She plopped down into her chair, the ivy brushing her bare calves and ankles, caressing her skin like a lover. I had to slap my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Axel must have sensed it. He looked in my direction, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
Oh, we were going to be great friends. I could see it now.
My father stepped around a wall and into the garden. “There are better uses for the clones than cleaning up for your soirees.”
She crossed her arms and pouted. “Michael said I could have him to help set things up, since he’s lame and worthless otherwise.”
“Come.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her from her seat and along the walk toward the house. “I have need of your services.” He eyed Carmen’s associate. “Your friend is welcome to watch us.”
Melinda squawked and hustled away in the other direction, light flashing off her gown, illuminating just how bad a fit it really was. Still, I couldn’t blame her. My father meant what he’d said. I was surprised he didn’t bend Carmen over in the garden and go at it with her in front of her guest. He didn’t care about anyone else, only what he wanted. I’d long since learned to lower my expectations of what a father should be.
I was accustomed to it. Still, it saddened me. At one time, my parents had been happy. But when my father inherited Aeropia and they had me, things changed. Now, they barely talked with each other—with me. He spent most of his time with his mistress and Stephan.
I pulled back into hiding and leaned against the wall, grateful I hadn’t been spotted. Things would have been bad for Axel if I had. I never wanted to hurt him again.
5
When I’d complained to my father about Axel’s treatment, he’d given it little attention, other than to tell me to stay away from the clones, that it was not good to associate with them. My father warned me, but I couldn’t stay away, even if I had wanted to. I’d discovered the humanity I’d been missing in my life, and all from someone they claimed had no soul.
As Eva’s story of her past unfolded, I realized how deeply they’d already integrated themselves into the aristocracy by the time I turned sixteen. Some were hidden, and others did not pretend to be anything more than they were, but were aware of the imposters.
The first time I experienced love, it was in the arms of a clone. In a kitchen pantry, against a bag of potatoes, I lost my virginity. It was forbidden to believe they were my equals, or worth my regard. The doctrine of the sins of association, the danger to my mortal soul if I associated with them, had been preached to me since I was a young child. Even though I was told I couldn’t love a clone, I did.
“Do not look at them, Olivia. They’re unclean.” When my mother spoke of the clones, she always referred to them as though they were things—not living, breathing people with feelings or emotions, and I supposed this was her way to excuse her treatment of them. In her mind, to even glance in their direction was beneath me. As a child, whenever I saw one, I thought they could suck my soul out by merely looking at me, and I avoided contact with them.
As I grew older, I learned differently, but to this day I carried nearly as many scars from her words as the countless surgeries I’d suffered. Perhaps that was why I was so drawn to them. Often when your parent told you to do one thing, you did the opposite. Exerting my independence, rebellion—whatever made me do it, I would never regret my choice to befriend Axel.
As the daughter of the leader of Aeropia, I should never have spoken to Axel. I definitely shouldn’t have made eye contact, but the day we met, something inside me recognized a kindred soul, one who sought freedom and happiness he never could have. We were not so unalike as society would want us to believe and were both human, though my kind made me wonder at times.
I remembered the first time I became aware of how badly the clones were treated. My eyes had been opened when I met Axel, and though I’d been told not to look at them, I did constantly. Watching them became an obsession, and I discovered how blind I’d been. I walked by them every day, but it wasn’t until I met Axel, that I discovered I hadn’t really seen them. Nobody did. They were invisible, much like myself.
What woke me to their plight was something so simple I’d never thought about it before, a necessity for survival. That day, I sat on a wooden stool in the kitchen, watching Cook chop herbs that had been harvested from the indoor conservatory. She rocked the chef’s knife over the basil on the stone surface of a huge island. I’d braced my hands on my chin, resting my elbows on the countertop, taking in every movement the old woman made.
My mother had never taught me the simple skills—cooking, laundry—adamant I’d never have use for them. A part of me always wanted to try. I chewed my lip while I watched, fascinated with how fast her hands moved.
“The young lady of the house should not be in the kitchen. It’s beneath you, miss.” Her reprimand was one I had heard often, but she’d never enforced it so, as always, I ignored it.
“I like it here.” I inhaled and smiled. Unlike the rest of the palace, the kitchen held heat and laughter.
My summer home, located in what was once North Carolina, was old, full of ghosts and drafts, an unfriendly place. Because of the climate shift, the weather behaved unpredictably, holding an Arctic chill until late spring. The palace had been built during America’s dark ages, right after the Great War, and had grown larger as time passed, until it served no other purpose than to become a display of economic gluttony, no more a home than a room you would stay in at an inn.
The kitchen, however, wasn’t impersonal. That room was always alive with laughter and humanity, and though I wasn’t supposed to be there, mingling with the common people, I risked my parents’ wrath and lingered for hours. I soaked in the servants’ chatter as they went about preparing the meals, joking with one another, gossiping about attractive boys and men. There, I did not feel alone. I learned so much about living at those tables.
Ingrid, or Cook as I called her, oversaw the preparations and would let me sit and watch, but she’d always been careful to inform me it wasn’t proper, lest my father or mother’s retribution fall upon her head.
“It always smells so good.”
Ingrid lifted her attention from the cutting board and gave me a soft smile. “Thank you, miss.”
“It’s you who should be thanked. I think the whole household will become fat from your food.”
“That would not be a good thing in these times. People have so little. Their leaders should be examples.”
And she had a point. I reached for a carrot. Cook went to swat my hand but pulled up short. “Sorry, miss.” She’d been all too accustomed to having her helpers steal scraps, and protected the food as though it were gold. I left the carrot on the counter.
“Go ahead, you can have it.”
“But not if I was one of the hired help?”
“No, miss. The freshest vegetables go only to the family. The peels go to the help. We make fine meals with what we’re given, breads and stews. The hydroponic greenhouses and orchards are expensive to run, but they keep the contaminants out of the food. Perhaps in your lifetime we won’t have to worry about it, but right now, not a scrap is wasted.”
I thought about the glass domes that dotted the horizon, packed inside the city walls. Conservatories. I had not been aware that only the rich had access to the crops grown inside them until Cook mentioned it. There were acres and acres of pastures and fields on our estate and spread across the country. My father drafted laws to prevent the use of Aeropian land for growing food, and cited the cancers and deformities of our past as the excuse. Those caught were treated with extreme prejudice, and if their families consumed the food, they could be executed for attempted homicide. All this, even when scientists in the United Regions stated it was perfectly safe, and had proven it to be the case.
So we clung to the old ways of growing crops in hydroponic domes, with gel as the soil and each plant hand-pollinated by clones. Most of the commoners settled for the leftovers and produc
e that had gone bad.
Outside, old orchards razed to the ground by the war had sprouted from the Earth again, and become overgrown and neglected. The fruit was left to drop on the ground and rot, and nobody would pick it up for fear of imprisonment. Fields had not been tilled in over a hundred and fifty years, but bore flowers, wild wheat, and maize. I wondered why it had to be this way.
The United Regions had long since begun farming and raising sheep, cattle, and poultry outdoors, and they were none the worse for it. It didn’t make sense to me. Our society starved, when abundance bloomed around us. Animals, once domestic livestock, now filled our forests and mountains, waiting for us to round them up again. It was as though we were slaves to our fear.
Even the freemen and women chose to suffer with meager remnants, making vegetable and fruit breads to survive, more afraid of the penalties for breaking the law than filling their bellies. So if the hired help got the scraps…
“What about the clones?”
Cook stopped chopping and frowned, not looking up, refusing to make eye contact. “What about them?” she asked.
“What do they eat?”
“You shouldn’t concern yourself with that.” She lifted her chin and fixed me with a stern expression, warning me not to go any further. But for all her display of bravado, I knew she could not vocalize the thoughts in her head or the words resting on her tongue. Shamelessly, I took advantage of her limitations.
I held Cook’s gaze, not backing down. Only seventeen, I already had authority, rank in the household, and I wanted an answer. A clone boy had saved my life but five days before. I wanted an explanation for how they were treated—needed to understand why. “I asked you a question.”
Cook nodded toward a large sack leaning against the wall by the back door. No print of any kind marked the outside, and threads hung from the edge where it had been ripped open—left gaping for who knew how long.
A small, gray mouse took the moment to emerge from the feed. It looked left and right before scurrying off the side and behind a cupboard. I shivered and swallowed my fear. If I were to make a stand, I could not let one small mammal scare me.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Feed. You add water.”
“What does it taste like?”
The old woman sighed. “You don’t want to know.”
“I do.” I looked over at the clone feed again. “Make me a bowl of it. I want to be an example.” Unable to rip my attention from the bag, I could only sit there and stare at it. My stomach clenched and churned. What little it contained rolled to the back of my throat and sat there, threatening to make a hasty exit, but I refused to back down. Not this time. That clone boy had saved me. What I intended to do could never make up for what he’d suffered at my expense.
“No, miss. Your mother would be furious if they caught me feeding that garbage to you. Forget I said that bit about the leaders being examples. I shouldn’t have spoken about it. It was not my place.”
I crossed my arms and tilted my chin at a stubborn angle, daring her to challenge me further. “I believe I gave you an order.” I’d never pulled rank before, and felt a bit of an ass for doing it. I couldn’t stand when people of title used their positions as leverage, but then again, some situations called for it, and this was one of them.
“I could lose my job. I have a family to provide for.” Cook eyed the object of our disagreement and turned back to her work, pretending to focus on the minced herbs. “Please don’t ask me to do that.”
“I believe I already did.”
With a sigh, Cook set the knife down, grabbed a cup from a peg on a rack, and walked over to the bag. She scooped up a portion, moved to a pot that hung over the fire that sat underneath where bread baked. From the ladle, she poured hot water into the feed and brought the cup back, setting it before me. “It’s too hot to eat now, let it cool. It thickens.”
In my head I jumped up and down, doing one of those victory dances often seen at athletic events. Success. I sniffed, and my mental boogie ceased. A musty odor wafted up. I looked closer at what I’d gotten myself into and nearly choked.
Several meal worms did a tortured dance of death inside the mush, doing their best to escape the scalding water but not succeeding. The back of my throat watered, and I was almost certain I would vomit. “What’s in it?”
“Fungus, vitamins, ground barley, vegetable oil.”
Sprinkled with mouse poop and dead bugs. I stared at it and swallowed hard. “Do you stir in sugar or salt, something for flavor?” This was for them. I would not, could not get sick. I had to make a stand.
“No, miss. Spices, sugar, and salt are expensive.”
“But you put that stuff in our food.” I leaned over and blew on the mush. The odor curled in on my nose and carried the hint of something gone rancid. I barely managed not to turn my face from it. “And your own?”
“Yes.” Cook frowned again. “You can have the carrot, a nice apple, or something else. You don’t need to eat that.” The look on my face must have told her I found it repulsive, and she capitalized on that.
“They eat this, so I think it’s only fitting we taste what we are feeding them. What makes us any better?” I stirred it, doing my best to bury the dying worms so I would not have to think about them when I did what I did next.
Cook gasped and shook her head. “Don’t ever let anyone hear you talk like that, miss.”
“Why? What are they going to do to me? Slap my hand? Yell at me? Confine me to my room?” I felt as much a prisoner as the clones and never was allowed to leave the estate without an escort, then only to go to a private, segregated school, without classmates. I had no friends, or anyone to call that, and certainly didn’t have much of a life.
I ate what they told me, behaved the way I’d been instructed, walked, talked and acted in whatever manner they saw fit. Yet the clones’ lives were not easier than mine. If I could do one thing to make it better for them, I would, starting with something they couldn’t do without.
“They’re not human.”
“That’s funny. They look human to me. Don’t they bleed as we do? They have two hands, two feet, eyes, ears, a nose, and mouth. Tell me, Cook. What makes them any less human?”
The clone boy who’d saved my life was human. I’d seen him from my window while I recovered. He’d limped as he carried General Axis’s things into the palace—and then later in the garden, when he became my secret partner by leaving the poison ivy under Carmen’s lounger. Nothing about my clone hero looked less than human, and I refused to think of him as anything but. Certainly, she was wrong.
“They are unnatural, products of artificial wombs, created in labs from the cells of their keepers. They are soulless. They cannot feel emotions the way we do. They have no conscience.”
“I think they feel more than you give them credit for.” I scooped up a spoonful of the steaming mush and blew on it. Cook cringed. With a smile, I plugged it into my mouth. The rotten taste overwhelmed the gritty texture. Something wiggled against the back of my tongue, not quite dead. I nearly spit it out, but didn’t. Pretending it was baked sugar-apple, I forced the lump down my throat, doing my best not to let it come back up. “That’s awful.” My throat clenched. “Have you ever tried it?”
Cook shook her head, watching in horror as I scooped up another spoonful and slipped it into my mouth. I gagged but kept it in my stomach.
“You don’t have to eat that.”
“Yes, I do. And I won’t eat anything else until you start feeding them real food.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can do whatever I want. It’s been over a hundred and fifty years since the war. Why can’t we start growing crops to feed the population decent food like the United Regions does?” I swallowed another mouthful. It churned in my guts. Cack, I coughed and cupped my hand over my lips.
“All the clean land and food plots are in the United Regions. We do not have domain over them.” Cook’s hand flew t
o her mouth. “Please stop. I’ll give you some apples. Take them out to the clones working in the garden.”
With a smile, I set the spoon down and looked up. “And a loaf of that bread—with butter.” Dairy products did not exist, but the butter products we used were made from vegetables grown in conservatories that took massive amounts to make small batches. Only the very wealthy enjoyed such extravagance.
“The president will have me shot.” My fingers stretched toward the spoon, and Cook nodded. “Okay, but you can tell no one I’ve done this. It’s considered stealing to give the food away.”
“Not if I’m doing the giving. Besides, if we harvest the fruit in the outdoor orchards, he will never know. I want to borrow some of your help to prune the trees and bring the gardens back.” Had my father been using starvation to control his people? It certainly looked that way. If the United Regions grew safe food, we should be able to as well. The bombs had dropped there at the same time, in the same war. It only made sense that if they could, we could, too.
“It’s not safe.”
“It is. None of the wildlife that eats it has suffered, neither has anyone in the United Regions. Give me some of the clones under your charge to work in the fields and gardens. Once you see it’s safe, you can have some of the fresh produce for your family, too. I can show my family and the people of Aeropia it’s okay to eat food grown from the ground again. I will lead by example.”
“Your father could have you executed.”
“He won’t,” I said, not entirely convinced he wouldn’t. I had to prove to the people it was safe, and would do so. Once the citizens saw, the leaders of Aeropia could no longer use the contamination as an excuse, the government would have to relax the laws or face a revolt.
“Okay.” Cook nodded. “You must tell no one. Come here tomorrow morning, before everyone in the house wakes, and I will give you some clones to help.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” Making an X across my chest, I sealed the deal. Why should the rest of the population not enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables? I now had a purpose, something to do that would help humanity. I hopped off the stool and casually strode to the basket, grabbing the apples, bread, and butter Cook had packaged for me to take to the clones.
The Book of Eva: Clone, Book One Page 6
