Cloneward Bound Read online

  EGMONT

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  First published by Egmont USA, 2013

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Paper Lantern Lit, 2013

  paper lantern lit

  All rights reserved

  www.egmontusa.com

  www.theclonechronicles.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Castle, M. E.

  Cloneward bound / M.E. Castle.

  p. cm. — (The Clone chronicles ; #2)

  Summary: After his clone escapes to Hollywood and becomes an actor, Fisher Bas goes on a school trip to get him back before their secret is discovered.

  eISBN: 978-1-60684-405-2

  [1. Cloning—Fiction. 2. School field trips—Fiction.

  3. Bullies—Fiction. 4. Middle schools—Fiction.

  5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C2687337Clo 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012024613

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  v3.1

  For my sister,

  As she steps out into the world.

  I think I owe a warning … to the world.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  It’s a tough life, being a middle schooler.

  You have to watch out for yourself.

  Or, in my case, all of your selves.

  —Fisher Bas, Journal

  “Morning, Fisher!”

  Fisher Bas smiled and waved at Jacob Li, then winced. His elbow ached. He was still getting used to saying hello to other kids. Up until about two weeks ago, his existence at Wompalog Middle School had barely been acknowledged—much less appreciated. Before then, his Monday morning was usually spent mathematically analyzing the layout of the decorative plants in the school’s hallway, calculating the chances of being spotted as he dashed from one to another.

  A lot can change in a few days. Fisher, once a stale bread crumb caught in the thin, scraggly stubble of middle school, had suddenly become a fresh, flaky croissant in the eyes of his classmates.

  Fisher made his way down the hall, passing spots that would always stand as monuments to his past embarrassments: the Museum of Fisher’s Pathetic Existence. First he passed infamous locker number 314, where he’d spent four entire class periods because he hadn’t known that the inside latch was broken when he’d hidden in it.

  Next, he passed the chipped double doors to the school library. He knew that if he inspected the larger books inside, a good half of them would have the faint imprint of his head. He winced whenever he walked past the encyclopedia shelf, and not just because the entry on particle physics was in dire need of an update. He’d offered to write it himself and glue his new entry over the current one, but the librarians hadn’t been too pleased with the idea, which had baffled Fisher.

  Leaving the library behind, he saw a line of metal coat hooks sticking out of the wall, one of which was bent crookedly toward the ground. Small as he was, Fisher weighed a lot more than a coat. The Vikings, the gang of bullies that had made his life a living nightmare since they had grown into hulking monstrosities in fourth grade, had held him down, stripped his coat off, and forced it on him backward. Then they’d pulled his hood up in front of his face and slipped it onto the hook.

  “Well, well, well. What have we here?”

  Fisher stopped dead in his tracks. He turned around, sneakers squeaking loudly, as if asking his permission to run away without him.

  As though summoned by his thoughts, there they were: the looming, ugly faces of Brody, Willard, and Leroy. The Vikings. They looked like statues cut from dark, grimy stone by a sculptor with no depth perception and very shaky hands.

  Brody stood in the center as always, the leader of the pack. Willard bobbled back and forth slightly on clumsy, uneven legs on Brody’s right, and to Brody’s left stood Leroy. By far the dumbest and most easily distracted of the bunch, Leroy’s eyes started to drift after a few seconds.

  “Good morning, Fisher,” Brody said with the least reassuring smile Fisher had ever seen. Alligators smiled with less malice. Fisher would know. His father kept one in the lab at home.

  “Um … hello,” Fisher said, trying to muster up some of his newfound courage. Unfortunately, when facing the Vikings, it was definitely not in the mood to be mustered.

  Before the TechX episode, most people at Wompalog had settled for ignoring Fisher. But the Vikings had gone out of their way to notice—and torment—him. They were obviously displeased that Fisher’s escaping from the famous TechX Industries—and exposing its dark secrets—had made him an overnight hero.

  Now everyone noticed Fisher, and he was no longer such an easy target. But just because they had eased up a little lately did not mean that the threat was over.

  “We’re just giving you a friendly reminder,” Brody said, rubbing his greasy palms together, “that we’re still here.”

  “And things may *hic* be qu-quiet now,” Willard went on, “but k-keep your ears open.”

  “We’ve, uh, got you under lobstervation,” Leroy finished. Brody turned and gave him a long, withering look, then let out a frustrated sigh.

  “Observation, Leroy,” Brody said. He turned back to Fisher. “Now get out of here before we decide to make this chat a little more private. Maybe in that janitor’s closet over there …?”

  Fisher looked to the closet in question and shivered. Unspeakable things had happened in the janitor’s mop bucket, and he wanted no part of them. He didn’t need a second invitation to flee.

  “Lobstervation??” he heard Brody say as he sped away. “What do you think I want to do, turn him into a shellfish? Willard, if you please.” The last thing Fisher heard before he turned the corner was the resounding smack of Willard’s broad, fat hand against Leroy’s broad, fat head.

  He walked around the corner so fast that he ran smack into a kid he hadn’t seen, half somersaulting forward and landing in a daze on his back.

  “Oop. Sorry, Fisher,” the boy said, helping Fisher to his feet. Fisher looked at the unfamiliar boy’s acne-pitted, smiling face. The boy was obviously an eighth grader.

  “No worries …” Fisher said, backing away. He still wasn’t used to the idea that other people knew him.

  Two weeks ago, an encounter with the Vikings would have ended with Fisher head down in a wastepaper basket or sifting the baseball field’s dirt out of his hair. But ever since his trained attack mosquitoes had swarmed the Vikings in the middle of the cafeteria, they’d been a lot more careful around him. He’d earned a degree of respect around Wompalog that even the Vikings were forced to acknowledge.

  Except he hadn’t earned it. At least, he hadn’t earned it alone. A feeling of guilt squirmed in the
bottom of Fisher’s stomach. As he headed to class, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper. He unfolded it for the four hundred and fifty-fourth time—he’d counted—and read the note.

  Two, aka Fisher-2, a genetically exact copy of Fisher. A clone that Fisher had made himself, using an extremely secret, highly dangerous chemical compound, Accelerated Growth Hormone, that he’d stolen from his mom’s personal lab. The last time he’d seen Two was in the collapsing corridors of TechX Industries, fighting with Dr. X: shadowy inventor, evil megalomaniac and, as it turned out, Fisher’s (former) favorite biology teacher.

  Moments later, the whole complex had turned into a hundred-foot-tall column of glowing dust. Naturally, Fisher had assumed that Two had gone down with the building and, as horrible as Fisher had felt about losing Two, he also felt a guilty sense of relief. If Two was gone, it meant that his secret was safe forever.

  Now, it turned out that not only was his secret not safe, it was running around Los Angeles, chasing after a commercial actress who formed the center of the fantasy Fisher had hastily created to try and keep Two in check. Considering how much havoc Two had caused while loose in the school, Fisher could hardly imagine what kind of damage he could inflict in one of the biggest cities on earth.

  Two school weeks had passed since TechX had gone up in an ash cloud, and Fisher had ridden the waves of glory well enough until Friday, when the note appeared in his mailbox. He’d spent all weekend in his room laboratory trying to construct a Two Tracking Unit. After a mind-numbing process of figuring out how to make it not just point at himself, he took the TTU out for a test run. Unfortunately, all it had pointed him in the direction of was an opossum, a 1992 Honda Civic, and a hot dog with peppers. Maybe if he could figure out what trace elements Two had in common with those things …

  Fisher refolded the note for the four hundred and fifty-fourth time and tucked it back into his pocket. He tried to will away mental images of the HOLLYWOOD sign blasting into space, Two perched happily in one of the crooks of the W. Fisher turned into his science classroom and took his usual seat at the front left corner.

  Every day for a year, he had walked into this room and sat down in exactly the same spot, while skinny, meek Mr. Granger had tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to get the class in order. Fisher had gotten to know Granger and even considered him a friend. Fisher was a genius. He had also learned, over the past few weeks, that he was a pretty good liar. This meant, he thought, that he should be a pretty good lie detector.

  But it turned out that his biology teacher had really been a fiendish, maniacal scientist bent on destruction and conquest, and Fisher hadn’t even had a clue. It made him wonder if any of his other teachers were really supervillains. He could definitely see his English teacher, Mrs. Weedle, fitting the bill. If Mr. Granger had been able to hide his true nature from Fisher for so long, what kind of secrets could the other people around him be hiding? He let his eyes wander around the classroom.

  But as he glanced toward the door, his mind went blank, and his lungs decided to take a quick mid-inhale break.

  Veronica Greenwich walked through the door trailing a blur of dawn light and silver mist—at least, that’s what it seemed like to Fisher. She saw him and smiled, and Fisher was just able to muster enough control over his face muscles to smile back.

  Fisher hadn’t told anyone that Granger was actually Dr. X and had been disintegrated along with the TechX building. Who would have believed him, anyway? As far as Fisher was concerned, all that mattered was that after Mr. Granger had “mysteriously disappeared,” there had been some reshuffling of the science classes, and he was now in the same class as Veronica.

  After she sat down on the other side of the room, Fisher slipped another piece of paper out of his bag and set it on his desk, then pulled out a pencil.

  Increase in social acknowledgement following TechX incident over time passed since, respect among scientific peers, reputation among students helped with homework … He scribbled in a few new variables and numbers. Taking into account recent actions of V—Veronica, in the equations—a careful measure of smiling ratio should yield answer … K.

  On the far right side of the equation, the point of all Fisher’s tangled math and logic, was the letter K.

  K: the exact moment in time when Fisher might get his first kiss from Veronica.

  K: the idea was something so otherworldly to Fisher that the only way he could cope with it was in a form that he understood: symbols, variables, and strings of numbers. It was the way that he best understood the world. At the same time, he knew that, if it happened, the kiss itself wasn’t going to take place on graph paper. And if—when!—an opportunity for K should arise, he didn’t know what he would do. Was there a book he could read? Somebody he could ask?

  His pencil worked like it had a mind of its own—and a frantic mind at that. The layers of equations scrawled along and filled out as Fisher added new variables to account for Veronica’s recent behavior toward him. At first, when he’d embraced his new hero status, she had coldly shrugged him off. But he could tell that the new result was going to yield a much smaller value for K. He felt his face begin to go slack as the last few results added up.

  He stared down at the new value of K. He blinked once. The number had indeed decreased by almost fifty percent—to only one thousand, two hundred fourteen years, and three days. He looked back over at Veronica as she neatly wrote the date at the top of her class notes. Maybe if I put both of us into long-term hibernation incryo-freeze pods …

  “Good morning, everyone!”

  Fisher was taken out of his reverie by the voice of Ms. Snapper, Mr. Granger’s replacement. She normally taught eighth-grade science, but had agreed to take over Mr. Granger’s class until further notice. Fisher quickly folded up his graph paper and slipped it into his bag.

  Ms. Snapper was tall and slender, wore black, wire-frame glasses, and had dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Since she had stepped in to teach the class after Mr. Granger’s mysterious disappearance, Fisher had gotten to like her. Still, he had liked Mr. Granger, too, and look how that had ended up. He was going to need some more time before he could feel at ease in this class, no matter who taught it.

  “I’ve got a special announcement to make,” Ms. Snapper said in a bright, cheerful voice. “You may remember Mr. Granger was planning a trip this week,” she said. “In spite of the … unfortunate circumstances,” she went on—none of the teachers seemed sure how to talk about Mr. Granger’s vanishing act—“I spoke to the administration and we’re going to go ahead with our class trip to LA, where we’ll get the privilege of seeing a taping of the popular TV program Strange Science! We’ll depart midday this Friday and be back on Monday morning in time for third period.”

  Several people shouted and clapped; others sighed, clearly annoyed at the prospect of giving up a weekend for anything school related. Fisher felt like he could bounce out of his seat. He’d forgotten all about the proposed trip in light of the whole clone situation. Two was in LA! Now Fisher had a way to get there. This could be his chance to find his clone … before everyone else found out about him.

  As an added bonus, Strange Science had become a late-afternoon favorite of his since it started airing. That was largely due to its host, who went by the name Dr. Devilish. He was tall and handsome, with a commanding presence and a smooth-talking charm—and he was an accomplished scientist. Fisher had never seen someone who had both academic and social skills. Dr. Devilish gave him hope for his own future.

  “Because this trip takes place over the weekend,” Ms. Snapper went on, “participation is strictly voluntary. So, can I get a show of interested students?”

  Fisher’s hand shot up first, and others followed. Some people were murmuring excitedly about Dr. Devilish; others were obviously looking forward to missing half of Friday and two class periods on Monday.

  Then Fisher saw Veronica’s hand go up. His pulse started thudding. It was too g
ood to be true. He quickly reached down and whipped out his graph paper. He scribbled with one hand as he kept the other up, trying to determine how going on this trip together might affect the value of K. Hopefully, enough to make it earlier than the year that Wompalog Middle School became an archaeological dig site.

  “Ms. Snapper?” said Veronica.

  “Yes … Veronica?” Ms. Snapper said, taking a moment to be sure she had her name right. “You have a question?”

  “Is …” Veronica looked slightly embarrassed. “Do you think there’s any chance we might get to meet Kevin Keels?”

  Fisher dropped his pencil.

  “Kevin Keels …” Ms. Snapper said, her eyes turning up in thought. “Is that an actor you like?”

  Fisher felt like he’d just been slapped in the face with a frozen mackerel. Kevin Keels was the latest pop sensation, a thirteen-year-old whose ballads and dance hits were slowly creeping on to every radio station nationwide, as Veronica—as well as all the other girls in the class—hurried to explain to Ms. Snapper. The only reason Fisher knew about the pop star’s existence was that CURTIS, the artificial intelligence he’d freed from TechX that now resided in his computer, had been wailing Keels’s incredibly annoying and brain-meltingly stupid songs for the past three weeks straight. And to top it off, Kevin Keels had just finished filming a movie about his rise to fame: Keel Me Now.

  Which was more or less the thought that went through Fisher’s head as he buried it in his hands, trying to drown out the excited chatter that filled the room.

  CHAPTER 2

  If the monkey really wanted to get the weasel, he would’ve stopped wasting time and burned down the mulberry bush.

  —Amanda Cantrell, Practice Harvard Admissions Essay

  By the time science class ended, Fisher felt as though his heart was plastered to the soles of his shoes. Kevin Keels? Kevin Keels, whose hair actually glowed as if a helicopter with a spotlight followed him everywhere he went. Kevin Keels, who sold out arenas so big you needed an astronomical telescope to see him from the back row. Kevin Keels, who had a basketball shoe named after him even though he didn’t play basketball.