Unnaturals #2

by Devon Hughes

  “Nah, old man. Mayor Eris is in charge, and Ms. Eva prefers to go directly through me now. You could say I got a promotion. And once my Clan finds Francine, you’ll probably be calling me Boss.”

  “Francine is the mayor’s daughter,” Leesa told Marcus.

  “She’s missing?” he whispered. Leesa shrugged, straining to listen.

  “I just need a bit more time. I’ve spent years working to help that child,” Bruce snapped.

  “Lots of good it’s done so far.”

  Vince’s voice was still light, but there was an edge to it when he answered, a finality. “End of the week, Doc. Then we move to H-trials.”

  “This is unethical!”

  The sound of Vince’s laughter.

  “I want out, okay? You tell Eva I want out.”

  More laughter, the slam of a door, then the sound of Vince’s steel-toed boots echoing down the hall.

  Leesa wiggled her eyebrows, and Marcus knew she was wondering the same thing he was: What exactly was going to happen in one week?

  “I won’t do it, I won’t do it,” the kids could hear Bruce muttering inside with increasing agitation. “I’m done. ENOUGH!”

  They heard the sound of a glass shattering. And then another.

  “The vials of serum!” Leesa hissed.

  “We have to go in there!”

  But when he reached for the doorknob, it was locked. Marcus started to jiggle the handle.

  “Hello?” Bruce’s voice asked, high and fearful, from the other side. “Who’s there?”

  Marcus didn’t answer—if Bruce knew it was him, there was about a zero percent chance he’d let them in. Marcus jiggled the knob more forcefully in response, and the door rattled on its frame.

  “Vince? Mayor Eris? Is . . . is that you?”

  Leesa started to pound on the door now, and inside, they could hear Bruce scrambling to his feet. As soon as he opened the door, Leesa pushed past him, and Marcus was face-to-face with his stepdad.

  “Marcus?” Bruce gasped. “What are you doing here?” His eyes were wide and a flush crept up his neck.

  Marcus glanced around him at the equipment strewn on the long metal tables. Test tubes, mixing dishes, microscopes, goggles. The room looked like what he’d always imagined school science labs to be a long, long time ago, before learning relied so much on slipstreaming and virtual experience. Apart from the broken glass on the floor, anyway. Leesa was right—Bruce had been destroying the vials of serum. Bruce rushed to grab anything he could and shove it out of sight. His usually precise movements were erratic, his hands fluttering around him like birds.

  But Leesa was already marching across the room toward the trays of test tubes.

  “We know all about the serum,” she said, and Marcus was in awe of how confident and in control she sounded. “We know what you and Eris are planning.” She was way better at bluffing than Marcus was.

  Bruce’s face spasmed in panic. “Oh, God, the press has already found out, haven’t they? I’m ruined.” His eyes were red rimmed and wild, his glasses askew. He ripped them off his face and started polishing them frantically with a dirty cloth as he muttered under his breath. “I thought it would work. Tigris scorpiones was always the most robust hybrid in matches. Certainly stronger than Vulpes pongo chiroptera. So why won’t the hominid cells adapt?”

  Marcus used to know a lot of the official names from researching animals during his Unnaturals fandom. Vulpes—that meant bat, right? And he recognized Tigris as tiger from the Invincible. Other than that, though, Marcus had no idea what Bruce was talking about.

  “We were trying to save the world! You and your brother always thought I was such a bad guy, but I always tried to do the right thing—you could never see that.”

  Marcus couldn’t help but scoff. “You thought the right thing was creating animals that would be hurt and killed for entertainment?” Bruce didn’t exactly make it easy to like him.

  “De-extinction was about saving animals, not destroying them. It was always about the research, never the glory.” He laughed bitterly. “Now she’s threatening my own kids?”

  Marcus hadn’t heard Bruce refer to him and Pete as his kids before. It made him feel weird—maybe because of all the things Bruce had said, that was the one thing that made Marcus feel like he’d gotten him wrong, somehow. And it sounded like he and Pete were in danger?

  “Where’s Pete?” he asked, cutting to the chase.

  Bruce’s fake smile fell, and he sank onto a stool with a deep sigh.

  “Just tell us! I know you know.”

  “He’s basically a hostage,” Bruce said dejectedly. “Eris’s hostage.” He slumped forward, and his shoulders shook as he started to cry.

  Marcus blinked. A hostage? For what? Why is the mayor blackmailing Bruce?

  “What does she want you to do, Bruce?” Marcus pressed.

  “I truly believed I could help the girl. Help all of us. But the experiment has changed. There are too many variables. It’s over.”

  He jumped up and started pacing, and then he got this crazy look in his eye and lunged for a Bunsen burner. Cranking on the gas, Bruce lit a match and started feeding papers and anything else within reach into the flame.

  “Bruce?” Marcus asked nervously. “What are you doing?”

  “I have to destroy it. Them.”

  Bruce was reckless and frantic right now, and waving that flame way too close to various chemicals and powders. There was a sudden spark and a small explosion that threw them to the floor.

  Bruce was against the wall, and he screamed as a paw darted out, scratching his arm. The cages had been covered with a curtain—Marcus hadn’t even realized there were animals in here with them!

  Leesa was crouched near the line of animal cages. “He has more scorpion-tigers in here,” she gasped, looking past Bruce to meet Marcus’s eyes. “They all look just like the Invincible!”

  By the time they understood what was happening the flames were licking higher and higher. The scorpion beasts were yowling and pacing as the smoke filled up their cages. They were just innocent animals! They didn’t deserve to die like that.

  Marcus stumbled over, coughing, and started undoing the latches, not thinking about the fact that they were bred to kill anything in sight.

  The scientist understood in the moment before Marcus did what was about to happen, though, and right as the stinging cats burst from the cages, claws swiping and fangs bared, Bruce threw himself over Marcus’s body, shielding him from the deepest scratches, as smoke enveloped them both.

  47

  THE LONG-SUFFERING MUTANTS WERE ABOUT TO RETRACE their steps through the desert when something caught the corner of Kozmo’s eye, like glass reflecting the light. Was that . . . a ripple of a wave? A flash of water? Or a trick of the sun?

  Flicker had said it was a mirage before, and Kozmo didn’t have the best eyesight, especially during the day. But now Castor was standing beside her, squinting in the same direction.

  “Flicker knows where she’s going,” Runt yipped. He and the lizard were already a ways ahead. “We just have to trust her.”

  Flicker seems to know a lot of things, Kozmo thought. But none of them really knew what went on inside that scaly head. “What’s it smell like to you?” she asked Castor, putting her trust in him first for once.

  “It smells like water,” Castor said immediately. “Might just be my brain wishing it was water, though,” he admitted. “What do you think?”

  “I think the sun sets in the west,” Kozmo answered. Old habits die hard, and she’d replaced her fluorescent-light-tracking routine of the room with a sun-tracking routine in the desert. Each day she noted its progress across the sky, what time it went to bed, and what time it got up in the morning. The days weren’t getting longer after all, even though it felt that way.

  She could tell Castor didn’t get the connection, though. “The west? Huh,” he said, cocking his head toward the circle of yellow overhead.

  Ko
zmo picked up a spindly stick in her muzzle and started to draw in the sand. “Jazlyn said that when she was in the science classroom, she learned that the only thing to the east of the city was barren wasteland.” She marked the wasteland on the right side of her map. “According to the sun, that means the wasteland is behind us.”

  “It’s hard to believe anything is worse than this desert, but okay, avoid barren wasteland,” Castor said. “Check.”

  He still wasn’t getting it.

  “So, if the barren wasteland is to the east of the city, that means that the river is to the west, and the Greenplains are farther west beyond that. And according to the sun, west is over there.” She nodded in the direction Castor had been pointing his nose. “Which means . . .”

  “It is the river I smell!”

  Finally, he got it.

  Castor’s tail stopped wagging suddenly as his face fell. “And it means the Greenplains are way back there, in the opposite direction.” Castor stood and looked after the group. “We’ll be right back.” He howled to throw his voice.

  “Wait!” Flicker was dashing toward them, sand whipping up in all directions so that she looked like she was running on water instead of hot ground. None of them had ever seen the lizard move so quickly before! “Don’t go over there, whatever you do! It’s quicksand. And full of mirages. And, um, infested with tarantulas!”

  “I happen to love tarantulas, anyway,” Castor said. The way Flicker was talking made Castor suspicious. He turned to his friend. “Jazlyn? Can you come take a look at this?”

  Castor whispered to her for a minute, and then, after giving them a strange look, the rabbit-panther raced toward the shimmering distance, careful to avoid the quicksand pits. She was back in less than a minute, and confirmed their suspicions.

  “I could see the outline of the trees, way down the river,” she reported, eyes wild. “How are we so off course?”

  Runt’s eyes were wide and watery, his head cocked in a curious pose. “We’re not going to the Greenplains?” he asked, his voice small. “Flicker?”

  Now the lizard was looking pale in the gills and green with guilt.

  “Have you even been to the Greenplains?” Castor’s voice was a sharp bark this time.

  “Yes!”

  Jazlyn stepped forward, shoulder muscles rolling. “Then you knew that you were taking us in the wrong direction? Far north of Lion’s Head, when we should’ve been going west, just across the river? We must be fifty miles away.”

  She pulled herself up tall to glower at Flicker, and for the first time, Kozmo could see how fearsome the rabbit-panther really was.

  “You lied to us!” she said with a hiss. “Why?”

  Flicker looked down at the sand. Her eyes tracked in opposite directions, noncommittal. “I thought . . . I just wanted an adventure and . . . a friend . . . and I . . . I’m sorry.”

  It was then that Runt sat down in the sand and began to howl.

  48

  IN A STRANGE TURN OF EVENTS, MARCUS WAS GOING TO stay with Leesa. In her one-room apartment. In the Drain. Underground. And for some reason, she was totally panicking about it.

  It’s fine, Leesa told herself as they descended. Don’t be weird about it. He’ll know if you’re being weird about it. Just helping a friend in need.

  Never in her life did Leesa think that Marcus’s mom would be calling her mom and asking if her son could stay with them for a few days. From what Marcus had said when they’d first met, Leesa got the sense that he’d only been allowed below the 100th floor line a handful of times. Clearly, the woman must’ve been desperate.

  Marcus’s stepdad, Bruce, had basically gone mad scientist, in the really nutso sense, right in front of them in the lab. They’d managed to get the guy home in the aircar, but then Bruce had to go to the hospital for the tiger-clone scratches, and when he’d started babbling about performing sacrifices for the red queen and resurrecting a zombie woolly mammoth, the doctors said they were going to keep him there for a while. Leesa was pretty sure it involved padded walls.

  Marcus’s mom was staying by Bruce’s side for the time being, and Pete was still missing, of course. Marcus said he was obviously old enough to stay home by himself, and Leesa pointed out that Zippy the automopooch could babysit him, which he didn’t think was half as funny as she did. But apparently his mom thought that leaving her almost teenage son in an all-white, all-glass apartment was riskier than sending him underground with potential viruses and bad influences, because he’d gone home to load up a backpack, and now here they were, about to descend into the Drain together.

  “It’s this way,” Leesa said, gesturing for him to follow her down the stairwell, and then immediately felt foolish. It was pretty obvious how you got to the Drain, wasn’t it? Maybe not. For all their fancy educations, sky kids seemed to know surprisingly little.

  This wasn’t a sky kid, though. This was Marcus, and he was smart. Marcus seemed to have forgotten to pack his wit in that big backpack today, though, because as soon as they were underground, he started saying the dumbest, most obvious things she’d ever heard.

  “It’s, like, a real neighborhood. A real city, with streets and homes and everything.”

  “Yeah . . .” Leesa smiled awkwardly, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. “What’d you expect? That we’d all be mole people or something?”

  “No, no, of course not,” Marcus said quickly.

  But from the tone of his voice, Leesa could tell that he kind of had. It went downhill from there.

  “There are so many people.”

  “Mmm,” she’d answer neutrally, while inside her head, she was yelling, Yes, over three-quarters of the population is crammed under the street so that you can all spread out and stretch your arms in the clouds.

  “It’s so dark.”

  That’s because there is no sun underground and all the light is piped in.

  “The center is so lively.”

  Yeah, because this is where people shop and talk and work and trade and live!

  “I can’t believe there are trees.”

  Technology, filtered light, photosynthesis, oxygen, survival. Science! What do you want from me?

  “The architecture is so creative.”

  It’s called having not a lot of space, not a lot of materials (mostly junk that you guys don’t want), and a whole lot of families trying to make it work. That’s how you end up with stacked subway-car towers and tent cities made of trash.

  And finally, the most genius comment of all: “It’s so different from the Towers.”

  “NO KIDDING!” She whirled around on him, red faced, finally fed up. “Yes. I get it. It’s way different than the sky luxury you’re used to. It’s obviously not light and airy and full of rich people and fancy things and solid structures with the best, sleekest, prettiest materials! It’s a neighborhood of people who had a tough break and got shoved underground and out of sight and totally forgotten about.”

  “Whoa.” Marcus’s pale face blanched paler, so it looked almost green under the fluorescent light. “I didn’t mean—”

  She didn’t care what he meant. He’d already had his turn to talk. “But it’s still full of lots of good people who care about their neighbors, and their homes, and their work.”

  “I know,” Marcus cut in. “Leesa, I know.”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like to grow up in one room with no windows and just a futon to share and a mom who is working so hard and a dad who’s not even there.”

  “Yes, I do.” He smiled gently, a sad smile. “At least that last part. And I know it sucks.”

  His dead dad. Shoot. Leesa felt awful for saying that. She wasn’t done making her point, though.

  “A lot of it sucks. But I’m still proud of where I grew up. I like being from here, okay?” For the first time, she realized it was true. She understood her mom’s hopes of a better life and getting out of the tunnels someday, but this place had shaped who Leesa was.

/>   “Okay!” Marcus grinned.

  Leesa’s face was flushed, and her heart was thumping quickly. A group of old ladies selling their market goods had turned to stare and were clicking their tongues at her.

  “Okay,” Leesa said, a little quieter.

  “For what it’s worth”—Marcus nudged her shoulder—“I wasn’t judging where you come from, or any of this. It’s different, but in a good way. It feels like a different country. I kinda like it better.”

  Leesa snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.” But she felt better. Her breathing didn’t feel quite so tight in her chest. She tugged one of Marcus’s backpack straps and turned him down the alley that led to her apartment.

  She opened the eight locks as quietly as she could, knowing that her mom was probably already taking her nap between her shift as a sky assistant and her job at the factory. But the last dead bolt always jammed, and by the time Leesa finally heard it click and pushed open the door, her mom was already sitting up on the futon, blinking the sleep from her eyes.

  “Mom, this is Marcus. Marcus, Mom.”

  Her mom stood up, quickly smoothing her clothes. Their house might’ve been tiny, but she kept it spotless, and she always looked perfect, too. It was the first thing you noticed about her—her style. Leesa never got sick of showing her mom off.

  Leesa’s mom strode over and held her hand out to Marcus. It was a little formal, but Marcus shook it enthusiastically.

  “So, you’re the boy my daughter’s been sneaking off to see all the time and who got her in all that trouble.”

  “Um . . .”

  Leesa got a kick out of how flustered Marcus looked.

  “Just kidding.” Her mom let out a deep laugh that filled the room. “I know she finds trouble just fine on her own. I hear you’re sharp enough to make Leesa laugh and stubborn enough to give her a run for her money. Both are pretty rare, you know.”

  “Okay, okay,” Leesa said, blushing.

  After setting up Marcus’s sleeping bag—good for below freezing, even though they lived in a heat zone!—giving him a tour with the history of every tchotchke and trinket, and asking him about every detail in his life, Leesa’s mom headed out for her second shift, and they were alone again.