And then I see what’s in her hand.
A small spray bottle, filled with bright green liquid.
I try to twist away, but she’s too quick. The reverie drug puffs into my eyes. The last thing I see before being enveloped in darkness is Jack’s still body being dragged away.
sixty-eight
My eyes fly open, and I’m awake.
And alone.
In the reverie chamber. Why did they leave me here? How long have I been out?
My first thought is of Jack. I scramble up from the wreckage of the reverie chamber and look frantically around. But he’s gone. And so is PA Young and the androids.
They left me.
But then, why did they drug me? Maybe I’ve only been passed out a few seconds—maybe my inhuman body found a way to bypass the drug.
My mind races. Julie can’t be far away; if I could find her, we could perhaps save Jack. Save him from a megalomaniac who rules the entire civilized world and an army of androids.
Shit.
I creep deliberately over the debris, careful to make no sound. I slink to the doorway, peering outside, but there’s no one there.
The door to the other reverie chamber, the one where Representative Belles was, is open. A light is on.
I see a shadow.
I move forward. All the monitors along the control room show nothing but blackness and static. There is no sound, outside of my thudding heart.
I peer into the other reverie chamber.
The first thing I see is the chair, and the blood. It leaks through a hole in the center of the headrest, a thick, viscous liquid that moves slowly, like syrup, but I know what it is.
A fat bumblebee meanders across my vision. I snatch it from the air, crushing its fuzzy, crunching body between my fingers. I do not have time to hallucinate right now.
“Ella!” a voice gasps, and on the other side of the room, I see Ms. White. We rush to each other, both babbling in frantic relief.
“We have to get out of here,” I say as she glances around wildly, telling me how she escaped PA Young.
“There are guards everywhere. Why are you here?” Ms. White gasps.
I think of what Jack said. “It was a trap.”
Ms. White clutches me harder. “I was trying to get out—they locked me in your mother’s room, hoping you’d return and they could use me against you. Some androids brought a boy about your age into your apartment to lock him up, and I used their distraction to get out. But there’s a whole army of androids blocking the exits. And then I came down here, and I saw… and I thought…” Her voice is choked with unshed sobs as her eyes skim from me to the bloodstained reverie chair.
“We have to get out,” I repeat, only half-listening to her. My mind is racing, trying to figure out an escape plan.
“And Hwa,” Ms. White continues, her eyes distant as she talks about PA Young. “I thought she was my friend. Oh, God, Ella—I used to think… some people contacted me, a few weeks ago, with information about Hwa’s method of ruling… and Ella… she’s a tyrant, she’s nothing like what I thought, and I tried to get out, to get both of us out, but she must have guessed, she must have realized…”
“This isn’t your fault,” I say, grabbing Ms. White’s arm. “It’s mine. I found the Zunzana, the group that’s been fighting PA Young here in Malta. Everything we thought about PA Young and my father’s research… it was all wrong.”
Ms. White grows very still. Then she tilts her head, staring into my eyes. “Your father’s research,” she says. “Do you know… what does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I say. “But PA Young somehow combined Dad’s research in cybernetics and Mom’s research with reveries to make… these things. They’re called cy-clones. Cyborg-clones. Part machine, part person. As strong as an android, but with human intelligence.”
And I’m one, I think, but do not say.
Ms. White starts pacing.
“I can see how that would work…” she says. “Your father had long been experimenting with bio-engineering and cybernetics. But—” She turns to face me. “You said ‘clone.’ To make a clone, you need a person to be cloned. And to make a thinking robot, you need…” She gasps. “They use your mother’s reveries, don’t they? They make a body, then use the reveries to transfer a person’s soul from their human body into the engineered one.”
I nod silently.
“But that means…” Ms. White pales. “The person who is transferred dies, doesn’t she?”
I try to speak, but I can’t—my mouth is full of honey. I smack my lips, trying to eviscerate the sweet taste. I focus on Ms. White, still marching around the room. I cannot go crazy, not now, not with so much on the line.
“Akilah…,” I manage to say, barely able to spit out the words. “Mom…” Me.
Ms. White’s face is pale, her eyes unfocused as she thinks. She hasn’t noticed my struggle to speak. “I suspect that the government’s been able to figure out at least a rudimentary method of creating cy-clones. It makes sense—they’ve figured out an alternative formula for your mother’s reverie drug, and patched together at least some of your father’s lost research. That’s what I could piece together from what I overheard while being held prisoner, at least.”
“They have?” I gasp, shocked.
Ms. White nods absent-mindedly. “So now the government’s figured out a way to copy some of what your father developed. But copies and imitations are never as good as the original version.”
Version.
I blink, and for just that moment—the space between shutting my eyes and opening them again—I’m back in the labs where my father was killed, where my mother died, where I saw three little icy morgue doors, each labeled.
Ella Shepherd, Vers. 1
Ella Shepherd, Vers. 2
Ella Shepherd, Vers. 3
And then my heart slams into my chest with the force of a defibrillator bringing it back to life, and I’m back in the reverie chamber with Ms. White.
“Are you okay?” she asks. She’s stopped pacing. She’s right in front of me, even though less than a second ago she was on the other side of the room.
“Fine,” I say, over the sound of buzzing.
Her mouth moves, but I cannot hear whatever she’s saying.
I can only hear the bees.
“STOP!” I scream
Silence.
Ms. White stares at me, worry etched into each line of her face.
“Are you okay?” she asks again.
“No,” I whisper.
I’m going mad, I’m going mad,
I’m
going
mad.
Ms. White frames my face with her long, slender fingers. “Ella,” she says. “We have to save you.”
“No,” I say, “We have to save Akilah and Jack.”
But then I realize that the words never left my mouth. My lips are sewn shut, not with thread, but with bee stingers, piercing the soft, pink skin that, just hours ago, Jack kissed.
Ms. White brushes my sweaty hair off my forehead. “Ella, your father was a genius. He developed the nanobots that saved your mother, and the technology that recreated her when she could not be saved any more. He made the first cy-clone. He gave your mother a piece of immortality.”
She peers deeply into my eyes.
“But he was only thinking of saving your dear mother, my best friend. And I loved him for it. But the government… it wants the formula. If they can make cy-clones out of healthy, young people, not people who were already sick like your mother, they can create the perfect soldiers.”
“Ella, dear,” Ms. White continues, oblivious to the one-sidedness of our conversation. “Your father knew what the government wanted. Knew how much the government would pay for his research. And he destroyed it all.”
“And then the government destroyed him.” The words fall out of me, each one escaping my mouth like a tiny bumblebee soaring past my l
ips.
Ms. White nods. “They killed him before they realized the research they had was falsified and useless.”
I open my mouth, my jaw cracking like plaster. “But they made cy-clones. Akilah.”
“Oh, yes. Your friend Akilah. And dozens of others. But none of them are good. They are poor copies of your father’s original work. The government hasn’t been able to recreate the methods perfectly. Eventually, all these models break. They last maybe one or two years.”
I struggle to move, but can’t.
“I think—I’m just guessing here, but I think that PA Young and the government believes there’s some key hidden inside you.”
That’s what Jack said too, almost exactly.
“If we could figure out the information your father left you—”
I cannot speak, I cannot move of my own free will, but my body shakes violently, my head whipping back and forth, no, no, no.
Ms. White frames my face with her hands, stilling me. “Perhaps he told you something, some memory you can no longer access.”
I can no longer access Jack.
Ms. White’s eyes shift back to the reverie chair. “Ella, I think… if we can find that secret inside of you, we… we might just have the weapon we need to fight PA Young and the corrupt government she’s building.”
“Run…” I manage to say. We have to run.
“Run where?” Ms. White asks, her voice even.
I blink—the safe house, the android Kim, the lab where Jack kissed me, Akilah strapped to a gurney—and then I’m back in the reverie chair, Ms. White leaning over me.
“Go…” the word is a struggle to say, almost impossible to hear.
“Go where?” Ms. White repeats. “Go to sleep?”
What? No. That doesn’t make any sense.
Ms. White leads me to the reverie chair. She pushes my shoulders gently, trying to get me to sit down. A bee lands on her face, walking over her eye, trailing its stinger along her lashes.
“I don’t know if this is real,” I whisper, but the sound is lost in the buzzing of bees.
sixty-nine
A hot tear slips down my cheek, and with it, the hallucinations fade.
“Ella?” Ms. White asks. She is the model of concern.
I look down. Without realizing it, I’m already strapped into the reverie chair. I can feel the drying blood from Representative Belles’s gunshot wound on the back of the headrest. I blink and the restraints are gone. Blink again, and they’re back, but they are black and yellow and fuzzy and sting my skin.
“I think I’m going crazy,” I say.
Ms. White blanches. “It’s all the nanobots inside you. You’re getting bot-brain.”
But it’s not the nanobots. The nanobots are a side-effect of being a cy-clone, not the cause of my madness.
“What’s happening to me?” My words come out slow, dripping from my tongue like honey.
Ms. White leans back. Her dress is green—why didn’t I notice that before?—the same poison green as the reverie drug.
“Ella, dear, you know I love you. And your mother.”
I nod. I try to pull away from the restraints on the chair. I can’t see them, not always, but I can feel them.
“But you’re not you any more, are you?”
My eyes widen with shock. I feel as if there are bees crawling under my skin, trying to vibrate their way out.
“You’re a computer. One with a very valuable file locked up inside your mind.” Ms. White steps closer, her eyes wide with sympathy. “I know,” she says gently. Kindly. “I’ve known for a while. It doesn’t matter to me. But I’m afraid of what will happen if we don’t get that file out of you. Ella, I need for you to go into a reverie. I need for you to find the information your father hid inside of you. That’s how we escape this nightmare, Ella. That’s the only way.”
I try to shake my head—No, this cannot be it, this feels like giving up—but then I see a figure moving behind Ms. White.
Dad.
You need to wake up, Ella, he says, but Ms. White doesn’t notice him.
It’s all in my mind.
I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy.
You need to wake up, Ella.
The words are a command I cannot obey.
“Have you ever wondered why you always access reveries through filing cabinets?” Dad asked.
When I access memories, I look through them as if they are a filing cabinet. A system that humans no longer really use—but computers do. Computers like me. Dad… Dad programmed me. That’s why I could hack Representative Belles’s computer so easily—because my brain is a processor. It talks to computers as easily as it talks to other people.
Dad made me. And he made my brain programmed to discover the truth. The hallucinations, his constant message—You need to wake up, Ella. He’s been trying to get me to find the truth for as long as I’ve been made.
My eyes open wide. I know what I have to do. I have to wake up.
And then Ms. White puffs the reverie drug into my eyes, and I fall instantly asleep.
I am standing in a room—the laboratory under Triumph Towers. I stand on the other side of the frosted glass door that leads to the lab marked Reverie Transfer. Through the glass, I can hear people shouting.
One of them is my father.
“NO!” he bellows. “It’s unethical, and I will not do it!”
Something nudges me in the back. I turn and see Ms. White. But not the Ms. White who I just found in the reverie chamber. This is Ms. White from last year, with last year’s haircut. She’s calmly holding a gun, the barrel of it resting against the small of my back.
“Go on in, dear,” she says kindly.
My legs tremble as the door slides open. My eyes go to my father. I see the fear in his face, anger. Defeat.
Ms. White pushes me forward, and I stumble into the lab.
“Ella, baby, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Dad says. “I didn’t know…”
I look frantically around the room. Perhaps if I could make a weapon… One wall is covered in unlabeled morgue doors, many of which are open and empty. The desk to the side of the wall is bare, except for a microscope and several glass vials marked “Phydus Prototypes.” Perhaps I could smash one over Ms. White’s head…
Ms. White pushes me into the reverie chair standing in the center of the room. It’s connected to another reverie chair, but that chair is empty.
“Philip,” Ms. White says genially. “We’ve tried negotiating with you. We’ve tried bribing you. I want you to know that, really, this is your fault.”
She raises the gun to my head. I can feel the hard metal rim of the barrel pressed against the thin skin over my skull. She pushes the gun against my head so hard that I’m forced back against the chair, my skull trapped between the metal chair back and the metal gun barrel.
“Jadis, please!” Dad says. He’s begging.
“Will you give us the formula and procedure notes you used to transfer your wife into a new body?”
“My wife—your friend!”
Ms. White nods. “My friend. The one who never shared her reverie formula with me. The one who won’t go public with the mental spa. The one who only gives me a salary, not a true partnership.”
“You love her! You’re Ella’s godmother, for God’s sake!”
Ms. White shows no emotion on her face. “Loved, Philip,” she says. “I loved her. But she’s a shell of who she was now. I gave her everything, even my right arm. But I’ve learned. If I want anything, I have to take it for myself.” Ms. White presses the gun against me harder, and I cannot bite back a whimper of pain.
“Would it help,” Ms. White continues casually, “if I told you that we know most of the formula already? We know that the transfer only works in a clone of the same person—we can’t swap bodies. We know that the percentage of nanobots in the clone must be high for the transfer to work. We know that clones have the ability to be enhanced with cyborg parts and a
re stronger, faster, and smarter than their original counterparts, and have the potential to live longer. As long as they’re not already afflicted with Hebb’s Disease, of course.”
She snaps the fingers on her free hand, and someone I can’t see walks to the back wall. I can hear a door zipping open, the metal slab sliding out, a thud of a body, a grunt of someone picking it up. Ms. White slides the gun down the side of my face, forcing my head to turn to the left and watch as a perfect copy of myself is dumped gracelessly into the reverie chair beside me. The replica-me has glassy eyes and her head lolls listlessly as a scientist I don’t recognize straps her body into the reverie machine.
“Thank you, Dr. Simpa,” Ms. White says absently.
I stare at the body on the chair. She’s empty. A shell of a person. Made up of cloned material, but also cyborg parts, metal and wires and computers beneath skin and flesh. Ms. White wants to force Dad to move me, the real me, into this manufactured replacement body.
“If I give you the formula, I’m handing you the most effective weapon the world has ever known,” Dad says hollowly. “You’ll make perfect soldiers. This would be more devastating than Einstein’s formula for the atomic bomb.”
Ms. White stares at him blandly. “I won’t do any of that. I’m just selling the formula. I don’t care what they do with it.”
Dad shifts so that he can meet my eyes. “Ella,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
And I know he won’t do it. He won’t trade me for the whole world.
Ms. White slides the gun down the side of my face, into the hollow between my collarbones, pressing the metal barrel painfully into my chest, resting over my heart.
“Last chance,” she says idly.
“I can’t,” Dad whispers. “Ella, I’m sor—”
Ms. White pulls the trigger.
Everything goes dark, and then I open my eyes.
Dad leans over my body. “Ella?” he asks. “Are you in there?”
I nod my head, then look to the right.
I am dead in the chair beside me. There’s a hole in my chest, and blood, so much blood, and too-white bone, and murky grey-ish pink bits of me dripping from the chair.