Chapter 35

We ran through the graves of the trees. The full moon spilled its light over the opalescent monuments, illuminating the eons of change. Though the trees were not what they had been born to be, they had not lost their beauty.

I saw and understood it all. When Gret howled, I answered. Our padded feet barely made a sound as we bounded over rocks and dirt. I couldn’t run as fast or as far as Gret, but she didn’t hurry me when I stopped to rest. My fur was patchy over my scars, new on old. Gret licked them gently.

The past did not disappear, and neither did the uncertain future, but for this one night, I only cared about the present. The stone trees, the moon, and the whole broken and beautiful world existed just for Gret and me. Every change in the universe, from the first adaptation of matter from nothing to something, had led us to this moment. Stasis? An illusion. The world had never been still.

Despite my best efforts, I had never been still, either. I had moved all this time towards pain and death, but also towards their opposite. I had moved towards Gret.

We ran until the moon hid behind the mountains and the sun revealed the colors of the trees. We would have kept going, but my body began to fracture again. The pain returned. Some changes could not be unmade.

Gret changed with me.

The transformation stalled. My outline was too blurry, my body amorphous. I lost the way back to my other form. Before I could panic, Gret reached out and pulled me close. I screamed against her shoulder, and the transformation resumed. Soon I was nearly a girl again.

I didn’t want to scream anymore, so I kissed Gret instead. When her lips parted, I threw all my love and beastliness at her. She gave all of hers back.

As the last changes finished, Gret revealed a secret kept from me my whole life: bodies were not just made for pain. With her hands and her mouth, she showed me new ways to feel. She did not treat me like I was fragile.

Language returned to me. I laughed aloud with the revelation that my own Age of Stasis had come to an end in the most fitting way possible: with exstasis.

Ecstasy.  

We lay against a wide tree stump and didn’t speak for a long time. I could scarcely imagine how big the tree must have been when it was alive, but only two feet of height remained, making it one of the tallest stumps left in the Forest. Red, orange, and gold swirls of stone spiraled behind Gret’s head.

All around us, the Forest shimmered in the dawn. Beneath the triumphant blue sky, spiky purple wildflowers pushed through cracks in the earth. A speckled lizard scurried out from a hollow in the tree stump, just as rodents and birds must have done when the tree was tall and living.

Gret ran her fingers over my ribcage, then pulled my legs across hers and leaned her cheek against my hair. I did not turn away from either her nakedness or mine as I relived the pleasure I had given her. Who would have guessed that was something I could do? I kissed Gret’s neck again, and I was so close to her that I could hear when her lips parted in a smile.

Gret was the first one to break the silence. Quietly, she said, “We didn’t hear the alarm at first. Good thing Rosie never goes long without looking at her laptop. When she saw the cuff was disabled, I didn’t know what to do. It was Luc’s idea to check the garage, and that’s when I smelled the blood. I nearly lost my damn mind until I realized it led somewhere.”

She tilted my head back so she could look at me. I ran my tongue over the inside of my lip. The cut had healed in the transformation.

“Glad that worked,” I said.

Gret kissed me fiercely.

“I knew it! I knew you did it on purpose. The others didn’t think so. They thought you wanted to take her on alone.”

“I thought I had to,” I admitted. “But then she was there and I thought about you and … I don’t know. I just wanted you to be able to find me afterwards.”

“There almost wasn’t an afterwards,” Gret whispered. I could hear the fear of the previous day still trapped in her lungs. It would take her a long time to exhale it all.

“There is now,” I assured her.

“How did all of this even happen?”

I relayed the events of the previous day as clearly as I could. Gret was silent after I finished.

“You’re wondering why I didn’t shoot her,” I guessed.

“That was your plan,” Gret said.

Not really. My plan was to tear her body apart with mine. But when it came down to it …

“I didn’t close the clamp. Her arm got in the middle of it while we were fighting, but I didn’t inject her. Don’t get me wrong — I was ready to beat her until she died.” My voice was more level than it should have been. “But I couldn’t do what she did to me. Not knowingly, at least.”

I explained it all: what Dr. Topher had made me, what I had done to Mr. Bicks. Gret’s breathing was steady behind me.

“I’d almost forgiven myself for biting him, but then I figured out that the adaptation she gave me is … to be an adaptationist. I had to end it. Except when I had the chance to change Dr. Topher — it’s like suddenly she wasn’t Dr. Topher anymore. She was just a human body, and carrying out the experiment was … impossible.”

“Not for her.”

“No. As soon as she injected me, I knew she’d killed me, and then I just … didn’t want murder to be the last thing I ever did. I made her handcuff herself so she’d be ready for you when you came.”

“You were that sure I could follow your blood?”

“Not at first. But after she injected me, I guess I just stopped doubting.” I ran my fingers over the bristly sides of Gret’s head, then let my hands drop. “Just because I didn’t kill her doesn’t mean I’m not a murderer.”

“Bicks had the same wounds you did,” Gret said. “Topher injected him, too. She killed him.”

“She experimented on him because I’d changed him already.”

“Millie —”

I held up my hand. “I bit him on purpose, and because of that, he died. I wasn’t protecting anyone. I bit him because I knew he was working with Dr. Topher, and I hated him for it.”

“But you wouldn’t have if you’d known what it would do.”

“No.”

“Listen, Millie, not wanting to hurt people is a good goal and I’m not gonna argue with it, but I’m also not gonna be mad at you for biting the guy who sold you out,” Gret said.

“What kind of monster am I? I always thought I’d die if I killed someone,” I said helplessly. “But I don’t want to die.”

Gret kissed my left wrist, then the right. They were covered in silver burns and needle marks, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“Remember that tarantula?” she asked.

“What?”

“After the thunderstorm. The tarantula you rescued from the puddle. Everyone else was grossed out, but you saved it. That was when I knew I was totally screwed.”

She’d lost me. “Why?”

Gret gave me an impatient look. “Because I was falling for you!”

Whatever my face did made Gret laugh.

“Don’t pretend you weren’t pissed when you figured out you liked me, too,” she said, holding me tighter. “Which was when, by the way?”

“Day one,” I mumbled into her shoulder.

“Bullshit. You hated me.”

“You were scary. For a lot of reasons. Including the fact that I didn’t hate you.” I smiled at the words that popped into my mind, and a frisson of fear and joy shot through me as I spoke them aloud. “How was a gay werewolf teen supposed to resist?”

Gret was speechless for a moment. Finally, she said, “Well … thanks.” She pressed her smile into my hair. “Anyway, what I’m trying to say is you’re the kind of monster I want to keep around.”

We lapsed back into silence, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. How could Gret keep me around now?

“Millie, I need to say — I’m really sorry. About the stuff I didn’t tell you about my pack.”

I nodded slowly. “I’m not saying it’s not a big deal, but I don’t want to be mad at you. Just please don’t keep anything else —”

“I won’t. Ever,” Gret said. “I always promised I’d never be like them. Not just whoever worked with Topher, but the rest of the pack who kept the traitor around. I get not giving up another nonstandard to the law, but why’d they have to stay with us? We should’ve kicked them out. But they probably just said it was in the past. Can’t do anything about it now, so let’s just forget it. That’s the kind of shit I told myself when I met you. I mean, you were right: at first, I just wanted to help you so I could feel better, but then you were there and you were real and it was – more than that. From the second I met you, Millie, it was more than that. So I pretended what my pack did didn’t matter anymore, so I didn’t have to tell you. But I was just being a coward.”

I recognized that logic. Even now, a part of me believed I was a coward for not killing Dr. Topher and for not hating myself enough for killing Mr. Bicks.

“Our makers were adults when they screwed us up,” I said. “At least we’re figuring out their mistakes a lot sooner than they did.”

Gret heaved a sigh that felt like it came from the center of the earth. “That’s why I cared so much about the Life Gardens. My family used our adaptation all wrong. I wanted to set it right. The Life Gardens are still a great idea, even if Dr. Joyan is …”

“Weak,” I supplied. We both knew there were worse things for a person to be, cold comfort though that was.

“Adaptations are about survival — survival of the species,” Gret said. “It could have been beautiful.”

I looked around at the desert. Nothing had gone according to plan, but that just meant I had to come up with a different one, with different risks. It was easier to bet on weakness, but if I kept doing that, how would anyone ever be strong?

“Where’s the rest of the pack?” I asked.

“Back at the tents,” Gret said. “No one was gonna stay behind on this one.”

“I think I have an idea.”

Gret listened carefully. She pointed out my naive assumptions, and we revised them together. Eventually, we had a course of action.

“I like it,” Gret said. “I have no idea if it’ll work, but I like it.”

We held our breath for a moment, but the time had come, and we both knew it.

“I don’t know where we are,” I said. “Do you know the way back?”

Gret pulled me to my feet.

Every step we took brought us closer to the real world, where everything could go wrong again. I pressed myself against Gret’s side as we walked. When I began to tremble, she wrapped her arm around me, and I realized that she was trembling, too.

After we’d walked a little while, I began to cough. The thin air curdled around me.

“What is that?” I asked.

“The dead man,” Gret said. “You can smell him from here?”

My eyes watering, I nodded.

Gret’s eyes flicked down to my leg, and she murmured, “Wonder what else you can do now.”

The scars on my thigh looked different. Rough knots of flesh had replaced the swollen pinpricks. I ran my hands over the ridges. They were fully healed.

“Did I hurt you?” Gret asked.

“I asked you to,” I answered.

As we moved closer to Dr. Topher’s camp, I held my hair over my face to filter the stench of Mr. Bicks’s corpse. Once again, I didn’t see the camouflaged tents until we were almost on top of them. Rosie’s car was parked next to Dr. Topher’s, which was covered with a speckled tarp.

“Wait here,” Gret said.

I sat down on a stone stump and ran my hands over its whorls as Gret ran to Rosie’s car. She disappeared into the backseat, then reemerged wearing her black tank top and buttoning her jeans. She jogged back over to me and thrust an armful of clothes at my chest.

“They’re Luc’s,” she said.

I dressed and said, “So everyone’s here? Is Luc …?”

“He insisted.”

“How’s he feeling?”

“Not great. That’s probably why he insisted,” Gret said. She gave me a crooked smile. “I bet our pack enjoyed freaking Topher out all night.”

Our pack.

Gret kissed the side of my head. “You ready?”

I put my hand in Gret’s.

“Let’s go.”

Chapter 36

Dr. Topher’s tent was the perfect size for a small pack of nonstandards to restrain an adaptationist. Sandra and Rosie threw their arms around me as soon as I entered. Wild laughter bubbled up from behind them, and I looked over Rosie’s shoulder at Luc, who grinned helplessly.

When Rosie let me go, a hush swept over the tent. There on the ground, sitting on a state-of-the-art sleeping bag, was Dr. Topher. Her chin rested on her knees. No one had removed her handcuffs.

“Did it work?” she whispered.

The pack looked at me. From their expressions, I knew that I was not the only one who could kill Dr. Topher, but I had a smaller request.

“Could someone blindfold her with something?” My voice only shook a little. “I don’t want her to look at me.”

Sandra snatched a shirt from the open duffel next to Dr. Topher’s sleeping bag. She twirled it by the sleeves and tied it around Dr. Topher’s head, taking care to twist her hair into the knot.

“Want me to gag her, too?” she asked, brandishing a pair of socks.

I considered. “No, thanks. She might have to answer questions. But she shouldn’t talk if we don’t tell her to.”

Dr. Topher’s mouth twisted, but she said nothing. I noticed a burnt hole in her sleeping bag near her feet and glanced at Rosie.

“I didn’t burn her,” Rosie said. “She was just talking too much. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” I said. “But weren’t you worried —”

“She’d already recognized me. She knew my father.” Rosie’s jaw twitched. “Apparently she’s kept herself up-to-date on the goings-on of her would-be successors. And the things that stopped them.”

My heart dropped. This complicated matters.

“Can you watch her?” I said to Gret. “The rest of you, let’s talk outside.”

I led the others away from the tents. It was strange seeing them outside their Supplicants Grove haunts, but somehow they seemed at home in this dead-living forest. Their eyes were wilder after their sleepless night. I explained to them what I wanted to do.

“Are you sure?” Rosie asked, her eyes wide.

“Yes, but you can’t be exposed, Rosie. If you’re afraid she’ll reveal you —”

“I can make her forget,” Sandra said.

She stood behind Luc, her wrists resting on the handlebars of his wheelchair. When she looked up, she didn’t quite meet my eye. At first I thought she was avoiding my gaze, but then I realized that, even with only a few feet of distance between us, she couldn’t discern the details of my face well enough to make perfect eye contact.

“No,” I said.

Sandra started to argue, but Rosie interrupted. “I won’t let you, darling, although I have to admit that I’d rather not — I would prefer if …” She plucked at her necklace. In a small voice, she said, “I’m scared.”

“I don’t think you have to worry,” Luc said, fixing his red-rimmed eyes on Rosie. The control over his speech had completely vanished; his voice was loud and frantic. “Last night, Dr. Topher said that she’s dedicated her life to nonstandard liberation. Even Dad didn’t fool himself that much, and I thought he was the king of self-deception.” He raised his eyes to me and I tried not to shudder. “Millie, I told her exactly how contemptible you think she is.”

Contemptible. I liked that. Contempt was fuller and richer than hatred. A snarling smile spread over Luc’s face.

“She’s scared of us, but she also wants scary nonstandards on the loose,” he said. “She thinks that’s how the world should be. But there’s something else. We went through her stuff, and we found lotsof vials and needles. She’s been working hard.”

My heartbeat rattled my ribcage. “Are there more subjects?”

“I asked her. She said no. I think she was telling the truth,” Luc said.

I had to believe she was. I looked at Rosie again. Her dress was rumpled. There was a raw spot on her lip from her venom.

“It’s still a risk,” I said. “The whole plan is, especially for you. People will start paying more attention to all of us.”

Rosie shrugged unconvincingly. “I’m a hacker. I’m better behind the scenes, anyway.”

“You shouldn’t have to hide.”

“Millie, I did kill a man. I am willing to accept some consequences. It’s a good plan. Just get on with it.”

I looked around at the pack, memorizing their faces. They stared back at me with an equal hunger, an equal love.

“Everybody ready?” I asked.

They nodded. We went back into the tent, where Gret had taken Dr. Topher’s blindfold off and laid out the syringes in a neat circle around her, needles pointed inward. Dr. Topher’s manufactured face was completely bloodless.

“She thinks you’re going to stick her with those,” Luc informed Gret.

“Don’t know where she got that idea,” Gret said. Her teeth gleamed as she grinned.

“There’s our Gret,” Sandra said, light dancing in her unfocused eyes.

“Gret,” Dr. Topher said, her voice hoarse. “So that is you.”

Gret’s grin died.

“I was very glad to hear that you got away, dear. It would have been such a shame if your whole pack had been imprisoned, when only a few of them aided me,” Dr. Topher said.

Gret’s breath whooshed like she’d been punched in the chest. She spun around, trying to conceal her reaction. A few? Gret had thought it was only one. At this point, it didn’t matter much to me how many members of Gret’s pack had betrayed me. The result was still the same. For Gret, though —

Dr. Topher raised her eyebrows. “Did you not know, dear, who helped me make our Millie?”

Gret squared her shoulders, readying for the blow. Behind her, Luc shook his head frantically.

“Sandra!” I said sharply.

Sandra swooped down and stuffed the socks into Dr. Topher’s mouth, then secured the gag with the shirt. Dr. Topher choked. I waited until Sandra fashioned another blindfold before stepping carefully past the needles and taking Gret’s hand. I held it tightly until the fur on her palm receded.

“When you decide it’s time to know, she won’t be the one to tell you,” I said. “We’ll find out another way.”

“Thank you,” Gret whispered.

I kissed her and turned back to the pack.

“Sandra, teach me how to drive,” I said.

Sandra offered to take Luc along for the ride, but he just glared. I pulled her away before she could argue. It wasn’t for us to decide if he was enjoying Dr. Topher’s fear too much.

Sandra dragged the tarp off of Dr. Topher’s car and we both climbed in. I tried to ignore Dr. Topher’s scent — and Mr. Bicks’s — as Sandra showed me how to turn the car on and drive out of the Petrified Forest. Finding the path between the logs and tree stumps took all of my concentration. We jolted silently until we reached the road.

“We weren’t even that far in,” I said, surprised. It had seemed much longer when I was with Dr. Topher.

“Good thing,” Sandra said. “Your trail was getting pretty faint. We had to keep stopping for Gret to make sure it was still there. A little longer and she would’ve lost you.”

My hands began to shake. Delayed shock. I’d felt this plenty of times. I pulled over to the side of the road and put my head down on the steering wheel. Sandra rubbed my back.

“I don’t want Dr. Topher imprisoned with my mom,” I blurted out.

“Make it one of your conditions,” Sandra said. “Seiren trick: you gotta convince yourself you can get what you want before you can convince anyone else.”

“Dr. Topher’s always been pretty good at that,” I mumbled into the steering wheel.

“Then good thing she’s gagged,” Sandra said. “You got her beat, Millie. No matter what happens to us next, she’s going down.”

She kept her hand on my back until my breathing was even. When I was able to look up, I said, “If any of this works, I’ll get you a new pair of glasses.”

Sandra’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “If they make them strong enough,” she said. It was clear from her voice that she doubted it.

“Did your father …?”

“Blind as a mole. He sang way too much for stuff he shouldn’t’ve. ’Specially when he was drinking. Which towards the end was basically always.” Sandra was silent for a moment. “Before the pack, I used to make people forget me all the time. I’d get into fights, and then panic, and then — poof. They wouldn’t even know I existed or why they had a bloody nose. Except the more I did it, the less I could see. I wish — I wish my dad had taught me better.”

“Kids should understand their adaptations,” I said quietly. Mr. Bicks’s mangled corpse flashed in my mind. I shook my head, then added, “I must have scared you guys so much. I’m sorry.” I was going to have to get used to that particular apology.

This time Sandra’s smile was more genuine. “Listen, I might be the only one without personal baggage about adaptationists, but if I could go back in time and find the first seiren? I’d sing ’em off a cliff.”

With that understanding reached, we resumed driving. Most of Sandra’s advice turned out to be variations on the same theme. (“Go a little faster.” “It’s okay not to go so slow.” “Speed the hell up, Millie.”) Driving was awful, but I could get myself to the compound, considering I only had to remember one turn. I brought us back to Dr. Topher’s camp, where we rejoined Rosie and Luc. Dr. Topher’s tent was still standing, but the second one had been disassembled. I could tell by the smell that it, and the body within it, were now in the trunk of Rosie’s car.

“Should we bury him somewhere?” I asked uncertainly.

“So he can be found later?” Rosie said. “No, I believe I can provide a more permanent solution.”

There was a brief silence, and then Sandra said, “Ew.”

“You don’t have to watch,” Rosie said primly. “It will take a while to milk that much venom, though. I suppose Millie won’t be the only one having a rather long day.”

“Are you … all right with that?” I asked.

In her most affected voice, she said, “I probably shouldn’t be, but frankly, I don’t mind in the slightest, as long as you don’t.”

For a moment, I was tempted to abandon all my plans and turn myself in with Mr. Bicks’s body. But whatever I owed him, I could no longer repay.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” I said to Rosie.

She gave me a sharp-toothed smile. “Not at all.”

The sleeping bag with the incriminating burn had been removed from Dr. Topher’s tent and stowed in Rosie’s car. Luc presented me with Dr. Topher’s satchel, containing all of her vials and lab notebooks.

“I took all the photos,” he said, brandishing his phone. “Rosie’s already uploaded them.”

We fell silent as Gret marched my bound and gagged adaptationist out of the tent. Dr. Topher tripped over her shackled feet, but the silver did not burn her. I watched until Gret pushed Dr. Topher into the backseat of the car, then turned away. Luc shuddered violently.

“Are you okay?” Rosie asked him.

“I’m fine. That was a psychological spasm, not physiological.” Luc had regained some composure in his voice, but his eyes were still fierce and strange. “Most of the time, it’s impossible to experience someone else’s emotions and not love them a little. But I don’t love her at all.”

Neither do I, I thought, and the silver cage Dr. Topher had built around me finally unlocked its doors.