Dante has a history that is almost as convoluted as the clone from whom his middle name is drawn.
Nev and I always maintained that we did not want children—kids are nice but we weren’t ready for one of our own, and it led to some pretty vicious arguments when I brought up the idea of having kids. I’d changed my mind after seeing how happy the listers who had children were. Nev remained adament for a month or so but gradually he came around, and we decided to have a son of our own.
I’m not sure how or when we chose to clone Dante as a six year-old as opposed to making him younger or giving birth to him naturally. I wasn’t ready to be pregnant and Nev wanted a son he could play ball with; I, however, didn’t want to make Dante too old—I wanted to have a child I could cuddle with, even for just a short time.
I encoded our DNA on optical chips and programmed the transmogrifier to create a clone from a mixture of that DNA. Dante inherited most of his father’s looks—the only exceptions being his green eyes and the subtle reddish tint to his dark brown hair. He got my temperament—at least the temperament I had as a child. He was quiet and shy and thoughtful, spending as much time reading books as he did playing. That did not do much to earn him friends—Dodger and Pieter, two of skeeter’s kids, were mistrustful of Dante at first, but when he saved Pieter from being crushed by a shelving unit—catching and holding the quarter-ton framework all by himself—they became fast friends, and Dante’s loneliness was eased.
I noticed that Dante seemed to grow at an unusually fast rate, sometimes waking up several inches taller than he’d been the previous night. At that time a temper which had not been present before erupted violently, and Nev and I isolated him from the rest of the Library for his safety and everyone else’s. His powers were taking hold of him in a way that they never had before, and I could see a darkness within him that frightened me.
One morning I found Dante unconscious, sweating and trembling violently. He’d been having nightmares almost every night for the past month, but at the time I thought nothing of it. I could sense nothing from Dante except grief and pain and anger so deep it eclipsed mine. He remained that way until later that night, when Brian, Michaela’s telepathic Peter clone, was able to telepathically link with Dante and come to the bottom of the mystery.
I got my powers from the Evil Peter from Divergence. Shortly after returning from that mission I began to have powerful nightmares. Through them Evil Peter—or rather, the demonic presence that had become him—tried to gain control of me by convincing me that my friends and family were dead. The dreams were incredibly vivid and it was only through careful mindfulness and the support of those around me that I was able to shake them. When Brian told me what was going on in Dante’s mind I was terrified. He was still a small child—at least I had faced the ghost of Evil Peter as an adult.
But Dante has strength beyond his years, and an ironclad unwillingness to give in to anyone. Once Brian linked with me he was able to show Dante that I was not dead as Evil Peter had made him believe. Dante unleashed his powers on the remnants of Evil Peter, destroying them.
It was a victory, but a bittersweet one. When I opened my eyes I saw that Dante was no longer a nine year-old child. The internal battle he’d waged had aged him dramatically—all the way to sixteen, nearly seventeen. The battle had taken its toll in another way—he was dangerously thin and weak for several days afterward, and the next morning he endured excruciating pain in his joints and bones—the result of growing almost two feet in less than five minutes.
Slowly but surely he gained weight and muscle, looking less and less like a skeleton and more and more like a healthy, normal teenager. He worried at first that his friends wouldn’t accept him but those fears were allayed—the kids who live at Long Title are used to strange occurances. Nev and I adjusted equally quickly with the realization that Dante hadn’t changed; he’d just gotten bigger.
The greatest challenge that now faces him is how well he can handle powers that come, admittedly, from Hell itself. Because the transmogrifier automatically filtered out imperfections in our DNA, Dante’s powers are a purer, more powerful version of mine (for whatever reason Dante didn’t get any of Nev’s absorption power) and so their effect on his temper is all the greater. Ari, Nev, and I have been spending entire afternoons teaching and training him in the hopes that his natural intelligence and goodness will protect him from evil, but there are times when his eyes glow and I wonder . . .
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