Chapter 25

By the time I got home, I had five more messages from Leela. I stared at the notifications without opening them. She’d already decided she couldn’t look at her mother. Was she wrong? What would they talk about? Would she tell her about me?

And what would she say if she did? Leela had kept secrets from me, but I’d done the same. So what if I told her everything? Would she say “good” like I said to Rosie? Of course not. If Leela thought it was better not to know that we came from murderers and thieves, then it was far kinder that she didn’t know what I had done.

Especially since not all my dreams of the clanging cage door were nightmares.

I opened my file again and scrolled past EP’s report. Unfortunately, what followed was unhelpful: legal documents and court transcripts first, then pages upon pages of medical records from my time at the compound. None of them could tell me about the additional modifications. Only Dr. Topher knew what she’d added to her clamp of needles, and she hadn’t written this file. But I did know where to find her thoughts.

I blocked my view of the screen with one hand as I called up the hidden video site. I scrolled frantically, knowing that the still image would not be of a girl. Too afraid to find the beginning of the comments lest I catch a glimpse of that creature, I started reading in the middle of Dr. Topher and Mr. Bicks’s conversation:

L: 1-10?

I: 10

L: now?

I: 8

L: monitor and report

I: ?

But Dr. Topher didn’t answer Mr. Bicks’s “?”. She started listing a series of numbers — encoded times and dates, maybe, or altered coordinates for meeting. At least that was what Leela’s soaps, some of which had spies in them, would have me believe, but I had no way of deciphering Dr. Topher’s code. Neither, I supposed, did Gret. She might not know what Dr. Topher’s question meant, either, but in my entire life, I had only ever been asked “1-10?” for one reason.

How bad is your pain?

And Mr. Bicks answered “10.”

There was still soil on my hands. I went to the bathroom and washed it off.

The next day, I had almost made it to the squat when I rounded a corner and ran straight into Gret. She steadied me by the shoulders.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” I said meaninglessly. “Where are you going?”

“To get you.” Her voice was gruffer than usual. “It’s Luc. He’s not feeling so hot. Probably shouldn’t have another brain around, especially if you’re …”

“If I’m what?”

“Upset. About yesterday. Or the day before. Or any of the thousand other things you have to be upset about.”

She was still holding onto my shoulders. I resisted the urge to lean into her touch.

“Is Luc going to be all right?” I asked.

“Of course!” Gret said, too quickly. “Sandra and Rosie ran to the hospital. We’ve saved up a little money and Luc conned his way into a renewable prescription the last time he was there. We can pay for some medicine.”

“Medicine for what? What are Luc’s side effects, anyway?”

Gret looked around. As always, this part of town was deserted, but she still leaned in close to say, “His dad got the empath stuff right. He picks up everyone else’s signals fine. It’s his own he can’t handle. His brain just, like, forgets his legs are there most of the time — that’s why he uses the wheelchair. Usually his arms are okay. And everything more vital has been fine.”

There was a pause in which we both added the unspoken so far.

Gret raised her hands, miming explosions around her head as she continued, “But sometimes he gets all these pain signals for no reason, or he’ll start seizing, and … yeah. Stuff like that.”

None of this surprised me. Plenty of adaptationists had tried to make psychs, but the only one who’d lived long enough to get to the compound had been poor telekinetic Dorina. Brains were tricky business.

Gret rubbed her face hard. “I need to get back to him. You’re fine, though. You’re not gonna transform today.” She looked back towards the squat and ran her hands through her hair. “Fuck, I’m not what he needs right now.”

“Why does he need you with him?” I asked.

“To help him drink water. Sometimes to massage him if he gets all locked up. To hold a basin if he gets sick. To keep him from falling off the bed.” Gret listed his needs as frankly as if she were synthetic herself.

I could manage the first three tasks easily enough, and though I wasn’t strong, Luc wasn’t, either. I could probably keep him from falling. But my mind would be a lot worse for him than Gret’s.

Just one more thing for you to do nothing about.

I inhaled sharply. I not only knew how to do nothing; I knew how to be nothing. That was exactly what Luc needed.

“Let me try something,” I said, sitting down on the sidewalk.

Gret gave me a weird look, but she sat next to me. Closing my eyes, I let down the wall that allowed me to ignore my body. I searched for pain.

The first thing I noticed was that I was thirsty. I’d barely drunk any water today. Gret would be disappointed, but that wasn’t big enough, so I moved on. My scars ached as always, but not too badly. I realized as I focused on them that the last two points were exposed to the air, not hidden beneath my shorts, but I held still. This only worked if I didn’t get distracted from my task. It had taken weeks to perfect this technique, and in those early days the protection it provided fractured so easily …

Millie! Pay attention. I turned my thoughts back to my body. The scars would do, I supposed, but was I really in so little pain? Usually I hurt much more than this.

Oh! My wrist. Raw and sore from a million pinpricks. I pulled on the band, digging the metal into the last place the needle had pierced. My arm twitched. I kept pulling.

“What are you doing?” Gret cried.

“Shhh.”

I let my consciousness follow the pain into those puncture wounds. Slowly, the world melted away. My mind gave a small kick of rebellion — it didn’t want to be confined to my hurts — but I forced it into its little box, where there was no room for anything else.

I opened my eyes, dimly surprised not to see the lab. I didn’t look directly at Gret. There were a lot of things that could shatter this throbbing emptiness, and she was definitely one of them.

“I don’t know if this will work,” I said, letting go of the wristband, “and Luc can kick me out if he wants, but I think maybe I can help.”

Gret didn’t ask how or why. She just said, “Let’s go.”

I did not look left or right the rest of the way to the squat. I just watched the ground, trusting Gret to take me where we needed to be. When we arrived, Gret lingered outside, and I walked in without her. I heard a strangled moan and hurried to Luc’s room.

Luc was curled up beneath his sheets, sweating and shaking. He gasped when I sat down beside his bed in his abandoned wheelchair.

“Is this okay?” I asked him.

His eyes were wild. “No. Yes. No. It’s weird. I don’t like it. It’s weird. What is this?”

I spoke to him from the needle marks in my wrist. “It’s how I used to clear my mind in the lab. I thought maybe I could help, if my feelings hurt less than Gret’s. Is it working?”

He didn’t answer for a second, but then said, “Kind of. Yeah. I think so.”

“What do you need?” I asked. I could look at him without worrying about breaking my focus. He was synthetic, and therefore part of the pain.

“N — nothing,” Luc said, breathing shallowly. “Not right now. I just — am I on fire?” He was trying to speak carefully, but his words slurred together.

“No,” I said.

“I can’t tell. I can’t tell what’s me and what’s not.”

I yanked hard on the wristband. Luc closed his eyes.

“I think my brain’s trying to control the bodies that go with the emotions that aren’t mine. Someday it might forget to keep my body alive, but no one’s sure if or when that’ll happen. There’s no one …”

“No one to compare it to,” I said.

Luc nodded, and then a spasm struck. He looked like he was about to transform. The side of his head smacked against the wall. I cradled his skull with my palm. He drove my knuckles into the stone, but my mind was still in my wrist, so it didn’t bother me. After a moment, he rested. I didn’t move my hand.

“What are you doing?” he panted. “Why does … is there something wrong with your wrist?”

“You can feel other people’s physical pain?”

“Not usually,” he said, his voice thready. “But pain takes place in the brain, and you’re — you’re doing something. I don’t understand it.”

“I shut it down,” I said. “Focus on one thing, and just — let the rest fall away.”

“It’s weird,” he said again. “Quiet and sad.”

“I’m not sad. Not when I do this.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Am I hurting you? Do you want me to go?”

“No! No.” He raised his hand weakly to mine. “It won’t be quiet if you leave.”

“Will the medicine help?” I asked.

“A little. As long as we can pay for it,” he said bitterly. Without warning, he burst out, “Fuck him! He’s thousands of miles away and I can still feel how relieved he is that I’m not his problem anymore!”

I didn’t say anything. The sudden storm of anger passed as soon as it had come. Luc shrank into himself, looking even smaller on the bed.

“I shouldn’t yell,” he said. “The first time you ever heard me, I was yelling.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” Luc said, his unfocused eyes glazed with tears. “I can’t be mad at people for feeling things …”

He groaned, his legs jerking. His body jolted closer to the edge of the bed. I pushed him back to the middle of the mattress.

“How did you learn this?” he asked. “This — focusing thing?”

“I had to.”

If I thought about why, my concentration would break. Luc didn’t ask more; something happened that made him bite his lip until he drew blood. I kept myself hurting while I stopped him from crashing into the wall or to the floor. I let him hold my hand so hard that I thought I might have to focus on that instead of my wrist. I was made of points and edges, but I used my body to keep Luc safe.

Finally, we heard the door open, and Luc gasped at the sudden wave of emotion.

“Are they hurting you?” I asked.

“So much.”

“I’ll get the medicine.”

I met Sandra and Rosie in the hallway. Without a word, I took the crumpled white bag. Luc told me which pills I needed to help him swallow. Slowly, the spasms ceased.

“I’m not burning anymore,” he said drowsily, his words sloshing over each other. He rubbed his wrist gently. He may have thought he was rubbing mine. “You can stop now. We’re both all right.”

Chapter 26

The rest of the pack and I went to the park so Luc’s sleep would be peaceful. The sun was low on the horizon. I watched the vibrant sky as my mind slowly unfolded from my wrist. I always experienced confusion when I expanded out of my pain, which used to be a good thing. Now I just felt nauseated.

“I shouldn’t have told my story with Luc in the house,” Rosie said. “That was so stupid of me.”

“Yeah, well, I should’ve kept my big mouth shut at work,” Sandra said, throwing her arm around Rosie’s shoulders. “If I did, you wouldn’t’ve venom-sploded in the first place.”

Rosie burbled a laugh and wiped her eyes. “That’s definitely not what it’s called.”

Sandra shrugged expansively. “You know, Tremont’s an asshole, but he wasn’t all wrong. The ancients did have some weird ideas. Me and Luc have talked about it. He says he wonders if the first empath regretted adapting. Like maybe they didn’t understand how creepy it would be until after they did it. But my people?” Sandra took off her glasses and cleaned them on her shirt, her unfocused eyes roaming the park at the tired people stopping for a rest on their daily trudge home from work. “My dad said they were noble, but only when he was drunk. Me, I never could figure out a good reason to adapt this way. I think I just come from bad folks.”

“We all come from bad folks,” Rosie said. “Except maybe Millie.”

“My mother has a life sentence,” I said.

“That only matters if you trust the law,” Gret said. “You don’t know why they put her away.”

Not for anything good, according to Leela. But somehow I didn’t want Ina Peng to feel guilty, even if she should.

I lost the thread of the pack’s conversation for a few minutes, my still-muddled mind wandering. I remembered the postcards on Rosie’s wall. She knew so much about her own culture, even though she was separated from it now. The past mattered to her — and for her to know about it, it had probably mattered to her mother. Could my mother have told me about Chinese culture? Did she have Chinese artwork on her prison cell walls? Or maybe she didn’t know any more than I did. I had no idea when my family came to America, or if her own parents were living. Maybe she was the orphan.

I redirected my thoughts to the pack when I heard Rosie say, “Gret, now that I’m done with the wristband …”

“I know,” Gret said. “We’ve bought ourselves some time, but we need to get to Topher before she gets to Millie.”

Sandra asked me, “Are your friends any closer to getting answers from the video guy?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t like this,” Gret said. “We’ve barely made any progress.”

“Speak for yourself,” Rosie said.

“The extra time’s not nothing,” I said, trying to forestall an argument that I didn’t want to have. “Mr. Bicks will want to take me right after a transformation. Now he won’t know when that is.”

“How do you know that’s his plan?” Sandra asked.

“Safety,” I said grimly.

Mr. Bicks wouldn’t chance exposing himself to another transformation, another “10” on the pain scale. He’d want to make sure I would stay a girl for a good long time while he transported me to Dr. Topher. Except I was never just a girl, was I? Or just a werewolf, either. Mr. Bicks was fooling himself if he thought he could ever be safe with me.

I crossed my arms tightly. “Look, if you guys can’t fix this, I won’t —”

“We will fix it,” Gret said.

“But —”

Rosie broke in. “Losing battle, darling. Just let her drive herself insane. You can’t stop her.”

“Thanks,” Gret said sarcastically, but added, “She’s right, though.”

The determination blazing on Gret’s face was too bright to look at directly. My gaze fell on Rosie instead, who raised an eyebrow at me, then stood up.

“I’m going to get some food,” she said. “Sandra, come with me.”

Sandra started to protest, but then stopped abruptly at Rosie’s look. They left Gret and me sitting alone beneath the supplicant tree. My heartbeat was as loud as my drum had ever been.

Gret said, “Whatever the hell you did back there with Luc — thanks.”

“It’s no problem,” I mumbled.

“Mm, bullshit,” Gret said.

“I’m okay now.”

Gret shifted half an inch towards­ me. I had to stop myself from scooting away — or moving closer.

“Considering how not okay your last month has been, okay’s pretty impressive,” she said.

I snorted. “People have called synthetics a lot of things, but ‘impressive’ is new.”

“You’ve been listening to the wrong people, then.”

“The whole world?”

“Yeah, ignore them,” Gret said, half-grinning. “Stick with me instead.”

I laughed weakly after too long a pause. Gret looked away and cleared her throat.

“What Sandra said doesn’t apply to the first werewolves. It’s not the same thing.”

“It’s an armed adaptation,” I said. Maybe there was more to serpetons than I’d ever considered, but what about teeth and claws could ever help people? “We’re weapons.”

“We’re a defense. We created ourselves to defend our people. We held the perimeter. We’re protectors.”

“Is that what your family was?” I asked. “Protectors?”

She squinted at the last rays of the sun. It took her a while to answer.

“I never knew my dad,” she said finally. “He was just some guy. My mom said he was nice, and that he never found out she was pregnant. I had lots of uncles and cousins and aunts, though — some blood related, some not. That doesn’t matter much in a pack. And I had my grandpa.”

“And your mom,” I said.

Gret nodded.

“Were they unregistered?” I guessed. Unregistered armed nonstandards were sentenced along the same lines as murderers.

“A few of them,” Gret said slowly. “When the police showed up, some of us — defended.” Her hands curled into the shape of claws, but she didn’t seem to notice. “My mom pushed me out the back window and told me to run. We had a stash of supplies in a separate location if we ever needed it. I stuck around there for a while, but … none of them ever came. I was thirteen.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

For some reason, that meaningless platitude made Gret flinch. “Don’t be,” she said fiercely.

I wanted to apologize again, but I wasn’t sure what for. Gret worked her jaw for a couple seconds, then glanced down at my leg, where my shorts covered my scars.

“Luc doesn’t have marks like yours,” she said, frowning.

“Um, I —”

“I saw them in the videos,” Gret explained. “Sorry.”

I sighed. “Dr. Topher used a clamp of needles.” I pressed the heels of my hands together and bent my fingers, demonstrating the jaw-like motion of the clamp.

“Like she was biting you,” Gret said, her lip curling.

“She said all werewolf children are bitten by the adults of their pack.”

“That’s so stupid,” Gret said. “A bunch of needles could never take the place of a real growth nip. And we don’t leave scars.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked, unable to stop the words from escaping my mouth.

Gret shrugged, then nodded. “But then you can transform, so.”

I waited for her to continue, but apparently that was all the explanation Gret thought was necessary. I remembered the last time Dr. Topher closed her clamp on me, just days before she fled. Someday you’ll be so much better at this than I am, marvel, she told me. Delusional. By that point, it was obvious my body would never be able to bear children — and what a relief that was.

“Do you think any of our parents — the synthetics’ parents, I mean — are in prison with the adaptationists?” I asked.

Gret looked stricken. “I never thought of that.” As if to herself, she added, “Standards and nonstandards go to different prisons.”

“Synthetics’ parents are standard,” I reminded her.

“Right. Of course.” Gret stood abruptly. “One thing at a time. Wanna run an errand with me?”

I didn’t even think about saying no. It took me two blocks to ask where we were going.

“To talk to Dr. Joyan,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know how long Luc’s gonna stay sick. We need a raise.”

I managed to avoid asking what makes you think she’ll give you one? For someone whose entire work depended on nonstandards, Dr. Joyan certainly hadn’t leapt to their — our — defense when Mr. Tremont started talking about “certain contingents.” Yet as awful as Mr. Tremont was, I also couldn’t pretend I loved the fact that Dr. Joyan lied to her donors. The only reason every single employee of Equilibrium Pharmaceuticals hadn’t been locked up with the adaptationists was the fact that the adaptationists had lied on their grant applications.

Then again, Gret was right: what standard would fund a project in which nonstandards were the heroes?

My wristband punched its needle through my skin. Gret reached down and lifted my arm. She let me go when the light turned green.

“Rosie thinks she can get it off,” Gret said. “The real results come to her computer now, but I don’t need them.”

“How can you tell?”

She gestured vaguely, her face scrunching with frustration. After a second, she gave up.

“I can’t describe it in words. Lots of werewolf stuff is like that. Language came before us. It didn’t know we were coming. And we didn’t add to it, because we didn’t have to. Not with each other. We just knew.”

Gret led me to a street of relatively well-kept houses. There was a tiny tricycle in front of one of them. The sky was almost dark now, and the owner of the tricycle was probably safe in bed.

We walked up to the front door of a house in the middle of the row. Gret knocked while I hovered behind her. Dr. Joyan appeared. At the greenhouse, she had been all smiles, but now she frowned.

“Gret. Millie. To what do I owe the visit?” she asked.

“I need to talk to you,” Gret said. “It’s kind of serious.”

“I actually need to speak with you, too, Gret,” Dr. Joyan said. “Why don’t you come in?”

Trust and hope were plain on Gret’s face, but I couldn’t suppress my worry as we walked into the little house. Dr. Joyan pointed us both to a couch. Unsurprisingly, every available surface in the room was covered with potted plants. The Life Gardens only housed practical food, but Dr. Joyan’s home was filled with beautiful flowers.

Dr. Joyan sat down in a rocking chair facing us. When she looked up at Gret, I knew what she was about to do.

“I’m afraid I have to let you and your friends go,” Dr. Joyan said.

I was close enough to feel Gret’s breathing stop and the painful deliberateness with which it started again. She said nothing.

“It’s not forever,” Dr. Joyan said. “Hopefully it will only be for a few weeks, a month at most. But you cannot show up for work on Monday.”

Gret cleared her throat twice before she could speak. “Why?”

Dr. Joyan folded her hands in her lap, holding herself carefully, like the nurses at the compound when they told us someone had died.

“Mr. Tremont was not pleased yesterday,” she said. “He is watching my workers, looking at my books … I can’t give him an excuse to back out. It will just be until I get the funding, Gret, I promise.”

I expected Gret to argue her way out of this the way she’d argued her way into my life, but she just sat there, staring at a deep red flower on the table between us and Dr. Joyan. Beside the flower were newer, shinier versions of the science books in Luc’s nightstand.

I said, “Only Rosie’s under seventeen. Seventeen-year-olds are allowed to work full time.”

“If they have signed consent from their parents or guardians,” Dr. Joyan said.

Gret said, “I can get consent.”

“If by that, you mean ‘forge,’ please don’t,” Dr. Joyan said, sounding tired. “I need to decrease my illegal activity for this funding, not increase it.”

Gret jolted like Dr. Joyan had slapped her. Unlike me, she wasn’t used to hearing herself reduced to illegal activity.

“I didn’t keep records of any of you,” Dr. Joyan said. Her eyelid twitched so hard I could see it from the couch. “I told Mr. Tremont I didn’t bother with the volunteers.”

“You never recorded us as your employees?” Gret said, shaking her head as though to clear it. Everyone talked about the stages of grief, but there were stages of betrayal, too. One of them was a confusion so intense you feared you were going insane.

“Gret, I’ve known you for three years. In that time you’ve told me practically nothing about yourself, but I have gathered that you and your friends would benefit from anonymity,” Dr. Joyan said.

“I’ve told you things!” Gret said. “You know me!”

Dr. Joyan pinched the bridge of her nose. “Gret, I thought you understood how important this man is.”

“I do!” Gret cried. “I didn’t even say anything when he was a being a dick to my friends, because I was thinking about you!”

“About the work,” Dr. Joyan corrected quietly. “This isn’t about me. It’s about the Life Gardens.”

Gret swiped furiously at her eyes. “I’ve done everything you ever told me to. I’ve worked so hard!”

“And now I’m telling you to step aside,” Dr. Joyan said. “We must do everything in our power to make sure the Life Gardens succeed.”

“That can’t be what the Gardens need from me,” Gret said. “They can’t need me to quit.”

Dr. Joyan hunched over. “This is what the people of the desert need from you.”

“My friends are the people of the desert.”

“Don’t do that,” Dr. Joyan said. “I can’t save everyone. No one can.”

She wasn’t wrong. During the wars and after, there had always been people who tried to help, who’d made things better, if only by a little bit. If there hadn’t been, probably none of us would still be here. Those people couldn’t be blamed for the ones who slipped through their fingers.

But for people like me – and, I saw now, people like Gret – somehow “I can’t save everyone” always seemed to mean “I can’t save you.”

“If Mr. Tremont gives you the money, but wants to keep monitoring your finances after he does, will you really hire them back?” I asked.

“He won’t stay in the desert,” Dr. Joyan said.

“That’s not an answer,” I said.

“I will hire everyone back as soon as I can!”

“As soon as you can,” Gret repeated mechanically. “But if you never can, then you never will? Even though we gave you our blood?”

Dr. Joyan didn’t speak. Gret stood up and left without another word, and I followed after her. She made it two houses before tears began falling from her eyes. By the end of the road, rough sobs tore out of her throat. She sank onto the curb, and I sat next to her.

“How am I gonna tell them?” she cried. “She knows we need these jobs. We don’t have anything else.”

Casting around for an idea, I asked, “What did you do before you found her?”

“Stole a lot. Gambled. My grandpa taught me how to play cards. But I can’t win enough for everyone, not with Luc sick …” Gret moaned, making no effort to stop her tears. “I was sure she would give us the raise. She’d have nothing if it weren’t for nonstandards willing to take a risk. Does she think she can replace us with registered people? They have more to lose. She needs people like us.”

I remained quiet. Even when standards bet on nonstandards, they never seemed to find it hard to cut their losses. Dr. Topher hadn’t taken me with her before the raids, after all. She got herself safe first.

Gret tilted her head back to stare at the sky. “How could she do this to me?”

How many times had I whispered those words, or when I couldn’t speak, screamed them in my mind? I had nothing to offer Gret. Nothing but myself.

“I know what it’s like,” I said.

Gret looked down at my leg. “I already knew, too. But I thought she’d be different.” She got up, her tears spent. “I’ll take you home.”

That night, I dreamed of the lab from the moment I closed my eyes until the moment I opened them again. I writhed on that table as though I had never left.

Chapter 27

The next day, I wandered around town, my head full. I still had not answered Leela’s messages. I wanted to go to the squat, but I didn’t know if my presence would harm Luc now that I was no longer locked up in my pain. I could always do it again, but I wasn’t in a hurry to. That surprised me, but not as much as my realization halfway through the morning that I had not thought of Dr. Topher – or my plan for her – in hours.

I tried to berate myself for losing focus on the only good thing I could do, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was too busy thinking about Luc, and the pack’s lost jobs, and my mother. I had never had so many distractions in my life.

Or was this what it was like to have a life?

As I passed the grocery store, I heard someone shout my name. Rosie waved at me from the park across the street. I crossed over to join her, and we retreated together to the park’s lone bench behind a large supplicant tree. She opened her laptop on her brightly colored dress.

“How’s Luc?” I asked.

“Heavily medicated,” she said. “We keep hoping that when the meds wear off, his brain will have stopped its nonsense, but …”

“How long does this usually last?”

“Three days. A month. Who knows? We only have money for a few more days of meds, though. Not a good time to get fired. Dr. Joyan better be glad I wasn’t there when she broke the news.” I must have looked alarmed, because Rosie added primly, “I would have given her a piece of my mind, Millie. I’m not talking about murder.”

“Uh, right. Why does the donor have to be Mr. Tremont?”

“His grandparents were from the desert or something. He likes to think he’s ‘giving back.’ But Gret thinks Dr. Joyan should expand her education efforts to the people of the desert themselves. We can already produce enough for small community greenhouses, and then after we’ve established those, we could try to help Dr. Joyan get large-scale funding some other way.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think nonstandards should be in charge of the whole thing,” Rosie answered promptly. “I bet we would have come up with this technology ages ago if biology programs actually accepted us. Dr. Joyan can work in her lab, but if it’s going to be our cells in the plants, then we should be the ones handling the donors — biological and financial — and making sure nonstandards actually benefit from this whole thing.”

I blinked. Rosie seemed hell-bent on ensuring that every aspect of my first impression of her was wrong.

“What does Gret have to say about all that?” I asked.

Rosie grimaced. “That I’m right, but also that I’m a naive rich kid if I think it would ever actually work.”

“Her idea isn’t much less idealistic.”

“That’s what I said.” Rosie sighed dramatically. “What can I say, Millie? You fell in with a group of useless dreamers.”

Useless. That was what I had always thought about dreaming. But that word didn’t fit the pack.

 “I should probably get to the squat for Gret,” I said.

“She’s not home,” Rosie said. “She went out to find some card games. She’s very good, even if it is an unsavory skill.”

I wondered if all rich fifteen-year-olds used words like unsavory in conversation. “What would you call hacking?”

“An art form. I’ve been in the Subnconscious all day, trying to see if anyone can help us.”

“Any luck?”

She shook her head. “It’s hard when all you need is money. Luc and I both stole what we thought was a lot, but we spent it all the last time he had a long episode. Speaking of Luc, I told him I was trying to find a way to remove your wristband, which would mean losing the tracker. He got very quiet.” Rosie looked at me steadily. “Why would Luc not want to get rid of the tracker, Millie?”

Sweat prickled down my spine. “I don’t know.”

Rosie smoothed her skirt. “Gret is afraid you lack urgency in solving your Topher problem.”

“A lot of other things have come up.”

Rosie inclined her head. “True. Well, I have to crack a whole lot of defenses to get the band off. They really don’t want you to ever remove it. There’s like five different levels of authorization. Breaking through them will take more time. And what with Luc …”

“He’s the priority,” I agreed.

There had to be a way to get the band off by force, but that would send an alert to Rosie’s computer. Maybe when the time came, that wouldn’t matter.

If the time came.

Rosie looked up sharply. Music — the most beautiful music in the world — wove its way through the supplicant trees and filled my ears, my brain, my entire body. A voice was singing. It wasn’t human — it had to be a god, a lost spirit come back to earth to save us all …

I leaned forward, aching. The voice needed help. It couldn’t save us alone. I’ll help, I thought. I won’t do nothing this time. But how?

The answer came, though the voice formed no words. Money. Of course. No one could do anything without money. But I had none! I leapt to my feet, ready to steal from the first person I saw, but everyone in the park was already walking towards the voice, emptying their pockets.

The voice kept pleading, and with every note, my heart ripped apart like my drum. This poor, sweet spirit …

The voice stopped. I leaned against the tree, panting. Rosie, who had also sprung to her feet, clutched at me with tears in her eyes. Suddenly, she gasped and peered around the tree. I followed her gaze just in time to see Sandra sprinting across the street, a bag swinging from her hand.

Rosie and I ran past other stunned park-goers and all the way back to the squat, but Sandra wasn’t there. Rosie darted out the front door again, beckoning me to follow her.

“If Gret comes back, don’t tell her,” she said. “Sandra probably went to the hospital to buy meds for Luc. I’m going to catch up with her.”

“How bad is this?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone in the park will realize they were ripped off, not unless they really lost a whole bunch of money, and who has that here? They’ll come up with a good reason for why their wallets are lost. Or if they can’t, they’ll think they’ve been pickpocketed. Sandra says people will rationalize anything. The only reason we remember what she did is because we saw her and figured it out. That gave us something to hold on to. Otherwise, the memory would just disappear.” She shivered slightly. “Wait here until I get back, unless Luc needs to be alone.”

She ran off, skirt flapping around her legs. I stepped into the squat, quiet but not empty. There was no point in avoiding Luc. I knocked on his door, and he called out for me to enter. He was curled up on his bed with his face to the wall.

“I’m all right,” he said preemptively. “Come sit down.”

I perched awkwardly on the edge of the wheelchair. There was a gap in the boards of Luc’s window, and a sliver of sunlight illuminated the rise and fall of his body as he breathed.

“Forgive me for not looking at you,” he said. Medication had loosened the tight hold he kept on his voice, which lilted like he was reciting a poem. “I’m better than yesterday, but I can’t do faces right now. Faces make everything more intense.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Care to tell me what’s going on?” he asked. When I didn’t answer, he continued, “Let me see. Sandra is avoiding me, and Rosie just left as soon as she came back. I think I know what that means. So do you, apparently, from that lovely spike of guilt we both just felt.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing I’m not already feeling,” he said, his voice harsh. “If Sandra keeps using her adaptation, she can go blind because of me.”

My chest tightened.

“Oh, yes. That particular side effect only progresses when the adaptation is used. Being with the pack was supposed to keep her from needing it, but of course, we synthetics have a way of complicating things. Not that I can do anything about it. I don’t know how to get in touch with my father anymore. If I could, I could blackmail my way back into his home as easily as I’d blackmailed my way out of it. The pack would be able to get by a lot longer without me.”

“Luc, the pack wouldn’t want you to go back to your father!” I cried. “They’re your friends. They couldn’t bear it if your adaptationist hurt you again —” My voice died.

“Fascinating,” Luc said with chilling mildness. “You’re going to have to deal with that eventually.”

I kept my mouth shut.

Luc sank deeper into the bed. “I know she wasn’t your parent, but did you think Dr. Topher loved you before — before it started?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

“Early childhood bonding is an important part of brain development,” Luc said hollowly. “Empaths know that better than most. I used to think my father was my best friend.” He paused, then said, “Ouch. What’s that about?”

“Your father didn’t kill anyone,” I blurted out. We both flinched. “I’m sorry. That isn’t fair, it’s just –”

“No. You’re right. He didn’t. Not yet, anyway.” Luc curled up tighter. “Maybe it made him better at it, that I was more to him than just a subject. More careful or something. But he didn’t … he never thought how I would …” He cleared his throat harshly. “I hope my father threatened my adaptation donors’ families. I can’t imagine real empaths doing this willingly. I don’t want to imagine that.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Thank you, Millie,” Luc said after a minute of uneasy silence.

“For what?”

“For yesterday. For what you did when you looked after me,” he said. “Even though it worries me.”

I pushed the wheelchair back a little. “You have enough to worry about.”

“I’m allowed to worry about you, too,” he said, so forcefully that we both shuddered. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself to feel better.”

He had it all wrong. “I wasn’t trying to feel better. I was trying to feel less. And I don’t hurt myself. I find something that already hurts.”

“Splitting hairs,” he said.

I folded my arms. Luc didn’t understand.

“I know you think I don’t understand,” he said.

“Hey!”

“Oh, was that your exact thought? Sorry. That happens sometimes. Still not a mind reader.”

“Sure.”

I was rewarded by a long exhale that might have been a laugh. When Luc spoke, though, he was dead serious.

“There has to be something better than pain.”

“Not in the lab.”

The gentleness returned to Luc’s voice. “Millie, we’re not in the lab anymore.”

Leela had said almost the same thing when she’d tried to talk to me about forgetting. Maybe it doesn’t help anymore? I hadn’t understood her then. I wasn’t sure I did now, either, but something inside of me wanted to.

A bird landed on the windowsill, its tiny brown body visible through the gaps in the boards. It sang a few trembling notes before flying away, its delicate wings flashing. Of all the adaptations in the world, not one human had ever been capable of flight.

“Do you think we ever tried?” I said quietly. I knew Luc would know what I meant.

“We must have,” he said. “It would have been the first thing on my list.”

I could hear the exhaustion in his voice. When he didn’t protest against my concern, I knew it was time to go.

“Feel better,” I said.

Luc mumbled, “Be careful.”

The rest of the pack had still not returned. I knew Gret would want to see me, but I didn’t want my presence to keep Luc awake, especially since he would surely be in for an unpleasant time when Sandra came back. I left a note for Gret in the kitchen, telling her she could meet me back in the park.

My head throbbed as I made my way through the maze of alleys. Each unwanted thought in my mind pounded against my skull: doum taka taka doum. I staggered, squinting against the overbright sun. The streets were too noisy, the day too warm. Names reverberated in my brain. They crashed into each other, all of them thumping with a different rhythm. Mr. Bicks. Gret. Dr. Topher …

Was there a way to choose which song I wanted to hear? There was no melody that was not filled with dissonance, no beat that kept perfect time. But some songs were sweeter than others.

I rounded the corner onto the main road. Through the haze of my headache, I saw flashy Mr. Tremont crossing the street in front of me. My eyes focused on his sunburned neck.

All of the music stopped. The only beat I heard was the pumping of blood and the echo of a clanging silver door.

I waited until Mr. Tremont reached the other side of the street. Then I followed him.

I kept my distance as he walked along, stopping when he stopped. He surveyed his surroundings with distaste. At one point, he turned, and I hurried to the edge of the curb, where I pretended to cross the road in the opposite direction. I hoped he could not sense the drumbeat driving me forward. Words pounded in time to the rhythm: Do something.

He kept walking. Once again, I followed.

The desert continued its onslaught against my senses. I felt every fleck of dust on my skin. I walked a little faster, closing some of the distance between Mr. Tremont and me. My eyes started to water. I’d forgotten I needed to blink.

Do something.

We passed the abandoned tricycle on Dr. Joyan’s street. I knew what a tricycle was because I once had one. We rode tricycles in the nursery. Sometimes we would race.

Early childhood bonding is an important part of brain development.

I must have loved them. Just not enough to ask if they were dead.

“Hey!”

I jumped. Mr. Tremont had doubled back and was advancing on me.

“Oh, don’t run away now,” he said. “Not after you’ve been following me for ten minutes. You’re one of those kids, right? Joyan’s volunteers?”

“I — I —”

Do something, I thought feebly.

“Why are you tailing me?” Mr. Tremont demanded. “I thought you and your gang wanted nothing to do with me. That fat little Mexican made that pretty clear.”

My shoulders tensed. “You insulted her friends!”

Tremont narrowed his eyes, looming over me. “Did no one ever tell you creatures to respect your elders?”

“Carl? Millie?” a voice said. “What’s going on?”

Dr. Joyan hurried up to us. She nervously tugged on one of her braids as Tremont jabbed an accusatory finger at me.

“One of your child laborers was following me,” he said.

“I’m sure she was just coming to talk to me,” she said swiftly. “I’m sorry, Millie, but as you can see, I have a meeting with Mr. Tremont, so now is really not a good time —”

“No, it’s fine, Dara,” Tremont said, his eyes flashing. “I’ll listen to what young Millie has to say.”

Without warning, he reached out to grab me. My hands shot up to ward off his touch.

The contact never came. Tremont and Dr. Joyan gasped and drew back, repelled by the dark, coarse hair that covered my palms.