by Corrie Wang
“S’up, y’all?” Sway says loudly, forcing his grimace into a grin. “Chilly weather we’re having, huh? I haven’t seen my balls in weeks.”
As one, the males all turn back to what they were doing.
Applebee’s must have been a restaurant and this space its kitchen. Stools and chairs are pulled up to all the counters and pass-throughs as if they were desk space, which only slightly lessens the fact this room looks better suited to hosting a coming-of-age party than running an all-male regime. The walls are crammed with old fluorescent beer signs and pre-Night band posters. A wooden plaque that says WELCOME TO THE MAN CAVE hangs crooked above a bathroom doorway, while holoscreens, each at least three solar panels wide, play non-work-appropriate sports on the back wall.
Or at least three of them do.
The fourth holoscreen is paused on the photo of us in the tunnel.
“Staring at it doesn’t help,” Sway murmurs.
Having said their hellos, the dogs disperse. Broadening his smile, Sway shoulder-punches a grizzled male with a bushy red beard who’s doing bicep curls with a fifty-pound barbell. It’s all I can do to suppress an eye roll. What a septic tank.
“Hey, Quarry.”
Sway bobs and weaves at the bearded male like a boxer until Quarry puts a heavy hand on Sway’s face, stopping him. It knocks Sway’s hat to the floor. He makes a distressed grunt and eyes me gratefully when I pick it up. On Quarry’s veiny forearm is a blistered keloid scar that looks like a pair of lips. A tattoo of a mustache sits right above it.
Through Quarry’s meaty palm, Sway says, “Crowded today.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not every day we have fees to hunt,” Quarry grunts, continuing his reps.
Fees to hunt? From the rapid number of blinks that Sway’s eyes perform, I can tell he is trying very, very hard not to look at me.
“You recognize the little blurry turd that’s helping them? He look familiar to you?”
“Nah,” Sway says. “His coat is pretty heat, though.”
Quarry snorts. “You’re as blind as Comma.”
Behind me, covering an entire wall, are dozens of grainy head shots of young males. They’re all taken from a distance. Some only catch a profile. Yet each one has a note card next to it listing what looks like the male’s height, weight, and address. In the upper-right-hand corner of each is a number. Next to the photos is a pre-Night map of downtown Buffalo. Two blocks along Delaware Avenue are heavily circled. Each number from the note card is matched with a corresponding downtown house.
I have no idea what I’m looking at. A most-wanted list? A neighborhood crime spree with profiles of the victims? Or the perps? Blurry as the photos are, I do see one similarity. All the males are about the same age.
About my age, in fact.
Quarry drops his hand from Sway’s face so that he can do reps on the other arm. When I hand Sway his hat, he carefully dusts it off before putting it back on his head exactly so. Quarry watches this process, lips curled with derision.
“You know…” He nods at the wall. “I almost feel sorry for them little nags. Imagine their surprise when they come back and realize they’re stuck with the likes of you.”
My gaze quickly travels to the wall of photos. This time, it lands on a grainy picture of a familiar wide nose, sturdy chin, and furrowed brow.
“Oh my mother.” I cough into my hand.
It’s Su.
“Nothing says they can’t trade up,” says a male whose upper-lip hair hangs past his mouth in two braids. “Get themselves a real man.”
“Don’t be a pedophile, Berserker,” Quarry snaps. “Mayor says they can’t trade up.”
Sway tries to lead me away, but I shake him off. Now all the other faces make sense, too. I just haven’t seen them much these last five years. But that’s Chardonnay with the button nose. Cinnamon Toast with the ’fro. Cocoa with the freckles. All of them named after luxuries their mothers missed. That’s our Miracle class. The last group of fees born after the Night.
Radio. Chenin Blanc. AC. They’re all there. How did the beasts have all this reconnaissance? These aren’t old photos. Su told me about Olive’s new buzzed haircut only a week ago. Were the males hiding in the woods snapping photos? Using drones? Suddenly, Grand’s insistence on abolishing old-world tech seems so… stupid. Didn’t she realize the advantage it gave our enemy?
“Me?” Quarry grunts as he works his triceps. “I’m praying that brunette is still alive.”
“Which brunette?” a bald, paunchy male asks.
“The one with the phoenix tattoo,” Quarry says.
The bald male looks to the board. But the fee Quarry’s talking about won’t be up there. He isn’t talking about a Miracle. He’s talking about my mom, Majesty.
“Nah, you don’t want her,” Braided Lip-Hair says. “She’s damaged goods, remember? She was in that pack of nags those boys messed up right after the divide.”
Sway tugs on my coat. Nods toward a door in back covered by emerald-green beads.
“Hold on,” I say, waiting for Quarry’s reply. “I want to hear this.”
“No.” Sway sighs. “I promise, you don’t.”
“You’re talking about that one with the gargantuan tits, right?” asks a beast wearing a fur coat that I can smell from here.
“Quarry, you don’t need to cross no river for big titties,” calls out an enormous beast with four chins as he bobbles his breasts. “I’ve got some right here for you.”
“If I wanted fat, Everest…” Quarry grabs his genitals.
This time I don’t protest as Sway steadily guides me away from the males.
“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming,” he sings under his breath.
I have never in my life felt this way. It’s like being dirty, but on my insides. I need to go home and warn everyone. No, correction. I need to get Two Five and then go home and warn everyone. No, correction to the correction: I need to kill everyone in this room, grab Two Five, and then go home and warn everyone.
“You know what I miss more than a nice pair of breasts?” the bald male muses. “Watching Neo Simone make three-pointers. What do you think happened to Neo Simone?”
“He’s dead,” multiple voices say simultaneously.
“You miss the news eighteen years ago?” Quarry asks. “Everyone’s dead.”
And then it all falls into place. All those posters out front. The reverse desensitization that all those fee videos were meant for. Nag classes. Forget the mob. There’s only one group the males are truly separated from.
Fees.
Next to all the ordered head shots, I spot one last photo tacked up off-kilter, as if in a rush. It’s snapped in the darkest of the dark hours but still clearly shows a fee riding a bike with a tiny tot clinging to the handlebars. Twofer’s smile glows brighter than a dozen solar lanterns on a pitch-black night. We’re both circled in red marker. Our note card has a giant red question mark on it.
As Sway finally corrals me through the doorway hidden by the emerald-green beads, I don’t know which realization is worse. That the beasts are planning a reunification with fees that we know nothing about.
Or that I was right.
Twofer’s kidnapping was all my fault.
“You didn’t tell me the males had an entire reunification campaign going on,” I hiss to Sway as soon as we step through the beads.
It takes my eyes a second to adjust to the darkness. Previously either a storage closet or a walk-in freezer, the room is now entirely taken over by pre-Night tech. Loose DVDs. Film reels. Countless pieces of equipment I don’t have names for. They’re all piled on top of filing cabinets and dressers that are filled with even more of the stuff. And yet there’s not one working lamp. The space is solely lit by screens that are stacked like blocks on an incredibly messy desk at the far end of the room. A high-backed swivel chair is rolled up tight to it, and a cot piled up with coats sits to the left. If his lair is any indication, I imagine the Influencer looks li
ke one of those ancient albino crustaceans that Twofer and I read about in that book on caves.
Also? Apparently, the Influencer does leave. Because he’s clearly not here.
“I didn’t think I needed to tell you about reuni,” Sway says, doing his surprised head jostle. “How can you possibly not know? That’s like not knowing what the Breeder Bill is.”
“I know what the Breeder Bill is.”
It’s why we had the divide to begin with. It was legislation Fortitude Packer tried to enact that called for all fees between the ages of seventeen and forty-five to solely focus on making babies. No role in the government. No outside jobs. Just baby making and child care. When Matricula and the other fees balked, Fortitude threatened to burn down their labs unless they complied. At which point, Matricula pulled a semitruck up to the labs, cleared out the fees, then fled Buffalo in the middle of the night. Fortitude was so angry, he burned the labs regardless. The following day, someone shot him in the head.
Karma, Su always says at this point in history class.
“But what does the Breeder Bill have to do with males wanting to reunify now?”
“Um, because of the Seventeen-Year Truce.” Sway doesn’t bother commenting on my blank expression. Instead he simply—graciously—continues. “After Matricula left and Fortitude was murdered, Mayor Grim came to power and begged fees to return. His mantra was ‘Whatever keeps them happy.’”
“Except then Grim was murdered,” I say. “Like a half minute later. Naturally.”
“Right. Chaos ensued. And when Mayor Bull replaced him, he left the divide alone. Because what did it matter? By then everyone had figured out the Night had made fees and males sterile and the babies Matricula took were too young to think about in reproductive terms. But to prevent human extinction, everyone agreed reunification would be revisited when the babies came of age. And a few months back…”
“Chardonnay turned seventeen,” I finish for him, stunned.
The Seventeen-Year Truce. Why hadn’t anyone told us about this? Where was this history lesson? Yet even as my brain forms these questions, it responds with this answer: Who’d want to grow up with a deadline like that hanging over their head?
“Does Matricula know about this?”
Sway nods. “I mean, she was there, so I’m assuming…”
“No, not about the truce, I mean does she know about your reunification plan?”
“I think Chia has brought it up? I’m just not sure Matricula has, um, agreed to it.”
My ears burn. “And that map of downtown Buffalo out in the office, with the dark circle and the numbers that correspond to each of my classmates. What’s that for?”
Sway takes off his hat and uncomfortably scratches the back of his head. High above the messy desk, three holoscreens run with code. On the desk, two screens show traffic footage while a third plays a film of a male in a bat suit flinging tiny bat-shaped objects at a male in an equally strange penguin costume.
“Well.” Sway clears his throat. “I think that’s the fenced-in community where they’re planning to relocate y’all once you’ve moved across.”
“Sway!”
Never mind hearing those beasts objectify my mother over her breasts. Over. Her. Breasts. They had note cards that read like an ingredient list. Like we were cans of beans that could simply be plucked off one shelf and thrown onto another.
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds, Glor,” Sway says.
“Or it’s worse than it sounds,” a quiet voice says. “Unless you appreciate your life as you know it being entirely blown to bits.”
I spin. Mama Bear out. “Who said that?”
The desk chair pivots ever so slightly.
“Oh good,” Sway says. “You are here. Glori, this is Reason, aka the Influencer. Reason, this is—”
“Yes, Sway,” Reason calmly interrupts. “I heard the first part of your introduction. Unfortunately, Glori, as I mentioned in earlier PTTs to your friend there, I’ve already helped more than I wanted. No, Chia, I swear, the tunnel photo came to me blurred. You’d better have burned that coat, bruth. Nag, Sway wasted your time. You both need to leave.”
“No,” I say.
“No?” Reason repeats with a soft laugh.
“If you have access to information about my brother, then the fastest way to get me to leave is to help me.”
Reason yawns. “Actually, the fastest way to get you to leave is to call Quarry.”
And then Reason leans forward to tap at one of his screens. Dark cowlicks stick up every which way beneath bright yellow noise-canceling headphones. I’d been expecting an adult. On Grand Island, only mid-aged fees were adept at pre-Night tech. Plus, I figured anyone who hated fees so passionately had to remember us. Yet Reason can’t be much—if any—older than me. His curiosity getting the better of him, he turns to give me a quick glance. Heavily lidded, soulful dark eyes begrudgingly take me in, then lock on mine with surprise.
“Oh my,” I breathe out, my tongue suddenly thick in my mouth.
With his cut cheeks, smoky complexion, and tousled hair, Reason looks caught beneath the wheels, as Grand likes to say. While his tight, ratty T-shirt only too finely accentuates that his upper body is as thickly muscled as a fee’s, his baggy sweatpants do little to hide the fact that his right leg is withered and frail. Without question, Reason is the most attractive human being I have ever seen. In my entire life. Ever.
Just as I step forward—to do what, I have no idea, congratulate him perhaps—one of the coats on the cot growls. It’s the dogs. All curled into one another so it’s impossible to tell where heads start and tails end. The biggest of the group—a mountainous brown mutt with jowls larger than Grand’s flapjacks—hops off the cot and plants its head in Reason’s lap. It breaks the spell. As does the fact that as striking as Reason is, he looks back at me with an equally arresting amount of dislike.
Reason absently rubs the dog’s ears and says, “Sway, have you at all considered how coincidental it is that as the truce is up, two fees cross who are stronger than any norm? Speak the mob leader’s first language? And also happen to need info that can only be accessed in the war room of Euphoria? I cannot believe you brought him here. I mean, Chia might be clueless, but there are limits.”
Sensing my annoyance, Sway holds a hand out to calm me.
“Maybe she speaks Japanese, Rea, but it’s not because she’s some assassin or in cahoots with the mob….”
“I also speak Spanish, Hindi, French, Chinese, and a little Burmese.”
“See?” Sway points at me. “It’s because she’s insufferable. No one knows better than you how ill prepared the fees are. And Chia might be clueless? He still hasn’t figured out that you’re the one printing anti-reunification posters. And you two live under the same roof. The peas-and-carrots one is hysterical, B. T. Dubs.”
Reason’s head twitches with begrudging acknowledgment. “Thank you. It’s my favorite.”
The enormous dog has now joined me to sniff my crotch.
“I told you, bruth,” Sway says with forced patience, crouching next to Reason’s chair. “The steam station has been temporarily compromised. I know how you feel about fees, but I didn’t know what else to do. Be reasonable.”
“You know that’s not helping your case,” Reason grunts.
Suddenly, Reason’s massive dog lurches up and puts his baseball-mitt–size paws on both of my shoulders and starts sniffing my pack, whining loudly.
“Mastodon, off,” Reason commands.
When the dog doesn’t listen, Reason grabs a crutch from the side of his desk and gets to his feet. The other dogs are immediately beside him. He steps forward so we are eye to eye. Exactly the same height. And I know in that moment that however nicely he intends to word it—which, given previous evidence, won’t be nice at all—Reason is about to tell me no. He won’t help us.
And then it occurs to me what Mastodon was after.
“Wait. I also brought you a gift.”
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Gently, swinging my bag to the front, I unzip it and take out the puppy. He’s delighted to be back out in the world, his tiny paws and pink tongue all aflutter. I hold the puppy up so it and Reason are nose to nose. Reason’s chin drops to his chest.
“Oh my Great Gatsby. Look at his little white paws. Come here, lover.” Gently taking him from me, Reason inhales the puppy’s warm popcorn smell and sighs. “My only regret in life is that I’ll never pet the little heads of every animal before I die.”
Reason snuggles the puppy to his cheek, then meets my eyes again. Su used to anoint her crushes with various hues of green. The darker the green—Mochi is so moss—the more she liked them. Reason is all the shades of green. Every single one. He is that fine. How could someone so stunning, someone who loves dogs so much, so thoroughly hate fees?
As the puppy chews on his thumb, I notice a tattoo of a lightbulb on Reason’s palm.
“What’s that mean?” I ask.
He holds his hand above his head, lightbulb facing out.
“So I’ll never run out of ideas.”
Clever. But when I smile, Reason’s eyes cut away from mine. He sinks back into his chair and resumes staring at his screens.
“What will you do if you find your brother?” he asks.
“Take him home.”
“And tell all the nags about what we’re doing here? About reunification?”
I glance at Sway. He nods, encouragingly. Tell him.
“Yes,” I say reluctantly.
“Fine, I’ll help. If telling nags about reuni doesn’t stop it from happening, I don’t know what will.”
What did we ever do to you? I want to ask, but settle instead for a flat “Great. Thank you. So do you really think you can find my brother?”
“Do I think I can?” With a glance over his shoulder at the main office, Reason grins and turns the volume all the way up on the man-bat movie. “I know I can. ’Cause I already did.”