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also soldiers. But you don’t look at all like a soldier, apart from your mark. No, don’t leave me. I’m still cold.”
    His arms, fallen sideways as he gapes in amazement, rise to hold me tight. I cuddle against his chest. I close my eyes. And I see my father’s face bending over me, inside the sarcophagus lid, mouthing the words, “At least the suspended animation will cleanse you from all the shit in your blood.”
    I press my face against the clone’s neck and caress his bare chest. His skin is smooth and hairless under my palm.
    It works. The bad memory frays and dissolves.
    But the clone trembles slightly. I’m scaring him, maybe. “What’s your name?” I ask gently. “And how old are you?”
    “Phaedrus—Phae—and I should be more or less nineteen broad cycles.”
    “I don’t remember my name,” I say firmly. It’s a lie. Maybe I could remember my name and my age, but I don’t want to.
    He smiles. “Don’t worry. You’ll remember. I always called you Prince.”
    I raise my face from his neck and look at him. He’s handsome, genetically perfected. His features are regular, though a bit too sharp. Straight nose and strong chin like the ancient Greek statues that provided the classical beauty canons. I touch his smooth cheek. In clones, facial and body hair have been genetically eliminated. Perhaps this is why he continues to touch my hair without realizing it. I follow the path of his upper lip with my fingertip. His lips are a bit chapped. Then I meet his eyes. Clones’ eyes are icy and cold as a glass bottle. His are deep, warm and frightened. He’s scared. I’m scaring him.
    “What is a guardian angel, Phae?”
    “My sole purpose is to watch over you during your sleep,” he says, as if reciting from a manual.
    “Do you have to watch over me even when I’m awake?”
    He looks puzzled for a moment. “I’m not sure.” His arms start to fall again. I need his arms to forget myself inside.
    “Please, hold me, I’m still cold. Why are you trembling? Don’t you like hugging me?”
    Maybe it goes against his duties, kind of. Clones are trained hard for specific tasks, and often they screw up if forced to do something different.
    He shakes his head. “No. I think instead it’s because I like it too much.”
    I raise my eyebrows at him.
    He swallows, and I watch as his Adam’s apple goes up and down. “I spent hours—years—staring at you behind that glass. I can’t believe you’re here in my arms.”
    “How long were you watching me, Phae?”
    His eyes widen in confusion. “How long…?”
    “How long have you been my guardian angel?”
    Surely no more than a few years. He’s just a boy.
    He blinks. “I’ve just said it. I’m nineteen.”
    “I know,” I begin, with patience. “I understood you’re nineteen. I asked when you started your task.”
    He shrugs. “The day I was born.”
    My amazement must be ridiculous, because he shakes his head and smiles. When he does it—when he smiles—his eyes seem to light up like stars and all of his face, attractive but too pale, shines. “All I know is that you left ninety-four broad cycles ago from Earth. Blasius — my predecessor—watched over you for the first seventy-five years. Then I was born.”
    “Were you born here? In this… crappy place?”
    “Crappy?” He enjoys the word and chuckles, as if he has never heard a word like that. “Yes. I was born in this crappy place.”
    “How many clones are there on this ship?”
    He touches my hair again. Now that he realizes he hasn’t done anything wrong—and I have ceased to rub on him—he’s stopped shaking. “I am the only one, since Blasius is gone.”
    By now I was expecting something like that. “No one else?”
    “No, no one else.”
    Of course my father has spared no expense for my one-way trip. My cheeks burn in shame and rage. A crappy abandoned spaceship and only a single clone to watch over me. So much trouble to get rid of me, selling my ass to some big