“Ugh. You like that stuff?” Wilbert makes a face at me and punches in an order.
“It’s growing on me.”
“Fungus has that effect on people,” he chortles. After handing me the steaming cup, something small, brown, and very rodent-like emerges from his shirt and squeals at me.
“What the eff is that?” I shriek, spilling hot tea on my pants. I pull my legs up onto the couch.
“Callie! Bad girl!” He scoops up the hairy thing and puts it on the floor. Now I can see that it’s the size of a tiny dog. A shiny pink, coin-shaped nose wiggles in delight. Dark, glistening eyes dart back and forth between us. “This is Callie. She’s a recombinant pig.” It’s the weirdest, furriest pig I’ve ever seen. Even the curly tail is covered in brown fuzz and is more pom-pom than tail.
“So how’s the lab work going?” he says, scratching Callie’s rump.
I answer him with an expression of disgust, and wisely, he doesn’t pursue it. Callie, however, isn’t as polite. She makes a super-pig jump onto the couch, pounces on my chest, and licks my ear with vigor.
“Ew, ew, EWWWW!” I shake my hands, and poor Wilbert scrambles to grab Callie off me. With a grunt and squeal, Callie goes back into his shirt. I wipe away the pig spit and pop out my slime-covered holo stud.
“There’s a sink over there. I’m so sorry. Callie isn’t usually so frisky with strangers. She must really like you.”
“Splendid.” Oh, it’s so nice to know I attract pigs. I head for the sink at the corner of his room. After a warm blitz in the sink, the slime is vaporized into smoke and sucked into a hole at the bottom. My holo stud sparkles.
“So, Wilbert.”
“Mmm?” The mini pork rind is nestled between Wilbert’s two heads in what can only be described as true pet devotion.
“Can you trace transmissions? Like where they come from?” I wiggle my holo stud up in the air.
“Sure. Should be easy enough.” He ambles over to me. “Turn it on.”
I slide it back into my earlobe and pinch it. Again, the static.
“Tell it to list transmissions.”
“Okay.” After my command, a list of calls shows up on a blue background. The list proves that I rarely get calls. It’s so pathetic. Dyl’s would probably have at least fifty calls a day. I have like, ten in the last two weeks. At the top of the list is one from Dyl, the day before we moved. There are scattered ones from my last lab, when they asked me to work overtime hours. There’s a rare transmission from Dad, when he’s bothered to tell me the obvious—that he’ll miss dinner again. But no calls resemble any permutation of a Q-sounding name. I turn to Wilbert, whose patient face appears on the other side of the transparent blue holo screen.
“Hold on. I know I got two transmissions in the last week, and they aren’t on here.”
“A challenge! Well.” He cracks his knuckles, and Callie wakes up, irritated. She snuffles his left ear and falls asleep again. He proceeds in a whisper. “Try looking at your sent transmissions.”
I request those, and a few show up. Similar to my received list. Still no Q, which makes sense, since I didn’t send any.
“But I didn’t—”
“Trust me. Now search deleted sent transmissions.”
I order this command, not understanding, but surprisingly two show up from the days since I arrived at Carus House. Ones I’ve sent. Except I haven’t.
“Ask for the destination.”
Now two lines show up on my screen. They say the same thing.
Error@hub5001S36
“What is that?” I squint at the numbers.
“It’s a scrambling hub. One of the towers masked a transmission. See, someone contacts you via a scrambling hub, and instead of leaving an imprint of its history, it turns around and pings backward, as if you sent the message, back to the origin. Kind of to erase its steps.”
“So can I find out who sent it?”
“No. The scrambling hub is all the data you’ll get. But most of the time, the hub is close to the origin of the call.”
“Do you know where that hub is?”
“Sure. 5001S36 is an address. 5001 South Thirty-sixth Street. That’s by the river at the edge of the southern district. You know, where all the old slaughterhouses used to be? It’s pretty run-down now.”
“Oh.” I’m bursting with unanswered questions. I’m happy I didn’t just imagine those calls, but still. Why would someone hanging around old slaughterhouses know about Dyl? Then again, the idea of Dyl and slaughterhouses living in the same thought nauseates me.
“You all right?” Wilbert asks.
I must have some sort of awful expression on my face. I try to hide it with a gigantic, fake yawn. “Yeah, just tired. I’d better go. Thanks, Wilbert.”
“No problem.” Callie is now snoring between his two heads, and Wilbert picks up the pig’s foreleg and waves it at me.
That pig officially creeps me out.
Exhaustion creeps up on me, limb by limb. Somewhere in this place is my room. I’ve been here just long enough to assume I know my way back from Wilbert’s room, so I take a set of winding stairs down into a dark, twisting corridor.
Crap. This can’t be right. I can hardly see my feet and none of the doors have the familiar glowing oval of the other Carus doors.
“How do I get to my room?” I say.
Two voices answer me. Simultaneously, I hear “This way, come here” and “Left turn in ten feet.” I’m confused. What’s wrong with the direction voice lady?
Then I hear it again.
“Come here.” The voice is low in pitch, beckoning innocently. My fingers feel along the wall, toward the end of the hallway. Weird voice or no, I’m getting out of here. I decide to trust the voice that said to turn left.
My finger touches the seam of a door. In a blink, it opens to reveal a large room lit with a low, violet-colored glow emanating from the edges of the floor. I don’t want to go in, but something makes me catch my breath.
It’s a painting of a dismembered hand, fingers stretching to extremes, but cut off at the wrist, leaning against the wall. The one next to it shows a long bone, still smeared with blood, floating in the same pale blue void the hand is in.
Another painting lying on the floor is huge, the size of a king-size bed. Thumb-size naked babies are painted in row after row, crammed into every corner. Each infant face has innocent, cherry-red cheeks and vacant eyes messily dabbed on in smudged colors. I think of the doll heads in my room, and my heart begins to pound behind my eardrums.
Next to the painting, a chair sits disemboweled, the stuffing scattered over a large area. The walls have smears of suspicious dark streaks. I’m praying that it’s not blood.
On the wall, a small screen is shut off, covered by an inch-thick transparent shield. I listen carefully, but there isn’t a sound. No voice, no nothing. I inch forward to the screen.
“On,” I say. It comes alive, in green. Soon it’s replaced by a dark image, a head with mussed-up hair that groans.
“I’m so tired, Ana. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” the head speaks. Then it looks up and stares me in the face.
It’s Cy. His face is pristine and beautiful, untouched by ink or piercings. He gives me the coldest look of fury.
“Get out. Now.” His words are cutting and meant to bite.
I back away from the screen, and Cy’s entire face fills the rectangle. Off to my left, a muffled laugh sounds. It’s not a good, happy laugh, but one of malice and discontent.
At that moment, I feel a cool hand clasp my wrist. I jerk back, but there’s no hand around my arm, no person nearby. But I can still feel fingers pressing against my skin. It starts to squeeze harder, hurting me. My hands start to shake. What have I walked into?
“Get OUT, Zelia!” Cy roars.