“Is something wrong, Dr. Scott?” Jeremiah asked. “Are you okay?”

“You will take the Meld as you are instructed, Mr. Adams,” Scott said firmly, and he strode across the room and out the door without turning around again.

Jeremiah sat, stunned, staring at the door after it closed. There was no mistaking what he’d seen. That was some sort of spasm, a seizure or something. Had Jeremiah been looking the other way, he might have missed it. It was that brief, but it had happened, and it was proof of everything he suspected.

Chapter 18

Day 100

Early on a Thursday afternoon, Jeremiah and Brent settled in for a viewing he was certain would show the clone alone at his desk. He was surprised, then, when the cameras opened up, not in his ViMed office, but once again in his mother’s room at the assisted living home.

“Now what?” he asked cautiously, not really wanting to know the answer. Brent said nothing.

The clone, dressed in his work clothes, was standing just inside the doorway, his back to the camera, and his mother was flitting purposefully around her small room, gathering clothes from the closet and the drawers and stuffing them, unfolded, into a suitcase, which lay open on the bed.

“Mom,” the clone said, and Jeremiah was surprised at how much it continued to bother him to hear the word come from his double’s mouth. The only person in the world who had a right to call her “Mom” was Jeremiah. “Stop packing. I didn’t say you had to leave right this minute.”

“Well, if they’re throwing me out, then why wait?”

“No one is throwing you out, Mom. Will you just stop for a minute and listen to me?”

“You’re working with them,” she said, a small, sardonic laugh escaping her lips. “You’re not fooling me. You think I don’t know. But I see everything.”

An exasperated sigh escaped the clone’s lips just as Jeremiah sighed in exactly the same manner in the lab. Brent typed something into his laptop.

“I think you’re imagining things. No one is working against you, Mom. We’re all just trying to help.”

“Do you take me for a fool?” she asked. “They’ve been stealing my things. Putting drugs in my food. And now you tell me I have to leave. I say good riddance! I’ll leave right now. The sooner, the better. It’s not safe here.”

“Just slow down, Mom,” the clone said, moving toward her and taking a balled-up blouse from her hands. “No one is trying to hurt you. No one is putting anything in your food. This is foolishness.”

The clone led her by the shoulder and eased her to the edge of the bed. She looked away from him and shook her head.

“Foolishness,” she said. “That’s what you’d like me to believe. But I know what’s going on.” As if to illustrate that point, she poked a bony finger at her temple and repeated it. “I know what’s going on.”