by Lydia Kang
Cy clears his throat. “How are you feeling?”
All I hear in my head is he French-kissed you all the way home before I finally shake my head to speak.
“I’m okay. Better.” I point to my hip. “This still hurts, but I’ll survive.”
“Yeah. I’m not surprised. It’s like they knew somehow you’d have people there with you. I guess that was their backup plan.”
“Plan for what?”
“They probably figured out that Dyl doesn’t carry a trait and wanted to verify it was your sample they had. If they even wanted to bother. For all we know, your special gift is just your Ondine’s curse. That’s not exactly marketable.”
“Well—” I take a step forward. “If I can just prove I’m ordinary as white bread—”
“You mean, white bread that can’t breathe normally,” Cy adds.
“Right. Well, then we have a chance to show them that they should just ditch Dyl, get her off their hands.”
“Okay.” Cy pushes up his sleeves, and he winces when they pass over several large pink splotches on his uninked forearms.
“Those are from Micah?” I reach out to touch his wrist, without thinking, and Cy allows it. Faintly, I see handprints where the pink is. The skin is shiny and raw.
“It’ll all be gone in a few hours,” he says. I let my hand fall, already missing the warmth of his skin on my fingertips.
“It still hurts, though?”
Cy nods. “How about you?”
I lift my wrist where Micah had grabbed me. It’s a little sore and pink, but not nearly as bad as what Cy went through. He pulls my wrist closer so he can examine it. His fingers slide over my arm, and I shiver, but he doesn’t let go.
“It’s my fault you went through that.” I force myself to meet his eyes. I can’t skulk away from my apologies. Not now. Cy takes a step closer to me and lets his hand slip up to my shoulder, leaning his head close to mine.
“If you’re really sorry, then don’t run away from . . . us again.” His breath is warm and swirls through my hair. I swear he almost said don’t run away from me.
“Okay.”
He lingers long enough to take a breath, then steps away and clears his throat. “C’mon. Sequencing time.”
“Right.” I clear my Cy-induced haze and nod. Think, Zelia. Focus on Dyl. Focus. “All of Dyl’s extra sequences so far code for junky stuff on the ends of chromosomes. Nothing I really need, I guess.”
Cy points to a sequence that glows green on the screen. “What about that one?” It’s a viable sequence. Finally. A real, useful gene that I’m missing, that might somehow make me different, in a special way.
“Here.” I punch in a command to compare it to our very old, very outdated gene library. I bite my lip. If it’s an ordinary, basic protein that’s been known for years, we’ll find it. If it’s a newly discovered one, we’re screwed. So I’m totally shocked when we find a match.
“Telomerase,” Cy announces the match.
“Telomerase? But I need that,” I say, confused. “It’s protective. It keeps our DNA from getting too short and degrading, every time a cell divides.”
“Didn’t people use to think that was the key to immortality? The fountain of youth?” He’s talking to the screen now, not me. “They tried to infuse more telomerase into people’s cells, so the cells would divide forever and never age. They’d have no Hayflack limit, no shelf life, so to speak. But people got cancer, so they tossed it.”
“But I don’t have telomerase. So I should be aging super-fast.”
“And you’re not.” He slips his hand around my wrist to pull me in closer. He looks at me from head to toe, spends an inordinate amount of time on my face. His head tilts sideways, as if looking at me askew will gift him with answers. I think I’m about to fail some sort of test, so I hold my breath until he clues me in.
“How tall is Dyl?”
“Um. Maybe five-four-ish?”
“And she’s, like, normal, I assume, in the usual female sort of ways?”
“No. She’s more than normal. She’s perfect. She’s got more body at her age than I did back then. Uh, you know, this is really not helping my self-esteem here—”
“Bear with me. You’re brilliant”—I blush—“and you certainly act your age. But . . . don’t you think it’s odd that you’re hardly taller than her?”
“Fine, so I’m a runt. I don’t need to hear that I’m underdeveloped everywhere, okay?”
Cy stares directly at my breasts and half covers his mouth. “Uh, your body is developed just fine, in my opinion.”
Now I’m really embarrassed. A little thrilled, but mostly embarrassed. Cy tries to rub away the warmth on his own face, then scratches his head.
“Have you ever . . . gotten your . . . you know.”
I flush hotly. “Please tell me you’re not going to ask about my ovaries.”
“I am.”
I pull away, covering my eyes as if afflicted with a sudden headache.
“I’m going to take that as a no.”
It’s so awful. Like I’m less of a girl or woman than everyone else in the world.
“Did it ever occur to you,” he starts, and grabs my wrist again so I can’t bolt, “that you’re just the ultimate late bloomer?”
It never occurred to me. I figured all the blooming that could possibly happen already did, and I was stuck with this awful, flawed body.
“I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong.” He crosses his arm.
“What?”
“You’re so much more extraordinary than you give yourself credit for. And I’m not just talking about your mind. Your body too.”
“You mean my ugly, runty body,” I quip.
“Why do you think you’re ugly?” Cy asks.
I’m all set to snap back with a bitter comment, when I see his face. He’s dead serious. Oohhhh-kay. I am speechless.
“In any case, how are we going to prove the theory?” He squints at me.
My eyes unfocus as I think. No telomerase. No junky DNA. Why? Why would I not have . . .
I snap my fingers. “C’mon. I need a new sample.”
“For what?”
“We’re going back to the beginning. We need a bird’s-eye view of the overall structure of all my DNA, the chromosomes, instead of looking at them in pieces the way we’ve been doing it.”
“A karyotype, huh? That’s kind of crude.” Cy stands up and comes with me to a cupboard, where I get a swab for another DNA sample. “Brilliant, but crude.”
“Yep. We’ve been staring at the pores on tree leaves. It’s time to look at the forest. Because if my theory is right, we’ve been looking for this trait the wrong way all along.”
CHAPTER 20
IT ONLY TAKES A DAY. BY MORNING, we have our answer. My karyotype is beaming onto a screen in the lab, where Marka, Cy, Wilbert, and I are staring, our mouths agape.
“Wow. You’re like a bacteria,” Wilbert murmurs. Cy smacks his extra head, and Wilbert yelps in protest. “What! It’s a compliment! You know, bacteria are far better than humans at surviving—”
“That’s enough, Wilbert,” Marka says. “Well. Now we know.”
The screen shows my forty-six chromosomes, coupled into twenty-three pairs. If I were normal, you’d expect to see twenty-three X’s, made when each stick-like pair of chromosomes join at the middle. But my chromosome pairs don’t look like X’s. They look like twenty-three infinity signs, or figure eights.
“My ends are all stuck together,” I say.
“Circular DNA. Like bacterial plasmids. We never would have seen it unless we looked at it like this.”
Cy touches the screen, tracing one of the chromosome pairs. “That explains it. Zel doesn’t need telomerase, because she has no telomeres. She has no ends to her DNA.”
“Hey! The party’s in here, I see.” Vera pops in through the door and lays her hands on my shoulders. “What’s that? They look like goggles.”
“Zel
ia’s DNA,” Wilbert answers. It’s impressive how he can talk with his mouth hanging wide open.
“Oh. So, why do they look like that?”
Marka leans toward her. “Human DNA is linear, Vera, like long pieces of string. The pieces have beginnings and ends, and every time a copy is made, the ends, or telomeres, get shorter and shorter. It’s one of the reasons why people age. Our DNA ends eventually shorten to the point a cell can’t divide normally anymore. Zelia’s DNA is packaged in continuous circles, like bacterial DNA. Her cells can make copies of the DNA when they divide, and the DNA never degrades or loses those bits at the end after each replication. Because there are no ends.”
Cy stares at me with a strange expression. In a split second, I realize it’s not wonder, or pride, or anything like admiration. It’s worry.
“I’ll bet,” Marka says, pointing to one of the middle-size infinity signs, “that the changes in your DNA caused you to lose extra sequences in one of your chromosomes.”
“Of course,” I murmur. “My Ondine’s curse. It must have caused a PHOX2B gene variant.”
“Yes,” Marka agrees. “Enough to have a profound effect on the breathing center in the brain. A small sacrifice, considering. Your Ondine’s curse is a marker. An ironic marker, since most babies would die from it.”
“Marker for what? What are we talking about here?” Vera windmills her hand, a get-to-the-point kind of gesture.
Cy jumps in before Marka has a chance. “It means, Vera, that Zelia may never grow old.” He snaps off the screen, and everyone stares at me. “She’s got the fountain of youth built into her genes.”
• • •
CONGRATULATIONS SWIRL ABOUT IN THE LAB, and I cough up as many fake thank-you’s as I can muster. Before long, I creep toward the door. Cy continues to discuss my trait with Marka, like the ramifications of what it means and, probably, my worth.
I can’t listen anymore. I take off for a transport, but the agriplane is locked. No surprise, after the junkyard fiasco. As I plummet to the bottom level of Carus, I wring my hands. Everything I know about myself is different now. I mean, it’s not like I reveled in my less-than-perfect physical characteristics. But they were me, all me.
So I go to the only place where things are more nonsensical than my life, for a little comparative normalcy.
Ana’s room.
My world has morphed so much in so little time, while her prison stays fixed and unchanged. I can’t break more promises.
Inside, the screen is off, and she’s sound asleep in bed. I’m disappointed. I’d hoped she’d be needing me, pulling me into one of her crazy conversations in Alice in Wonderland mode. I tiptoe over to where she’s curled up. A tangled ribbon of girl.
Ana’s hand is open, palm facing up. Something small and tiny is cupped inside. I kneel down to peer at it. It’s a tiny plastic baby doll, hardly bigger than the tip of my finger. It’s completely intact, unlike the doll heads from my room. Then I notice there’s another lying on the floor. And another, the head coming out of her other fist. Little 3-D versions of the ones in her painting.
“My lucky. My trinket. Put it back.” Ana’s voice enters my head, but her eyes are scrunched in pain, still unconscious. She’s sleep-talking.
I sit on the edge of the bed to stroke her hair. Ana’s murmurs and ramblings slowly subside. Her face relaxes into a neutral expression, without torment. I bend closer, and see that her pillow has a huge wet spot. She’s cried herself to sleep.
“Oh, Ana. What is going on inside that head of yours?”
“You really want to know?” Cy asks. He’s leaning against the door, watching us. He must have followed me here. I ready myself for the verbal thrashing he’ll give me for invading her room, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he waits for me.
I take an unsteady, serpentine path to him through the detritus of her room. Cy extends an arm to help me through the last, junkiest part of her floor. His hand is warm and strong, and he holds mine a touch longer than necessary.
“Wilbert already told me what happened to her,” I confess.
“He doesn’t know what really happened. And I should have told you.”
“Told me what, exactly?”
I wait for him to say more, but he shakes his head and waves me to the transport. We zoom upward, and he leads me to his room. The wall of tortured souls is still up next to the crude tattooing machine gracing half his room. All the monitors on the other side are dark. Beyond that, his bed is a rumpled mess of blankets. Once the door is shut, he commands the room to turn off all wall-com functions. Finally, some privacy.
Cy sits on the bed, and I hunker down on the floor next to him, waiting. I wait for a long, long time. Even now, he can’t just tell me.
“It was a year and a half ago.” Cy covers his eyes with his hands, as if this helps to uncork his brain. “Micah had arrived a few years before that. I suspected something was going on between them, but I ignored it. Micah was my best friend in Carus. He made it look completely platonic, like she was his kid sister too. He said he was going to take Ana on her first junkyard run, and then, poof. They took off.” Cy looks down to me, and scrunches his forehead. “Zel, I don’t like talking down to you.”
There’s no chair nearby, so he scoots to the end of his bed to make room for me. It’s a little overwhelming—his bed smells like him, of course. It’s intoxicating. It reminds me of that night in Argent, that real or unreal kiss with him, where he was all over me. I stare at my hands, afraid he’ll read my thoughts. Now is not the time to be thinking of such things.
“Marka tried to find them, but I wouldn’t leave Carus to help her. I was terrified of Aureus. More afraid for myself than for Ana.”
“But . . . she came back, right?”
“Yes. But by then, it was too late.” He won’t look at me, and I can barely hear his whisper. “Zel, she was pregnant.”
“But—that’s not possible. Infants are all vaccinated, no one can get pregnant until they turn eighteen, when it’s reversed.” The idea of a girl pregnant at age fourteen is so repugnant I can hardly fathom it. There haven’t been cases of pregnancy under the age of eighteen in the States for almost fifty years. Not since the vaccines became mandatory.
“No. That’s not true. We’re not everybody, and those vaccines are carefully registered. Once you’re off the grid, you’re off the grid. Micah’s always been obsessed with transmission of mutations to new offspring. He used to joke about little baby Micahs running around, and we just laughed it off. I should have paid more attention.
“Micah took Ana straight to Aureus, hoping they’d be interested in her and the baby. But her body reacted badly to the pregnancy, or Micah’s DNA, I don’t know. Her blood started clotting all over the place. She had a stroke and lost the baby.”
“That’s what she lost,” I whisper. It makes sense. Oh god, and now he’s with Dyl, who stared at him as if he was the only thing in her otherwise empty universe.
“I saw him kissing my sister.”
Cy’s expression remains unchanged. He’s not surprised at all. “He’s using her. Because Dyl’s family has power and potential.”
“You mean me?”
“Yes.”
“But how would he know that?”
“They must have realized Dyl was completely normal. Your blood tests at New Horizons must have been switched by accident.”
The incompetent technician who drew our blood . . . I remember. I get up from the bed and walk to the giant machine and touch the old-fashioned pistons attached to the needle. I run my finger down to the cluster of smooth needles, covered by a hard cap for safety.
“But see, now that I have this trait, I’ve got something to bargain with.”
“No, you don’t. You can’t bargain. It’s all or nothing with them.”
“Then I’ll go. I’ll trade myself for her.” I stand a little taller. But I’m quaking in my shoes, all feathers and fluff, no hero at all.
“It’d be suicide. For bo
th of you.”
“Ana was able to come back,” I reason.
“Right, and look at her now.” He unclasps his fists to run them through his hair. “You are too precious to put yourself in their hands. They’ll sell your trait to whoever has the most money and leave your body in cryo. Or worse, just tie you down and farm your bone marrow every day. Everything we’ve tried to do to keep ourselves safe from them—keep you safe—you’d be undoing. Even your dad was afraid of this.”
Dad. I think back to his words in the hospital before he died. He’d said: “Take care of yourself. Stay safe, no matter what.” I remember thinking it was odd that he didn’t say anything about Dyl. Now I realize—he knew.
He knew I had a trait, that I would be coveted by Aureus. In his eyes, I was more precious than my sister. My anger flares. Probably all our lives, he’s placed a different value on his love for us.
I’m so upset by all this information that I forget my hand is still on the tattoo machine. My hand involuntarily squeezes, popping the cap off, and a needle jabs my index finger.
“Ouch!” Before I can even look at it, Cy runs over and grabs my hand. My finger sports a splotch of ink, and he wipes it carefully away with the sleeve of his shirt. A tiny black dot is now embedded in my fingertip.
“Looks like you just got your first tattoo,” he says. He doesn’t smile while he examines my newest addition. I don’t smile either. Every time I look at this dot, I’ll think of how my father let me down. How he let Dyl down in a way a father never should.
I pull my hand away from Cy. I refuse to give Dad any of my mental time right now. “This whole torture thing you do, tattooing yourself every day. Does it hurt?” I ask, while he’s too close to escape my question.
“Yes.”
“Does it take the pain away?”
“No.” His face is stony. He won’t look me in the eye anymore.
“Well, I don’t want to live in purgatory for the rest of my life. I’m already in it. I’m going to get my sister back.” I brush by him and head for the door. When it opens, Hex saunters by half a second later. It’s too much of a coincidence.