“Sounds nice,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. And I supposed I would be perfectly happy there, away from everyone else. “The truth,” I told him, “is that I really want to live in number nine.”
“To feed your honey fix?”
“No. I mean, well, sure. I’d have to fight Benji for it. But I want to fix that house up back the way Agatha had it. I’d get all that junk out of there and make it a home again. Mr. Quist and I can keep bees back there, and I’ll have gardens and keep chickens and—”
“They’ll never let you move in there,” he said.
We were nearly out of the woods now. I could see the outline of my house in front of us. “Why not? It’s just sitting there.”
“They just won’t. It’s not like the other houses.”
“So?”
“Having the houses all the same makes things easier.”
We stepped out onto my lawn, which squished underneath my feet. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Sure thing, Mori. We’ll just wait and see.”
“You’re going to be okay getting home?”
He smiled more at the ground than at me. “Yeah, Mori. I’ll be okay. Good night.”
“Good night.”
He started walking away.
“Hey, Theo?”
“Yeah?”
“I like this version of you. This midnight version. Even if you do tell me I can’t have my dreams.”
Maybe each of us had a midnight version of ourselves, I thought, one without dampening or latencies or enhancements or therapies. Maybe that’s why I’d always liked going walking at night.
“Too bad it’s only the midnight version,” he said. And then he disappeared into the trees.
I’d had every intention of going right inside and telling my parents I was home, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the feeling of this night. I was afraid it would slip away and I would never have it again. Clara had sent them a text message letting them know I was okay, and as far as they knew, I was still at Theo’s. So I walked around to the sidewalk out front and made my way around the lower half of the cul-de-sac.
I passed number 9, which was as dark as always, and walked past the houses of my neighbors.
The woods on this side were eerie, too. The wind had knocked down a string of trees, and they offered up their roots like a lady lifting her skirt to reveal not legs, but a mess of snakes.
I didn’t go out toward Oakedge. I was afraid of what I would find. Instead, I walked on, right up the fence.
A tree had fallen here, too. It bent the fence and then reached out over the stream. The leafy top rested on the far side of the gully.
If I wanted to, I could climb right up on the tree, walk across it like a balance beam, and go all the way to the other side of the gully. And from there—who knew?
A bat swooped above my head and I nearly dropped my flashlight. I reached out and touched the tree trunk. It was wet, but not too slippery. Tucking the flashlight under my arm, I clambered up onto the trunk, first on my knees and then onto my feet. My heart and my brain were going a mile a minute, telling me this was a bad idea. It was hard to breathe. But I slid my feet along, moving forward until I was right above the fence. Then I slid a little bit more.
For the first time in my life, I was outside the fence.
I held my arms out wide and looked up at the gray night sky, a smile spreading across my lips. I knew I was not going to tell anyone about this breach. It didn’t matter. After all, it’s not the fences that keep us safe. It’s us.
27
Once I finally got into bed, I slept till almost noon. I checked on my trees, which had made it through the storm okay, and then helped Mr. Quist clean up his garden. Most of the vegetable plants had been trampled down by the rain, but a few survived and we retied them to their stakes. He sent me home with a tomato the size of my two fists.
That night my parents sent me to bed early. My watchu had checked my status, and some blip told them I was tired. Or maybe it was just the dark half-moons under my eyes. I picked up Prince Philip and stared into his black digital eyes. He buzzed, then settled in on my hand. “I’m not tired,” I told him, since I had no one else to tell.
I stayed in bed for a while, flipping through Agatha’s bee book. Her bees were not doing well. Each day she found more bee carcasses in the snow.
Lucy says I’m being too hard on myself, but it’s safe to say this experiment with modified and cloned bees has failed. What’s odd is that what I feel is not the curiosity I used to feel when an experiment failed to yield the results I’d hoped for—no curiosity, no drive to reboot. Instead what I feel is akin to homesickness. And there, too, is something strange. When I lived in Cambridge, all I ever thought about was Old Harmonie—getting out here for the weekend, escaping the city. My heart was here. Now, though, say the word “home,” and I think about my lab at MIT. This place is not mine anymore. Perhaps it’s time for a homecoming.
So there it was, the answer I had been seeking: she left because Old Harmonie didn’t feel like her home anymore. It had changed, or she had changed, or both, maybe, and she wanted to return to her lab.
It still didn’t explain, though, how she had left her best friend behind.
Thirsty, I climbed from my bed and edged down the hall toward the bathroom. My parents were in the living room, and their voices danced up the stairs to me.
“So what are we supposed to tell her?”
“The truth.”
I crouched down at the top of the stairs so I could hear them better.
“Really. So it would go something like, ‘Oh, honey, sorry to tell you, but your new best friend, she’s a top-level project and she’s being recalled.’”
I could feel my heart beating faster and faster. Ilana. They were talking about Ilana.
This was not news. Theo and I had figured it out. But the way they were talking . . . What did “recall” mean?
“Nothing is definite yet. Maybe they can solve—”
“And if they can’t?”
“Then we’ll just say they moved back to California.”
Dad made a noise that sounded like a cross between a sigh and a grunt. “Will she believe it?”
“I’m not sure they’re even that close anymore. Anyway, Ilana showed up out of the blue, and she’ll leave just the same.”
I thought of that day she had emerged from the car, how perfect she had seemed. Now everything was upside down.
“If I had realized there was any chance of this project being scuttled, I wouldn’t have been in favor of bringing her onto Firefly Lane,” Mom said.
Scuttled. The files on the computer flashed before my eyes. And then that room, that horrible room with all the pieces of old projects. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the awful sight was in my brain: Ilana falling down into that pile of parts.
“I was never in favor,” Dad said.
“It’s easy for us to sit here—”
“I know. Other people have struggled. But we have limits here, guidelines. And this project pushed those limits. Bold new directions,” Dad said. “Your grandmother would be rolling over in her grave.”
I tried to force myself to take deep breaths. This couldn’t really be happening, could it? They weren’t really talking about getting rid of Ilana?
“Maybe,” Mom said. “But haven’t there been days? Like after the yellow jackets—haven’t you wanted to just up Mori’s resistances?”
“Her common sense, maybe,” Dad said. “We let free her curiosity, and I thought we’d dampened down her bravery enough.”
Every bit of me froze.
My body, my breath, even my heart. Stopped cold.
They’d always told me they’d never dampened me. But they had. I wrapped my arms around my stomach.
I twisted my hair around my fingers. How could they have done this without my knowing? It was an easy procedure, but you still needed to go to a doctor—
As soon as I tho
ught it, I knew. I knew when they had done it: it was a few years ago, when I’d been in the hospital with the stomach flu. The fear I had felt when I got out of bed, it wasn’t just because I had been so sick, or the trauma of being in the hospital so long—they’d dampened my bravery too much, so everything was terrifying. Then they’d fixed it, adjusted the levels like Theo had said.
My parents had lied to me.
“Fine. Tell me you didn’t want to bring the mumps vaccine straight home to her, and not risk her getting on that bus and going into the center.”
Dad didn’t reply.
My body shook. They had lied to me. Not only that, they had stolen something from me.
“The point is, I understand what Meryl Naughton did. Ilana might not have been a real girl, but she was like a daughter to Meryl. And now we know it wasn’t successful, and that’s good knowledge to have. I just wish it wasn’t our kids who were caught in the middle.”
My head spun.
“Nothing’s been settled yet,” Dad said. “Maybe they will be able to figure her out.”
There was a shifting sound, and I imagined my mother nestling into my father. They didn’t speak anymore, or at least not loud enough for me to hear.
I tiptoed back to my room with my hand against the wall to steady myself. What, exactly, were they thinking of doing to Ilana? They couldn’t possibly scuttle her, I told myself. They were probably just going to bring her back to the lab. They would keep working on her programming, keep training her so she acted right.
The way my parents had messed with me.
I stopped at the bathroom. With the light off, I leaned over the sink and scooped water into my mouth. My hands looked silver in the darkness. Like they belonged to someone else. I turned off the water and stared at my fingers. Ilana’s were so long, and when she tended to the plants in Oakedge they curled gently around the stems. My own hands were small, with narrow fingers that never seemed to work quite the way I wanted them to. Had my parents chosen these hands for me? Or had they been a mistake?
Ilana’s hands were perfect. They had probably come out precisely the way they were designed. It was the behavior that they were still trying to program just right.
Tears pooled at the bottom of my eyes.
None of this was her fault. She hadn’t asked for any of it. She’d been lied to just like my parents lied to me. That bad dream I’d felt like I couldn’t wake up from—that was because of them. What must this life feel like to her with constant adjustments? Every time she wakes, she could be different. She could be kind or she could find herself attacking her best friend all because of adjustments and manipulations she had no say over: how unsteadying that must be!
I closed my eyes to wipe away the tears, and when I did I saw that room full of parts again. Arms and legs and torsos. And on top of the whole big pile, I saw Ilana, her eyes closed as she sank down, down, down into the pit just as she had sunk in the water.
And that, I realized, that was the lie. She was not just a container to be filled and refilled, shaped and reshaped. She was Ilana, and Ilana was my friend.
28
I wiped my eyes one more time and took a deep breath. Crying would not fix anything. It never did. The air cooler was circulating cold air into my room, but it still felt stifling. I needed to clear my head, and there was only one place that I could do that. I needed to get outside. I thought about that night of the storm, when Theo and I had gone walking. Everything had been still and quiet and new. And I remembered how it had felt to be on that tree trunk, standing on the outside of the fence. I had told Theo I would never want to leave, but now I could imagine walking on that trunk, marching right out of here. That would serve my parents right.
My stomach hitched at the thought of it.
Still, even if I didn’t go out the fences, I knew I couldn’t stay inside the house with those—those traitors. Not a moment longer.
Maybe I could go back to the center of the cul-de-sac. Maybe it would still be peaceful.
And so I did something I had never done: I slipped out of the house and wandered through my neighborhood. I had been out alone many a night, but somehow it felt more deceptive leaving through the sliding door in our kitchen than unzipping the door of my tent.
I stepped outside and my nose filled immediately: smoke.
It plumed up from the bottom of the cul-de-sac. I knew which house it was, but still I ran around the bend and toward the driveway to number 9. Smoke drifted up from behind the house.
Down the driveway, and then around back.
There were the flames licking against the back wall of the white house and turning them black. The fire was reflected back in the windows, making them look like demon eyes. I felt a hitch in my throat, like I was going to throw up, at the same time as tears welled in my eyes. Agatha Varden’s house was always supposed to be there. Number 9 was never supposed to change. It was our house. My house. And now it was burning to the ground.
I sprinted all the way home.
The smell of smoke followed me.
I would tell my parents as soon as I got home, that’s what I told myself.
But I didn’t.
What I did was let myself in the sliding door, slip down the hall to my bedroom, change back into my pajamas, and then lie awake the rest of the night because everything—everything—in my world had changed.
The smoke still drifted up and over Firefly Lane the next morning, acrid and harsh. We followed it down around to the bottom of the cul-de-sac, and I tried to pretend I was as surprised as everyone else when we stopped in front of number 9, or what was left of it: a black, smoldering pile.
“What I don’t understand is how it caught fire after the storm,” Theo said. “If it had been hit by lightning during the storm, then that would make sense. But this was a day later, so how did a fire just start?”
“Maybe it was an electrical thing,” Julia said. “It still had that old electricity. Maybe something got knocked loose and no one even knew.”
I looked over at Theo. He was holding Benji’s skateboard, running his hands against the wheels to make them whirrrr.
“Just as long as we don’t have another lockdown,” Benji said. “Although if we do, and we could be with your nanny again, Theo, that would be rad. She’s pretty cute.”
I expected Theo to make some snide comment about Benji or his nanny, but he said, “Yeah, that was all right.”
The firefighters tromped over the ashes, poking it with rakes and shovels.
“I’m sure they’ll figure out what happened,” Julia said. “It’s probably for the best anyway. Now they can build a new house there like all the rest, cut down the grass, get rid of the yellow jackets and snakes.”
“We’re definitely safer without it, but man am I going to miss that honey,” Benji said.
We kept silent after that and watched the firefighters do their work, poking and poking, turning over red bits of wood and metal.
Eventually Julia and Benji rode away, and it was just Theo and me in front of the house.
“You okay?” he asked.
This had been her house. Her home. Not just another building made by Krita, but one she had lived in and made her own before everyone’s house was the same. There was something much more personal about it. Baba had been there. Destroying the house was like cutting her and Dr. Varden out of our history.
My voice came out cracked, dried from the smoky, dusty air of the fire: “I guess so.” It wasn’t even a house anymore, really, just a pile of black and red, like coals in the barbecue. The heat still came off it, though, washing over us in waves that turned our cheeks pink and brought beads of sweat to our temples. Poking up through the ashes were pieces of twisted metal of various sizes. Some of them were probably the robot parts we had found.
I turned so I was facing him. His profile was strong against the smoke-gray sky, and I got the sense that he was changing before my eyes, slowly enough that it was barely perceptible, but surely, all the
same, he was morphing into something stronger and sturdier than he had been.
“I’m not a very good person,” I said.
“Mori.” His voice cracked. “Did you start this fire?”
“What? No! Why would I do that?”
“To cover up for Ilana. To make sure no one else found out.”
“They all know,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“We were right about Ilana. You were right. She’s a project. An advanced project. Your mom knew right from the start. All of our parents did. And I guess she’s not working the way they expected. They want to recall her. To scuttle her.”
“Wait, what? Who told you that?”
“I heard my parents talking last night. They said they never would have let her come to Firefly Lane if they thought the project would ever be canceled.”
“They said they were going to scuttle her?”
I thought back to my parents’ conversation. “Not definitely, but they seem to think it’s a real possibility. They said something about pushing limits. About bold new directions.”
Theo tugged on his hair. “I don’t think that’s what my mom meant,” he said.
“But it is!” I cried. “Remember the first day the family came? Your mom stayed home. After already missing two days for your latency, she stayed home again. She never stays home. And then she marched us all over there and was so excited for us to be Ilana’s playmates. Not our friend, our playmate! She was so excited for this project, and for you and all the rest of us kids on Firefly Lane to be a part of it.”
“Maybe,” he said. Then he took a deep breath. “They didn’t say they were for sure going to scuttle her, right? So that’s good. It means it’s just a possibility.”
“How is that good?”
The Firefly Code Page 20