Death of a Clone

by Alex Thomson

“Of course. Heard you heading up the spine, so I followed to keep an eye on you. Then I was listening by the door while you thrashed it out with Ortiz. Well played, by the way.”

  “Yeah. Any time. You too—thanks for saving my life and everything.”

  “So.”

  “So. Pretty crazy, right? Now what?”

  Ortiz is stirring. A little bit of spittle forms at his lips.

  “I think you need to leave for a few minutes,” he says, fingering the spike. “We can’t let him live, Leila.”

  “All right,” I say. I reach out and pluck the taser from his hands. “Mr Lee’s mine, though. And I don’t need any help with that.”

  “All right,” he says, after a pause. “Then we regroup in the Leisure cabin and decide what to do next. Okay?”

  I nod, stumble out, and abandon Mr Ortiz to his fate.

  19

  REVOLUTION

  WE SUIT UP in silence. Mr Lee is watching me, but I refuse to meet his eyes. In the corner of the airlock, a red light flashes lazily. I count the beats between the flashes. One… two… three… four—

  Flash.

  I fix my hood on, taking my time, letting Mr Lee sweat it out.

  I’d told him I’d found some new clues, in the tunnel where Lily died. He was wary, wanted to know more details, but I was firm, saying he needed to see the clues in situ. I suggested that I show Mr Ortiz, if he didn’t want to come, and that made him change his tune—soon he was following me to the airlock, no arguments.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  We step outside and board Banana, the last remaining jeep. I let him drive, out of spite. He doesn’t have much of a feel for the pedals, and Banana jerks back and forth as we make our way to the East tunnel complex. He’s gripping the wheel tight, as if he could snap it. His channel patches into mine.

  “Why don’t you tell me what these clues are?” he says. “Better than trying to have a conversation at the bottom of a mineshaft.”

  “I’d prefer to do it my way, Mr Lee,” I say. “Trust me.”

  “I do trust you, but there’s no need to be theatrical, Leila.”

  “Mmm.”

  “You’re not trying to do a Poirot, are you?” he says, trying and failing to inject a light-hearted note into his voice.

  “It’s Marple,” I say. “I prefer Marple. Just be patient. All will be revealed when we get inside the tunnel.”

  I’m trying to think of all the ramifications of what Mr Ortiz told me, but I don’t know where to start. As we pass the rim of a crater, it suddenly hits me that I’m old. I’m not a child, fresh out the vats, I’m forty-five, I’m ancient. All those orbits, plugging away in the depots… Earth! How many more cycles have I got left in me, anyway?

  As I gaze out of Banana, peering up at the stars, the sheer bloody unfairness of it all hits me. I mean, really, it’s too much. All those millions of people on Earth, they all knew, they all allowed this to happen. Somehow, I could have accepted it if they’d dropped the pretence, if it was admitted that this was a slave colony. But the bloody bastards didn’t even have the courage to do that. So they set up this farce. Why? To protect our feelings, or theirs?

  We hit a bump and both jerk forward. Mr Lee is tapping his foot, shaking it practically. He patches in and mutters something about dust and visibility.

  As for you, I think. As for you, you lying worm….

  For a moment, I consider how satisfying it would be to barge him, grab the wheel, and send the jeep tumbling down the dunes. The urge is almost overwhelming; I have to fight it down. At least with the people of Earth, all they did was close their eyes and turn away. Easy enough to do, when you can’t see the person you’ve condemned to a life of servitude. But Mr Lee—

  How many times has he looked me in the eyes and lied to my face? He was the only person on Hell I really trusted, apart from Lily. When he lied about death row, I was angry, but I kind of understood—it was his story, his life. But this—this is on a whole new level. Every time he spoke to me, it was a lie; every time he kept silent, it was a betrayal. And then there are the Overseers before him, who I can’t remember. Every single one—thirty-seven years of lies.

  He’s the worst of them all, though—with his smiles, and his poxy books, and his gentle, avuncular manner—like he’s not an Overseer, we’re friends really, like this whole business of ore mining demeaned us both. And the whole time, he was laughing at me. At least Mr Ortiz and Mr Reynolds were honest about what they thought of us.

  I want to be sick. I want to replay every conversation I’ve ever had, everything I’ve ever seen. So many lies—his insinuations about Mr Fedorchuk and the Jays; the fantasies he painted for me about what life on Earth would be like. I want to go back and rip out every memory I’ve ever had of him—make it all un-happen.

  Mr Lee: sad face, comforting me after Lily’s funeral. Mr Lee: concerned face, advising me about my investigations and warning me about the Jays. Mr Lee: patient face, giving me a hand and packing ore in the depot. Good Earth, I want to smash something.

  You smiling sack of shit, I think. You poxing liar.

  And he will say it was to protect us, but the truth matters, it really does. The truth of what we’re doing here is all we have. Because once you pull away the curtain—the fantasy of vats and targets, the reward of a journey to Earth—once that is gone, the smallness of the truth, the banality of it, is just so pathetic that I feel my whole body shrinking in on itself. I mean, what are you left with, when that’s all gone? Twenty brothers and sisters, trudging to and from the mines, cycle after cycle, orbit after orbit. An eternity of swag piling up and up, filling the depot. No wonder the Overseers despise us.

  WE REACH THE tunnel complex, and Mr Lee turns off the engine. “Lead on, then, Leila,” he says.

  We climb out, and I pass the spot where I saw Jolly cradling my sister’s body. I head for the tunnel entrance, with a last look up at the watery sun, now at its zenith. Then into the mineshaft where Jolly said he found her body. Eighteen cycles ago, she came here with her killer.

  I step back and gesture to Mr Lee. “You go first,” I say, patching in. “Keep going until I tell you to stop.”

  He stops for a second. Darts a quick look at me, then presses forward. “The anticipation is killing me, Leila.”

  After a few steps, he has to crouch down, and I follow him in. He leaves the trolley for me, and shuffles along at a slow pace. I take the rope and pull myself along, pausing occasionally to let him get ahead. Soon he’s on his hands and knees, crawling along down the track. After a hundred feet I call a halt.

  “Far enough,” I say.

  “Where’s the evidence, Leila? I don’t see anything.”

  “Never mind the evidence.”

  Something in my voice makes him look over his shoulder. I’m pointing the taser at him, at the small of his back.

  “What’s going on, Leila?” he says, with a kind of forced, strained calm.

  “I had a little chat with Mr Ortiz,” I say. “He told me everything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He starts to manoeuvre around to face me, and I bark, “Hold it!” He freezes, and slowly turns back to the depths of the mineshaft.

  “How we’ve been here rather longer than the six years we believed. How there’s going to be no collection for us, not ever. How Spiral Systems shipped us here from Earth, for a lifetime of slavery. How you’ve been lying to us every minute of every cycle that I’ve known you.”

  To his credit, he does not try to bluster. “Okay,” he says.

  “Okay? Okay? That’s your response?”

  “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “No moral relativism? No shifting the blame onto Spiral? No, um, apology?”

  “I’m truly sorry. Truly. But I don’t think an apology is the slightest bit good enough. My only defence—what would you have me do differently? Should I have told you the truth?”

  “You said something similar when I found out about your pa
st,” I say bitterly.

  “And I was right, just like I am now. What good would it have done?”

  “I’m not going to argue the rights and wrongs of that. What I’ve brought you here for is Lily.”

  “Lily?”

  “You killed her, didn’t you? She was close to figuring it all out. This whole sordid little conspiracy. And she came to you with questions, because she trusted you. But you couldn’t let her find out, could you? You had to return to Earth. Had to see your family again. So, Lily had to be silenced.”

  Over the channel, I can hear Mr Lee’s long, tired sigh.

  “Leila…”

  “Andrew saw you outside the tunnels. A grey-stripe suit. I thought it was Mr Reynolds, but the Bees were with him the whole time. How did you get her there in the jeep? Did you tell her you were going to show her something that would explain away all her concerns?

  “Regardless, after you’d killed her, and hidden her body deep in the tunnel, you drove straight to the depot, to try and find the evidence she had told you about. I’m right, aren’t I? Because there were only two people she might have spoken to about her three clues—you, or Juan. But Juan was with me in East 3. He could have killed Lily, but he didn’t have a jeep to take to the depot.”

  “It was an act of mercy.”

  “Mercy? Really?”

  “Look at your lives, Leila!” he spits, making me jump. “You’re stuck in a loop you can’t escape. But at least you’re not forced to acknowledgeit. What good does it do to know the truth?”

  “I—”

  “Lily guessed, but I saved her from finding out the whole, grim reality. That’s what I did, it was the very least I could do.”

  Tears are welling up, I can hardly see through the visor.

  “And me too? That’s why you sabotaged my jeep? Another ‘act of mercy’?”

  “It was just supposed to give you a scare!” he shouts. “To warn you off! Please, Leila, try to understand!”

  “You’re running out of lies. You know I’m too stubborn to be warned off.”

  “Ortiz should never have told you. Whatever you did to him, he should never have told you.”

  “How did you kill her? Did you look her in the eye when you did it? Did you?”

  “I made it as quick and painless as I could.”

  “You’ve lied to me this whole time, you’re lying to me now. An act of mercy! You killed her ’cause you were scared! You just wanted to get home!”

  “I still have a life! You want me to throw mine away, because you can’t have one?”

  I shudder. A horrible thought strikes me. The four other Ells I dreamed of: Lolita, Lilith, Lara, Lucia. They were real—it wasn’t a fantasy.

  And with complete certainty, I know they didn’t die up in a spaceship, but that we were once a Family of Ells on Hell, all six of us. Half-formed pictures now, echoes of my last conversation with Lily in our cabin. Something stinks here, Lei, you know it does.

  Images, sounds, fill my brain. I have a clear memory of four Ells in our cabin, whispering, something that didn’t make sense—one of my sisters saying she was going to… investigate. And another image that flashes past: Mr Lee, me and another Ell, but it’s not Lily, I could swear to that. There was a third Ell here, then, alive as recently as the last orbit.

  “Has this happened before?” I ask him. “Did you kill my other sisters when they started to investigate? Am I just the last one to figure it out?”

  “No! I swear to you! There were just two of you when I arrived—I don’t know what happened to the other four.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Leila, I’m not a killer like Ortiz. Lily was… I panicked. I couldn’t persuade her to show me the clues she had found, or tell me where she had hidden them—we started to argue. I think she realised that I was part of the conspiracy, that she shouldn’t have confided in me. She started to head back to the jeep. Everything was going to come crashing down—I panicked.”

  “I thought it was an act of mercy.”

  His sobs come crackling over the channel. “I’m sorry, Leila. I never—”

  I cut off the patch. I don’t want to hear any more. I wasn’t sure up ’til this moment, what I was going to do. But this is the final betrayal. It’s not enough that they imprisoned us here on this lump of rock, not enough that they set us to an unwitting lifetime of labour. They had to kill all five of my sisters, because the Ells couldn’t help investigating, they’d worked out something was rotten on Hell. And so, in the horrible words of Mr Ortiz, our production line was ‘discontinued.’ No need to bring out replacements for the pesky Ells who were stirring the pot, and sticking their noses into the inner workings of Hell. Just kill them off, one by one.

  And that is too much to bear.

  I pull the trigger on the taser and it whips out with a flash, takings him in the back. His legs spasm and he collapses to the floor, shuddering. Then I take a sharp lump of swag, and smash it down on the tube connecting his oxygen supply. I twist it, making a small rip, which thrashes as the oxygen escapes. I don’t know how long he’ll be unconscious for, but he won’t have enough oxygen to walk all the way back to base.

  Let him spend his last minutes knowing he’s about to die. It’s more than he gave Lily.

  I turn around awkwardly in the mineshaft and a shower of ore dust falls on my hood. I shuffle out, suddenly exhausted. The Overseers are gone. The revolution has happened, almost by accident.

  The Ays won’t like it—but they’ll have to go along with it, once they see where the wind has blown. I straighten up as the tunnel opens to the mouth of the warren—the ‘lobby,’ as Mr Lee used to call it. Sunlight is streaming in, reflecting off the quartz, and it’s sparkling, so damn beautiful that for a moment I forget about everything.

  EPILOGUE

  A NEW DAWN

  MY EYES SNAP open. For a few seconds, I have that thrilling, terrifying sensation of not knowing where I am or who I am. Then I turn my head to the side, see Jeremy, asleep, and I remember again.

  I have a work shift commencing in forty-seven minutes. We are mining as much swag as we can, but it is a struggle. With only ten of us left on the asteroid, ore yield is grinding to a halt. Four Bees, three Jays, two Ays. And one Ell, me, poor little Leila. It would help, of course, to have the Overseers back, but they are buried deep in the bowels of Hell. I can remember their names—Ortiz, Lee, Reynolds, Fedorchuk—but not their faces. Mr Lee—sometimes I feel like I can picture him, but then the image will drift away.

  The Jays have taken on most the Overseers’ responsibilities, and keep all their papers locked in one of the cabinets. Joseph manages the Rota as best he can. The two remaining Ays, Andrew and Aaron, have to endure a punishing schedule, and whenever I see them, they are lying exhausted in one of the Communal cabins—broken men.

  I get to my feet, carefully moving Jeremy’s arm, not waking him. I walk to the mirror. A lined face stares back at me, crow’s feet crawling out the eye sockets. I think of my five sisters—Lily and the other four. It seems unfair that our Family was the only one to be reduced like this, but I get on with it. I have Jeremy to keep me company, at least. The hardest thing for me to bear is surviving without books. The reader broke many cycles ago—the screen just gave up, now a dead, grey rectangle. And with that, my portal to Earth disappeared too—all those stories, all those lives. I can still recall traces of some of the more memorable stories. And Then There Were None, with the ten strangers stuck on an island: that strikes a chord. Or Brave New World, with its alphas and betas and gammas—all written over a century before the Families existed.

  Sometimes, I’ll whisper the stories to myself in my cot, or what I can remember of them, when Jeremy’s asleep.

  I wash my face and get dressed. Everything seems slower these cycles, like moving through treacle. And my body aches all over, surely more than it used to. I can feel twinges in both knees, a dull ache in my back, a constant headache, a pain in my gut, a long scar down my
leg that flares up at night and stops me from sleeping. Jeremy occasionally lets me take the pills, and they help to dull the pain.

  In his cot, he stirs. He finds this cabin too big and empty, and it disrupts his sleep. It was an Overseer’s cabin once—Mr Ortiz, I think, though I can’t be sure. Sometimes he’ll retreat to the old Jays’ cabin, but he always ends up coming back. He won the cabin in a chess game, and I think he’s determined to enjoy his prize.

  I DRIVE TO the Depots in Cabbage, alone. Everywhere always seems so quiet and empty now, with just ten of us. I mean, I’m not saying we were permanently bumping into each other before, or having traffic jams—but you’d see someone in the spine and say hello, or walk into the Community cabin and have a chat with a couple of brothers. Even in the tunnels, just having another body a few hundred metres away would be a comfort. Whereas now, driving across the plains of Hell, or loading swag onto a trailer, you feel like you could be the last person left in the universe.

  I climb out of the jeep, wander into the ore depot. It’s a dismal sight. Crates of swag are dumped in a sprawling mess, with black rocks spilling out from every one. The Ays would be horrified if they saw. There’s no order, none of the regularity I see in the rows of crates towards the back of the depot. Really, I have no idea what I’m doing here. What I wouldn’t give to have Mr Lee back, or a couple of my sisters. Together, we’d get things back on track.

  As I walk up the rows, I realise tears are springing to my eyes, and I’m not sure why.

  ACCORDING TO JOLLY, the Collection Ship is due to arrive in around 500 cycles. I just hope we’ll have collected enough.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MANY THANKS TO beta readers Chris Dugan and Ben Geiger, to David Moore and all the team at Abaddon, and to Jennie Goloboy for taking a chance on me and being such a splendid agent. Also, there would be no book without my wife Nicki, who has encouraged my writing for so long, or my Mum and Dad, who tolerated my obsessive reading habits (especially of Agatha Christie) when I was a boy.