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.”