Part III: Metamorphology

Chapter 21

By the time the pack was ready to leave the park, the puddles had vanished. The desert once again appeared as it always did, with no evidence that it had ever changed at all. Sandra grinned as she counted her money, but I knew what she had just done was illegal. There was no way that seirens were allowed to sing in public, whether they used their adaptations or not.

Rosie snapped her laptop shut. “Done,” she announced.

We all turned to stare at her. Her dimples deepened at the attention.

“Done? With the cuff? Millie’s free?” Gret said. The spiky bristles of the supplicant tree filtered the sunlight that fell on her face.

“Not quite,” Rosie said. She looked around and motioned us closer so she could whisper. “I had to duplicate EP’s code so I could rig the results to always read green. Now I have to break their connection with the actual band and replace their code with mine so they don’t notice anything’s wrong.”

“So you’re not done at all,” Sandra objected.

“Well, I can’t do that from here,” Rosie said. “Their security is too strong for me to work remotely. But if we can get inside the compound …”

“We can’t,” Gret said. “That’s the whole point of this, so Millie doesn’t have to go back.”

“I can,” I said slowly. “I don’t only go there to — I go for visits. There’s one coming up this week.”

“Perfect,” Rosie said.

“Not perfect!” Gret snapped. “When were you going to mention this?”

“Today,” I said, pretty sure I was telling the truth.

“And who’s gonna take you there? Bicks?”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “But he picks up other people first. The first gens, from other towns. I won’t be alone with him.”

“You sure about that?” Gret demanded.

“He hasn’t tried to call in his favor,” I said, mostly to myself. “She’s making him wait.” I looked back at Gret. “Besides, if I don’t get this cuff — I mean the wristband off, then I’ll have to be alone with him.”

Gret frowned mightily, but there was no argument to be made. Rosie held up another thumb drive.

“Ready for some espionage, Millie?” she said.

I took it. Rosie smiled, showing all of her sharp teeth.

The next few days passed in a blur. Dreams of biting needles plagued me relentlessly, but the night before the visit, I didn’t sleep at all. The midnight prick of the wristband passed me by, and then the 3:00, as I turned Rosie’s drive over and over in my hands.

I flicked the cap off the end and studied the metallic glint of the plug. All I had to do was insert it into one of Mr. Patter’s computers, and Rosie’s program would do the rest.

A part of me must not have expected her to actually succeed, or I wouldn’t have felt so shocked. Until this point, my plan for Dr. Topher had just been a terrible fantasy. Step one was out of my control, so there was no reason to worry about step two. But now the waiting was over.

The tricky part of activating Rosie’s program would be doing it without Mr. Patter noticing. I had tried to come up with an idea better than enlisting any other synthetics for help, but there was no alternative. I was hoping I would get away with this without any unwanted questions from Leela, but just in case, I’d held onto the information about my mother. Surely she would forget about anything else after she heard that.

Of course, Leela would eventually notice that I wasn’t transforming at the compound — probably before Mr. Patter did. Then I would be forced to tell her the truth, or at least part of it: that I was scared Mr. Bicks would betray me to Dr. Topher. That there were nonstandards in Supplicants Grove willing to help me. That without the wristband tethering me to the compound, I could leave. Like she never could.

Of course, once Leela knew that Dr. Topher was after me, she would tell me to turn Mr. Bicks in and return to the safety of the compound. The only way she would know that that was not an option would be if I told her I had used my teeth. Then Leela would let me leave, but only because she’d never want to see me again.

On the morning of the visit, the complaint messages seemed even pettier than usual. Every entitled diatribe shredded my nerves until I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. I could feel the ripped drum under the bed like an extension of my own body. I longed to find a rhythm that would distract me from my racing heart, but the drum’s silence was permanent.

I forced my thoughts away from that, and they landed on Gret. I drank a glass of water. Even across town, Gret’s nagging was effective.

Finally, it was 5:00. I ran down the stairs, but Mr. Bicks hadn’t arrived yet. I tried to take a deep breath, abandoned the effort as futile, and stood on the curb.

The van came late, as it always did. Mr. Bicks took a larger vehicle to pick us up for these visits, and I went dizzy with relief when I saw four first gens through the windows. I relaxed my grip on the phone in my pocket. At Gret’s insistence, I had brought it with me.

I slipped into the van and sat in the back row of seats, watching the first gens so I wouldn’t have to look at Mr. Bicks. All of them appeared standard at first glance. First there was Amelia, whose adaptationist had been particularly inept. Instead of being able to digest any substance, as the adaptationist had intended, she was allergic to nearly everything. Her pale and swollen face was turned towards the window.

R.J. and Erik had been labmates. They spoke rapidly with their hands. Their adaptationist had been uncommonly cautious: she had only attempted to augment her subjects’ hearing. She’d succeeded in increasing their sensitivity to sound, but not their resilience. Their hearing had deteriorated as rapidly as it had strengthened, and now R.J. and Erik wore specially fitted earplugs twenty-four hours a day.

Finally, there was Jania. She technically was visibly nonstandard, but her wig covered the ring of eyes that encircled her head. Only two of these eyes had even a little sight; luckily for Jania, one of them was in the front.

The first gens ignored me. To them, I was a liability: the dangerous armed second gen who could bring down the whole independent housing project if I screwed up. Mr. Bicks’s attention, on the other hand, was all on me. Unwillingly, my eyes rose to meet his in the rearview mirror.

He looked awful. His oiled hair was still in its proper place and he was as overdressed as ever, but he had puffy shadows like Amelia’s around his beady eyes, and his lips were pale. The evening sunlight suddenly seemed too bright; I blinked and squinted down at my lap.

I may not have had Gret’s senses, but I knew Mr. Bicks’s scent now, and I would have been able to tell if he’d had any open wounds. He didn’t. His blood was safe in his veins where it belonged. But Dr. Topher had a habit of wearing out her assistants, sometimes to the point of nervous breakdowns.

Or maybe that was just from working with me.

I stared out the window, but I couldn’t escape the sound of Mr. Bicks’s heavy breathing. My vision swam as we passed the Petrified Forest. The distant stone stumps swayed and wiggled like they were trying to dislodge their dead roots from the earth. My mouth filled with thick saliva. I was afraid to swallow it, sure that I would vomit if I did.

The van hadn’t come to a complete stop before I threw open the door and stumbled into the dirt. As surreptitiously as I could, I spat into my hand and wiped the slime on the rusty gate. My palm felt hot and filthy, but it showed no signs of fur.

As soon as Mr. Bicks opened the door in the ground, I rushed inside. The cool, treated air hit my face like a slap. I hurried down the hall past Leela’s room to knock on a different door. After an agonizingly long moment, Markie opened it.

“Hey, Millie!” he said. He sounded surprised to see me, but also inexplicably pleased. “How’s it going? Back for your visit?”

I shoved past him into his room and closed the door behind me. “Can I ask you a favor?”

He looked confused, but did not hesitate. “Sure. What?”

“I’m gonna go to my meeting with Mr. Patter now,” I said. “In a minute, can you come and distract him?”

Markie frowned. I walked around him so he couldn’t see my face, stopping next to the army of pill bottles on the nightstand beside his enormous bed.

I recited my rehearsed lie: “I just want to take a look at his notes about me. He said my blood samples have been normal since the last transformation, but …”

Markie’s face cleared. Even though I’d never gone rooting around my records, it was a common enough pastime for many at the compound. Mr. Patter believed that the less we knew, the more at peace we would be, but I’d heard the sullen murmurs all my life from those who didn’t appreciate being kept in the dark about themselves. I’d always ignored them until now.

“Yeah, no problem,” Markie said.

I thanked him and left the room. Nausea threatened to overtake me again, but I closed my damp hand around the thumb drive and hurried to Mr. Patter’s office.

The first gens and Mr. Bicks had disappeared. The former, I knew, were all being seen by the nurses. Once their medical exams were out of the way, they could forget this place existed for another couple of months. I didn’t know where Mr. Bicks had gone, and I doubted I wanted to.

I knocked on the door. Mr. Patter ushered me inside and motioned for me to sit. I did so, trying to focus. I’d had “Riverbed” stuck in my head since the weekend. The music made it hard to think.

“How have you been getting along, Millie?” Mr. Patter asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Anything of note in Supplicants Grove?”

I shook my head.

“What about your wristband? How has the new schedule been treating you?”

I almost said fine again, but given what I planned to do, why shouldn’t I tell the truth?

“It wakes me up too much,” I said. “I’m not sleeping enough.”

Mr. Patter blinked. He was not able to find a smooth, bland platitude before there was a knock at the door. He opened it a crack.

“Markie, I’m in a meeting,” he said.

“I know, sir, sorry,” Markie said. “It’s just that Leela’s been on a customer call for almost an hour, and he’s being really difficult.”

I winced. I had not asked Markie to bring Leela into this.

“Leela knows how to deal with difficult customers,” Mr. Patter said dismissively.

“But he started talking about synthetics, sir, and your name came up —”

Mr. Patter didn’t wait for the end of that sentence. “Stay here,” he said over his shoulder, walking as fast as he could without actually breaking into a run. Markie nodded at me and lumbered after him.

I closed the door.

Hand shaking, I pulled the thumb drive out of my pocket. The computer in the top right corner was where I had first seen the wristband spreadsheet. There was a socket on the side of the screen. Rosie said that the drive only had to be inserted for twenty seconds. After that, my wristband’s connection to the compound would be broken, with EP none the wiser.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right” was one of Mr. Patter’s favorite sayings, but synthetic rules were different. As an organism with no output, the best I could hope to do for this world was to return it to the state it was in before I was created. There was only one way to do that.

I scream to an unhearing ear, return my love to me.

I shoved the drive into the computer. The blank screen burst into life. I counted the seconds like drumbeats: one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-one-and-two …

The wristband chart divided like a cell. For a second, the two boxes flickered next to each other, and then the original went dark. The clone expanded to fill the space it had left.

… and-three-and-four.

At the fifth count of four, I yanked the drive out and stuffed it back into my pocket. The wristband didn’t feel any different. The computer screen went dark again, and I could see my own ghostly reflection in its surface. My eyes gleamed wildly; I barely recognized them as my own.

“You’re free,” I whispered to that feral girl, but she didn’t look like she believed me.

Chapter 22

Mr. Patter burst back into the office to find me meekly waiting in my chair. His thin lips were pinched with irritation.

“Pardon the delay,” he said, in a tone that was more command than apology. “Where were we?”

“I don’t have any more news,” I said. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Very well,” Mr. Patter said. He was too distracted to hear the strangeness in my voice. “You may go.”

I moved down the hall in a daze. My ties to EP had been cut, but no one here knew it. As I slipped into the darkness of Leela’s room, I felt like an intruder in the place I had called home for ten years.

Markie was leaning against Leela’s tank. “Did it work?” he asked. “Did we give you enough time?”

I nodded.

“When Mr. Patter got here, we told him that the caller hung up,” he explained. “There was nothing in the call log, obviously, so now he thinks it’s someone rich enough to pay to have his number removed from our tracking services. That’ll freak him out.” He caught his breath and looked between me and Leela. “Um – I guess I’ll leave you to it, then?”

I was staring at Leela. Her paper-thin skin was taut with concern.

“Thanks, Markie,” she said quietly. “I’ll see you later.”

Markie nodded and shuffled from the room. On the way out, he raised his hand as though to pat me on the shoulder, but seemed to think better of it. I didn’t speak until the door closed behind him.

“I have something to tell you,” I said. “I found something out, and I don’t know if it’s true for you, but maybe we — oh, I should have gotten your file while I was in there! I’m so sorry, I didn’t think —”

“Millie, what are you talking about?” Leela asked. Her voice was strangely careful, like Luc’s.

My heart was pounding harder than it had been in Mr. Patter’s office. I’d known Leela for most of my life. Why shouldn’t I be able to speak of myself to her? Yet I had to force the words from my throat.

“I saw my file. It said father unknown, but — I have a mother. I mean, obviously I do, but she’s not dead. Or at least she wasn’t when they wrote it …” My voice faltered. How often were those files updated? I swallowed hard. “It said she’s in prison.”

Leela’s webbed fingers tightened on the edge of her tank. They had begun to bleed at the knuckles. Her face was devoid of the millions of nameless emotions that I had felt when I read Ina Peng’s name. She just looked sad.

And guilty.

“You knew?” I gasped.

“Millie …”

“But when? How?” I cried. “Mr. Patter never said. He never told me —”

“So you really never looked,” Leela sighed. “I knew you didn’t want to talk about it, but I thought – well, I hoped that you must have at least tried to find out where you came from.”

“Why would I — I thought I was an orphan. What was there to find out?”

Leela just shook her head, an awful mix of incredulity and helplessness in her expression. My face flooded with heat.

“I asked him once,” Leela said. For a second, I though she meant Mr. Patter, but then she continued: “He told me if it hadn’t been for him, I would be dead. He said he saved me, which meant he could make me into whatever he wanted. I figured that meant my family was dead, too, but they had to have existed at one point, right? Once we were here for a while, I figured, well, we have computers. Even if Mr. Patter won’t tell us anything, I can at least learn some things about myself. It barely took any time at all to find out where the adaptationists got all of us.”

“All of us?” I said, my voice as weak as my knees. I sat down on the floor before Leela could see me stagger.

Leela’s lip cracked and began to bleed, the shiny beads dark against her glowing skin, but she did not submerge. Her eyes were focused on nothing. “The adaptationists traveled all over the country to find people who had no one else to raise their children. People who – who couldn’t come looking for us later.”

So I had been both right and wrong. Ina Peng hadn’t known about the experiment, but Dr. Topher had not forced her to do anything. Had my mother placed me in Dr. Topher’s arms when she signed me away? Had she kissed me goodbye?

“Do they know what happened to us?” I asked.

Leela shrugged. “I don’t know if anyone ever told them. Mr. Patter won’t let us make contact.”

“You’ve asked him?” I said, my voice scaling upwards.

“No. Not me.” Leela’s words were flat, bitter. I’d never heard her sound like this. I hadn’t known she could. “Some of the others have. Markie’s one of them, and Tricia, and Doreena before she …” She swallowed. “I think a lot of the ones who are – worse off – have petitioned to reach out before it’s too late. But Mr. Patter always says no.”

My head reeled. “So – everyone knows? Everyone but me?”

She shrugged sharply. “I haven’t talked to everyone.”

But she had talked to some of them, even though we synthetics were supposed to keep to our little pairs. It was a testament to Leela’s sweetness that anyone besides me even visited her, let alone had conversations about their personal lives and histories.

When she hadn’t even had that conversation with me.

“You knew I didn’t know. I’ve said that I’m an orphan — that we’re orphans, and you didn’t — you never —”

Leela slipped beneath the surface. The blood on her hands and mouth spiraled away from her skin. She stayed under for a minute, her eyes open and staring at me. Her gills flared, filtering oxygen from the water and, perhaps, the blood she had just shed. My perception shifted along some unseen axis, and suddenly I could barely recognize her. Leela was an eerie creature of the deep, thrown into the desert and my life by a terrible miscalculation.

When she reemerged, she pushed her fine hair off of her face and said, “Why would you want to know? I wish I didn’t. They took us from people who will never be set free. Thieves and murderers.”

“The adaptationists are the thieves and murderers! They stole us and killed us —”

“So what does this change? This just means we don’t come from any good people at all, parents or adaptationists!” Her bloodshot eyes produced no tears, but I could still tell when she was crying. “Wasn’t it better to think that we’re orphans, but before they died, our parents were just … nice and happy and didn’t ever give us away?”

I’d never thought that that my parents were nice and happy. I’d never thought anything about them, because I thought they were dead.

“You can’t just not tell me things about my life!” I said. Shouted. I was shouting at my best friend.

Leela’s gills flared. “What about all the stuff you’re not telling me? You didn’t need Markie to lie for you just so you could look up your mother, did you? And all this stuff about Mr. Bicks that you won’t even explain … what is going on with you, Millie?”

I was going to tell you, I tried to say, but that wasn’t true. I’d used my mother so I wouldn’t have to tell Leela anything else. Rage pushed me up from the floor. It called me to the cages. That was where an angry werewolf belonged, right? But I didn’t know who needed the protection, Leela or me.

Besides, the cages didn’t do a very good job of containing my rage, did they?

Leela wasn’t done: “You’ve been acting weird since your last transformation — before that, even! Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Even you think I’m that stupid?”

I had never thought of Leela as unintelligent. Not when the tutors despaired, not when Mr. Bicks taunted her, not when Mr. Patter gave up on her.

But that wasn’t what I said.

“If you thought it was a good idea to lie to me about my own mother for ten years, then yeah, you must be pretty stupid!”

The look on Leela’s face when I said those words was one I knew I would never, ever forget. At least in the cages, I had not been able to see what I had done.

“You didn’t want to know. You never want to know,” she said eventually, her voice shaking. “What would have been the point of telling you anything about Millie Peng, when that is obviously your least favorite subject? Why would I tell you when I knew it would just be one more thing that you’d never do anything about?”

For a second, I thought I was transforming, but the pain I felt was not the agony of breaking bones. It was much worse.

Leela pressed her hands against her head. “Millie, I didn’t mean —”

I ran away from her.