As the soldiers haul me down the curving sidewalk toward the gate leading out of the training ward, the athletic instructors begin to round up the soccer players, herding several dozen of my terrified identicals toward the academy to await instructions from Management.
Other groups of identicals stop walking, running relays, and weeding flower beds to stare at me with detached fascination. My arrest is no threat to those who don’t share my face.
I don’t know where they’ve taken Trigger. The only thing I know for sure is that I’ve managed to stand out from my peers again. But this time I’ve become a spectacle. I am clearly defective.
And the world has no place for defects.
The patrol car rolls to a stop in front of the Management Bureau, and one of the soldiers helps me out of the backseat because my hands are still bound. Without a word, they march me into the lobby, and people turn to look. I stare at the ground. My face burns hotter with every step. Cady 34 was right—I was not meant to be anything more than a single pixel out of a much greater image.
I was never meant to be noticed on my own.
We head through the shiny lobby to the very elevator Trigger 17 and I shared weeks before, but if the soldiers are aware of the coincidence, I can’t tell. I think about that day as the elevator climbs, and even now I can’t truly regret speaking to Trigger. When the doors slide open on the top floor, the soldiers pull me along too fast for me to read any of the signs.
I have no idea what office takes up the fourteenth floor of the Management Bureau.
The soldiers march me down several hallways and through several doors they have to access by scanning the bar codes on their wrists. Each door leads to another hallway lined with more closed doors. This place is a maze.
The rooms are neither labeled nor numbered, and that fact makes my chest feel tight. Without signs and placards, how can anyone know what kind of work goes on here? How can people know whether they are in the right place?
Are we not supposed to know those things?
Finally I am led into an open area from which several hallways branch. The soldiers guide me down the first hall on the left, and one of them holds his wrist beneath a sensor built into the door. A light flashes green and the door unlocks with the whisper of a sliding bolt.
“Hold out your hand,” one of the soldiers says as he slices through the plastic loop binding my wrists. He pulls a pen-shaped object from one pocket, and my pulse jumps. I try to withdraw my hand, but the other soldier seizes my wrist. His grip is fierce and bruising. My heart beats so hard my ribs hurt.
This is my worst nightmare.
“I’m not defective.” I know that’s a lie, but terror has stolen my courage. With a soul-shattering bolt of shock, I realize I don’t want to die, even though my death would benefit Lakeview. I don’t want Poppy or any of the other girls wearing my face to die. I would rather have them around me—flaws and all—than give them up for the good of the city.
For the first time in my life, I do not care about the welfare of the city that created me and gave me life. That raised and educated me. The city I was intended to serve since before I was even a handful of carefully designed cells.
The first soldier presses the pen to the pad of my right index finger and again I try to pull away, but my struggle is useless. He pushes a button on top of the pen. A needle shoots from the bottom into my skin. The sting is slight, but it echoes through me like a mortal wound.
As he releases the depressor, the needle sucks up several drops of blood so my genome can be examined for flaws. The soldier releases my arm and shoves me into the room they’ve just unlocked, and before I can even take a deep breath they’ve closed the door behind me.
The bolt slides into place, and a chill crawls across my skin.
The soldiers’ footsteps get softer as they walk away, and I spin to stare through the window in the door. The hallway is deserted. There are several other closed doors with identical glass windows, but the rooms I can see into are all dark and evidently empty.
My room is empty too, except for me. There is no carpet and no furniture. The walls, floor, ceiling, and door are all made of the same smooth material, and every surface is painted the same pale gray. The consistency is disorienting. I can’t tell where the floor ends and the walls begin until I’m practically standing in the corner.
This room feels like it can’t truly exist, and in it I feel like I don’t exist either. Maybe that’s intentional. To get me used to the inevitability of what’s coming.
Defective and inefficient genomes must be recalled for the good of the city. That is the most fundamental principle of a productive and orderly society. There hasn’t been a recall in my lifetime, but I’ve always known it could happen. I’ve always known it should happen if Lakeview were ever burdened with a flawed genome.
What I didn’t know is how terrified the defective identicals would feel. How reluctant they would be to give up their lives—to simply cease existing—for the good of the city.
I never imagined that selfless commitment could feel so terrifying.
Footsteps clack from outside my door, and I press my face against the window—the only feature in this strange gray room. On the other side of the glass, two more soldiers escort a man in a white lab coat toward the room across the hall. His eyes are brown, like mine, and his hair is just starting to turn gray, but his face is unlined. I’ve never seen his genome before, but the lab coat can mean only one thing: he is a scientist. From the Specialist Bureau.
The soldiers unlock the door, and as they push the man into the room he twists to argue with them, gripping the doorjamb desperately. The name embroidered on the left side of his lab coat is Wexler 42.
The door closes, framing his face in a square of glass, and Wexler’s focus finds me. He goes still as the soldiers walk away, leaving us staring at each other. Wexler frowns, studying my features. Then recognition hits him and he stumbles back from the door, wide-eyed.
He knows me. Or at least, he knows my face.
It’s no surprise that he might have seen one—or more likely a pair—of my identicals somewhere around the city, even outside the training ward. There are five thousand of us, after all. But why does he seem so shocked? Why does looking at me so clearly terrify him?
Wexler steps forward again until his nose is nearly pressed against the glass. He studies what he can see of my features, and the intensity of his focus draws chills across my arms.
Finally, he blinks and steps back from the window again. His cell door opens. Just an inch at first. But when no alarm sounds and no footsteps come running, he pushes the door the rest of the way open.
I stare, stunned. How has he…?