by Shanon Hunt
I was a pathetic little thing.
I swipe a string of drool from my mouth with the back of my hand and open the stall door. Four lambs manage to run past me, but I yank the door closed before the last little guy gets out.
I drop down onto the prickly straw and sing gently. “Layla had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb.”
I wrap my arms around his neck. He’s so soft; I just want to squeeze. But he bleats in my ear, and I startle. My stomach rumbles. Or maybe it’s the fetus moving again, I’m not sure.
I hug Little Lamb and feel his fast pulse. It starts to slow but becomes louder. And louder. And—
Layla jerked awake. Someone was knocking on a door, calling her. People outside. Men.
“Go away,” she mumbled. Her voice was hoarse.
But she heard the click of the latch as they let themselves in. God, could she ever get an evening of privacy? She squeezed her eyes tightly against an onslaught of flashlights.
“Christ almighty,” said a stranger from above her.
“What the hell?” The crunch of footsteps across the straw floor of the stall was like nails on a chalkboard.
She didn’t open her eyes. She threw an arm over the fluffy woolen neck of her lamb. “Leave us alone.” She was already drifting back to sleep.
Retching sounds penetrated her haze like acid rain.
Then, from somewhere above her, the click of a radio. “Sir, we’ve found her in livestock, along with a slaughtered animal. She appears to have eaten most of it.”
36
October 2022, Mexico
Layla was too exhausted to resist as she was lifted onto a gurney. Her head lolled to the side as guards secured her arms and legs with restraining straps and wheeled her out. The cool breeze outside the barn woke her up, and she opened her eyes to a circle of shoulders and backs surrounding the gurney as they rushed her toward a set of headlights.
Her stomach contracted. Its contents rose in her chest with such force that she arched against her constraints as she heaved. She didn’t even have enough warning to turn her head. Viscous chunks of meat and stringy, bloody animal fur landed on her lap. She barely got a breath before she vomited again, this time with more fluid that ran down her legs and pooled on the gurney.
Three security guards spun away from her, burying their faces in the crook of their arms.
The sour smell of bile blew in her face, and she vomited a third time.
Layla had a little lamb.
She heard again the snap of his tiny neck as he crumpled to the ground. She’d leaned over him and laid her head on his warm, fluffy body. She’d inhaled his scent and pressed her lips into his wool, feeling his slowing pulse against them. Then she’d opened her mouth wide and bit down.
“Oh my god.” She choked. Coughed and sputtered. The memory flashed anew, and she heaved again, but her stomach was now empty.
“Oh my god,” she repeated as tears fell from her eyes. Her nose dripped onto her lips, and she pulled against her restraints so she could wipe it. “Let me go.”
But they kept walking.
She finally pulled enough air into her lungs to cry out. “Let me out of here!”
But no one spoke during the entire drive to the infirmary.
Her gurney was met with a full medical team the moment they rolled her across the threshold and swept her down the hall and into a private room.
“James. Please, someone call James.” She needed to hear his comforting voice even more than an explanation of what was happening to her.
She watched in silence as a nurse unbuckled her wrists and began removing her clothing using a pair of large scissors. Another nurse filled a tub with warm water and soap and began scrubbing Layla’s bloodstained hands, arms, and face. Layla watched the soapy water grow dusky, becoming a dark, sullen pink.
And then Dr. De Luca was there, gazing down with pouted lips and his usual disdainful coldness, but the first voice she heard belonged to James.
He stepped in front of Dr. De Luca and immediately recoiled, covering his mouth and nose with his arm. “Jesus, what did you do?”
She wasn’t sure if he expected her to answer. No matter, because no words would form in her mind anyway. The look of profound revulsion on his face was nothing she’d ever seen before.
“Clean her up and send her to salvage.”
Salvage. Oh, god, she was one of them. One of those monsters.
James turned to leave, but she grabbed his sleeve. “Wait, James, please!”
He yanked his arm from her grip and smoothed the sleeve of his expensive navy blue suit. “You’re a killer, Layla. You can no longer be trusted in this Colony. Or by me.”
37
October 2022, Mexico
James steeled himself to Layla’s cries as he stalked out of the room and down the hall toward the stairs. But it wasn’t until he was safely inside the stairwell that he paused to think.
“Fuck!” He slammed his palm against the cool cement wall. “Of all the shitty timing.”
He buried his head in his hands and squeezed fistfuls of hair. This screwed up everything. If he didn’t distance himself from Layla, convince Stewart that the development of the praefuro model was the single priority, Stewart would get suspicious. Start doubting his motivations. Start nosing around the research center until he sniffed out the reversion program.
And that was not a risk he could take.
And he had about thirty seconds to come up with a plan. He had to put her away. Away from him and away from doing more damage to the Colony. But goddammit, salvage wasn’t the answer.
He’d have to throw his trump card: the security guard.
He pulled out his phone.
The head of security picked up immediately. “Yes, sir.”
“I’d like a full in-person report on your investigation into the death of Eric Ortiz.”
“Of course. Should I come to your office at, say, nine o’clock tomorrow?”
“No, I need it immediately. I’ll come to you.” He looked at his watch. It was after nine p.m. It had been an awfully long night for the security team already, and he could tell by the silence on the other end that a meeting now would be quite an inconvenience. “The Ortiz matter has made it onto the radar of the Eugenesis leadership team, as a matter of Colony safety and security in light of what—” He couldn’t say Layla’s name. “In light of tonight’s incident. In fact, I might ask Stewart Hammond to come along.”
“Sir?”
James rarely involved Stewart in site issues, and frankly, most of the operations leaders found Stewart to be eccentric and unpredictable.
“Thank you in advance for accommodating us on such short notice and so late in the evening. We’ll look forward to your honest, straightforward assessment.” He spoke slowly to make his point clear, dropped his phone in his shirt pocket, and continued up the stairs to the observation room.
Stewart was leaning against the glass with both hands, watching Layla’s room below. When the door closed behind James, he turned with a drawn expression that James had seen him fake more than once before. “I’m so sorry, James. I know you cared for Layla.”
James strolled over to the coffee machine to avoid the observation window and slammed an empty coffee cup onto the fill tray. “You know I hand chose her. She had all the qualities of the perfect carrier. Never did I think she’d end up a rager.”
“I know. I remember.”
He picked up the carton of milk and pointed it at Stewart. “I built her from nothing. As Allison Stevens, she was a pitiful wretch of a girl, always falling to pieces. But as Layla, she blossomed into a perfect, obedient experimental subject.” He shook his head. “All that work, and it was all a waste.”
“Not a waste at all. We’ll have the offspring. She’ll be the goose who laid the golden egg. Her contribution to Eugenesis is extraordinary. You should be extremely proud of your efforts in developing her, even if her time has been cut shorter than you’d planned.”
> James sipped his coffee, keeping his gaze on the back wall.
Stewart laid a hand on his back. “Come on, it’s been a long night. Let’s go back to the office, and I’ll pour you a drink. I brought back a fantastic bottle of Baijui from China. I was going to give it to you as a gift for surviving this long week, but tonight’s as good a time as any. Whaddaya say?”
James stretched his neck to both sides. “Thanks. I’ll take you up on that in about an hour. Right now, I need to swing by security. They’ve been running an investigation into a missing guard whose body was found at the bottom of a nearby ravine. They suspected it was an accident, but they now believe it was foul play, and the investigation has taken a turn toward Layla as the assailant.”
Stewart’s brow furrowed. “Is that right?”
“I didn’t believe it at first, but now, after what’s happened tonight—well, I need to hear what he has to say.” He stepped out and called over his shoulder. “You wanna meet at the cigar bar later?”
Stewart’s voice stiffened. “Mind if I join you for that discussion with security?”
James shrugged. “Be my guest. It’ll be helpful to have a second set of ears. We can discuss what we think over that bottle.”
He winked.
***
Amadi Aroyo had been James’s hire to head up the security team. Nigerian-born but raised in Guatemala, Aroyo was well over six and a half feet tall with an imposing appearance and an unshakable expression of stone. Yet he didn’t rule with an iron fist. He was thoughtful and judicious, which James thought was a good fit for the Colony.
Stewart took a seat at the conference table but James remained standing, his hands clasped behind his back. It allowed him to put some distance between himself and Stewart.
“As you requested, I asked my team to check up on Sister Layla on Thursday evening,” Aroyo said. “Mr. Ortiz volunteered to stop by your shared cabin after his shift ended and ensure the cabin was secure. He radioed back affirming that was the case. Since his next shift wasn’t until Sunday morning, he wasn’t identified as missing until he didn’t show up for his shift. I sent a team to his room and asked them to check the campus boundary walls for signs of a breach. Only then, late yesterday, were his remains discovered at the bottom of the ravine.”
“So you didn’t ask Layla about the guard?” Stewart asked, his brow furrowed. “Why wouldn’t you have started there?”
Aroyo glanced nervously at James, who nodded. “Brother James preferred we didn’t upset Sister Layla during her difficult pregnancy.”
James shrugged. “As I told you, I had no reason to suspect Layla had anything to do with the missing guard. I wasn’t about to saddle her with such a shocking accusation.”
Aroyo continued. “The mistake I made was allowing Sister Layla to access our backup files in the surveillance control room. She’d woven a story about a potential harassment issue and said she wanted to verify the claims. Given her relationship with you, sir, I allowed her to look at the tapes. Of course, that occurred Saturday evening, before we realized Mr. Ortiz was missing. I had no reason to be suspicious.”
The deletion of the tapes had been an unexpected and regrettable setback. Video footage of Layla leaving the cabin with Eric Ortiz would have been proof of a rational state of mind. James had considered secretly restoring the deleted files with his own copies, but that would’ve left a digital trail leading right back to him.
“You didn’t accompany her inside the surveillance control room?” Stewart’s tone was accusatory, and James wished he’d stay quiet. If Aroyo felt under fire, he might hold back important information that Stewart needed to hear.
But Aroyo didn’t seem bothered by the tone. “No, sir. She was in the room with one of my staff for about twenty minutes and left without filing a harassment claim.”
James leaned against the edge of Aroyo’s desk.
“In the absence of the security footage, we questioned the residents of the neighboring units,” Aroyo said. “A young woman spotted two people leaving your cabin and walking down the path toward the ravine. It was dark, and she wasn’t able to identify Sister Layla, but she described a woman with long hair walking with a wide gait, as pregnant women often do.”
James already knew the answer, but he asked for Stewart’s benefit. “Did the witness note any aggression? Rage behavior? Fighting, clawing, biting?”
“No, sir. She said she thought perhaps you and Sister Layla were out for a late walk, maybe to relieve some pregnancy discomfort.”
It was so late, and James felt his muscles tensing with impatience. He wanted to blurt out the right answer, the one that he was painstakingly nudging Stewart toward, but he bit his tongue. This had to be Stewart’s idea.
“Once we had this eyewitness account,” Aroyo continued, “we attempted to contact Sister Layla at home. We found the cabin empty. We alerted Dr. Elliott and began a campus-wide search. She was found in the barn.”
James turned to Stewart. “What do you make of it?”
“It sounds calculated. She pushes him over a cliff—”
He lifted a finger. “That’s assumed. We still have no proof of that.”
“—and then she deletes the tapes. She’s trying to hide it.”
James could see the wheels turning in Stewart’s mind. He just had to be patient.
Stewart addressed Aroyo. “Curious. The guard—did he have any known diseases?”
Aroyo shrugged. “Not that I’m aware of. He’d been here a long time, since we opened our doors at this site, so he’d have received medical clearance back then.”
James jumped in, trying to keep his voice steady. “Two years ago, we didn’t have the analysis panel we have today. Maybe we missed something. But it’s a moot point. Attacking livestock is a brain stem response, an act of rage.”
Come on, Stewart. Argue with me.
“No, James,” Stewart said, “she didn’t attack the livestock. She was hungry. She needed to eat meat, and that’s characteristic of both ragers and predators.”
“What are you saying?” James asked, as if he didn’t follow.
“A rage attack would’ve involved destruction to the gate enclosures and panicked animals. That would’ve been heard by the farmers, but there was none of that. She simply helped herself to some dinner, so to speak.”
“Hmm.” It wasn’t difficult to appear tormented.
“Didn’t you say she was a vegetarian?”
He nodded. Almost there.
“She was starving for meat, and the way she fulfilled her need was a calculated move.” Stewart rose abruptly, his eyes filling with stars. “She’s a predator. She’s not a rager.”
James took a seat, a subtle sign of deference, and allowed Stewart to take over.
Stewart swung around to Aroyo. “Call ’em up. I’m overriding James’s order. She will not be sent to salvage. I want her moved to the den.”
James scraped a fingernail along the edge of the guest chair. “Are you sure this is the right answer? I don’t know. We can’t afford a mistake.”
“That’s the difference between us,” Stewart said. “You’re a brilliant implementer, and that’s why you’re in charge of operations, but I’m the one with the intuition. You know the process. I know people.”
James nodded as Stewart stabbed a finger at Aroyo’s phone. “Make the call. We have another predator right here in Mexico. What a day. Let’s go get that drink, Jimboy. Now it’s a celebration.”
James repressed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t the perfect solution, but it would buy him some time and keep Stewart out of his business for a while longer. And these days, every minute mattered.
38
October 2022, Mexico
Layla didn’t know why the ambulance had suddenly switched directions and brought her to the room she now occupied. James had instructed the medical staff to send her to salvage. She heard it loud and clear, even though he covered his face in overwhelming disgust and cowered from the woman he pr
omised to love and cherish for the rest of his life.
But this wasn’t salvage. Perhaps Isaac didn’t have her room ready just yet. Maybe, given her incredibly important leadership role in the Colony, James had insisted that she get a larger corner cell, with cherrywood prison bars instead of ugly steel. Or maybe the surgeon wasn’t available to remove her teeth and fingernails.
She inspected her fingernails. Two were broken, and she filed the sharp edges against the light blue cement wall she lay facing.
The interior wall color for general housing had been her idea. We have enough white around here. We’re not trying to stupefy our people into a state of purification by lack of visual stimulus. Now, do you like Sapphire Ice or Cloudless Sky better? The longer she looked at the Cloudless Sky wall in front of her, the more she wanted to throw something at it. Something bold and staining, like a glass of red wine.
Or a bucket of warm sticky blood.
She rolled onto her other side and took inventory of the room. Just as she expected, it held a desk with a built-in device charger, a two-shelf bookcase without books, and a five-drawer bureau, all white and all with wheels so that they could be moved to the resident’s taste—also her design. She’d studied furniture catalogs for hours before selecting this particular brand and style.
It had felt so important at the time. Everything she did, every decision she’d made, had seemed so critical to operations. Only now did she realize how trivial it all had been, pointless busywork that James had overhyped as engineering genius. There’s just no way I could’ve come up with that idea, Lay. We’re so lucky to have you.
She wanted to puke.
Of course, she just spent an entire night puking, and her throat burned as a reminder. Even after nothing remained inside her to expel, they pumped her stomach through gastric lavage. We can’t risk food poisoning with the baby so close to term, Dr. De Luca said. It was barbaric.