by Elodie Colt
“Yeah, I figured that much. Thanks, though, for the nice words,” I added rubbing the sleepiness from my eyes.
The smile stayed plastered on Scott’s face, but his voice grew firm when he sat down on the only chair in the room, facing me.
“Nightmares?” he wanted to know.
I puffed out some air and threw my head back against the wall. “You could say that.”
Scott nodded in understanding. “They’ll go away.”
“When?” I asked desperately searching for answers on the ceiling above me.
“When you understand who you are, what you are here for, and know what you have to do.”
I pondered over this and frowned. “Sounds like I need a whole lifetime to achieve that,” I muttered.
Scott chuckled. “We’re here to change that, don’t worry. You’ll be part of my Freshmen class from now on. It’s separated into a few theoretical lessons, but mostly practical lessons. Here’s your schedule for the next few weeks,” he explained and pressed a white ball of paper into my hands. With a frown, I disentangled it from its crumpled state, snorting when the ugliest handwriting stared back at me.
“Wow, did you ever think about a career as a calligrapher? You certainly have the talent,” I mocked him.
“Hey, I had a long day yesterday and was…” He struggled for the right words.
“Stoned?” I jogged his memory which earned me a lazy smile from Scott as the spicy scent of certain ‘greeneries’ hit my nose.
“Hey, a joint here and there doesn’t harm. You should try it once, find your inner peace and all that shit.”
I laughed. “I doubt that’s a good idea as long as I’m in the dark about my ability.”
“Don’t say that. My ability tends to get better when I’m high,” he replied while chewing on his bubble gum.
“What’s your ability?”
“I’m a Tracer.”
I tried to remember what Jimmy had told me about Roes with Tracer abilities but came up empty. “Sorry, what’s that again?”
“Let’s just say, I have a very delicate nose,” he explained and nudged the tip of his nose with his forefinger.
“Ah, yes, I remember. So, what is it exactly you can do?”
“I can smell extraordinarily well. It can be very handy. Well, sometimes.” I frowned at him. I couldn’t see how this ability would be of any use, let alone in battle. He elaborated when he took in my confused expression.
“The receptors in my nose are more developed. Smelling the ingredients in meals is just one benefit. For example, I can smell how calcareous water is or which ingredients your shampoo has. I can also smell people and make out their individual scent.”
I grunted at the mental image in my head recalling him sniffing me yesterday for a good whole minute. “Like a dog?”
Scott frowned, clearly not appreciating the comparison. “Similar, but you have to admit I’m more handsome,” he exclaimed, making me laugh again. We’ve known each other for barely a few minutes, but I already liked the guy. He was easy to talk to.
“I can smell emotions. Happiness, fear, anger, sexual arousal… Everything that’s caused by hormonal release.” Now that was creepy. It seemed similar to mind reading. “I can also make out the different substances in the air. I can tell you the weather for the next few days, but I’m still working on it because knowledge of chemistry is essential for that, which sucks because I despise chemistry,” he complained, resting his feet on the edge of my bed and crossing his ankles. “It can also be annoying sometimes. I can smell when girls are having their period, when someone had sex, when Cassie’s using too much of her perfume… you get the picture.”
Okayyy… That was gross.
“But I can also taste better than anyone. As you probably know, the olfactory sense is tightly connected to the gustatory sense, so tasting food and drinks is somehow richer for me, which is also why I’m very touchy with meals. I always have to hold my breath when I smell the oil and food additives of a hamburger or every other kind of fast food for that matter. George, our main cook in the compound, always has a hard time pleasing us Tracers.”
I pondered over this. His ability seemed so simple to me, but I guessed the possibilities were endless. I would have to be careful around him, but I doubted that was even possible. How should I hide from him that I was having my period? Ugh!
“So, if you can smell human emotions, can you also detect if someone is lying?”
“Very clever girl,” he complimented with a wink. “Yes, I can, sometimes. It’s difficult because there are so many scents connecting in different ways. Mostly it depends on the person. The closer I am to you, and the better I know you, the easier it is for me to detect emotions. So, don’t worry, hazelnut, you’re still a mystery to me.” He gave another wink as he made a huge bubble with his pink chewing gum letting it burst with a popping sound.
“Hazelnut?” I’d heard the nickname before.
“Yeah, sorry, Sarah gave you the nickname because of your eyes. I think it fits, although I think the usual pet name ‘honey’ would be perfect. You really do smell extraordinarily sweet,” he chided, earning a sour look from me.
“Why don’t you get ready, and I’ll see you in class?” Scott suggested. I nodded and watched him leave. Before he touched the handle, he turned around once again. “Oh yeah, I forgot. Don’t be surprised if you get nasty looks from the students. You’re the only Natural here,” he told me with an apologetic look.
“Yeah, I figured that much. I’ll be the outsider here for the time being,” I muttered.
“Don’t let them get to you. Don’t be ashamed of being different, be proud of it,” he advised before leaving my room.
~~~
Warily eyeing the box containing my contact lenses, I fought the temptation to cover my eyes and hide my face behind a large hood. Chances were high everyone in the compound already knew about me. Better to get it over with as quickly as possible.
My gaze went to the fading bruise on my neck in the reflection of the mirror. I was looking at it differently now—not with resentment for the man who caused it, but with shame. Ricky had been Dylan’s brother after all. I wouldn’t hide it under a scarf but wear it as a reminder.
With my thoughts set and a deep breath, I put my bag over my shoulder and left to walk into the unknown.
It was worse than I’d feared. Every single person I passed shot me looks—startled looks, confused looks, fearful looks, deprecatory looks, resentful looks, and all kinds of other unidentifiable looks. It was all I could do not to back away from their stares. Unfortunately for me, it was a long way to the classrooms on the lower level.
I was one of the first to enter the room and took a seat in the back row where I could hide like the coward I was. Students started to file in chattering and giggling intensely. After a while, the whispers started, and I could practically feel their gazes on me. I refrained from groaning. Would it always be like this?
A few minutes later, Scott entered the room. His gaze swept over the students until he found me in the last row. He gave me an encouraging smile and nodded in approval. I shrank back even lower in my chair praying he wasn’t going to introduce me to everyone.
I wondered why Scott was a teacher here. He didn’t strike me as a person to bother much about sharing knowledge and keeping difficult students in check. I was sure he’d been a difficult student himself. Maybe I misjudged surfer boy over there because of his affection for pot. He seemed to be a pretty nice and smart guy.
“All right, Freshmen, please take your seats. To begin with today’s class, I want to continue where we finished last time. As you hopefully remember, I told you about Jonathan Ecclestone, one of Charles Darwin’s best students, whose research resulted in finding the first Roes and, therefore, the next steps of human evolution at the end of the nineteenth century.
“Ecclestone documented the whole research process, but it never was published. I’ll come to that later. Nevertheless, Eccle
stone’s research is still the basis of our current state of science. Today, we’re going to talk about what Ecclestone discovered.” Scott seated himself in the front, his gaze drifting over the faces of his students. “Let’s start with an easy question. How many chromosomes do we humans have?”
My eyebrows shot to my hairline. Seriously? I briefly wondered if Jimmy had put me in the wrong class of ‘Freshmen’ as he’d called it. A girl with long red hair shot up her hand. Should I be worried that only one student seemed to know the answer to Scott’s question?
“Yes, Amber?”
“Forty-six.”
“That’s correct. And how many chromosomes do Roes have?”
Okay, I hadn’t expected that one. No fingers shot in the air, and I knit my brows in confusion. I was the last person to know the answer, but a different number of chromosomes would be pretty weird. Was it a trick question?
Since I’d come to—mostly—accept what I was, I’d never thought about how huge that progress in evolution was, and what it meant for the people populating this planet. Scott could smell people’s emotions for God’s sake. And Cassie could change her appearance in the blink of an eye. What would I be able to do if we ever found out? Turn water into wine? Ha, now that would definitely be handy. In that case, I wouldn’t need to worry about what to do for a living any time soon.
“No one?” Scott’s voice interrupted my trail of thoughts. “What do you think? Do we have the same number or not?” he repeated and propped his feet on the desk in front of him. “Jared, what’s your guess?” Scott directed his attention to a boy whose head was leaning on both of his arms on the table. He looked half asleep already.
“I don’t know. The same number, I guess,” he mumbled, his voice muffled by the fabric of his sweater.
“And why do you think that?”
“Because only mongoloids have a different number of chromosomes?” he half stated, half asked, causing his neighbor and a few other students to snicker.
“Good way of thinking. Do you remember the most common reason for Down syndrome?”
The girl with the red hair answered again. “I guess it has something to do with chromosome twenty-two.”
“Not exactly, it’s chromosome twenty-one that is affected. In over ninety percent of Down syndrome cases, chromosome twenty-one doesn’t exist as a pair, but as a triplet. So,” Scott paused dramatically, picking up a pencil and shoving it into his mouth to chew on it.
“What Ecclestone discovered was that Roes have three chromosomes as triplets.” Scott held up three fingers for emphasis. “One of those triplets is always chromosome twenty-one. Which others are developed as triplets depends on the ability. The only chromosome that will never be affected is the last one. Who remembers what that chromosome is for exactly?”
Another girl held up her hand. “The one for sex. XX for female and XY for male.”
“That’s correct, Marcy—”
“But if we have so many triplets, shouldn’t we look completely different than the others?” another student interrupted, the topic apparently raising interest.
“We do look different, but except for the biggest difference—the color of our eyes—we wouldn’t notice if not looking close enough. Our body halves are more symmetrical, our skin and hair are shinier, our teeth whiter, our limbs longer, and so on. For the others out there, we’re just prettier, but no one would guess it’s a calculated result of a long evolutional development. Also, we’re not just different on the outside. In general, we have better vision, better hearing, better perception. We don’t get ill that easily, we don’t age that fast…”
What? Was he kidding? What did ‘not age that fast’ mean? I fiddled with the hem of my shirt, trying my best not to panic. No one seemed shocked by the information except me. I would have to question it in private later.
The boy named Jared asked another question. “So, are we all some super-mongoloids then?”
“You certainly are, man!” The boy to his right slapped him on the shoulder and earned loud laughs from the class. Jared didn’t seem too happy about it.
“Down syndrome was a faulty design,” Scott continued without acknowledging Jared’s joke. “It was proof that only one triplet in the number of chromosomes didn’t work. Three triplets were the answer. Ecclestone checked the results of his research multiple times because he couldn’t believe what he found.”
“How did he find out, anyway?” Amber wanted to know.
“By accident. Ecclestone visited his friend, Francis Parker, who was a farmer. Parker had a sheep herd behind his little farmhouse with about thirty sheep. Late in the evening, Ecclestone and Parker were drinking tea when Parker suddenly claimed he’d heard a wild animal. The sheep herd was many yards away on the top of a hill behind his house. When they made it there, three sheep were lying on the ground with their throats ripped open. Ecclestone couldn’t imagine how Parker had heard an animal from that far away.”
Scott threw his half-chewed pencil on the desk and stood up to pace back and forth.
“A few months later, something similar happened, and Ecclestone asked Parker for permission to make a few tests on him.” Scott stopped pacing, his eyes glinting in excitement.
“What he found was revolutionary. Three triplets in his chromosomes… number twenty-one, number fifteen, and number thirteen. That’s the chromosome structure for a Catcher as we know today. But there was one thing Ecclestone couldn’t understand—Parker couldn’t use his extraordinary hearing all the time. It seemed like it came and went, but he wouldn’t find what he was looking for until he found Parker screaming in pain. That was when the Awakening started, but you’ll learn about this biological process when you’re part of the Intermediates.”
I never heard anything called ‘the Awakening’ before, but for some reason Scott’s announcement triggered turmoil in the classroom. The boys started to cackle, winking, or whistling at the girls who in exchange either snickered in anticipation or flipped them off.
“Yeah, yeah, calm down, everybody.” Scott quieted the classroom before continuing with his lesson. Great. I seemed to be the only one in the dark about what the Awakening was.
“Ecclestone was determined to find other people like Parker, but for the next two years his search would be in vain, so he came to the conclusion that Parker was one of a few or probably the only one with a crazy mutation. After some time, however, he came upon a man with the same ability and bingo!” Scott clapped his hands in enthusiasm, causing Jared to jerk up from his half-asleep state.
“In the end, he found five Roes with Parker’s help and could verify his thesis about the next step in human evolution. Of course, there was still the question about the inheritance,” Scott mused, scratching his chin. He had a talent for capturing you with his storytelling, that was for sure.
“It turned out that the genetic development for becoming a Roe required two Roes in the parental line. So, one Roe and one ‘human,’” he put the word in quotes for lack of a better term, “wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, Ecclestone died of cancer a few months later, but Parker continued with the research. He found a woman with flashing golden eyes and that was when the first Natural was discovered.”
On hearing this, the class grew completely silent. Even Jared was sitting straight in his chair perking his ears. I didn’t miss the judging and questioning eyes flipping in my direction causing me to retreat further in my chair and wishing for a hoodie to hide under.
“She had the same number of chromosomes, but there was one thing that made her special… her gender chromosomes weren’t the same. The X-chromosomes had developed differently. They were not just two strands crossing in the middle, but…” he paused, lifting the three inner fingers of his hand, “… three. And as there was no letter in the alphabet to look similar to what he saw in the microscope, Parker named it the E-chromosome to pay his last respects to his old friend Ecclestone.”
My jaw nearly dropped to the surface of the desk in front of me. No w
ay!
“Does that mean Naturals have a different gender?” Jared again asked one of his super intelligent questions, making me want to strangle him with the sleeves of his sweater for bringing me only more misery.
Scott laughed. “No. The X-chromosome does still exist. It just has a little appendage in the middle. Parker wouldn’t live long enough to discover a second one of this rare species which is why it took a few decades for science to discover that Naturals would always be women.”
I shifted in my seat. As much as I hated to admit it, the puzzle pieces started to fit together. Shawna. Me. Jenna—the girl Jimmy told me about.
“Why?” Jared asked.
“Because to become a Natural there have to be two E-chromosomes available which doesn’t work with the male Y-chromosome. Not for now, anyway.” Scott paused to take a sip of water before he continued.
“But as you all know, Naturals are extremely rare. We assume that not more than a little over four or five hundred exist in the world, but we can’t be sure. Parker had to continue his research for a few more years before he discovered that Naturals were only born if the father was a Roe and the mother a Natural.”
Scott gave me a wink, but my breathing ability said goodbye for a second. I’d suspected my mother to have the same heritage, but my father, too? Had they known about the world out there? What abilities did they have? And if my mother had been a Natural, what about her grandmother and great-grandmother? How far did it go back in my bloodline?
“Parker would have made a lot of money if he’d published his documentation along with Ecclestone’s, but he may have suspected that their discovery should stay a secret for a while longer, so he gave only Roes access to his paperwork. Since then, we’ve been trying very hard to keep our existence hidden.” His gaze swept over the class one last time before he clapped his hands. “All right, that’s enough for today. You can go to your next class.” And with that, he dismissed us.
I waited until the students filed out, and I was the only one left before walking over to Scott’s desk.