Chapter 14

I swore to myself I wouldn’t use the mud again, but the next morning, it hardly mattered. My burns had completed more than a week’s worth of healing overnight. I felt dirtier after my shower than I did before, even as my skin delighted in the water’s soothing touch instead of flinching away. I considered throwing away my sheets, but EP wanted evidence that our belongings were falling apart before they bought us new ones. I scrubbed them in the tub, but the acrid smell still clung to them.

My computer summoned me out of the bathroom. I frowned at the screen. What was Leela doing up so early? She usually woke about three minutes before the workday began.

“Hey,” I said, opening the box. “Everything okay?”

“Do things have to be not okay for me to call you?” Leela’s voice was light, but she leaned heavily against the lip of her tank.

“Did they change your water?” I guessed.

“They woke me up at five,” Leela complained. “I don’t know why Mr. Patter always schedules it so early.”

“Maximum productivity,” I said.

It was one of Mr. Patter’s favorite phrases. On the screen, Leela stifled a yawn. When the compound techs changed her water, she had to lie in a cramped tub where she was unable to fully submerge. She always wound up with patches of flaky red skin.

“You should go back to sleep before work,” I said. “You have to be ‘enthusiastic and energetic’ for all those customers.”

Leela was so sweet and pleasant on her sales calls that no one would ever guess she was synthetic. I knew the customers bored her, though. They weren’t nearly as interesting as the stories on her screen.

“I’ll sleep later,” she said, which meant the cleaning had left her too uncomfortable to rest. My gaze flicked towards the container of mud and my stomach churned. “I have shows to catch up on. Past and Present has been really good lately. Are you ever going to start watching that?”

“Why? Your recaps are better than the show.”

“Well, thank you, but you’re wrong. The show is genius.”

“Mm, is it?” I teased. I’d seen three episodes, which had been more than enough for me.

“Yes,” Leela insisted, and she launched into an explanation of why. Listening to Leela describe the soap opera, it sounded like a masterpiece. She definitely put much more thought into it than either the writers or the actors.

When Leela was finished with her Past and Present dissertation, she said, “So? How are things with you?”

“I, uh, met some people,” I said.

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to stuff them back in. Why would I tell her that, when it could lead to so many questions I couldn’t answer?

“People?” Leela said.

I nodded reluctantly. “There, um — there’s a park across the street from the grocery store. I was sitting there the other day, and these … friends came up to me. Four of them. They’re around our age. We talked for a bit.”

“Four close friends?” Leela said quietly.

I could have slapped myself. Though all of us synthetics had grown up together in close quarters, Mr. Patter had always discouraged close friendships of more than one or two people. We had assigned seating at meals and took lessons from our tutors in pairs. He told us this was for our own psychological protection. If we loved every synthetic, we’d mourn too hard and too often.

I was not the only synthetic who went along with Mr. Patter’s outlook, and I knew better than to ask – or even think about – why. But Leela, despite never leaving her room, had managed to ingratiate herself with nearly everyone in the compound. There was a difference, though, between fondness and real friendship. Though she never admitted to me outright that she wanted more friends, I wasn’t an idiot. But as long as we never spoke about it, we could both pretend it didn’t hurt.

“What did you talk about with these friends?” Leela asked.

“Uh … plants,” I invented. “One of the girls works with plants.”

Leela cleared her throat twice and said, “Do you think you’ll speak to them again?”

I shrugged.

“You should,” Leela said, but when she dunked her head under the water, she stayed down for a long time.

I’d been so caught up in keeping secrets for my own awful sake that I hadn’t even thought about keeping them for Leela’s, too. Everything I told her about the real world was a taunt, even when she begged me for details.

When Leela resurfaced, she said, “I talked to Mr. Bicks yesterday.”

I jerked back like his name was a needle. “What? Why?”

“You said to keep an eye on him.”

“Yeah, but not to talk to him directly! I want you to stay away!”

“I can’t really stay away if he’s in my room.”

“Why was he in your room?”

“Because I asked him to be,” Leela admitted. “Don’t look at me like that! He’s been creeping you out and I wanted to get to the bottom of it! You’ve had a rough couple weeks — I had to do something.”

I put my head in my hands. Just like Gret, not even thinking about her own safety.

“Did you get to the bottom of it?” I asked.

“Oh. No,” Leela said. I exhaled. “He was in a seriously bad mood, though. I told him I thought I heard the tank pump leaking in the bathroom, and even though it obviously wasn’t actually broken, he started going on and on about how everything is stupid and ruined and no one’s even bothering to fix it anymore. At first I thought he was talking about us being broken, but then it sounded like he meant, like, the real world. Maybe that’s why he’s worked down here all this time. I almost felt bad for him, except — never mind.”

“What?”

“Well, I didn’t think about it until last night, but then I had this lab dream, and …” Leela swallowed so hard that I could hear it. “I don’t know about you, but ‘we need to fix the world’ is something I used to hear a lot.”

My whole body jolted. Leela was right. Dr. Topher had certainly tried to remake the world; to her own mind, she was fixing it.

“Millie, you don’t think Mr. Bicks thinks that — that the adaptationists were right, do you?” Leela asked.

“How could he?” I said slowly. “He’s seen what’s left of all that.”

Leela sank a little lower in the water. “Yeah. Just — you’re the one who wondered if something was up with him. Please be careful.”

We ended the call shortly after that. I was grateful for the monotony of the workday, but even when I replaced all my thoughts with other people’s complaints, tension spread from my forehead down my neck and into my newly unburned spine. By the time I left my apartment to meet Gret, I was so stiff I could barely walk down the stairs.

Before I reached the park, Sandra, Rosie, and Luc emerged from a store I had never been in. Rosie scowled to see me, but Sandra broke into a grin.

“Perfect timing!” she said. “Gret told us to get you. She stayed late at work, but she’ll meet us back home.”

“Oh. Okay,” I said, feeling an absurd little pang. I’d gotten used to Gret waiting for me.

Sandra was dusted with the same soil as Gret often was, but Rosie looked pristine in her blindingly orange sundress. I’d never seen Luc outside. The sunlight made his skin look even duller than usual, but his eyes were bright.

“How are you, Millie?” he asked politely.

“Fine,” I said, belatedly adding, “You?”

“Any day with new books is a good day,” he said.

I looked at the small stack in Luc’s lap. In point of fact, none of the books looked “new”: their covers were all in various stages of dilapidation. Almost shyly, Luc held one up to me.

“Want to see?” he asked.

I hesitated before taking it. Human Migration, Volume II was emblazoned on the front in faded letters.

“It was a good find,” Luc said. “I only had volumes four and five. One of these days, I’ll complete the set.”

“Take your time,” Rosie muttered. Sandra laughed.

Seeing — or sensing — my confusion, Luc explained, “I’m the only one who isn’t gainfully employed, so I’m the pack teacher. Just because we’re a bunch of dropouts doesn’t mean we can’t keep learning.”

Sandra groaned loudly. Luc ignored her.

I opened the book. The inside cover was printed with a map of the world, with arrows spilling out from East Africa, where modern humans first took charge of their own evolution. I found the arrow that led to what was now China, stretching eastward across an entire continent. It was a great distance, but longer still was the journey to North America, all the way on the other side of the world. At some point, my ancestors, securely standard in the Age of Stasis, had made that second trek. I tried not to blame them for it. They couldn’t have predicted Dr. Topher.

Luc said, “I don’t suppose you have any of this set from your schooling?”

It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. “Oh. No. The tutors didn’t teach us this.”

“History?” Luc said, his brow furrowing.

“Well, we learned U.S. history. Plus some of the wars from when the Age of Stasis first began. That’s pretty much it.”

“No one taught you about your own cultures?” Rosie said, haughty outrage in her voice.

I looked away. What was the point of having a culture when I was an orphan? When Mr. Patter said our backgrounds didn’t matter anymore, he meant our ancestry as much as our adaptations. The only holidays we were allowed to celebrate in the compound were patriotic ones, though those were a bit of a farce these days. Even the name “United States” was frankly silly – it had been ages since the old state lines had really mattered, with the country now being divided between rich Preservations and everywhere else, where the land and weather were only suitable for the poor.

“It’s not like we were raised in different cultures. After what happened to us, we’re all … the same,” I explained.

“So when you say you learned U.S. history, you just learned about what the Europeans did once they took over the Americas?” Rosie said. “Like the people who actually adapted here don’t matter?”

I shrugged. Technically, I had adapted here, too. Or at least I had been adapted here.

Rosie scowled. “You don’t live with EP anymore, you know. You don’t have to stay ignorant.”

Luc gave Rosie a quelling look and said to me, “If you ever want to borrow the book, you can.”

As we turned into the first side street off the main road, I flipped to the table of contents. There was a huge section about the migration to East Asia. I almost turned to the first page listed, but instead shut the book and cleared my throat.

“How many books did you get?” I asked. In addition to the stack on Luc’s lap, there was a bulging bag wedged between his leg and the side of the chair.

“Oh, those aren’t books,” Luc said. “That’s Rosie’s computer stuff, which she refuses to carry.”

“You have a wheelchair,” Rosie said. “No one has to carry it.”

“Except I’m pushing the wheelchair,” Sandra pointed out.

“Well, I wouldn’t need new hardware if it weren’t for my project,” Rosie said, sparing me a brief glare.

“Don’t listen to her,” Luc said to me. “She’s always happy to have new toys.”

“And yet I can do so much with so little,” Rosie said. She produced a thumb drive from her pocket and held it out to me like it was a dirty tissue.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The encrypted file from the video site,” Rosie said. “Your file. All the information EP has on you.”

“Don’t worry,” Luc said quickly. “Gret wouldn’t let anyone read it.”

Rosie dropped the thumb drive into my hand. I stuffed it in my pocket, where its hard shell rested against my leg like the exoskeleton of some underground crawling thing. Nothing on that drive was fit for the light of day, yet as we walked, my hand kept straying to it. I felt like a child compelled to cut open a beetle to see how it worked — but children like that became adaptationists.

Luc suddenly tensed. A burst of laughter behind us made us all jump. I yanked my hand out of my pocket and looked over my shoulder. Two boys a little younger than me had come up behind us. They nudged each other.

“How’d that dude get so lucky?” the first one said, so loudly that I knew we were meant to hear him. “Three females all to himself!”

“Probably can’t even appreciate it,” the second boy said. “Who knows what else doesn’t work besides his legs?”

I flinched. Rosie shook her hair in front of her eyes as though it could hide her. Sandra’s hands tightened on the handles of the wheelchair.

“Keep walking,” Luc whispered.

The boys followed us. Having failed to get a reaction, the first one tried again.

“Maybe that’s why the girls are so ugly,” he said.

“I don’t know,” the second one said. “I wouldn’t mind having a go at the bald one.”

In a storm of swearing, Sandra spun around. I leapt away as she drew back her fist, but Rosie caught her arm. The boys laughed louder. Luc slowly turned himself to face the fray.

“You’re making an awful lot of noise,” he said, his mechanical voice gone cold. “I wonder why big, strong boys like you have to be so loud.”

The kids stopped laughing, looking unsure. One of them said, “Hey, man, what’s your —”

“Big, strong boys shouldn’t have to yell to get girls’ attention. Not when there’s a whole valley full of people who’d gladly — well.” Luc’s eyes flicked down to their groins. “Surely not all the girls in the valley have turned you down. Of course, if I’d failed at something over and over and over again, I’d want to yell, too.”

“The fuck do you get off, freak of nature?” the first boy demanded.

“I said I’m sure that’s not your problem,” Luc said. “Unless you were to start yelling again. Then I may suspect otherwise.”

The boys both drew a breath to shout, then deflated when they realized the trap Luc had set. It might have been funny if my heartbeat weren’t throbbing in my throat. Rosie seized Luc’s wheelchair, spun him around, and sped away. Sandra and I both hesitated, but she came to her senses first and grabbed my arm.

“Leave them,” she muttered, like I’d been the one who’d tried to throw a punch.

When I looked down, my hands were clenched into fists.

Epithets followed us down the alley — “Freaks! Creatures!” — but the boys stayed where they were. Soon, we lost sight of them in the labyrinth of streets. None of us spoke until we were in sight of the squat, and when Luc broke the silence, I wished he hadn’t. Something dangerous had crawled into his careful voice.

“That was easy,” he said. “People like that – they’re all so easy.”

Chapter 15

Luc and Sandra retreated to their rooms immediately, while Rosie and I stood on opposite ends of the front room, resolutely not looking at each other. Mercifully, Gret walked in the door about two minutes later. She took one look at us and sighed.

“What’s going on?” she said.

Rosie grabbed her arm and pulled her into the kitchen. I paced around in the front room, trying to return my breathing to its normal pace. At the other end of the hall, Rosie’s voice was growing shriller.

“You have to talk to Sandra,” she said. “She can’t just hit people —”

I crept down the hallway, wanting to hear Gret’s response.

“… want her to do, Rosie?” Gret was saying. “She barely gets in fights anymore. You can’t blame her for this one, not if they talked to her like that.”

“I don’t care how they talked to her! I need — I mean, the pack needs —”

“Okay, enough. Did you get the parts you were looking for?”

There was a pause before Rosie decided to honor the subject change. “Yes,” she said sullenly. “No one will be able to trace my work back here.”

“Are you sure?”

“The Subconscious hasn’t steered me wrong so far.”

Without warning, Rosie burst back into the hallway and brushed roughly past me. I caught a brief glimpse of her face; she looked close to tears. Gret poked her head out of the kitchen and jerked her head at me to come join her. Her lips were pressed into an angry line.

Since I could hardly pretend I hadn’t been eavesdropping, I said, “What’s the Subconscious?”

“Oh, right,” Gret said, filling a glass of water at the sink. “It’s like this whole hidden online network that a bunch of nonstandard computer geeks set up. Anonymous nonstandards can give each other advice and help out when they can. Government’s been trying to bring it down for years, but it keeps popping up. Rosie’s learned a lot about hacking on there.”

I frowned as Gret set the water on the table. “Hacking can be dangerous.”

“She’s not bringing down power grids, Millie.”

“What about the people teaching her?”

Gret gave me a piercing look. “Most nonstandards like the idea of a network of people looking out for them.”

I crossed my arms, my fingers digging into my skin. I didn’t know this Subconscious’s intentions, and they sure didn’t know mine. Synthetics didn’t automatically trust someone just because they were nonstandard. After all, if it hadn’t been for the adaptation donors, we wouldn’t be what we were.

Gret sat down and indicated that I should do the same. She leaned back onto two legs of her chair and stared at me across the table. I squirmed and looked away. I could still feel the tension of the altercation with the two boys in my shoulders and knuckles, even though I hadn’t actually done anything.

“It’s been a week since your last transformation,” Gret said. “That’s how long it took between the last two.”

“I still have the wristband on,” I muttered.

“Well, that doesn’t give you a hell of a lot of warning, does it? The new video went up. You were already transforming when it started.”

My pulse thudded so hard that I was sure Gret could see it in my throat.

“Mr. Bicks didn’t have the camera ready,” I said, my dry and heavy tongue distorting the words.

“Yeah, he was cursing all over the place.”

My hand tightened on my right arm, just above the elbow. Or was it the left arm? Had I even seen what I’d done, or had I just felt it?

“So you watched it?” I said, my voice louder than I intended it to be. “Did you watch all the videos?”

Even with the windows shuttered, the tenacious desert sun found a way through the cracks. Gret’s motionless face seemed to glow in the yellow light. She leaned forward, and her chair fell back on all four legs with a thump.

“I didn’t watch any of them all the way through,” she said. “Just the transformations. Luc said it was an invasion of privacy, but I had to know what I was dealing with if I was gonna bring the pack into this.”

I laughed helplessly. “Luc said it was an invasion of privacy?”

“He really cares about that stuff,” Gret said, a hint of a growl edging into her voice. “I didn’t let anyone else watch the recordings.”

“No, of course not. That’s for werewolf eyes only,” I snarled, words spilling out of my mouth before I could vet them.

“I’m not the only one watching, in case you forgot. There were a shit-ton of comments on this last one.”

Another mistimed heartbeat jolted my ribs. Obliviously, Gret continued.

“The commenters pulled out the hardcore cryptic shit this time. No clue what they were talking about. You should read them. You might have a better idea.”

I did have a pretty good idea, which was exactly why I did not want to read them.

“What about your friend?” Gret asked. “What sort of intel has she come up with?”

“It’s not like Mr. Bicks is wandering around the compound telling everyone he’s chatting with a fugitive adaptationist,” I said.

Except based on what Mr. Bicks had spouted off to Leela, he might as well have. Of course a synthetic would recognize lab rhetoric.

Gret pounced on my hesitation. “But?”

“Nothing,” I muttered. “Just that he’s been talking about fixing the world.”

“Huh?”

From the doorway, Rosie said, “Adaptationist talk. That’s what it’s all about for them.”

Gret and I both jumped. “How long have you been listening?” Gret demanded.

Rosie’s eyes were puffy, but her voice was as prim as ever. “So it’s okay when Millie eavesdrops but not me? Or am I not allowed to get food in my own home?”

Gret gestured furiously at the fridge. “Get it and get out.”

Rosie bared her sharp little teeth at Gret as she crossed the room. “You should have smelled me standing there. But I guess our new guest is pretty distracting.”

Gret’s cheeks turned blotchy red even as my own face flamed.

Rosie straightened up from the fridge, a withered, whitish orange in her hand. “I’m not the only one who grew up around adaptationists. If you really want to catch a genius who escaped from justice, we do have an expert.”

Gret shook her head. “Luc’s done enough for us today.”

A door creaked open in the hall. A tight voice called, “Luc can hear every word you’re saying, and would like it if you didn’t speak for him.”

Gret clenched her jaw and stalked out of the kitchen. Rosie gave me one more disdainful, red-rimmed glare before she left with her orange. Hunched over the table, I listened through my growing headache to Gret and Luc bickering in hushed voices. Luc apparently won the argument, because Gret reappeared pushing his wheelchair. He had a feverish glint in his eyes.

“How do you think you’ll find Dr. Topher?” Luc said to me, each word clipped and cold. “What actually is your plan here?”

I clenched my teeth and didn’t answer.

“I can believe that Mr. Bicks is an idiot, but even if he does make a mistake, do you really think you’ll notice before Dr. Topher does? Adaptationists are careful. How do you think she never got caught?”

“I don’t know, how did your father manage it?” I shot back.

Gret started forward, but Luc held up his hand. Blood drained from my face. I had never spoken to another synthetic like that.

“My father knows who he can trust and who he can’t,” Luc said. “Mr. Bicks is useful to Dr. Topher because of his position at your compound, but she’ll need other allies. There are still like-minded scientists out there.”

“They were arrested,” I said automatically.

Luc gave me a withering look. “How could they arrest people who hadn’t yet committed a crime? Do you believe there were noother aspiring adaptationists who hadn’t had the chance to act on their ambitions before the raids?”

The kitchen was too warm, but my skin felt cold. “Dr. Topher had assistants, not collaborators,” I insisted. “She can’t go crawling to another scientist while she’s wanted and on the run. Then they’d be in charge, not her. She wouldn’t like that.”

“She wants to continue her experiment, doesn’t she?” Luc said. “She’ll need outside help.”

“If she had allies, we won’t find them. She’ll have gotten rid of them,” I said, thinking of my attorney on her spiritual quest.

Luc snorted. He looked nothing like the quiet, gentle boy who’d endured my horror after the last transformation. His narrowed eyes were flat and mocking. Under their gaze, the rage that always clung to me these days flared out like a sun storm. Luc could have turned his father in at any time, but then he would have been sent to the compound. He let an adaptationist walk free just to avoid being with his own kind.

“You may have freaked your dad out enough to make him stop, but Dr. Topher’s different,” I said. “She still wants what she’s always wanted, and she won’t risk anyone else getting there first.”

We glared at each other, both leaning forward with clenched fists, until Luc sagged suddenly in his seat. He blinked rapidly.

“You’re right,” he said, raising a shaky hand to his forehead. “The way you feel about yours and the way I feel about mine aren’t the same. I don’t know how I got them mixed up.”

His lip wobbled. Gret, still standing behind the wheelchair, tried to peer around to see him, but he hid his face.

“I can usually tell the difference between me and other people,” he said, a plaintive note in his voice. “Today is just — I’m — Gret?”

“It’s okay, bud,” Gret said gently. She took Luc back to his room and began to pound on the other doors. “Clear out! Luc needs the squat.”

I stood and hovered at the end of the hall. Sandra swept away without looking at anyone. Rosie emerged more slowly. Gret pointed at the front door.

“Go with Sandra,” she ordered.

“Not when she’s in this mood!” Rosie said. “She’ll get in another fight.”

“Make sure she doesn’t,” Gret said.

“That’s not my job! I’m working right now, doing what you told me —”

Gret’s hands shot up. Rosie yelped and leapt back, but all Gret did was clutch at her own hair.

“Why can’t you all just act like a pack?” she cried.

“You’re not with werewolves anymore, Gret,” Rosie retorted. “Except for your new favorite. Hope she’s not more trouble than she’s worth.”

Rosie ran out of the squat. Gret stomped back into the kitchen, snatched up my untouched glass of water, and stalked away again. When she was all the way down the hall, she yelled, “Millie, let’s go!”

I followed. Unlike Rosie, I was good at doing what I was told.