Taken (Erin Bowman)

could live.”
    Harvey smirks at the mirror. “Well, there’s really no point asking anything else,” he announces. “We all know Forgeries are incapable of love. Not to mention he passed every question with flying colors, not even a smidgeon of deceit in his answers.”
    “Well, one more question then,” Fallyn says. “What was the goal of that Order troop? Why was Evan looking to approach Mount Martyr?”
    “It was called Operation Ferret,” I say. “The mission was to infiltrate Rebel Headquarters and bring Harvey back at all costs. Alive.”
    “Now I wonder why they’d want to do that,” Harvey muses aloud, a playful note of humor in his voice.
    “It’s quite obvious why, isn’t it, Harvey?” Fallyn jeers. “You’ve given us too much of an edge since you joined. The Order can’t deal with your revealing their secrets anymore.”
    “Wait, what?” I ask.
    “The Order’s greatest weapon is near useless against us now,” Fallyn continues. “Harvey knows all the secrets, the ticks, the signs. And Frank can’t have that. He can’t have someone revealing how all his technologies work, preparing for how to defend against them. Plus, he wants Harvey to finish the job he started.”
    I stare at the mirror in the back of the room. “I’m not following any of this.”
    Fallyn sighs heavily. “They want him back. They want back the man who engineered the Forgeries.”
    This is how another truth is revealed to me, ironed out before my eyes. My father said that it was impossible for Harvey to have started the Laicos Project because he would have been too young. And this is true. But Harvey was utilized at a young age. He was somewhat of a child prodigy, a genius with technology and genetics. After Frank’s workers failed to create the tools he had hoped from the Heisted boys, Harvey was recruited at sixteen years old.
    He worked in the Order’s defense and weaponry units in Union Central. He spent months, bent over operating tables, extracting what he needed from Heisted boys. Many terms that I do not understand are mentioned, but through his technological ingenuity, Harvey created what no other scientist or lab worker could. Harvey produced the first Forgery. It was identical to the Heisted boy, both in appearance and personality, opening its eyes with the same skills and mannerisms as its source. The Forgery was strong and healthy, but it was still only one soldier.
    Despite Frank’s wishes, Harvey couldn’t create multiple Forgeries from a single test subject. Each further replica was a weaker, fuzzier, less perfect version of the first, growing ill and perishing quickly. Frank urged Harvey to stay focused, and in the meantime, put the first generation of Forgeries to work on the front lines. They were effective in the field against AmWest, stealthy and powerful.
    “A few years ago, things fell apart,” Harvey says, as my father, Ryder, and Fallyn join us in the room. “I had been working to create limitless Forgeries for many years, and still couldn’t crack it. One day, the subject I was running a test on died during the procedure. Even though it was a Forgery of a Forgery, I realized it was still a real, living, breathing person. He had thoughts and a heart and a pulse. It was as if a veil of ignorance shattered then. For the first time in years I saw what I was doing. I was cutting up children and trying to make weapons for a man whose tactics I didn’t fully support.
    “Things had gone from bad to worse in Taem since I started working for Frank. Sure, the city was orderly and he protected the people from AmWest, but everything was regulated to an extreme. For me, water was plentiful and there was a library always at my disposal for research. Frank even let me play old records of Mozart while I worked because I said it helped me focus. But all around me, people were being arrested for those very same acts.
    “So the next day when I was supposed to report for work, I got on the trolley, went the other direction, and didn’t look back. I found a poor town beyond the dome willing to take me in. I stayed there for a few months, until the Order came looking for me. I took to the next town, and then the next. But they kept coming. They never stopped.
    “I ran into Elijah in the Great Forest about three months ago. He told me that all across AmEast people had started to leave cities under Order control. Backlash in Taem was the worst. They knew the threat from AmWest was as present as