She was simultaneously falling and drowning, hammered by the enormous volume of water and driven onto the anvil of an unseen slope. As she caromed from one jagged surface to the next, tumbling and spinning, she lost all sense of direction. Her lungs begged her to take a breath — water or air, it hardly mattered — but the pounding impacts left her unable to even gasp.
Something clipped the side of her head, just a glancing blow, but enough to drive a spike of pain through her skull. She wrapped her arms over her face, curling up into a protective ball, and braced herself for the next collision. She spun and bounced, slammed and scraped, blind and all but deafened by the roar of water. Yet through it all she remained conscious, and that eerily calm inner voice kept her company.
You have work to do.
She thought she knew what that meant. Her cloned siblings — men and women who had each followed different paths in life, and yet shared memories of something that had never actually happened — were preparing to trigger a chain reaction of destruction on the world.
Wipe the slate clean.
Jenna was not the only person who was aware of this, but she did know something that no one else knew — not Cort or Noah or any of the government assassins hunting the clones. She knew why they were doing it. She also knew that what had happened thus far — the SARS outbreak, the Internet attacks, and perhaps countless other acts of aggression and terror over the last two decades — were merely a prelude to what was about to occur. The attacks were merely preparatory moves, setting the stage for something that would trigger a global holocaust. But before the final act, the message had to be sent.
The message was the linchpin. Stop the message, and the planned destruction would be averted, or at the very least, postponed. Jenna knew from where and when the message would be sent, and only she was in a position to stop it.
Stop it? Why?
Tumbling through limestone tunnels like a spider in a downspout, the question of why—to say nothing of how—seemed unimportant. Yet, she was still alive, and as the miserable seconds stretched out into minutes, the impacts became less frequent. She could feel the rush of cool air on her face. She could breathe again! She was no longer falling, but being swept along in a subterranean river.
And sinking.
The chilly fresh water did not buoy her up the way salt water did, and as the crazy whitewater run slowed down, she was forced to uncurl her arms and legs and paddle to stay above the water line. After a few minutes, or perhaps only a few seconds, she felt herself moving faster again. The bottom rose up under her, scraping against her feet. Then without warning, she was falling again, vomited out of the cave and into daylight once more. The light was painfully bright after too much time in the darkness.
She tumbled down the face of a waterfall, splashed down into a pool beneath it, and was driven to the bottom by the force of the cascading water. Hydraulic eddies pinned her there, but she fought against them as she had everything and everyone else that had tried to kill her. After a brief struggle, she wrestled free of their grip and clawed her way to the surface.
The current, swift with the volume of rainwater feeding the river, caught hold of her. The water snaked between towering walls of limestone, slick with wet moss, impossible to climb. Jenna could do little more than tread water, dog paddling to stay in the middle of the river where she was less likely to be smashed against the rocks.
Despite the tropical climate, Jenna felt her body heat leaching away, and with it, the strength and will to keep going. Fatigue — physical and mental — stole over her, and without realizing it, she stopped paddling. The air in her lungs kept her buoyant, but when she exhaled, her head dipped closer to the surface. She knew she had to keep her face out of the water, but her consciousness was a dim light, unable to penetrate the dark clouds of exhaustion and hypothermia, fading with each passing second.
Fading…
Suddenly, she felt very heavy. The current pushed hard against her, but she wasn’t moving. The river, it seemed, had chosen to cast her up on a rocky shoal.
Safe in the knowledge that she probably wouldn’t drown, she was content to simply lay there, the tepid water continued to leach away her body heat. She needed to get out of the river and find shelter from the rain, but even the contemplation of movement was a daunting task.
Just get out of the river, she told herself. Do that much, and then you can rest.
With a groan, she rolled over and started crawling. The slippery rocks shifted beneath her, dropping her to the bottom, bruising her knees and scraping her palms. She endured the river’s final attack and dragged herself onto the shore.
Now get up. Find some shelter.
She shook her head. No. Rest now. That was the deal.
Her internal retort was half-hearted. She knew that she had to keep moving. Just a few more seconds…
Something rustled in the woods beyond where she lay. She turned toward the sound, just as a man stepped into the open.
“No,” she groaned, but her plea was as futile as everything else she had tried.
She didn’t recognize the man, but there was no mistaking the pistol in his hand or his intent when he aimed it at her heart. He did not fire, however. Instead, he held something close to his mouth — a cell phone or walkie-talkie — and spoke. “This is Trace. I found her.”
There was a brief pause, and then a disembodied voice — Cort’s voice — issued from the handset. “You know what to do.”
53
Trace’s expression reminded Jenna of how Zack had regarded her in the Everglades, just before—
I stabbed him in the eye.
— he tried to kill her. There was no grin of triumph, no exultation of sadistic bloodlust. Just a grim mask of resolve to perform an unpleasant task for the greater good, like cleaning up a toxic waste spill or putting out a brushfire.
You are dangerous.
He brought his gun up with a determined brusqueness. She could almost read his thoughts: Make it quick. Don’t let her distract you. She’ll kill you if she gets the chance.
Jenna doubted very much that she was physically capable of killing him. Just trying to speak left her on the verge of collapse. “How…did you find me?”
No real mystery there. The drainage system was probably a matter of public record. One phone call, and Cort would have known where she would end up. After that, it would have been a simple matter to intercept her on the river. She did not need an explanation. She just needed to make him realize that if he pulled the trigger, he would be killing a real human being. Trace showed no indication that he had even heard her.
You have to live.
How?
Flight? Impossible. She wasn’t sure she could muster the strength to stand, much less make a dash for the tree line, and even if she could manage that, Trace was so close, she wouldn’t get two steps.
Fight?
With what?
She closed her right hand over a smooth river stone the size of her fist. She could throw it. Even if she didn’t put him out of commission, it might buy her a second or two to run.
And then what?
Her inner voice had no advice to give, but to her surprise, Noah’s advice came to her. Your gut reaction to a threat will be to either run away, as fast as you can, or to blow through it head on… But a lot of times, those are the worst choices you could make. You might make a bad situation even worse, or you might miss out on an opportunity.