Trigger pulls a small folding knife from his pocket, but I hardly feel it when he cuts the restraint from my wrists. The plastic falls to the ground, and dimly I realize that someone will find it eventually, and they might figure out that we were here. That we saw the caravan. That I was not in one of those trucks.
But they’ll never know the full story. Management won’t let that happen. They just killed almost five thousand people to prevent that very thing.
“Shh…,” Trigger whispers into my ear, his arms around my shoulders, his jaw scruff catching in my hair, and that’s when I realize I’m crying. I am bawling and gasping and choking on tears. My nose is running. The entire world looks like a watercolor painting viewed too closely through my tear-filled eyes.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The recall.
They told us that recalls were good. That they were necessary to preserve order. To keep the rest of us safe and productive.
But that’s not what this is. This is pointless death. This is thousands and thousands of lives stolen. Our violent, wasteful ancestors had a brutal, ugly name for this.
Murder.
Lakeview just murdered my best friend. All my friends. Nearly everyone I’ve ever known. Management thought that if they recalled an entire genome, there would be no one left to miss the missing. But I’m left. I miss them.
“Just hold it together long enough for me to find someplace safe,” Trigger whispers.
But there is no place safe. That’s the whole problem.
Trigger turns away from me, and I hear the scrape of metal against metal. His knife is out again. He’s forcing a lock. A second later he pulls open a heavy door and tugs me into a narrow space with a big echo. Another stairwell.
“Where are we?” I sob, wiping my eyes, but the effort is futile. The tears won’t stop.
“The Specialist Bureau. The workday is over. There won’t be anyone here but the night cleaning crew, and if we stay in the stairwell we won’t have to worry about cameras. But I need you to get it together. We can’t stay here long. The longer they go without catching you, the wider and more thorough the search will be.”
Get it together. That sounds like nonsense.
How am I supposed to get myself together when we just saw several dozen truckloads of bodies roll toward the city gate? When almost everyone I’ve ever known in my entire life is dead? Because of me.
There is no getting it together.
In the back of my mind, in spite of everything that had gone wrong, I believed there was a way to fix this. We could tell everyone that my identicals weren’t flawed. We could fight. We could escape into the wild together and Poppy, Trigger, and I could make some kind of “crazy,” primitive life on our own. Harvesting wild vegetables. Hunting wild…cows. Or whatever soldiers learn to hunt and cook.
But that was never anything more than a fantasy, and now that fantasy is as dead as every friend I’ve ever had.
I will never see another face that looks just like mine.
Nothing will ever be okay again.
Trigger opens each door a crack, one at a time, to make sure no one’s approaching from the first floor of the Specialist Bureau or from outside. Then he pulls me into a hug. But that only makes me cry harder.
I cling to him. I don’t know how to stop, and he doesn’t seem to care that I’m getting tears and snot on the shoulder of his uniform jacket.
“Dahlia.”
He says my name three times before I’m able to take a step back and wipe my face with both hands. His face looks stretched out of shape, viewed through the tears still filling my eyes.
“We need to go.” He brushes a strand of hair back from my face, where it was plastered to my skin with either tears or snot or both. “And now that you’re not crying, we may make it out of the city without being seen.”
“How?” Nothing has changed. The city gate will still be locked, and even if it isn’t also guarded, neither of us has the clearance to unlock it.
“There’s another way out of Lakeview, and as long as they don’t know I’m with you they won’t know to look for us there. So we have to hurry before they figure that out.”
The recall is over. Ford 45 will want to speak to Trigger. About me.
“Wait.” Everything is moving too fast. Whatever’s wrong with me got my sisters killed, and if I leave Lakeview without that information, I’ll never get it. “There’s something wrong with me, Trigger. You heard them. I’m an anomaly.”
“What I heard is that they haven’t found you yet, but now that they’ve used cadets to double the patrol, they will very, very soon. Come on.”
But I pull back on his hand, and he seems even less willing to let go of me than he is to stay in the stairwell.
“I’m different, Trigger.” That word has always felt ominous. Different is dangerous. Different is doomed. The recall of my entire genome has more than confirmed that. “No matter how much I look like Poppy and Sorrel and Violet, no matter how much I love them, I never really fit. I’ve been trying to deny that for a long time. Trying to pretend I don’t have thoughts I’m not supposed to have. That I don’t want things I’m not supposed to want. But whatever’s wrong with me cost my friends their lives, and I have to know what they died for. I have to know how I’m different. I have to know why I’m different. I can’t strike out into the wild forever without knowing.”
My undefined difference would haunt me, along with thousands of ghosts that wear my face.
“Why does it matter?” Trigger asks, and his voice is soft not just in volume but in tone. “You’re not different anymore, because there’s no one left for you to be different from. Now you are who you are. I like who you are. And if we get out of the city, you can be who you are for the rest of your life.”
Everything he’s saying is true. But…“I need to know what’s wrong with me and whether this was inevitable,” I say. “Were my identicals doomed because of what I am—something beyond my control—or because of what I’ve done? What you and I have done. We’re responsible for so much death, Trigger, and I need to know why this is happening. I need to know why I exist in the first place. If I am flawed. I need to know why the geneticist who designed me is on the run just like us.” I take a gulp of air. “I need to know how only one out of five thousand identical genomes became flawed, and why he would put that genome into production if he knew.”
“Your geneticist is on the run?” Trigger’s eyes are wider than I’ve ever seen them. He’s starting to understand.
I nod. “His name is Wexler 42.”
“Maybe he didn’t know. That’s why he’s running. He’s figured out he made a terrible mistake and that he’ll have to pay for that.”