Chapter 101 Her Own Face

For a long moment I cannot do anything but look at myself look back. The face in the tank is mine the way a word repeated too many times stops being a word.Every feature is in the right place. Brow. Mouth. The small crookedness at the left eye.Still wrong.Wrong before I can name why.Because I have spent thirty years behind this face and I know what it does when no one is supposed to be watching, and that knowledge is what the face in the tank does not have.It is my face with the person scraped out. My architecture, swept clean and refurnished by someone else.“They’re called the finished line,” Leo says, low through the panel, and there is grief in the machine of his voice.“Or the products. The Director doesn’t pretend with names the way the city does. He took the real sample, the one that got out, and he didn’t just clone you. He improved you. For purpose.”“Improved how.&r

Chapter 102 The First Hunt

They send it for me before the assessment can. That tells me who is really in charge down here, and how little patience he has left.It comes while Damian is being escorted back to his quarters and Mara has gone to keep the others from noticing my absence, in the narrow hour I am alone in the residential tier with my brother in the walls.It does not come the way a guard comes. There is no alarm, no squad, no announcement.Only the silence changes, a thinning, the particular hush that falls over a space when a predator has entered it, and I have lived my whole life as the thing that makes that hush, so I know it from the other side the instant it arrives.I turn, and it is standing at the end of the corridor wearing my face. Out of the tank now. Dressed in the same soft grey as the tame ones, which is its own obscenity, my face above a gentle collar.It stands the way the finished things stand, too still between breaths, and it looks at me with my

Chapter 103 What I Am

Damian finds me standing over my own body.He comes fast, the way he came on the beach, the way he comes whenever I have burned and the field has screamed it across the city, and he stops short when he sees what is on the floor, and for once even he has nothing ready to say.He looks at the dead thing wearing my face, the slack features, the silver guttering out of the open eyes, and then he looks at me, the living one, glowing, cracked, swaying on my feet, and I watch him understand what just happened and what it has done to me.“It told me the truth,” I say. My voice is very far away.I am waiting for him to argue. To do the human thing, take my shoulders, tell me I am more than that, the thing a person says to a person who is coming apart. It is what I want, and wanting it is part of the unraveling, and I hate that I want it from him of all people.He does not do the human thing. He does the Damian thing instead, which is worse and b

Chapter 104 The Cage Tightens

The gentle city stops being gentle the way a tide turns, all at once and everywhere. The warm light goes white and flat. The soft doors that opened at a touch lock with a sound like teeth meeting.And the people, the tame untroubled people who sat in the commons and taught children to read, lift their heads from whatever they were doing and turn, all of them, toward the residential tier, toward me, with the blank unhurried attention of a thing that has been told what to do and feels nothing about doing it.Caleb is the first to reach the corridor.He looks at the dead clone on the floor, and at the casing in my glowing fist, and at the silver still webbing the skin of my arms, and the kind light in his face does not vanish, which is the most frightening part.It simply turns. The same gentleness, the same untroubled certainty, pointed now at the work of bringing me down.“You shouldn’t have made him decide,” he says, sorrowful, si

All Chapters of The Surrogate’s Blade: Chapter 101 - Chapter 104

Chapter 101 Her Own Face

Chapter 102 The First Hunt

Chapter 103 What I Am

Chapter 104 The Cage Tightens