Free Emergent (A Beta Novel) by Rachel Cohn Page B

but a sister would be forever.
    Elysia will never be my forever, no matter how much she looks and acts like me. I reject her. I refuse her. I may have to live in proximity to her for the time being, but I will never, ever
accept her. She stole me.
    Let’s just stop with small talk.
    “Who got you pregnant?” I ask her.
    Would her child be considered my child too?
    Her fuchsia eyes pierce directly into mine, challenging me as an equal. I’d appreciate her spunk more if she hadn’t stolen that from me too. “I was violated by the son of the
Governor on Demesne.”
    What?!
    Holy crap. My blood boils into a rage so much bigger than when I discovered Elysia’s existence, worse even than knowing she carries my memories of Xander. I can’t help it. I imagine
what happened to her happening to me, and my gut reaction is: I will kill whoever did that to me. I mean, her. KILL.
    For an instant, Elysia is that sister I used to long for. I want to touch her hand, hold her close to me, to comfort her, to promise her vengeance. I don’t. But I want to.
    A human boy on Demesne treated my clone like she was his property. She
was
his property. Fact. Another version of my face, my body—given no rights or choice, created to serve and
have no wants or desires of her own—there for him to take, just because he wanted to.
    I ask, “Is that why you escaped Demesne? To get away from him?”
    “No,” says Elysia. “It was kill or be killed. So I killed him. And now I am here.”
    Wow. I thought
I
was the outlaw, living as a runaway on this feral island.
    Elysia is the real rebel. She is a murderer. How can a deed so awful make me want to respect her? She took no prisoners. She exacted her own vengeance.
    Xander and Aidan enter the mess hall. My eyes lock with Xander’s for a moment, and my heart burns. I still can’t believe he’s
here
. His look in my direction offers me no
clues if he feels the same. His beautiful turquoise eyes are as blank as a clone’s.
    Elysia looks to him, and then to me. “I’m sorry Alexander hurt you so badly.”
    “How much do you know?” I ask her.
    “Jingjing,” she says, shocking me. “You had already been to Demesne once before, with Alex, hadn’t you?”

IF I CAN’T HAVE HIM, I’ll die,
I thought
.
    Xander was about to leave for a whole new life in the military.
    His old life was better. Swimming. Surfing. Me.
    The only way to survive his new life would be to change with him. I’d go away with him and escape boring school, my tyrant father, the cheerlords who pretended they were my friends but
really weren’t. Once I started a new life with Xander, I’d reinvent myself as someone better, someone happier. Someone perfect, like him.
    Today, this would happen, I told myself. Time to take the dive. If I finally accomplished the one dive that had eluded me since Xander started training me, it would be a fateful sign. Xander
and I were meant to be a team. The Uni-Mil shouldn’t be allowed to break us up.
    I stood atop a ten-meter-high diving platform as Xander watched me from below. I stepped to the edge of the platform and turned around, so my back faced the pool. As I placed my feet in the
familiar formation, Xander called up to me. “The back two-and-a-half? Today’s your day to perfect it. I feel it, Z. You can do it.” His deep, gravelly voice made him sound years
older. He had left home to live on his own when he was just sixteen years old. At nineteen, he was about to the join the elite wing of the Universal Military, which his peaceful Aquine people
traditionally shun. His deep voice announced he was his own man.
    I could do harder dives than this one. But this one, because it was the dive I had choked on at Olympic trials, was torturing me. I wanted to get it right again, so I could move on—in
my training, in my tortured subconscious.
    “Hell yeah!” I said. Generally, backward dives were my lucky dives. When my back was to the pool, I couldn’t see the spectators