Replica

by Jenna Black

  If he thought running back out there and screaming for the security officers to stop would help the situation, he might have tried it. But somehow when that single egg was tossed, both the crowd and the security officers holding them back had lost their powers of reason and self-control. Nate had never seen anything like that before, and he hoped he never saw it again.

  His security escorts waited until Nate and Fischer were safely in the elevator before walking away. Nate supposed they were going to join the fray, assuming it wasn’t all over by now. He hoped no one had been seriously hurt.

  To his surprise, Nate found that there was a slight tremor in his hands as he straightened his jacket and tugged on his cuffs. All that hatred, all that violence, was because of him. Because he wasn’t really Nate Hayes, no matter how much he felt like it. He was a Replica, an artificial human being. How could he blame the people of Paxco for being horrified at what he was?

  Nadia accepted him because she knew him, because she could talk to him and see that he was still the same person. She could be lulled into almost believing he was the original Nate Hayes because the illusion of the Replica was so powerful. The same could not be said of the faceless mob. Maybe his father wasn’t just being an opportunistic bastard when he wanted Nate to do this commercial. Maybe it was damned important that the public be more exposed to him so they could come to accept him.

  “Seems hypocritical to me,” said Fischer, staring up at the numbers above the door instead of looking at Nate, “that people who depend on Paxco for their livelihoods are out there demonstrating against Replicas. Ungrateful bastards have to know Replica technology is our number one source of revenue. Do away with Replicas, most of them would be out of a job, maybe even out on the street.”

  Nate rarely paid much attention to his bodyguards unless they did something to annoy him. Hell, he didn’t even know what Fischer’s first name was, had never bothered to ask. It humbled him that the usually taciturn man was trying to take some of the sting out of what had just happened.

  “Yeah,” Nate said, though he wasn’t sure he agreed with Fischer’s point. Yes, the Replica technology was an enormous revenue stream and provided thousands upon thousands of people with jobs and salaries and homes. But it was a very unsettling technology, and the morality of its use was far from clear even in his own mind. But if Fischer was going to be nice to him …

  Nate cleared his throat. “Look, I should have just let you get me out of there without throwing a tantrum like I did. Sorry I was a dick.”

  Fischer kept looking at the lighted numbers. “It’s all right. I’m used to it.”

  He said it completely deadpan, not a hint of amusement in his eyes or voice, but since Nate was 99 percent sure he was kidding, he laughed. Which his body instantly told him was a bad idea.

  Fischer finally tore his eyes away from the floor numbers. “Are you hurt, sir?” he asked in concern.

  “I’m fine,” Nate assured him, forcing a tight smile as he waited for the pain to fade.

  Fischer looked skeptical, but the elevator had arrived at their floor, and the doors slid open.

  * * *

  Nadia drifted slowly back to her chair, staring at Dante—or perhaps she needed to mentally start calling him Sandoval—reshuffling the puzzle pieces in her head and trying to put them together. She wasn’t having a whole lot of success.

  “You work for Dirk Mosely,” she said, speaking slowly as she eased into her chair. “You carried a message to me from Kurt Bishop. And Bishop isn’t rotting at Riker’s Island as we speak?”

  Dante shook his head. “Not unless something drastic has happened that I haven’t heard about.” He crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture that looked almost defensive. Nadia hadn’t unraveled the riddle yet, but one thing she felt certain of: Dante was not supposed to be telling her any of this.

  Unfortunately, now that he’d dropped his bombshell, he seemed reluctant to volunteer any more information. However, Nadia had no qualms about dragging it out of him. She wanted to spit out questions in rapid fire and shake the answers out of him, but she forced herself to take it slow. The last thing she wanted was to make him clam up again.

  “Okay, fine,” she said as she settled on question number one. “If you’ve been in contact with Bishop, then why haven’t you told your boss?”

  Dante reached up and rubbed at his eyes. “I can’t believe I opened my mouth.”

  “Well, you did.” Nadia couldn’t make sense of the emotions roiling through her any more than she could make sense of the puzzle Dante presented. She was excited at the prospect of finally getting some answers, and yet there was also a good deal of dread about what those answers might be. And then there was the frightened, cautious, maybe even paranoid part of her that whispered this all had to be some kind of an elaborate trap, set by Mosely to trick her into revealing every scrap of information she’d kept secret.

  Dante huffed out a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. “Right. But I need you to promise me something first.”

  She understood his caution, but it was far too late for it. “We both know I’d promise you my firstborn child if that’s what it took to get you talking right now. We also both know I’d never make good on it. You’ve opened the barn door, and you look pretty silly chasing after the galloping horse.”

  Even in the midst of his obvious turmoil, Dante managed a half smile. “You have a way with words.”

  “I’m glad I amuse you. Now, tell me what’s going on!”

  The hint of humor vanished from Dante’s face. “You’re right and I can’t hold you to any promises, but I’m begging you not to repeat anything I’m about to tell you. Lives are at stake, my own and other people’s.”

  Lives had been at stake from the moment someone had stabbed the Chairman Heir to death, and Nadia had been shouldering the responsibility to protect them so long it felt almost natural now. “I understand. Now, who are you, really?”

  With the grim resolve of a soldier marching into battle, Dante sat up straight in his chair and met her eyes. “My real name is Dante Sandoval. My parents are both sanitation workers.” He made a face of disgust. “One step removed from Basement-dwellers. We’re technically Employees, but we’re so low Mosely didn’t want anyone to be able to look into my background. I’m not respectable enough to be a servant, you see, so he insisted I make up a new name for this assignment.”

  Nadia had no trouble hearing the bitterness in his voice, and now she understood a little better why he’d seemed so touchy about her status as an Executive.

  “I’m sorry if I’m being insensitive,” she said, “but I’m not that interested in your background right now. I want to know—”

  “I know what you want to know,” he interrupted, and she saw a renewed flash of anger in his eyes. Anger that he visibly tamed, reeling himself back in as she suspected he’d done a thousand times in his life. Kind of like how she’d held in all her anger with Nate for so long. The problem with holding it in so fiercely was that it tended to get out at the most inconvenient times.

  “I guess my background isn’t that important,” he conceded. “I was just trying to explain that people like me, people like my family, have shitty, miserable lives working shitty, miserable jobs without ever being able to hope for better, and people like you have everything handed to you on a silver platter just because you happened to be born an Executive.”

  No doubt about it, Dante was harboring one hell of a lot of class anger. Nadia would have liked to point out to him that her life wasn’t as much of a picnic as he might think, but entering into a debate about the class system wouldn’t get her the information she wanted, so she bit her tongue.

  “Eventually,” Dante continued, “it gets to a point where the downtrodden have had enough, and they band together. It’s happened a million times over the course of history, and it’s happening now.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means there’s a resistance movement
forming in Paxco.”

  Nadia frowned at him. “Am I supposed to be shocked? Someone’s protesting something practically every day.” Nadia had the uneasy suspicion that if it weren’t for Mosely and his security goons, there would be a lot more protests, and they’d be a lot bigger and louder. The government wouldn’t be so gauche as to publicly quash protests, but they would make sure such protests were a controlled burn, not something that could catch on and spread.

  “I don’t mean the kind of resistance movement that involves marching around carrying signs. I mean the kind that’s actually going to do something about the injustice.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” Nadia asked. She wanted to know more, but she had to keep the conversation focused. She and Dante had had the schoolroom to themselves for quite some time now, but there was no guarantee someone wouldn’t come looking for one or both of them at any moment.

  “I’m part of it. I’m here because I’m working a mission, trying to infiltrate Mosely’s spy network. It’ll probably take years before he’ll trust me with anything sensitive enough to be useful, but when he does, I’ll have the ammunition to help the resistance take down the entire Paxco security division.”

  Nadia might have stood up and cheered the vision, if she didn’t think that Dante’s resistance meant to take down more than just Paxco’s security division. She didn’t for a moment think that the class system was fair, nor was she blind to the massive corruption within the government of Paxco. The Chairman himself was about as corrupt an individual as she could imagine. But it sounded like the resistance movement had ambitions to start a revolution, and that wasn’t a pleasant prospect, either.

  “Bishop’s part of the resistance,” she said, the lightbulb suddenly going on above her head. “That’s why he didn’t flee Paxco when he had a chance. And that’s why you’re carrying messages for him.”

  Dante nodded. “The resistance is mostly Employees, but there’s a fair number of Basement-dwellers. I’ve heard we even have a few low-level Executives, though I don’t know who they are.”

  Now that she had more puzzle pieces, Nadia found it easier to put them together, though she didn’t much like the picture that was forming. Dante had been sent on a mission to infiltrate Mosely’s spy network. What were the odds that another member of the resistance would have found his way into the Chairman Heir’s household on the basis of pure chance?

  She tried to drive the thought from her head. She would worry about the twists and turns of Bishop’s motivations later. Right now, she had to concentrate on the fact that she was sitting face-to-face with someone who was capable of contacting him.

  Of course, Bishop had reached out to contact both her and Nate within the last twenty-four hours, and that contact had been far from friendly. He’d delivered the message that he didn’t want to be found with vicious conviction, and she wondered what she was doing, still trying to find him after all that he’d done. After all, he’d had Nate beaten last night, had hurt him body and soul.

  But in the end, none of that mattered. What mattered was that neither she nor Nate would be able to rest until they found out what had happened on the night of his murder, and there was only one person who could tell them.

  “I need you to take a message to Bishop,” she said.

  Dante looked at her as if she were insane. “You’re joking, right?”

  She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “He underestimated me, and he underestimated Nate. I told Nate the truth about the tracker this morning.” Her throat and chest tightened at the memory of the look in Nate’s eyes, but she tried to keep the pain from showing on her face. “I even showed him the note Bishop wrote me. He now knows for sure that Bishop is still in town, and he’s not going to stop looking for him.”

  “He has to stop,” Dante hissed, leaning forward as if his very intensity could convince her. “He almost led Mosely’s men right to him last night.”

  “I know,” Nadia said calmly. “That’s why Bishop would be much better off if he’d just bite the bullet and talk to Nate. The least he can do is tell Nate what happened on the night of the murder.”

  Dante shook his head. “Have you ever considered that there’s a reason he’s not telling?”

  “Maybe Bishop does have a good reason for everything he’s done,” Nadia said carefully. “But that doesn’t change anything. Nate isn’t going to stop looking for him. Not until he finds out what happened, at least.” Probably not even then, now that Nadia had helped convince him that Bishop still loved him. Perhaps that had been a mistake on her part, but it was too late to change it now. And Dante didn’t need to know just how personal Nate’s attachment to Bishop was. It was always possible that Dante knew the truth, but if he didn’t, she wasn’t going to be the one to reveal it.

  “If he keeps looking, he’s going to get himself killed again,” Dante said. “And he might get a whole lot of other people killed along the way. People who won’t come back from it.”

  “So tell Bishop to talk to him. Surely talking to him would be better than letting him keep stumbling around in the dark.”

  Dante groaned and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. “I am so sick of stubborn people!”

  “Just tell Bishop what I told you.” She didn’t have any more convincing arguments she could trot out, but then she probably didn’t need any. Bishop knew Nate too well. Once he realized the beating last night still hadn’t convinced Nate to stop looking, he’d know his only choice was to contact Nate.

  Dante let out a resigned sigh and sat up. “All right. I’ll tell him.”

  “Can you also tell him…” Nadia swallowed hard, past the sudden lump in her throat. “Tell him I had no choice. About the tracker, I mean.”

  “I already told him that,” Dante said. “I know better than most what Mosely’s capable of.” He reached for her hand and gave it a firm squeeze.

  That simple touch felt better than it had any right to. She barely knew him, and he obviously had an enormous chip on his shoulder about Executive girls, but right now it seemed as if he was the only person in her life who was being nice to her and wasn’t making demands.

  “You told him, but he didn’t buy it,” she said. “If he weren’t so angry with me, he’d never have had you slip me the message. There was no point in it—except to let me know he knew about me. Not that I blame him.”

  Dante squeezed her hand again, showing no sign that he was planning to let go anytime soon. “He’s never had to go head-to-head with Mosely, so he doesn’t understand.” But I do, said the look in Dante’s eyes.

  Nadia nodded. It shouldn’t matter to her if Bishop thought badly of her. They had never liked each other anyway. But his was another name on the list of people she’d disappointed over the last week, and the weight of it all was getting to her.

  Still holding her hand, Dante moved his chair closer to hers until their knees were touching. He took her other hand and met her eyes. She was drowning in misery, but Dante’s hands were like a lifeline.

  “Don’t blame yourself for any of this sh— er, mess. Mosely strong-arms people for a living, and he has the weight of all of Paxco behind him. It wouldn’t have done anyone any good if you’d called his bluff, because we both know whatever he threatened you with, it wasn’t a bluff. Your choices sucked, and you took the lesser of two evils.”

  The warmth and earnestness of his expression was almost enough to make her cry. Why couldn’t Nate have looked at her like that? Why could someone who was practically a complete stranger understand and sympathize when her best and oldest friend couldn’t?

  “It’s not really Bishop’s hard feelings that are getting to you, is it?” Dante asked softly. “You said you told your boyfriend about the tracker. I don’t suppose he took it so well.”

  Grateful as she was for Dante’s kindness, she had no desire to talk to him about Nate. “I just wish none of this had happened.”

  He was still holding her hands, and one thumb b
rushed absently over her knuckles. She wasn’t sure if he even knew he’d done it, but the simple caress awakened a swarm of butterflies in her stomach.

  Not that he had meant it as a caress, of course, she told herself. He was being nice to her because she was in distress and she needed the hint of kindness. It wasn’t anything personal. He’d already made it quite clear how he felt about Executive girls in general. And the butterflies didn’t mean anything except that she was feeling lonely and vulnerable after her fight with Nate.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the schoolroom, and Dante hastily let go of her hands and rose from his chair. One moment, he was warm and friendly and … comfortable. The next, he was stiff and upright, playing the ill-fitting role of the dutiful servant.

  “Would you like another cup of tea before I clear the rest of the service?” he asked, standing at attention.

  The footsteps continued past the doorway and faded into the distance, but Dante didn’t relax his posture. It was no doubt best for both of them if he kept up his act at all times anyway. Mosely wouldn’t appreciate him giving comfort to the enemy.

  Already missing the precious few minutes of camaraderie they’d just shared, she rose to her feet.

  “Thank you, Dante,” she said, taking pleasure in knowing she was addressing him by first name like an equal and no one else would know it, “but I don’t need any more tea right now.”

  With a formal half bow, he turned away.

  * * *

  Inside Paxco Headquarters, life went on as if nothing had happened.

  Nate, still badly shaken, reported to the private studio where the commercial was to be shot, and it was every bit as awful as he’d anticipated. The script made him want to gag, and he could only imagine what kind of sappy “inspirational” music they’d be playing in the background. He couldn’t remember his lines to save his life. The crew kept moving him into position like he was a doll—heedless of his bruises, of course, because they didn’t know about them. The lights were hot enough to make him sweat and bright enough to fuel his headache indefinitely. Usually, he was good in front of the camera, but this time he flat-out sucked.