Into the Abyss (7 page)

“He was in the training room earlier,” I say, “and we walked part of the way back to my room together, and I saw him again on the way here. He was on his way out, though. Probably running away from everything going on.” I shrug. “He asked me to leave with him, but I told him no.”

“Why would he ask you to go anywhere?”

“I don't know, nor do I care.” The last part is a half lie, of course, but I manage to hold my trademark blank stare this time, keeping my curiosity to myself.

“I don't understand why the idiot won't answer me,” Jaxon says. “He always has his phone on him.” He moves to the door, apparently already giving up on the possibility of forcing anything else out of me. “I'm going to go look for him.”

But Catelyn steps in front of him. “Your mother already has people out looking for him. And she told us both to stay in here until everything calms down, remember?”

They keep arguing. I tune them out by spinning back and forth in the desk chair and focusing on the creaks and whirs of its wheeled base instead of on their voices.
Creak. Whir. Click. Whir.
The mechanical sounds are predictable, soothing. Empty sounds, empty motion. And my mind circles wonderfully, emptily, with them.

But my eyes keep drifting back to the family portrait on the wall, and every time they do, my mind threatens to stop. To focus, and to reopen all the thoughts from tonight that I have so carefully filed away.

Those bodies in the security room.

How quickly, how anxiously Seth confronted me.

Those clones staring at me.

Emily staring at me.

Why hadn't I simply stayed on that bridge and let whatever was going to happen below happen?

I only left my room to find Catelyn. I never wanted to
be in the middle of all these other things, or to care, or even think, about anything or anyone else. And I am so used to not having to care about things I don't want to that for a moment I actually feel my awareness slipping, my computer-brain apparently freezing in its attempt to process all these unwanted things.

I close my eyes.

Reboot, reboot, reboot. . . .

Open my eyes and look away from the portrait.

No.
I won't think about any of this. Only emptiness. Empty
creaks
.
Whirs. Click click clicks—

“Let me see your phone.”

Jaxon and Catelyn both turn to me, and I realize then that I've said this aloud, and that my hand is outstretched and waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

“Why?” Jaxon finally asks.

A good question. And one I don't have an answer to, despite all my brain's eagerness to fill my mouth with other words without my say-so. Fortunately for me, though, Jaxon seems distracted enough by his argument with my sister that he doesn't bother pressing his question. I just stare expectantly at him until he silently tosses me the phone.

I don't know why I am doing it, but as soon as it hits my hands, I pull up his recent calls and I dial Seth. After four rings, I am greeted by a recorded message of his voice, telling me to “leave it.”

All I leave for him is a number—mine. A number I have given to almost nobody else, and that I forget I have most
of the time, even though the communication device that it goes to is always around my wrist. It's another condition of my living here: The president wants to be sure I am always reachable.

I'm sure Catelyn recognizes the number too, though she only watches me curiously as I hang up the phone. I can tell she is dying to press me for more answers and explanations. But she knows it's useless too. Maybe once I understand Seth better—if I ever do—I will try to explain today to her, if I can.

Or maybe not. In a way I am starting to feel possessive of my strange conversations with Seth, feeling that need to guard them the same way I protect everything Catelyn tells me, whether she wants me to or not. I am a hoarder of words and secrets. I suppose because most girls with bodies as old as mine have plenty of secret things of their own by this time: moments that only they know about, things given to them in confidence to keep for themselves. But I have precious little that feels like it is only mine. Six months is not much time to collect a life of your own.

So I turn around and I keep to myself, pulling the scraps of my life that I do have around me like a thin and ragged cloak, and I leave Jaxon and Cate to their own hushed conversations and secrets.

•  •  •

An hour and a half later, the communicator around my wrist beeps.

Catelyn lifts her head from the pillow in Jaxon's lap and blinks sleepily at me. “Who . . . ?”

I glance down at the number that has never flashed on this tiny screen before, and I almost want to laugh, though I am not sure why. Catelyn has told me several times now that my sense of humor needs work. And she is clearly right, because both she and Jaxon are wide awake now, and watching me with decidedly grim, less-than-amused expressions.

Beep, beep, beep.

I pop the earpiece from the screen's edge and slip it into my ear, then tap the answer button—which responds only to my individual fingerprint—on the device's other side. But I don't lift it to my mouth to say anything. Not even hello.

I don't have to, though, because Seth is quick to speak first: “Are you alone now?”

Why does it matter? I want to ask. But then I glance up and meet Jaxon's eyes, and think of his earlier frustration when Seth wouldn't answer him. Clearly, for whatever reason, Seth doesn't want his brother to be able to contact him. If he knows I am still this close to Jaxon, he is likely to hang up on me.

“Yes,” I lie. “I'm in my room.”

“Good.” Silence, then the sound of his breathing, quickening as if he's suddenly started walking fast. “Stay away from Jaxon. And Cate, too.”

“Why?”

“You need to get out of the CCA headquarters.”

I spin around in the chair, hoping once more for the empty motion to lift emptiness into my thoughts—this
time so I can be sure to sound as detached as I want to when I answer him. “You know, I was hoping you would have something more interesting to say this time.”

I don't hear his reply to this, because at that moment I sense movement. I jerk around just as Jaxon reaches for the earpiece. I twist so fiercely up and away from his touch that the chair skids out from under me and hurtles into him.

“That's Seth,” he says, knocking the chair away and ignoring it as it totters on half its wheels for a few seconds before crashing to the floor. “Let me talk to him.” His voice is even, but loud. Loud enough that Seth hears him.

“Liar,” he breathes into my ear, sounding almost amused.

“Given that you haven't been exactly forthcoming with me,” I say, backing away from Jaxon, “I assumed lying was just part of the game.”

He laughs darkly on the other side. A tiny black hole of sound, one that feels like it is swallowing up everything between us until he says, “We're not playing a game here—we could call it that if you like, but I'm not sure it's possible for either of us to win. Just so you know.”

I don't know if he is trying to intimidate me with this last part, but if he is, he is wasting his time. “Impossible games are my favorite kind,” I say. And then I mean to hang up, because I am finished with his evasiveness and with trying to carry on a conversation while both Jaxon and Cate are trying to wrestle me away from it. My hand is slow to find the end button, though, slow enough that Seth manages to leave me with a few last words:

“Perfect. Then you should meet me downtown, at the statue in the center of Market Square, around dawn.”

Click.

Found the end button, finally.

I pull the earpiece out and snap it back into its place. “I seem to have lost the connection,” I say in response to Jaxon's incredulous look.

“Call him back,” he says. “Give me that earpiece, and call him back.”

Catelyn sighs in a way that clearly tells me she is too tired for this argument. I can't do what Jaxon asks, though. I won't. Not even for a second do I want Seth thinking I am calling him back, or that he has any of that sort of control over me. I have to maintain some sort of command over whatever is happening tonight.

“You know he's alive at least,” I say, picking up the chair and pushing it back under the desk.

“Why is he answering you and ignoring me?” Jaxon's face seems perfectly impassive when he says it. But Catelyn must see something in his eyes that I don't; her body language and expressions are more familiar and easy to read, and I've memorized that look she is giving him now—the way she bites her lip and tilts her head to the side like that, the way her body sinks deeper into her seat, bit by tiny bit, as if absorbing whatever perceived hurt she senses rolling off someone.

Empathy. I know the word for it. And Catelyn has tried, several times, to explain when I need to put myself in someone else's shoes, so to speak. It's difficult, though.
Maybe the shortness of a six-month life is to blame again; it seems as if it would be easier to sense someone else's hurt if you had spent a lifetime collecting and recognizing pain for yourself.

I don't think it would be worth it, anyway, however much or little time it took. I have no plans to become more like Catelyn—to be any more in touch with hurt, whether mine or anyone else's. Whatever pain I notice, all I want to do is file it neatly away where I don't have to feel it. Where I can control it, and not the other way around.

Because the second I start worrying about other people hurting, I end up in places like this, with my mind racing with all these things I don't understand. I end up forgetting about myself, and the danger I might have put myself in by staying because of Catelyn.

“It's been calm outside for a while now,” I say quietly. “The president is probably wondering why I haven't come to see her yet.”

Anger is one of the simplest, easiest emotions to read. And now it's unmistakably written all over Jaxon's face. “Yeah. You should go,” he says, and I can feel him glaring after me, all the way out the door.

The hallway outside the president's
room is dimly lit, aglow only with the pale-white security lights that line the bottom half of the wall. The headquarters are almost completely quiet, wrapped in an uneasy hush and forced calmness as members follow protocol to finish restoring order. Our walk here didn't contribute any extra noise either. Yes,
our
walk, and not simply mine, because Catelyn supposedly wanted a change of scenery. And Jaxon didn't want her to go alone, so he came too.

I am not sure why they had to walk with me, though.

They remain quiet company, at least. Quiet enough that all three of us hear a voice long before the person it belongs to—a middle-aged man with graying hair and a sharp chin—rounds the corner ahead. Catelyn averts her gaze, but I keep staring at the man walking toward us as she whispers, “That's Silas Iverson. Josh's dad.”

I already know this, but I don't bother to point it out. I've seen him before, and all it takes is once; I remember him the same way I remember everything I see and hear. And he and Josh look so much alike that I don't think he could deny his son even if he wanted to.

His attention remains fixed on the conversation he is
having over his communicator, his pale-blue eyes staring straight ahead until he has almost walked right past us. Only then do those eyes dart toward Jaxon. He gives a curt nod. Indifferent, still—at least until he truly catches sight of me. Then his step slows. His voice starts to trail off, almost to complete silence before he realizes it, and he has to apologize to whoever is on the other end of his communicator.

He doesn't say a word to us, though. He just averts his gaze and picks up his pace again.

“I wonder where he's heading off to,” Catelyn says, once he is well out of earshot.

Something in her tone strikes me as odd; she sounds too concerned about what looked like nothing more than a man going for a walk to me—especially since half the CCA is awake right now.

I think it might be simply because she is still worrying about my run-in with Josh earlier, until Jaxon turns to her and says, “Probably off to another of his committee meetings. I'm sure they'll have lots to discuss after tonight.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.” She turns the direction Iverson disappeared toward, and takes a step as if she is thinking about following him.

“What meetings?”

Catelyn hesitates before glancing back at me. “He and a few others formed this . . . group thing, a few months back. They said their goal was to help bring the CCA back to its roots, to the philosophy they started with, which . . .” She doesn't seem like she wants to finish her sentence, but
all I have to do is think about his son, and the way Silas himself hurried away from me just now, and I can guess the rest on my own.

“Which probably didn't include harboring a clone within the very walls of the CCA, for whatever reason?”

Catelyn picks at her fingernail instead of looking at me. “Something like that.”

“It was only a few of them at first,” Jaxon says. “Mom figured it was just a knee-jerk reaction to her bringing you back here, a protest that would die out before it gained much momentum. But more and more people seem to be listening to him lately, and they're getting more secretive about things. We're pretty sure they're holding meetings somewhere outside of headquarters, but we haven't been able to figure out where—or what they're planning, exactly.”

I suppose this means Seth wasn't lying when he mentioned the changes taking place around here, then.

Should I have trusted some of the other things he said, after all?

Almost as if she can read my thoughts, Catelyn forces her eyes to mine again and says, “Maybe you should talk to the president about leaving for a while? If you won't go back to our house, I'm sure she can figure something else out. She has plenty of connections.”