The Gryphon Project

by Carrie Mac

  LATER

  Marlin was waiting for her on the same bench near the station. Phee couldn’t believe that it had been only hours earlier that she’d said goodbye; it felt as though days had passed since then. She sat beside him, and neither of them said anything for a while. Then he spoke, his face shadowed in the glow cast from the street lamp. He looked worried.

  “Where’d they take Neko?”

  He’d obviously seen Nadia and Neko’s parents leave with him. “ To see some shrink.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow, I guess.”

  “Tomorrow or not? Don’t you know?”

  “No! Let it go, already.”

  “Why do they think he needs a shrink?” He emphasized the word they as if he had his own idea about why Neko would need a psychiatrist.

  “Why do you think?” Phee gawked at him. “One of his friends is dead, another one has disappeared, and he’s keeping some big fat secrets that are eating him alive.”

  “And Nadia and Neko’s parents only know how to shuffle their kids off to some quack.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Has he talked to you?”

  “A little.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. Like the rest of you guys.”

  “And Nadia?” Marlin asked. “How’s she holding up?”

  “She’s next for the shrink. Her appointment is Tuesday.”

  “God, Nadia. I miss her.” Marlin dropped his head in his hands with a heavy sigh. “I miss her so much.”

  “Then tell her the truth.”

  “She’d never understand.”

  “She might not. But she might come around.”

  “I can’t force her to make that kind of decision. What if she decided to tell on me? And even if she didn’t tell, I can’t put her at that kind of risk. And what would be the point? I can’t hang around forever, Phee. I’d have been long gone by now if it weren’t for having to sort out this mess with Gryph.”

  “How are you going to sort it out?” Phee asked. “If none of the guys know about you?”

  “I have a plan,” he said. “But I don’t want to use it. I’m hoping the guys come up with something on their own. Something better.”

  “Better than what?”

  Marlin stared at her.

  “Never mind,” Phee said. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “Not yet.”

  Phee changed the subject instead of beating the dead horse a little more. “Where will you go? When it’s over?”

  “To be with my parents.”

  “They’re changed too? Like you?” She thought back to the message she’d listened to on his phone. The woman’s voice. “It’s happening now. We can’t wait for you.”

  “That was my mom,” Marlin explained when Phee told him about the message.

  “That’s why you couldn’t meet me. You had to go be … what? What do you call it?”

  Marlin shrugged. “Reconned, I guess.”

  “But you didn’t die.”

  “No.”

  “Do you have the same DNA?”

  Marlin shook his head.

  “But how not?”

  “You don’t need to know that. Not right now anyway.” Marlin stood. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” Phee followed him as he strode toward the station.

  “I’m going to show you something Gryph wanted you to see.”

  “Then why didn’t he show me himself?”

  “He didn’t get a chance.”

  “Or he didn’t want to.”

  “He wanted you to know about it.” Marlin stopped in his tracks. “You especially. In case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case anything happened to you.”

  “What are you going to show me?” Anxious excitement rode up her spine, making her shiver. But Marlin didn’t answer, so she just followed him, hoping she could handle whatever was coming next.

  THEY GOT OFF the train one station before the stop for the Balmoral. This too was still part of the fish-packing district, but the far edge of it. Beyond the last street lay the abandoned freeway, and beyond that reclaimed parkland, and beyond that, the two-per settlement nearest to the city. It was common knowledge that the area between this edge of the city and the two-per settlement was rife with criminal activity. Phee hesitated.

  “I’m not going in there.” She pointed at the vast darkness that stretched out beyond the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

  Marlin gave her a friendly shove toward the fence. “Oh come on, you’re chicken all of a sudden?”

  “You are Saul, aren’t you?” Phee muttered.

  “I told you not to use that name, Phee.” His tone sharpened. “I meant it. You keep doing that and I can’t see you again. Understood?”

  Phee nodded. “Got it.”

  “Good.” Marlin slowed down to let her catch up after gawking nervously at the thick brush on the other side of the fence. “And just so you know, we’re not going over the fence. Not tonight, anyway.”

  “Fine,” Phee said. “And just so you know, I’m not chicken.”

  HE LED HER, in what seemed a very circuitous route, on a good half-hour trek between squat warehouses and rambling factories, all reeking of rotting fish. He paused only once, to toss something into a garbage can on a dark corner, where the street light had burned out or broken. Finally, he stopped in front of yet another long, sprawling warehouse. Standing derelict on the roof was a large billboard once meant for drivers on the freeway to see as they passed: CAPTAIN MURPHY’S FAMOUS FISH STICKS, starring a cartoon fisherman—Captain Murphy, presumably—with an anchor tattoo and a net slung over his shoulder greeting the commuters of days gone by with a corny grin.

  “What is this place?”

  “Home, sort of. For now, anyway.” Marlin rapped on the door. It opened a crack, and then wider. A woman peered out, eyes squinting with suspicion. Classical music wafted from a room illuminated at the end of the dark corridor behind her. Mozart—Phee recognized the melody. Oscar’s favourite.

  “Who’s she?”

  “The one I told you about.”

  “Of course, of course.” She smiled and opened the door wide. “Come in, come in. I’m Polly. You’re Phoenix, right? Gryphon’s little sister?”

  Before Phee could ask her how she knew Gryph, Marlin broke in with “I haven’t explained things yet.”

  “Hi.” Phee let the woman shake her hand before turning eyes full of questions to Marlin. “And will you?”

  “I will.” Marlin put a comforting hand on her shoulder and steered her down the hall after the woman. “After Polly makes us a cup of tea. She won’t let us do anything before that.”

  Phee lowered her voice. “Is she your mom? Reconned?”

  “No, no.” Marlin laughed. “Polly is just Polly.”

  The warehouse was a labyrinth of hallways and rooms. It quickly became apparent that it was a laboratory of sorts, although it was damp and smelled vaguely fishy. She caught a glimpse into one of the rooms that opened off the hall. Inside were several capsules like the stasis ones at Chrysalis. She could see only the one nearest her well enough to recognize that it was a Chrysalis capsule. It had the logo on the side, and a number stamped into the metal, like the one Gryph was being kept in.

  “This is an illegal recon lab, isn’t it?”

  “Bingo,” Marlin said lightly.

  “Be serious,” Phee said. “How’d you get the capsules?”

  “Chrysalis was finished with them,” he said with a shrug. “Funny thing happened on the way to the scrap metal factory.”

  “I said be serious!”

  “Why?” Marlin gestured around him. “Isn’t this all serious enough for you as it is?”

  “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t even know this place exists.” She turned angry eyes to Marlin. “Why did you bring me here? What if I have to do a lie detector test for
Chrysalis?”

  “Why would you?” Marlin asked. “You weren’t there.”

  “But what if I have to take one anyway?”

  “Look, you wanted to know what’s been going on. Well, this is what’s been going on.”

  Confused, Phee asked, “What do you mean?”

  “This is where Gryph was coming to when he left the Shores at night. And when he spent the night at my place.”

  “Here?” Phee had imagined all kinds of things: the skate parks all to themselves, stupid double-dog dares, general boy mischief, even long dull hours of bottomless coffee at the diner. But not this.

  Marlin nodded. “When I told him about my recon, he wanted to see this place.”

  “He didn’t freak out?”

  “Not at all,” Marlin said.

  “Not even for a second?”

  “No. He said he was raised right. That Oscar and Eva brought up kids who knew better than to judge.”

  All of a sudden Phee felt tremendously guilty for ever having thought less of Saul—Marlin—because of his status. And the day at the no-per zone, how she’d judged all those people for who they were.

  “He wanted to show you this place. He wanted you to know that you had an option, if you ever needed it.”

  “I still have one recon.”

  “And after that?”

  “I don’t know,” Phee replied. “Hopefully there won’t be an ‘after that.’”

  “Well, if there ever is, you know that it doesn’t have to be final.”

  “It is for Gryph. It is for anyone who ends up at Chrysalis. You can’t help him. And you wouldn’t be able to help me.”

  “Well, not if you died suddenly, maybe. But if you knew you were going to die, like from cancer or something. If you knew enough in advance.”

  “ To come here?” Phee asked, amazed. “ To let some underground, filthy lab recon me? Of my own volition?”

  “We do good work at these labs,” Marlin said evenly. “Gryph thought you would understand.”

  “I’m trying to,” Phee said. “But you have to admit it’s all a lot to take in all at once.”

  “Well, Gryph trusts you. And I can tell you that he wanted you to know about this place. Especially because it’s his fault that you only have one recon left.”

  “When were you guys going to tell me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You told Gryph over a year ago.”

  “Yes. Not long after the X Games, I guess.”

  “But not me.”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “Only because Gryph is dead.”

  “And because I have to go away.”

  “Where?”

  “Better if you don’t know.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?” Phee felt a sudden panic. Saul, in this new form, felt like the last tenuous connection to Gryph. If he went away, she’d be that much more alone.

  “It’s just better if you don’t know, Phee.”

  “And so he won’t tell you.” Polly was back with the tea fixings. “Right, Marlin?”

  “Right,” Marlin said.

  “But you can trust me, Saul—”

  Polly and Marlin frowned at her.

  “Marlin. Sorry.” Phee wasn’t sure if they could trust her, but hoped they could. She hoped that she would make the right decisions too, and not reveal this place to anyone, even under the pressure of a Chrysalis lie detector test. “You can trust me.”

  MARLIN EXPLAINED that he’d finally decided to tell Gryphon the truth about his family and where he’d really gone when he’d left for a couple of weeks in Grade 8. He’d died in fact, at home, from meningitis, the same strain that had sent three of the boys’ classmates to the hospital. He couldn’t go, though, as his DNA was not on record with Chrysalis. So he’d died, where the others had not, and then he’d come here, or to its incarnation at the time, which had been an old mill out by the delta.

  “We keep moving the lab,” he said. “Every few months or so.”

  “How did they recon you?”

  “We have my cord blood,” he replied. “My parents were fugitives long before I was born. They’ve been recon activists since they were in college.”

  “But how is it a secret?” Phee wanted to know. “How come you can be identified along with the rest of us, like at the train station and on school registration day?”

  “All that’s facial recognition and fingerprints, retina scans. No one except Chrysalis actually checks DNA. We can hack everything else into the various systems.”

  Phee hadn’t known that. She’d always assumed that the identity technology was all-encompassing, right down to DNA.

  “So there are lots of illegally reconned people out there?”

  “A significant number,” Polly broke in. “Yes.”

  “And what about now?” Phee aimed her question at Marlin. “Whose DNA do you have now?” She imagined them harvesting DNA from dead people they couldn’t save, or worse.

  “My own, still.” Marlin touched his hands to his face. “This is all surface reconning, along with things like fake glasses. Coloured contacts. Practically starving myself,” he added with a laugh. “Lifts in my shoes. And hair dye.”

  “Hair dye?” Phee could hardly believe that something you could get at the drugstore was part of such an elaborate disguise.

  “We do the least number of medical interventions as possible,” Polly said.

  “I see,” Phee said, although she didn’t. But she’d had enough details for the moment, so she changed the subject. “What did Gryph say when you told him the truth?”

  “I’d double-dog-dared him not to tell anyone,” Marlin said with a smile. “He never breaks a double-dog dare. He got it. And more important, he got why he had to keep it a secret. Even from Tariq and Huy.”

  “Why’d you tell Gryph in the first place?”

  “I didn’t want to be alone with the secret anymore.” He fixed his eyes on Phee now. “And because he’d told me about you.”

  “That he pushed me?”

  Marlin nodded. “It was eating him up. He wanted to tell you the truth but wasn’t sure if he should.”

  “A secret for a secret?”

  He nodded again. “A doozy given deserves a doozy in return.”

  The two of them smiled, Marlin for his own reasons, and Phee because she could just imagine the two boys swapping deep secrets as if trading hunting knives.

  After a long pause, Marlin continued. “At first, he was going to tell your parents. He thought they could help. But I persuaded him not to.”

  “But they could help. My mom anyway. I’m not sure about my dad. He’s on the Congress.”

  “We were going to try to get your mom on board. We only have two doctors right now, so we’d really be able to use her.”

  “But?”

  Marlin cocked an eyebrow. “But then Gryph died. He’s taking a break from his regularly scheduled programming.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “I know, I know.”

  It all made sense now, how Gryph had changed. She had to smile at herself, for all those times she’d thought he was using drugs. She’d been so wrong. So very wrong.

  “What about Chrysalis?” she asked, coming back to the present.

  “He was trying to get out of his contract,” Marlin said. “In the meantime, we were super careful not to give them any reason to be suspicious.”

  “But they are,” Phee said. “They know he’s up to something.”

  “They’d never guess this.” Marlin gestured around them. “They’d never guess that their top athlete was slumming with a bunch of rogue reconners.”

  “And he was okay with all of this?” Phee thought back to the fated trip to the no-per zone. How Gryph had seemed open to it all in a way that Phee wasn’t.

  “Not at first. He was as confused as you are.” Phee didn’t deny it, so Polly carried on. “But then he really started to make up his own mind about the way things ar
e. How they should be. And what he could do about it. Like the rest of us here, he came to believe that everyone should have the same access to the same number of recons in a lifetime.”

  Marlin nodded. “Equal rights, equal recons.”

  “What was he doing about it?” Phee asked. “What was he doing here?”

  “Making a difference.”

  “But how?” Phee imagined him in a lab coat, handling stem cells and test tubes of accelerator. That was ridiculous, though. He was just a teenager, not a scientist at all. So she wasn’t surprised when Marlin set her straight.

  “Nothing glamorous,” he said. “Bringing food from your garden, cleaning up. He helped move the lab to this location. Brought clothes for people to leave in. Biggest help was physiotherapy, or sort of. He’d help the patients get back onto their feet, get healthy before they left. He taught them stretches, exercises.”

  “He even played basketball with them.” Polly smiled, remembering. “He brought one of those nets, you know? The ones you fill at the base with sand so it doesn’t topple over. He tried to get me to play, of all things.”

  Phee listened, her cup of tea balanced on one knee cooling as she rolled this new information about her brother around in her head, trying to make it fit with her idea of who her brother was. Is.

  “That explains why he was acting different about Chrysalis,” Phee said. “They used to be so important to him.”

  “True.” Marlin nodded. “And he was trying to break free from Chrysalis.”

  “Maybe he should’ve started genuinely losing every once in a while.” Phee laughed. “But he wouldn’t do that, would he? He might be able to give up first place, but not second.”