The Surrogate’s Blade
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’
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