The Almost Girl – ebook edition (29 page)

Still, limitations aside, short of flying, it’s a super-suit, unmatched in design or abilities.

Defense,
I command silently, and feel the programming engage as the suit tightens against my body. The movement is barely noticeable to human eyes, but the slight smile twitching along the corners of my mother’s mouth irks me. It’s no surprise – she knows the suits better than anyone. After all, before she defected, she invented bioprogramming of the early prototypes.

I stare at her with narrowed eyes.

“You still don’t trust easily, do you?” Aurela remarks.

I’m hard-pressed to wipe my standard frown off my face. “Not really. Where are my weapons?”

“Why do you need them? Surely you’re protected enough already.” Her meaningful glance dips to my uniform, but in the same breath, she gestures to a cot against the far wall, and with some relief I notice my harness and scabbard on top of it along with our two crossbows. I walk over to inspect them, but they seem the same as before. If anything, my swords look like they’ve been cleaned and oiled. I frown but sling the harness over my arm.

Aurela sits at the table and inclines her head for Caden and me to do the same. I place the ninjatas carefully on the table and take a seat. At a glance from their leader, the men who had accompanied us leave the room. The last one – a boy near my own age – shoots a glare at me that could melt rock, but I just grin, baring my teeth at him in a mockery of a smile. It’s a look that has scattered crowds. His glare fades quickly.

“Haven’t lost your touch, I see,” Aurela says, noticing the exchange. At my stare, she continues, her voice soft. “There are many stories of you, even ones as a mother I wish I’d never heard. But you did what you were commanded to do, and you did it extraordinarily well.” I remain silent. “At fourteen, your reputation preceded you. Even grown men were terrified to face you. What made you leave? Defect?”

I knew the question would come. I spare a brief look to Caden but his face is carefully expressionless. He wants to know the answer, too. “Cale ordered me to find Caden.” I pause, searching for the right words. “I was to bring him back alive.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” I snap, evasive.

Aurela’s return stare is measured. “We need to trust each other, Riven. I know you feel you can’t trust me, and that I will have to earn that from you. Even though I don’t fully know your motives, you’re here and he” – she says with a searching glance at Caden –“is safe.” She reaches her fingers across the table where my hand is resting, but I pull it away at the last second. She lets hers rest where mine had been. “I know that my daughter is in there somewhere. I felt it before. I don’t know what happened with Shae, but she would have moved heaven and earth to keep Caden away from you if she thought you were a danger.”

“She did,” I grit out. “She failed. She didn’t trust me, either.”

“She didn’t at first.”

“How do you know that? Did she tell you?”

Aurela nods, folding her hands in her lap. “Whenever she everted back here to evade the Vectors or you, she appraised me on what was happening in the other world.”

I slam to my feet, anger coloring the inside of my skin with dull red flame. “And you let her? You let her evert over and over again, knowing what it would do to her? How could you do that? Knowing it would kill her?” The words are rushing out of me like a river of pain from between clenched teeth. “What kind of mother are you?”

“A fighter, like you.”

“You sent her to die!” I scream, fist curling at my sides.

“She was there to protect him from
you
.”

All I could see is her face behind the fire now burning in my brain, inflaming me. And then I’m lurching toward her. Out of the corner of my eye, Caden jerks out of his chair, but I don’t let it distract me. For an older woman, my mother is fast, darting out of my way and spinning across the top of the table like a gymnast. I leap over it. I don’t know whether it’s my rage that blinds me, but I don’t see her strike until it’s too late. Her arm catches me across my side, knocking the wind out of me. In her other hand, I see the glinting blade of my ninjata that had been on the table. Its point is pressed against my neck.

Caden flings himself on top of me before I can move. “Riven, stop,” he growls. “Shae was there for me. You know that. She told you that. Stop blaming yourself or anyone else for her death. It was what
she
wanted.”

All the fury seeps out of me like the air in a balloon, and I close my eyes. My voice is strangled and bitter. “She died for nothing.”

“That’s not true,” Caden says. “She died for us.”

“Then she died for nothing.” I open my eyes to meet his, and then Aurela’s. The pity in hers is suffocating. “It is true. My mission” – I spit the words – “was to bring you to Cale. He’s the king here. And he’s sick. He needed me to find you” – my heart twists, but Caden has to know all of it – “for parts.”

“For parts?” he echoes vacantly. Caden’s eyes are horrified but I have to finish. I have to tell him what he is. He’ll find out sooner or later, and either way, he’ll hate me for it.

“Body parts. You’re a clone, Caden. You’re not real.”  

CONFESSIONS

 

Aurela’s incredulous laugh is long and hollow and cold at my bombshell. I push Caden off and stand slowly, dragging him up beside me. Aurela is wiping tears from her eyes, waving away the people who had rushed into the room at the crashing sound of Caden’s chair.

Caden jerks away from me, shrugging off my arm. “What do you mean, I’m a
clone
?”

But I don’t answer, my eyes still resting on Aurela, who is shaking her head with an expression of complete disbelief on her face. Caden is a clone, I’m sure of it. I’d heard it from Cale’s own mouth.

“You’re no clone,” Aurela chokes and then looks at me, her stare discerning. “Is that what Cale told you?”

I flinch inwardly at her words but I nod, wary, studying her face for deception. But her eyes are clear and her voice even more so. “He’s not. Caden is the real prince of Neospes.”

“That’s impossible.” Though I think them, they’re not my words. They’re Caden’s. He sinks into the chair behind us with a stupefied expression. “I’m
not
… not a… prince.”

“You’re wrong,” I say to Aurela. “He’s not. Cale is.”

“Am I? Think back, Riven. You know I’m telling the truth.”

Had Cale lied to me? Or is Aurela the one lying? But as quickly as I ask myself the second question, I’m replaying the events in my head, searching for anything that could have told me Cale was lying. Why should I doubt him now, if I hadn’t then?

Unless I hadn’t seen it. I hadn’t wanted to see it.

Cloning is an old technology, used only by the royals, and forbidden everywhere else. It has undesirable side effects – we learned the hard way that clones had odd frailties – like weakened immune systems or psychosomatic disorders. In a world rebuilt on utopian principles, genetic purity was critical to survival, and cloning was outlawed shortly after the Tech War. But clones were still commissioned as safeguards for the monarchy, an extra layer to protect the royal line from insurgents. When Cale confided that his clone had been taken, I was suitably outraged on his behalf. He said that he was sick and would die if I weren’t able to locate and bring the clone back to Neospes. I was the only one he could trust.

After his father was murdered, I was so eager to do Cale’s bidding, so eager to save him that I agreed without a second thought. But in hindsight, I still don’t see any deception. Was I been so gullible? Am I still?

“I’d rather be a clone,” Caden says dully to no one in particular. “I always knew I was different, but this just takes the cake.”

“So there’s no clone?” I ask slowly, Caden’s inane words piercing the sudden fog of activity in my brain.

“No,” Aurela says. “There is. It’s just not Caden.”

The realization hits me through the fog like a ton of bricks to the face. I feel my feet stagger backward, and my hip braces against the side of the table. Grasping the edges with numb fingers, I hold myself from sliding down.

“Cale’s the clone.” My voice is a monotone. Aurela nods, her expression compassionate. The realizations come more quickly after the first. I put two and two together quickly. Cale’s mother had left when he’d been four. “Their mother left to protect the prince,” I muse quietly, sparing a glance at Caden, who still looks like he’s in some kind of waking dream. I don’t blame him. My mind is spinning like an unstoppable top. I can’t imagine the confusion he’s feeling.

Aurela nods. “She suspected Murek long before. She knew he was collaborating with your father to assassinate the king. It was only a matter of time before they came for her son.” Aurela stops, lowering her voice. “They wanted to use him. Leila knew she was in danger when she realized she was in the way. When she took him, she went to the Artok. They brought her to us, but the only real safe place for her and the prince was her world.”

June wasn’t lying after all. Leila had always been from over there, and she took her son to the only refuge she knew. And that’s why June and Era broke all the oaths they’d taken as Guardians to protect her. The puzzle is far more intricate than I’ve ever imagined. I shake my head. “Even if she did switch them before she–”

“She didn’t switch them,” Aurela interrupts. “That was your father’s idea after she everted. They needed a puppet, so they made up this story that his mother had died. But Cale–”

“–told me the truth. That she’d everted with the clone. I mean, that’s what he thought. Or what he’d been told.” I pause and half stand. “By Murek and my father.”

It all made sense. My father knew that Cale was the only person who I ever had any loyalty to, so when Cale got sick, he took the opportunity to tell him about the clone, and it was natural that Cale asked me – his most trusted confidant – to track down the clone, even if by obeying his orders in secret, it made me appear to be a defector in the eyes of everyone else.

“I see you now understand.”

“Why would they send me?”

“Because you were the best,” Aurela says gently. “You
are
the best. The Vectors reported that Caden was with Shae in the Otherworld, and Cale knew you were the only one who could fight or beat her.”

“So is Cale really sick, or is that all a lie, too?”

Aurela pours something black that looks like coffee into three mugs, and sets a steaming cup in front of Caden and then in front of me. I take a gulp, and although the bitter taste overwhelms me at first, the aftertaste is thick and mellow like butterscotch.

“No, our reports confirm that he is sick.” Her words cause the cracks inside of me to widen into furious chasms that I can feel splitting me apart. Relief seeps in to flood the fractures as I realize that Cale didn’t lie to me. He didn’t send me on some fool’s mission. He didn’t betray me to my father. He sent me to help him live, even if it were part of some misguided plot of Murek’s. I’m sure Cale would never betray me. He is as much a victim of Murek and my father as we are.

Sighing heavily, I glance over at Caden, who hasn’t moved, sitting with his head in his hands, staring into the mug as if it holds answers only he can see. I can’t even imagine what this must be like for him.

“You OK, Caden?” I ask.

“What do you care?” he rasps without looking up. “You brought me here to die, didn’t you?”

“No!” I say, pounding my fist on the table so hard that the shock runs up my arm and through my back. “I didn’t. I mean, at first you were a target, but now…” My voice trails off, caught in the turmoil of what exactly Caden has come to mean to me.

“Now what?” he says, turning around with eyes so green, they’re like the grass in his world. It’s like they’re seeing right into me, past all the flesh and bone, deep down where there’s nothing else but truth. “Now what, Riv?” he whispers.

I stare at Aurela, but she can’t say the words for me. Instead, her face is compassionate, as if somehow she already knows. She knows what I feel… everything I’ve kept buried under my orders. I owe Caden the truth, don’t I?

“But now…” My throat is clogged and my eyes are smarting. “Now it’s different. You’re my friend.” I can see that those words are not enough. Caden’s gaze drops from mine to stare once more into the coffee mug.

I’m struck dumb. My mouth won’t move. Nothing is moving. A single tear weeps out of the corner of my left eye. I leave it, feeling its hot path meandering down my cheek. My tears are the words I cannot say.

“Come,” Aurela says gently, interrupting the heavy tension between Caden and me. “Let’s get you two settled for the night. We’ll talk more tomorrow, once you’ve had some rest.”

The minute we leave the room, I feel disoriented again, as if I’m suffering vertigo. I take deep breaths as Aurela escorts us down some more dark passageways. It helps. I notice that the men fall into silent step behind us, guarding their leader at every moment. Even though I know how important she is in this small community, for the first time I start to question just
how
important she is. She holds herself with a quiet confidence – the same self-assurance I remember as a child. But there’s no arrogance in her words or her manner. She is one of them even as she leads them.

Caden has a room all to himself with an armed guard. Now that I know who he is, I’m not surprised. Aurela is taking no chances that word has already gotten out about Caden’s identity or that some zealous defector will try to get back into Murek’s good graces by offering up the runaway prince.

“Cade,” I say at the entrance. “I’ll see you tomorrow. OK?”

“Yeah.” But he doesn’t look at me at all, not even when he lies back on the cot at the far end of the room and lays his head on his palms, staring up at the ceiling. I stand there for a moment, uncomfortable, before I hear Aurela gently calling my name. “Night, Cade.”