by Lydia Kang
“I want to be like you, Thel,” she’d lisped.
Five years later, here she is, reading poetry. I’ve lectured her on the danger of trading her soul for trendy clothes, assuming there was nothing else in her pretty head. I hate myself right now.
Without thinking, I put her holo stud in my other earlobe. The warmth of my skin boots up the holo, and I pinch it on. Dad gave me voice-access to her holo, so someone could police her transmissions while he was out all the time. But I was always too busy to check.
Her peach-colored screen glows before me, the content headings spin around a lacy globe studded with gems. Music, movies, school textbooks, diary . . .
Diary?
I shouldn’t. It’s not for me. I should respect her privacy.
I rub my dripping nose with a filthy sleeve. Without Dyl, and not knowing for certain when I will see her again, I can’t resist. This diary is the closest thing I have to her.
“Access diary,” I order.
A new spinning globe of sparkling icicles emerges, the entries hanging from them like Christmas ornaments. I select the one entitled “Dad’s Poem.”
Dyl’s delicate face comes on-screen and her eyes settle on me. I never thought her face would ever be so agonizing to look at. It’s just like when I saw the hologram of Dad.
Her voice is musical, tentative. “Dad showed this to me. I just . . . it’s so . . .” Her eyes roam upward, trying to find the words. “He said I would understand what it was about.”
My face burns with quiet jealousy. Why didn’t Dad show it to me? Didn’t he think I could understand it?
“Anyway.” Dyl rubs her nose, and I freeze, because I’m rubbing my nose the same way. “Listen.”
Prayer for My Child
The chill heralds rain.
Replete with tears and wrongs,
The storm blurs in the distance
As I watch my child,
Asleep in the crib.
Dyl reads the entire poem, eight stanzas in all. It’s beautiful. My chest aches as I listen to her voice, to the words.
I replay the poem over and over, until my brain hurts from not blinking. Soon my eyelids droop and I put on my necklace, letting the rhythm of the box’s precise breaths take over. I make a pillow out of the poetry book and leave the holo on, letting Dyl’s voice pulsate in the recesses of dreams blooming in my head.
It was always me, not Dad, who helped Dyl fall asleep all those years. For once, she’ll do me the favor. I’m grateful, even for the pain it brings me. I want the dreams of cribs and Dyl and Dad, and their words melting into uncertain lullabies.
• • •
OH, THIS IS WHAT STIFFNESS IS. I am seventeen going on seventy.
Something is attached to my head. In the murky, amber light of morning, I wake to find my cheek firmly embedded in the poetry book’s cover. The floor is hard and more unforgiving than it was last night. I push myself up, and my hand lands painfully on something irregular, both smooth and sharp. I unglue my eyelids to see what it is.
It’s a tiny chunk of plastic. A doll’s head, salmon-pink. The eye color has been scratched off with a fingernail so the sockets gape, empty and blind. The neck is ragged where it was cut off a plastic body. I drop it like it’s poison.
Someone has been in my room.
Whoever it was is gone now. It doesn’t seem as if anything else has been touched. Dyl’s purse is still next to me. I unclasp my necklace and suck in a huge lungful of air.
Slowly my mind clears, and one thought parks itself in my consciousness. I’ve got to find Dyl. Part of the puzzle is why she was taken in the first place. I have no way of knowing who Q is or if he’ll get in touch again, or if he’s an ally or an enemy. The only proactive thing I can do is get to a lab.
I head for the bathroom, peeling off my shredded clothes, and step into the shower. Under the spray, I examine my arms and Cy’s handiwork. There’s a hint of a lingering soreness there, but all the wounds are closed and with hardly a trace of scar. Amazing.
I wrap myself in a tiny towel and head for the closet. Oh frick. There are hangers, but nothing on them. My pile of discarded clothes look like they’ve been gnawed and spit out by a rabid animal. I can’t put those on either. Didn’t Wilbert say that Vera was supposed to show me my room?
“Vera?” I say, using my nicest voice. “Vera, are you there? I’m having some wardrobe issues. Um, can you help me?”
Only a minute later, my room door opens. “You rang, Princess?”
Vera is wearing purple yoga pants and a matching halter top cut low in the front to show off her bouncy green cleavage. Her long brown hair is tidily wrapped in a bun on her head.
I jerk my thumb toward the closet. “I’m sorry, but . . . I need some clothes.” I put on my most helpless expression, which at this point is not a thespian effort at all. “Please, Vera?”
Vera narrows her eyes and eyeballs me critically. “Come with me.” She spins around and marches out of my room.
“But—” I’m still in a towel. Oh well. I don’t really have a choice. I pad behind her, skulking in her magnificent shadow as she leads me down the hallway, turning left, then right, and finally into her room.
At least, I think it’s a room. It could be an indoor jungle. Grow lights cover the ceiling, and every inch of table space is occupied by vines twisting out of control and delicate seedlings trying to grasp the light. Next to a few dwarf palm trees is an old-fashioned tanning bed, its clam-shell halves slightly open, as if ready to bite. I guess that’s where she sleeps. Or grills really big sandwiches, who the hell knows.
Inside her closet are racks of brightly colored clothes. Vera taps her foot, waiting for me to pick something out.
“Look,” I say, “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. But I don’t have that”—I point at Vera’s curvy figure—“and I prefer to hide this,” I say, waving at my own body.
Vera rolls her eyes. She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a wadded bunch of black items. “Take these.” There’s lace on some of the pieces, I can tell already. I’m itchy just thinking about it. “It’s the most conservative lingerie I own, from a few cup sizes ago.” She glances at my chest and I pull the towel tighter. “Never wore it, though. I was an early bloomer.” Bloomer. Ha.
Vera reaches into the back of her closet. “Here,” she says, handing me another dark armful. “Leggings and skirts fit for a nun.”
Before I can look through them, she hooks a perfectly toned arm through mine and I nearly lose my towel in the process. She drags me to another transport and we go up to the top floor (Wilbert’s vertigo-inducing tour is long forgotten—I’m totally lost) and down the hallway to a darkened room.
Taking up half the room is a gigantic sewing machine constructed of mismatched junky components. A long robotic arm with ink cartridges ends in a grouping of about ten needles. It hovers over a table big enough for a person to lie down on. A laser attachment lies unused on the floor.
One wall is covered in prints depicting bodies in agony—burning alive in tombs on fire, drowning in an oily, black river. Another has skeletal humans beseeching demons who stab them with prongs to keep them in cauldrons of fire. Really relaxing stuff.
While I’m wondering why getting dressed has to involve depictions of otherworldly torture, something else catches my eye. Across the room is a desk with four enormous screens above it.
The first screen has a map of the States, with several red dots aglow in a random configuration across the country. A map key is scrawled in handwriting on the screen. Next to the largest red dot, it says “Previous known Aureus locations.” One dot, in contrast, luminesces in blue over central Neia. Beside it is a question mark.
On the second screen, a graph containing photo IDs—babies, kids, and teens as old as I am—is tagged to a third screen with a list of body parts and various gene sequences. There are lists of companies, products, and addresses.
The fourth screen is dark and empty.
“Here you g
o, sweet pea.” Vera’s tone is so caustic, she might as well have called me fermented cabbage. She hands me an armload of shirts, all dark-hued—blacks and browns and several dusky blues and grays.
“Thanks. Uh, so whose room is this?” I ask.
“It’s Cy’s,” she says, already halfway out the door.
“Wait, wait. Is he okay with me taking his clothes?”
“Probably not. But happily, that’s your problem now, not mine.” Vera takes off, leaving me feeling and looking like a very guilty thief. As I head for the hallway, a hiss sounds behind me.
Oh, no. Is Cy in here? I turn to find the sound, but the machine hasn’t moved, and I’m positive the room is empty. Something moves in the fourth screen, which was turned off before. A blob expands within the frame. A pair of glittering eyes find mine and blink twice. I see a fall of disheveled dark hair, and reddened lips that open, ready to speak.
I clutch the clothes closer to my chest, as if they’ll provide some feeble protection. She doesn’t speak, just watches me, but I’m filled with a different fear than when I first saw the mutant kids. Instinct tells me this girl is damaged and dangerous and that logic doesn’t exist in her world. She stares at me like I’m the last drop of water in a desert. I step away from the screen, and the girl moans in pain at my retreat.
I turn around and run to my room. I don’t look back.
• • •
IN MY ROOM, I GET DRESSED IN the least lacy set of black lingerie, a pair of black leggings with a tube-miniskirt, and one of Cy’s dishwater-gray shirts. It’s perfect—loose, shapeless on my small frame, and soft. I can’t quite ignore the boy pheromones embedded in the fabric. Kind of spicy and smoky with a woodsy note.
I pick up Dyl’s purse, and mentally brush away the freaky girl, the sewing machine from hell, even Q’s static-filled warnings. But I can’t remove the memory of that list of body parts. I think of Dyl and her delicate fingers, her doe-like eyes.
No, I can’t go there. Not now.
I take out the hairbrush and examine it minutely. I find three strands of her hair.
DNA. My ticket to figuring out what Dyl’s trait is.
I put it all back in Dyl’s purse and sling it diagonally across my shoulder. Didn’t Wilbert say Cy was supposed to show me the labs? I leave my room and pause in the hallway, wishing I had a compass for this place.
“Where is everyone?” I wonder out loud.
A calm, electronic voice emerges from the walls. “Marka is in her laboratory, level one. Hexus, Cyrad, and Wilbert are in the holorec room, level two. Vera is—”
“Thank you,” I say, cutting off the voice.
“You’re welcome,” the voice responds.
The walls give me directions down some winding stairs and a long corridor. I find the holorec room and push the door open a tiny crack. The sounds of squeaking sneakers and a bouncing basketball hit my ears.
“I still think we should go get her. It’s her first day,” Wilbert says.
“Technically, her second. So get her,” Hex says, huffing. More squeaking sneakers, and a whoosh.
“This isn’t fair, I only have two hands!” Wilbert pants. “I don’t want to play anymore.”
Someone dribbles the ball quickly. “C’mon Wil. Who else can I play with?”
“How about Cy? He’s good.”
“Cy knifed my basketball last month when I invited him. So, yeah. No.”
Cy’s low voice erupts from the distance. “I can hear you both, cretins. Shut up.”
Wilbert drops his voice. “Anyway, I gave her a tour yesterday.”
I hear him plunk down on the floor, and I open the door a bit more and peek in. Half the room is a perfect reconstruction of a last-century New York City corner basketball court, complete with a partially cloudy sky, chain-link fence, and faded paint on asphalt. Cigarette butts litter the ground, from a time when they were as easy to buy as bubble gum.
Hex is still dribbling and shooting baskets, his arms a blur of motion. On the sidelines, Wilbert gulps down water, his skin bright red and glistening with sweat. Farther away, the court abruptly transitions to a white area with a treadmill climbing wall, slowly turning over. Cy, in a drenched, sleeveless T-shirt and baggy fatigues, tirelessly finds foot- and handholds as he maintains his elevation.
“Pause wall,” he orders. He spits on the ground (gross) and barks, “Water.” A small orange bot scurries out of nowhere to scramble up the wall like a spider, offer a bottle of water, and retreat. It quickly mops up his spit before disappearing. Cy doesn’t resume climbing; he listens to Hex and Wilbert quietly discussing my arrival while he chalks his hands from a bag on his waistband. He restarts the wall, climbing steadily, and makes a derisive sound.
“She’ll figure this place out, if she’s smart. And if she’s not smart, well. Sucks to be stupid.”
My skin prickles in response.
Hex tries for a three-point shot and makes it. “Sweet!” He burps. “Ugh. Too much bacon. C’mon, Cy. She’s nice. Cute too, in a runt-of-the-litter sorta way.”
“I don’t know why Marka dragged her here. She’s worse than ordinary.”
My stomach clenches with fury. I know I’m ordinary, but to have it uttered with such disgust makes me want to take my ordinary fist and stuff it in his extraordinary face. This guy makes my blood boil. And I never knew I had a boiling point.
Cy’s not done. He spits on the floor again. “She’s damaged goods.”
“Don’t be so lofty,” Hex says, burping up more fried pig. “The government thinks you’re a defective product too.”
“I’m an improvement from the status quo. She’s at death’s door every time she freaking hiccups.”
I’m so pissed that I shove the door open and it smacks against the wall. Wilbert sprays out a mouthful of water across his lap. Hex snorts in amusement and Cy twists to look over his shoulder to lock eyes on me. He doesn’t stop the wall, which continues to glide downward. At the last second, he jumps to land deftly on the floor, sending the spit-cleaning bot squealing away. He’s still staring at me.
“Blueberry bread?” Wilbert offers nervously, holding up a tiny plate. I cringe. It’s probably got saliva spray all over it.
“No thanks,” I say. Cy finally turns away when Vera and Marka walk in, each holding a cup of something steaming. Vera’s got a plateful of more food.
“Hello, Zelia. How are you this morning?” Marka asks, her eyebrows furrowing over my disproportionately oversized shirt.
“Do you want the long or the short answer?”
“That good, huh?” she says, her face full of concern. “We all missed you at breakfast—”
Hex clutches the ball. “There was breakfast? At a table? Since when?”
“Hexus,” Marka warns, and Hex holds up three hands in apology, while the other tosses the ball. “Anyway, I figured you needed to sleep in. Vera, give her some tea.” Vera reluctantly hands me a steaming mug.
“Would it be okay if I tinker around in one of the labs?” I ask. “You know. For my education and all.”
Marka watches me for a moment. Or perhaps smells me? Her face breaks into a gentle smile.
“Of course. Ask Cy, he’ll tell you what you need to know.” She goes to the door, then turns around. “I’ll find you at dinnertime. We have lots to talk about.”
“Okay, sure.” I watch her leave, hesitating. Should I ask her about the millions of weird things I’ve seen since I got here? Then I remember Q’s words. Trust no one.
My stomach suddenly pitches a grumble so loud that Hex makes a face.
“Feed that girl, will ya?” he barks at Vera.
“Shut your piehole, insect,” Vera says, putting the plate of food between us. It’s got a bunch of green-brown squares that smell grassy but sweet. Maybe she’s trying to poison me, but I can’t work on Dyl’s DNA if I pass out from hypoglycemia. I pick up a square. It’s this or Wilbert’s spittle-blueberry bread.
“What is it?” I ask.
&nb
sp; “Parsmint brownie,” Vera replies. She ignores everyone, trying to read the e-tablet on her lap. Twice, Hex’s basketball bounces precariously close to her head. Oddly, the ball never gets close to me or Wilbert. The third time, she swats at it viciously. “If that ball gets close to me again, I will injure all your balls beyond recognition!”
Hex crosses his leg and purses his lips. Wilbert laughs but stops when Vera stares back. Oooh-kay. Happy that I’m not the source of her anger, I take a delicate nibble of the brownie. Vera flicks her eyes toward me as I chew. It’s herby and fibrous and tastes like something far too healthy for me. A honey and orange blossom flavor finishes it off.
“Wow. This is good,” I say, taking a huge bite. Vera doesn’t reply, but for the first time, the hostile expression on her face melts away a tiny bit. I wash the brownie down with the tea, which tastes a bit like mushrooms. I don’t care, I’m so thirsty.
Cy’s done with his climbing, but he doesn’t leave. He spends a lot of time mopping his head. Hex stops playing to pick up a brownie. He takes a bite and tosses the uneaten bits on the plate. “Ugh. Another dirt-delight.”
“Oh. You’re vegetarian?” I ask her.
“That means she’s like a cannibal, right?” Wilbert snickers.
“Shut up, Wilbert.” Vera’s cheeks turn brown. I guess that’s what happens when green people blush.
“We’re all cannibals, in theory,” I say, still chewing.
“How’s that?” Cy asks, holding his towel. When I look him in the face, I forget what I was saying. The lip ring is gone and replaced by a set of studs piercing his cheeks. His tattoos have all changed. They’re bright and distinct again, but this time there are fork-tailed demons over his arms, in a deep navy color. No tattoos on his face. How can that be? Is it just painted on? As he steps forward, I realize it can’t be paint. His shirt is sweat-soaked and clinging to his chest and broad, angular shoulders, and none of his wet skin is dissolving the designs. He asks again, “How are we like cannibals?”
“Well.” I clear my throat. “If you think about it, all the molecules in the world are constantly being recycled. What our bodies get rid of eventually ends up in the air, in the food we eat. We eat each other in one way or another.”
