Dr. Frankenstein and Mike were waiting for me when the elevator doors opened. “Welcome home, Angel,” Dr. Frankenstein said.
I ignored him and walked straight into Mike’s arms.
I surprised Mike a little—his arms hung stiff for a second before coming around me—but I’d already betrayed my feelings so I saw little point in pretending I didn’t care for him.
Mike let go of me too soon—I hadn’t realized until I touched him again how worried I’d actually been. “Angel, you remember Leona and Vincent Cole, don’t you?”
I turned and saw two more people standing in the wings. “Of course.” I even smiled, but I didn’t like the intense way Leona was looking at me.
“Well, Angel, you’ve had a very busy day,” Dr. Frankenstein said patronizingly. “I’m sure you’ll be wanting to go to sleep. Vincent, why don’t you show Angel to her room? A tour can wait until tomorrow.”
Vincent took my arm, separating me from Mike. I started to jerk free, but Mike gave a little nod. He’d been here longer than I had and must know something. I went with Vincent to the elevator. God, I was tired.
Vincent hit the button for B2—the subbasement, I presumed. A key was required to get back up to the ground floor.
“Have you been here long?” I asked, when it became obvious that Vincent wasn’t going to say anything.
“Yes.”
I persisted, following him out of the elevator. “How long, exactly?” I was wondering if they’d been here since the badminton tournament, so Vincent’s answer stunned me.
“We live here.”
I stopped dead in the middle of the hall. The overhead camera swiveled and focused on me. “What? For how long?”
“Since our fourteenth birthday.”
“What happened? Did they just come and take you?”
He looked amused. “Hardly. No, we offered them a deal. We would stop pretending to be stupid and start working for them, if they paid us money.”
I shook my head sadly. “You poor naive innocents.”
A little red color stung Vincent’s cheeks. “It was the smartest thing we ever did.”
“We? Meaning you and Leona?” I raised an eyebrow.
“We’re much better off here than we were in that museum.”
“Yes, I can see that.” I trailed one hand along the wall tiled in dark green. Two levels down, no sunlight.
I’d succeeded in making Vincent angry and defensive.
“Their funding won’t last forever, you know,” he warned me. “When it ends, you and your friend will be thrown out into the snow, penniless, barely able to speak the language, unable to do simple things like dial a phone, much less get a job. Leona and I will have a cushion.”
His remarks about getting a job and not knowing the technology sounded depressingly real, but I reminded myself that there were always careers in the arts. All you needed to be a dancer, for instance, was a supple body and good coordination, which I had in spades.
“You and Leona will have money?” I repeated. “You don’t have it yet? Let me guess, the good doctor Frankenstein is holding it in trust for you.”
“We have money.”
“Oh, and what have you bought with it?” I gestured at the hallway again. “Looks as though there are a lot of shops here.”
“We go on field trips,” Vincent said through clenched teeth.
I kept poking fun at him. “Oh, wow, you get to see the inside of two malls a year, is that it? They are treating you splendidly. Like a king.”
Vincent stopped. “You’re to stay in this room. The docs will probably test you tomorrow, so rest up.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have every intention of sleeping in.” And no intention of doing any tests.
Vincent seemed to read my mind. “Wait until he makes you an offer you can’t refuse, babe. You’ll cooperate. Here’s your door. There’s a puzzle lock on it. You have five minutes to solve it or you sleep standing up in the hallway.”
“Cute. Do you pet monkeys do tricks for food, too?”
“At least I’m getting paid to do tricks. Think about it.”
“I’d rather be a caged falcon than a tame pigeon,” I said to his retreating back.
I thought seriously about exploring the halls or smashing the lock but decided I was too bone-weary to start any battles tonight. The lock consisted of a four-by-four-inch square with fifteen sliding tiles that, when correctly arranged, formed a picture. It took me two minutes.
A grotesquely fat walrus leered at me from the lock panel.
“Very cute.” I didn’t bother turning on the lights, suspecting that they, too, would have some sort of puzzle. Five minutes later I was sacked out on the bed. Ten minutes later I was asleep.
I woke up when someone put a hand over my mouth.
I was sleeping fully clothed on top of the covers, and I had raised my legs for a brutal kick, when I recognized Mike’s voice. “Shhh. It’s just me.”
“Took you long enough,” I grumbled, but inside I felt a warm glow of happiness. Let the scientists do their damnedest, we were together.
Our lips met, but the possibility of infrared cameras kept the kiss fairly short. Likewise, we only asked questions the doctors already knew the answers to.
“How did they take you?” I asked.
“They were waiting for me when I got home.” He shrugged. “They were armed, so I didn’t argue. Where have you been? I expected you to be in the same aircar I was in. Did you escape?”
“No. I didn’t find out you were gone until the next morning when I went jogging.” I explained briefly about the cameras, the riot, and all the broken computers.
Mike was silent for a moment. “So why are you here? They wouldn’t have dared to touch you in front of so many witnesses.”
“Because you’re here, silly. Because we’re a team.” Because I couldn’t bear to lose you. Then, awkwardly, when Mike didn’t respond, “Wouldn’t you have come for me?”
He didn’t answer, getting up. “I should get back to my room now. Breakfast’s at six, and if you’re not there they don’t feed you.”
In hurt silence, I watched him go.
He stopped at the door. “All right, I would have come.” His voice was fierce. “But it still would have been a frigging stupid thing to do. You broke open their Historical Immersion scheme. Following me into their clutches just gives them another weapon to use against both of us.” He glided out the door.
A small snap told me he’d removed one of the puzzle pieces and mixed up the rest so no one else could get in.
I woke up in a bad mood the next morning, compounded by the discovery that punching in w-a-t-e-r on the shower dial after I broke the code produced only cold water. Warm had to be specified.
For breakfast Mike and I were served cold toast with very sour crabapple jelly while Leona and Vincent dined on Belgian waffles with whipped cream and strawberries.
Subtle, Dr. Frankenstein was not. It amused me that food was his weapon of choice. I remembered how once “Uncle Albert” had brought me a huge chocolate bar but refused to give it to me until I recited my multiplication tables. Even in grade three I was too smart to fall for that and began a whining campaign instead until, obviously unused to children, Uncle Albert gave me the chocolate bar. I immediately turned back into my sunny self.
Leona pointedly ignored me all through breakfast. She spoke to Mike, though, flirting. “When the doctors are done with you this afternoon, you have to come up to my room. I’ve got some cassettes, and you promised to teach me that dance step you showed me at the badminton tournament.”
“If I have time,” Mike said, but there was a razor edge to his smile that kept me from wishing anything worse on her than acne—and chubbiness.
The only time Leona looked away from Mike was to glare at her silent brother and his half-full plate. “Eat or I’ll throw up.” She opened her mouth and made as if to stick her finger down her throat. Vincent grimaced but dutifully polished of
f his waffle.
Mike and I exchanged glances. What was that all about?
A scientist in a white lab coat separated me from the others after breakfast.
“Angel Eastland?” She pumped my hand, quick and energetic. “My name’s Catherine Berringer; it’s a pleasure to meet you at last.” I’d halfway been expecting Aunt Patty, but Catherine was a stranger in her midthirties, blond, attractive, with a blinding smile. I could immediately see why Dr. Frankenstein had chosen her to give the speech. She reeked of sincerity and enthusiasm, interspersing her tour with propaganda.
“This is the game room. We’ve tried to make the tests as fun and challenging as possible.”
The place was a dazzling Disneyland of future wonders. Instead of board games like Monopoly and Clue, there were interactive holographs of murder mysteries, puzzles made out of twisted metal with dozens of possible movements, and war game simulations where you could choose to reenact battles from the time of Alexander the Great up to wars I hadn’t even heard of because they hadn’t been fought yet in 1987.
My fingers itched to press the buttons, but I forced myself to look unimpressed. “Games stop being fun when they become homework.”
Catherine wasn’t stupid. She must have sensed my interest, but she only smiled and said, “Well, we have plenty of plain old boring tests for you to take, too.”
I felt like an ungrateful wretch, but I couldn’t let my liking for Catherine weaken my purpose. “What if I refuse?”
“Obviously we can’t force you to take the tests.”
That never stopped you before.
“But we’re hoping that you will take them. The project doesn’t exist to torment you, Angel,” she said gently. “We have a purpose, an important one.”
“Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know. I’m sure it’s a very good purpose, very noble. But I don’t care.”
She looked disappointed but not angry. “All right. But you’re only postponing the inevitable.”
We visited the gym next. Aside from a small track to run laps around, almost all the space was taken up by exercise machines—more technological wonders that measured your heartbeat and even the amount of fatigue poisons in your muscles. Catherine proudly pointed out the tiny badminton court and rackets. “You and Mike may continue practicing every day if you’d like. We’ll even bring in your coach. Rick Hrudey was considered the best un-Augmented badminton player in the world in his time.”
The goody she was offering me lacked spice. I liked playing badminton because I liked exercising. The Olympic dream had only been a means to an end.
I put out another feeler. “Did Coach Hrudey surprise you when he offered to coach Mike and me to stardom?”
“Oh, yes,” Catherine admitted readily. “Everyone knew, of course, that he was searching for an un-Augmented team to train. He’s been very vocal about his quest to bring back the prestige of the old Olympics, touting a contest of muscle and skill instead of machine against machine. Since modern schools don’t promote competitive sports, he turned to the Historical Immersion Project. But we were shocked when he picked you. Prior to that, popular wisdom ran that your fondness for sports was just an effort to overcompensate for the mental skills you were repressing. It was Dr. Frank who finally theorized that the Renaissance genes produced physical as well as mental superiority.”
I hadn’t been overcompensating, but she was partly right: sports and drama and social events had been safe ways to show my personality.
“So where’s Dave?” I asked.
“Who?” She looked puzzled.
“Dave. You know,” I said sarcastically, “the sportswear rep.”
Her face remained uncomprehending.
“Dave the Terrorist.” I tried again. “The radical who kidnapped Mike and me.”
“He’s in jail, I imagine,” Catherine said, powder blue eyes wide. I studied her closely, but as far as I could tell she wasn’t evading my question. She really didn’t know Dave was on the scientists’ side. “I saw him get arrested on the news. You’re not afraid of him, are you? The Institute is very secure,” she assured me.
“Ah, but is it secure from the outside or only from the inside?”
Catherine blinked, then forged ahead with her speech. Terrorists didn’t interest her. “You and Mike have incredible gifts—intellect, athletic ability, leadership—and we’ve only scratched the surface. Both of you embody the true Renaissance ideal: the rebirth of humankind. You have so much to share.” Her eyes shone with zeal.
I punctured her balloon rudely. “What makes you think we’re willing to share? If you wanted our help, you shouldn’t have treated us like prisoners.”
A hit.
Her hands fluttered in distress. “They were wrong to put you in the Orphanage when you were just babies. I’ve always disagreed with that. But you have to realize that the discovery of a new subspecies of human sent a shock wave through the world.
“For months afterward the media were full of wild speculations on the origin of the Renaissance children: aliens impregnating human women, evil genetic experiments dating back to the Cold War, descendants of ancient Atlanteans. All sorts of baloney.”
“And what was the truth?” My heart was beating harder than it should have been. I was who I was; my beginnings shouldn’t have mattered to me, but they did.
“That you were the top secret project of President Needham’s North American government. Genetic engineering was performed on fifty of you at the one-cell stage. We don’t know much more than that. When you were discovered, a lot of computer databases were wiped clean.”
“Exactly how were we discovered, anyway?”
“Purely by accident. A reporter was digging for some dirt on an entirely different issue and stumbled across a few references to Project Renaissance. He blew the whistle, and a United Nations watchdog team was sent in. The whole house of cards that the Needham government had built came tumbling down when the team discovered fifty violet-eyed babies. Babies who were genetically different.”
“What kind of differences?” I knew I was smarter than most people were, but intelligence shouldn’t show up in one’s DNA.
“Your brains are more complex. Almost without exception Renaissance children are born without appendixes and never develop wisdom teeth. Your immune systems work faster, your reflexes are astonishing, your bodies produce different hormones, your menstrual cycle is not the same. … I could go on for hours. Small things, but recognizable and always an improvement. The media started to call you the Inheritors of the Earth.” She paused. “Would you like to see a clipping file?”
I nodded and followed her to her office. I paged through the file slowly. A toddler with violet eyes on the cover of Time. Hysterical letters to the editor, calling for our extermination. “Noted Scientist Says Renaissance Children Should Be Sterilized.” I looked at that one a long time.
“Many people saw you as a threat to their children’s future,” Catherine said quietly. “An elite who would gobble up all the wealth and good jobs and take over the government. There were riots over the issue.”
Another picture of people bashing each other over the head with signs that said Devil-Spawn and Inheritors.
“The government of the time institutionalized you partly for your own protection,” Catherine said.
“How altruistic,” I said sarcastically.
She hurried on under my glare. “They had tunnel vision, of course. They couldn’t see beyond the immediate public-relations problem. But the current project head holds very different views. Why, the first thing Dr. Frank did when he got promoted was place all of you in loving homes.”
Loving? I had lucked out, but what about Mike? And Leona and Vincent hadn’t shown much hesitation about bailing out of their supposedly perfect family.
I shook my head. “You’ve done a lot more than just tear us from our homes. You’ve violated every aspect of my life, of my privacy. Curtailed every freedom. I don’t owe you a thing.”
She didn’t have a comeback for that, and we resumed the tour in silence. The next stop was the test room. “This is Dr. Boleyn. He keeps statistics and compiles the test results. Would you like to hear your scores?”
“No thanks.” I already knew my scores. “I have an average of fifty-one percent in my academic courses. I took great care to maintain it.”
Dr. Boleyn was a graybeard. When he shook his head his long beard swung back and forth like a pendulum. “Not quite, Miss Eastland. We realized, of course, what you were doing right away. Sometimes you got every second question wrong as a way of taunting us. Or every first, second, fourth, seventh and eleventh wrong, making a pattern. Getting exactly fifty percent every time is just as revealing as getting one hundred percent.”
His pompous smirk made me ache to punch him. “But not revealing enough,” I said. “You could prove we were smart, but not that we were geniuses, or you would have pulled us out of the Historical Immersion Project sooner.”
I marched out of the room, and Catherine had to break into a fast trot. She made no comment, still cheerful.
“And this office belongs to Dr. Estevez. She’s our resident psychologist. Feel free to drop by any time and have a chat with her if you’re feeling frustrated or unhappy.”
I just looked at her. “If you want to raise prisoners’ morale, you have to set them free first.”
My words flew in one ear and out the other. She looked more determined than ever. “This doesn’t have to be a jail, Angel. Just think. You were a child when you made the decision to hide your gift. You can change your mind.” She said this as if it were a great revelation. “There are issues at stake that you were too young to understand. It has been my opinion all along that you should have been told at age thirteen or fourteen and allowed to make a decision based on the true facts.”
“Which are?”
She became very serious. “Toxic wastes, pollution, and the breakdown of the ozone layer have weakened the human race. In each generation more and more children are born with serious birth defects, one in ten of which is correctable only by Augmentation. The incidence is even higher among the Spacers. Human genes are becoming very fragile. People get sick more often and for longer. You, Mike, Vincent, and Leona have spent only one day in the hospital among the four of you, and that was for a concussion. The tinkering that was done to your genes is against the law, but now that you’re here, you’re needed. We need your DNA to strengthen the human race, and we need you to become scientists and help to cure us.”
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