Hennessy nods. “Okay. So what’s the plan from here?”
I shrug with a glance around the car at all three of them. “Find some clones and start streaming?”
Dahlia turns to Trigger, a sudden idea gleaming in her eyes. “We won’t last long like that. The first instructors who see us will…Well, I don’t know what they’ll do. They think I’m dead, and they’ve never seen e-glass or a livecast. But I’m sure they’ll report us to Management. Can you get rid of them for us? Even just for a few minutes?”
“All of them?”
Dahlia glances out the car window at the sun, which is steadily sliding toward the horizon. “It’s dinnertime. Why don’t we stream from one of the secondary dormitory cafeterias? Secondary is years thirteen through seventeen,” she explains. Then she turns back to Trigger. “We can use the cafeteria on the first floor so we won’t have to wait for the elevator or waste time climbing stairs.” She frowns as she thinks. “Which classes are on the first floor?”
“Um…” He types something on his stolen tablet, then taps and begins scrolling. “Assorted manual-labor classes. Years fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen.”
“Perfect,” my identical declares. “Can you send a ping to all the first-floor conservators telling them to meet somewhere and wait for an address from Management?” She shrugs. “I don’t know how long they’ll wait if Management doesn’t show up, but if you disable their communications after you send the ping, they won’t be able to ask about what’s supposed to be happening without actually sending someone to Management.”
Trigger beams at her. “That’s a great idea.” He speaks as he types on the tablet. “That should buy us some time for the livecast.”
“Will the cafeteria work for this video?” Dahlia asks me.
“It’s perfect. We want footage of clones doing something normal. Laughing, talking, arguing. Maybe even throwing some food around. The goal is for everyone to understand that we’re just like everyone else.”
“But how sure are we that this is going to shame the public into doing the right thing?” Hennessy asks. “History is full of evidence that that won’t happen. My fear is that ultimately, business owners and wealthy private citizens—our people,” he says with a pointed glance at me, “will always choose to buy clones rather than pay a fair wage for citizen labor.”
“Okay…” I take Hennessy’s hand in both of mine. “There’s a possibility that as long as they can make and buy clones, they will. So we’ll have to take that option away from them. For good.”
“How?” he asks.
“By destroying their raw materials.” Trigger smiles. He’s caught on. “The central gene cache. Millions and millions of strands of DNA, stored and cataloged centuries ago, after the world changed. Most from casualties of the war, from all over the world. But if the Administrator loses that DNA, won’t she just take more samples? Start mining DNA from…I don’t know…citizens?”
“That’s illegal,” Hennessy says. “Living beings cannot be cloned without their permission because they own their own genes. So even if the Administrator started collecting new samples right now, she couldn’t use any of them until the donors had all died.”
“It would take decades, if not centuries, to amass a collection even close to the variety she has now,” Dahlia says. “And that variety is what enables Lakeview’s geneticists to design such healthy and efficient clones. We all learn that in school.”
“So if we destroy the cache…,” I say.
Dahlia smiles. “We destroy the system.”
“Are you sure about this?” I ask as Trigger and I sneak through the shade of the Specialist Bureau. The sun hovers on the horizon, casting long shadows all over the grounds. It was only a month ago that we were here, doing this very thing behind this very building.
Back then, we’d been hoping to rescue my identicals from euthanasia at the Defense Bureau.
Today, our mission is one of destruction, rather than rescue, but my hope for a positive outcome feels no more realistic now than it did then.
“I don’t see that we have any choice,” Trigger says. “We were all in agreement about that back in the car.”
“I’m still on board with the mission,” I whisper. “It’s the method I have reservations about.” It doesn’t quite seem fair that Waverly and Hennessy get to do a livecast while we’re stuck sneaking into the most dangerous building in the city.
“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing,” Trigger says, and that, I believe. “And your idea will hopefully make things that much safer. They should be leaving any—” He points across the lawn at the Defense Bureau, where both of the rear exits have just opened, almost simultaneously. “There they go.”
Indeed, as I watch, several high-ranking Defense officials—all men and women who must be approaching the year-forty-five mandatory retirement—file out the rear doors. I lean around the corner of the Specialist Bureau, careful to stay in the shadows, and from here I can see that even more Defense officers are leaving through the front door.
“Where did you send them?” I ask.
“To a totally made-up emergency meeting at the Management Bureau. I killed their communications after I sent that ping, but Defense has protocol in place to deal with things like that. They won’t wait as long as the dormitory conservators will before looking into this. So we’ll have to be fast.”
“But those guys are just leadership, right? There are still regular soldiers in the building?”
Trigger nods, tapping something on his stolen tablet. “They would never believe a ping asking everyone to vacate the building, no matter what excuse I used. But the soldiers who’re still in there are more used to taking orders than issuing them, and that’s a best-case scenario for us.”
“You’re sure you can get in?”
“The exits won’t be locked,” he says. “But if we use any scanner in the entire city, our bar codes will trigger an alarm. So we’re either going to have to find someone to let us into any locked room we need access to, or bypass the scanner altogether.”
We wait, my pulse swooshing rapidly in my ears, for the last of the Defense officials to disappear around the corner, headed across the manicured administration ward grounds toward the Management Bureau and the fictional meeting. Then Trigger shoves his tablet into his pocket and grabs my hand. We take off for the back of the Defense Bureau at a run and we don’t slow until we’re behind the building, hidden from sight.
Trigger pulls open the first door—he’s right, it’s unlocked—and we sneak inside, his boots silent against the white tile floor.
I’ve never been in the Defense Bureau headquarters; it’s brighter and more sterile than I expected. There are no shadows to hide in, and all the doors seem to have scanners built into them. Which means they’re all locked.
I follow Trigger down a series of identical white hallways, flinching with every squeak of my sneakers against the floor. I wish we’d found a trade laborer’s uniform for me to change into. That wouldn’t have helped me blend in with a bunch of soldiers, but it might have kept me from standing out so much that they look at my face and recognize me as a girl who should be dead.
Trigger stops at a hallway intersection with one finger over his lips. I go as still and quiet as I can, listening for whatever he’s heard. There are no voices, but I hear the familiar squeal of chair legs against tile.
Trigger gives me a “halt” gesture, and I nod. He peeks around the corner to the right, then takes off silently in that direction.
I lean around the corner to watch. I can’t help it.
Halfway down the hall, a soldier sits in a folding chair behind a small table, stationed in front of a closed door. His chair is angled away from us, and he’s reading something on his Lakeview-style tablet.
He starts to turn, and Trigger lunges the last few steps. He wraps his rig
ht arm around the soldier’s neck, bracing his hold with a grip on his own left forearm. The soldier claws at Trigger, but finds no purchase on the sleeve of his uniform. His feet kick against the floor and his knee slams into the underside of the table. I flinch over the noise. Then the soldier goes limp.
Trigger positions the soldier’s chair behind the table again, then leans the man forward with his forehead resting on his folded arms, as if he’s fallen asleep at his post. Then he grabs the gun from the soldier’s holster and the standard-issue backpack from beneath the table and jogs silently back to me.
“Step one accomplished,” he whispers as he tucks the gun into the back of his waistband.
We press on, and twice we have to cross hallway intersections without being seen or heard by people standing guard next to more doorways. I’m just starting to feel halfway stealthy when Trigger stops me again. He leans in until his nose brushes my ear, his breath stirring my hair, and a pleasant chill travels over me, in spite of the circumstances.
“The armory is just around this corner,” he whispers. “There’ll be a guard outside the door, and he won’t be young or inexperienced. I’m going to need your help for this.”
I’m afraid to speak and get us caught.
“I’m going to go around that next hallway and approach from the other direction. I want you to wait exactly three minutes.” He pulls out the stolen tablet and taps it to bring up the clock. “Then go around this corner and distract the guard. You shouldn’t have to do anything. Just get his attention. I’ll take him out from behind.”
I’m far from confident I can play my part.
“Three minutes.” I open the clock on my own tablet. When one minute clicks over to the next on both tablets, he nods. “Starting now.” Then he peeks around the corner and stealthily crosses the hall.
As I watch, he turns right at the next intersection. And I’m on my own. My heart thunders in my chest, so loud I’m not sure I’d hear any footsteps approach.
If I mess this up, we’re all “screwed,” to quote Waverly.
One minute passes. Then two. Every second is agony. My lungs feel like they’re on fire until I realize I’m holding my breath, so I exhale slowly. Then inhale.
Two and a half minutes. I want to peek around the corner, but if I’m too early, this won’t work. It might not work anyway.
The third minute ticks over. I take a deep breath. Then I step around the corner.
At the end of the hall, there’s a sliding glass window next to a locked steel door. A uniformed guard is stationed in the room beyond the window. He’s at least year thirty. There’s a braided cord over his arm and a cluster of medals pinned to his chest.
I take another quiet step, and he looks up. “Hey.” The soldier slides open the window. “You’re not authorized to be in here. Who are you?”
“I…” The word dies on my lips. I should have spent the past three minutes coming up with something to say. Tell him you’re hurt. Tell him you’re lost. Tell him there’s some kind of emergency, and he’s needed outside. But my tongue refuses to cooperate. “I…”
“Stop where you are!” The soldier disappears from the window, then opens the steel door. His hand slides into his pocket and he pulls out a standard-issue tablet as he marches toward me. “Don’t move.”
I couldn’t even if I wanted to. He’s pulling his gun now, and I’m frozen where I stand.
Then motion over his shoulder catches my eye. Trigger rounds the corner behind him and jogs toward the soldier on silent feet. At the last second, the soldier hears him, but he’s too late. Trigger presses the barrel of his stolen gun to the back of the soldier’s head. “Holster your weapon,” he orders softly. “And put the tablet back into your pocket.”
“I—”
“Don’t even try it,” Trigger warns, “or I will blow your head all over this hallway.”
Slowly, the soldier slides his tablet into his pocket and holsters his gun. Trigger takes the gun from him and sticks it into the back of his waistband. Then he removes the other gun from the soldier’s head and smashes the butt of it into the back of his skull with a sickening thud.
The soldier’s eyes roll back into his head. He collapses to the ground.
Trigger waves me forward as he kneels over the unconscious guard and removes his tablet from his pocket. He glances at the screen and exhales heavily. “He was half a second from raising the alarm.” Trigger cancels the on-screen order and pockets the tablet. Then he clicks a button on the gun and hands it to me. “Hold this. The safety’s on.”
I take the gun because I have no choice, but holding it feels…wrong. Scary. I’m trained to create life—to grow food to feed people—not to take it.
Trigger squats and grips the unconscious guard beneath both arms, hefting him as close to upright as he can. “Get his arm. Open the door.”
I push the soldier’s sleeve back to expose the bar code on his wrist; then I hold it beneath the scanner next to the armory door. A red beam passes over it. The scanner beeps. The steel door unbolts with a heavy scraping sound.
“Open it,” Trigger says.
I push the door open and hold it for him as he drags the guard inside, where his unconscious body won’t be seen by anyone who walks by. The door closes behind him, and I gasp as I look around.
We’re in a huge, high-ceilinged warehouse-like room, as sterile and white as the rest of the building, and blindingly lit from above by a series of fluorescent lights. Beyond the high stool stationed in front of the sliding window, racks of long black rifles and handgun stands line the walls, and rows and rows of black powder-coated shelves form a maze of aisles in the middle of the room. The shelves hold crate after crate after crate, all black and most labeled as containing ammunition for the guns on the wall. More kinds of ammunition than I even knew existed.
“This way.” Trigger lays the unconscious guard on the floor in the aisle, and I follow him as he jogs toward the end of the first row of shelves. Here, the crates are a different size and are made of a sturdy green plastic.
Trigger unzips the stolen backpack, then opens one of the crates. Inside it lies a series of metal rings about two inches deep and about the diameter of my palm. At first I think they’re hollow, like bracelets. Then Trigger lifts one, and I see that they’re filled with a thick, clear gel.
“Here.” He extends the backpack toward me. I take it and hold it open while he carefully stacks ten of the gel-filled rings inside. “Okay. One more thing; then we’re out of here.”
In the next aisle, he opens another crate and removes a pen-shaped object about the diameter of my thumb, with a button on one end and a tiny screen on the side. “We probably only need one, but just to be safe…” He takes another pen and slides them both into the smaller front pocket of the bag. “Let’s go.”
We sneak out of the Defense Bureau the same way we snuck in, tiptoeing past a couple of door guards before slipping outside under the cover of darkness. The sun has finally set.
I hope Waverly and Hennessy are okay in the Workforce cafeteria.
If none of this had happened, that’s where I would be right now.
“Okay, do you know where the genetics lab is?” Trigger whispers as we peek around the corner of the building.
“Yeah. My class took a tour once. It’s on the other side of the Management Bureau.” Where we sent all the high-ranking soldiers.
Trigger nods. “We’re going to have to take a circuitous route, back around the Specialist Bureau. But the good news is that there shouldn’t be anyone still working there this time of night. Unlike Defense. You ready?”
I take his hand with a nervous smile. Then we run.
We make it to the Specialist Bureau with no problem, but as we’re rounding that building to come at the genetics lab from the back, we hear footsteps. Then voices.
??
?I want everyone on alert,” a man’s low-pitched voice commands, and when we peek around the corner of the building, we see that the man speaking is at the front of the returning cluster of officers.
“That’s Saber 44,” Trigger whispers. “The highest-ranking soldier in Lakeview.”
“Call the secondary cadets out of the dorms,” Saber 44 continues. “Dinner can wait. I don’t know what’s going on, but when the Administrator realizes that communications are down, she’ll head back here immediately. In the meantime, I want everyone on patrol, but you’ll have to send someone to the dorm in person while we work on restoring communications.”
“Sir, there’s been no reported breach from any of the gates or checkpoints,” a woman’s crisp, clear voice replies. “Couldn’t this be a glitch? Or even a prank by one of the students? It wouldn’t be the first time an ambitious Special Forces cadet has tested out his or her training here at home.”
Trigger grins at me in the shadows. Clearly, he’s one of those ambitious cadets.
“Until we know otherwise, we’re going to assume this is real,” the man’s voice barks.
We’re already an hour late for the wedding rehearsal. People in Mountainside must know something is wrong by now. Including the Administrator.
“The dorms,” I whisper, and Trigger pulls his tablet from his pocket.
“We’ll have to warn Waverly.”
“How many stories is that?” Hennessy whispers as we stare through the tinted e-glass car window at the building we’re parked in front of.
“Twenty, at least.” I’ve tried to count the floors of the building in front of us, but I keep losing count. “And this is just the secondary dorm. There’s also a primary and an intermediate.”
“It’s so strange that they decided to build up instead of out, when there’s so much space out here.”
“I think it has to do with their cluster principle. Dahlia said they’re expected to spend as much time as possible with their identicals, to foster a sense of identity and purpose. That must work better when they stack everyone on top of one another.” I exhale and glance at the clock on my tablet.