Raven: The Young Adult World of Genetically Modified Teens and the Elite (Swann Book 6)

by Ryan Schow

  “For you,” he replied, “anytime.”

  After breakfast, practically then entire day, Julie thought about the sex they had, and she dreamt of the sex they would have. After awhile, after her lust reached full blush, the guilt drove itself deep into her heart. Then, like a mantra, she neutralized these vile needs by repeating these words over and over again: “I will not get pregnant this summer.”

  Unbeknownst to her, however, she already was.

  3

  It’s morning at the lab, I guess. Maybe it’s afternoon, or night. The truth is, I’ve been asleep for a long time and I feel so revived that whatever day or time it is, I simply don’t care. Rolling over on the couch, my body rising up through the fog of sleep, into awareness, I sense something odd, something different. My eyes slide open and, startled, I practically explode out of my skin.

  “Jesus f*ck!” I scream, looking at Alice who’s standing over me, staring. With black hair draped in her face, and her pale skin, she looks like a grade school vampire. Or something out of the movie The Grudge. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  Alice has that look on her face. Like she’s a dog waiting to be walked. Or waiting to be acknowledged. The only thing she’s missing is a leash. Gosh damn freak.

  “I’m spending today with you,” Alice says.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t take the crying anymore,” she says, her hair in her face, one eye peeking through. “It hurts my head.” The miracle babies. Rebecca’s children. I don’t mean to, but my mind slips effortlessly into hers. She’s talking not about the miracle babies, but about the surviving child.

  Holy cow, she killed the other one?!

  Wow.

  I withdraw from the top layers of her psyche, but not before catching a flash of the single child at Holland’s apartment in the city with Brooklyn, Holland’s blonde assistant.

  “How’d you get here?” I ask, pissed off that I finally get a respectable moment’s rest and I have to wake to this. To her. To more disturbing revelations.

  “Cab,” she says, and I’m realizing just how close she’s standing to me. After seeing the image of her dropping the screaming infant out the window of Holland’s apartment, I don’t want her so close to me.

  Yet she won’t back up. She’s just standing there, looking down at me. I can feel it. The darkness churning within her. The heat. With her white dress and her black work boots, she’s a spitting image of the zombie apocalypse.

  “You took a cab?”

  Alice breaks eye contact, looks at my hand. Her dainty little fingers walk their way into my palm. She tries to hold my hand. I shake her off, fire her a look.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Her eyes bleed to black, the pale skin growing whiter, so white that bluish veins stand out all across her face. Her arm goes ridged, her fingers flashing out, stiff, violent.

  Already I’m bristling. Already I’m preparing myself. “If I feel even the slightest bit of heat, I swear to God you little bitch, I’ll kill you.”

  “No,” she says.

  “You can die,” I tell her. “I can’t.”

  She just stands there, like a statue of something coughed up from Hell. Then her fingers soften, as does her arm and her back, and her eyes drain away the darkness.

  I throw my legs over the blanket, push her little body aside and stand up. “What time is it?”

  “Day,” she says.

  “You really took a cab?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to spend the day with me then?” I ask, looking at her with new eyes. The way she looks, she’s just a little girl. Not hot. Not violent. Just a girl wanting a friend, a sister. She gives me a slight nod. “Okay, then. First things first. I have to check on Holland. Then we are going to the salon to do something about this hair,” I say, grabbing the bottom of my new blonde mop.

  Alice follows me back to the lab. Unlike the Astor office, there is no secret book case or underground lab. It’s a lot easier this way. We find Quentin pacing, fretting. My focus narrows to just him. Everything else fades. Good God, his head is a swarm of bumble bees. He’s got so many colliding thoughts!

  What an awful burden it is, soaking up the emotions of others. Quentin is troubled. He’s terrified the glass tank holding what looks like a gigantic, pulled apart monster won’t hold much longer. Jesus, is that Holland? It has to be. It is the first time I’ve seen him since awakening. I refused to look when I woke up. Now I can’t turn away.

  “What the hell did he do to himself?”

  “I followed his protocol to the letter,” Quentin says, like he’s lost. He can’t even meet my eyes. For all he knows, I could be Godzilla. “This…abomination”—he says, swallowing a hard lump in his throat—“is Dr. Holland.”

  “We need…we need to fix him.” I feel Alice looking at him, like he’s a painting that’s not real. She’s not connecting the dots. Which is good.

  “He said to kill him,” Quentin mumbles.

  “No.”

  But I’m wondering if maybe Quentin’s right. Gerhard used to be five foot ten, medium build, regular features (except for those two front teeth with the signature gap in between them). Sure his brain had elements of lunacy, as in he was cold, calculating and relentlessly cruel. But everything physical seemed, I don’t know, normal. Now he looked so injected with proteins and human growth hormones and steroids that he’s over-packed with muscle. Flesh and sinew, it’s pulled and stretched, bones showing, muscles exposed, tendons strained and tearing.

  “His skin,” is all I can say.

  “I know,” Quentin replies.

  His skin looks leathery to the touch, like maybe it has a beef-jerky texture, but mottled and spoiled looking. It definitely isn’t the right color. Not that peach tinge. Think about how your skin would look after death and decomposition set in, or how it would look if you spent so much time in tanning beds you started to darken and splotch and lose elasticity. It’s a mix of that.

  No, it’s worse.

  I swallow and my throat is the Mojave desert. “He’s a dermatologist’s nightmare,” I say, talking out loud. My voice is coming from miles away by the hollow sound of it. This has to be the nastiest, most destructive looking transformation ever. I say, “How can he even be alive? I mean, look at his face.”

  “He looks inhuman.”

  There’s unabashed horror in Quentin’s eyes. He hasn’t seen the things I’ve seen. Hell, he hasn’t seen the things any of us have seen.

  “Pull your shit together,” I say. For a second, I’m not sure if I’m saying it to Quentin, or to myself. We both need help processing this…thing.

  Holland’s features should have come together by now, but they haven’t. His nose is odd and bulbous, strangely uneven; and his eyes are grossly oversized. Even his teeth have degraded, becoming stalactites and stalagmites in his ugly, crooked mouth. One cheekbone is significantly larger than the other, and half his forehead seems to be outgrowing the other side. Whatever he did to himself, he looks like something born and raised in hazardous waste. Like Leatherface in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or Sloth from The Goonies.

  “We have to kill him,” Quentin says. “It’s what he said to do, and now I understand why he made me promise. He knew the risk.”

  “And I said no,” I say with force. “We need the formula for the original transformation. He needs that. The one he’s been doing since his Josef Mengele days. He wouldn’t want this. I don’t care who he was, or how much of an asshole he’s become, he wouldn’t want this.”

  “What did you just say?” Quentin asks, his face turning pasty white. I feel his brain in a hard scramble. It’s like a hundred bullfrogs all jumping at once, but in different directions.

  “What do you mean, ‘what did I just say?’”

  “This…Holland…that thing, he was…is…Mengele?”

  Uh oh.

  “You didn’t know that?” He shakes his head, horrified. Great. “When you said he was a mo
nster,” I tell him, “the truth is he has always been a monster. An awful, hateful human stain. But he’s also a genius. Possibly the foremost study on genetics this world has and as much as I’d love to end him right now, I can’t. And neither can you.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Think about it. He started out brilliant, and he kept learning. Where others like Einstein and Tesla died, he found a way to live, to continue learning, to keep experimenting, and now he has found a way to beat death, to harness immortality, to preserve youth and heal all illness. For all intents and purposes, he is a god. And as much as I abhor the very nature of him, I won’t let you kill him.”

  “If he’s that awful and that powerful, that’s exactly why we should kill him.”

  “If anyone’s gets that privilege,” I say, facing Quentin head on, heat quickly stealing into my face, “it’s going to be me.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because I said so.” I hated when my parents said that. I get it now. Your reasons are your own, just like my reasons for wanting to be the person to close out Holland’s life are my own, and that’s it. Period, dot, end of discussion.

  “Well, this isn’t right,” he says, looking back at the body.

  “You’re gosh damn right it isn’t. And we’re going to do something about it right now. Well, after I get my hair done anyway.”

  “Are you kidding me right now?” Quentin says, incredulous.

  “No. I’m not. Oh, and I need a couple hundred bucks and the keys to your car. Alice and I are going out.”

  4

  Netty showered to wash the sex off her while Brayden pretended not to watch. Then they both got ready in the gorgeous, not-at-all private bathroom. She said, “You should come over for breakfast. It might be the last time I get to see you.”

  “Your mother really isn’t going to ground you, is she?”

  “If she doesn’t kill me, then yeah, I’ll be locked in my room until my vagina falls off.”

  “If I show up with you,” Brayden said, “she’ll know. About us, I mean. Then she’ll ask if I’ve left your virtue in tact, again. Netty, love, I don’t like lying to your mother.”

  Netty, her towel pulled tight, moved toward Brayden, put her hand on his newly visible six pack, just below his patchwork of scars, and—almost nonchalantly, but sexy in a bad-girl sort of way—said, “I lie to her all the time, and she lies to me. It’s how we function without killing each other.” Tracing her finger across his skin, she said, “Really, Brayden, a little lie here and there, it’s no biggie.”

  He took her wandering hand into his and said, “I’ve got to go to Abby’s, otherwise I would.”

  She took a step back, dropped his hand, frowned, then proceeded to do her makeup while doing a terrible job acting like nothing was wrong. “It’s always Abby with you,” she finally said with enough disdain to pump Brayden full of anxiety.

  He was thinking, here we go again.

  “You’re not jealous, are you?” he said. He took a step toward her, watched in the mirror as she applied the barest of eye shadow.

  “Of course I am. Look at her. Except now that she’s become…whatever the hell she’s become, it’s kind of hard to imagine you and her hooking up. I mean, she can’t even remember you and you’re just…you’re just you to her. A guy on the edge of her world.”

  Now it was his turn to be miffed. Throwing on a shirt, he said, “What does that mean?”

  She spun around, face-to-face, no hint of fear in her eyes. “It means she has guys falling all over her and because of…what happened…she has no idea she was once fat Savannah. You and I know whatever humility she had, it’s not going to exist when she realizes she can have any guy she wants. Then look at you. And look at me. We’re not in her league. Not at all.”

  “Don’t do this, Netty.”

  “With these skinny legs and knobby knees, and this freaking dog’s ribcage—” she said, pointing out all the things about herself she thought of as flaws.

  “You say it like I can see every rib, which I can’t—”

  “And these pathetic tits—” she said, cupping her little A cup treasures.

  “I like your tits!” he said, taking her hands. “Seriously Netty, stop!”

  She shook her hands out of his, clearly angry.

  “And my hair? I mean, who the fuck has hair like this anyway?” She turned sideways, and pointed to the side of her head that was cut super short, the new punk rock style of it long on one side and cut super short on the other. “I look like the kind of girl you’d go skateboarding with, or smoke a joint with, not the kind of girl boys dream of, or jerk off thinking about.”

  “I love your hair. It’s not like anyone else’s. Don’t you see? Everything you don’t like about yourself is what makes you unique and different and attractive to me. I like different.”

  “You say that now, but when you’re around Abby—”

  “When I’m around Abby what?”

  “You look at her in ways I can’t describe, almost like you need her, like if you don’t have her you will never feel complete.”

  There it was. Her real feelings laid out before him. Netty finally admitted to her jealousy and the truth was, she was right to feel that way. But what could he say?

  “You’re not reading me right if you think that,” he lied. “I just want her back to the way she was. You’re her best friend. I’m a distant second, but I’m her second best friend no matter how you look at it, and to me that means something.”

  Shadows passed before Netty’s sparkling eyes. She was in a different place. Somewhere in the past.

  “Abby was my best friend,” she said, her Russian accent more prominent when she was talking from the heart. “But that’s past tense now. Still, it’s hard not to think about who we were. How we used to hate boys together, flip off the paparazzi, and not worry so much about the things we ate or if we were popular. When she was fat Savannah, she used to try not to cuss, except when it came to Margaret and then she could swear like she was getting paid by the word. We used to go to school and talk shit about people and life, and we’d laugh and do the stupidest things together. And now this. She doesn’t even remember me. Or any of what made us such good friends. It’s like it never happened.” Her eyes cleared and she looked directly at him. “So when I see you looking at her the same way, it reminds me of how I feel, what I’ve lost. Except for you, when you look at her, I know there’s something more. You said so at the club. You’re in love with her. You’ve always been in love with her.”

  “We all lost something when she died,” he said in soft tones. “Some more than others.”

  “It never came back.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’re still in love with her,” Netty said. “You’re in love with her and not even trying to deny it.”

  “I’m in love with another version of her,” Brayden finally admitted. “One who’ll never know the best parts of me because now she doesn’t even know me. And she doesn’t need me. The way things are going, we don’t need each other anymore.”

  “I liked being needed,” Netty confessed.

  “Me, too.”

  Netty looked at him a long time, and he never flinched. He just looked right back at her, locked into the pain in her eyes, the loneliness, how Abby’s death killed a part of her, too. How her death and then her resurrection killed things in both of them. He wondered, will that be the strongest connection between us: our mutual loss?

  “Let me finish getting ready,” Netty finally said.

  When she was done, as they were walking out of the hotel, Netty said, “Tell her I said hello.” The way she said it though, it was like she knew no matter what she said, it wouldn’t matter. The girl that was once her best friend, she was gone.

  5

  Alice and I head to one of San Francisco’s many corner beauty shops where we wait for about a half an hour before I tell this chubby girl with blue tinted hair I want the blonde gone. She seems happy.
Apparently she hates blondes, and girls that look like me. Skinny girls. Whatever.

  “I want the blonde to be black. Black as raven’s wings.”

  “What about her?” she says looking at Alice, whose hair is all stringy and long. She’s sitting beside me in a plastic chair with a People magazine looking at the pictures.

  “You want some taken off the bottom, Alice?” I ask. She nods. Looking up, I say, “Take off about four inches. Maybe five.”

  When we’re done, Alice looks cleaned up and I have a longish A-line that’s jet black. “You have any makeup?” I ask the blue haired behemoth. She points to a makeup line I haven’t heard of. I grab some mascara and a few pencils of black eyeliner. There’s about ten shades of lipstick, too. I choose a brick red my stylist seems to approve of.

  “Not a fan of the old look?” she asks.

  “Too vanilla,” I say. She laughs and I pay her with Quentin’s money.

  “You want to go shopping?” I ask Alice. She looks at me, solemn, not a hint of joy in her expression and nods her head no. Apparently this has been enough.

  “Well then, it’s back to the lab, Batgirl.”

  I follow Alice out to the Jaguar in the parking lot. Looking the way I do, I feel absolutely wrong in this car. Like I’m searching for myself, but driving my uptight parent’s car. Whatever, I tell myself. It’s only temporary.

  Inside the lab, in a perfectly reasonable tone, I tell Quentin, “This problem we’re having with Holland, we’re not going to fix it on our own.”

  “I know,” he replies.

  “So who’s the head geneticist in New York?”

  These days, it would almost be easier crawling his brain for the answers, but the doctor from Dulce who was neither human nor alien, he said people like me—of which there are none left—we abuse our powers and eventually die. Or kill ourselves. So I ask questions of Quentin. And I try to keep to my own brain.

  “There are two geneticists,” he says. “Good ones.”

  “Get the better of the two on the phone and get him over here, a.s.a.p. And whatever it is you’re doing to Holland, whatever shitty regimen he has you running, stop it immediately.”