Part I: Stasis

Chapter 1

By the third time my fingers slipped out of rhythm against my frame drum, I knew it was time to stop. This close to 6:00, even music could not distract me. I set the drum down on my closed laptop and leaned my chin in my hands and my elbows on my desk as I stared across the tiny apartment to the kitchen cabinets. Not much in them, I knew, but I probably had some pasta left. I’d get dinner started as soon as I knew how this evening was going to go. My left hand curled into a fist against my jaw. I tried to unclench it, but the muscles did not want to relax.

Any second now …

The wristband whirred, and its interior needle jabbed the inside of my left wrist. My arm jerked, instinct pulling it away from the source of the sting, but there was nowhere for it to go. The wristband could not be removed.

I lowered my hand and looked down at the thin colorless stripe in the middle of the band as it processed the blood sample. Thirty seconds passed. The stripe turned red.

No pasta tonight.

I had a routine to follow. Into a worn-out cotton bag I placed a change of clothes, my toothbrush and toothpaste, and, gently, my frame drum. Then I sat on my bed in the corner and inspected my palms. Nothing yet. My insides started to feel sore, but not for any biological reason. Just anticipation and self-pity – and, perhaps, the lack of dinner. I wished the band had turned red at the noontime needle. Then I at least would have gotten half the day off from work.

Four and a half weeks had passed since the last time the light turned red. I kept track on the calendar on my wall. Without that daily flick of the pen in the numbered boxes, the days would blur together, but since I had coping mechanisms, I had no reason to be surprised. Somehow I always was.

A silent fifteen minutes passed before a too-loud knock at the door made me jump. Before I could stand, a key scraped in the lock. Mr. Bicks never waited for me to let him in. He swung the door open and glared at me.

“How close are you?” he said.

“Not very.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

I hitched my bag over my shoulder and followed Mr. Bicks out onto the staircase to my second-story apartment. As soon as the desert sun hit me, my neck began to sweat beneath my hair. I hadn’t been planning on going outside today, so I hadn’t pulled it back. At least I was dressed appropriately, wearing my usual uniform of a nondescript tank top and shorts. Mr. Bicks, as always, was dressed to impress, though exactly whom he wanted to impress was a mystery to me. He forced the points of his silk vest down over his tailored shirt, which sported growing yellow stains in the armpits. I followed him to his car and sat in the backseat, the door still open.

“Hands,” Mr. Bicks said. His face was bright red. Even his mustache looked overheated.

I held out my arms. Mr. Bicks slapped a pair of handcuffs onto my wrists, fitting the link just above the no-longer-glowing wristband. The cuffs were inescapably tight. The skin beneath them burned.

“In,” Mr. Bicks said.

I slid further into the car. Mr. Bicks slammed the door, then clambered into the driver’s seat. A sheet of thick, hard plastic separated us, with a grate of tiny holes in the center to allow us to speak. We never did.

I leaned my head against the window as we drove away from Supplicants Grove, the town I’d called home for the last four months since my seventeenth birthday. We bumped our way along the winding road that led through the valley and away from the dense collection of squat, rundown buildings. The mountains outside my window changed from stark, striped pyramids to gloppy red mounds before disappearing entirely as the car sped into the flat open desert. With Supplicants Grove behind us, the world was empty: fifty percent sky, fifty percent dirt.

I looked at my hands again. Angry rashes crept out from beneath the handcuffs, and my palms looked like I’d pressed them into a pile of soot.

I could feel Mr. Bicks’s eyes, which spent more time looking in the rearview mirror than at the road. If anyone ever accused him of it, he would swear up and down that he wasn’t afraid of anything, but in the mirror, his face told a different story. I bit my lip, suppressing the impulse to snarl.

Every few minutes, I checked my palms again. Soon they were covered in coarse, dark hair. The drive from Supplicants Grove was only twenty minutes, but it always seemed much longer. Still, by the time Mr. Bicks cleared the double set of rusty gates and parked behind the other cars in the enclosure, nothing aside from my hands had changed. As always, Mr. Bicks had gotten all nervous for nothing.

The single road stretched for miles in both directions, not thinking to stop where our car had, but a well-worn path of tire tracks marked the dirt through the gates. The tracks led to a set of metal cylinders that stuck up out of the ground. At first glance they appeared to be old junk, but close up, I could see the outline of a roof peeking through the dust, with a heavy metal door at one end. Mr. Bicks pushed me aside and wrenched it open.

“Ladies first,” he said.

My arms shaking and hot, I walked into the ground.

The compound was laid out in the shape of a T, with the staircase right where the two lines met. To my left and right were the offices, supply closets, and exam rooms. Down ahead of me was the dormitory hall. During the wartimes, these rooms had housed soldiers, but in the past decade, the compound had been repurposed. I led the way to the very end of the hall, to the room that had been mine since I was seven years old.

The doors were all closed. Before I arrived on these occasions, an alarm blared out of the residents’ computers, warning them to keep away. The only door that remained open was my own. I stepped through and held out my trembling hands. Working clumsily at arm’s length, Mr. Bicks unlocked the handcuffs.

The relief was overwhelming. I sagged against the doorpost, holding my arms away from my body and letting the climate-controlled air soothe my raw skin. The welts were darker than usual. I tried not to think about that, and mostly succeeded. I was good at not thinking about the things I couldn’t change.

“Quit wasting time,” Mr. Bicks said. “In you get.”

My old room looked exactly as I had left it: neat bed across from the bathroom door, cages in the back corner. I sat on the bed while Mr. Bicks dragged the camera and tripod out of the tiny closet. He fiddled with the settings and pointed the lens at the cages, then ducked out of the room. I could hear him breathing just outside the closed door.

That’s not normal, I told myself. Don’t listen to people breathe. But I couldn’t stop. The muscles in my back bunched as I counted each of Mr. Bicks’s snuffly breaths. A shooting pain ripped through my jaw, followed by another in my left foot. My lips drew back of their own accord, and unwanted images filled my mind, all focused on the source of that breathing.

It was time to make myself safe.

I eased the smaller cage out of the larger one, my fingertips blistering on contact. The big cage was cube-shaped and made of shining bars, while the small one was a parody of a dress. The metal tube had two thick shoulder straps like a tank top, if tank tops were made of body armor fibers. The rest of the wearable cage was mostly steel, overlain with thin but effective silverleaf. The “hem” narrowed into points at the front and back, giving full range of motion to my hips while protecting my modesty, such as it was.

Away from the cold eye of the camera, I stripped out of my clothes. The two crescents of scar tissue on my thigh were angry and inflamed. I took a deep breath before crawling inside the cage-dress. My skin burned, but I managed to drag myself into the big cage, my arms and legs also searing as they touched the bars.

“Ready,” I called. I had to repeat myself twice before my voice was loud enough for Mr. Bicks to hear.

His eyes narrowed immediately. “You said you weren’t close.”

“I wasn’t. I’m not,” I said.

“But you look like hell.”

“Thanks.”

Mr. Bicks scowled as he locked the big cage. He was opposed to what he called “sass.” He didn’t like reminders that we had personalities.

Someone knocked on the open door.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Mr. Bicks snapped.

The boy in the doorway ignored him, and since he was nearly twice Mr. Bicks’s size, Mr. Bicks allowed it.

“Hey, Markie,” I croaked.

Markie took a moment to catch his breath, his face red and sweaty, and then he smiled at me.

“Hey, Millie,” he said. “Leela wanted me to tell you ‘break it back.’”

Leela loved soap operas, and she’d learned that actors told each other “break a leg” for good luck. That was too literal in my case, so she’d modified the saying to “break it back.” Even though she couldn’t come and tell me herself, she always made sure I got the message.

I nodded my gratitude, and Markie shuffled away. Mr. Bicks rolled his eyes so hard it had to hurt. A growl rose in my throat, but I swallowed it.

“Have fun,” Mr. Bicks said, slamming the door behind him.

I laid myself down so that only the left side of my ribcage and abdomen was pressed hard against the silver tube. I stared into the camera, knowing exactly what it saw. My post-Static ancestors were from China, though whether they had come to America one or ten generations ago, I had no idea. The only links I had to my biological family were my surname and my appearance. Someone – many someones – had walked through the world with my eyes, my wide forehead, my pointed chin. But beyond our shared features, I couldn’t imagine my family, and they hadn’t lived long enough to imagine me. That was probably for the best.

The camera didn’t care about my face. The gauntness of my body beneath the cages was more scientifically relevant. Also of note was the way the hair on my palms matched the hair on my head: coarse and dense. I wore it long. I liked wrapping the thick black blanket around my shoulders.

Without warning, the first spasm hit. Pain like hot oil bubbled through my veins. Inside me, things bent and cracked and moved. When I stopped screaming, I bared my teeth at the camera, even though I didn’t mean to.

“Enjoy the show,” I said.

The camera didn’t answer.

For a long time, not a lot happened. Come on, get it over with, I thought.

Of course, as soon as I got what I asked for, I tensed up, trying to fight what couldn’t be fought. The camera watched as my body disconnected from itself. My hands twisted into shapeless lumps of writhing flesh and loose bone. The scars on my thigh seared.

Eventually, my screams turned to howls.

The sound died abruptly when my windpipe slid out of alignment with my shifting lungs. You won’t suffocate, I told myself, as I always did. It’ll fit back together soon.

I never believed me. Deep down, I always thought that this would be the transformation that finally killed me.

I was howling again before I realized I had resumed breathing. Wiry black fur sprouted all over my body. It protected me a little, but the silver foil still scalded my skin. My limbs stretched into new shapes with the sound of rocks grinding. The edges of the cage bit into my thighs and armpits, which weren’t really armpits anymore.

Why was I still lucid?

But no — no, there it was. My thoughts dissolved into snarling. My organs were shutting down and restarting like a burnt-out engine, and my vertebrae stretched like putty to form an itchy, prickling tail. At this point, the loss of my mental faculties was a relief.

Once that mindless creature took over, it stopped fighting the transformation. My eyeballs turned to goo and changed shape. The bones in my ears shattered and my eardrums wriggled like bugs in hot tar. I bit through my tongue and lips when my teeth lengthened.

I smelled blood. My own.

When it was all over, I lay there in my silver cages, enraged but exhausted. I panted and burned and bled.

Who would make this choice? Who would become what I was?

No one. There were those who had chosen a different kind of transformation, but not like this. Not like me. And I never chose.

I wasn’t a very good werewolf. I wasn’t even a real one.

Chapter 2

When I was little, a reporter once asked me, “What’s it like to be a wolf?” Even if my lawyer hadn’t ushered me away, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. After my transformations, I could occasionally remember a handful of disconnected impressions, like images from a movie I’d half-slept through. Other times, I was left with only a gap, a blankness in which I had ceased to exist.

That night was a nothing night. I returned to awareness when I began to turn back into a girl. It was just as painful as turning into a wolf, but I didn’t make as much noise. The silver cages robbed me of the energy. When the transformation was over, I counted my fingers and toes, making sure that no claws remained. I twisted around and saw no tail, then brushed my ears with my shoulders, assuring myself of their human shape. Finally, I mustered what little strength I had left, reached through the bars, and flipped a switch on the floor to signal my return to personhood.

While I waited for my monthly rescue, my thoughts turned, as they so often did, to what had brought me to this point. Or rather, who had brought me here.

People change for a reason, and there’s always a reason to change.

That was what she used to say. Dr. Dagny Topher, MD, PhD, and AMW — America’s Most Wanted. Dr. Topher worshipped at the altar of change, and she wasn’t alone. After all, before the Age of Stasis, the ancient cultures proudly took credit for every tiny variation of humanity, whether they’d done it on purpose or not. (Half a dozen cultures claimed they’d created red hair, but most experts these days were pretty sure that was an accident.)

Centuries upon centuries later, the scientists who styled themselves “adaptationists” tried to learn how much of what our ancestors said was true and how much was boasting. They pored over tablets and cave walls, searched through people’s brains and genes. Then they did more tests, bigger tests — experiments — to learn how we made it all happen.

There may still be reason to change, but no one can do it anymore.

Someone knocked on the door, shaking me out of my brooding thoughts. A tall woman slipped into the room.

“How you doing, sweetie?” Brenna asked. “You all back?”

I nodded, and Brenna closed the gap between us. Her skin was mottled green and brown, but she had come by her adaptation naturally. A lot of down-on-their-luck nonstandards came to the compound to put their lives back together, since we residents obviously couldn’t judge them for anything. In most places, Brenna wouldn’t be able to count on much respect, even for something as benign as a camouflage adaptation.

Brenna extracted me first from the big cage and then from the silver tube before throwing a blanket over my shoulders. She wiped my face with a damp cloth, then checked my pupils for responsiveness and my palms for fur. Satisfied that the crisis was over, she stood.

“Welcome back, Millie,” she said.

She left me alone, taking the small cage with her. The big cage stayed.

I remained still for a while, just breathing. My transformation injuries had already mostly healed. The silver burns would take longer, but they, too, would be gone before the next time I transformed. Fast healing was the one and only benefit I had received from my anonymous adaptation donor. The adaptationists’ purposes had been a pretty open secret back then, so where Dr. Topher had found a real werewolf willing to surrender their blood, I didn’t want to know.

I dragged myself to the bathroom. Sitting on the floor of the narrow shower, I began to scrape dried blood off my skin without turning the water on. In the desert, every tap was on a timer, so I had to make sure I was as clean as possible before rinsing off. I rubbed dry soap all over myself, hissing as I went over the worst of the red and gray-blue silver burns crisscrossing my ribs. Finally, I reached up to release the drizzle of lukewarm water and sat beneath it, trying to work out the tangles in my hair.

By the time the water shut itself off, I was just about ready to stand. I stumbled to my feet and leaned against the wall until my vision cleared, then wrapped myself in a towel, shuffled to the bed, and collapsed.

I dreamed about the lab.

We all had lab dreams. They were the go-to excuse for tiredness, distractedness, or a bad mood. They weren’t just a post-transformation thing; I had them almost every night.

I never got used to them.

In the dream, fur sprouted and shed in patches. Since my body hurt in the waking world, it hurt here, too. I could see through my skin to my snapping bones and tendons. The percussive noises reminded me of my drum, except they didn’t keep time.

I stood and walked to the door, trailing veins and wires. Sometimes I had two feet, sometimes four. I was naked. The door was locked.

I sat on the ground and waited. The door opened.

Keep trying, my marvel, Dr. Topher said. I need you to keep trying.

Bright surgical light surrounded her head, but I could not see her face. In one clean, white hand, she held the clamp of needles. It gaped like a jaw, ready to close around my leg again. I reached for it with my broken claws.

Good, marvel. Let me change you. Someday, you’ll do the same.

I jolted awake. At first I was confused — lab dreams usually lasted longer before I could wrench myself out of them — but then I heard the insistent knocking at the door.

“Just a second,” I called. I dressed in my plain clothes and checked the clock. I had been asleep for nearly twelve hours.

I lurched across the room and found Markie once again outside the door. His eyes were smiling in his puffy face.

“Leela wanted evidence that you’re still alive,” he said.

“Ta-da,” I said weakly, spreading my arms.

Markie hissed at the sight of the silver burns.

“They go away,” I muttered, glad the worst of them were covered up.

“Sure,” Markie said. “Leela also says there’s food in her room if you want it, or I can go back and get it for you.”

“No, I’ll come.”

We walked slowly down the hall. Markie’s movements were almost as stiff as mine, and his breath clattered like a faulty climate control vent. We both concentrated on dragging our feet and didn’t bother each other about it. A few voices from other rooms called out quick greetings; I waved vaguely back. Though I had lived with all of the compound’s residents for most of my life, I kept to my best friend and they kept to theirs. It was, we had always been told, easier that way.

Halfway down the hall, I waved goodbye to Markie and entered a room to the right, closing the door quickly behind me. I waited while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Most of the light in the room came from the large tank of water against the back wall — or more accurately, from its occupant.

“Millie!” Leela squealed. She held out her phosphorescent arms, her webbed fingers splayed wide.

I crossed to the tank and leaned against the glass, allowing Leela to close her arms around my neck and kiss the top of my head.

“How’d it go?” she whispered.

“Same old,” I said.

Leela released me and ducked into her tank, which spanned most of the width of the room, with a tube attached to one side through which Leela could swim into her bathroom. Through the glass, I could see the redness recede from Leela’s round, pale eyes, and some of the roughness fade from her lips. She wore a waterproof dress, which swirled around her calves. The gills on her neck flared once before she bobbed up again, pushing her nearly colorless hair out of her face.

“Eat,” she said, pointing at a plate of food on the floor.

If not for the experiments, Leela would have made a good, if fussy, mother. I wasn’t sure where she’d learned to be maternal; her adaptationist, Dr. Guerrera, had reputedly been a much more distant figure than mine. He’d had a daughter of his own, though. I could still remember Leela’s face as she watched cute, dimpled Marirosa Guerrera snuggle up against her mother’s side in the courtroom. They’d traveled north from the border to sit faithfully behind the man who had confined Leela to a glass box for the rest of her life.

“How’s things?” Leela asked me as I sat.

“Not bad,” I said.

Leela hummed her skepticism, but didn’t outright challenge me. I raised my eyebrows at her. The skin on her lips was already peeling again.

“How’s things with you?” I said pointedly.

“Not bad.”

We made faces at each other.

“I guess it’s Saturday by now, right?” I asked.

“Yep, you missed a day of work.”

“Mm, I’m lucky like that.”

Leela snorted. I relaxed into her unspoken understanding. All of the residents of this compound were like me: synthetics.

We turned to our tasteless food. Leela’s dinner was set up on a tray that was hooked to the edge of her tank. Every so often, she dunked her head, sponging the dryness from her fragile skin, if only momentarily.

Tucking her dripping hair behind her ears, Leela said, “So how’s life on the outside?”

“Not very interesting,” I said, my stomach squirming at Leela’s hungry expression.

“Come on, there has to be something!” she pressed.

I worried my lower lip with my teeth, unsure how to explain that I only ever left my apartment to go grocery shopping. Otherwise my only trips were here, either for transformations or the monthly social visits I was allowed. What was I supposed to do out there by myself? If Leela could come with me — but no. Even if her experiment had actually succeeded, the desert was no place for a meer.

“I saw a little kid chase after a scorpion when I went shopping,” I said. “So that was kinda scary. But then his mom picked him up before he caught it.”

As an anecdote, it wasn’t much, but Leela was riveted.

“How old was he?” she asked, her hands to her mouth.

“I don’t know. Three, maybe?”

“How big is three?”

I raised my hand to show how tall the kid was.

“So tiny!” Leela cried. “The scorpion could’ve killed him!”

“He never really got close,” I assured her.

“Was his mom scared?”

“She yelled at him,” I said. “He started to cry.”

“She just didn’t want him to do it again,” Leela said confidently. “She yelled ’cause she loves him.”

I gave her an oh, really look. “So you’re a psych now? Reading people’s minds?”

“That’s not a thing,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I just understand people. I’m very in tune.” She folded her hands in an old-timey prayer position, the picture of the stereotypical mystical meer.

“Ah, yes. The great sage of the compound,” I said, grinning up at her.

“Hmm. The Illiterate Sage. I’d watch that show.”

“You can read.”

“Shh! Not so loud! You’ll bring the tutors back!”

I laughed, but my heart twisted. Lessons had always been difficult for Leela, since they required too much time out of the water. When she watched her shows, she only needed part of her face exposed to the air, but hours of handling books and taking notes had been torturous for her. Our guardians had never shelled out for a waterproof computer. Eventually the tutors gave up. Mr. Bicks thought the whole thing was hilarious, so Leela started making quicker and wittier jokes at her own expense to head him off. I laughed when she wanted me to, but I never thought the jokes were very funny.

“Anyway, I’m right about the mother,” Leela said. “In Standstill, Antonio’s mom …”

I tuned out. Antonio was one of the many fictional characters Leela had a crush on. She had a crush on the actor, too, which was even worse. He didn’t know she existed. Still, she persisted in talking about him as though someday they’d meet.

Leela always tried to make me tell her which people from her shows I wanted to date, but I never answered. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to some of them, but I refused to indulge in the impossible. Besides, even if I could “find love,” as Leela put it, I wasn’t interested in the same people she was. Since nothing would ever come of either of our feelings, I had no reason to tell Leela that. But sometimes, this one extra layer of difference between me and even my fellow synthetic made me feel a little less real than I already did.

Hence the tuning out.

I began listening again when Leela spread her hands, having arrived at some sort of conclusion. “See what I mean? Parents yell when they’re freaked out.”

“Guess orphanhood saved us a lot of noise, then, huh?” I joked.

Leela smiled, but it was crooked. “Guess so. Did you bring your drum?”

I nodded.

“Go ’head,” Leela said, her smile evening out. “Play me something.”

I slipped out of her room and shuffled back to mine, where I pulled my frame drum out of my bag. The drum was old, but it didn’t look it. As wards and employees of Equilibrium Pharmaceuticals, we synthetics were allowed a small amount of bonus health and beauty products. I used my free lotion to keep the drum supple. It was my only personal possession, bestowed to me by my lawyer for being so well-behaved during my testimony. For weeks, she had dragged me past the street performer on the corner near the courthouse. I had never heard anything like that raggedy old man’s rhythms in the lab.

I ran my hand against the taut membrane, my throat relaxing at the soft shhhh of contact. The drum was a foot and a half in diameter with a thumb hole in the wooden frame. No decorations. The appearance wasn’t the point. When I got back to Leela’s room, she cheered as I held up the drum. I ducked my head, hiding my smile. I readied my hands on the frame — left on the bottom to hold it steady, right poised at the side — and began to play.

My fingers flew, light but sure. Doum taka taka doum tak. I kept it simple at first, then added flourishes as the mood struck. I knocked on the frame, scratched the membrane, and spilled rhythms into the small room.

The drumming emptied my mind of anything unnecessary, including the acknowledgment of pain. I didn’t watch Leela as she listened, but I could sense her attention. It was the only sensation I needed to feel.

Without warning, the door opened and light from the hall flooded the room. Leela squeaked and dove into her tank. I dropped the drum.

“Time to go,” Mr. Bicks said.

He slammed the door, and I remembered every burn on my body.

Chapter 3

Mr. Bicks led me down the hall to the first door to the left of the staircase. He knocked and stepped back, shoving me in front of him. We didn’t speak to or look at each other.

“Come in, Millie,” Mr. Patter said.

I slipped into the little office, leaving Mr. Bicks outside. As a corporation, Equilibrium Pharmaceuticals had survived the adaptationists much better than we synthetics had, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been individual casualties. Mr. Patter’s official title was the Chief Supervisor of Discontinued Experiments. Once he had been EP’s Director of Resources, but when the world discovered exactly where those resources had been directed, Mr. Patter had wound up with quite the situation on his hands. He was eventually cleared of any deliberate adaptationist funding, but he obviously couldn’t remain in his position after oversights of such magnitude. So he was placed in charge of us instead.

Mr. Patter pointed me to a desk chair opposite his own. Pale and muted in coloring and attire, he was a small man to fit his small room. He was completely standard: his ancestors had never altered the basic template of their human bodies and brains. All of his evolution had taken place by chance, not choice.

So had mine, until Dr. Topher came along.

Screens covered every inch of the office’s walls. Most of them were connected to the compound’s computers. The other screens displayed unnecessary security footage. I stared at a grainy image of the desert sunset and waited for the interrogation to begin.

“How are you feeling, Millie?” Mr. Patter said.

“Fine.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

Which was why I never gave any other answer. I silently recited his follow-up question a second before he asked it.

“Do you feel strong enough to return to Supplicants Grove?”

I was tempted to say no, but if I did, I wouldn’t actually get to spend more time with Leela. I’d just have to stay in bed the whole time, and I could do that just as easily in my apartment.

“I’m fine,” I repeated.

“Good. How have you been getting along out there in the town?”

“Fine.”

“Have you had any noteworthy interactions with the residents of Supplicants Grove?”

“Just grocery shopping,” I said, thinking about the crying child and the scared mother. They hadn’t noticed me.

“And the event?” Mr. Patter asked. “Did you feel it coming on before the wristband detected it?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“But if you had?”

“I’d’ve called.”

“What about in the car?”

“Just my palms,” I said, lulled by the back and forth into telling the truth. Mr. Patter pounced.

“You didn’t have any indication that the event was coming, but your hands were already changing by the time you got in the car?”

“Not by the time,” I said, glaring at the empty desert on the screen above Mr. Patter’s head. “We’d driven a bit. And my hands weren’t changing. My palms were just hairy.”

Mr. Patter waved the distinction away. “But it is possible that your palms could grow hair before you notice that the transformation is approaching? And if this took place at, say, three in the afternoon —”

“Then the noon test would’ve caught it,” I said, hating the sullenness in my own voice. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

My blood knew when I was going to transform before the rest of me did. Every six hours, the wristband took and analyzed a sample and sent the results back to the compound. My keepers always had ample time to whisk me away from civilization before I could bring any more infamy to the name of Equilibrium Pharmaceuticals. Sometimes I wound up sitting in the cages for hours before I transformed.

Mr. Patter wasn’t giving up. “What if you had been grocery shopping and your hands changed?”

“I’d notice,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I looked at my palms constantly when I was around standards.

Mr. Patter snapped his notebook shut and crossed his arms. What he wanted me to say was that it wasn’t safe for me to be out in the real world and that I needed to come back to the compound forever. I refused to give him the satisfaction. Besides, Leela would see it as a personal betrayal if I didn’t hold onto my “freedom” with both of my occasionally furry hands.

“Have you received any contact from your attorney lately, Millie?” Mr. Patter asked.

“No.”

“What about any other synthetics in external housing?”

“They don’t live in Supplicants Grove.”

“You could email each other.”

“We don’t.”

Mr. Patter relaxed a little. “It’s good to remain independent. That’s what the external housing program is for, after all.”

Oh, I was independent, all right. I was the only seventeen-year-old synthetic who was allowed to live in the real world. Since the adaptationists had worked in cycles of seven years, all the others were twenty-four. There weren’t any older synthetics. All prior subjects had died.

The first generation of survivors was the reason EP let some of us out of the compound in the first place. After the labs were raided, the then fourteen-year-old first gens had no intention of living underground with their younger, more thoroughly ruined counterparts. Part of the agreement their lawyers worked out with EP was that, if at all possible, synthetics must be provided housing outside of the compound and afforded the anonymity of any registered nonstandard. It was a “fundamental rights issue,” the lawyers claimed, which was enough to scare the courts into compliance. Absolutely no one wanted this debacle to take the international stage.

I’d never expected the external housing program to apply to me. People with armed adaptations had the most stringent registration requirements; for that reason alone, I never expected EP to bother rehoming me. Yet after nearly ten years of no contact, my lawyer had provided the compound with a sizable donation and the idea for the wristband monitor. She’d ordered EP to provide me with outside housing, considering I looked standard almost all the time and didn’t need constant medical attention. The donation was conditional upon my release.

She had never visited me or asked what I wanted.

“You’re a good worker, Millie,” Mr. Patter said now. “You’re prompt and thorough. But you know why I worry about you, don’t you?”

There were a hundred different answers to that question, but I bit them all back.

Mr. Patter said, “If any conflict were to arise from the presence of synthetics in the world, then the adaptationists will have won. You don’t want that, do you?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re doing the world proud, Millie. As long as you don’t cause any trouble, then you are defying your origins. That’s all anyone can hope to do.”

With that, Mr. Patter dismissed me. I left the office, my fingers digging into my silver burns. He didn’t need to lecture me about defying my origins. The EP history tutors had twisted facts like screws, but I knew the basic story of our forsaken species. No one knew exactly when the last natural adaptations had taken place, but slowly, the world had realized that people could no longer change themselves – the Age of Stasis had already begun. The standards came to hate the nonstandards they had once revered. They turned on each other, too. Empires rose and fell, though few were greater in their prime than what the United States – itself an extension of old Britain – used to be. Armed adaptations gave way to bombs, and more missiles fell on the earth than rain. Without the hope of someday taking charge of their own bodies, rulers tried to control everyone else instead, coming up with more and more absurd reasons to convince their people to direct their hate over invisible borders instead of towards the ones drafting them to war. All the while, forests burned. Rivers and lakes turned to wasteland. People volunteered to join the endless fighting, because at least armies fed them.

After centuries, even the rich began to suffer.

Once that happened, there was finally some reason for hope, because then the people who could stop the fighting actually wanted to. In the U.S., the rich retreated to the National Preservations where the scars on the earth were less obvious, leaving everyone else to eke out whatever meager existence they could. Armies and diplomats alike withdrew behind their nations’ borders, and they passed new international treaties that could essentially be summed up as leave us alone. Those who couldn’t live without power found new ways of exercising it. The types of people who used to become presidents and generals now were CEOs.

Cynicism is ugly, Mr. Patter and the bevy of tutors he hired would say when I came close to voicing even a fraction of these thoughts. Yet they were the same ones to preach against the world-ruining temptations of power, since we synthetics were living products of it.

Because uneasy peace didn’t suit everyone. The adaptationists developed their weapons in secret, knowing that if they controlled adaptations, they could control everything. The only reason new wars hadn’t started was because those biological arms dealers couldn’t figure out how to build a gun that didn’t break.

So those were the origins I had to defy. As I left the compound with Mr. Bicks, a phrase floated to the top of my mind. Crimes against humanity. Where had I heard those words?

The courtroom. I stumbled; even after ten years, certain memories had the power to knock me off course. The judge had said those words the day he announced the verdicts. He looked down at all of us and said that the adaptationists had committed “crimes against humanity.”

Even now, I didn’t know if we were the humanity or the crime.