Strange New World

by Rachel Vincent

  “Oh my God,” Waverly moans. “Am I in the catalog?”

  “Of course not,” Lorna says. “If you were, we would have known about this months ago.”

  Hennessy’s gaze flicks back to me and he looks…conflicted. “It sounds like Dahlia’s genome won’t mature until next year.”

  Not that there are any of us left to “mature.”

  “It was all a lie.” My voice sounds hollow. I’m looking right at Waverly, but what I see is every friend I’ve ever had. Everything I’ve ever known. “Graduating and working with my friends, for the glory of Lakeview. It was all a lie.” No matter how many times I say it, the grief feels brand-new.

  “Lakeview is a business.” Lorna says. “And as with any business, the object is to turn a profit. I know that must come as a shock to you, but—”

  “That’s all we are to you?” I ask, and Lorna blinks, evidently surprised by my softly worded question. “Is that all she is to you?” I nod at her daughter.

  Waverly flinches. “I’m not a clone,” she insists. “And I sure as hell am not a servant.”

  “If you don’t believe me, take a blood test,” I say. “You deserve the truth as much as I do.”

  Waverly rears back. “I can’t…” She turns to her mother. “We can’t send samples to a lab, Mom. Someone would sell the results—”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Lorna assures her, but I don’t understand what she’s going to take care of. What I do understand is that everything—even information—is for sale here.

  “It’s nearly two in the morning.” Lorna gestures at the door, and it slides open. “We all need some sleep. Tomorrow, I promise we’ll have answers.”

  But tomorrow, Trigger and I will be long gone—well on our way to exposing the truth about Lakeview to its “citizens.”

  The moment the door closes behind my mother, I head for the liquor cabinet.

  “Waverly.” Hennessy’s footsteps clack behind me on the reclaimed wood floor, and I turn on him.

  “If you say a word to my mother—”

  He plucks the glass from my hand and gives me that gallant little smile that makes my insides melt. And turns millions of viewers into obsessed fangirls and fanboys. “I was going to say ‘Allow me.’ ”

  “Thanks.” I settle onto the couch again and run my hands through my hair. “I was half-afraid you were going to demand the ring back and bolt on me.” I don’t know what to believe about Dahlia yet, but if any of this were to get out, it would be just as damaging to Hennessy as it would be to me.

  He pours two inches of my father’s imported whiskey into my glass. “If you don’t know me better than that by now, then we have bigger problems than that other girl wearing your face.” He swallows half the whiskey in one gulp, then sits next to me and gives me the glass.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just…” I drink the rest of the whiskey and squeeze my eyes shut against the burn in my throat. “This is a nightmare, and you’re taking it so well. Too well.”

  “It hasn’t really sunk in yet,” he admits. “Nor has it been verified.”

  “I think her face pretty much verifies it, Hen.”

  “That you look alike? Yes. But that doesn’t mean you’re actually clones. I don’t see how either of you could be. You both talk like normal people—well, relatively normal, in her case. Neither of you walks around staring at the ground. And I’ve never seen you wash a dish or sew a scrap of clothing in your life.” He’s grinning now. Teasing me. But he has a point.

  “She’s definitely not like any clone I’ve ever met. Trigger isn’t either.” Though the only soldiers I’ve really interacted with are my personal guard, and while they typically work in silence, they don’t stare at the ground and try to blend into the walls like other clones.

  “That’s what I’m saying. I think this is more complicated than simply, ‘Waverly’s a clone.’ And even if that’s true, I’m certainly not ready to believe Dahlia’s the prototype.”

  “Me neither.” I tuck my bare feet beneath his thigh on the couch, to steal his warmth. I feel cold all over. “So you really thought she was me?”

  He shrugs. “She sounded a little…odd, but certainly not clonelike. And you’re Waverly Whitmore, of those Whitmores.” His teasing smile draws one from me, in spite of the circumstances. “The fact that you might have a clone or be a clone never occurred to me or to anyone else. It still sounds ridiculous. Like some crazy Labor Party conspiracy theory.”

  “Thank goodness. I can’t even process the thought of Dahlia at a social event. What did she say?”

  “Nothing that gave herself away, obviously. Though the more I understand of this, the more of a miracle that seems. She showed up in a trainee uniform.” He laughs. “I thought it was a costume! I lent her Margo’s backup dress. My sister was furious. But I think that’ll be the worst of the fallout.”

  I set my empty glass on a coaster. “I still don’t understand how there could have been five thousand copies of me running around Lakeview for sixteen years without anyone noticing.”

  Hennessy shrugs as he slides one hand up my calf, beneath the loose cuff of my pajama pants. “Seren and Sofia aren’t allowed on the training grounds, and I doubt their mother’s actually seen every one of the hundreds of genomes she puts into production. The Administrator strikes me as more of a delegator than a micromanager. So I guess it’s possible.”

  “If this had gone on for another year…”

  “Hey.” He takes my hand. “That didn’t happen. There’s only one of them left, if the others ever even existed, and she’s a little weird, obviously. But I don’t think she’s going to go running to the networks.”

  That possibility hadn’t occurred to me until the words fell out of his mouth. “What are we going to do with her? She can’t stay here! Someone will see her. She can’t stay anywhere!” Hennessy and I have two of the most recognizable faces on the planet. Our show is a hit worldwide—except in Lakeview, obviously, because no one actually lives there, except the Lockes and several hundred thousand clone servants-in-training, with no connection to the outside world.

  “Hey. It’s going to be fine, Waverly.” He squeezes my fingers, smiling at the gorgeous vintage twelve-carat circle-cut diamond weighing down my left hand. “Your mom will sort this out, and we will live happily ever after.”

  “Yes, you will,” my mother says as the door opens again. She practically floats into the library, her robe flaring out behind her, and as usual, she sucks up all the oxygen in the room. She doesn’t do it on purpose. She’s just the kind of woman who commands attention. And holds it, in her silk-gloved, iron-fisted grip. “Hennessy, I assume you’ll be staying the night?”

  “If you don’t mind.” He stands, and immediately I miss his warmth on my feet. His hand in mine. I wish we were already married with a house of our own. I wish we weren’t sleeping in separate rooms.

  I wish tonight had never happened.

  “I’ve had a guest room made up for you in the south wing,” my mother says. “I know you’re of age now, but please let your parents know where you are so they won’t worry.”

  “Of course.” He pulls his tablet from his pocket, and before he can message his mother, I pull him into a hug. “Good night, Waverly.” His kiss feels a bit formal, as if our audience is the whole world, rather than just my mother. But I let him go without demanding a better one because I have questions for my mom that I don’t want to ask in front of him.

  He clearly intends to stay with me, despite the potential for scandal. But I don’t want him to hear anything that might give him—or his parents—any reason to change his mind.

  Even in the middle of the night, under an obvious load of stress, my mother looks perfect. Without makeup. But now when I look at her, I don’t envy that. I don’t study her face, hoping I’ll look as good as she does when I’m her age
.

  Tonight when I look at my mother, all I feel is anger. Betrayal.

  “How could you do this?”

  She holds my gaze, unmoved by my judgment. “I had no choice, Waverly. You, of all people, should understand that. I would have done anything to have a child. And look what a smart, beautiful daughter I got out of it.” She tries to brush the backs of her fingers down my cheek, but I lean out of range.

  “Look what else you got!” I point at the ceiling, where Dahlia and Trigger are presumably sleeping on the second floor. “And considering that yesterday there were nearly five thousand more of me, I’d say you got more than your money’s worth!”

  “Are you finished?” My mother folds her arms, waiting for my rant to exhaust itself. She never raises her voice. She doesn’t have to. Investors and executives alike have withered beneath the silent warning in her outwardly patient, polite gaze.

  Normally, I would push right past it. Surely I inherited the ability to be just as intimidating as she is. But I don’t even know how true that is anymore. “Am I even really your daughter?”

  Her expression softens. “Of course! You are one hundred percent the product of my own and your father’s genes! I carried you myself and I have the stretch marks to prove it.” A frown flickers across her face. “Well, I did until I had them surgically corrected. We just couldn’t conceive you the standard way. Everything else about you is on the beautiful and exceptional end of normal.”

  “Except for the fact that there’s an exact replica of me upstairs. I still don’t understand how this is possible. She’s not a clone, Mom. She can’t be, and neither can I. Clones aren’t capable of normal social interaction.”

  “Actually, that’s not true. Wexler 42, the genetic engineer she mentioned, is a clone. His speech is perfectly normal, and he acts like you and I, though he’s a bit sheltered from living in a self-contained clone factory. And he’s not the only one. Clones are produced for different tasks and with different specifications and abilities. Some, like Wexler, are highly functional and very smart, because they have to be. Trigger 17 seems to be evidence that at least some soldiers fall into that category as well.”

  “But how is that possible? I thought the process of reproducing a genome degraded it. That no copy could be as functional as the original.”

  My mother gives me a wary frown. “Where did you hear that?”

  I can only shrug. “That’s just what people think.” Clones aren’t like us by virtue of the very fact that they’re clones. They’re not capable of anything other than the menial tasks they perform. “If that’s not true, why aren’t our servants like Dahlia?” Why aren’t they like me? “Or, I guess, why isn’t she like them? Why would a gardener need to function socially on the same level as a geneticist?”

  “I don’t know. Dahlia’s clearly different. Maybe her whole genome was. Maybe that has something to do with how and why it was designed. Speaking of which…I guess I owe you an explanation.”

  “Yes. Please explain to me how I came to be mass produced like a cheap suitcase, rather than conceived as an individual by my individual parents.”

  She sighs, and a strand of dark hair—just like mine—falls over her shoulder. “Waverly, lots of couples have trouble conceiving.”

  “Yes. And they go see a fertility specialist. Not a genetic engineer—and a clone, at that.”

  “We went to fertility specialists. We saw the best doctors in the world,” my mother says. “But they all told us the same thing: that your father is infertile. Completely without hope.” She pauses to let the gravity of that fact sink in.

  Noble families must have an heir. A genetic heir. It’s as true for Hennessy and me as it was for my parents, Lorna Emsworth and Dane Whitmore, when they married.

  The Emsworths pioneered instant encrypted data transfer and the Whitmores developed the first e-glass technology. My parents were famous before they got married, but afterward?

  The world was obsessed with them—their fledgling marriage, their glamorous clothes and travel and lives. And with watching her stomach for any sign of a baby bump. I’ve seen the old footage. Hundreds of millions of views. Tens of millions of followers. And hardly a second of privacy.

  I know the feeling. I decided to embrace it rather than fight it. To give people an official glimpse into my life—one that I control—and the world has welcomed my choice more enthusiastically than I ever anticipated.

  “Your father and I are both only children,” my mother continues. “Without an heir, we’d have been the end of both the Whitmore and the Emsworth lines. We would have had to hand DigiCore over to the investors or name a nongenetic successor. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “So you what? Went to see the Administrator?”

  My mother actually smiles. “Amelia Locke wasn’t the Administrator then. Her father, Oliver, was still running Lakeview. But back then, as now, the Administrator brought an annual delegation to Mountainside—and to all the other major cities—to help his most important customers assess their needs and place orders. The envoy is mostly high-ranking management, but they also bring a geneticist, to answer technical questions.”

  “And those are all clones?” Before tonight, I’d never heard of a management or a scientist clone.

  “Yes, but they’re not for sale. Lakeview produces them in very small batches and only uses them to manage the training grounds and to design and produce the rest of the clones. That way the Administrator maintains total control over the proprietary process and over the clones who run it. They’re considered intellectual property.”

  “Like DigiCore’s patents?” The company has registered hundreds in my lifetime alone.

  “Yes. Like living, breathing patents. And the Lockes are so paranoid that their process will be stolen that they only employ their own clones. The Lakeview compound is Amelia’s own little universe, where she plays God.”

  “If the Administrator is so controlling, how did you manage to hire a clone geneticist to…make me happen?”

  “That year, Oliver Locke led the envoy to Mountainside, and Amelia accompanied him, preparing to take over the family business. The geneticist they brought was called Wexler 23. He was young and overwhelmed by all the differences between Lakeview and the rest of the world. And he developed a…well, a fascination with me.” She shrugs. “As he was explaining his job, I realized he could do for your father and me what the fertility specialists could not. So I got Wexler alone for a few minutes and asked him to design an embryo using my DNA and your father’s.

  “I thought he’d refuse, or report me to the Administrator, because if he’d been caught, they would have executed him and every one of his identicals.”

  “Wait, you asked Wexler to design an embryo?” I sit straighter, frowning at her. “Alone? What about Dad?”

  “I didn’t tell your father. What I asked Wexler to do was illegal, and I couldn’t drag him into that.”

  “So he still doesn’t know?” My head feels like it’s about to explode. There’s a clone in one of our guest rooms, and my father has no idea she exists. Or how I came to exist.

  “No. But obviously I’ll have to tell him tonight.” My mother looks more irritated than nervous at that realization.

  “But how did…? How did you get pregnant? How could he not know?”

  “Wexler sent me the embryo—he sent me you. I went back to the fertility specialist I trusted the most, and I paid her double her typical fee to sign a nondisclosure agreement and perform the implantation. When I was sure it had taken—that I was pregnant—I told your father we’d beaten the odds. Science doesn’t always know best.” Her smile is almost nostalgic. “He was overjoyed, and happy men are quick to believe anything that lets them remain happy.”

  She lied to my father. She broke the law. But if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t exist.

  I can’t dec
ide whether to stomp out in a storm of profanity or hug her.

  “Okay. But what about the rest of it? I mean, we don’t know that Dahlia’s the prototype. I can’t be the clone if I’m a year older than she is, right?”

  My mother sighs. “Honey, I suspect there were routine delays—inspections, approvals, and previously set schedules—that slowed down the production of five thousand…um…trade laborers, even though the embryos were all produced at once. That’s why you were born before Dahlia and her identicals.”

  “But Wexler could have lied, couldn’t he? She could be my clone?” I can’t make sense of this any other way. I don’t feel like a clone.

  “He could have lied, but I don’t think he did,” my mother says. “The other identicals were euthanized because of the anomalies they found in Dahlia’s DNA. If she were another clone, rather than the prototype, there wouldn’t have been any anomalies to find.”

  “Maybe what they found in her really were flaws,” I insist, clinging to what feels like my last hope. “We need to verify this for ourselves. I want to see a geneticist. Or a doctor. Someone we can trust.”

  My mother takes my hand, and the somber, sympathetic look in her eyes terrifies me all the way into the pit of my stomach. “Waverly, you’re already seeing a doctor we trust. And finally, what he’s been telling us makes sense.”

  My last thin thread of hope dies. “This is what’s wrong with me? This is why Dr. Foster said Hennessy and I shouldn’t wait to get married?”

  My mother nods. “Dr. Foster and I have always assumed that your hormone deficiency was something similar to your father’s infertility. Something we could fight with money and technology, like I did to get you. So it made sense that the younger you started trying, the better. But Waverly, the hormone therapy isn’t working, and now I understand why.”

  My eyes begin to water, but I blink away the tears, determined not to mourn a loss I might not even be suffering. “You’re going to have to explain that.”