I’m not sure I do think that. As much as I like the idea of picking wild vegetables, I also liked knowing when and where I would get my next meal. I liked sitting with Poppy in the cafeteria, trading my corn for her tomatoes.
It’s dinnertime, and I don’t know how to find food now that I’m not supposed to exist, either in Lakeview or in the wild. And I don’t have Poppy.
“I wonder what’s going on?” Trigger mumbles as we walk, and I realize he’s lost in thoughts of his own. “That private soldier—I recognized his genome. He graduated when I was a year fourteen. If all the soldiers in the break room were private security, something big must be going on….”
We slow down after we pass the Administrator’s secret tunnel, and Trigger starts to look more confident. “Yes. This is the way. Sorry for the detour.”
I can’t resist a small smile. “It’s good to know you’re not right all the time.”
“Why would that be good to—”
A soft scraping noise draws us both to a startled stop. He raises one finger to his lips, but I’m already too scared to make a sound, other than the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears.
Trigger holds one palm out in a “wait here” gesture, but my feet don’t want to listen. I don’t even realize I’m still following him—finally I’ve mastered silent steps—until over his shoulder I see a man wearing a long white lab coat. He’s hunched over a scanner built into the stone wall next to a massive, reinforced metal door. The man turns, and I recognize him.
We’ve found both the runaway geneticist and the city gate.
“Wexler 42!” His name explodes from my mouth before I even feel it on my tongue, and when Trigger flinches I realize I’ve shouted. The geneticist looks up as his name bounces back at me from every surface of the stone tunnel. Our gazes meet. His expression shuffles through surprise, then relief. He’s not happy to see me, but he’s not frightened by my presence either.
Trigger, however…
“Who’s your friend?” Wexler demands as his gaze rakes over the cadet, apparently searching for weapons.
Friend. My eyes close and Poppy’s smile flashes across my memory. I’ve never used the term friend to refer to anyone who doesn’t look just like me, but this new use of the word feels less strange than it might have before Trigger’s nontraditional use of words like beautiful and kiss.
“This is Trigger 17.” There’s no reason to withhold that information, because his felonious aiding and abetting has probably already been discovered by Management. He’s probably as wanted as I am.
That, and if we come a few feet closer he’ll be able to read Trigger’s name on his uniform.
“Trigger.” Wexler seems to be tasting the name. Trying it out. “The toy soldier who woke up Sleeping Beauty. Too bad the world will never hear that story.”
My brow furrows. I don’t understand.
Wexler laughs, and his gaze has caught on me now. “He’s the boy from the shed, right?”
Of course he knows about the shed. They would have told him what I’d done when they asked him what was wrong with my genome.
“But that wasn’t the first time, was it? Before the equipment shed, he was the boy from the elevator, right?” My surprise must be obvious, because he chuckles again. “It’s in your files. An alert went out for Trigger 17 twenty minutes ago, so I cross-checked his name with yours.” Wexler holds up his tablet.
Why would he ask me Trigger’s name if he already knew it? Did he think I would lie?
“Why aren’t they tracking you through that?” Trigger’s gaze is focused on the tablet. When Wexler doesn’t answer, Trigger frowns. “They should have been all over you the minute you logged in to the system. Did you disable the locator?”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the geneticist doesn’t look confused.
“He hacked his tablet.” Trigger turns back to Wexler before I can figure out which question to ask first. “Can you hack the door lock?” He sounds excited now, as if escape is suddenly a real possibility.
“I’m trying.” Wexler turns back to the wrist scanner, which is mounted to the wall at an odd angle. “But it seems to be less an issue of hacking than…snipping.” He pulls a small folding knife from his pocket with his spare hand.
No, it’s not mounted. The scanner is now hanging from the wall, shining its red laser beam at the floor near our feet. Wexler has pulled it away from its base panel to expose a smaller panel connecting several colored wires to several other wires.
“No!” Trigger pushes him out of the way. “Cutting any of the wires will trigger an alarm. You have to access it through the system. Give me that.” He snatches Wexler’s tablet and begins scrolling and tapping his way through options so fast I don’t have a chance to read them.
Gardeners have access to a class set of tablets for schoolwork, yet I don’t recognize anything I’m seeing on Wexler’s. I don’t know what system they’re talking about.
While Trigger works on hacking, I grab the geneticist’s arm, and with it his attention. Wexler returns my gaze not as if he wants to look at me, but as if he has to. As if he can’t help it. “What’s wrong with me?” I demand before I can lose my nerve. “With my genome?”
“You are an anomaly.”
“I know that!” My hand clenches around his elbow. “But what does it mean?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” Wexler pulls his arm from my grip and takes a step back. “You’re just…different.”
Panic burns its way up my throat. “I can’t be different. No one’s different.” Different means inefficient and conspicuous. Different is a death sentence. “Ford 45 said—”
“You spoke to Ford?” Wexler’s brown eyes widen as Trigger grumbles softly at the tablet, and even in the dim light from a bulb ten feet above us I can see the tension in every line of his aging face.
“No. We overheard him talking to one of the Defense commanders. He said I have two defects. What are they? Why can’t I see them?”
“First of all, they’re not defects. They’re anomalies,” Wexler insists. I open my mouth to argue, but he speaks over me. “And second, you can’t see them because they’re on a genetic level. They’re only visible with a very powerful microscope, and even then they’re only obvious with twenty-five years of genetics training. Physically you are virtually identical to all the other girls in your division.”
“Virtually? Not exactly? Did you put flaws into my genome on purpose? Or did you just forget to fix mine before I was put into production?”
But he’s already talking again, following his own thoughts rather than mine. “They’re not flaws, Dahlia. You have no flaws. You are perfect. I made sure of that.”
Pride echoes as clearly in his voice as indignation shines in his eyes. He’s insulted by the description of something he created as “flawed.” Yet how can any difference not be a defect?
“You don’t understand.” His gaze searches mine. “But that’s not because you can’t understand. It’s because they’ve taught that possibility right out of you. It’s a shortcoming of nurture, not nature.” His focus strays from my eyes until he’s watching all of me. Studying me. The attention feels invasive yet not personal. He’s looking at me like I look at my best tomato plants, as if he’s pleased with the work he’s done. “You are unique, Dahlia.”
Trigger glances up from the tablet in surprise, and I realize he’s been listening even as he taps and swipes his way toward freedom.
Unique. That word burns into me like the heat in the center of a chunk of coal. I feel like I will crack into fiery bits at any moment.
Unique comes from the root of the word one. It means individual. Distinctive. Singular. One of a kind. The only of its kind. I know the definition, yet the concept feels obscure and out of focus. Not relevant to me or to anything I’ve ever known.
No one is unique. Geneticists are few, but they are not unique. Trigger is scarred, but beneath the marks training has given him, he is the same
as all his identicals, down to the basic building blocks of life.
Even the Administrator…
Well, the Administrator is unique, but only because the rest of her genome was “retired.” Because Lakeview only needs one Administrator. But even she didn’t start off as an individual. To make her unique, they had to euthanize everyone else created from her genome.
Because I’m unique, they euthanized everyone else created from my genome.
For the Administrator, being unique is an honor she’s earned. But for me it is a disaster. A death sentence. Why would a sixteen-year-old hydroponic gardener—one of thousands of laborers—be different from the rest? How did it happen?
“You knew.” I can hear the accusation in my voice, and Wexler doesn’t deny the charge. “You knew I was flawed, but you put me into production anyway. Why?”
“It’s not that simple. You’re not a clone, Dahlia.”
“What?” Trigger looks up from the tablet. His brow is furrowed. “Everyone’s a clone.”
“Not Dahlia. She’s a prototype. The mold from which the others were all formed. But she wasn’t supposed to be.”
“I don’t understand what that means.” In fact, I don’t understand anything anymore. How can anyone be unique? And…“If I’m a prototype, shouldn’t I be like all the others? Or rather, shouldn’t they all be like me?”
“Usually, yes.” Wexler runs one hand through his short hair, then exhales heavily. “They’ll kill us all if they catch us, so you may as well know the truth. Dahlia, your genome was never meant to be cloned.”
“That makes no sense,” Trigger says, just as I say, “What was it meant for?”
“You were a special order for a private client from another city. An under-the-table order, because we’re not allowed to work for anything other than the glory of Lakeview. As you well know.”
“Client?” I don’t know that word. “Under the table?” It’s like he’s speaking another language.
“Years ago, I did a favor for a friend from another city. But I had to do the work in secret.”
“I was that work?”
“Yes. And I was very proud of the work I did on you.” Wexler is watching me like a tomato again, eyeing my every feature. Studying my every gesture. “But engineering you took so long I no longer had time to do my actual job. I had no choice but to alter your genome slightly to fit Lakeview’s needs, then use that tweaked version to fulfill Management’s order for five thousand female trade laborers.”
For one long moment, his words tumble around in my head, refusing to line up in any order that makes sense. Until finally one fact emerges from the chaos. “You designed me for another city?”
“That’s treason,” Trigger snaps with more anger than seems fitting for a boy currently trying to disable the lock on one of the city gates.
Wexler ignores him. “Not for a city. For a person.”
“Who?” Why would anyone need a genome?
“That doesn’t matter, and you wouldn’t understand the answer,” Wexler insists.
My cheeks burn with anger, but I move on because I am suddenly very aware of how long we’ve been here and how close Management might be to finding us. “You designed me for a person, then you tweaked my genome and used it to produce an entire class of trade laborers for the city of Lakeview?”
Wexler nods.
“And those tweaks are the differences between my genome and all the others?”
“Yes!” He’s clearly excited that I am catching on. He looks…proud. “And you are everything you were supposed to be. If anyone is ‘flawed,’ it’s the others. Your ‘identicals.’ ”
But that makes no sense. None of the others were caught kissing a boy they had no business even speaking to. None of the others are running for their lives. None of the others have condemned thousands of their sisters to a hopefully peaceful but very permanent death.
“Why am I here if you designed me for a person in another city? Why didn’t you fulfill the order?”
“I did fulfill it!” But Wexler’s gaze drops to the ground. “At least, I thought I did.” He fiddles with the edge of his lab coat, and I wonder why he’s still wearing such a distinctive garment while he’s on the run. “But when they showed me the result of your blood test, I recognized my own work immediately. It seems that I accidentally sent one of the genetically altered embryos—one of your clones—to fulfill the private order.”
“And I—the prototype—wound up as one of five thousand trade laborers who are only identical to me on the outside.”
“Yes.” Wexler nods absently, as if he’s lost in his own thoughts. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
Yet somehow none of this makes sense. Talk of unique individuals and private orders means little to me other than a vague, uneasy awareness of how very wrong the whole thing feels. How very strange and illogical and incredibly inefficient.
Why design only one of anything?
What use would anyone have for one child? A child who is unique, as far as Wexler’s friend from another city knows. What happened to that girl I was supposed to be? Why would she be raised alone? Is she being trained to be something special? Like…an Administrator?
“What are these tweaks?” I ask as Trigger types something into a form on Wexler’s tablet. “What makes me different from all the others?”
“It’s nothing you will ever need to worry about. You have my word.”
“I’m not…sick?”
The geneticist looks appalled. “No. You are perfect.” He glances at his tablet and his eyes narrow when he sees what’s on the screen. Whatever hacking Trigger has managed to do. “Here.” He snatches the tablet over the cadet’s protests and opens a new screen. His fingers move so fast I can barely follow the motions, and a couple of seconds later he pulls a familiar penlike device from one of the pockets of his lab coat. “Give me your finger. I’ll show you the differences.”
I hold out my hand, and Wexler’s pen bites into the fleshy part of my middle finger and takes its sample. A red bubble wells up on my finger and I stare at it, fascinated that something as small as a single drop—not to mention a chain of DNA—can tell the world so much about a person.
Wexler pulls the cap off the opposite end of his pen to reveal a small bit of metal. He plugs the pen into his tablet and a fresh screen opens. Seconds and a few taps later, Wexler holds the tablet out so I can see it. He taps and scrolls his way through charts and images—chromosomes, a DNA helix, and several things I can’t even identify—so quickly that I can hardly focus on the first before it’s gone. He speaks as quickly as he swipes, and I recognize even fewer of the genetics terms than I do the images; I’m relieved to see that Trigger looks as mystified as I feel.
“But what does all that mean?” the cadet demands when Wexler scrolls into the dozenth image in just a few minutes.
The geneticist launches into a brand-new “simplified” version of his explanation, and Trigger and I focus so much of our attention on the images and words that we don’t notice the approaching noise until it’s nearly upon us.
Trigger hears it first, and when he looks up from the tablet, his narrow-eyed gaze focused in the direction of the Administrator’s secret escape passage, adrenaline fires through my veins. The sound is just a scrape against concrete, but I recognize it as footsteps. Several sets.
“What did you do?” Trigger demands, and I turn to see that he has Wexler by the throat. The tablet no longer shows confusing charts and illustrations. Instead Wexler has reopened the screen Trigger was last on and has entered several characters into a form that has replaced them with asterisks to hide the password from us.
“How could you?” I whisper as the truth hits me. I should have realized he didn’t need a new sample, since there was already one on file. “Trigger, he took my blood because he knew that would sound an alert.”
Wexler gurgles something inarticulate that seems to support my guess.
“It’s only
been minutes,” Trigger whispers. “Not enough time to move troops in bulk. These must have come straight from the Administrator’s mansion.”
“In bulk?” I feel like I’m going to be sick. “How many will they send?”
“If they know I’m with you? Plenty. But I only hear three sets so far.” He lets go of Wexler’s throat. “Open the door. Now.”
Wexler inhales in great gulps, hunched over his tablet as he struggles to catch his breath. “Trigger is their worst nightmare,” he gasps. “They’ve taught him enough to make him truly dangerous.”
The same seems to be true of the geneticist, but in a completely different way.
“Open it,” Trigger growls. “Now.” Then he takes off in the direction of the approaching footsteps just as three uniformed soldiers round the curve.
Wexler raises his tablet and types frantically with one hand. Trigger throws his foot in a wide arching kick, knocking guns away from two of the three soldiers at once. And I can only watch, fascinated, while each of them fights for our freedom in his own way, hoping that my skills will prove more useful in the wild.
Trigger drops to the ground and sweeps one soldier’s feet from beneath him while he grasps for one of the dropped guns. He stands, weapon in hand, and bashes the fallen soldier in the head with the grip of the weapon. The soldier collapses in a heap at his identicals’ feet.
On my right, Wexler makes a gleeful sound, and I turn to see that his password has been accepted and he’s being asked to confirm some command.
Trigger grunts again, and I spin just as one of the disarmed soldiers punches him in the jaw. His head snaps back and he stumbles into the wall behind him. Trigger bounces back to jab the soldier in the gut, then grabs the man’s head and rams it into the stone wall once, twice, three times. The soldier falls and Trigger stands up straight to face his only remaining foe.
Red light flashes in my eyes and a high-pitched electronic wailing scrapes the inside of my skull raw. But beneath that is a low grinding sound. I turn back to Wexler and find the huge metal door slowly rolling open. My heart leaps into my throat. Whatever password he’s stolen has unlocked the gate but set off an alarm.