Nine

by Zach Hines

  Whatever.

  Julian had no interest in the future success of the Burners. All he wanted was the information he had been promised. After the meeting, Nicholas gleefully called Julian up to the stage. He put both hands on his shoulders and eyed him levelly. “You did good,” Nicholas said. “You did very good.”

  He produced a folder from his bag and handed it to Julian.

  “As promised,” he said. “Hot from the LakeNet database.”

  Julian opened it up. He blinked rapidly as he tried to process what he was reading. He felt his head reeling again.

  “This is really as much as I could find, and I did a deep dig, let me tell you,” Nicholas explained. “But like I said yesterday, I lack a context to put this information into.”

  Julian’s eyes were racing over the text, reading it again and again.

  Nicholas continued, “Nevertheless, I hope this little morsel can bring you some solace.”

  Julian looked up at Nicholas, his mouth open, dumb.

  “Well,” Nicholas said, clearly unable to deal with Julian’s awkward response. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  He tapped Julian’s shoulder as if waiting for a response. But none came. So he shrugged and left.

  Julian was left alone in the orchestra room, reading and reading again what Nicholas had given him.

  The Attison Project.

  According to the date, this was Julian’s mother’s last assignment at the Lakes before being dismissed.

  An in-depth study on the behavior, biochemistry, and evolution of the local fauna, especially the cat population, as affected by Lake phenomena.

  Chapter 23

  “A THREE NOW?”

  Cody stood on the porch of Cat’s Cradle, a deep, dimpled frown etched on her face. Julian wished dearly that he had a scarf or a handkerchief to tie around his neck. He shrugged his shoulders, trying in vain to obscure his number.

  “Yeah, a long story—”

  “Aren’t they all?” Cody said, cutting him off, and went inside, obviously pissed.

  Julian followed her through the living room, where two girls who looked about twelve or thirteen years old were sitting on the carpet, sorting boxes of clothing—donations maybe?—into piles by color. There was a red pile, a blue pile, and a gray pile, which, Julian realized with a sinking feeling, might actually be a green pile.

  They entered Glen’s computer room. Cody closed the door behind him and leaned against it, her arms crossed and her face stern. Glen swiveled in his chair and nodded to Julian by way of hello, then swiveled back to his monitor, where he brought up a screengrab labeled “Test Subject 32.”

  “So,” Glen said. “We certainly have a Lake cat on our hands. Or in our freezer, as the case may be. Not only that, and a bonus for us, is that the chip it had was a more advanced model than the ones we’ve collected to date. It had a bit of firmware still on it, which looked slapped together and had plenty of little exploits left behind by sloppy coding. I used it to get deeper into the database than I’ve been able to before. Reverse engineering—it’s your friend.”

  Julian blinked at him in confusion, but Glen continued, “And I found a name. Test Subject 32. Not a great name for a cat. I would’ve gone with Shadow or Tracer or something more interesting myself, but there you go. Check out the info on the chip.” He gestured to the screen. “Age, time/date of scans . . . Scans. Like they do with us when we’re reborn.”

  “That was exactly my supposition,” Cody said. “Now it’s finally confirmed.”

  Julian was floored. “So, they are being reborn. The cats. This is unbelievable.”

  “Well, believe it,” Glen replied. “Because it’s right here.”

  Cody walked over to Julian. “You said you had something to show us.”

  Julian fumbled in his bag for the printouts Nicholas had given him. Cody pushed Glen’s keyboard out of the way and spread them on the table.

  Julian explained: “It’s some kind of staff list for the—”

  “The Attison Project,” Cody said, her eyes darting over the page.

  “That mean anything to you?” Glen asked.

  Cody scrunched up her face, thinking. “You see the word ‘Attis’ thrown around a lot by the Lentic Research Unit. Attis was a Greek god that represented decay and rebirth. The nurses liked to think of themselves as demigods. A real self-absorbed bunch.” She kept reading. “This is a staff list. Lucy Dex. So, that’s your mom, Julian?”

  He nodded.

  Glen laughed and leaned back in his chair. “Too good to be true. Son of Attis! Does that make you a demigod? A quarter-god?”

  “I have no idea what this is,” Julian said. “My mother never told me anything about any Attison Project, and I’m sure my dad has no clue. All we knew was that she worked in the Lentic Research Unit.”

  “This is the research program for these nine-lived cats,” Cody said, handing the sheet to Glen, who held it close to his glasses. “This is the program all the chipped cats came from.”

  Glen nodded. “Yeah. Sure looks like it.”

  “Maybe the cat had a bond or something with my mother,” Julian interjected. “Maybe that’s why it came to my house when it . . . died.”

  Cody turned to him. “Possibly,” she said. “Have you seen the cat in any other unusual circumstances?”

  Julian frowned, remembering the nightmare last night. The cat on the island, with the terrible hiss and gleaming fangs—its mouth hinged open, about to swallow him whole.

  “I’ve been having dreams about it, actually.”

  Glen’s eyes bulged, and he turned to Cody. “Look, I get this is a good sign, but that’s just creepy,” he said.

  Cody didn’t respond. She just went back to studying the document.

  Glen continued, “Maybe we should step back from this for a bit. Especially right now, with the nurses turning up pressure on the Friends, it doesn’t seem wise to be getting involved with some crazy dream-cat experiment quarter-god boy.”

  Still, Cody didn’t respond.

  “Hello?” Glen said.

  Finally, Cody looked up.

  “Look at this,” she said, stabbing the document with her finger. “Callum Collins.” She snorted. “So, he was in the Lentic Research Unit. Why didn’t he tell me?”

  Glen read over her shoulder, his eyes scanning the page quickly.

  “Callum? Hell no. Didn’t you hear what I just said?” he said.

  “I was strategically ignoring it,” Cody replied.

  “You guys know this Callum Collins, I take it,” Julian interjected.

  “He was one of the original Friends. He donated this house to us,” Cody replied matter-of-factly. She stacked the papers back into a pile. “And now we’re going to go see him.”

  Glen shook his head. “I said, hell no.”

  “Glen, don’t be a contrarian,” Cody snapped. “I know Callum has his concerns, but he’s involved with this. Even though he’s been hiding it from me . . .” She frowned. “Why has he been hiding it? What does he know?”

  Glen shook his head. “Callum was pretty clear about us staying away from him. I believe the words he used were, ‘Stay the hell away from me . . . forever.’”

  Cody shrugged. “Glen, I have to.”

  Julian stopped their argument cold. “Can he tell me what happened to my mother?”

  Cody looked at him, a curious brow raised as she evaluated his sudden gusto.

  “Glen?” she asked. “You coming?”

  Glen shook his head and closed his eyes. “No,” he said again, under his breath. “Hell no. . . .”

  Julian followed Cody to the kitchen, where she retrieved the dead cat from the freezer and wrapped it in several layers of plastic wrap. She ignored Julian’s gaze and said nothing to him, as if she had also wrapped herself in several layers of protective coating.

  “Hey,” Julian said. But she didn’t respond.

  She stuffed the cat into her backpack and went to her room, the one with the red
door. Julian followed her, but she turned to him abruptly outside the door.

  “You wait here,” she said. She slipped into the room and closed the door behind her, careful to prevent him from so much as getting a glimpse of what was inside. After a few moments, she returned, zipping up her hoodie. “Let’s go,” she said curtly.

  They sat in silence on the drive, their vigilant scanning for pursuers keeping them occupied. Finally, when it became obvious that no one was following them, Julian turned to her. “Let’s talk.”

  She turned to him like she was inspecting, well, a dead cat. “Okay, let’s talk,” she said. “I’ve been looking into degradations at the Lakes since well before you even considered burning your One,” she continued. “And now, it seems like you are an important part of this. This cat that was following you and your mother’s recently discovered identity are some of the biggest leads I’ve had yet. However . . .” She looked over at the Three on his neck. “Your continued burning is an obstacle to my trust.”

  Julian frowned. Not this again.

  “Is it?” he asked. “Do you not trust me? I’m sorry, but you don’t even know me. You don’t know that my mother disappeared one day and then came back and attacked me before she went off and permadied right in front of the Lake. You don’t know that she never wanted me to burn, and after seeing what happened to her, I didn’t want to, either. You don’t know that I have a father and a brother, and our family’s life score is pathetic because of me, and the bank was about to take our house. You don’t know that the Burners told me they could help me find out something about why my mother went so crazy. All you do know is that I’m here in this car with you and a dead cat. So excuse me if I don’t feel the need to earn your trust, especially considering that we are on the way to a mysterious ex-Lake scientist who apparently doesn’t want to see you, and you—with your off-limits room and your insane theories—could be dangerous, or deluded, or both.”

  Cody gave a slow-clap.

  “Yeah, well,” Julian said. “Trust is a two-way street. You need to tell me why the hell you care so much about any of this.”

  After a moment of silence, Cody nodded. “I suppose it’s personal for me, too, like it is for you,” she said. She stared out the window. “The Department of the Lakes took my parents from me.”

  “Are they permadead?”

  “Yes,” Cody replied immediately.

  She brushed the hair from her face and tied it back into a ponytail, then continued matter-of-factly. “My dad was an engineer who worked for the army. He was part Japanese, and he could speak the language. So they wanted him in Japan during the Kyushu Crisis.”

  “What’s that?” Julian asked.

  “Big overpopulation problem. The Buddhists started revolting against the life schedule. My mother went with him. She was a chemist, and the army gave her a posting out there analyzing the Lake water. I was born there. My father helped build the famous Tori Wall around the Kyushu Lake. He was promoted up the chain after that.

  “But when they transferred him to Lakeshore, he realized something was wrong. He was high enough on the food chain at that point to figure out that the nurses were covering up the fact that the Lakes were . . . changing. He quit, and he and my mother went underground. . . .”

  Julian nodded.

  “You know about the 6/12 incident, right?” Cody said. “When the army burned down that compound in Florida that was making the synthetic Lake?”

  “Of course,” he said. The 6/12 incident was a big deal. A group—a cult, really—was using stolen water, trying to form a Lake beyond the reaches of government control. It was a weeklong standoff, and it ended in flames. That was when they started really censoring the news.

  “Thirty people died, including my parents,” Cody said. “They were just trying to continue their research. All they did was ask questions.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julian said. This wasn’t making him feel more comfortable. In fact, it deepened his misgivings: Cody had connections to such a high-profile incident, and she was being tagged by unknown followers, and they were on their way right now to meet someone who didn’t want to receive them.

  Cody looked over at him, her frown dimpling her cheeks.

  “I was just a kid. I didn’t want anything to do with the authorities. I went on the run. I ended up back in Lakeshore, living on Retro Row. That’s when the Friends found me.”

  “So you do know what it’s like,” Julian said, “to lose a parent.”

  A moment passed as she studied him.

  “Tell me,” she said, “are you going to be a Four the next time I see you?”

  “No way in hell,” Julian replied.

  Her dimples faded as her frown flattened out. It wasn’t a smile exactly, but it was a start.

  Chapter 24

  THE DRIVE TOOK THEM OUT OF THE ELM FOREST AND DOWN through Lakeshore to the wide, manicured fields of the West Side Hills, to the lawns and stables and ranch houses of the upper-crust suburbs.

  When Julian was little, the family would have a Sunday picnic out in the state park, and on the drive home through these hills, they’d talk about what it would be like to have a ranch or a farm of their own. Julian’s father always said he could give a retired racehorse a good home, and he could board two or three more horses from the folks downtown—the stables would end up paying for themselves. Julian would watch these fields whip by the window, trying to imagine himself on a horse, tackling acres of the rolling green like one of the knights in his childhood storybooks. He watched from the back seat as his father kissed his mother’s hand. She had just gotten a new job at the Lake. This was going to be the future. These hills were where they were going to live. . . .

  These now gray hills.

  Callum Collins lived among these hills, in a white two-story house down a winding driveway. As they approached, Julian stole a glance at Cody’s face. He saw her eyes were hard and determined, flickering in and out of the light as they passed through the shadows of the fence posts.

  They knocked on Callum’s door for what seemed like ten minutes. Finally, once Julian’s knuckles were raw, it opened. Standing there was a thin man in a flannel shirt who looked about the same age as Julian’s father. He had a short, closely cropped beard and thick, black-rimmed glasses.

  He looked directly at Cody. “How did you find me here?”

  “The Friends . . . left some of their financial records behind at Cat’s Cradle,” she said.

  “Please leave,” Callum said. “I made it clear that I have nothing to do with you people anymore.”

  “I’m not here asking you to come back.” Cody opened the bag, revealing the dead cat. “I’m here about the Attison Project.”

  Callum flinched at the sight of the cat, but it wasn’t disgust or shock—it was a kind of weary recognition. Callum scanned the horizon, as if making sure no one else was with them, then stepped outside onto the front step. “Don’t talk and just follow me around back,” he said.

  Behind the house, Callum grabbed a shovel from a pot of tools and led them through the backyard to the edge of the forest. A small stream ran through the underbrush.

  “The house is probably wiretapped,” he said. “The stream washes out the noise, but keep it to a whisper just in case.” He gestured toward his foot—there was a black ankle monitor strapped above his boot. He was clearly on some form of house arrest.

  Cody took the cat out and set it on a tree stump. Callum kneeled down next to it, carefully unwrapping the plastic until the dead cat was completely exposed. Callum muttered something indistinguishable to himself as he examined the cat. He turned the cat’s head around in his hands, looking it in the eyes. “Yep,” he said, as if that meant anything. Julian looked to Cody, but she was just as perplexed as he was.

  Callum then checked the cat’s ear, pulling back the fur to reveal a small black tattoo. He sighed and stood up.

  “He’s a Nine,” he said. “That’s the end of this one. He was a real sweet boy, too.
Really loved the soy cream.”

  “You know this cat?” Julian asked.

  Cody spoke over him. “Callum, we have files on the Attison Project. We know you were on the team, and now we need to know what it was about.”

  Callum’s eyes darted between them, and he clenched his teeth.

  “I’ve been trying to understand what’s been going on at the Lakes,” Cody said. “I’m continuing my parents’ work. Please, help me understand.”

  “No recording,” he said.

  Cody nodded and pulled her backpack off her shoulder. She retrieved a notebook and a pen. “Notes only,” she said. “No voice or video.”

  Callum watched her uneasily, then picked up the shovel and spiked it into the earth.

  “Attison was a project we ran out of the Lentic Research Unit. We were trying to find a cure for retrogression and rebirth Wrinkles. The cats and the cicadas were the only other animals that we knew of who were responding to the Lakes like we were. The cats, being more intelligent organisms, were the ideal test subjects.”

  Cody scribbled furiously in her notebook. Callum forced the shovel into the ground with his boot.

  “That was the intention,” Callum continued as he began excavating a small hole, the musty black earth piling up beside him. “We might’ve gotten somewhere, maybe, but then the new Lake director was installed. He put a new lead on Attison. We had new orders, and I didn’t like the new direction, so I was bumped down the chain until I walked away.”

  He worked at the hole until it was a few feet deep, then he gently lowered the cat into it. “He deserves a proper burial,” he said.

  Julian watched as the dirt piled up around this mysterious visitor who had intruded into his life. He nodded toward it, a silent goodbye.