“Which one’s yours?”
I turned. A smiling woman stood behind me, her face hidden behind gigantic mirrored shades. Too young to be a parent, and she was dressed almost like one of the runners, in short Lycra tights and a form-fitting tech shirt. Assistant coach, maybe? I pointed toward the runners.
“The blonde girl, off to the right,” I said. “The one who just sat down.”
She took a step forward, her shoulder almost brushing mine.
“Is she a freshman?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s excited to get started. She’s been running seriously for a few years now, but this will be a big step up from what she’s been doing.”
She laughed then, and not in a kind way.
“Oh,” she said. “I’d say so. Briarwood is the most intensive running program in the Northeast. Are you sure your girl’s ready for what Coach Doyle is going to expect from her?”
I turned to look at her. White-blonde hair, features symmetrical to the micrometer, skin flawless and unlined—I needed to see her eyes to be sure, but I was 90 percent confident she had some variant of the Pretty package. Not Bioteka’s standard, though. The hair color was a shade off, and the bust-to-waist ratio was a bit too low. I was trying to remember what the GeneCraft standard cup sizes were when she cleared her throat.
“Sorry,” I said. “What?”
“Well,” she said. “I was asking whether you thought your daughter was ready for Doyle’s meat grinder. But would you rather talk about my breasts?”
My eyes snapped back up to her face.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just . . . uh . . .” I couldn’t really say that I was trying to figure out which company had built her, could I?
She laughed again, with a bit more warmth this time.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I quit getting upset about being ogled right around the day I turned forty.”
“Oh no,” I said. “I wasn’t . . .”
She patted my shoulder.
“Sure you were. And even if you weren’t, I’d like to pretend that you were.” She held out her hand. “I’m Bree Carson. My daughter is Tara. She’s the other blonde, halfway around the circle from yours. She’s a junior.”
We shook.
“Drew Bergen,” I said. “My daughter’s name is Hannah.”
Her eyebrows knitted. Watch it, I thought. Don’t want to wrinkle up that perfect skin. The fact that she had a kid on the team clarified why I couldn’t figure out what mod package she had. She was probably ten years too old for even the first GeneCraft standard Pretty set. Whatever mods she had, they were like Hannah’s—custom-engineered, just for her.
“Hannah Bergen,” she said. “Why is that name familiar?”
That was my cue to smile.
“Hannah set some age-group records on the track last spring. One of the local sports feeds did a feature on her at the beginning of the summer. Next big thing, you know?”
“Right,” she said. “Tara saw that. She mentioned it to me, asked if I thought Hannah would end up with Doyle this fall.”
“And here she is.”
“And here she is. Which brings me back to my original question. Do you think she’s ready? Coach Doyle has a reputation, you know.”
I shrugged.
“Hannah’s a tough kid. She’s got wheels, and she’s been working like a dog this summer. I think she’ll be okay.”
She touched my arm and smiled again.
“I’m sure she will. I’ll be cheering for her this morning. As long as she doesn’t beat Tara, that is!”
She gave a nervous little laugh then. The runners were getting to their feet.
It was another half hour or more before they really got started. Doyle gave a little welcome speech, then ran them through a dynamic warm-up routine that looked pretty similar to what I remembered from back in the day. Bree and I chatted on and off while we waited, huddling in the shade of a leafy old oak at the edge of the field. We were the only two parents who’d stayed to watch. I spent most of the time trying to figure out a way to steer the conversation around to her mods. I was dying to know exactly what tweaks she had, and how she’d managed to get them.
Non-therapeutic genetic modification had only been legal in most of the United States for about thirty years, so I was assuming that Bree’s parents must have either gotten a medical exemption, or traveled abroad when they put her together. So, if it was a medical exemption, was it legitimate? A surprising number of docs lost their licenses around the time I was born for taking money from parents who wanted fake certifications of potential genetic illness, so that they could slip in other mods with the fixes. On the other hand, if they went out of the country, where to? Qatar was the first place to really cash in on wealthy Americans who wanted mods for their kids that the US government wouldn’t allow, but the cutters there quickly developed a reputation for making monsters. The Koreans were just ramping up their genetic-tourism business when California legalized elective modifications, and cut their legs out from under them.
As it turns out, though, “How did your parents manage to circumvent the law to Engineer your preternaturally perky breasts?” is a very difficult thing to ask a near stranger. This was only six years after the Stupid War. Even asking someone if they were Engineered was pretty much taboo.
So, we talked about the sorts of things that parents forced together by circumstance rather than choice have talked about ever since our ancestors first came down from the trees and started attending their children’s soccer games. We talked about the hot, dry summer. Her front lawn was burned brown. My tomatoes hadn’t yielded enough fruit for a decent dinner salad. We talked about the election that was coming up in November. She found Andersen’s Hero-of-the-Stupid-War shtick just as annoying as I did at that point, but didn’t think she’d be able to bring herself to vote against him because Morrone was even worse.
We didn’t realize that there wasn’t going to be an election that November, of course. That all happened later.
We even talked a little bit about our girls—cautious, tentative boasting, mostly. Tara had run second or third for the girls’ team the previous year, and was hoping to move into the top spot that fall. Bree asked where I thought Hannah would fit in. I told her we’d know soon enough.
Honestly, I was expecting Hannah to finish pretty near the front of the pack. I knew the sorts of times Doyle’s girls had run the year before, and I kept thinking back to what Hannah had done to me at the Nature Preserve at the beginning of the summer, and how hard she’d been working ever since. I couldn’t believe there were more than two or three girls there who could even stay with her over a five-mile course, let alone beat her.
Finally, Doyle gave the runners one last chance at their water bottles, then lined them up between two traffic cones he’d set up at the edge of the soccer field, and sent them off. A tall, rail-thin boy with ghost-white skin and long black hair led them once around the field, and then off along a winding trail into the woods. By the time they disappeared, the pack had already stretched out a bit. A tightly bunched group of five boys took the lead. Tara and another girl followed a half dozen yards behind, with a mixed group of boys and girls strung out behind them. A pack of four girls brought up the rear. Hannah was one of them.
I got a good look at Hannah’s face as she rounded a cone at the near corner of the field. She’d only been running for a few hundred yards, but already she was hurting. I’d told her a dozen times that this was going to be different from running with a bunch of middle-school girls, but from the look on her face, I was guessing that it was just then starting to sink in.
“So far, so good, right?” Bree said. “Hannah’s in with a good group. Hopefully she can stay with them.”
I turned to look at her. It was hard to read her expression with those glasses in the way, but I didn’t get the impression that she was trying to mock me.
“It’s a long run,” I said. “Hannah likes to start carefully, and move up as the r
ace goes on.”
I had no idea if that was true or not—Hannah hadn’t trailed at any point in a race in more than two years—but it sounded plausible, and it got Bree to shut up for a few minutes.
“I hope Coach Doyle has water for them out on the course somewhere,” she said finally. “It’s awfully hot.”
She took off her glasses then to wipe the sweat from her eyes. Her irises were a never-seen-in-nature shade of violet, not the GeneCraft-standard light blue. I looked closer. Her pupils were vertical slits.
“You know,” she said. “It’s really not polite to stare.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry again. I’m usually not this much of an oaf.”
She sighed, and put the glasses back on.
“It’s okay. I’m used to it by now. These eyes are the reason that my father’s going to wind up in one of those nursing homes where the staff beats you up every night, and the other residents steal your things.”
I laughed.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Yes, they’re a little startling, but they’re also beautiful. Do they work?”
She gave me a tentative half smile.
“Thank you, I think. And yes, they work fine.”
“Your daughter,” I said. “Does she . . .”
Bree shook her head, and the smile disappeared.
“No,” she said. “Everything they did to me got hidden in recessives. Tara’s father is normal, and so is Tara. She’s an only child, so there’s no need to worry about these eyes popping up again for at least a few generations.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”
She took a deep breath in, then let it out slowly.
“It’s fine, Drew. It’s just . . . my father got to play his little pranks on me. The thought of him getting to play them on my daughter as well . . .”
I shook my head.
“Pranks? I guess I can see how it might feel that way to you, but to me . . . your eyes are kind of like the paintings at Lascaux, you know? To be able to pull that off when they did, I mean . . . it’s more than Lascaux, really. It’s like they threw a bucket of paint at the wall, and it splattered into the Mona Lisa.” I took a breath. I’ve never been great at reading people, but she didn’t look like she was getting ready to slap me.
“I’m sure these eyes were quite an accomplishment,” she said. “I’m sure the gene cutter my father hired was very proud of himself. How do you think it felt, though, to walk around with these eyes six years ago?”
I looked away.
“Right,” I said. “Probably like you had a target on your back.”
“Not on my back,” she said. “Right between my eyes.”
We stood in silence for a while, watching Doyle pace back and forth across the field and stare at his watch. Finally, I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t mean to be nosy, but could I get another look?”
She hesitated, then took off the glasses again. I took a half step toward her. Those eyes really were amazing. Up close, they almost seemed to glow. I leaned in until our faces were only inches apart. She didn’t pull back. She didn’t even blink. Her pupils opened up until they were almost round.
“So,” she said finally. “You’re an engineer?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m a design lead for Bioteka. Mostly agricultural products, though. That’s where the meat of the business is. Human mods get all the press, but they’re pretty much a boutique service.”
She put her glasses back on.
“Is that right? I never had the head for engineering, but I’ve always been fascinated by it.”
“Really? You honestly don’t seem like much of a fan.”
She laughed.
“Well, I’m certainly not a fan of what they did to me. I don’t have a problem with better tomatoes, though. Are you working on anything interesting?”
I smiled.
“You could say that. I’m heading up a project that’s cool enough to rate a code name.”
One eyebrow poked up over the rim of her glasses.
“A code name? You mean like the Omega Project?”
“Close. It’s called Project DragonCorn.”
She giggled. I’m not ordinarily a giggle fan, but hers didn’t bother me for some reason.
“DragonCorn, hmm? And what, exactly, is a DragonCorn?”
“Well,” I said. “Presumably, it’s a cross between a dragon and a unicorn.”
That got me a full-throated laugh.
“Please, please tell me you are actually creating a cross between a dragon and a unicorn.”
I shook my head.
“Sadly, we are not.”
“Sadly. So, what are you creating?”
“I could tell you, but . . .”
“Right. You’d have to kill me.”
She would have been surprised by how close that was to the truth.
The lead pack of boys came out of the woods, sweat soaked and flushed, right around twenty-five minutes after they’d started. The one who’d led at the beginning—Bree told me his name was Jordan—was at the back of the group when they came into view, but by the time they’d circled the main school building and come down the stretch run to the soccer field, he was back in front. The five of them finished within a few seconds of one another, in a little over twenty-seven minutes. Doyle was waiting for them at the finish, with a cooler full of water bottles and cold, wet towels.
Tara came in by herself, less than a minute behind the boys. The trailing pack filtered in over the next two minutes, boys and girls intermingled, all of them looking ragged and dripping with sweat. Two of the four girls that Hannah had started with came in together, at just under thirty minutes. Hannah was maybe ten seconds behind them.
When Hannah finished, the last girl still hadn’t come out of the woods.
Doyle was off to one side, in a huddle with Jordan and Tara. One of the girls went over to them, and tapped him on the shoulder. He took a quick look around, counted heads, and yelled, “Where’s Sarah? Who was running with Sarah?”
The two girls who’d come in ahead of Hannah looked at each other, then both pointed at her.
Doyle waved Hannah over. He spoke to her. She answered. He grabbed her upper arm, leaned in close and almost shook her. She burst into tears. He barked something at Jordan. The two of them grabbed water and towels, and took off into the woods at a sprint.
Bree was staring at me.
“You might want to go talk to your daughter,” she said.
5. In which Hannah learns one lesson, and teaches another.
So, all in all, my first day of high-school cross-country could have gone better. It was hot, I was nervous, I finished next to last in the time trial, and I got yelled at by Coach Doyle.
Oh, and I basically got blamed for almost killing Sarah Miller.
That was totally not entirely my fault, by the way. You could blame a lot of people for what happened to Sarah, and there’s no way I deserved to be at the top of the list. Start with Sarah herself. She’d spent the entire summer training on a treadmill in her parents’ air-conditioned home gym, and she didn’t hydrate before the start of the run because she was afraid she’d have to stop to pee halfway through. Then there’s Coach Doyle. It was almost 100 degrees that morning. Did we really need to run a time trial? And don’t forget Jess and Miranda. They were only a couple of strides ahead of us when Sarah went down. They could have stopped and helped just as easily as I could have—but they didn’t, and when Coach Doyle asked who had been running with Sarah, they both turned and pointed at me.
The ambulance showed up maybe four or five minutes after Jordan and Coach Doyle took off into the woods. It drove right up onto the soccer field. Two paramedics climbed out of the cab, walked around to the back, and started pulling out gear. They didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. I took that as a good sign.
“She probably just overheated,” Dad said. “Look, those guys aren’t worried. I’m sure they’ll look
her over, give her some water, and send her on her way.”
I nodded, and tried to wipe my nose with the back of my arm. It didn’t work—just left me with a mix of sweat and snot smeared across my upper lip and cheek.
“Here,” Dad said, and handed me a handkerchief. I mopped my face clean, blew my nose, and handed it back to him. He looked down at the mess in his hand, made a face, and carefully folded it snot side in.
He was still trying to decide whether to stuff the hanky back into his pocket when a blonde woman wearing wraparound shades came up beside him. She touched my arm and said, “Hey, Hannah. I’m Tara’s mom. Are you okay?”
I shrugged. I didn’t trust my voice yet, and I really didn’t want to start blubbering again in front of a stranger. The other runners were scattered around the field in groups of twos and threes, heads close together, talking in whispers. Every so often I’d catch one of them looking at me. Nobody was smiling.
“Here they come,” Dad said. Sarah, Jordan, and Coach Doyle came out of the woods together, walking slowly. Sarah was in the middle. Her arms were around their waists, and theirs were around her shoulders. A wet towel hung over her head, and another was draped around the back of her neck.
“Look at that,” said Tara’s mom. “She’s fine. I’ll bet . . .”
Sarah’s knees buckled. Jordan and Coach Doyle held her up as her head sagged forward and she vomited up something thin and yellow. The paramedics started toward her. Her arms and legs began thrashing, and they broke into a run.
Here are some things that I did not previously know about heat stroke:
Heat stroke can occur in otherwise healthy athletes who are exercising in hot weather.
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