Ash drops down next to me. He swings the torch around the room. I see the odd shape, the glimpse of a reflective surface, and I get the sense of things surrounding me. ‘It’s OK, you’re safe,’ Ash says. He can probably hear I’ve stopped breathing.
I force my lungs to work again. The air tastes surprisingly clean – medicinal almost. I know that smell. Then there’s the earthy scent of coffee, the freshness of star anise. And I swear I can hear Dad’s voice. Goldilocks came upon a little house in the woods. She knocked on the door, and as nobody replied, she went inside.
I spin around, staring into the darkness. ‘Did you hear that?’ I ask.
‘What?’
Silence. Just the strange sound of bubbles and the soft whir of machinery.
‘It’s nothing.’ I must be losing my mind, all the stress, the change in sleep patterns.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yeah, yeah. I’m just tired.’
He drapes a protective arm around my shoulders. ‘You ready?’
‘I guess.’
He raises his voice. ‘Lights on.’
The lights overhead hum into action. The blueish glare stings my eyes, especially after stumbling through darkness for so long. I blink several times, a combination of excitement and fear chewing on my guts, and slowly, I survey the room.
A series of large cylindrical tubes line the walls, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Each cylinder is filled with transparent fluid. Judging by the lazy motion of the bubbles, it’s more viscous than water. It looks almost like a giant lava lamp, the way the fluorescent light catches the shifting globules of air. My brain struggles to make sense of the shapes suspended inside the fluid – limbs, hair, faces.
Each cylinder contains a person.
Lifeless. Naked. Eyes which stare blankly ahead.
I can feel my stomach shrinking, my soft palate arching, my tongue pulling back in my mouth. I think I’m going to puke.
‘Violet, are you OK?’ Ash holds me up and rubs my back.
‘Are they . . .?’
‘Dead?’
I manage to nod.
‘No, no, they’re not dead,’ he says.
I swallow down something foul tasting and approach one of the tubes, my entire body trembling. I look at the floating person. It’s Willow. His tanned body completely limp. He has a tube going into his mouth and his nose, and his caramel hair wafts around his face, long and unkempt, disturbed by the bubbles which slowly drift by.
‘Ash?’ is about all I can manage to say.
‘It isn’t Willow.’
For some reason, this comes as a huge relief. My pseudo-boyfriend isn’t some weird alien hooked up to machines. But if he isn’t Willow, who the hell is he? As if in response, the floating boy blinks.
I step back, a cry catching in my throat.
‘It’s OK,’ Ash says.
‘They do that sometimes.’
Drawn to that face – that slack, unfeeling face – I take a step closer, the tip of my nose connecting with the glass. Ash is right, it isn’t Willow. It just looks like him. But this floating boy’s nose is a little crooked, his lips not quite so full. My eyes flick down his form. His body’s less muscled and his legs look shorter.
I can’t help but stare at his genitals. I’ve never seen a naked man before. Not unless you count the photo in my biology textbook, which Ryan kindly scrawled the word Virgin across, or the time Mitchel Smith streaked across the football pitch. But up close, in real life, I’ve never seen a naked man. It looks kind of shrivelled.
‘Are you staring at his dick?’ Ash asks. My gaze moves to Ash’s reflection. He’s smiling, his eyes full of laughter. My cheeks start to burn.
A plaque marks the base of the cylinder. Duplicate #1.
‘Who is he?’ I ask.
‘Willow’s brother.’
‘Willow doesn’t have a brother.’
Gently, Ash takes my shoulders and turns me so I look at the next cylinder along. ‘No. He has three. They’re Duplicates.’
Three floating boys. All so similar to Willow, just not quite so perfect.
My stomach starts convulsing again, that foul stuff fills my mouth . . . Duplicate #3 has no legs.
‘His, his legs are missing.’ I can’t tear my eyes away from the point at which his legs should join his torso. They’ve been removed at the pelvis, leaving his genitals intact. A perfect, surgical slice. No blood, no scraps of tissue, just sealed-up stumps. I can hear someone breathing heavily, a panting in my ear. I realize it’s me. I begin to feel dizzy, the scent of medicine returning. Coffee and star anise. One was too hot, one was too cold, but one was just right.
I spin in tight circle. ‘There it is again.’
‘What?’
‘That voice.’
‘Violet, there’s no voice.’
Oh God. It’s in my head. The shock’s making me hear things. That’s just what I need, mental health problems.
‘Don’t worry.’ Ash strokes my arm. ‘This place plays tricks on you, it’s creepy as hell.’ The gentle motion of his skin against mine lifts me from the panic. He’s right, it’s just this creepy place.
Slowly, I look at the other cylinders. Two versions of Willow’s dad, three versions of Willow’s mum. And lodged between Duplicate #5 and Duplicate #6, a control box – a dusty monitor and an array of switches and buttons.
‘What is this place?’ I finally say.
‘Storage,’ Ash replies. ‘The Gems decide what they want their baby to be like – looks, talents, those kind of things. They pre-order and grow them in artificial sacks.’
I nod. I know this from canon. I cross the room to look at an almost identical Mrs Harper. She has a fine, red scar across her chest, and pink sores on her inner thighs. I look closer. It’s as if pieces of skin have been peeled away from her legs.
Ash follows. He stands so close, I can feel his breath on my neck. ‘Genetic enhancement isn’t as precise as you may think,’ he says. ‘It takes several attempts to make the perfect baby, so they grow several foetuses at the same time. The obviously flawed ones are flushed before birth.’
‘One was too hot, one was too cold, and one was just right,’ I whisper to myself.
‘What’s that?’
I shake my head. ‘Nothing, just a story my dad used to tell me.’
Ash rests his hand against the glass, just above almost-Mrs-Harper’s face. A tender gesture. He sighs. ‘I’m guessing that these babies were too good to flush.’
I trace her features with my gaze. She looks nothing like Willow. Blonde hair, pale skin, slender shoulders. But those lifeless, staring eyes are the exact same shade of copper.
‘They keep them for spare parts?’ I finally say.
‘It’s the only explanation.’
I look back to that fine scar, and I notice she’s hooked up to a small pump by a loop of blood-red tubing. Mrs Harper must have had a heart problem. I guess the Gems didn’t eradicate all diseases like Sally King wrote, I guess they just found other ways of defying death and illness. And judging from those missing patches of skin, I’d say Mrs Harper’s wrinkle-free face has had some help. I know from canon that she’s in her sixties, even though she only looks about thirty.
I can’t help thinking of Frankenstein’s monster, assembled from different body parts, held together with coarse stitching. I’ve heard that comparison before. Nate called Alice a filthy Frankenstein Gem on the way to Comic-Con. Such a strange coincidence, like Nate somehow predicted this. Unless it wasn’t a coincidence. Unless Nate somehow made this happen by saying it. Or maybe the phrase lodged somewhere in my unconscious and I made it happen. This reminds me of that sash, the one I wore to Comic-Con . . . Did I somehow create Rose’s belt of blood?
I immediately dismiss the idea, partly because it’s ridiculous, and partly because I don’t have the head-space to process it.
‘Are you coping OK?’ Ash asks.
I shake my head. The shock, the disgust, makes way for a cleaner emotion – anger. How could they do this? How could they mutilate their own siblings? I look towards Willow’s truncated brother. I remember the backstory from canon now. Willow was in a terrible riding accident when he was twelve and spent several months in hospital undergoing regenerative surgery. But King never mentioned anything about dismembering an unconscious sibling.
I think about Nate – his pixie grin and his spiky hair and the way he always knows random facts about everything – and the anger intensifies.
‘They’d do that to their own flesh and blood? To their siblings, to their children?’ I say.
Ash’s fingers entwine with mine. ‘The dangers of playing God, I suppose.’
I turn to face him. He looks pale, even for Ash. ‘So the Imps don’t know about this?’
He shakes his head. ‘There’s rumours of big storage warehouses filled with Duplicates in secret locations in the Pastures. I’ve never heard of relatives keeping them on site before. And as far as I know, nobody’s ever seen one, or at least, admitted to seeing one.’
My throat clamps shut, but I manage to force out one single word. ‘Willow?’
‘He may know.’
‘I could ask him?’
‘No.’ Ash suddenly looks afraid. ‘Why do you think I haven’t told anyone? It will put you in grave danger. The government obviously don’t want this getting out. And according to the rumours, most of the Gems don’t even know. It’s probably just the wealthy, powerful Gems who can afford back-ups.’
‘They’re not back-ups, they’re people.’ I wipe my face, the anger returning. ‘You should have told someone about this, someone who could help.’
‘Violet, sometimes it really is like you’re from a different planet. If I speak up about this, you can guarantee I’ll wind up dead in some alley, or dancing on those gallows. And then who would help Ma? Who would bring back the Gem coins for food? I’ve got to put my family first.’
‘So why did you show me this?’
He looks sad for a moment. Remorseful. ‘I – I wanted you to know what the Gems are truly like. The lengths they’ll go to in their quest for perfection.’ Unexpectedly, he wraps his arms around my neck and pulls me in really close, so my face rests on his shoulder. The scent of sweat and soap stills my pulse, and for a moment, I feel OK again. When he speaks, I feel his breath in my ear. It doesn’t tickle like Willow’s did, it just feels amazing. ‘And I just had to tell someone – it felt like a weight inside me, the secret, that is. You’re the first person I’ve ever really trusted.’
I begin to cry again. And not just because of those dead-eyed, floating Duplicates, or because of the empty space where almost-Willow’s legs should be, or the missing heart beneath that fine, red scar. But because Ash will only ever know almost-Violet, the Duplicate, the player.
He will never know the real me.