by Lydia Kang
Hex hoots. “That’s totally disgusting. So you’re saying I could be ingesting Wilbert’s toenail clippings?”
Vera gathers herself and leans toward me, but stares down Hex. “Ignore him. Our brother Sex is out of it, most of the time.” She grins, a white set of perfect teeth almost fluorescent against her green lips.
“Don’t call me that,” Hex growls.
“Why not? It’s anatomically correct.” She gesticulates dramatically to accentuate her words. “You see, the number six is written as hex in Greek, or sex in Latin. However, neither word takes into account that he’s a virgin.”
“VERA!” All four of Hex’s biceps bulge out, ready to hit something, as Wilbert guffaws on the side. Okay, I need to get out of here. I push off the floor and keep an arm protectively around Dyl’s purse. Cy heads for the door at the same time I do. I step right up to him, but he doesn’t acknowledge my close proximity.
“Hey,” I say. He opens the door to leave. “HEY!” I roar. Wow. I’m impressed with the volume of my own yelling.
“What?”
“I need to see your lab here.”
“What for?” Again he gives me this look. The one that tells me I’m not special, I’ve got no trait, so I’ve nothing worth researching. Basically, not worth his time.
I don’t want to share this project with Cy. But I need him. Based on the subjects that holo-Dad taught him, he’s the only one with a clue about what I need. He waits for my answer, but when it doesn’t come, he makes to leave again.
“Okay, okay!” I yell, then drop my voice. “I want to find out what my sister’s trait is.”
“You got a sample?” he says. I try to ignore the fact that he’s staring at my chest now, his eyes narrowing.
“Yes. Can we go now?”
“Is that . . . my shirt?”
“There’s nothing else I could wear,” I explain. Cy turns around to glare at Vera, who’s still in a fight with Hex. They’re a blur of gesturing green and muscled arms.
“That’s my shirt,” he says again, as if this stupid garment is the end-all and be-all of everything important in the world.
If this is what stands between me and helping my sister, then so be it. I drop Dyl’s purse to the ground, yank the shirt over my head, ball it up, and launch it straight at Cy’s face. I’m so angry that I hardly care that I’m showing so much skin in public.
“Here’s your damn shirt. Now can we please go to the lab?” As I turn to walk out the door in my black bra, I pretend not to notice Vera’s irritated face, Hex’s and Wilbert’s open mouths, and Cy’s untattooed and distinctly red cheeks.
CHAPTER 9
OUTSIDE THE HOLOREC ROOM, CY TOUCHES my arm softly. I’m expecting a grab, or even a pinch. I’m surprised.
“Here, take it.” He hands his shirt back to me, which is now damp from his sweat and smeared with chalk. He’s making a clear effort to keep his eyes away from my body, as if he actually wants to see me in my underwear, but is being polite.
Before he changes his mind, I yank it over my head.
Cy leads the way up a few floors to a corridor I definitely haven’t seen before. It’s all cement floors and walls, with industrial metal and plastiglass doors. At the first one, he steps aside so I can enter. It’s the most polite thing he’s done since I got here.
The lab is big, twice as huge as Marka’s. Several machines hum near the door and a few solutions mix by themselves under the hoods. The faint scent of chemicals, ether and xylene, linger in the air and welcome me. I take a few steps in and my eyes flutter shut in bliss for a moment.
This place—it speaks a language I know by heart. The chemicals, the black tables, the vented hoods and boxes of lint-free, industrial-grade tissues . . . I feel more at home than I have since I stepped into Carus. Cy walks ahead of me and crosses his arms, waiting for a judgment. I can see why. The machines look—I hate to admit it—really, really old-fashioned, like from movies in the twentieth century. It’s so far from the contemporary labs I’m used to working in. My initial happiness deflates a little. They have state-of-the-art security systems and these lab dinosaurs in the same house?
Cy walks me to a desk in the middle of the room with seven holoscreens. DNA sequences race by on three of them; another one displays a chemical structure resembling a flying bat. Three more screens are blank.
“Here is where you’ll work.”
“Okay.” I take off Dyl’s purse and gently put it on the desk. Cy punches something into the computer. The three blank screens come to life in vivid yellow with black letters. Introduction to Basic Genetics. The second one, Cell Culture and Vector Mechanism, Level One. And finally, Plasmid Fusion Techniques for the Beginner.
He’s got to be kidding. I raise up a finger in protest. “But I don’t want—”
“It’s the rules here.” Cy’s patience is twirling down a virtual drain already. “You learn it. Then you do it. Nobody’s going to be your lab slave here.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“You’ve got nothing but time in this place.”
He’s so wrong, because I don’t have enough time at all. I move toward the desk.
“I didn’t say I want you to do my work for me.” With a few touches, I shut the three learning modules off. I cross my arms and face him. “What I need to know is do I have to purify DNA the old-fashioned way, or do you have a B-SyndiK extractor so I don’t have to waste my time?”
There it is. The tiniest hint of a smile. It warms his slate eyes just a touch, like cold butter that softens after landing on warm toast. And for the first time, I realize, holy smokes, he’s fantastically cute when he doesn’t look like he’s sucking on lemons.
“All right then. Get to work.”
“About time,” I say, smiling.
Cy settles onto a hoverstool and it adjusts to set him perfectly at the desk. Now I need to orient myself to machines that need a lot more TLC than I’m used to giving.
“Where did you get this junk?” I say, peering at a machine that looks like an electronic ice cream maker, but is probably a centrifuge.
“Where else? The junkyards.”
I’m waiting for him to laugh, but he doesn’t. “This stuff is . . . was trash?”
“Yeah. We go whenever we run out of parts.”
“I thought we’re not allowed to leave Carus House. For safety and stuff.”
Cy’s desk chair hovers and bounces as he spins to face me. “I don’t. But sometimes Vera or Wilbert will go on a run. The junkyard guards get paid to look the other way. We can’t purchase legit molecular bio equipment or it would get traced to Carus.”
“Why don’t you ever go there?” I say, pulling out one of Dyl’s precious strands of hair. It goes into a small, autoclaved glass vial. Nothing in the lab is disposable either, it’s all glassware. Super-old-school.
I realize Cy is pointedly not answering my question. Okay. Maybe his chatty engine just ran out of fuel. I turn to the hood and reach for some solutions to extract her DNA, but stop.
I’m not used to being my own boss like this. Usually I was assigned a protocol in the labs I’ve worked in. I was never there to solve problems, but to work on projects that had been previously planned out. For the first time, I have to write the map in my head. By myself. It’s so strange. But instead of being lost, I know exactly what I have to do.
It feels amazing.
I toss some of that energy toward Cy, hollering, “Hey, can I run her sample against the free DNA database at the NIH? Do you have access?”
Cy shakes his head. “Off limits.” He tips his head toward a massive chrome refrigerator behind me. “Gotta do it by hand. We have a bunch of wild-type control samples. As ordinary as they come. Pure vanilla.”
“Ah. And my sister is bilberry-saffron-macadamia-fudge brittle.”
“You may not be tall, but you’ve got a way with metaphors.”
“Thanks,” I say dryly. Cy passes behind me, leaving a waft of his scent in his
wake. He heads for the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask. Cy doesn’t respond. I raise my voice. “Hey!”
The door closes behind him. One thing is for sure: Cy’s clear as plastiglass about what’s off limits for discussion. I head to the refrigerator and peruse the rack of samples there, but I hesitate, feeling weird about using some stranger’s DNA.
I close the fridge door and reach for Dyl’s holo stud in my earlobe. Her image speaks to me, still reciting Dad’s poem.
Remember to be beautiful.
The flesh is a sad reflection.
Do not be tempted by
Worth in symmetry, in shades of clay,
In carmine lips.
Look, without looking, for beauty.
Beauty. Dyl’s worth is no longer in her looks, it’s in this strand of hair. And I’ll use my own, plain, unspectacular self to help her. I’ll be the control DNA, to compare to hers. Of course. Whose DNA could be more ordinary than mine? I find a sterile swab and scrape some cells from the inside of my mouth, put it in another test tube, and start the protocol to isolate both samples of DNA. Let Dyl’s special trait shine.
For once, I’ll be proud to be in the shadows.
• • •
I WORK NONSTOP, LOSING TRACK OF the hours. Dyl’s holo stays on constantly as I work. It’s comforting hearing her chatter, seeing her face. She talks about boys she likes, new poetry, her classes, me. There is a lot of “Zelia says this” and “Zelia says that.” I tend to fast-forward through the parts where she complains about how much I nag her.
In spite of my hard work, I botch the first sample. I cuss so loudly that Vera applauds from a distant room. The machines have cranky personalities and I make mistakes in the process of getting to know them. I could turn to Cy for help, but a new stubborn streak seems to be sprouting in my neurons, and I don’t ask.
Marka wall-coms me while I’m reading an ancient electrophoresis manual on Cy’s computer.
“Zelia, it’s time for dinner.”
“Thanks, but I’ll skip it.”
“I knew you were going to say that, so if you don’t come to the kitchen in ten minutes, I’m having Hex pick you up. Physically, if necessary.”
“Okay, okay!” I concede. I head back to my room to wash up first, hiding Dyl’s purse under my pillow. After a thorough face-splashing, I come back out to find the purse strap trailing out from behind the pillow. I swear I tucked it away from view.
I run my hand through the contents, but everything seems to be there. Some round things knock against my fingers, and I dig deeply to pull them out.
More tiny baby doll heads. What the hell? I put them on the table next to my bed. There are four of them now, all with their eyes scratched out. I must be losing my mind. No one was in this room when I came in, and I shut the door. Dyl’s purse has been with me all day.
Maybe I’m just hypoglycemic. Hypoglycemic and imagining things.
“Zelia?” Marka intones from the walls.
“I’m coming,” I say, picking up Dyl’s bag and running out.
I find Marka in the hallway. Once again, I’m startled by her appearance. She’s so tall and elegant, wearing a snug white tunic that flutters below her hips. Pale wheat-colored pants swish against her legs. She doesn’t have a single awkward angle on her body.
I follow Marka, partly because I don’t know where I’m going, and partly because she’s got Amazonian legs.
“Marka, I think someone’s been going into my room.”
She doesn’t look surprised. “Wilbert is a terrible snoop.”
“I really don’t think it was Wilbert.”
“You can lock the doors on your voice command. But I assure you, there’s no danger here. You’re safe.”
“But—”
Cy’s voice barks through the walls.
“Zelia.” He doesn’t sound happy. Marka gives me a look that says she’s used to whatever bad mood he’s in.
“What?”
“Clean your crap up.”
“I’m not done. And it’s not crap. I’ll be back soon.”
Cy curses. Marka’s only symptom of annoyance is speeding up. Great. Now I have to jog to keep pace.
“Cy, if you need extra equipment, then by all means poach it from Hex’s lab. He’s not using it,” she reasons.
The walls go silent.
“Friendly guy,” I say. “My father worked with him the last few years? No wonder he looked so beaten down all the time.”
“Actually, they worked really well together,” she says as we reach the kitchen. “I’m impressed, though. Cy’s behavior can be much, much worse.”
“I’ll bet your dinners here are pretty fun.”
“Ah, well.” Marka clears her throat. “Actually, we don’t really have meals together.”
Hmm. I guess all is not peaceful and happy in the land of Carus. I glance around the kitchen. There’s a food efferent, as well as some modern ion ovens. Marka punches in an order at the efferent, but nothing happens.
“Cy was in charge of loading up the efferents this week. Sorry. We’ll have to go analog today.” She opens up the refrigerator and takes out some cheese and tomatoes. We start slapping sandwiches together, which is fun. I haven’t made a sandwich since I don’t know when. I douse mine in salt, pepper, and mayo, but Marka keeps hers unseasoned. I take a huge bite and almost choke from trying to swallow too fast.
“Marka, geez, don’t try to kill her. At least not yet.” Hex’s voice sounds close, but it’s coming from the wall. I’m getting used to the wall-coms. Not the eavesdropping, though.
“Is there no privacy in this place?” I say, still choking on crumbs.
“Precious little. I’ve been trying to get Wilbert to change the settings, but he keeps forgetting.”
“No secrets, then, huh?” I finish swallowing and chug some water. “So how did this happen?” I wave my half sandwich around the kitchen. “Not the kitchen, I mean. Carus.”
Marka refills my water. “I almost wish I could give you my scent memories. They’re so much more detailed than words.” She brushes the crumbs off her hands. “When I was a child, I was overwhelmed with my scent trait. It gave me terrible headaches and I wore a mask all the time, housebound. Even though my parents were well connected, it took years to locate a geneticist who could figure out what was wrong with me. Or right with me, depending on your perspective.”
“What, do you have more scent receptors in your nose?”
Marka smiles. “Yes, even more than canines. And they’re not just in my nose, they run all the way into my bronchi. The olfactory center in my brain is pretty huge.” She frowns. “But it wasn’t a natural, random mutation. My genes were altered in too many places.”
“By whom?”
“I wish I knew. I asked your father what he thought, but he doesn’t have any idea either.” She puts her hand to her mouth. “I mean ‘didn’t.’ I’m so sorry. Sometimes I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
I stare at my lap to hide my watering eyes. It was only three days ago. With everything going on, I’ve been distracted from my grief. But it lies in wait for moments like this, when it can slap me fresh across the face.
Marka doesn’t try to pat my shoulder, or say anything. She lets the quiet rest between us.
“So,” I say fumbling with my wet sleeve, “what happened after you found out about your trait?”
“The geneticist went to report my findings to the government. He was following the law, of course, but my uncle interceded.”
“Your uncle?”
“He’s an influential senator in California. I come from money, Zelia, and power. It’s the reason why I’m still alive, and why Aureus has been less than successful in bringing Carus into its folds. But they’ve been getting bolder. They’re making their own friends in the government. Taking Dyl under my nose was proof of this.”
I pick up my sandwich and nibble it, but it’s suddenly tasteless. “What happened to that geneticist?
”
This time, Marka looks at her lap. “He died in a magpod accident.”
I drop my sandwich. Visions of bobbling, out-of-control magpods swim in my memory. “A magpod accident,” I repeat slowly.
“Yes. My uncle made it happen. My records were erased and all my DNA samples destroyed. He thought I was a gift to the world, not something to be reported and taken away. My family staged my death once I turned eighteen. It was fairly easy, since everyone knew I was an invalid. My uncle helped set up Carus off the grid in a neutral state, far from California and with limited allotments for my freedom. He’s slowly working to reverse the laws, but nothing substantial has happened. It’s through him that I have a link with New Horizons, and another foster home in Kansas City. That’s it.”
“So you’ve brought other kids here. That’s very . . . good of you.”
“It’s not just about being good.” Marka stares past me as if she could see through the walls. Maybe even beyond the borders of Neia. “You know, I still remember what that geneticist smelled like. Curiosity, coffee beans, and clean linen. And the pure scent of his newborn daughter . . .” Her violet eyes are glassy as she meets mine. “I have the blood of an innocent man on my hands, Zelia. It does things to you.”
CHAPTER 10
THAT NIGHT, I MAKE SURE MY DOOR is securely locked. Half a dozen times, I’m awoken by haunted sounds that are either torn bits of dreamscape, or nothing at all. Once, I swear I catch a forlorn sigh, only to realize it’s a scuffing breeze outside the building.
When I wake up in the morning, there are no new doll heads decorating my room.
I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me today. I grab a quick breakfast of cereal in the kitchen, where artifacts of other Carus members remain. Dirty mugs, the crust of a cheese sandwich, and the carcasses of four doughnuts with the glaze nibbled off.
It’s weird. Considering all of Marka’s good intentions, they’re not very cohesive as a foster family. Everyone’s content to be far away from each other for most of the day. Dyl and I always made sure we had breakfast and dinner together. We’d call Dad every night before dinner, though most times he couldn’t join us. But at least we tried.
