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  “Jack, I’m Nyla. What are you talking about?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Breathe. Just breathe. But his lungs were filling with cotton, and he couldn’t get the breaths out.

  “Nyla-314?”

  “Nyla-313,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. As if his chest weren’t squeezing down into a tiny suffocating pinpoint.

  He turned on her, this Nyla. He took her arm, gripping it hard. He couldn’t stop himself. “Why aren’t you Nyla-314?” Nyla-313 stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. Jack tried again. “Where’s Nyla-314?”

  Nyla-313 shrugged. “She’s home, in our dorm.”

  He squeezed harder and the Nyla winced. “Why didn’t she come?”

  “You’re hurting me.” She wrenched her arm from him and rubbed it where he’d held her. “What’s wrong with you? You haven’t Paired with Nyla-314 since that first night, weeks ago.”

  He felt sick. He was going to be sick.

  Jack sat down heavily on the cot. He stared at the Nyla, feeling like he knew her intimately—​her eyes, her lips, every length of her violet-smooth skin—​but he didn’t know her at all.

  “Nyla-314, I thought—​She was—” He ran a hand through his hair, struggling with his words. “We talked. I told her things, things nobody else—”

  Nyla-313 watched him, bewildered. “There’s nothing special about Nyla-314. We’re all sisters. You know that.”

  Jack looked up at Nyla-313. She blurred in front of him. He blinked, trying to see her clearly. “You were a different one every time,” he said, fighting not to believe it. Moments ago she’d been in bed with him. He’d spent only a few hours with her, only a few hours with any single Nyla, and he didn’t even know which ones had been in his bed and which hadn’t.

  Nyla-313 smiled gently at Jack. “The Pairing has gotten better each time, hasn’t it?” She knelt in front of him, placed her palms on his knees. “My sisters, we all learned what you like from each other.”

  “You talked about me? You took notes and then came here and made me think . . . ?” His voice sounded thin from lack of air. He pressed his hand to his mouth, feeling more ill by the second.

  “It wasn’t like that, Jack. We weren’t out to make you think anything. We wanted you to enjoy the Pairing as much as possible. This wasn’t some kind of trick. We’re sisters; we share experiences. We share everything.”

  We share everything.

  Jack suddenly felt very much like a thing.

  Like a human.

  Nyla-313 put on her shoes and went to the door. “I’m sorry, Jack. But you should see why it doesn’t matter. I mean, we’re all Nylas.”

  The familiar anger bubbled up again. We’re all Nylas. Of course they were all the same; they were clones. It had certainly taken him long enough to figure it out. Althea-310 was right, he really was an idiot.

  She stood halfway out the door. “Jack, don’t be upset. Samuel-299 said—” She stopped herself.

  “What about Sam?” Jack asked, and it came to him, what he should have figured out weeks ago. “He sent Nyla-314 that first time, didn’t he? He sent you all here.”

  “Don’t be mad at him. He wanted to help. He told us it would help you be . . .” She considered a moment, thinking back to the words Sam had used. Jack closed his eyes, already knowing what she was going to say. “Help you be more socialized.”

  In his mind’s eye, Jack saw a succession of Nylas slipping in and out of his room, with Sam standing by, smiling at his experiment. He couldn’t deal with it, not all in one night. He had to leave. He grabbed a bag and started gathering the things he would need from his room.

  “What are you doing?” Nyla said.

  “Leaving. Leaving Vispera.”

  “But . . . are you allowed to leave?”

  “Nobody owns me. I can do what I want.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “The jungle. They won’t find me there.”

  “You’ll die in the jungle. No one could survive out there, not by themselves.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  Nyla’s hand tightened on the door.

  “You’re going to tell them, aren’t you?” When Nyla didn’t answer, Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry, Nyla, but you’re staying here.” He moved toward her, and she edged farther into the hallway. “You can’t leave. I don’t want to hurt you, but you can’t leave.”

  Nyla-313 stared at him, hugging her arms, and then backed away from the door.

  “Someone will be by in the morning,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

  She would be fine, too. He’d been locked inside this room more than once. He’d survived.

  Jack passed her quickly, his bag in hand, and once outside the door, he turned the lock, trapping her inside. Without looking back, he left the lab building.

  Outside, staring up at a half-moon barely visible in the tempestuous sky, he breathed in the humid air.

  He wanted to run, to find the paths he knew at the edge of the jungle, past the wall and through the mango trees and ferns. He’d run until his legs gave out and he fell in the yielding dirt, blanketed by stars. Then he thought of the cottage far up on the hill, shielded by trees and outlined against the night sky. That was where he had to go. He would stop there for anything else he might need. If his mother thought she could do it, he could too.

  He took a breath from his inhaler, waited for the cotton in his lungs to break apart, and then ran.

  Halfway to the cottage, the sky broke. Rain poured down, thrummed against his skin. As if the rain gave him energy, he ran faster, slipping again and again on the muddy path up through the trees and over the wall. He tore open the door of the cottage. It’d been abandoned after his mother’s death. No one else had use for it. Only Sam knew that Jack still came here; the others never left the confines of town.

  The air inside swelled with the dampness outside. The windows, covered in thick drapes, trapped the dust in the dark house. The rooms smelled of animals nesting in the shadowed corners. Jack collapsed on his bed and pulled the quilted blanket over his shoulders. He willed his muscles to relax as he listened to the rain sweeping through the trees and to distant peals of thunder. He’d fallen asleep to this countless times, hearing those identical sounds in thunderstorms. This storm felt different. He wasn’t the same person he’d been when he slept in this bed as a child.

  The clones would come looking for him in the morning, after they found the Nyla. He had until then to gather what he’d need and escape to the jungle. How could he stay? What Sam had done, and the Nyla too, felt worse than any of the pranks or taunts he’d endured before. There was something wrong with them, with all of them. His mother must have thought so.

  Jack wished she were still alive to tell him what to do.

  He was tired, bone-tired, in mind and body. He lit a candle against the dark, then curled on his side. He felt betrayed, but he would still miss Sam. Sam was the one person who at least tried to care for him, who halfway understood him. Sam hadn’t been much of a father, but it wasn’t his fault. For all Jack knew, human fathers had also failed their sons at times. And as much as Jack resented Sam sending the Nylas to his room—​and his face burned with anger when he thought about the conversations they must have had about him—​he knew Sam well enough to know what he’d been thinking. In his own way, Sam was trying to make Jack part of the community—​to socialize him.

  Even the Nylas hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. What she’d done with him—​what they had done with him—​that was how the clones Paired. It’d been his own fault for thinking she was different.

  The rain would stop soon enough, and when it did he would leave. Jack closed his eyes, wanting sleep to claim him, just for a few minutes.

  He’d only just drifted off when he heard the front door creak open. They’d tracked him down quickly. But it wouldn’t have been hard. He’d figured he had until morning, but of course Sam would have told
them to look in the cottage.

  Then he heard a quiet, familiar voice calling, “Hello?”

  Chapter Nine

  Althea

  Althea had seen Jack run from the labs. She’d been heading there to apologize when he burst through the doors. He’d pulled a hand through his hair, his head bent low as if distraught, then in a single, unexpected movement, he’d run full force, past the banana trees shaking in the night air, a bag slung over his shoulder. Something had dropped from the bag though, and when she went to pick it up, she found it was his inhaler. So she followed him. She’d barely kept up, watching through the leaves for glimpses of his hair, flashing silver-white in the moonlit clouds. By the time the rain started, she’d already followed him halfway up the hill, to the wall of the town that appeared through the sheets of rain on the steep side of the slope.

  Hidden among vines was a makeshift ladder leaning against the wall, and she climbed it, only to find no such ladder on the other side. She had to jump from the top to the ground, which Jack probably found simple enough, but her dress tore, and she rolled her ankle and skinned her knee while awkwardly trying to lower herself down the stone barrier. It would have been easier to go through the gated bridge by the river, but by then she would have lost him, and at some point in all the difficulty, she became determined to deliver the inhaler. Once over the wall, she discovered the ramshackle house with loose shutters, its front door hanging open. Althea stood for a moment, breathing hard. She felt exposed outside the safety of Vispera. She stood in the shelter of the porch for a few moments, then went inside.

  “Hello?” she said, following the muddy footsteps that headed upstairs. She’d never seen a place like it before. Dusty and damp, it was so unlike the clean, well-ordered dorms she grew up in.

  The door to the room upstairs was closed. She raised her arm to knock, paused, then simply opened it.

  Jack was sitting on the bed. He must have heard her come in, because he didn’t act surprised to see her.

  “Jack?” she said, feeling strange about being there. She suddenly felt like a trespasser.

  He absently twirled a white ball sewn with fraying red thread in his hands. His hair, dark with rain, fell across his eyes, but he seemed not to notice or care. When he looked up, his eyes weren’t as gray as she remembered. They seemed almost blue, even in the dim room. A candle glowed in a narrow circle of light on the desk. The reflection of water from the windows cast broken paths on the striped wallpaper, drops of rain spilling down.

  Jack tossed the ball next to him on the bed. “You followed me,” he said, his voice flat. It wasn’t a question.

  The room was sparsely furnished. There was a chair by the desk, but she didn’t feel like sitting down. He didn’t seem to want her there, just like when she’d showed up in the labs with Carson. He scanned her briefly, taking in her wet clothes, her skinned knees, the hair sticking to her neck in damp strings. Her hands folded and unfolded.

  “Listen, I don’t know what you’re doing here. Go home.”

  Althea blinked at him, momentarily forgetting herself why she’d followed him. “You dropped this,” she said, holding out the inhaler.

  He snatched it from her hand as if embarrassed that she should have seen it.

  “Okay. You can leave now.”

  He was being rude. She ignored him. What reason had anyone in Vispera ever given him to be nice?

  “Did Samuel find you another guitar?” she said, spying the instrument propped in the corner.

  “You mean after Carson smashed the first one? Yeah. You want to tell him about it, in case he’s itching to destroy another?”

  “Show me how it works.”

  He eyed her suspiciously.

  “I’d like to see.” She picked it up, surprised by how heavy it was, and plucked one of the strings. “Please?”

  At first his eyes narrowed, as if he was trying to figure out whether she was making fun of him, but then he took the guitar and his fingers fell naturally against the strings, finding placement without him even thinking about it.

  “You’re not going to like it,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  He fiddled with the keys on the end, plucking the strings here and there, and then let out a slow breath. With a brisk movement of his fingers and hands, the guitar vibrated.

  The sound made her gasp. It seemed to shake everything in the room, filling each inch of empty space the way the rain filled the air in the jungle outside. It was in her body, her lungs, that thrum and movement, a noise that clattered through her brain like the itch of a memory just out of reach. Right when she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore, he stopped, pausing to let the last tremor of the strings still to silence.

  “That’s it?” she asked, more than a little confused.

  “That’s it,” he said, like he didn’t feel the need or desire to explain it. Which was fine. At least he seemed calmer now. His anger when she’d first showed up had softened.

  He held the guitar, his hand distractedly caressing its curves. As she watched his fingers ripple with the contours of the instrument, her skin, cold and damp from the rain, began to warm with a heat stirring in the pit of her stomach. He looked up to see her staring at him, and the warmth seemed to stir the air between them, a kind of communing unlike anything she’d known before. It was similar to the Pairing, actually, but at the same time so different that, without any warning, it scared her.

  She suddenly wanted to see his smile. Maybe if she saw it, these feelings would go away and she could go back to her sisters without thoughts of him intruding on her, which seemed to keep happening. She only wanted his lips to part and reveal the slightly crooked bottom teeth, something she’d seen once and thought an imperfection, but somehow it no longer was. Unable to stop herself, she reached her hand up to trace the lines of his mouth.

  His eyes shuttered as he turned his head away, leaving her more confused than before. He must have felt what happened between them, but he went back to his guitar as if it’d been nothing. After a minute, he was lost in his thoughts, but she didn’t want to leave.

  Her room with her sisters was a simple, white-painted dorm, a row of beds on one wall with matching yellow coverlets, a row of desks on the opposite wall. It was exactly like all the other rooms in the Althea dorm. Jack’s room was crowded and chaotic. His bed was draped with a quilt of trim blue squares and white thread sinking into soft cotton. The walls were covered in pictures and paintings. There was a large poster of a human man, tall and dark, leaping into the air, a bright orange ball cupped in his palm.

  “Football,” she murmured, recalling what little she knew of human history.

  Jack finally acknowledged she was still there. “What?”

  She pointed to the poster. “That’s what he’s doing. It’s a sport. Humans played it.”

  Jack didn’t look at the picture. “Basketball,” he said. “You were close.”

  “Samuel-299 gave you all this stuff?”

  “My mother. She liked to find human things stored in the Tunnels and bring them to me. Like that,” he said, tipping his chin to the poster.

  Jack had books stacked haphazardly on a shelf. They spanned at least five hundred years of human history, maybe more. If Inga-296 was trying to recreate a human’s room, Althea couldn’t pinpoint what century she’d meant to be represented. There were countless human artifacts in the Tunnels. They contained everything the humans and the Original Nine had wanted kept safe. It was deep underground, climate-controlled, and safe from contamination. Except for the Sample Room, the items in the Tunnels were merely of historical interest. Althea was intrigued by them, but only because she’d always liked history. Otherwise, the things kept there were mostly what the humans had valued but that Vispera had little use for. Things like the poster on Jack’s wall.

  Althea straightened. Jack was still softly plucking the strings of the guitar.

  “Well,” she said awkwardly. “I just thought you might need the inhaler.
”

  He glanced up. “Wait.” He put down the guitar and stood in front of her with his hands shoved in his pockets. He struggled for what to say. “It was nice of you. Thank you.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. She’d only gone to the labs to talk to him, to apologize. She hadn’t really meant to be here, in this cottage with him. “I’m sorry for what Carson-312 did to your other guitar. I’m sorry I didn’t do more to stop him.” Althea didn’t just mean the Declaration, and she thought Jack could tell. “Also, I didn’t . . .” Althea meant to apologize for calling him unsocialized, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it again. “I’m sorry I didn’t like your book,” she finished lamely, tucking wet hair behind her ear. “Those dogs that fly . . .” She trailed off.

  He smiled. It was what Althea had wanted, to see his smile, and it was supposed to make these strange feelings go away, but they didn’t. She was only left frustrated and wanting more.

  “You didn’t have to like the book,” he said. “And the Tunnels have lots of guitars.” They stood for several moments, at a loss for what to say or do next, until Jack startled Althea by abruptly turning around. “Hold on,” he said.

  He rifled through his bookshelf, scanning several before he found the one he wanted. He didn’t hand her the book, however, but instead a piece of paper tucked inside. It was a page of words written in a precise script.

  “It’s not a story,” he said. “It’s a poem. You might like it better.”

  She held the paper, then twisted her mouth skeptically. “Did a human write it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “A woman wrote it. I know you didn’t like the story because it was made up. This is different.”

  Althea felt Jack watching her as she read the words of the thing he called a poem. It was about losing things, how it was easy to lose things—​keys and watches and such. It said that losing things was an art, which made Althea more puzzled than ever about what the humans thought art meant. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, it said, over and over, as if the human writing it was trying to convince herself more than anyone else. Why didn’t she simply say what she meant straight out?