Tentacle and Wing

by Sarah Porter

  I look out at the twilight-blue grass, the red-glowing bodies just above us now, the rising white blot of the mist-smeared moon. So is Marley going to be some kind of butterfly girl, or maybe a moth?

  “Rowan!” Gabriel yells. He’s glowing silvery white; there are moments when his skin lights up in a way that everyone can see. Bioluminescence is usually so beautiful, but on him it just gets on my nerves. Normally he’d jump dramatically off the grassy shelf, but he’s limping pretty badly, and instead he sits down to slide onto the beach.

  “Gabe!” Rowan gets up and runs to hug him. “Ada told me how you tried to grab her when she slipped into that pit in the cave. I guess you didn’t see Soraya waiting there under the water? Anyway we’re both fine. Soraya took care of Ada and got her back here safe. I can’t remember anything that happened, so maybe she helped me out, too.”

  Gabriel turns to stare at me. He’s trying to settle his skin, but blurts of magenta keep interrupting the silver glow. Ms. Stuart and maybe twenty of the kids are jumping and climbing down right behind him. He knows he can’t say, You told him what?

  “Don’t feel bad, Gabe,” I say loudly enough that everyone will hear. “You tried your hardest to reach me. I could hear you yelling for me as I was going down. And I really thought I was going to die when I hit the water, but then Soraya was right there and she caught me. I was terrified for a few seconds, but then she started sharing her air with me and I realized she was a friend.”

  I’m almost ready to laugh at the savage, bewildered look on his face. Then he gets a little bit more of a grip on himself.

  “That was so great of Soraya, then. When I saw you go under, I was sure you weren’t going to make it.” His voice sounds so fake. Is he really fooling everyone?

  “Right,” I say. “So you had to go back and tell Ms. Stuart there was nothing you could do. That must have been awful.”

  “Ada!” Ms. Stuart says, walking across the sand. “And Rowan! I was afraid to believe it until I saw you both for myself. This could tempt me to adopt an irrational faith in miracles.”

  She hugs me. I don’t hug her back, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Ada, you seem to be covered in—​what is it? Some kind of mucus?”

  “Soraya’s spit. She took my head inside her mouth so I could breathe.”

  Anywhere else people would flip out at that, but Ms. Stuart gives a wooden laugh. “Then a shower is in order. And both of you must be famished.” I am, in fact.

  She flashes Gabriel a hard-edged look and reaches for Rowan, who hugs her like he means it. “I can’t imagine what we would have done if we’d lost you, Rowan. You’re the living heart of this community.” It’s the first sincere thing anyone’s said in a while.

  We head back up the hill, and after we get cleaned up, Rowan and I sit in our pajamas with big bowls of spaghetti in our laps. They let us eat on the sofas in the lobby as a kind of reward for being alive, and after dinner there’s a huge, flat chocolate cake that Mr. Chu baked in a hurry while we were showering. Rowan and I tell our lying stories over and over again, inventing new details when we have to. Everyone has so many questions. Indigo won’t stop clinging to me, and Corbin is sprawled across Rowan’s lap. It’s after midnight, but nobody sends the small kids to bed, and they start drifting into sleep with their frosting-smudged noses in the carpet.

  Rowan keeps beaming me warm, secretive smiles, and Gabriel sits cross-legged on the floor and watches me. I have to add a few parts to match the story he told while he thought I was dead: Oh, right, I did catch hold of a ledge inside that hole, and Gabriel was just throwing me the rope when my hand slipped. Totally. So much happened afterward that I forgot to mention that.

  I ask to see Marley, but they tell me she’s asleep, or at least in some kind of trance, and that I shouldn’t disturb her.

  My head falls against the leather back of the sofa. I’m going to let my eyes close just for a moment. Just one, and then Ophelia and I will get our group of little kids ready for bed. We’re being irresponsible, letting them stay up so late.

  I’m dreaming about Indigo brushing her teeth when I half wake: just long enough to feel someone lowering me into my own bed.

  When I found Rowan on the beach earlier, why was he crying? I really should have asked.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “ADA! ADA! Ada!”

  Marley’s voice wakes me. She’s screaming so loudly that no one anywhere near here will sleep through it. I jolt up and slide out of bed, fumbling my feet into my unlaced sneakers before I even understand what’s happening. In the window the sky is lemon yellow with late dawn and the grass pitches like there might be a storm coming.

  “Ada! Come! Melting words—​almost dead—​there’s a message! Ada!”

  I’m trying to make sense of what she’s shouting as I dart through our door and into the hallway, Ophelia mumbling sleepy questions to my back.

  Maybe there is no sense in it, though. Maybe whatever she’s going through is making Marley delirious. Her room is at the back of the building around a bend, and she has it to herself—​Gabriel never seemed to care about putting her with a roommate—​but it’s not nearly as nice as the others, some kind of converted linen closet with a cot and a dresser shoved into the corners. There are even shelves with stacks of white sheets going yellow from age, and dried-up bottles of cleaning supplies.

  When I get there, the door is ajar. I push through and almost trip over Dr. Jacoway, who’s sitting on the floor with his knees up and his chin propped on his folded arms. His body is so wide and full of folds that he looks like a crumpled tissue. He’s staring rapturously at something over the dresser and doesn’t react to me at all, even though I thumped into his back hard enough to bruise him.

  That thing dangling over the dresser? It’s made of what might be torn sheets, but they look weirdly shiny, stiff, brittle. They’ve been plastered into a lumpy shape like a huge peapod, glued to the ceiling somehow so that the lowest point twitches an inch above the dresser’s scarred white top. Near the top there’s a tuft of something coppery brown, curled and flicking rhythmically up and down.

  Oh, no. That tuft is Marley’s auburn curls.

  All the rest of her has vanished inside that pod of matted sheets. Her chrysalis.

  I don’t think she can see me through the fabric, but she might sense me somehow because she starts screaming again. “Ada! Ada! I know! It came into my mind! A message in blue words, shining! Ada!”

  Blue words? Really?

  “Marley, I’m here. Everything’s fine, you don’t need to be scared. I’m going to climb up on the dresser so we can talk, okay?”

  “All night she writhed there as if she were encased in a dream, gorging up her wet lacquer onto the sheets, layering the bands about herself. She seemed to hear nothing, see nothing, beyond what was necessary for her task. Then with the dawn, she began to shudder, and then to scream,” Dr. Jacoway murmurs, more to himself than to me. “An ordinary sapiens girl, so one might have thought, but revelation waited in her until the time was ripe. Most remarkable. Now she blossoms with surprise.”

  I wish he’d leave us alone, but from the way he’s staring and smiling to himself, I’m pretty sure that’s not happening. He’s studying her as if she’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen.

  I scramble up onto the dresser and carefully stand up, pressing against the wall. Marley’s mostly still now, but sometimes she thrashes unpredictably and I’m afraid she’ll knock me off. I want to look into the opening at the top of her chrysalis, to try and meet her eyes, but even on tiptoe I can’t manage it, so I give up and wrap my arms around her shell of weirdly plasticky sheets. Even if she can’t see me, it might comfort her a little to feel that I’m with her.

  “I’m right here beside you, Marley. You can tell me anything you want, okay? You can whisper if you want. I’m right next to you.” I can feel her shivering through the slick, awful material surrounding her. It bends slightly in a springy way.
>
  “Ada?” Her voice is softer now, without the frenzied insanity.

  “Yes, Marley.”

  “My mind was gone. Like dying. When I could think again, it was full of words.”

  Blue words. Maybe the blue truly communicated with her somehow? “What did it say?”

  “That it’s afraid for its children. It’s afraid of what will happen to us. It says we’re hope in terrible times that are coming, and we need to be protected from what she wants to do.”

  What Marley just said opens up so many crazy possibilities that I start wanting to believe she’s out of her mind after all.

  “It said that we’re its children? Marley, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  Or does it? The idea gives me a cold, queasy feeling. Was this what Rowan was trying to tell me yesterday?

  I can feel her trembling violently inside her chrysalis. “It called us daughters. It called Gabriel the violent child. It said it won’t help them, but they’re very close now anyway, and it’s afraid.”

  “Close to what?”

  Marley doesn’t answer that. Instead I hear the dry sound of a shredding cotton sheet and then a horrible noise. Marley must be coughing up something so thick and slimy that it nearly chokes her. Then, inside her shell, she starts to sob. Now even the gap that her hair stuck through is being pasted over. She’s completely sealed in.

  “Oh, Marley!” I wish I’d been a better friend to her. “You’re going to be okay. You’ll come out of there when it’s time, and you’ll be, you’ll be amazing . . .”

  “It won’t be me, though.” She barely gags out the words through her tears. “I won’t see you again, Ada. I’m dissolving. Don’t even call her Marley. Please? It won’t be me.”

  “Marley!” She’s making wet, gulping sounds in there, and I can’t tell what’s happening. “Dr. Jacoway! We need to stop this! We need to cut her out of there.” Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

  “That would be the end of her, I’m afraid. From this death at least she can return to us transformed.”

  I don’t know when I started crying. I’m stroking Marley’s chrysalis, trying to soothe her while she jumps and gasps inside it.

  “Seems like she’s done talking for now,” someone sneers from the doorway. “You won’t be finding out that way, Ada.”

  I don’t have to turn to know who it is. The door was open the whole time. Why didn’t I stop to think who might be there listening?

  Because I couldn’t think, not about anything but Marley and everything she’s going through. But I should have. I can’t afford to let down my guard like that. Not ever.

  “Poor Marley,” I say without looking at him. “You heard her, didn’t you? She said her mind is gone. Dissolving. No wonder everything she was saying was so totally disconnected from reality.”

  “The violent child? Me?” Gabriel says. I can hear the tight grin in his voice. It’s like he thinks he just won some kind of point, though I don’t know what the game is. “You’re right, Ada. That’s got nothing to do with anything.”

  I start to feel afraid that he might attack me again, even with Dr. Jacoway sitting there, and I turn and slide off the dresser. Marley’s completely still now, and very quiet. I remember reading somewhere that caterpillars actually liquefy inside their chrysalises and then their bodies reassemble in their new shape. It makes sense if you think about it, since a butterfly doesn’t look anything like a caterpillar with wings. How does it feel to let go of yourself so completely?

  “Anyway, Ms. Stuart will be glad to hear we’re close. She was worried we were on the wrong track; like, that she might need to start over from scratch. I can tell her we don’t need your floating blue whatever after all. And that means we don’t need you, either. See, I’ve been telling her we should just lock you up until you fold, but now—​I don’t know, feeding a prisoner sounds like a waste of our resources.”

  I can’t stand looking at him anymore. He’s handsome, sure, but in such a cold way that it’s worse than any ugliness. His skin has that flat whiteness it gets when he’s feeling especially self-satisfied. I decide to ignore his threats; that’s not the part that really matters.

  “You mean, you’re getting close with that project you were telling me about? In the cave? That’s great, Gabriel. But close to what?”

  “Like you don’t know!” Gabriel snaps. “Like I wasn’t right there in the room when you were jabbering on about your theory to Dr. Jacoway here. You didn’t figure that much out by yourself, either. I don’t know what you were trying to do, saying all that garbage right in my face. But it didn’t work, Ada.”

  “Her theory?” Dr. Jacoway asks. “But this can’t be the same girl—​the one who spoke of Aphrodite, who claimed that she had risen from the waves in just the same manner. Or is there some resemblance, after all?”

  I don’t say anything. Gabriel thinks I know a lot more than I really do, that’s obvious. And whatever they’re up to, it seems like it must have something to do with the algae I was talking about: algae that can carry entire chromosomes among different species. I think of those petri dishes in Ms. Stuart’s office with their glaze of reddish dust. Of course: red algae are the kind that can write over sections of DNA.

  Gabriel said there was some problem stopping them. He said the blue could solve it, or at least they believe that’s true. Does that problem have something to do with the fact that Chimera Syndrome occurs only on Long Island? Because if I know anything about Gabriel, he’d absolutely love to see chimeras spread all over the world. That’s the war he’s always dreaming about, a conquest: more and more and more of us, until we take over. And if I was right about the algae, why hasn’t the syndrome spread by now? Is there something keeping it contained?

  The blue is afraid for its children, Marley said. Its daughters. That includes her and me, Ophelia and Soraya and Indigo.

  No wonder Dr. Jacoway doesn’t remember the scientists at Novasphere working on the algae that brought chimeras into being. People massacred those scientists for no reason at all.

  I see it now. Something else changed the algae, reengineered it as a way to create us. Something with powers we don’t understand: a shining tangle of blue brilliance that nurtures part-human tadpoles in the dark, that calls us darling.

  Those poor scientists. They had nothing to do with it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I’M SUPPOSED to go to class. I’m supposed to sit at that conference table across from Gabriel, and act calm, and read The Tempest aloud with everyone, wondering the whole time what Gabe is planning for me now that he’s completely sure they don’t need me—​to act as an interpreter between them and the blue, to coax it into helping them with their war on the normals. If the blue could create us here, it could do the same thing everywhere, or at least everywhere near the ocean; that must be their reasoning. As I get dressed and head down the hallway to breakfast, I’m thinking about what today will be like and wondering how I’ll stand it.

  “Ada? You saw Marley, right? Is she okay?” It’s Ophelia, fluttering up behind me.

  “Not really. It’s like she’s losing herself. It’s not quite as bad as dying, but I think for her it feels pretty close to that.” The hall is jostling with kids. I catch a glimpse of Gabriel’s hand blinking blue and orange between the clustered bodies ahead of us, and my mind’s not really on the conversation.

  “But—​she’s going to have wings! She might be able to fly! Did you point that out to her, Ada? How phenomenal it’s going to be? Because I think you might be the only person here she’ll really listen to.” I can feel the cool stir of wind as Ophelia hover-hops along. The ceiling isn’t high enough here for her to launch herself upward, and I get the feeling that she hates it more every time her toes touch down on the carpet.

  “I did tell her that. But she says that whatever she turns into, it won’t be her anymore. Not—​not her real self.”

  She flurries around me and turns, softly curling a hand on my shou
lder. “Ada? You seem sad. I know you’re worried about Marley, but that’s not all that’s wrong, is it?”

  I think about how to answer. Gabriel might tell her part of what Marley said; he’ll give her a version of it that’s useful for him, anyway. “She was saying some crazy things. Like—​whatever accident happened to make the chimeras, whether it was the scientists at Novasphere or whatever—Marley was calling us its daughters. And I guess that made me miss my real parents.”

  Ophelia nods. She’s walking close to me now with one wing brushing my shoulder blades. “Have you heard anything from them?”

  It’s a sensitive subject for everyone here, so I usually avoid it. But Ophelia sounds like she really cares about the answer, and maybe I can admit this much. “I’ve been too scared to check my email. I know I should, but I just can’t make myself do it.”

  “Would it help if I stayed with you while you checked? You know, for moral support?” The shimmer on her eyes almost swirls; maybe she’s feeling anxious about something herself.

  I smile at her. It took me a while, but now the complicated green-black sparkle of her compound eyes doesn’t seem alien or eerie to me at all. They’re beautiful, and they’re so right for her. “Thanks. I think that might make it easier.”

  Personally, I’d way rather believe we were all a disastrous mistake, the result of some experiment gone horribly awry at Novasphere, than accept my new idea: that the blue truly is our parent, that it made us for reasons of its own. But maybe that’s because I have real parents out there, and I don’t like the idea of them being replaced by some floating inhuman thing, even if it is beautiful. Just thinking about it makes my insides twist, and I want to escape from ever having that thought again.

  Rowan and Ophelia might feel differently, though. They might go crazy with longing at the realization that they have a parent who never abandoned them, who drifted and nestled around them in their sleep, even if they could never see it. I can imagine that would feel like a huge improvement over the way their human parents acted, sending them away as soon as they were born. As soon as they saw how their babies stirred their shining wings, curled their flippers.