Tentacle and Wing

by Sarah Porter

  Then I hear the violent, wrenching roar as the gate finally gives way.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THE HEADLIGHTS thrust forward, twisting on the blackberry bushes. The normals are driving right onto the grounds, their voices tumbling out in drunken shouts and bursts of ugly laughter. I think most of the kids have scattered by now, but I can hear Ms. Stuart trying to shout the invaders down, and Dr. Jacoway—​oh, he’s singing to himself, his voice slurred and dreamy and utterly insane.

  Red-shining bodies rush staggering over the grass. I see Dr. Jacoway holding up his arms, waving them back and forth.

  “Not the children! You have no business, sirs, in tampering with miracles you could never understand. But, oh, I understand! I know these children for what they are. The spirit of life itself saw the coming risk of human extinction, and it made them, it made them to be our new hope!” The words come out as a weird, warped song, and he walks right into the path of a truck rumbling slowly onto the grounds, the same one that was here before, with the loudspeakers in the back. Ms. Stuart must be close enough to see what’s happening. Why doesn’t she run to him and drag him out of its way? “I will not allow it. Not a hair, not a scale, not one feather. I will not! I will—”

  “Dr. Jacoway!” I scream. “They’re not stopping!”

  But he doesn’t hear me, or he doesn’t care. He’s still singing as the truck rolls over him. I see him pulled under the wheels, I hear his breathy cry, and I’m struggling to free myself from the kime carrying me. To help him. But I can’t.

  I hear his song end.

  In the darkness and confusion, the stampeding humans don’t seem to notice us until we’re pretty close. The mob is bigger than last time, but even so, I’m pretty sure the frog chimeras have them seriously outnumbered. There’s a burst of light, maybe from a flashlight, and a strange woman’s face jerks to a halt inches from mine. Her mouth is wide, her hair sticking up and singed off on one side. She’s gawking at the kime holding me and trying to scream, but all she can make are these little gagging sounds.

  But other people can still scream, and they do.

  I hear gunshots, and I watch as one of the greenish kimes swipes a gun out of someone’s hand without even looking and drives it barrel-first into the ground.

  Bright orange light flares through the grass, and then I realize that a man with a torch has been snatched up by his ankles so that the fire laps up around his arm. He shrieks and drops the torch, and the kime holding him treads out the fire with its bare damp feet.

  I can hear the hiss as the flames are extinguished. I’d like to believe it doesn’t hurt, but the pale semihuman face is tight with pain.

  But it doesn’t do anything to the man it’s gripping. His upside-down face is red and sweating, and his arms swing out in random, pointless punches. But the kime just lets him dangle, and my heart speeds up from hope: that the kime army has come here to stop them. To protect all of us.

  Not to hurt anyone, even if they might deserve it. Not to fight.

  Another of the frog people wrests a megaphone from a teenage human boy who’s just sitting on the ground in shock, and hands it politely to someone back behind us. I crane, but I can’t see who it is.

  The chaos seems to be dying down. Maybe half the human mob has run away. The truck and a few pickups and cars are so tightly surrounded by silent green chimeras that they’ve stopped trying to drive. And the remaining normals are mostly caught by their feet or pinned in the grass. There’s a feeling of weary confusion in the air. Nobody knows what to do with a riot that has stopped before it could really get going—​even if it’s stopped too late for Dr. Jacoway.

  Someone climbs on top of a car and hefts the megaphone.

  “You said you came for Ada Lahey. She’s here, and she’s fine, and she can leave with you. If she wants to. No one will stop her.”

  Rowan. He’s the glimpse of warmth I saw before, squeezed in with the frog people. That’s where he was: he went to get help.

  The chimera holding me sets me softly on my feet.

  “The normal girl,” someone says, jumping down from the truck carrying the loudspeakers. I recognize him. It’s the man who was doing the talking the first night, when they threw a rock at me. Scott Held, Gabriel said, one of the leaders of the massacre at Novasphere, and now he’s murdered the last survivor from that night. Dr. Jacoway’s mind was shattered, I know that. And so was his heart.

  But his courage and his kindness? Those were as strong and intact as ever.

  “The normal girl,” Scott Held repeats, walking toward me. His dark hair crests in the wind. He must have been young when he killed those scientists, because he doesn’t look older than his early thirties now. “We should have known as soon as we saw you, that you couldn’t be one of these freaks. We never should have been fooled. You know they lied and told us you were dead? We know better now, Ada, better about all of it, and we’re here to get you out.”

  He reaches for me. I pull away. How dare this man act like he’s my personal hero?

  “Don’t touch me,” I say.

  “She’s just frightened,” somebody croons. A woman. “The poor girl is in shock. Get her father, somebody, will you? He’s in the car just back around the bend.”

  So my dad told the lies that started this mess, but then he decided to wait it out at a safe distance? He didn’t want to watch the kids here die because of him?

  “We’ll take her and go peacefully,” Scott announces to the kime army, like he’s got anything to say about it. They stand still and watch him, a few of them holding human captives—​though most of the humans have been set down now and are leaning on each other or huddling in the grass. “We’ll overlook—​whatever this new freak show is, that you’ve all been getting up to.” He nods to indicate the frog chimeras, and he doesn’t even try to keep the disgust off his face. “As long as we never see anything that there shouldn’t be outside the grounds. Anything unnatural.”

  I can tell from his voice that he’s lying. They’re outnumbered now, but he’s already plotting to come back. Maybe with more powerful weapons. Maybe with the real military. And he’s so sure everyone hates us that he’s not even worried about going to prison for what he’s done.

  “I’m as unnatural as they are,” I say. “If I can leave here, then so can everyone else.”

  “Now, Ada, that’s not true. They’ve told you so many lies that you’ve started believing them. But you’re a real, right, pure-human little girl, and this is no place for you.”

  I never like being condescended to very much, but I like it even less from someone who just murdered my friend—​because even if Dr. Jacoway couldn’t remember me for ten minutes at a stretch, that’s exactly what he was.

  “I can prove what I am,” I say. “And I’m not ashamed of it.”

  I keep waiting for Ms. Stuart to say something, but she’s watching from off to the side and keeping her mouth shut. She’s smart. Probably she’s calculating that anything she can say will just make the situation worse for her. Now that she’s been caught lying, it’s not a good idea to call attention to herself.

  Gabriel’s nearby too, face-down on the ground with a frog chimera sitting languidly on his back. His visible skin is blinking like a traffic light, but no one is paying attention.

  Rowan is the one who comes to me. He climbs down off his perch, the megaphone dangling from his hand, and twists his way through the tangle of humans and chimeras. His fur makes his red glow look softer and fuzzier than most people’s. When he gets close, Scott Held jumps back from us, looking at Rowan’s round, silky head with absolute loathing.

  Rowan reaches a flipper toward my cheek and then drops it self-consciously. His brown eyes are riveted on mine.

  “Ada,” he half whispers. He leans closer. “Ada, this is your chance to get out, and you should take it. You know what Gabriel would have—​no one here deserves to have you stay.”

  “You deserve it,” I tell him. “And so does
Soraya.”

  “Just—​go have a normal life, Ada. No one could ever guess, not by looking at you. Don’t give up your whole future for us!” Tears are wobbling in his dark eyes. One slips free and soaks into the fur on his neck.

  I have more than one possible future, though. It’s not about giving up my old ideas of my future; it’s about choosing a new future, one I’m just beginning to understand. But I don’t have time to explain that to Rowan now. I can see a section of the road through the broken gate, and my dad is there, running around the bend. Once he gets here and starts talking, I probably won’t be able to get anyone to listen to me. They’ll trust him instead. I might be carried out of here by force.

  I turn to Scott Held. “Do you have a piece of paper? Or your jacket would work, too. Hold it up in front of one hand.”

  There’s a wave of murmuring from the humans. The frog chimeras are just as quiet as ever. Rowan is tear-streaked and pink, like he’s holding his breath. “Why?” Scott Held asks. He’s too taken aback to keep simpering at me.

  “So I can show you how unnatural I am.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  IT ONLY takes half a minute. Scott Held and his followers might not want to believe it, but they all know that nobody human could see what I can see. Only a filthy, hideous kime could do that. Rowan steps out of the way but stays close, letting me know he’s there for me. I stare them down. “Well?”

  And that’s when my dad comes pounding through the gate, sparing just one quick glance for the bent iron bars. He doesn’t seem interested in the frog chimeras at all. Just how much did he know before I came here?

  “Ada! Ada, thank God you’re safe. What unbelievable cruelty—​they told me you were dead, sweetheart. I knew it couldn’t be true.”

  He’s been coming closer while he’s talking, and now he reaches to pull me into his arms. I step back before he can catch me.

  “Ms. Stuart lied to you,” I say. “But you lied, too. Did you know Dr. Jacoway? You’re both biologists. Did you ever meet him?”

  “Dr. Jacoway?” He looks stunned, and really sweet, with his golden-brown skin and warm gaze and his glasses tipped at a slant. I don’t think I understood how badly I missed him and my mom and my home until this moment. All I want to do is give in, hug him tight and sob while he carries me to the car. But I can’t. “I studied under him. Many years ago.”

  “He’s dead,” I say. “Scott Held crushed him to death with his truck. And he was murdered because he wanted to protect the kids here. Not because he’d done anything wrong.” Dad stares at me. “You ran past his body, and you didn’t even look.”

  “I was desperate to reach you, sweetheart. Once they made that outrageous claim, that you’d been killed in an accident—​I wasn’t sure what they’d try next. I was sure you were in danger.”

  He steps forward again, and again I dance out of reach. My hair keeps blowing in my face, and when I push it back, my cheeks are slippery with tears. I didn’t even know I was crying.

  “I was. Gabriel over there tried to murder me, twice. And the second time Ms. Stuart was ready to sit back and let it happen.”

  I know they’re both listening, but I won’t look at them. They’re no better than Scott Held; just like him, they’ll crush anyone in the way of their plans.

  And right now I can’t look at my dad, either. I love him, but I understand too much. I know what he’s done. I turn my head toward the violet sky, the black trees pitching like waves. Bats like shining ribbons swoop after insects.

  I need to cry for hours in someone’s arms, but they won’t be his.

  “That’s just what I was afraid of. So you can see—​Ada, you accuse me of lying, and I did. I would have said anything, done anything I had to, to get you out of here!”

  “Maybe you should have thought about that,” I say, “before you sent me in here to be your spy.”

  The crowd has been pretty quiet. I guess for them, watching this is as good as TV. But now there are some reactions: surprised huffs and murmuring. My dad glances around. Like he was counting on me to keep that part secret and not embarrass him.

  Like that matters more than all the kids who could have died tonight. More than Dr. Jacoway, lying there with his rib cage crushed and his mouth wide open. I can’t see him well—​there are too many people in the way—​but I can see his ruby glow starting to dim to a dull brick red.

  “I never wanted it to be you, Ada,” my dad says at last. The same words he used in his email. “But my bosses, my—​associates—​all impressed on me how perfect you were for the task. So beautifully human-looking that no one would question how you’d passed undetected for so long.”

  So it was never a secret that I’m a chimera—​at least, it wasn’t a secret from everyone. It’s a crazy thing to realize. Maybe I was only free all those years because his associates were waiting for me to be old enough to be their pawn. Maybe during all those doctors’ visits they were studying me, and I never even guessed. There’s a much bigger game being played than I ever realized. If there’s some kind of conspiracy, how deep does it really go? My breath is heaving, and I must look stunned.

  I guess he doesn’t notice how much understanding this hurts me, because he just keeps talking.

  “But then, if you came under suspicion—​if they thought you were a human plant—​you could easily prove your true nature.” I think of Ms. Stuart, fake-casually asking me for that demonstration in her office. She’d wondered that exact thing. “And then, there’s your extraordinary vision. It’s unique, as far as we know.”

  There it is again. I wonder if he wanted the same thing Ms. Stuart did: for me to find the blue, and find a way to help him use it. Harness its power, like it’s just some weapon and the first side that gets hold of it will win. I can see how people who’ve never experienced the blue for themselves might get that idea, and how amazing it would be to control the force that made all of us. But nobody can use it; it has its own ideas. That doesn’t seem to occur to either of them.

  And they can’t use me, either.

  “Why did you agree to send me, though? What did they promise you? You said something about leaving Long Island, but that—​you wouldn’t have agreed just for that?”

  He flushes. The heat of his blood rising in his cheeks makes them shine like lanterns. That’s enough of an answer. Right; being stuck in the quarantined zone has been devastating for his career.

  “The whole test,” I say. “The Popsicles. You were in on the plan before that happened. You helped set me up. And you let me believe I was contagious, but you knew that wasn’t true, either.”

  “Ada,” he says. “Ada, listen. I wanted what was best for you. For our whole family. Staying inside the quarantine—​it’s stifling. I wanted a better future than that for you.”

  “And what about Marley and Corbin?” I ask. “They got caught too. Ripped away from their families. Why? Just to make the whole bust look more realistic?”

  He doesn’t answer that. Not directly. “Marley? We’d been watching that girl for years. I posed as a pediatrician to study her personally, once; such a fascinating case. She’s only thirty-seven out of forty-six. Barely human at all. It’s astounding that she was able to pass for so long.”

  The answer that matters to me isn’t in his words. It’s in the tone of his voice. There’s a thin, sharp edge of contempt.

  I’m forty-five out of forty-six, and I guess that makes me almost good enough. Almost a real daughter. But not quite so real that he wasn’t willing to trade me for his freedom. I see. I completely understand, and I wish more than anything that I could squeeze all my love for him out of my heart. Crush it and throw it on the grass and tell him to his face that I hate him.

  But I can’t. And I don’t. I love him, and I just wish he’d done a better job of loving me back.

  He reaches toward me again. “Ada, come along. I understand you feel strongly about the choices I made, and you have every right to be upset. Let’s talk
about this at home.”

  His voice has softened so quickly that it’s like he threw a switch. He knows how to say all the right things. He’s smart that way. But Ms. Stuart is pretty good at that too.

  Rowan, out of everybody—​he’s the only one who recognizes just how awful this is. He leans closer and curls a flipper on my shoulder.

  “Dr. Lahey? You’re welcome to visit here—​I mean, if Ada wants to see you. But there’s no way we’ll let you take Ada against her will.”

  My dad scowls at him. “And who do you mean by we? You and the people who tried to murder her?”

  Rowan shakes his head. “They don’t count anymore. And anyway, you know that’s not who I meant.”

  As the night gets deeper, the tall greenish army blends into the darkness more. But as I look around, I realize they’ve moved to stand in a ring twenty feet from me and Rowan. They’re guarding us. My dad stares at them and then turns around, probably checking to see how many of Scott Held’s people he can call on for support.

  The answer is almost none. They’ve been getting up off the ground in ones and twos, staring around disoriented, and then wandering off. Why would anybody stay to fight over a kime girl like me? Back through the gate, back into cars. Hot exhaust plumes scarlet from their tailpipes. Even Scott Held is climbing back into the cab of his truck and slamming the door. His mouth is bent in a disappointed sneer.

  My dad turns back to me. There’s such a strange look on his face: regret and longing, but also something more calculating, like he’s about to lose something he wants intensely. And I think I can guess what it is. He still needs me and whatever I know to persuade his bosses to let him leave Long Island.