by Libba Bray
Something flashed at the bottom of the card, but Evie’s mind couldn’t quite make sense of it. And then the card went dark.
“Hand me another one, please,” Evie said. It was coming faster now. She pawed through the remaining cards as if she were the machine itself. Small details poked through:
Subject #28. Michael Murphy. Mother: Eileen Murphy. Race: Irish.
Subject #67. Anna Schmidt. Mother: Hanna Schmidt. Race: German.
Subject #101. Israel Miller. Mother: Esther Miller. Race: Jew.
Evie raced through, searching for information: Vitamin injections. Vitamin injections. Vitamin injections. Disrupts radio signals. Hears spirit voices. Dream walks. Astral projection. ESP. Created ball of light in my presence. Telepathy. What she was seeing on these cards was astonishing. She wanted to know more but there was no time to linger. Already, she was pressing her body’s limits. Something was nagging at her, though. It was that line at the bottom of the first card. It had been added later, she could tell. And it had been added to the other cards as well.
“Evie. Not too long, okay?” Henry said. “Be careful.”
“Just one more,” Evie answered.
Subject #144: Sarah Beth Olson. Mother: Ada Olson. Address: Route 144, Bountiful, Nebraska. June 1, 1915. Hears spirit voices. Some prophecy. May 5, 1916. Mother reports that subject speaks to an imaginary friend, the man in the stovepipe hat. Mother is frightened by this. Girl has frequent seizures. Do not recommend proceeding.
The man in the hat! This girl had spoken with him. But why did they recommend not proceeding? There was no note added at the bottom of this card. There was a flash, and Evie glimpsed Miriam Lubovitch Lloyd. She had the same dark brows and amber-flecked eyes as Sam. Miriam did not look happy as she spoke to Rotke. “They are only children. We must protect them. I do not trust those men. I know Jake does not like me, a Jew.”
“But I’m a Jew, and he wants to marry me,” Rotke answered.
“There is an emptiness in his soul,” Miriam said. “He wants to use me to keep the Eye open. But I refuse. I refuse!”
“Evie? Her nose is bleeding.” Jericho’s voice.
“We should stop.” Sam.
“No. Just one more minute…”
What had been coded at the bottom of the cards? She had to know. The memory was close. She could feel it. She barely tasted the tang of her blood coursing over her lips and into her mouth. There it was! A final coded note on the card just as she’d felt on all the others: January 25, 1920. Subject deceased.
“Head back,” Jericho scolded, pinching the bridge of Evie’s nose. “You don’t want to start bleeding again.”
“They’re dead. They’re all dead,” Evie said in a nasal voice.
“What killed them?” Henry asked.
“What if the vitamin tonic that made us also makes us sick over time?” Ling posed.
Evie looked to Jericho. “Can you ask Marlowe?”
“Every time I’ve tried to talk to him about Project Buffalo, he’s refused.”
“We could always go back to your uncle and Sister Walker and ask them,” Sam said.
“No! I will not have anything to do with them. They can’t be trusted,” Evie said. Her head swam. She had pushed too far and now she felt awful. “Subject number one forty-four is still alive, though. At least, there’s no note on her card. Sarah Beth Olson. Bountiful, Nebraska. Oh. Oh, no. Ugh. I think I’m gonna be sick.”
Sam noted the look of disappointment on Jericho’s face and tried to hide his smile.
“I’ll help you to your room, doll,” Sam said, jumping up before Jericho could. It was petty on his part.
He didn’t regret it.
LITTLE FOX
Back in his room, Sam rummaged through every drawer. He didn’t really expect to find anything related to Project Buffalo, but now that he was here where the project had taken place, where his mother had worked and, according to the official reports, died, he wanted to know everything. There was nothing in the drawers, of course. Just some stationery and rich-people tchotchkes. “A letter opener shaped like a peacock?” Sam shoved it back into a drawer and shook his head.
After Evie had upchucked and before she’d fallen sleep, she’d confessed to Sam what the card had shown her about his mother. “Something about protecting children and Jake not liking her. And Sam, Sam, she… she said he wanted her to keep the Eye open, but she wouldn’t.…” Evie burbled, half out of it.
“What? What about the Eye?” But Evie was already asleep.
Sam remembered his mother as loving but firm. She was direct and opinionated. He could imagine somebody like Jake Marlowe not liking that very much, and he wished he could’ve watched his mother square off against that big-shot goy. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again, if he would ever hear her calling him “Little Fox” in her native Russian. He wondered what he would say to her if he did now that he knew she had been part of Project Buffalo during the war. He couldn’t escape the truth: The mother he loved had been as complicit as Will and all the others.
“Ma?” he said to the empty room. “Ma, it’s me, Sergei. I’m here.”
Silence. He hadn’t expected a response, of course. Just because her memory lingered didn’t mean anything. But his heart sank a little anyway.
He thought about his father back home and found that he missed him. He thought about Jericho, about how, standing next to him, Sam had felt small and dark and foreign, with his streetwise accent, gritted up by the South Side of Chicago and the Lower East Side of New York’s immigrant melting pot. Sam looked hard at one of the gold-framed photographs on the wall. In it, a dozen blue-eyed, tux-clad men sat at a table looking unbothered and smug, as if they expected that the world would bend to them. After all, the world usually did. Sam felt that whatever he’d managed to grab for himself could be taken away at any moment. That was why he held on so tightly. He wondered if he would ever feel like he could let go or if he’d always feel as if he had to fight for his place.
“Jesus, Sergei,” he said, reprimanding himself with a roll of his eyes. “Leave the philosophy to the giant. You’re becoming a real flat tire. How’s about we find something to steal?”
Sam sneaked out of his room and moved silently down the hall. The night had worked on him, reminding him that he was not on top. He was spoiling for a fight. He slipped a silver ashtray into his pocket. That had to be worth some money. There were probably plenty of things in this house that nobody would miss.
Sam sneaked down the winding staircase, peering through its braided, wrought-iron balusters to make sure it was safe. Light seeped out around the half-open door of Marlowe’s private study, where his club meeting was taking place. From where he stood in the shadows, Sam could smell the cigar smoke. Close but out of reach. Outside. Always on the outside. Sam burned with a desire to be on the inside for once. He wished he could hear what those stuffed shirts were talking about.
Wait a minute, he thought. I can.
It was a risk. He wasn’t sure how much time he’d have. But Sam loved risks. He was a gambler, through and through. He grinned. “Why the hell not?”
“Don’t see me,” he said, cloaking himself. Hey, Jericho, he thought with a snort. I can do something you can’t do, pal. And then he let himself into the room.
Wealthy men in tuxedos sat in cushy club chairs playing backgammon and chess. Brandy snifters dotted the tables. The heavy cigar smoke tickled Sam’s nose and throat, and he had to work not to cough or sneeze. Walking among the powerful men undetected, Sam got a thrill. Oh, brother, he thought. How much would I love to move stuff around?
Over by the roaring fireplace, Marlowe raised his glass. “To the Founders Club. Long may they reign.”
“Hear, hear!” the men in cushy chairs said, raising their glasses.
The Founders Club! Sam’s head buzzed—this wasn’t just any club meeting. These were the fellas who had financed Project Buffalo. Sam hoped his invisibility act would last a little longer.
“How is our pet project coming along for the exhibition, Jake?” a beefy man with a red nose growled around the cigar in his mouth.
“Oh, fine, fine. Jericho’s making excellent progress. Tomorrow we’ll give him the full dose.”
“Imagine it: a class of perfect, pure Americans—done right this time,” a thin man with sloped shoulders said as he moved a chess piece across the board, and Sam didn’t know what that meant. And what were they doing to Jericho?
He moved farther into the room, standing so close to the men he could practically move the chess pieces himself. It gave him a sick thrill. He was tempting fate. He didn’t care. He liked knowing he could move among them and they’d never know it. They didn’t control everything.
“And have you heard any more from your mysterious friend beyond?” a mustachioed, bald man asked as he sipped his brandy.
The great Jake Marlowe looked upset. “No.”
“Honestly, Jake, when will you stop trying?”
“Never! I’m no quitter,” Jake said.
“You’re going to run out of Diviners soon.”
“Not if I can make more of them again.”
The men laughed. “Well, don’t use tainted stock this time. That was your trouble—experimenting on lesser stock.”
“At least if something went wrong with the formula, we didn’t have to care,” the beefy man laughed.
“Yes. Shame about how it all turned out,” another man said, as if they were talking about a failed garden instead of human beings. “Dr. Simpson was making progress with sterilization at the asylum before that unfortunate fire. He’ll need a new surgery now. The Supreme Court will say yea to Buck versus Bell—I’m sure of it. Then the state will be able to sterilize the unfit without interference.”
Sam could feel his anger rising. He wanted to throw over the chessboard and watch the pieces scatter. He wished Theta were here to burn the room down. He wanted to watch it go up in flames.
“But can you imagine the threat if those little Diviners had been allowed to come into their full power? The war certainly showed us what had to be done,” the cigar-smoking man said. “Oh, I’ve discarded, Charles.”
Sam wanted to stay and find out more, but his skin tingled and itched, a warning. Any minute now, he’d be visible. One of the chess players shifted in his seat, looking behind him.
“What is it, John?” his chess partner asked.
“I had the strangest feeling there was someone behind me, watching us. The brandy, I expect. I should call it a night.”
“Or you should have more brandy!”
Time to go. Quickly, Sam darted out of the room and tiptoed down the hall a safe distance. From the dark of a sitting nook, where Sam had stopped to scratch his itchy skin against the molding, he could still hear the men laughing. Sam was sick with anger: Their mothers had been chosen and experimented upon because they’d been considered expendable.
The war certainly showed us what had to be done. The cigar-smoking man’s comment haunted Sam. What had the schmuck meant by that? Every time it seemed they got a piece of the Project Buffalo puzzle, they found the puzzle itself was much bigger than they had ever imagined.
Sam stole into the hallway, hoping he could make it back to his room undetected. As he passed the empty soldiers’ room, he was seized by a strange feeling, something from so deep in memory it felt nearly like bone or breath. He took a step into the room. A tiny voice whispered: “Little Fox! Is it you?”
“Mama?” Sam called. He was answered only by the scratch of trees against the window and the boastful talk drifting out from Marlowe’s party.
But he could swear that for just a moment he had felt the unmistakable presence of his mother.
THE ÜBERMENSCH
The next day at afternoon tea, Jake Marlowe swept into the dining room. “I’m afraid Jericho is needed for some tests. But we’ll return him to you soon enough,” he announced.
“Can’t it wait?” Jericho asked. He wanted to be with Evie, not spend the rest of the day down in the basement laboratory like some rat in a cage.
“No. I’m afraid it can’t,” Marlowe said, and then he was gone again.
“Guess you better do what Dad says,” Sam gloated.
Evie kicked at him under the table, but Henry got there first.
Once Jericho was gone, Sam told Henry and Ling about his night with the Founders Club.
“You could’ve been in real trouble if they’d caught you,” Ling said.
Sam smirked and hooked his thumbs under his suspenders. “Me? I’m too good to get caught. But you shoulda heard these chumps talking about Project Buffalo. They wanted to experiment on people like us, so-called mutts. People they thought couldn’t fight back. Because to them, we weren’t ‘real Americans.’ If something went wrong, they didn’t care.”
“This is why I never leave the city. Bad things happen in country houses. Just look at all of literature,” Henry said. “Uh-oh. Ling is wearing her serious face.”
“I always wear my serious face,” Ling said. “I was just wondering something. You grew up rich, Henry. How did your mother get included in this experiment?”
“We were well off, not rich.”
“Why do rich people always pretend they’re not rich?” Ling said.
“I know that Mama had three miscarriages before me, and my father saw it as her personal failure to produce,” Henry said, nearly spitting out the last word. “It only worsened her depression. She saw plenty of doctors. Now that I remember, I overheard Flossie telling a friend that my father had taken Mama to New York to see a ‘special doctor.’ It’s possible that’s how she made it into the program. If so, between my overbearing father and her delicate mental state, she would’ve been in no condition to refuse. You still have your serious face on, Ling.”
Ling nodded. “That’s because I have a serious question: What do you do with a little army of very powerful Diviner ‘mutts’ if you don’t like or trust those people to start with?”
Down in the lab, Marlowe rolled up his sleeves and readied a syringe of serum. This formula was different—thicker and a midnight blue. “What’s that?” Jericho asked.
“I’ve made some modifications. We’re going to really give it to you today, Jericho. No half measures. Let’s see what we get with the full serum,” Marlowe crowed as the nurse and a doctor readied the room.
“Have you tried this on anybody else?” Jericho asked. He tried not to show how frightened he was as the nurse tied tubing around his biceps and swabbed alcohol across the hollow of his arm.
“No. You’re the first.” Marlowe squeezed the top of Jericho’s shoulder. “You should be proud.”
But all Jericho wanted to do was to yell stop. I don’t want this; please don’t do this.
The nurse frowned as she took his pulse. “My goodness, his heart’s beating very fast.”
“We should get started. Not make him wait any longer,” Marlowe said.
Stop talking over me. I’m right here, Jericho thought.
Marlowe plunged the syringe into Jericho’s vein. The new serum wasn’t cold like the other stuff. It was warm. Uncomfortably so. It whirred through his veins like an invasion of bees skittering toward his heart. Everything around Jericho seemed a threat, as if the world were closing in, ready to take and take from him, reducing him to his most primitive emotions. Panic fluttered against his chest, beating to be let out. He moaned, muscles spasming. His fingers balled into fists, then spread out again, as if reaching for help.
“Easy, Jericho!” Marlowe’s voice.
And then, all at once, the scratching inside his veins gave way. The fear was gone. In its place was a feeling of sheer, unstoppable power. Take from him? From him? The Übermensch? A mocking laugh burbled up from deep inside Jericho. Well, he’d protect what was his—he’d hit first and hit hard! He wanted to win. No, he wanted to conquer. It was exciting and primal, this feeling. Jericho was reduced to his senses, and his senses were acute. He cou
ld hear a gull sipping water from the lake half a mile away. Could smell the antiseptic harsh and prickly in his nose. Could see every paintbrush stroke on the laboratory walls. He was the sweep of history and the arrow arcing toward an unseen future. His blood raced as if he were running through heavy trees, a kingly beast prowling its fiefdom, ready to pounce at anyone who dared challenge his authority.
Jericho inhaled deeply. His lungs seemed infinite. Evie. He’d caught the scent of her.
The restraints ripped in half as he broke through them. He could sense the nurse’s terror, vaguely heard Marlowe’s shouts as he pushed off from the table. But Evie was his only, all-encompassing thought. Carts crashed as Jericho pushed them out of the way. Glass tubes shattered on the floor. A doctor stood between Jericho and the elevator. Jericho thought about snapping his neck like a twig.
“Leave him alone!” Marlowe cautioned the others. “Let him go.”
Jericho spied the elevator key. Take, he thought. He shoved the key into the elevator and rode it up to Marlowe’s decorative library. The colors in the room were vividly bright to him. He was shirtless, but the cool air didn’t bother him. His body had never been more awake. The elevator was ascending. Arguing, panicked voices inside. Time to go. He was hunting. Hunting for Evie. He drew in another lungful of air.
She was in the rose garden.
Jericho threw open the door, the iron hinges bending slightly as he did, and then he bounded across Marlowe’s manicured lawn. Evie drew him, narrowed the world until she was the world. He saw her at the bottom of the long green slope, sitting in the gazebo, reading a book, surrounded by an explosion of flowering dogwood. She looked up. Smiled. He leaped a tall hedge with no trouble and strode toward her as if commanding an army. Her smile disappeared.
“Jericho?” she said.
He could hear her heartbeat quickening in alarm. But his blood was powerful. It spoke to him: I am the Übermensch, a god among men. The world belongs to me.