She had promised to take him to Las Vegas.
Mom? I’m scared.
“I’m here now,” she said. “Don’t be scared, okay?”
“Mom . . .”
“Hush, kiddo.”
A single thought, through a blizzard of psychic static: I love you, Mom.
And then Xerxes was gone. The blanket sagged, empty but for a slurry of organic molecules. The ammonia-and-hay odor of dead homunculus wafted out of the incubator. Niobe sobbed. One nurse hugged her tightly, patting her on the back and murmuring encouragements, while another collected the dead child’s remains in a sample jar.
The chimes sounded again, louder this time. A low voice on the PA system. “Genetrix to therapy two. Genetrix to therapy two, please.”
She didn’t want to go. But Xerxes’s death had slipped a knife into her gut, and every secret, selfish thought gave it a vicious twist. Regularity was crucial. Generations yet unborn—but cherished no less—would drop like mayflies, if not for BICC’s rigid methodologies. And so she went, for the sake of her future family.
Therapy room two mimicked the layout of Niobe’s own quarters, except for the larger bed (a California king-size mattress) and the curtains along one wall.
Christian was seated on the edge of the bed. He looked up when she walked in. “Where were you? They’re going nuts in there.” He gestured at the curtains with the long, knobby fingers that always felt warm and strong on her hips.
“With Xerxes.” She wiped her eyes. “He passed. Just now.”
He grunted, pulling the shirt of his BICC uniform over his head. The soft blond hair on his body didn’t catch the lights, so his chest looked slick and bare.
“He was scared,” she said, walking behind a bamboo privacy screen in the corner. Niobe had insisted on the screen. As she draped her sweatshirt over the top of the screen, she added, “He would have liked it if you visited.”
“Who?”
“Xerxes.”
“Oh.”
The bristly hairs at the base of her tail snagged the waistband on her sweatpants. As she worked them free, she added, “You could come, next time.” Christian said nothing.
She scooted under the covers while Christian had his back turned. The linens made scratchy noises as she pulled the sheets around her. She wished she had shaved her legs, wished the wild card hadn’t given her pig hair.
The nightstand clunked as Christian dropped a prescription bottle into the drawer. He popped a pill in his mouth. She pretended not to see any of it. The pills made her feel ugly. Uglier.
She lifted the covers for him, but he paused to draw the curtains, revealing a long mirror along the far wall.
“Maybe we can leave the curtains closed, just once.”
The mattress bobbed as he climbed in next to her. “They go ape-shit when we do that.” As he plumped a pillow under his head, he added, “Besides, it’s all for the kids.”
A cotton tent raised itself farther down the bed, below Christian’s waist, as he laced his fingers behind his head. The pill had worked, whatever it was.
She leaned over to kiss him, but he pulled away.
“C’mon, Niobe. They’re waiting.”
No warmth between her legs, no tingling desire. Not that it mattered.
Niobe sighed. She took care not to glimpse the mirror as she straddled Christian, not to see her shapeless, doughy body; her tail; her acne.
Christian laid his hands on her waist, strong fingers wrapping around her hips. He never touched her stomach, or her back, or her breasts. She wanted his arms around her, but resigned herself to holding his shoulders. His fingertips dimpled her flesh as they found a rhythm.
Her tail convulsed. Niobe groaned. The ovipositor widened for peristalsis with a tearing pain that robbed her of breath. The first egg in a clutch was always the worst.
Christian finished with a little convulsion of his own, but not before she was already climbing down. She wanted to hide behind the privacy screen, but Pendergast and the others were adamant about recording every detail of the birth process. At least the sheets made a passable toga; Niobe had a lot of practice.
Christian rolled off the bed. He pulled his boxers on.
The first egg formed at the base of her tail. Through clenched teeth, she said, “Won’t you . . . unhhh . . . stay?”
He pulled his shirt back over his head. “What?”
“Don’t you want to”—another burst of pain as the first egg passed midway along her tail and the second formed—“meet the little ones?”
“Can’t. Docs gotta examine me.” Christian combed his hair in the mirror. “I’ve explained this before.”
She wondered why they couldn’t examine him before each session, but couldn’t catch her breath enough to ask. The tip of her tail tore open to pass a sticky, pineapple-sized egg. She deposited it in the square marked on the floor, where the cameras on the other side of the wall and in the ceiling could film the hatching from multiple angles.
Christian opened the door.
“Maybe you could come by and see them later?”
“Maybe,” he said. And then he was gone.
Niobe dressed while the trio of eggs wobbled, shuddered, and expanded. The first disintegrated with a little pop, overlaying a talcum-powder smell on the odors of antiseptic and sex. In its place stood a three-foot-tall homunculus: stocky, bald, but with a bushy, fiery red beard.
He rubbed his scalp and looked around the room with wide, coal-colored eyes. “Mommy?”
Niobe smiled. She opened her arms. “C’mere, Yves.”
They hugged, her son strong and healthy in her arms. She tried not to dwell on that. He felt the twinge through their bond, though, and said, “Look what I can do!”
He ran up the wall on two feet. She watched him dance upside down on the ceiling while the second egg hatched.
Yvette was tall and lithe—or would have been, were she of normal size—with waist-length auburn hair, sharp cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes. Stunning.
Thanks, Momma. The girl kissed Niobe on the cheek, then settled in her lap. She smelled like summer rain.
“Mom!” Yves kept dancing overhead. He moved on to an Irish jig, complaining, “Mom, you’re not LOOK-ing!”
“That’s fantastic, kiddo! We should sign you up for Riverdance.” Better yet, Niobe imagined, a trip to Ireland.
The third hatchling, Yectli, had pale, nearly translucent skin, a shock of white hair, and eyes like the wide, bright New Mexico sky. Albinism as a mild form of jokerism? The kid got off lucky.
“Better than that, even,” he said, reading her thoughts. He swelled his chest and cocked a thumb at himself. “Watch what I can do.”
Yectli turned toward the mirror and held his arms out. Ten little lightning bolts crackled from his fingertips to the mirror. Through the wall Niobe heard a crash, then somebody yelling for a fire extinguisher.
“I did it for you, Mom,” said Yectli. “I zapped that camera good!”
The room smelled like ozone.
Drake was securely belted into a helicopter seat with a soldier on either side of him. This was so nuts it almost made him laugh, but he was too miserable for that. He wondered why he needed to go someplace else in the first place. The doctors and soldiers scared him, but he wasn’t going to show it. And he wasn’t going to let them make him cry.
The helicopter was flying over desert scrub and they were headed more or less toward the setting sun, so Drake figured they were headed west. They might be flying over Pyote. Hell, it could be New Mexico or Arizona for all Drake knew. Desert didn’t look like much from the air. The soldiers spoke to each other every now and then in some kind of military talk that didn’t make much sense to him, but most of the time they were quiet.