by Kathryn Hoff
The tall soldier who’d let us in pulled down his mask, revealing a worn and lined face. “Welcome to the lab, Dr. Bardo. I’m Sergeant Hank Stonehouse, head of security here. Sorry for all the fuss, but we keep security tight on account of the End-Timers.”
“Ah,” Paula said. “The group at the gate?”
“Yes, ma’am. The local preacher has them convinced the end of the world is coming. They seem to think we’re part of the problem instead of looking for a solution.”
The sergeant led us to the principal’s office, where the man at the desk took our pictures to make badges for us and had us sign a bunch of forms.
“No leaving the premises without permission,” Sergeant Stonehouse said. “Anything you need, let me know. No need for masks within the building—access to the facility is limited to staff and my security squad. Keep your badges with you at all times—you’ll need them to open the outer doors and the doors to the labs.”
A fidgety teenager in a gray jumpsuit with ECA across the back stuck his head into the office. “I can take them to Mendez.” He was carrying two baby bottles filled with milk.
The sergeant chuckled. “All right. This here is Charles Burbage, goes by Chubb. You can follow him to Dr. Mendez’s office.”
The boy grinned at us. “Up here, this way.” He was tall and thin, about sixteen, with light hair and freckles. Orphan bracelet, E-4.
Chubb bounded up a staircase wide enough for the whole tenth grade. Paula and I trudged up behind.
Upstairs, the linoleum was gritty with dust and half the bulbs in the overhead fixtures were out. A sign on the wall said No running in the hallway, as if a teacher was going to pop out of a classroom and give us detention. The place was so empty, our footsteps echoed as we passed closed classroom doors.
No white suits in sight.
We weren’t alone, though. Distant doors slammed and floors creaked, like ghosts haunting a castle’s forbidden wing. The air still smelled like sweat socks, so maybe they were the ghosts of Eclipsed high school students.
With every step, I got more antsy.
At room 211, Chubb paused and said in a low voice, “He’s not doing so good,” before opening the door.
Room 211 had been a classroom big enough to hold thirty desks. Now it was some sort of lab, full of computers, file cabinets, microscopes, and lots and lots of vials filled with stuff in colors that made me queasy.
Behind a desk stacked with notebooks, a gaunt man was stretched out in a recliner, tucked under a red plaid blanket.
“Ah, Paula. How lovely to see you again.” Gray face and skimpy hair, his smile looked like a skeleton’s—all teeth and no lips.
Paula smiled sadly. “Hello, Leo. This is Jacqueline Kennedy, my foster daughter.”
He grinned like a death’s-head. “Welcome to the Hamilton Lab, Jacqueline Kennedy. I would never have recognized you.” He laughed at his own wittiness.
Like I’ve never heard that before.
“Going to manage our hairy subject, are you? Good, good. Charles, why don’t you show Jacqueline to the intern’s quarters?”
Chubb touched my arm and led me out to the hallway. When he shut the office door, Chubb paused and held a finger to his lips.
Walking soft, I followed him to the room next door. He took me to a corner near the window and pointed.
There was a hole in the wall where some cables snaked through. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear Mendez’s raspy voice just fine.
“…attitude, Paula. I’m sorry to have had to activate the conscription option, but truly, I had no choice. As you can see, my time and energy are limited. This phase must be completed as soon as possible. There have been problems, setbacks. It’s all taking far too long.”
“Leo, what are you doing? Experimenting on chimps was bad enough…”
I didn’t like the worry in Paula’s voice. Paula never worried about stuff unless it was important.
“Don’t be stupid,” Mendez hissed.
Maybe Paula should give him a thesaurus.
“This course of action, however repugnant, is absolutely necessary. We are racing against time here. The failure of the first two—perhaps it was simple carelessness, but that failure put us months behind. But now we are close, very close. If we lose this window of opportunity, it will be a disaster.”
Problems and setbacks? Failure of the first two what? Quinn had mentioned “incidents,” too, when he’d come to visit our apartment. What was going on in this place?
A doorknob rattled and a new voice, deep like a big man’s, said, “Leo? Ah, Paula. Excellent. Avery’s been quite anxious…”
Chubb pulled my arm again and we tiptoed out to the hall and up a flight of stairs.
The third-floor hallway was a little cleaner and the lights worked.
“So, you’re the monkey girl, huh?” Chubb said.
“I’m helping with the research.” Well, in a way, I was. “Chimps are apes, not monkeys.”
“Then I guess that makes you the ape girl. What are you, fifteen?”
“Just turned sixteen.”
“Reyna’s sixteen. I’m gonna be seventeen three days after Christmas.” He seemed gloomy at the prospect.
I nodded. One more year, and he’d lose the orphan bracelet and all the support that went with it. Teen home was bad. No home would be worse.
“What was Mendez talking about,” I asked. “A ‘failure’ with the first two?”
“I dunno. Some kind of screwup in the lab. Happened before me and Reyna got here, but it made them tighten the lab security. Now you can’t get into any of the labs unless your badge is coded for it.”
“Do people screw up often here?”
“You screw up, and you’ll be back in teen home pretty damn quick.”
The school was a standard square floor plan with a courtyard in the middle, like my teen home had been. “The first and second floors are all labs and offices and storerooms,” Chubb said. “Third floor is sleeping quarters.”
“Can you show me Paula’s room?”
“That’ll be on the east corridor with the other doctors, as far from the crying babies as they can get.” Chubb led me to a room that had been made by dividing a classroom in half. It was furnished with a saggy, beat-up double bed with a bunch of bleached-out sheets and blankets, plus an easy chair, a chest of drawers, a bookcase, and a lamp to make it homey. It had probably all belonged to some family who was dead now. Our boxes were stacked by the door.
“Bardo fostered you, huh?” Chubb’s voice had a touch of envy. “You related to her or something?”
“No.”
“What, she just picked you out?” He looked me over like I was the runt of the litter. “How’d you manage that?”
“Must be my winning personality.”
How the hell would I know why she picked me? After wave two left a lot of orphans, the Eclipse Control Agency had sent out calls for volunteers to be foster parents, promising that any kid with an orphan bracelet would get free health care and social services. For a while, childless couples or independent singles trickled in to pick out a happy baby, and grieving parents came to look for a replacement child. The infants and cute little kids were snapped up.
Then came waves three and four and five, and more and more orphans. The ECA stepped up the public service announcements and offered cash for taking hard-to-place children. Eventually, the ECA made it sound like a civic duty, like you weren’t patriotic if you didn’t have an orphan or two around the house. Now that we were in wave six of Eclipse, there were more orphans than homes to absorb them. Especially kids with behavior problems, like me. If Paula hadn’t taken a chance on me, I’d still be kicking my heels in a teen home.
And if I screwed up, I could be there again.
I pulled out two of the boxes. “These are mine.”
“You got stuff?”
“Clothes and books.” I picked up a box, proud of having two whole boxes of belongings that were mine alone.
Great. Already I was getting resentment over my few possessions.
He led the way down the hall. “You should stay out of the doctors’ digs. And don’t make any noise on the hall at night or Westerly will give you monkey duty. She’s got ears like a bat. Oops, I forgot,” he sneered. “You’re already on monkey duty.”
We turned a corner to the south hall and more staff quarters. I peeked into the women’s bathroom—there were sinks and three regular stalls, and a stall at the end had been converted to a shower. It smelled like disinfectant.
“We’re around the corner on the west hall. Here’s me and Gabe.”
The door to 322A was plastered with magazine pictures of baseball players. Inside, his room was half a classroom, with the old venetian blinds still in place, a narrow bed way over to the side and nearby, a crib. He had an easy chair, too, and a changing table and a set of shelves for clothes and baby things.
“Is Gabe your brother? I thought they didn’t allow staff to bring their kids here?”
“Brother? Shit no. He’s the baby I take care of. But yeah,” he grinned, “I guess we’re kind of like a family. Maybe he is my brother-from-another-mother.”
“I don’t get it. Why doesn’t Gabe stay with his mom or dad at night?”
“Cause he’s an orphan, stupid.”
Limited vocabulary. But if they didn’t want family members at the lab, why bring in foster babies?
The door across from Chubb’s was covered with drawings of fairies. They peeked out from behind lilies and rosebuds with simpering half-smiles, wearing dragon-fly wings and skimpy dresses with waists like wasps. Cut-out hearts said Reyna and Deedee in letters that curled like ivy. An equally artistic sign said Keep out!
“That’s Reyna’s room,” Chubb said. Duh. “Deedee’s her baby to look after. Stay out of there. Reyna doesn’t like anybody nosing around.”
Since when did an orphan get the right to be touchy about privacy? I bit back the snark and instead said, “Nice drawings.” All the skinny fairies peeping out were a little creepy, but the drawing was skillful.
“Yeah. Reyna wants to go to art school.”
I nodded like that was a totally reasonable thing to hope for, even though the chances of an orphan going to art school were slimmer than a fairy’s waistline.
My room was next to Reyna’s, another half-classroom that faced the rear. Near the windows was a single bed, with two folded gray jumpsuits laid on the bare mattress. Some metal shelves were pushed against the wall. Otherwise it was a big, lonely space.
Chubb dropped the box he’d been carrying. “Not like your posh foster home, I’m sure.”
The bottoms of the tall windows had been painted over, but there were gaps where I could peek out. The window faced west, onto what had been playing fields at the back of the school.
“What’s out there?” I asked. Some low, pre-fab buildings squatted on the remains of a football field, soaking in the November rain.
“That’s the soldiers’ barracks, and the dog run, and the incinerator’s on the right.”
A wail sounded from down the hall.
“Uh oh, that’s Gabe,” Chubb said. “I better go get him before Reyna gets even more pissed at me than usual.”
I followed, feeling worse and worse. Having my own room was nice, but the vacant half-classroom was nowhere near as cozy as my cubby in Paula’s living room. Chubb, resentful about my having been fostered and having a few clothes and books. Reyna didn’t sound like a friendly type either.
Guards to keep angry people out. Rules to keep us in. Screwups and failures.
I hated the whole place already.
CHAPTER 6
Crying, spit-up, and dirty diapers
The nursery was a full classroom on the north hall. It still had its schoolroom whiteboards, but now they were covered with drawings of fairies and angels instead of equations. The windows were painted over on the bottom, but gray November light poured in the clear upper panes. The floor was covered in spongy tiles. Indestructible toddler toys—huge plastic blocks, those rings that stack on a peg—brightened the place with primary colors. There was a sink and changing table at one end, and a couple of cribs. There was even a television, probably salvaged from some Eclipsed family.
A teenaged girl in a gray ECA jumpsuit sprawled in a beanbag chair with her tablet on her lap and her legs stretched out in front. Nearby, a baby in a blue romper played on the floor.
All the noise came from a second baby, screaming from a playpen, standing with his tiny fists gripping the bars like a convict in a jail cell.
That child was angry. Dressed only in a diaper, a green shirt, and drool-soaked bib, his eyes were squeezed shut and his streaming nostrils looked as big as a baby orangutan’s. Waaaaaah! His mouth gaped like a wet pink cave, with two little teeth poking up on the bottom. His ears stuck out like cup handles and his dark hair frizzed like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. A tiny orphan bracelet circled his left wrist.
“Where you been, Chubb?” the girl demanded. “Gabe’s been trouble on wheels all morning.”
“Reyna, this is Jackie Kennedy.” Chubb handed her the bottles, then picked up the screamer and bounced him on his hip. “And this is Gabe and that’s Deedee.”
As soon as he’d been picked up, baby Gabe stopped crying and happily punched at Chubb’s face.
“Jackie Kennedy? Like the first lady?” Reyna’s black hair was pulled back into a bunch at the back. Colorful bangles that matched her dangling earrings nearly hid her orphan bracelet and E-2 tattoo. The sleeves and pants of her jumpsuit were rolled up and tied with cheerful red ribbons.
Gabe reached for Chubb’s nose. “Gubba.” Baby Deedee carefully rolled onto her knees and rocked back and forth like she wanted to crawl but hadn’t quite figured out how.
“First what?” Chubb asked.
Reyna shook her head at Chubb’s sad lack of knowledge. “Mm, mm, mm. You’re so ignorant, Chubb. Jackie Kennedy, she was married to President John F. Kennedy, him that was assassinated like a hundred years ago. She was elegant.”
Reyna pursed her lips at my sweatshirt and khakis and scuffed shoes, making it clear that “elegant” did not describe me. “She set fashion trends for years. They got a picture of her in the Cold War unit. Which you would know, if ever you did your schoolwork, Chubb.”
“Yeah, well, it’s my name,” I said, lamely. Reyna was elegant, or she would be if she weren’t slouched on a beanbag. Her wide dark eyes and cinnamon-brown skin were made for reds and golds, not a gray jumpsuit.
Gabe arched backward, nearly throwing himself out of Chubb’s arms. As soon as Chubb put him on the floor, Gabe crawled toward me, bowling the other baby over on his way and making her cry.
Reyna picked up the baby girl and cuddled her. “Don’t worry, baby Deedee, I got you.” Reyna’s soft side seemed to be reserved for the little ones, which made me like her a little better.
Deedee was a smaller version of Gabe, squashed nose, fuzzy hair, and all. In her brown face, her hazel eyes were as big and round as quarters. Her ears looked like they’d been added later and stuck on with glue. Her orphan bracelet was smaller than the rings dangling from Reyna’s ears.
Gabe reached my feet and raised his arms. “Gubba gubba.” I let him grab my fingers and pulled him up.
“Are they twins?” I asked. “Deedee and Gabe?”
“Nah,” Reyna answered. “Gabe, he’s almost nine months, and Deedee, she’s only seven months. Poor little mites. We’ve been taking care of them almost all their lives.”
It didn’t make sense. When Paula said the lab had a nursery, I’d figured she meant to take care of the babies belonging to the people who worked there. But instead, they’d hired orphan teens to look after orphan babies. Mendez had told Paula there were “exceptional circumstan
ces.” What sort of circumstances would put two babies in a research lab? I didn’t think I’d like the answer.
Reyna asked, “You gonna take care of Molly?”
I looked around for another baby. “Uh, no, I’m supposed to help with a chimp.”
Chubb laughed. “Molly is the chimp. I hope you know what you’re in for. See, Molly throws things when she’s mad, and since she’s only got one thing to throw—”
Great. A poop thrower.
Paula walked into the nursery with a large—very large—woman wearing a triple-XL white lab coat over her jumpsuit. She looked like a walking iceberg.
“This is our nursery,” the woman said. It had been her voice, foghorn deep and punctuated with wheezes, that I’d heard in Mendez’s office. “And these are the two most precious members of our little community, Gamma Zeta and Delta Zeta.”
Chubb muttered, “Gabe and Deedee.”
I silently agreed. Only a scientist who knew nothing about how kids got teased would name her babies after Greek letters.
Westerly ignored him and beamed at the babies. She wore her white hair short, which did nothing to soften her hard face. Reading glasses dangled from a strap around her neck and bounced on her bosom with every step.
Paula already had a white lab coat on. “Jackie, this is Dr. Westerly. June, this is my foster daughter.”
Westerly’s blue eyes gleamed. “Ah, yes. Jacqueline Kennedy. You don’t resemble your namesake much, do you?”
“I get that a lot,” I mumbled. I glanced at her wrist: E-5. I never liked fives.
Westerly ignored me. “As you can see, Paula, we’ve tried to give our charges a reasonable quality of life—a home and work for the older children and care for the youngest ones. Jacqueline can assist here in the nursery when she’s not needed in the primate lab.”