Nova (12 page)

Tiring of the game, we’re about to put the holo away when I suddenly get an idea.

“Teal, can you do the age thing in reverse? See what someone would look like younger?”

“Sure. Why? Want to see yourself as a baby?” She runs the picture in the opposite direction. I stop her when it hits age nine. For a long moment, all I can do is stare at the holo in front of me.

“Can you make me a digi of that?”

Teal gives me a curious look, but makes the digital and uploads it to my chit. We’re about to throw on the viewer when the front door sounds.

Teal checks her watch and whistles. “Only two hours.” She gives me a sidelong glance and says grudgingly, “Maybe Dad’s right.”

Right? My brow furrows in confusion until my mind flashes back to her message.

Oh, and be nice to that new girlfriend of his. From the sounds of it, she’s been really good for him.

Me? Good for Michael? I thought it was the other way around. Before I can formulate a response, the door to the bedroom flies open and Michael fills the doorway. “What are you still doing here?” he blurts out.

I stand and fumble for my stuff, suddenly worried that I overstepped some boundary, stayed when I should have gone. I try for a nonchalant shrug. “I had to make sure you were sat, right?”

He blinks, clearly surprised. Then without warning he steps forward and hugs me. “You’re a good friend, Lia.”

For a second, all I can do is stand there, mouth half-open as the truth hits me like a rogue comet. Michael’s right. I may not be Lia Johansen, I may not ever know who I really am, but I’m not nothing.

I am Michael’s friend.

Of their own volition my arms rise up, folding around Michael as fiercely as he’s holding me. His hug is warm and solid and something I’ve been craving for an eternity, I just didn’t know it. I close my eyes and let myself ache with the most profound anguish I’ve ever felt. Ache, and be soothed by the balm I find in his arms.

Maybe it’s not a name to call my own, but I can’t help thinking that I’d take the identity
Michael’s Friend
over
Human Bomb
any day.

I’m coming back from the hygiene unit after getting ready for bed later tonight when I remember the digital I had Teal make for me. Plunking down on my cot, I activate my chit.

There it is, that blonde nine-year-old, age progressed down from my own image. Hand trembling slightly, I pull up one of the digitals Michael uploaded for me from when we were kids. The two girls look exactly alike.

I gasp, excitement welling up inside of me as I stare at those digis. The clues have been there all along; I just didn’t put them together, not until I saw the digital. The way Lia and I both get motion sick, the way we both like to run and hate reading, the way we’re ticklish on the bottoms of our feet and are good at math. I’m not just some generic clone cooked up from some scientist’s DNA in a lab sent to take her place. I’m
Lia’s
clone.

The explanation makes so much sense, I could almost smack myself for not figuring it out before! A clone, grown from Lia’s DNA in a lab and rapidly aged to match her age. It explains everything—why we have so many things in common, why I was at Tiersten, even why I have no identity or memories of my own. I’m probably only a matter of weeks old, grown specifically for the purpose of infiltrating New Sol.

Relief pours through me at this new understanding. After all these weeks of wondering about my past, it all makes perfect sense now. Suddenly my friendship with Michael doesn’t feel like such a sham. So maybe I’m not the
actual
Lia who grew up with him on Aurora, but I’m pretty darn close. I have her DNA, her natural talents, her personality. I’m not such a fraud, after all!

I pull up a few more digitals from Michael, marveling at how perfectly they match the age-enhanced image. There’s the one of Michael and me on the swing, and there’s one of us on bikes, and there’s another one of just me, sitting on the porch steps in a floral sundress and pigtails. I smile at the image and enlarge it, looking at those chubby cheeks, messy braids, and bright green eyes. The resemblance between us is amazing.

Lying back on my cot, I test out my new identity in my head.

My name is Lia Johansen, and I am the clone of a prisoner of war
.
Created for the purpose of destroying New Sol Station, I believed myself a failure when my clock stopped and I didn’t go Nova. My life changed forever when I met a boy named Michael, and he became my friend.

As stories go, it’s not such a bad one, I think, a slight smile curling over my lips. Not so bad at all.

16
THE SWING DANGLES,
limp and
drifting, from the bar overhead. I clutch the chains and drag my feet through the dirt below. Around me, the playground is abuzz with activity. Children, hanging from the monkey bars and riding the merry-go-round, swishing down the slide and running through the field. White flowers dot the grass at intervals; white flowers with blue centers.

I pick a blossom near my feet and twirl it around in my fingers. Of all the children on the playground, only I am on the swings. Only I am alone.

No, not quite. There she is, another girl off to my left. My eyes zero in on her. She is blonde, like me, with green eyes and small hands. A jump rope whistles around her head, her feet striking the ground in cadence with her voice. I strain to make out the singsong lyrics.

“Cross my heart and hope to die

Stick a needle in my eye

My past is gone, my life’s a lie

All I have left to do is die.”

I gasp, climbing off the swings and moving toward her, compelled by the sound of her voice. The song continues:

“Wait! Before my time is through

I have one secret left for you

A way to start a ticking clock

A key to loose a stopped-up lock.”

A group of boys kicking a soccer ball run in front of me, and I lose sight of the girl. I push against them, straining my head as I try to spot her through the crowd. What secret? What key?

“Cross your heart and hope to die

Stick a needle in your eye

We both know you’ve earned this pain

And now it’s time to die again.”

The boys are gone as quickly as they appeared. I take a step forward, and stop. The girl has vanished as well. I turn around, looking for her, but the children have all disappeared, the playground empty and still. “Wait!” I call into the silence. “Who are you? Where did you go?”

No answer.

Something catches at the corner of my eye, and I turn toward the school. The clang of the school bell bursts from the building. Not just the building, but the swings, the bars, all around me, raucous and pulsing, pulsing, pulsing—

The klaxons jerk me from a sound sleep. Strident and shrill, they wail through the cargo bay in high-pitched pulses, and I’m up and staggering off my cot before I even realize what’s happening.
What the . . .
 ?

Pressing my hands over my ears, I wrench my head left and then right, trying to figure out what’s going on. Are we under attack? Is the ceasefire at an end? Or is this Plan B, the Tellurian’s backup plan when I didn’t go Nova as intended? I brace myself for weapons fire, for the earthshaking impacts of deton-cannons exploding against the station’s hull, but the telltale bangs don’t come. Not yet, anyway.

I dare to lower my hands the slightest bit. “What’s happening?” I yell at a young woman in sweats a few feet away. She stares at me, eyes glazed in fear, and I scream the question again. Her eyes blink, and this time she manages to shake her head at me. She doesn’t know either. In fact, no one seems to, the other prisoners stumbling about in various states of dress, frightened children clinging to bewildered parents with crying infants in their arms, uncertain whether to run, and if so, where to go.

Before I can formulate a plan, soldiers pound into the bay. Their orders are barely audible over the shrieking of the alarm, but I realize from their motions that they want everyone up and following them. I fall in with the mob of refugees stampeding toward the bay entrance, certain that at any moment we’ll be annihilated by some terrible weapon of mass destruction.

A terrible weapon of mass destruction. Even in spite of the urgency, the irony of the situation isn’t lost on me. I would almost find it humorous, if I wasn’t so utterly terrified.

Stumbling over the lip of the bay entrance, I almost fall before a random hand rights me. We are practically jogging now, and I struggle to look around through the dense crowd. From what I can glimpse, the main level is in complete chaos, refugees from two locations being herded through the area while various spacers and station personnel hurry toward their ships or the lifts. Soldiers urge them on their way, quick commands bringing order to the chaos. In fact, for a mass evacuation at seven in the morning, they seem to have things surprisingly well in hand, their sharp eyes watching to make sure no one is trampled in the rush even as they guide us into yet another storage area near the center of the level.

The walls are reinforced—a bunker of some sort, or as near as they have in this part of the station. I take a seat against the wall as directed, smashed up between a large man with a handlebar mustache on one side and a little girl with a red ponytail on the other. The stench is almost overwhelming in here, the sour-and-sweet smell practically burning my nostrils as I sit amid the crush of bodies. I pinch my nostrils together, but it doesn’t help. I can still taste them, like a thick film of odor clinging to my tongue. I try to ignore it, again listening for the sounds of attack, but I hear nothing besides the ceaseless howling of the klaxons. My hands shake, my palms sweating and slippery despite my best efforts to stay calm. If only Michael was here to hold my hand.

As if some divine presence read my mind, a hand suddenly slips into mine. I start in surprise and glance down to find the red-haired girl staring up at me. She can’t be more than eight, and whether her parents survived Tiersten or not, they don’t seem to be with her. She has a death grip on my hand, her palm tiny within my own. My own fear ebbs slightly as I stare at her pale face, and I squeeze her hand back.

“What’s your name?” I lean down and ask her, as much to distract myself from the situation as her.

“Kaeti.” She has to repeat it three times before I hear her.

“I’m Lia.” I take a look around the bay, hoping to find some redheaded adult anxiously searching the crowd for their child, but no one stands out. “Are your parents on the station with you, Kaeti?”

She shakes her head.

“An aunt or uncle maybe?”

Another shake.

“Anyone?”

“There’s Lela,” she says, and after some more questioning I determine that she’s an ex-prisoner who has taken Kaeti under her care along with a couple of the other orphaned children. Against all reason, I feel a sudden sense of kinship with this child. We’re nothing alike—not in looks or age or even origin. Not even in experience, for my years at Tiersten are only a fake, the memories someone else’s rather than my own. Neither of us has parents, though; neither of us has family. We’re both alone, and in that I find a similitude between us that speaks to me.

“I don’t have any family either,” I admit. “I have a friend, though. His name is Michael. What about you?”

Kaeti blinks at me a few times, and then begins speaking haltingly about one of the other refugee children. It’s strange. Here I am, crammed into a reinforced bay while the station’s alarms scream bloody murder, somehow having a conversation with a little girl I didn’t even know existed ten minutes ago. I’m so absorbed in the experience, it actually takes me a minute to realize the klaxons have stopped sounding.

A murmur sweeps over the crowd, everyone wanting to know what’s going on. A voice suddenly booms from the public address system.

“Emergency Drill Beta has now been completed. Station facilities and transit services will be reopening momentarily. All personnel are now free to resume normal activity. Thank you for your cooperation.”

Emergency Drill Beta?
So these past thirty minutes of terror were nothing more than a test?

Around me, I hear cries of outrage, the other former prisoners no more happy about the ordeal than I. Still, there’s nothing to do but collect ourselves and start the shuffle back to our respective holds, to sleep if we can or begin our morning routines if we can’t. I’m waiting for the mob in front of me to move when my chit vibrates. I answer the incoming link.

“Morning, Lia.”

“Michael! What’s going on? Did you go through that too? Was this really all just some sort of test?”

The questions tumble out of my mouth one after another, and Michael laughs. “Hey, power down, Li-Li, everything’s sat. It was just a drill.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You mean you’ve done this before?”

“Sure, all the time. We have a drill for every possible scenario that could ever happen—drills in case we come under attack, or there’s a hull breach in one of the rings, or there’s an overload in the hub’s power reactors. That’s a fun one—they actually separate the station for that one. I had to watch an informational holo and pass a test on them when I first moved here. Everyone does. I guess they didn’t make you guys do it since you aren’t permanent residents. They’re just to prepare us in case something goes wrong and a real alarm goes off.”

“A
real
alarm?” I ask nervously.

“Yeah, there’s these small alarm boxes situated around the station, in case there’s a fire or a relay explosion or something. Only the officers can set them off, though, so don’t get any ideas.”

He winks at me, and I find myself doing one of Teal’s signature eye rolls. As though, out of the two of us, it would be
me
who had the ideas.

Michael starts chuckling. “I remember my first drill, about a month after I moved here. I was determined not to look like a null, to play it cool rather than vaccing out like most newcomers, so when the siren went off I took my time moving to the shelter. Trouble was, I forgot that the SlipStreams lock down fifteen minutes after the alarm goes off, so by the time I got there it was closed. I was trapped in the hub! I had no idea what to do.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, an officer found me and took me to one of the hub shelters. Gave me a real jawing out, too. The only reason he didn’t give me a fine was because I was a minor. You can bet I never missed another SlipStream after that.”

Despite my irritation over being woken up so early for a drill, I find myself smiling. Leave it to Michael to get stuck in the hub during an evacuation drill!

“Anyway,” Michael continues, going all serious, “I was linking because I just wanted to say I’m sorry. For walking out like that last night. I was a total drone.”

“No, you weren’t—”

“Yes, I was,” Michael interrupts. “Or as Teal put it, ‘How could you just walk out on Lia like that? Is your brain
completely
deprived of oxygen, Michael?’”

I can’t help laughing. Michael’s imitation of Teal’s scornful tone is dead on. “Did she really say that?”

“Uh huh. You know Teal. She’s never afraid to say what she thinks.”

Teal defending
me?
I can hardly believe it. Though her hostility toward me did seem to lessen temporarily when I asked to wait for Michael last night, he and I are only closer now. If anything, I would appear to be even more of a threat to their relationship in her eyes. I wonder what changed her mind.

Then again, maybe she wasn’t really defending me, but was just mad at Michael for leaving her to entertain me all night.

“So do you forgive me for acting like a de-oxygenated drone?”

“Of course.”

“Teal said you would. You’re truly one in a galaxy, Lia.”

Well, two in a galaxy, I almost say, thinking of the real Lia and my discovery from the night before about being her clone. Instead, I just thank him for the compliment and wave goodbye as he signs off to go to school. With the hold half-empty now, I find it easy to join in the march back to my cargo bay. As I walk down the corridor, I catch sight of the alarms Michael mentioned, unassuming gray boxes situated at regular intervals along the station walls. Curious, I check one out. It’s a simple device, with a scanner for the officers to swipe their chits and a keypad to enter the specific alarm code. Shaking my head, I just hope we never have cause for a
real
alarm to go off.

To my surprise, Kaeti is still beside me even with all my dallying. She follows me the rest of the way to the bay and watches as I pull out clean clothes from my locker. She sits on my cot while I change behind a cargo crate, and even after I return from the hygiene units she’s still there, waiting for me. Somehow I made another friend, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with her.

I’m saved from having to figure that out when a tired-eyed matron comes running over. “Kaeti!” she calls, relief evident in her voice.

“Lela?” I hazard as she gathers Kaeti up in her arms and looks at me curiously. She nods, and I tell her my name.

“Thank you for taking care of Kaeti, Lia.” She glances around. “Do you have family here?” When I shake my head, she adds, “Neither do I. Kaeti is my family now.”

Once again, I feel that sudden sense of connection, that feeling that I’m not so different from everyone around me after all. Even after Lela leaves with Kaeti, I think about them, the orphaned redhead and the lonely matron. Maybe families aren’t just born, but made. My mind flicks to Michael, to Teal and Taylor.
Maybe, just maybe . . .
But I don’t let my mind finish the thought.

It is only as I’m sitting down to breakfast in the cafeteria on Nine that I remember that strange dream I had this morning, just before the alarms went off. I struggle to recall it, but all I can seem to bring back is this one stanza, repeating over and over in my head.

Cross your heart and hope to die.

Stick a needle in your eye.

Your past is gone, your life’s a lie

All you have left to do is die.