All I hear in my head is he French-kissed you all the way home before I finally shake my head to speak.
“I’m okay. Better.” I point to my hip. “This still hurts, but I’ll survive.”
“Yeah. I’m not surprised. It’s like they knew somehow you’d have people there with you. I guess that was their backup plan.”
“Plan for what?”
“They probably figured out that Dyl doesn’t carry a trait and wanted to verify it was your sample they had. If they even wanted to bother. For all we know, your special gift is just your Ondine’s curse. That’s not exactly marketable.”
“Well—” I take a step forward. “If I can just prove I’m ordinary as white bread—”
“You mean, white bread that can’t breathe normally,” Cy adds.
“Right. Well, then we have a chance to show them that they should just ditch Dyl, get her off their hands.”
“Okay.” Cy pushes up his sleeves, and he winces when they pass over several large pink splotches on his uninked forearms.
“Those are from Micah?” I reach out to touch his wrist, without thinking, and Cy allows it. Faintly, I see handprints where the pink is. The skin is shiny and raw.
“It’ll all be gone in a few hours,” he says. I let my hand fall, already missing the warmth of his skin on my fingertips.
“It still hurts, though?”
Cy nods. “How about you?”
I lift my wrist where Micah had grabbed me. It’s a little sore and pink, but not nearly as bad as what Cy went through. He pulls my wrist closer so he can examine it. His fingers slide over my arm, and I shiver, but he doesn’t let go.
“It’s my fault you went through that.” I force myself to meet his eyes. I can’t skulk away from my apologies. Not now. Cy takes a step closer to me and lets his hand slip up to my shoulder, leaning his head close to mine.
“If you’re really sorry, then don’t run away from . . . us again.” His breath is warm and swirls through my hair. I swear he almost said don’t run away from me.
“Okay.”
He lingers long enough to take a breath, then steps away and clears his throat. “C’mon. Sequencing time.”
“Right.” I clear my Cy-induced haze and nod. Think, Zelia. Focus on Dyl. Focus. “All of Dyl’s extra sequences so far code for junky stuff on the ends of chromosomes. Nothing I really need, I guess.”
Cy points to a sequence that glows green on the screen. “What about that one?” It’s a viable sequence. Finally. A real, useful gene that I’m missing, that might somehow make me different, in a special way.
“Here.” I punch in a command to compare it to our very old, very outdated gene library. I bite my lip. If it’s an ordinary, basic protein that’s been known for years, we’ll find it. If it’s a newly discovered one, we’re screwed. So I’m totally shocked when we find a match.
“Telomerase,” Cy announces the match.
“Telomerase? But I need that,” I say, confused. “It’s protective. It keeps our DNA from getting too short and degrading, every time a cell divides.”
“Didn’t people use to think that was the key to immortality? The fountain of youth?” He’s talking to the screen now, not me. “They tried to infuse more telomerase into people’s cells, so the cells would divide forever and never age. They’d have no Hayflack limit, no shelf life, so to speak. But people got cancer, so they tossed it.”
“But I don’t have telomerase. So I should be aging super-fast.”
“And you’re not.” He slips his hand around my wrist to pull me in closer. He looks at me from head to toe, spends an inordinate amount of time on my face. His head tilts sideways, as if looking at me askew will gift him with answers. I think I’m about to fail some sort of test, so I hold my breath until he clues me in.
“How tall is Dyl?”
“Um. Maybe five-four-ish?”
“And she’s, like, normal, I assume, in the usual female sort of ways?”
“No. She’s more than normal. She’s perfect. She’s got more body at her age than I did back then. Uh, you know, this is really not helping my self-esteem here—”
“Bear with me. You’re brilliant”—I blush—“and you certainly act your age. But . . . don’t you think it’s odd that you’re hardly taller than her?”
“Fine, so I’m a runt. I don’t need to hear that I’m underdeveloped everywhere, okay?”
Cy stares directly at my breasts and half covers his mouth. “Uh, your body is developed just fine, in my opinion.”
Now I’m really embarrassed. A little thrilled, but mostly embarrassed. Cy tries to rub away the warmth on his own face, then scratches his head.
“Have you ever . . . gotten your . . . you know.”
I flush hotly. “Please tell me you’re not going to ask about my ovaries.”
“I am.”
I pull away, covering my eyes as if afflicted with a sudden headache.
“I’m going to take that as a no.”
It’s so awful. Like I’m less of a girl or woman than everyone else in the world.
“Did it ever occur to you,” he starts, and grabs my wrist again so I can’t bolt, “that you’re just the ultimate late bloomer?”
It never occurred to me. I figured all the blooming that could possibly happen already did, and I was stuck with this awful, flawed body.
“I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong.” He crosses his arm.
“What?”
“You’re so much more extraordinary than you give yourself credit for. And I’m not just talking about your mind. Your body too.”
“You mean my ugly, runty body,” I quip.
“Why do you think you’re ugly?” Cy asks.
I’m all set to snap back with a bitter comment, when I see his face. He’s dead serious. Oohhhh-kay. I am speechless.
“In any case, how are we going to prove the theory?” He squints at me.
My eyes unfocus as I think. No telomerase. No junky DNA. Why? Why would I not have . . .
I snap my fingers. “C’mon. I need a new sample.”
“For what?”
“We’re going back to the beginning. We need a bird’s-eye view of the overall structure of all my DNA, the chromosomes, instead of looking at them in pieces the way we’ve been doing it.”
“A karyotype, huh? That’s kind of crude.” Cy stands up and comes with me to a cupboard, where I get a swab for another DNA sample. “Brilliant, but crude.”
“Yep. We’ve been staring at the pores on tree leaves. It’s time to look at the forest. Because if my theory is right, we’ve been looking for this trait the wrong way all along.”
CHAPTER 20
IT ONLY TAKES A DAY. BY MORNING, we have our answer. My karyotype is beaming onto a screen in the lab, where Marka, Cy, Wilbert, and I are staring, our mouths agape.
“Wow. You’re like a bacteria,” Wilbert murmurs. Cy smacks his extra head, and Wilbert yelps in protest. “What! It’s a compliment! You know, bacteria are far better than humans at surviving—”
“That’s enough, Wilbert,” Marka says. “Well. Now we know.”
The screen shows my forty-six chromosomes, coupled into twenty-three pairs. If I were normal, you’d expect to see twenty-three X’s, made when each stick-like pair of chromosomes join at the middle. But my chromosome pairs don’t look like X’s. They look like twenty-three infinity signs, or figure eights.
“My ends are all stuck together,” I say.
“Circular DNA. Like bacterial plasmids. We never would have seen it unless we looked at it like this.”
Cy touches the screen, tracing one of the chromosome pairs. “That explains it. Zel doesn’t need telomerase, because she has no telomeres. She has no ends to her DNA.”