Breeder

by Honni van Rijswijk

  I feel so much despair. Westies will always be kept outside the glory of this world. As for the future—it’s all about making Corp kids. And then, I realize, I just made my decision: I’m going to strap explosives around my body alongside Alex and kill myself with the Response. Even though I know it will change nothing, at least I’ll be standing side-by-side with Alex. And with Westies. I’m not part of the Corp; I grew up Westie, after all.

  “Will?” the surgeon says.

  I look over. “Sorry?”

  “Come here and look!” she says. Beautiful paper lanterns are being lit and released onto the river, while uniformed staff with tiny lights in their hair bring platters of food to us down at the riverbank.

  We see the dean across the crowd, seated alongside his distinguished guests in a ribboned-off VIP area. He gives us a wave and a wink. The surgeon smiles back, her eyes flat. Then she leans in and whispers to me. “He called me to say he was uncomfortable with our deal. Can you believe his cheek? I’m sure you’re not the only unconventional enrollment here.” She points to the student body. “He wants an additional ten thousand units per live birth.”

  I nod. Presumably she’s not absorbing the loss. The surgeon keeps waving at the dean until he turns away, and then her smile disappears.

  “Anyway. It’s all for the best. We’ve decided to cut Luke out and split his units between us. I’m just letting you know so you’re not shocked when things change. Luke will handle your initial enrollment and processing into the college. But after that, you won’t see him: we’re going to deal with potential parents directly. Luke won’t find out for a few months, and by then, it will be too late.”

  Luke would have arranged to pay the Gray Corps a percentage of those birth payments, and I don’t think it’s wise for her to cut out the Gray Corps. But I don’t say anything.

  •

  On the journey home, the surgeon says. “You know, you could have a great life, Will. Later on, you can be a scientist and have a wife and child, just like the two women who have your baby.” Your baby. I shudder. Everything about . . . that . . . has gone into the black box in my mind.

  “The contract will be executed in two days,” she continues. “You’ll be locked into the Incubator overnight and then tomorrow you’ll go to the college again to start your enrollment process. I can’t emphasize how valuable you are.”

  Well. That’s a comfort—or would be, if I valued my life at all.

  The car pulls up at the surgeon’s place. I go to open my passenger door, when the surgeon activates the central locking system. My door won’t budge. She turns to me.

  “I’ve thought about your request regarding Alex and we will go ahead with that. But I want one more egg extraction to cover my risks and expenses. So that would bring the total to five additional egg retrievals per year—all to go to me. You would still have one cycle off to recover.”

  I nod. “Okay.”

  “So we have a deal?”

  I shrug. “Yes.”

  She looks surprised. “I thought you’d be more . . .”

  “Grateful?”

  “Just . . . happy.” She shakes her head.

  I make my mind go blank. I can’t even think about the deal, about that chance of a life with Alex—it will break me. If there were any way I could convince Alex, I would. But I can’t.

  The surgeon unlocks my door, and gestures to Luke to come over. “Luke will be taking you to the college tomorrow to go through your enrollment papers. I have work to do.”

  •

  We enter the Incubator and as we walk past the cells, and past the guard stations, I can feel the rising tension—the Incubator is louder than usual. There’s the sound of scuffles and raised voices, the sense that things aren’t quite right. The Night of Fires is coming. Luke can feel the tension too.

  We’re only in my cell about half an hour when the same orange Shadow suit from the night before appears.

  “We need another medical check,” she says to Luke, deadpan, and starts to process me.

  Luke frowns but then he nods, and I’m taken out of my cell and down the fire exit, the Shadow yanking at my wrist. “Hurry. Hurry,” she says.

  When we reach the bottom, Cate comes around the corner, and the Shadow moves a few feet away. I step toward Cate and before she can say anything to me, I tell her, “I’ll do it. Send me in with Alex.”

  Cate laughs. She looks furious. “Terms have changed, Breeder runner.”

  I shiver. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll give my life for the Response. I mean it.”

  She shakes her head. “You know, Will—there are things worse than death.”

  My heart leaps. “Yeah. I know that.”

  “Whenever the Response blows things up, do you know what the Corp does?”

  “Yes,” I say, remembering the court and the magistrate, and wondering where Cate is heading with this. “You’re all caught and sentenced to death in the Rator.”

  Cate nods. “Ringleaders and Shadows are sent to the Rator. But do you know what happens to the other Responders who are still of breeding age?”

  “No.”

  “The Corp doesn’t like to waste their valuable breeding equipment. So they’re strapped to beds and left to breed under sedation for a few years, until their brains are too messed-up to revolt. We call them Bodies. Do you understand?”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  I can see that Cate is trying to calm herself. She’s trying not to shout at me. “I had a little chat with Alex. She says you’ve got a deal with the Corp to get you both out of here.”

  I’m stunned. I can’t believe Alex would tell Cate.

  “I also hear from my sources that you’re going to be a college girl,” Cate says.

  I don’t respond.

  “You’re not a real Westie, are you?”

  I hesitate, then shake my head.

  “You’re actually Corp.”

  She’s worked it out. “Fucking hell,” Cate says. She looks like she wants to murder me. I can see her restraining herself. “Okay,” she says. “I planned for Alex to carry one of the first bombs on the Night of Fires. But I’m going to use her as support crew instead. Which means her future will almost certainly be as a Body.”

  “No. No!”

  “Unless you can convince me otherwise. Do I have your attention?”

  I nod.

  “Good,” Cate says. “Are you going to the surgeon’s place again tomorrow?”

  “No. To the college.”

  “This is what I’m going to get you to do . . . You’re going to take more bomb components to the Scholars Club tomorrow. But this time, you’re going to assemble them. We’re going to detonate their precious collections and their precious college kids at the same time that we blow up the Incubator.”

  “You want me to build bombs? I’ve smuggled components, sure, but I’ve never built . . .”

  “That’s a you problem.” Cate says.

  What if I fuck it up? What happens to Alex then?

  “What if . . . what if we worked together?” I say quickly. “I could be in college working for the Response. Your person on the inside. We could use their technology. Their resources. I could smuggle it all out for you. Whatever you want. For years! It seems like such a waste to just blow it all up . . .”

  Cate spits on the floor. “We? I’m not working with you, Corp vampire.” She hates me so much.

  “Cate,” I plead. “I understand where you’re coming from. I really do. I’m angry too. But the Corp will just shut you down. Even if you blew up the whole Incubator, they’d just build another, and put more Breeders in it. There are millions outside the Wall, waiting.”

  Then she hits me. Right across the face—and it hurts like hell. “You’ll put bombs in the college—where I tell you—and then I’ll decide what h
appens to Alex.”

  I maintain eye contact with her; I don’t let my hand fly up to cradle my stinging face.

  “How will you . . . know the bombs have gone off?”

  “Oh, we’ll know, alright. You’ll program the bombs to go off at 2:30 a.m., and the Night of Fires will start shortly after. If your bombs don’t go off, Alex becomes a Body. If you do what we say, we’ll let Alex be a suicide. Do you understand?”

  “I—yes.”

  She smiles.

  I try to calm the panic inside.

  One phone call to the surgeon, tipping her off that Cate is leader of the Response, and Cate will be tortured for information and then eliminated. But where would that leave Alex? Anyone associated with Cate would be sent to the Rator, or spend the next few years as a Body.

  As though Cate can read my mind, she says, “I’ve let my core people know the deal: if anything happens to me, even if I die tomorrow night, those bombs still better go off or Alex becomes a Body.”

  I nod.

  “The guy in your cell is one of the surgeon’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll leave him while he’s needed. Then we’ll take him out too. So we have a deal?”

  I nod again, and she hands me three egg-shaped bombs, some tape pieces, and elastic, and watches as I work quickly to pull the bombs apart, putting their components inside my pockets and underwear.

  “You’d better deliver,” she says, turning away.

  The orange Shadow takes me back to my cell. Luke raises his eyebrows and I walk past him, curl onto my hard bed. I spend the night trying to think what to do.

  •

  The next morning, I watch Luke’s face in the rearview mirror from the moment we pull out of the parking lot of the Incubator. I can feel the bomb parts pressing against my skin. I take in Luke’s tired eyes, his beat-up car, the way his shoulders curl forward. It will be years and years before Luke’s life will be anything like Rob’s. I bet he’s hoping that this deal will get him on the fast track. But the surgeon and the dean have sold him out. What if I could somehow cut another deal for him, work an angle that way? He may not want to deal with a Breeder, though—or believe me when I tell him they’re cheating on him. In his mind, this deal is going ahead, and he’s being paid well. After a few minutes, my heart pounding, I decide to risk it. I say, “Have you ever done a Breeder run?”

  He meets my gaze in the rearview mirror. I think I feel the car slow a little. Then his eyes go back to the road and the car speeds up. We ride in silence for another five minutes or so.

  His eyes appear in the rearview mirror again. “What do you want?” he says.

  “It seems to me you could do better in this deal. I mean, speaking Westie to Westie—it’s always the Corp screwing everyone over.”

  “You’re a Breeder. What do you know? And there’s no Westie alliance here—you’re one of them.”

  “Well, I know they’ve done a deal behind your back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re getting your upfront payment of one hundred thousand units and then they’re cutting you out completely. They’re splitting the payments that come after that—for the live births—between themselves. The surgeon reckons she can do everything the Gray Corps affiliate usually does herself, through the Incubator.”

  “Prove they’re cheating me,” he says.

  “I can prove it but we’d need to get someone else involved,” I tell him, and he doesn’t answer, so I continue. “I’ve thought about the way forward and my take is—the surgeon is no longer needed. We need the dean to deal with the Corp buyers—they purchase eggs through his college. But what if there were a way to cut the surgeon out of this, for the Gray Corps to deal directly with the Corp buyers and the dean? For a hell of a lot more units?”

  He shakes his head. “We’d need the surgeon to shepherd through the live births or the deal wouldn’t work.”

  “The Gray Corps would make sure she took care of those births. Especially after she tried to cheat them.”

  He sighs. “I don’t know . . .”

  “I know the Gray Corps,” I say. “I was a Breeder runner. I worked with Robert Hunter. He’s Tier 1 in the Gray Corps.” I don’t say, Assuming Rob made it through and wasn’t sent to the Rator. Then again, I got to know Rob over those months at the Wall, and I bet that if anyone had a plan B, it would be Rob. He probably had to pay a lot of people off, but I also bet he had bags of units, gold bullion, pirate booty, whatever, hidden somewhere for just that reason.

  I watch Rob’s name register on Luke’s face. My gut read on Luke was right, he’s low down in the ranks.

  “Do you know him?” I ask.

  “Of him,” he admits. I breathe a sigh of relief—Rob is still around.

  “Someone like Rob would have the clout to cut the surgeon out and then you and Rob could split her fee. You’d just have to pay an incentive to the dean. Or threaten him for trying to screw over the Gray Corps. And more important than that, you’d have a basis to work with Rob in the future.” He looks surprised that I know how Gray Corps hierarchy works. The catch is that I need to get Alex out too. I need the Gray Corps to arrange that. But that’s not for Luke.

  “And, as you know—the surgeon won’t be able to touch you once the upper-tier Gray Corps is involved,” I say.

  I’m winging it here. My heart is pounding. His silence is unnerving me.

  “I can’t call Rob on my phone,” I say. “But if you’re interested . . . I . . . I could use your phone.”

  I sit back in my seat. There’s nothing else to say.

  Luke is quiet for the rest of the drive. He could use this deal to break into the upper tiers of the Gray Corps, but he would also be risking being sent to the Rator if the deal falls through.

  When we reach the Scholars Club, he says, “What’s Rob’s number? I could call him on your behalf.”

  Does he really think I’m that stupid?

  “No,” I say, my heart pounding. “I need to talk to him directly.”

  “Fine. I’ll think about it.”

  Luke walks me up to the stone steps of the Scholars Club, and I ring the bell. Before I say goodbye to him, I look him in the eyes, and I can see that I have his attention.

  •

  Jasmine answers and shows me inside. Her face is closed, wearing that mask that Corp people are so good at putting on and taking off.

  “I’m working on a special project,” she says, as I follow her into the library. There’s a boy there too, working on a laptop.

  “This is Clancy,” Jasmine says. Clancy waves without looking up.

  “New girl,” Jasmine says to Clancy. “Niece of Professor Keeling.”

  Now Clancy looks up. “What’s your major?”

  I try my best not to stammer. “Science. Genetics, some day. I hope.”

  “I’m working on a genetic selection project at the moment,” Clancy says. “You can have a look if you want.” I go around and have a look at his computer, and he shows me some modeling. “This is for the echidna—I’m trying to edit out some of its disease-prone genes. When the modeling’s finished, I’m going to try it on samples. Ultimately, we want to reanimate it—I’m hoping to be on Professor Williams’s team,” he says. We spend a few minutes tracing the model.

  From when I was tiny, I’d stand on the Wall and watch the exploration machines. I imagined that they were discovering things to improve our lives—Westie lives, not just Corp lives. Life here doesn’t have to be just about the Corp. We could work toward something else, rather than allowing the Corp to gobble up all our resources. If the Response can infiltrate the surgeon’s house, why not the Scholars Club and the whole college? I can imagine a world where we could do right by Ma’s legacy, through research that would mean the fertility crisis would be over, the fight for nourishment would be over, and
we’d be able to reanimate the broken land, heal the blighted waterways. There wouldn’t be a need for the Wall, because there’d be plenty for everyone. Why not?

  I realize that Jasmine is looking right at me with that mask-face and for a split moment, I see that behind it, there’s another feeling—but I can’t tell what it is.

  “You know, I’d better tell the tutor you’re here,” Jasmine says. She goes out the door and returns a couple minutes later with a woman in her twenties, who smiles and places a shiny laptop in front of me.

  “Lara, isn’t it?” she says. “Welcome. I’m Dr. Ellis. The dean said you’d be here today. This laptop is for you. I also have quite a few online forms for you, I’m afraid, so make yourself comfortable.”

  Dr. Ellis sets me up at the other end of the same large wooden table where Clancy and Jasmine are working. She pulls over a lamp with a green light. I can feel the bomb materials pressing against my skin.

  “From Astor College, right?” Dr. Ellis asks. Jasmine and Clancy look up and giggle. “Ignore them,” she adds. “The website’s pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll be in the next room if you have any questions. The others will help you if want coffee or a snack.”

  Her heels click away as she leaves the room.

  I look at the computer screen. I’ve never had my own computer before—the computer I used at school was over ten years old and leased from the Corp at a cost of five units per week. Clancy and Jasmine go back to work as I start answering the questions on the forms. I type in my answers, enjoying the fictional life of Lara Goode, but my mind is racing. I have to find a place and time to plant the bombs. I have to work out how to set up the bombs. What I want most, of course, is to make a deal with the Gray Corps and get Alex out altogether, but what if Luke isn’t a risk-taker, or worse, what if Rob won’t take my call? In that case, unless I succeed with the bombs, Alex suffers a worse fate than death. I touch the outline of the bomb components under my dress.