by Ann Halam
Dr. Franklin told us we mustn’t think we were going to turn into a haddock and a robin! He’d used pieces of original animal genes as his basic material, but the final product, that had been injected into us, was new —genes that he’d created, that had never existed before in the world. He said we’d still be human, when the treatment was successfully completed, but more than human.
He came to visit us every day, took blood samples, tested our reflexes and things; and spent about an hour explaining what was supposed to happen, with fancy computer graphics and diagrams, which he showed us by plugging his computer into our fancy TV. Every time he came to see us we both had to do more of the IQ test things, but he talked to Miranda much more than he talked to me—about how wonderfully birds are adapted for flight, and how cleverly he, Dr. Franklin, had fitted these adaptations into his artificial genes. How her skeleton would have to change. How big her wings would have to be, to get a human-sized “bird” off the ground.
He hardly said anything to me about turning into a fish.
It should have been a relief that he didn’t talk to me, but the weird thing was, I felt jealous. When Dr. Franklin sat with Miranda, talking to her as if she was his favorite student, and complimenting her for asking good questions, I felt hurt and left out. When he looked at my medical test results and frowned, I felt as if I’d done something wrong.
“He’s playing mind games,” said Miranda, when we were alone. “Remember what Skinner said. He doesn’t just want to change us, he wants to ‘study the psychological effects.’ He’s seeing how we react to being treated in different ways. Don’t let it get to you.”
Yes, we knew there was probably always someone listening, and watching. We’d decided we didn’t care. Next time we were working on an escape, that would be the time to worry about keeping secrets from our captors. We hadn’t given up. The next thing we tried might work. We told each other (in whispers, last thing at night) that we’d better have a really good plan, because we’d only get one chance.
The time passed strangely easily. We watched films, we played games, we did fashion shows for each other, we plucked each other’s eyebrows and painted each other’s nails. We found the plastic drinking glasses in the bathroom cabinet, and didn’t have to drink out of the pitcher anymore. We found the microwave, and warmed up our pastries in the morning, so they were lovely and soft and gooey. We didn’t speak to the orderlies, but if we got anything to eat that we didn’t like, we would mutilate it with toothpaste swirls and hair conditioner, to show our disapproval, and that kind of food would not turn up again. (I developed a real aversion to seafood. Miranda would still eat chicken, though.)
And all the time, it was as if we’d been pushed off the top of a very, very high building: so high that we seemed to be floating. But we weren’t floating, we were falling.
Sometimes I’d lie awake in our “night” and imagine I could hear the jungle cat howling.
Sometimes in the “day,” when Dr. Franklin would arrive with his laptop and his tests and his educational toys, I’d wish that I was chained up and blindfolded in some dark cellar. I’d rather have been like that than have to face his cold bright eyes. He was never nasty to us. Even when he was telling us off, and warning us about the straitjackets, he was polite. But I had the strange feeling he was pretending too. We were
But we were so afraid of being put back in the straitjackets that we let the days go by.
pretending we were his students, his volunteers, his willing guinea pigs. He was pretending that he thought we were human, because that was the way to get the best behavior out of us. But in his mind, we were animals. So it didn’t matter what he did to us.
But whenever I felt bad, Miranda was there. She’d talk about how we were going to escape, making up the most ridiculous plots. Or she’d talk about how amazing it would be when we had our superpowers, and how excited she was about being a volunteer. We’d lie on our beds describing how wonderful it would be when she could fly and I could explore the beautiful oceans. I didn’t believe her, of course; and I knew she didn’t believe it either. We weren’t going to escape, we weren’t going to have magic powers. We were going to die, horribly. But as long as she kept talking like that I could pretend. I could go on being cheerful, hour by hour and day by day, instead of crouching in a corner howling.
Every day and every hour, I knew she was saving my life.
And when Miranda needed me, when she broke down and cried, I was there.
She wasn’t always brave. She was just so much braver than me.
Every night, last thing before we turned away from each other to fall asleep, we’d cut the notch. It was important to keep counting the days, even though we knew we’d almost certainly lost track. It helped a lot. We’d pretend we were back on the beach, under our favorite palm tree. Then I’d say the notch was cut, or Miranda would say she was doing it; and we’d play the tomorrow game.
“Tomorrow,” I might say, “there’ll be muesli and cold fresh milk for breakfast.”
There was never any milk, except some Long Life stuff that tasted like dishwater, which we gave the toothpaste/conditioner treatment, and would not drink.
“Tomorrow,” Miranda might reply, “the orderly will accidentally leave behind a toolbox with dynamite in it. We’ll blast our way out, take over the labs, reverse our treatment, and zoom away from this stinking island in our dear Dr. Franklin’s private jet.”
“Do you know how to fly a jet plane?”
“Of course I do. I’m half-bird, you know. I can fly anything.”
But while the voices talked nonsense, the hands were clinging so tight it hurt, telling each other the truth. It was a special treat we allowed ourselves. For a few moments, every night, our hands could say what we mustn’t ever say aloud—unless we wanted to start screaming.
We’re so frightened, so terribly frightened.
Tomorrow the horror begins. Tomorrow we start turning into monsters.
Day Forty-nine (or so)
Miranda felt sick, and couldn’t eat her breakfast. When Dr. Franklin came he took the usual blood samples, put them in a little machine which he plugged into the TV, and looked at the results on the screen. He didn’t seem pleased with mine. I felt bad about that. Then he gave us both something he said was a vitamin injection, and some pills we had to swallow. He put a patch, like one of those nicotine patches people wear when they are trying to stop smoking, on my upper arm. He told me not to take it off, because it was an immunosuppressant, to boost the effect of the infusions. Miranda didn’t get one.
Day Fifty-five
We never missed the notch cutting, not as long as we were together. If I leave out days it’s because nothing happened: we were getting dressed and eating meals, playing games and watching films, going into the bedroom when the red light came on (we called it the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign), and putting up with Dr. Franklin’s visits. On Day Fifty-five Miranda hadn’t slept. I knew because I’d heard her tossing and turning all night. When we were eating breakfast, one of her back teeth fell out. It didn’t hurt, there was no blood. It was the cap of a back tooth, the roots must have been reabsorbed into the gum.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “It’s not serious. It’s probably because of all that time on the beach, hardly eating anything.”
We played around with our clothes collection, but she kept going and looking at herself in the mirror in the bathroom, and coming back frowning. About lunch-time, but before the FASTEN SEAT BELT light came on to warn us the orderly was coming, she came back from one of these trips and said, “Semi, will you look at my chest?”
So I looked. Between her breasts (we weren’t wearing bras, there were none that remotely fitted our skinny chests), there was a sort of low ridge, that went upward from her diaphragm toward her throat. The skin over it looked stretched, with little whitish lines in it, and the whole bump was much paler than her tan. Our living room was littered with things Dr. Franklin had brought with him to illu
strate his lectures. There was a bird’s skeleton mounted on a stand; there were feathers of various kinds lying on the coffee table. Miranda went over and looked at the skeleton, tracing the bones with her finger.
“My sternum must grow,” she murmured, in a strange, distant voice. “The sternum, that’s the breastbone, has to grow big enough to anchor the flight muscles. A bird’s flight muscles are up to twenty percent, that’s a fifth, of its body weight. Think of it. Something big enough to carry those huge muscles will stick out of my chest like a keel underneath a boat.”
My mouth had gone dry. I couldn’t speak.
“So this is it,” she said quietly. “It’s going to happen.”
She took hold of me by the shoulders, and stared at me with big, burning eyes. “Exciting,” she said fiercely. “An adventure. Repeat after me, Semi. An exciting adventure, a thrilling chance to have superpowers. You got that? Say it.”
“An exciting adventure,” I managed to mumble. I wiped my tears with my fingers. She laughed at me, and we hugged as well as we could, so’s not to hurt her.
By the end of that day, four more of her back teeth had come out.
I still didn’t have any symptoms at all.
Day Fifty-six
Dr. Franklin says Miranda’s losing her teeth is fine, she’ll be perfectly okay after the transgenic effect is complete, and not to worry. Miranda says her bones hurt. All her joints, especially her wrists and elbows, look sore and swollen. We asked Dr. Franklin for a supply of painkillers, but he says we can’t have any “self-administered” medicines; or any drugs to suppress the nausea, because it would interfere with the procedures. Maybe he thinks we’d try to kill ourselves.
If that’s what he thinks, he might be right if it was only me. But he doesn’t know Miranda. She’s tougher than that. And while Miranda can keep going, I can.
We’re still human. The next thing we try might work.
Day Fifty-seven
Miranda’s breastbone is enlarging incredibly fast. I think it’s getting bigger by the hour. She’s stopped talking about being in pain, but I know it’s hurting her. When Dr. Franklin came today, he brought a freshly killed jungle pigeon and spent ages talking to her about lift and flight angles and showing her how marvelously a bird’s wing can change shape as it flies; how the tail spreads and twists, folds up and spreads out, like the tailplane of an aircraft, acting as a stabilizer and a rudder. Then he sat with her while she did another of his IQ tests. She has to use a keyboard, and work on the screen. Her finger joints are too sore for her to hold a pen.
I think her fingers are getting longer.
I didn’t have to do an IQ test. I sat there stroking the pigeon. Its eyes were closed, its feathers were soft and downy, gray with a greeny-pink sheen. It reminded me of outdoors, of trees and sky and all sorts of things I probably wouldn’t ever see again. I wished it didn’t have to be dead. Dr. Franklin kept glancing at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. I suppose I looked a bit mad, sitting there petting a dead bird.
I know he thinks I’m the weak link. That’s why he never tells me anything about being a fish. Either that, or there’s nothing interesting to say. But I’m beginning to suspect that my infusions simply didn’t work. Miranda will leave me, she’ll go on the great adventure alone, and I’ll be left behind.
When he left, he took the pigeon with him. I was sorry. I had wanted to keep it.
Miranda sat for a long while saying nothing, staring at the blank TV. She kept opening her mouth as if she was yawning, and touching the corners of her lips.
Finally she said, “Do’ mi ’oice ’ound staynge?”
I was frightened, so I said loudly, “No! No it doesn’t sound strange at all!”
“My mouth feels weird,” she said, and we both smiled in relief, because that time she sounded normal. “I think all my teeth are going to fall out,” she said coolly, as if this was the most ordinary thing in the world. “Birds don’t have teeth, do they? Maybe I have to have no teeth, or I won’t be able to fly.”
“Ask Dr. Franklin. He’ll explain it to you.”
It’s hard to describe how we felt about Dr. Franklin. We were terrified of him and we didn’t ever stop hating him, but we longed for his visits. I was jealous of the attention he paid to Miranda, but I also thought it was right, because she was more important than me, at least that’s how I felt. She deserved more of his favor.
He was like a god.
People who get kidnapped, or who are held hostage by terrorists, often behave like this. They start depending on the kidnappers, and treating them with lots of crazy respect, because they have nowhere else to turn. We’d agreed we’d try to remember that the way we felt about him wasn’t real, it was a survival trick our minds were playing. Miranda said, “We can’t stop what’s happening to our bodies, but we can control what happens to our minds.” But it got harder.
We didn’t have anyone else but Dr. Franklin, all through this time. I suppose Skinner must have been involved in the things that were done to us when we were taken to the operating room (we were always unconscious for those trips); but we never saw him. I think he wasn’t trusted to be near us, unless we were out cold (not until it was obviously too late), in case we were able to convince him to help us.
I don’t think the orderlies knew what was happening. As far as they were concerned we were trespassers, being kept away from the secret stuff until Dr. Franklin could arrange for us to be sent back where we came from. Or something like that. They never saw us after things started to get weird. Dr. Franklin and Dr. Skinner looked after us then pretty much entirely by themselves.
The technicians, the ones who had brought us back when we tried to get away, and the ones who acted as nurses for the two doctors, must have known. I don’t know what Dr. Franklin told them, if he told them anything. Maybe he told them we were ill, and being given treatment that would save our lives, and we were crazy too, and that was why we had to be kept locked up. But whatever they knew, I suppose I can understand why they didn’t try to help us. Dr. Franklin was like a god to us. They probably felt the same way. He was a very impressive person.
Also, to be brutal, they had their families to think of. They knew about that ward with the cages around the beds. They knew enough to understand that the scientists needed young people for the human trials. If they thought it was a case of letting us be guinea pigs, or letting it happen to their own children, I suppose they didn’t have much choice.
Day Fifty-nine
Miranda woke up and started searching around her pillow. I didn’t know what she was doing, until she said, calmly, “Oh, my front teeth. Look, they’ve started dropping out now. Here they are, lying on the pillow for the tooth fairy. He told me it might happen. Birds don’t have teeth, do they?”
I nodded, bending over her and stroking her black hair back from her sunken face.
“I think he must be giving me tranquilizers, Semi. Everything seems so far away.”
I could hardly make out what she was saying, but I didn’t bother telling her that. She knew. Her eyes were getting bigger, or else her face was getting smaller . . . the bone shifting into a different pattern. Her cheek-bones and her jaws were changing shape.
I was still taking my share of the daily injections, the patches and the pills: but I still had no symptoms. I couldn’t breathe at night, and I was rather floppy. But that didn’t have to be anything to do with the treatment. It was stuffy in those windowless rooms, in spite of the aircon; and neither of us was eating much. We had no appetite. I told Miranda to stay in bed, and went to the bathroom, because for the first time I felt something odd.
When I looked in the mirror, I saw marks like bruises on my neck. When I touched them, the skin came apart under my fingertips. It was as if two rows of little wounds had opened in my throat, from the inside: but there was no blood. I was glad of that. I’ve always been a coward about the sight of blood. I put my hands over my chest, wondering what was happening to my lungs, inside
there, changing so that I could breathe underwater.
Big deal.
I’d chosen the easy option, and I wished desperately that I could have my choice back, and save Miranda from her cruel tortures. But it was too late.
Dr. Franklin didn’t stay long, when he came that morning. There’d be no more lessons on the science of flight now, no more IQ tests for Miranda. Later he came back with Dr. Skinner. They set up the equipment Miranda needed, to get her through the critical stages of her change. I didn’t speak to Skinner. I could hardly bear to look at him. I had to keep going into the bathroom. I couldn’t stop crying, because she was leaving me, she was going somewhere I couldn’t follow. But I managed to stay cheerful when I was by her.
“Exciting,” I whispered, holding her hand gently. “A tremendous challenge. You’re going to have superpowers.”
Day Sixty-two
Miranda complained that there was something wrong with her shoulders. She said, “I can’t get my arms to come forward, it’s as if both my shoulders are dislocated.” I’d been having to help her a lot, almost carrying her to the bathroom when she needed to go. It wasn’t hard, she was so light, it felt as if she was made of paper. But I couldn’t do that anymore, since the drip had been put into her stomach, and the monitor machines had been taped to her chest and head.
I moved the stand that was carrying the drip-feed. She wasn’t able to form words well, but I knew she wanted me to have a look. I turned back the sheet and saw red smudges on her pajama jacket. My hands were clumsy. I didn’t have much feeling in them, due to the immunosuppressants or something. When I’d managed to unfasten the buttons, I saw that the keel of her breastbone had burst through the skin, and the raw flesh was oozing blood and clear fluid. I could see the bone, all white, and the thick bands of gleaming purply red, which were the new muscles—
