by Rob McCarthy
The steel deck of the Boulin Bridge hummed beneath my worn tires and dead ahead a grey haze hung over the districts. According to her file, the last signal from Bailey Burke’s transceiver had originated on the bridge. That wasn't unusual for runaway mods. The slums started on the other side, where every mod in the business was born and raised, and where no transceiver worked reliably. That final signal could have meant Bailey was on her way home. Of course, other possibilities existed as well. Like that jackers had already finished with her and dumped her body in the river. I glanced out the window and into the dark water below. There’d been a time when crews dragged that river every weekend. Not anymore. Too little profit in it. Mods and water didn’t mix.
The truck ramped down the foot of the bridge and into Pond District, where my tires splashed through potholes in the muddy roadway. Soot-stained shipping containers crowded both sides of the lane, and the oily smoke of cook fires forced its way through my vents. I flipped a switch, and the fog lamps threw yellow light past the edges of the road, illuminating hunched figures wearing rags and tending pits of glowing coals.
The misery of the districts was nothing new. But what surprised me every time was that the kind of girls you saw strolling the grounds of Marichal Lab’s campus—girls with millions in hardware grafted to their spines—had all come from places like this.
Although not a one of them ever came to Marichal straight out of the shipping crate. They all made a stop at the Mod Girls Club along the way. Usually a five- or a ten-year stop.
After another five miles, I pulled up in front of a brick building that someone had tried very hard to make look respectable. Beneath a green canvas awning, a gold-lettered plaque declared the building home to the Faith Junction Chapter of the Mod Girls Club of America.
Like all chapter headquarters, Faith Junction’s was a boarding house. But compared to its surroundings, it looked like the Ritz. Its windows had actual glass panes. A concrete sidewalk led from the road to the door. And a glowing button activated a working intercom. All very swank stuff for a district where a dead bolt qualified your dwelling as deluxe.
Of course the money for those amenities came from companies like Marichal. But it was money well spent. The Mod Girls Club did all the work that the big companies couldn't: pulling the best girls out of the worst homes, helping them grow up healthy, then making sure the right corporations got first crack at them. As far as the biotechs were concerned, the deal was a steal: A supply of healthy girls, and at what price? The measly cost of upkeep on a district flophouse.
A woman's voice greeted me over the intercom. I held my ID in front of the cam. "Contract Enforcement," I said. "Marichal Labs."
The lock buzzed, and I entered a vestibule. Then a second security door opened onto a polished hallway that gleamed like glass beneath a red carpet.
A matronly woman who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty greeted me. Her pinned hair, cardigan sweater, and long plaid skirt said she was the housemother.
Which was how she introduced herself, with a sternly polite bow: "I'm Mrs. Price. Housemother."
She led me up the hallway, and from behind the doors on either side came the lingering smells of the evening meal, along with the rumble and steam of washing machines churning through the week's laundry.
Hanging from the picture rail were group portraits of the chapter members. In each picture, thirty or forty girls stood on risers, wearing identical dresses, dresses apparently chosen to emphasize the girls’ uniform health and fitness. Scattered among these group pictures were headshots like the one in Bailey Burke's file.
Like Bailey Burke, the girls in the headshots all had that same glow of health, accentuated by hair and makeup that emphasized their clear skin and toned necks. Beside each portrait, an engraved plate listed the girl's name, her last year in the chapter, and the company where she signed her first mod contract. I recognized all the usual suspects: the global giants in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, the smaller firms in biotech and genetics. These were the Faith Junction chapter's most successful alums, its Mod Girls Wall of Fame.
Mrs. Price took me through a door at the end of the hall. The small room's ancient paneling had been restored to a lustrous shine, and more portraits hung from the walls. A great oak desk filled the center of the room, and Mrs. Price seated herself behind it. She gestured me to the nearer of a pair of antique crimson velvet chairs. In the farther of the two chairs, a skinny girl with wiry copper curls sat in flannel pajamas and a plaid robe. She looked like she'd been summoned from bed. When I nodded at her, she squinted at me as if she’d forgotten her glasses. She was not Bailey Burke.
"Mr. Devlin," Mrs. Price said, "this is Mackenzie Dougal. I asked her to join us."
I said hello, and the little ginger gave me a weak smile. Her pale brown eyes squinted harder, as if straining to bring me into focus. She gave up and stared at her hands in her lap.
I brought up the missing girl’s file on my handset and set it on the desktop for both of them to see. "As Marichal probably told you over the phone, I'm here about a girl they modded yesterday. Bailey Burke. She’s one of yours."
Mrs. Price glanced once at the picture on my screen and then, with her small, pursed mouth, said: “Actually, Mr. Devlin, I am afraid that she is not.”
I looked at the girl with the copper-wire hair. Then back at Mrs. Price. I waited for more.
"I did receive a phone call from Marichal this evening,” Mrs. Price continued. “And they were kind enough to send me the girl’s file. However, as I just finished telling them, Mr. Devlin, the Faith Junction Mod Girls Club has never had a member by the name of Bailey Burke. And I can say that with certainty."
I looked again at the teenager beside me, still searching her face for any similarity to Bailey Burke's picture.
"Never?"
"Never."
I shifted on the crimson velvet, and the old chair creaked beneath my weight. "In that case, don’t you think you could have told Marichal that over the phone? And spared me the trip? Someone like you must know how important time is—"
But the housemother talked over me, and in a way that said talking over people was something she did for fun. "I believe it might also interest you to know, Mr. Devlin, that the club has contacted chapters in all our neighboring districts. We shared this picture with them. Two hundred members in all. Not a one of them has seen this girl. Ever."
Her comment made me look at the picture again myself.
“And I believe it worth adding that such a girl would scarcely fail to draw the club’s interest. Were she actually from the district."
“Were she from the district—what makes you think she’s not from the district, if you’ve never seen her before.”
Mrs. Price’s eyebrows rose approvingly at the picture. "A girl like this? From Faith Junction? I would know.”
She was right about that. Bailey Burke looked like she could be a poster girl for the MGC. She looked like her picture belonged on the wall of fame.
“So you don’t think she’s from the districts?” I said.
"Unless she was raised somewhere out of sight—such as in a dungeon—no, this girl is not from Faith. I seriously doubt she is from any of the districts. We would know."
"You said none of your members had even heard of a girl named Bailey Burke?”
“Well . . .” She looked at the redhead seated beside me. "That is why I asked Mackenzie to join us."
Mackenzie glanced up from her lap at Mrs. Price. The grimace on her face made me want to go find her eyeglasses.
"Mackenzie has some information that I believe you will want to hear." Mrs. Price nodded to the girl. "Mackenzie, Mr. Devlin is here on behalf of Marichal Laboratories. He is a licensed contract en
forcer, and you may speak to him in confidence. Now, tell him what you told me."
The girl's eyes flitted to my face. The gold of her irises suited her copper coloring. But she had little of the beauty and confidence of Bailey Burke.
"Last summer." She spoke in a shallow voice. "I put in my application for Marichal. And they made my map.”
She stopped and looked at Mrs. Price. The housemother made a steeple of her fingers beneath her chin.
“And they told me I had a mutation."
"A mutation?" I said. "You mean they found one in your genome map?"
She nodded. "I thought that meant I couldn't be a mod. Because I wasn't perfect—"
Mrs. Price interrupted: "No girl is perfect, Mackenzie. That is not the point."
"They wanted to do more tests. So they brought me there. For a whole day. They said my mutation was rare. Really rare. And then they said my mom had it, too. Only my mom never had her map done. Not that I ever knew, at least. But they said she would have the mutation for sure because I had it. They said we were one in a million. Or two in a million, I guess."
I found myself scanning her face and hands, as if I might see some evidence of her mutation. But the mutations that interested Marichal didn't give people webbed fingers or an eye in the middle of their forehead. They were things you couldn't see. Things in the DNA that affected how cells reacted to particular molecules or to reconfigurations of the DNA itself.
"They told me Marichal was starting a program. They wanted to use me . . .” One of the copper curls fell in front of her eyes, and she hooked it behind an ear. “They said it would be for a long time. And I would get more money than the other programs."
"Tell Mr. Devlin about the woman, Mackenzie."
Mackenzie’s eyes fixed on the pattern in the rug beneath her slippers: a red, gray, and blue tapestry, with gold shapes that looked like ribosomes.
"There was a woman who went through the tests with me. I didn't talk to her. I tried, but she didn't want to talk to me. She had the mutation, too. I think she knew Marichal was going to take me and not her. Except Marichal didn't take me—"
I interrupted her. "Why did you think Marichal would take you and not her?"
Mackenzie’s pale lips tightened, as if she’d tasted something bitter. "Because she was old."
“Old?" I said. “How old?” To a teenager, twenty was old.
The girl looked at Mrs. Price, and the bitterness left her mouth. An apologetic frown took its place.
Mrs. Price smiled. "As old as I am? Is that what you mean, Mackenzie? That's all right, dear. You can say that."
The girl looked at her lap and nodded.
"That old?" I said.
Mrs. Price’s gray eyes widened.
I scrambled. "I mean, somebody as old as Mrs. Price—as old as me for that matter—could never be a mod. Not anymore. These days, over thirty is game over.”
Mrs. Price said, "Tell him the woman's name, Mackenzie."
The girl’s sad olive eyes regarded me then stared at the picture on my handset. She said, “Burke."
"Burke?" I looked at the picture again myself.
"I sat in the waiting room with her. The morning and the afternoon. They always called her that. Mrs. Burke.”
"Did they call her Bailey Burke?"
She shook her head, and that same copper curl again sprang from behind her ear. "They called her Madison Burke."
The housemother nodded solemnly. As if all were obvious.
It took me a second to connect the dots. But I got there, eventually.
"Wait, they told you that your mother would have this mutation—the very same thing?"
"That's what they said. And she never got mapped."
A forty-year-old woman named Burke. A rare gene that passed from mother to daughter . . .
"Can you describe what this Mrs Burke looked like? Apart from being around my and Mrs. Price's age?"
The girl nodded to my handset. "She looked like the girl in that picture. Like Bailey Burke. Just older."
“Did she look like she could be this girl's mother?"
She nodded. "She had red highlights in her hair, but they were fake. I could tell,” she said with some pride. “And she was heavier. But she was pretty, like that girl. And her skin was the same. Like china. And she had nice clothes, too."
"Nice clothes." I picked up the handset and stared at it, trying to picture the girl's mother.
"I'm sure you can understand now why I called you here," Mrs. Price said.
"Yeah." I turned to Mackenzie. "I appreciate it. This could be helpful."
Her eyes returned to her lap, and the rest of her face relaxed.
"Now, Mr. Devlin . . ." Mrs. Price said, this time with a different tone to her voice—a tone I didn't like. "I do understand that this is likely outside the purview of your particular position," she said, "but as I am sure you would expect in such a situation, the club does fully intend to follow up on this matter. Including an investigation into charges of fraud—"
I didn't doubt the MGC would go after Bailey Burke. But she was also right that all that was “beyond the purview of my particular position.”
“My job starts and ends with finding the girl, preferably while she’s still alive.” I got to my feet.
Mrs. Price stayed seated. "Obviously the responsible party here has defrauded Mackenzie, costing her what would have been a very beneficial arrangement, one that would see to her long-term interests."
Not to mention the interests of the chapter, which took a cut of every girl's contract. I kept that thought to myself. "I hear you," I said. "My advice is call Marichal's legal office Monday morning. In the meantime, this girl is a minor and missing."
"Of course." Mrs. Price looked away and fidgeted in her chair.
I gave the nearsighted girl a smile, but I didn’t think she caught it.
On my way out, I stopped at the most recent group portrait in the entry hall. Mrs. Price was in the picture, sporting her cardigan and hair bun. And so was Mackenzie Dougal with her springy head of copper curls and, I was glad to see, a thick pair of eyeglasses. But I saw no one who looked like Bailey Burke on those risers. The club wasn’t pulling anybody’s leg. Bailey Burke was a fraud.
I was on the phone with Daysn, the ombudsman at Marichal Labs, before I was back in the truck.
"I’m saying, she isn’t even a real member of the MGC."
"What?" Daysn said.
"She's not a member of Faith Junction. Or any chapter around here. She probably isn't even from the districts."
"They're sure about that?"
"The housemother told me they circulated her file. Two hundred members. Nobody's even heard of this girl."
"What the—"
"Yeah, I know, but hang on a minute. You can search applicant records, right?"
"Yes. But the Bailey Burke file is classified. I told you, she got a prototype—"
"I know, but I'm talking application records. Do an applicant search on a Madison Burke. From this year."
"Madison,” she said.
"A Faith Junction kid named Mackenzie Dougal interviewed at Marichal a couple months ago. You can pull her file, too. She said there was a woman named Burke who went through a bunch of tests with her. Madison Burke."
"Hang on, she's in here. I'm looking at her right now. That is definitely not Bailey Burke."
"I’m not finished. Madison Burke and this Mackenzie girl had the same mutation. Something rare. Something Marichal wanted. And they were applying for the same program. Can you tell, was Madison Burke a candidate for the prototype that Bailey Burke got?"
"No, and she never would be, Frankie. Madison Burke turned forty-one years old last year."
"I know but get this: Marichal told the Faith Junction girl they tested that her own mother would have the exact same mutation she has. No matter what. So I'm assuming that works both ways?"
"You mean if Madison Burke had a daughter—"
"Yeah. A daughter named B
ailey."
"Who would have the same mutation. Matrilineal inheritance."
"Exactly. In fact, I'm gonna trust my gut that she does have a daughter. You just tell me that you’ve got an address for Madison Burke."
Daysn did have an address for Madison Burke. She had a lot more information than she had for Bailey Burke. Including a phone number. I was trying it for the fourth time when I slowed the truck in front of a white ranch home in the neighborhood of Meadowbrook. The trip had taken me back across the river, out of the districts, and onto a respectable street of modest single-story homes seated neatly on matchbook lots, most of which looked painstakingly maintained.
One exception was the home of Madison Burke.
Thick tufts of brown weeds sprouted through gaping cracks in the driveway, where a carport's shabby awning sheltered something half covered by a tarp. I put the flashlight on it, and saw the rusting remains of a motorcycle. It looked like somebody had crashed it.
The porch light next to the door was off and the drapes were drawn across the front of the house. But as I moved past a darkened picture window, sounds came from inside. They were the sounds of a man and a woman in bed. Or possibly on the living room floor. The man's voice was gruff, but the woman's sounded young. If it was Bailey Burke, she wouldn't be the first mod to run away for a weekend with the boyfriend.
I pulled back the battered screen door and pressed my thumb to the broken chip of a doorbell.
Nothing happened. At least nothing more than what had been happening before I’d shown up—what had been happening between women and men since the dawn of time.
I pounded on the door, and the moaning abruptly stopped.
In the quiet I heard the chatter of a television.
I knocked again.
A man's angry voice shouted, "Who is it?"
I raised my badge to the peephole. "Contract enforcement. Open up!"
"Get lost!"
I raised my fist to knock again, but there was the click and slide of a chain, and then a tug at the door.
The tug failed to open the door, which was stuck in its warped frame. There was a grunt and a harder tug, and the wood made a barking sound as the door burst open. It banged at the end of the chain, and behind it stood a man of my height, probably mid forties, with a strong build that had gone flabby around his middle. His eyes were glassy, and sweat glistened on stubble that once had been jet black but now was turning gray—just like his thick head of salt-and-pepper hair. He gave off a smell of booze, and he was buck naked.