Decker/Lyle smiled, confused. “Isn’t it yours?”
“I—yes. Of course. I just wondered if you’d moved it.” She smiled back, a strange mixture of embarrassment and … Is that guilt? Lyle looked at the others, catching the tail end of a disapproving glance from … Jeffrey? Since when does Jeffrey dare to look at Cynthia that way?
“Why would I move your boat?” he asked.
“It was just a slipup,” said Sunny. “Give her a break, it won’t happen again.”
Decker/Lyle looked up sharply. “Wait, what?” Why were they acting so weird?
“I’m just saying,” said Sunny, “we’re all new to this. I mean, sure, we’ve been practicing these characters for weeks, but—”
Lyle’s head seemed to fill with alarms: They’re not acting like themselves because they’re not themselves. “You’re duplicates.”
The other executives looked at each other with confused half smiles, as if he’d just accused the sky of being blue. “Well … yeah,” said Cynthia. “Aren’t you?”
Decker/Lyle didn’t answer, his mind racing with the implications. These were all duplicates. What did that mean?
The fake Jeffrey’s eyes went wide: “He’s real. They stuck us in a car with the real Lyle.”
“Why would they give us the real Lyle?” asked the fake Sunny, stammering. “They … we’re … supposed to go to the Bahamas now, right?”
The fake Cynthia went pale. “They told me Buenos Aires.”
The fake Sunny lunged for the door, but the handle wouldn’t open.
Decker/Lyle looked over his shoulder, scanning the crowded Manhattan street behind them. Is that another limo going the other way? He couldn’t tell. He turned back around, frantic. What’s going on?
The money, he thought, they wouldn’t give us money if they were— He pulled the nearest briefcase onto his lap and snapped it open. It was full of newspaper.
“Oh, shi—”
The limousine exploded.
33
Thursday, July 12
1:13 A.M.
The home of Delia Tyson, Flushing, Queens
155 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle was dead, which the real Lyle took as a welcome relief. He’d spent the last week and a half terrified that someone would find him—Ibis or NewYew or the press or the cops. It seemed like everyone was hunting him. But then the entire executive staff of NewYew had died in a car bomb, and suddenly Lyle was free.
Until a few hours later, when another Lyle was found floating in the East River. And if there were two Lyles, the press said, why not more? Surely the father of human cloning had more than one copy of himself. And so he was a fugitive again.
Dead or not, Lyle was too afraid to go outside, and so he hid in his grandmother’s house, watching the TV or the computer or his phone, or more often, all three at once. He watched the news scroll by with story after story about ReBirth: it was the best-selling product in its market. It was the primary topic of every talk show, late night and daytime. Police were cautioning against its use. Religious groups were decrying it as a sin, or a salvation, depending on which group you were talking to. People were using it wrong, or too much, or in ways Lyle had never dreamed: there was a thriving black market for celebrity DNA, and everyone from movie stars to political leaders was afraid to go outside.
I guess I can’t blame them, thought Lyle. I haven’t left the house in more than a week.
Lyle’s grandmother was a rugged old woman now nearly a hundred years old, who slept almost twenty hours a day and spent the other four nearly oblivious to Lyle’s presence. She never talked to anyone but the maid and the neighbor boy who delivered her groceries, and when either of them came Lyle hid in the backyard, crouched in a small wooden toolshed, praying his grandmother wouldn’t choose that moment to remember he existed and say something to her visitors.
Now it was night, and he didn’t dare to turn on the TV, worried that anyone who might be watching the house would see the light and know he was there. Assuming anyone was watching the house at all. He’d never seen anyone, but if the government was smart enough to be checking his relatives’ homes he had to assume they were also smart enough to be discreet about it. He padded into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and closed it again; there was nothing there. It was time to leave another note asking the neighbor boy to make a run to the store.
There was a noise by the back door, and Lyle froze. It’s a burglar. Or it’s one of the Ibis Lyles. Or maybe it’s just the wind tapping the tree against my window. He heard it again, a loud click or a knock, not like a friendly knock on the door but a determined, mechanical thunk; someone was definitely there. He scrounged on the counter for a weapon, finding a knife handle in the darkness and holding it determinedly in front of him. It’s a killer, he thought. It’s an assassin, from Ibis or the government or even from NewYew—I wouldn’t put it past them. Maybe that Christian group linked me to Kuvam and decided to take me down, too. Too many people want me dead.
He took a cautious step toward the back door, holding his knife in front of him, watching the doorknob slowly turn of its own accord. He raised the knife, hands trembling, and the lock opened with a click. The door swung open slowly, and Cynthia stepped in. She was dressed in loose black pants and a black turtleneck, a pair of small metal lock picks glinting faintly in the starlight.
Lyle stared at her, confused. Cynthia knows how to pick locks?
Cynthia scanned the room and recoiled with a start when she saw him, staggering backward. “Geez, there’s a dude with a … spoon?” She paused, regaining her composure, and a large man, also dressed in black, swung into the doorway with a pistol aimed straight at Lyle’s chest. Lyle yelped and dropped his knife, which clattered away from him on the tiled floor. He peered at it in the light from the doorway. It was a spoon.
“This the guy?” asked the big man, and Cynthia nodded, whispering, “Yeah, I’ve seen that face a hundred times. I took better care of it, though—geez, man, the least you could do is take a shower every now and then.”
“Cynthia?” asked Lyle.
The large man stepped in carefully, pushing past Lyle and sighting down each hall and doorway with his gun. “Is there anyone else in here?”
“No,” said Lyle. “What are … who are you? And Cynthia, why are you dressed like a burglar?”
“Because he is a burglar,” said another woman. Susan stepped into the doorway with a wry smile. “This is Tony Hicks, he was in our product test. Sorry about the break-in, we didn’t know if you were awake. Or alive.”
“I…,” Lyle stammered. “What?”
Susan came in, patted him on the shoulder with a smile, and pushed past him. Cynthia—or Tony, thought Lyle—came in behind her, glancing back outside suspiciously before closing the door.
