Replication

by Jill Williamson

  “Okay,” Aliza said. “He can stay while we sort this out, but if his dad comes looking, we have to let him go. We want to help, but we can’t harbor a runaway.”

  “O-kay. Good. Thank you.” Abby closed her eyes for a moment. “But he’s not JD Kane. Look, if you stop by the school tomorrow at lunch, I’ll sit with JD, so I can prove it to you. Trust me, I wouldn’t offer to sit with him unless it was important.” Her voice rose. “If we don’t help Marty, they’ll kill him. If he dies, the other fifty-four boys will likely die too.”

  Martyr tensed. Could that be true? Only the J:3s were scheduled to expire soon.

  Pastor Scott raised his hands. “Okay, okay. Calm down. We’ll keep an open mind.”

  “Can we talk to your dad about this?” Aliza asked.

  “Yeah,” Abby said. “I’ll have him call you after we deal with the police.”

  Aliza raised an eyebrow, and her voice squeaked out, “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s only to throw off Dr. Kane’s guards.” Abby stood, and Martyr stood with her. She turned and looked into his eyes. “I’d better go before they change their minds. You’ll be safe here. I’ll call when I know what to do next.” She bit her thumbnail, then leaned up on her toes and pressed her lips against his cheek. Martyr’s body tingled with electricity, like when the ankle taser was activated but without the pain.

  Abby pulled away too soon, and the pleasantness of her touch faded into a sensation of fear. She was really going to leave him with these people? She said she would call, but how? He followed her to the door, still clutching the cell phone in his hand. Perhaps she meant for him to talk into the device like she had. Would Pastor Scott or the pragment Aliza show him how to use it? “Will I see you again?”

  Abby grinned, but her eyes did not sparkle. “Of course, silly. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  Then she threw her arms around him, like she did before leaving that morning for school. Martyr felt another small burst of electricity. He buried his nose in her hair and inhaled, hoping to commit her scent to memory.

  “Don’t worry, okay?” Abby said. “I’m really smart about these things. Once I get a project, I never fail. You’ll be okay, I promise.”

  Then she was gone.

  When Abby walked into the house, the first thing she saw was the box on the counter. She peeked inside, wondering why Dad had brought his things home.

  “Abby, honey? That you?” Dad walked down the first two steps from upstairs and paused when he met her eyes.

  Abby motioned to the box. “I meant to ask you earlier. What’s all this?”

  “Dr. Kane asked us to take home any personal belongings, just in case.”

  “In case the cops came snooping around?”

  Dad sighed and walked down the stairs. “Looks that way.” He sat on a stool at the counter. “I know you’ve always disagreed with my work, but—”

  “Dad, can we not do this right—”

  “You’re right. About a lot of things. I’m not saying you’re right about everything, but a lot, okay? What Dr. Kane is doing with those boys is wrong.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  She put her arm around his shoulder, and he pulled her close. “Thank you, for not letting me lie to myself about it, honey. You ready for me to call the police?”

  Abby took a deep breath. “I think so.”

  Dad placed the call, explaining how his daughter had found an intruder in her room and scared him away and that Abby wasn’t hurt. They promised to send a car as soon as possible.

  Abby went up to her room to pray. She went over the situation with God, hoping to feel some validation about their plans, but instead her prayers drifted from Marty to her dad’s involvement in a cloning lab, then settled on her mother.

  Mom would have known exactly what to do.

  Tears streaked down Abby’s cheeks. People always said you never know when it might be the last time you do certain things in your life. Most of Abby’s final memories with her mom hadn’t been that way. They’d known Mom was dying and had plenty of time to fit in a last trip to various places, but the memories weren’t completely joyful because they all knew it had been the last: The last trip to Niagara Falls. The last trip to New York City. The last time standing together on the Empire State Building. The last time making cookies. The last time sitting in church. The list went on and on. Abby relived them all, forgetting that she had been praying. Dwelling on the loss that now felt so fresh. So raw.

  Why had it happened? In her heart, Abby knew she didn’t need to know; she trusted God. Still, her heart ached for what could have been. She longed for the moment when she would see the good in this loss, how God had made beauty from ashes.

  For just a moment, Abby indulged herself in trying to make an answer fit, trying to understand God’s plan. If her mother hadn’t died, Dad might not have quit his job at GWU, because he wouldn’t have been as desperate to try and save Mom. They all would still be living in Washington DC, and they wouldn’t know Marty existed. Marty might not have even managed to escape, for surely the scientists who worked there for years knew better than to leave their keycards lying around.

  The bittersweet reasoning eased some pain in Abby’s heart. A new sorrow overtook her mind: the idea of Marty living underground, never seeing the sun or sky, never breathing fresh air, fifty-five of him, all different ages, some strong, some broken, all prisoners in the name of science. Baby and Hummer and the one without legs …

  Abby spiraled into another wave of emotion, pleading to God that he would expose the wrongness and protect the boys. If it wasn’t done just right, the government might take the boys away to a new prison to be studied by different scientists. The doorbell jolted her back to reality. She snapped out of prayer mode, said a quick amen, and peeked out the window. The cops were here.

  She smoothed her hair and went into the bathroom to rinse off her face, which didn’t bring down the swelling as much as she’d like. She ran cold water over a washcloth and held it against her eyes. It seemed like she stood there forever. She turned the washcloth over and put the cooler side on her eyelids. What was going on downstairs? Would Dad even involve—?

  “Abby, honey?” Dad’s voice called from downstairs.

  Finally. She draped the washcloth over the towel rack and took a deep breath. “Coming.”

  Abby descended the stairs and found two officers sitting on the couch in the living room—a man with a thick brown moustache and a woman with a long blonde ponytail. The woman’s crystal-blue eyes made Abby think of a human lie detector. She hoped her perceptions were wrong.

  Dad was sitting in the armchair across from them. “Here she is.”

  Abby walked over to her dad and perched on the arm of his chair.

  He put his arm around her waist. “Abby, these officers have come to ask some questions about the intruder.”

  Abby forced a small smile and glanced from one cop to the other. “I’m not sure how helpful I’ll be.”

  “I’m Officer Jackson,” the female cop said. “This is Officer McNear.” She gestured to the guy with the mustache. “Were you hurt at all?”

  “No,” Abby said.

  “Your father already told us his version of what happened, but we’d like to get an official statement from you. You feel up to that?”

  “Sure. I went up my room, mad because Dad made my friends leave. We were just studying, but Dad kicked everyone out. I was”—Abby glanced at her father—”really embarrassed.”

  Jackson’s gaze drilled into Abby. “What happened next?”

  Abby looked to where Einstein was eating out of his dish. “When I turned around, a boy was in my room, crouched in the corner.”

  “Did he speak to you?” McNear asked, his voice a rumbling bass.

  The sound pulled Abby’s gaze away from Einstein. “No. He just sat there. I yelled at him to get out and he ran.”

  McNear turned to Dad. “Did you see him leave, Mr. Goyer?”

 
“I didn’t. I’d stepped into my office in the den. I heard Abby yell, then the door slam. That’s it.”

  McNear smoothed his moustache and looked to Abby. “Why did you wait until today to call this in?”

  Abby jerked her head to look at her dad. He was supposed to have said that this had just happened. Talk about raising a red flag in an investigator’s mind. “Uh…”

  “It’s my fault,” Dad said. “I didn’t want to blow things out of proportion for a high school prank. But Abby was so insistent about what she saw, well … after I slept on it, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to report it.”

  Abby sighed inside. Then a sudden overwhelming feeling of shame overtook her. She had talked her dad into lying to the cops and now they were getting caught in their deceit.

  Jackson wrote something down in her notebook, then glanced at Abby. “Could you describe him?”

  “Uh … he was bald … and tall and … thin.” Abby scrambled to think if her answer might hurt Marty. She didn’t see how it could. “He was wearing gray sweats and a white lab coat. Like the kind a doctor wears.”

  Jackson turned to Abby’s dad. “So he changed his clothes after your daughter saw him?”

  Abby frowned at her father.

  “I guess he must have.” Dad shrugged. “All I know is that I found those clothes on my bedroom floor.”

  Abby followed Dad’s nod to the kitchen. Marty’s sweats, T-shirt, and lab coat were folded in a neat pile on one of the kitchen counters. Ug. They really should have rehearsed what they were going to say, which only confirmed the inkling in the back of her mind that this was wrong. They were making up a story, wasting the officers’ time. She hated people who did stuff like this.

  “How old did he look, Miss Goyer?” Jackson asked.

  “Seventeen or eighteen.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  Abby paused. She wasn’t supposed to know any clones existed, so in her mind, the boy in her room would have been JD Kane. She didn’t want to lie anymore, nor did she want to get JD in trouble. If she said the intruder looked like JD, would that help the case against Jason Farms? If JD had an alibi, would that give the police reason to search the barn? Perhaps.

  “He looked kind of like JD Kane, a boy at my school. But the thing is, JD has hair. Even more strange, he had just called me on my cell because he’d forgotten some books when our study group ended. JD was waiting outside when I brought him the books, and when I went back upstairs, the guy was still in my room.”

  “So you saw JD outside when he was supposedly in your bedroom?” Jackson asked.

  Now Abby was having second thoughts about the tell-the-cops plan. What if the police started looking for a JD lookalike? How was that going to help Marty?

  “You and JD Kane are friends?” Officer Jackson’s gaze bored into Abby’s.

  “He’s my lab partner.”

  “Have you ever dated?”

  “He asked me out, but I turned him down. He’s not really my type.”

  “How did he take that?”

  “Take what?”

  “Your rejection?”

  Great job—you just handed them a motive. Officer Jackson thought JD had come into Abby’s room because he was stalking her or something. “Oh, JD’s fine. Actually, he seemed more determined than ever to get me to go out with him once I—”

  Dad coughed.

  “—said no.” She glanced at her dad. Oh. Her answers weren’t helping, and now it really looked like JD was stalking her. She should have left it at “strange bald guy I didn’t recognize” and been done with it. She would never lie again. It was one of the Ten Commandments for a reason. Doing it only made things worse.

  The cops asked a bunch more questions, mostly about JD. Abby did her best to paint JD in a favorable light, but she got the impression the cops had their own preconceived opinion of JD Kane.

  When the cops finished asking questions, Dad walked them to the door. “Thanks for looking into this.”

  “We’ll head over to the Kane residence next,” Officer Jackson said. “We’ll call if we find out anything. Let us know if there are any more … strange visits.”

  “Will do.”

  Abby winced inside. JD was getting pulled into this mess, but it was his dad’s fault for cloning himself.

  Dad called the lab next. He told them he called the police because of an intruder and that later his daughter had described him as JD Kane. Dad assumed it had been Martyr.

  While Dad talked to the lab, Abby escaped to her room, conscience nagging. She was glad Marty was at Pastor Scott’s place and that they’d thrown the Jason Farm scientists off the trail, but could she have accomplished the same thing without bending the truth? Calling the police had seemed like the perfect idea at the time, but now that it was over, it wasn’t sitting so well. What if JD got in trouble for something he didn’t do?

  She crawled under the covers on her bed and snuggled against Einstein. Her obsession with forensics and detective work had gone too far. She, Abigail Goyer, a girl whose goal in life was to enforce the law, had broken it today. Mom would have been disappointed. Mom had always told her it was up to the two of them to show Dad what loving God was all about.

  Abby had failed today in a big way.

  It had been her idea to lie to the police, and Dad had gone along with it. She’d led her father astray. This thought sent Abby into a long bawl-fest. It had been ages since she cried, and this made twice in one day. She cried so long it hurt. She couldn’t breathe. Snot dripped everywhere. Her eyes stung. Her sobbing scared Einstein so much he squirmed out of her grip and darted out the door.

  The exit of her dearest friend made her cry harder. She prayed long and hard. She knew God had forgiven her for the lies, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be consequences for her actions. She dreaded those consequences.

  Good thing Abby wasn’t in charge of running the universe. Things would sure get messy in a hurry. Deep down, she trusted that God would take care of Marty and the other clones, but it wasn’t in her nature to sit back and not get involved. She really needed to work on giving up control. She only hoped her meddling hadn’t made a bigger mess for God to clean up.

  [CHAPTER FIFTEEN]

  MARTYR SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY on the brown sectional.

  Dinner had been filled with new and interesting foods he was still struggling to describe, but it also had been awkward because Pastor Scott asked many strange questions. Martyr sensed Pastor Scott becoming frustrated. The man seemed to suspect that Martyr had done something wrong.

  Now they sat in the living room, which was what Aliza called the room with the sectional, recliner, and TV. Martyr didn’t understand this title since there were no beds here. Clearly it was only one of several rooms in the facility that was being lived in.

  Again, Aliza sat on the end of the sectional and Pastor Scott sat in the recliner. Martyr sat in the corner of the sectional. The pillows squished around him and gave the sense of protection against Pastor Scott and Aliza’s unnerving gazes.

  “Abby said you had questions about God,” Pastor Scott said, fixing his brown eyes on Martyr. “Why don’t we focus on those for a while?”

  “Where does he live? Can you take me to his facility?”

  Pastor Scott glanced at Aliza, his lips nearly frowning. “God doesn’t live in any building—on earth, at least—not even a church.”

  “I don’t understand.” How could someone live nowhere? Did God roam the land like the birds and horses? “Abby said God hears my words and thoughts. But how can I hear him if I cannot find him?”

  “Through prayer and reading the Bible,” Pastor Scott said.

  Prayer, like Abby had done before eating her food. “Is this Bible a book?”

  “Here.” Pastor Scott got up and pulled a book off a shelf. He flipped through it and handed it, opened, to Martyr. “This is a pretty easy-to-understand Bible. Go ahead and read some. Let me know if you have any questions. I recommend starting here, in J
ohn.”

  “You don’t start at the beginning?”

  “You can if you want, but John is probably going to give you some of the answers you’re looking for. The red letters, those are God’s words.”

  Red letters intrigued Martyr, but if Abby was wrong, and this God was not Martyr’s creator, then he was wasting his time looking for answers here. “Abby told me that God made me. How do I know if that’s true?”

  “The only way to know for sure is to believe it. Listen, the Bible says in Jeremiah 1:5, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.’ God made every human on the planet. He loves each one dearly. He created you for a purpose. And if you believe that, it can change your life.”

  Martyr perked up at the word purpose. “I want to believe so I can discover my true purpose before it is too late.”

  “Marty,” Pastor Scott began, “why are you in such a hurry?”

  “Because I will expire in fifteen days.”

  The house phone rang. The second ring cut off midway.

  Dad yelled from downstairs, “Abby! Phone!”

  She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Scott. Abby, I need you to come back over here. I’m a little worried about JD. I mean, uh … Marty. How much do you know about him?”

  Abby winced. “Is he trying on your clothes?”

  “He seems mentally ill, maybe even suicidal.”

  “Oh, he’s not suicidal, he just thinks he is going to die on his eighteenth birthday. Personally, I don’t think it will happen. Dad doesn’t either. But you never can tell with scientists and their experiments.”

  “Abby, please. You’re not making a lot of sense.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Would it help to talk to my dad? I’ll get him. Dad!” Abby carried the phone down to the kitchen. “Dad, will you explain to Pastor Scott about Marty? I don’t think he believes me about the clones. He thinks Marty is mentally ill.”