I giggled. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but there it was. “No, I guess you probably shouldn’t.”
“Exactly.”
The toast popped up. I pulled it out of the toaster and buttered it before retreating to the table to sit and nibble while I watched Jacob cook. He clearly knew his way around a kitchen; while mine couldn’t possibly be familiar to him, he had at least managed to find the things he needed for scrambled eggs. The fact that he’d done it while wearing a full hazmat suit just made it more impressive.
He dished the eggs onto a plate and walked over to set them in front of me. “Every bite,” he said, in a firm voice. “I don’t want to try figuring out whether you can take ibuprofen without metabolizing it and starting to sweat painkillers.”
“I’ve never tried to take painkillers,” I said, accepting the fork he handed me and stabbing it into the eggs. “I’m not sure they’d do much.”
“So let’s not find out. Eat.” He turned his back on me as he returned to the stove and began cleaning up the mess he’d made.
There was something oddly soothing about enjoying breakfast in the evening, with someone else washing dishes in my kitchen. It was a sort of domesticity that I’d never experienced, not even when my parents had been alive. They hadn’t wanted me in the kitchen while they were cooking, for fear that I might touch something without one of them noticing. I wasn’t even allowed to be there when they were cooking something for me, something I couldn’t possibly taint.
It was odd, but it had never seemed strange to me back then, that they would create and raise a poisonous child without putting on gloves and letting me watch them scramble my eggs. It had taken me weeks to learn how to do anything more complex than make a sandwich after I was finally allowed into the room. Without the Food Network, I would probably have burned the whole house down around my ears.
When Jacob was done cleaning up he turned back to me and asked, “Are you feeling a little better?”
I nodded.
“Good. You should get some sleep. Ms. Ng doesn’t need you to come into the office tomorrow; you’ve earned a day’s rest. Do whatever you need to do to be healthy.”
“I will,” I said. “And, um, Jacob? Thank you. For everything.”
He smiled. “It’s no trouble at all.”
I walked him to the door, and watched as he drove away. Then I went upstairs, to my bed. I fell asleep with my clothes on.
When I woke up, I was still a killer, and my bank account was seventy-five thousand dollars larger. There was an email from Ms. Ng with the names of some contractors she recommended for the necessary repairs to my home. All of them were guaranteed to be fast, efficient, and as unobtrusive as possible, backed up by the Limbus name.
I called the first one on the list, arranged a consultation, and went back to bed.
*
The next three months passed in a comfortable routine. I would get up and go to the office, allowing the contractors—backed by the Limbus guarantee—to come in and work while I was gone. They charged me an additional ten percent for the protective gear they had to wear while they were in the house, and I paid it gladly. It was worth it for the floors that didn’t creak and the outlets that didn’t spark when I had to plug in something new. They even replaced the corroded beams in my greenhouse, polishing the glass until it sparkled, until going to lie down in my beds of earth felt more like a vacation than a penance.
The receptionists and guards at the Limbus building had become used to my presence, and no longer spared me a second glance as I walked across the lobby to the elevator that would take me to my daily tasks. Ms. Ng was always there to show me to the plants I would be learning to copy, providing me with the sample papers that would determine how successful I had been. Sometimes, after a particularly good morning, she would invite me to sit with her in the company cafeteria and eat lunch. Those were the best days. On those days, I could hold my fork with fingers made clumsy by even the finest gloves and pretend I was an ordinary worker with an ordinary job—something clerical, maybe, something involving telephones and typing and asking people how I could help them—just sitting with a coworker and enjoying a few minutes off the clock. Those were the days when I felt real.
At the end of the third month, I came in to find Ms. Ng holding a red folder in her hands. Her expression was grave. My heart sank.
“Another assignment?” I asked.
“Optional, as always, but you fulfilled the first so admirably that I felt it was time for something more challenging.” She offered me the folder.
I took it. There wasn’t really another choice, not for me, not now: I had passed the point of other choices when I killed Mr. Winslow. Inside was a picture of a handsome, smiling man with deep brown skin and kind eyes.
“Jonathan Disher. Entrepreneur, builder of faulty medical devices. He has been indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds, including the daughter of a Limbus executive. He’s very fond of dating services. He believes that involving computers minimizes the chance of things going poorly. We’ve already set up a profile for you, and you should be matched with him ‘automatically’ by the end of the month.”
“Oh,” I said, in a small voice.
“Which brings us to today’s task. It will seem strange if he dies immediately after meeting you: he’s received a sufficient number of threats for his security to be cautious. He needs to survive your first date, and die following the third. We’ll be spending the rest of this week working on harmless chemical compounds.”
My expression must have been something to see. Ms. Ng actually laughed, visibly amused.
“What, my dear, did it never occur to you to mimic the cabbage, or the rose? Something non-toxic, that could be absorbed by human skin without leading to death or distress?” Her face softened. “It didn’t. Your father never told you. Beatrice, you’re designed to sweat these chemicals, but chemicals themselves are not inherently bad things. All humans excrete the things they take into their bodies. You just do it in a purer form than most.”
My legs felt suddenly weak. I wanted to sit down right where I was. Instead, I stared at her, my fingers clenching on the folder, and asked, “I could touch somebody without killing them?”
“You certainly have that potential, yes. This week will determine whether you have the skill. If you do, the date goes forward; if you do not, you’ll have to respectfully decline.” She smiled. “It should be a challenge.”
A challenge that could change everything. “I’m game.”
Her smile widened. “Good.”
*
Toxins were easy.
I had been producing toxins for my entire life. In the absence of something to mimic, my body produced a novel neurotoxin, a chemical slime that was something between an orchid and a tree frog in terms of toxicity. Just a brush of my fingers could kill a man. Toxins were simple.
Harmless chemicals…those were hard. They had structures and forms that were like nothing my body had ever tried to do, and no matter how involuntary my body’s chemical production truly was, practice was still key. I touched cabbage flowers, roses, edible blooms of a dozen types, and still the assay strips turned bloody red, signaling the presence of my native toxins in my skin. It didn’t help that so many plants were toxic in one stage and harmless in another. My body chemistry kept bending them back toward dangerous, forsaking safety for the sake of the kill. It was what I had been designed to do. My conscious mind might say that it was wrong, but my autonomous systems wanted nothing more than to fulfill my purpose.
I tried harder. I focused, I meditated, I concentrated on how wonderful it would be to touch someone else’s skin without the knowledge that I was signing their death warrant hanging over me. I thought about the joys of connection, affection, all the small, simple, primate things that had been denied to me for so very long.
I thought about Jacob, and the taste of oranges rose up in the back of my throat like a reminder of the kisses I had never given—to anyone—and
how sweet it would be to share them with him.
“Oranges,” I blurted.
Ms. Ng looked up from her clipboard. “Come again?”
“I meant, um…oranges. Could we try with those? Citrus oil isn’t fatal, is it?”
“Hm. No, I don’t believe it is, even in the quantities you could produce if excited or agitated. It has a distinctive but not unpleasant odor; people will assume you’re wearing some sort of strong, inoffensive perfume. There could be issues with people who have citrus allergies, but I can double-check that your target isn’t one of them. Yes. Orange blossoms will be our next test flower. Good thinking, Miss Walden.”
I went home that night glowing from her praise, and slept fitfully, haunted by dreams where I touched people and was touched in return, with no one dying, no one screaming, no one pulling away from me. Every man had Jacob’s face, and every woman looked like Ms. Ng, but smiling at me, laughing, with eyes that were full of light. I woke drenched in sweat and aching with a need I had no prayer of fulfilling. Not by myself. My body had heard the whispered promise of someone else’s hands, and nothing I could do was going to be good enough until that promise was fulfilled.
When I reached the office, with dark circles under my eyes and hot anxiety in my hands, I was greeted by Ms. Ng with her arms full of thorny orange branches. Flowers clung to them, white and delicately perfumed. She smiled to see me. It wasn’t the warm, welcoming smile of my dreams—it was too professional, and too proprietary, for that—but it was still a smile, and it was still for me. That alone was enough to make it a highlight of my morning.
“Let’s begin,” she said, and dropped the branches into my arms.
I sat wrapped in orange boughs for over an hour, letting them press against my skin, breathing their scent into my nostrils, and wishing, harder than I had ever wished for anything before, for this to work. For this to be the answer, the key, the—not cure, because there was no cure for what I was, not short of rebuilding me from the DNA up—the solution, rather. The solution to how alone I was, how alone I’d been for my entire life.
Ms. Ng came into the room on silent feet, almost reaching my side before she said, “Your hand, Miss Walden, if you please. Let’s find out whether this has been a…fruitful path for our tests.” Her mouth twitched a little at her own pun, not quite committing to a full smile. She was saving that for the moment when the assay strip failed to change color.
I pulled my hand away from the bough and took the slip of paper from her hand. She was wearing gloves, but I was still careful to avoid touching her fingers with my bare skin. Fabric could be permeable. Accidents could happen.
We both watched the paper raptly for what felt like an age. It didn’t change colors. Finally, terrifyingly, Ms. Ng did something I had never expected her to do.
She began taking off her gloves.
“What—”
“Science is a beautiful thing. It never lies to us. It tells incomplete truths, at times, but it never lies, and it isn’t lying to us now.” Ms. Ng tucked her gloves neatly into the pocket of her dress, reached down, and took my hand in both of hers.
Time seemed to stop. I couldn’t focus on anything beyond the feeling of skin against skin, of someone else’s pulse beating in contrast with my own. How did humans walk in the world every day, knowing that this painful intimacy, this connection, was all around them, waiting to be grasped? In that moment, I loved her more purely than I had ever loved anything, and I hated my parents with equal fervor. They were the reason this was the first time anyone had touched me with such intent. They were the ones who had taken everything that should have been mine away. I, and everything I destroyed, was their fault.
Reality crashed back down over me. I yanked my hand away. “What are you doing?” I demanded, voice suddenly shrill. “I could kill you!”
“No, you couldn’t,” she said calmly. “Look at the paper.”
I looked at the paper in my other hand. The color hadn’t changed at all.
“You’ve deactivated yourself. Oh, I’m sure you could give me a killer dose of vitamin C, but as far as killing me goes, I’m afraid that’s currently beyond your capabilities.” Ms. Ng leaned over to take the paper from me. “I’ll get this to the lab, and we’ll monitor your toxin levels for the rest of the day, to see how long it will take for your normal biochemistry to reassert itself, but for the moment, you’re as harmless as anyone else. How does it feel to finally join the human race, Miss Walden?”
I stared up at her, searching for the words that would make her understand how much this meant to me. I couldn’t find them. I wasn’t certain they existed. Finally, insufficiently, I said:
“Perfect. It feels…perfect.”
And Ms. Ng smiled.
*
It seemed like such a simple solution, when I stepped back and looked at it with fresh eyes: just spend an hour every day wreathed in citrus blossoms, and I could fool my system into manufacturing something harmless, even beneficial, for up to eight hours. I had to be careful to avoid other vegetation during that time period—even brushing against a rosebush was enough to alter my body chemistry and cause me to start sweating poisons again—but as long as I monitored my surroundings and didn’t eat or drink anything fresh enough to remember its original chemical composition, I was as safe as anybody else. Even cooked vegetables wouldn’t trigger the changeover. It was flowers I had to avoid.
Lots of people go for entire weeks, months even, without touching a single flower. Thanks to Ms. Ng and Limbus, I was finally free.
To my own jaded, resigned eyes, it was nothing short of a miracle. I had convinced myself that no matter what, I was never going to have a normal life, or anything that remotely resembled one. I was always going to be the girl in the corner with gloves pulled up to her elbows, cringing away from the slightest chance of contact. Now…
I would always have to be careful. I was my father’s creation, after all, and no amount of time spent wreathed in orange branches was going to change that. But as long as I watched myself, as long as I took care and remained aware, I could have anything.
I wanted Jacob.
I was patient. I was so patient that it made my bones ache and my skin itch under my gloves, which I still wore every morning and re-donned every afternoon. Eight hours was the most my orange boughs could buy me. Assuming we started at eight-thirty, which we did most mornings, I would be toxic again by the time I went home. We began testing my limits, figuring out how much—and how little—it took to trigger the change from “harmful” to “harmless.” If we exposed me to orange blossoms again at the seven-hour mark, we could extend the amount of time that it was safe for me to be in the company of another human.
“It may eventually be necessary for you to spend the night with a target,” said Ms. Ng, reasonably. “We’ll never ask you to do anything that you’re not comfortable with, or anything you’re not prepared to do, but knowing your limits will allow us to better plan your assignments.”
They’d ask me to kill, but they’d never ask me to sleep with someone I didn’t want to sleep with. There was an irony in that that I didn’t feel like looking at too deeply, like it might tell me things I didn’t want to know. So I kept submitting to the tests, and I kept making private notes about their results, charting the distance between desire and feasibility.
In the end, it seemed that a single handful of crushed orange blossoms was enough to trigger the change in my biochemistry. I waited for a Friday afternoon, when I knew that I wouldn’t need to come to the office. Ms. Ng left me alone in the room where I sat to absorb the various chemicals I was learning to replicate, and I stole two fistfuls of flowers. It was such a small act of rebellion, barely worth noting. Just a quick motion of my hands and the flowers were tucked safely away in my purse, protected by the plastic bag that I had brought from home. There were so many flowers remaining on the orange boughs that Ms. Ng didn’t even notice when she came back into the room. She looked at my chart, smiled, and then
transferred the smile seamlessly to me.
“You’re making really excellent progress,” she said. “Next week, we’ll start working on transitive toxins. It’s best if you don’t use your own when it can be avoided. We don’t want people to get suspicious.”
“No,” I agreed, and stood, letting the old orange boughs drop away. They’d be gone before morning, and come Monday, they’d be replaced with fresh ones, ready to lend me their fragrance and their harmless nature.
“The website has done its job,” she continued, still smiling. There was something shadowed in it now. “Your first date will be next Wednesday night. You’ll be provided with a dress, and with a dossier to read, telling you everything you’ll need to know about your new paramour. He’s very handsome. That part shouldn’t be difficult for you.”
For the first time, her eyes were hard, daring me to disagree with her, to say that any part of this, however small, would be difficult in any way. Her smile looked less like a benediction and more like an attack preparing to happen. I shrank back, trying to push my own feelings aside. There was no reason for me to be leery of her. She had only ever been good to me. She had only ever helped me. Yes, she had asked me to kill a man, but she hadn’t forced my hand; Limbus would have continued to employ me either way.
Ms. Ng was my friend. There was no question about that. I smiled hesitantly. “Whatever you need,” I said.
“Good girl,” she said. “I’ll see you Monday.” Then she turned and walked away, and her heels didn’t make a sound on the carpeted floor.
*
“You okay today, Bea?” Jacob cast a concerned look in my direction, eyes focusing first on my gloved hands, and then at my face. “You’re awfully quiet.”
“I’m just…thinking, that’s all. Can I ask you a really awkward question, and not worry about you thinking less of me?”
To my relief, he laughed. “When Limbus found me, I was a newly-minted Army vet with PTSD, a prosthetic foot, and no job prospects. Technically the first two are still true, but thanks to the company, I’m never going to need to go job hunting again. I get to use the skills I learned in the armed forces, and I get to go home to a roof that doesn’t leak and a fridge full of food. I promise you, there’s no question so awkward that I haven’t heard it before.”
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 6