“Coffee,” she mumbles against the tabletop. “Industrial strength.”
Wilbert grabs two patches and slaps one on each of his heads, and Hex actually lies down on the floor with four hands covering his face. He groans miserably.
“Hex, are you okay?”
“I will be, if everyone will go mute for a few days.” He drops two hands to gently massage his stomach.
“Well, I’m glad I didn’t make any cocktails for breakfast,” I say lightly. At the mention of cocktails, Hex jumps off the floor, beelines into the kitchen, and pukes noisily into the sink.
Vera lifts her head to look at the kitchen door and then me. Cy emits a noise that sounds like air escaping from a balloon. We all burst into laughter. It’s the warmest sound I’ve heard in days. Wilbert starts pouring cups of coffee, when Hex stumbles back into the common room.
“Please don’t say that word again. Or anything that means the same thing.” He sits down at the table and Vera pushes a fresh cup of coffee over to him.
“Thanks,” he murmurs, and Vera’s lips twitch against her raised mug.
I survey the scene, realizing that for once, we’re all in the same place and not trying to yell at each other. “So, uh. How often do you guys do this club thing?” I ask, yawning so widely that my jaw actually cracks.
“Occasionally,” Wilbert says.
“Never,” Cy adds. I watch Cy after he speaks, and he turns to watch me right back. Finally, I drop my eyes to my coffee.
“But it’s never that exciting, that’s for sure. This one’s going into the books,” Vera says. “Locked away, never to be spoken of again.”
“Locked away would be nice. I saw things I never want to see again,” Hex says between coffee slurps.
As did I, I want to say, but I don’t. “Did you have fun, Wilbert?” I ask.
“All I remember is puking,” he says, grabbing some toast. “And wishing I had a mouth on this guy”—he pats his faceless head—“so I could puke twice as fast.”
“Schweeeeeet,” Hex slurs, and there’s another round of laughs. Even Wilbert’s being a good sport, joining in.
“Did Marka come home yet?”
“Not yet,” Wilbert answers. “She might be there for a few days. We never know until she shows up.”
“How often does she bring kids home? I mean, there aren’t a lot of you guys here,” I say.
“Not often. Well, before you there were the twins, little Edgar and Pria. They had these extra eyes on their body. Creepy, but kind of cute after a while. Something wasn’t right with their brain development, though. They couldn’t walk, or eat right. They died within a few months.”
“How did they . . . you guys . . . get the traits? Can they be undone?” I ask, thinking of Dyl.
Vera shakes her head. “No way. Every cell we have is altered—”
“Undone? We’re not errors that need fixing,” Cy interrupts, glaring at me.
“I didn’t say that!” I retort, exasperated. I turn my back to Cy and ask Hex, “So, is there something in the water that I don’t know about?”
“No,” Vera says, softly rubbing her skin. “It’s not something in the water. Our traits aren’t random mutations. You can’t get subdermal chloroplasts without purposeful tinkering.”
“Then how?”
It’s silent for a while. Everyone steals a look at Cy, but no one speaks, as if they’re afraid of him. Finally Cy clears his throat. “New genomic sequences, directly targeting the oocytes of women. With the right cell uptake vector, you could make it into a pill. The women would never know until something like Wilbert showed up on ultrasound.”
“That technology doesn’t exist,” I counter.
“You’re looking at proof that it does,” Cy says, sitting up and returning my glance. “No legal lab has access to that kind of technology.”
“And it’s been going on for a long, long time,” Wilbert adds. “Way before we were born. I mean, look at Marka.”
“But who could possibly be doing that to women? Is it Aureus?” I wonder aloud.
“I don’t think so,” Hex says, rubbing his unshaved chin. “The way they keep trolling the orphanages and foster homes? It’s like they’re Easter egg hunting, only someone else hid the eggs out there, you know?”
The conversation dies, right then and there. Everyone grows silent, thinking of their own twisted beginnings, all with the same empty space of an answer. I attempt to restart the conversation.
“So Wilbert, you came here two years ago?”
“Yep,” he responds, then smiles shyly when Vera doesn’t add some scathing remark afterward.
“And before that . . .” He trails off, eyeing Cy.
“We came five years ago,” Cy says.
“We?” I say.
He puts his coffee mug down on the table. Everyone flinches when he gets up, but he only walks calmly to the door. “My sister and I. And Ana doesn’t deserve to be in a hangover discussion.”
I feel bad. I wasn’t trolling for gossip, but Cy probably doesn’t know that. Before he leaves, he says quietly, “Thank you, Zelia, for the coffee.”
We all breathe a sigh of relief at his exit.
“Girl! What did you put in that drink? An elephant tranquilizer?” Vera asks.
I shake my head, surprised myself. I reach for a piece of dry toast, thinking about Cy, seeing him in my mind’s eye walking within Carus. Maybe he’s going to the lab. My heart thumps an extra beat in anticipation of going there myself to work.
“I’m home, guys.” Marka’s voice sounds from the room’s wall-coms.
“How’d it go? Got a new rugrat to introduce to us?” Vera asks.
“No.” The deadened tone of Marka’s voice immediately squelches any good feeling in the room. Maybe she knows about our excursion.
Minutes later, she walks in and dumps her overnight bag on the floor with an exhausted sigh. Hex sits up to watch her every movement and Vera pours a cup of coffee for her.
“What is it, Marka?”
“I got there too late,” she says, her voice slightly hoarse. Vera puts her hand to her mouth.
“Too late? Too late for what?” I ask her. “Did Aureus try to take him?”
“No. Aureus probably passed on this kid a long time ago. Not a useful trait. By the time I got there, they’d already put him down. He was just five years old. If only I’d gotten there sooner.”
I shake my head. “You sound like you’re talking about dogs or—”
“We are dogs.” She grimaces at her cup. “No, we’re less than that. We’re nonexistent mistakes in the eyes of the government. They’re trying damn hard to keep up the nonexistent part of their promise. I’m lucky they didn’t kill me too.” She lifts her head from her coffee, her eyes rimmed with red. “My contact there isn’t willing to risk her neck for me much longer. I’m so glad you guys were all safe here while I was gone.”
At this, Hex coughs guiltily. I know we’re all thinking the same thing—there won’t be another club excursion for a long time. Maybe ever. We each give Marka a hug and disappear to our separate sanctuaries, to swallow down the reality of who we are, and how close to dead we could be.
I practically run to the lab, hungry to finish the next step and bury myself in work, formulas, lab protocols. Dyl constantly invades my thoughts, and I use the panic to work even harder. The hours fly by before I realize it’s the middle of the night. Cy never appears. Although I’m disappointed at first, I welcome the solace and lack of distraction.
Finally, exhaustion overtakes me and I head to bed. My feet take a path that swings by Cy’s room. Stupid feet. I don’t really want to talk to him, but it doesn’t matter, because his room is empty. I’m so tired that I bump against the walls a few times on the way to my room. Finally, the door to my bubble room comes into view.