•
Every time the gas hisses, I go totally blank. And then I dream. I dream and I remember things.
I’ve always had trouble sleeping. Even as a tiny kid, I had nightmares: a yellow demon wrapped around a chair, ghosts slithering under the bed. I only half believed in demons and ghouls, but Ma was a true believer. I could see it in her eyes when I told her about the devils that crawled around my room and taunted me in the dark.
She was scared, I could tell. She said to me, “Snap out of it, Will. You have to stay strong.”
“I can hear them, Ma,” I told her. “I can hear them talking. They wake me up.”
Ma believed in demons, but she was always practical—she offered to get me some earplugs.
When the gas hisses, the devils that I haven’t seen in years come back.
Tits! they hiss. We can see your tits, you fucking Breeder!
You’re here for the next twenty years, Will, they say. They’ll make you squeeze out twenty babies.
I wake up gasping, reaching out, trying to fight something or someone.
The worst thing isn’t the nightmares. The worst thing is the vivid memories of Alex, and of Ma—simple things like Alex’s bright eyes laughing at me, or Ma’s soft hands covering mine. The memories rush at me in the night with such realism, and then I wake up with the ache of missing them.
When I was seven, I had a friend called Brock, who was ten. A kid that much older was like a god to me, and I was thrilled he wanted to hang out. He called me little freak, because when we first met he saw me balancing on top of the Wall, staring out at the badlands.
“You’re going to break your neck, little freak!” he yelled in delight. We were forbidden to take risks like that. If you fell and broke a leg as a Westie, you were as good as crippled for life—there’s no way the Corp was going to spend valuable units fixing up a complex fracture for someone in Zone F.
We used to scramble up and down the Wall and look out at the badlands, planning pirate missions to hold up the Corp vehicles and take all their stuff. Brock’s family were smugglers and thieves, like a lot of the people who lived in Zone F, and he had a lot to say about how to hold up a Corp operation. Ma had no problem with people doing what they had to do to survive, but she hated Brock’s family, and she told me outright not to play with him. She said that Brock’s father was a known snitch, who shopped people for units. She also said that Brock wasn’t quite right—there was something “off” about him—and that it was weird he wanted to hang around with me, a kid three years younger than he was. I thought Brock was funny, and besides that, he had his own pocketknife, so I kept playing with him—I just didn’t tell Ma.
Feral cats still roamed Zone F back then, and whenever Brock saw one, he’d try to catch it. He told me he’d do “experiments” on any cats he caught, but the only time I saw Brock catch one, it scratched his face off. I wanted to see what Brock would do, how far he would go.
One day, before nightfall, Brock led me to the “Breeder house” at the end of our street. The house had been abandoned long before anyone could remember. The local teenagers said that a Breeder who’d escaped the Incubator once lived there with her six secret kids, until someone tipped off security. One night, she killed them all in their sleep, then she killed herself. The teenagers wouldn’t go inside—said the house was haunted.
At first, we just stood in front of the Breeder house, staring at it. The house felt terrible, even from the sidewalk. Both its front windows were smashed and the grass went up past our waists. The house looked like it would be dark and wet inside. There’d be a smell—not of cooking and washing but a wet, hurt smell.
I wanted to go home.
“Come on!” Brock shouted, and he went bounding through the grass, around to the back of the house. I followed him—I didn’t have a choice.
The window above the back door was cracked and Brock put his arm through the hole, moving slowly around the slicey bits of glass. The handle clicked and the door flapped open and we stood there. Even Brock just stood at the threshold. I could feel the cold air of the Breeder house on my face; a little shiver went down my back.
Then Brock shoved me, and I lost my balance and fell inside. I stumbled over the linoleum, my hands reaching out, wanting to get my balance, but also not wanting to touch anything. I was surrounded by big dirty shadows. Brock laughed at me. I kept going, through the empty living room, and, to show him I wasn’t scared, through to the kitchen. My eyes adjusted and I could see a table, chairs, a bench. A big, sad gap where the fridge used to be.
“What are you doing over there?” Brock called out.
“Nothing.”
Brock came over to me. He took his knife out of his back pocket and flicked it open. Whiippt. His eyes were bright.
He carefully folded the knife back into itself. Then he flicked it open again.
He held the knife in front of my face. I thought about the cats and I wished that I were home again. I wished Ma knew where I was. I wished her shift had finished early and she was coming to get me because she somehow knew where I was.
“See the blood on the floor?” Brock said, and shoved me.
There was a big, brown circle. It could be anything—mud, or rust. I nodded anyway—it wasn’t worth pissing him off. He reached out and squeezed my arm.
“See that doorway?” he said, pointing down the hall.
“Yeah. Duh.”
He smacked my head. “Shut up, freak. She came through there. All the kiddies, sitting around the table, having their dinner. She came up behind them with her knife.”
Everyone knew she killed the kids in the middle of the night, when they were sleeping.
He opened the top kitchen drawer next to the sink.
“See the drawer full of knives?” Brock said.
There was nothing there. “Sure,” I said.
Brock looked at me. He flicked his pocketknife open and shut a few times. Then he put me in a headlock.
“Strip,” he said.
“What?” My heart was pounding.
“You heard me! Everything off!”
Taking my clothes off was unthinkable. I never did it in front of anyone, not even Ma. I never took PE classes, so I never had to get changed at school—Ma gave me a note that said she preferred I use the time to work, and the Corp was more than happy for me to do some extra Manual Processing instead.
Brock pushed the knife nearer to my face. “I mean it. Strip.” His eyes were glittering.
He put the knife on my collarbone. He pushed and I felt a sting and we both looked at the blood. Only a bit of blood, but it was right there, on my skin and on the knife.
“Shit,” he said. But he wasn’t scared. He was thrilled with himself. “Take off your shirt, or I’ll cut you again. I’ll really do it!”
He would do it, we both knew that. I took off my shirt and threw it on the ground. He came over and kicked it away. It made him even more thrilled.
“I don’t know why you and your ma are so stuck-up,” Brock said. “My dad says there’s something suspect about you just turning up here. Out of nowhere.” It wasn’t unusual for people to show up in a new part of Zone F, but Brock was right that Ma could be stuck-up, and it set people against her.
“How old’s your ma, anyway?” Brock asked, grinning.
I didn’t answer. “Take off your jeans,” he said.
I took off my jeans and threw them down. I stood there in my underpants.
“Wanna know what my dad says you are?” Brock said.
I felt something inside me crack.
“Take off your underpants, little freak!” Brock shouted. “My dad says you’re a . . .”
And that’s when I kicked him. I swung my leg up and kicked him so hard, right in the nuts. He was on the ground, so I kicked him again. I wasn’t a freak. I was going to be a successful We
stie someday—much more successful than Brock. A proper job, a house, a Shadow. I’d show them all.
Then Brock reached up with his knife and slashed my arm from elbow to thumb.
They say that I screamed so loudly, lights went on up and down the street. Suddenly, Brock’s father was in the room. Brock’s father carried me home and wrapped my arm in a clean rag, and then they all waited with me for Ma to come home from the plant.
The next thing I remember is waking up in my own room. On the bedside table was a bubble strip of painkillers and a glass of lemonade. It was the middle of the night, and there was no traffic. The only sound was the buzz of a streetlight. I started to cry but couldn’t think why—I just felt unbearable sadness.
I didn’t go to school the following day, and we moved away from that house the next night.
When we got to the new place, it was another dirty and broken rental in another part of Zone F. We moved four more times after that. Each time, we had to get the security chips cut out of our wrists and new ones sewn in. We got new IDs, new unit profiles and new names. Each time, our unit level plummeted as we traded the surpluses Ma had painstakingly saved for new lives. First, I was Will Grover, then I was Stephen Elliott, then I was Keats Tyrell, and then Adam van Glusser. The last time we moved, Ma let me choose my name for the first time: Will, I told her. I want to be Will again, the name my mother gave me. I became Will Meadows.
•
I hit puberty at age eleven. Until that point, everyone thought of me as a boy, and this was how I thought of myself too. A boy who was working toward a future. Ma must have decided to pass me off as a boy when she bought my first fake ID, as a newborn, but she never told me why she did it. I’m guessing she didn’t want to lose me to the Corp, like she lost my mother when she was only seven. Or maybe she decided that, while life in the Corp is hard for all Westies, it’s more bearable to live here as a male. All I know is, Ma never, ever called me a boy or a Breeder. When she brought it up, she would say to me, “We have to be careful about your condition.” I think she was scared that if we actually talked about it, I’d accidentally say the word “Breeder” to someone. As it turned out, I never felt strongly that I was either a boy or a Breeder, so living as a boy was just fine with me. I don’t think I could have survived going to a Preincubator Center as a little kid. But then, who does, really, survive it?
When I hit puberty, Ma completely lost her mind, and for a while, Ma actually locked me up. Locked me inside our tiny house while she was at work, and wouldn’t let me out of her sight when she was home. It was traumatic—suddenly, I couldn’t do whatever I wanted. Suddenly, I couldn’t roam the streets with all my friends. I hated my Breeder body: really, really hated it. I blamed it for all the crappy things I had to put up with: the terror that I was going to be discovered by a CSO and burned in the Rator; or stolen by a Waster and raped and murdered; or worse, taken to the Incubator and made into a baby machine for the Corp. I blamed it for the way men and boys looked at me. There was a growing softness around my hips and stomach, and I had breasts. My body bled out of nowhere. I felt like it was attacking me. And then Ma found out about Crystal 8, and all the bad Breeder stuff went away. My body went back to normal. I was allowed out of the house again. I could run the streets freely. Nobody was going to kidnap me or rent me out to the Corp. I could live as myself again. I could live as a person.
We moved again—that’s when I became “Adam van Glusser”—and I was secretly a Crystal 8 boy. I learned how to pick out other Crystal boys like me. The Crystal made us thin and some of us even grew slight mustaches, but I could always tell. There weren’t many of us. There were never any in my class or in my neighborhood—sometimes I’d pass one on the Transit. I’d want desperately to talk to them, to send a sign, but it was too dangerous. I’d just watch them, and think Goodspeed, hoping the best for them with all my heart, and then I’d walk on.
I was still Adam when I met Sommer. She was the only Breeder left in our grade—we were both twelve years old.
I wanted to be Sommer’s best friend from the first time I saw her.
Sommer’s parents were rich—rich for Zone F, anyway. She was a quick, smart-mouthed, skinny kid with fast hands, and she was tougher than most of the boys. Sommer lived with her Shadow mother and her father in a two-level house. Her parents must have done a lot of illegal stuff to be able to keep her at school and out of the Incubator, because in addition to Breeders being Dead Units—they’re not allowed to generate any credit outside the Incubators—their families are charged an annual Breeder Tax of one thousand units once they turn six years old. Even Breeders who weren’t sent to Preincubation programs were kept home from school by the time they were eight, so as not to ratchet up education debt for their families. Sommer told me she was never going to the Incubator. Her parents were keeping her home until she was fifteen, she told me, and then she’d go to a Zone C high school to become a profesh. I knew that was impossible—everyone knew that the Corp collected all the Breeders when they turned thirteen years old, no matter how many units their families saved up. But I didn’t say that to Sommer.
I asked Ma if we could tell Sommer and her family about Crystal 8, hook her up with the Gray Corps smuggler at the plant who sold Ma my Crystal—help Sommer really stay with her family and go to high school.
“Definitely not, Will,” Ma said. She made me promise to keep my mouth shut.
Sommer wasn’t embarrassed about being a Breeder. As she hit puberty, she put on big earrings and floofy skirts—she seemed determined to make it even clearer to everyone that she was a Breeder.
The last time I spoke to Sommer, she waited for me outside the school gates and we walked home together because best friends walk each other home, and we were best friends. It was almost dark when we reached the front of my house.
I put my hand on our gate. “See ya,” I said to her.
“See ya. Wouldn’t wanna be ya,” Sommer said, and she winked.
The next day, there was a raid on our Crystal smuggler and Ma was afraid we would be traced. We moved in the middle of the night for the final time. I don’t know if Sommer believed right up to the moment she was taken away by the Corp that she was going to Zone C for high school or whether she knew all along that she was going to the Incubator. I like to think that her story was her way of saying Fuck you to everyone.
•
“Hey!” I yell, just to hear the sound of my voice. The silence is killing me, and as the sedatives wear off, I’m so fucking bored. I never hear footsteps or the scraping of shoes or muffled voices outside, only the voice from the intercom. I would settle for the sound of shouting, for the sound of nails down a board, for the sound of a fly buzzing. There’s nothing. I hum to myself but if I forget and sing too loud, I get the sprinkler.
“Hey!” I yell again, knowing I’ll get sprayed. I just want to hear the voice again, I just want to hear another human person—it’s worth the hose—but they seem to know that, because no sound comes through the intercom. Instead, another blast from the sprinkler. Bastards.
But then the voice starts. “Think about it. We have a choice with respect to our circumstances. What choices have you made? What exact choices got you here?”
“Hey!” I yell.
The voice starts again. It’s a recording that they put on a loop. I’ve heard it so many times that it no longer cracks the boredom. “Think about it. We have a choice with respect to our circumstances . . .”
•
I hear the click and the voice says, “Eat the food or we’ll force-feed you. It’s up to you.”
I’m sitting in the chair and on the table is a white plastic tray of food. On the tray there are three squares of different-colored mush: brown, yellow, and orange. Foul. The voice has been telling me that I need to sit up more, to retain muscle tone. I’m on a break from the IV. Instead I have a drug patch in my back that they stitched under my skin while
I was in a drug-sleep—no amount of clawing can remove it.
The intercom clicks and the voice says, “Eat the food or we’ll force-feed you with tubes. It’s up to you.”
Fuck that. I sweep the tray onto the floor where it spatters all over the concrete and up the wall. So revolting. So satisfying.
The intercom clicks and the gas comes, and then the orange mustache suit and the orange Shadow suit are in front of the door and the mustache is carrying a long hose with a funnel-thing at the end, and the Shadow is carrying a bottle of something brown. Then they’re inside the room and I’m up out of the chair but the man has me around the arms and is holding my jaw and the hose is being forced down my throat with a clawing, wrenching pain.
“Wrong choice,” says the orange Shadow.
“You need nutrition,” says the orange man.
It feels like scraping and drowning, all at once. It hurts so, so much.
•
I’m five or six years old. It’s the middle of the night and Ma’s heels click on the floor and she bends over to kiss me goodbye before she leaves for her shift.
“Ma,” I say. I’m half asleep.
“Yes, love?”
“Were you really once a Zone C?”
“Yes, love.”
“And were you really a profesh?”
“Yes, love.”
“And what happened?”
She sighs. “Ah, Will. I have to go to work.”
“Please! Ma, you never tell me anything.”
She sighs again. “I grew up in Zone C. My parents had saved a lot of units and I had a good childhood. I had to go to the Incubator when I was fourteen. That was the maximum age back then, and my parents could afford to keep me until it was no longer possible. I stayed in the Incubator a long, long time. Then your grandfather came to choose a wife, and he chose me—I was thirty-five. So I left with him. And we had your mother—we were so lucky to have a child. We lived in Zone C, and were happy, until your grandfather died when she was six years old. Cancer. Then, your mother was all I had left—I wanted to keep her with me forever. But we’d spent all our units on his treatment, and didn’t have the units to keep her. The Corp came and took her . . .” Ma starts to cry. “Will, I have to go.”
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