Twenty-Five
“Are you prepared?” I heard my voice ask. Not my voice. Her voice. Three watched me, head cocked.
“Prepared?”
She nodded. “To test your fighting skills, to ensure Dr. Laurent didn’t tamper with them too much when she made unauthorized adjustments. We all get tested on our physical combat prowess.”
Fighting skills? Queasiness rolled through my stomach.
I glanced up at the spectators’ window, where another six faces pushed close to the glass next to Lucas Webb’s, one of them Holland’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started placing bets.
I shook my head and gestured to her. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want them to make me into”—I swallowed the “you” at the last second, realizing how awful that might sound—“into something I’m not.”
She tilted her head again, brown hair sliding over her right shoulder. If I touched it, would it have the exact same silky texture as mine? “I know what you were going to say,” she said, echoing my hand motion in an uncannily identical wave. “You don’t want them to make you into me. Don’t worry—you’re not hurting my feelings. It’s a pretty illogical thought, though. You are me, just with more emotions. And our wants are irrelevant here.”
You are me. . . .
The idea ripped at the thin fabric holding me together, tried to release every bit of fear I’d been stuffing back, hiding from view. That’s what they wanted . . . Holland, this creature, all the curious eyes up in the window. They wanted to turn me into a true clone of the creature standing across from me. For me to give up my feelings and give in. Three had said our wants were irrelevant, but I wouldn’t, couldn’t believe that. No matter what, I wouldn’t let them make me into her.
Without warning, Three took a graceful step toward me, and I lurched a corresponding step back. A waltz of sorts. “You should make sure you follow directions while you’re here.”
“Why? You can’t possibly care what happens to me.” Or could she? After all, Holland had mentioned fixing my emotional flaws, not getting rid of emotions altogether.
She did that one slow blink again, which I was starting to figure out meant she was puzzled. “We come from the same building materials, share the same technology. If we were human, we’d be sisters. We understand each other.”
Sisters.
I wanted to cover my eyes, to turn away, to wish this entire scenario out of existence. This . . . distortion of me actually felt a connection between us. She thought we were the same. Which, if it was true, meant either she was more human than they gave her credit for, or . . . I was less human.
My head whipped back and forth, faster and faster. “No, we don’t understand each other. I have feelings. While you . . .”
That slow blink again. “I have feelings. But mine function properly, as behavior guides. Whereas General Holland says you actually experience emotions, similar to a human.” She frowned. “Hopefully they can fix that.”
Fix that. As if erasing my emotions would be as easy as changing a dead car battery. A shudder tore through me. That couldn’t be the case.
Until this moment, I hadn’t realized what a service Mom had actually done for me. Even though she’d lied in the process, at least by making me think I was her daughter, that I had a father, she’d taught me how to love, how to experience a full spectrum of feelings, the highs and lows and everything in between. Having that snatched away with a simple procedure . . . surely that wasn’t possible?
Before I could freak out completely, Lucas’s voice rang in my ears.
The purpose of this first exercise is to test your defense skills. It’s crucial that you not be taken down and captured in hand-to-hand combat.
His voice sounded smooth, detached. Like he was talking to a machine instead of a person.
I glanced up at the window again and glared, pouring out every bit of anger and hatred for this place, Holland, the creature next to me who hadn’t asked to be created but disgusted me nevertheless because she reminded me how far from human I truly was, and him. The young man who’d administered these tests, who was ordering me to fight without a single thought for how that might affect me.
Through the glass, our gazes connected. The intensity of mine must have startled him, because his lips parted in surprise. After a couple of seconds he broke contact, looking down like my stare was burning a hole right through him. Both hands raked through his hair, mussing it even more. He was suddenly looking extremely uncomfortable up there.
I squashed the pang I felt. After all, he’d administered this test. If he felt bad enough, he was more than welcome to trade places with me.
When he finally straightened and reestablished eye contact, I lifted my hands, palms out, and shrugged my shoulders. “And?” I mouthed.
. . . and we really want to compare your capabilities to those of Three.
His tone was softer this time.
Ready?
All the warmth rushed from my body, leaving me cold, so cold. My hand flew to my mouth to mask a panicked giggle. Ready? Hardly.
My fists balled just as I heard Mom’s voice.
“Whatever you do, don’t lose control. Your feelings are a detriment there.”
I drew in a deep breath and relaxed my hands. “Do I have a choice?” I asked in a steady voice.
His thick eyebrows shot up his forehead before his lips twitched. My fists balled again. So glad I could amuse him.
No.
“Then don’t ask.” At that, I turned away, disgusted.
A brief pause, and then Lucas’s voice boomed into the room, this time via a hidden speaker.
“The test will commence in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”
Three lunged before the “one” could even finish leaving Lucas’s lips. I feinted back, placing myself out of reach just in time. She frowned and blinked. Puzzled again.
“You’re not scared, are you? Because they’ll deduct points for that.”
She was right—I knew that. While I might not have any desire to fight, my less emotional sister had a point. Right now, my desires were irrelevant. Especially if I wanted a chance to see Mom again.
Alive.
I nodded, opening my mouth to say “Oka—”
Three’s foot whipped into my face with a deafening smack.
Contact made.
Thanks for nothing. That was my dazed mental response to the internal voice as I flew backward and landed hard on my right side, my hip striking the ground first, followed by my cheek. Hard enough that the force of impact reminded me of my fall from Kaylee’s truck. I didn’t have time to check for potential injuries, though, because Three followed the kick by lunging forward, so quick she was almost a blur. I rolled to the left, missing her pounce by a millisecond.
I barely had time to regain my feet when crunch! Her hand caught me in the left shoulder, with even more force than the kick.
I stumbled, went down, once again barely rolling out of the range of the kick that followed. At this rate, I was going to lose within two minutes. They’d terminate me, and who knew what’d happen to Mom.
As I scrambled away, I frantically wondered how I could prevent any of that from happening. Maybe it was because I was out of practice, maybe they’d upgraded Three’s training programming, maybe Mom had erased something crucial when she’d hidden my past. Whatever the cause, my twin was kicking my butt and then some. The structure forming my hip felt like it needed an extra-long session with Mom’s special toolkit.
If I kept this up for long, there wouldn’t be anything left of me to dismantle.
Just then, a noise blasted into my ear. Like maybe Lucas had coughed. It shifted my attention back onto Three, but not quite quickly enough. Her foot stomped into the ground, scraping against my ear with enough force to send even my meager pain receptors shrieking.
That would have been my face if it hadn’t been for Lucas.
And she was still coming.
I threw myself into one more desperate roll, needing to buy myself even a fraction of a second to regain my feet—before my better-equipped counterpart crushed me like a tin can.
A counterpart who was only two steps away. And who’d be anticipating another roll by now.
Backflip.
I didn’t question the voice this time. Didn’t stop to consider that I’d never performed a backflip in my entire life—at least, not in my admittedly patchy memory. I just latched onto the idea, and before I could blink, my body flew into action, like it had done this one hundred times before. I slammed my palms into the ground, kicked my feet over my head, and pushed. Hard. For a second I revolved in the air with nothing to anchor me, face rotating toward the ground, and fear punched me in the gut. The next instant, I was grabbing the floor with my toes.
As I landed, a familiar rush swept though my body, like a burst of the adrenaline I didn’t have. No time to celebrate the success of my acrobatics, though. I dropped into a defensive stance the instant my feet hit the concrete. Braced myself. I couldn’t keep running—I had to hold my ground.
At least this time I was semiprepared when the blow hit.
I swerved, just enough so that her fist glanced off my cheek. Still, the force made me lurch sideways. But I didn’t go down. I recovered my balance, ducked her follow-up punch . . . then lashed out with my foot.
She dodged just in time, but finally, finally, I’d done something offensive. Rolling around on the floor might have saved my body from damage, but I sincerely doubted it was scoring me any major points with the spectators.
Even now, I felt the weight of their eyes on me. Holland’s, and Lucas’s. And despite my one nondefensive maneuver, ice prickled down my back. I was still failing.
On the plus side, Three recognized that I’d snapped out of my initial ineptitude. She pulled back and circled me slowly, those eerily familiar eyes scrutinizing my every move as I circled with her. She was just waiting for me to make a mistake.
I lashed out with my left foot—a decoy. As she feinted to the side, my right jab connected hard in her throat. She stumbled back, three steps, then four.
A human would have been incapacitated by that blow, the fragile trachea closing off momentarily. In fact, I’d used that exact move back at Clearwater. But Three recovered as soon as the backward momentum stopped.
I lashed out with my right hand. With equal swiftness, Three threw up her left forearm to block my move. And so it went as we continued circling. One of us would strike, the other block, keeping us locked in a never-ending stalemate.
But I had to win.
How on earth could I sneak past her defenses? Especially when, most likely, both of us had been uploaded with the exact same training programs, making it impossible not to predict each other’s moves?
The answer emerged like a whisper inside my head. Simple. I shouldn’t be relying on our similarities. I should be playing up our differences. If I couldn’t win on her terms, I’d have to win on mine.
“So, do they let you listen to music here?” I asked, with every sense on full alert, ready to lunge at the faintest sign of motion.
“Your distraction attempts won’t work, you know,” my counterpart said patiently.
“Who said anything about distraction? I just think we deserve a little music. In the movies, there’s always music when people fight.” Well, at least in the one action movie I’d ever seen. With Mom . . .
I pushed her image out of my head. The intent was to distract my opponent, not myself. “Here, I’ll sing you one of my friend’s favorite songs. She played it all the time back in Minnesota.” And then I launched into a semituneful rendering of “Brown Eyed Girl.” A song that Kaylee had blared every time it came on the classics station she loved.
My voice echoed in the sterile room, accompanied by our footfalls as we continued our circular dance.
I finished the first verse and launched into the chorus. Wishing I could spare a glance for the faces watching us from overhead. They had to be wondering if Nicole Laurent’s prize machine had short-circuited. Or been permanently damaged by her tampering. But I didn’t dare. The second I took my eyes off my sister, even for a second, she’d strike.
“This song isn’t even appropriate. Neither of us has brown eyes,” Three finally said. But she remained vigilant.
She sidestepped. I sidestepped. And sang. Only five feet separated us.
“We used to sing, sha la la la—”
Left roundhouse kick.
Right uppercut.
A list of potential moves paraded through my head, but I ignored them all for one I knew the android part of me would never consider. Mainly because it was asinine. No experienced fighter in her right mind would try it. The probability of serious injury was way too high.
The move’s lack of logic was exactly why it might work.
So I continued belting out the peppy chorus—even as I dived headfirst for her feet.
I realized how truly ridiculous this move was. But it was too late. Ignoring the Abort! flashing behind my eyes, I dug up my failing courage and hoped for the best.
My combatant’s reflexes were lightning quick, but that was only because her internal computer processed all the likely attacks and prepared her body to act on them. But she wasn’t prepared for this. That gave me the extra tenth of a second I needed.
She recovered fast, her right leg lashing toward me mid-dive. Not fast or forceful enough. As her foot went up, I grabbed her calf, jerking hard as I shifted all my body weight to the right.
I let go and had rolled harmlessly out of the way when she crashed to the ground. An instant later, I leaped onto her waist, pinning her arms to her sides with my hands, her torso with my knees.
“La la te da,” I finished softly.
She thrashed, but I held tight. No way was I doing this again. This test was over.
Finally she relaxed. From her supine position, she blinked at me, nose wrinkled. “Next time, can you please sing something else? I find that song . . . annoying.”
A small, slightly hysterical giggle burst from my throat. I’d won! I’d won the fight, and I’d done so by using both my android and my human sides.
My flare of elation was cut short by Lucas’s voice.
Well, that was . . . interesting.
He still watched me from the window. He wasn’t smiling, but this time, his amusement had been clear in the way he drew out “interesting.”
The burst of warmth fizzled completely, leaving behind a twisting knot in my gut. One test, that’s all I’d finished so far. I still had two more to get through, and I could only imagine they’d be even harder, perhaps impossible. “Can I see my mom now?”
Three sprang to her feet, rocking lightly back and forth from her toes to her heels. “Are we done, or do we have another round?” she asked, glancing up at the window. The eagerness in her voice told me she’d be more than happy to have another go at me.
No, you’re done for now.
From the way she cocked her head slightly toward the left, I could tell Lucas was speaking to both of us.
Three, you scored higher on the first portion of the test, by managing to put your opponent on the defensive and landing some substantial blows.
She smiled, the same way as when Holland had patted her head.
But Two ultimately scored higher by realizing that combat techniques wouldn’t be enough to win, and using . . . ingenuity . . .
He did smile this time. It was just the faintest upturning of his lips, but even so . . . I balled my fists against the urge to smack the expression right off his face. This was my life, my mom’s life, that he found so hilarious.
. . . to outmaneuver an equally skilled opponent and ultimately subdue her.
Three, please wait by the door for your escort. Two, I’ll be down in a minute.
Three immediately swiveled but paused to peer at me over her shoulder. “Perhaps General Holland won’t terminate you after all,” she said, in the pleasant tone of a cashier. Like she was thanking me for my Blizzard order, and not suggesting someone would be tinkering around with my insides.
She sauntered toward the door, which beeped and slid open just as she reached it. A twenty-something soldier, clad in the standard black T-shirt, multipocketed cargo pants uniform they favored in this place, waited on the other side.
The two of them disappeared around the corner. I waited for the door to close.
Instead, another young man appeared in the open frame, this one clad in a rumpled white-collared shirt, loose tie, and gray slacks with a sagging hem on the left.
The boy from the spectator window.
Lucas Webb.
