Chapter 4

I watched the desert as the car sped away from the compound. Without the transformation looming over me, I could once again appreciate its beauty. It wasn’t really just dirt and sky. Tough, spiky wildflowers grew out of the cracks in the earth, and cacti, lizards, and tarantulas dotted the ground. Halfway back to town, we passed the Petrified Forest. The tree line was set too far back from the road to see the details of the stone stumps, but they stretched all the way to the horizon, reminders of a bygone era. As we kept driving, the Petrified Forest gave way to living supplicant trees, named for the way they raised their spiny branches to the sky like they were praying.

No one had ever taught me how to pray. In the compound, we’d learned a little bit about world religions in our history lessons. Believers worshipped one god or many gods or some variation on the same theme. At the heart of all these religions, according to the tutors, was the idea of a spirit of change, a divine force that had singled out humanity as its chosen species. This spirit’s will was the reason we began to change ourselves deliberately, instead of letting chance take its course like the other animals did.

Nowadays, most people said there had never been any spirit, and no one had chosen us at all.

I remembered how disappointed I’d been when the tutors told us that. I’d never learned about religions in the lab, and I would have liked to believe that maybe they had a little merit. But I had no illusions about any spirits interfering in my life. If anyone ever had chosen us, they must have left a long time ago.

The sky melted from orange to deep purple as we drove into Supplicants Grove. After being back in the compound, the town seemed even huger than usual, though I knew it was small in the rest of the world’s eyes. Mr. Bicks dropped me off at my apartment complex without saying goodbye. His tires kicked up a cloud of dust as he sped away. Coughing and blinded, I stumbled to the staircase, but when I cleared the grit out of my eyes, I stopped dead.

Someone was sitting outside my door.

The figure jumped up and let out an explosive sigh. Wrong apartment, I thought. The lamp beneath the awning over the staircase had broken, so the stranger’s face was in shadow. I could only see that she was broad and solidly built. Weak yellow light leaked out from between the blinds in the apartment below me. It dimly illuminated the stranger’s boots, which seemed too heavy for the heat.

I began to climb the stairs but stopped halfway up, clutching the banister as the dark world suddenly sharpened. The chips in the cheap siding on the building, the fake graining in the composite staircase – every detail stood out as stark and vivid as a fever dream. My skin tingled where the air blew against it. The stranger watched silently.

“This is my apartment,” I said.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. Her voice was gruff and didn’t invite argument, but I argued anyway.

“You’re mistaking me for someone else.”

“No. Let’s go inside.”

I closed my fingers around my keys.

“I don’t know you,” I said.

She made an impatient sound in her throat. Very quietly, she hissed, “I’m a werewolf! Now will you let me in?”

I dropped my keys.

Without missing a beat, the stranger scooped up the keyring and barged into my apartment. I stayed on the stairs, twisting to look at the road. Mr. Bicks was long gone.

Slowly, I ascended the rest of the steps, my knees and thoughts creaking like old hinges. A werewolf. A real werewolf?

I closed the door and turned the light on. The stranger — the werewolf — was about my age. I had never seen anyone like her. Synthetic faces twitched, dipped, and shied. This girl looked like she’d been carved from stone. Her eyes, like mine, were narrow at the corners, but their shape was a little rounder and their gaze much harder than mine. Her black hair was shaved close on the sides, and the top swooped back from her forehead in a thick wave. There were freckles on her snub nose, which should have made her look like a little kid but didn’t. She wore a black t-shirt and the kind of shorts that were only given to boys in the compound.

I may not have known how to pray, but I did silently ask why, of all the werewolves in the world, the first one I met had to be so perfectly and painfully designed to render me speechless. My strangely sharpened senses were even more pronounced in the light. Every item in my dull apartment, from the toaster to the garbage can, was overbright, but the werewolf was the most shining of all. The longer I looked at her, the dizzier I felt, until I swayed where I stood. The werewolf closed the distance between us before I realized she was moving. She gripped my arm and led me to my desk, lowering me into the chair.

“You gonna pass out?” she said.

I rested my forehead against the desk and didn’t answer. I felt her handprint pressed into my arm even after she let go. Noises came from the kitchen, and then the werewolf pushed a glass of water into my hands.

“Drink,” she ordered.

I drank.

“Better?”

I nodded.

“Good. We have a lot to talk about,” she said. “People are watching you, and you might be in danger.”

I had to run over every word in that sentence three times before I understood what she’d said. Then I asked my very first question to a real werewolf: “What?”

“I said people —”

“I heard you,” I said. “But what do you — how doyou — who are you?”

She crossed her arms. “My name is Gret. Let me use your computer.”

Without waiting for my permission, she flipped my clunky EP-issued laptop around and bent over the desk. Her swoop of hair fell over her forehead as she typed rapidly. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. At one point, Gret swore under her breath and dug into her pocket to consult a folded piece of paper. My laptop made a couple of high-pitched error noises, which Gret ignored. Eventually, she spun the screen back to face me.

I slammed it shut.

“What are you doing?” Gret said, straightening back up.

I pushed my chair away from the desk, breathing hard. I’d only seen the image for a fraction of a second, but it was already burned into my mind: a video box with a little “play” arrow blinking in the middle, waiting to be clicked. Beneath it was a still shot of the cages in my room at the compound — with me inside of them.

“Did you see it?” Gret said. “People are watching your transformations. There’s comments below the video. They’re talking about you —”

“How did you find these?”

“I already knew you were here, so —”

“How?” I said, gripping the edge of my chair hard enough for my hands to cramp. “That’s not the deal. I’m registered with the town, but no one outside of EP is supposed to —”

I broke off. Neither of us had spoken the word synthetic yet, but by invoking Equilibrium Pharmaceuticals, I might as well have.

But of course she knew. No real werewolf would be in a cage like me.

No real werewolf transformed like me, either. Had Gret pressed play?

“Didn’t you know there was another werewolf in town?” Gret said.

I shook my head. Another item to add to Dr. Topher’s list of failures: real werewolves could sense each other up to a mile away. I was surprised I was even werewolf enough for Gret to locate.

As if in answer to my unspoken thought, Gret said, “I could tell you weren’t … born a werewolf. I didn’t know why you were here, so I started looking into things.”

In other words, she’d researched me. She wasn’t the only one. The rise and fall of the adaptationists had been the scandal to end all scandals. The U.S. had only barely managed to convince the global community that the adaptationists were rogue agents and that our country didn’t deserve to be buried beneath everyone else’s stockpile of unexploded missiles from the final wars. No doubt we synthetics were the subject of book reports all over the world.

“I have a friend who’s good with computers,” Gret said. “She can find stuff that’s been hidden. She dug up the videos.”

I found my voice again. “So you broke intoEP’s private corporate network —”

“No. The videos aren’t with EP. They weren’t supposed to be found.”

“Then how did you find it?”

“That’s Rosie’s territory,” Gret said, shrugging. “Makes no sense to me. She learned all that crap from the Subconscious.”

I had no idea what that meant, but I decided it could wait. I was piecing together what had happened here.

“EP has researchers who monitor us,” I explained. “That’s who the videos are for. They try to — to make us better, if they can.”

Which they couldn’t, but their continued attempts were part of the corporation’s terms of guardianship. Unfortunately, short of genetic therapy, which was forbidden for obvious reasons, there was almost nothing they could do.

Gret said, “I told you, it’s not connected to EP’s network.”

“Because they don’t want people doing what you just did and finding them! You’re not supposed to remember we’re associated with them.”

“Read the comments,” Gret insisted. “A lot of it’s in some sort of code or something, but it doesn’t sound like researchers. They’re too — interested in you.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“The researchers are supposed to be interested in us,” I said, my voice gone flat and mechanical.

Gret didn’t look convinced. I held my breath, waiting to see if she would expand on her implication. My apartment was too warm, but goosebumps rose on my arms.

I said, “If you think people are — that I’m not safe here, then I’ll show the video to EP. They’ll know where it came from.”

“Don’t do that!” Gret said. “What if they take you back to that bunker? They’re torturing you there! What’s the deal with those cages?”

“They keep me safe.”

“They’re poison. Everyone knows that werewolves are allergic to silver.”

“That’s the point. It weakens me.”

Gret’s nostrils flared. “That’s supposed to be a good thing?”

I was on my feet before I realized I’d decided to stand. “I’m not like you!”

Gret didn’t flinch or even blink. She just bared her teeth right back at me, and I saw just how true my words really were. In her face, I could see what Dr. Topher had tried and failed to create in me.

“When I first found your scent, I could taste the silver in it,” Gret said, her voice low and growling. “Why the hell would you trust EP after what they did to you? After what they’re still doing to you?” she added, pointing at my silver burns.

“The collaborators were arrested,” I argued, clasping my wrists behind my back. “The company’s made their reparations.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure no one got away with it. The police found every single supplier.”

My fingers dug into my burns. “What do you want from me? You come here saying I’m in danger but not to tell anyone —”

“I want you to work with me,” Gret said. “I want us to get to the bottom of this.”

I stared at her. Gret had spied on me, had seen things she was never meant to see, and now she expected me to play detective with her — a stranger who could never understand anything about my life.

I crossed to the door and held it open.

“The videos are for the EP researchers,” I said tonelessly. “If it turns out they’re not, I’ll let my guardians know. Thanks for the heads up. Good night.”

“But —”

“Unless you want me to call EP right now and you can explain it to them.”

Gret’s eyes widened and blotches of red bloomed on her cheeks. I wondered what other secrets this werewolf was keeping. Whatever they were, I had no space for them in my life.

Gret stomped past me, jerked the door out of my hand, and slammed it shut behind her. My apartment turned dull and vague once more.

I did not open my laptop for the rest of the night.

Chapter 5

When I first moved to Supplicants Grove, I was unable to sleep for several weeks. I was too used to bomb-resistant walls and ten feet of earth blocking out the world around me. Here, there were cars and airplanes, insects and wind, and people all around. Gradually, I came to appreciate the sounds of the town. At the compound, I could wake up and not know if life on Earth had ended while I was asleep. Now, I always knew that it carried on. It was a small pleasure of external housing that I hadn’t shared with Leela; I doubted she knew what she was missing.

But after Gret’s visit, I was right back where I started. At the slightest noise, my head snapped up and my limbs froze. I became like one of the veiny-eared jack rabbits I used to watch from the fenced-in yard of the compound. My eyes darted around the room and my ears strained until I was satisfied that what I heard was only a bird or an oblivious passerby.

Despite the intermittent jabs of the wristband and the raw silver burns on my ribs and hips, the first couple of weeks after a transformation were usually a period of calm. Like all synthetics, once I had reached the legal minimum working age, I’d been assigned to a low-level job. Instead of EP paying out of pocket for our upkeep, our “salaries” funded the care the company was required to provide us. EP spent the same amount as it always did to keep us alive, but now they got their busy work done as a bonus.

My job was to answer complaint messages. I responded to each melodramatic missive from far-flung customers with a standard template that I altered just enough to seem personal. Substitute “toothpaste” in here, “sleeping pills” there, and always remember to be comforting but not overly apologetic. The goal was to calm the customers before EP was forced to refund their money. EP, despite its shady past, still had the pharmaceutical monopoly in the United States, so there were enough complaints to keep me mindlessly busy from 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week.

Now, however, my concentration was shattered. Every time I heard a noise, I lost the thread of what I’d been doing. I had to restart tasks over and over. After four days of this, I received an automated message scolding me for my decrease in productivity. I deleted it.

I knew I needed to send the transformation video to Mr. Patter, but how would I explain it? He wouldn’t believe that I’d found it on my own. I’d never had any interest in computer science, not after I’d learned about cyber warfare in my history lessons. I hated weapons.

Outside, someone was humming. It was still too hot to open the windows, so the sound was faint, but whoever it was had a beautiful voice. I’d heard her every evening for six days now; presumably, she was visiting someone in the apartment complex. I hoped she’d stay a while.

A message from Leela appeared on my screen.

wanna chat?

Just finished work. Super tired, I typed back.

u said that ystrday, Leela replied.

I’d also said it the day before, and the day before that. I had not spoken to Leela face to face since I met Gret.

trnsfrmation was a bad 1?? Leela asked.

I looked down at the still-raw silver burns on my arms. Guess so. You ok?

same old u no me

We’ll talk over the weekend, I promised. Love you.

luv u 2! feel better! Leela’s icon disappeared. I imagined her closing her laptop and soaking her hands in the tank.

I hesitated for a moment, then opened the mysterious video and scrolled quickly past it. The bar at the bottom ran from 00:00:00 to 09:36:21. In the lab, Dr. Topher had showed me plenty of footage of real werewolves and the even rarer true wolves. They weren’t identical, but they shared the same basic, powerful physiology. While Dr. Topher would prepare her clamp, I’d watch illegally filmed werewolf parents biting their children’s shoulders and feet during their first transformations. The children yelped and whined, but Dr. Topher explained that all young werewolves needed help at first. It was like a vaccine, she said, but instead of building antibodies against diseases, the parents’ bites built up the children’s cellular energy, since a great deal was necessary to change forms.

After Stasis began, standards spread rumors about werewolves. They pointed to the practice of biting the children as proof of their savagery, and even said that a bite could turn standardsinto werewolves, which was obviously ridiculous. Still, rumors persisted that werewolves kidnapped standard children and changed them into beasts like themselves. Dr. Topher loved that horror story. She showed me videos of werewolves and true wolves using their teeth to tear into frightened prey animals. If I can change you into that, my marvel, imagine what else we can do. We’ll change the whole world together!

Transformed, I could not see my own teeth. I only had scraps of knowledge about that other body. A cramped paw, a flash of tail. I had never seen the sum of my wolf’s parts.

I started to reread the notes beneath the video. There were two commenters who were identified by a long string of random letters. The first began with L and the second with I, which is how I came to think of them. My eyes settled on a fragment of their conversation.

L: Ag too much

I: no change

L: derm worse

I: still safe

L: barely

The conversation devolved into abbreviated gibberish after that. I thought I understood this section, though. “Ag too much” — Gret was right. Someone else had recognized the effect the silver had on me. “No change” possibly meant that the amount of silver exposure I endured remained constant. With my burns throbbing, I already knew about “derm worse.”

Still safe. Barely. My safety was the EP researchers’ responsibility, but I had no illusions that their bar was set any higher than “barely.” They were contractually obligated to keep me alive if they could, and that was all. So why did L care so much?

There was another explanation. EP didn’t care what happened to my body, but there was someone who always had —  

I slammed the laptop shut before I could complete that thought. The beautiful humming outside the window slowed my racing heart to a sustainable rhythm. I took out my drum and tapped along to the beat until my fingers slipped off the frame and I fell asleep.

I dreamed that the werewolf was sitting before me, still but not static. I was hazily aware that I was dreaming, so from the safety of unreality, I watched her as she watched me. Synthetics didn’t get to make a lot of choices about our appearances — we wore what EP provided us — but Gret obviously did. I had never seen anyone who looked like her in real life. The only context I had for Gret’s hair and clothes and what they might mean came from Leela’s soap operas. Depending on the show, depictions of girls like Gret existed along a spectrum of neutral to highly unflattering, but my options were limited, so I’d used these representations to silently identify my own useless feelings and desires — if desire was even the right word. Synthetics couldn’t really want. We only would have wanted.

If I weren’t a synthetic, I would have wanted …

I blinked, breaking dream-Gret’s gaze. When I opened my eyes again, I was back in the lab. Shadows of passing feet slithered under the door as I lay on my examination table, but no one entered the room.

When I woke up, I realized that I could no longer put off grocery shopping. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as soon as I left the protective walls of my apartment. A tall white girl behind me was adjusting the tape on the broken strap of her sandal. She looked up. She wore enormously thick glasses, and her brown hair was buzzed almost to her scalp. I’d never seen her before, but she smiled when our gazes met. I looked away.

I was halfway to the grocery store when I realized I was being followed.

Every time I looked over my shoulder, the girl with the glasses was half a block behind me, swinging her long arms like the pendulums of old clocks. She made the same turn onto the main road that I did. There were a lot of people out on the cracked sidewalk, all trying to get their errands done during the weekend. Even so, I could see the top of the girl’s shorn head over most of the crowd.

I walked a little faster. The distance between us remained constant.

I darted into the grocery store. Half a minute later, the door opened again. I took one look at the shaved head before disappearing down the middle of the three aisles.

It’s groceries. Everyone needs groceries, I chanted silently. I’d almost convinced myself when I heard the humming.

That beautiful voice belonged to the girl. I had first heard her the day after Gret showed me the video. She wasn’t visiting someone at my apartment complex. She was watching me.

I dropped my grocery basket with a clatter and ran.

The windows on the buildings shot the sun’s glare into my eyes, but I didn’t blink. The familiar effects of adrenaline took over, and for once I was not in a cage. Soon my apartment was in sight.

It was no good. I wasn’t fast enough. Footsteps closed in and circled around me. I opened my mouth to scream.

“Please don’t, Gret’ll kill me!” the girl said.

My teeth clicked shut, clipping the tip of my tongue. When my throat loosened, I swallowed blood, as well as the tears that I hadn’t noticed streaming into my gasping mouth.

“Gret?” I wheezed.

The girl grimaced. She was barely even out of breath.

“You heard me, right? That’s what gave me away? I’m such an idiot,” she said. “Here, let’s get in the shade.”

She led me to the supplicant tree across from my building. I stumbled in the wake of her long strides, limbs numb with both relief and something uglier. The shadow of a praying branch fell over the girl’s face.

“You’ve been spying on me,” I said.

“Spying’s a harsh word.”

She grinned like we were friends. I took a step toward her. Even though I only came up to her chin, something made her take a step back.

“Why are you here?” I demanded.

She raised her hands. “Okay, listen, I’m just keeping an eye out until Gret figures out what to do.”

“What to — I told her I’d handle it!” I said, my voice cracking.

“Yeah, well, Gret likes to handle things herself.”

“This is none of her business!”

The girl raised her eyebrows. “She told you what she is, right?”

I leaned back against the supplicant tree, my nails digging into the fibrous trunk.

“So just because she’s — what I’m supposed to be — we’re what? Allies?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know her! What does she think she can do if someone tries —”

I couldn’t finish that sentence.

“Like I said, she’s trying to figure that out,” the girl said.

“And in the meantime, she sent you —”

“Who said she sent me? I told you she handles things herself. Tries to, anyway. But I know when I might be useful.”

She put a strange emphasis on useful.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The girl grinned again, and I liked it even less the second time. “You know what Gret is,” she said, “but you haven’t asked what kind of monster I am.”