Doppelganger

Chapter 1

Trash cans were never a good place to go looking for a meal. No one really threw away anything but bread crusts, coffee grounds and beer cans, and if they tossed out anything good like half a sandwich or out-of-date meat, you could bet that one of the hundreds of homeless regular people had gotten to that trashcan first.

She avoided trash-picking when she could. She was good at charming people and had been invited to numerous houses for dinner, but sometimes there just wasn't anyone to con a meal out of when she was between places to stay. In the six and a half months she had been out of Manticore, she had been through three orphanages, two foster homes, and she had forgotten how many run-down, awful shelters where the rich people tried to do the right thing and send food to the thousands of homeless people. They were always overcrowded, and she only stayed at them long enough to grab a meal, usually a packet of instant noodles or something else generic, and run off again.

To hide her identity, she had gone by a variety of names: Megan Jameson, Georgia Niles, Lily Tatem, Jessi Campbell and a few others. Phonebooks were great resources when looking for new names.

Her real name? Besides the designation X8-270, she didn't have one.

270 couldn't afford to stay in the same place for long, no matter how good the food was or how nice the people were. Staying somewhere for longer than a couple weeks meant giving people too much time to figure out her weirdness, to memorize her face, to get close to her. Not to mention she would start feeling attached to the place, and with her territorial ocelot DNA, that was never good. So she moved. A lot. Sometimes all that moving meant missing out on sleep and real food, but she dealt with it. She was trained to deal with it.

If she was going dumpster-diving, like tonight, she preferred the trash bins outside of the neon-lit, store-front Chinese restaurants. She had found out soon after Manticore had blown up that a half-eaten egg roll with some orange duck sauce on it was pretty wonderful if she hadn't eaten for a couple days.

Chinese restaurants were good, too, because sometimes the cooks would leave extra food out for the stray cats, and she could eat with them. They didn't mind her, probably because they realized that she was sort of one of them in a way. She was probably too much like them now, half-feral from her time spent roaming the streets.

Tonight there was no one to trick a meal from, and no one had left food out for the cats. She nudged an empty metal tray with the tip of her sneaker and huffed a sigh as she glanced over at the rusting metal dumpster. It was massive. No wonder none of the other homeless people had claimed it.

At seven-years-old, she had been one of the oldest soldiers...kids in her unit, but she had also been shorter than most of them, small for her age. It had earned her the nickname 'Runt' from the scientists and doctors and the staff and even their handler, Colonel Channing. She hated it.

Crossing the empty alley, she shimmied up the stack of wooden boxes beside the bin and then lowered herself inside. She grabbed onto the side of the dumpster as her feet sunk into the fried rice and chicken lo mein; cold teriyaki sauce soaked into her jeans and a slimy, wet wonton somehow wriggled its way into her sock. It smelled rancid, and she doubted that a trash truck had been by that week. It was a good thing that she didn't need to eat much.

She knelt down in the garbage and started pawing through the refuse on top. Hopefully someone had tossed out a takeout box that some customer had forgotten to take with them in their haste to leave the shop. Those were always the best because the food usually hadn't touched the garbage.

Finding a small white takeout box full of some spicy chicken and rice, she grinned and looked around for a discarded pack of unused chopsticks. She picked up a pair in a bright red paper packet with white Chinese writing and stuck them into the pocket of her oversized hoodie. Moving quietly and quickly, she slinked over to the side of the dumpster and pulled herself out of the metal behemoth.