“Client?” I don’t know that word. “Under the table?” It’s like he’s speaking another language.
“Years ago, I did a favor for a friend from another city. But I had to do the work in secret.”
“I was that work?”
“Yes. And I was very proud of the work I did on you.” Wexler is watching me like a tomato again, eyeing my every feature. Studying my every gesture. “But engineering you took so long I no longer had time to do my actual job. I had no choice but to alter your genome slightly to fit Lakeview’s needs, then use that tweaked version to fulfill Management’s order for five thousand female trade laborers.”
For one long moment, his words tumble around in my head, refusing to line up in any order that makes sense. Until finally one fact emerges from the chaos. “You designed me for another city?”
“That’s treason,” Trigger snaps with more anger than seems fitting for a boy currently trying to disable the lock on one of the city gates.
Wexler ignores him. “Not for a city. For a person.”
“Who?” Why would anyone need a genome?
“That doesn’t matter, and you wouldn’t understand the answer,” Wexler insists.
My cheeks burn with anger, but I move on because I am suddenly very aware of how long we’ve been here and how close Management might be to finding us. “You designed me for a person, then you tweaked my genome and used it to produce an entire class of trade laborers for the city of Lakeview?”
Wexler nods.
“And those tweaks are the differences between my genome and all the others?”
“Yes!” He’s clearly excited that I am catching on. He looks…proud. “And you are everything you were supposed to be. If anyone is ‘flawed,’ it’s the others. Your ‘identicals.’?”
But that makes no sense. None of the others were caught kissing a boy they had no business even speaking to. None of the others are running for their lives. None of the others have condemned thousands of their sisters to a hopefully peaceful but very permanent death.
“Why am I here if you designed me for a person in another city? Why didn’t you fulfill the order?”
“I did fulfill it!” But Wexler’s gaze drops to the ground. “At least, I thought I did.” He fiddles with the edge of his lab coat, and I wonder why he’s still wearing such a distinctive garment while he’s on the run. “But when they showed me the result of your blood test, I recognized my own work immediately. It seems that I accidentally sent one of the genetically altered embryos—one of your clones—to fulfill the private order.”
“And I—the prototype—wound up as one of five thousand trade laborers who are only identical to me on the outside.”
“Yes.” Wexler nods absently, as if he’s lost in his own thoughts. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
Yet somehow none of this makes sense. Talk of unique individuals and private orders means little to me other than a vague, uneasy awareness of how very wrong the whole thing feels. How very strange and illogical and incredibly inefficient.
Why design only one of anything?
What use would anyone have for one child? A child who is unique, as far as Wexler’s friend from another city knows. What happened to that girl I was supposed to be? Why would she be raised alone? Is she being trained to be something special? Like…an Administrator?
“What are these tweaks?” I ask as Trigger types something into a form on Wexler’s tablet. “What makes me different from all the others?”
“It’s nothing you will ever need to worry about. You have my word.”
“I’m not…sick?”
The geneticist looks appalled. “No. You are perfect.” He glances at his tablet and his eyes narrow when he sees what’s on the screen. Whatever hacking Trigger has managed to do. “Here.” He snatches the tablet over the cadet’s protests and opens a new screen. His fingers move so fast I can barely follow the motions, and a couple of seconds later he pulls a familiar penlike device from one of the pockets of his lab coat. “Give me your finger. I’ll show you the differences.”
I hold out my hand, and Wexler’s pen bites into the fleshy part of my middle finger and takes its sample. A red bubble wells up on my finger and I stare at it, fascinated that something as small as a single drop—not to mention a chain of DNA—can tell the world so much about a person.
Wexler pulls the cap off the opposite end of his pen to reveal a small bit of metal. He plugs the pen into his tablet and a fresh screen opens. Seconds and a few taps later, Wexler holds the tablet out so I can see it. He taps and scrolls his way through charts and images—chromosomes, a DNA helix, and several things I can’t even identify—so quickly that I can hardly focus on the first before it’s gone. He speaks as quickly as he swipes, and I recognize even fewer of the genetics terms than I do the images; I’m relieved to see that Trigger looks as mystified as I feel.
“But what does all that mean?” the cadet demands when Wexler scrolls into the dozenth image in just a few minutes.
The geneticist launches into a brand-new “simplified” version of his explanation, and Trigger and I focus so much of our attention on the images and words that we don’t notice the approaching noise until it’s nearly upon us.
Trigger hears it first, and when he looks up from the tablet, his narrow-eyed gaze focused in the direction of the Administrator’s secret escape passage, adrenaline fires through my veins. The sound is just a scrape against concrete, but I recognize it as footsteps. Several sets.
“What did you do?” Trigger demands, and I turn to see that he has Wexler by the throat. The tablet no longer shows confusing charts and illustrations. Instead Wexler has reopened the screen Trigger was last on and has entered several characters into a form that has replaced them with asterisks to hide the password from us.
“How could you?” I whisper as the truth hits me. I should have realized he didn’t need a new sample, since there was already one on file. “Trigger, he took my blood because he knew that would sound an alert.”
Wexler gurgles something inarticulate that seems to support my guess.
“It’s only been minutes,” Trigger whispers. “Not enough time to move troops in bulk. These must have come straight from the Administrator’s mansion.”
“In bulk?” I feel like I’m going to be sick. “How many will they send?”
“If they know I’m with you? Plenty. But I only hear three sets so far.” He lets go of Wexler’s throat. “Open the door. Now.”
Wexler inhales in great gulps, hunched over his tablet as he struggles to catch his breath. “Trigger is their worst nightmare,” he gasps. “They’ve taught him enough to make him truly dangerous.”
The same seems to be true of the geneticist, but in a completely different way.