But the clone's jaw is set. His lips are tight. He is, after all, intensely, fatally Jacksonian, and there's a way that Jacksonian lives work. "Grubbers get kicked around," he responds. "Get killed or eaten alive. I'm not going to be a grubber." He hunches and glares intensely at Miles' half-finished food. (What would happen if he tried to take it? He's still hungry.) "Anyway, I bet you'd like that, wouldn't you? Me fading away into nothing. No one to ever challenge you or anything. But I don't intend to, not for one moment. Not while everything is still going on."

Everything, however elliptically, meaning the clone business. He might not speak the name of it aloud, but it makes his face settle into a taut sort of anger; his expression becomes boilingly, ferociously hostile.