Strange New World

by Rachel Vincent

  Sofia loops her arm around mine, and for the first time, I realize she has the Administrator’s eyes. “Margo and I were just taking bets on whether you’d actually show up. We’ve hardly seen you in ages!”

  “I get hiding from the press, after that social media spanking you took over your new ‘platform,’ ” Margo says. “But are you hiding from us too?”

  “Of course not.” I smile, even though my cheeks are starting to ache. “I was just feeling run-down. I’m still a little tired.” But the moment the words are out of my mouth, I realize they don’t sound like Waverly. She would make a joke at her own expense. And speak with more confidence.

  I know what to do. But actually doing it is another story.

  “Speaking of the engagement party,” Sofia adds. “My mother was pissed about what you said.”

  “Oh, I…” It never occurred to me that my statement on clones’ rights could affect Waverly’s relationship with the Administrator’s daughter. Not that that would have stopped me from making it.

  “It was awesome!” she leans in to whisper, squeezing my arm. “Next time give me a little warning so I can livecast it!”

  She’s happy that her mother was angry?

  “It was spontaneous, right?” Margo asks. “That’s what my brother said.”

  “Hell of a publicity stunt,” Sofia leans closer to whisper.

  “It wasn’t—” But before I can insist that my speech was sincere, Lorna catches up with us, with three other women following her like ducklings behind their mother. For the next half hour, while Sofia and Margo sample hors d’oeuvres and sip champagne, I smile and make small talk with women whose faces look familiar from the engagement party, but whose names I can’t remember, because Waverly didn’t deem them important enough to include in our prep work.

  I don’t know how anyone can keep all these different faces straight, and their names tell me nothing about what function they serve in society.

  Lorna leads her friends away to find fresh drinks, and Waverly’s friends flock back to my side. “I can’t believe you’re getting married!” Sofia gushes as she stares at a stack of elegantly wrapped gifts standing on a table across from the buffet. “I’m so jealous.”

  She is? That’s not something anyone in Lakeview would have admitted to, and I don’t know how to respond. When I look to Lorna for a silent prompt, she makes a circular gesture, telling me to circulate. Go talk to more people.

  For the next hour, I make my way around the garden with Sofia and Margo, thanking people for coming, challenging my memory with names and personal facts I’d never even heard until two days ago. My goal is to disappoint Network 4 with the most uneventful shoot they’ve ever filmed. I know from the episodes I’ve watched that Audra can turn a broken fingernail into a full-scale crisis, and they’re going to have to do just that if they expect any drama from me tonight.

  Margo, Sofia, and I have gotten through about half the guests when a clone waiter approaches carrying a tray of very tall cone-shaped stemmed glasses half-filled with what looks like a scoop of pink ice cream floating in a bubbly liquid. “Raspberry sorbet cocktail?” he asks.

  “Yum!” Sofia takes one, but Margo turns her nose up with a muttered comment, calling the drink juvenile.

  Mindful of Waverly’s instructions, I thank the waiter and take a glass, then sip from it as I continue mingling with people who think they know me. The cocktail is much sweeter than champagne, and the bubbles still tickle the back of my throat. But I like this drink. Though I’d rather be eating the sorbet than letting it melt in my glass.

  When I’ve spoken to everyone and shown off the ink on my arm about a thousand times, I head for the buffet table. I’m tired of making conversation with strangers, and I can’t be expected to talk with a full mouth, can I?

  Sofia and Margo trail after me, but I hardly hear anything they’re saying because I’m captivated by the display of food. At the center of the table is a tall white tiered cake stand, crowned with a gorgeous white cake—like a miniature version of the one being made for the wedding. It’s covered in smooth rolls of cream-colored frosting, decorated with dozens and dozens of intricate cream swirls and hearts, topped with a real ribbon.

  On the tiers below is a series of tiny cakes decorated like the larger one, in alternating shades of cream and “pink champagne,” each topped with a stunning, delicate flower made of frosting.

  I’m dying to try one of them, but I don’t know how to eat it without making a mess of such a beautiful cake. So I grab a tiny, flaky piece of puff pastry instead. It crumbles in my mouth and chocolate melts on my tongue. I select another one and take a bite. Then I turn to find Margo and Sofia staring at me.

  “Run-down, huh?” Sofia’s smiling. “Hungry too, I guess. Any nausea yet?”

  Margo rolls her eyes. “I told you. She’s not pregnant.”

  “Definitely not pregnant,” I confirm, and for once I’m glad that I’m the one here in Waverly’s place—that question would have been like a slap to the face for her.

  As nervous as I am about the party games, it’s almost a relief when they begin. Margo and Sofia are the people most likely to notice that their best friend is acting strange, so the less time I have to spend alone with them the better.

  Waverly prepared me for the games during our shortened prep sessions all week. Fortunately, as the bride, I only have to play judge for most of the silly contests, and when I realize my role is actually kind of fun, I can’t help but wonder if the raspberry sorbet cocktail I’ve almost finished is as much to blame as the games themselves.

  By the time the trivia contest begins, I’m truly enjoying myself. I’ve never heard most of the stories about Waverly and Hennessy that the women read from their score pads, and they show a side of my clone I wish I could see in person. A fun-loving, humorous side.

  After the games, Lorna leads me to the bride’s chair in the gazebo, and the guests file in to sit around me on the built-in benches. Cameras peer into the gazebo from all angles, and the light is so bright it’s giving me a headache.

  Lorna hands me gift after gift wrapped in shiny paper and beautiful ribbons, and I open and exclaim over them, though I have no idea what half of them are.

  As soon as the last one is opened, I thank everyone, then excuse myself to use the restroom. But really I just need a moment to myself. As I walk alone—faster than Waverly probably would—through the garden, then into the lobby of the hotel and down a back hall toward the restroom, my gaze catches on all the clones. Working.

  Were there this many when we came in? How could I have missed them?

  Their uniforms are drab and nondescript, their mannerisms quiet, their gestures small. Their voices, when they’re actually used, are soft, as if to avoid being heard unless it’s absolutely necessary.

  Every motion they make is designed to fade into the background. To be overlooked. But I should see them.

  By the time I get to the restroom, I feel sick.

  A woman stands by the bank of sinks set into a marble countertop, waiting to give me a towel after I’ve washed my hands. A name tag reading Aida 27 is pinned to the front of her gray uniform.

  When I’m done, she takes the towel from me and drops it into a hole cut into the countertop. She never once looks at my face.

  My heart aches as I leave the restroom. Aida 27 and Julienne 20—and all the Aidas, and Juliennes, and Stewards, and Lances, and Triggers, and Dahlias—we’re worth more than a nearly mute existence, wandering around in a mental fog, making people’s meals and handing them towels. We’re worth what we were promised. What we were told we were working for—ourselves and our own lives.

  I have a platform. The crowd isn’t as big here as the one at the engagement party was, but there are still plenty of cameras, and if I give another speech, someone will livecast it. Sofia, probably.

 
; But Trigger will suffer. Lorna will have him killed. And for what? So that some interviewer can speak to Waverly again next week and tell the world that this is another stunt?

  That’s not the way. People in Mountainside can’t see the problem because they don’t want to know it exists. They don’t want to admit that it exists.

  The way to fix this is to open eyes, but not these eyes. I have to open eyes in Lakeview. There will be nothing the Administrator and her soldiers can do against several hundred thousand angry and enlightened clones, half of whom are old enough to put up a fight. Especially once the clone soldiers realize they’re fighting on the wrong side.

  Trigger can help me show them that.

  I head across the foyer with renewed purpose, but when I see Audra looking for me, I duck into a hallway behind the elevator bank. I’m too angry to fool her at the moment, and I will not be roped into doing voice-overs for Waverly’s show.

  I walk down the narrow, dim hallway as fast as my high heels will let me, and the farther I go, the louder the sound of running water and the clang of metal pots becomes. I’m near the kitchen, in the employee-only section of the hotel, and if I’m caught, I’ll have to pretend to be lost.

  I pass a set of double swinging doors and glimpse a massive stainless-steel kitchen bustling with activity, and I’ve almost decided to turn back the way I came when a sharp voice at the end of the hall draws my attention.

  “Yes, round up all the 27s tonight, as soon as they’ve finished cleaning up after the Whitmore party.”

  I freeze at the sound of Waverly’s surname. Then I inch closer to the open door, on my toes to keep my heels from clacking on the tile.

  “All of them, boss?” a second voice says.

  Chair springs squeal as someone inside the office sits. “Of course all of them. The vouchers came through last week, and our batch will be out of transition tomorrow. We’re getting forty brand-new year-eighteen manual laborers at a discount, to replace the forty who’re being retired.”

  “You ever seen it happen?” the second voice asks, and I realize from the slightly distant quality that he’s speaking from a tablet or a wall screen. “You ever seen them…retired?”

  “Hell no. That’s why we return them before they hit their expiration date—so I don’t have to see forty identical hotel maids drop dead at once.”

  I gasp, then slap a hand over my mouth. My legs shake, and I lean against the wall for support as what I’m hearing zooms into crystal, brutal clarity.

  This is the other anomaly. The bridge Lorna said I wouldn’t have to cross for more than a decade.

  This is why none of the clones in Mountainside is older than year twenty-seven.

  When clones turn twenty-eight, they die.

  My dad’s working late and my mom’s with Dahlia at the bridal shower, so there’s no one home to catch Julienne 20 and me having a late lunch together. Yet when she steps into my room carrying the tray, she looks ready to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” I take the tray and set it on the table as the door closes behind her.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening—” She slaps one hand over her mouth and stares at me with wide, horrified eyes. Then she drops her gaze to the floor. Her hands are shaking. Her eyes are damp.

  “Sit.” I pull out a chair for her. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Julienne looks up again, and the conflict behind her eyes appears excruciating. She doesn’t sit. “I’m not supposed to do this. I’m breaking all the directives, but I don’t know what else to do!”

  “What directives?”

  “The directives. The rules. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you, except to ask how I can serve you or what I can cook for you. I’m not supposed to be looking at you unless you tell me to.”

  My pulse races. The strange sedatives have finally been flushed from her system. She’s truly awake and able to answer questions, but she is terrified, and I can’t blame her. “You can trust me, Julienne. I want you to talk to me, and I’m not going to tell anyone else. I’m not going to get you in trouble. Okay?”

  She hesitates. Then she nods. “Okay.”

  “Who gave you these directives?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she says at last. “I remember the voice saying them over and over, but I can’t see the face. There’s just…darkness and directives. And that voice.”

  “Where were you when you heard the voice?”

  “I don’t know! I was at graduation, and they gave us cake to celebrate. Then there was the voice and the darkness. Then I was here, and everything was different.”

  “They drugged you,” I tell her. “It was in the cake.” That’s the only thing that makes sense.

  She nods, but her eyes are unfocused. Whatever she’s seeing, it isn’t happening here and now. “There were directives in the training ward, and there are new directives here, and I’m not following them now. Someone’s going to notice, and I’m going to be recalled.” She meets my gaze again, her eyes wide and panicked. “My whole genome will be recalled!”

  “Julienne. Sit. Please.” I point to her chair at the table, and she sits. But I start pacing. I’ve done this to her. I was trying to understand what made her the way she is, but instead I’ve scared the crap out of her.

  Recalled. Euthanized. Murdered. That’s what she thinks is going to happen, because I broke her.

  Only I didn’t break her. I fixed her.

  Right?

  “No one’s going to be recalled,” I assure her. “We don’t do that here.” But don’t we? At twenty-eight, don’t we send clones back to the Administrator to be euthanized? And isn’t my mom planning to send Dahlia and Trigger back as soon as we’re…done with them?

  I can’t let that happen.

  “I don’t feel right,” Julienne mumbles, staring at nothing, though her gaze remains fixed on the thick white rug.

  I sit in the chair across from her and study her face. “Does something hurt?”

  “No. I feel…good. But that’s not right. Everything is too bright. Too focused. Everything sounds too…clear. There’s too much…” She glances around my room as if she’ll find the answer there, among my posters and pictures and hologram planters. “There’s too much of everything.”

  Her gaze strays to the tray, where our plates still sit covered by silver domes. “Is it the food? Did you put something in the food?”

  “You made the food,” I remind her. “There’s nothing bad in what you make, but the food they’ve been giving you for years—the food from Lakeview—is drugged, like the cake you ate at graduation. Contaminated with something that keeps you in a mental fog. When I threw away your food and started giving you mine, you began to…wake up.” I don’t know how else to describe it. Or how much of it she remembers. “Before, you hardly spoke and never looked anyone in the eye. You just worked and kind of shuffled through the halls.”

  “Those are the directives,” she says. “Speak only to offer assistance or answer questions. Keep your gaze downcast. Do your work quickly and efficiently. Don’t draw attention. Don’t ask questions.”

  “But it wasn’t like that in the training ward, was it? You were normal back then, right? You felt like…this?”

  She nods slowly. “Everything was bright then. Everything was clear. Food tasted good and running felt good, and talking was…allowed. With our identicals, anyway. I had friends. I had sisters….”

  “I—” The screen on my wall plays a happy little melody, then fogs over as it wakes itself up.

  “What’s that?” Julienne asks.

  “My bridal shower. It’s starting.” I look up as a new camera feed opens on my e-glass.

  “Bridal shower?”

  “It’s a party where people bring gifts to the bride. A woman who’s about to get married,” I explain when Julienne’s expression r
emains blank. “Like how my parents are married.”

  A light goes on behind her eyes. “Like before the world changed.”

  “Yes. Only the world didn’t change that much anywhere except for Lakeview. People everywhere else still get married and have babies. The ‘archaic’ way.” That’s the term Dahlia uses.

  Julienne looks confused, but not as surprised as Dahlia was when she got her period. “I…I think I knew that.” She frowns at the hands she’s wringing in her lap. “It feels like remembering something I didn’t know I’d forgotten.”

  “It’s the drugs. In your food.” It has to be. “I think you’ve seen and heard everything around you in Mountainside for the past two years, but the drugs kept you from truly processing anything.” From understanding what she was seeing and hearing.

  In the window in the middle of my screen, my closest friends—and several of my mother’s business associates—are standing in small groups in the garden at Ridgecrest, the nicest, most expensive hotel in Mountainside.

  The garden looks beautiful. Real pink tulip arrangements are scattered all over the place, and stunning champagne-colored flowering vines climb the sides of the gazebo. We had to order them three months in advance to train them to climb as they grew, which meant reserving the gazebo for that entire time, to keep anyone else from renting it for another event and ruining my flowers.

  It breaks my heart that I can’t see them in person.

  “Audio on,” I say, and string music fills my room. The buffet is covered in tiny cakes and bite-sized appetizers, centered around a gorgeous champagne fountain.

  “Wow.” Julienne stares at the screen. “I’ve seen these a million times, but never really stopped to look before. It’s like a giant tablet.” She squints at the figures milling around the garden. “Is that happening now?”

  “Yes.” I spot Dahlia talking to one of my mother’s associates, flanked by Margo and Sofia. She’s holding a half-empty champagne cocktail, which means she’s drinking too fast. And there must have been a delay in setting up the feed. Dahlia’s already mingled her way halfway around the garden.