Sebastian and I both look at each other, panting from the raw emotion radiating from the flashback. “What does it mean?”
I shake my head, trying to piece the memory back in the correct order. I ran up to the school at night, propelled by a phone call from Teddy. Mr. Kimmel was already there, waiting for me, and let me know it was too late, Bash was already gone. I seemed to think he may have died yet Teddy saved him somehow, despite what Bash wanted. But Mr. Kimmel wanted me to tell him how to get Theseus to work, because Bash refused. I refused too.
“The timing of it is too coincidental. That happened Monday night.”
Sebastian rubs his jaw. “Hours before someone deleted our memories.”
I tear up my sleeve and grab a pen from my purse, squeezing a few more vertical lines onto the timeline sprawled across my arm.
S has six months to live
S’s Duplicell procedure/Teddy’s procedure
S cured—Monday night
S and A refuse to use Theseus or tell anyone how it works
Kimmel leaves himself a note as memories are deleted
S no memories/A’s memories deleted
Admin computer stolen
Projects due
Press conference
There’s one more piece of the memory that sticks out to me. Kimmel, asking me to show him how Theseus works. As if it actually works, no more kinks to iron out, no bugs to solve. “I think…” I pause, testing the words out on the tip of my tongue before I commit them to Sebastian’s ears. “I think our project is done. Ready. We got it working.”
His mouth parts, nodding. “But we decided not to use it.”
“The bug that Kimmel alluded to. It was us.”
One thing’s for certain, I’m not going home like my mother demanded. I need to find Teddy.
HiveMind will tell me where Teddy’s last known whereabouts were. When I access his account, I watch the memory that was synced only five minutes ago. I stare out of his eyes at the basement retina scanner. He looks left and right down the clear hallways, thinking about how all the students have headed home already to put the finishing touches on their presentations for tomorrow’s board review. Weird. Teddy didn’t even go to school today, so why is he heading there as soon as it ends? A red light sweeps over the image, nearly blinding me. But then the light turns green, beeping with acceptance. Teddy swings open the door and marches down to the basement with purpose.
The back of my neck tingles. Why would he be granted basement access?
The only thing on his mind is a phrase, repeated in refrain: Don’t cry yet. Don’t cry yet. Don’t cry yet.
He bypasses the now empty IT room and defunct server room. He turns a corner and stands in front of room thirty-four B. Another retina scanner greets him, this one admitting him without question as well. I remember Teddy coming up from the basement the other day, but I’ve never been in room thirty-four B. It must be one of the generic locked storage rooms I always ignore.
The memory ends there. I’d have to wait for the next one to complete the capture and sync before I can see the rest, but we don’t have time for that. “Still have your copy of my mom’s eyeball?”
He reaches into the back seat and pulls out his backpack. “Yep. Too bad I’m not being graded at how well I’ve kept it preserved.”
“You are and you passed. Now let’s go find out what Teddy knows.”
AS SOON AS we step inside the empty hallway, my pulse beats hard and fast in my neck. If my mom comes back and finds me here, I’m toast. My mouth clamps shut and I force my breathing to leak as slowly as possible through my nose. When we reach the retina scanner, Sebastian carefully unearths his copy of my mom’s eye and holds it up. My hands clench until the light turns green. He swings the door open.
Sebastian and I carefully walk down, placing each foot gingerly on the step below. We stop in front of room thirty-four B. It contains no sign, nothing but a heavy door and the same level of recently upgraded security as everything else down here. Sebastian uses the retina scanner to unlock the door and then he gently places the eye back in the ice and hands me the container. I place it in my purse to keep it close. My hands shake when I pull the door open.
White flooring leads up to sleek metal tables. Metal squares line the walls, each with a little hook on the end. The room twists into different sections, and metal drawers line those walls. I shiver from the sudden burst of air-conditioning, loud as thunder, and rub my arms over my sleeves. Sebastian’s teeth chatter and his hair dances from an overhead vent.
“This looks like…” Sebastian leans close to inspect one of the metal slots. There’s a number etched into it. “A morgue.”
I press my palm against the metal and yank it back with a yelp. It’s ice cold. “Why would there be a morgue in the basement of the school?”
With my pulse beating in my ears, I grip one of the handles and tug it toward me. A long tray slides out, covered with a white sheet. There’s a bulge in the center beneath the sheet, too small to be a person. We nod to each other, our silent form of counting one, two, three, before we pull back the sheet. A foot rests on the slab, looking perfectly normal except for the fact that it’s not attached to a body. There’s no sinew or bone sticking out of it. The top of the foot where the ankle should be rounds off in a perfect skin graft.
I thrust my hand into my mouth and bite down to stop myself from screaming. Sebastian swiftly shoves the cold chamber drawer shut and then clamps his hands over his mouth.
Maybe this is where Teddy keeps all the body parts he printed.
There are so many metal shelves here. “How many parts are there in the human body?” I whisper to Sebastian.
“Two hundred and six bones. Six hundred and forty-two skeletal muscles. But judging by the foot, they’re not being printed separately. It’s impossible to know how many combinations he’s printing.”
He pulls out another tray a few rows down, the sound of metal scraping grating on my last shred of nerves. The lump under this one is significantly larger. Body-sized.
I brace myself in every way I can: hand steadied on a cold metal drawer, breath stilled, legs apart.
Slowly, he peels back the white sheet.
And there, lying on the tray, is a body with only half a face.
But it’s the face of my father.
My heart pounds so hard and fast it feels as if it’s about to explode out of my chest. Panic claws at my gut, and I stumble away, hand clamped over my mouth, until my back hits one of the metal shelves. I spin around and yank it open, sliding out another tray with another person-sized blob underneath the white sheet. With a tug, the white sheet falls off, revealing another copy of my dad, this one sporting a mangled ear and a large gaping hole where an eye should be. Instead of gray skin, this one still boasts a rosy hue, as if he’s just sleeping.
Bile bubbles in my throat and I slam that tray back into the wall before pulling out another. There’s another body, gray hairs forming an inkblot pattern on his chest, but instead of a head, the neck ends in a smooth stump.
I pull out another and another, each one containing a version of my dad that’s somehow wrong. Somehow not whole. Somehow not the same.
But still, they’re all him.
I stop at one that’s nearly perfect, just a small imperfection on the back of his skull. My ragged breaths grow harsh against my raw throat. I haven’t seen his face in so long, and even though none of these copies are whole, each one plugs a void so deep in my heart that my chest seems too small to even contain it. I feel like I’m suffocating just from standing here, trying to bask in the image I haven’t set my eyes on in far too long. I take in every pore, every beauty mark. I reach out to stroke his cheek, somehow still warm despite his being gone for over a year. The other side of his skull is just a flat plane of skin, like a slab of marble a sculptor has only half chiseled. Hot tears press against my eyes, and when Sebastian wraps his arms around me, I collapse into him, no longer able to hold myself upright.
A sob rings out from somewhere down one of the hallways hidden inside this room. It must run half the length of the building. Sebastian and I jerk apart and I suck in a shaky breath. All I want to do is stay here, staring at my dad’s face, but I know we need to follow that sound. We need answers. I can’t afford to fall apart right now.
With a gargantuan amount of willpower, I press a finger to my lips and tiptoe toward the sound, my legs wobbly, bypassing more rows of refrigerator shelves that resemble metal laundry chutes. How many contain copies of my dad? I nearly break down from that thought.
Around a corner, Teddy comes into view, his back to us, leaning over an open drawer. There’s something resting on the metal slab, a person-sized bulge.
“It’s not the same,” Teddy whispers to himself between sniffles. “You’re not the same.” Another racking sob rips from his mouth. His shoulders convulse. “God, I miss you so much.” He rests his head on the lump beneath the sheet. “No one else understands what I’m going through. It’s killing me.”
We creep toward him, keeping our footsteps light, but his sniffles cover our movements.
His voice softens. “I’m so sorry, man. I should have honored your request. I should never have let her talk me into going through with this.”
Teddy shifts, burying his head in his hands to cry some more. With his head lowered, the person lying on the tray comes into view. Not just any person. It’s Sebastian, lying cold and dead on a white sheet.
His hair’s the same, his body’s relatively the same though more gaunt, it’s all the same except for one differentiating factor: the bluish-gray tint to his skin. Bash’s plastic-rimmed glasses rest on his face. The cloying stench of decay lingers near him like he’s dead.
Because he is dead.
I let loose a sharp, tense scream. Sebastian vomits onto his sneakers. Bash is dead.
Teddy bolts upright, frantically rubbing his knuckles against the tears streaming down his dark cheeks. “Arden. Sebastian. What are you doing here?”
I stare, unblinking, my face frozen in anguish. Clues echo in my head, robbing me of breath.
Why Sebastian woke up without memories but knows textbook information. Information that could be uploaded into a fresh brain even if memories aren’t available. Why he had a memory of lying on a metal slab that seemed to last for days according to the file size. How he was cured of cancer. Leo’s video talked about duplicating cells and eradicating the disease from each and every one. Teddy’s the master of 3-D bio-printing. Zoey mentioned that Teddy had printed every body part, and the evidence of every printed body part is standing right beside me, tears leaking from his eyes.
Leo couldn’t save him. Neither could Teddy. The only thing they could do was replace him entirely.
The procedure was done in two parts, Leo’s mapping and then Teddy’s printing. Sebastian must have been created from the mapped data and prepped for days on a metal table.
I look at my boyfriend. But my head volleys between the boy standing beside me and the one on the tray. The boy I love is … both of them. The one standing beside me and the one who will never stand again.
I whip my head around the room at all the metal trays, each one likely containing a failed prototype, a 3-D printed clone gone wrong somehow, just like the copies of Dad I found. Leo’s words from earlier come back to me, telling me that Sebastian isn’t the first person he experimented on, Dad was. The only clone they ever got right is Sebastian.
I whirl on Teddy. He frantically plucks the glasses off Bash’s face and throws the white sheet over him. He slides the glasses into his pocket, avoiding my gaze but breathing hard.
“Explain,” I demand through gritted teeth.
He swallows hard and scrubs a hand over his face before nudging Bash back into the cold prison with his hips. “You shouldn’t have seen this. You should forget—”
“What?” I scoff. “You’re going to delete my memories of this moment too?”
He squints at me. “Not sure what you’re insinuating.”
A hysterical laugh leaves my throat. I have no time for this shit. “Tell. Me. What’s. Going. On.” The words slide through gritted teeth. “Start from the very beginning.” I flourish my hand around the room. “Or I tell everyone about everything in here.”
A large sigh rattles his shoulders. “Leo was working on the cell project, but the mice kept dying shortly after being cured. And I’d gotten really good at printing body parts. I was starting to experiment with printing them connected.”
Sebastian stares at Teddy. “Y-you mean printing bodies?”
He swallows hard but nods.
“And it was Zoey’s idea to marry the two projects,” I say, putting more pieces together. A barnacle, she called it, because she was latching onto two other projects to make hers whole. Now I understand why Teddy couldn’t give her co-credit; she didn’t really do anything.
“Leo finds the cancerous cells and eradicates them before I print a fresh model. Except”—Teddy rotates his hand at the various metal cells—“it took a lot of practice to get right.”
I shiver. “Why are you keeping all the copies of my dad?”
“To study them. So I don’t make the same mistake again.”
Now I really want to throw up.
“The procedure wasn’t refined yet,” Teddy says fast, his hands shaking. “I couldn’t get it to work in time.” He stumbles toward me, and both hands grip tight on my shoulders. “It’s for the best. Your dad’s still whole, even though he’s gone.” Teddy’s eyes flick toward Sebastian and then back to me. “Your dad’s still the same.”
My head swims with this news. Hot tears press against my eyes. “No!” I back up, shaking my head. “I would rather have him here. Just like I have Sebastian.”
“But you don’t have Bash.” Teddy holds my gaze, trying to get me to understand something my brain still can’t make sense of.
“How did I die?” Sebastian’s whisper against the silence forces us to turn back to him.
Teddy rakes a hand through his hair before plopping down in the nearest chair. “Monday night Bash came in for another scan. We were just comparing everything in his body with the—the lusus naturae.” When we both look at him strangely, he clarifies, “The clone.” He eyes Sebastian up and down. “You.” His eyes flutter shut. “He—he told me he’d made a decision.”
“He’s right here.” I jab my arm toward Sebastian.
“That’s not him.” Teddy shakes his head. “Bash told me he wasn’t going to go through with it. That he wanted to die as himself and he wanted me to destroy … him.” Teddy flicks his eyes toward Sebastian. “I held Bash’s hand and promised I would.” He buries his head in his hands. “Oh God.”
Sebastian’s expression draws tight. I inhale a shaky breath and then lace my fingers with his.
“He wasn’t supposed to die for several more weeks, but suddenly he couldn’t breathe. It was just a routine test, nothing invasive, no needles. He clutched his chest, coughed up blood.” Teddy bites down on his fist. “He died. Right there on the table. I did some scans—it was a pulmonary embolism.”
Sebastian sucks in a breath.
“It’s common for terminal cancer patients, brain cancer patients especially—but it was just so sudden. One second he was talking and the next he was gone forever. I called Zoey to come over. You too, Arden. We had to decide, right then and there, what to do. I tried to honor his wishes, but … You didn’t show up and she started the process with the clone we’d already prepped and I was too numb to stop her. Too selfish to stop her.”
A spike of horror shoots through me. Zoey knew. She knew this whole time about Sebastian and she never said a word.
Fat tears leak from Teddy’s eyes. “I betrayed my best friend’s dying wish just so I could get him back.” His voice cracks and he sets his anguished gaze on Sebastian. “But you’re not the same. You won’t ever be the same.”
Sebastian’s jaw clenches. “That’s because you deleted all my memories.”
“I didn’t delete anything. After we got you working, Zoey called Leo over to upload any knowledge he could so he could test the upgrades he was working on. Leo doesn’t even know he gave those upgrades to a clone.”
He was a blank clone, void of everything. Memories. Knowledge. Personality. “To save Bash, we needed to transfer his memories, his entire personality. But I refused.”
Oh my God. Theseus referred to the moral question of whether or not a ship was still the same ship if every single wooden board was replaced. Every part of Sebastian has been replaced, except for the last step. The final piece of the puzzle. Not just memories but his entire personality.
Sebastian’s eyebrows shoot way up his forehead. “But that doesn’t explain about your memories being gone.”
“It does.” My head spins. I grip the lip of the lab table to keep myself upright. “Marrying all three projects was Zoey’s idea. Not just two. She needs them all to succeed because she was denied co-credit for each individual project and this is her last chance. Except I refused to go through with the last part of the project.”
My best friend, one of the only people I trusted completely, betrayed me. My chest aches. It feels as if someone punched their way between my lungs and ripped out my heart in the process.
Sebastian snaps his fingers. “And so she deleted your memories of me and our project to prevent you from remembering that you wouldn’t go through with it.”
“And she’s probably trying to get it to work herself so she can complete the personality transfer without my involvement.” I taught her how to code. There’s a good chance I once taught her how Theseus works. Her hacking skills prove that she’s done far more practicing than she let on.
So Sebastian never had any memories because he’s a clone, but Zoey deliberately took a pickax to mine, one by one. And once we reunited on our project, she started weeding out our memories every time we got too close to the truth. Kimmel’s had to go too—he knew too much and kept trying to remember it just like we did. My mom was probably a liability too. I’d been running to my best friend for help this entire time, but all that did was give her the information she needed to betray me. No wonder my mom showed up for her appointment at the data center early. Zoey probably tipped her off to my presence there.
This also explains why Teddy still has his memories intact. Zoey couldn’t bear to mess with his personality by removing anything.
Sebastian’s shoulders rattle as he takes a deep breath, swallowing hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Do you think I’m—” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Incomplete?”
I muster up my most genuine smile. Just being in the vicinity of him makes my cells light up like a circuit board. “You’re perfect.”
“But I’m not. I’m an experiment that someone couldn’t even finish. The guy you fell in love with is dead and the only thing left is—”
“You.” I grab his hand across the table and lace my fingers with his. “I fell in love with you.”
The bright overhead lights illuminate the pain on his face.
“Nothing’s going to change my mind.” I squeeze his hand, but then I glance over at Bash, lying dead on the tray under the sheet. If I got my memories back, would I even feel the same way about Sebastian?
“I’m pretty sure I can change your mind.” The click of heels diverts our attention to the end of the hallway, where Zoey comes into view. “When I remove these memories, anyway.”