“I keep thinking about all the people I stepped on along the way. And the rats.”
They removed all of their clothing. Luck stared at Starlock’s naked body, unashamed. It was as beautiful as she had remembered it—more beautiful. He was three years older than the last time she’d seen him unclothed. He was a man, strong and lovely. He was studying her as well, but the look on his face was more sad than anything else.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
“So are you.”
They didn’t touch each other. The weight of the walled city had settled between them. Instead they stuffed their dirty clothes into a washing machine and watched as water and soap darkened the material. Luck wasn’t sure the machine could wash away the smell.
The shower room had several stalls. Starlock turned on the first one, and they both stared in awe at the gallons of warm water that came flowing out. There were showers on the Rez, of course, but they were usually feeble and lukewarm.
“The humans were frivolous,” Luck whispered. “And arrogant. They treated us like…like monkeys or something. But…”
“They didn’t deserve this.”
“No.”
“Come here,” Starlock whispered.
He pulled her under the spray with him. They washed and washed. Luck watched dirty water flow off them and down the drain, until at last the water ran clear and they were absolutely clean.
Still, they did not touch. Luck kept seeing those people with antennae, hanging upside down in their overturned car as rats scurried over their bodies. When she thought about the world outside, she felt as if her body weighed a thousand pounds, as if her heart were so heavy it would fall to her feet.
“You’re crying,” Starlock said.
Tears had begun to flow down her face, and even though the water washed them away, more came, as though she might cry out her whole body weight until nothing was left.
“They were just like us,” she told him, when she could speak. “They pretended we were different, and we accepted it. But we were the same.”
“I know.”
Starlock pulled her to him and held her as the warm water ran over them and Luck sobbed against his shoulder.
* * *
When she was all cried out, they wrapped themselves in towels and found the bedroom. It was a small chamber on the interior side of the hall, so there were no windows. A light came on automatically when they opened the door, revealing several bunk beds, with bottom bunks that were wide enough for two people. They unfolded a blanket across one of these and crawled beneath it together.
The walls were covered in a mural that depicted a meadow full of flowers, with a yellow sun up in the corner of the ceiling, spilling warmth over everything. Among the flowers and grass, human children in their many, many forms leaped and played. Luck saw golden arms raised to catch a ball, long ears twitching to listen to something far away, and a boy with four legs jumping higher than any Proto ever could. But over by the door, there was an ordinary little girl, sitting beneath a tree, playing with a doll. Humans and Protos were in this painting together, she realized, as though Mizter Dekkle and his colleagues had claimed otherwise, but they had known all along that everyone was equal.
Starlock turned off the lights and settled next to her. “Do you know how many times I imagined sleeping in a bed with you?” he whispered. “Thousands. But I never imagined this.”
“How could we ever imagine this day?”
They lay in silence for a while, Luck curled into him, Starlock holding her tightly.
At length, he said, “When we find a proper radio, we can call the Rez. And the other reservations. We’ll get all the Protos to come and we’ll find a way to take the children somewhere safe.”
“There might be hundreds of kids,” Luck whispered, “or thousands.”
“But there are thousands of us too,” he pointed out. “And Miz Babbidge said there’s lots of food in the city. Think, Luck, there are libraries here. You can read whatever you want.”
That was something Luck hadn’t considered. “We’ll know what happened in all the years after our books end.”
“And what to teach all of those children.”
“And there’s the rest of the world,” Luck said. “Maybe people across the oceans.”
They thought about this for a bit as Starlock tucked his chin against her neck.
Then Luck said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“You know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Thank you too.”
They drifted off that way, pressed together so tightly they might have been one person.
* * *
In the middle of the night and half asleep, they began to kiss each other. Luck was dreaming they were on the Rez and also on the highest floor of the building with diamond armor. They were together, in her dream, in both the safest place in the world, and also the most frightening. They were at the pivot point of everything, with the world revolving around them.
She kissed Starlock and kissed him and kissed him, in the dream and in real life, enough to make up for three years apart. They woke just enough to pull the towels off each other. There was nothing between them then, and Starlock was warm and strong and everywhere, the weight of death and the dead city banished for a little while.
Pain brought Luck fully awake for a few moments. She sensed the dead all over the city looking at her, their varied arms reaching out to grab her. Then the faces were gone, the city was gone. She was back in her dream, with Starlock, enveloped in the all-consuming sense of the two of them together.
At that moment, Luck understood something new. There were horrors and there was death, there was evil and arrogance and apathy. But more than these, there were friends and there was hope. There was her life on the Rez and there was the wide world. And there was love. The bad things collected, but so did the good—and the good, she grasped, were more important than the bad. You could look past the bad if you wanted. Each good thing Luck had experienced, each good thing she had learned, built upon all of the others and added up to one thing she felt completely for the first time:
Human.
This book began with a revelation. After poring over articles about gene editing, methods of growing human organs outside the human body, changing the body’s structure and function using bioelectronic interfaces and microscopic mechanical devices, and all manner of coming wonders, I thought, “This is it. Soon we’ll be able to eradicate disease, extend our life spans, turn humans into superhumans!” A few minutes later I had a very different thought: “We will definitely find some way of messing this up in spectacular fashion.”
The stories in this novel were born in the space between my first thought and my second thought.
As we are increasingly able to live without disease, modify our bodies, and change what it means to be human, how will these capabilities alter our view of each other and of the world? What will it be like to grow up, to fall in and out of love, to choose what you believe in, when the very essence of “you” might be changing?
I don’t have the answers. All I have are the six young people who inhabit this book, and I’ve tried very hard to set their stories down properly. I hope I’ve succeeded.
These six stories, and the single novel they create together, were, to me, a kind of dragonfly: savage, iridescent, and unearthly. I want to thank the people who saw their grimness and their hopefulness and decided to make them into a proper book.
Krista Marino, firstly for tearing through the manuscript over the weekend so we could talk about it at lunch on Monday. But secondly, and mostly, for all her care with this book and her love of the characters.
Ray Shappell, for the eerie and wonderful cover. Ken Crossland for the lovely look of its pages.
Colle
en Fellingham and Amy Schneider for the copyediting, without which no author should go out in public.
A huge thanks to the many, many creative and wonderful and caring people at Penguin Random House who worked to make this book and share it with the world, particularly Jules Kelly and Joshua Redlich.
To Jodi Reamer, whose gut instincts are uncannily accurate and whose excitement over this book was infectious. (Incidentally, her love of Disneyland is just maybe possibly starting to rub off on me, but I will deny it if questioned.)
To Kassie Evashevski, for keeping an eye on me and this story, even when she was on the other side of the country.
To Cecilia de la Campa at Writers House, for bringing my books to every corner of the world.
To Helen Russell, for helping me translate dialogue into Russian, including many swearwords.
To Sky Morfopoulos, Alexandra Meldal-Johnsen, Jennifer Anderson, and Michael Doven for being my beta readers.
To my family, and particularly my husband, Sky Dayton, who is a pretty great husband and who puts up with and possibly even enjoys the strange things I like to read and talk about. Also to my children, who make it hard to relax or concentrate or finish things or keep a clean house but who make me laugh and look at the world with fresh eyes and feel happy to be alive. I love you all very much.
Arwen Elys Dayton is the author of Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful, as well as the Seeker series—Seeker, Traveler, Disruptor, and the e-novella The Young Dread—and the science fiction, Egyptian thriller Resurrection. She spends months doing research for her stories. Her explorations have taken her around the world to places like the Great Pyramid at Giza, Hong Kong and its islands, the Baltic Sea, and many ruined castles in Scotland.
Arwen lives with her husband and their three children on the West Coast of the United States. You can visit her and learn more about her books at arwenelysdayton.com and follow @arwenelysdayton on Instagram and Facebook.
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