Tentacle and Wing

by Sarah Porter

  Everything inside me, thought and blood, seizes up—​because that’s exactly what I said to Gabriel: I think maybe light moves differently for me.

  “I don’t know if I can see that,” I breathe. “How would I know if it wasn’t the same for everybody?”

  Right away there’s something tight and skeptical in her face. What she said feels true to me, in fact: that part of what I see must be polarized light, whatever that is exactly. Like those spindly wires of light I saw striking off the fence below the ocean’s surface, where Ophelia insisted she couldn’t see anything. I’m almost sure this is the explanation.

  “Ada, the ways in which each of us can help depends on the particular gifts we’ve received. Rowan catches fish for everyone, because he can swim deeper and faster, and stay underwater much longer, than almost anyone else here. Your outstanding gifts are your human appearance and your vision. If you want to help us, use them to their maximum potential. Do you understand?”

  “You mean, if I see something that might be the thing you’ve been looking for here, I should tell you?” Everything is starting to make a little more sense. “What happens if you find it?”

  “Finding it would be only the beginning. But there’s a distinct possibility that it could change everything, for all of us. That’s all I can tell you now, Ada.”

  Something blue and beaming stirs in the corners of my eyes. I stop myself from twisting around to stare at it, but I can feel it settling on my shoulders with a breathy rustling. It’s holding me, and I bet it knows we’re talking about it.

  “But if you can’t tell me what it is, how will I know when I see it?”

  So far I’ve only worried about what Ophelia wants, and Gabriel, and Ms. Stuart. But maybe what really matters is the blue light. I mean, what does it want? Would it want me to tell her? It’s drifting over the top of my head now, bouncing up and down in front of my eyes. A game.

  Ms. Stuart hesitates. “If no one other than you sees it, and if it shows signs of intelligence, I think we can both be fairly confident of the identification.”

  “Intelligence?”

  She nods. “That should be enough information for now. Keep an eye out.”

  I have a million more questions, but she stands up to let me know it’s time to go. I’m pretty short for my age, not quite five feet yet, but she’s no taller than I am. She holds out a hand and I shake it, and the whole time I’m standing there, the blue is gushing over me, spinning like a tornado. If she had eyes like mine, she’d see a brown girl at the core of a glowing storm.

  But she doesn’t. And I notice how careful it is not to touch her. It doesn’t even ruffle my hair, I bet because Ms. Stuart would notice if it did.

  “What happened?” Ophelia says at dinner. But she’s looking away from me while she asks, like she’s already waiting to change the subject.

  “It was no big deal. She just wanted me to demonstrate for her, show that my infrared really works. It was almost like she thought there might have been a mistake about me.”

  That’s sort of true, and Ophelia’s fidgeting anyway. “Cool. But I could’ve told her you’re not any kind of normal if she’d asked!”

  And for the rest of the evening, she just chatters happily about a project she and Rowan are working on, some model of their idea of the perfect animal: one that could move from air to deep sea to ground. It’s like she wants to forget about everything I might have seen, and all the possible meanings my “hallucinations” could have, and maybe especially whatever Gabriel and Ms. Stuart might do about them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE NEXT few days are calmer. We go to class, which turns out to mean that everyone older than nine hangs around in an old conference room heaped with novels and history books and boxes full of gears and prisms and electrical parts, reading or writing or building whatever we want, and then every once in a while, one of the adults comes in and gives us crazy math puzzles to solve or reads us Shakespeare out loud or lectures us on the history of science. The younger kids meet in different rooms down the hall. It seems sloppy and chaotic as a way to get an education, until I realize that even the nine-year-olds are doing math harder than anything I had in school and can explain exactly how a retrovirus works. I only really know that stuff because my dad is a scientist and he taught me a lot at home.

  Around three we go do whatever chores we’ve been assigned. I spend the first several days in the laundry room, sorting shirts and jeans with slits and holes in weird places by the names inked inside them, then folding everything and delivering the piles to the right rooms. It’s boring but peaceful. Marley’s working beside me, and I sometimes try to start a conversation with her, but she’s sulking too hard to say much. I keep waiting for the blue to come to me again—​for some reason I feel like it’s usually nearby when I’m doing the laundry—​but I don’t see it.

  I have to try to talk to it, I think. I need to ask it what I should do. Even though it probably can’t talk, so how is that going to help?

  After chores we get an hour to ourselves, when I can squeeze in some violin practice. Then dinner, then helping the kids who are too small to put themselves to bed squirm into their pajamas and brush their teeth. Ophelia and I are in charge of a group of eight kids, mostly three or four years old, who share one big room. I wanted Corbin, but he ended up in Rowan’s group, and that’s even better. Rowan has practically adopted him.

  The saddest of our kids is a poor little girl named Indigo, the blue-skinned girl I saw in the lobby that first night. She’s part jellyfish and has short tentacles like stinging spaghetti all over her back, and thicker ones on her head that luckily don’t hurt nearly as much. She starts sobbing every time she stings me by accident, no matter how many times I tell her it’s okay.

  “But you’ve got to really, really watch out for that patch on her stomach,” Ophelia warns me. She points to a noodley ring around Indigo’s bellybutton. “Those short pink ones? The poison in those can knock you unconscious for hours. The really dangerous thing is that sometimes one gets torn off by accident—​they grow right back—​but if it’s in the bed or something, you might not see it.”

  Indigo curls into a ball out of shame, hiding her tummy, and whimpers until I give her kisses on both cheeks and tell her ten times how sweet and adorable she is, how she’s exactly what she should be. And when I say it, I feel it—​like I could smack anyone in the face, even my mom, if I heard them call Indigo a freak. Really, the amazing thing is how quickly I get used to everyone, to their spines and otter paws and the rows of tiny armored legs bristling off their rib cages. They’re still cute and silly and wild like little kids everywhere.

  Ms. Stuart insists that all the small kids need cuddles, so we wrap Indigo in a big towel and have snuggle time with everybody in a heap together and read the kids stories for half an hour. Lights out for them is at eight.

  For us, it’s whenever we want. Most nights, that means there’s a party down on the beach.

  There are two ancient computers in the library with the slowest internet connection imaginable. I could check my email and see if my parents or any of my human friends wrote to me. Every night I stop at the library’s glass door on my way to the beach and stare at the blank gray screens for a long moment, thinking about how I’ll feel if I check and my inbox is empty, or if there’s a message from Nina telling me she hates me for tricking her for so long. After a while, it’s like I can read the words without even seeing them: If I’d known you were a kime, I never would have had anything to do with you!

  And then Rowan calls for me, or Ophelia flutters her wings against the window, or I think of Marley sitting at the edge of the firelight looking like she’s struggling to keep her tears in. And I go: out across the meadow shading blue, with racing edges of blazing orange where the grass catches the sunset. I charge down to the sea with a sundress on over my swimsuit, leap onto the sand, watch Gabriel building the fire while his hands reproduce the flames moving just behind them an
d his face turns twilight blue. It’s a regular game of his, to take on every color flowing by, as if he were a boy made out of glass.

  I asked him once, and he told me he’s practicing for the day the normals break in here: I’ll take off my clothes and walk into the woods, and no one will ever see me. Except for maybe you, Ada, but you’ll keep your mouth shut. And then I stopped talking to him, because he almost made it sound like a threat.

  The only thing different tonight is that some grocery store sent us a supply of expiring food that includes slightly stale marshmallows, and they’re still pretty good if you toast them. We’re all perched on hunks of driftwood around a low bluish fire, leaning in with our long sticks. I’m working on my second marshmallow now, spinning it very carefully above the embers, going for that soft-as-sand tan.

  Rowan’s next to me, grinning at my technique. “You would be a marshmallow perfectionist, Ada. I get the feeling that you’re all about self-control. You’ve got to keep that marshmallow precisely five inches from the coals at all times, right? And give it exactly three rotations per minute, to make sure the color is even. And—”

  And my marshmallow goes up in a puff of flame. I blow it out as fast as I can and glare at it: a charred ball weeping white goo, the whole thing caught in a halo of bright red heat.

  “That never would have happened if you weren’t distracting me!” I’m only half kidding, but Rowan just smiles his lazy smile, pulls the burnt marshmallow off the stick, and stuffs it into his mouth.

  “Ah, my sinister plan has succeeded!” Melted marshmallow is gummed in his chin fur, and I’m trying to wipe it off when Marley actually comes up to the fire with a stick in her hand. Rowan and I scoot over to make room for her. Rowan hands her a marshmallow and skewers another for himself, and she smiles at him like she means it. It’s a big change from how she was acting even yesterday, but I try not to show how surprised I am. It’s almost like she’s made a deliberate decision to accept us.

  “Are you feeling any better, Marley?” Rowan asks gently. All he’s wearing is his swimsuit, and the firelight reflects in waves on his dark fur. “About being here?”

  She drops her head and a flush spreads up her cheek. Her auburn curls flicker in the wind. “It still feels really unfair. That I have to be locked up like this.” She barely whispers it. “But—​that doesn’t mean I think it’s fair for you, either.”

  Rowan’s eyes go wide, and I bet mine do, too. I never would have guessed she could feel that way.

  “Almost everyone here—​our parents got rid of us as soon as we were born. So it sucks knowing that, but at least we don’t know what we lost, and you and Ada do.” Rowan bites his lip, musing. “Or, actually? I wonder which is worse? To remember everything you’ve lost, or just to imagine how great it would have been to be wanted? Like, which is ultimately more unfair?”

  “It’s not unfair that any of us are locked up,” I say. “If you think about it, the only unfair part was that me and Marley were free for so long. We could all be contagious!”

  Something changes in Rowan’s face. I can’t tell quite what it is, but there’s an edge to his look and to the way he’s holding his mouth.

  “So what if we are?”

  For the first time, I wonder how far away he goes when he slips through that hole in the fence. I haven’t mentioned anything to anyone about that sea monster Rowan was hanging out with, and I haven’t seen it again, either—​but maybe he has more reasons for sneaking off the grounds. For all I know, he swims at night to places where he’s close to regular people.

  “So people don’t want their kids to be born dead! And they don’t want them to be—”

  “Like us?” Now his voice is so ragged that he almost sounds like Gabriel. “Too bad for them. There are more of us all the time, and there are going to be way more soon! All locking us up does is make the normals feel better, so they can pretend they’re doing something to protect themselves. But in reality—”

  I’ve never seen Rowan flare up like this. He’s usually so relaxed, but now his right hand clenches in midair and his breath comes fast and excited. Then he sees Marley’s stunned face and falls silent.

  “Why would there be more of—​more chimeras soon?” Marley whispers. She’s twirling her curls so tightly around her fingers that the flesh is red and swollen.

  “My whole point is just that worrying about whether we’re contagious is ridiculous. Chimeras keep being born anyway, right? All over Long Island. So locking us up doesn’t actually make the normals any safer.” Rowan’s gone back to being completely relaxed, his voice slow and patient. He’s done it so quickly that a worm of unease twists in my stomach. He turns to me with a big smile. “Anyway, Ada, why should we stress about that? We’re an immense improvement over, ah, old-style humans, right? What regular human can do what Gabe can do, or you can do, or I can do? I swear”—​and now his voice shifts into a parody of a housewife on an old TV show—​“sometimes I think the normals are just jealous of us!”

  Marley laughs a little too hard at that. I don’t. I’m busy thinking.

  Rowan lifts up his stick with a perfectly golden marshmallow at the end. I’d completely forgotten he was toasting it, but now he swings it over and offers it to me. I have this weird feeling that it’s important for me to take it right away, so I do. I can feel the molten squish under its crisp skin.

  “So you’re saying we should infect normal humans?” I ask. “To improve them? I mean, if any of us ever get the chance?”

  The lights of a yacht glide by beyond our enclosure. A babble of laughter and clinking glasses floats over the waves to us. I can see the way some of the kids are watching it with a mixture of wistfulness and resentment. There’s so much adventure out there, and they can’t have any of it.

  “How would any of us ever get the chance?” Rowan asks. “Who’s ever going to get over all that razor wire?” Marley is still laughing behind me, but I’m looking into Rowan’s dark brown eyes, and he’s looking back into mine, and something passes between us without being said.

  Even I can’t lie with my eyes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’M WANDERING through what I know is a dream, something about a castle full of endless spiral staircases carved from glass. A lizard draped over the nearest railing flicks its tail across my face, and I fling up an arm to brush it away. As I turn to look at it, I see that thousands of unknown animals are embedded in the stairs far above me, animals that I know are meant to go on living, surviving, no matter what happens to our world. Dimly, I think of all the problems you hear about on TV, like the rising oceans and spreading deserts and the new, bigger, more violent hurricanes, or the crazy dictators threatening to launch missiles, and how my dad always says that we’re entering a dangerous new era—​but the creatures in the stairs would make it through everything and start the world over again.

  They’re beginning to stir, and glass rains down on me, not sharp, but as soft as sand, and the lizard slithers from his perch to kiss my cheek with human lips. It’s such a sweet kiss that I’m not scared at all. It reminds me of the way my grandmother kissed me when I was still tiny.

  There’s another stirring in the air, and this time I’m half awake. Sometimes Ophelia wakes me up in the mornings by teasing me with little wing strokes. “Stop it!”

  My eyes open enough to see that it’s still pitch-dark. I push myself up on my elbow and see the red blur of Ophelia’s warmth glowing through her sheet on the bed across from mine. Feathers of moonlight glint on her outspread wings. It wasn’t her.

  The moon glow in our room turns faintly blue. It throws my shadow forward onto the bed’s upholstered headboard, so it must be behind me.

  I spin around and see what looks like a human hand made of eddying blue light pulling away. Straight through our closed door. The room falls back into moon-glazed blackness.

  The hand slides through the door again, palm down and fingers spread. Glow spasms on our walls, and I worry about it wak
ing up Ophelia before I remember that to her it’s completely invisible. Then the palm turns upright, slightly curved: the way you reach out when you’re waiting for someone to take your hand. My heart swells with something between fear and exhilaration.

  I don’t believe in ghosts, but honestly I think a ghost would be less crazy than whatever it is I’m seeing.

  I shouldn’t trust it, but it’s come to our room just for me.

  I have no idea what it wants from me. For all I know, it’s completely evil. But I’ve been waiting for my chance to try to communicate, and I guess it has too. And then my dream is still lingering in the back of my mind, and my fear gets mixed with the sweetness I felt then. The hope.

  I slide out of bed in my summer pajamas, soft cotton shorts and a matching tank top, and fumble with my toes for my flip-flops. I’m not about to take my eyes off the blue for one instant.

  It must know that I’m coming, because it gives a little flourish and glides back through the door. I go after it as softly as I can, turning our doorknob very slowly to mute the click of the latch. Then I’m in the long hallway and the blue is tumbling gleefully through the darkness. It doesn’t bother making itself into anything human-shaped anymore; instead it rolls like a tussle of living silk.

  I follow it around bends, up into the lobby, and then out the front door. The grass shines with a pale burn in the moonlight, but the roses look nearly black. Everything wavers together in a warm wind.

  It’s taking me somewhere, and I hesitate, but then the thought of the walls on all sides reassures me. We’re basically in prison here, so how far can I really go? The woods aren’t deep enough to get lost in; you can only walk two hundred yards or so between the trees before you hit mortar and stone.