Blight Page 27

  I frown, puzzled. “Me, but not Isabel?”

  My mother looks up. “I was so alone, m’ija. You were gone. Your father was gone. I thought you were both dead. But I had a record of your DNA, and the technology was there.”

  “So you made a copy of me?” I know I need to stay calm, but I feel as if electricity is shooting through all my nerve endings. “You just . . . replaced me?”

  Anger flashes across her face. “I never replaced you. It wasn’t simple for me, Tempest. It wasn’t easy.”

  “Oh, God.” I rake a hand through my hair. “Does Isabel know?”

  “Know what?” Isabel stands in the doorway in her pajamas, hair messy from sleep.

  “Nothing, m’ija.” My mother jumps up and hurries to her, shooting a warning glance at me over her shoulder. “Go on, get into your school clothes and I’ll make some breakfast.”

  Isabel looks between the two of us, and then turns and trudges back down the hallway.

  “She’s going to find out,” I say quietly as soon as she’s gone. “She picks up on more than you know.”

  My mother’s mouth tightens into a line. “And you’re an expert, after knowing her for a week?”

  I stand. Any guilt I had about manipulating her into telling me the truth evaporates.

  “I know I don’t like being lied to, so if she’s my clone, I imagine she doesn’t either.”

  “Tempest . . .”

  I brush past her and storm down the hall, into my room. I want to slam the door, but it will only hush closed, so I punch the wall and scream, instead. Altering our seeds, optimizing them, never really bothered me, but . . . human beings? Are they AgraStar’s intellectual property the same way the seeds are? If they run away, does the company have the right to hunt them down, reclaim them? And who decides what’s optimal? Resistance to common diseases, obviously, but what about height, build, skin color? They’ve already decided which languages we should speak and which we should forget. What if they decide hair like mine is too much trouble, and instead of making me straighten it in a salon, they go a step further and write it out of the genetic code altogether? What if they perfect us so narrowly that we’re like our crops, all wiped out by a single agent?

  A few moments later, there’s a soft knock at the door. “Tempest?” my mother says.

  “What?” I snap.

  “I have to go to work and get Isabel off to school, but I’ll be home by three. We can talk more about this then, okay?”

  “Fine.” I’m already restarting the tablet, going through the commands Isabel taught me. I’m going to make use of every minute my mother is gone, pull every piece of information I can from her files. I’m done being lied to. It’s time to extract the truth.

  My mother’s files are a maze of information. I try searching her hard drive for “blight resistance” and “seeds,” but nothing turns up on the first search, and the second generates thousands of results. The sheer volume of documents might be a better security measure than her passwords and biometric lockouts.

  I enter a search for my name, and along with the photos she already gave me, I find a log of my internet activity—all the searches I did and sites I visited under my own profile. Fortunately, there’s nothing more incriminating than maps of the city and me looking for updates on the spread of the “forest fire.” I find a similar log for Isabel. It’s equally clean, but that isn’t surprising. Isabel is smart enough to work around the invisible eyes everywhere.

  Inspiration strikes me. “Adela,” I type into the search bar. My security profile springs up. Only it isn’t simply static files like the ones my mother gave me to look through. This is active, monitoring my heartbeat and location, displaying a photograph of me, and listing my security clearances. I tap the edit button, and it responds. Holding my breath, I flip over my settings, giving my com cuff access to the detention levels of the MA buildings, the R&D labs, and all the executive-level doors and elevators.

  “Yes!” I smile. But what I really need is the data on the blight resistance genes. Without that, all the open doors in the world mean nothing.

  I work through the morning, digging through file after file, all of them with meaningless alphanumerical names—MX33-18, H1-L25, P92-IL1. Spreadsheets and database files I can’t parse, project summaries that aren’t much clearer. I sigh and rub my forehead. My exhaustion headache is coming back, creeping along the base of my head and into my jaw. If I lie down for a few minutes . . .

  No. I blink furiously and sit up straight. I can’t fall asleep right now. There’s a mountain of data to sift through, and I have only a handful of hours until my mother comes back.

  I page through another set of files—all color-coded columns of numbers. Nothing that looks like the bar graphics Dr. Mitra showed me. Nothing like the DNA record in my files. I groan and flop against my pillow. Will I even recognize the data when I see it? What if my mother has it encoded somehow?

  I rub my eyes and pick up the tablet again. I open another set of files. The screen is so bright, the light stabbing at the back of my eyes, pouring pain into my skull. I squeeze my eyelids shut. Just for a moment . . .

  The sound of the door chime startles me awake. I sit up quickly, dazed. Footsteps in the hall. I look at the tablet open in front of me. No time to log out. I slide it under my pillow just as my mother appears in the doorway.

  “Tempest?” She frowns at me from the doorway. “Are you okay, m’ija?”

  “Yeah.” I rub the grit from my eyes. “I fell asleep.”

  “That’s understandable. You were up all night.” She sits down next to me on the bed. “Are you still angry with me?”

  I check myself. I feel quieter after sleeping, less jagged. “No.”

  “I was having a chat with Dr. Lefebvre today.” She runs her hand over the bedspread, smoothing out the wrinkles, studiously not making eye contact. “I know that was a lot to take in this morning. I was thinking . . . perhaps you, Isabel, and I should speak to one of the family counselors. This is a big adjustment for everyone. We have a lot to work through.”

  “Okay,” I say. Getting angry with her was the wrong tack. I can’t do anything for Alder if she has me under a microscope.

  “Yes?” My mother brightens. “Good. I’ll make an appointment.”

  “Great.” I make myself look at her and work up a small smile. No threat, no security risk. Only an emotional teenager.

  She stands and walks to the closet. “We should pick out something nice for you to wear tonight. Your young man will be here in a few hours.”

  “Are we still doing that?” I frown.

  “Well, yes.” She stops and turns to me. “Unless you don’t want to. Dr. Lefebvre agreed it would be good for you to socialize in a familiar environment.”

  Socialize in a familiar environment? She sounds like Dr. Mitra’s report. I bite back my anger. “No, it’s fine. We should still do it.”

  “Excellent.” She spins back to the closet. “Maybe something blue. Cool colors look so pretty against a warm skin tone like yours.”

  While her back is turned, I scoot forward on the bed and slip my hand beneath the pillow, feeling for the manual OFF button. I find it and press it down just as she turns back to me, holding out a cornflower-blue dress cut to knee length.

  “This will do nicely, don’t you think?” she says.

  I nod and fake a yawn, withdrawing my hand from beneath the pillow in a way I hope looks natural.

  “Poor thing. You should go back to sleep,” my mother says. “I’ll come wake you an hour before dinner so you can get ready.”

  “Thanks.” I lay my head down on the pillow.

  “I love you, m’ija.” My mother bends over and presses a quick kiss against my forehead. “We’re going to get through this together, okay?”

  I nod, holding my breath. I wait until the door closes softly behind her and her steps recede down the hall before I let it out. My whole body is shaking like the aftershock of an earthquake. I’ve called out
my mother for lying to me, shouted at her, slammed doors, when I’m the liar. I’m the one who’s planning to betray her.

  The blue dress is silky on my skin, like fine fescue grass. My mother has piled my hair on top of my head in glossy waves and is trying to convince me to let her apply makeup to my face.

  “Just a little shimmer on the lips and some blush,” she says.

  I shake my head. Having Eli over for dinner is bad enough, but me looking shined up and fancy? It’s only dragging out the inevitable, setting us both up for more pain.

  “I’m not used to it,” I say. “It doesn’t feel like me.”

  “You won’t say that when you’re older.” My mother waves a lip-gloss tube at me. “In ten years, you’ll be swearing foundation is your best friend.”

  There’s no point in fighting her. She’s determined.

  “Fine.” I close my eyes and screw up my face. “Do it.”

  My mother laughs. “You’d think you were going to your execution.”

  My stomach turns. I know it’s a joke, but AgraStar has been known to execute traitors. Not often, and not recently, but it’s happened. And I’m dangerously close to becoming exactly that.

  “What about me?” Isabel pokes her head into the bathroom. “Can I put on makeup?”

  “You can paint your nails,” my mother says, not breaking her concentration on the line she’s drawing on my eyelid.

  Isabel scowls. “Tempest gets to, and she doesn’t even want to wear it.”

  “Tempest is a young woman,” she says, uncapping the lip gloss. “When you’re done with your primary studies, you can wear it too.”

  “Ugh!” Isabel slouches away.

  “None of that at dinner!” My mother calls after her. “We have a guest.”

  My mother steps back, letting me see my reflection in the mirror. “What do you think?”

  I stare at myself. “It’s . . . pretty.” My eyes look bigger and brighter, more alert. The girl in the mirror doesn’t exactly look like me, but she doesn’t not look like me, either. Or maybe I’m just getting used to who I am here. A different version of the AgraStar ideal, but still something created by them. The thought makes me uneasy.

  The door chimes. Eli’s arrived.

  My mother clicks down the hall. I hear the door open, and follow her.

  “Specialist Byrd.” She gives Eli a brief, airy hug. “So glad you could come.”

  “Thanks for inviting me.” He spots me lurking in the hall. “Hey, Tempest.”

  My heart lunges the way it always does when I first see him. Ellison. And then the aftershock a split second later. Not Ellison. Eli.

  “You look nice,” he says.

  I flush. “You, too.”

  He’s wearing a dark green dress uniform with brass buttons. It makes him look more slender than he did in his fatigues and T-shirt. His hair is freshly trimmed, and he smells like shaving cream and pine. Suddenly my dress and makeup feel less out of place.

  “Why don’t you two sit down?” my mother says. She’s grinning like a cat that’s caught the plumpest, juiciest bird in the nest. “I’ll let them know we’re ready.”

  “So.” Eli takes a seat on the couch and rests his elbows on his knees.

  I join him. “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t have to dress up for me.” He gives me a sidelong smile.

  “I didn’t,” I say. “I did this for my mother.”

  “Yeah.” He looks down at his dress uniform. “Same here.”

  I laugh. “I guess she has that effect on people.”

  The door chimes again, and servers in white aprons wheel carts bearing covered platters into the dining room. A light, buttery smell fills the air, making my mouth water.

  I look at Eli. He nods mock-knowingly and mouths, “Parsnips.”

  I suppress a snort. “Definitely.”

  We take our seats—Eli and I across from each other, Isabel at my side, and our mother at the head of the table. She lifts the cover from the largest platter with a flourish.

  “Crab cakes Benedict with a lemon hollandaise sauce and roasted asparagus.” She smiles. “A little treat for us.”

  Eli’s eyes go wide. We look at each other. I know what he’s thinking. Seafood, this far inland? She must have had it specially shipped from the coast, maybe the Charleston port facility. And asparagus is a specialty crop, slow to grow and not practical for mass production. How much did this dinner cost?

  “I don’t like asparagus.” Isabel sticks out her tongue. “It makes your pee smell funny.”

  “Isabel!” my mother says. “Not at the table.”

  “What?” Isabel says. “It’s true.”

  “It’s okay,” Eli says. “Thanks for the warning.” He winks at Isabel.

  My mother passes around a bottle of spring water and another of white wine. Once our glasses are full, she raises hers.

  “To new friends.” She beams from Eli to me. “And new beginnings.”

  I smile back, but I feel sick. Every second I sit here binds me closer to my mother, to Isabel, to this whole life. The idea of betraying them . . . my throat knots. I have to. I have to save everyone living outside AgraStar’s protection, even if it means I might lose this family and the glimpses of belonging I’ve been chasing for the last fourteen years. I have to make sure the earth doesn’t rot out from beneath us. The thought of ignoring everything I’ve learned and going on like none of it happened, like Alder’s body isn’t covered with bruises and my mother didn’t call us assets, and the blight isn’t still creeping toward the coast, makes my stomach ache, too.

  “So, Eli.” My mother sets down her glass. “Tell us about yourself. Are you hoping to make captain?”

  I stop cutting into my crab cakes. Why is she asking him that? She knows he’s on the leadership track. She’s read his entire file. She as much as created him.

  Eli swallows and sets his fork beside the plate. “Actually.” He wipes his mouth with a napkin. “I just found out I have charge of a transport tomorrow. It’s sort of a test to see if I’m ready for my own team.”

  “Corn diesel?” I say, remembering what he told me about his last transport duty. “Are you nervous?”

  “Prisoner transport,” he says. “And yes. I’d be crazy if I wasn’t.”

  I freeze. Prisoner transport. “Where to?”

  “An assimilation camp down near Valdosta.” He slices a piece of asparagus in half. “This food is amazing.”

  “Thank you,” my mother says. “I’m sure you’ll perform beautifully tomorrow. We’ll be calling you captain in no time.” She grins and winks at him.

  I stare at her, and then catch myself and quickly drop my eyes to my plate. Assimilation camp . . . Alder. Tomorrow. They’re moving him tomorrow. Did she know Eli would draw this duty? Did she engineer it?

  “Is everything all right, Tempest?” my mother asks. “You’ve barely touched your food.”

  “It’s so rich.” I hurriedly spear a chunk of crab cake and stuff it in my mouth.

  “Well, leave room for dessert,” my mother says. “We have Black Forest gâteaux to look forward to.”

  I eat, not tasting anything, while my mother makes small talk with Eli, and then Isabel takes over and starts telling him about her snake. An idea is forming in my brain. I think I know how I can rescue Alder. But it means not just risking this new life; it means giving it up entirely. And first I have to find the blight resistance data. I have to make sure that if I free Alder, there’s something for him to escape to in the end.

  .25.

  HONEY LOCUST

  GLEDITSIA TRIACANTHOS

  I huddle beneath the covers in the glow of the tablet screen. It’s past midnight, and I’ve gone through half of my mother’s files. I rub my forehead and sigh. A few more hours, and my window to rescue Alder will be gone. He’ll be on his way to the assimilation camp.

  I skim through the remaining file names, hoping something will catch my eye, but it’s all meaningless to me. Suddenly
it occurs to me—time. I sort the files by most recently modified. The tablet screen blinks and rearranges the list. The top three files have been created in the past week. It has to be one of those.

  I open the first one. Genetic charts! But no . . . I look closer. This is a proposal for a new corn strain, not a genetic analysis of tomato seed. I click on the second file. Financial reports, detailing the lost revenue from the spread of the blight and the evacuations, as well as projected earnings and territory expansion from the sale of the blight-resistant seeds to the sharecroppers and new contracts signed by unaffiliated farmers desperate for the company’s protection. AgraStar is going to lose money short-term but gain it in the long run. I chew on a hangnail and open the last set of files. This has to be it. It has to be.

  A grainy image pops up—an overhead shot of a young man with dark hair and pale skin handcuffed to a desk. Alder. Another man steps into the frame, also pale, but bald and heavyset, wearing security forces fatigues. My heart stops. Kurich.

  “Did you turn her?” Kurich asks.

  Alder shakes his head. “I told you. We took her prisoner in the confusion after the explosion. You saw—she turned me in at the first opportunity.”

  “She was pretty worked up over you.” I can’t see Kurich’s face, but his voice is firm. “Screaming and ranting at the checkpoint guards.”

  Alder looks up at him. “We’d just escaped the Red Hand. You would have been screaming and ranting, too, if you’d seen what we saw.”

  She. That’s me they’re talking about. Does he really think I turned him in at the first chance, or is he lying for me?

  Kurich slams the table. “Don’t get smart with me, shirk.”

  I look at the time stamp on the video. Two days after we arrived at the checkpoint. I was having my hair washed and styled while Alder was chained to a table. How is he even upright? The video is too blurry for me to see whether he already had the bruises I saw in the basement of the MA building.

  “Let’s go back,” Kurich says. “You say you headed southeast on foot after the explosion, but you didn’t encounter any patrols?”