“How far is Los Angeles from here?” Kayla asked Allyson in the morning.
“Just twelve miles,” Allyson replied from the kitchen, where she was buttering toast for their breakfast. “Why?”
“My grandmother died in a psychiatric institution there. I thought I’d go search around and see what I can find out about her.”
“It’s a big city,” Allyson cautioned.
Jack picked up Allyson’s handheld computer. “Maybe I can save some legwork by running a few preliminary searches,” he said, stretching out on the futon and beginning to input information.
Kayla joined Allyson at the table. “I was hoping you and Jack could come to the facility with me today,” Allyson said. “Together we might be able to figure out a way to get the infometric computers to open those subfiles. We could search for the secret bar code algorithms, too.”
“Final level!” Jack burst out triumphantly, swinging around and off the futon. “I found your grandmother! What a hacker genius I am!”
“If you say so yourself,” Allyson teased.
“I do say it,” he said, unabashedly proud. His search had connected the name Kathryn Reed to a private psychiatric facility in Los Angeles. It had once been called St. Francis Clinic but was then taken over by Global-1 and renamed the GlobalHelix Mental Health Center.
By cracking their security code, he’d entered a subfile that gave him an index of former patients in which he found Kathryn Reed’s name. “It looks as though she was in and out of there a number of times between 2007 and 2015,” he reported, reading the information on the screen.
“What does it say about her mental illness?”
Jack looked up from the computer with a puzzled expression. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean?” Kayla asked.
“It says she was admitted to the center for treatment of schizophrenia, but everything in this file has to do with her DNA.” He continued to read rapidly, his eyes darting across the screen. “It says she donated genetic material for ‘cellular experimentation.’”
Allyson joined Jack on the futon and read the screen with him, her expression becoming increasingly troubled.
“Tell me,” Kayla pressed anxiously.
“I don’t think your grandmother really was schizophrenic,” Allyson said. “To me, it looks like that was just a cover story to conceal the real reason she was there.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Kayla, I don’t know how to say this,” Allyson said. “So I’ll just come out with it. It looks like you’re a clone of your grandmother. She was selling her genetic material to Global-1 for a cloning project.”
“Which means she’s not actually your grandmother,” Jack added gently. “Your great-grandmother would be your mother. Kathryn Marie Reed is your … twin, I suppose.”
Allyson nodded. “Twins — or triplets or quadruplets or quintuplets — are the closest thing in nature to clones.”
“But clones have no father?” Kayla asked, barely speaking through her shock.
“Genetically speaking, your great-grandfather provided the male component in your creation. Kathryn Reed’s father is also your biological father. They replicated Kathryn’s DNA however many times.”
“Six times,” Kayla said slowly, remembering the name of Kathryn Reed’s child as it was listed in her file.
KM-1-6.
Saying she needed a little time alone, Kayla left the apartment and began to walk. She had so much to think about.
A clone. She was an identical genetic copy of someone else — of Kathryn Marie Reed.
So much made sense now. Kara. Kendra. The palm reader. The smiling, bar-code-loving Kayla on the TV. Kayla herself. And the one Kendra had said was dead — KM-6.
This had so many meanings for her. Her parents were not her parents. It meant her father was her older brother, in a way. No — it made her his aunt, his mother’s sister. At least it meant they were related.
She laughed, darkly remembering how everyone had always commented that she resembled her father but was the exact image of her late grandmother. No kidding!
She did some calculating. Kathryn Reed would have been forty-nine years old in 2008, the year Kayla was born. A little old to give birth but not impossible, though maybe she hadn’t given birth. The embryos might have been implanted in different mothers.
Kayla had once had pictures of her mother sitting in a hospital bed holding her as a newborn. And she’d seen pictures of her mother when she was pregnant. So her mother, Ashley Reed, must have been carrying her own mother-in-law’s clone.
Why had they done it? Was it for money? Her father had worked for the FBI. What if it was part of some government experiment?
Kayla recalled something that made her stop walking, stunned by the realization. The night before, the file Allyson had showed them had listed Kathryn Reed as a participant in the Genetic Enhancement/Manipulation Program.
Enhancement and manipulation.
There were six clones, and GlobalHelix had done something to change their genes.
Kendra in all her ranting madness had talked about an increasing level of enhanced powers. When she had been in the G-1 Pediatric Rehabilitation Center she’d glimpsed her own GlobalHelix file. Is that what she’d learned — that each cloned embryo had been enhanced at an increasingly intensified level? Enhanced how?
They had to get the infometric computers to open the subfiles. They needed to know what other experiments GlobalHelix was doing with nanobiotechnology. And she needed to learn exactly what they had done to her genes.
She hurried back to Allyson’s apartment, eager to talk with her friends about what she’d been thinking. She had to impress upon them the urgency of opening those subfiles.
Running up the stairs, she found Jack and Allyson huddled over a pad at the kitchen table. Allyson was drawing a map or floor plan of some kind. “We’ve figured out a way to get into the research facility,” Jack told her. “I went by the facility and got a look at the work schedule. The night guard is still scheduled to work alone, so we’ve got to do it tonight.”