True Born

by L. E. Sterling

  I spy the first sign as the car crosses through the gate and wades into a sea of people. Evolve or Die. I don’t understand these signs. Father says they indicate that a lot of rabble have gone mad.

  The boy holding it up can’t be more than twelve, but you can never tell these days. He’s got the startlingly gaunt frame of the starving or sick, his face smeared with dirt and desperation. Chances are he’s either a goner himself or his family has been wiped off the map and he’s providing for himself.

  Sometimes they get religious, the orphans. Sometimes the zealots get them. He aims a look right at us, at me, as we drive by. I want to sink down in my seat and never be seen again. But of course, that’s impossible even if our father would allow it.

  Is he out there? I search the crowds for a particular face, a face I haven’t been able to get out of my mind for the past few days. It’s been a constant knot within me. At night I’ve unraveled those moments on the stairs again and again, wondering for the billionth time who the stranger could be. A preacher’s man? A merc? Though if the stranger protects one of my classmates, I’d likely have seen him after school when all the mercs come to pick up their charges. More importantly, what is he? I know most of the Splicers in the city, so he’d likely not be one of us. A Laster? Surely he’s too vital, far too arrogant….

  As I pick over the moments feverishly, I wonder if I should tell Margot about what happened. No, I remind myself. That would give the man more importance than he deserves. I’ll likely never cross his path again. Somehow the thought doesn’t lend me comfort.

  A creeping sensation pokes at me. Margot hasn’t moved, but I catch the flick of her eye in the opposite direction. There, on top of a burned-out car the color of storm clouds, a man wearing a long, dirty white robe smiles gently down at the crowds—weird enough for these times. A shiver crawls up my spine as he watches us, his eyes piercing black under thick, bushy eyebrows. His smile grows thicker, kinder.

  “Who is that?” I say under my breath. Only Margot can hear me. We’re quiet-quiet. It’s a game we’ve practiced our whole lives.

  “Preacher man,” she murmurs. You don’t usually see the preachers. More often than not they stay hidden in the basements they call churches. The government frowns on the preacher men, calls them “seditious.” This one, though, seems bold as daylight. It’s a thought that jolts another shiver down my spine.

  Our father shifts on his seat, a grim expression stamped across his stern, handsome features. As always, he’s impeccably dressed in his gray pinstriped suit and black overcoat. He holds his gloves absently across his lap. He’s never apart from these shiny black leather gloves, so soft they feel like butterfly wings. Margot thinks he needs them like he needs the car, his suit, the towering gates around our house: totems to keep him safe from the rabble. Even sitting across from us he doesn’t notice our eyes drifting to the lone figure atop the carcass of a car. All around the preacher man, milling and standing and sitting, are people. Dozens of people, some missing limbs, most with a look in their eyes I’d as soon call frantic. Lasters.

  In Dominion they have a saying about the Lasters. Those who can, Splice. Everyone else comes in Last. There’s another one, too, not much used in polite company, as our mother likes to remind us.

  What’s a Laster? A dead man.

  They say the Plague started when people did—it just took its sweet time warming up and getting good and ready to strike us all dead. There was another name for it at some point, before the scales tipped and nearly everyone was dropping from the wasting disease: bodies turning traitor and gobbling up people from the inside out. That’s all forgotten now, as useless as the crumbling towers without enough people to light them up. As useless as the hospitals that can’t keep people alive, not anymore. People used to survive the Plague, we’ve been told. It would come on more slowly, folding people up slowly, one day at a time. Now when it strikes, you’d better kiss your babies goodbye. Most people don’t last the week once the symptoms start.

  If you’re lucky, like us, you can become a Splicer. If you’re born in the Upper Circle, you can hop in your private car and drive to a private clinic with enough guns and gates thick enough to be called safe. Nice doctors and nurses in white gowns and dripping with gold jewelry wheel you into a room where they use long needles to sew medicine into your DNA. New DNA to take over where your own falls apart and starts to go rogue.

  Our mother has gone in three times already. When she thinks we’re not listening, she likes to tell her friends that there’s more new DNA hardwired into her than old. Practically a test-tuber. Our father hasn’t been struck yet, but we all know it’s just a matter of time. If you’re born, you’re living on borrowed time.

  But there are others they don’t even whisper about.

  One day you walk into a store and everyone is either a Splicer or a Laster. Next thing you know, in walks a pale woman with a shark fin sticking out from a slash in her blouse. Can’t be a Splicer. Splicers can’t grow the extra hardware.

  True Borns are born with it.

  They don’t want us to know. In the Upper Circle they talk openly of the Splicers and Lasters. But no one wants us to hear about the True Borns. No one from our Circle will hire one. Oh, maybe our Circles across the sea will. From what Robbie Deakins tells us, the True Borns make great security detail, special ops, merc, army. People to ride the gates and shotgun our cars. Our Circle encourages others to pretend they don’t exist.

  What we know we’ve gathered from listening in at their late-night cocktail parties. When the laughter gets more desperate and dies down. When the voices go low and the women start to cry.

  Sometimes the Splicing doesn’t work, you see. Sometimes they come out and say there’s nothing they could have done. They never mention the “L” word.

  But in the Upper Circle, the week you turn eighteen, they throw you a party to Reveal your fate, good or bad. After that, they’re supposed to give you the test results. By the time you’re eighteen they can pretty much pinpoint when your genes will blow. The earlier they Splice and dice, they say, the better your chances are.

  We reckon you can pretty much predict what the results are from when you’re told. Carrie Olsen’s parents sat her down after throwing her a magnificent party and gave her a round trip ticket around the world. Two days later she came to school blotchy and wild-eyed. We all knew her first Splice would be her last. Just like her mother, who’d already lost both her legs despite multiple trips to the Clinic. And then she disappeared.

  Robbie Deakins, on the other hand, was given his results the day before his party. We’d never seen him so relaxed. He smiled and danced with us both, even though he only likes Margot.

  ...

  The slogan is scribbled everywhere in Dominion, a constant reminder. EVOLVE OR DIE. It is spray-painted on the sides of buildings, most gap-eyed and crumbling. On looted and abandoned storefronts, on cars without windows, on homes half torched for heat. It’s painted on the sidewalk, the long, dripping letters red as blood as we roll into the private testing and treatment compound known as the Clinic. Just before the steel gates squeeze shut behind us I cast another long glance at the rabble, hoping to catch a glimpse of my strange savior. I swallow my disappointment when he doesn’t appear. Then a moment later we’re escorted into the building by men with yet more guns, and I don’t have time to ponder it any longer.

  A smiling, slender blonde in a short snow-white dress greets us at the door. Her legs are long and thin and delicate, the limbs of a colt. Huge blue eyes sit in a flawless face. She ushers us down the long halls while our father goes with one of the genetic doctors into a private room, and she seats us in identical white leather reclining chairs.

  The nurse gets chatty with us. “So not long now until your Reveal, yeah? You gals must be so excited. You going to have a big bash with rock stars and celebs or what?”

  I share a look with Margot. Our nurse obviously doesn’t have clearance to access our background file. If she
did, she’d know we would never be allowed in the same room with rock stars. Our father is one of the most important people on the continent, let alone Dominion. Father is Chief Diplomat of the continent-state of Nor-Am, a position second only to the Prime Minister and surely ranking above the Senators. Father’s job is to wield influence. It’s because of him, he’s fond of telling us, that the cities and villages still counting survivors haven’t gone completely lawless. He’s the reason that other continent-states not yet hit so hard by the Plague haven’t invaded. Father tells us his job is to look out for the interests of every outpost of humanity still remaining in the once-great continent-state of Nor-Am—it’s just that Dominion, the most populous and influential city remaining, is the most important. It’s common knowledge that most of those outposts are even worse off than we are.

  And as we’re constantly reminded, in Father’s line of work, appearances are everything, so we Fox sisters need to set an example. Our Reveal party will be small and sedate. On the guest list will be the Mayor of Dominion, the Prime Minister of Nor-Am and his family, and a handful of the most important Senators and foreign dignitaries. One or two people our age will be shipped in to dance with us, sons of dignitaries twice as boring as their fathers. We will be expected to mingle and serve our guests as befitting our family station—regardless of our results.

  Margot reaches her hand across the small space between us. I take it automatically, a hand I know as well as my own. She doesn’t turn her head. Nor do I.

  “Isn’t it a little weird that we have to do our tests again? Was there some kind of mistake with the first one?” Margot says it innocently enough, a slight twang to her voice to match the nurse’s rabble-like twang.

  “Well, hon, sometimes they get mixed signals, you know? Like when you think a boy likes you but then he goes all hot and cold?” She winks. Margot’s fingers tighten on mine.

  “Uh huh.” Margot nods. “So there’s a problem with your machines? Or with the staff?”

  The nurse frowns. “Not this staff. They’re five-star amazing. Must have just been a bad sample or something. Try not to worry about it, sweetie.” She pats Margot’s arm just before she shoves the needle in my sister’s vein.

  I squirm on my seat. The skin on my arm crawls from the sharp pain originating in my sister’s arm. Relaxed beside me, Margot doesn’t move a muscle. She knows what I’m feeling even if she can’t do anything about it. This is just how it is with us.

  “How much are you going to take this time?” My voice shakes as our coltish nurse comes around to me and drives a needle into my arm. It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as Margot’s did. Our hands stay folded together. There’s a note in our file about letting us. One of the perks of being born us.

  “Oh.” For the first time she looks a little dismayed. “I’m sorry, hon. Didn’t they tell you? We gotta go through the whole Protocol again. The whole shebang.”

  My twin and I did know. We’d been told. Still, it bothers us. A full day’s worth of giving blood, going through tests, having your organs measured and documented. Urine samples, more blood samples, hair samples. We’d already been through this two times in the last two months. We no longer believe they’d gotten “bad” samples—not that we’re going to let on to the nurse.

  And funny thing is, each time we come, the Protocols Nurse is new. This is the third we’ve had, each as clueless as the last.

  We know better than to ask our parents. The deepening silence and constant rounds of testing and lies must mean the news is the worst. Late at night we lie together, holding hands and whispering under the deep canopy of one or other of our beds. We’ve thought about what it will mean if one of us turns out to be a Laster. We’ve talked until dawn about what we’d want, what we’d do. I tell Margot I’d want to go with her, but she’s against the idea.

  “One of us needs to survive,” she said to me, her gray-green eyes as serious as I’ve ever seen them.

  “What if it’s not that?” I asked her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we’re, you know,” the words mere whispers, “True Born?”

  Margot laughed. “Us? I know we’re different but really, Lucy.”

  “No, I’m serious,” I told her as I pulled a strand of tawny brown hair away from her face. “Do you really think they’d keep testing us if it came out we were Lasters? Does that sound like them?”

  “No,” Margot admitted.

  And that got us to thinking. And listening through the walls like mice.

  True Borns don’t worry about needing enough money and luck to successfully Splice. True Borns don’t catch the Plague.

  They say True Borns are genetic throwbacks. Something in their DNA has woken up and jumped back in time, back to the OldenTimes when we were animals, mutating and evolving into humans. Some of those genes hold the code for becoming dogs, or apes, or sharks and other fish, reptiles. Some True Borns look a lot like the origins of their DNA: long limbs that hang to their knees, or tongues that loll out of misshapen mouths. A few, we hear, actually sprout fur or grow gills. True Borns can be extraordinarily strong, gifted at hunting and catching prey.

  None of them, not a one, ever catch sick.

  Evolve or die. That’s what the True Borns have done, ever since the Plague began. The preacher and his people have a point.

  “Can’t be,” Margot told me, shaking her head.

  “Why not?” I asked, but I knew why. Margot and I, we look perfectly normal. We haven’t sprouted fur or feathers. Our eyesight isn’t 40/40. We are as human as our mother and father, bone and blood.

  Lying back on the white Protocols chair, trying to forget the uncomfortable pricks of the needles, I can’t help but think about the stranger again. The sheen of bright emerald rolling over his eyes. As I’ve done a hundred times since yesterday, I dismiss the possibility that he’s one of them. You can tell True Borns just by looking at them, right?

  And yet…

  Nurse finishes with a big old Miss Dominion smile as she straps the blood into a tester case and tells us to hang tight while Clive comes for us. Then disappears with a clack of her heels.

  This is not Protocol. This is not how it’s supposed to go. Unlike the poor rabble, we of the Upper Circle are tested every year. Not for longevity, but for traces of the disease. Some of the more superstitious are under the impression the Plague might be catchy, like a virus. We know Clive, have known him for years. He’s not supposed to come get us. The nurse is supposed to bring us to him. The blood can wait. The rest of the tests can’t.

  She leaves anyhow. I eye Margot uneasily until a few seconds later there’s a knock at the door. A dark, swarthy man with a huge dimpled grin peeks in. Margot lights up.

  “Clive!”

  “There are my special ladies,” he says. From behind his back he pulls two roses, one blue, one white, and hands one each to us.

  “Thank you,” Margot mumbles over her white rose. A suspicious stain spreads across her pale cheek.

  “You’re welcome,” Clive says. “You ladies ready for your tour in the spotlight?” He hands out a line like this every time. We climb down and follow him through the long, antiseptic halls of the Clinic, Clive and Margot chatting away like old pals. As he guides Margot into a room with metal walls, metal ceiling, metal floor—all the better to keep things sterile, he’s told us—I stop at the door.

  “Clive, did Protocols change?”

  His eyes shift restlessly. “Naw, we’re just a bit short staffed this month. You know how it is,” he says, grim-faced.

  I nod. It’s the one answer we can’t argue with. We all know Lasters are becoming extinct. In the past two decades alone the population of the planet has dwindled by half.

  And when I lie down and stare into Margot’s eyes as we’re wired in and put through the paces, I’m more scared than I ever have been.

  Something deeply weird is going on.

  Chapter Three

  The air feels charged as we glide down th
e stairs a little after three and wait outside our father’s study. Margot beckons me into the alcove just off the heavy wooden sliding doors that lead to his sanctuary. Her voice hitches as she pulls on my pinky, a promise pledge. “No matter what’s in there.”

  My smile is crooked and weak. “No matter what,” I say.

  No one needs a special gift or a crystal ball to tell us that something is going on. We hear a cough from inside. The door draws slowly open, revealing Shane. A man sits across from our father on the couch, the obligatory polite coffee untouched before him on the long glass coffee table. Another man and a woman stand behind him, giving off the alert and frighteningly efficient air of good mercenaries. Their eyes are peeled on us as we walk into the room, like lancets on our skin as they study, dissect, memorize our descriptions and stats.

  But the roaring in my ears, loud as a drone, and the sudden crazy lurch and tilt of my stomach, is not due to our father having hired new bodyguards without speaking to us. The man standing behind the couch is him.

  No one should be so handsome, I think as I drink him in. A shag of sunlight blond frames a pair of cat’s eyes, too blue, the color of indigo, twinkling now with something like amusement. My gaze drops to those chiseled cheekbones I’ve been daydreaming about, ending with a strong chin. I take in the faded blue jeans, the black shirt open at the collar. I clench my stomach against the sudden butterflies, nod to him and the woman, who at this point is just a bundle of details: long dark hair, pale skin, green eyes that laugh at me.

  The seated man stands and the remainder of my breath tumbles out of me. It’s not just that he’s immense. He is well over six feet, although slender in that athletic way. It’s not even that he’s gorgeous, although he’s that, too. As his gaze sweeps Margot’s face, then my own, with eyes the color of a storm sky, I realize what it is. It’s not often I see an aura of power shimmering around someone. Stepping back, I collide with Shane’s chest. He grasps my arms and holds me there.