by Lydia Kang
“Oh. That sounds easy.”
“But we have to make forty-six different ones, individualized for each chromosome. Otherwise, you’d get a tangle of different chromosomes attached to the wrong ends.”
“That would be one ugly necklace,” Wilbert says, getting into the swing of things.
“Right. And we have to cut the chromosome ends in a way that makes them stick only to their assigned, new clasps. That is, forty-six individualized scissors that cut sticky links on each chromosome for each matching clasp.”
“Uhh, this is going to take a while, isn’t it?”
“Three days,” I say under my breath. Luckily no one hears me.
“Anyway, what brings you here? You didn’t really want a lesson in chromosome clasps, did you?”
“It’s Callie. She’s getting arthritis. Can I borrow some of your brew?” Wilbert asks. When Cy shakes his head, Wilbert’s face tightens with anxiety. “Please?”
Cy sighs. “Only this one time. It takes me a while to make enough for one person, let alone a pig.”
“How old is Callie?” I ask.
Wilbert scratches Callie’s rump, and the rump responds with a sad twitch. “She’s two. But she’s only got another year or so. It’s her hybrid genes.”
“Haven’t you done enough experimenting on her?” Cy looks at Callie with a critical eye.
“What? She’s like a guinea pig-pig?” I ask.
“Yeah. Callie’s gotten Hex’s stuff and Vera’s too. But so far, she only grew extra hair follicles, and the green stuff we injected took a week before it started to affect her breathing. Isn’t dat wight, my widdle puddums.” Callie licks Wilbert’s nose in what can only be described as a trans-species make-out session. I cover my eyes. Gross.
“Here,” Cy says. From the back specimen fridge, he produces a tiny needle-tipped syringe filled with lavender fluid. “We could try intravenous, see if that works. Zel, help me hold Callie’s leg down.”
“I don’t have time to play vet!” I yell over my shoulder, taking down an armful of beakers from the cupboards.
“Please, Zel? I can’t hold her down! She’ll be mad at me all day,” Wilbert says.
Great. I pull on a pair of lab gloves and hold her neck and body while Cy pins her leg down. He injects a mini-dose of the liquid into her vein, but a few loud pig cusses later, she looks the same. Wilbert puts her on the lab floor and she walks with a kind of stiff, crotchety gait.
“She looks the same,” Wilbert complains.
“She looks like she has something stuck up her ass,” I observe.
“It should work immediately.” Cy dumps the syringe in a sharps container. “And I don’t even know if it’s compatible with pig physiology. Maybe a joint injection next time?” He disappears into another room to find a separate batch of his brew.
I can’t be doing this. I back away and fetch more glassware.
“Time,” I whisper, and my holo pops up. The counter is ticking down to my rendezvous with Micah. I have exactly two and a half days left, and I really need five. If only I could forgo sleep. I walk over to Wilbert, who’s coaxing Callie toward him with a cube-shaped strawberry. Cy is still out of the room.
“Wilbert, the sleepless wonder.” I smile. “I have a proposition for you, but it’s just between me and you, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Got any Wilbert-brand of caffeinated beverage?”
His nose twitches. “Maybe.”
• • •
I WAIT UNTIL CY IS RUNNING THE next set of clasps in the fragmenter, and sneak out before he realizes I’m missing. I run to Wilbert’s room, where he’s waiting for me, holding a transparent vial in his hand.
“It’s old, but it should work. Callie stayed up for a whole week using this stuff. For you, maybe three or four days.”
“Has anyone remotely human tried it?”
“Not this batch, but it should be fine. It puts a portion of your central neurons in sleep mode, but you have others to do your awake thinking. So your brain is constantly resting. But watch out, the simultaneous dreams can be a little odd.”
“Hey, wait. Don’t they have something like this on the market? What’s it called . . . ForEverDay?”
Wilbert shrugs, bumping his extra head. “Yeah, I guess my brew’s not so special. But this is custom-made and lasts longer.” Wilbert pours his elixir into a tiny glass. It’s yellow, like pee.
I sniff it. “Are you sure—”
“It’s not piss, I swear. I made it lemon-flavored.”
“Oh.”
Well, down the hatch. It tastes like lemon and liquid plastic. I don’t feel strange at all. After a minute or two of waiting for the world to split into two existences, nothing happens.
“How do I know it’s going to work?” I say.
“Wait till bedtime. Then you’ll know. Now”—he rubs his hands together—“for your part of the bargain.”
“I’ll test my elixir on Callie first chance I have a complete set. Once the cell culture shows it’s actually working, she’ll be next.”
Wilbert nods with satisfaction, and I get back to work.
In the lab, I’m so stressed out that Cy keeps his distance from me, which I appreciate and hate at the same time. Around ten thirty, his head falls onto his arms at the desk. He’s out cold. After fifteen straight hours of work, it’s no surprise.
On his desk, the formula for the Cy-derived bio-accelerant is nearly ready. It turned out to be three separate proteins that make a trimer. It’s so exquisite, in concept. Trust Cy to be beautiful, even on a molecular level. He had said it would be interesting to synthesize, but he’s been spending more time working on my stuff than his.
Half an hour later, something happens to me. I blink my eyes, and my vision is layered with another image that fades in and out. It’s the white dome and the agriplane under a yolk of a sun, complete with Vera sunbathing in all her verdant beauty, down to a microscopic black thong. Cy is there with her, slathering almond oil on her legs. She arches her back to give him a crooked smile.
This is the dream I’m having?
Good god. The price of sleeplessness is going to be pretty damn high.
• • •
I GET THREE MORE CLASPS MANUFACTURED before Cy wakes up at his desk at two a.m.
“Hey,” I whisper, and let him wrap his arm around me as I walk him out of the lab. He must be mostly asleep, because he doesn’t question why I’m working so late.
Inside his bedroom, a new dream springs up in the quiescent side of my brain. We’re in the shoddy little room of my old apartment, before the magpod accident that started it all. Cy is in my arms and in my dreams. Two for the price of one. Not bad.
“Don’t leave,” he says in the dreamscape.
“I want to go. It just reminds me of bad things now.” I’m tugging on his shirt, pulling it down low enough to expose the top of his chest. Tattoos of tiny skeletal baby dolls plaster his skin.
“It’ll all change if you leave. Make it stop. Now.”
“But where will you be?” I ask. “If I don’t leave, my father won’t die, but then we’ll never meet, will we?” My logic is spot on, even unconscious.
Cy kisses me, bending my neck back with the force of his embrace. It feels so real that my hands and belly tingle from the experience of it, even though the real and nearly unconscious Cy is stumbling into his bed. He exhales a mighty puff of air as he reaches for a pillow, but I climb over him, unable to shut off the image of him and me, swirling in our embrace, our clothes slowly peeling away.
I straddle Cy in the bed, asleep and so peaceful. His lips are open just enough to accept mine, and his dark lashes flutter a little. I wonder if he dreams of me too.
In my dream, we are saying good-bye with our bodies, wrestling with a desperation, warm and uncontrolled. My own heart runs quickly, like legs galloping down a steep bank. Faster and faster. I want it to be real.
My awake body dips lower, and I kiss him, gently at first, t
hen with more strength as he begins to respond. His hand slides around my waist, and I let him pull me closer. The dream and reality are almost in sync. Cy begins to peel off my shirt.
The door to my dream-world room opens abruptly, and Dyl stands there, emaciated and white. Her sundress is torn and the dirty hem drags on the floor of our almost-abandoned apartment.
“We have to go, Zelia.”
Both Zelias stop kissing both Cys.
“We have to go,” she repeats, insistent and commanding.
“Why are you making me choose?” I say in the dream.
“Oh, Zel. There’s no choice. There never was.”
And with that, I’ve jumped off Cy’s bed, my breath caught in my throat. I back away from Cy, who groggily comforts himself by embracing a pillow and falling deeper asleep. I close his door and walk back to the lab in the silence of the phosphorescent-lit hallways. The dream is over. Reality is the only thing I have now, and my task.
Oh, Zel. There’s no choice. There never was.
I know she’s right.
• • •
TWO DAYS LEFT.
I change my clothes at dawn after a fast shower. Turns out the dreams don’t come all the time, but in short bursts. If I close my eyes, my eyeballs start whizzing around. It’s disconcerting, so I hardly blink. Then my eyes dry out like rubber balls.
The visits from Dyl keep occurring, interspersed with ones from Dad and Cy, of course. Cy and I have a pretty healthy sex life in my dream world, and the mind-porn during work is really disruptive. It makes Wilbert’s elixir kind of useless during the dream cycles, as I can’t take advantage of all the time gained by using it.
I finish hiding the new clasps and scissors I’ve made just before Cy shows up at nine, freshly scrubbed and wide awake. I don’t have to fake a smile.
“You’re up early,” he remarks.
“Only just. I’m on the fifth batch.” I’m impressed at how easily the lie comes. The truth is that fourteen batches are done. At this rate, I’ll have them finished with a few hours to spare.
“That’s it? Well, we’ll get there, eventually. We’ve got time.” He slurps a coffee and sits in front of his monitors, watching the news.
No, I think. Thirty-nine hours until midnight tomorrow. And meanwhile, Dyl could be getting sicker and sicker every hour that goes by. No one suffers from that knowledge but me.
I snap the fragmenter shut, punch an order in, and check on the cell cultures needed to test the first round. I could test all fourteen, but try to be content with just two for now. If the chromosome makes the telltale infinity sign, then I’ll know the scissors and clasps worked.
Two hours later, I fist-pump in victory.
“What?” Cy comes running over, slipping his hands around my middle. I can’t have him think things are different, so I allow it. My eyelids succumb to gravity for a second, and I memorize the sensation of his hands encircling my waist.
God, I feel like a drug addict taking morphine for a hangnail. It’s okay. I’m not really going back on my promise to Dyl. It is a necessary thing. Well, the necessary thing is kissing my cheek now.
“You haven’t let me kiss you in a while,” he whispers.
“I’ve been busy.” I throw him a bright smile, brushing off his complaint. “Here, look.” I hook up the microscope to the screen that feeds to his desk. He peers at the screen, where there are twenty-two pairs of normal X-shaped chromosomes . . . and a single figure eight.
“It worked?”
“Your confidence in me is astounding.”
“How’s this for confidence?” he says, pulling me into an embrace. I swerve out of his open arms, shaking my head.
“Mm, no. Back to work.” Cy’s disappointment darkens his eyes. The guilt weighs on my shoulders, and I hunch over. “I’m sorry. The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can . . . you know, Marka can get Dyl out of there.” Crap. Cy catches my Freudian slip. He crosses his arms and doesn’t say anything for a long time.
“That reminds me. Marka wants to talk to you.”
“Sure.” I have precious little time, but enough for Marka. I head toward the door and Cy follows me like a shadow.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going with you.”
“You’re guarding me, aren’t you?” My hands rest on my hips. It’s the small girl’s version of fluffing my feathers to look bigger.
“Maybe.”
“I don’t need a sitter. Really. Call Marka in a minute to prove I’m there. And then I’ll come right back.”
Cy leans over for a kiss, and I let him. After what feels like forever—a delicious, forbidden forever—he lets me go.
A few minutes later, I enter Marka’s lab, but it’s empty. The bottled scents still sparkle behind their glass doors, a museum of all things human captured in convenient, travel-sized containers. I wait for Cy to check in, but the room stays silent. I guess he does believe me, which is good. Trust is essential when you’re planning to lie to everyone you know.
Hmm. Where’s Marka? It’s quiet as death in her lab, unlike ours, which constantly buzzes with elderly, arthritic machines.
“Marka?” I call.
“Be there in a minute. I’m on my way,” her voice intones from the walls.
To pass the time, I start reading the handwritten labels on the bottles, stoppered like fragile, expensive scents at the store. The liquid is clear as water.
Love, type 7 (E)
Love, type 8a (E)
Love, type 8b (E)
Lumbar radiculopathy
Lung cancer, small cell
I smirk. She can smell love? There’s actually a number limit on them? I wonder if she’s bottled roses and candy, or something more comforting, like the scent of Cy’s neck. I read on.
Lupus
Lying (E)
Lyme disease
I stare at the bottle titled “Lying.” Oh no. I remember wondering before if she could smell that, but I wasn’t serious. That is not good for me right now.
“Zelia, hi!” Marka rushes in with a swoosh of air.
“You wanted to talk to me?” I shove my hand under my seated butt to keep from fidgeting.
“Yes. I want to know how your work is coming along. If I’m going to try to get Dyl back, we need to make a plan.”
“It’s going. We’re producing the elixir right now, but it’s going to take time to make a complete set.”
“Good.” She smiles warmly. I’m not lying yet, so I don’t mind that she’s so near. I surreptitiously check out the doors. There is one directly behind me, and the one Marka walked in from. A long, polished rectangular window spans the entire wall opposite from the scents. I point at it.
“Hey, does that window open?”
“Huh? Oh, sure. But I don’t ever open the transoms. The scent of Neia drives me crazy. Too much stimulus for my nose.”
Really. Interesting. “Marka, I need to ask you one more time.” She must know what’s coming, because she inhales deeply, probably reading my desperation.
“No. I can’t let you get Dyl yourself. It’s out of the question.”
“But she’s my sister.” I try to keep my voice low and steady, but it’s hard. “It’s only right. Please.”
“Zelia,” she says, clamping her hand on my arm. “Your father made me promise to keep you two safe. I’ve already lost Dylia. I won’t endanger you.”
“Well, seeing as I’m his daughter and you were just a . . . client, I think I have a right to make this decision.”
“Oh, Zel.” She presses her eyes shut for a few seconds. “You don’t understand the odds.”
“I got the top score in biostatistics last semester. Try me.”
“If I take your experimental product to them, there is a ten percent chance they’ll exchange it for Dyl. If you go, there is a one hundred percent chance they’ll take you, and your product, and keep Dyl too.”
“You don’t know that,” I counter.
“Yes, I do.
”
“How?”
Marka gives me a steady stare. “You have to have faith. I just know.”
“I’m not asking you to explain the existence of Hindu gods, Marka. So, no, I don’t have faith. Prove it.”
“You are so stubborn, like your dad.” She swallows and pinches her nose shut (which is, I guess, her idea of clearing her mind). “I didn’t want to tell you this. I don’t even know how to begin.” A few moments later, Marka jumps off her stool and slides open a drawer. She plucks an item out of it and brings it to me, carefully laying it in my hand.
My fingers close over the object. It’s light and small, irregularly shaped. I open my hand. A dark and horrifying revelation grows in my belly.
It’s a tiny baby doll, like the ones littered all over Ana’s room.
Her trinket.
“Zelia, are you done there yet?” Cy’s voice calls from the lab.
The tiny baby doll is still in my palm when I look up at Marka. She puts a finger to her lips to urge my silence. The baby discussion is not for Cy’s ears, apparently.
“I’ll be done soon,” I say. It’s hard to not sound disgusted, especially when it’s seeping from my pores.
“Cy dear, give us another few minutes,” Marka adds.
“Okay, I’ll be there in five.”
Marka rolls her eyes and touches her forehead in an oh crap gesture.
“This isn’t just about Ana’s miscarriage, is it?” I keep my voice as quiet as I can.
“No. And Cy doesn’t know. I never told him. I didn’t have the heart. It would kill him to know.”
“Know what?”
Marka takes the little baby from me and turns it over in her palm. “They harvested her ovaries when they saw she couldn’t carry babies.”
“Harvested?”
“Yes. I think they took them out in such a crude way—she has no scars on her belly, you know.”
“How else would they take them ou— Oh.” My imagination doesn’t have to be that vivid to realize what animals they were. I cover my mouth.
Marka hurries her words. “They’re trying to breed more kids, using any girls with traits for the task. They may be using non-trait girls as surrogates.” She drops her eyes to her lap. “I think . . . I know that Ana’s pregnancy was planned. It wasn’t some lovers’ accident. Micah used her, and when the pregnancy didn’t work, Aureus took what they wanted anyway.”