by Trisha Leigh
“It’s better than more books on South Carolina history, or memorizing the names of every slave owned by the Darley family between 1785 and 1862.” She pauses, then heaves a sigh when I don’t respond. Those studies were about keeping us busy while the staff studied us, and we all know it. “More applicable, anyway.”
The street of single-story, one-room brick cabins stretches in front of us. It may look sad to some people, but we have everything we need, including at least a little privacy. Reaper and I share the cabin second closest to the big house. Haint lives next door with Pollyanna, but she and I spend most of our time in Mole’s cabin, since he’s the lucky one who ended up with a single.
I peek inside and see that Reaper isn’t here—she’s probably still finishing up her testing. The lethal Operational testing is a secret, but even though Mole never talks about what they make him do, we suspect it’s bad. He never shuts up otherwise.
Haint and I sit on what’s left of my crumbling stoop. The ancient concrete slumps into the grass and mud, trying its best to bury itself alongside the era that constructed it. I nudge a clump of mangled earth and gray pebbles with my toe, resting my elbows on my knees. The sun has crested in the sky, signaling lunchtime, but I’m not really hungry.
I squint up at the glowing ball. “Don’t you have training soon?”
“Every day. It coincides with your nap time, doesn’t it?” She bumps my knee with hers.
“I like to mix it up. Sometimes I take a walk down by the boathouse or paddle one of the canoes out on the river.” Most days, while the Operationals, Substantials and Developmental are working on honing and maximizing their mutated genetics, I choose the water.
I drift and think about how, when Edward Darley built this plantation, the river was the road. It ferried visitors from neighboring homes, and the family rode it to their house in the city.
There’s a question that lives inside me, restless and separate. It feels like a dragon breathing fire, molten words that spurt into my belly while the canoe rocks gently: What would happen if I oared past our property line and into Charleston?
I’m not like the others, after all; I could hide out there in the world. No one would know what I can do, not unless I tell them.
But I stay. And the dragon seethes.
I want to change the subject. My afternoons are mine, and I like them that way. “How’s training? Manage to walk through anything solid yet?”
Her face glows. “Yes. I stuck my arm through a door the other day.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me? That’s amazing!”
Whether or not our mutations can be developed has been a pet project of the Philosopher’s and one of the reasons for our tests and our ever-changing holistic medicine regiment. Potential progress from any Cavy might mean my own ability could evolve into something useful, but I’m not holding my breath.
“I don’t know. It was just my arm, I couldn’t get all the way through. And it’s one of those old doors. It’s half faded into history already.”
“It’s amazing,” I reassure her softly. Because it is. Jealousy and pride wrestle inside me, neither winning, neither losing. I’m used to not being able to decide.
She shrugs, then gets up to stretch, but the sparkle in her dark eyes betrays her pleasure. Her feet disappear, then come back. She repeats the exercise with her shins, then her knees, followed by her thighs, vanishing one section at a time until she’s doing a convincing impression of the Headless Horseman, which never fails to freak me out. I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it—melting away pieces then bringing them back before doing another chunk was the first assignment she’d conquered, and now it’s like comfort food.
It’s her tell. She’s got something on her mind, something more than training.
“What’s going on?” The quiet, unsettled feeling breaks free of her restraints and tweaks my nerve endings.
“Nothing. I have a weird feeling, that’s all.”
“Are you still thinking about that guy who showed up here last week?”
We had a stranger at Darley, the first one since any of us came to live here. He claimed to be lost, and the Philosopher let him charge his phone before giving him a map and directions to Magnolia, another plantation situated several miles down the river. Haint’s the only one who laid eyes on the stranger, because we’ve been instructed and drilled on the proper procedures should a stranger ever wander onto the property. They boil down to one thing—stay invisible. Haint’s the only one who can accomplish that but still be wherever she wants, and her penchant for eavesdropping is legendary. Maybe it comes with the territory, because who could resist?
The man was middle-aged and alone, she reported. Handsome, tall, disheveled, and sporting a pair of eyeballs that never quit moving. Even with his jeans, T-shirt, Windbreaker, and sneakers—typical attire for plantation visitors—he unnerved her.
It did seem suspicious that he would accidentally find Darley, given no one else ever has. Drayton, Middleton, and Magnolia are all accessed from the same road as we are, but their big signs are hard to miss. Darley isn’t marked, it sits down a different fork in the road, and vegetation grew over the once dirt-and-gravel path that connects us to the modern world long ago.
The Philosopher doesn’t seem worried, though. No one is, and the boys are convinced our savior had the mystery man murdered before he got back to town. I don’t agree with them, not aloud, but it’s possible. We’re a secret. People do things—in the movies, at least—to protect those kinds of things. The people they care about.
Even though the Philosopher cares for us, it’s never been clear whether he cares about us. His work, though… nothing is more dear to him.
“I can’t forget about him,” Haint admits, finally appearing again as solid matter. She stands on one foot, then the other, biting her full bottom lip and casting wary glances toward the big house. “I don’t like him knowing about Darley. About us.”
“He doesn’t know about us, though. He only met the Philosopher and the Professor, and they showed him around the parts of the house that aren’t full of medical equipment. Didn’t you say they told him they were preserving the property?”
“Yeah, but…”
“Well, what do you think could happen?”
Despite my reassurances, my stomach clenches. Thinking about leaving is one thing, but the prospect of being torn away against my will, maybe separated from the Cavies, breaks sweat out on my palms. We all know what the staff says will happen if the real world, the modern world, finds out about us. About what we can do.
They say that the world won’t understand. That out there different is bad, it’s dangerous, and people shoot first and ask questions later. That we’ll end up in government laboratories at best, tossed in some kind of mental hospital at worst.
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Like, the winds are changing. Sherman’s marching East.”
“The Yanks didn’t burn Darley the first time. Maybe the plantation is magical, like Mole thought when he was little.”
She snorts. “Too many Harry Potter books. He thought Darley was like Hogwarts, invisible to the unmutated world.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice? To think that we’re special? That people would envy us our invitations here?” The memory of Mole, his little boy face twisted into a determined frown as he tried to convince us all we were witches and wizards, makes my heart ache even now.
That was before they made him kill that damn chicken he loved so much. Before they learned he’s lethal. So many things changed for him that day.
“I think we’re special, Gypsy.”
“You are, maybe.”
“You are, too. If I can stick my arm through a wall, and Reaper can pull the blood straight out of a rat’s veins, and Athena can hear people chatting in the secluded gardens at Middleton, who’s to say there’s not more to what you can do, too?”
It’s nice of her—of most of the Cavies—to take the time to reassure me I’m
not worthless. Not Inconsequential. The truth is I am, and furthermore, I’m not sure that in the real world it would matter. They spend their days wishing they were more powerful, more different. I spend mine daydreaming about what life would be like had I never come here. If my brain and genome had never been mapped, I’d never come to the Philosopher’s attention, and I could have gone through life with a single strange quirk.
Okay, I probably have more than one, but just the single big one.
“You’re right,” I agree so she’ll go away. Her training session is about to start, anyway, and a brief birdcall a moment later verifies my guess as to the time. I smile at Haint, one of my best friends at Darley, and tip my head. “See you later.”
“Later, Gyp.”
She disappears into thin air a few steps onto the tree-lined drive. I try to make out footprints or a shimmer in the muggy winter afternoon, anything to tell me when she crosses through the gates and into the big house, but it’s too far away.
It’s idyllic in that moment. Suspended in time.
And then it shatters, like a perfect, crystal vase smashing onto a tile floor.
A black-and-white police car screams up the drive, freezing me in place and chasing away the plantation’s peaceful afternoon. Another follows, then another, and another—so many that I lose count. They stir up dirt into a massive cloud, like a bunch of roadrunners whirling through a cartoon desert.
The dirt clogs my mouth, dries out my tongue. Snakes down my throat and into my lungs, choking off all the warnings that beg to be shouted. The realization that everything is about to change closes my throat the rest of the way.
Fear nips at my stomach, bites my heart. My friends are in that house. My family. Adults who may not love me but have spent sixteen-plus years caring for me. The Cavies, who do love me.
The only people in the world who will ever know what it’s like to be me.
My eyes are glued to the sight of strangers swarming the big house, black and thick like ants on a hummingbird feeder. The bricks of the only home I’ve ever had feel warm against my back. The dirt settles, then poofs up again under the feet of too many cops to count. Their uniforms are black and blue, with a few tan ones thrown in for good measure, and they all draw guns as they move toward the big house in a fanned-out formation.
None of them notice me, my mouth gaping in silent warning. There’s nothing I can do as they burst through the front doors. They’re going to find us.
Dread chills my skin, makes me tremble as I watch the police storm the house, as the faint strains of yelling and screams and protests surf the stagnant air toward Slave Street. But for all of the terror making it impossible for me to breathe, for all the desperate need to cling to the way things have always been, the dragon inside me celebrates.
He twitches his tail, grins a dragon grin, and thinks, Now, Gypsy, you and I might be able to fly. And even if we can’t, no one out there will think we’re lesser for it.
Chapter Two
Everything that happens over the next twenty-four hours globs together, like an anthill after the twins squeeze a whole bottle of honey onto it. My hospital room hosts a slow-motion parade of cops and doctors and suspiciously nice ladies called social workers. There are blankets and coffee and eyes.
All kinds of eyes.
Kind ones, worried ones, scared ones, curious ones. Mine, which have barely closed.
The television in the room plays a live feed, not just movies like the ones at Darley, and the news of our discovery and “rescue” has been on a continuous loop. When it’s verified that no one at Darley had legal custody of us, the local cops turn into FBI agents within a couple of hours, and are then joined by less identifiable government agents. Homeland Security, maybe, or CIA. They flop out their badges when they introduce themselves, asking a bunch of questions that slide together, the letters from one word jumbling with the next. It’s deafening.
I never noticed how quiet it is at Darley Hall. Never realized how lost I would feel without the other Cavies; even our connection has gone silent.
At first panic overwhelmed us and we all tried to crowd the shared, private, safe mental sphere we use to communicate. Our emotions and thoughts were too big, made the Clubhouse too crowded and unbearably loud until we shut the doors that connect us.
Now they sit in their hospital rooms and I tremble alone in mine. Listening. Trying not to cry. Needing my friends and wondering if all my wishes for a different life brought this fate down on the rest of them, who had been perfectly happy with the way things were. If my selfish jealousy would land us all in a permanent government laboratory, poked and prodded and caged like rats.
My heart has twisted and wrung so many times since those cops showed up at Darley, since they dragged our benefactors out of the big house and shoved us into ambulances that it sags toward my knees making apathetic attempts to beat, to pump blood normally. But how can it do such a thing when nothing is familiar?
My friends are nearby but impossibly far away. The life they were content with—and maybe that I should have been, too—is gone forever.
Despite the scrubbed hospital air and all of the eyes peering at me, loneliness sits on my chest like an elephant. It scratches my skin, makes me itch as if these crisp sheets and extra blankets are lined with poison oak. The whole world is an unknown and my body seems determined to treat it all as a threat. It clams up at incessant questions. I refused to let the nurses take my vitals or give me any kind of IV, but they took some blood and seem satisfied that we’re fine, physically. Mentally is another matter, and they’re not wrong. My mind feels torn apart, lying in chunks that have no idea how to get me through the coming conversation, never mind the rest of the day.
Whether or not what the Philosopher told us all these years holds true, whether or not they would harm me if they knew the truth, all of my instincts scream to protect the secret—mostly because it’s not only mine. My stomach hurts, won’t stop hurting until I know what will happen to us now, know that my friends haven’t been discovered, either.
The man who had “accidentally” stumbled onto Darley Hall is a reporter of some kind, and had been following up on a tip from a local fisherman who claimed to see children on the property. Darley was abandoned so long ago that most people have forgotten it ever existed, and the family had never been as well known or as well off as much old Charleston blood. It had taken the reporter weeks to figure out where the fisherman had spotted us, and longer to figure out how to get to the plantation without using the river.
This is what the cops and agents and doctors tell me, over and over, until it starts to sink in. They talk and talk, but when they want me to respond, fear holds my tongue captive. It’s like balancing on an invisible beam above a river filled with crocodiles—I have no idea where to step.
No matter how many times I’ve tried to convince myself I’m not like the other Cavies, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not like the people in this world, either.
“What’s your name?”
A woman poses the question after advising me she’s a social worker. It’s just her and me in the room and I take a moment to study the gray streaks through her mahogany hair, the wrinkles that cut fissures around her kind eyes and mouth. There’s a difference about her that unnerves me—a determination in the set of her jaw, tangled with sympathy and truth in her gaze. She’s going to insist on what the others have let slide. Make me talk.
The realization pushes my heart into overdrive again, dries out my mouth. At least I slipped the monitor off my finger before it had the chance to register that my heart rate, like my fellow Cavies, rests above what’s considered safe or normal. No one’s said anything about it and they’re not afraid of me, instead treating me more like an injured animal than anything else. One without teeth.
I guess they think I’m Inconsequential, too. It should be a good thing, but after a lifetime of hating the classification, it prickles.
“What’s your name?” she repeat
s, insistent but firm as she crosses her legs. “I’ve got all day.”
Telling feels like a betrayal. Of the Professor and the Philosopher and everyone else. The patient air about her validates her willingness to stay in this room however long it takes to earn my confession, though, and they won’t let us go if they think we’re all dumb or mute.
“Do you have a name?” she tries.
I shrug again, then work on negotiating the release of my tongue, succeeding as the fear recedes to the back of my throat and burns. “Not a real one.”
“Well, that’s okay. What did they call you at Darley?”
It probably doesn’t matter if I tell her. No one is going to guess that my name relates to a strange genetic mutation, that I’m called Gypsy because of my way of seeing the future.
My caretakers are beyond help, anyway, and the amount of guilt and pain and loss at the realization that they’re gone from me forever threatens to curl me into the kind of ball that even the pushy social worker can’t unfurl.
“What’s your name?” I ask, trying to buy time to find my footing. Anything that feels solid in this new world.
“You can call me Sandra, if you like.”
“They call me Gypsy.”
Her shoulders fall from around her ears. “Okay, Gypsy. Well, first of all I suspect you’re right about it not being your real name. Your given name.” She pauses, picking a piece of animal hair off her dark wash jeans. “What did they tell you about where you came from? Anything?”
“I’m an orphan. All of us came to live at Darley Hall before we were three months old.”
“So Darley is an orphanage.”
I nod, unwilling to lie when she’s being honest. I don’t want her to stop talking, not if she can maybe tell me who I was. Where I came from. And it’s not a lie. It’s a house where orphans live, so maybe it is an orphanage.
