“How could you tell?”
Dawn stroked the kitten’s soft fur. “He giggled when he passed. I figured he must be up to his usual mischief.”
Mykl sat cross-legged at James’s feet and began tugging the laces with practiced finesse. “You figured right. He did a doozy today!”
While Mykl’s deft little fingers worked their magic with the dingy size thirteen shoes, James’s gray eyes gazed up at Dawn with infatuation. The low morning sun was sneaking into their dismal world to illuminate the greatest beauty within the Box: Dawn. It was difficult to tell which was brighter, the sun or Dawn’s translucent radiance.
Feeling the sun on her face, Dawn took a slow, deep breath as if trying to capture its warmth into her body. Her head was held high and her slim shoulders were back, without fear of the world or the evil it could throw at her. Pale blue eyes the color of a cloudless desert sky gazed beyond their confinement. She owned the Box with her quiet elegance.
But while those she encountered marveled at her beauty and strength of spirit, her view of the world didn’t extend beyond her arm’s reach. She knew light only as warmth. Colors were useless names for old memories. Shapes manifested themselves exclusively through touch and imagination. Such was the life of the blind.
At age seven, a doctor visiting the Box had told Dawn she would never see again. He blamed her condition on a combination of malnutrition and some childhood disease she hadn’t been immunized against. At fifteen, she still suffered from headaches as a result of that illness.
Teeka hopped off Dawn’s lap and pounced on James’s laces.
“Kitteh!”
“Hold her for me, James,” Mykl said.
James gently picked up the squirming kitten and held her protectively under his chin.
Loose bits of trash filtered through the fence and danced across the asphalt. Mykl looked up to survey the quad and shook his head. “That razor wire is depressing. It makes this place look like a prison.”
“I don’t mind it,” Dawn said.
“Ha ha. You’re the only one who wouldn’t,” Mykl replied flatly.
“Keeps out Ass Angel.” James said it as a simple statement of fact. Mykl and Dawn said nothing.
The Asylum Angel—as he had called himself in his haunting letter—was referred to as the “Ass Angel” by those in the Box. A security camera had captured him taping an envelope to the asylum’s main entry door. When Lori read the letter, she called the police in a panic. She later explained to her charges that the psychopathic Angel had threatened to send all the children to heaven unless they were immediately adopted. Mykl secretly wondered if it was all a ploy to make them more agreeable to adoption.
Also included in the letter was some type of crude cipher. Lori made a copy for herself before the police arrived, and she readily flashed that copy, with good effect, whenever certain individuals misbehaved. And when a local paper published the cipher and a pixelated image of the Angel, Lori allowed it to circulate, uncensored, among the kids. Even those who couldn’t read knew the crazy symbols meant they were marked for death. Lori seemed to enjoy hearing them talk in fearful whispers.
“Don’t worry, James,” Mykl said. “He can’t get inside here. After all, we have this beautiful twelve-foot fence topped with razor wire.”
And it was true: for all its dreariness and uncaring staff, the Box offered safety. Unfortunately, the kids were treated like unwanted pets in a pound. They were fed and watered, and the television stayed on all day long to keep them occupied, but they had little hope of ever being adopted. At least they weren’t put to sleep when they got too old; instead, they were summarily kicked out. But even a dog about to be put to sleep got a pat on the head every once in a while.
When at last Mykl unraveled James’s knots, he carefully retied them with his own special James-proof version. “There. Now leave them alone for the rest of the day!”
“Yes, Myyyklll.” James placed Teeka back on Dawn’s lap. “Have kitteh back, pretty Dawn.”
Just as Dawn reached out to receive her, Lori burst into the quad. “What are you doing with that mangy cat?” she growled.
Teeka responded by puffing up in a fury of fur and claws. She wriggled out of James’s grasp, flew across the quad, and disappeared under a gap in the fence. Even an innocent kitten had the sense to run from the demon-woman.
Mykl saw Dawn mouth the word “bitch” in mute protest. Lori never seemed to notice Dawn’s insults.
“You know the rules,” Lori said. “No pets. Don’t let me catch any of you with one of those vermin again. Now get back inside!”
Yelling and screaming from the Box drowned out all but the first peal of the breakfast bell. James assisted Dawn to her feet and escorted her inside. Mykl glanced back at the fence and saw a young white furry face with a black smirk of a mustache peering around a crumpled garbage can. Mykl kept his smile to himself and walked past Lori with firm control over the sharpened words prickling the tip of his tongue.
James and Dawn were disappearing into the cafeteria, and Mykl had to double his shorter strides to catch up. He was pleased to see that they were serving his favorite breakfast today: oatmeal and orange-flavored water. It must be a special day; they hardly ever served orange-flavored water.
James guided Dawn to an empty space at the end of a long table. “Stay with Dawn, James. I’ll go get our food,” Mykl said. He grabbed a tray to get in line behind the others waiting for their daily gruel.
Boredom radiated from the pimple-faced drudge behind the counter. “Three please?” Mykl said. He held up three tiny fingers and wiggled them. He knew math wasn’t a strong point for the volunteer kitchen workers.
With three steaming bowls on his tray, he made for the drink counter. He was handicapped by his size and five-year-old muscle strength, and adding three overfull drinks to the tray made transport even more of a challenge. Slowly… Slowly…
“Mykl? Are you letting my oatmeal get cold?” Dawn asked with a smile.
“Hold your kittens! I’m coming, I’m coming!”
James applauded when Mykl finally delivered the tray to the table with only minor spillage. “Tank you, Myyykll.”
“Yes, thank you, Mykl. Did you happen to bring spoons too?” Dawn asked innocently.
Grumbling, Mykl fetched spoons as well.
They ate and bantered among themselves, with James and Mykl taking the brunt of Dawn’s sharp wit. “When are you going to grow, Mykl? Are you sure you’re not some sort of government experiment gone horribly wrong?” she teased.
Mykl flicked a pebble of hardened oatmeal at her chest. She flinched, and James blew a snot bubble through a snort of laughter. “No fair!” she exclaimed. “You should be ashamed of yourself for picking on a poor little blind girl.”
“Not me. It was James!”
“James no flick booger!” he cried in defense.
“Booger? It was a booger?” Dawn snorted as well, which only caused the boys to tease her, and soon they were all lost in a massive giggle fit.
After breakfast, while Mykl scraped their bowls into the trash, James escorted Dawn to the dayroom. The two were inseparable. James gladly served as her eyes and valiantly took on the duty of guardian angel, and in turn, Dawn shared her kindness and friendship.
Mykl ran to catch back up to them. He found Dawn stretched out on a threadbare tan couch, her eyes staring into infinity, her pose reminiscent of a hieroglyph of an Egyptian princess Mykl had once seen on an Internet travel site. James sat at her feet in peaceful admiration.
With a running start, Mykl jumped high into the air and plopped into the middle of an old beanbag chair nearby. “I saw Teeka hanging out by the fence after Lori scared her off. She should be there waiting for you in the morning.”
“I do love that little rat,” Dawn said.
“Teeka no ratteh. She kitteh!”
“James, what are you going to do in six months when they make you leave for being too old?” Mykl asked. but it was Dawn he loo
ked to for a reaction.
“Mehbe James stay and serve boogers?” he replied.
“Lori would never let you. She hates us,” Dawn said. “God, she pisses me off.” She closed her eyes and hugged her body tight as if fending off a chill. Abruptly, she sat up and rose in a swift graceful motion. “I have a headache. I’m going to my room… No, don’t get up, James, I can find my way. It’s not like anything ever changes around here.”
James looked sad as his perfectly postured princess disappeared up the stairs.
“C’mon, James,” said Mykl, “we may as well go too. It’s better than hanging around here and waiting for Lori to yell at us for existing.”
James struggled to his feet. “Yeeaah, why she so mean?”
“I don’t know. The whole world is that way. We just happen to be stuck in our own little slice of it. It could be worse—we could be adopted by the Ass Angel.”
James scowled. “Not funnily, Mykl.”
Tina, a shy, blue-green-eyed girl Mykl’s age, walked past them on her way to the quad. She was a relatively new addition to the Box. “Hi, James. Hi, Mykl,” she said in a small voice.
“Hi, Tina,” they said in unison. Mykl was watching her walk away when James poked him in the shoulder. “You likes her,” he teased.
“No I don’t!” Mykl turned his back on James and lengthened his stride toward their dorm. “She’s a girl!” But all the way down the hall, James chanted, “Myyykll likes Teeenaa, Myyykll likes Teeenaa,” while Mykl countered, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
A lingering stink of urine and vomit saturated the dorms. One acclimated to it, eventually. Girls lived upstairs to separate them from the boys. Mykl and James shared a space downstairs. The odd pairing went against normal practice—the customary system paired individuals of similar age—but Mykl had little to complain about. James slept in the upper bunk, didn’t snore too loudly, and his size kept the mean kids at bay.
As soon as they stepped inside their dorm, James promptly set to work on one of his peculiar pastimes: dots. All six foot three, two hundred twenty pounds of him plopped down at the child-sized desk they shared, and a lock of roughly cut ash blond hair hung below his brows, bouncing rhythmically, as he hunched over a pencil and made pages and pages of dots on blank sheets of printer paper that Mykl had liberated from office supplies. The activity appeared to be therapeutic and kept him from making knots in his shoelaces, so Mykl never troubled him over this particular quirk.
It certainly isn’t his only quirk, Mykl thought as he spied an old newspaper opened to the crossword puzzle lying on the floor. James never paid attention to the questions that went with the puzzle; he just filled in the blank squares with words of his own choosing, using his unique style of spelling. To Mykl’s amazement, James always filled in every box, and every word made sense—down and across.
James also had a pre-bedtime habit of pounding out dozens and dozens of pushups and sit-ups. It kept him extraordinarily fit. When Mykl asked him about it, James replied that he’d once heard someone on television say that you had to do those exercises if you wanted to be healthy. Mykl simply arched an eyebrow at James’s rare display of common sense.
Mykl once overheard a member of the staff commenting that James was autistic. Mykl did some research on autism on the Internet and decided to challenge James to a game of solving square roots. James always calculated them faster. He was smart in his own eccentric way.
Perhaps that was why Mykl sometimes likened James’s situation to his own. When Mykl had first encountered children his own age, he’d thought there must be something wrong with them—before quickly coming to the realization that he was the odd one. At the age of three, it was already obvious there was something unusual going on. Others his age didn’t act or think like he did. Adults mistakenly attributed his quiet demeanor to some type of mental abnormality. His incredible ability to absorb and compile an adult vocabulary had only served to justify their diagnosis. Though he was usually very careful about revealing his abilities, sometimes his filter would give way, such as when a snappy retort was too good to keep to himself. That often happened with Lori.
Did James realize that he was odd, too?
I don’t care what other people think of him, Mykl thought. James is my friend.
If only he could be taught to leave his blasted laces alone.
CHAPTER 11
Late into the night, a wailing ambulance siren pulled Mykl from the serene depths of sleep. He opened his eyes and stared at the sagging, exposed wire mesh that somehow managed to keep James and his tattered mattress from crashing down and killing him in a bone-crushing instant.
Mykl rolled over and hugged his pillow. Before being awakened, he had been dreaming of his mother. Thoughts of her still haunted him. He loved her. Why did she have to die? And why did she keep so many secrets—use so many names?
And where was his father? The only thing he knew about his father was that they supposedly had the same name. Yet even armed with a full name, his Internet research had yielded nothing.
And that had left Mykl stuck here, at the Las Vegas Foundling Asylum.
The orphanage.
Mykl knew that foundling asylums had virtually disappeared from advanced societies for a number of decades, in favor of foster care. But the foster care system had broken down, as legitimate foster parents had become vastly outnumbered by abusers who simply took in as many children as legally allowed to get the maximum government stipend. Too often that money bought alcohol and cigarettes, instead of food and clothes, and local politicians decided that the money was better off kept in their own expert hands. And so it was that the foundling asylums, operated by the governments themselves, replaced foster care as the most popular means for dealing with unwanted children.
This didn’t result in an increase in the quality of care. Underfunding was the norm, and the politicians were always looking for ways to spend even less. Revised sterility laws proved to be the most popular solution to the problem of unwanted children.
Sterility laws had long been in place for pets. In hindsight, it had only been a matter of time before their success led to similar ordinances for people. Habitual criminals, welfare recipients, and those who wished to live in subsidized housing were soon all required to submit to chemical sterilization. Infertility could be reversed with a drug, but it was available only by court order. Careful screening measures claimed to sterilize only those who weren’t worthy of being parents in the first place. But the policy had little effect on the growing number of homeless children.
Mykl got out of bed and crept to stargaze at the window. It was a clear night, and if he pressed his cheek to the cold glass, he could almost see Orion’s Belt between the security bars. He loved looking at the stars and often snuck into the quad late at night to stare awestruck at the grandeur of an open sky.
James rolled over, and the protesting squeal of wire mesh echoed through the still air. Mykl looked around. At this hour, Lori should be long gone, and Linda would be in charge of the Box. Mykl chuckled. All Linda ever did was show up and go to sleep.
He shuffled to his dresser to retrieve a pair of socks. They all had holes in them, but he had only himself to blame for that. He’d long ago decided that shoes were too noisy; socks were ever so much stealthier. Choosing a pair with the fewest holes, he gave them a sniff and sat on the scuffed linoleum to pull them on, taking care to avoid enlarging the tears. Then he slipped out the door and padded softly down the hallway. A quick reconnaissance of the dayroom confirmed that Linda was earning her keep for the night by warming the full length of the couch.
The office computer was his ultimate goal, but first Mykl wanted to visit the quad. A security camera kept watch on the door, but he doubted anyone ever bothered to check the security recordings. In any case, no one had ever confronted him about his nighttime forays—or his petty pilfering of office supplies.
The door to the quad was locked at night. It was unlocked by a button at the desk, b
ut would remain unlocked only so long as the button remained pressed—and while it was pressed, an annoying buzzer alarm sounded, so taping the button down or leaving a heavy object on top of it was not an option. But in his early days at the Box, Mykl had developed a method for unlocking the door without raising suspicion. It involved a ruler, a paper clip, a wad of paper, and three strips of tape, all of which could be found among the office supplies.
After bending the paper clip into the shape of a flat square with an “X” in the middle, Mykl inserted it in the crack between the door and the jamb, resting on top of the bolt. He then shoved the end of the ruler just below the bolt, taping it into place to catch the paperclip. The second strip of tape covered the crack where the bolt lay; its purpose was to keep the reconfigured paperclip from tumbling out after it slid past the moving bolt and landed on the ruler.
Mykl then returned to the desk and tapped the button, causing only the slightest bit of buzz from the alarm. Linda never stirred. When the bolt slid aside, the paperclip fell, landing on the ruler. And when the bolt attempted to slide back again, locking the door, it was blocked by the paperclip. The locking mechanism was defeated.
Mykl pulled the door open slowly—it often produced a high-pitched screech if opened too fast—and heard a soft plaintive meow from outside. Teeka lay curled up under the chair, patiently waiting for Dawn to come feed her in a few hours. Mykl shoved his wad of paper into the strike box and used the last piece of tape to secure it as insurance against the door relocking. Closing the door softly behind him, he slipped outside and knelt to pet the hungry kitten.
Mykl’s fingers combed through fur that was soft and cold—too cold, in Mykl’s mind. He knew what it felt like to suffer through a chilly night. All he had to offer the kitten were his socks, so he sat and removed them, then gently laid the holey offerings over the purring, curled-up beast. She gave him a slow blink of loving trust.
Stargazing would have to be brief tonight. The cold was already seeping into his toes; he wouldn’t last more than a few minutes before they began hurting.
The Prometheus Effect Page 6
