City of Beasts

by Corrie Wang

  “Well, Espe couldn’t grow and monitor all those fetuses herself.”

  “So they’ve all been stuck there? All these years?”

  “Stuck?” I ask. “You mean imprisoned. Still think your mayor and the mob aren’t teammates, Reason?”

  “I’m highly considering the possibility. But I don’t get why Chia would go through all the trouble of reunifying, if he’s able to make babies?”

  Maybe because it killed two birds with one stone. It rejuvenated the population, and it took away our bargaining chip. Previously, we were the only ones who could make babies. Both the regular lab way and the old-school physical way. That meant the males had to respect it when we said, Leave us be on Grand Island. But now that males had that power? We were a lot less relevant, which meant we were far less safe. I can still hear the glee with which those males in Chia’s offices discussed Majesty’s breasts.

  “Glori,” Su starts to say.

  “Don’t worry, I know.” I grip her hand. “Those labs change everything, and we need to tell our community about it immediately. But we don’t need two people to warn Grand, Suze. I’ll go for Twofer. Reason, you make sure Su gets home safe.”

  “I’ll make sure Su gets home safe,” Su snaps. “Though I will let you point me in the right direction.”

  Reason mumbles something about he’ll point her in the right direction all right, but then more loudly says, “We’re in luck. Bertha hasn’t left yet.”

  When we step from the woods, we’re met with rolling snowbanks. Tops of green SAVE THE PLANET signs poking out here and there. We had those, too. Until fees used them all to patch roofs. Beyond the snowbanks is an imposing building of stately marble columns and grand steps. A partially snow-covered sign reads: BUFFALO ALBRIGHT-KNOX-GUNDLACH ART MUSEUM. On the side of the museum, a huge screen shows an old broadcast of the throw-the-ball sport that plays on every station. Despite the cold, males stand scattered in front of the screen, occasionally yelling advice. There’s at least a dozen patrol soldiers between us and the transports. All with guns. All on alert.

  “Beasts turned an art museum into a bus station?” Su asks.

  Reason blows into his hands. “The common thought was if the air wasn’t breathable, animals were nearly extinct, and nags amputated themselves from us, what’s the use of art?”

  “A lot of it’s been looted anyway,” Sway adds with a grin as he and Reason slap hands.

  Su sighs with disapproval, but I’m too transfixed by the transports to care. There are four altogether, and each one is a massive, armored, prehistoric-looking creature cobbled together from pre-Night vehicles, farm equipment, and building parts.

  “How long did it take you to make these?” I ask.

  Sway laughs. “We didn’t. A fee did. A sculptor. They’re pre-Night. Having to do with our monstrous need for transportation destroying the planet like the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. Or something. They all run off furnaces that burn garbage. We use them to reach the farthest parts of the livable zones, since most vehicles’ charges don’t last that long.”

  The giant screen on the museum has switched from sports to the tunnel footage. BREAKING NEWS, the feed on the bottom of the screen reads. UPDATE: THE REWAURD FOR THE FEMAILS IS NOW $75,000. THE REWAURD FOR THE MAIL A BETTING THEM IS RAISED TO $35.

  “Come on,” Sway says. “Now they’re just being mean.”

  “I hate when Chia puts Regulator at my terminal,” Reason moans. “Dumb goit. I’ll never live this down.”

  The males who had been watching the sport now turn and survey the lawns. Each of them is holding some kind of very professional-looking weapon. Hunting knives, a crossbow, semiautomatics. They aren’t randomly standing out in the cold at all. Exactly like the patrol soldiers, they’re here waiting for us.

  Having recently burst from the woods, we’ve attracted attention. A few eyes narrow as they take us in. A cinder block of a male with a cordless nail gun ambles our way. Reason is instantly on his portable. The big screen cuts out. Males groan. When it resumes playing, it’s a scene of a group of males on a stage doing a coin toss. One of them says, “Man, I’ll go first against this choke artist.” The norm headed our way looks back over his shoulder, then says, “Oh nice!” and stops to watch.

  “The Eight Mile rap battle.” Reason grins. “Works every time.”

  “You have an easy fix for all the patrol soldiers?” Su asks.

  “In fact,” Sway says, “we do. Bon Jovi?”

  “Geez, Sway.” Reason rolls his eyes. “Of course.”

  After looping an arm through his crutch, Reason throws both arms around my and Su’s shoulders, then belts out: “Tommy used to work on the docks.”

  Weaving side to side, we stumble away from the woods, the boys singing at the top of their lungs. And I realize that these males aren’t male. At least not like any we learned about. That’s why one sequestered himself in the outskirts along the river and the other kept himself hidden in the back room of a club buried in his screens. As Sway yells directly into my ear—“Whoa, we’re halfway there. Whoa, livin’ on a prayer”—I can’t help thinking they don’t belong in this world of Rage, Chia, and Charlestonians any more than Twofer or I do.

  When we reach Bertha moments later, we are wounded by nothing more than annoyed or longing glances, and I am getting increasingly excited to ride this transport. Bertha’s engine room is the cab of a semitruck. Giant steer horns are affixed to her roof. A patrol soldier is checking tickets. Disentangling himself from us, Reason lurches forward.

  “Hey, Escalade, look,” Reason says, slurring those three words in seven different places. “I found them. Here’s the fees. You can go home now.”

  Su shoots me an alarmed look.

  I shake my head slightly and murmur, “Trust.”

  “Is that right, Reason?” Escalade asks as he writes down the name and citizen number of the male behind us, then hands him a worn blue ticket.

  “Yup. I’m a hero.”

  Nodding like his head’s come loose, Reason suppresses a burp and not so subtly takes a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket, wraps it around the two blue tickets he brought from Euphoria, then presses the whole packet into the guard’s hand.

  “Now that you’re in my debt, my friend Benjamin asks that you let me put my friends on this transport without telling Chia about it.” Leaning into Escalade, he wetly whispers, “Chia hates Sway and Caliente here. Hates them. Come on. What do you say?”

  “I say you need to learn to hold your liquor, Influencer.”

  Yet he hands back the tickets minus the hundred-dollar bill.

  “You are a true diamond in the rough, Escalade. Always one step ahead of the breadline. One swing ahead of the sword. Hey, can I get a moment here? To say goodbye?”

  Pivoting toward me like a wobbly spun nickel, Reason pulls me to him. His eyes alight with mischief, he lightly presses his nose to mine. Our lips are only a finger’s width apart.

  “Hey now,” Sway barks.

  “It’s the alcohol.” Reason hiccups.

  Su shockingly makes no protest. The guard, however, holds his hands up and resolutely turns his back to us. Reason immediately drops the dopey drunkenness.

  “Su,” Reason says. “Watch our perimeter for a sec, would you?”

  Su considers him suspiciously, but the request so aligns with her natural instinct—always watch your perimeter—she does as she’s told.

  No sooner is Su’s back turned than Reason urgently says, “Glori, there’s something I haven’t told you. I know Chia didn’t send the mob across to steal Two Five or kill those fees, because I didn’t tell anyone that I saw you and your brother on that footage until the next day. We’ve all watched the film a hundred times since then, but the night it was recorded? The night you took Two Five out for that bike ride? I was sleeping.”

  This is not what I was expecting. “I don’t understand.”

  “Everything that records overnight, I watch in one lump over breakfas
t. Which would have been about five or six hours later, around the time the neighborhood was getting raided.”

  “So someone else was watching your screens?” Sway says, then squats to clean a smudge off his shoes.

  Reason hesitates. “Maybe? Though not likely.”

  “I keep thinking,” I say. “About how precise the mob’s attack was, like they weren’t looking for more children, but for specific fees. It almost seems like the mob was planning to attack anyway, and Two Five was a last-minute bonus. Is that what you mean?”

  Su sighs loudly and glares at us over her shoulder. Wrap it up.

  Quickly, Reason says, “I guess what I’m saying is maybe you’re right. Maybe Chia and Rage are working together, but I’m not sure it was a male who put the word out that you have Two Five.” He glances at Su. “I’m not sure you should be trusting anyone right now.”

  Next to us, Bertha roars to life. I cover my ears. I’ve never heard an airplane engine, but I imagine this sound can’t be too far off. Su comes back over.

  “Your video ended.” She nods at the museum screen and the males who are all coming out of a freestyle daze.

  I clear my throat. “Take good care of our puppy.”

  Taking the puppy out of my coat, I kiss his head and hand him to Reason. Holding the puppy to his heart, Reason takes off his hat and dips toward me in a mini bow. A lock of hair falls over his eye, and before I can think better of it, I pull him in for a hug. He is muscles and tension and heat, and he embraces me back without hesitation.

  “I’m sorry they left you behind all those years ago.”

  “It’s okay,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry I held it against you. Please take care.”

  “Time to go,” Sway says loudly.

  And then Reason lets me go and Su is filling his void, hugging me even tighter. There are no last-minute instructions this time. When she lets go, we simply stare at each other.

  “When you see Grand, tell her I’m okay.”

  “So long as you promise me you’ll do everything in your power to stay okay.”

  “I promise.”

  I’ve known Su my entire life. She loves Two Five, she said so herself. Granted, on good days, she treated him like he was a time bomb, keeping him at arm’s length as if he might explode and turn into one of them at any second. Could I see her venting to one of her crushes? And could one of those crushes have ties to a fee that worked on this side?

  The question is so easily answerable, it doesn’t need to be asked.

  “Word of advice?” She casts a glance at the males. “I know this is your intro to having working hormones, but don’t get your hopes up, okay, my little straight-arrow cohabby?”

  “Suze, I’m hardly here to rom-com.”

  “No, I know. I’m only saying, as much as you might like these males? Reunification is never going to happen.”

  “This is by all counts the weirdest day of my entire life,” Sway says as we board Bertha. “And that includes the time those goits wandered in from Chicago and tried to sell me and Comma lakefront apartments.”

  Bertha’s interior looks like a child’s drawing. Aisles abruptly end. Flights of stairs take us up, only to lead us immediately back down. Sliding open a door, we exit the first car and step into what looks like a pre-Night school bus that’s been sliced down the middle. Seats and windows line the left-hand side, while a metal wall with two doors for restrooms is on the right.

  “This can’t be right,” I say. “Every seat is taken.”

  “We wouldn’t have tickets if there weren’t seats.”

  It’s so different here. Back home, there would have been handshakes and “Hello!”s among all the passengers. Fees would have been splitting sandwiches and sharing dried fruit. Here everyone averts their eyes as we pass. But then I catch the gaze of a male in a kelly-green cap. Fifty or so, and a norm, he seems to recognize me but then quickly looks away. I glance at him over my shoulder as we cross into the next car. Likewise, he furtively looks back after me.

  “Sway,” I murmur. “I think I’ve been spotted.”

  “Let’s just get to our seats.”

  Except when we make our way to the end of the next car, it turns out I was right. There are no more seats. Sway checks the tickets again. Thirty-two and thirty-three. I point to a solid metal wall with the same numbers on it and a tiny eye-level knob. Sway gives it a tug and the wall slides open.

  “You have to admit,” I say, “Reason is very everything.”

  He booked us our own private, hidden compartment.

  “I guess on paper,” Sway says. “Comma’s had a crush on him for years. I never got the attraction. I mean, did you notice how Reason tries never to say his name in a sentence? He’ll be like, ‘The purpose of my being here…’ What a goit.”

  I yank down one of the bars from the luggage racks above our seats and wedge it under the door handle. Once the door’s secure, I press my ear to it. But I hear nothing outside.

  “I don’t think he followed us,” I say. “False alarm?”

  “Or he was into you. People watch you when they like you. I mean, you’re no Reason, of course….”

  I bat my eyelashes à la Marilyn. “But who is?”

  Sway pretends to vomit. After he puts our packs up on the remaining luggage bars, he offers me the window seat. Meant for school-age children, the bench is so small that when I sit on it, my knees are almost at my chin. I can’t help laughing. Sway joins me and his grin breaks even wider than mine. We shouldn’t be in such good spirits. Males are making babies and planning to force fees into a reunification they don’t want. Still, we’re on our way to get Twofer and also? It’s nice being back to only the two of us.

  Out in the hall, a male announces the various travel times to every stop on our route, then shouts, “Last call.”

  Scrunching farther down in his seat, Sway pulls the brim of his hat lower over his forehead. There’s that freckle again under his right eye. It is perfectly round, and I have the insatiable urge to press it.

  “Staring,” he says, but softer than before, sleepy. His eyes hold mine. He breaks the stare first. “We should get some sleep. We’ve got at least a two-hour ride until we get to the farms. Maybe longer if the snow’s piled up.”

  “Sway?” I ask.

  “Sleeping.”

  “If Reason’s right and the mayor didn’t know about Two Five, then why hasn’t he put up a reward for him? He knows he crossed. Why is he claiming he isn’t here?”

  “Good question. Let’s ask him.”

  I breathe on the window, then draw Twofer’s fortress on it. “Sway?”

  “Mhh?”

  “I’m not nineteen. I’m one of them. A Miracle baby.”

  Yawning, Sway takes off his jacket and tries to snuggle under it like a blanket. “Yeah. I figured.” He closes his eyes again.

  “What? How?”

  “Aside from the fact that you barely look thirteen? Reason and Comma are both attractive, but I mean, Comma needs glasses and Reason’s kinda short and he has those big ears. You’re like the Maybach of designer babies. You’ve obviously been CRISPRed.”

  If ex-utero births were old science, CRISPR was ancient science at this point. It was first detected around the early aughts. The acronym stood for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Essentially, it was molecular scissors. It let you recognize and select a virus, disease, or character trait in a line of DNA and effectually snip it out. Muscular dystrophy. Alzheimer’s. Sickle cell anemia. All cured by CRISPR in the midtwenties.

  “If this is about that fighting stuff, I’ve trained every day for almost my whole life.”

  “Yeah, but no offense, it’s not that you’re not normal for a fee. You’re not normal for a human being. Your eyesight. Your sense of smell. Bruth, you speak, like, four languages.”

  “Seven,” I softly correct.

  “Not to mention how strong you are. I mean, that crazy flip over the barbed wire fence? Do you know how long i
t’d take me to get down one of these luggage bars? Try infinity. It would take me an infinity of life to work one of those suckers off.”

  “How did you not know about SymSacs, but you know about CRISPR?”

  “I knew about SymSacs. Comma’s dad told us all about them. Comma’s a sac baby. He was a six-month-old fetus when the Night hit. I don’t know why Chia lied to Reason. It never occurred to me other goits didn’t know.”

  Sway yawns, smacks his lips together, then says, “Fortitude and Matricula weren’t so different, you know. They both saw the collapse and planetary reboot as an incredible opportunity to make something great. Fortitude was just more old-school. Or at least that’s what Rugged always told us.

  “Rugged said the Breeder Bill didn’t require a fee’s primary focus to be on making babies; it emphasized that the primary focus had to be on the ‘natural’ way of making babies. I think Fortitude was trying to outlaw CRISPR.”

  “But who would want to do away with CRISPR when it makes the best humans?”

  That was the thing. CRISPR didn’t only cut. It let you add. In 2017, the Chinese were the first to use the science on embryos. Shortly after, in 2018, they were also the first to CRISPR an actual fetus, making the DNA of a baby girl impervious to the HIV virus. Initially, people the world over feared the implications. They worried about the exact super race of “designer babies” that Sway pegged me as. Yet when babies (and adults) began dying—actually baking—in the insufferably, unsustainably hot regions of the world, or developing subpar immune systems in the most polluted, people minded a little less that scientists could adjust their baby’s DNA to cope with it.

  “Maybe,” Sway says as delicately as if he’s knitting lace, “Fortitude wanted to do away with the idea of ‘best.’ I’ve talked to old males about pre-Night times. How competitive it was. How there was this pervasive feeling that someone always had more than you, was doing ‘better’ than you. How no one was satisfied with their share, no matter what portion they received. If that’s what always striving for the best of everything got us, I can kind of see Fortitude’s thinking and why he and Matricula clashed so hard.”