

“I'm only telling you because if anybody knew about not having a home to go to, I thought it would be you.”

“We are not the same.” The words come out harshly, and the way he sinks toward the wall a little—as if those words are something physical, pushing him back—almost makes me wish I could take them back.

I can't, though.

So instead, I do something that I usually don't bother with; I've never much cared, before, whether or not people understand me—but this time, at least, I try to explain myself for him. “I was somebody before I was reborn at the CCA,” I say, “and this city is full of people who know who that somebody was, who expect me to be the girl who came before even if they won't claim that out loud. Your memory was as blank as mine when you woke up as Seth, maybe, but Angie wasn't there. And I know you're angry about that, but at least you had a chance to become whoever you wanted to be because of it. You didn't have a house full of things people told you were yours. You didn't have photographs of people who looked exactly like you that you didn't remember taking. You didn't . . .”

Stop
, I command myself sharply.
You've made your point. You don't need to talk to him anymore.

Why do I want to keep talking to him?

“Catelyn told me you were only six when the president found you,” I say, voice almost a whisper now. “You've had nearly a dozen years to make a life full of things that actually belonged to you. So don't try to tell me we're the same. Just . . . don't. And perhaps you should actually try thinking for once, before you throw away all those things you've made, just because you're angry with the people
you made them with. With the family you made them with.” I hear the bitterness slinking into my tone toward the end, but I can't stop it any more than I could stop talking. I don't know where it comes from, even—just that it's there. And I expect Seth's reply to be an equally bitter,
Why don't you mind your own business?

He continues to be full of surprises, though.

“I'm sorry,” he says instead, and I know he isn't apologizing for anything he's done, because from the way he is looking at me, it's obvious that I am the only thing he's thinking about just then.

“Don't be,” I say, averting my eyes. “Just forget about it.”

But in true Seth form, he doesn't manage to stay quiet. “I wish those things were still yours. Some of them, at least—like the photographs and stuff. I really do.”

“Keep your pity,” I say. “I don't want it.”

It's just one more thing that I don't understand or know what to do with.

He does manage to be silent for a minute then, long enough that it grows well past the point of uncomfortable. I turn away and move for the door, more than ready to be finished with this room and conversation.

“Everything from here on out is yours though, right?” he asks, before I can make my escape. His voice is close to timid in a way that seems completely out of character for him. “Your past might not be yours, but everything that happens from now on is all you, right? You don't have to follow the president's orders out here, and Huxley doesn't
have control over you. And that's . . . I mean, most clones don't have that. So it's got to count for something, right?”

I stand in the doorway, letting the things he's saying sink in. But I don't look back before disappearing into the hall. And I avoid eye contact with everybody I pass on my way outside and then head straight for the solitude of the woods.

Seth doesn't follow me. Only his words do—and one of them in particular.

Control.

I find myself thinking, again, about a way that I could possibly test the reprogramming that Leah has done. Because so long as she has fixed that malfunctioning bit of me, then Seth is right, isn't he? I have control. We both do. It's how he managed to stay hidden in the CCA for so long, and it's what brought us together while setting us apart from the brainwashed clones that plague this city.

Does it matter, though, as long as those brainwashed clones still exist?

It seems we'll forever be lumped into that majority—guilty by association—and that my life will never manage to be all me, as Seth put it. Not unless something in this plagued city changes. Something in the clones, something that puts an end to the CCA and Huxley's warring.

Something drastic.

An idea flutters in the back of my mind, quiet and small and impossible at first. But just like the conversation I had with Seth, it refuses to leave me alone. It only grows louder. Bolder. I spend the next several hours alone with
it, walking the edge of the woods until that idea becomes a plan, until I have turned that plan over and over and imagined all the ways it could possibly go both wrong and right.

And by the time I head back into the dark, quiet house, I am almost ready to do something drastic.

There is no one in
sight aside from Leah, who sits watching a system of computers similar to the setup Seth had back at the warehouse.

“You all right there, clone-girl?” she asks with a yawn. “How's your head feeling? Any more crazy spells to speak of?”

I still haven't really tested it. But I have an idea, now, of how I might be able to create the sort of violence I need to try to prompt a blackout reaction from my brain. It will have to wait for Seth, though, assuming he ever decides to come out of that room again. But still, just the thought of it—along with the excitement of another, grander plan that is thrumming through my veins—makes me feel positive enough to answer Leah's question with: “So far so good.”

“Awesome.” She pauses, leaning back in the computer chair and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. The quiet stillness between us borders on amicable—instead of the uncomfortable silence I'm used to causing most people—and maybe because of that, I venture a few steps closer.

“So, I should thank you, I guess.” It's premature, I
suppose. But she asked me if I was all right, and for some reason I almost feel as though I should thank her just for that.

She lets her hands fall back to her lap, and her gaze trails up to the ceiling. “You're welcome, I guess.” She looks like she tries to smile then, but something stops it. Drowsiness, maybe. A glance at the clock above the doorway tells me it's well past midnight. I frown; I didn't realize I'd lost track of time quite as much as I apparently did. And I don't want to wait until morning to figure out the details of my plan.

“Is Angie still up?” I ask.

Before she can answer, we hear a whistling sound coming from the kitchen area.

“In there,” Leah says, closing her eyes and sinking a little more deeply into her chair. “She doesn't sleep much these days.”