MARTYR HAD NEVER RIDDEN inside a car. He liked the red color of this one very much, but the seatbelt reminded him of the restraints on the exam tables at the Farm. He shifted in his seat, pulling at the confining strap across his chest and staring at the surroundings flashing by. The only thing that made it bearable was the fact Abby’s car smelled sweet like her. He gripped the handle above the door as she steered around the curves in the road. The car moved very fast over the hard snow, and twice, when Abby slowed at a red sign that said STOP, the car skidded over the white line.
Martyr wasn’t convinced this was normal.
Abby steered the car into an open area with many other cars of different sizes, colors, and styles. She stopped and climbed out. Martyr followed her toward a tall facility with many windows. The sky was starting to grow dim, and the lights shone brightly from the glass panes.
Martyr slipped on the icy ground, not used to the boots Dr. Goyer had loaned him. He was glad to have them, as they—and the red Christmas socks—kept his feet from touching the freezing ground, but they were tight, pinched his toes, and felt awkward to walk in.
Abby grabbed his arm. “Careful. It’s really slick here.”
Martyr wanted to answer, but her statement seemed so obvious, he wasn’t certain she sought a response. As she drew him closer, her sweet smell reached his nose. It was harder to detect in the cold air, but still pleasant. He liked how she worried over him. No one had ever worried over Martyr like this. Not since Dr. Woman, anyway.
“Kylee said he’s in apartment 5C,” Abby said. “Try to remember that in case you leave for some reason. But don’t leave unless I come for you or tell you otherwise.”
“5C,” Martyr repeated as Abby pressed a button on a silver box attached to a black gate.
“And keep my cell phone in case you need it.” She held out the red device.
Martyr took the device from her, running his fingers over the smooth, red top. Cell phone?
“Hello?” The voice came from the box.
“Pastor Scott? This is Abby Goyer. Kylee’s friend? She said she called you. Is this a bad time? We really need your help.”
“Not at all, come on up.”
The box emitted a metallic buzz, one Martyr wasn’t sure he liked. Abby pushed open the gate, took Martyr by the hand, and went inside, towing him along. Her touch—even wrapped in the black glove—sent a wave of heat through his body. Her hand was small and always seemed to know what to do. Her hands would never hurt anyone, either; Martyr just knew it.
A tall man with dark brown skin answered door 5C. His hair was very short and black, and a short beard shaded his chin. He opened the door wide enough for Abby and Martyr to enter. Martyr tried not to stare, but the man’s skin was even darker than Dr. Max’s.
“Have a seat, guys.” The man motioned to a long, brown, L-shaped sectional, similar to the one shown on TV. This room also had a TV, much smaller than the one at Abby’s facility.
Abby sat in the center of the sectional. Martyr sat beside her. A woman with short, curly black hair stepped out of a doorway at the back of the room. Her skin was lighter brown, like Dr. Max’s. And there was something wrong with this woman: her stomach protruded out in front abnormally, making the fabric of her shirt stretch tight over her belly like she was hiding something. She took her time lowering herself onto the end of the sectional, as if her body were injured.
The woman’s smile took up most her face. “Hi, I’m Aliza, Scott’s wife.” She leaned over and held out her hand.
Martyr stared at her hand. Was he supposed to do something? He turned to Abby and whispered, “What’s wife?”
“I’ll explain later.” Abby reached across Martyr’s lap and grasped Aliza’s hand briefly. “I’m Abby.”
Martyr whispered again, “Is she a broken?”
Abby gave him a curious smile. “Why do you ask?”
Martyr touched his stomach. “She has an abnormal growth.”
Abby giggled, her green eyes sparkling. “Aliza’s pregnant. I’m sure she’s perfectly healthy.”
Martyr wanted to ask what pragment was but figured now was the wrong time.
Pastor Scott sat on the arm of a recliner across the room. There had been many recliners “on sale now” on the TV as well.
“You’re JD Kane, right?” Pastor Scott asked. “I saw you play against Colony at regionals.”
Again Martyr looked to Abby, not knowing what to say.
Abby scooted to the edge of the sectional. “Pastor Scott, something amazing has been going on in this community for a long time. Completely unethical, but amazing. Did Kylee tell you anything about my dad?”
“Only that the two of you have some major differences of opinions.”
“My dad’s a molecular biologist. For years he’s been seeking cures for diseases via embryonic stem cell technology. It’s a pretty controversial line of work, but my mom had cancer, and even though Mom disagreed with Dad’s line of work, he was desperate. Anyway, this is the first job Dad has taken since we lost Mom last year. I had hoped he was working someplace … normal.”
Martyr had no parents, but he could imagine that losing a mother must be horrible. Losing Dr. Woman and the J:1s and J:2s had been hard enough.
“JD Kane is my lab partner at Fishhook High,” Abby said. “He was at my house last night studying. Kylee was there too. When they left, I went up to my room and found Marty.” She placed her hand on Martyr’s thigh, causing his stomach to lighten. “I thought it was JD, playing some weirdo prank, until JD called my cell phone from his truck. He’d forgotten some of his books and wanted me to run them out to him since my dad didn’t seem to like him much.”
“JD was on the phone, but this guy”—Pastor Scott pointed at Martyr—”was in your room?”
“Exactly,” Abby said. “I ran out to give JD his books—he really was out in his truck, with hair—and when I came back inside, Marty was still in my room. He said he stole my dad’s keycard, got out of the lab, and rode to my house in the back of Dad’s truck. I guess I should explain my dad works at an underground lab called Jason Farms, which is run by Dr. Jason Kane. According to Marty, there are fifty-five Jasons on this Farm. I think they’re all clones of Dr. Kane.”
Pastor Scott’s lips twisted in a small smile. “Real cute, guys. Did Danny Chang put you up to this? ‘Cause I’m gonna get that guy good.”
“You have to believe me,” Abby said. “Marty is in danger—the scientists want him back. Please, can he stay here for now? Just until things calm down? Dad is worried they’ll come to the house any minute.”
Pastor Scott glanced at Aliza. “Abby, we’ve just met JD—I mean, your friend. I don’t think—”
“Marty’s the nicest guy in the world, I promise. You don’t have anything to worry about. May he sleep on your couch, at least for tonight? He has a lot of questions about God that I don’t know how to answer. The Bible doesn’t really talk about cloning, so—”
“Okay,” Aliza said. “He can stay while we sort this out, but if his dad comes looking, we have to let him go. We want to help, but we can’t harbor a runaway.”
“O-kay. Good. Thank you.” Abby closed her eyes for a moment. “But he’s not JD Kane. Look, if you stop by the school tomorrow at lunch, I’ll sit with JD, so I can prove it to you. Trust me, I wouldn’t offer to sit with him unless it was important.” Her voice rose. “If we don’t help Marty, they’ll kill him. If he dies, the other fifty-four boys will likely die too.”
Martyr tensed. Could that be true? Only the J:3s were scheduled to expire soon.
Pastor Scott raised his hands. “Okay, okay. Calm down. We’ll keep an open mind.”
“Can we talk to your dad about this?” Aliza asked.
“Yeah,” Abby said. “I’ll have him call you after we deal with the police.”
Aliza raised an eyebrow, and her voice squeaked out, “Excuse me?”
“Don’t worry. It’s only to throw off Dr. Kane’s guards.” Abby stood, and Martyr stood with her. She turned and looked into his eyes. “I’d better go before they change their minds. You’ll be safe here. I’ll call when I know what to do next.” She bit her thumbnail, then leaned up on her toes and pressed her lips against his cheek. Martyr’s body tingled with electricity, like when the ankle taser was activated but without the pain.
Abby pulled away too soon, and the pleasantness of her touch faded into a sensation of fear. She was really going to leave him with these people? She said she would call, but how? He followed her to the door, still clutching the cell phone in his hand. Perhaps she meant for him to talk into the device like she had. Would Pastor Scott or the pragment Aliza show him how to use it? “Will I see you again?”
Abby grinned, but her eyes did not sparkle. “Of course, silly. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
Then she threw her arms around him, like she did before leaving that morning for school. Martyr felt another small burst of electricity. He buried his nose in her hair and inhaled, hoping to commit her scent to memory.
“Don’t worry, okay?” Abby said. “I’m really smart about these things. Once I get a project, I never fail. You’ll be okay, I promise.”
Then she was gone.
When Abby walked into the house, the first thing she saw was the box on the counter. She peeked inside, wondering why Dad had brought his things home.
“Abby, honey? That you?” Dad walked down the first two steps from upstairs and paused when he met her eyes.
Abby motioned to the box. “I meant to ask you earlier. What’s all this?”
“Dr. Kane asked us to take home any personal belongings, just in case.”
“In case the cops came snooping around?”
Dad sighed and walked down the stairs. “Looks that way.” He sat on a stool at the counter. “I know you’ve always disagreed with my work, but—”
“Dad, can we not do this right—”
“You’re right. About a lot of things. I’m not saying you’re right about everything, but a lot, okay? What Dr. Kane is doing with those boys is wrong.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
She put her arm around his shoulder, and he pulled her close. “Thank you, for not letting me lie to myself about it, honey. You ready for me to call the police?”
Abby took a deep breath. “I think so.”
Dad placed the call, explaining how his daughter had found an intruder in her room and scared him away and that Abby wasn’t hurt. They promised to send a car as soon as possible.
Abby went up to her room to pray. She went over the situation with God, hoping to feel some validation about their plans, but instead her prayers drifted from Marty to her dad’s involvement in a cloning lab, then settled on her mother.
Mom would have known exactly what to do.
Tears streaked down Abby’s cheeks. People always said you never know when it might be the last time you do certain things in your life. Most of Abby’s final memories with her mom hadn’t been that way. They’d known Mom was dying and had plenty of time to fit in a last trip to various places, but the memories weren’t completely joyful because they all knew it had been the last: The last trip to Niagara Falls. The last trip to New York City. The last time standing together on the Empire State Building. The last time making cookies. The last time sitting in church. The list went on and on. Abby relived them all, forgetting that she had been praying. Dwelling on the loss that now felt so fresh. So raw.
Why had it happened? In her heart, Abby knew she didn’t need to know; she trusted God. Still, her heart ached for what could have been. She longed for the moment when she would see the good in this loss, how God had made beauty from ashes.
For just a moment, Abby indulged herself in trying to make an answer fit, trying to understand God’s plan. If her mother hadn’t died, Dad might not have quit his job at GWU, because he wouldn’t have been as desperate to try and save Mom. They all would still be living in Washington DC, and they wouldn’t know Marty existed. Marty might not have even managed to escape, for surely the scientists who worked there for years knew better than to leave their keycards lying around.
The bittersweet reasoning eased some pain in Abby’s heart. A new sorrow overtook her mind: the idea of Marty living underground, never seeing the sun or sky, never breathing fresh air, fifty-five of him, all different ages, some strong, some broken, all prisoners in the name of science. Baby and Hummer and the one without legs …
Abby spiraled into another wave of emotion, pleading to God that he would expose the wrongness and protect the boys. If it wasn’t done just right, the government might take the boys away to a new prison to be studied by different scientists. The doorbell jolted her back to reality. She snapped out of prayer mode, said a quick amen, and peeked out the window. The cops were here.
She smoothed her hair and went into the bathroom to rinse off her face, which didn’t bring down the swelling as much as she’d like. She ran cold water over a washcloth and held it against her eyes. It seemed like she stood there forever. She turned the washcloth over and put the cooler side on her eyelids. What was going on downstairs? Would Dad even involve—?
“Abby, honey?” Dad’s voice called from downstairs.
Finally. She draped the washcloth over the towel rack and took a deep breath. “Coming.”
Abby descended the stairs and found two officers sitting on the couch in the living room—a man with a thick brown moustache and a woman with a long blonde ponytail. The woman’s crystal-blue eyes made Abby think of a human lie detector. She hoped her perceptions were wrong.
Dad was sitting in the armchair across from them. “Here she is.”
Abby walked over to her dad and perched on the arm of his chair.
He put his arm around her waist. “Abby, these officers have come to ask some questions about the intruder.”
Abby forced a small smile and glanced from one cop to the other. “I’m not sure how helpful I’ll be.”
“I’m Officer Jackson,” the female cop said. “This is Officer McNear.” She gestured to the guy with the mustache. “Were you hurt at all?”
“No,” Abby said.
“Your father already told us his version of what happened, but we’d like to get an official statement from you. You feel up to that?”
“Sure. I went up my room, mad because Dad made my friends leave. We were just studying, but Dad kicked everyone out. I was”—Abby glanced at her father—”really embarrassed.”
Jackson’s gaze drilled into Abby. “What happened next?”
Abby looked to where Einstein was eating out of his dish. “When I turned around, a boy was in my room, crouched in the corner.”
“Did he speak to you?” McNear asked, his voice a rumbling bass.
The sound pulled Abby’s gaze away from Einstein. “No. He just sat there. I yelled at him to get out and he ran.”
McNear turned to Dad. “Did you see him leave, Mr. Goyer?”
“I didn’t. I’d stepped into my office in the den. I heard Abby yell, then the door slam. That’s it.”
McNear smoothed his moustache and looked to Abby. “Why did you wait until today to call this in?”
Abby jerked her head to look at her dad. He was supposed to have said that this had just happened. Talk about raising a red flag in an investigator’s mind. “Uh…”
“It’s my fault,” Dad said. “I didn’t want to blow things out of proportion for a high school prank. But Abby was so insistent about what she saw, well … after I slept on it, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to report it.”
Abby sighed inside. Then a sudden overwhelming feeling of shame overtook her. She had talked her dad into lying to the cops and now they were getting caught in their deceit.
Jackson wrote something down in her notebook, then glanced at Abby. “Could you describe him?”
“Uh … he was bald … and tall and … thin.” Abby scrambled to think if her answer might hurt Marty. She didn’t see how it could. “He was wearing gray sweats and a white lab coat. Like the kind a doctor wears.”
Jackson turned to Abby’s dad. “So he changed his clothes after your daughter saw him?”
Abby frowned at her father.
“I guess he must have.” Dad shrugged. “All I know is that I found those clothes on my bedroom floor.”
Abby followed Dad’s nod to the kitchen. Marty’s sweats, T-shirt, and lab coat were folded in a neat pile on one of the kitchen counters. Ug. They really should have rehearsed what they were going to say, which only confirmed the inkling in the back of her mind that this was wrong. They were making up a story, wasting the officers’ time. She hated people who did stuff like this.
“How old did he look, Miss Goyer?” Jackson asked.
“Seventeen or eighteen.”
“Did you recognize him?”
Abby paused. She wasn’t supposed to know any clones existed, so in her mind, the boy in her room would have been JD Kane. She didn’t want to lie anymore, nor did she want to get JD in trouble. If she said the intruder looked like JD, would that help the case against Jason Farms? If JD had an alibi, would that give the police reason to search the barn? Perhaps.
“He looked kind of like JD Kane, a boy at my school. But the thing is, JD has hair. Even more strange, he had just called me on my cell because he’d forgotten some books when our study group ended. JD was waiting outside when I brought him the books, and when I went back upstairs, the guy was still in my room.”
“So you saw JD outside when he was supposedly in your bedroom?” Jackson asked.
Now Abby was having second thoughts about the tell-the-cops plan. What if the police started looking for a JD lookalike? How was that going to help Marty?
“You and JD Kane are friends?” Officer Jackson’s gaze bored into Abby’s.
“He’s my lab partner.”
“Have you ever dated?”
“He asked me out, but I turned him down. He’s not really my type.”
“How did he take that?”
“Take what?”
“Your rejection?”
Great job—you just handed them a motive. Officer Jackson thought JD had come into Abby’s room because he was stalking her or something. “Oh, JD’s fine. Actually, he seemed more determined than ever to get me to go out with him once I—”
Dad coughed.
“—said no.” She glanced at her dad. Oh. Her answers weren’t helping, and now it really looked like JD was stalking her. She should have left it at “strange bald guy I didn’t recognize” and been done with it. She would never lie again. It was one of the Ten Commandments for a reason. Doing it only made things worse.
The cops asked a bunch more questions, mostly about JD. Abby did her best to paint JD in a favorable light, but she got the impression the cops had their own preconceived opinion of JD Kane.
When the cops finished asking questions, Dad walked them to the door. “Thanks for looking into this.”
“We’ll head over to the Kane residence next,” Officer Jackson said. “We’ll call if we find out anything. Let us know if there are any more … strange visits.”
“Will do.”
Abby winced inside. JD was getting pulled into this mess, but it was his dad’s fault for cloning himself.
Dad called the lab next. He told them he called the police because of an intruder and that later his daughter had described him as JD Kane. Dad assumed it had been Martyr.
While Dad talked to the lab, Abby escaped to her room, conscience nagging. She was glad Marty was at Pastor Scott’s place and that they’d thrown the Jason Farm scientists off the trail, but could she have accomplished the same thing without bending the truth? Calling the police had seemed like the perfect idea at the time, but now that it was over, it wasn’t sitting so well. What if JD got in trouble for something he didn’t do?
She crawled under the covers on her bed and snuggled against Einstein. Her obsession with forensics and detective work had gone too far. She, Abigail Goyer, a girl whose goal in life was to enforce the law, had broken it today. Mom would have been disappointed. Mom had always told her it was up to the two of them to show Dad what loving God was all about.
Abby had failed today in a big way.
It had been her idea to lie to the police, and Dad had gone along with it. She’d led her father astray. This thought sent Abby into a long bawl-fest. It had been ages since she cried, and this made twice in one day. She cried so long it hurt. She couldn’t breathe. Snot dripped everywhere. Her eyes stung. Her sobbing scared Einstein so much he squirmed out of her grip and darted out the door.
The exit of her dearest friend made her cry harder. She prayed long and hard. She knew God had forgiven her for the lies, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be consequences for her actions. She dreaded those consequences.
Good thing Abby wasn’t in charge of running the universe. Things would sure get messy in a hurry. Deep down, she trusted that God would take care of Marty and the other clones, but it wasn’t in her nature to sit back and not get involved. She really needed to work on giving up control. She only hoped her meddling hadn’t made a bigger mess for God to clean up.