With one last effort, Jim threw his weight backward and crashed to the ground, landing hard with the girl’s head knocking against his chest, driving the breath from his lungs. Wheezing, he blinked up at the stars and tried to steady his wheeling vision, but then the girl lunged upward—surprisingly spry—and crawled toward the cliff on her hands and knees.
“No . . . you . . . don’t!” Jim grabbed her ankle and dragged her roughly backward. “I’m trying to save your life!”
He sensed movement to his right; another Vitro, this one a skinny boy with a shaggy afro, was within inches of plunging to his death. Jim threw out his free hand and grabbed the boy’s calf. The Vitro looked down, blinked as if unsure what to make of Jim’s hand, then tugged his leg in an attempt to break free.
With one struggling Vitro in each hand, Jim wriggled backward, dragging them both with him. “Hey!” he yelled. “A little help over here!”
He managed to wrap his arm around the girl’s waist, and he held her tightly and struggled for a better grip on the boy. He reached up, yanked the hem of the boy’s hospital gown, and slammed him onto the ground. Under other circumstances he might have felt guilty for hurting them, but at the moment he was burning with anger. He’d been shot at, shoved around, almost blown to bits, nearly drowned, nearly lost at sea, and now he was giving up his last chance at escaping to save the lives of two miserable kids who didn’t want his help in the first place. He cursed at them beneath his breath and held on doggedly, despite their struggles. The girl waved her arms as if they were swords, and she caught him hard across his nose.
Suddenly the doctors were there, two of them. They grabbed the Vitros and held them tight, whispering soothingly to them though it seemed to do zero good.
Jim scrambled up and his eyes darted to the trees behind the building; he could make a run for it—but where would he go?
He never got to find out, because Strauss ran toward them with a pistol in her hand.
“On your knees!” she shouted to Jim. “Now!”
THIRTY SOPHIE
Crack!
The gunshot echoed around the room.
Nicholas yelped as the wand flew out of his hand and crashed against the far wall, its metal plate severely dented by the bullet Moira Crue had fired at it. She stood framed in the doorway, her gun leveled at Nicholas.
Sophie bolted upright and started to call out Mom—but then she remembered, and the word stuck in her throat.
“Back away, Nicky,” said Moira. “Now.”
He didn’t move. His face hardly registered surprise as he said, “Did you like my little present?”
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Moira said softly, her eyes fixed on Nicholas as if he were a snake about to strike. “Nicky, they won’t forgive you. They won’t tolerate you. You’ve given Strauss and Corpus every reason to end you.”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. I’ve got a few more cards to play.”
Moira looked sorrowful. “No. I’m afraid this ends now. You’ve gone too far, Nicky. Why did you do it? Everything was going so well. You had a life here, which is more than you would ever have had without this place.”
“Oh, don’t lie, Moira,” he snarled. “You hate me. You all do. Since the day I was born all I have been to you is a failure, a reminder that you’re not God.”
“That’s not true.” She lowered the gun slowly, straightening with a gentle sigh. “We raised you kids as if you were our own.”
Sophie sat frozen on the bench, her ears roaring. She watched Moira through hard eyes.
“Sophie,” Moira said, walking toward her but keeping an eye on Nicholas. She held out her free hand. “Are you all right? Your shoulder—”
“Don’t—” Her voice came out as a barely audible rasp. “Don’t touch me.”
Moira drew back, her eyes widening. “What did he tell you?”
“The truth,” Nicholas interrupted, a bit sulkily. “Which is more than you ever told her.”
“We’ll talk,” Moira said to Sophie. “When this is all over, we’ll talk about this.”
Sophie said nothing. She stared at the wall behind Moira , eyes wide and unblinking, refusing to look at the woman who had let her live a lie for her entire life.
“What are you trying to do, Nicky? Are you trying to imprint her?”
“She’s a Vitro.” He shrugged and leaned against the bench, inspected his nails. “Don’t you want her to live up to her full potential?”
“Yes, Dr. Crue, I’m a Vitro. Didn’t you hear?” Sophie’s voice was black and bitter. She still didn’t look Moira, but rather at the spot just over her shoulder. She wasn’t sure she could look her in the eye without crumbling.
“Nicholas, get out of here. Now. The Vitros are imprinted on you—you have to stop them. What you did . . .” She stopped, swallowed. “This is evil, Nicholas, even for you. You went too far. Get your butt up there and help the doctors.”
He gave her an elaborate bow, then sidled out of the room. Then Moira turned to Sophie.
“No, Sophie, I’m not your mother,” Moira replied, looking impatient, as if she couldn’t be bothered to have this conversation right now. “I don’t even know who your mother is, though I’m sure we could track down her information in our records.”
“The thing you told me about Lux, about her almost dying and your making her a Vitro to save her—that was a lie. You lied through your teeth. All my life! You lied that you were my mother!”
“Yes. Yes, I did, but I had to—I needed you to believe me. Lux is your sister, because eighteen years ago we split a zygote into two embryos and thus created a pair of identical twins that would become you girls. That’s what all the Vitros are— leftover clusters of potential, frozen embryos locked in freezers in the basements of fertility clinics all over the world. We take them because no one else wants them, and we put them in ectogenetic tanks and raise them. We give them life when they had no hope of life, Sophie—is that wrong? If it wasn’t for me you’d still be nothing but a microscopic, frozen bunch of cells.”
“It’s not you I’ve been trying to get to all my life,” Sophie whispered, more to herself than to Moira. “It’s this island. This is my home. This is where I was born.”
“Nine months after we thawed you out,” said Moira. “You’re a Vitro, yes. The very first Vitro. Older than Nicholas by a week and a half. You’re a control, Sophie.”
Sophie held up a hand, shaking. “Wait. A control? Not the control?”
Moira fingered the buttons on her coat, her eyes slightly averted. “There are ten of them, ten sets of identical twins created in glass vials. Half of them are here, and the other half are out in the world, living normal lives. You were the first. I suspect Nicky’s known about you for years, though he hid his knowledge from me—but he can’t have known about the others. Their records are kept in another facility in . . . well, that doesn’t matter.”
Sophie fell silent a moment, imagining nine others like herself, all ignorant of their origins, living lives built on lies. “Did I ever know them? Were they on Guam too?” she asked softly.
“No. They were all placed in homes through private adoptions, long ago. We’ve monitored them in secret, at a distance. They have no inkling Corpus even exists, and they never will.”
Sophie forced herself to meet Moira’s eyes. “Then why not me? Why am I different?”
“You weren’t . . . you weren’t supposed to be.” A shade of weariness fell over Moira’s features, dragging the corners of her mouth down and settling on her brow in the form of a deep crease between her eyes. “You were to be adopted out like the others. But your father and I . . . well, Foster and I, we were young and we’d always thought we didn’t want children. But we saw you, just a baby, just a tiny, blue-eyed baby with a smile that split our hearts, and we . . . we bent the rules a bit.”