Breeder

by Honni van Rijswijk

  I watch the phone all night. At dawn it lights up and I answer it.

  “I’ve found out about your grandmother. Jessica Meadows is deceased. I’m so sorry, Will.”

  I’ve always known that they would have killed Ma right away, but I feel sudden pain all over. It’s real—she’s gone. And her death is on me. I think back to that morning. I should have gone home straight after meeting Alex in the diner. Ma must’ve been so worried that day—not knowing anything, wondering where I was. And then she would have heard the choppers coming. First, in the distance—and then, closer. The slow realization that they were coming for her. And Alex—if only I’d talked her down that day, if only I’d convinced her to walk home instead, to stay in the Gray Zone. I see myself on that bus, setting everything in motion, and I can hardly breathe.

  “Your grandmother’s original name was Sophie Gray,” Cate continues. “She was a member of the Response.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s right. You must have another Jessica Meadows.”

  “That’s what my contacts say. They’re usually correct.”

  “What does that mean, Cate? That she was member of the Response?”

  “She joined when she was in the Incubator—that’s when most join. My contacts say she worked hard from inside. That she was instrumental in helping some of the younger ones escape. After she was released, she continued to help the Response with intelligence and with resources, when she could. She even hid our people when needed. But around ten years ago, she said she had to stop contact with us, that she wasn’t in a safe place any longer.”

  I think of the people we kept hidden in the first house I remember, the house carved into the wall. We didn’t hide people after we moved. She chose me over her work with the Response.

  “Do you know how she died?”

  “The Rator, Will. I’m sorry.”

  “Was she interrogated?”

  She pauses. “She was. I’m so sorry to tell you. Are you alright?”

  “Yeah.” Ma was such a brave person, and spent her final moments in pain and terror. She deserved so much more. And it’s all on me.

  “I’ve heard you’ll be taken to Zone A today. Don’t forget our agreement.”

  “All good.”

  “This phone is a burner—give it back to an orange suit now, will you?”

  “Roger that.”

  Moments later, the sliding door to my cell opens and I hand over the phone.

  •

  I’m sedated, put in another Incubator van, and taken away that morning, just as Cate said I would be. When I open my eyes, there’s the warm light again. Daylight is coming into the room from all directions. There are big, open windows with a gentle breeze coming straight through. The air is so fresh and sharp, it could cut you. No mask; I feel it touching my skin. I think of the dome over Zone A—we could always see it glittering, reflecting in the sun, but I never imagined it would feel like this. The air carries scents from the outside world: dirt, petrol, fresh-mown grass. I try to name them and I feel giddy with the stimulus. My god—I can smell coffee.

  The painted angels are there, above me—I’m in the surgeon’s long room, the one with the soft bed, the same room as last time. I concentrate on an angel in the center: gazing up, ecstatic. I hope Ma has found her Heaven. I hope Ma has her own angel who protects her and makes her happy.

  Outside, a bird calls.

  No shackles, no drip. I’m on a gurney. There are bandages on the left side of my face. There’s a fresh pot of coffee and some pastries on a tray to the side of my bed.

  The surgeon is sitting next to me in a large, wooden chair, holding out a small plate with a croissant on it. I’m not sure how afraid I should be. I take the croissant and bite into it, and she pours me a cup of coffee. She holds it out, and I take that too and drink. I try not to show how good it is. I take another sip. I’m back in Zone A, and for the first time I can remember, I’m not physically suffering. That in itself is enough to make me feel high. I feel like myself again. At the same time, I don’t know what it means to be myself—or at least, who I was before I was broken down. The pain and loneliness have made me into something else.

  I raise a hand to my face and feel the bandages crinkle.

  “I’ve had your Breeder brand removed,” she says. “It will feel tender for some weeks. There’ll be no permanent mark.”

  “Why?”

  “You have a beautiful face,” she says, ignoring my question. She reaches over and touches my jaw.

  I flinch—both at the word beautiful and at her touch.

  “Handsome, then,” she says. The surgeon hands me a mirror and my sad reflection looks back at me. The softness of my face; the curls of hair that frame it. Well-fed, healthy skin. It’s not me. I put the mirror down.

  “I want to live as a boy again,” I say, so quietly I doubt she’ll hear. To be honest, I’ve never exactly felt like a boy, but I sure as hell don’t feel like a Breeder. I wish I didn’t have to be either. I wish I could just float above all this, without a body at all. Or without a body that had to be one particular thing. But if I have to choose—and it seems I have to—then I’ll live as a boy. Living as a Breeder is no life for anyone.

  “That simply isn’t possible,” says the surgeon.

  I turn and look her full in the face. “What do you want from me?”

  “Ah, that Westie bluntness again!” She holds my gaze. “Except, you’re not really a Westie. Are you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We do genetic profiles on all Breeders when they arrive at the Incubator, Will,” she says. “You’re one hundred percent Corporation. There’s no Westie in you at all.”

  “That’s bullshit!” I tell her. I belong to Ma. In my mind, all I can see is Ma, and Cranky, and our little home in Zone F. I’m as Westie as they come.

  She shakes her head. “I was able to link your genetic tests to our records.” She holds up her phone, shows me a photo of a young girl.

  “This was your Breeder. We have her records on file.”

  I reach out to touch the phone. I can’t stop myself. The surgeon lets me. The photo is of a girl about thirteen years old—it must have been taken soon after they put her in the Incubator. She is small for her age, and she is unsmiling, looking up defiantly at whoever is taking the photo. I gently trace her outline with my finger.

  “Not my Breeder. My mother.”

  “She’s not your mother, Will. Breeders are only surrogates for Corp babies. Of course the Corp wants all the babies’ genes to be Corp. Didn’t you know that?” She’s genuinely surprised that I don’t know.

  I shake my head. I feel dizzy and stupid.

  “I mean. If we wanted Westie genes we’d just open up the Wall. Millions of people waiting out there!” She laughs.

  This is not what the Corp tells us. Only 5 percent of people are fertile, so I know most Breeders are surrogates, but the Corp tells us that the babies birthed at the Incubator are genetically both Corp and Westie. That the Corp is desperate to make the most of what fertility is left, to guarantee the future of the human species. Did Ma know I wasn’t her genetic grandkid? If Ma was part of the Response, she must have known that all Incubator babies are Corp. If so, why would Ma look after a Corp kid? She kept so much from me.

  My mother escaped from the Incubator, where she was incubating a Corp baby—me. I never belonged to my mother, and I never belonged to Ma. Ma must have known that. And yet she kept me. I feel like I’m losing Ma all over again—there’s pain deep in my core. What was Ma thinking? She gave up everything for me, a Corp bastard. Why didn’t she just give me back to them? As a member of the Response, surely a part of her must have wanted me as far away from her as possible?

  “Does it say how my mother escaped the Incubator?” I ask the surgeon.

  “Your Breeder escaped as part of
a suicide mission with the Response, but then defected from her group. Presumably to have you.”

  A suicide mission? “That’s not what I was told.”

  She shrugs. “That’s what her security record states.”

  Yet again, I think about who I should trust and who I should believe.

  The surgeon swipes to two more photos.

  “These are your Corp bio parents. You look like your bio mother, don’t you? You have the same eyes.”

  I look a lot like her. But seeing her, I feel nothing.

  Ma loved me so much and I loved her, and she knew I was her Corp enemy—genetically, at least. It doesn’t make sense. She sent me out, beyond the Wall, to capture her own people, so I could buy the drugs that kept me safe—that doesn’t make sense either. Just survive, Will, and try to be happy. That’s all there is.

  “I’m not a Breeder,” I say.

  “Well, actually, legally, you are. Legally, you’re still bound to the Incubator. But only until your new contract.”

  She holds up her phone. There’s a picture of a baby. I turn away.

  “Don’t do that. She’s your ticket out of here.”

  She smiles. “Have I got your attention?”

  She has.

  “You know of course, Will, that Corp girls—Zone A girls—don’t go into the Incubator?”

  “No,” I say. According to what we learned at school, it’s important that every zone contributes. I mean, I know that Breeder Incubations are a key way for Westies to assimilate into the Corporation. But I was told that Corp Breeders were Incubated too.

  “Do you know what happens to the babies who are born in the Incubator?”

  “They’re taken to Zone C, initially,” I tell her. “Then they’re assessed and plugged into the system—allocated a zone, given their initial unit allocation, and evaluated continuously from there.” From birth to death, and so on, forever.

  The surgeon smirks at me. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “School.”

  “You really don’t know the truth?”

  I shrug, embarrassed and confused.

  “We only adopt them out to Corp people. Strictly Zone A. For a very high price. It’s our mission to preserve our genetic connection to the original Corp families. The Incubator was built to serve them. Us.”

  She holds up a photo of a baby—my baby. “And your kid is fully Corp. You weren’t just a surrogate—we used your egg. I needed to see if your eggs were viable after all your chemical exposure in the outer zones. And they are. Do you know how valuable that makes you?”

  I look at the photo. It’s the first time I’ve seen the baby properly. Her. She’s small and red and angry. I’m glad she looks so angry. Seeing her little face makes me feel strange—angry too, but something else. Before I can think too much more about her, the surgeon swipes to the next photo: two good-looking, middle-aged women.

  “Your daughter belongs to them now, Will. They’re both Corp lawyers. They’re delighted to have her. More important, they’ve paid a significant fee for her.”

  It’s surreal to think that—she—was in my body. I can’t think of it—her—as mine. But more than that, I can’t bear the fact that I brought her into this hell.

  “Will she be a Breeder?” I ask.

  “No. No, she will never be a Breeder. I keep telling you—only Westies are Breeders. The Corporation only has women and girls. She’ll have a wonderful life with more than she could dream of. Don’t give her another thought.”

  “So is everyone in Zone A rich?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “We have rich and poor.”

  “But—what about the outer zones? They’re part of the Corporation too.”

  “Well, yes. Technically. But they’re not part of Zone A.” She smiles. “I mean, we need the other zones for labor and reproduction. But Westies are excluded from Zone A. We don’t want them as part of our actual lives, do we?”

  We? “So—what do you want from me?” I ask her again.

  “I want to take you out of the Incubator.”

  “You want to . . . adopt me?”

  She laughs. “No, you little idiot. I want to lease you to a college. Or rather—lease your valuable genetic assets. Keep our Corp bloodlines going.”

  I don’t get it. “Lease me for what?”

  She smiles.

  “I’ll kill myself rather than be pregnant again,” I say. “You know I’ll do it.”

  “College girls aren’t Breeders,” she says.

  •

  I’m sitting on a swivel chair in the middle of the surgeon’s room. Behind me, a short man is styling my long, curly brown hair with an ironing device and some sweet-smelling spray. The surgeon sits beside me, talking about the college system and my future role in it. I force myself to stay calm. I need to find an angle.

  When the stylist finishes, my hair looks pretty much exactly as it did thirty minutes ago, but he and the surgeon both smile and sigh appreciatively before he leaves.

  The surgeon shows in another man, who gently peels the bandage off my face. I can see a faint shadow of the Breeder mark and I go to touch it, but the man gently presses my hand down. He takes out some tiny containers and applies ointment, which instantly cools the skin. He then puts concealer over the mark, dabbing and blending. Soon, he’s applying bright colors all over my face.

  The surgeon throws some clothes onto the table in front of me. “Different styles you can choose from,” she says. “Now, I know you’ve been living as a boy for a long time . . .”

  I can’t look her in the eye. I pick through the clothes. They’re exquisite, made of soft fabric with sharp corners, but all are, definitely, dresses. Their colors are bold, so different from the muted tones we wear in the outer zones, and some of the collars and cuffs have actual jewels sewn into them.

  “It would be more profitable for you to present as a girl as we negotiate the contract. And for the next few years. College girls on your kind of scholarship do tend to present as very feminine. For the purposes of maximizing bonuses and such. It’s a marketing thing. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say. I don’t want to talk about my body at all.

  “Great! Anyway, Corp males and females are completely equal,” she says.

  “I’m sure that’s totally the case,” I say, and reach for the most androgynous-looking dress in the pile.

  “Right!” she agrees, because apparently they don’t have sarcasm in Zone A.

  “What about my bio parents?” I ask the surgeon, sweetly. “Won’t they want to know about me?” I imagine contacting them out of the blue, their long-lost Corp kid, ready to emerge full-grown into their lives and be cared for and loved. Ready for me to work them, to escape.

  She smiles sweetly back at me. “You’re one of two hundred fifty-three offspring for your bio mother,” she says. “For your bio father, it’s four times that number. Like me, they’re rare super-producers—I have three hundred fifty-two genetic offspring, myself—and, like me, I imagine they haven’t given a thought to you beyond the big unit reward they got from the Corp, fifteen years ago, when you showed up in their accounts as a live birth. They honestly wouldn’t give a shit.”

  I go into the restroom and change from my tracksuit into the dress. There’s a mirror, and through the bright makeup, I see my face has some of its angles and lines back, because I’m no longer on Breeder hormones. Though it’s still rounder than it was when I was on Crystal. All thanks to those nutritional, terrible-tasting cubes of mush. I want to smash the fucking mirror.

  I walk out and the surgeon says, “Game time,” and as we start to walk down the hall, she puts her hand on the small of my back as though she’s scared I’ll run off. I can tell she’s anxious and since I’m not used to seeing any emotion in her, this makes me interested.

  We go past a large, circula
r staircase in the middle of the house and I look up, hoping to see what’s above. I count five floors. There are corridors leading out in four directions. I can’t believe this is a place where just one person lives. The surgeon seems to have a full staff.

  A door slams and there are footsteps coming down the staircase toward us. A young woman, a little older than me, freezes when she sees us. She meets my eye and I look back directly, in case she’s my contact for Cate. But the expression she shoots back takes me by surprise—fury. Then she quickly looks away and asks the surgeon something about wine glasses.

  •

  I’m sitting at the surgeon’s dining table in an enormous room. In front of me is a sheet of heavy paper titled Luncheon, with over twenty menu items. There’s proper linen, a bottle of wine, and candles. The surgeon and another guest sit at the table, and they each have two attendants on either side of them—two beautiful young people, who are not waitstaff, but who are just standing there, decoratively, wearing the dresses I saw earlier, as well as jewelry in their ears and on their necks and wrists. At the top of the room are more young people, their faces, sad, holding the musical instruments I’ve heard. I don’t know the names of all of them, but I know the large one is a cello, and the small one a violin. There’s a piano. And then wind instruments—so many.

  “Please help yourselves,” the surgeon says, as waitstaff bring platters of meat and vegetables and fish to the table. It makes my eyes water—there’s enough to feed a family for several weeks—and it just keeps coming. The surgeon has made all her staff wear a uniform. I watch them glance at her when she isn’t looking and they clearly hate her guts. They may be Corporation and live in Zone A, but in this respect they’re just like us Westies—they can’t do anything about it.

  Opposite me sits an older man, the dean of Excelsior College, which the surgeon says is the most prestigious college in Zone A.

  “Your aunt tells me you’re planning to apply for college this year,” says the dean. He says the word aunt in scare quotes—“aunt”—which tells me that the dean is “in on it,” although I’m not yet clear what it is. And I’m sure that, just like in the Gray Zone, both the surgeon and the dean have different interests in it, and different leverage to get what they want.