by Jon McGoran
He glared back at me.
“I’m serious, Del,” I said, softening my voice. “You’re not going to change him. Sometimes you have to just walk away and let him be his miserable self.”
He turned and started walking away from me instead.
“Del!” I called after him. I felt bad, even though what I’d said was true. I started to follow him, but when he got to the corner, he turned right instead of left. Toward the McAllister Street Bridge. The one outside the city.
“Uh, Del?” I called after him, running to catch up. “Where are you going?”
“You said it yourself. You can’t be late. This way is fastest.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, hurrying to keep up with him. “But it’s outside the city.”
“It’s not the edge of the world,” he said with a sharp laugh. “You’re not going to sail off the edge, for God’s sake.”
I didn’t like the way he was taunting me, and I really didn’t like the fact that it was working. I’d been outside the city, plenty of times. We used to go all the time when I was little. But the zurbs had gotten weirder since then. I wasn’t scared. I just didn’t like it.
On the last block before North Avenue, the northern edge of the city, the houses turned ratty. Some had beat-up cars out front, old gasoline models retrofitted with electric motors. Half a block from the Avenue, the Super-E utility lines came out of the ground in huge gray pipes that rose onto metal structures taller than the nearby houses. The Super-E lines didn’t cross the Avenue. That’s where the city ended, and so did the reach of the city’s electricity. The lines made a faint, high-pitched hum, but it was mostly drowned out by the whine of the cars whooshing past us on the Avenue.
The blur of cars looked a lot like the Levline, except instead of silver it was all different colors blending together. The Avenue wasn’t technically a Smart-route, since it had traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. But your car had to be in autodrive to be on it, or else you could get major fines.
The sound of the traffic grew louder as we approached, then it fell away altogether as the crossing light turned green.
I stopped walking, but Del didn’t. The numbers on the pedestrian light were counting down. Soon it would turn red, and it would be at least five minutes before it turned green again.
Where I was standing, on the city side of the Avenue, the sidewalk was trashy and unkempt, but the other side was a hundred times worse—there was twice as much litter, and the concrete was cracked and split and overgrown with weeds. The houses lining the far side of the Avenue were vacant and covered with vines.
“You’re going to be late,” Del called over his shoulder, taunting me again. He was halfway to the other side. The light clicked to yellow.
I ran after him, across six lanes. We both stepped onto the curb just as the light clicked to red.
Del grinned down at me.
“Now what?” I said, shouting over the sudden rush of cars accelerating behind us.
He shrugged and started walking down the road. “We cross the McAllister Street Bridge, and we go to school.”
A block off the Avenue, the traffic sounds faded away to an unsettling quiet. The houses were more and more run-down the farther we walked. Dark, vacant windows stared down at us.
Two blocks from the Avenue, the street was pocked with sinkholes. Some of the houses were completely hidden by foliage. Some had been torn down, with the debris piled into what used to be the basements and half-covered with dirt. The rest had been left to fall down on their own, and many were well on their way. One had a tree growing through the second-floor window. The window wasn’t even broken; someone had left it open, and now a tree was growing through it.
I would never have let on to Del that I was the slightest bit nervous, but as we walked, I could feel imaginary eyes watching my every step.
It wasn’t until the next block that I discovered they were real.
FOUR
Chimeras.
Three of them. Two were on the front steps and one was in the driveway of a big old stone mansion that looked like it had been converted into apartments before being abandoned altogether.
None of them moved a muscle as they watched us. It creeped me out that we might have just as easily walked right past and never noticed them.
The two on the steps had bird splices. Beige feathers covered their heads instead of hair. Their huge black eyes stared at us, unblinking, above noses that were large but somehow graceful, with a pronounced curve. They looked exotic—maybe even beautiful. But they were also unsettling.
They wore jeans and T-shirts. The one on the left had a green stone set in her pierced nose. Apart from that they could have been twins. If they’d gotten their splices from the same batch, I guess in a way they were.
The one in the driveway, wearing khakis and a maroon jacket, had some kind of cat splice. His ears were pointy, his nose flat, and he had a thin sheen of striped fur on his face, more tabby than tiger. His upper lip was slightly puffed out. His eyes were different, too; they were still human in shape, but the pupils seemed elongated.
I realized I’d seen him before, in the city, getting kicked out of Genaro’s Deli. Genaro was a cranky old guy, and a big-time chimera-hater. He had signs all over his deli saying HUMANS ONLY and ANIMALS MUST WAIT OUTSIDE. I’d heard that chimeras sometimes went there just to provoke him.
The cat was staring at me, but I couldn’t tell if he recognized me.
“Jesus,” I whispered involuntarily as we passed.
“Chimeras,” Del said softly.
“Don’t stare,” I said, quickening my step.
“They’re so cool,” he said, stopping to look back at them.
“They’re not cool,” I said. “They’re creepy. What are they thinking, doing that to themselves?” I stopped and looked back, too, and the cat chimera in the driveway narrowed his eyes. Maybe he sensed my disapproval, or maybe he did recognize me from the neighborhood.
There was a movement at the doorway, and I noticed a fourth chimera, looking out from the shadows inside the house. He stooped as he came through the doorway and out onto the porch.
I couldn’t tell what he was spliced with—maybe a dog or a wolf—but his face was striking. His skin looked smooth and fair, but tanned from the sun. His ears were slightly pointed and his nose was wide, ending in a flat triangle. He had a prominent mouth, full lips, and a strong jawline. His hair was kind of awesome, chestnut brown, peaking down into his forehead and spiked up as it swept backward. But his most arresting feature was his eyes—large and wide set, they were a deep, soulful brown; calm but wary, and radiating intelligence.
He was also massive—probably close to seven feet tall, and solidly muscled, like he was part mastiff and part landmass. Come to think of it, he may actually have been part mastiff.
The whole effect was not entirely unattractive, if you were into that sort of thing.
I’d never seen him before, but I got the sense that maybe he recognized us.
The two bird chimeras on the steps looked up at him with a quick, jerky, simultaneous movement. Then their heads snapped back in unison to stare at us.
“What’s up, Del?” said a voice, sudden and surprisingly close.
I turned to discover yet another chimera, leaning against a tree right near us. He had pale brown eyes in a face that narrowed to a point, with a faint coat of fur, reddish brown on the top half and white along his jaw, chin, and neck. He might have been part fox. I was still trying to figure it out when I heard Del responding, “What’s up, Sly?”
I looked at Del as it sank in that he knew this chimera. Then the big guy in the doorway said something to his friends. His words were too soft for me to hear—just a low rumble that I felt in my chest—but the bird chimeras rose together in response and hurried inside. I turned to see that the cat in the driveway was gone, and so was Sly. The big dog chimera stared at me another moment, then stepped back through the doorway and disappeared into the shadows
.
FIVE
We were half a block beyond the chimera house when I laid into Del.
“How did that chimera know your name?” I demanded.
He shrugged, like it was no big deal. “What do you mean?”
I glanced back over my shoulder, then gave him a stern look. He knew what I meant.
“I know some chimeras,” he said, shrugging again. “They’re cool.”
“They’re depressing,” I snapped.
“You’ve never seen one before, have you?”
“I’ve seen plenty of them,” I said. Chimeras had been a thing for at least fifteen years, after the bio-hackers started mixing with the body-mods to see what would happen. But people who actually got spliced had stayed pretty much underground until the last five or ten years. And up until two minutes ago, I’d only met or seen up close a dozen or so, including that cat from Genaro’s Deli.
The only chimeras I actually knew were pals of Nina Tanaka, who’d been one of my best friends until seventh grade, when she moved into a giant house on a much nicer block and started hanging out with the rich kids over there. One of her chimera friends had a single cheetah spot on her shoulder and the other had three tiny parakeet feathers in her earlobe.
It wasn’t illegal to get spliced. But it was illegal for anyone other than a doctor to give someone a splice—and since the American Medical Association had made it clear that any doctor caught giving someone a splice would lose their license, there weren’t a lot of medical professionals willing to risk it.
Some countries were more chill about splicing and it was legal and regulated, sometimes even promoted by the tourism board as a reason to visit. Nina’s friends had probably gotten spliced at some posh spa in Belize or Switzerland, or someplace else where one-percenters could pay big bucks for a licensed doctor to give them a targeted splice and come out with a tiny, discreet—and very fashionable—alteration.
The guys we had just encountered had probably gotten spliced by a “genie,” some weirdo in a basement or a garage somewhere. It was a hell of a lot cheaper, but they took their chances and got what they got.
“Splicing is stupid, Del,” I said. “It creeps me out, and so does the fact that you think it’s cool. Mixing animal genes into your DNA just to get some feathers or a tail or whatever? It’s nuts.”
“It’s not nuts.” He laughed, but his voice sounded hot.
“You know they use a live virus, right? They load the splice into a virus and infect you with it. That’s how they do it. They make you sick.”
“Doctors use the same technique to treat all sorts of things. It’s how Syngenius does their genetic enhancements, and they’re totally legit.”
I rolled my eyes. Syngenius did synthetic gene alterations for all sorts of physical traits. More hair here, less hair there. Brown eyes with green flecks, green eyes with brown flecks. Instead of splicing in new genes, they edited your existing genes. It was super expensive but getting more popular with the people who could afford it.
“Well, I’m not nuts about Syngenius, either,” I said.
“Of course you’re not, Jimi. You get squeamish about tattoos, for God’s sake.”
“That’s right, and splicing is a thousand times worse! You saw the same health vids I did, about people’s bodies rejecting splices and having bad reactions, their immune systems going haywire, their organs becoming malformed, infections, all that stuff! And even if everything goes right, what about the future? What about college?”
He laughed. “Not everybody is destined to go to college.”
Del’s grades had been tanking lately and he had been dropping hints that maybe college wasn’t for him—hints I tried to ignore, because I didn’t know where that left me. For years we’d had a plan: we were going to stay in Philly and go to Temple University, together.
Once again, I changed the subject.
“Never mind about college,” I said. “What kind of jobs are they going to get? Remember that article we had to read for Mr. Martinez? Kids who get spliced are way more likely to end up unemployed. What kind of future is that?”
Mr. Martinez was our US History teacher. I think I liked him a little more than Del did.
Del turned to look back at the chimera house. “An awesome future.”
“Squatting in some abandoned house outside the city? That looks awesome to you?”
“Compared to working at a bank every day, or something like that? Hell, yeah!”
“Who says you have to work in a bank?” I rolled my eyes again. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“No, I’m not,” he said, looking right at me, his eyes fired with intensity. “There’s plenty of ways to make a living where you don’t have to sell your soul. Those guys have the right idea.” He pointed back at the chimeras’ squat house. “You don’t think every miserable drone working at a big-box store or sitting around in some crappy cubicle had said at some point they would never end up like that? Well, these chimeras made sure of it. They burned the ships behind them. That’s awesome.”
“It’s not just jobs. What if they decide they want a family? Can you even have kids if you’re a chimera?”
“Of course you can have kids.”
“What if they come out as some horrible genetic jumble?”
“That’s not how it works, and you know it, Jimi—or did you miss that part of the health class vid? It’s somatic. The gene splices don’t affect the genes you pass on.”
He said somatic like it was his vocabulary word of the week, but he was right. I was surprised he remembered—and that I’d forgotten. “Well, you’d have to be crazy to become a chimera these days, anyway,” I said. “So many people hate them.”
“Crazy people hate them.”
Del’s dad was one of those crazy people, even more than Mr. Genaro. But I thought I probably shouldn’t mention that. Instead I lowered my voice and tried a different approach. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but those crazy people are trying to pass laws against chimeras. Starting right here, Del. Did you know that? Have you heard of the Genetic Heritage Act? It’s already passed the Pennsylvania state legislature. If the governor signs GHA into law, chimeras would legally be considered nonhuman.”
“First of all, of course I know that. Everyone does. Second, it doesn’t say they would be legally nonhuman, it says they would be legally nonpersons, and third, there’s no chance in hell it’s going to become law. But if it did and I were spliced, I’d just go somewhere else. Somewhere less screwed up.”
It bugged the hell out of me that he was technically right about there being a distinction between human and person, especially since I knew that he had no idea what that distinction was. Human was a biological and social concept. Legally it had no meaning. But legally, a person was someone with rights and protections, compared to a non-person, which had all the rights of a cinder block or an apple. I almost called him on it but I wanted to hear more about his crazy plans.
“‘Go somewhere else’? And where exactly would that be? You know they’re pushing GHA laws in, like, thirty-something states.”
“And they’re going to fail everywhere,” he said smugly. “But if they succeeded, I’d just go to Chimerica.”
I laughed. “There’s no such place as Chimerica.”
“Sure there is. I know chimeras who have friends that have gone there.”
“Del.” I tried not to roll my eyes again but failed. “Chimerica is a make-believe fairyland invented by people who want to pretend their kids or brothers or sisters or friends who were dumb enough to get spliced didn’t die from it. Or die from living in a squat with no food or medical care because they can’t get a job.”
I may have laid it on a little thick, but that didn’t make it any less true. I’d heard kids at school talking about some mysterious, secret, safe place that only chimeras knew about, the same way kids talked about UFOs and alien abductions. With all this Genetic Heritage Act crap in the news, Chimerica was a trending t
opic. In a way, I got it—if someone I cared about had ruined their life by getting spliced, I’d want to believe in a magical safe haven for them, too. Especially now. But really, the whole idea was ridiculous.
Del seemed entirely unfazed by what I’d said. “Then you can’t come.”
I felt a cold anger at him—for being so immature and condescending, and for making the future sound so bleak. But I also felt scared, and that made me even angrier.
“Just shut up,” I said, picking up my pace as we crossed the McAllister Street Bridge. Doubling back toward the city, we passed through a neighborhood that seemed to be inhabited—smoke rising from chimneys, cars that were junked up but looked like they still ran. But after we crossed back into Philadelphia, the streets were oddly deserted. The fact that we weren’t speaking to each other might have made them seem even more so.
We got to school before the end of homeroom, but we had to sign in late anyway. I gave Del a glare to let him know I was still annoyed, and we went our separate ways.
We passed each other in the hallway between classes a couple of times, but we didn’t speak. We didn’t even make eye contact during our calculus test. And when Del missed the bus after school, I went ahead and got on it. I wasn’t going to let him make me late twice in the same day. Besides, I needed to be home when my mom called to check up on me.
SIX
Coming home to the empty house, I felt the usual mixture of loneliness on one hand and relief on the other.
Sure, I loved my family, but generally I was glad they weren’t around. My brother, Kevin, was a hotshot athlete, the star center for the varsity basketball team, among other things. He was a senior, and my mom was taking him on a four-week US tour, visiting all the big colleges that wanted him to come play for them.
“This year is about Kevin,” she had said when she told me she was taking time off from her job as a marketing consultant to shop him around.
I understood. His college ball career was about to take off, and he would probably make a lot of money someday. But I still had to laugh—because when was there a year that wasn’t about Kevin?
