Your One & Only by Adrianne Finlay

Author:Adrianne Finlay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Althea had no idea who to tell about the boy who looked like Jack but couldn’t possibly be Jack. None of it made sense. In the end she didn’t have time to work it out, because Carson shouted Jack’s name to anyone who would listen while the Samuels tended to his injured shoulder and broken nose in the clinic.

She’d half dragged Carson to the clinic while he cradled his arm, crying with rage, pain, and humiliation. As he’d leaned against her, his emotions roared into her, threatening to overwhelm her. It was a relief to hand him off to the Samuels.

Carson hadn’t been lying then about the night of the fire. He’d seen someone he believed was Jack sneaking into the labs. It was the same boy who’d found them in the banana grove, the same boy who’d kissed her. But that boy wasn’t Jack. They both were quick and strong, but this boy was wild, with a ferocity in him, a cold determination she couldn’t imagine in Jack, no matter how much the Carsons pushed him.

Now Althea stood before the Council. They waited, patient and strangely unreadable, while she told the story of what had happened in the banana grove and encountering the boy who was clearly Jack’s brother. She ended by saying, “He looked like Jack, but it wasn’t him.”

The Council members didn’t react. They simply rested their elbows on the table, their hands clasped in front of them.

“You’re right,” the Inga finally said. “That wasn’t Jack.” Althea waited, frustrated by their lack of response. The whole way to the Council meeting, she’d been mentally rehearsing arguments, calculating how she could persuade them that the boy with the bow and arrow wasn’t Jack. She didn’t need confirmation of what she already knew. She wanted more. The Inga seemed to sense this. “The person you saw, it must have been Jonah.”

“So you have Jack locked up, and you didn’t once consider it could have been someone else who did what you accused him of? That it could have been this Jonah?”

Samuel-294, Samuel-299’s replacement on the Council, answered Althea. “Copan said he died over a year ago. We thought he was dead.”

“How could you not tell him?”

“Tell who?”

“Jack, of course. How could you not tell him he has a brother?” Inga’s mouth turned down as if the thought had never occurred to her. And why would it? Jack wasn’t their concern. They’d never cared about him.

“When we created the embryos from Jack’s genetic sample, it’d been several years since we’d had any success with survivable embryos. We sent some of them to Copan as well,” Inga said. “We had Jack, and they had their own human from the same sample—​another Jack. They didn’t call him that, of course. They didn’t give him a name at all. He named himself Jonah.”

“But he’s not another Jack,” Althea said. “He’s different. He’s dangerous.”

Samuel-294 shrugged. “Samuel-299 said Jonah’s violence was because of how Copan treated their human subjects, but he was always violent. That’s why he was terminated.

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