It was a game that the two of them played. Bowen had Morgan, and Kelly had... well, whoever she had. Bowen didn’t know. But he never went home unannounced. And Kelly always made sure her affairs were hidden. No evidence. No embarrassment. The two of them would spend a few days pretending that they liked to sleep with each other. Then he would go back to work. Back to Morgan. And Kelly would go back to her life without him. It was a decent system. These days, though, Bowen had a hard time remembering what benefit he got from it. There were tax benefits, he supposed. And though she didn’t know it yet, Kelly wouldn’t have to put up with him much longer, anyway.
After an inspection at the security gate to make sure he didn’t have any electronic devices, Bowen’s car dropped him off at the Institute’s central building, the Bagley Administration Center, which stood on top of a grassy mound in the middle of the campus. Standing on the sidewalk, Bowen breathed in the smell. Pine trees. Clean, mountain air. The Appalachians rose on all sides of the Institute. Just like Bowen liked things. Isolated.
“Park,” he told the car before shutting the door, and the electric engine faintly hummed as the self-driver rolled away. He stood watching the car as it disappeared around the other side of the Bagley Center. It was a brand new car. Last month, his old car had nearly totaled itself and his wife’s Cadillac because of a software bug that had made the car back repeatedly into the wrong garage space. Kelly had been furious. She thought the accident had been Bowen’s fault. But her mood had improved when the government replaced her Caddy with a BMW.
Even though he didn’t like some of the things that they had to do, Bowen believed in the work of the Institute. Of course, he didn’t try to sell himself any lame excuses about the needs of the many and the needs of the few. He didn’t entertain any illusions. The Institute trampled on the rights and lives of the Anomalies. But it had to be that way. It wasn’t as if they had ADHD or a spectrum disorder. Or even something like schizophrenia. Even if they never actively threatened others, the Anomalies were a danger to everyone. Rights weren’t absolute. Two of the Anomalies—Celina and Francis—had destroyed lives before they came to the Institute. When you could do what they could do... well, it just couldn’t be helped, could it?
Celina, especially, had used her ability to do some nasty things. When she was seventeen, she had made a teenage boy named Nathan run away with her. She took Nathan to an abandoned house in the woods and forced him to have sex with her repeatedly. When Bowen saw the video of her confession and listened to her describe in detail what she had made Nathan do with her, it had made his cock stiffen.
God, Bowen thought with longing. What it must’ve been like to be the boy...
But Celina could only have mental control over Nathan while she was awake, so she only managed to hold onto him for three days before she couldn’t put off sleep any longer. The boy escaped finally. But Celina had done irreparable damage to his mind, and DHS had to euthanize him.
Celina had been sexually abused by one of her stepfathers for most of her life, so nobody blamed her for her behavior. Not really. But that didn’t mean she could be allowed to just go free. And despite what her stepfather had done to her, he didn’t think Celina was a mere victim. It made Bowen’s skin tingle and his groin stir to think of just how in control Celina was. That was what made her so dangerous.
When he had first seen Celina, she’d been sedated and restrained to a gurney. She’d worn only a hospital gown, and Bowen had been struck by how lovely her legs were—long and well muscled, but still soft and shapely enough to be feminine. She had short hair that accentuated the beautiful features of her face: full lips that would never need lipstick, a Mediterranean nose, and a smooth jawline. Bowen had wanted to touch her face. To brush his fingers across her smooth lips. To slide his hand up her leg to the inner thigh. He might have done it if Dr. Simmons hadn’t joined him at just the right time.
Unlike Celina, Francis had never done anything dramatic. Or outright wrong, exactly. But when the Institute had located him, his mother had been on the brink of psychosis. She had lived for years with a son who could read her every thought. And since she had deliberately violated the Susan Wade Act, she lived in constant fear of being found out by DHR agents. In the end, she had been happy to hand Francis over to the Institute for treatment and research. Happy not to go to jail. Happy to sign a legal agreement stating that her son was dead. Happy to sign an agreement never to discuss her dead son’s abnormality. Happy to receive monthly payments of $13,876 (tax free) for her loss. Happy to have a hysterectomy so she couldn’t break the law again. All things considered, it was a nice reward for someone who had committed a felony.
Theresa, though. She wasn’t like the other two. She’d had a stable family life with parents who had managed somehow to cope with her abnormality. But when she was just thirteen, they had a car accident during a rain storm. Theresa had survived it without a scratch, but her parents were both killed. Paramedics found the girl weeping over their bodies, repeating the same words over and over.
“I couldn’t save them.”
Soon they discovered that the girl shouldn’t exist. Her parents had no registered children. In fact, they had been rejected fifteen years earlier for a child application because of their low income. So the paramedics contacted the Department of Human Reproduction. Several channels of communication later, Bowen received a call about a teenage girl in an “abnormal mental state” who had been “born outside of the legal norm.” Now Theresa was almost eighteen and lived in her own suite of rooms deep under the Constance Hamilton Center for Genetic Psychiatric Research. On the other side of the Institute from Francis and Celina.
Theresa had grown into an attractive young woman, too, but in a different way than Celina. Her big green eyes looked at everyone she met with an unearthly sincerity, and she kept her sandy blonde hair braided to one side, letting it hang down over her shoulder onto her chest. There was an innocence about Theresa that you wanted to protect. Not to say that Bowen wouldn’t screw her if he had the chance, but Theresa wasn’t like Celina. Bowen wanted to make Celina scream in pleasure. But what he wanted from Theresa was to see her lying on her side next to him in the dark, her green eyes wide, her girlish braid curling over the soft flesh of her neck. He wanted her to whisper in his ear, It’s okay. You can have me.
That was why he hadn’t been to personally see Theresa in weeks. With Celina, it didn’t matter that she knew that Bowen wanted her. In an odd way, that seemed to make them more comfortable with each other. But he wouldn’t be able to help feeling shame if Theresa knew the thoughts he had about her. Bowen wasn’t accustomed to feeling shame about anything.
He climbed the stone steps and passed through the double doors into the administration building.
“Good morning, Dr. Bowen,” said the blonde desk assistant.
“Morning, Savannah,” said Bowen, stopping at the reception desk. He rested his arm on the counter in front of the desk and smiled down at the woman. “You look nice today.”
Savannah smiled. “I hope you had a good weekend.”
Bowen exaggerated a sigh. “I tried, but I spent the whole time thinking about being back right here.”
He let that linger for a second, hoping that she’d understand the insinuation. She only looked at him patiently.
“Please let Dr. Simmons know I’m here,” he said finally.
“Sure thing,” Savannah said. Bowen waited for her to look at her computer screen and type something on the keyboard before he glanced down at the soft skin barely visible between the folds of her blouse where the top two buttons were left undone. Savannah dressed more modestly than the other administrative assistants, but to Bowen that made her more attractive. His behavior toward her sometimes bordered on the unprofessional, but he didn’t mind that Savannah always looked right into his eyes when he spoke to her. Or that she smelled like a hint of lavender. Or that when she handed him something, she sometimes let her fingers just barely
brush his as she pulled her hand away.
Sometimes he thought about inviting Savannah to his suite, which had the best view of the mountains of any building on campus. But that wouldn’t look right. His rank and connections meant that he was basically immune to Title IX claims—as long as he didn’t do anything completely reprehensible—but it wouldn’t look right for him to sleep with a staff member. Looks were important. So he would have to be satisfied with Morgan.
“Have a good day,” he said, and walked past the desk.
Brushed steel doors slid closed with a sigh, and the elevator descended one floor to the first sub-level. When the doors slid open, he stepped out into Station 1, a brightly lit room with television monitors on one wall and a nurse’s desk that wrapped around the center of the room. He scanned his handprint on the plate on the wall next to the elevator to check in. Three nurses, one for each Anomaly, had been chatting at the desk when he entered, but they stopped their conversation short when the elevator doors opened.
“Morning,” said Carver, the big nurse who was in charge of Francis. “Good weekend?”
“Too long,” said Bowen. He crossed the room toward the monitors to check on the Anomalies. “I spent the whole time irritating my wife and wandering around my house hoping to find a drink I’d stashed somewhere.”
The nurses laughed politely. They always laughed when he said things like that because they were good employees.
Bowen glanced at Francis’s primary monitor. He lay on his bed reading a comic book. Bowen didn’t understand how a grown man could enjoy comics. But then, Francis wasn’t a normal grown man, was he?
“Why can’t they all act like Francis?” asked Bowen to the room at large.
“No kidding,” said a nurse named Victoria.
Bowen turned to another monitor. Celina, who wore nothing except her underwear and a sports bra, was doing decline pushups with her feet on the floor and her hands planted on the rail of her bed. She had been asking for a chin-up bar, and Bowen had told her that she could have one if she behaved. For several weeks she had behaved. But one morning her nurse, Peter, had gone down to take her vitals, and she had made him masturbate just outside the glass wall of her cell while she watched. The monitoring nurse upstairs didn’t realize what was happening at first because Peter’s back was turned toward the hallway camera.
“Why doesn’t she have her clothes on?” said Bowen, not looking away from the monitor.
“Dr. Simmons said that it wasn’t worth fighting with her or putting her to sleep,” said Victoria. “Do you want me to dress her?”
Bowen let his eyes linger on Celina for a moment. He imagined running his fingers through her short hair while she kissed down his chest and past his navel.
“Give her a little while,” Bowen said after a moment.
“Yessir,” said the nurse.
A door across the room from the elevator opened, and Simmons walked through. A tall woman with a severe face and thick, strong limbs, Simmons intimidated with a glance. Today, though, she looked... bothered? Her eyes seemed wearier than usual.
“Rough weekend?” Bowen said.
Simmons crossed the room and glanced into the monitors. “Nothing unusual. Celina tried her damnedest to get some head from Peter. Francis and Theresa had a quiet weekend. I think we might consider giving those two some outside time.”
“We can talk about it,” he said. “Nothing interesting in the EEGs, huh?”
“Nothing at all.”
Bowen sighed. It had been years, and they were still no closer to understanding the source of the Anomalies’ powers than they were in the beginning. They had discovered a lot through experimentation. Celina’s range wasn’t as wide as Francis’s. Thank God. Theresa seemed only able to read minds and not to control a person’s actions or put thoughts into their head. Alcohol, marijuana, and other inhibitors affected their ability to use their abilities. But nothing biological or neurological about these people explained why they could do what they could do. Yes, they knew which sets of genes had to be present—all the artificial uteri in the world would be pointless if they couldn’t at least filter that out—but that discovery had been made long before Bowen’s time, back at the beginning of SRP. But what was it about that particular combination of genes that resulted in telepathy? No one had a damn clue, even now, after all these years. That was another reason he regretted that he was scheduled to die next year. Whoever finally figured out what made the Anomalies tick, it probably wouldn’t be him.
Bowen sighed.
“Suppose it’s time to call a priest?” he said. “An exorcist? A witch doctor?”
Simmons laughed but cut him off with a wave. “We’ve got other things to worry about at the moment. Jones-McMartin and whatshisface are here. They’re over in the gymnasium with their people. They want us to go ahead with the maze experiment. Today.”
“They’re here? Now?” said Bowen, annoyed. Senator Nancy Jones-McMartin had been a pain in his ass for months, and General Tolbert was a pompous, self-important dick from head to toe. Why hadn’t Savannah told him they were here? “I’ve told them that they shouldn’t come here. It’s too dangerous.”
Simmons snorted. “You know how General Walrus thinks.” She screwed up her face and imitated General Tolbert’s gravelly voice. “I’ve fought in three desert conflicts. I lived without food and water for five weeks. I’ve chopped the peckers off of seven warlords and force-fed them those wrinkled sausages! No little girls or weirdo boys are going to make a sissy out of me. I’m the general who’s going to put a noo-cue-ler warhead up Kim Jong Sung’s ass!”
Bowen laughed. Simmons wasn’t attractive. She was too big-boned, too masculine for Bowen’s taste. But he liked working with her just the same. As much as he liked surrounding himself with beautiful women, the combination of Simmons’s unattractiveness with her sense of humor made her easier to work with than a lot of people.
Simmons smiled. “He’d be down in Celina’s cell right now if we’d let him. Girl, show this old soldier what you can do! And none of that sissy shit!”
“And then she’d have him trying his best to give himself a blow job. Too bad his gut would get in the way.”
Simmons laughed at this.
“Anyway, the building isn’t ready,” said Bowen.
Simmons stood up straighter and put on a self-satisfied face. “Actually, it is. They sent a courier the day you left for your long weekend to let us know they wanted to do the test today. I put a rush on the construction. They just finished up this morning.”
Bowen sighed. So much for an easy first day back.
“Why the rush?” said Bowen. “We already know what the test is going to tell us.” At least, they knew what it would tell them about Celina. Bowen wasn’t sure how Francis or Theresa would perform.
Simmons sighed. “It sounds to me like they’re pushing through that Eris idea.”
Bowen’s stomach turned a little. He was all in for studying the Anomalies, trying to find the source of their abilities, looking for ways to apply their telepathy. But the Eris project scared him.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”
6
Jessica leaned her motorcycle into a curve, and the woods opened up to reveal a wide expanse of asphalt with manicured Saint Augustine grass around the edges. Rising from the middle of the parking lot was a rectangular building with a gray granite facade that reflected the sunlight, at least a hundred yards wide and four or five stories high. It had no windows except for a large glass entrance and awning supported by columns of the same granite.
Below the awning, two large holograph projectors displayed large images of parents and children. Two men with a little girl sitting on one of their shoulders. A man and a woman with identical twins. A family in a field kicking a soccer ball. On one side of the glass entrance, the name of the facility blazed in huge red and white letters: ARTEMIS ADVANCED REPRODUCTION CENTER.
Jessica slowed her motorcycle to a stop at the end of a line of cars that waited for admittance at the guard shack. As usual, protestors lined the road to the gate—anti-SRP forces on the right and pro-SRP counter-protestors on the left—but unlike usual, it wasn’t just a bunch of retirees holding hand-painted signs and sitting in lawn chairs today. The crowds on both sides of the road were on their feet, chanting, shouting, almost roaring with rage. As Jessica killed her motorcycle’s electric motor, she heard the loud whine of several police drones. In her rearview mirror she saw two Dragonflies emerge from behind the trees.
Military aircraft? What the hell are they expecting to happen?
Jessica had mixed feelings about these kinds of protests. On the one hand, she sympathized with people who thought that mandatory contraceptive implants meant government control over women’s bodies. On the other hand, she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to go back to the way things were before, with all of the wild, uncontrollable, and unnecessary health risks to both mother and child alike. Lugging a fragile, developing fetus around inside another human’s body was not only reckless but grotesque.
She took off her helmet, hung it by the strap from one of the handlebars, and shook out her hair.
8:49 a.m.
Should have gotten here earlier. On the phone, Hayden had sounded like the kind of man who had no time for bullshit. She’d lost interviews before for being just a minute or two late.
“Do not screw this one up,” her editor had told her yesterday. “This one has to be good. It’s going to be the new Roe v Wade, Obergefell, or Cason v United States.”
Carlo said that about every big story, but Jessica thought he might be right this time.
The Way Out Page 3
