“Zelia!” a voice booms behind me. It’s Hex or Cy, I can’t tell. The distant crunch of footsteps on fallen crisp fronds grows closer.
“What can I do?” I cry at the gray screen.
“For one thing, don’t tell anyone about us.”
“But—”
“Don’t talk about me. I promise I’ll tell you more when we meet.”
“Where?” I can’t hide the desperation in my voice.
My question goes unanswered as the thick static resumes. The crunching steps are close, so I turn off my holo. It’s Hex. I must look panicked and ill, because immediately he puts four hands on me as if I’m going to fall over.
“Hey, you look awful. What happened?”
“Nothing. I just needed some air.” I steady myself, but I have to hyperventilate a little. He appraises me and steps back, crossing both pairs of arms.
“You’re pretty spooked.”
I wave my hand around. “There was this . . . thing.” In a flash, I remember the bird that got zapped by the blue fence on my first day. “It flew by my head,” I lie.
“Oh, the white bats. Yeah, they’re irritating.” He spins around, but the airspace is bat-free. “Oh, I almost forgot. Cy wants to talk to you. Something about hogging one of the lab machines.”
“Why didn’t he come himself?”
“He’s stuck in the lab. He promised not to murder my basketball in return.”
“How kind of him.”
Hex shrugs. “That’s what siblings are for, right?”
I can’t help it, but I don’t remotely think of these people as family. Dyl is all I have. She’s real. These people, this place, it’s not the same. Hex sees my face and shades his eyes from the sun.
“You miss your sister, huh?”
My eyes water involuntarily at his question. “Yeah.”
He steps forward and wraps his arms around me, my face peeking out between his two left arms. Being hugged by a four-armed dude is unbelievable. It’s all comfort and warm muscles and just . . . wonderful.
I wipe my face off with a sleeve. “So, you have a lab too, right?” I ask, heading for my conversational comfort zone.
“Eh, I’m just twenty butterfingers in there. Marka forced Cy to watch over my shoulder and I managed to isolate my trait, but I kept screwing up the next part. No one, not even fourth-world countries, will benefit from having three noses or four pairs of lips, so my work is kind of done.”
We walk back to the stairwell entrance, where Vera is decently dressed in a white bikini top and sarong. She’s reading on her holo and eating a small handful of soil by moistening her finger in her mouth, pressing it into the dirt, and then licking off her brown fingertip.
“That is so wrong, on so many levels.” Hex shields his eyes.
“Move along, people.” She waves us away, too absorbed in her reading to parry with Hex’s insults. Hex throws me a conspiratorial smile.
I smile back, but it’s not real. Underneath, I’m a tangle of conflicting thoughts. What if Q is the only person who’s really on my side?
I CLOSE MY EYES WHEN I PASS through the doorway of the lab, and ready myself for the upcoming argument. I’m not hogging Cy’s machines. They’re our machines now.
What I don’t expect is to see Cy at his desk, clutching the edge of it so hard, I can see the cut of his triceps. His tattoos are so dense today that hardly any patches of pale skin show on his arms or neck. Black plugs widen his earlobes. The expression on his face isn’t the usual mask of anger or irritation. It’s crestfallen. As if he’s failed to erase a heartbreak he wishes didn’t exist.
I creep forward, afraid to say anything. The screens above him show news clippings from a few medical journals.
NIH halts neural transfer research due to high mortality
Long-term stroke reversal study proves ineffective
Case studies of promising neural growth factor reveal negative results
And something far more worrisome—a spreadsheet of a lab protocol, marked with red stylus lines. It’s crossed out violently as if it’s been raked over by bloodied fingernails.
As I peer at the images, my foot hits an errant metal scoop on the floor. Cy jerks his head up. His eyes meet mine, and for a second I glimpse the sorrow inside them.
Oh god, I know that feeling. The same one I felt when Dyl was taken.
Before I can say anything, he’s out of the lab, but not before I hear him bark through the doorway, “Screens off!”
The seven screens on his desk blur to gray.
CY DOESN’T RETURN TO THE LAB. In fact, I don’t see him for the rest of the day. At dinnertime, there’s a rare, multiple-Carus-member showing in the kitchen after Vera makes a huge eggplant Parmesan casserole. Only Cy is absent. No one wall-coms him to join us; they seem more cheerful without him around.
I wish he’d come back. Some soft, squishy part of me feels guilty for not saying anything when he was upset. I know what I wouldn’t say. Crap like “It’s going to be all right.” The biggest lie in Holo-Hallmark history.
Late into the night, I reach the final stage of making multiple copies of Dyl’s DNA. I was thrilled up to the part when I trashed the entire batch by pouring the wrong buffer into the replicator.
I have exactly one strand of Dyl’s hair left. One chance. I’ll make it happen. Even if I don’t, something else buoys my hope and quells the panic that Dyl is slipping out of my grasp.
Q’s voice continues to haunt me. The clock on one of the screens flashes 1:45 a.m. I head out the door for answers of a different sort.
In the hallway, I ask, “Where’s Wilbert?”
“Down the hallway, take the left transport to level one.”
If only the walls could tell me what I really wanted to know. What Dyl’s trait is, and how Q knows her. If Dyl knows how much I love her. Why Cy’s heart is as broken as mine. The secrets of the universe. The usual.
As I head for the transport, I figure it doesn’t hurt to ask. “Do you know who Q is?”
“Q is a letter of the alphabet,” the wall answers tonelessly.
Great, thanks.
“Okay then. What’s the meaning of life?”
“I have been programmed by Hexus to reply ‘meatballs,’” it says.
Oh lord. Serves me right for asking.
Before long, I find Wilbert’s workroom. A couch and coffee table sit in the center of the room, a cozy contrast to the mess of hardware everywhere else. Instead of rows of lab tables (or the naked women in his bedroom), computer screens cover each wall. Broken machines with their guts spilling out—hair-thin photon wires and internal gel circuits—lie on every inch of available floor space.
“Wilbert?” I carefully step over the broken chunky machines, making my way to the sofa, upholstered in a vomitous tan plaid.
“Yee-ah.” Behind the largest pile of junk, a hand waves, followed by one of Wilbert’s heads. “Be right out.”
“Is this all for your doctorate?” I say, poking the innards of what looks like a titanium espresso machine. Part of the gel circuit sticks to my hand, and I try to wipe it on my shirt. It stays aggressively attached to my finger, like a bit of gummy candy with glue-like aspirations.
“Oh, that’s not good. Here.” He emerges from his mountain and hands me a tiny spray bottle. “Use that.”
I spray the goop on my finger, and it dissolves enough for me to wipe it off on my sleeve.
“Can you believe that drop of gel held enough storage space for one million books?” His eyes are wide open and eager with a geektastic expression I know so well. I’ve doled it out enough times myself. “Want something to drink?”
“Sure. Got any of that mushroom tea of Vera’s?”