I am infused with a sensation I have not experienced before. I do not want the dolphins to be hurt. And also, this: I hate this man.
More than that:
I am afire with rage!
I burn with indignation!
I glow with fury!
Launching myself forward, I push the syringe away, grab for his throat. The man struggles. He is weak. I see now that a single torpedo is lodged in his chest. He avoided the electrical shock, but he is still wounded. My hands close around his neck.
I boil with vengeance!
He kicks at me with his artificial flippers, pressing me away. I yank the tether of my stunner, pulling it toward me, wrap my hand around the weapon, and then I shoot him from a distance of two feet. There is no getting away this time.
He spasms and jitters, a marionette beneath invisible hands. When he goes limp, the syringe and his sound weapon sink slowly toward the ocean floor.
What was their plan? To disable the dolphin guards, slip through the net, and capture me? Capture me and the chimeras? Capture all of us, including the dolphins? Re-create the sea paddock somewhere else, under their own control?
I now understand the wisdom of the Blessed Cures Consortium keeping intruders. If no scout ever returns to their competitors, then the next set of intruders will be equally unprepared.
“Go take!” I say to the dolphins.
They have recovered from the shock of the man’s weapon, but they will not overlook what he did. They twist their bodies angrily as they sweep up to the three floating men, and they use more force than is strictly necessary to prod and push the intruders toward the island.
When we reach its nighttime shore, I surface, blink my eyes, and then crawl up the sand. Flippers are not made for land, but I can move by scooting backward, inching myself up the beach. From there, I help haul the men above the line of wet sand—safe, if they are still alive, until someone comes for them. Then I sit for a while, feeling the evening breeze.
Come, come, come? the dolphins ask, their heads bobbing above the surface, their bright eyes watching me on the shore.
I hold up one hand, which is an answer they understand: Wait.
The tops of my habitat and the surgery pod, the jetty, and the line of net enclosing our cove are all that are visible of the paddock from up here. Across the water, the clinic is lit with its nighttime security lights, and it is quiet, closed up. Someone will be on duty, but most of the lab techs, and certainly Mr. Tavoularis himself, have gone home for the night. It is pleasant to breathe without the rebreather for a few minutes, sitting on the beach. But already my skin is tightening, beginning to itch.
I send up a flare, and then I scoot back into the water. The dolphins are around me as I sink into the cool embrace of the ocean. I blink my eyes into underwater vision, and as I float away from the island, I look past the net, the loose flaps of which are billowing this way and that in the current, to the paddock enclosure beyond. My habitat. The clinic. The world of land and air. Bluebear and the manatees. It is strange to observe these things from above the water and then to observe them again, immediately, from below.
You should see what is there, no matter how you look, and yet that is not always so. The point from which one views something…is everything.
Instead of the paddock, what I am seeing at this moment is a multiple-choice question, written in neon letters across the inner reaches of my skull:
A boy is designed to be extra smart, but the procedure goes wrong. He is then given dolphin skin and legs and sent to spend his life tricking manatees into surgery. Is this boy:
human
inhuman
dead weight
something else
I know the answer at the back of the book is either B or C. My mother picked C, and Mr. Tavoularis, if pressed, would probably pick B.
Turning my head in the other direction, I peer into the darkness of the open ocean: predators, prey, known and unknown.
And here I am: lungs, rebreather, flippers, hands. I am meant for both places and for neither.
This is something you learn when you have taken hundreds of tests: The person who wrote the test has selected one answer as truth. If you don’t choose that answer, you are marked as having chosen wrong. And yet, as the test taker, you still get to select which answer you believe is correct. It is your option, always, to see the answer differently from anyone else.
Do you see that
dead weight
can become
eight waded?
Because there are eight of us, seven dolphins and whatever I am. We have waded to the island and now we are drifting back into the depths of the sea.
I wonder: How do I wish to live?
The answer is not: As a normal person.
Because that has never been possible.
It could be that the answer is this: Differently.
Do I wish to be the boy in the room in the Genetic Radiance clinic or the boy in the sea cage?
Answer: Maybe I don’t wish to be either of those things.
Practical question: Is there a choice in the matter?
Answer: Probably not.
And yet: Is there more to Alexios that what has been living contentedly in the sea paddock?
Answer: Maybe.
Perhaps the best question is this: Would I like to find out?
Play, play, play, play? ask Loud Mike and Shark Girl. They are rolling and twisting, proud to have washed their hands of those painful men. Metaphor. I will stop pointing it out.
The other dolphins are copying them, so they are a mass of elegant, circular motion. Win! Win! Win! one of them says.
Loud Mike swoops in front of me, allowing me to grab onto him. I do, feeling something new in the touch of my hands along his fin.
When I have taken a firm hold, I do not say “play.” Instead, tilting my body toward the open ocean, I tell them, “Run!”
A moment later, as one, all eight of us are rushing, rushing, rushing into the darkness together.
Into the sea
becomes
no hesitate.
So I won’t. And here we go.
Youth is wholly experimental.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
1. SNOWSTORM
It happened so quickly that Jake didn’t realize they’d been spotted until the men were already surrounding them—this was only moments after he and Kostya had crawled through a jagged opening in the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of the industrial landing site. Maybe they’d drawn attention because, in the middle of what looked like a snowstorm, they were wearing only the shirtsleeves and baggy pajama bottoms and thin knit caps they’d stolen from the crew quarters on the ship. No, Jake saw as he looked at Kostya, who was dodging the men’s grasping arms, it was their skin that had given them away. Kostya’s terror at being in Russia again was overwhelming his skin supply. His hands were melting back into themselves under the strain, revealing metal and crystal beneath. As two men got hold of Kostya, things got worse: his metal skull began to appear beneath the hem of his hat, and his brow was now glinting in the streetlights.
Chyort voz’mi! Dammit! Jake swore in his head in Russian as he tried to elude the other three men. American swears didn’t feel real anymore. The bosses had been yelling at him for God knew how long, and now nothing sounded strong enough unless it was in Russian.
The men were crying “Zakhvatit’ eti katorzhniki,” which Jake’s mind translated automatically into “Grab these convicts!” and then the men—tall, bearded, massive in their winter coats—succeeded in grabbing Jake as well.
He and Kostya made eye contact: Now!
Jake deployed his secondary left arm with the knife clutched in the sma
ll hand. He felt the weapon bite into a man’s flesh.
“Chyort voz’mi! Dammit!” the man hissed, letting go of Jake.
Kostya wrenched himself out of the other men’s grasp in the same way. With one more glance at each other, to confirm their commitment, they ran in opposite directions, through the heavily falling snow, faster than anyone should be able to run. This had been their simple plan if they were spotted—surprise and sudden flight.
Jake hadn’t expected to need the plan so soon after arriving; they’d waited for night to fall before stealing off the ship and venturing out into whatever Russian city this was, in the hopes of finding deserted streets, but the city, which enclosed the landing site in a tight grip, was alive and rowdy. On the crowded sidewalks, he had to slow down as he pushed past knots of pedestrians hunched against the driving snow.
At the corner, he turned back once. Kostya was well away in the other direction, hidden among the crowds. The man Jake had cut stood in the distance, clasping his arm as it bled. The snow, marred by footprints, looked green beneath the nighttime security lights by the high metal fence, and the man’s blood looked brown. So many colors after the darkness on the ship. The other men who’d tried to capture them were yelling to each other in frightened, delighted, wicked excitement—Convicts? From where? I’ve never seen that kind before. I imagined they’d be stronger. But they’re like children.
We are children, Jake thought as he ran. The Russian bosses weren’t stupid. They didn’t want their mine slaves able to attack them. So Jake and Kostya and all the others still back in the camps in the distant void of outer space were as weak as kittens if they tried to resist normal people. Only one of Jake’s full-sized arms could exert any force against a human—and that was a lucky accident of improper maintenance by the bosses. The secondary arms they’d used to get away from their attackers were feeble limbs, made for delicate work and useless without a weapon.
Jake’s feet sank through the snow—it was fluffy on top, where the fresh layer was settling, slushy beneath where the old snow lay. People followed him with their eyes, because his hands and feet were bare. They were still covered in skin, though, and his secondary arms were folded up against his ribs and hidden beneath his shirt, so as long as Jake kept moving, it would be hard to tell that he was different. And Kostya—hopefully his friend had gotten control of his skin and it was growing back over his metallic hands and forehead.
Jake shoved through a group of men who were singing and drinking and blocking the sidewalk. When an alley opened up on his right, he slowed, hunched over, and then crept into the shadows between buildings.
This alley let out into a longer alley, mostly covered in snow, which ran along the back of a city block. It was very dark here except for the small amount of light that filtered haphazardly between buildings. The darkness didn’t matter; Jake’s eyes could see in both glaring sunlight and near-total blackness.
Come on, you chertovski rab! You damned slave! he snapped at himself. Focus. Find clothing!
A man was sprawled outside a grimy back door, his cheek against the snow, a spray of vomit across the ground in front of him. Drunk. The English word came to Jake for the first time in years, and it conjured up a sunlit afternoon overlooking a beach, his father in a deck chair, a beer in his hand. “Go in the water if you like, Jakey, but I intend to sit here and get drunk.”
The drunk man was muttering to himself, but Jake couldn’t make out any of the words. The nine months on the ship traveling to the mining station had been spent, mostly, in front of screens that had drummed the Russian language into their heads, but mumbled drunk Russian was still beyond him.
Nine months. Learn your lessons, you grebanyye raby! You fucking slaves. How many months to get back? one of the others had asked the duty boss, when their Russian was good enough to ask questions. The boss had looked down at the hapless girl in her sleep rack and had barked at her, Back? You won’t be able to count that. None of them had known what he meant, but it had sounded like a life sentence.
As Jake wrestled the parka off the drunk man, the reek of vomit and beer assaulted his nose. He liked both odors; they were alive, and so different from the odors one experienced in the mines. In the little inflated domes with their weak atmosphere, all you could usually smell, if your nose still worked, was the electric burn of rock cutters and the tang of melting platinum.
When he’d wrapped himself in the parka, Jake pulled on the man’s hat and boots and gloves, so that his face was the only thing showing. This was all right, because his face looked, for the most part, exactly as a face should, as long as you didn’t examine it too closely.
He pressed on through the alley. Above, in the heavy, snow-laden sky, were huge shapes—blimps, he thought, or something like them—patrolling the city with ominous serenity. Could they see him and know what he was? He couldn’t spare more than a fleeting thought to wonder.
After a time, he came out onto a wide street that was packed with men and women and even children. It wasn’t actually late, he realized. It was winter, and if this city was far to the north, it was possible that it was only the afternoon. And here he was, escaping through rush-hour throngs.
Families everywhere. It was strange to see them after all this time, and yet it was the idea of family and home that drew him on. Jake’s own family would be long gone. And if their house was still standing, it was standing on the other side of the world and he’d left it by way of a path so long and strange he didn’t really have words to describe it. Maybe all the Russian words had pushed out the American words and left him nothing. He felt a tickle at the edges of his eyes, but there was no fear of tears; the mine slaves did not have the ability to cry.
Focus, you nekrasivi rab, you ugly slave, he told himself. If he wanted even a chance of discovering whether there was anything left of his home, he had to keep his mind on the present.
He spotted the girl when she paused on the sidewalk at the end of the block. A bubble of manic glee rose in Jake’s throat. Block. Sidewalk. How could such old-fashioned, everyday things still be here? How was the world so ordinary when Jake himself had become something else?
The girl caught his attention because she looked young—probably still a teenager. Like Jake. Was he still a teenager? Sfocusiruy, Jake, focus.
From what he could see of the girl beneath her fur-lined cap, she was very beautiful, but not in the generic way everyone’s face had been beautiful in the asteroid belt. The girl was beautiful because she was flawed. Her skin was rosy from the harsh cold. There were tears in her large, dark eyes from the wind. Her lips were chapped, her skin dry. Beautiful.
Something about the girl’s posture suggested that she was in familiar territory, that she was relaxing because she was almost home. He flexed the joints of his left arm and hand, the only limb that would exert any force at all against a human.
How was it done? Looking into the past was squinting against sunlight. The memories were so bright, they were painful. Girls in bathing suits, boys in swim trunks. He’d put his arm around someone years ago…her name was Dahlia. Long, tangled blond hair, skin browned by the sun. He’d put his arm around her and she didn’t mind. Dahlia had leaned into him. That was how it was done. He unhooked his secondary left arm from his rib cage, let it unfold beneath his parka. The half-sized metallic fingers were still clutching his weapon, a sharpened piece of the metal he and Kostya had pried out of the cargo bay on the way back to Earth. The girl was climbing the steps to the doors of an old apartment building.
Come on, you rab! Jake told himself. Go now!
He willed himself up the stairs at a jog, and all at once he was at the top, right next to the girl as she pulled her hand out of her glove to press it to the palm reader next to the door.
“Privet, kroshka!” he said as he wrapped his ordinary left arm around her as tightly as it would go. Hi, cutie. The girl’s face, stricken,
turned to him, and in a heartbeat, she had sprayed something all over his eyes. When he didn’t even flinch and his grip on her shoulder remained firm, the girl looked confused and then terrified. “Take me inside,” he told her, continuing in Russian. His secondary left arm had come out of the parka and was jabbing the sharp metal blade into her side, just hard enough for her to understand that he meant what he said.
“Please, don’t—” the girl began.
Jake tightened his full-sized arm around her shoulder and leaned in as if to kiss her. To anyone walking by, they were two lovers on the front steps of their apartment building.
“Now,” he whispered into her ear.
2. APARTMENT
The girl was called Yulia Boykov, as Jake discovered when he had her strip down to her underclothes. The contents of her pockets were now strewn across the cushions of the tiny sofa in her tiny living room: coin money, ID, tissues, hand warmers, cell phone (or whatever it was called now—it was a communications device that lived in the crook of her collarbone, held there magnetically by something beneath her skin). The canister she’d used to spray his face was also on the sofa. It was mace, Jake realized after he’d stared at the container for a few moments. She’d sprayed him with mace and it had done nothing. His eyes looked like his old human eyes, but they had been reskinned and insulated to withstand vaporized platinum and unshielded sunlight. Mace had no effect, and the shock of this had startled Yulia Boykov enough to give him an advantage.
The girl was standing near the open doorway to her minuscule kitchen. Dark, shapely eyebrows arched above hooded eyes fringed with equally dark lashes. Her long hair was very blond at the ends but very dark at its roots. The mine bosses kept their heads shaved, so Jake had forgotten what long hair was like. It was so odd, to grow strands of protein out of your head in an unending stream. Humans were so animal.
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