I glance over my shoulder at the door to the hall. This strange reprieve can’t possibly last long. Any minute Trigger will burst into the room looking for me. Or, if he’s lost the fight, the soldiers will come to drag me away.
“Waverly?” the boy repeats. And even though he seems concerned about the girl he thinks I am, he hasn’t come to the obvious conclusion—mistaken identity—despite the name embroidered on my borrowed jacket.
What union would a girl named Waverly belong to? I can’t place the name, but that’s not particularly unusual. I don’t know all five thousand female trade labor names. But what bewilders me even more is how Waverly, regardless of what union she belongs to, could possibly know this unfamiliar, oddly dressed boy. She shouldn’t know any boys, other than those in our bureau, and none of the trade labor boys anywhere near my age bear this brown-eyed, fair-skinned, freckle-free, straight-nosed face.
Yet the boy’s gaze travels over me with a familiar manner that sets off alarms in my head. No boy other than Trigger 17 has ever looked at me like that. As if he finds pleasure in the view alone, beyond what service I have to offer the city. But this boy isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at the poor, doomed Waverly.
Have she and he broken the same rules Trigger and I broke?
My heart beats harder at that thought. Maybe I’m not the only anomaly. Maybe this Waverly and I share the same genetic flaws.
However, that doesn’t fit with what Wexler 42 told me about the origin of my genome. Could he have been lying? He betrayed Trigger and me to aid his own escape. A man with that little honor could certainly have been lying about everything he told us.
I don’t know what to think. Who to believe. How to respond to this unfamiliar boy who seems to think I should know who he is.
Finally, his gaze snags on the name embroidered low on my left shoulder. “Violet,” he reads, and his brows dip in confusion. “Where on earth did you get that uniform?”
That’s not what I expected him to ask. Why would he assume the uniform doesn’t belong to me, rather than assuming he’s mistaken Violet 16 for Waverly 16?
My answer is the same either way. “I stole it.”
His laugh is loud and joy-filled, as if I’ve just told him the funniest joke ever. As if he’s not afraid of being caught in the closet with a girl he shouldn’t even be speaking to. A girl who should be dead. “If only the world could see you now,” he says. “How the hell did you plan to sneak into Seren’s birthday party in a laborer’s uniform?”
Seren? I don’t know that name either. But with the mention of a birthday, suddenly I understand. It’s just like Trigger said. Like I learned about once in history. Someone’s—Seren’s—birth is being celebrated in the archaic tradition, presumably with the ceremonial presentation of a cake lit on fire.
The bygone festival is a celebration of excess and waste all squandered on a single person. It fell out of fashion long ago, when technological advancements allowed the production of people en masse, with much greater efficiency.
So who could this Seren be, and why is his birth being celebrated?
Why did he have a birth? Was he not removed from incubation on the same day as everyone else in his division?
Is this the party Aida 22 was referring to?
“Waverly?” The boy is frowning now. He looks worried by my silence. But I can hardly focus on that, because I’m still puzzling over his clothes. He’s not wearing a uniform. He’s wearing a suit. Like members of the Management Bureau wear—except rather than Management-black, this boy’s pants and jacket are a dignified shade of gray. His lapels are shiny, a subtle yet extravagant detail I’ve never seen before, and the pressed, button-down shirt beneath his jacket is a much paler shade of the same color.
Why is he wearing the wrong colors? Why is there no name tag pinned to his jacket? Why is he talking to me as if we know each other? As if there is no shame and no risk involved in speaking so casually to a member of another bureau?
Even Trigger 17, with his bold mannerisms in private, treats his infractions with the gravity they merit. But this boy is cavalier with his audacity. No citizen of Lakeview would…
My eyes widen as I take in his strange clothes and fearless curiosity, and suddenly I understand.
This boy is not a citizen of Lakeview.
If our Administrator sends delegations to other cities, might it not be possible that other cities would send delegations into Lakeview? Could this boy be in Lakeview on a diplomatic mission? Could this birthday party somehow be part of the diplomacy?
The only part of that theory that doesn’t fit is Waverly. How would a diplomat from another city know a sixteen-year-old trade laborer from Lakeview?
He wouldn’t. So how…?
And with a sudden jarring leap of intuition, I understand. This boy with odd mannerisms and a dangerously audacious speech pattern hasn’t mistaken me for another trade laborer. Waverly is the identical Wexler 42 accidentally sent to another city to fulfill his “special order.”
Waverly isn’t dead. She’s the girl I was meant to be. Hers is the life I was meant to live.
I stagger backward. The understanding that I’ve just come face to face with my diverted destiny—with what should have been—is enough to rock me off the foundation of my own existence.
If not for the mix-up, I would know this boy. I might wear the strange clothes that are evidently standard in his city. I might not have my name embroidered on all my jackets and aprons, though I can’t really make sense of that, because how would anyone know who I was if not for the embroidery?
If not for the mix-up, I might not be a trade laborer.
That idea shakes me like a mental aftershock. I’ve never thought about doing anything other than growing hydroponic vegetables. I’ve never wanted to do anything other than grow hydroponic vegetables.
If I hadn’t been incubated here in Lakeview as a member of the hydroponic gardening union, I would never have met Poppy. Or Trigger 17.
I would not be who I am now had that mistake not been made.
“What’s wrong?” the boy asks, and I realize my eyes have filled with tears. The only identical I have left is Waverly, wherever she is, and this boy believes I am her. That’s why he hasn’t raised an alarm and given me up to the soldiers.
“Is this about the uniform?” His confusion clears as he decides to believe his own theory about my tears. Before I can figure out how to answer, he ducks around a rack of strange and exotic outerwear. Mystified, I follow him to see that the coat closet is actually much bigger than I’d assumed. It’s bigger than my dorm room.