Strange New World

by Rachel Vincent

  “If that’s your bridal shower, shouldn’t you be there?” Julienne says.

  “I am there. In a way.” I point at Dahlia on the screen.

  Julienne’s eyes widen, but rather than looking confused, she seems relieved to finally understand something. “You have an identical.” Then she frowns. “I thought you were an individual.”

  “So did I, until a few weeks ago,” I mumble as my identical stuffs her face with a fourth hors d’oeuvre. Which I would never do. Which I told her not to do. “That’s Dahlia 16. You’ve cooked for her every day for the past month. She’s staying in the blue room.”

  Julienne slaps one hand over her mouth, then speaks through it. “I thought that was you…”

  I turn to her, surprised. “You thought you were feeding me six meals a day in two different rooms?”

  “I don’t…” She stares at her hands again while she visibly tries to sort out her memories. “I don’t know. I didn’t realize that made no sense. Or, maybe it didn’t matter that it made no sense. I couldn’t…I couldn’t think. Trying to figure things out felt like an enormous effort. It was easier just to follow the directives and do what I was told.”

  A cold current surges through my veins, chilling me all over. “That is terrifying.” What kind of drug can sap someone’s will to think?

  “Yes, it is. Now,” Julienne murmurs, her gaze unfocused, as if whatever she’s seeing has already happened. “But while I was in that moment, it felt…right. I felt good. Satisfied. I felt like everything was okay, and nothing really mattered, as long as I followed the directives.” She looks up at me, her gaze now sharply focused. “Is that how I’m supposed to feel?”

  “There is no ‘supposed to,’ ” I tell her.

  “Then why was I eating that food in the first place? Who gave it to me?”

  “It’s sent from Lakeview. People here think clones have to eat special food to maintain their hormone levels.” But I can see from her frown that she doesn’t understand hormones. She turns to the food she brought, as if it suddenly puzzles her. “Are you hungry?” I ask.

  “Will I be in trouble for this?” She waves one hand at the lunch neither of us has touched.

  “I…” Yes. She and I will both be in trouble for this. “Um, if anyone figures out that you’re…awake. For now, when we’re not alone, can you just pretend? Just stare at the floor and stay quiet. I don’t think anyone will notice.” No one really ever notices clones anyway, and clearly the drugged food is intended to make sure of that. “I’ll figure out what to do in the long term, I promise.”

  Though the truth is that I have no idea what a long-term solution might look like. I didn’t think beyond figuring out why our servants acted so differently than Dahlia and I do.

  Now that I’ve “fixed” Julienne, what am I going to do with her?

  On-screen, the string quartet finishes its song, and I turn to see the shower guests head toward the gazebo, where Dahlia sits in the chair of honor.

  “Why do you only have one identical?” Julienne asks.

  “The Administrator had the others recalled,” I mumble as I watch Dahlia take her—my—seat at the front of the gazebo.

  Julienne’s gasp startles me and I turn away from the screen to see her staring at me in horror. “You said they don’t do that here.”

  “Do what? Oh, recall clones? It happened in Lakeview, but they’re not dead. The Administrator lied about that, but Trigger 17 and Dahlia 16 didn’t know that when they escaped.”

  “Dahlia 16,” Julienne murmurs, walking around my room. Her gaze fixes on me and her eyes widen. “That’s where I’ve seen you. Your class is four years behind mine.” She studies my face. “You look older now, but I saw you on the training grounds all the time.”

  “That wasn’t me,” I tell her. “I grew up here, as an individual.” I block her path to recapture her attention. “You had classes with Dahlia 16 in the training ward? Or…meals? Your class knew her class?” I don’t really understand how daily life works in Lakeview.

  “No, but I saw her class on the grounds all the time.”

  “And there are five thousand of you, right? And five thousand from the boys’ year-twenty class?”

  Julienne nods. “Why?”

  “And there are ten thousand nineteen-year-old clones out there somewhere, working in cities all over the world? And ten thousand eighteen-year-olds?”

  She nods again. “And the year-seventeen class will graduate soon, when they’re all promoted.”

  “Promotion” is the clone equivalent of a birthday. When the numbers behind their names increase.

  Horror washes over me and I sink onto the sofa while the room spins around me. “That’s thirty thousand clones already out in the world who should recognize my face whenever they see it.” Because they grew up seeing Dahlia and the rest of my identicals on a daily basis. “And that’s just in the manual-labor category. So why haven’t they recognized me?”

  “How would they have seen your face?” Julienne asks.

  I look up at her in surprise. “On the wall screens. On their…” Finally, I understand. “Clones don’t have tablets. And they don’t use wall screens.” And the mental fog from their medicated food keeps them from truly noticing the people they serve, much less anyone else who appears on-screen in a room they happen to be working in.

  For one blissful second, relief washes over me. If none of the other working clones has recognized me so far, surely the chances that they ever will are slim. Especially since Dahlia’s class will never be put into the workforce.

  But I feel guilty the moment I’ve had that thought. They won’t be put into the workforce because my mother’s going to have them killed. And the only reason none of the rest of them recognize me is because they’re kept drugged out of their minds.

  That shouldn’t be happening. But I don’t know how I could stop it, even if I were willing to expose myself as a clone. All that would do is humiliate my family, and possibly get me—and Dahlia—“recalled.”

  Who would that help?

  I need to talk to Dahlia. And to Hennessy. If I’m going to do something, I need to make sure my fiancé is on board, and that Dahlia, Trigger, and even Julienne are all on the same page with us.

  This is too big for me to tackle alone.

  “Pack up all the gifts and have them stored in the guesthouse for now,” Lorna says to a clone named Marshal 24, who’s stood beside the car listening to her instructions for at least five minutes. “Double-check the inventory and make sure they’re all accounted for. Dismissed.”

  “Happy to serve, ma’am.” Then he heads back into the hotel as she sits in the backseat next to me.

  “Well done,” Lorna says as the car pulls away from the curb. “I’m glad to see you can behave when you’re properly motivated. Although your goodbyes could certainly have sounded a little more sincere.”

  We’re lucky I remembered to say goodbye to anyone at all. The only thing I could think about when I made it back to the garden was that Aida 27, the bathroom attendant, might have only hours left to live.

  Lorna must know that clones die at twenty-eight. Which makes her offer to build a clone town in the wild for my identicals sound even less believable than it did before.

  “Does that mean I may have dinner with Trigger?”

  I can feel her watching me, but I don’t look up because I can’t shield my thoughts right now. They’re too fresh. Too terrifying.

  “Yes,” Lorna says as the car winds its way up the mountain toward the Whitmore estate, driven by a clone named Lance 26. “If you behave, you will be rewarded.” Her magnanimous tone grates on me like sandpaper, slowly grinding me down to nothing.

  We spend the rest of the ride in silence, while Lorna checks the public feeds on her tablet. She seems pleased with whatever she’s reading, and she doesn
’t look up again until we pull through the gate. “You can go to Trigger’s room now,” she says, tapping through a menu on her tablet. “Your dinner will be there in half an hour.” When the car stops, she follows me inside, then disappears into her suite without another word.

  I knock once on Trigger’s door, and when I open it, he stands up from the chair by the window, where he’s clearly spent most of the day.

  “Dahlia!” He races across the room and I meet him halfway, where we collide in an embrace that quickly becomes a meeting of lips and tongues and hands. It’s only been a few days, but Lorna could take this away from us again at any moment, so I can’t stop until I’ve kissed him so long and so hard I can barely feel my lips.

  And even then I don’t really let him go. I just pull him into a hug, still standing on my toes.

  “I missed you so much,” he whispers into my hair. “More than I missed the sun.” His neck is warm and scruffy against my face, and every word he says vibrates against my cheek. “Do you know why they let me out?”

  “Because I refused to help Waverly.”

  “Why would you do that?” He murmurs the words against my skin so they can’t be overheard. “She could have hurt your identicals.”

  “She doesn’t have access to them yet. I only had one move, so I made it. And it worked. This time, anyway.” I hold him even tighter and whisper into his ear. “We have to go. Now. Tonight.”

  He nods without question. Without objection. “You have door access?”

  “Yes, but our dinner will be here in a few minutes. If we run before that, Julienne will raise an alarm.”

  “Okay.” He leads me toward the small table and chairs Lorna had set up for us when we first started eating in the gray room, with its disabled wall screen. “Do you still have a tablet?”

  I pull it from my clutch and set them both on the table between us.

  “Good.” He lays his hand casually on the table, covering my translucent tablet, and when he stands, he palms it and casually slides it into his pocket. Then he leans down as if for a kiss and whispers into my ear. “I’m going to go in the bathroom, where there are fewer cameras, and disable the audio in this room.”

  “My tablet isn’t connected to the system,” I whisper back.

  “It will be in a minute.”

  While he’s gone, I wave one arm at the wall screen, just in case it’s somehow been reactivated.

  “That doesn’t work,” Waverly says.

  I whirl around to find her standing behind me. I never even heard the door open. “I was just checking.”

  She glances at the closed bathroom door, then aims a look up at the ceiling. “Dahlia, I’ve ordered dessert from the kitchen. Come have some with me and tell me about the shower. In my room.”

  “Your mom said I could have dinner with Trigger.”

  “Please.” She glances at the ceiling again. Where there are cameras. Oh. She wants to talk about something she doesn’t want overheard.

  This is new.

  “Okay, we’re all…,” Trigger says as he steps out of the bathroom, but he bites off the rest when he sees Waverly standing in the middle of his room. “Hi.”

  “We’re muted?” I ask, and he nods, one brow raised to ask me why I would say that in front of my clone. I turn back to Waverly. “Say whatever you have to say. And if you really ordered dessert, you can have it sent here,” I add. “Because I’m not going to your room without Trigger.”

  “How did…?” She frowns at him, until he hands me back my tablet. “Oh.” For a second, I’m afraid she’ll turn him in. Then she nods. “Okay, I’ll update the dessert order.” She taps a few times on her tablet, then pockets it. “It’s not something I have to say so much as something I want to show you. But that’ll have to wait until the food gets here.”

  “Then I’ll go first. Waverly, I overheard something at the shower. You might want to sit.” I pull out a chair at the table for her, but she only frowns at it.

  “Just spit it out, whatever it is.”

  I take a deep breath. Then I take Trigger’s hand. “I think we’re all going to die at twenty-eight.”

  “What?” Trigger says. “What are you talking about, Dahlia?”

  But Waverly leans with one hip against the dresser and exhales heavily. “She’s talking about the expiration date. All clones have one. Most of them are ten years after the date of maturation—which is age twenty-eight.”

  “You already knew about this?” How could she not tell us?

  “Yes. And I also know you don’t have one. That was the other anomalous thing they found in your genome. Trigger may not have one either—soldiers are an exception to a lot of rules. But I have one.”

  I sink onto the end of Trigger’s bed and he sits next to me, clearly trying to absorb the news.

  “My mom’s trying to find a geneticist we can trust to develop a gene therapy for me, using your DNA. To see if that’ll help. But finding a doctor has become complicated,” Waverly says, her voice cracking.

  She’s scared.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “In part because my mom told me not to.” She holds my gaze. “But also…you already lost your identicals once. It felt cruel to tell you that you’re going to lose them again. For real this time.” She shrugs. “I mean, ten years seems like forever until you truly start thinking about it. College is four years. If I go, that’ll only leave me six years, really, to live my life. Even if I manage to have kids, I’ll die while they’re still young.”

  “Waverly…” I feel like I should do something. Hug her.

  “I know kids and college aren’t really relevant to your identicals, but ten years is still a really—”

  I’m already across the room with my arms open as she bursts into tears. I pull her into a hug, and for the first time since we met, she feels like my sister. Because for the first time since we met, she seems to truly understand what it’s like to be a clone.

  Slowly, her arms wrap around me until she’s hugging me back. Crying on my shoulder.

  I sniff back tears of my own and when her soft sobs ease, I loosen my hold on her. But instead of letting me go, she holds me tighter, just for a minute. “Dahlia, there’s something else I have to tell you. About your identicals.”

  But then the door slides open and Julienne 20 comes in pushing a small cart carrying three silver domed plates. As she begins setting our food out on the table, her eyes downcast, Waverly sniffles and lets me go. Then she pulls up a series of camera feeds on her tablet until she finds her mother, who’s neck-deep in a bubble bath in her own suite. With a green mask over her eyes.

  Apparently satisfied, Waverly pockets her tablet. “Julienne. It’s okay. You can show them.”

  Trigger arches one brow at her. “Show us—?”

  Julienne 20 stands up straight and slowly raises her gaze until she’s looking me right in the eye. Then she gives me a small smile. “I’m…um…awake.”

  It takes me a second to understand. “Oh!” I pull her into a hug, even though we’re really just now meeting. I’m so thrilled to see another clone acting normal that I don’t know what else to do. “How did this happen?”

  “There were sedatives in the food,” Waverly says. “The boxed food Lakeview sends. For the past week, I’ve been splitting my meals with Julienne and the drugs finally wore off.”

  “You did this? For her?” I can’t stop smiling.

  “And for answers,” Waverly admits.

  But now Julienne looks worried. “Are you sure this is okay?” she asks.

  Waverly nods. “Only when it’s just the three of us, and I’m sure no one’s watching.”

  “Welcome back,” Trigger says with a smile. “I wish I could say I’m happy for you, but this isn’t a very good place for clones to be.” He frowns. “Not that there’s a go
od alternative.”

  For a moment, we stare at each other in silence, sharing a problem that is bigger than any of us. Than all of us. Finally, Waverly bursts into motion. “Come on. Julienne made this food; the least we can do is eat it. And eat this.” She pulls the cover from the last large platter, and I can’t help but smile, in spite of the circumstances.

  The dish holds a dozen of the pink-and-white miniature cakes from the bridal shower, each small enough to fit into my palm.

  “I asked my mom to have an assortment of leftovers brought home so I can at least try the food from my own shower.”

  There are only two seats at the table, so I set a couple of the tiny cakes on the edge of my dinner plate and join Trigger on the end of his bed, where we eat with our warm plates on our laps. Waverly insists that Julienne join her at the table. Like a guest.

  I watch them for a few minutes and realize that they look pretty comfortable with each other. That Julienne seems to trust my clone. I want to trust her. I want to tell her what Trigger and I are planning. I want to ask her for help. Or at least for advice.

  But if our trust is misplaced…If she tells her mother…

  Waverly looks up, as if she can feel me watching her, and her expression sobers as she sets a half-eaten little cake on the napkin in front of her on the table. “Dahlia. Your identicals…”

  I’m pretty sure I know what she’s going to say, but I need to hear her say it.

  “My mom’s not going to build a town for them. She’s planning to have them recalled. Once we’re done with the hormone and gene therapy.” Though it can’t be easy, she holds my gaze, waiting for my reaction. But Trigger beats me to it.

  “We assumed that was her plan,” he says with a shrug. “But obviously we can’t let her do that.”

  “I’m not going to let her have anyone killed,” Waverly says with a glance at Julienne, who has a smear of pink frosting on her upper lip. “I swear on my life—what’s left of it. On my marriage,” she amends. “On the kids I still hope to have someday. Even if she’s doing it to protect me.”