Unsure of what I would find, I slowly pull the dead girl's shirt up. The first giveaway is the bellybutton; I feel it again and it feels real. I pull the shirt up further: up over her small, round breasts. I have to position her arms over her head in order to fully expose her chest.

It is just as I had feared. Her chest is bare and free of markings, except for a small freckle just above her left breast. I look up at the face, partially obscured by the shirt: the face of a real girl, not a clone. She stares blankly at the ceiling; I pull the shirt the rest of the way over her head then rub at her chest to make sure the serial number hadn't just been covered with makeup or something. I inspect the rest of her body, but every inch of her skin is normal. No sign of being a clone.

I sit with her head in my lap, and absentmindedly take her cool hand in mine, as I try to piece together all the implications of what I had just discovered.

First, the girl I had killed in class was not a clone, meaning she was actually Christina. But she responded to being murdered just like a clone would. Either she wanted to die, or she had her memories replaced by those meant for the clone. Either way, there should be a clone of Christina somewhere.

The next question is more difficult. What should I do about it. The punishment for killing a real girl is high. Even if it was by accident in place of a clone. The rules for killing clones require you to specifically document their serial numbers before you murder them, but we have never had a problem with this, so we usually just do it afterwards. If I am found with the real girl's body in my house, I would be in serious trouble. However, I will also need evidence that it was actually the clone that I had killed. I have to find that clone.

I made my decision, I zipped the corpse back up into the body bag and carried it out to my car. She fit easily into the trunk. My first stop would be the university.

The university's cloning center is easy to access. There is limited staff in the evenings, and I already have a badge that lets me access the majority of the facility. If you move quickly and know where you're going, you won't even see anybody else. The first area I check is the processing center, a large room where clones are installed with memories and conditioned. Christina's clone is not in the here, so I decide to move on to the barracks. I check the roster outside the door to the long hallway of rooms. Her name is listed second to last. She is in room 458.

I walk down the barracks hall. Nearly 100 rooms line the hallway, each with two or three clones. The majority are destined for the testing of experimental weapons or chemicals, a few make it into the lab assistant category, and maybe five or six were commissioned by Dr. R. I reach room 458 and check through the window. Three girls sit in chairs. None look at each other, and they are all quiet. Christina, still with her dyed pink hair, sits closest to the window, but facing away. I unlock the door with my badge, and three heads turn my way.

"Christina," I call quietly.

She stands abruptly, and walks out the door past me then stops in the hallway.

"It's time?" She asks.

She willingly follows me out of the building. I let her into my car, and get in next to her. She smiles at me as I pull up her shirt. Her flat stomach bears no belly button, and her chest is marked with a long string of letters and numbers. At this point I can dispose of both bodies and hide my involvement in the death of Christina, but with the bright eyed girl next to me I have some other ideas. Her green eyes, full lips, and slender form me to spend more time with her.

We leave campus and head for the city's Organic Material Disposal and Recycling Center. As students at the university we have free access to the center as much as we want. Christina and I work together to unload the body bag. We take the corpse into the facility. The deposit area is empty, but the hum of machinery comes from the warehouse area as the remains of dead cones and other biological material is processed and refined to be recycled or used in countless other processes.

Since there is not an area for human disposal, we stop at the clone disposal area. I unzip the bag once more. The clone most likely hasn't even seen a reflection of herself, so she does not even recognize the dead girl. I grab the arms and she grabs the legs as we hoist her into the recycling depository. We let her drop onto the conveyer belt that leads down to a large, loud grinder. I watch as she enters head first. One moment, she could be a girl asleep; the next her head is reduced to a splash of red. The clone had turned her head away, but I can't help but watch as the rest of her body is consumed by the maw of spinning blades and champing steel plates.

I think about pushing the clone in then and there, but her body is beckoning. All I want to do is take her home and have some fun with her.