“He’s not like other adults. He’ll help us if he can.”
“You said that about Dr. Varden, too,” Theo reminded me.
“Mr. Quist is different.”
Theo tugged on his bangs. “He may not have a choice. He may not be able to tell us and still stay here—”
“We have to ask him,” I said.
“Right on,” Tommy said. “Let’s go see the wonderful Mr. Quist.”
Julia picked up her crutches that were leaning against the climber. As she was doing so, someone called her name. “Hey!” he called again. “Hey, Julia!” It was DeShawn. He and his friends rode their bikes across the playground and stopped in front of us. “It’s good to see you’re back!”
“Thanks,” she said. She blushed a little. I couldn’t remember if Julia had ever had a real conversation with DeShawn Harris, or if she had just worshipped him from afar. Her whole face went a little smushy as she looked at him.
“Is it true you got attacked by a coyote out there?” he asked.
She ran her hand down her leg. “Just some dogs. I almost outran them.”
“I bet.” He grinned.
“The dogs took a hunk of my muscle out, but it’s regenerating right now. Super-cool process, and once it’s done, nothing will be able to catch me.”
He leaned back against the dome climber and gave her a half smile. “What about me? Will I be able to catch you, Julia?”
She twisted a strand of hair around her finger.
Theo asked, “What else did you hear?”
DeShawn looked at Julia for a moment longer, then turned toward Theo. “Lots, Staarsgard. Everyone is talking about you. Is it true it’s like toxic smog out there?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why were you in the hospital so long, Benji?”
“VIP status means I get some extra care,” Benji replied breezily.
“Our air is the same as yours,” Amnah said. She bristled beside me.
“Not exactly the same, though, right?” DeShawn asked.
Amnah didn’t answer.
DeShawn leaned closer to Julia. “That stuff on her face,” he whispered. “Is it contagious?”
“Lay off it, DeShawn,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“You know they’re all clear,” Theo said. “Or else they wouldn’t be allowed in.”
“Sure, sure,” DeShawn said. But he still backed away from the outside kids.
“Your parents need to dampen your arrogance,” I told him.
“It’s not arrogance if you can back it up. That’s confidence,” he said. “Something you actually seem to be developing, for better or for worse.” His friends laughed. They all could go in for a dampening, the jerks. “I still can’t believe that little Mori Bloom busted out of Old Harmonie. And for what?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.
“Haven’t you heard about Ilana?” he asked. His face looked innocent, but I knew he was messing with me.
“What are you talking about?”
“All I can tell you is what I’ve heard.” He paused, staring at each of us. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but word is, they boxed her up and shipped her away. That’s what my parents said.”
“No.” I shook my head hard. “That can’t be possible.”
But one of DeShawn’s friends nodded enthusiastically. “I heard they carried three different versions of her out of the house.”
So that was the story going around: half-truths that made Ilana the villain and Krita the ones who took care of the problem. The Krita people were always going to spin the story so they were the heroes.
“I heard four,” said another boy. “Creepy little clone robots.”
“Stop,” I whispered. How could they be joking about this? She was a person, and they were going to laugh about destroying her? Was that what this whole town was all about? If you make a mess, you sweep it away. You burn it down and erase it. You laugh about it afterward. “She’s my friend, and none of your stupid jokes are going to change that.”
For a second, DeShawn actually looked like he felt a little sorry for me. Then he shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I heard. Don’t be so broken up over it, Mori. She wasn’t ever really real, anyway.”
Julia stepped forward. “Enough, DeShawn.”
DeShawn held up his hands. “Hey, don’t blame me. At least I’m telling you all the truth.”
The truth. I’m not sure such a thing even existed. But I knew my own truth, what I felt in my heart. Ilana was real—a real girl and my real friend. “Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go.” I pivoted and led my friends out of the playground and around the cul-de-sac until we came to Mr. Quist’s house. The fence to his back garden was open, swinging a little bit in the breeze.
27
“Are you sure about this?” Julia asked.
“He’s our best chance for learning the truth,” I replied.
The sun caught the mica on Mr. Quist’s walkway and made it glint.
“I know,” Julia said. “It’s just that, once we know the truth, we can’t un-know it.”
She was right. How I had wished to un-see the file we had found about ALANA, to un-think what it made us suspect about Ilana. Since going outside, and thinking about what we did in Old Harmonie, whether any of us were real or true or natural or designed—whether those words made any sense at all—not knowing, not learning, not seeing seemed the safer choice.
Theo said, “I think we’ll just feel better knowing she’s okay.”
“What if she’s not okay?” Julia asked.
My stomach turned. “Then I want to know that, too.”
“But if we find her,” Julia said. “Aren’t we putting her in danger again?”
I cocked my head to the side. “You aren’t siding with DeShawn and them, are you? You don’t still think she’s a freak?”
“I never thought she was a freak,” Julia said, but she couldn’t look at us.
“We all did, Julia, at least for a minute,” Theo said.
“But she’s not,” Mouse said quietly.
“Fine. Maybe I did. And maybe I was wrong, but what I know for sure is that all of us are safer with her where she is and us here.”
“I spent my whole life being safe, Julia. I’m not going to take the easy way. Not this time. I understand if you don’t want to help, but—”
“No,” Julia said, rubbing her leg. “No, I’m in. Let’s go.”
We went through the garden and found Mr. Quist kneeling on one of his little gardening mats and holding a fresh tomato in the palm of his hand. He looked up when we came marching in. His eyes softened and he said, “Well, if it isn’t the Firefly Five. And friends.”
I introduced Amnah, Mouse, and Tommy and then I said, “We want to know about Ilana.”
“What do you want to know?” he asked. His attention had gone back to the tomato. He began twisting the green stem at the top of it.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“That question has a complicated answer,” he said as he plucked the green leaves from the fruit and threw them over his shoulder.
“Everything is complicated! That’s all people will say, no matter what I ask. It’s complicated. Even when I asked if I was sick, my parents just said, ‘It’s complicated.’ I’m tired of it!”
Theo put a hand on my shoulder, but Mr. Quist didn’t seem bothered by my outburst. Instead he took out a pocketknife and began slicing the tomato while he still held it in his hand. All the juice was spilling out over his fingers like blood. My heart raced.
“We just want to know if she’s okay,” Theo said.
Mr. Quist popped a slice of tomato into his mouth. After he swallowed, he said, “I believe she is.”
“So you know where she is, then?” Tommy asked, pouncing like a cat on a mouse.
“Not precisely.”
“You know who has her?” Theo asked.
“I think so.”
“Mr. Quist, please!” I begged. “I can’t play some stupid game while you eat your tomato! I need to know if she’s okay.”
“We talked about these plants, didn’t we, Mori?” he asked me, holding out his hand that had both a slice of the tomato and his knife in it. “About the way plants had been manipulated?”
I nodded.
“I was trying to tell you—” he began.
“I know,” I said. “I know what she is. We all do. I don’t care if all this genetic manipulation and whatnot is bad for plants. She’s not a tomato.”
“Of course she isn’t,” he said. “Come on inside. I need to wash my hands.”
Even though all the houses of Firefly Lane were the same, his felt different somehow. Darker. His kitchen didn’t open up into his living room or dining room. Each room was its own separate space. We went in through the kitchen, where he stopped to wash his hands, then into the living room, which he had set up like an office.
“I worked for your great-grandmother,” he said. “In her lab when I first got started. She was a wise woman.” He sat down in an old leather swivel chair.
“I know,” I said as I sat down on a worn couch. The upholstery had faded pink rosebuds on a green background. Mouse sat next to me on the couch, her body warm and still.
He pulled up a photograph on his tablet. “There we are,” he said as he turned the picture into a holopic we could all see: Dr. Varden and my baba with a very young Meldrick Quist beside them. They only looked a few years older than him. “But we didn’t agree on everything. And she and Dr. Varden didn’t agree on everything either.”
“Of course not. No one does,” I said.
“What are you getting at?” Theo asked.
“Here’s what I can tell you. Lucy said that if Agatha was truly worried about the ethics of the project, then she couldn’t just take it down and hide away the pieces. She had to get rid of all of it.”
“No,” I said, my voice wavering. “That’s not the way she thought. She always said that failure was a route to learning.”
“But failure wasn’t the problem with the ALANA project. Those difficulties they were having—like the uncanny valley—they were solvable challenges. The group didn’t have a solution at the time, but knew they would someday.”
“Like now,” Julia said.
“Yes.” Mr. Quist changed the photograph to one of a simple helperbot, a white one with huge, black insect eyes. “They started by making interactive AI lifelike in only the broadest of strokes, like the eyes on this helperbot. Then there was the biomimicry work and we started having helperbots and chatbots that looked like animals, and robots that moved like animals.”
“Like my robobee,” I said.
“Precisely.” He typed something onto his tablet, then brought up a whole slate of pictures of robotic insects. “Some of the design is simply for fun; for others, it is purposeful. Either way, these were steps forward. At the same time, advances were being made in replication. Three-dimensional copiers could get down to the centimeter, then the millimeter, then immeasurable. Materials work moved forward, too, so it wasn’t just a replica in plastic, but any material you could imagine, and now we can print our ice cream.”
“Like at Sully’s!” Tommy said. “Best ice cream joint around!”
“And in parallel, genetic engineering moved forward. And cloning. And all this progress came together. Scientists would bump into each other in coffee shops or on the way to the restroom and chat about what they were doing. What we were doing. And we’d say, ‘Hey, that’s cool, have you thought about this?’ Or ‘What if we tried that?’ Or ‘We should put our projects together.’ It was exciting. It is exciting. That’s how science works. That’s how we advance.” He looked at the holopic of the robobees and shook his head.
“That’s the whole point of the Idea Box, right?” Julia asked. “Bringing together all these ideas?”
“Yes, but there was no one checking over us. No one putting on the brakes.”
“Why would you want to?” Tommy asked from his perch on the edge of Mr. Quist’s couch. “Science rushes forward.”
“Precisely. And sometimes that means you get where you are going very quickly. You make great advances. But sometimes that means you veer off course, or you crash along the way. If you don’t think about what you’re doing, if you don’t plan for all outcomes, you aren’t being responsible. They didn’t do that with ALANA. They didn’t think through the problems of creating a person,” Mr. Quist said. “A whole new person. Back then the lines weren’t so blurry. Genetic engineering was new and, frankly, people were scared of it when it came to children. ‘Designer Babies,’ they called it—and it made everyone squeamish. Now, well, we have our naturals and our designed kids. Everyone knows about it and everyone is fine with it.”
“Everyone in here,” Amnah said.
“And out there,” Tommy added. “I mean, we do genetic engineering out there, too. Fixing problems, making choices.”
“Minor choices,” Amnah said.
“It’s like you said, Mori,” Julia interrupted their argument. “That thirty percent is just an arbitrary line.”
“Anyway,” Amnah mused. “Even if they had scrapped the whole project, someone else would have figured out all the pieces eventually. That’s the way science works.”
I ran my fingers through my hair. “But all of this is about ALANA. We’re talking about our Ilana. Where is she?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Mr. Quist said. “Dr. Varden would never completely scrub a project. Even though Lucy told her to get rid of it all, she kept the consciousness on a hard drive.”
That made my stomach turn. Next to me, Mouse stiffened, too.
“Ilana is not ALANA,” I said.
“I know that,” Mr. Quist said. “But Agatha felt responsible for both of them. And as long as she is around, I don’t think Ilana will be scuttled. Not completely.”
She was safe. I took a deep breath. Dr. Varden had saved her. I knew Agatha would do it. Theo and Julia each reached over and grabbed one of my hands. Why were they trying to comfort me? Ilana was safe, wasn’t she? Wasn’t that what Mr. Quist was trying to tell me?
“So Ilana is okay, right?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Mr. Quist replied, looking down at his lap.
“It means there’s still time,” Mouse said.
Amnah added, “For now.”
Mr. Quist stood up then. “We’re finally getting some cherry tomatoes after the storm. Still a little yellow, but quite delicious. Let me send you all home with some. Mori, come with me to get the boxes.”
Theo stood up, too, but Mr. Quist said, “No, no. Only Mori needs to come. We’ll just be a minute. Meet us out in the garden.” He led me into the kitchen. The tomatoes were piled in a blue bowl on the counter, shining and clean, but he said, “Wait here a moment.” When he came back, he was holding a slim book. “She left this for you.”
“Ilana?” I asked. “When?”
“Before all this. When things started to go bad.”
He held out the book to me: it was a guide to edible and nonedible plants of New England. It looked old, with the cover photo faded and the edges of the vinyl cover a little scuffed. When I flipped through, I saw that it had been published in 1997: practically an antique. The cover was thick and even had a pouch for storing specimens or seeds in it.
I flipped through wondering why Ilana had wanted me to have this book. On the title page she had written: “In case of emergency. Love, Ilana.”
That was it. In case of emergency? Maybe that meant she really was thinking of us living in Oakedge. But what if it meant something more?
“Your friends are waiting,” Mr. Quist said. “Best not to keep them too long.”
“Thanks, Mr. Quist.” I turned to go.
“Don’t forget your tomatoes,” he said.
“Right.” I stuffed the book into the back pocket of my shorts and pulled out my T-
shirt in the hopes that no one would see the book. I didn’t want to talk about it until I knew what it meant. Then I picked up the tomatoes and thanked Mr. Quist again.
Just as my hand was on the doorknob, he spoke: “Mori, you can’t fix everything yourself.”
“I know,” I said.
Through the glass, I saw my friends, new and old, out in the garden. Julia tossed a tomato toward Tommy’s mouth. He caught it, but it spurt juice and seeds all over his lip. When he laughed, some came dribbling out.
“It’s just a matter of who you can trust, isn’t it?”
He was quiet for a moment. “You’ve been right so far. Don’t start doubting yourself now.”
Theo glanced up. He saw me through the glass and smiled and gave a little wave. Mouse turned and looked over her shoulder and smiled, too. I stepped back out into the sun.
28
I went to bed with the book from Ilana stuck under my pillow. It was the only piece of her I had. Everything else had been taken away, erased as cleanly as a hard drive.
I stared up at the ceiling and reached under my pillow and fingered the edges of the pages. Had she read the book, too? I hoped so. Maybe it would be useful to her wherever she was.
I pulled my sheet up and rolled over.
I had told my parents I was tired—I had nearly said I wasn’t feeling well, but that would have been a mistake—and gone to bed early.
Mouse and Amnah had gone to bed, too, after they’d spoken to their mother on the phone. She was coming up from wherever she’d been down south. Ms. Staarsgard was working on getting all the paperwork in order for their mother and Tommy’s uncle to come and get the kids. I wasn’t sure why it was taking so long, but I was glad they were still here. They shared the guest room on the first floor. I’d left them with a stack of my favorite books.
My new kitten was curled up in a ball next to me. She was nothing more than a little puff of fur. I hadn’t named her yet. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to keep the guilt gift, but I found myself absentmindedly petting her.
On the shelf next to me was the box with Prince Philip, my robobee. I reached over and picked up the wooden box. I held it on my stomach for a moment before creaking the top open. Philip buzzed awake almost immediately. He flew out of the box and landed on my hand, where he purred and flapped his wings contentedly.
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