Falls the Shadow (6 page)

“I'm not hungry.”

From the look on her face, you'd think I'd just cursed her name and threatened her life all in the same sentence. She doesn't say anything, though. Not at first. At least a full minute passes before her expression twists into something I don't recognize, and then to my amazement she says, “You don't have to eat, then.”

And that's the moment, I think, that I realize how serious this all is.

So serious that even my mother doesn't know how to handle it. And if she can't handle it, then what are the rest of us supposed to do? It doesn't feel like the normal weathering the storm anymore. Nothing makes sense now. My thoughts are all twisted up, darting around, quick and impossible to keep track of. Which is maybe why I can't stop the question that rises to my lips, that cuts its way out through the heavy air before I can swallow it.

“What if Violet had died and never come back?”

I know instantly that I've said the wrong thing. The most terrible, most impossibly wrong thing. My father's expression turns from stern to disappointed instead.

God, I
hate it
when he looks at me like that.

My mother doesn't look at me. She just does what she usually does when I start asking questions about all of this and she isn't in the mood to scold me for it herself: She goes into the living room, creaks open the cabinet in the corner, and takes the video disc from it. Then she comes back, grabs my father's work tablet that's on the nearby counter, and situates it in front of me.

If I were more like my sister, maybe I would have the guts to do what she always does when Mother tries to punish her with this: simply get up and walk away. Maybe laugh on my way out the door. Because I've seen the awful video that's loading now more times than I care to count, and I hate it more with every viewing.

But I'm not my sister. So I just sink farther into my chair and try to become the polished oak until this is over with.

Even if I don't listen, though, and even if I let my eyes glaze over, I can still picture what's playing perfectly in my mind on the tablet's screen. It's a video produced by Huxley. It starts with a brief history of the war, of the overpopulation and climate change that led up to a crisis of resources and then to tension, tension, and more tension until some countries grew weary of searching for solutions and instead started searching for someone to blame. And then it talks about how much of the Western world—particularly the United States, with its massive population and less-than-conservative lifestyles—was a natural target.

There were no explosions. That's why, while the rest of the world usually refers to it as the States War, most of the ones who lived it—like my parents—refer to it as the Silent War. Silent and deadly, with no flashy show of weapons or outward flexing of military muscles for Huxley's video to re-create. Instead, the screen shows dramatic reenactments of a sickness slowly overtaking the population, of streets growing less and less crowded, of poisoned water supplies and infected, withering crops.

The drone of a man's voice follows, reading out death
and destruction statistics. Almost one hundred million dead. those who were exposed to infected water or food but who still managed to survive ended up developing the strange marks on their bodies like the ones on my mother's arms.

Aside from those marks and occasional odd stomach pains, though, she's healthy enough. And my father was even luckier. He waited out the worst of the hostilities overseas, spending several years living with my great-grandparents in Germany. When they came back to the rural North Carolina town he was born in, they found it more or less untouched.

But others weren't so fortunate, and the video doesn't spare any details about all of the horrible, lingering effects most of the country has faced; the war summary ends with a series of graphs and maps and charts, depicting new political and economic divides and the instability of what was once supposedly one of the greatest countries on earth. They talk about the infected, like my mother. About the way they were treated almost like lepers in the immediate postwar world, when people weren't sure what they were dealing with, or whether they were contagious or not. No one could be sure.

And that brings Huxley to the point they're making, as the sharply dressed scientist in the video tells me now:
You never know what the future holds, or how quickly things can change. But with cloning you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing that at least something you love is not as irreplaceable as it used to be.

My mother has left the table now; I hear her pacing back and forth on the tile floor in the foyer. Probably tugging
the sleeves of her cardigan down a little more with each step, absently trying to cover the marks that are already out of sight to everyone but her. Guilt gnaws at the back of my mind as I think of her face, and I wish, again, that I'd just eaten my vegetables and kept my mouth shut. Haven't my parents been through enough already?

They were just kids when everything in that video happened—which means they've had practically an entire lifetime to live with the fear of it happening again. Now add the fear of something happening to me, or of us losing Violet all over again, and suddenly everything that scientist is saying makes perfect sense. I understand.

I still don't want to listen to him anymore.

Mother's been gone long enough that I assume she's waiting for me to leave before she comes back. The video is still rambling on about the benefits of cloning when my father clears his throat, gets to his feet, and starts to gather our mostly untouched plates. He piles his napkin and silverware onto mine and then just hovers awkwardly beside me for a moment, like he's an understudy who has no idea how he ended up onstage.

He eventually remembers his lines, though. “You should get to sleep early tonight if you can,” he says. “We likely have a long couple of days ahead of us.” Then he plants a quick, hesitant kiss on the top of my head and disappears into the kitchen without another word.

*  *  *

I don't get to sleep early.

Instead, I lie awake listening to my parents arguing.
My father's calm, unyielding tone. Mother's clipped words and occasional shouting. I have my sheets drawn up over me like a tent, but through them I can still see the bright green display of the clock that tells me it's well after midnight. In just a few hours, I'm going to have to face the world outside the safety of these walls. Which is going to be even more complicated now that I can't even take refuge at school. I've managed to keep the whole suspension thing from my parents for now, but what, exactly, am I going to do come tomorrow morning?

I sit up. While my mind chases questions and possibilities, I let my gaze wander toward the figures outside my window. Earlier, I set the glass to a dark tint—like I always do to block out the setting sun—so I can't make out distinct people. They're all the same, though. They all blur together to me. The anxious camera crews. The CCA members standing on our street, lecturing about the evils of cloning in loud, booming voices. The police officers there to keep a riot from starting—and waiting to question Violet themselves, when she finally comes home. Everyone wants to be the first to see her, to catch her, to demand answers from her.

I'd like to demand some myself.

I'm not going to be able to sleep in my bed tonight, it looks like. This isn't the first time reporters have camped out on our lawn, though. So I'm already prepared for this. I've got places to hide.

Our house is one of the oldest in Haven. The rooms are laid out strangely, and they're not uniform in size or shape. It's
all so haphazard and uneven, full of nooks and crannies that Violet and I spent an entire childhood discovering. It's almost as if the builders were simply making things up as they went along. Just one more reminder of how different my parents used to be; they're really too practical, too no-nonsense for this house now. Which may be why Mother talks all the time about moving. She always comes up with a reason to stay, though.
Too much work. Too many memories.
And her favorite:
Too many people speculating about what ran us off.

In my room, there's a random tiny space within my closet that I discovered when I was little; the door to it blends in so seamlessly with the wall that it's almost impossible to see. To pry it open, I have to slide a thin butter knife, which I keep in a shoe box under the bed, beneath the tiny crack between the door and the floor.

I already have spare pillows and blankets in here, and I bring my computer tablet and the digital picture frame from beside my bed to give me some sort of light. I make myself comfortable and set the frame down beside me. It sifts dutifully through its pictures, oblivious to the world outside the memories it holds; black-and-white, artsy photos of me and Violet playing dress-up, of our whole family at the beach, of the last time our grandmother visited us.

If you were only judging by the pictures in this frame, the logical conclusion would be that we are a normal, happy family. If you were an outsider just glancing in, you wouldn't be able to tell that the pictures of my sister are of two different people.

But I can tell.

Most of the time I don't want to, but I still can.

What will I do when Violet comes back, I wonder? Maybe I'll scream at her. Hit her. Pick up this frame and throw it at her feet, hard enough to shatter it into a hundred tiny pieces. And then maybe I'll grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Ask her,
why? Why do you keep making things worse? What is wrong with you? You're the big sister. You're supposed to watch out for me, to set an example, to give me someone to look up to. Don't you know that? Didn't they program that into that stupid brain of yours? You should know that that's how this is supposed to work.

Maybe that's how it would have worked too, if the first Violet was still here. If the first Violet was still here, maybe I wouldn't keep finding myself in this same place, hiding and doing everything I can to avoid the wake of destruction this one leaves in her path. And maybe I wouldn't have to sit across from an empty chair at the dinner table, and we'd have normal conversations there, instead of ones about war and politics and paparazzi.

Instead it would be
How was school today, Cate?
or
Tell me about that boy who drove you home, Cate.

If only she was still here.

I glance over at that frame. The display's stuck on a picture of the two of us, Violet with her arms wrapped in a playful headlock around me. It's recent. Definitely New-Violet. I think about flipping the picture over on its face so I won't have to look at it anymore. I think about taking it and burying it in the darkest corner of my closest
too, or maybe going back to my window and throwing it outside, right into the crowd of all those people who are waiting for her.
There she is
, I'd shout at them.
Take her. I don't care. I'm tired of looking at her.

Suddenly I feel a crawling in my skin—a disgust with myself for thinking these things. I wrap my blanket tighter around myself and curl closer to the corner, like I could somehow sink into the walls, the floorboards. Away from myself. I don't like having these dark, terrible thoughts about Violet. But sometimes they're just there, and sometimes I just can't get away from them.

I hear the old house creaking through the walls. My parents climbing the stairs to their bedroom, probably. I wonder if they'll sleep tonight, or if they'll lie awake like me, having terrible thoughts of their own.

Or worrying.

Because there's no denying that the spaces in my thoughts—the ones that aren't filled with anger—are filled with a gut-twisting anxiety for Violet. In the end, I know I'm only fooling myself by thinking I could stand to never see her smiling face again. I don't even know if I could yell at her or hit her or do any of those things. She is my sister, after all. Or what's left of her.

And right now I just want—need—to know she's safe.

But I have a bad feeling about that.

Thirty more minutes have somehow slid by, according to the tablet's display. It's going to be morning before I know it, and I still have no idea what I'm going to do. All I know is that I can't tell my parents. One delinquent daughter is
plenty for them to have to deal with. My problem, as usual, is silly compared with the ones surrounding Violet; mentioning it would just be an extra irritation they don't need.

My options are limited, though. Faking sick is out; Mother's only let me stay home from school one time—and that's only because I passed out on the front porch after she insisted I get up and get ready. You have to show up, she always says, or people will start talking.

As if they didn't do that already.

I don't have a license to drive, and our driver would tell my parents if I tried to skip school. And I don't think my parents would approve of me taking the ETS—especially with everything that's happened today. They'd be right to disapprove too, because I'd probably get jumped by more crazies like the ones outside.

There's only one other option I can think of: I grab the phone from my sweatpants pocket and start to flip through my contacts. It's a short list, so it doesn't take long. It also doesn't take long for me to realize that I wouldn't feel comfortable calling any of these people and asking them to pick me up in the morning. How sad is that? After sixteen years of living here, it seems like there should be somebody I could call.

And then it occurs to me:
Jaxon
.

His face, his voice, his laugh—it all drops into my head and sets it spinning again. I don't have his contact information, but I should be able to find it easy enough; he doesn't seem like the type who would try to keep that sort of thing off the Network.