Criminal Destiny (16 page)

Tori approaches the end room and turns to me. “Give me a boost.”

She steps into the basket I make with my hands. I heave her up to the window. It takes some doing, because she has to remove the screen. But within two minutes, she's in. We hear her drop to the floor.

We run around the front. She's already standing there with the door open, grinning widely. “Welcome to our humble abode.”

“Get that screen back in!” I snap. “They've got mosquitoes the size of B-52s around here!”

The place is a dump by Serenity standards, but with the advantage of not being in Serenity. There are two double beds—one for the girls and one for Eli and me. We give them first dibs on the shower.

By the time they come out, we're dead to the world.

I wake up scared.

These days, I always wake up scared. But today's different. I'm in that dump truck in Denver and it's tipping me down into the wood chipper. The grinding noise is loud and very near, and I'm sliding, falling . . .

Heart hammering, I leap out of bed, biting my fist to keep from screaming as I struggle to get my bearings. There's no wood chipper, just an air conditioner—in great need of maintenance—a couple of doors down. I'm still in the room at the Tumbleweed Inn. The air is hot and heavy as pea soup. We don't dare use our own air conditioner, since no one is supposed to be here. Dim light filters in through the uneven venetian blinds. Not morning, not yet.
More like predawn. I check the nightstand clock. 5:16 a.m.

Amber's still asleep, sweat beaded on her brow. In the other bed, so is Malik—at least I assume that lump in the blankets is him. (I recognize the snoring.) Where's Eli?

A second later I spot him in the center of the room, still as a statue, staring at the front door.

“What?” I ask in a low voice.

“Someone's out there,” he whispers hoarsely.

“Are you sure?”

“I swear I saw the doorknob turn.”

I go to the window, open the blinds an inch or so, and peer outside. The walkway is deserted. I move to the other side and check the opposite direction. Nobody's there. But at the far end of the strip, I can see a splash of light spilling out of the office.

“The coast is clear,” I report. “But the check-in desk is open.”

He looks worried. “Do you think the clerk will be able to tell someone's in the room?”

“I don't know,” I reply, “but we'd better do a little scouting around. If anybody's about to call the police on us, we need to be gone.”

We kick into shoes, grab some money, and slip out the
front door. We snake around the back of the Tumbleweed Inn, confirming first that the truck is well hidden. Malik did a good job parking it in some thick trees, where it wouldn't be easily spotted by employees or guests of the motel.

The office has a high rear window, just like the rooms do. We're not worried about being heard, since an ancient air conditioner roars in there too. Eli boosts me up and I peer inside.

The clerk reminds me of my own mother (the person who posed as my mother, obviously). The resemblance puts me at ease and on edge at the same time. She's all alone at the desk, watching a tiny portable TV. I spy on her for a few seconds and conclude that there's no way she knows trespassers broke into one of her rooms last night. She looks bored—half-comatose, actually. Her attention never wavers from the small screen.

I jump down and signal Eli to start back.

“What, no room service?” he whispers.

I smother a laugh. I like being with Eli. In Serenity, we were getting to be pretty close. Malik used to tease us about being boyfriend/girlfriend, although it was nothing like that. Now we spend more time together than ever, but it's
not the same, since we're always running for our lives. All at once, I realize how much I miss hanging out with him.

We're about halfway to the end of the strip building when Eli suddenly wheels. “Did you hear that?”

I turn and scan our surroundings. There's nobody around. From the front of the motel, the ice machine clunks. “Is that what you heard?”

He looks doubtful. “Maybe. It's probably just me. I'm pretty stressed these days. For all I know, the doorknob never moved either.”

“We're all on edge,” I assure him.

But as we reach the pavement of the side parking lot,
I
hear it—and it's definitely not the ice machine. Scuffling footsteps, dislodging rocks and chunks of fractured concrete. Yet when we turn around, no one's there.

Is someone
stalking
us?

We're not walking anymore. We run the rest of the way to our room and duck inside.

“Wake up!” Eli cries at the sleepers.

They're out of bed like a shot. “What is it?” Malik babbles, blinking wildly.

“We're not sure,” I confess.

His brow lowers. “You woke me up for not sure?
Come back when you're sure!”

Only half-awake, Amber stumbles toward the bathroom. Her eyes aren't open yet, so she doesn't see it. There's a face at the window, pale and indistinct through the dusty screen.

I scream. That wakes Amber up, and the guys come running. But by that time the face is gone.

“We've got to disappear!” I hiss. “They're after us! He was looking in the window!”

“Who?” Eli demands.

“I couldn't tell. He has to be really tall, though, if he could see in! Maybe one of the Purples.”

“I'm not sticking around to find out!” Malik declares.

We jam our stuff into our backpacks. I peer through the venetians. “Coast is clear.”

“On three,” whispers Malik. “One . . . two . . .”

He hurls the door open and leaps outside. But instead of making his escape, he trips over something and crashes sprawling to the pavement. We hear a muffled
“Oof,”
definitely not from Malik.

Eli picks up the nearest weapon, a porcelain table lamp, yanking the plug from the wall. Brandishing it like a club, he springs after Malik to fight for our freedom. He lifts it
high, ready to deliver a devastating blow.

Malik's eyes bulge.
“Stop!”
He grabs the lamp in mid-stroke.

Amber and I scramble into the fray. We gawk. We goggle.

Lying on the ground, stunned, is Hector Amani.

My head explodes. Seriously, that's what it feels like.

Hector—I never thought I'd see the little shrimp again! I shouldn't be seeing him now! He
died
!

The others are just as blown away. Eli drops the lamp, which shatters on the concrete.

Half to prove to myself that he isn't a ghost, I throw my arms around Hector and squeeze.

“Not so hard,” he gasps. “I can't breathe!”

“You're not supposed to breathe!” My voice comes out unsteady. “You're supposed to be dead!” There's wetness running down my cheeks. I think I might be crying. Impossible—Gus Alabaster never cries! But I don't care. I can't process any information beyond the impossible fact that Hector's okay.

“We don't have time for this,” Tori hisses. “There's a Purple around. We saw him looking into our room.”

“That was
me
,” Hector rasps.

Tori shakes her head. “That guy had to be six-foot-five.”

“I was standing on boxes,” Hector explains. “I had to make sure it was really you.”

“Why didn't you say something?” Amber demands

He's sheepish. “I got so excited to see you that I fell. I came around to knock on the door, and Malik plowed me over.” He rubs his brow. “Elbowed me in the face.”

We get him ice for his forehead, but not before the hugging happens—first the girls, and then Frieden. I go again for good measure, and this time I really crush him. He's feeling it, but he doesn't complain. We both understand that coming back from the dead is a pretty big deal.

It's time for some major catching up. Hector lies on one of the beds, holding the towel-wrapped cubes to his bruise, and rakes us with a resentful glare. “Thanks a lot, you guys, for saving yourselves and leaving me alone to die in the woods.”

Only the shrimp could make me so happy and so exasperated all at once. “Some things never change. Complain, complain, complain. We
looked
for you, man. We screamed
the forest down until the cars started up from Happy Valley.”

“It's true,” Eli confirms. “When we couldn't find you, we thought you went over the side with the truck. You were still hanging on when I jumped.”

“We had to drag Malik away,” Tori adds. “He was out of his mind. I've never seen him like that before.”

“And you see the thanks I get.” I glare at Hector, my cheeks hot. “I'm the one who should be ticked off at you, letting us think you're dead. I wasted a lot of sad on your unworthy butt!”

“It's like Eli said,” Hector admits. “I hung on too long, and by the time I jumped, the truck had already broken through the barrier. I rolled into a tree and I must have got knocked out. It was good luck—if the tree hadn't been there, I would have gone all the way to the bottom and burned up in the explosion.”

“How come the Purples didn't catch you?” asks Amber.

“I ran into the woods and climbed a tree. They searched like crazy, but they never looked up. I could have spit down on them a couple of times. I heard them talking. They were pretty sure we all died in the wreck. I guess traffic cones burn really slow, because the flames went on for days, and they couldn't get close enough to figure out we weren't there.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Malik. “But how did you get
here
?”

“Don't rush me. I'm telling the story. So I stay in the woods as long as I can, thinking maybe you guys will come back for me.” He shakes his head. “Maybe some people can survive in the wild, but not me. You swallow ten million berries and all you get is a stomachache. Once I chased this rabbit for hours, but when I finally caught him, I couldn't figure out how to make him die. So I let him go. I'd barely eaten in days. And I thought, whatever they do to me in Serenity, it can't be as bad as starving to death. So I walked back into town. But you're never going to believe this: Nobody was there.”

Eli nods. “We escaped with their secret, and they ran away.”

“What could I do?” Hector continues. “I went home. At least there was food. I ate everything. I was spooning cold peas out of the can. I poked around, looking for clues about where everybody went, and I found my mom's private diary. This name kept coming up—C. J. Rackoff. She compared me to this guy in at least a dozen places. I remembered there's real internet near the factory, so I took our laptop over there. He's a big-time crook—famous, even. And you know what? I think he's the guy I'm cloned from.”

Eli, the girls, and I exchange meaningful glances. Say
what you want about Hector—and I do—nobody can deny that he's smart. Our paths were totally different and still the facts led the five of us to the exact same place. Surely that means we're on the right track.

“Anyway,” Hector concludes. “The website said C. J. Rackoff was in jail here, so I gathered up all the loose money I could find and walked out of town.”

“Three hundred miles?” Tori challenges.

“Of course not. I hitchhiked. At first, people thought I was running away, so I had this idea. I started saying I was
already
away, and was trying to get home. Who wouldn't help a kid get home? Whatever the next town on the sign was, that's where I pretended to live. It takes a long time, but eventually you get where you're going.”

“How did you find
us
?” Eli probes.

Hector shrugs. “You can't just knock on the front gate of a prison. This hotel is the only place around here. I swear, when I saw you guys, I thought it was a hallucination.”

Crazy story? Sure. But it's a lot easier to swallow than the series of events that brought us four to the Tumbleweed Inn.

His eyes grow wider and wider as we fill him in on what we've been through since the breakout. It spills out of us in bits and pieces like we barely believe it ourselves. We do barely believe it ourselves.

When we get to the part in Jackson Hole, and how we cut out our neck implants, he looks squeamish and feels for his own. There's no bump like Amber's, but upon closer inspection of his skin, we find the telltale scar, long healed, in exactly the right spot.

Hector is confused. “If I still have the chip, why didn't the barrier get me?”

Eli shrugs. “They would have had to turn it off when they took the other clones out of Serenity. Or maybe they never fixed it after we wrecked it when we broke out.”

That annoys me. “Are you saying I went through that torture for nothing?”

Amber rolls her eyes. “We all went through ‘that torture,' not just you.”

“Which doesn't change the fact that
I
went through torture! I was bleeding, you know!”

Hector grins. “I see leaving Serenity hasn't changed what a big baby you are.”

I glare at him. “Real funny coming from a kid who can't even get killed and make it stick.”

“Hector, we're so glad that you're okay,” Tori tells him. “It was agony to go on without you, and we thought about you every minute—especially Malik.”

You know what? I'm actually grateful to her for that.
Somebody had to say it. I never would have.

It strikes a note with Hector, who flushes. “I thought about you guys a lot too,” he mumbles uncomfortably.

“Right,” I dig at him. “You thought about how we abandoned you, how everything bad that happened was our fault. We were basically starring in another exciting episode of your favorite show,
Oh, Poor Me.
”

“Yeah, but it worked out okay, right? We're all together again.”

“The freak show's back in business,” I agree.

Here we are, five escaped clones huddled in a cheap motel room outside Haddonfield, Texas. Less than a quarter mile away, behind high walls, barbed wire, and iron bars is a connection to the sinister experiment that's responsible for our existence.

The truth is very close. We can almost taste it.