Cloneward Bound (5 page)

He had just set the clipboard down and picked up the Two Tracking Unit to work out its kinks when three knocks sounded at his door.

“Can I come in, Fisher?” said his mother’s voice.

“Sure,” Fisher said as he attempted to leap back into his bed and look calm, but ended up looking like an over-caffeinated spider.

The door opened, and she walked in as Fisher tried to untangle himself from his top sheet.

“How was the orchestra?” Fisher asked as his mom sat down on the bed.

“Very good,” she said. “I’ve always been a Stravinsky fan. Listen, Fisher … the government shutdown of my project is serious.” Fisher nodded as slowly and placidly as he could. “I don’t know how some of the AGH went unaccounted for. It’s possible that I made an error somewhere or that something in my equipment was off. And that’s probably what happened. But I still have to consider all the possibilities.” She turned to look Fisher directly in the eyes.

“Like … what?” Fisher asked, hearing FP shift in his sleep and wishing he would swoop down and fly Fisher out the window.

“Someone might have taken it,” his mom answered. “Dr. X had plenty of people working for him. It’s even possible that kidnapping you”—there was a slight hitch in her voice—“was just a diversion, to get your father and me out of the house so that his spies could slip in and steal it. But I just don’t know.”

It took a moment for Fisher to understand the mixture of suspicion and gentleness in her expression. She suspected him. But at the same time, she’d lived through the terror of having him kidnapped and not knowing if she’d ever see him again.

Fisher felt pins of guilt sticking him in the ribs, but not hard enough to make him talk. It would be one thing if he’d taken some AGH to study it or to try and make himself taller. But there was another Fisher running around, and he wasn’t ready to see either of his parents’ reaction to that.

So he cleared his throat and said, “Who knows? Dr. X was capable of a lot. I saw that when I was inside TechX. I’m just sorry you had your project canceled.”

“It’s all right,” his mom said, sighing and standing up. “When I began to realize the possibilities for the project, I started to regret ever having done it. And the government knows just how dangerous the stuff is. The teams they dispatched to track the AGH down have been ordered to destroy anything it was used to create or alter. They’re even confiscating and destroying the giant plants I made when I was testing a prehuman version of it.”

Fisher felt his breath catch in his throat like a fishhook.

“Good night, Fisher,” his mom said, walking to the door.

“… G … night,” Fisher managed to push out as she closed it behind her.

A lot of things had been on the line before. Now, everything was. If he failed, not only could he be arrested and imprisoned … Two could be killed.

CHAPTER 4

A big, white spitball sailed over the seats like an artillery shell over a trench. The hum of conversation had swollen to a deafening roar, and small objects whizzed back and forth without warning. During the seven-hour trip to LA, the shouting, cascades of Cheetos and spilled Pepsis, and flying, spittle-encrusted pieces of notebook paper, had quickly turned the bus into a mobile trash heap.

In other words, it was just like any other Wompalog Friday, only in a small, cramped space from which there was no escape.

Fisher had hoped he’d be able to talk to Veronica during the trip. Not helping his cause was the fact that seats had been assigned, and she was sitting two rows in front of him, next to Trevor Weiss. Fisher could only imagine what they were talking about. Trevor’s two favorite subjects were his collection of handmade pencil cases and the history of trout fishing.

Another spitball nearly grazed Fisher’s head. He had
spent time working on a quickly deploying anti-spitball shield system, but he hadn’t figured out a way to get the reaction time right, and tests had ended with the shield smacking him in the head as often as the spitballs.

As soon as his head had hit the pillow the night before, visions of dark-suited figures, eyeless behind pitch-black sunglasses, had filled his head. They chased him around street corners. They chased him through dark forests. He had even, at one point, tried to dive into a lake and swim to safety, only to be pursued by a sinister agent riding a giant grouper.

What if the investigation led to him and Two? Would Fisher be locked in a military laboratory and forced to make more clones? Would Two be cryogenically frozen while teams of researchers analyzed his chemical composition and cellular structure?

Then a still more chilling thought hit him. Fisher had made Two. What if he was forced to lead the team that took Two apart? He couldn’t imagine accepting the task. But what would they do to him when he refused?

It was an unexpected relief when Ms. Snapper decided to play a documentary on earthworms to “entertain and enlighten.” It was doing neither, but it was, at least, helping to keep Fisher out of his head.

“And so, with the coming of the April storm, the soil becomes saturated and the noble creatures, knowing
their peaty homes shall soon flood, inch ever upward until they majestically break the surface and look blindly upon the cloudy sky.…” The whining monotone of the narrator’s voice was barely audible, but still loud enough to be annoying.

Fisher poked his head cautiously above his seat, straining to see even a bit of Veronica’s beautiful golden hair. But his field of vision was filled almost instantaneously by the head of Warren Deveraux, which popped up like a champagne cork.

“Hey, Fisher! Nice bus, huh? It’s got screens and everything! Hey, d’ya think we can actually get TV on here, or just videos? And look how clean the windows are! I bet they wash them twice a day. What do you think? Twice? Maybe three times?”

Warren was a boy with exactly two settings: on and off. Fisher had learned this well.

“How about the cushions?” Fisher said. “Are they comfy enough?”

Warren popped back into his seat to investigate.

“Wow, yeah, this is—
zzzzzz …
”

Fisher shook his head.

“Fisher! Hey! We need to plan!” Amanda snapped her fingers in front of his face. Fisher turned to her sheepishly.

“Sorry,” Fisher said. “I was, uh, seeing if the earthworm made it out of the ground.”

“Uh-huh,” Amanda said, jotting something down in a spiral notebook on her lap. She gave him a quick glare before turning back to her planning. “Look. LA is a big city. It’s going to be hard enough to find Two even
with
a good plan.”

“What have you come up with so far?” Fisher leaned against the window. His eyes drifted back to Veronica, or what little he could see of her (mostly an elbow).

Amanda chewed on the end of her pen thoughtfully. “What about the studio that’s casting the new commercial?” she said, writing the word
STUDIO
in the center of her notes. “Two must have sent his video along to them. They might have a phone number for him or something.”

“Good thinking,” Fisher said. “I could get that personal info if I pretended to be his twin brother.”

“You
are
his twin brother,” Amanda said. “Just not the usual way.”

Fisher took a moment to think about that. She was right; biologically, a clone was just an artificial twin. But more than that, before his disappearance, Fisher and Two had really started to become close. At first the difference in personality had made Fisher think that they could never coexist, but when they were fighting for their lives together, he’d realized how much they had in common. Now Two’s life was in danger again and he didn’t even know it.

He stretched his stiff neck, peering out the windows as he did, and his eyes paused on a sleek black car just behind and to the left of the bus. Its windows looked tinted … or was that just the reflection of the light?

Fisher sank lower into his seat. Were black-suited government agents watching him even now? Could they possibly know about Two?

But as he watched, the car began to drift farther away. Maybe Fisher was being paranoid. Would the agency really suspect a twelve-year-old of stealing the AGH from right under the nose of his genius mother?

All the same, Fisher slipped out of his seat and worked his way up the aisle, trying to see where the black car was going. Trevor shuffled past him toward the bathroom, his face a deep green. Fisher craned his neck to keep the car in sight. He had moved two rows forward when the bus swerved severely, with no warning at all. Fisher rocketed sideways … straight into Veronica’s lap. The bus lurched a second time and came to a stop.

“Fisher!” Veronica said, surprise and concern equal in her voice. “Are you all right?”

Fisher froze, wide-eyed, his brain shouting five contradictory things at his body.

“I-I-I’m sorry, I—” he stammered at last, sitting up quickly. “I hope I didn’t—um …”

“Is anyone hurt?” said Ms. Snapper, standing up and
looking over the bus, row by row. “Everybody okay?” Once she had seen that nobody in class had been hurt by the bus’s sudden halt, she turned back to the bus driver. “What happened??”

“Something’s on the windshield!” said the gray-haired man. He had pulled the bus to the side of the road. “Biggest insect I’ve ever seen!”

All the students craned their heads to look. There was a large, pinkish object slowly sliding down the windshield. It was the size of a lapdog, or a fat cat, or …

“FP?” Fisher said in disbelief. He popped up and bolted toward the front of the bus. “I, um, I’m sorry, Ms. Snapper. That’s my pig.” Ms. Snapper and the driver looked at him like he had a marmoset tap-dancing on his head.

“Why is your—um,
pig
—on the front of our bus?” Ms. Snapper turned back to stare at FP, who had now slid down to the bottom of the windshield.

“I honestly wish I knew,” Fisher said. “I’ll go get him.”

Fisher hopped out of the passenger door just as FP slipped off the bottom of the windshield, leaving a thin, translucent streak behind him. Mr. Bas’s hair gel! He must have been glued to the top of the bus this whole time, though how he had ended up there was a mystery. It looked like the effects of the hair gel were finally wearing off.

Fisher caught the very tired-looking pig in his arms.

“Are you all right, boy?” Fisher asked. FP looked up and snorted at Fisher before nuzzling his chest. “You just don’t like to be left behind, do you?”

Fisher carried FP back onto the bus. All the kids burst into a chorus of “aww” and “Let me see him! Let me see him!”

Ms. Snapper looked down at FP, who looked back at her and snuffled piteously. She tentatively reached a hand down and scratched his head, and he made a low contented sound.

“Well …” she said doubtfully, “I can’t imagine how he got up there, but we’re more than halfway to LA by now. As long as you can keep him under control, he can come along.”

Fisher bit his lip to keep from saying that keeping FP under control was like trying to lasso an eel. He simply nodded and forced a smile, and carried FP back to Veronica’s seat. FP seemed to remember Veronica because as soon as Fisher sat down, the little pig tapped her with a front hoof and nuzzled his snout into her side.