Emergent (A Beta Novel) (5 page)

I feel immediately relieved. Xander’s not wounded. He came here to swim! I know it. The place is too perfect for him to resist.

My hurting heart feels suddenly brighter, happier, pounding with excitement. I hate him, but I’ll never stop loving him, and now he’s here. After all I’ve been through. After
all he’s been through. We have so much to discuss, to figure out. Our lives are completely different from the last time we saw each other, but surely our hearts are the same: joined.

I can’t believe I ever entertained the idea of seducing a clone tonight, when my superhuman is about to be returned to me today.

The sailboat approaches the atoll shore and I can’t even wait for Aidan and Cesar to pull the boat onto the sand. XANDER! I SEE HIM! This is not a dream! He’s emerging through the
trees, lean and gorgeous, just as I knew he would be. I could not miss that tall, beautiful, genetically perfect man anywhere. I leap out of the boat into the shallow water and run as if my life
depended on it, run toward the man who took my heart away once but now is going to give me my heart—and life—back.

“Xander!” I call out.

Wait.

What?

I’m too late. He’s found someone else. He’s holding the hand of another girl.

I run until I meet them at the shore, and then I stop, dead cold, in front of Xander and the girl.

I stare at her.

The girl is me.

The girl whose hand Xander is holding is my clone.

I HAVE TO KILL HER.

That’s my first thought. She’s
exactly
me, only not me. A fake, an imposter. An outrage I want to see destroyed,
immediately
.

By the symbols aestheticized on her face—a violet fleur-de-lis on her right temple and a plumed, purple-blue flower vined onto the left side of her face—she’s clearly a
Demesne-brand clone. My human emotion right now, boiling in every cell of my still very much alive soul:

RAGE.

MURDEROUS RAGE.

I didn’t die! The ’raxia-induced death party caused my heart to stop, but I woke up! My body was retrieved by pirates and sold as a First, but the attempt to clone me on Demesne
failed because I’m a teenager and they don’t make teen clones. Aidan told me so!

So why is my clone standing right here? Her fuchsia eyes—the primary physical distinction between a First and a clone—reflect the anguish I feel. Shock. Confusion.

“Zhara!” Xander exclaims. He drops the girl’s hand and stares at me, equally joyful and horrified. “You’re alive! How is this even possible?” He tries to pull
me to him, to hug me, I think, but I recoil from his touch.

I’m not sure whom I want to kill more—him or her.

I can’t even say anything to him, I’m so stunned by the sight of her. My clone has nothing to say, either. The sight of me must be equally as shocking.

“You look so different, Zhara,” says Xander. “What happened? Are you all right?”

I barely hear him because I can’t stop staring at her. The worst part of my clone’s face? It’s so pretty, so soft in comparison to the horror show I know I must look like by
now. Since the last time I’ve seen Xander, I’ve been to hell and back. We made love and then he left me, and I retaliated by becoming a hellbeast to everyone except the one who’d
hurt me and gone away. I failed at Olympic trials, got kicked off the cheerlords, and then my own father sent me away when my ’raxia problem got out of hand. I had a death party, was
resurrected, and escaped a mad scientist’s compound, taking refuge with escaped clones on an island so feral even the outlaws call it Heathen.

Sorry if I look like crap now.
Different
. I’ve been busy.

I’ve had no mirror to see myself, but I can feel the leatheriness of my overexposed skin and the brittleness of my overgrown hair, matted and wild from sun and wind. I must look more like
a monster than a seventeen-year-old girl by now. Hey! I had a birthday sometime in the last few months. Did anyone back in Cerulea even celebrate? Remember me?

The instinct to murder my clone, who looks so much sweeter and more innocent than I could ever be, temporarily fades as a bizarre thought occurs:
My clone and I could make the freakiest
synchronized diving pair ever. At last, the gold could be mine.

A sense of appropriateness at times of crisis has never been my strength.

What is the appropriate thing to say to the worst nightmare you didn’t even know you had?

Hi. You seem prettier than me. I hate you already.

You cut my hair. I never thought I’d look good with short hair, but your little pixie-punk style actually looks good on my face.

(Yeah, I get it. This situation is literally life and death, and I should be thinking about other things besides my hair right now. I can’t help myself. Good hair is so important, and
I’ve let mine become an entangled monster.)

Really, the shock is too great. There’s nothing to say to her. So that’s what I say, my mouth agape, my jaw clenched into stunned submission, my heart pounding in horror. I say
nothing.

Instead, I run.

I run down the beach and into the trees, past a sapphire-blue lagoon lodged in the middle of this island atoll. My clone just came from swimming in this lagoon with him. I know
it; I
feel
it. The lagoon looks like a perfect little paradise and I hate her for sharing it with him. It should have been
me
there with him.

I run and run until my breath finally gives out and I slump down under the shade of a palm tree. I am: Exhausted. Confused. Horrified. My heart might give out right now and I wouldn’t
begrudge it doing so.

I wish I could die.

But I already have.

All death got me the first time was a clone who stole the man who stole my heart.

Xander follows me to my resting spot in the palm-tree shade. At least he has the decency not to bring her along.

So much has happened since the last time I saw Xander. There’s too much to say to him. The best that comes out of my mouth is, “What’s her name?”

“Elysia.” Hearing Xander’s familiar gravelly voice, I want to die again, but this time from unbearable pain in my heart—beating too hard for someone I loved, and who
loved me back, just not enough.

Faithfulness is supposed to be Xander’s genetic imperative. He’s an Aquine. When they mate, it’s supposed to be for life. I counted on that when I gave myself to
him—mind, body, and soul. Even more than Aquines value their superior looks and bodies, they value loyalty. They have a divorce rate of zero, because they cultivate their people to choose
forever mates over casual dalliances. Why was I the exception? Or is his relationship with Elysia a really sick extension of the “loyalty” he was supposed to feel exclusively for
me?

Elysia. Even her name is better than mine.

I can’t look at him. Sitting beneath the tree, I cover my head with my arms. I don’t want him to see me, either. I don’t want him to know I’m crying, even though I
can’t stop the shake of my body or the sound of sobs coming from my mouth. I won’t share the sight of my tears.

“Zhara.” He says my name gently. Xander places his hand on my back to comfort me, but his touch feels like poison. I flinch, and he removes his hand. “I thought you were dead.
Then I discovered Elysia on Demesne, and I realized the mistake I’d made when things ended between us. I still had the same feelings for you—and they transferred to her. She was like a
second chance with you.” His voice is filled with pain and compassion, and not the mimicked kind I’ve gotten used to from clones. It’s real.

My sobs abate, but not my fury. “You’ve got a strange way of acting out your grief. Did anyone even come looking for me?”

“I was training on the Base at the time, not allowed contact with the outside world. Your father sent a search party after your disappearance. I offered to go, but he wouldn’t allow
it. You were presumed dead. Your father was devastated.
I
was devastated.”

I’m too dumbfounded to speak. Gently, Xander says, “The bodies of your two friends washed ashore. I’m so sorry. Did you know they died?”

“Of course I knew that. And they weren’t my friends,” I snap. Why am I being mean even to the dead now? What’s
wrong
with me? “I disappeared so close to
Demesne. Didn’t anyone even worry that I’d been cloned if they never found a body?”

“The pirates who harvest Firsts could have taken the other two bodies to Dr. Lusardi, but they didn’t, so no one made that assumption about you. The investigators assumed you
drowned.”

“But pirates
did
find my body. They sold it to Dr. Lusardi’s laboratory on Demesne. Only I wasn’t dead. I woke up.”

“Indeed. I can see that you’re very much alive.”

“Why did no one search for me on Demesne?”

“Come on, Z. You know that practically nobody can get on that island except the people who own property there. And nobody thought Dr. Lusardi was working on teenagers. She publicly stated
before the Replicant Rights Commission that she’d never attempt to clone teenagers, because their hormones would screw up her science. She said it was impossible to transition teen clones to
adulthood so they were therefore invalid as subjects for her work. I know. I had to study all her statements before I took the Uni-Mil assignment on Demesne.”

“Guess Dr. Lusardi lied.”

Aidan
lied. That galls me more. Dr. Lusardi’s lie resulted in my clone. That sucks. Hard. But I have no relationship invested with Dr. Lusardi; I never met her. Aidan’s lie
feels so much more personal. Unforgivable.

“Your hair is different,” Xander comments.

My head lifts up from hiding beneath my arms to stare at him in shock. “
That’s
what you have to say to me after all this? ‘Your hair is different’?” I
shouldn’t feel a small measure of satisfaction, but I do. He noticed my hair.

“There’s too much to say. I don’t know where to begin.”

We both laugh softly, and for a moment, the tension is relieved. “Yeah. Feeling that too.” My fingers wrap strands of wild blond hair, streaked now in blue and black. “After
you left, I cut off the pink tips. I was feeling pretty beat up, so I got black and blue streaks. The roots have grown out, but the streaks remain. They remind me of how I feel. Damaged.”

“Glad you haven’t lost your sense of melodrama, Z-Dev.” He’s teasing, trying to keep the moment light, using his old nickname for me, short for Zhara-Daredevil. But
I’m not laughing anymore. Instead, I glare at him. He averts his turquoise eyes from my face to look at the late afternoon sun. “Let’s go. We need to get off this atoll before it
gets dark. Elysia and I will return to the Rave Caves with you and the other Defects.”

“They don’t like to be called that. They’ve chosen the name
Emergents
for themselves.”

“Excellent. That’s what we hope for them. That they choose their own identities.”

“Who is
we
?”

“Those of us in the military who have been secretly supporting the Defects’—rather, Emergents’—quest for Insurrection. For freedom.”

It’s just too much to take in. Last year, at the urging of my father, Xander joined the elite wing of the Universal Military, which Xander’s peaceful Aquine people traditionally
shun. His people also don’t believe in cloning, because it’s not “natural.” But now Xander has gone AWOL from the Uni-Mil in order to aid and abet Demesne clones? My
head’s going to explode from confusion.

“Get up,” says Xander.

“Don’t rush me,” I snap again. “I’ll get up when I’m ready, not when you tell me to.” I actually do want to stand up, but I won’t do it now,
because he demanded it.

“The sun will set soon. You know that’s the most important time of day to an Aquine, because you always begged me to forego that sacred time so we could swim longer.”

“So, wait. You can have sex with me and then decide after that we’re not ready to be mates—completely against the basic philosophy of Aquines: valuing loyalty above all else.
Yet you can’t let go of your stupid Aquine twilight meditation ritual? You are the ultimate hypocrite!” It’s my curse that in the many months since I’ve last seen Xander,
between his military training and whatever has happened to him since, his body has filled out into unholy appeal. His bronzed legs and arms are more muscular, his torso fuller, his face harder and
more rugged, his turquoise eyes deeper and more intense. I’ve been to hell and back. Maybe he has too.

Softly, Xander repeats, “I’m so sorry. I’ll never be able to convey to you how deeply sorry I am. I was wrong. But what’s done is done. All we can do is move
forward.” He looks above to the setting sun. “
Now
, Zhara.”

I will reject him as he’s rejected me. I vow it.

“I’ll leave when I’m ready,” I repeat.

“We don’t have time for a Z-Dev temper tantrum,” says Xander. Instead of arguing with me, he simply lifts me into his arms and slings me over his shoulder. I beat his back with
my fists and his chest with my feet. I try to squirm from beneath his arm holding me down. But I am nothing against the big man’s strength. He does not waver as he walks through the trees
with me over his shoulder, as if he didn’t even notice that his clone girlfriend’s First is clawing her fingernails down his rock-hard back, drawing blood but not causing his stride to
slow down one bit.