His lip curled. “Yeah? Well, what’d you ever do to him? I wasn’t the only target here.”
Althea pressed her lips together. She had no desire to talk with this boy about the Pairing. “He’s always had it in for you. You shouldn’t have attacked him that time in school.”
Jack laughed, his eyes cold. “I’ll be sure to make better choices next time someone’s trying to kill me.”
“Don’t be an idiot—he wouldn’t have killed you.”
“Why don’t you tell me how you react next time it’s thirty kids against you?”
“The Altheas weren’t part of what happened. We didn’t do anything.”
Jack leveled his gaze at her, his eyes clear and accusatory. “Exactly.”
Althea realized what he was saying and felt her face flush. “There was nothing we could do.”
“Listen, don’t talk to me. I don’t need you feeling sorry for me. Someone will figure out you’re gone soon enough. Just wait till they show up.”
She did feel bad for Jack, though why that should upset him was a mystery. She hadn’t been aware her feelings surrounding him were palpable to the others, but they must be if Carson had picked up on them so easily.
Althea had no idea how long it would take for someone to find her. The situation, it seemed, was perfect for her to be stuck all night. She’d felt her sisters’ irritation and anxiety earlier. They would probably conclude she was avoiding them after the disaster of the Pairing Ceremony. In any case, they’d be asleep by now. They wouldn’t be looking for her tonight.
Althea felt jumpy. Jack must have noticed how wary she was, because he rolled his eyes.
“Settle down, would you?” He collected his book from where he’d tossed it and then sat on the floor, leaving her the bed. “I’m going to read, which is what I was doing before your friend ruined my night.”
“He’s not my friend. And what am I supposed to do?”
“Take the bed. Sleep or something—I don’t care.”
“Don’t you sleep?”
“Of course I sleep. Do you think I don’t sleep? You people—you clones—why do you think I’m so different from you?”
Althea didn’t like the way he said clones, as if it was something bad.
“But you are different. Aren’t you?”
“No,” he said, though Althea suspected he had his own doubt on the issue. He settled into his book, disregarding her.
There was no way she was going to fall asleep while locked in a room with the human. She took a book from the bookshelf. Silas Marner, the cover read. It had a picture of a human man holding a yellow-haired child.
Jack gave an exasperated sigh.
“Not that one,” he said, snatching Silas Marner from her hand.
He handed her the book he’d been reading, The Call of the Wild. He went back to his spot after selecting a new book for himself, seemingly at random. He didn’t look at her again. Althea took the book and gingerly sat on the edge of the cot.
Jack spent the next long hours apparently content to turn pages, barely shifting position. Althea had a harder time. She started the book, but none of it made sense. It took ages before she realized that the story wasn’t even about a human. It was about a dog. But that was such nonsense. She wasn’t a complete idiot about human history; she knew back then they didn’t have dogs with human thoughts and feelings. The further she read, the worse it became, with page after page about clubs, fangs, blood, and wild animals in ice-frozen forests.
Of course the human read such things.
He was mastered, she read, by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars—
Flying? The dog was supposed to be flying?
“Oh!” she exclaimed, flinging the book to where it landed, for a third time, on the floor.
She was secretly pleased when this time Jack jumped at her outburst. He scowled at her, then fished the book from under the desk. It had landed face-down with the spine bent. He carefully flattened the pages and closed the book, then took up his own again.
She had no idea what time it was, but surely this interminable night was almost over. She couldn’t tolerate being stuck here anymore. If he liked reading that jumble of nonsense, he really was a strange creature.
“How can you read those things?” she said, gesturing to his books, horrified by the sheer number he’d collected. None of it made any sense. “Anyway, these books should be in the Tunnels. I don’t think you’re even supposed to have them.”
He shrugged, unconcerned.
“And you read them?”
“Of course. You read, don’t you?”
“All the Altheas do. But we read textbooks and essays. That thing.” She indicated the book he still held in his hand, pointing to it like she would to a spider. He held it like it was something precious. “It’s . . . awful.”
“Then don’t read it.”
“The Council said you were intelligent. You don’t actually believe a dog can tell a story, do you?”
She hated the way he shook his head, like she was the one being dimwitted.
“It’s not real, obviously. It’s made up.”
“It is made up. It’s lies. You’re reading about things that never actually happened.” Althea crossed her arms. “Seems like a waste of time to me.”
“Never mind,” he said, turning his back to her. “Stare at the wall the rest of the night for all I care.”
“It’s a better way to spend the night than reading about flying dogs.”
“They’re not—” he said, then shook his head in frustration and went back to his book. “Forget it.”
Althea must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, the lights flickered on in the lab and shocked exclamations came from outside the door. When she opened her eyes, the lab workers—mostly Nylas and Kates—were in the room and staring at her and Jack, aghast. She stood to find Samuel-299, the one on the Council, looking sternly at them both, as if she’d had something to do with this mess.
“Finally,” Jack muttered. He winced as he stood, sore from having sat on the hard floor all night. Without a glance at her or Samuel-299, he lay where she’d been on the cot, his back to the rest of the room. He was going to fall asleep, just like that. If he could dismiss her so easily after she’d been stuck there all night, she was capable of the same.
“Jack,” Samuel-299 said, glancing from Althea to him, “what’s going on? What’s an Althea doing here?”
Jack pretended he’d heard nothing, his eyes already closed.
Althea smoothed the wrinkles from her Pairing robe, inexplicably embarrassed to still be wearing them the morning after the ceremony.
“Althea,” Samuel-299 said. His eyes wandered to her wrist, which she moved to cover with her shawl. “Althea-310, is it? What happened? How’d you get in here?”
Carson-312 had been a jerk, but there was no point in telling on him to the Samuel. They weren’t children. She could handle the Carsons. “It was a dumb prank,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out. “Are you all right? It was a Pairing night. Did anything . . . happen?”
A muffled sound came from the cot, and Althea narrowed her eyes at Jack’s back. Did the Samuel actually think . . . and did the human just scoff? She turned to Samuel-299. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just ask that.”
Althea knew she shouldn’t talk this way to a Gen-290, but she was tired and achy. The Pairing, Hassan, Carson-312, the endless night—it was all too much. She was mad at the Carsons for being jerks and annoyed at Samuel-299 for his implication. She was mad at herself for the situation she was in. And everything about Jack was incredibly irritating.
“So you didn’t . . .” Samuel-299 said, his voice trailing off.
She looked at the Samuel
pointedly and smoothed her robe once more. “I’m tired, I just want to go home.” She nodded toward the bed. “If he wants to be alone so badly, let him.”
Samuel-299 rubbed his hand across his face and Althea noticed for the first time how haggard he looked. It set him apart from the other Gen-290s, who didn’t have those circles under their eyes.
“You didn’t get along, then?”
Jack’s back was turned. He hadn’t even pulled a blanket over himself. His knees were bent, and his arms folded across his chest. She knew his sleep was feigned and that he was listening to hear what she said. Well then, fine.
“The subject is not what I’d call well-socialized,” she said, immediately pleased with her turn of phrase. She usually wasn’t mean-spirited, but all night he hadn’t been the least bit friendly, or made any effort to put her at ease. He acted like she and the rest of Vispera—you people, he’d said—were beneath him. Beneath a human.
Jack hugged his arms a bit tighter across his chest, and something in that slight motion gave her a stab of guilt. After all, she’d probably made things harder for him, too.
Before she could say anything else, Samuel-299 stepped away from the door to let her through. He was too distracted to chastise her for talking to him so dismissively. It was just as well, given her mood, which was worsening by the second.
Turning back just before she left, she caught sight of Samuel-299 standing before the bed, his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, gazing at Jack’s still form. Samuel-299’s feelings were difficult to read, a map of conflicting emotions. He was angry, that was clear, probably with the Gen-310s for playing pranks that disrupted his lab and his project. He had the usual distraction of a Samuel working through a problem, methodical and rational. But he was also concerned, exasperated, and . . . What was it? Sad, she decided. He was so deeply sad. It took her breath away once she felt it, and then it was all she could feel. It consumed him, and in that moment, he was as foreign to her as Jack. He wasn’t one of the Samuels at all; she didn’t know who he was.
She shook her head. That was ridiculous. Of course he was a Samuel. She just needed sleep, and she’d messed up her brain trying to read that book about the dog. All she wanted was to curl up in bed back at the dorms, with her sisters’ beds lined up next to hers in a neat, orderly row.
She knew however, as the door closed behind her, that the Council had been right—the Samuel was too close to the project. Regardless of what the Council decided about their experiment, it was tearing the Samuel apart.
As she headed back to the dorms in the early mist of dawn, she stopped in front of Remembrance Hall and looked up at its white steeple. She didn’t know what would happen to Jack, and after that long night in the cell, she wasn’t sure she even cared. He didn’t seem to want anything to do with her or Vispera.
The morning light shone against the stained glass of the building, casting a brilliant red into the sky. Althea’s usual composure trickled back with the warmth of the light.
Samuel-299 could take care of himself, she told herself, and what happened to Jack was none of her concern.
Chapter Six
Jack
It’d been a month since the Pairing Ceremony that brought Carson-312 and Althea-310 to Jack’s room. He’d been spending his days in apprenticeship with Sam at the clinic. Once or twice he’d been allowed to assist Sam with a clone injury—a Viktor’s broken finger, a Kate who’d burned her arm. But the clones didn’t like him treating them, even if he was just assisting Sam, so mostly he did what the Gen-310 Samuels didn’t want to bother with, like rolling bandages, cataloguing pills, or organizing closets. In the evenings, he spent hours at the cottage reading through the books and papers left behind in his mother’s office, hoping to find some clue to why she’d raised him so he’d never be accepted by the other kids his age. He loved her, and he missed her, but what had she been thinking?
Where you came from is important, Jack, she’d said, bustling into the cottage with armloads of books and art she’d snuck out of the Tunnels. Nobody here understands how important it is. The Council doesn’t know; they don’t understand that we need you. Don’t give up. This is your past, your human past. These things are for you. They belong to you.
But she was the one who hadn’t understood. The human world wasn’t his past. He’d grown up in Vispera, in the same time as the clones. Anything in him that was human only made him more alone. His mother had told him not to give up, but she’d never told him why any of it mattered.
Then, two nights ago when the Gen-310s held their next Pairing, Jack found himself spending the whole night in his room, anxious and fidgeting. He kept watching his open door, waiting to see if anyone would come in through the lab to ogle the human.
He told himself he was relieved when nobody showed. If anyone did come, it would probably be another Carson anyway.
Not well-socialized, she’d said, sounding as arrogant as the Carsons. How exactly had she expected him to be? She’d acted like he was about to attack her. She was apparently too blind to realize that Carson-312 was the dangerous one that night. He’d seen Carson’s face. She was lucky Carson hadn’t done worse than lock her in the room for a night. Jack shook himself, blocking the images from his mind of what could have happened.
If she wasn’t smart enough to be afraid of Carson rather than Jack, why should he try to be sociable with her?
He pulled off his shirt and grasped the edge of the bathroom door frame. Hoisting himself up, he felt the release of built-up energy that came when he focused too much on things he couldn’t control. After a while, he stopped counting and simply took pleasure in the strain on his muscles and sweat in his eyes, the ache that let him know he would be too exhausted to let thoughts run unbidden through his head.
Caught up in his workout, he wasn’t aware of someone else in the room until he heard soft breathing behind him. He dropped to the floor, shaking out his hands.
Maybe it was the Althea, he thought, before dismissing the idea. She hated him. Why would she come back? But he didn’t dismiss the thought quickly enough to avoid the sting of disappointment when he turned to face one of the young Nylas standing in the doorway.
She gazed down the length of him, her eyes somehow both tranquil and intent. He knew what he must look like. He was sweating and breathing hard, his hair was plastered to his forehead, and he towered over her, his muscles and broad shoulders unnatural compared to the delicate Samuels and Hassans. The hair on his arms bristled when her gaze followed a path from his chest and down his stomach. His lip curled. Just another zoo animal. He drew a shirt on and stared back at her.
“You want something?” he said. “Or did you just come to stare?” He pressed his lips together, hating the resentment in his voice. Not well-socialized, he heard in his head.
“I . . .” She seemed at a loss for words. “I was talking to . . . my friend, Althea-310. She told me about you.”
“Yeah? I bet she had a lot of great things to say. Did she tell you how dangerous I am?”
“You are?” The Nyla’s eyes widened.
Jack shook his head, beyond exhausted by the way they all stared.
So the Althea had talked about him. What could she have possibly said? That he was an unfriendly brute who wasted his time on books that made her scream in revulsion?
Feeling like an idiot, he asked, “What’d she say?”
“She told me you were lonely.”
Cursing himself for asking the question, he shrugged his shoulders and made to turn away. He didn’t want their pity.
“I was also told you were smart, and could be funny and nice, and that you’re so angry all the time because you’re lonely. Is that true?”
Now she was making fun of him. He was supposed to believe Althea said all that?
“Did a Carson put you up to this?”
Her brow creased. “I haven’t talked to the Carsons.”
In a way, the Gen-310s were worse than the 290s and
280s. He never really knew why the older Gens did what they did with him, but he knew their day-to-day motives. They gave him tests to take—personality tests, intelligence tests, blood tests, and sometimes injections of medicines and drugs the nature of which they never explained. But the clones his age, they always seemed to be playing some game, and he was sick of not knowing the rules.
“So what, you thought you’d come over for tea?”
“No,” she said, her dark eyes blinking at him. “Not tea.” She closed the door behind her.
He backed away. “Okay.”
She approached him, smoothly confident. She circled his small space, her fingertips lightly tracing over his desk, his books, as she casually looked over the few things he owned.
“You don’t have very much,” she said.
“Listen, you shouldn’t be here.”
She peered at him over her shoulder, and her mouth softened into a smile. “So—are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Lonely.” She approached him with her hand raised, delicate and graceful, as if she was about to touch his face with the back of her fingers. A cup of pencils rattled on a shelf as he bumped against it.
“I don’t understand.” And then her fingers brushed his cheek. He swallowed as her touch slid down to the center of his chest. “What are you doing?”
She touched his lips with a fingertip, and her mouth formed into a shhh. With one hand, she picked up his, and with the other, she reached into the pocket of her robe. She withdrew a silver ribbon and draped it around his wrist and then over his palm and through his fingers, until it wrapped finally around the end of his thumb.
Jack knew what went on at the Pairing Ceremonies. He’d read about the customs in the Vispera histories and textbooks. And he’d read Sam’s books on physiology and psychology. He’d also read his own books, his human books, and those stories often dealt with things like romance, love, and sex. It was his books, not those of the clones, that told him what people did when they loved one another. Whatever he knew, his mind couldn’t form a coherent thought when she slipped the silver-gray robe from her shoulders and let it pool at her feet. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. He gave way until they lay back on the narrow bed.
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