VIOLET EYES

by Nicole Luiken

  It sounded good: the saviors of the human race. I imagined the politicians would have rallied to their cry.

  But I had no desire to be a savior. It wasn’t that I wanted to rob banks; I just wanted to make my own choices.

  “What a load of BS. You don’t need a cure. You’ve already found one: Augmentation. Carl is no less a human being than someone wearing glasses to counteract myopia. It’s your own prejudice that’s making you grasp at straws.”

  Sadness clouded her face. “You don’t understand. Soon we’ll all be Augmented.”

  “So?”

  She just kept talking. “You have a gift.” Blah, blah, blah. “You have a responsibility.” The ultimate guilt trip. She couldn’t understand my refusal. “We’re offering you a career, training, anything you want.”

  “Sorry. I don’t think lab rats have much of a job future.”

  I was almost looking forward to seeing Dr. Frankenstein again at the end of the tour. At least he didn’t believe his own lies.

  It was lunchtime before Catherine finished exhaustively detailing the facilities. I ditched her and headed for the cafeteria. Mike and Leona were already eating. Their heads were close together; they were in the middle of an intense conversation that rang warning bells with me.

  “You didn’t fall for her lies again, did you?” Leona was asking.

  “No,” Mike said. “How could I? I’ve already fallen for you, Leona.”

  My heart gave a terrible lurch.

  “You’re so pure. Your eyes are like amethysts,” Mike said. “And your lips … your lips drip venom.”

  “My God,” Leona said, “you do believe her.”

  I resumed walking, my panic easing. I didn’t know what was going on between Mike and Leona, but I would find out.

  They were sitting at a two-person table while Vincent sat alone at the next table. The polite thing to do would have been to sit with him.

  I’ve never had much of a problem being rude. I pulled up a chair and plunked my ham sandwich and myself down between Mike and Leona. “Hi there,” I said cheerily.

  Mike’s shoulders stiffened, then relaxed. “Hi yourself.” He looked amused at my blatant staking-out of territory. I didn’t care.

  “Be careful, you’ll knock over my drink.” Leona looked annoyed.

  “Hmm, there isn’t much room, is there?” I said, as if just noticing this. “Let’s push the two tables together.”

  We did this, and Vincent’s sparkling wit joined the lively discussion. Not.

  Me: “So, Vincent, what’s on the schedule for this afternoon?”

  Vincent: “Depends.”

  Me: “On what?”

  Vincent: “Lots of things.”

  I rolled my eyes at Mike. He winked back. “Well, in that case we might as well finish our championship game,” I said.

  “It’s already over,” Leona said quickly. “You forfeited when you ran off the court.”

  “Ha. As I recall, you were scrambling to return one of my shots. I didn’t hear your racket twang into it when the lights went out,” I lied. “You missed; we won.”

  The ensuing argument lasted longer than my ham sandwich and was still raging when we reached the court. While we were warming up, a technician came for Mike. “They need you in Dr. Estevez’s office.”

  “And if I refuse to go?” Mike inquired.

  The techie didn’t back down. “I’ll call the guards and they’ll tow you there.”

  “Call away.” Mike served the birdie.

  It was no bluff. Mike didn’t resist, but he didn’t help, either. Two large guards dragged away his limp body, like a passive resistance protester at a peace rally.

  I turned to Leona. “Singles?”

  She nodded. She and Vincent exchanged a brief glance, and he left the room like an obedient dog.

  We played one set to five—fast, furious, and silent.

  Leona broke the silence first. “I want you to leave him alone.” She drove a shot past me.

  I caught the shuttlecock with the very tip of my racket, bouncing it just over the net. “Do you always get what you want?”

  “I do when it concerns Vincent.”

  She surprised me, and the birdie dropped through a hole in my guard. I had presumed we were talking about Mike. Interesting. “What does Vincent have to say about that?” I served a high clear to the back of the court.

  “He leaves things like that to me.” The birdie arced back toward me.

  “Things like money, too? Are you the one who persuaded him to sell out?” I smashed the white shuttlecock back into her court.

  The birdie got caught in her badly strung racket, and I saw real hatred in her expression. “Don’t look so damn smug. Once Frankenstein gets his blackmail claws into you, you’ll comfort yourself that at least you’re getting paid, too.” She threw her racket at the wall and stalked out.

  I chased after her on impulse. “Wait!”

  Her face could have been a stone carving of a faerie, highborn and cruel.

  “How is he blackmailing you? Maybe I can help you.”

  Her eyes scorned the very idea, and she started walking again.

  “What can it hurt?”

  She stopped. Turned. “You want to help? Somewhere in Dr. Frankenstein’s secret files is the location of Vincent’s baby. Find it and we’ll help you escape.”

  “Baby?” I couldn’t help it; my jaw dropped.

  “The history Vincent and I were immersed into wasn’t as recent as yours. We got World War II London during the blitz,” Leona spoke rapidly, as if fearing interruption. “Vincent fell in love with a girl. Erin Reinders. He got her pregnant. Erin was sent away to the country to have the baby, and he was supposedly given up for adoption, but Frankenstein has him.

  “Frankenstein gave us a choice; cooperate or never see the child again. We chose to cooperate.” She paused. “That was four months ago. Ever since then Vincent’s been depressed. He wants to sleep all day, and if I don’t hound him and threaten to become bulimic, he doesn’t eat. I’d just finally convinced him things weren’t so bleeding bad when you came up with that tame pigeon crap.”

  I stood in the middle of the room, thinking, for a long time after she’d left. For all her anger, her story sounded genuine to me.

  Damn Dr. Frankenstein to hell. I wondered if he had arranged for the girl to get pregnant. Talk about Machiavellian.

  Mike returned from the shrink, but my appointment was next, so I got dragged off and didn’t get a chance to tell him about Leona’s little revelation or to ask him what poison Leona had dripped into his ears.

  Dr. Estevez was a brown-skinned woman in her forties with a beautiful soft contralto voice. I recognized her vaguely as having been the school counselor one town back. “I have some questions I’d like to ask you. We run a psychological profile of all the residents here. None of the questions are ones that I would hesitate to answer myself.”

  “Bully for you.”

  “Will you answer my questions, Angel?”

  “Ask all you like.” I crossed my legs casually to demonstrate how relaxed I was. “I just don’t promise to tell the truth.”

  “I often find the lies people choose to tell more revealing than the truth,” Dr. Estevez said. “Let’s start with the basics.” She asked me a series of questions about my family background, all information she already knew.

  I alternated between the truth and lies on a whim, enjoying the subtle battle of wits. The interview was almost at an end before I realized Dr. Estevez hated me.

  I was accustomed to charming people, and her carefully hidden dislike made me curious. “Why don’t you like me?”

  She didn’t prevaricate or insist that she did like me. “You’re very full of self-pity. You keep harping on the prison that you grew up in, as if it were some terrible place. Nobody beat you, you had an excellent education provided free of charge—”

  “I’d hardly call an education a hundred years out of date excellent.”

/>   She continued, unperturbed. “You come from an unbroken home, went to parties, had many friends”—one friend, I thought, many acquaintances—“have spent the last ten years having a rousing good time at the taxpayers’ expense, but when they ask something of you in return, you spurn them. You have no idea how good you’ve had it.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” I suggested. I was pretty sure she would anyhow.

  My flippancy annoyed her further. “I will. I was born in a Tenth World country in Central America, a banana republic too poor to feed its own people. The United Nations couldn’t maintain the peace there. My parents were shot to death in front of my eyes when I was five. Don’t you dare tell me how tough you’ve had it.” She flipped her notebook shut and stood, forcing me to leave.

  I considered her words carefully, then decided that atrocities committed in another country didn’t excuse crimes committed here.

  I was thinking so hard that I bumped into a technician in the hallway. His pile of papers slid to the floor. I bent over to help him pick them up on the off chance that I might glimpse something interesting. I shuffled papers—graphs, tests, more graphs—then handed them back to him with a friendly smile. “Here you go. Sorry about that.”

  My smile listed badly when he clumsily slipped me a folded note.

  I was fresh out of pencil cases so I read it right there in the hall—aloud.” ̵I can help you find your own kind.’”

  I ripped the note into four pieces and scattered them on the floor in front of the techie. He was youngish and thin with intense eyes.

  “What do you think I am? Stupid?” I shoved him.

  He blinked in owlish alarm, scuttling backward. “What are you talking about?” Blink.

  “Nice,” I said. “You can tell Dr. Frankenstein you gave it the good old college try, but you failed.”

  “Dr. Frank? You think I—” Words failed him.

  “Duh.” I walked away, perversely insulted by the ploy.

  My own kind.

  Maybe I didn’t want to find my own kind. Maybe I happened to like my parents and Wendy and Carl.

  CHAPTER 14

  MIKE AND I DINED with the charming Dr. Frankenstein that night on French bread, cheddar soup, steak, baby carrots, whipped potatoes, Caesar salad, and a side dish of escargot. The good doctor did like his feed. He chowed down with an enthusiasm that dulled my own appetite.

  It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps my mother had purposely burned the chicken Kiev that Uncle Albert had so hated.

  “Do I disgust you?” Dr. Frankenstein asked between chews. He popped another whole snail into his mouth, then used a bit of bread to soak up the garlic butter sauce. His sideburns were already shiny with it.

  I saw no reason to lie. “Yes.”

  “Good.” He chugged back an entire glass of milk, then smiled coldly. “Thin people tend to underestimate fat people. They associate physical bulk with mental slowness. They’re wrong.”

  He stuffed down another slice of French bread, chewed, swallowed, and smacked his thick lips. “Did you ever wonder why you’ve met so few fat people?”

  “Exercise and smart lifestyle choices?” Mike suggested, his lip curled in disgust.

  “Oat bran, you mean?” Dr. Frankenstein chuckled dryly. “Don’t be naive. Liposuction. They had it even back in the 1980s. Only in the future it’s become much cheaper and more thorough. In addition to vacuuming fat out of your thighs, they can clean the fat deposits out of your arteries. People are just as piggish in the twenty-first century as they were in the twentieth. They are fat people wearing thin bodies, but they are still fat. I choose not to hide my true nature. I am what you see: a glutton.”

  I cut my T-bone steak into neat bite-size pieces. “You like looking unattractive?”

  “As I said, I find it useful to be underestimated. If I were to tell you this room is absolutely free of surveillance cameras and listening devices you wouldn’t believe me, would you? ‘He’s trying to trick us,’ you’d think.”

  “And now you’re trying to fast-talk us,” Mike said.

  “On the contrary. You have it backward. I don’t want to trick you into anything. I don’t need to: you’re already in my hands.” He let us savor that particular bit of unpalatable truth while he poured a small lake of gravy onto his plate. Some of it slopped over onto the tablecloth, and a few seconds later he dragged the sleeve of his white suit through it.

  “We’re not being taped,” he continued, “because I don’t want what I have to say being recorded for posterity.” He shoveled in a mouthful of potatoes, talking through the spuds. “So you see, both your assumptions are wrong. I do not always lie, and I care about my own neck more than I care about you.”

  I affected a look of boredom. “The more you protest your innocence, the less I believe you.”

  “As you wish.” He smiled, showing a sprig of parsley caught between his two front teeth, “I was certainly listening to both of you earlier today. To answer your question, Angel, Dave Belcourt is in jail, and he was working for me. He just didn’t know it.”

  I remembered Dave saying, “He’ll get you. He’s smarter than both of you put together.”

  Dr. Frankenstein shook his head sadly for the poor deluded fool. “I infiltrated the radicals’ circle some time ago. I passed them the information that the favorites in Rick Hrudey’s much-publicized badminton demonstration were Renaissance impostors. They wanted to assassinate you, but I persuaded them to torture the location of the rest of your comrades out of you first. They were quite happy to shoot several bullets into the crowd to cause confusion. ‘There are some casualties in every war,’ Dave said. The terrorist version of ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs,’ I suppose. They certainly scrambled a few. Two gunshot wounds and five people crushed in the stampede.”

  I stared, unable to say a word in the face of such casual evil.

  “My contribution to the scheme was the van, so planting the bugs was easy. You ended the game a little sooner than I had intended, but you proved a theory of mine. Real danger made you show your true colors at last. Too bad it wasn’t the kind of evidence I could give to the big boys who hold the purse strings. Silly sheep that they are, it would still occur to them to wonder how the van happened to be bugged.”

  “What about the Orphanage fire? Was that you, too?” Mike asked.

  “Alas, I cannot claim responsibility for that one. The fire was set by some radicals, who have since been jailed. I lost a considerable investment that day. Fortunately, it wasn’t a total write-off, as my supervisor kindly got himself asphyxiated.

  “The new project head listened to my idea to immerse the remaining dozen Renaissance children in history. You should have forgotten the need to play dumb within two or three years, lulled by the peace of your new family, and begun manifesting your intelligence again, but you always were contrary, weren’t you? Eight children escaped from their incompetent keepers, leaving the da Vincis and you and Michael. Seeming duds, all four of you. I got a lot of egg on my face over your lack of results.”

  I broke into his self-pity, one of his earlier statements bothering me. “If you couldn’t use the evidence Dave gained you to trap us, why did you bother doing it?” I asked.

  “To prove that he’s smarter than we are,” Mike said, cold dislike on his face. “Only the game didn’t go quite as far as you would have liked, did it, Dr. Frankenstein? You didn’t get to ride to the rescue. We jumped Dave all on our own.”

  “An assumption totally without facts.” Dr. Frankenstein’s genial smile left his face. He seemed to put it on and take it off like a mask, feeling little genuine amusement. “But then, that seems to be your failing.”

  “Yours seems to be taking forever to come to the point,” I said. “You didn’t invite us to dinner for this.”

  “Don’t be impatient. Dinner’s not over yet.”

  I spread my napkin over my steak. “I’m full.”

  Mike stood up. “Let�
��s go, Angel. He has nothing to say that we need to hear.”

  “Michael is lying; he doesn’t want you to hear what I have to say,” Dr. Frankenstein said to me. “He’s afraid of what I might tell you about him. I really think you should stay for dessert.” For an obese man he moved lightly, taking only seconds to push back his chair and move to the fridge in the corner. With the air of a magician conjuring up rabbits, he produced three glass dishes on a silver tray.

  “Strawberry ice cream.” He smiled hatefully “Your favorite, I believe.”

  CHAPTER 15

  MY FIRST THOUGHT was that their listening devices must have been very powerful to have heard us talking over the engine of the bus. I opened my mouth to laugh off Dr. Frankenstein’s clumsy attempt to drive a wedge between Mike and me—and then I saw Mike’s face, and my vocal cords seized up like a rusty motor.

  Mike looked angry—and guilty.

  “Do have some ice cream,” Dr. Frankenstein said. “It’s delicious.” He ate a spoonful, smacking his lips and grinning like an evil gnome. I felt a powerful urge to punch my fists into his soft gut until he doubled over and puked.

  “We had lemon sherbet last night, didn’t we, Mike? We had a nice long conversation and a late night snack when you came in. We shared secrets.”

  “Don’t listen to him. He’s lying,” Mike said. I read guilt in his desperation. He would have laughed if the accusation hadn’t been true.

  The freezer hadn’t been turned up high enough. The ice cream had melted to a thick sludge, just the way I’d liked it as a child.

  “He betrayed you,” Dr. Frankenstein murmured in the distant background. “Get back at him. Tell me the secret he shared in return. Nothing important, just a little tiny secret. He told me yours.”