For the last few days, I’d had nothing but time to listen as she relayed every detail to me, helping me to relive her past with each word, and what she said, scarred my mind. I only hoped I could do her tale of monsters justice, for no amount of repetition would free the horror of what my people—my family—did, from my conscience.
That fateful morning, Eva found herself strapped to a table in the Imperial Hospital. The cold seeped from the stainless-steel surface and numbed her flesh. A stiffness settled into her marrow, and she ached as though frozen from the inside out.
She’d turned her head to watch while they worked. All efficient, without pause. They’d taken from her before and were well practiced in the art of dissection. The roadmap of scars and healing sores testified to her treatment.
The clanking of metal instruments echoed in the sterile environment. The windowless room, built of concrete blocks and painted a chilly white, made the space appear as though it were nothing more than a morgue. Except she wasn’t dead.
Not yet.
They’d strapped an oxygen mask over her face, and it burned her eyes, nose, and mouth. The plastic visor fogged, but not enough she couldn’t see what they were about to do. It didn’t matter. There would be no stopping them. Her life didn’t belong to her.
Eva had bitten her lip so hard, she’d drawn blood. They would have hurt her for one word, so she chose the pain over speaking. A tug on the straps proved they’d locked them. Only one limb remained free. That unrestrained leg had tubes running into it, and needed to remain so to enhance the flow of blood and fluid, all to keep her organs fresh.
Ice slugged through the needles into her body, and in that spot her flesh had turned blue. The murmur of voices filled the room as the medical staff discussed her procedure. Though they talked softly, they roared.
She balled her fists and took a deep breath. Tears pooled in her eyes from the oxygen, but some because she didn’t want to die. She’d wanted to scream that she was human, wanted to cry, but what would she cry for? They wouldn’t hear her. They wouldn’t care. So she watched and listened.
The nurse set a bottle of liquid down on a wheeled stand near her un-strapped leg. Fighting was against the codes, and our society had taught the clones well. The fear instilled in her from the age of a tiny infant kept her compliant. She unclenched her fists and felt the blood rush back to her fingers, then twisted her wrists in the restraints. In that slight action, Eva realized she wasn’t as helpless as she’d first believed, or as compliant.
They, her keepers, had been careless. An inch, perhaps more. The cuff around one of her wrists had space. Many thoughts went through her mind when she glanced at the bottle of liquid again. Concede. Die. Fight. Die. Oh how she wanted to live. It hardly seemed worth it to strike out, but to do nothing was quiet acceptance. At least if she fought, someone would remember her, and in that, she’d exist.
She did not accept what they wanted. All her life, she’d been forced to be what she was. This one moment, this sliver of time, Eva wanted to claim as her own, be who she wanted to be.
They’d continued to ignore her. The heart, they’d take that first. Her other organs could be frozen in cryo for later use. When one of the doctors caught her watching, he ceased talking. He nudged another beside him, and the man yanked the curtain closed around her bed.
Then the conversation continued, all about what and how they would remove her organs. All as though she couldn’t hear, or didn’t care. Merely parts to be harvested. I remembered thinking how monstrous it was, that those who claimed to save humanity could torture a living being so. Their programming from childhood created a false sense of normalcy. Much like children exposed to violence from birth, they were desensitized. Blind.
It wasn’t an excuse.
When the voices stopped and the clanking of tools ceased, they drew the curtain open again. A nurse with pasty skin checked Eva’s vitals on a monitor next to the bed. She offered no apologies for what they were about to do. With indifference to Eva’s plight, she turned her back to retrieve more instruments, only to swing around with a bottle in her hand. She stuck a needle in the top, drawing liquid into the syringe, and then set it on the tray at Eva’s feet. Her fingers plucked a sponge soaked with iodine from the sterile tray and scrubbed Eva’s chest. Once she’d sanitized the surgical area, she laid a clear film over the spot, wrapping her like butcher’s meat.
“I could see everything,” Eva had said. “Do you know what it is like to watch death creep toward you, while all you can do is wait for it to arrive? It comes, but you can do nothing about it.”
“No.” I’d answered, but not because I hadn’t been there. Death had always been my companion. He stood beside me every waking minute, waiting to take my soul. Dying had never been a novelty. My end would come sooner, rather than later. I did not fear it the way Eva did.
The cart near her feet was covered with sadistic objects. All for killing, all for taking her life to give it to another. And then there was the bottle, a simple glass container the nurse had held moments before. Eva couldn’t read, so she had no idea what it held. The words were foreign marks, patterns, and designs, yet her instincts screamed it would help her to survive.
Concede.
Die.
Fight.
Live forever in a memory.
They had no right. It was her life. She didn’t care what liquid filled the bottle, only that if she was to die, it would not be without a fight. Since birth, she had gone along everywhere they’d led her. That day, she would not be a follower.
She summoned her strength and thrashed out with her leg, kicking the bottle off the stand. The nurse spun around, her eyes widened.
“Time ticked by in slow motion.” Eva’s face went blank as she’d recalled the events that followed.
The woman dove for the bottle, missing it by inches. It fragmented on the floor. Bits of glass and liquid bounced up from the impact. A hissing sound filled the room, and a cloud of gas floated toward the ceiling. The nurse screeched and rolled across the floor, covering her face, dragging fingers over the mask, peeling it back and revealing scarlet lips, clawing and clawing, smearing lipstick the color of blood everywhere. Then silence. The sound of her voice, the air in her lungs, had been stolen.
“Dead perhaps?” Eva’s eyes had held no emotion. Cold, dark, without feeling, she spat her next words out like shards of ice. “I cared not.” The venom contained in her features had me pushing back against the headboard of my bed, struggling to catch my breath. I then understood her fear.
The nurse had gone motionless, her eyes popped wide, broken vessels painting them as red as her lips. The doctors scrambled over one another to get away, falling victim to their panic. They didn’t make it to the seal. Bodies slumped to the floor, thrashing, gasping, desperate for life-saving oxygen.
One doctor, sprawled on the tiles, turned his head toward Eva. Blue fabric stretched taut over his mouth. Even so, she could see his jaws open and close in a struggle to breathe. An arm extended, and his fingers reached for her, grasping for help she had no inclination to give. Seconds later, his limb dropped to the floor, and his chest stopped rising and falling. All along, she continued inhaling and exhaling the oxygen flowing into the rubber cup over her nose and mouth.
A drop of condensation plopped down on her nose and tickled the surface as it raced for the tip. Dead, dead, dead. Words of murder no longer came from their mouths. She hadn’t known what to expect—it had never been explained to her—but Eva discovered one thing, death was glorious, because it came with something else.
Freedom.
She scanned the room, pausing to study the items resting on the table, most importantly, it. They’d removed her security belt. Those in control of her were gone. All lay still in their self-made morgue, but if she wanted to remain free, it wouldn’t be wise to stick around.
Eva worked her hand out of the cuff with some difficulty, scraping it on the strap as she pulled free, leaving some of her fle
sh behind. In a matter of moments, she’d unbuckled the other cuff and sat up to undo her ankle.
The tubes were attached like leeches on her leg. When she grabbed the strands of loose spaghetti, Eva closed her eyes. The liquid squished inside the rubber noodles she squeezed. Letting out a breath, she yanked. Stinging and dizziness swamped her senses. When she opened her eyes, all that remained in her leg were holes her blood trickled out of. From the ends of the tubes dangled silver needles, several inches long.
Slowly, she let them roll out of her hand, falling to the floor with a wet plop. Blood from the bag had continued to flow, pouring onto the polished tiles. When she craned her neck to look, her image stared back at her in the reflective pool. Alive. Free.
Her attention shifted back to the dead woman. A visual gauge of the nurse told her she was about her size, maybe a bit bigger. So she hopped off the bed, stripped the clothes from the corpse, and then grabbed the oxygen tank to tiptoe around bodies and broken glass to the empty observation room next door. Eva pushed through the gelatinous barrier making up a door between the two. She looked around to make sure nobody watched, and then lifted the edge of the mask to take a breath. The gas had not come through the seal as best she could tell. So she peeled it off and tossed it into the corner, making haste to change, slipping into unfamiliar garments, pulling a lab coat on after.
With a tug, the collar came up, and she rubbed it against her cheek. Her fingers brushed down the flesh on her belly, taking in each welt, dip, and scar earned from years of wearing the girdle. Odd, but not unwelcome.
When she looked up at a disc-shaped mirror attached to the wall, her mouth dropped open. Eva blinked. Once. Twice. For all intents and purposes, she looked like them, a white-coated reaper. Except for the chip. With a twist of her chin, and a sideways glance from her peripheral vision, Eva saw the one thing left that defined her status in society.
Cupping her hand over her cheek, she watched as the blue light pulsed through her flesh, illuminating tendons, vessels, and outlining the bones. Not even a mask could hide it.
She searched the room until her gaze landed on the rubbish where they’d discarded her clothing. With deep regret, she retrieved her garments. Oh, how she’d wanted to bask in the comfort for a few more moments, but to do that would be to play with a chance she’d be caught. To escape, she would leave wearing what she came with. Today, she would leave as a clone. Then nobody would look twice.
She’d made a choice, and it felt good. So she made another. Eva opened the door to the hall and stepped out. A quick glance left, and then right. As she’d expected, no one looked in her direction. She took a step. They still didn’t pause, but continued on with what they’d been doing, chattering about patients and schedules. Eva moved down the corridor to the stairs. Up them.
And then she walked out the front door.
2
That day Eva crossed the border, unsure how she’d made it over the one-mile strip called no-man’s land, Aeropia’s version of the demilitarized zone. There, a violent blast had scorched the Earth, and the ground was littered with the remains of would-be defectors. Bits and pieces of bone and flesh lingered with trash and wreckage, and, in one spot, a scalp of long red hair flapped in the breeze like a banner, still attached to a mummified mass that was human once.
Rats and vultures ripped at fresh, and not so fresh, corpses. They hopped and scurried about, growing fat from the feast. They’d paid her little mind, their bellies too full to give her a second glance. It had been the one place that had been between her and freedom. Somehow, she’d navigated the hazards.
“Get down. Put your hands on top of your head and cross your ankles.”
Eva stared at the men in black, wearing Kevlar helmets and goggles, their blasters pointed at her. The patches on their sleeves told her she wasn’t in Aeropia anymore, but it didn’t mean she’d found safety.
Freedom had been but a few feet away when they’d come out of nowhere to take her into custody. Her arms were jerked behind her back, cuffed with hard steel that bit into wounds left from her escape. They dragged her across the ground, over patches of sand melted to glass by weapons of war. Bones stuck up from the surface. One sharp piece gouged her shin, tilling a furrow in her flesh. It would leave a small scar, a memento of her escape, the only one she’d choose to keep later. It was, she told me, a symbol of her defiance and, in that, her life.
She didn’t scream, didn’t resist, even as they opened the door on the back of a vehicle and shoved her inside a dark box. Eva bunched the fabric on her pant leg and held it over the wound, doing her best to stop the flow of blood. Warm and sticky, it coated her hands and drenched the thin fabric. It could be minutes before they opened the door, or days. She hadn’t bothered to ask where they were taking her, or why.
Eva only knew she didn’t want to die in the back of that transporter; feet from the freedom she’d craved her entire life. So, she staunched the hemorrhage of blood and waited. They’d tell what they wanted. They always did.
Two days later, she huddled on a cot in a six-by-six cell, shivering from the cold, hugging her arms around her body, and rubbing her skin to bring heat back to her flesh. The coarse fabric of her pants had become crusted into the wound on her shin and pulled every time she shifted her position.
Darkness wrapped her like a blanket, but she could still see her breath floating in the silent air. It danced around in the inkiness like a ghost. Blowing out, she’d watched the vapors twist and shift. For a while, it entertained her, but soon she grew bored and restless. “I wondered if I’d escaped only to become a prisoner again.” In her heart, she’d known she would do anything to stay there, even if it meant existing in a cage. Only death remained for her in Aeropia.
At last the door cracked open and light poured in. Eva sat up, zeroing all her focus on the entrance. Her fingers tightened on the metal bench that held a thin mattress she’d sat on for two days. The door continued to open, each second like a minute.
Instead of a tray of food sliding across the floor, two people stepped inside. The light behind them prevented her from seeing more than their silhouettes. It didn’t matter. It took a moment to assess her visitors.
A waft of perfume and the click of heels on stone tile told Eva the first was a woman. The person who followed, however, moved with stealth and, despite his size, barely made a sound as he strode into the cell. From the breadth of his shoulders, to the way he dominated the space, the other could only be male. Eva scooted across the cot, backing into the corner.
He stopped, not coming any closer. A light clicked on, and whoever held it cast the beam in her face. Eva threw her arm across her eyes to block the blast of illumination.
“Shut it off. She’s been in the dark for two days,” the man said. His voice sent tremors through Eva’s body. She curled into a ball and wrapped an arm around her shins.
The light snapped off. “I needed you to get a good look, sir.”
“You should think before you act. She’s terrified.”
“Don’t let that timid display fool you. If it’s her, she killed an entire surgical crew in the Aeropian capital city.”
“I would have, too, if they’d tried to take my heart. Can you blame her for wanting to live? She’s a survivor. Not an animal. Why wasn’t I notified about her sooner?”
“We thought it wise to wait until you came back from the field assignment.”
“You thought wrong.”
“Yes, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“Damn right it won’t.”
Eva dropped her arm and lifted her chin, letting her eyes adjust. The man seemed to care about her misery, the first who had. His behavior surprised her, but also made her leery. She blew out another breath and watched the mist vanish. They couldn’t do anything that hadn’t been done to her before, but she still feared what might happen—that she’d only escaped to meet her end in a colder place. She’d gotten away once, could do it again, and would wait for the opportunity. It w
ould come.
“She looks just like her,” he said, his voice filling the gloominess.
That Eva looked like my mother was only a surprise because the abuse the clones endured changed them. Even though they were duplicates of their masters, damage inflicted on them from youth distinguished them from their keepers. Eva’s scars remained hidden.
The cruelty and arrogance of my father never ceased to amaze me. He would not have anything other than a stellar picture of his life for others to gaze upon. He hid the ugliness where nobody could see it.
The man stepped forward.
Eva slammed back into the corner, her heart skipping beats. Stone prevented further retreat, but it didn’t stop her from trying to sink into the surface, become invisible, a defense mechanism she’d learned long ago. Blend. But that would prove impossible.
“It’s her, the one who killed the doctors and nurse over in Aeropia,” the woman said.
“If she is, it’s our lucky day.” He took another step toward her and leaned in. “What do you say? Are you the clone they’re looking for?” His breath puffed over her, creating its own dancing specter. She lifted her hand and dragged her fingers through the mist he’d created.
Eva didn’t say anything at first. She wasn’t sure if they wanted to kill her, if it was safe to talk. After several seconds of awkward silence, her training kicked in. Rule number three had been so ingrained, she couldn’t stop herself. “I am.”
The man whistled. “Because of you, Aeropia is locking down. They’re afraid of a clone rebellion.” He chuckled. “Serve them right if you all turn on them.”
“I just want to live.”
The man smiled. “And you shall.” From his pocket, he pulled a set of keys that jingled as he grabbed her wrist and released her from the cuff attached to a five-foot chain. “Come with me.” Where he touched her wrist burned, and Eva couldn’t help but yank her limb from his grip. Once free, she scrambled to the other side of the cot, putting distance between them again.
The Book of Eva: Clone, Book One Page 2
