Chapter 23

Gret had instructed me to come straight to her after Mr. Bicks brought me back to Supplicants Grove. I knew she was afraid that Mr. Bicks would steal me away even with all the first gens in the car. But he dropped me off first, just like always. We didn’t speak a single word to each other.

When I got to the squat, I walked up to the door, stood there for a few seconds, then turned around. I sat behind the laundromat and waited until Gret appeared. She jogged over to me.

“Why didn’t you knock?” she asked.

“Not fair to Luc,” I said. “Are we out of his range?”

Gret’s eyebrows shot up. She sat down next to me.

“Yeah. What’s the deal? Rosie said everything worked.”

Good. Fewer return trips to the compound for me.

“My mother is in prison,” I said, staring straight ahead.

“I know,” Gret said, nonplussed.

I remained silent. She drew in a sharp breath.

“Did you just find that out?”

“A few days ago.”

“But — I mean, isn’t it common knowledge?”

I didn’t want to say I never asked. Gret wouldn’t be impressed by that. I wasn’t impressed by that. Instead, I said, “Dr. Topher told me that — that I didn’t have anyone but her.”

I realized as I said it that I had told Gret more about Dr. Topher than I had ever told Leela. My anger was not diminished, but I didn’t know which way to direct it.

Reflexively, Gret laid her hand on my right knee, below the scars. She drew back quickly as though I had burned her, but I was the one who felt scorched. I looked at my leg and was surprised not to find the shape of Gret’s palm branded into my skin.

“My — my mother is in prison, too,” she said.

I looked up at her. She took a deep breath, ready to launch into the tale of her imprisoned mother. As much as I wanted to know about the werewolves who brought Gret into the world, the deep crease between Gret’s eyebrows betrayed how much this story hurt her. My skin itched with the grime of other people’s pain.

“Will you take me to the Life Gardens?” I asked.

Gret snapped her mouth shut. I turned my arms over to display the greenish veins beneath my skin.

“I know I can’t really help,” I said. “Not like you. But I could just, like, water some plants or something. Please. I don’t want to just do nothing about anything.”

“Don’t you have work?”

“I’ll say I’m sick. Mr. Patter will believe it. I was impolite to him today.”

“Glad to hear it,” Gret said. She paused, then smiled. “Of course you can come.”

About a dozen times throughout the night, my laptop chirped at me, startling me out of a half-sleeping stupor. Leela was messaging me. I ignored her. At least, I thought bitterly, this made it easier not to tell her what was going on. Better that she think I was apathetic and useless. Before I’d moved to Supplicants Grove, Leela and I had repeated “it’s only fifteen minutes” to each other over and over again, but I knew now the distance between the compound and the real world could not be measured in time or miles.

No big loss to her, though, was it? Not if she was close enough with the other synthetics to share secrets with them – to keep secrets with them, from me. She could find a new best friend easily enough. Plenty of the others were in the market for one. Markie’s had died years ago. It turned out that fireproof skin was pretty useless if it immediately turned cancerous.

Near dawn, when I received yet another message, I sat up and took out Rosie’s thumb drive. Defiantly (but not sure whom I defied), I plugged it in and pulled up my file. I scrolled past Ina Peng’s name and began to read. After my birthday, there was another date: first treatment. I thought the experiment had begun when I was four, but apparently, Dr. Topher had made her first alteration to my DNA when I was six months old. My hands flew to my mouth to cover the horrible smile on my lips. My innocence had been edited out of my genetic code when I was too young to put up a fight. The sigh I heaved was one of relief.

I expected to see a lot of information about Dr. Topher, her apprentices, and maybe even the adaptation donors, but the file really was all about me. After the basic information, there was an official EP medical write-up. I tried to read it, but it started talking about things that had happened in the lab, so I had to stop. Spots danced in front of my eyes as I looked away from the screen into the darkness. I wondered if I would have to find some pain to disappear into, but after a few minutes, my breathing returned to normal. I scrolled down, not reading anything until I came to EP’s conclusion:

Topher was undeniably the most accomplished of all her peers. If she had simply transplanted the adaptation of the natural werewolves in her employ, it is possible and even probable that she would have succeeded. However, the additional manufactured alterations to the subject’s genetic code appear to be the root of the adverse effects that the subject experiences, as well as the cause of death for the deceased subjects. As she left her assistants in the dark and absconded with all copies of her research, Topher has stymied Equilibrium Pharmaceuticals’ attempts to isolate the subject’s manufactured alterations or to determine their intended purpose.

Shaking again, I closed the file. Additional manufactured alterations. So Gret was right. There really wasn’t anything werewolf about me. Dr. Topher had made me into something else, and no one even knew what.

The next morning, I went outside feeling like the ground beneath my feet had shifted. But no matter what Dr. Topher had intended for me, it was certainly not to be a gardener. So that was what I would be, at least for today.

I waited on the corner for Gret to pick me up. I’d emailed Mr. Patter, and as I’d predicted, he accepted my lie with unctuous well wishes, clearly relieved that compliant little Millie wasn’t really turning rebellious on him. He did not say anything about the wristband. Apparently I was in the clear, though it still stuck me every three hours.

The ugly car rolled up and stopped in front of me. Sandra was in the driver’s seat again, with Gret next to her. I climbed into the backseat with Rosie, who was wearing pigtails and shiny pink lip gloss. No one would know by looking at her that she had just hacked Equilibrium Pharmaceuticals.

“Thank you,” I said to her. “Everything worked.”

“You can thank me by not taking unnecessary risks,” Rosie said sternly. “Dr. Joyan is discreet, but you don’t want your guardians noticing you’re acting unusual. You don’t want your adaptationist to notice, either. One fugitive to another — because that’s what you are without that wristband — you’ve got to be careful.”

Only when we arrived at the greenhouses did I realize that Rosie had referred to herself as a fugitive instead of a runaway.

I didn’t have time to dwell on that, because the next thing I knew, I was getting out of the car and wondering if I’d made a huge mistake. We had driven away from the town and the ruins, down into a deeper part of the valley. A group of pristine white tents surrounded four large glass greenhouses. Some of the people hurrying between them were nearly as young as I was. Many of them, however, were adults carrying clipboards. They waved notes and data at each other.

This was a lab.

Gret touched my elbow. I jerked away and she raised her hands.

“Shit, sorry,” she said. “Luc said you might — he said to tell you it’s different here.”

I swallowed hard. “Well, different’s what I’m looking for.”

Gret took a few steps forward, then turned to see if I was following. I was. She led me to the first greenhouse in the row. Sandra hummed, swinging her long arms in wide arcs. I recognized the tune as one of Leela’s favorite songs. I let my hair fall in front of my face, glad that Luc wasn’t here.

We reached the first greenhouse, and Gret opened the door. I braced myself for tourniquets and syringes, but all I saw was green. Transfixed, I touched the dark, floppy leaves of the nearest plant. I’d never felt such a soft, smooth leaf, but the soil in its pot was the same hard, blanched dirt that the cacti and supplicant trees grew in. The air was a little more humid than outside, but not by much: this was still the desert, just with food that wasn’t freeze-dried.

“Our bodies have always been the source of new life,” a voice said from behind me. “Not just our own human life, but bacteria, fungi, plants, and in this way back to animals. As a species, we’ve been uniquely adept at disrupting this cycle, so it is our responsibility to atone. I don’t believe we have to wait for death and decay to make these amends.”

I turned around. Dr. Joyan smiled.

“You must be Millie,” she said. Her voice was warm, and so was her hand when she shook mine.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, not entirely sure I was telling the truth. Dr. Joyan’s speech was pretty, but I couldn’t shake my distrust of standards making amends with nonstandards’ cells. Then again, Dr. Joyan was a woman who lived in Supplicants Grove: hardly a beneficiary of the disrupted cycle she described. My opinions all felt frustratingly half-formed. I’d always known the compound’s education was drivel, but I’d never tried to learn beyond what they had taught me. I had done nothing, just like Leela said.

Oblivious to my ethical crisis, Dr. Joyan said, “Gret’s told me a lot about you.”

Alarmed, I looked at Gret. What could she have told Dr. Joyan about me that didn’t give my secrets away? But Gret was busy studying a plant and didn’t look up.

“Have room for a menial task girl, Doc?” Sandra said, smiling cheekily. “’Fraid we didn’t bring you a new donor, but she wants to help out anyway.”

“I’m sure we can think of something,” Dr. Joyan said. “Some new growths need to be repotted. Gret, why don’t you demonstrate?”

Gret motioned me to follow her down a narrow path to the back of the greenhouse. She showed me how to ease young tomato plants out of the pots they’d outgrown. Their tangles of stringy roots held the crumbly soil together in a tightly packed clump. Carefully, we teased the ends of the coiled roots apart “to let them know they can grow more,” as Gret explained. Then we added more of the soil to the bigger pots and set the growing plants in, patting them down until they fit comfortably. Gret smiled when I made my first complete transfer.

Most of the plants weren’t in pots, but in long troughs that filled almost all the space in the greenhouse. I couldn’t identify most of them, but they smelled wonderful, sharp and tangy and sweet. Leela would love this. It was exactly the kind of adventure she would want to hear about. A tear escaped from my eye. I stopped it on my cheek before its tainted cells fell on the leaves beneath me.

Gret reached out and touched my arm again, and this time I did not move away.

“You okay?” she asked.

I nodded, then shrugged. Gret removed her hand from my arm, leaving dirt clinging to my wrist. She tried to wipe it away, but just smeared more onto me. I laughed a little.

“Sorry,” Gret said with a grimace. She turned her hands over, showing me the soil in the crevices of her square palms. “Side effect of working here. You can’t mind getting a little dirty.”

“I mean, you literally gave me a pot of mud, so clearly I’m okay with that,” I said.

Gret laughed, and my need to cry diminished. Her laugh always sounded startled, like humor was an unexpected and thrilling surprise.

Other people started to trickle in the greenhouse. Some were as young as us, and some were almost as old as the woman in the hospital bathroom. They called good morning to Gret, asked for my name, and told me it was nice to meet me. I forgot their names pretty much immediately, but I watched them from the corners of my eyes. They all wore old clothes and worry lines on their faces. They looked generally healthier than the people I’d grown up with, but infinitely more careworn than anyone I’d seen on a TV show. Two young men working near us laughed at a joke told by a third, and I tensed, waiting for them to start in on us like the boys Luc had been forced to humiliate. But they kept their eyes on their work and their grins for each other.

I had just begun to almost relax when, from the front of the greenhouse, a voice boomed out, “I see some new faces here today!”

Gret jerked her head up, all traces of a smile gone.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Tremont. The donor. He’s never here this early,” Gret whispered back.

“What does he know?”

“About us? Nothing.”

“So…?”

Gret hesitated, then said, quietly and quickly, “So he’s heard the rumors that Dr. Joyan actually uses nonstandard material instead of just adapting the plants.”

“Which is true!” I hissed.

“Do you think anyone would fund us if they knew that?”

“Any other new workers, Dr. Joyan?” the hearty voice said. “I’d love to meet them all.”

Gret screwed her eyes shut tight. “Just go along with whatever Dr. Joyan says.”

She pulled me to my feet and didn’t let go of my hand until we were halfway down the line of troughs. I recognized the well-dressed man I’d seen in the park the day after my last transformation. Mr. Tremont was tall and handsome, though his once-pale face was badly sunburned. An unnoticed scrap of peeling skin hung from his forehead. The sleeves of his starchy dress shirt were rolled to the elbow, and he wore a heavy ring on his right hand.

“Hello, girls,” he said as Gret and I joined Sandra and Rosie. “You seem pretty young to be here on a school day.”

Dr. Joyan hurried over to us. “Mr. Tremont! I didn’t know you’d be showing up today,” she said with a smile. “I see you’ve met my volunteers. The local schools have such wonderful service programs.”

“Yes, I’d love to hear more about that,” Mr. Tremont said smoothly. Dr. Joyan’s smile tightened. “I have a concern I wanted to discuss first. I spoke to the local grocer, and it seems not everyone is in favor of this little project of yours. I can’t say I blame him for worrying about tainted food.”

Sandra shifted her weight. Gret touched her wrist in warning.

 “I provided your team with all the plant samples they requested,” Dr. Joyan said. “They informed me they found nothing unfit for consumption.”

Mr. Tremont waved that away. “I’m sure the science is good, but people have to believe in your product if they’re going to buy it. A lot of people out here in the desert have had to deal with those contingents who’ve decided they’re more special than everyone else, and that ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ are bad things.”

Mr. Tremont paused to see if Dr. Joyan would offer an argument. From the sudden silence in the greenhouse, so did everyone else. I waited for her to point out the obvious fact that those “contingents” had not been in power for many centuries. She did not.

Mr. Tremont continued, “Now you’re saying that normal and natural aren’t good enough for plants, either, and that’s hard to swallow for some honest, hardworking folks. When you think of some of the crazy ideas the ancients had —”

“Using seawater to grow plants isn’t natural, either,” Sandra said loudly. “Neither is, like, farming at all. People invent stuff.”

“Yes, but the type of ‘people’ matters, sweetheart,” Mr. Tremont said.

“I’m not your sweetheart!” Sandra snapped.

Mr. Tremont’s smile hardened. “Now do you see why people are worried, Doctor?”

Blood rushed to Gret’s face and neck. She didn’t even try to hush Sandra, but it didn’t matter, because Sandra was too apoplectic to speak. My skin burned with the memory of the silver cage door banging closed on the straps of my bag.

“How. Dare. You.”

We all jumped. Rosie stepped out from behind Sandra, jabbing her finger at Mr. Tremont’s chest.

“You make everyone dance for you while you hem and haw about your investment. Then you insult my friends, who are just trying to help! What good have you ever done? And don’t say you’re doing it now. We all know you haven’t forked over the money because you’re not sure what people will think of you for funding us. If you can’t play the hero, you won’t help, even if it’s the right thing to do!”

A muscle beneath Rosie’s jaw was visibly throbbing. Dr. Joyan looked like she was about to pass out. Mr. Tremont’s eyes narrowed.

“Doctor, call off your creature,” he sneered.

K-ssssss!

I stared at Rosie, trying to figure out where that sound had come from.Her mouth was closed, but I could have sworn she’d actually hissed at Mr. Tremont. Mr. Tremont didn’t seem to notice. He swept out of the greenhouse, with Dr. Joyan at his heels.

Rosie gave Gret a panicked look.

“Go,” Gret whispered. “Take Millie with you.”

Sandra tossed Rosie the car keys. Rosie grabbed my hand and dragged me with her, running all the way to the car. She drove erratically for a few blocks, her lips pressed tightly together. Finally, she peeled into a deserted alley, slammed on the brakes, and threw open the door. She spat a thin yellow substance onto the ground, then leaned back, panting.

Steam rose from where she had spit. I leaned over her to get a closer look and gasped. The pavement cracked before my eyes, and a bubbling crater formed in the road.

“Now you know,” Rosie said hoarsely. “I’m nonstandard, too.”

Not just nonstandard. Rosie was a serpeton: the deadliest armed adaptation in the world.

Chapter 24

We drove back to the public lot, the silence punctuated only by the squeal of tires. Rosie parked crookedly and put covers up in the windows, so no one could see the flawless interior of the ugly car. We got out and she peered at me over the hood, her eyes red and haughty.

“I suppose I have to tell you my story now,” she said. “You know what I am and what my father was, but you don’t get to draw your own conclusions about me. Not anymore.”

She stalked out of the lot, and I followed. Her dress flapped around her knees as her sandals smacked the pavement. She wore blue today, a gentler color than the blazing sky, with little capped sleeves covering her shoulders. To tell the truth, I’d thought of her clothes as a silly affectation from a time when she was still wealthy and well cared for. Now I wasn’t sure.

“You’re not going to like this story, Millie, darling,” Rosie said. Her rich kid cadence couldn’t hide the tremor in her voice. According to the law, at fifteen, she was still too young to live without adult supervision.

“I don’t like my story, either,” I said.

As soon as we got back to the squat, Rosie called out, “Sorry, Luc.”

Luc wheeled himself out of the kitchen, a notebook in his lap. “What happened?”

“Millie knows what I am and I’m going to tell her why I’m here.”

Luc went still. Only his eyes moved, darting from Rosie’s face to mine.

“Maybe we should have stayed in the car,” Rosie said.

Luc shook himself. “No. No, it’s fine. I’ll just be in my room. Let me know if you need anything. But — close the door behind me, please.”

He maneuvered into his bedroom. I saw him square his thin shoulders as Rosie shut him in.

Rosie’s room was across the hall from Luc’s. The walls were decorated with scraps of colorful fabric glued into exuberant collages alongside faded postcards depicting bold murals and crumbling step pyramids. Bits of polished rock and petrified wood adorned the night table. Rosie’s laptop was on her pillow and there was a small pile of unfolded laundry on top of the bed. She shoved the clothes aside and sat, motioning for me to join her.

“I’m sure you know how jealous adaptationists are of nonstandards,” she said. “My mother said that all standards are, but the adaptationists are just more open about it. They knew that if they were able to get humanity adapting again, the standards who said they hated us would be the first ones lining up at the labs.

“Since my father couldn’t adapt himself, the next best thing was to have a nonstandard child. He wanted it to be a rare adaptation, a glamorous one. Serpetons are easy to find, considering the registration laws.” She looked me up and down, her eyebrows arched. “The ancients did like their predators, didn’t they?”

I nodded. Most adaptations were geographically specific – seirens were from Southern Europe, oculi from the Middle East, and so on – but some adaptations were chosen again and again by cultures who had nothing to do with one another. Wherever there were jellyfish, there were some form of whipskins. Wherever there were snakes, there were serpetons.

Wherever there were wolves, there were werewolves.

There were regional biological variations – sometimes big ones, like whipskins with tentacles and those without – but the basics were the same: where humans saw danger, they sought to become it.

Rosie looked at the postcard of the pyramid on her wall. “Not everyone turned on their nonstandards as soon as Stasis began. In Mexico, serpetons – not that we called ourselves that – were revered right up until the Europeans came. They’d already massacred almost all of their own. They didn’t know our gods. To them, an adaptation based on serpents meant devil-worshiping — or at least, that was their excuse to steal everything and kill everyone. Did you know that the colonizers had whole councils on whether or not our people had souls? Not just us, either, but all the standards here who hadn’t killed us – because, you know, the lack of wide-scale nonstandard murder was somehow proof of our savagery. Never mind all the uses we’d found for our venom in stonework, or how we’d used it to make weapons so people could defend themselves from jaguars and crocodiles. We’d even found ways of diluting it to help fight skin infections.”

I knew this story would only get worse from here, but I was rapt with attention. This was nothing like the history EP taught in the compound. Art? Medicine? I’d never heard of an armed adaptation being used for anything other than warfare. What else had I missed when I hadn’t been looking?

Rosie continued, “Anyway, that’s over now. The few of us still alive today are basically all completely destitute. Who wants to hire someone who can kill them with a single bite? Before my mother met my father, she assumed that one day she’d die of starvation. My father ended all that for her, and he didn’t treat her cruelly, at least not at first. He was also smart enough to make arrangements for my mother and me if anything ever happened to him. We remained comfortable after he … went away.” A spasm of sorrow contorted Rosie’s pretty round face. “I was so little. My father loved me, and I didn’t know it was just because I’m exotic.

“He put certain colleagues in charge of my mother’s affairs. When I was a kid, I thought they were just businessmen, because my mother said all the adaptationists went to prison, but that wasn’t exactly true. All of the famous adaptationists went to prison, the ones with their own labs — except for yours, of course. All of the apprentices from those labs were put away, too. But did you ever wonder, Millie, about the next generation? The ones who wanted to be adaptationists, but hadn’t gotten there yet?”

Luc had asked the same thing. The colors in the collage on the wall swam together. I blinked hard.

“My father was less cautious than most adaptationists. He considered himself a patron. While the others waited for new protégés to come to them, he sought his out. Not all of them made it to the lab before the raids, but my father had already involved them in his affairs. They became caretakers of his assets — including my mother and me — and in return, they were free to test their own hypotheses.”

“The experiments stopped ten years ago,” I said, my mouth dry.

“I told you you wouldn’t like it,” Rosie said. “But you already know that isn’t true. Your adaptationist is still working on you. People like that don’t just give up.

“My father’s colleagues were not as kind to my mother as my father had been. They kept their distance from me. I think they were more afraid of me than they were of her. She’d already learned how to stay quiet. How to be obedient. But I — well, maybe I’m more like my father than my mother.

“Then one day —”

Rosie stopped. She shook her head robotically. She was back in a past she didn’t want to remember. I recognized this. At the compound, it was common.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said again.

“Oh, darling, that wouldn’t make it less true,” she sighed.

But she couldn’t do it. Not until, by some impulse I didn’t know I had, I reached out and put my arm around her shoulders. I didn’t know what comfort my touch could possibly give, but apparently it was enough for Rosie to keep going.

“They took the venom from my mother,” she said. “I didn’t — I didn’t even know the subjects were there. I wasn’t allowed to go in the cellar. I don’t know why I chose to disobey that day. I was just a brat, really. I was tired of rules that I didn’t understand. And I saw — I saw — all of their experiments were failures.”

By the way she said failures, I knew she didn’t mean like me.

Rosie pressed the space beneath her chin. “Our venom is one of the most acidic substances on earth. The adaptation is much more complex than most people realize. Everything about our skin, our saliva, the lining of our throats is altered to withstand contact with the venom. The venom sacs are the most important part. They’re lined with a special membrane that basically makes them indestructible. The test subjects developed the sacs. Then they developed the venom. But they never developed the membranes.” Tears pooled and fell from her eyes. “There was a girl … such a little girl. Her whole jaw had just fallen apart, and she … she was rotting alive.” Rosie gasped. In her mind, she was in that lab right now.

“You have to believe me. I checked. I found their notes. There was no saving her. The new adaptationists were just waiting to see how long it would take for her to die. She was … when I was little, my mother made me angry on purpose to draw my first venom. I didn’t try to bite her. I guess we’re born knowing not to. I spit on the floor, and Mami took an eyedropper and dripped it on my wrist.”

She displayed a tiny scar on her smooth brown skin.

“It burned, and we’re much more tolerant to it than standards. Mami said all of us have scars on our wrists from where their mothers taught them.” A solitary, violent sob burst forth. “But it was Mami’s venom in that girl! Mami’s venom killing her. So I asked the girl … I asked her …”

“You asked if she wanted to die,” I whispered.

“Quicker! I asked if she wanted to die quicker. She was already dying. She was in so much pain. She nodded again and again, and then when I said all right, I’ll do it, she held still. So still. She let me find the artery in her neck — under all that rot — and I bit it open. I didn’t use any venom. I didn’t burn her. I just let her heart pump her blood away.

“I knew I had to get out of there and call the police. But then Warren — one of my father’s men — came running downstairs. I looked at him and thought, ‘He did it, he killed her,’ and I didn’t hold my venom back for him.”

She took my face in her hands and forced me to look at her, to make sure I understood what she had told me.

“Good,” I said.

Rosie smiled. It was terrible to behold.

“I should have known you’d understand,” she said. “You can bite, too.”

I shivered violently. Rosie let me go.

“Well, then I had a problem. I was registered, and I knew what happened to armed nonstandards who used their adaptations. I stole one of my father’s cars and as much cash as I could grab and I drove as far as I could. I called the police from a safe distance. Everyone was arrested, except for me. I’m wanted for murder, but don’t worry. The case was never made public – that would mean admitting that there were still adaptationists out there. There are definitely still police who’d love to catch me, but they won’t get any help from civilians.”

Yet I’d seen how nervous undue attention made Rosie. I wondered who she was really telling not to worry, me or herself.

“And your mother?” I asked.

Rosie looked back at her postcard of the pyramid. “I tipped her off from the car. Told her she had three hours to get away before I called the cops. I couldn’t – I’d never send a fellow nonstandard to prison. My whole life, Mami told me to stay out of trouble, because when we’re arrested … we generally don’t last long. She had no idea I went on the Subconscious. She would’ve died. Sometimes I wish I’d just bitten all my father’s men, rather than hand them over to the cops and give them the credit. Who knows, maybe some of the men wish that, too – jail’s no joke even for standards. But there wasn’t time, and they weren’t all there.”

“Where’s your mother now?”

Rosie shrugged, trying and utterly failing to look unconcerned. “Probably went back to her people. They’d know how to hide her. She wanted me to come with, but –” She shook her head sharply. “It was her venom in that girl.”

“Do you … do you think the men …?”

“Threatened me to get her to cooperate?” Rosie’s voice was cold. “Of course they did. And I’m sure they were very convincing and my mother thought she had no choice, so she gave them her venom and children rotted alive. Would you be able to look at her ever again after that?”

I didn’t know. I still had no idea what Ina Peng had done.

Rosie drew herself up. “So that’s me. A killer. I’m sure I haven’t exactly raised your opinion of me. But now you know the truth. Just please don’t hate me for — that girl was going to die anyway. She was.”

Almost certainly. Perhaps even definitely. But I knew living people who were told they’d definitely die.

Back before, if someone had given me a choice …

“I don’t hate you,” I said, my conscience withering inside my chest. “And I’m sorry. When I met you, I shouldn’t have said —”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Rosie said, and I was oddly glad that she wasn’t too upset to be self-righteous. “But you’re right to hate my father. I don’t know what he was thinking, trying to make a meer. He liked flashy things. He probably just wanted her to glow.”

I whispered, “She does.”