by Nadia Afifi
Amira took a step back.
“Is she a Fed?” Rozene yelled. “Here to carve me to pieces when I die like the others? You don’t know what’s wrong with me. None of you know anything! You’ll let me die! Me and my baby!”
Her wrists slid out of Naomi’s grip and she shifted her fury toward the source; the holomentic machine. For a heavily pregnant woman, she grappled at the equipment with surprising strength while Naomi pulled at her elbows, fighting to regain control. Naomi panted with the effort of restraining Rozene while Amira stood in stunned silence, rooted to the ground. “She’s here to help, she’s a—”
“You think I’m crazy!” Rozene continued to claw at the wires, albeit with less conviction. “I’m not crazy. I wasn’t crazy before I came here, it’s the drugs you give me that are making me crazy. All I do is sleep, and these dreams….”
“Sedate her now,” a light, calm voice said, and Amira gasped.
Valerie Singh stood at the ward’s entrance. The scientist leaned against the door frame, observing the scene with a nonchalant detachment that suggested they were discussing the weather at a picnic.
Rozene collapsed back into the bed and burst into tears. The outburst, the rise followed by the crash, reminded Amira of her first course with Dr. Mercer, when he brought the class to the last operating Westport asylum. The elderly patients shifted between despair and sudden bursts of rage in the blink of an eye, the supposed product of chemical attacks during the Drought Wars. She pitied and feared those haunted survivors in equal measure. The small woman in front of her, shoulders slumped with exhaustion, inspired only pity.
Naomi pulled a syringe from her coat in a swift, furtive motion and in seconds, Rozene’s head tilted to one side, the small features on her tear-streaked face relaxing as she slipped back into unconsciousness.
Amira recognized Dr. Singh immediately, from her countless appearances on television and the Stream, but she was taken aback by how diminutive the famed geneticist appeared in person. Dark-skinned with black hair tied into a tight, elegant bun, Dr. Singh had an aura of effortless composure that was offset by calculating green eyes. She wore the signature black coat reserved for Aldwych’s highest-ranking researchers, its lapel decorated with a variety of medals and pins, compact trophies from a long, eventful career.
“You must be Amira Valdez,” she said. “Our new assistant from the Academy.”
Amira cleared her throat, glancing back at the now catatonic Rozene. She struggled for words.
“Yes.”
“I’m not up to date on how modern therapy is taught these days, but I would think the goal would be to help the patient, not instigate a nervous breakdown.”
Amira flushed. “Before I can do anything to help, I need to understand what’s happening to her and why. I can’t tell from her profile summary how the previous psychiatrist was treating her.”
Dr. Singh smiled with cold appreciation at the subtle retort – both women knew there had not been a dedicated psychiatrist on the project before today.
“Is it safe to sedate her in her condition?” Amira continued, emboldened.
“Safer than the alternative,” Singh said.
She turned to the monitor displaying Rozene’s vitals and ran her hands pensively over the screen. “I understand the science of cloning and of genetics, and there is nothing medically wrong with M. Hull. She should be healthy and on her way to the history books, as should I be, delivering the first true human clone to the world. She should not be in danger, but for some reason, she is.”
She paced across the room and Naomi jumped out of her path.
“The previous subjects both died with no clear and conclusive medical explanation,” Singh said. “With the physical options ruled out, it’s obvious to me now that the problem we are facing must be a psychological one. Stress can attack and corrode the body more fiercely than any cancer. And we know that young women from the cesspools known as the compounds” – she nodded at Amira – “are especially vulnerable to both.”
Singh paused, staring at the monitor again with an indecipherable expression. Amira bit her lower lip, absorbing the sting of the insult in silence.
“This vulnerability has its advantages, though, at least for us,” Singh continued. “Babies are born in the compounds without genetic manipulation, not even to prevent cancer or Alzheimer’s, which is standard practice in any city. While primitive, it does make the process of cloning and manipulating the embryonic DNA much easier. Fewer complications than those we encountered with regular subjects – until these final stages of pregnancy.”
Singh resumed her pacing. Though she was in constant motion, her movements were never hurried or suggestive of uncertainty.
“I will not waste your time or mine with false niceties,” she said. “I did not request a holomentic reader, and certainly not a student, but the decision has been made. You are here because people with more power than me” a note of clear contempt crept into her smooth voice – “decided to make it so. But since you are here, your role should be extremely clear. Fix my subject. And failing that, get her to the point where she’s sane enough to keep herself and this fetus, special as it is, alive for the next few months. The world is watching us.”
Chapter Four
Submergence
The bitter cold front that gripped Westport for the last month finally gave way as the sun fought through the dense Pacific clouds, turning the pavements slick with melted snow. Westport’s residents had been long accustomed to periodic snow throughout the year and knew to embrace the warmth whenever it reemerged.
“A rough first week?”
Amira nodded, tearing into a slice of pizza with grim ferocity. Julian and D’Arcy sat across a narrow table, shoulders touching.
They sat outside, taking advantage of a warm Westport night. After passing through several Riverfront bars, they found an all-night diner that overlooked the murky canal, the perfect place to begin the grim transition to sobriety.
Julian leaned back into his seat in drowsy contentment. Rail-thin with dark brown skin and a large mop of curly black hair, he fidgeted with the animated air of a happy drunk unwilling to concede the night’s end. D’Arcy sat calmly, twirling the saltshaker with her thin, pale fingers. She shot Amira a sly smile. They had run into each other several times in Aldwych that week. Amira always did a double-take at the sight of D’Arcy in conservative, professional attire. D’Arcy had earned a reputation as a wild bohemian at the Academy, due to her ever-changing appearance. On this particular night, her strapless dress revealed a string of tattoos and tribal scarring down her left arm along with a new henna pattern around her neck, made to look like twisting branches. Her dark, razor-straight hair was contrastingly simple, hovering above her pale shoulders. In Aldwych, however, D’Arcy played the game.
“I feel like you’ve been hiding from me,” D’Arcy said, waving the pizza in a mock-threatening gesture. “I came up to the Soma yesterday to drop off some code and that adorable assistant said you were logging a session in the back rooms, ‘not to be disturbed under any circumstances’.”
Amira laughed, imagining pink-haired, bubbly Naomi parroting her warning at D’Arcy.
“Sorry about that,” Amira said. “Like you said, it wasn’t an easy week.”
“So that poor girl isn’t getting any better?”
“No,” Amira sighed, her thoughts returning to Rozene. “She doesn’t trust me, so I haven’t even tried a waking reading yet. I’ve just been monitoring her dreams for now. She’s sedated for at least half of the day – special sedatives that are supposed to be safe for pregnancy, but it doesn’t seem right.”
Following the outburst on the first day, Amira and Rozene’s rapport had not improved. Remembering the learned bigotry of the Trinity Compound, Amira wondered if Rozene’s hostility derived from Amira’s skin color, but the young woman treated others on the pro
ject, including Valerie Singh, with comparative respect. To allay concerns that Amira was a ‘Fed’, Naomi had revealed that Amira had escaped from a compound as well. Amira had been downloading recordings from the holomentic machine at the time and Rozene laughed aloud from the bed, a shrill, mocking sound of disbelief. When Amira admitted that it was true, she had come from the Children of the New Covenant, she felt an odd sense of flattery that Rozene had considered it impossible, followed by guilt at her own desire to be as far removed from this broken woman as possible.
Once she accepted the fact of Amira’s compound past, Rozene’s distrust of her only grew. Amira would catch Rozene staring at her as she arranged the lab equipment, watching with a hungry, searching expression. Amira did not need to read her thoughts to know what question plagued Rozene – how had this compound girl ended up here?
Amira smiled grimly. “Valerie Singh thinks I’m an idiot. She has this way of looking right through you, like you’re a piece of decoration on the wall. Some cheap painting of a fruit bowl.” Accustomed to endless praise at the Academy, Amira was stung by Singh’s dismissiveness to an unexpected degree. Though Amira tried to return the indifference, she desperately wanted to prove herself to the geneticist, a woman who validated her loftiest ambitions. Dr. Singh came from a notoriously volatile region in India after the Drought Wars, where girls attended school under the cover of armed guards, before thriving in cosmopolitan Kolkata. Amira had hoped that Dr. Singh’s background would provide a source of common ground, an illusion quickly dispelled in the last few days.
“Well, we’re all idiots compared to the famous Dr. Singh,” Julian said. “Even this one here.” He nudged D’Arcy affectionately. Amira had only known them as a couple, having met them both on her first day in the Canary House. Both studied in technical fields, although Julian’s true loves were his radio show and artwork. Julian had claimed the empty attic of the Canary House for his art, covering its walls with rich colors of paint and chalk. Amira visited the makeshift studio frequently to escape the heat of her own room, as well as to take in the dystopian, surreal landscapes that stretched around the ceiling.
“I need to make some progress,” Amira continued. “Dr. Singh thinks the subject – Rozene’s – health problems at her age are mostly psychological at this point, so the onus is on me to figure out how to mitigate them.”
“Mitigate?” D’Arcy asked, her thin brows arching slightly. “Isn’t it obvious why she would be under stress? She’s a guinea pig who watched the previous batch of subjects die under ‘mysterious circumstances’. I don’t blame her in the slightest for being in a panic. And I also find it strange that two – two – healthy young women just dropped dead and miscarried, don’t you think?”
Amira bristled at the contempt in D’Arcy’s voice.
“These are the best geneticists in the world,” she said with a hint of defensiveness. Though it had only been a few days, she was now part of the Pandora team. “And this is Westport, not compound territory. There’s no conspiracy and no malice. That’s what the anti-cloning religionists want you to think.”
“The world isn’t divided cleanly between the forces of scientific truth and the compounds,” Julian said with uncharacteristic gentleness, a by-product of the alcohol pulsing through his system. “Westport isn’t as perfect and pure as you make it out to be, Amira. We’re all human, after all. There are bound to be prejudices, mistakes made. And at the end of the day, it’s money, not knowledge, that fuels Aldwych.”
Amira wrinkled her nose before hiding her frustration in another slice of pizza. Julian never failed to mention the world’s nuances and complexities, but spent little time experiencing life outside of the cities. For Amira, Westport was more than an adopted home – it saved her from the misery, the pseudo-life she would have lived out in the compound. Even on her worst days, she remembered that fact.
She sighed, gazing down the promenade. The chains of light from the nearby bridge reflected in the canal, its black water swaying rhythmically with restless, breaking waves.
“What’s going on down there?” Julian called, pointing at the lower walking path that lined the waterway. Near the bridge, a small crowd gathered around something on the ground. A skinny teenager with a red mohawk prodded a stick toward a small, dark object before backing away nervously.
“Some junkie hyped on Elysium,” D’Arcy said under her breath.
The kid looked around, confused, and saw Julian waving above him. “It’s a bat or something,” he shouted back. “We’re trying to get it to move, but it looks hurt.”
Amira leaned over the rail. It certainly looked like a bat, a more familiar sight to her than to Westport natives, who treated any non-domesticated animal as an exotic creature to be coveted and feared in equal measure.
“Let’s check it out,” Julian said eagerly, and he ran down the walkway steps. D’Arcy smiled down at the scene with a bemused, forcibly detached air, but followed closely behind to watch the excitement. Amira remained seated.
“Look, it’s trying to move!”
“It might be a baby or something, maybe it can’t fly yet….”
“How can you tell?”
“Something going on down there?” A male voice, closer than the crowd by the canal.
A man had taken the seat opposite Amira, nodding in the direction of the expanding crowd along the river.
Amira blinked with surprise at the man’s sudden appearance. Where had he come from? “Just a crew of drunks who’ve apparently never seen a bat before,” she said.
The man was unshaven with a wry smile that enhanced his sharp, not unhandsome features. It was difficult to discern his age – by Westport standards, he could be as old as forty or as young as his early thirties in a compound, where time turned at a faster, harsher pace. His worn jacket looked several sizes too large for him, drawing attention to his slight frame. A web of tattoos peered out behind his long sleeves, extending to his wrists. The man’s eyes were red, bloodshot, and there was an odd glow around his pupils that did not come from a Third Eye. Not used to the Westport pollution, perhaps. He stretched casually back into the booth.
“Not impressed with the flying rodent, love?” he asked. His accent was difficult to place, a hybrid of Standard North American and one of the United Kingdom’s countless regional inflections.
“I dissected a few, before that became illegal,” she said. In truth, she had never dissected a bat. The creatures were ubiquitous in the desert, hovering in dark swarms outside of her bedroom at night, but Amira decided to avoid any hints of the compound.
“So, another science kid.” He leaned in closer toward her with a confiding, playful grin. “This city is full of them. Is anyone here not an Academy student or a struggling artist?”
“We get the occasional visitor,” she replied. Though she was beginning to tire of the uninvited tablemate, a sense of politeness drove her deeper into the conversation. “Are you from Westport?”
“Nah, I’m an outsider myself,” he said, before taking a drink from D’Arcy’s abandoned water glass. “Name’s Hadrian Wolfe. I came down from the North American Space Harbor a few days ago.”
The North American Space Harbor, commonly referred to as NASH, was the largest human-formed structure in space, an enormous gateway station for research hubs that cruised through Earth’s lower orbit. The space elevator connected the Pacific Parallel to NASH, which rotated in line with the Earth in geostationary orbit, enabling the elevator to transfer cargo and workers into space. In addition to the business of scientific research, NASH also played host to the thriving space tourism industry.
Amira smiled, reaching out to shake his extended hand. “Well met.”
He leaned back again, watching her flick crumbs of pizza crust from her fingers. Aside from Julian, Amira always felt uncomfortable eating in front of men. On the rare occasions when she woke up in a room that was not her ow
n, she snuck out in the early hours to avoid the threat of breakfast.
Julian and D’Arcy lingered at the base of the canal walkway. The bat fluttered its wings in a feeble, erratic attempt at flight, pushing off the ground and careening sideways until it landed again to a cacophony of groans from the expanding crowd.
Hadrian Wolfe chuckled before turning back to Amira. “You don’t seem happy for someone on a night out, at least not like your friends over there.”
Amira shrugged. “It’s been a long week.”
“Long week? Trouble with classes, or something tied to the work you do?”
The pointedness of the comment disarmed her. The work you do. Though his demeanor remained open and casual, Amira, whose job centered on extracting information from people, recognized the early stages of an interrogation.
“So, you work at NASH?” she asked, gesturing upward to the sky.
“Most of the time. Sometimes, my work takes me to the other stations or back to HQ here in the ’Port. And sometimes, to Aldwych.”
The breeze from the river passed through her, bringing a cold, sober realization with it. He continued to smile but his light blue eyes were now probing, alight with unveiled purpose. This was no chance encounter.
“You’re ISP,” she said, her pulse kicking up a notch. International Station Police. An investigator for NASH.
“How’d you guess?”
“You have that undercover space cop look.”
“I wanted to chat with you in a more relaxed setting, Amira Valdez,” Agent Wolfe replied. “And explain how you could help us both.”
Now sober in every sense of the word, Amira grew tense and rigid in her seat. When she remained silent, formulating her response, he continued.
“I work at the Space Harbor,” he said, nodding upward to the cloudless sky, where, on the clearest of nights, Westport denizens could see a bright light over the ocean that marked the enormous station. “And keep an eye on the goings on at the research stations spinning around above us – stations run by the companies in Aldwych, including your new employers at the Mendel-Soma building, where Pandora resides. You’ve no doubt heard the news that something is going on at the Carthage station – Alistair Parrish’s station.”