He nodded and hazarded a guess. “You’re the one who secretly kept tabs on the quiver kids, right?”
“Yes, for about a decade. I tracked the progress of you and the others whose adoptions I was responsible for: Green, Red and Cyan.” She paused. “And White. My ex is a physician and he taught me how to game the medical bureaucracy to secure health records. Scholastic files were more of a challenge. It took some subterfuge to get the schools to release them.”
“Why’d you stop tracking us?”
“After all that time there were no indications of an IQ boost. And privacy laws were becoming more restrictive. Actually, I never completely stopped. I’ve occasionally looked in on what the four of you were up to. None of you are overly active on social media but there’s still information to be found online. I attended your high school graduation, Aiden. Discreetly of course, from the back of the auditorium. I happened to be visiting a friend in the area at the time.”
Aiden faced Grant. “And what about you? You’re one of us, right?”
“I am.”
“I adopted Grant as a single mother,” Cho said. “I bent the rule that the children were to be placed in traditional, two-parent households.”
“Mom didn’t marry until later,” Grant added. “Dad never knew about the experiment. She kept that part of my life secret from everyone.”
“So you’re the anomaly, White,” Aiden concluded.
Instead of confirming it, Grant and Cho exchanged a cryptic look.
“Maurice Pinsey was really that terrified of White?” Cho asked.
“Yeah, acted like White and Satan were BFFs. He was going on about the fact there were three experimenters and six babies, which he believed represented the number of the beast, 666.”
Cho sighed. “Maurice always had strong religious beliefs. Unfortunately, he allowed those beliefs to overcome the rational skepticism every good scientist requires. We chose six babies simply because… well, it just seemed like the right number for the experiment.”
“You didn’t confirm that you’re White,” Aiden said, turning back to Grant. “Is that your color name?”
Another odd look passed between mother and son.
Aiden frowned. “OK, what’s going on?”
“I promise we’ll reveal everything,” Cho said. “But please bear with us a moment. It’s important. What else can you tell us about the others, about the precise nature of their powers?”
Aiden spoke of Michael de Clerkin’s ability to transmit a hologram of himself to distant locations and about Bobbie Pinsey’s manifestations, as well as her cryptic message that matched the words from Aiden’s green dream. He revealed Jessie Von Dohren’s growing ability to use her manifestations as weapons and his fear that she too might try to go after the quiver. He also mentioned what Michael had said about Rodrick Tyler, about Blue’s desire to penetrate the realm beyond the beasts.
When he finished, Grant and Cho launched into a mystifying dialogue.
“Could the message that came through Gold refer to an initial step for safe entry into a cleaving?” Grant asked.
“Possibly,” Cho said. “The Pinsey girl could be some sort of telepath, receiving information from within the shroud. Blue’s talk of penetrating a realm beyond the beasts could be a similar reference.”
“Red’s ability to transmit himself… a means for traveling through the shroud? And Magenta’s powers a defensive system for enabling safe passage?”
“Possibly. But we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions.”
“Conclusions about what?” Aiden demanded. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve suspected for a long time that the quiver kids represent six pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” Cho told him. “They fit together to achieve a common purpose.”
“What purpose?”
Again, mother and son exchanged meaningful looks. Aiden’s displeasure grew.
“Look, just tell me what you’re not telling me, OK?”
“You’ve had a lot to deal with over these past few days,” Cho said. “Learning you were adopted, that you’re a quiver kid. Those encounters with Red and his mercenaries. But now I’m afraid you’re going to have steel yourself for a shock far more profound.”
She nodded to Grant, who continued. “I’m a quiver kid. But I’m not White. I’m Green. Mom thought it best to take the added precaution of hiding your real identity. The truth is, you’re the seventh quiver kid, the anomaly. You’re White.”
“Believe it,” Cho said, seeing the doubt playing across Aiden’s face. “In your final months at Tau, I subjected you to an intense psychological campaign meant to indoctrinate you into thinking of yourself as Green instead of the color name you were commonly addressed by. When the two of us were alone, I called you Green. I brought you green toys and endlessly repeated that color to you. I read you stories filled with green imagery. I used sleep-learning, played low-volume tape recordings in your crib repeating the word green. I did everything in my power to saturate your young mind with that hue, and likewise make you forget your real color.
“And it worked. That color was successfully imprinted upon your infantile psyche, and to such an extent that you dreamed about it in later years. When you finally learned you were a quiver kid, you naturally assumed you were Green.”
Aiden had no reason to doubt her. It also might explain why he was the only quiver kid of those he’d encountered to dream of a color.
“OK, so you brainwashed me into thinking of myself as Green. But what about my parents? Wouldn’t they have known my real color?”
“Yes, but we encouraged the adoptive parents, at least the ones who’d had contact with the babies at Tau, never to use their color names. We wanted all of you to grow up with a clean slate, to have no conscious memories of a different identity in your earliest years. It was sensible advice and clearly your parents took it to heart. Not even your father’s letter revealed the truth.”
Aiden remained confused. “But why? Why go to all that trouble to change my color?”
“I was afraid of what Maurice and Colonel Jenkins might do. Although the colonel was dying, I was concerned he may have passed on knowledge about an aspect of the experiment to his military associates. Jenkins was a rather cold and unpleasant man. I feared that his associates could be of a similar ilk.” Cho grimaced. “People not overly concerned with morality and ethics.”
Aiden cracked a bitter laugh. “You’re talking about morality and ethics? Really?”
“Point taken. I’m aware that I bear responsibility for initiating the experiment. It boils down to a matter of degree. There were certain lines I wouldn’t cross. Colonel Jenkins had few such qualms. He once suggested that we euthanize one of the babies in order to do a detailed autopsy, look for physiological changes that might only be detectable postmortem.”
“Bastard,” Grant muttered.
“And then there was Maurice, whose full-blown descent into supernatural beliefs was accelerated by White’s arrival – your arrival. Pinsey grew increasingly tormented. I feared that his faith might someday compel him to hunt you down, possibly with harmful intentions in mind. Your earlier comment about him equating White with Satan isn’t far from the mark. In his worldview, you came to represent something evil, something that needed to be destroyed.
“Changing your color identity wasn’t an all-encompassing solution. It certainly would have done little to safeguard you should Maurice or Colonel Jenkins’ associates attempt to track you down. Its main purpose wasn’t so much protection from them as it was protection from yourself. I felt that if you ever unearthed what had occurred in your earliest years, it would be better for you to believe that you were one of the six, not the anomaly.”
Cho laid a comforting hand on her son’s shoulder. “Grant was always the real Green, of course. Since you’d already encountered or become aware of most of the other quiver kids, it was only logical for you to make the erroneous assumption that he was White.”
&n
bsp; Aiden shook his head, more confused than ever. “So Jenkins saw me as a lab rat and Pinsey as the devil. But none of this makes any sense. White was supposed to be the control in the experiment. He wasn’t infused with quiver. Yet I suffer from the manifestations like the others. Did I somehow acquire my ability by being around the other babies? Is that why I was called the anomaly?”
Cho and Grant stared at him. Aiden saw the flaw in his reasoning.
“But that can’t be. I didn’t have my first chunkie until I was twelve. So why would you call me the anomaly when I was only eighteen months old and still at Tau?” The answer came to him. “There was something else different about me, something apparent early on.”
Cho asked Grant to get her laptop and he headed upstairs. While they waited for his return, she gazed at Aiden with the oddest expression, something between curiosity and sadness. It made him uneasy. He had a hunch that everything he’d learned over these past days was mere preamble to what was about to be revealed.
Grant returned with a MacBook. He spread it on the coffee table in front of Aiden and maneuvered the trackpad to open a file.
A video played. It was grainy, as if shot in low light by an older, analog camera. There was no audio. Point of view was from up high, probably from a ceiling mount. The lens was aimed down the length of a small nursery with curtained windows. There were six cribs, three on each side. The colors of the cribs matched their occupants. Boys were on the left, Blue, Green and Red. The girls – Gold, Magenta and Cyan – were on the right side of the central aisle.
“Surveillance video from more than a quarter century ago,” Cho explained. “It was taken the day you arrived at Tau Nine-One.”
The babies looked to be about nine months old. They were lying on their backs, asleep.
Suddenly they awakened, weirdly in unison. All six crawled to the foot of their cribs facing the aisle. Red, Magenta and Cyan were strong enough to pull themselves upright. The others remained on their bellies, staring through the bars.
Something was happening in the aisle. A ball of quivering energy formed about a foot above the floor. Resembling a miniature sun, it bathed the nursery in a surreal gray light.
The babies stared at the ball of energy. None of them seemed frightened or surprised. Aiden thought it was downright creepy the way the six of them were transfixed
The energy brightened for an instant, then disappeared as swiftly as it had arrived. Left in its wake on the floor was another baby, a boy, naked, squirming and crying heartily.
A door at the far end was flung open. A youthful Ana Cho rushed into the nursery. For a long moment, she gazed in stunned silence at the howling baby on the floor. Recovering her poise, she picked up the seventh quiver kid and cradled him in her arms.
Grant paused the video. He and his mother remained silent, waiting for Aiden to absorb the implications. For what seemed like minutes but was probably only a few seconds, Aiden could only gaze in disbelief at that final screen image of Cho holding him.
He finally found his voice. “I don’t… understand. You’re saying that I just… appeared?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head, unwilling to believe. “No, this is some sort of trick. A special effect. The video was doctored.”
“I assure you, such is not the case. This video documents exactly what happened in the nursery that morning. Your arrival at Tau had nothing to do with you serving as a control in the experiment. It was unplanned and unprecedented. Spontaneous generation of a fully formed human baby, age approximately nine months.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“Analysis of both your mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA reveal that the standard twenty-three pairs of chromosomes residing in nearly every cell in the human body are proportionally present in the other six. In a very real sense, those babies are your biological parents. Genetically, you are the offspring of the six original quiver kids.
“Extensive tests proved that you were approximately the same age as the others. Physically, emotionally and mentally, you exhibited the typical features of a baby at that developmental stage. Strictly for your own future reference, we approximated and assigned you a birth date of nine months earlier.”
“This is crazy. How could I just pop out of thin air?”
“A question I’ve puzzled over for decades. What meager evidence there is would seem to suggest you were formed by the combined nascent abilities of the other six. You are a sui generis creation.”
Aiden’s hands began to shake, probably a delayed reaction to the impact of the revelation. He locked his palms together in a futile effort to stop the shaking. Cho remained serene in the face of his agitation.
“If I wasn’t born here, then where the hell did I come from?”
Cho shrugged. “Prior to the moment you appeared in that nursery it was as if you simply didn’t exist. The first nine months of your life never happened.”
Aiden stood up. He felt lightheaded. He gripped the chair arm for support.
“This is nuts. It makes no sense.”
“I’m sorry, Aiden. I know this must be difficult to absorb.”
Difficult? The word didn’t come close to describing the turbulent feelings cascading through him.
“The truth of your arrival was known only to me, Dr Pinsey and Colonel Jenkins. The three of us conspired to keep it that way. We invented the story that you’d been brought to Tau to serve as the control for the experiment, and that you were born to a poor itinerant woman who died giving birth. We confiscated this video before anyone else could view it.
“Shortly thereafter, Pinsey began to go off the rails. He assigned increasingly religious interpretations to your appearance. Colonel Jenkins became lost in fantastic imaginings as well, although with more sinister goals in mind. He wondered if quiver might become a means for the spontaneous creation of soldiers who, because they lacked traditional parents, wouldn’t require the civil rights and legal protections afforded the rest of the citizenry. He envisioned an army of such children, an army whose members could be isolated from earliest childhood and trained as perfect soldiers, unfettered by the niceties of a civilized upbringing.”
Cho grimaced and shook her head. “Insanity. Jenkins and Pinsey, in their own distinctive ways, were both quite mad. That’s why I put such effort into trying to hide your true identity.”
My true identity. Aiden’s mind raced. His thoughts became a jumble of ideas, all clustered around the notion that he wasn’t really a human being. The story that he’d been born to a woman who died bringing him into the world, and who he’d assumed had likely been a prostitute, now seemed like a wonderfully desirable past. Better such a fable than the truth, that he’d never had a real mother and father.
Cho continued, her words a relentless attack on his very nature. “It would appear that whatever immeasurable changes the six experienced from the quiver infusions enabled them, perhaps through some unconscious gestalt process, to bring you into the world fully formed. It’s possible your arrival was a primordial flexing of their combined powers. Such unintentionality could explain why the others experience manifestations that lead to the development of distinct abilities, whereas in your case such abilities appear to be stillborn.”
“You’re saying I’m a side effect?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily put it in those terms.”
But Aiden could tell that’s what she believed. It was all too much to absorb. He’d come here looking for answers only to find them in the form of a wrecking ball slamming into his consciousness, reducing the pillars of his life to rubble.
He couldn’t stay another moment in this house. He bolted for the front door, ignoring the shouts of Cho and Grant. Their voices melded into a droning roar, the sound of a mind seeking escape from itself.
FORTY-FIVE
Aiden sprinted down the pavement, oblivious to direction or destination. Zigzagging from street to street, he ignored strolling pedestrians. A pack of preteen girls lunged from his
path, their eyes widening with alarm as he bolted past. Whether they saw pain or madness on his face, he couldn’t have said.
The weather was comfortable, reminiscent of a morning run in Birdsboro this time of year. Aiden noticed neither the cloudless skies and cool breeze, nor the smattering of passing vehicles and occasional weaving bicyclist. The world had morphed into an unreal blur, a distorted reflection of his inner state. He felt unhinged. A lifetime’s illusion that he was fundamentally like everyone else had been shattered.
I was never born. I never had real parents. I’m a freak.
Running usually provided a respite from his troubles. Today it brought no relief. But he had no choice but to keep going. Maybe running until he was overcome by exhaustion would result in a blessed fall into unconscious oblivion.
Feelings of being different had plagued him from the first time he’d manifested a chunkie. But Cho’s revelation had ramped up those feelings to an unbearable level. He wanted a do-over, however desperately childish such a wish. He wanted to go back in time five days to that fateful call from George Dorminy.
I don’t want the damn safe, he would have told Dorminy. Drive it to the nearest river and drown it in the depths.
The do-over fantasy ignited memories of his father. More than ever, he missed Dad, missed the man’s comforting presence. Had Aiden asked his father how he should deal with such overwhelming torment, Dad would have put that keen engineering mind into overdrive, dug into a storehouse of sage advice and generated a solution.
Aiden abruptly recalled the letter’s final paragraph, where Dad had talked about how he and Mom had fallen in love with Aiden the first time they’d seen him smiling and giggling in a playpen.
In all these years that love has never wavered. You brought us a joy that made our lives more meaningful than we ever could have dreamed. We can only hope and pray that you’ll remember the good times you had with us and find a way to get through all this.
A red light fronted a busy intersection. Aiden halted his mad dash. Leaning over, he planted his hands on his thighs and gulped down fresh air. He’d been running without breathing properly, without pacing himself, without having a destination in mind. Dad would have considered such behavior wild and foolish and told him so.
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