The Adoration of Jenna Fox (24 page)

And I'm afraid I am becoming something that the
old Jenna Fox never was and maybe ten percent isn't enough after all. I am
afraid of Dane and that the something that everyone says he is missing is the
same thing Father may have left out of me, too, and that Senator Harris is
perfectly right about it all and Father is perfectly wrong. I'm afraid I will
never have friends like Kara and Locke again and it will all be my fault. I'm
afraid that for the rest of my two or two hundred years I will still have all
these questions and I will never fit in.

And I'm afraid that Claire and Matthew Fox will
discover that the new, improved Jenna doesn't add up to three babies at all and
never did and everything they risked was for nothing, Because when all is said
and done, I am not special at all. Those are the kind of things I am afraid of.

But I am not afraid of
Allys
.

"She said she liked me," I say to
him. "She wouldn't tell."

"I saw her eyes."

I turn around and lay my head against his
chest. I listen to his heartbeat. A real heartbeat.

"We need to talk to her. Soon," he
says.

Sliding

Allys
is not at school the next day. Or
the next. Should I worry?

I listen for sounds. Knocks on the door.
Footsteps.

Sirens tracking me down.

When Mother and Father are gone and Lily
is out in the greenhouse, I listen, waiting for the silence of the house to
crumble.

I wait for creaks on the stairs, and I
wonder what it would be like to be imprisoned again. And then when the silence
is long and sustained and I am beginning to believe it will always be there,
when a tiny doorway is opened and I am trying to slide through to that place
called normal, the silence is broken again.

Not by footsteps. But by a voice.

Hurry, Jenna.

A voice crisp and clear. Not the voice
of my past. Not the voice of a dream. The voice of now.

There are no keys flying through the
air. No hot glimpses of a night that still escapes me but has changed me
forever. No memories of words said in haste. But fresh words that somehow crawl
through my scalp until I feel I may be mad.

We need you. Now.

Match

I stomp through our eucalyptus forest,
letting my feet come down hard on twisted pieces of bark and twigs, listening
to the snap, the crunch, and the sounds I can control. I kick up the woven mat
of leaves at my feet and release months and years of decay and send beetles
scurrying for cover. The voices are quiet. I slow my pace. Is it guilt speaking
to me? Or did Father not understand everything his tampering might lead to? I
hear the rush of the creek at the bottom of the incline and the rustle of
something else nearby. Birds?

The forest is foreign, an import, Lily
tells me. At the turn of the last century, someone thought he could make his
fortune raising the timber for railroad ties. As it turned out, the wood was
too hard for cutting once it dried, and the groves were abandoned. They spread
on their own, sometimes wiping out native species of plants. Lily is not
pleased.
Original, native, pure
—these
are the words that matter to Lily. And
Allys
.

I look at the trees that don't belong,
brought here through no fault of their own. Their bark is soft velvet, mottled
and creamy, and their scent is pungent. The leaves, smooth slices of silvery
green, create a thick, lacy carpet on the forest floor. Beautiful but unwanted.
What have they crowded out that was more beautiful or more important?

I reach out between two trees, pressing
a hand against each, breathing in slowly, closing my eyes, searching for
something beyond their bark and branches and second-class status on these
hills, searching for something like their souls.

Snap!

Crunch!

My eyes shoot open.

Pain grips my wrist.

"Dane!" I try to pull away,
but he holds tight, squeezing harder, watching my face for my response.

"Let go," I tell him.

His face is no longer empty but instead
crackling with something else. It is the only time I have seen his eyes bright
and engaged, like he has been plugged in. He doesn't smile.

"Let's go for a walk," he says.

"I'm not walking anywhere with you,
Dane."

"Why? You prefer boys like Ethan who are
dangerous? I could be dangerous." He pulls me closer, his breathing
labored.

I feel his fingers dig into my skin, his blue
eyes, pulled to sharp pinpoints, like an animal's, adrenaline driven, hungry
for nothing else but destruction, empty of self and others. Dane, fully flesh
and blood, but one hundred percent of nothing.

"Not nearly as dangerous as me. I'm
leaving." I try to pull away.

“I said
we're going for a walk," he says, jerking
me closer.

"Let's not," I answer, and my free
hand juts forward to his groin. My aim is on the mark, my grip as tight as his.
His eyes widen. His fingers tighten on my wrist. My fingers tighten, too. His
eyelids flutter, his face reddens.

"I may walk funny, Dane, but Ethan says I
have the endurance of a horse. I can stand here all day long. Can you?"

He makes a last effort by twisting my wrist.
Pain rips up my arm. In return, my other hand squeezes beyond his limits. He
screams out, releasing my wrist. I let go of him, and he falls to his knees,
moaning. Besides the revulsion running through me, I feel something unexpected
—gratitude. He's shown me how empty a one hundred
percent human being can be. Percentages can be deceptive.

His face trembles, and his eyes are sharp and
cold looking up at me. He is still trying to catch his breath, and I know I
have only a few seconds before he comes at me again.

"Jenna, there you are! Shall we finish our
walk?"

Mr. Bender comes through the woods, making a
show of his golf club, swinging it more than he is using it for balance on the
hillside.

"Yes," I say, leaving Dane to
contemplate how much worse a golf club in his skull might feel than my hand in
his groin.

Mr. Bender and I walk down the incline and
cross the creek where a downed log provides a bridge. "I was in my yard
when I saw you walk into the forest," he says. "When I saw Dane
follow a short time later, I grabbed my club."

"Thank you. Between your golf club and my
grip, I think he's headed in the other direction by now." We walk out of
the forest and up the path that leads to his house.

"Should we call the police?"

I hesitate. "No. It wouldn't be a good
idea for either of us. I'll be more careful in the future."

"You shouldn't go into the forest alone.
It's not just that criminal. Sometimes there are mountain lions in the
area."

I stop and face him. "Really, Mr. Bender
—or should I call
you
Edward?—we both know I can
be replaced as easily as a damaged
Netbook
. Backups
are handy that way."

He looks almost as stunned as Dane did a few
minutes ago. "How'd you figure it out?"

"The backups or you?"

"Both."

"I have five hundred billion
neurochips
, Mr.  Bender.  It wasn't difficult.
But Father probably told you about that already."

Mr. Bender nods, looking down. He shouldn't be
ashamed. He was Father's friend before he was mine. I resume my pace.
"When you have five times the brain capacity, I guess it's just a matter of
time before you start using it." Details from two-year-old Jenna's brain
had surfaced sometime after I saw the old battered aqua car in Mr. Bender's
garage. "And I finally remembered an old photo that hung in our brownstone
when I was a toddler. It was of Father with his first car. The aqua one he
passed on to you."

Small slips these are, memories they wouldn't
expect from a two-year-old, but my memories don't differentiate
—two days, two years, or ten—they are all the same weight and
intensity.

"I just found the house for him. I owed
him that," he says. "I don't know as much as you may think. Your
father told me very little."

"To spare you, probably. The less you
know, the less guilty, right?"

He doesn't reply.

"So you kept in touch with him all these
years?"

"Not at first, but after a few years I
needed that connection. I needed someone who knew me before. So that the rest
of my life wasn't invalid. It's more painful to leave your identity behind than
most people imagine. Essentially, you've been erased. It doesn't really make
sense, I know, but when I finally contacted your dad, he listened and he
understood. He was always
therefor
me, from giving me
his car when I needed to get away to being there when I needed to talk."

"You talk often?"

"Maybe once every year or so. Not often.
And then we have to be careful. He called me when you were hurt. He was wild
with grief. And then he called me again a few days later. He babbled mostly.
Thinking out loud. I thought he was drunk at first. Really talking more to
himself than me, but I guess he just needed me there to listen. He said he knew
he was going to lose you unless he did something . . . drastic. He didn't tell
me what. He just hung up, and I didn't hear from him again until he called
about needing a house that was out of the way."

"So that was your role. Long-distance
Realtor." A slight tilt of his head, and a hesitant nod, makes me remember
what Lily said. "Oh, and you were also the other half of the whisking
team," I add.

"Whisking?"

"Getting me out of Dodge."

He smiles. "Right. I'm part of the
emergency drill. Your father said he'd rather keep you here since he can easily
get medical support if something goes wrong, but if the authorities should find
out, your grandmother is to bring you to my house. From there I take both of
you to an airstrip not far from here.
It's
only a short flight over the
border into Mexico to another airstrip. And from there you'd fly to Italy.
Italy has more liberal laws regarding transplants."

"And brain uploads? The Italians can't
count?"

He is silent.

"Or to make matters simpler, and save you
some time, my parents could just pop my backup in the mail instead. Parcel
post
could take me to Italy, probably for a lot less expense and worry. Or if
they really want to splurge, they could overnight me with Air Express. Or they
could
—"

The rising delirium in my voice makes me stop
my rant.

"Come," Mr. Bender says. "Let's
sit and talk for a bit."

I nod and follow him up the slope to his house
and we sit in two chairs on his back porch looking out at the pond and my own
house on the other side.

"What's wrong with Dane, Mr. Bender?"
I ask. "My friend
Allys
says he's missing
something."

"I don't know exactly, Jenna, but I think
your friend might be right. All I know for sure is that he's trouble."

"But at least he's legal."

Mr. Bender jogs his chair toward me and leans
forward. "Listen to me, Jenna. There are different kinds of laws. Some are
written in books, and some are written in here." He taps his chest.
"Dane may have the paper kind of legal, but he has none of the kind that's
planted inside."

But how does it get there?

I look at him, his hand still resting against
his chest. How does the "legal" kind get inside? Can it be sewn in by
a surgeon with careful stitches?

"What do you see, Mr. Bender, when you
look at me?"

I watch his eyes, taking in my skin, my face,
my eyes. I see him consider every twitch, every blink of my eyes. I can see his
every misstep, every considered lie, every return to truth. It's a line he
crosses often, and sometimes lies and truth melt into something else. His
tongue runs across his lips. He blinks.

Truth. Lie. Truth. The something else.
Confusion at what  I am?

"Please," I say.

"I see a lot of complicated things when I
look at you, Jenna. A horrible unexpected turn, a second chance, hope
—"

I stand. "Hope for what, Mr. Bender? A
life where I can never be what I was, and can't even be what I am now without
hiding? This is all too hard."

"Jenna." He stands and holds my
shoulders. "I'm sorry for what you're going through. I know it's been
difficult. Believe me, no one knows as well as I do how hard it is to start
over. I think that's why I wanted to help you from the beginning, maybe even
when I shouldn't have. I saw the frightened teen I once was when I looked at
you."

He lets go of my shoulders, but I keep looking
into his face. Mr. Bender is as old as my father, but I see something in him
that is as young as me. Do certain events in our lives leave a permanent mark,
freezing a piece of us in time, and that becomes a touchstone that we measure
the rest of our lives against?