by Lydia Kang
“It’s not like Carus, is it?”
I jerk in surprise to see Cy standing right next to me. He’s got dark circles under his eyes, but seems less gaunt than when I found him in Dubuque. I find myself holding my breath, standing so close. It never fails to surprise, how easily he can unmoor me.
“No, it’s not,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm.
Cy clenches his jaw. Most wouldn’t notice, but I see the telltale ripple of muscles along his cheek. He rubs his forearm absently. He did that yesterday too, after disembarking the magtrain.
“Is your arm okay?”
“Oh. Yeah, fine.” He smiles at me, but it’s a shallow smile that doesn’t touch his eyes. “Where are you assigned?”
“Childcare.” I slump my shoulders. “Julian told me yesterday he wouldn’t let me near a lab with a ten-foot pole. Not until I’ve earned it.”
Cy doesn’t seem to be listening anymore, because Julian and Renata have entered the garden. They’re having a heated argument that ends with Julian hissing, “Not in front of the children. We’ll get more medicine when I say it’s necessary.” Renata’s hair is in frizzled disarray and she’s still wearing a powder-blue nightgown. Her brown cheeks are dulled, and dark circles shadow her eyes. She sits at a table next to Xiulan and grabs a cup of coffee, slurping it. Behind Julian’s back, Renata pats Xiulan discreetly on the shoulder and her skin flashes green before quieting to a putty color. Renata’s eyes brim with tears, and a single drop rolls down her cheek and salts her coffee.
Julian walks up to me and touches my waist. I sidestep him, but the possessive hand stays planted on my side. “Zelia. Sit with me. You too, Micah.” I glance over my shoulder to see Micah walking slowly toward the garden. His skin is ashen and his hair messy, like he didn’t sleep a wink. He holds his braceleted wrist at an angle, away from his body. Reluctantly, he sits down at his newly appointed seat at our small table. Cy joins Blink at another table.
Micah’s wrist is raw and oozing beneath the bracelet. He can’t rest it anywhere without cringing in pain. He pushes away the plate of pastries and just sits there, staring at his wrist. I’ve never seen him like this.
Julian didn’t clip his wings; he singed them to ashes.
Julian sits down and takes a huge bite of an apple turnover. “He was hard to figure out, you know.” He waves his bitten pastry at Micah.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“His trait. I make sure I’m immune to every person’s trait in Avida. Took a page out of SunAj’s book. Micah generates current, so I found a medicine that makes my skin nonconductive to electricity. Then I simply grafted immune-compatible artificial skin to his wrist, and his own protection against it was gone. Simple. Elegant.”
I stare at the raw, burned flesh around his bracelet and lift my eyes, meeting Micah’s.
“There’s nothing elegant about torture,” I say slowly.
“Discipline! There’s a difference. Anyway, my next project is her.” He slides a look to Caliga. She’s sipping her coffee, oblivious to Julian’s lecherous stare. “My lab is already working on it. Or you could help me. I understand you’ve already seen the formula.”
“I don’t remember it.”
Julian laughs. “You need to work on your lying skills, Zelia! You’re so absurdly obvious.” He leans forward. “There’s an art to lying, Zelia. Ask this one.” He nudges Micah, who scrunches his face in pain. “Well, I’m off. We have a big day tomorrow, Zelia.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I’ve arranged a meeting for tomorrow afternoon with several senior Inky officials. They’re quite interested in meeting you. Your first lesson in politics! I promise, it will go swimmingly.”
He grabs Micah’s forearm, and Micah cries out in agony. Everyone at breakfast goes deathly silent. “You’ll perform perfectly, because you already know the consequences if you don’t.”
Julian drops Micah’s arm and leaves the rose garden. Slowly, everyone recovers except Micah, who sits trembling in the chair next to me.
My bracelet buzzes a warning, and a holo pops up to tell me I’m due to attend my childcare duties.
I get up to join a group leaving the garden, not knowing what to say to Micah.
“Zel.” He grabs my wrist with his bad hand and gently pulls me back to the table. I don’t have the heart to jerk away, knowing how much it would hurt.
“What?”
“I meant what I said before. I didn’t sleep with Dyl. And I didn’t sleep with Ana either.”
Pressure rises in my chest and I fight the urge to yell at him. “I don’t believe you.”
“SunAj was obsessed with trying to figure out how your dad created traited kids. Dr. Benten didn’t share the code with him, and SunAj was desperate to make new products. He took complete control of the entire process. They were both sedated and impregnated in a lab. It wasn’t me. It was never me. I’m telling you the truth.”
I lean closer and stare him down. “You manipulated innocent girls. Children! You victimized them. You’re just as guilty as you were before.”
CHAPTER 16
I’M WAITING AT THE TRANSPORT DOOR WHEN Blink walks up to me. We both enter it and scan our bracelets, but only one floor lights up: the lowest level.
“Oh. Are you babysitting too?” I ask, though inwardly I’m all Please say no.
“Yes,” she says stiffly.
Oh joy.
The doors open to a gigantic, dimly lit underground cavern. A wetsuit-clad boy welcomes us—Tennie, the boy who lost a hand trying to escape. Two kids splash around the shallow end of the water, which glows with a faint blue-green phosphorescence. I’m surprised there aren’t more.
“Welcome to Mutant Nannying 101,” Tennie says, grinning.
“Tennie,” I say. “Like Tennis?”
The boy laughs. “No. Like Tennessee Williams. Renata went through a playwright phase when I was born.”
Blink stands there staring at us, until I clear my throat uncomfortably. “Uh, Tennie, this is Blink.” I flinch at my own mistake. “I mean Élodie.”
“You may call me Blink,” she says delicately.
I frown. “I assumed you’d hate the name Blink.”
“Oui. Je déteste ça. But it defines me. So.” She shrugs.
“How many kids are in Avida?” I ask Tennie.
“Twelve.”
“Wow. Such a big place for so few people.”
“Well, it used to be fifteen. Three have died in the last year.”
Surprise stops me cold. Those are horrible odds. “What? Why?”
“We don’t know,” Tennie says. “A couple of the kids kept getting sick. They’ve been trying to figure out if it’s related to their traits maybe . . . I don’t know, making their bodies expire? It’s weird.”
That’s so strange. No one in Carus ever got sick, except for Hex, from eating too many lemon bars in one sitting. Kids in Aureus were killed all the time when they were deemed useless or noncompliant, frozen in that blue ice wall I’d seen. But sickness? Then again, my dad did help when some kids weren’t healthy. Vera mentioned having vitamin deficiencies that he’d balanced out for her particular physiology.
“Anyway. We’ve got way worse problems now, right?” he says, knowingly nodding at me. “No? You don’t know?”
“Know what?” Blink asks.
“Didn’t you hear the news?” He turns on his bracelet holo, and the scrolling news channel pops up. A headline about illegal products flashes in red. “See? Our products are being taken off the shelves and destroyed. Someone sent information to the press that proved that Teggwear, ForEverDay, and those skin-healing serums from that new guy—Cy?—were derived from people with altered DNA.”
“But none of those products change people’s DNA. They’re just pharmaceuticals made from the same chemicals that traited bodies make,” I argue.
&nbs
p; “Does it matter? Anything associated with us right now is pretty bad. Some guy out there is leaking info and wants us dead.”
“Who?” Blink and I say it simultaneously. She smiles shyly at me and I allow a tiny smile back.
“No one knows. I guess that’s why Julian is desperate to meet with the Inky politicians tomorrow. Some of those products are made at our factory in Inky. The SkinGlow, and SkinChange.”
I remember seeing ads for those. SkinGlow is a party drug that allows you to glow in the dark. And SkinChange is similar, but lets you flash rainbows.
“That’s our money, our lifeblood.”
“Does Julian have any idea about who’s leaking the information?”
“I hope so,” Tennie says. “Anyway, time to meet your charges.” He cups his hands, hollering, “Hey, delinquents! Come meet your other nannies.”
The two kids splash over to us, drenching my legs. The little boy with the wraparound sunglasses swims up to us, and another girl who looks totally normal, maybe seven years old?
“I already met them!” the boy yells, and flops backward into the water.
“So polite! That was Jensen,” Tennie tells us. “This is Penelope.”
“Hi,” Penelope says, and then points beyond us. “Can I play with that mouse?”
Blink and I spin around, searching the ground for vermin. “What mouse?” I say.
“That one.” She points again, to the far rock wall, full of dark crevices and moss.
“There is no playing with mice. Or rats. Okay?” Tennie tells her. At our confused faces, he adds, “She has superior vision. You’ve probably heard of her product, Visionite. The big game hunters in Utaz love it. She can see a fly from a mile away. You’re lucky she didn’t analyze your wrinkles.”
“I’m eighteen. I don’t have wrinkles,” I say, frowning.
“According to Penelope, everyone’s face resembles a dry lake bed.”
Great. My face is already geriatric.
This underwater cavern is astonishingly real. The ceiling is covered in bone-colored stalactites that bare their teeth fifteen feet above eerily glowing water. I stoop down to the water, swirling it. The eddies and whirlpools flash with liquid foxfire.
“Amazing,” I murmur. “How did you guys do this?”
“Ask Cela,” he says, disgusted. Tennie points to where a figure is swimming toward us beneath the water. Every inch of her naked skin is faintly aglow in blues and greens, the same ones throughout the cavern. When she breaks the surface, she spits water at Tennie, and not in a joking way. It’s the same water girl who took Ryba into the oasis pool.
“What are you doing here?” she says to Tennie.
“I was assigned, okay?” He crosses his arms. Cela gives me and Blink the once-over and crinkles her nose, like we’re yesterday’s garbage. Might as well try to be civil.
“Hi. I’m Zelia,” I say. Cela keeps frowning at me. “I love what you did with the bioluminescence. How did you do it?”
Cela bares her teeth. Her canines are sharp and shiny. “I spliced luciferin and luciferase genes into the natural bacteria of the water. Is that good enough an answer for you?” She turns around and then disappears into the depths.
Oooookay.
Tennie shakes his head. “Don’t take it personally. She hates your dad almost as much as she hates me. She thinks of herself as being a victim of . . . let me see if I can get the words right.” Tennie take a deep breath and in his best professorial voice, intones, “The ultimate objectification of personhood down to the basest molecular level.” When I give Tennie a blank stare, he shrugs. “Being created for the sake of her genes, rather than for the sake of making a human being.”
I raise my hands. “Yeah, if anyone is listening out there. I had nothing to do with that!” I say, exasperated.
“I know. Like you had nothing to do with making me like this,” he says, waving his one good hand. I don’t notice anything at first, and then I see that his hand is dripping water all over the rock he’s standing on. It’s like he’s sweating water all over the place.
“You’re gifted with excessive, voluntary sweating?”
“Ha. Not perspiration, but precipitation. I condense water out of the air by negatively charging the ions around me.”
“Julian and Renata are your parents?” Blink asks. We both stare at her, surprised. She’d been so quiet, we almost forgot she was here.
“Yep.” He smacks the moisture off his hand onto his shorts.
“But you tried to escape,” she says, frowning.
“I never said we got along.”
“You are blessed to have parents who love you.” She takes off her sunglasses and she wipes her eyes with her sleeve.
I feel bad for her. I know what it’s like to have a parent who seemed to care, even if Dad wasn’t truthful with us. And I have Marka now.
“So . . .” I start carefully. “Did they abandon you?”
Her wide black eyes turn on me. “Abandon? No. I wish they had. They slapped me into silence when I cried in the sunlight. They locked me in a brightly lit room, trying to force my trait to go away. And when they realized how well I could see in the dark, they made me steal things, in the worst parts of Montreal.” She stares at the cavern wall. “So much evil happens when the lights go out. I saw it all.”
“Geez,” Tennie says. “I’m sorry. Well, you’re safe now.”
Blink takes a step back from both of us. “We’ll never be safe, as long as we’re abnormal. We’ll always be used as cattle. I wish we’d never been born.”
Blink retreats to a mossy stone and puts her sunglasses back on. Tennie throws pebbles at the water when the transport door behind us opens. I’m surprised to see Tabitha walk toward us. She’s wearing nothing. I wonder if that’s still considered naked if she’s covered in fur.
“So. They let the Wookie out of the freezer, huh?” Tennie says, smirking.
Tabitha ignores him and steps to the water’s edge, far away from where the kids are splashing around, and taps the surface of the water. Tap, tap, tap, pause. She repeats the rhythm until Cela’s lithe body appears, bucking beneath the surface toward the rocky shore. When she surfaces, she speaks in low tones with Tabitha. I catch a few words of it. Something about breathing, and turnover, or something. Cela twists back into the water, and Tabitha marches in, following her. They disappear into the depths in a few seconds.
“Where are they going?” I nudge Tennie.
“The other water rooms. They’re accessible by underwater passageways.”
“Wow. They really built this place to be pretty complicated,” I remark. The grotto even smells perfectly real. Damp and mossy, with mineral-laden air.
“These caverns weren’t constructed. They’re natural. Apparently, the first person Aureus put in charge here was a water child. She had the building built over this place,” he says, gesturing to the stalactites. “There’s an underwater river in Inky, and a bunch of linked underwater caves too. I hear there are exits to the surface, outside of Avida and Inky, but none of the water kids ever leave.”
“Why not? I’d be out of here in a heartbeat.” Or a breath, if I could hold it for that long.
“Because there’s no guarantee they’d be able to get to another body of water without drying out and dying. Their lungs don’t work so well. Remember the Wookie’s girlfriend, Ryba? I hear she was only out of the water for two hours. Nearly killed her.” Tennie rubs his stump against his temple, thinking. “That’s the thing with our traits. Sometimes they’re like genetic handcuffs. I mean, can you see the Wookie—”
“Please call her Tabitha. Or I’ll start calling you Luke Skywalker.”
“Hey, that would be appropriate,” he says wryly, holding up his amputated wrist. When I don’t smile back, he concedes. “Okay, fine. Anyway, can you imagine Tabitha living in a fifth-world,
tropical climate? She’d die. Or Cela living in a desert? We’re trapped by our traits.”
He’s right. I think of this while we watch the kids, chatting about this and that.
Blink joins in and warms up to our conversation after a while. When Tennie walks to the far edge of the water to play with the kids, she blurts out, “He doesn’t like me like that, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Cyrad. We are friends. Nothing more.”
“Oh.” I have this crazy need to smile, but I suppress it.
“Micah and Tegg disciplined him almost daily when he first arrived. He’d heal quickly, but he would fight back the next day. Tant et plus. He was so angry. No one would speak to him but me. Sometimes we talked all night long about you, and your family.” She picks up an ugly brown rock from the ground. It’s like a rock potato. “You have nothing to be jealous about. It is I who is jealous.”
I feel rotten for how I’ve felt about Blink. Élodie. “Well . . . I am jealous. You’ve spent a whole year with him. A year that I don’t have.”
She nods and we sit in quiet silence for a minute. Tennie bounds over and smiles. The kids are shivering, wrapped in towels and running for the transport.
“Lunchtime! Let’s go.”
We stand up and walk inside the transport. When the doors shut, it doesn’t budge.
“Okay, who didn’t scan their bracelet?” Tennie asks.
“Oh, me. Sorry.” I wave my wrist against the black pad, and it indicates floor three, not the top floor where we’re supposed to go to lunch. “Weird.” I turn on my holo port and a new schedule message pops up.
LUNCH: Holo Room Six
“That explains it,” Tennie says. The transport zooms up when a tiny, cold hand slips into mine. The little girl, Penelope with super vision, tugs at me.
“What’s your trait? I can’t see it,” she says. I stoop down until I’m eye level with her. She’s got stunning green eyes and crooked front teeth.
“My trait doesn’t show,” I explain. “My body won’t grow old.” I don’t bother mentioning the scent trait—or that we can develop more than one trait—because I get the feeling it would be bad if Julian found out.
