by Marita Smith
Catherine took the phone back and grimaced. “I have to take this.”
She walked out onto the balcony, sending a draught of cool air curling inside. Robyn yawned and rinsed her mug before turning her attention to the plates. It was the least she could do. She didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the sound carried through the open door and into the kitchen.
She heard Catherine hiss, “Sophie, I’m sorry, but it’s over.”
Robyn scrubbed at the stubborn grains of rice that clung to the bottom of the pot.
“You were the one who left, remember? Goodnight, Sophie. You can’t keep calling me like this.”
Robyn put the pot next to the sink to drain. The door clicked shut, and Catherine joined her with a tea towel.
“Sorry about that.” Catherine ran a finger through her hair.
“No worries,” Robyn said. “A friend?”
Catherine snorted, then clapped a hand over her mouth. “Ex-girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Robyn failed to hide her surprise. Catherine doesn’t look gay, she thought to herself, then instantly regretted her prejudice. She always edged around the LGBT stall at market day, wavering in the face of so many half-shaved heads and rainbow tie-dye shirts and dresses. She admired their self-assurance but shrank away from it at the same time.
Catherine plucked the pot from the draining board and encased it in the tea towel. “You’re welcome to stay here, tonight.”
“That would be incredible, thank you. As long as I’m not intruding …” Robyn began.
“You’re not intruding on anything. Honestly.”
Wrapped in a woollen blanket on the couch, Robyn wondered what Sophie looked like, if Catherine had cooked for her, too. She pushed the thought away.
Three down, two to go.
11
Eli
The room was all white; blinding pale tiles and concrete floor. Eli cradled his left arm at the elbow. The splotched teal galaxy there was beginning to bloom with an algal green. They’d taken so much blood. His head thudded as he strained to feel Una, following the veins that stuck out against his skin with his fingers. Maybe they’d suck him dry, like an insect caught in a spider’s web. A slow death.
It had been three weeks. Twenty-one days. Una’s mind was a faint thread that sometimes disappeared for hours on end. The longest separation he’d ever endured. Ever. Eli rubbed his temples as the door opened with a thump, the security mechanism grating with a metallic screech. He held his arm out again for the needle. Every morning. He knew the drill.
The hallway was full of people in lab coats. They bustled past him in a blur of faces and starched collars. You didn’t linger in the corridor. The thin scientist who’d taken his blood sample pushed him into the crowd, his constant babysitter shadow. Eli shuffled head down to the cafeteria, a long room with splotchy linoleum packed with folding tables. He wondered if it had been a real school at one point. It reminded him of the dining halls of American movies. Legions scattered in a strict hegemony, food fights and mac and cheese, brighter than chamomile flowers. Here, there were no alliances. The other kids didn’t speak to him. No-one talked. They ate quickly, eyes down. Minds flitted against his own, disappearing before he could latch on, communicate with them. The place must be full of animals but he never saw them. The absence was painful. No updates on fledglings, wind currents, the feeling of bursting through a cotton-wool cloud, soaked to the skin. Eli’s mind felt like an empty cage.
When he finished breakfast, his babysitter came to collect him.
“This way.”
Instead of turning back toward his cell, he pushed Eli down the corridor in the opposite direction. The change in routine sent a jolt of hope through Eli’s chest. Something is happening.
Heading toward the door, Eli’s hand skittered against the crook of his elbow. He’d never been past the end of the long corridor before. The thrum of voices escalated as he stepped into a wide, open atrium. Eli blinked. He saw trees through a huge glass door and a road streaming with traffic. It was much brighter than he remembered. He moved toward the light. He’d never been indoors for this long in his entire life. His skin itched for the sun, for a breeze, anything.
His babysitter turned to talk to a woman at a high desk, leaving Eli unattended for a heartbeat. An insincere laugh rose behind him as the woman reacted to something the scientist said. Eli’s legs twitched with the knowledge. He was so close; all he had to do was turn and run, get lost in the crowd. He was fast, he’d be out and away before anyone realised … He stopped, fingertips inches away from the glass. Una.
“Ahem.” The lab coat gripped his shoulder, dug in with his fingers. “This way, kid.”
He steered Eli away from the glass, past an identical corridor stretching in the opposite direction. Eli filed the knowledge away as he was pushed through a door, the receptionist staring through him as if he didn’t exist.
Maybe he didn’t anymore.
Straightaway, anxious cries flooded his brain. The enormous space looked like an aircraft hanger on TV, sans planes. Children filled a line of chairs running through the centre. Some of them he recognised from the cafeteria. Tubes snaked from metal racks into their arms. Some slept, legs twitching. Others stared forward, nails digging into the sides of their chairs. Scientists moved between them, stopping only to scrawl in notepads or adjust the liquid flowing through the tubes.
What are they doing to them? Eli stared in horror at the blank, drugged faces.
Behind the children, cages set into the rear wall housed an orchestra of faint howls. The piteous moans rose through the cavernous space, but nobody seemed to notice. Silent wails filled his mind.
Help us.
Free us.
Kill me.
“Hurry up, kid.” His babysitter thrust Eli into an office on the same floor. Eli’s breakfast churned in his stomach as he digested the scene. He rubbed his shoulder, watching as the Chinese woman murmuring into her phone dismissed his babysitter. Screwing his eyes shut, Eli concentrated on separating the voices from his mind. It was harder without Una, but he managed to partition them like she’d taught him.
Help. Free. Kill.
“Eli, hello.” The woman stood and gestured to the chair opposite her desk. Eli sat, clasping his hands together in his lap. She was younger than the other lab coats. Pretty.
“My name is Xiaofang, but you may call me Fang.” Fang sat down again. “It’s good to finally meet you.”
Eli said nothing. He knew spiders drew in their prey, cooed to them even as they wrapped them in silk, the little embalmed bodies jerking far too late.
Fang leaned forward and placed her elbows on the desk. “I wanted to talk to you about your osprey. What do you call her?”
Eli swallowed. “Her name is Una.” He searched the thrum of voices again, but he couldn’t feel her.
“She’s not out in the main experimental area,” Fang confirmed, as if reading his mind. “How old were you when you met her?”
“Twelve.” His father carried the osprey fledgling tucked inside his woollen hat, found on a cold spring morning in the remnants of a nest dashed against the rocks. When Una had stepped onto his palm, a shockwave of pain had quivered through his body. Locking eyes on him, her voice had filled his head. My name is Una, young air walker. Her absence ached like a phantom limb. His father had described the pain once: how he went to use the leg, the shock fresh each time before he remembered its absence. Losing Una felt the same.
“What is this place?” Eli asked. He imagined Fang spooling silk, suffocating him. He might as well ask while he still had air.
Fang finished writing her notes, continuing as if he hadn’t uttered a word. “You’re from the Mongolian steppe, is that right?”
Eli nodded into his lap. They knew this. He’d still be herding with his father if these people hadn’t taken him away. The scholarship had been a cruel li
e.
“Traditional hunting with your father,” Fang elaborated.
Eli nodded. “Yes, but mainly for the tourists in the summer.” This year they’d saved enough to replace the solar panels on the yurt. Eli wondered if his father had finished installing them yet; if anyone helped in Eli’s absence. Maybe the panels are even still wrapped in rugs, the English incomprehensible to his parents. The thought brought angry tears to his eyes. Eli blinked them away as Fang spoke again.
“As I understand it, your routine was quite exceptional.” Fang watched him closely.
More than exceptional. Ospreys are unusual compared to the falcons most of the nomads trained. With their connection, Una had been extraordinary in full flight. Word spread. “Ospreys are very intelligent birds,” Eli said. “And my father is an excellent trainer.”
“I wonder if it’s purely training.”
“Of course.” Eli forced a laugh. The room felt closed in, like a cocoon, too warm. Sweat beaded at his temples.
Then he felt her. Eli grasped the desperate brush of her mind. Una, he projected, flooding the thought with all his anguish.
Little one, stay strong. It will hurt.
What will –
The pain seemed to erupt at the same time all over his body, his legs jerking as the muscles contracted and released. Eli fell out of his chair, couldn’t stop his head from colliding with the ground. Una was close by; he could feel her. Eli closed his eyes, flitting into Una’s mind. The sensation was a momentary relief, almost as if he had stepped back into his family’s yurt, his home. The smell of curing pelts and mare’s milk reached his nostrils.
The pain didn’t stop; long, jarring bursts of it. He saw lab coats holding Una down, the rod singing her flesh, talons rising to rake empty air.
Abruptly, it stopped. The spasms abated. Eli heaved in breath as Una’s presence disappeared. The metallic recirculated air made him gag. He swallowed and tasted iron. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he left a jagged bloody smear.
“I don’t think training can explain a shared pain response,” Fang continued at her desk after Eli had pulled himself from the floor onto his hands and knees. His arms wobbled as he strained to hold the position.
“Now, I’m going to ask you some more questions, and you’re going to answer them.”
Still on the floor, Eli nodded. It was only a matter of time until he was eaten alive. He wondered how much Fang already knew.
When the boy was escorted out, Fang opened the window; the lingering smell of scorched flesh was off-putting. Eli. She couldn’t pinpoint the compounds in his distinctive blood work. Fang stared at the chromatogram for the umpteenth time, willing the two peaks to resolve into something, anything.
Eli was special, the Chief had been right, even if Fang was not on board with the Chief’s wishy-washy spirit mojo. Fang pushed the chromatogram back into her folder. No, this is hard science. This, she can crack.
Someone knocked on the door. “Fang? The meeting is about to start.”
“I’m on my way.”
Fang smoothed her jacket as she strode through the experimental area. Heads nodded in her direction and she acknowledged them with a tip of her chin. The children were docile, only mildly drugged but used to the routine. They were being given a new spectrum of compounds this week. Fang paused on the stairs as one of the subjects vomited, yanking her IV with her. The blonde girl kicked out at the scientist who reached down to help her. Leaning on the balustrade, Fang watched as the girl ran a few hesitant steps, tripped and fell to her knees. Dragged back to her seat, the girl didn’t protest, head lolling onto her shoulders. A name wafted up the stairs, and Fang tested it on her tongue. Sara. She’d keep an eye on that one too. She liked spirit.
The conference table filled the long boardroom; it was scattered with papers and mugs of coffee. Fang took a seat beside a broad man in a navy sweater.
“Brock,” she said.
The MRI agent nodded before returning his attention to the female figure pacing the room. Miranda. The Chief Director could be terrifying. Fang admired that about her. One day, she will command a room like this.
“How is it possible that you failed to capture a young woman, a boy and a juvenile brown bear? Twenty men. You had twenty men. The trail has gone completely cold.”
Fang cocked her head as the soldier blushed scarlet. He’d grabbed her ass the first time the reactionary team had been on site for transport, and Fang had nearly broken his wrist. He didn’t have any snide comments this morning. Fang tried in vain to remember his name; she was pleased that he wasn’t memorable enough for her to have retained the information.
“Nobody ever said anything about a bear. It was the bloody bobcats that did it, just came out of nowhere …”
Murmurs rose around the table. A bear. An interesting animal partner. Brock rubbed the bridge of his nose and kept silent. Robyn’s chromatograms for the new subject matched Eli’s exactly.
“Derek’s research time has increased exponentially,” said Vulcan. Fang assessed him, a mountain of a man, hard eyes set into a military-grade buzz cut.
“You’ve been riding him too hard. It’s to be expected.” Miranda stopped pacing and uncapped a bottle of water. “But we can’t afford any more mistakes.” She sipped water and jerked her head toward the soldier. “Check it out, discreetly.”
The soldier nodded, cheeks still red. “Yes, ma’am.”
Miranda addressed the grey-haired woman on Brock’s right. “Weaving? Any developments?”
The woman shook her head. “His mother just passed away and he’s gone home to Wales. I expect him to be absent for several weeks.”
“Regrettable. Make sure Terence doesn’t linger.”
The rotund agent wedged next to Weaving cleared his throat. “Catherine is proving amenable to the genes you suggested. No real changes to report,” he wheezed.
“Thank you, Deckker.” Miranda caught Fang’s gaze, nodded.
Fang sat up a little straighter, zinging with pride.
“Fang. Can you provide a report on progress here.” A statement, not a question.
Fang swivelled in her chair and faced the other agents. “The scholarship scheme has been extremely effective. The boy, Eli, is our most suitable candidate. We are still working on identifying several elusive compounds and tracing the exact genetic loci on which the mutation lies.” She drummed her fingertips on the table. “In the meantime, we are moving forward with our activation trials, applying broad-range mutation targets to the other children.”
“Like chemotherapy?” Deckker said.
Fang nodded. “Same principle, yes.”
“Is it working?” Brock asked.
“It is too early to tell,” Fang replied. “It takes repeat exposure for successful activation to be observable, or –”
“Or death,” finished Brock.
Fang nodded. “We’ll know more definitively over the next week.” Her heart leapt at the impressed expressions on the agents’ faces.
“Excellent.” Miranda glanced at her watch. “Let’s get back to work.”
The agents stood and gathered their folders. Fang watched as Miranda sent Brock a faint nod. Frowning, she clutched her papers to her chest. What was that about?
Miranda turned to her before she had time to process the strange exchange. “Fang, a moment.”
Fang leaned forward in her chair. Miranda sat beside her, taking another sip of water.
“I am surrounded by incompetents,” Miranda announced. The Chief hooked her silver hair behind her ears. “I’d be lost without you, Fang.”
The first time she met her supervisor, they’d sat in the back of a dark sedan. Miranda had spelled it all out – the chance to be part of the next genetic revolution with full experimental control, no limitations. The driver had pulled up in front of a gleaming, glass-fronted building. B
eijing International School. She’d been based here ever since. Eighteen months. She wasn’t naive, she knew Miranda had hedged her bets with others. But the others weren’t self-aware. Fang made a point of avoiding hubris, but felt flattered nonetheless.
“Eli can speak to animals with the capacity for flight, and it appears this Fletcher is a vessel for those of the land.” Miranda drained her water, crushing the empty container. “Judging by the swathe he cut through the reactionary team.”
Fang closed her eyes for a moment. Here we go again. It weakened Miranda, this dependence on a spiritual domain. Eli possessed unique capabilities, but they were the result of evolutionary advance, rare gene mutations. They were not evidence of spirits.
“That leaves the girl, able to speak with creatures of the sea and lakes.” Miranda pushed a folder across to Fang, collecting the little ring of condensation left by the water bottle.
“I know you’re sceptical, Fang. But even you have to admit that the predictions have proved accurate so far.” Fang looked at the familiar photograph, a reconstructed series of drawings from some Laotian temple Miranda had scoured years ago. The ring of moisture surrounded three central figures, two boys and a girl. A huge bear dwarfed the first boy, while the second rode astride a great bird of prey. A dragon with long whiskers was entwined around the girl.
“I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.” Fang pushed the photograph away.
“The dragon? It could be a metaphor.” Miranda tapped the photo. “Up the experimental dosage. We’re close.”
Fang opened her mouth to protest, the blonde girl still fresh in her mind. Sara. Miranda lifted a finger to still her.
“We can bear the losses. I need to know if it is possible to trigger the genes. Everything may depend on it.”
Fang nodded.
Swing, step. Swing, step. The phone strapped to her arm buzzed with bright red letters. 15km. Fang’s head torch swept an arc of light in front of her feet. Swing, step. Swing, step. The early morning was her favourite time of day, the air quality index usually lowest before dawn. Still, Fang patted the reassuring lump in her pocket. Although she hated her dependence on her puffer, she really did need it.