When she felt the corners of her eyes begin to sting, Sophie stretched them wide open, refusing to cry.
Moira went on. “We couldn’t keep them all, of course— all those baby Controls, with their twins still encased in glass. But you captivated us from the start. You must believe me. Choosing you, convincing Corpus to let us have you—it had nothing to do with the project or with our research. It was pure enchantment. We adored you from the start, don’t you see? We both did. We fell in love with you, darling, and we couldn’t stop ourselves.” Her voice gained momentum, as if tumbling downhill, her words getting away from her in a rush. “We took you and raised you as our own, and I have never regretted a moment of that.”
Sophie sucked in a breath and held it, felt it burning in her lungs as she glared at Moira. “Well, obviously that’s not true.”
Moira bit her lip, looked down at the floor. “Our separation had nothing to do with you. Nothing in the least. My greatest regret in life is letting you go—but don’t you see? It had to happen. You couldn’t have stayed in Guam. You were too close. Sooner or later you’d make your way here and all the work we put into shielding you from this place would have gone to ruin. Though,” she laughed bitterly, “here were are, I suppose, so what good did it do? But what came between your father and I had nothing to do with you. There was so much more to it.”
“Do I have a chip?” Sophie asked, her voice hollow.
“No, of course not.”
“But . . . it beeped. That wand thing.”
“Nicholas was trying to intimidate you, make you fear him. He’s a psychopath.”
“Yes,” said Sophie, going monotone. “So I’ve heard.” He killed Jim. He killed Jim. The words chased themselves around her head, making her dizzy. It still didn’t feel real.
“His stunt with the wand . . . It’s a classic psychopathic move, a kind of display of power. Put it out of your mind. The only abnormal thing about you is that you were created in a glass box. Well. That, and your remarkable aptitude for stubbornness.” She sighed. “As for the Controls. Having never raised a fetus through ectogenesis—artificial gestation, being born from a machine instead of a mother—we needed to be able to measure ectogenic children uninfluenced by a chip against those who were. None of you have chips.”
“Proper scientific method, eh? Never change more than one variable at a time. You needed me and the other Controls to live a normal life—huh, well, as normal as could be, considering. So you posed as my mother. Watched me grow up. Measured me, as you say. Go on, then. Give it to me straight. No more lies.”
Moira exhaled slowly, then nodded. “Very well. Yes. Your father may have left the project here, but no one can ever fully escape Corpus. He’s held up his end, keeping me updated on you. Written reports, sound files, videos. I’ve watched you grow up, Sophie, even after you moved to the States. You are a remarkable young woman. So brilliant, so motivated, so strong.”
You think you’re better than us, but you’re not. You’re not as special as you think, Sophie Crue. Nicholas’s laughter pierced her thoughts, and her skin prickled as if he were standing right behind her. The very first Vitro. And her own so-called father, spying on her for Corpus, never telling her the full truth. She had been able to forgive him for not telling her the truth about Skin Island—but could she forgive him for not telling her the truth about herself? She didn’t know. She needed time, time to think, to evaluate from this new perspective. She wanted to go back, pull out scrapbooks, memories, home videos, to review every moment of her past with clear eyes, unsullied by the lies that had tainted her years. Who am I really? What has my life truly meant? She could never look back at her days spent running wild on the beaches with Jim the same way. Her rough acclimation to New England, the exotic vacations around the world with Moira, every conversation, every look, every moment with her father was different now, with new meanings and undercurrents brought to light that she’d never even suspected were there.
She wasn’t even a Crue. She was just Sophie. Sophie Nothing.
She let out a long, slow breath as a peculiar feeling came over her: buoyant, exhilarating lightness, as if she’d swallowed a lungful of helium. She felt as though a thousand-pound pack had been lifted from her shoulders, and she could suddenly fly.
“Sophie?” Moira asked uncertainly. “Let me look at your shoulder. Please. That bandage is done all wrong.”
Sophie sat very still as Moira unwrapped the cloth Jim had hastily tied and then bit her tongue to keep from whimpering as Moira’s fingers probed the wound. When she shut her eyes, she saw an explosion of red on the inside of her eyelids, and she felt a rising surge of panic and grief that she struggled to keep down, packing it away. She could only deal with so much at once, and she decided to deal with the easier trauma first, feeling cowardly for doing so, feeling as if she were betraying Jim by putting off the internalization of his death.
“It only clipped you,” Moira said, sounding relieved. “Let me take care of it.” She found some gauze in a drawer, and a cool cream that she gently applied before wrapping the shoulder in a quick, effective bandage. As she tied it off, she whispered, “I know you must be devastated. But I do love you.”
She loves me, too, in her own way—because she created me, Nicholas had said. I’m her project; she doesn’t love me, but the reflection of herself in me.
“You have a home here, Sophie,” Moira went on. “If you want it. The reason I said no before—you must believe me that I wanted you to have a life of freedom. Yes, Corpus has been watching you your entire life, but you didn’t know that. You felt free—and so you were. But now that you know the truth, I guess it doesn’t matter. We needed you to feel that freedom, to grow up as ordinary a girl as you could be, so that we could measure the differences between you and Lux. As with all the Vitros and their Controls, we needed to know how different Lux would have been compared to a perfectly normal version of herself.”
I wasn’t even created to be Sophie—but a version of Lux. An alternative Lux leading a fake life. But even that thought didn’t weigh down the burgeoning sense of weightlessness in Sophie’s chest—and that astonished her. Why am I not angrier? Why am I not crying or yelling or demanding to know why?
“Do you hear what I’m saying, Sophie? You can stay here. There’s no point now in your going back, if you don’t want to.”
“No point.”
“No.” Moira reached out, rested her fingertips on Sophie’s knee.
Sophie drew away. “No point?”
“Sophie, what’s wrong? Talk to me, sweetheart?”
“No.” Sophie stood up, keeping the bench between them. “No,” she repeated, her voice calm. “You don’t get to call me that, not anymore.”
“I know. I have no right. But if you’ll listen—”
“Don’t you see?” she said, spreading her hands. “Don’t you see what this means? I can go, Mom—no, Dr. Crue. I can stop trying to impress the mother I never had. I can stop living my entire life around you, stop packing myself into little boxes just to live up to your standards. The meds they make me take, all those times Dad told me I was crazy for still loving you—I hated it. I hated myself. I thought the reason you left me was because I was broken.” Now she was crying, and she dashed the tears away angrily. “I thought that if I could just prove to you I was okay that you’d come back for me. But I’ve lived my entire life to please a lie.” Sophie pressed her hands to her temples, her breath coming in deep, heady drafts. “But not anymore. No, I won’t stay on Skin Island. You and Corpus have controlled me all my life, every bit as much as you’ve controlled Lux—no, don’t say it. I may have not known you were there, but you were pulling strings the whole time. Well, I won’t be controlled anymore.” She turned around again. “The first step toward being free is recognizing that you’re not. I’ve done that. I won’t go back now, not to what I was.” “You can’t run. It’s not that simple. Your father can’t protect or hide you.”