Ms. White shoves the androids aside. She seems uneven without one arm, and there is rage in her face unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
And then I hear footsteps down the hall, coming from, of all places, my own bedroom.
Boots thud hollowly on the floor, and Jack emerges from the shadows.
My heart leaps into my chest—with hope, with something else, something stronger—
More than a year ago, I was killed, my memories forcibly jammed into a cloned body enhanced with cybernetics, pieces of me disappearing bit by bit. Including my memories of Jack.
So why does my whole soul react when I see him?
Because…
Because he still loves me, even after I forgot him.
I don’t have any memories of Jack. I have no reason to save him because of a shared past. Those are memories I will never, ever get back. All I have of Jack are the past few weeks. The way we slept side-by-side while on the run. The way he pressed his hand against my heart, certain that it proved my humanity despite my cy-clone body. The way his kiss seared into me, desperate and passionate, as if he were trying to put everything he ever felt into the pressure on my lips.
I don’t care about how he used to make me feel; I want to save him because of the way he makes me feel now.
Now. Now in this very moment, when I realize that he needs saving.
Because his eyes are glassy. His skin sallow.
And I recall the way Julie and Xavier were beat up after the fight with Akilah, but Jack and I weren’t. I recall the way Jack was in the military, the same unit as Akilah. I remember all the little things, the moments when he wasn’t tired or wasn’t hurt or wasn’t… human.
“How long?” I ask, backing away slowly.
It is Ms. White who answers. “We turned him before we turned Akilah.”
So, from the moment I met him, Jack was a cy-clone, too.
The perfect spy into the Zunzana. Into me.
Always able to stay one step ahead. Always, unknowingly, giving Ms. White our exact location, the exact information she wanted. Jack’s arrival pushed me to discover Dad’s secrets in my subconscious more than anything else. Whatever tests Ms. White did on me didn’t work—she needed me to find the information and hand it over to her. She knew I wouldn’t give it to her blindly, so she used Jack.
“Did he know?” I ask. He steps closer. Closer.
Ms. White barks in laughter. “He was as ignorant as you.” She sounds amused. This is entertainment for her.
Something cold and bitter and hard snaps in place inside my soul.
And that is the moment he attacks.
seventy-five
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, panicked.
“Get her!” Ms. White screams from the doorway, her breathing jagged.
Jack charges forward, but I dodge him, throwing the kitchen chairs at him. He smashes them aside, advancing, advancing. He moves as quick as lightning, leaping over the end of the table, using the momentum to slam his feet into my stomach. I double over, gasping for air, and he rams the flat of his palm into my chin. I reel back, the pain of the blow reverberating through my whole body.
I feint toward the hallway, then lunge out of Jack’s grip, slipping on the tiled floor. My mind spins at the possibilities before me. I can’t hurt him. Even knowing that Jack’s not really Jack, I can’t hurt him.
I try to run.
Ms. White is in the doorway now, with her army of androids. I spin on my heel, heading for the tarp-covered gaping hole in the wall, the scar in the side of the building caused by the android explosion. Jack sweeps at my legs, knocking me down. My head cracks painfully against the tiled floor, and I taste blood in my mouth. I concentrate and realize that I can turn the pain sensors in my brain off. Handy.
He leaps on top of me, his knees pressing painfully into my chest. I try to throw him off, but his hips shift down and his biceps harden as he forces my arms down. My back bucks, and I slam my head into the floor, cracking the tile, trying to gain some traction.
It’s useless.
“Jack,” I gasp. “Please.”
Please. I think I love you. I know you love me. Please. Don’t hurt me.
Don’t be this hollow shell.
But nothing happens.
He is controlled—absolutely, utterly controlled by Ms. White. And this is what she wants to do to people. Let them have their own lives, until she wants them. Give them the strength of giants, but not the power to control it.
The pressure on my chest intensifies.
Ms. White walks casually forward. “So,” she says, as if dictating an agenda to a secretary android, “it has become painfully clear that I cannot rely on you to give me your father’s formula either consciously or subconsciously, so I will just have to take it from your body. A shame really, but it can’t be helped. And as you so graciously took my arm, perhaps I should have this boy do it.”
His fingers dig into my skin between my breasts, and it feels as if he would like to rip the beating heart from my chest and crush it in his hands.
I close my eyes for one second—no more.
My father gave me what I needed to survive.
When I open my eyes, I know what I have to do. My body—my body that is just a copy of myself, filled with nanobots and steel bones and parts manufactured in a factory—my body will not fail me. Because even if it was pieced together, it was made by my father, and my father will not fail me.
I shift my weight, springing upward, throwing Jack from me. I leap up from the floor, sliding down on one knee as I jab stiffened fingers into Ms. White’s solar plexus, sending her flying across the room, gasping for air. I twirl around Jack, grabbing the back of his head with one hand and slamming my other hand against the side of her neck. Jack is faster and stronger than I had thought, able to slip from my grasp despite the blow I’ve given him, but he’s not fast enough. I drop to both knees, sliding under his open-legged stance and kicking up from the floor, pushing him away in the same moment. He drops heavily, and I throw myself on top of his body, much like he’d pinned me to the ground before.
We’re close to where Rosie the android exploded, the gaping maw of a hole in the apartment opening up mere meters away. It still smells of destruction and burning. Scorch marks smear the ground, and the giant tarp covering the hole flaps in the wind.
But rather than try to hurt him, I stare into his eyes. They are empty and dead inside, pools of bright blue color that do not have a single spark of emotion.
Eyes are the windows to the soul.
I frame his face with both my hands, staring into him. I pour in every emotion I have: love and trust and hope, but also fear and pain and sorrow. My eyes burn the way they did before, when I first realized the power my father left for me. When I stared into Akilah. My entire body stills—and so does his.
He blinks. And when he opens his eyes again, I see him, the real him, the Jack I have fallen in love with all over again.
“No!” Ms. White screams, and she does something—some sort of remote command or something—and the life snaps out of Jack like a rubber band breaking.
He tries to shove me off, tries to pull my hands away, tries to break my arms.
But I don’t let go.
I can do this.
I hacked into Representative Belles’s computer. I hacked into my own mind. I can hack into his.
Jack’s arms snake up, his hand wrapping around my throat.
Squeezing. Squeezing.
How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me.
Black spots float in front of my eyes. I can’t breathe. This is more than when I was hiding underwater, able to hold my breath. Jack is choking not just air from me, but my very life.
The black dots merge, striped with yellow.
You’re the queen bee, Dad said. Funny that.
Bees have been following me everywhere.
I
taste honey in my mouth.
No, that’s not honey.
It’s blood.
A buzzing fills my ears.
You’re the queen bee.
But Dad wasn’t a part of the Zunzana, he didn’t know about Jack’s secret code.
Queen bee.
Queen… of the hive.
All the computers in the world are on a network. They’re linked by our cuffs. But I’m a computer. Jack’s a computer—Akilah—PA Young—all the cy-clones. We’re all computers.
You know the great thing about computers?
They can be hacked.
seventy-six
Linked computers are like bees in a hive, connected to each other, despite being separate.
And I’m the queen bee.
My eyes flash open, and I feel the burning inside of them, like fire, like rage. I stare at Jack, and his eyes fly open, too. I connect to him wirelessly, remotely, our eyes portals into our operating systems. I see—no, I feel—the string of commands that makes Jack controlled by Ms. White.
Fire and electricity and passion boil inside of me, inside of Jack, and I sever the connection.
His hands drop from my throat.
But I’m not done. My power extends far, far beyond just us. I sense PA Young, tied up with metal bars and steel downstairs, where I left her. Snap. I free her mind from Ms. White’s control. My reach goes further. Dozens in the capital building, sleeper cells in Triumph Towers, people who don’t even know that they’re cy-clones, just doing their jobs and going home at night to their families without even realizing that one day Ms. White would call on them and force them to become this inhuman monster to do her biding.
Snap. They don’t even know they were trapped, but I’ve broken the bonds around them.
Further. The safe house. There’s Akilah. I fill her mind with fire, I burn away the ties twisting her brain into something it’s not.
Snap.
Further, further. To the lunar base, the soldiers Ms. White used for experiments. Snap. Snap. Snap. The spies she placed in the Secessionary States, awaiting a time when she might need to use more terrorism and war to convince people through fear and manipulation to willingly come into her grasp. Snap. Snap. Snap.
Free. They’re all free.
It is only then that I stand, only then that I turn to Ms. White, with the fire of my power burning in my eyes.
“We are free,” I say, my voice buzzing with the sound of the hundreds of people she’d turned into cy-clones. We were a part of the network, a part of the hive, but it was not Ms. White who had control.
It was me.
And I have freed them all.
“We cannot be controlled,” I say. My voice is loud and low, and through my mouth, all the others speak as well. We are all united in this moment, all united against this horrible woman who thought to control us all.
Ms. White cowers in terror.
“We cannot ever be controlled!” I roar, my voice rising among the horde.
But this much power, it burns through me like a fire. I was not meant to hold the strings of every single person to me. I tremble, the power inside me scorching my veins.
“Please,” Ms. White begs. She’s scared now. She’s really, truly scared. I don’t think she ever saw me as anything other than her little robot or the container that hid Dad’s research. She forgot that I was a person, and that my father gave me a very specific set of skills, skills designed to stop her.
“Ella,” Ms. White says. “Think now. Think about what you’re doing. You’re not one of them. You have seen the possibility of war. You know what the consequences can be. Don’t—” Her voice cracks. “Don’t throw away all we’ve worked for. We are on the brink of a peace the world has never seen.”
“Control is not peace,” I say.
“You think you can stop this?” Ms. White says. Her knees quake, but she stands anyway. “There is no stopping technology. The Secessionary States already have similar tech. Someone else will make cyborg-clones, someone else will be in control. All I want is peace. Yes—I wanted a peace where I profited, but still, peace. If you stop me now, the next person to rise up won’t want peace. They’ll want war.”
I feel the ripple of fear that passes from me into the hive of all the other cy-clones. The fear of being used. The soldiers’ fear of battle.
But I pull it all back into my heart, and I lock it up inside of me.
“I will never allow you—or anyone—to take away our humanity,” I say. “We are not robots. We have a human soul, if nothing else, and I will never, ever allow this power to be used in any way.”
Ms. White smiles sadly. “You already are,” she whispers. “You think I can’t see it in the way that boy stands behind you? You’re connected to all the cy-clones. You didn’t sever my control of them; you just shifted it to yourself.”
My stomach drops. She’s right. I can feel all the other cy-clones she made, I have access to them, their thoughts, their actions, their voices. I could, with merely a thought, make Jack stride over to Ms. White and snap her neck. Or jump off the side of the building. Or kiss me. I could do it to them all. I control the Prime Administrator. I could release her from her steel bonds and put her in her office and control the whole entire world.
I could.
And the power is intoxicating. It courses through me. It burns, yes, but it burns so beautifully.
And that is the very reason why I gather all the strings of the power tightly inside of me.
And that is the very reason why I have to let it go.
I release them all. I cut the bonds I have made between all of us, and I let it all go.
And just when I stumble and think I’m about to fall, I feel Jack’s strong arms wrap around my own, holding me up, keeping me steady. Not because I forced him to. Because he loves me. Because that is what love does.
And I know.
I will never fall again.
epilogue
Prime Administrator Young looks as if she has been shaken to her very core. I don’t know if she would have believed me if I’d just gone up to her and told her she was no longer human, but a cy-clone capable of immense strength… and capable of being controlled. But she felt it, felt me—all of the cy-clones did.
She knows.
“I had no idea,” she says. “I think I can see it now, in some of the decisions I’ve made this last year, some of the laws I’ve put through, but at the time… it felt like I was the one deciding. I didn’t realize the level of control Jadis exerted over me.”
I nod. She seems different now, free of Ms. White’s influence. Perhaps a little more aged, but also a little more scared. This suits a person who faced war the way PA Young did. Not all confidence and bravado, but a little fear for her own consequences, for the people she would affect.
Her clear eyes meet mine. “I’ll have to step down, obviously.”
“But—” Jack starts.
PA Young is already shaking her head. “I cannot run the risk that someone else figures out a way to hack, er, me. It’s too dangerous. For the good of us all, I must step down from my position as Prime Administrator.”
And now I see why she was elected, and why she has been the strongest leader the Unified Countries has ever known. The Vice Administrator—a slightly older man originally from Mexico—seems to be a good man, but he will always be in PA Young’s shadow.
The androids, previously under Ms. White’s control, are all turned off. They’re piled into one corner, their bodies stiff and oddly-angled, their eyes still open wide and staring at nothing.
“I’ll have to take Ms. White into custody,” PA Young says. “Obviously. The trial will be a fiasco. I don’t know how we’ll keep cy-clones from the media… and that worries me, because the more people know about the possibility of… of us, the more likely they’ll try to emulate what Ms. White has already done.” She pauses, fear evident on her face, but she also looks resigned. “Where is she?”
Jack and I excha
nge glances. “I didn’t know what to do with her,” I confess. “And I wasn’t sure who to trust, at least not at first, so…”
PA Young narrows her eyes. “What did you do?” she asks.
Jack and I lead her down into the basement of the Reverie Mental Spa, into the reverie chamber, where Ms. White is plugged into the machine.
“I’ve rigged it to give her a continual dose of the drug,” I say.
“That’s not much of a punishment.” PA Young scowls at Ms. White’s sleeping form.
“She’s not reliving happy memories,” Jack says.
PA Young’s eyes dart back and forth between us.
“I’ve made her relive, over and over, the last few days,” I say softly, watching Ms. White’s body. “I’ve had to fill in the blanks with my own feelings and experiences. She’s spiraling around those last moments, those times when she went against me, and she’s feeling it from my side, the pain, the betrayal.”
She thinks she’s awake. I’m doing to her just what she did to me. I’m making her feel what it was like to slowly go crazy, to question everything. To watch my mother die. To fight for my life against my best friend. To feel the man who loved me try to kill me.
To know that the woman I trusted as much as my own mother betrayed me.
That’s what I’m making her feel.
I’ve turned her into me, and made her live the life she forced me to live.
Over and over and over again.
As PA Young leaves—escorted by a frantic security detail that had no idea where she’d gone the night before—Jack and I stay behind. He leads me to the roof of the apartment, the place that was, in another life, ours. It’s hard to see the stars in the perpetual twilight made by the lights of the city, but we squint up at the sky anyway.
I lean into his hard chest. Akilah is awake and herself again, and she and Julie and Xavier are coming here. They are the only family I have left, and joy bubbles up inside me at the knowledge that, despite everything, I am not alone.
I lean back in the warmth of Jack’s arms, and the infinite sky stretches out before me, and for the first time in my life, I finally feel free.