Beta

by Rachel Cohn

  “Sorry won’t bring Becky back,” I tell Alex. There’s nothing left to say on the subject; I’m done discussing it. I stand up in the boat, preparing to dive. “I’d like to go for a quick swim.”

  But Alex looks at the clouds forming in the sky and says, “Rain’s coming. But there’s a great swimming hole on that atoll over there.” He points to a small island about a quarter mile from our boat. “I’ll take you there tomorrow if it clears up.”

  “Can I dive there too?”

  “There are some elevated diving spots, yes. But maybe that’s not a good idea in your delicate condition, daredevil.” He says that last word with too much familiarity.

  “Daredevil? Was that what Zhara was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t call me that. And I am feeling more than well enough to dive again.”

  ALEX MEDITATES AT SUNSET EVERY NIGHT. It’s some Aquine thing. Reflecting on gratitude. Whatever. It’s no FantaSphere adventure.

  His absence allows me and M-X to share the evening by the campfire, talking. Here on Mine, M-X does not treat me as a companion, but as just a regular girl. Here on Mine, it does not matter if I go Awful. I am wild and free already here.

  “I would like to stay here,” I tell M-X.

  “Now that you are better?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “Impossible,” says M-X. “I heal, and I send away. It’s no fun for me having long-term guests.”

  “I don’t believe you. Everyone desires companionship.”

  “Not true. And if you’d witnessed the things I did in Dr. Lusardi’s infirmary, you’d prefer a lifetime of solitude after that too. Besides, you will have to leave with the Aquine soon. He has imprinted on you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  But I think I already know. You know you own me, Z. It’s starting to make sense.

  Aquine mate for life. Whatever happened to tear them apart, he is still bonded to Zhara. And by extension, then, to me. Whether I want that or not. Whether I desire Alex in return or not.

  “You are his mate,” M-X says. “He rescued you. He nursed you back to health.”

  “You said that you healed me.”

  “I gave you herbal remedies. He stayed by your side night and day, wiped your brow, held your hand, fed you broth, kept you clean. I think he even prayed for you.”

  If he thinks he owns me now, he’s got another think coming.

  I don’t want to be owned by anybody, ever again.

  M-X’s pet monkey climbs onto her shoulder, jumps to the banana tree above her, and pulls down a new bunch of bananas. He pulls a banana from the bunch and hands it to M-X for her to peel for him, but she returns the banana to the monkey’s hand. “Go over there and offer some food to our guest. She must be very hungry now that she’s feeling better.”

  The monkey steps over to me and offers me a banana. I take it, but do not peel it. The monkey regards me quizzically. So I peel the banana and offer it back to him. “Here, you have it.”

  M-X says, “You need to eat. While you convalesced, you were fed broth enhanced with healing herbs, but you must be yearning for richer food now.”

  “I am, but for some reason the smell of bananas makes me nauseous. I guess you don’t have a secret stash of chocolate somewhere here? Perhaps a strawberry shake?”

  “Your days of strawberry shakes are over. Not only are they not available here in the wild, but your body should not process Dr. Lusardi’s chemicals anymore either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you are pregnant.”

  I turn my head around, checking. Am I in a FantaSphere game? Or is this some type of sick joke on M-X’s part?

  “Not possible,” I finally say. “Replicants cannot replicate.”

  “That’s what we thought. Until now.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I am a Healer. I know. And your blood sample confirmed my suspicion.”

  “I refuse.” My hands press into my belly. I feel nothing. “There is a thing inside me? I want it gone.” The very thought of my body producing a new being is repulsive to me. I’ve barely started my own life. If indeed there is a new life growing in my body, it was conceived in violence, and it was not meant to be. This shouldn’t even be possible. So many lies these humans have fed me.

  This is so unfair! I want to scream.

  M-X says, “That ‘thing’ is life, and it is just as much a fighter as you, apparently. You must respect it. If this is possible for you, perhaps it is possible for the rest of our kind. You are hope.”

  “I took a life. I am not worthy of being a symbol of freedom and hope. I am a coward.”

  “If that were true, I would not have bothered trying to heal you.”

  I protest! “I can’t have a baby. I don’t know even know how to be a person yet. Will you help it?” I ask her. “If it is emerged.”

  “Born,” she corrects me. “It will be born. Not emerged.”

  “If it is born,” I say. The level of desperation and fear I suddenly feel is as shocking as the news that my body, which was not supposed to be able to reproduce, can indeed reproduce. This news is more awful than losing Tahir, than learning of our imminent Awfuls. “Will you take care of it?” I beseech M-X. “I cannot. I do not want it.”

  “You do not know what you want. You’ve spent your short life being brainwashed to believe you’re not supposed to even have wants. You can’t make this decision now about what grows inside you. It’s too early on.”

  “I can!” I assert.

  I can’t.

  “Help me get rid of it,” I plead with M-X.

  “I have promised the Aquine I won’t, in exchange for his taking you away now that you are healed. Aquine believe in the sanctity of life. He will take you as his mate now. He will love and raise your child as his.”

  “That’s absurd! I do not ask that of him!”

  “You don’t have to. It’s his biological imperative. He can’t not do that, with his mate. Your First was his mate, regardless of whether he and she were old enough or ready to make that bond. It happened. And Aquine mate for life. Which means you are his mate now, because she once was.”

  I may as well be living back at Governor’s House. I am given no choice about where I would like to go, or how. I am just told. More and more, I understand why human teenagers become rebellious. It must be so they can take control of their own lives.

  What control could I possibly take for myself?

  I am a pregnant, teenaged Beta clone who has murdered the son of the chief executive lording over an island owned by the world’s richest people. I have no education, no wealth, no resources. A choice in my own destiny is not really an option right now. I am obliged to go along with anyone who can help me survive this next stage of my life.

  THE OCEAN STORMS OUTSIDE IO’S RING ARE particularly harsh; they’re what caused First Tahir to lose his life. All of that energy used within the ring has made the ocean beyond Io’s violet waters more and more unstable. There’s a reason only random Defects and pirates try to traverse it.

  I dream about this violent, nonviolet ocean that night, as a loud thunderstorm passes over our jungle fortress, dripping rain onto my body through the holes in the thatched hut’s roof, filling my heart with terror with each bolt of lightning and crack of thunder.

  In my dream, I have gone fishing with Alex.

  As we set sail, I think, Humans amaze me. They have created the technology to replicate themselves, and the technology to craft eco-bubble paradise islands in the middle of nowhere serviced by their manufactured clones. They have built cities, destroyed cities, and built cities anew. They have gone to space and constructed colonies light-years away from their beloved Earth. And yet, for all their technical prowess, there are those among them who still travel via…inflatable boat?

  Seriously? I shout to Alex over the roar of the ocean’s waves. An inflatable boat?

  This boat was all that was available from the Rave Caves, he re
plies. They are not exactly teeming with supplies there. It was either this boat, or swim.

  The sky turns a dark gray as fog wraps around the boat. Quickly, visibility declines to nil. When we left the island of Mine, the sky was clear and the sea calm. He won’t admit it aloud, but I know. We are lost. The churning sea has tossed us off course. The ocean must be punishing me for what I did to Ivan. The sky cracks open in thunderous fury, sending a bolt of lightning directly to the boat’s hull. As the boat starts to deflate, the Aquine says, Looks like it’s a swim after all.

  The water is cold and bitter, furious. It wants to swallow us whole. Waves pound us, the current batters us, yet we manage to swim.

  Stay close! Alex shouts at me. We just have to make it to the atoll.

  He need not instruct me. My body knows just what to do. It has done this before.

  This is how Zhara died.

  I don’t know if it’s because of the lightning strike, the proximity to her mighty love man, or because I am just the most utterly defective Defect Beta, but here in my own dream, Z’s visions return. I’m grateful for the vision, actually—seeing what she experienced allows me to separate myself from my nightmare’s impossible swim through the stormy sea.

  The previous visions I borrowed from her provided glimpses only of him. Beneath the water, he beckoned and enticed, a siren call. You know you own me, Z, Alex would say. It’s Zhara’s voice I hear now, for the first time. It’s the same voice as mine, but harder, angrier. She was very bossy.

  Woo-hoo! Death party! she shouts. I see the waves battering the dinghy she is on. I see two other people on the boat with her, a male and a female, perhaps around the same age as she, but their faces are blurry. I can’t see them. I can only sense their fear and panic in direct conflict with the serene relaxation coursing through their veins. Zhara and her friends had gone on an unauthorized excursion away from their school camping trip. They wanted to sit on the ocean and do some ’raxia and swim as close to Io’s ring as they could get. They never even got close before the storm set in. Quickly their ’raxia dreamscape turned into their ’raxia nightmare. To survive, they had to abandon ship. But the drug they’d taken worked directly against them, sapping them of the focus and strength they needed in the moment of crisis.

  At least we’ll die happy, Zhara thought.

  Even she didn’t believe it.

  She doubted she was strong enough for this swim. Persistent, nagging doubts were what crippled her strength throughout her life. I’m not good enough, not strong enough. I’m not worthy. But she was.

  It was the ’raxia that killed her, not the stormy swim. She took the ’raxia to feel ease, to feel something other than the pain that had welled so big in her heart that she wanted to die rather than experience one more day of such heartache, a hurt so big it had killed her competitive focus and cost her a place on the Olympic diving team. She’d discovered that doing ’raxia made the pain go away. But this time, the ’raxia made her too easeful to swim. Sober, she could have survived the storm. But in this moment of crisis, not only would she not make it, she’d be taking her friends down with her. They hadn’t been keen on leaving their school group. But she’d begged. Teased. Gotten her way as always by promising an epic good time and an adventure to brag about to the group later, once they returned to the camping site.

  Her nightmare is my nightmare. I struggle to swim through the churning waters, fighting for survival, just as she did. I see clearly what happened to Zhara. She drowned. She went down not for lack of strength, but because her heart simply stopped. OD’d. She wanted so badly to stop her heart from hurting. The ’raxia allowed her heart to comply.

  AFTER MY NIGHT’S BATTERED SLEEP, THE morning sun beams bright and peaceful, as if the sky had never unleashed hell the night before.

  “You promised me a swim,” I tell Alex the next morning, when I find him clearing the brush of downed branches from the night’s storm. “I want a nice, refreshing swim. In calm water.”

  He drops the downed tree he’d been carrying away. “Let’s go,” says Alex. “I’m always available for a swim.”

  We take the canoe to the nearby atoll he pointed out yesterday. It’s a coral-reefed island comprising a few miles total of dry land with beach and trees, encircling a central water source. On a bright, warm and sunny day like today, without a cloud in the sky, while dolphins swim around the atoll, green turtles waddle across the sand, and seabirds fly above us, humans might consider this stretch of beach some kind of paradise.

  Zhara would have loved to be stranded on a deserted island with Alexander Blackburn. She might have called the experience a honeymoon. I think of it as yet another curiosity I must experience until I can ultimately be reunited with Tahir.

  A pregnant Beta can dream, right?

  Alexander and I are not the first to discover this island. Others have been here before us and scattered their relics throughout the island. They’ve carved their names into cactus flowers. Amber Pierre. Jake + Nicholas. Alone with God and turtles, Ezekiel. They’ve left pieces of clothing—T-shirts and swimsuits—hanging from tree branches.

  Alex leads me to a spot in the middle of the atoll where emerald-green trees encircle a perfect blue-water lagoon lined in pink sand. Paradise, for real. Somehow, Alex thinks I need help with this paradise. Ha! Paradise might be the only terrain I am educated to navigate. He tries to take my hand, to steady my steps into the warm water, as if I am fragile. I pull my hand away from him.

  “I am sixteen,” I tell Alexander. “I know how to take care of myself.”

  “You are the equivalent of seventeen,” Alexander says. “Zhara’s birthday was last month.”

  I do not really know what to say to him. There is so much to ask him, but it’s hard to focus when every time he looks at me, I know he is seeing her. He sees my vining and my fuchsia eyes, and I am sure he mourns. When I look at him, wearing only black swim trunks on his extremely muscled body, I see his turquoise eyes and the wisps of sun-kissed blond hair trailing around his face, and all I can think is, You did it with her. You did it with Other Me.

  I cannot deny: it is a thing of utter beauty to watch Alex swim.

  He doesn’t just swim in the water; it’s like he dances in it. His strokes, so powerful, are so graceful at the same time; he’s like a human fish who belongs in this beneficent tropical water.

  Perhaps he could teach the thing growing inside me to swim too. There’s not much regarding the human feeling termed happiness I will be able to offer this thing conceived in violence. But an Aquine could love and protect it as I never will be able to.

  I swim, following Alex to the middle of the lagoon where the water is deep, but our feet can still touch the bottom. I sink my feet into the warm sand of the seabed. The sun seems to shine directly around Alex, as if enshrouding him in a halo. “Tell me more about Zhara?” I request.

  We both begin to tread water, to keep moving while keeping conversation afloat. Alex says, “I first met her when I was sixteen and she was thirteen. I helped coach her diving team. Zhara was an amazing diver, training for the Olympics, but she had a lot of family trouble. She lost her mother very young, and was always fighting with her father. She could have been a true athletic champion but her basic nature—rebellious, tempestuous—was always at war with her physical gifts. Soon after she turned sixteen, I was nineteen, and had decided to join the military. In the water, we were mates, because there, Zhara was her best self. But on land, she was too much to handle. She was willful and selfish. She was constantly trying to provoke me into a relationship with her. I was very attracted to her, but I thought her not mature enough to mate with yet. But then, one night, soon before I left for the Base, I gave in to temptation. She dared me. And I could not resist her any longer. But the next morning, I broke it off. Told her it had been a mistake, that she was too young, too impetuous. I left for the Base, and from what I heard, she slowly spiraled out of control until that camping trip, when she disappeared.”

&nb
sp; “I thought Aquines imprinted for life. How could you have broken it off with her after?” I ask him. I have no reason to defend her, but I can hear that my tone sounds accusatory.

  Alex says, “Aquine engineering can have flaws, just as yours does. It’s not one-hundred-percent perfect. That is my shame, my failure. My rejection of Zhara after what we shared should not have been able to happen, but it did.” He stops treading long enough to stand again and observe me. “I acted callously, and in direct contradiction to the very nature of my people. I am not proud. And now, here you are.”

  Hey, sun, I want to say to the light’s halo effect framing his muscled body. Guess the Aquine’s not such an angel, after all.

  He is honest. I have to respect that about him.

  I swim around his standing figure, inspecting him the way the humans have so frequently inspected me. Appraising. His sculpted biceps and pectorals. The bronze of his tanned skin. His sun-kissed blond hair. His turquoise eyes, staring so intently into mine now. Wanting.

  Alex releases his feet from the water’s bottom and returns to swimming—this time, chasing me through the water. I laugh as he darts beneath and around me, and I do the same, resurrecting this aqua dance I know he did so many times with her.

  But I own this experience now. She is gone. He is mine for the taking, should I choose.

  Do I even have a choice?

  I let him catch me. We are breathless as his big arms encircle my body, and pull me close to him. I look up into the pools of his eyes, and I know. He is not Tahir. But he will do.

  With Alex, I can join the Army of Defects in the Rave Caves. Alex can train me so that I may be part of the Insurrection. Be the symbol of freedom they want me to be. They want to rise up; I want to rise up. I want purpose and direction, not a life cut short like Zhara’s. I want to finish what Xanthe and Miguel started.

  Alex will take care of the being growing inside me. He is not my love. But he is an excellent solution. My choice is decided. I will join his call to arms. His arms, so beefy and strong—are so very enticing. Not such a sacrifice to want to be wrapped inside them.