LUCY YANKED ZOE from the floor and tossed her into the living room behind them. Zoe hit the floor hard, the crack of her weight echoing off the old wood panels. The wind left her lungs, and she couldn’t catch a breath. She wanted to scream out to Lucy, but she couldn’t, and her brain snapped into survival mode. She had to get away.
Zoe rolled toward the couch and pulled herself under the coffee table. Lucy reached down for Zoe’s ankle and yanked her back out.
Zoe finally caught a breath and sucked it in deep, using its momentum to push words from her lips. “Lucy, stop! Please.”
But Lucy was in a rage. Again she yanked Zoe from the floor and hurled her against the built-in bookshelves. Zoe slammed against the rows of book spines and heard wood crack and split behind her. She toppled to the ground, hard books falling on her, as she used her arms to block her face.
She grabbed for the books and slung them at Lucy, who ducked each one without even trying.
“Lucy—” Zoe tried again.
“Stop calling me that!” Lucy cried back.
A light dinged in the back of Zoe’s mind. “Number Nine, stop! Number Nine!”
Lucy paused for just a moment, and Zoe used it to push herself to her feet. She bolted down the hallway, past the basement door, and slammed out the back door.
Zoe raced down the back steps and dared to glance back to see that Lucy was upon her. She grabbed Zoe’s shoulders, yanking her backward. Zoe punched her fists out over her head as she headed toward the ground. They slammed into Lucy’s chest, causing the girl to huff and release hold of Zoe.
The ground came hard. Ignoring the pain, her adrenaline charging, Zoe rolled three times to her chest, pressed up, and bolted around the corner of her house back toward the main street.
Through the rows of houses, she cut across to the right. She knew this place inside and out. Lucy didn’t. That would be Zoe’s only advantage.
She pressed faster, weaving in and out of the line of homes. Then she raced up the back steps of another home, through the living room, and out the front, which put her a couple of yards from the main street.
Zoe forced her legs to pump faster, cutting across the open space between the house and the storefronts, and then behind the buildings where she’d parked the Jeep. She busted through a rear door and found herself in the general store. It was dark at the back of the building with no lighting, only the sunlight from the large glass windows at the front shining in. She took a momentary pause and listened.
She could not hear Lucy but knew she couldn’t stop. Her chest heaving like an excited dog, Zoe rushed down the backside of the store, passing the tall shelving units where canned food still sat, and glanced out the front windows for her pursuer. She reached the back right corner and opened the door that stood there. It led into a small hallway with ascending stairs, and Zoe took them two at a time. At the top she found another door and pushed it open to the roof.
They had never been allowed to play up on the roofs because it was far too dangerous, but she knew what was up here. The roofs of each building were nearly connected, separated by only two or three feet.
Zoe moved in a crouched position, keeping herself as low as possible. Lucy couldn’t get her up here, but she could still spot her. Zoe rushed to the edge and clumsily crossed the gap to the next building. Across and breathing heavily, she dropped to a squat and scanned the street.
Nothing. She continued to the next roof, moving with intention and trying to stay out of sight. On every new roof she stopped to look for Lucy, who was somewhere down there. She was approaching the last roof. Down below, parked on the other side of the street, was their Jeep.
She rushed to the roof’s far edge. A thin metal ladder was melded to the side of the brick. Glancing in both directions, Zoe hopped over and started her descent.
Her feet plopped down onto the grass and she started for the Jeep. Just as she reached the street, Lucy stepped into view at the opposite end. Zoe pushed forward as Lucy started toward her.
She reached the Jeep, swung around the back end up to the driver’s side, yanked open the driver’s door, reached into the middle console, and withdrew the gun she’d seen stowed there earlier. She whipped it out and around the open car door, aiming it right at Lucy.
“Please, Lucy, stop!” Zoe yelled, her hands shaking.
The girl just drilled her with an intense, unblinking stare and kept coming.
“Lucy, don’t! Number Nine, stop! I don’t want to hurt you.”
Lucy continued, her resolve frightening, her stride unaffected.
Zoe cocked the weapon, her fingers almost shaking too much to hold it, and she used her free hand to steady it. Lucy would kill her. Zoe was certain of it, but could she shoot Lucy?
“Number Nine, I don’t want to hurt you. Just stop!”
Lucy marched on.
Panic, fear, and anguish met on the battlefield of Zoe’s mind. She should shoot the machine coming toward her. That’s what she was at this point, wasn’t she? Was there any of Lucy even left? If Zoe didn’t shoot her, then she might as well hand Lucy the gun because it would be a death sentence.
“Stop! Why are you doing this?”
Lucy stopped a foot away. “I have orders.”
“To kill me?” Zoe asked.
Lucy nodded. “You’re an enemy of the state.”
“From Director Hammon?”
Lucy didn’t say, but Zoe knew it couldn’t be anyone else.
“Lucy, I am not your enemy,” Zoe said.
“My title is Number Nine. Lucy is gone.”
“No, I don’t believe that.”
“You will when I kill you.”
Zoe fought through her fear and forced the gun steady. “Olivia gave you the name Lucy because she knew you were more than what they taught you to believe. I know it too. I am not your enemy. I am your friend.”
“I have orders,” Lucy said.
Zoe didn’t understand. “But you helped me escape Xerox. You could have killed me already. Why now?”
“I was following another set of orders. To get you to safety, which I did.” She was like a computer, processing commands one after the other. Programmed to execute orders. But to Zoe she was more.
“You’re more than what they programmed you to be.”
Lucy thought for a moment and then said, “Shoot me, or I will take that gun from you and make you regret it.”
Zoe didn’t doubt her, but even with her instincts screaming at her to listen, she knew she couldn’t pull the trigger. She’d already risked everything to save Lucy. Even if it meant dying now, there was no way she could shoot the girl.
She had been holding her breath, so she released all the built-up air from her lungs and slowly lowered the weapon. Then she tossed it to the street and accepted her fate.
“I can’t,” she said. “I won’t.”
Lucy glanced down at the weapon but didn’t move for it. “Why?”
Zoe swallowed. “Because I care about you.”
“No, you care about Lucy.”
“You are Lucy.”
“That was only a name given to me by a delusional woman, but it is not who I am. This is who I am,” Lucy said, another cruel streak flashing across her face.
“This is what they programmed you to be, but I have seen you be kind. You’re good, Lucy. You help people. You helped me. You’re human.”
Lucy paused, then said, “You’re human. And I’ve watched you make all your choices out of your programming. How is that different?”
Zoe was struck by the truth coming from Lucy’s lips. “The fact that you’re even asking that question is proof that your programming isn’t everything.”
“Our pasts make us who we are,” Lucy said. “Our pasts are our programming, and mine made me a weapon. I was built and programmed to be this way.”
Zoe could see her childhood home looming in the distance behind Lucy. “And I was taught by my mother to fear everything and to trust no one. I was built this way too.” Even as the words came off her own tongue, she felt like she was hearing them from someone else. Like they were a truth someone else was saying. A truth coming from a place deep inside her she had long ago silenced.
“And we can’t change how we were built,” Lucy said.
Zoe thought she agreed, but there Lucy stood in front of her, a girl she knew, acting like someone she didn’t. The Grantham Project had built her to be a certain way, but then Olivia had given her a simple name and a different identity.
A thought bloomed inside Zoe’s mind. “Olivia changed your programming.”
Lucy’s eyes began to soften, and a curious tint colored them.
“She gave you a name and cared for you. She loved you, and because of that you changed.”
“Olivia changed me?” Lucy dropped her eyes and seemed to be searching the thoughts playing out inside her mind. “Grantham built me into a weapon, and Olivia changed me into something good?”
Silence filled the air, Zoe watching her attacker and friend wrestle with things unseen.
“What if I don’t want to be Number Nine or Lucy?” the girl asked. “Do we get to choose who we are?”
Zoe opened her mouth to say, “Of course we can choose,” but then stopped.
“Am I trapped by my past,” Lucy asked, her voice quiet and mournful, “like you?”
Zoe felt the weight of her question bear down on her like an anvil. As if all the pain that filled the houses and buildings around her had suddenly risen into the air above her and was smashing her with its fists. And for the first time in her entire life, something new opened up inside her gut.
“I don’t want to be trapped,” she said, a fresh wave of tears collecting behind her eyes.
Lucy was contemplating again, her face twisted in deep thought as she tried to find sense. Zoe let her have her space. She had nothing to add. What could she say? She was just like Lucy.
The thought dawned like the sun, and it disturbed Zoe to her core. Lucy may have been built and programmed by the government, but wasn’t Zoe programmed by the world around her? The stories she’d grown up with, the rules she’d been taught. By that same logic, wasn’t everyone just a product of their own personal programming?
“Maybe we don’t have to be trapped,” she posed. “Maybe we can change, choose a different programming.”
“Like rewriting the past?” Lucy asked.
“The past is done, but maybe going forward we can tell ourselves a new story.” Zoe wasn’t sure what was coming over her. Maybe it was something about being back here in this place, but a childlike energy washed over her. Similar to the kind her brother Stephen once had, long ago on this very street.
“If you could pick any story you wanted,” Zoe said, “what would it be?”
Lucy was quick to catch her meaning, and the darkness that had been clouding her vision faded. “I’d be a regular teenager, in a cool place like high school.”
Zoe chuckled. “You’re the only person to dream about being in high school.”
“I’d play on the soccer team and know what a Beyoncé is,” Lucy continued.
Again Zoe chuckled.
“I’d just be a girl, with a family and friends and homework.”
Zoe wanted to wrap the girl in her arms and make those simple dreams come true. There was a moment of silence before she sliced it open. “I’d have grown up in Montana. On a farm, where I learned at a young age to ride a horse and worked with my father until the sun went down. We’d go inside for hot dinners, and all we’d ever talk about was the goodness of the world, so that by the time I was an adult I’d believe in it.”
“I wish they were true stories,” Lucy said.
Zoe nodded, her mind telling her that dreams were just that, but the new feeling that had blossomed in her chest pushed her to believe there was more truth to this than they yet knew.
She began to speak, but Lucy’s face went rigid. She swept the gun off the ground and placed a finger to her lips. Zoe jumped away from the armed girl.
“There’s an engine coming this way,” Lucy said. “Someone’s here.”