Breeder

by Honni van Rijswijk

  I put my mask on and start stamping the ground from the cold and blowing into my cupped hands. It’s one of those rare, forty-degree nights. I’m not used to the mask anymore and it makes my face itchy, so I take it off, then start wheezing, and put it back on. I unzip my tracksuit and start to rip out the components. I’m looking up at the camera and cursing how long it’s taking Cate to show up. Then I hear footsteps and a voice.

  “Will?” It’s Alex.

  She’s come around the corner with another orange suit, who leaves us to it and moves to the stairwell. Now Alex is standing in front of me. Her bright eyes, her beautiful face. I tear my mask off.

  I move forward to hug her, but she backs away, wraps her arms around her body. I get it. After everything that’s happened, I don’t want another human touching me again either. Ever. Except Alex. She looks so different—so pale, and her eyes are bright with pain and anger, not her old joy.

  “Cate sent me for the components,” she says.

  I hold out my hand and Alex takes them and nods and now she smiles, and I see the old Alex again. She puts everything in her pockets and looks at me with her big, frank eyes. How strange I must look to her: my fat, pink cheeks, my long, curly hair. Almost unrecognizable.

  “Will,” she says. “They told me you tried to kill yourself.”

  “Yeah.”

  She takes both my hands in hers. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, Will.”

  It’s so good to hear her voice, to feel her touch. I’m suddenly filled with ridiculous hope. What if the surgeon agrees to my terms and Alex and I get to have a life one day? What if?

  “Listen, Will,” she says, looking around to where her guard is standing with mine, about thirty feet away, both smoking and talking. Then she clasps my hands more tightly, and starts talking quickly about the Response, and about their plans for a new world.

  I put my hand on her arm to stop her. She flinches. “Alex, do you know what those parts are for?”

  She nods, her eyes bright. “Cate’s going to blow up the Incubator, destroy key infrastructure. The Night of Fires. I’ve volunteered. I want you to as well, Will. You know how to work systems. Cate . . . doesn’t think we can trust you, but I told her we can. You could help us so much.”

  I suck in my breath. “A suicide mission?”

  Alex nods.

  “I mean . . . I get it. If they’re going to drive us to suicide, we should take them with us on the way out. I’m not afraid to die.”

  “Right!” Alex says, smiling. “The Corp was built by people like us. Literally, by our blood and our flesh. It’s time for us to take it over.”

  I think of the Book Shadow, the courtroom with the weeping Shadows, Rob pushing the Shadows into the Rator. “It’s pointless,” I say gently. “You know how it goes—the Corp always crushes the Response.”

  Alex looks at me, angry. “Every act of resistance matters. I don’t care if it takes generations . . . it starts with us.”

  “The Corp will kill you, Alex.” I can hear my voice, high and panicky, when what I want is to stay calm and to reason with her carefully.

  “So? I’ll die blowing up part of the Incubator. And more girls will come after us and die blowing up other pieces. We’ll do it slowly. I don’t care! I’d rather die fighting those fuckers than live like this.”

  She pulls me closer, holds my hands to her lips. “Say yes! I told Cate you would!”

  There are tears in my eyes. I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to her. I look over at the orange suits. They’re halfway through their cigarettes. We don’t have much time—I have to just go for it.

  “Alex, what if I could get us out of here?”

  Alex stares at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “Have you heard from Cate that I’ve been taken to Zone A?”

  Her face is closed, unreadable. “Yes.”

  “Listen . . . this is going to sound nuts, but I have a direct connection with the chief surgeon of the Incubator. I have a deal with her to get us both out of here. We have a shot at real lives. Out of the Incubator into Zone B, with jobs and a house and everything.”

  She laughs. “A deal with the Corp? How?”

  “It’s complicated.” I can feel my face getting hot. Will Alex work out that I’m really a Corp?

  “Will. Tell me how.”

  I ignore her question. “I said yes to their deal. But only if they take both of us out of the Incubator.”

  Alex’s face is full of horror. “No, Will. No.”

  “Alex, think about it. An actual life, instead of years in the Incubator. Being happy. In Zone B!”

  “You mean, live a great life while everyone here suffers and dies? No way. That’s so fucked, Will.”

  “Listen though. We could still help the Response. From the inside, from Zone B. From a place of strength. We would find out about how everything really works. I mean, who knows what we could do? Has anyone from the Response even done that before? And we could do it together. We could fight the Corp together.”

  “No,” Alex says. “What you’re talking about is complicity.”

  “Alex, I swear! I can think of scenarios where I’d strap a suicide vest on and head to the barricades but not when there’s a chance at life. We have a chance, Alex!”

  “That’s . . . it’s evil, Will.”

  My heart’s racing. This is going much worse than I thought it would.

  “It’s time to pick a side, Will.”

  We stare at each other. I want to bring back the old Alex before it’s time to go. I feel annihilated. She’s never going to change her mind. I look over at the orange suits. They’ve finished their cigarettes and look like they’re readying to get back. “When’s the Night of Fires?” I ask.

  She looks away from me. I feel that distrust again. “Alex?”

  “Night after tomorrow,” she says. “Don’t tell her I told you.”

  “Are you sure we can trust her?”

  She nods without hesitation and I feel a pang. “With all my heart. I knew her when I was in the Incubator last time—before she was leader. Cate got me out of here back then—she set off a bomb that freed a bunch of the youngest Breeders, including me. I owe her everything.”

  I sigh.

  “Will, long before I knew you, I was part of the Response. It’s my whole life.”

  “Okay. I get it.”

  She nods. “Cate said something else . . .” She takes a step away from me, pulls her arms tight around herself, her whole body tense.

  “What is it?”

  She looks away, then starts talking quickly. “Cate said that she found out you were a Breeder runner. I told her that’s bullshit. I told her there was no way in hell. It’s bullshit, isn’t it?”

  Fuck. Alex looks up at me. For a second, I think of lying to her, just because I can’t stand the thought of what’s coming next. But I can’t.

  “Cate’s right, but . . .”

  I step toward her, my hand outreached, but she pushes me away and starts to cry.

  “Alex?” She doesn’t answer. “Alex?”

  “I can’t believe you could do that,” she says, so softly I can barely hear her. “And I can’t believe you lied about it.”

  I just stand there, my heart banging. There’s nothing more to say about it.

  “At least promise me you won’t have anything more to do with this deal,” she says.

  “But, Alex, it’s our only chance . . .”

  “Promise me!”

  I hesitate. “I can’t promise, Alex. I just can’t.”

  The orange suits move toward us. Alex looks at me and then leans in and whispers—“Long live the Response!”—as the orange suits separate us and take us back to our cells.

  •

  I spend the night wide awake, my jaw cl
enched. As much as I want to live, and as much as I want a life which has Alex in it—even if it’s just knowing she’s in the world somewhere—every time I think back to her face, I know that she’ll never, ever change her mind. She’ll never, ever compromise. She’ll never let me take her to Zone B. I can’t drag her out of the Incubator only to imprison her another way.

  I may as well strap a bomb to myself. I may as well tell Cate yes. Yes, Cate, I’ll run bombs for you, even though I know the surgeon and all her cronies will shut the Response down and send us all to the Rator and our deaths won’t change a thing. My mind ticks over, trying to think of some other way out, and keeps coming up with nothing.

  In the morning, Luke and I drive to the surgeon’s house in Zone A. When I arrive, the surgeon gives me another fancy dress to change into, and then Luke escorts me to the passenger seat of the surgeon’s black sports car. The surgeon hands me a giant, delicious-smelling coffee in a large cup with a Latin insignia plastered on it. I wrap my hands around it.

  “Remember that you’re my niece,” the surgeon says, as I fidget in the passenger seat next to her. “You’ve transferred from Astor College in the north of Zone A. Alright?”

  “Yep.” The surgeon is taking me to Excelsior College. It’s a special celebration day or something, and the surgeon is beside herself. She went to Excelsior herself and she can’t wait to see it again.

  “Stop fidgeting!” she says, and I stop playing with the remote buttons for the windows.

  “I’ll introduce you to some other college girls,” she continues. “It’s important that you make a good impression.”

  “Okay.”

  We drive in silence for a few minutes, and then the surgeon pulls her sports car up to the Excelsior College security post. I try to look past it, into the college grounds. Excelsior College was apparently part of the original city, the one that stood before the End Times. A lot of it was razed to the ground but they rebuilt it, and the bones of some of the original buildings remain today. This is where the country’s richest families have studied for hundreds of years.

  The surgeon is holding her coffee in a gloved hand as she talks to the CSO, who then waves us through. The tall metal gates open and we drive down a long, smooth, straight road.

  As we drive, the surgeon proudly points out the key landmarks.

  “The Flatiron building, as they had in New York,” she says. “A famous city from Before. We were able to source the correct bricks.”

  “The Cathedral of Notre Dame,” she says, as we drive past a giant stone church.

  “The Sydney Harbor Bridge,” as we drive over an actual goddamn bridge. I’m looking at the surgeon with my eyebrows raised but she doesn’t even register. “Excelsior College campus has reproduced the best parts of cities from the old world.”

  “That’s nice,” I say.

  “We also have a Versailles, including genuine reproductions of its key treasures, but it’s on the other side of campus,” she says, in an apologetic tone.

  We’re meant to be in a state of emergency, yet the Corp has poured energy and resources into reproductions of ancient gray stone churches and glass skyscrapers and—all of it. All of it.

  “And that’s the river, modeled on the Seine River, where we’ll be celebrating later,” she says, pointing west.

  “Celebrating what?”

  “It’s the day of the Flamen Dialis—the final day of Trinity Term. It’s a very sacred day for Excelsior College and, of course, alumni. Lots of fun.”

  We keep driving and I try to take it all in: the stone buildings, the beautiful lawns, the happy and beautiful young people smiling and laughing in the sunshine. None of them are wearing masks. I roll down the window: the air is pure. Then we drive through the stone gates of the Scholars Club.

  “Remember, your name is Lara,” the surgeon says, as she parks.

  We step out of the car and the surgeon strides down the bluestone path toward an ornate, redbrick building. I’m overwhelmed by everything I can see and hear and smell—I try to keep up with her but I need to stop and look.

  There’s a sound in the tree above me.

  The surgeon turns back, irritated—then her face lights up. “Do you know what that is?”

  “A . . . bird?”

  “Dacelo leachii—a blue-winged kookaburra.”

  The tree it’s sitting in is beautiful, with waxy red blossoms. “A flame tree,” adds the surgeon. “Brachychiton acerifolius. The Scholars Club prides itself on its Australian collection.”

  •

  We enter the front door of the massive Scholars Club and step into a foyer, which leads to another beautiful room with a long, wooden table, where a young woman is sitting calmly at her laptop, which seems to float above the table.

  “Hi,” calls the young woman, looking up.

  She introduces herself as Jasmine Anderson. She’s been waiting for us. She looks about a year older than I am, and she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I feel overdressed in my stupid red velvet dress with ruby trim. Jasmine’s smooth, blond hair is tied up with a kind of cord-thing at the back. She is so gorgeous; she really is. I feel funny about being close to her, because she’s a college girl and a completely different species from me.

  “I understand you went to school here too, Professor Keeling, so I’ll leave you alone to look around,” Jasmine says, and the surgeon beams at her. “Just let me know if you need anything.”

  Jasmine starts typing away on her keyboard, but I can feel her watching me at the same time, as though I’m some sort of rare creature in whom she’s taking a scientific interest. I look at the surgeon anxiously—it must be clear to Jasmine that I’m a Breeder. The surgeon smiles and squeezes my arm, hard, reminding me to act normally, and starts to show me around the room. The Scholars Club is where the surgeon lived, when she went to Excelsior. This is the library and the reading room where she studied. There are residential halls upstairs.

  I’m entranced by all the lovely stuff in the room: even the pens gathered in a bunch on a desk are each uniquely beautiful. There’s a massive painting down one wall of the room which the surgeon tells me is from the eighteenth century. The painting depicts a small group of people examining a strange animal on a slab, and one of the figures is pointing to it. The animal looks like bits of other animals that I’ve seen in pictures: part duck, part rat, or something. The title is The Platypus. They also have a giant fireplace. Alongside these old-fashioned pieces is all the state-of-the-art technology you might dream up. Part of me is thinking about how this wealth is built on the backs of the Breeders and all Westies. The other part of me wants to slowly lick the long line of leather-bound books.

  The surgeon sees me coveting the books. “Did you know,” she says, pointing to a screen at the center of the bookshelf, “that there’s a center hundreds of feet beneath us that preserves the genes of all the creatures on earth? Scientists are being sent out into the badlands to retrieve genetic samples so they can be reanimated. The Scholars Club is particularly interested in the antipodean animals.” She turns to me. “That screen there gives you direct access to the specimens, so you can study them. Isn’t that beautiful?”

  I nod. Rich people are reanimating kangaroos, while thirteen-

  year-old girls have rich people’s babies in the Incubator. Isn’t that just beautiful?

  “Jasmine wants to be a scientist,” the surgeon adds.

  It’s like Jasmine can feel me silently judging her because she looks up and narrows her eyes at me, and I feel a mad cut of hate, or wretched jealousy, or something. Jasmine is deadly bright as well as deadly hot, and she wants to be a scientist one day. I’m sure she will be. There’s no danger of the Incubator for her—Jasmine is pure Corporation. She’ll never be shoved somewhere and shot full of chemicals, injected and tested until she can’t stand up. If she’s fertile, she will have to suffer the Egg Retrievals ju
st like me, though. And just like the surgeon had to. I feel a bite of mean satisfaction.

  Jasmine and the surgeon look at each other, and Jasmine says, “I know you’ll be living off-campus, but you’ll use the library and the reading room here. And the kitchen. Come and see and have a snack.”

  We go into the kitchen and Jasmine opens the fridge and starts to throw stuff on the center island, which is a luscious slab of green stone, probably pilfered from a rare sacred site somewhere in the badlands.

  “I’m starving,” Jasmine says, chucking different types of posh cheese, dips, and fruit on the slab, making a little pyramid of food. She looks at me, her eyes laughing. I smile at her.

  “Dig in,” she says, shoving a cracker piled with something white into her mouth. She sighs, rolling her eyes. “That is fucking lovely. Have some of the blue cheese.”

  The surgeon nods at me, and I sit on a stool at the other end of the island.

  “Here,” she says, and smears some cheese on with a knife and holds out the cracker. I hesitate and then my stomach growls—I’m hungry too—and so reach over and take it.

  Damn. She’s right—it is fucking lovely.

  After our snack, the surgeon takes me on a tour of the rest of the Scholars Club, including the residential halls on the upper floors. I meet more boys and girls who attend the college—so many that they all blend into one. They’re all versions of Jasmine—impeccably dressed, clear-skinned, and polite, with unreadable expressions.

  Then the surgeon wants to meet with some of her old college friends, so I spend the rest of the day walking around the grounds by myself. It’s a beautiful day and at first, I’m overwhelmed by everything I see. But as the day goes on, I feel tired and melancholy—and like a total outsider.

  At sunset, we meet down at the Seine.

  There’s a crowd of a few hundred people lining the banks: college kids, their proud parents and grandparents; alumni across many generations. Everyone is well-dressed and well-fed. No doubt they all have a staff to style their hair, do their makeup. “The most elite people are here,” the surgeon whispers to me. It’s the most animated I’ve ever seen her. I get it—they’re the special ones. The most elite of the original Corporation families. And the super-producers who keep their line going. There’s nothing more they love than being with each other, noticing each other, being noticed by each other.