I can’t help it—I laugh. “Not very encouraging, is it?”
She smiles. “That’s one way of looking at it. I prefer to look at it another way—which is that if they are persistent enough, even tiny drops of water, over time, can change the rock forever. And it will never change back.”
She points to the center of the slab, where there is a small impression, like a shallow bowl carved into the stone.
“That, for example, wasn’t there when they installed this thing.”
I nod, and watch the next drop fall. Even though I’m wary of the Bureau and everyone in it, I can feel the quiet hope of the sculpture working its way through me. It’s a practical symbol, communicating the patient attitude that has allowed the people here to stay for so long, watching and waiting. But I have to ask.
“Wouldn’t it be more effective to unleash the whole tank at once?” I imagine the wave of water colliding with the rock and spilling over the tile floor, collecting around my shoes. Doing a little at once can fix something, eventually, but I feel like when you believe that something is truly a problem, you throw everything you have at it, because you just can’t help yourself.
“Momentarily,” she says. “But then we wouldn’t have any water left to do anything else, and genetic damage isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved with one big charge.”
“I understand that,” I say. “I’m just wondering if it’s a good thing to resign yourself quite this much to small steps when you could take some big ones.”
“Like what?”
I shrug. “I guess I don’t really know. But it’s worth thinking about.”
“Fair enough.”
“So . . . you said you were looking for me?” I say. “Why?”
“Oh!” Zoe touches her forehead. “It slipped my mind. David asked me to find you and take you to the labs. There’s something there that belonged to your mother.”
“My mother?” My voice comes out sounding strangled and too high. She leads me away from the sculpture and toward the security checkpoint again.
“Fair warning: You might get stared at,” Zoe says as we walk through the security scanner. There are more people in the hallways up ahead now than there were earlier—it must be time for them to start work. “Your face is a familiar one here. People in the Bureau watch the screens often, and for the past few months, you’ve been involved in a lot of interesting things. A lot of the younger people think you’re downright heroic.”
“Oh, good,” I say, a sour taste in my mouth. “Heroism is what I was focused on. Not, you know, trying not to die.”
Zoe stops. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of what you’ve been through.”
I still feel uncomfortable with the idea that everyone has been watching us, like I need to cover myself or hide where they can’t look at me anymore. But there’s not much Zoe can do about it, so I don’t say anything.
Most of the people walking the halls wear variations of the same uniform—it comes in dark blue or dull green, and some of them wear the jackets or jumpsuits or sweatshirts open, revealing T-shirts of a wide variety of colors, some with pictures drawn on them.
“Do the colors of the uniforms mean anything?” I ask Zoe.
“Yes, actually. Dark blue means scientist or researcher, and green means support staff—they do maintenance, upkeep, things like that.”
“So they’re like the factionless.”
“No,” she says. “No, the dynamic is different here—everyone does what they can to support the mission. Everyone is valued and important.”
She was right: People do stare at me. Most of them just look at me for a little too long, but some point, and some even say my name, like it belongs to them. It makes me feel cramped, like I can’t move the way I want to.
“A lot of the support staff used to be in the experiment in Indianapolis—another city, not far from here,” Zoe says. “But for them, this transition has been a little bit easier than it will be for you—Indianapolis didn’t have the behavioral components of your city.” She pauses. “The factions, I mean. After a few generations, when your city didn’t tear itself apart and the others did, the Bureau implemented the faction components in the newer cities—Saint Louis, Detroit, and Minneapolis—using the relatively new Indianapolis experiment as a control group. The Bureau always placed experiments in the Midwest, because there’s more space between urban areas here. Out east everything is closer together.”
“So in Indianapolis you just . . . corrected their genes and shoved them in a city somewhere? Without factions?”
“They had a complex system of rules, but . . . yes, that’s essentially what happened.”
“And it didn’t work very well?”
“No.” She purses her lips. “Genetically damaged people who have been conditioned by suffering and are not taught to live differently, as the factions would have taught them to, are very destructive. That experiment failed quickly—within three generations. Chicago—your city—and the other cities that have factions have made it through much more than that.”
Chicago. It’s so strange to have a name for the place that was always just home to me. It makes the city smaller in my mind.
“So you guys have been doing this for a long time,” I say.
“Quite some time, yes. The Bureau is different from most government agencies, because of the focused nature of our work and our contained, relatively remote location. We pass on knowledge and purpose to our children, instead of relying on appointments or hiring. I’ve been training for what I’m doing now for my entire life.”
Through the abundant windows I see a strange vehicle—it’s shaped like a bird, with two wing structures and a pointed nose, but it has wheels, like a car.
“Is that for air travel?” I say, pointing at it.
“Yes.” She smiles. “It’s an airplane. We might be able to take you up in one sometime, if it doesn’t seem too daunting for you.”
I don’t react to the play on words. I can’t quite forget how she recognized me on sight.
David is standing near one of the doors up ahead. He raises his hand in a wave when he sees us.
“Hello, Tris,” he says. “Thank you for bringing her, Zoe.”
“You’re welcome, sir,” Zoe says. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Lots of work to do.”
She smiles at me, then walks away. I don’t want her to leave—now that she’s gone, I’m left with David and the memory of how I yelled at him yesterday. He doesn’t say anything about it, just scans his badge in the door sensor to open it.
The room beyond it is an office with no windows. A young man, maybe Tobias’s age, sits at one desk, and another one, across the room, is empty. The young man looks up when we come in, taps something on his computer screen, and stands.
“Hello, sir,” he says. “Can I help you?”
“Matthew. Where’s your supervisor?” David says.
“He’s foraging for food in the cafeteria,” Matthew says.
“Well, maybe you can help me, then. I’ll need Natalie Wright’s file loaded on a portable screen. Can you do that?”
Wright? I think. Was that my mother’s real last name?
“Of course,” Matthew says, and he sits again. He types something on his computer and pulls up a series of documents that I’m not close enough to see clearly. “Okay, it just has to transfer.
“You must be Natalie’s daughter, Beatrice.” He props his chin on his hand and looks at me critically. His eyes are so dark they look black, and they slant a little at the edges. He does not look impressed or surprised to see me. “You don’t look much like her.”