Incubation

by Laura Disilverio

  On the way back, I wait for him to stop and pull the hood over my head, but he doesn’t.

  Federico floats toward me, his hair billowing in the current, blood spurting from the hole my knife tore in his neck. His mouth opens and closes like he’s saying something, but no words come out. I’m trying to swim away from his grasping hands, but they’re reaching for me, reaching for me . . .

  I sit bolt upright on my mattress, breathing ragged. It was a nightmare, I tell myself. A dream. I look around the dormitory, focusing on now familiar objects. Fiere’s mattress, empty. Halla on the mattress beside me, sleeping on her back with her rounded belly sticking up. The wooden chair in the corner. The torn travel poster tacked to the back of the door. “—sit exotic Bangkok” the text below a golden Buddha figure begs.

  I lie back. It must be almost morning. It was after midnight when we got back, although I felt like we’d been gone for days. Alexander was waiting for us, skin waxy with pain and tension. Saben gave him a brief sketch of what happened, playing up my role. Alexander kissed me on both cheeks, gave me a draught he said would counteract most of the chemicals I might have swallowed in the river, thanked me, and sent me to bed. I know he and Saben talked for a while longer because their voices, words indistinguishable, drifted up to me.

  I lie back down, but sleep eludes me. All I can think now is, I killed a man. I killed a man. I killed a man. The words loop through my head. I’m not sure how I feel about it. Bad. I roll that idea around. I’m not even sure I feel bad. I ought to. Killing is wrong. Amerada needs all of its citizens to rebuild and repopulate. It happened so fast. Reflex, muscle memory, just like Fiere talked about. In that split second, I knew it was keep Federico from warning the others, or die. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want Saben to die. It was us or Federico. That justified it, right? It was combat, not murder. Federico betrayed us thinking he was betraying Kareen; he deserved to die. I can’t quite convince myself of that. I lie awake, wrestling with it, until a lightening beyond the filmed windows tells me the sun is up.

  “Oh, my goodness! What happened to you?” Halla is awake, facing me, eyes wide. “Your hair. And why are there brown streaks on your face?”

  I scrunch my fingers through my shorter hair. “I, uh, got tired of it, thought it would be easier to take care of this way,” I lie.

  She gives me a look that says she knows I’m lying. Best friends can say all sorts of things without opening their mouths.

  "I helped Bulrush with something, okay? I can’t talk about it.”

  “As long as you’re okay.” She rolls out of bed and stretches. “I am so ready to have this baby. Loudon’s unit should get back today. I can’t believe I’ll see him tomorrow. By the way, I think your hair’s cute like that.” She disappears into the hall.

  When it’s my turn in the hyfac, I scrub my face until it’s red, trying to get rid of the dye. There’s nothing I can do about my hair which seems to have developed a wave now that it’s shorter. I cock my head and assess it in the sliver of mirror hanging over the sink. It’s not hideous.

  Apparently, Wyck thinks otherwise. “Why’d you cut off your hair? Where’d you disappear to last night?”

  I’m too tired to lie. “I can’t talk about it.” I try to move past him, eager for breakfast—starved, in fact— but he blocks my way.

  “Saben was gone, too.” There’s accusation in his voice.

  “So?”

  “Were you with him?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Were you with him?”

  The look of frustration and jealousy on his face makes me say, “Not in any romantic way.”

  Before I can guess what he’s going to do, he grabs me by my upper arms and kisses me. He mashes my lips against my teeth. It hurts. I wrench away. “What the hell, Wyck?”

  He runs his hands through his brown curls. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just—You can’t trust him, Ev. He’s geneborn. What’s he doing here anyway?”

  I wasn’t about to discuss Saben with Wyck this morning, despite having some of the same reservations. I was too emotionally and physically battered. “I can’t do this,” I say, and brush past him.

  Halla is already in the dining room with Alexander, Saben, and surprisingly, Fiere. Halla’s standing, staring down at Alexander who is sitting with a dish on his lap. “What do you mean the house is on ‘lockdown?’”

  “One of the ministers’ wives was murdered last night,” he says calmly without glancing at me or Saben. “The city is in an uproar, with IPF everywhere. We can’t risk going out for a day or two. I know you’re eager to see Loudon, my dear, but you’re going to have to be patient a day or two longer.”

  “I’m having his baby any day now. I need to see him,” she pleads.

  “You will,” Alexander says. “Just not today. And probably not tomorrow.”

  Halla runs out of the room, tears in her eyes. Emotions are running high with everyone, I note. I glance at Fiere who is ghost-pale but composed. No one would guess she had surgery yesterday. “How are you?”

  She gives a wry smile. “Better than you’d think. Kareen’s a miracle worker, despite her sub-par training.” She shoots a mischievous look at Alexander who manages a smile.

  “I’m the one who’ll be changing your dressing later this morning, so be careful,” he says. It’s a hollow threat. He’s so pleased she’s doing well that he looks twice as energized as yesterday.

  “There’s no sign of infection,” she tells him. “I peeked.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Would I be this perky if there were?”

  “Perky” is not a word I’d have associated with Fiere.

  “You’d probably still be annoying if you had gangrene, the flu and cholera,” Saben teases.

  Fiere actually sticks out her tongue at him. I watch in mild astonishment. Alexander looks on with a smile, a benevolent father watching his children spar. For a moment, I want more than anything to be part of this family. Then I remember that they’re not really a family and that if they were, they regard me as the third cousin twice removed who has to be tolerated for a while, but not really included. I remember that I’ve got plans of my own—finding my real parents—and that Bulrush is not part of those plans. Wyck concentrates on his breakfast of mushrooms, potatoes and dried fish and leaves as soon as he scoops up the last bite.

  As soon as he’s gone, Fiere leans forward, then winces and straightens again. “I hear you did well last night.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  She doesn’t seem to expect a response. She says, “Must be the excellent training you received.”

  Saben jeers, Alexander smiles, and I can’t help laughing. “Must be,” I agree.

  I help Fiere to her temporary room on this floor so Alexander can examine her. I suspect she has overexerted herself because she leans heavily against me. I steady her as she sits on a bed that’s actually up on a frame. She starts to untie the loose robe wrapped around her, but then stops.

  “I already saw the scar,” I say neutrally. “You had a hysterectomy, didn’t you?”

  With a decidedly less friendly glance than earlier, she says, “I suppose you think you have something on me now.”

  “No. I don’t want ‘something on you.’” Who would I tell anyway? It’s not like I’m in a position to trot to the IPF with the information, no matter how condescending she is sometimes. I wouldn’t anyway; I don’t want Fiere put to death for having her womb cut out.

  “Then I suppose you think I owe you an explanation.”

  “You don’t owe me anything. Give it a rest, why don’t you?”

  I’m on my way out the door when she says, “I’ve borne two children.”

  I turn slowly, not sure how I feel about receiving her confidence, but not feeling like I can reject it and walk out, either. “You were a surrogate?”

  She nods. “Against my will.”

  “How can that be? What do
you mean?”

  “Four years ago. I got careless. Doesn’t matter how. Bounty hunters snatched me and sold me to a RESCO. They inseminated me.”

  “What’s a RESCO?”

  Fiere looks like she can’t believe I don’t know the term. She hesitates, as if she regrets starting this conversation. “Reproduction Support Community. Hah! It’s a euphemism for hell, for baby-bearing slavery.”

  “My God.” I imagine people like Armyn and his mother, or the Dravon brothers, running these baby factories. “What happened?”

  “I had a baby. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. They took it away and inseminated me again two weeks later. I had no opportunity to get away, no way to contact Alexander. I thought about killing myself. But I didn’t,” she spits. “There were dozens of us there. Some of the women had had six or seven babies in as many years. They treated us well as long as we didn’t cause trouble. The food was good and plentiful, the medical care the best in Amerada. They kept telling us how privileged we were to be bearing Amerada’s future leaders.” Her snarl says what she thinks of their rhetoric. “I made a contact. One of the midwives. She smuggled a note to Alexander for me. He got me out after I had the second baby. I begged him for a hysterectomy.” Her fingers pluck at the robe. “In the early part of the century, they outlawed what they called ‘puppy mills,’ which was the same concept, only with dogs. They treat women like dogs, worse than dogs.”

  “It can’t be legal,” I breathe.

  She gives me that disbelieving stare. “Legal? The RESCOs are government-run. Don’t you know anything about the real world?”

  I stand abruptly. “That can’t be true! Sure, the government encourages women to be surrogates, but they don’t force them. I’ve had friends from the Kube volunteer for surrogacy. They have a baby and then they move on, go to school or move to an outpost.”

  “Have you ever talked to one of those women again?” Fiere asks with a knowing smile. “They volunteer to have one baby, but then they find they’re virtually prisoners, forced to have baby after baby until they’re worn out. The government usually lets them go after eight or nine, I understand.”

  “Then how come the whole country doesn’t know about this? How do they keep these women from telling everyone what happened to them?” I’m sure she’s wrong.

  “Memory wipe,” Fiere says soberly. “SMO.”

  “That technology’s still experimental,” I say. “It doesn’t always work. Sometimes it wipes out too many memories.”

  “I know.”

  I take a hasty turn around the small room. “I don’t believe you.”

  Fiere seems too tired to argue with me. She lies back against the pillow. “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t change the facts. That’s where the Dravon brothers would have taken you and Halla if Bulrush hadn’t kicked their asses.”

  I know the government is concerned about growing the population, but what Fiere’s suggesting is gross, repulsive, horrifying. She must be wrong. The Pragmatists can’t sanction this, can’t employ thugs like the Dravons. Maybe these RESCOs exist and Fiere got caught in one, but they can’t be government institutions. They can’t be. They must be run by individuals, criminal organizations who are selling the babies on the black market. I know there are lots of people who want children who can’t have any themselves and who have been on the government waiting list for a geneborn child for years. Some of them, I’ve heard, will pay for a baby and forged procreation license.

  “You can tell Halla,” Fiere says. “Not about me, but about . . . about RESCOs. She should know. She needs to be careful.”

  “Thanks, Fiere.” She’s in pain, only a day out of surgery; I’m not going to argue with her.

  “This doesn’t make us best friends or anything,” she says as I walk to the door. “I just thought you should know.”

  “Got it, Fiere. Not best friends. Ships that pass in the night. Two people who happen to be putting up at the same brothel, sharing a wall, passing in the halls, one of them occasionally throwing a roundhouse kick at the other . . . nothing more. Got it.”

  Alexander’s in the hall, about to come in, so I leave the door open as I stalk away. “What’s bothering Everly?” I hear him ask before I move out of earshot.

  What is bothering Everly, I ask myself as I run down the hall. I desperately want my beach. I need the pounding waves, the scouring wind, the briny scent. Being cooped up in this house is driving me crazy. Never mind that I was out of it last night and almost got shot and drowned; I need out now. There’s nowhere to go. I suspect Halla’s upstairs, crying about not getting to see Loudon, and I can’t cope with her pregnancy-addled emotions right now. Idris is probably doing something Bulrush-ish somewhere, maybe on the illicit computer. Wyck . . . I can help Wyck dig tunnels.

  I don’t know exactly where I’m going, so I’m forced to ask Saben. I find him in the kitchen. He shoves aside a sheet of paper when I come in. Probably secret Bulrush plans. I’m tired of all the secrecy. He gives me a curious look, but tells me how to find the new tunnel excavation. “Want me to show you?” he asks.

  “I can find it.” I hurry down the ladder, wincing as abused muscles complain, and borrow one of the scooters Saben said would be hidden in a declivity not far away. I zip through the dimly lit tunnel, feeling like a mole. I remember the story of Thumbelina, forcibly wed to a mole, and I shudder. When I get within a few hundred yards of the excavation site, I hear the rhythmic sound of a shovel hitting dirt and then tossing it. Clang, scrrrape, plup. Clang, scrrrape, plup. I come around a corner and see Wyck, shirtless, shoveling with a fury that suggests he, too, is working through something.

  “I’ve come to help,” I say when he looks up.

  “Grab a shovel.” He nods to where three shovels are leaning against the tunnel wall with a stack of old flooring for braces.

  We shovel side by side for half an hour, dumping the dirt into a cart. “What do they do with all that?” I ask, leaning on my shovel for a breather. My palms are blistered.

  “Take it up top and spread it around at night.” Wyck keeps shoveling, doesn’t look at me.

  “Look, I’m sorry about this morning. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, but I promised.”

  “It’s okay. I understand.”

  Even if he understands, it’s clear he’s not okay with it. “Where shall we go after Bulrush moves Halla and Loudon and the baby to wherever?”

  This makes him pause and look at me. Sweat drips into his eyes. It’s not hot down here, but it’s muggy. “You still want to go?”

  “Of course. You didn’t think I wanted to hang on here, did you, become part of the Bulrush underground railroad?”

  I can tell that’s exactly what he thought.

  “I’m not a . . . not a that kind of person.” Not a rebel, not particularly brave, not a risk taker. “I’m a scientist. I need a lab, plants, the opportunity to help a community, maybe an outpost, grow food. I know cloning vectors and gene expression, not ambushes and fighting and super-secret code words.”

  The old grin lights Wyck’s face. “I am definitely not a shoveler. So, when Halla’s safe, we’re going to go west, find an outpost and do our thing?”

  I nod. “Sounds like a plan.”

  He reaches out a callused hand and I put mine into it, moving closer so he can kiss me. This kiss is gentle and sweet. I smile up at him.

  “Cas was talking about coming with us,” Wyck says, releasing me. “That would be okay, wouldn’t it? I mean, three of us would be safer than just us two, right? He’s got military training, after all, and knows all the Bulrush stations en route to the outposts,”

  I’m taken aback. Cas and I haven’t conversed much beyond “good morning” and details of the Kareen mission. “I suppose,” I say slowly. “I didn’t know you had discussed us—our plans—with anyone else.”

  “Cas is a good listener,” Wyck says, not meeting my eyes.

  Puzzled, I study his face. “I need to get back and c
heck on Halla. She was really upset about the lockdown.”

  “I’ll go with you. I’ve had enough of this shoveling crap to last a lifetime.”

  It takes only a few minutes to skim back to the ladder below the brothel. Wyck leads the way confidently, having traveled the route daily for more than a week. We part with a quick hug. I head upstairs to find Halla, steeling myself for the inevitable outpourings of tears, frustration, and worry.

  She’s not in our room. Hm. I check the hyfac. Empty. I trot down the stairs. She’s not in the main room, the ballroom or the kitchen where Gunter and Saben are cleaning a bag of vegetables that a sympathizer has dropped off. I peek into Fiere’s room, thinking Halla might be keeping her company. Fiere’s asleep and Halla’s not there. I’m beginning to get worried. I return to the kitchen. “Have you guys seen Halla?”

  “Not since breakfast,” Saben says. He puts down the clump of radishes he’s cleaning. “Want us to help look?”

  I nod. The three of us fan out and search. We meet back in the main room five minutes later. Alexander joins us, having been alerted by Saben. “Halla’s gone,” I announce.

  Alexander frowns. “Where could she—”

  “Loudon.” I’m suddenly sure of it. “She’s gone to find Loudon.”

  “How could she?” Saben asks. “She doesn’t know where the base is.”

  Cold steals through me. Without a word, I dash upstairs and grab my messenger bag. Book, feather, other detritus. . . The map I printed out at the Kube is gone, the one with the geocoords for Loudon’s base. I return to the others. “She’s got a map,” I say. I explain.

  “Damn the girl,” Alexander says, worry etching his face. “Even if she gets to the base, she’ll never get access to Loudon. She’ll be arrested.”

  “Or worse,” Saben says.

  With Fiere’s tale of RESCOs fresh in my thoughts, I blanch. “We’ve got to find her.”

  “I’ll go,” Saben says. “She can’t have left more than—at most—an hour ago, right? With any luck, I can catch her before she gets to the base.”