Strange New World

by Rachel Vincent

  “Last month, I met someone who changed my life. Someone who’s about to change the whole world. I want you to meet her too. Okay, Hen, zoom out.”

  Hennessy touches his side of the tablet with his thumb and forefinger, then pushes them together on the screen, widening the camera’s view. To include me.

  I try to smile. It’s not my first time on camera. But it is the first time I’ve been on camera when I wasn’t pretending to be Waverly. When I wasn’t shielded by the secret of my identity.

  “This is Dahlia 16. Wow, right?” Waverly says to the tablet. “I thought the same thing when I met her. I promise that what you’re seeing is real. There are no effects at play here. And it gets weirder than that. Dahlia is not my clone. I’m hers. Yeah.” She nods dramatically. “Let that sink in.

  “How that happened is a longer story than we have time for right now, but what I want you to know is that everything we’ve ever been taught about clones is a lie. Clones are not slow. They’re not dim. They’re not less than the rest of us in any way. What they are is drugged. They’re bombed out of their minds on something that lets them work and keeps them happy, but stops them from truly thinking or feeling. Want proof? Meet Dahlia.”

  Waverly turns to me, but I can only blink at the camera. “What am I supposed to say?” I ask, and she laughs.

  “Just tell them something about Lakeview. About how you grew up.”

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Lakeview isn’t what you all think it is. It isn’t even what we think it is, when we’re growing up there. Clones grow up just like all of you do, in a lot of respects. Most of us go to class until we’re eighteen, and we play sports for recreation, and we love cake and hot chocolate. But there’s one big difference. We grow up thinking every other city in the world is like Lakeview. That everyone, everywhere, is a clone. That someday, we’ll take jobs in Lakeview and work for the glory of the city.

  “We don’t find out we were actually designed, produced, and trained to work as unpaid servants until the day we graduate and are taken to a facility in Valleybrook to be ‘transitioned.’ Drugged, to be made pliable and complacent, so we will work for you without complaint.”

  “Messed up, isn’t it?” Waverly cuts in. “It’s all true. Dahlia and I are proof. Clones are just like everyone else, and they don’t deserve what’s been happening to them—to us—for hundreds of years. We’re on our way to Lakeview to blow the lid off this whole thing, and since that obviously didn’t happen, if you’re seeing this, I need you guys to do that for us. Share this video. Send it to everyone you know. Spread the truth like a disease and turn it into an epidemic. We’re counting on you to change the world.”

  Hennessy hears the final note in her voice and taps the tablet to end the video. “Nice.” He whistles as he stares at the image of the two of us, frozen on the transparent screen. “You’re right. This is going to change everything.”

  “Thanks,” Waverly says as she takes her tablet back. “Let me set this up….” She taps a series of options and scrolls through a time wheel to schedule the video. “It’ll drop on my main feed in five hours, unless we’re still alive and free to cancel it.”

  “Just in time.” Trigger points through the windshield, and Waverly and I turn to look. “There’s Lakeview.” He reaches across the car to take my hand. “Welcome home.”

  “How are we going to get in?” Dahlia asks as the Lakeview city wall grows closer, and the breathless quality of her voice seems to echo the fear threaded through every beat of my heart. My mother and I have fought several times over her refusal to let me come here, and suddenly, despite the adrenaline firing through my veins, I’m starting to think she was right.

  “If the guard sees Dahlia and me, he’ll arrest us all,” I say. “I feel like we should have given this part more thought.”

  “Relax,” Hennessy says as sun flashes off the guard booth I can now see through the deeply tinted e-glass windows. “I’ve been here to see Seren a dozen times. The guards know me. Unless you think they’d know Seren’s already in Mountainside, for the rehearsal.”

  Trigger shakes his head. “I doubt the Administrator keeps them apprised of her personal schedule, or her family’s. Most of the guards don’t even know she has kids.”

  “Okay.” Hennessy nods. “We just have to stop them from seeing you two twin princesses.”

  “How do we do that?” Trigger asks.

  Hennessy winks, then stands hunched over in the fairly confined space, and I understand.

  “We hide. Rise, soldier,” I say with a smile. Trigger and Hennessy move and we fold down the back of the bench seat they’ve just vacated. “The trunk.”

  I crawl into the space and curl up on my side to make room for Dahlia, tucking the voluminous folds of my beautiful dress around me.

  Dahlia crawls in after me and I wince when her hand slips on my hair and pulls several pieces out. She curls up in the other half of the trunk, her knees inches from my face, and Hennessy blows me a kiss, then folds the seat back into place.

  For a second, it feels like Dahlia and I are true twins, sharing some kind of carpet-lined womb.

  The seat groans as Hennessy sits on it, and dimly I hear the creak of leather as Trigger climbs into the front seat, assuming the same personal-guard role he played during their escape from Lakeview.

  How could that have been just a month ago?

  “Are you scared?” Dahlia whispers in the dark.

  “Terrified,” I confess. “You?”

  “Yeah. I know this is the right thing to do—the only thing to do—but…”

  “Exactly.” I don’t know how to put it into words either, but I understand how she feels.

  The car slows to a stop, and my pulse races. Through the padded leather seat back, whatever Hennessy’s saying to the guard is too muffled to be understood, but a second later, the car rolls forward again, and I release the breath I’ve been holding.

  Surely if they were going to search the car, there would have been shouting.

  A couple of minutes later, Hennessy says something. The car slows again; then the seat groans as he stands and folds it down. His face appears in the gap. “Come on out.”

  “But stay down,” Trigger warns from the front seat.

  Dahlia crawls out first, and I follow her, careful not to rip my dress. I practically collapse on the opposite bench seat, with my back to the clone driver, who sits in his mental fog, waiting for further instructions. I wish I had a way to rescue him from his drugged state. Something faster than taking away his Lakeview-issued food for a few days.

  Out the window, I see nothing but sunlit fields of sheared winter-brown grass, but when I twist to look through the windshield, I find a cluster of tall buildings looming closer with every second.

  “Okay, now what?” Hennessy asks as he pushes aside layers of my skirt to sit next to me, leaving Dahlia alone on the other bench seat. “I’ve pretty much expended my usefulness.”

  “Now we find a tablet,” Trigger says. “And you’re still plenty useful, because you’re the only one of us who can walk into the Administrator’s mansion without getting arrested.”

  Hennessy frowns. “Wait, you actually want me to go in there?”

  “You told the guard that’s where you’re going, which means he’s already called ahead to the mansion. Even though Seren wasn’t there to take the call, the butler will be expecting to let you in, so we need you to show up, if for no other reason than to delay raising the alarm. No one can know that the rest of us are here until I punch a hole through the network blackout, which I can’t do without a tablet. And that’ll be just as easy to find at the mansion as anywhere else.”

  Hennessy’s brows rise. “So I’m the distraction?”

  “The very hot, very capable distraction,” I say as I scoot closer to him, admiring the fit of his tux.

&
nbsp; “Seren and Sofia send messages all the time, so they must have the same kind of bypass access their mother has,” Hennessy says. “Do you want me to try to steal an extra tablet?”

  “Have you ever stolen anything?” Trigger asks.

  “Other than a bottle from the liquor cabinet? No.”

  “Then don’t start now. You’ll just get caught and blow the whole thing.”

  Hennessy looks insulted for a moment; then he shrugs it off. “Okay, so what? I just hang out with the butler while you steal a tablet?”

  “Tell him Seren forgot something and you’re there to pick it up.”

  Hennessy’s brow rises. “You want me to tell him I left my own wedding rehearsal to pick up something several hours away for my best man?”

  Trigger shrugs. “Even if he doesn’t believe you, he won’t question you. He’s not allowed to.”

  “What about Dahlia and me?” I’m totally out of my element in clone central, an irony I am not unaware of.

  “Stay in the car and keep your heads down,” he says. “I’ll be as fast as I can.”

  Dahlia’s eyes widen; then she slides off the seat onto the floorboard. “We’re here.”

  As I kneel next to her, pressing down puffy acres of organza, I glance out the window to see a large house looming in front of us, well ahead of the cluster of taller buildings beyond it.

  “Pull around back, please,” Hennessy says to the driver. “This isn’t a formal occasion.”

  The car rounds the house and pulls to a stop beneath a covered portico next to the garage. I stare up at the building without rising from my crouch. I want to go in and see the infamous Administrator’s mansion. I want to surprise Sofia and Seren, swipe whatever alcohol we can get our hands on, and order something to snack on from their kitchen, to make up for all the Lakeview parties I’ve missed.

  But that will never happen. They’re on their way to my party.

  Even if they don’t yet know about my strange connection to their mother’s business—to the legacy they no doubt expect to inherit—they will by tonight. And I have no idea how they’ll take that news.

  “Wish me luck,” Hennessy says.

  “Good luck,” I whisper, wishing I could give him a kiss instead.

  He steps out onto the driveway, and just before the car door closes, I see the back door of the mansion open. A man in a butler’s uniform speaks to Hennessy.

  “Turn him around.” Trigger whispers from the front seat, and I realize he’s not talking to me—he’s evidently trying to communicate telepathically with Hennessy. “I can’t get out of the car while the butler’s facing us….” He must be watching through his peripheral vision, though, because like the driver, he’s facing forward, wearing his professional guard face.

  I hear a door close.

  “Good,” Trigger mumbles, and when he dares a glance toward the house, I understand that Hennessy has followed the butler inside. “Here goes everything.” He silently eases his door open.

  Trigger gets out of the car in a squat and drops below my line of sight. Then the door closes with a soft click.

  “Don’t worry,” Dahlia whispers. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  I know she’s right. If she weren’t, they would never have made it out of Lakeview in the first place. But there’s a world of difference between hearing about dangerous escapes from the safety of the subsequent retelling and witnessing them firsthand.

  I tap on the window and an opacity dial appears. I set the window to single-direction opacity so that we can see out but no one can see in; then I apply the setting to all the windows, as well as the rear windshield. Dahlia and I are now hidden from sight, unless someone glances through the front windshield, which can’t be adjusted. I dare a peek to see what’s going on.

  “What do you see?” Dahlia asks.

  “Trigger’s rounding the car,” I tell her. But he’s so quiet that if I couldn’t see the top of his head over the hood, I’d have no idea he was there. “I don’t see anyone else, but—”

  Trigger stands, then jogs toward the back door.

  “I think he’s going inside,” I narrate. “No, wait. It looks like he hears something.” Trigger flattens himself against the exterior wall of the house, right next to the back door, to the left of a set of simple concrete steps. A second later the back door opens. “There’s someone—”

  Trigger grabs the man emerging from the rear of the mansion and pulls him off the steps into a chokehold. In one fluid movement.

  “A man in a black suit came out, and Trigger took him down. In, like, a second. In complete silence.” I can hear the awe in my own voice, but Dahlia only nods from her crouch on the floorboard, pride shining in her eyes. “That guy’s totally unconscious.” If I couldn’t see the rise and fall of his chest, I’d think he was dead.

  “Trigger’s really good.” Dahlia shrugs. “Of course, the guy in the black suit is just Management. Not a soldier. But I’ve seen him take down soldiers too.”

  “He’s taking him…” I watch as Trigger drags the unconscious man toward a door on the other side of the portico. “I don’t know what’s through that door.” But it must be a storage room of some kind, because a second later, Trigger steps out alone, tucking something about the size of my hand into his pocket. He glances both ways, then jogs toward the car.

  A second later, he opens the door and slides into the front seat again, as if he never left.

  Dahlia exhales in relief, and I realize that though she was confident, she was also worried.

  Trigger chuckles. “That was the easy part. This is the hard part.” He pulls the tablet from his pocket and taps on it to wake up the screen. “Fortunately, they don’t usually use screen locks, because they don’t expect anyone in Lakeview to steal one. Or to hack one.”

  “Really?” I find that hard to imagine.

  “They’re really big on following the rules here,” Dahlia explains while Trigger taps his way through several menus. “Breaking rules means you’re flawed, and flaws will get your entire genome recalled.” She frowns. “Which, evidently, just means you’ll be sold before you were scheduled to graduate. But everyone here thinks it means euthanasia, which is a pretty big deterrent.”

  “Do you think my instructors have changed their passwords?” Trigger mumbles, evidently to himself.

  “You know their passwords?”

  “He knows a lot of things,” Dahlia says. “He once took down the entire communication system so he could come get me out of class himself, claiming Management wanted to see me but couldn’t get a ping through.” Her cheeks are adorably pink.

  My clone is in love.

  “I didn’t think stuff like that happened in the training ward.” Either the hacking or the hooking up.

  Dahlia laughs. “It doesn’t.”

  “We’re not your average clones,” Trigger adds. I peek over the seat to see that he’s now navigating through a screen that contains only text. He’s actually typing commands onto the screen, because there are no options to tap. No links to take. He’s hacking the hard way. The way that only people trained in writing code—or in cyber warfare, evidently—know how to do. “Almost…there…,” he mumbles.

  Then the back door of the mansion squeals open.

  “Thank you.” Hennessy glances anxiously at the car as he comes onto the back steps, carrying something in his left hand, and I can practically see his relief when he realizes I’ve tinted the windows.

  I drop out of sight again, just in case, and Hennessy rounds the car to get in from Dahlia’s side so the butler can’t see inside the car.

  “Well?” he asks as he sinks onto the bench seat, holding one of Seren’s neckties—evidently the ostensible reason for his trip to the mansion.

  “Don’t look down at me!” I whisper, and his head pops up immediately. />
  “Sorry.” Hennessy’s foot taps nervously against the floorboard, an inch from my hand. “Did you get what we need?”

  “Yes,” Trigger says. “But the butler’s still watching.”

  “Head toward the front gate please,” Hennessy says, and the driver gives a command to the car. Hennessy watches the rearview mirror as we pull away, and I know when tension melts from his frame that the butler has finally gone back inside. “Okay, take the next right and circle toward the training ward.”

  The driver does as he’s asked, without question, and suddenly I realize what a travesty it is for anyone to be too drugged to question things. It seems to me that questioning authority should be considered a fundamental human right. That’s the way I live my life, anyway, much to my mother’s chagrin.

  “That was fast,” I say as I climb onto the seat next to Hennessy. Dahlia sits across from us, where she can look over the seat at whatever Trigger’s doing on the stolen tablet.

  “Yeah, I was afraid it was too fast for Trigger to—”

  “Got it!” Trigger exclaims from the front seat. “The network block is down. At least until someone discovers that and puts it back up.”

  “How likely is that?” I ask.

  “Not very. The instructors don’t know the external network exists. Upper-level geneticists and Management must know, because they go off-site to take orders for clones for other cities. But they have no reason to try to connect, because they don’t know they can.”

  “Won’t their tablets automatically connect, like ours do?” Hennessy asks.

  “There’s no auto-connect on standard tablets here,” I tell them. “DigiCore makes their tech specifically for Lakeview. That’s why there’s no e-glass.” They use a cheaper, less advanced technology. “And they don’t auto-connect because there’s not supposed to be a signal for them to connect to.” Or, more accurately, the signal is blocked, except on the Lockes’ devices.