I don’t recognize Trigger 17 by his voice. I recognize him by the warmth in the way he says my name. By the casual nature of his declaration, as if we can simply pick up where we left off. As if the entire world isn’t just beyond that closed door, waiting for proof that we are both flawed. That we shouldn’t even exist.
“I thought you were gone with the rest of your division,” I say into the darkness. “What are you still doing here?”
“Gone with…? Oh, the graduates?” His silhouette shrugs against the greater darkness. “Those were infantry cadets. Around three thousand of them total. There are about a thousand of us left, and we’re all specialists. Linguists. Explosives experts. Special Forces.”
“Why did the infantry graduate early?”
“Who knows? I guess Lakeview needed some more grunts.”
“But they didn’t finish training, did they?”
“We’re not quite finished.” His shadow lays one hand over its heart, a movement I can hardly make out in the dark. “But it doesn’t take a lot of training to catch a bullet.”
“Why would the city need more infantry if we’re not at war? We’re not, are we?”
Trigger’s shadow shrugs. “Not that I know of. I’ve been in the wild for nearly a month, and the only thing I know right now is that I want to see you.”
He steps forward, and I lose my breath.
“What are you doing?” I can’t tell if my pulse is racing from the scare he’s just given me, from the fact that he hasn’t graduated and left me, or from the knowledge that we’re alone in the dark. Or because now I might get to touch him again. Is it early enough in the day for his face to be smooth?
Does he want me to touch him?
It doesn’t matter. As happy as I am to see him, we can’t be here. Even if Special Forces cadets are afforded some measure of freedom while they’re not in class, I’m not. My instructor will be expecting me.
“I brought you something.” There’s a new note in his voice—an eager excitement. He sounds like I feel when it’s time to clean out the water bed and plant something brand-new. “I saw you come in here alone, and I thought this would be my best chance to give it to you. This shed could be our new stairwell.”
I swallow the lump in my throat and remind myself to breathe. That last sentence made no sense, yet I understand it perfectly.
He steps closer, and I can see him better now that my eyes have adjusted to the low light. He’s holding something small and vaguely oblong between his left index finger and thumb, and I wonder if his genome is left-handed. Then I notice that what he’s holding has a familiar silhouette.
I squint in the darkness. “Is that…?”
“It’s a peanut. I pulled the plant out of the ground yesterday afternoon, about halfway between Lakeview and Riverbend, and I saved this one for you.” He drops the peanut in my cupped palm, and I lift it to my face for a better look. It smells like the earth. There are still tiny clumps of dirt clinging to the shell.
Somehow, like the carrot, this wild peanut seems…hardy. It must be, to have survived out there on its own with no one feeding or watering it, or monitoring its health, the efficiency of its growth, or the state of its environment.
“Should I eat it?”
He laughs. “That’s typically what one does with a peanut.”
“But once I eat it, it will be gone.”
“And as with the carrot, there will be others, Dahlia. I know where to look.”
But he shouldn’t have a chance to bring me another peanut, because we’re not supposed to be alone together. We’re not supposed to be talking. I can’t think of a rule specifically forbidding bringing wild produce into the city, but I’m pretty sure he would get in trouble for it if anyone knew.
Yet somehow I believe him. There will be other peanuts.
So I crack the shell in one hand and pull the top half off. Lying in the cradle of the bottom half are three round kernels, which he would probably call nuts. They are perfectly formed and covered in a thin reddish skin. Though it was grown without fertilizer, constant attention, or proper spacing, I see no obvious flaws in this wild peanut.
I dump the kernels into my palm, then toss all three into my mouth.
Trigger 17 watches me while I chew, and to my surprise I can actually taste a difference between this wild peanut and the ones we’re served as high-protein snacks. Maybe it’s a different variety. Or maybe different growth methods yield different tastes. Either way I am fascinated. I want to see where this peanut grew. I want to see how it grew.
I want to know if peanuts that grow all on their own, with no one micromanaging their environment, can possibly be as strong as peanuts grown side by side in a bed of thousands under ideal circumstances.
But those are things I was never meant to know.
Trigger 17 is someone I was never meant to know, and we should not be here. Especially considering that he’s had no chance to hack into any system to buy us time.
“I have to be showered and back at my desk in twenty minutes.” Yet I can hear the reluctance in my own voice.
He takes another step toward me. “How fast can you shower?” His voice is suddenly deep and gravelly, and the question sends an unexpected bolt of anticipation through me that settles low in my stomach.
“I…” My whole body seems to be tingling, and I don’t know why.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about you,” he whispers, and I am relieved to realize I’m not the only one haunted by our stolen time in the stairwell. “When I eat, I wonder if you grew the food. When I see a flower, I wonder if it’s a dahlia. Nothing has changed that I can tell, yet everything feels different. It’s like you’re on the edge of my vision everywhere I go, but when I turn to look you’re never there.”
I take a deep breath, but immediately I need another. I’ve felt the same way for weeks. “Why?” I ask him in spite of the now-familiar flush in my cheeks. “Why can’t I get you out of my head?”
What is this feeling? Why am I drawn to him like a magnet to metal, when I know this can only mean trouble for us both? Management makes no effort to keep the boys and girls in the Workforce Academy apart, but we aren’t even allowed to speak to people from other bureaus. Is this why?
“Because you’re attracted to me.” Trigger’s gaze seems to see deep inside me. “And it’s very much mutual.”
“I don’t understand what that means.” But maybe I do, at least a little bit. My hands feel pulled to his flesh—to his arms, his chest. My gaze feels pulled to his face, where it snags on his mouth again, even in the dark.
“I know. Workforce doesn’t truly fraternize. You girls exist alongside the boys in your union, but it’s like you’re uninterested in each other, and I can’t figure out why. Unless it’s that the boys in your union don’t look very different from the girls.”
“Is it different in Defense? Is your fraternizing more like…this? This attraction?” I want him to say yes, because that would mean that what’s considered a flaw in me isn’t considered a flaw in every girl. That would make me feel a little less damaged. Yet I want him to say no, because I don’t want to think about Trigger 17 feeling this strange and electrifying attraction to some other girl.
“Yes. Every time we leave the city, we’re risking our lives. In order to stay functional and efficient under that kind of pressure, we’re allowed to decompress on a level commensurate with our stress level. That’s true for both our male and female cadets.”
I frown at him in the dark. “I only understood about half of that.” But the parts I understand have deepened the warmth spreading through me.
The only basis I know of for boys and girls being drawn to each other comes from a now-obsolete biological imperative my class learned about in our basic biology unit from year fifteen.
Much like plants growing in the dirt, people used to grow in the wild as well. Children were produced one at a time, with only the occasional set of two or three, and even those rarely matched one
another. Fertilization was messy and ridiculously inefficient. The process required a man and a woman, rather than a geneticist and a lab, and conception was never a guarantee, but because that was primitive mankind’s only way to reproduce, men and women were drawn to each other for the purpose of procreation.
The whole thing was crude and uncivilized, yet neither of those adjectives seems to apply to the way I feel with Trigger staring down at me. I feel like my heart is too big for its cavity and my skin is too flushed to be at a normal temperature.
This isn’t supposed to be happening. Mankind has moved beyond the need for such urges and biological reactions. Yet Trigger doesn’t seem surprised or confused.
“I’ll show you.” He takes another step toward me. “May I kiss you?”
“Kiss…?” My question dies on my tongue as his hands land on my shoulders and slide down my arms. He bends toward me and I suck in a surprised breath. Then his lips meet mine, and I lose the ability to think. I can only feel, and I’ve never felt anything like this in my life.
This is not a kiss. A kiss is bestowed upon skinned knees by nannies in the primary dorm. A kiss is bestowed upon cheeks by identicals in celebration of a team victory. A kiss eases the perception of pain or elevates a feeling of success. This is something else entirely.
This kiss ignites the heat simmering low in my stomach like a match dropped in a puddle of fuel.
Trigger sucks gently on my lower lip, and my mouth opens in surprise. He slides one hand into my hair, tilting my head for a better angle, and I feel the gentle graze of his teeth. The tip of his tongue brushes my upper lip, then dips into my mouth, and my world explodes into a vibrancy and intensity I have never imagined possible.
When Trigger steps back, he leaves me gasping for breath. Hungry for more. “That’s a kiss,” he whispers.
Though my sixteen years of life experience argue otherwise, I am suddenly certain that he’s right. That I’ve been tragically misled on the subject. “Show me again.”
He reaches for me, a wicked smile haunting his mouth in the darkness. We are deep in the middle of our second kiss when the door flies open. Harsh daylight drenches our private moment. Terror surges through me.
Belay 35 stands in the doorway. At his back are two identical soldiers from year twenty-two. “Dahlia 16!” my instructor cries as the soldiers push past him.
“No! Wait!” Trigger shouts as they haul him away from me. “This isn’t her fault. I snuck into the shed. I did this.”
I hear a soft zipping sound as they secure his hands at his back with a plastic strip.
“You are both hereby remanded to the custody of Management for violation of the fraternization directive,” one of the soldiers informs us.
My heart races as they turn me around and push me up against the volleyball rack. Several of the balls fall and bounce at my feet. One of the soldiers pulls my hands behind me while the other slips a zip restraint over them. The plastic pins my wrists together and pinches my skin, but I don’t truly understand the meaning of words like fear and humiliation until they haul me out of the shed.
A class of female year-sixteen carpenters watches from the lawn, their soccer game forgotten. They stare at me, shocked, their expressions an exact reflection of the fear my own must show, because we all share the same face.
No, we share much more than that. If something is wrong with me, it’s wrong with them too. They know what my arrest means as well as I do.
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.
Defect
ive 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.