“Hey! The party’s in here, I see.” Vera pops in through the door and lays her hands on my shoulders. “What’s that? They look like goggles.”
“Zelia’s DNA,” Wilbert answers. It’s impressive how he can talk with his mouth hanging wide open.
“Oh. So, why do they look like that?”
Marka leans toward her. “Human DNA is linear, Vera, like long pieces of string. The pieces have beginnings and ends, and every time a copy is made, the ends, or telomeres, get shorter and shorter. It’s one of the reasons why people age. Our DNA ends eventually shorten to the point a cell can’t divide normally anymore. Zelia’s DNA is packaged in continuous circles, like bacterial DNA. Her cells can make copies of the DNA when they divide, and the DNA never degrades or loses those bits at the end after each replication. Because there are no ends.”
Cy stares at me with a strange expression. In a split second, I realize it’s not wonder, or pride, or anything like admiration. It’s worry.
“I’ll bet,” Marka says, pointing to one of the middle-size infinity signs, “that the changes in your DNA caused you to lose extra sequences in one of your chromosomes.”
“Of course,” I murmur. “My Ondine’s curse. It must have caused a PHOX2B gene variant.”
“Yes,” Marka agrees. “Enough to have a profound effect on the breathing center in the brain. A small sacrifice, considering. Your Ondine’s curse is a marker. An ironic marker, since most babies would die from it.”
“Marker for what? What are we talking about here?” Vera windmills her hand, a get-to-the-point kind of gesture.
Cy jumps in before Marka has a chance. “It means, Vera, that Zelia may never grow old.” He snaps off the screen, and everyone stares at me. “She’s got the fountain of youth built into her genes.”
CONGRATULATIONS SWIRL ABOUT IN THE LAB, and I cough up as many fake thank-you’s as I can muster. Before long, I creep toward the door. Cy continues to discuss my trait with Marka, like the ramifications of what it means and, probably, my worth.
I can’t listen anymore. I take off for a transport, but the agriplane is locked. No surprise, after the junkyard fiasco. As I plummet to the bottom level of Carus, I wring my hands. Everything I know about myself is different now. I mean, it’s not like I reveled in my less-than-perfect physical characteristics. But they were me, all me.
So I go to the only place where things are more nonsensical than my life, for a little comparative normalcy.
Ana’s room.
My world has morphed so much in so little time, while her prison stays fixed and unchanged. I can’t break more promises.
Inside, the screen is off, and she’s sound asleep in bed. I’m disappointed. I’d hoped she’d be needing me, pulling me into one of her crazy conversations in Alice in Wonderland mode. I tiptoe over to where she’s curled up. A tangled ribbon of girl.
Ana’s hand is open, palm facing up. Something small and tiny is cupped inside. I kneel down to peer at it. It’s a tiny plastic baby doll, hardly bigger than the tip of my finger. It’s completely intact, unlike the doll heads from my room. Then I notice there’s another lying on the floor. And another, the head coming out of her other fist. Little 3-D versions of the ones in her painting.
“My lucky. My trinket. Put it back.” Ana’s voice enters my head, but her eyes are scrunched in pain, still unconscious. She’s sleep-talking.
I sit on the edge of the bed to stroke her hair. Ana’s murmurs and ramblings slowly subside. Her face relaxes into a neutral expression, without torment. I bend closer, and see that her pillow has a huge wet spot. She’s cried herself to sleep.
“Oh, Ana. What is going on inside that head of yours?”
“You really want to know?” Cy asks. He’s leaning against the door, watching us. He must have followed me here. I ready myself for the verbal thrashing he’ll give me for invading her room, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he waits for me.
I take an unsteady, serpentine path to him through the detritus of her room. Cy extends an arm to help me through the last, junkiest part of her floor. His hand is warm and strong, and he holds mine a touch longer than necessary.
“Wilbert already told me what happened to her,” I confess.
“He doesn’t know what really happened. And I should have told you.”
“Told me what, exactly?”
I wait for him to say more, but he shakes his head and waves me to the transport. We zoom upward, and he leads me to his room. The wall of tortured souls is still up next to the crude tattooing machine gracing half his room. All the monitors on the other side are dark. Beyond that, his bed is a rumpled mess of blankets. Once the door is shut, he commands the room to turn off all wall-com functions. Finally, some privacy.
Cy sits on the bed, and I hunker down on the floor next to him, waiting. I wait for a long, long time. Even now, he can’t just tell me.
“It was a year and a half ago.” Cy covers his eyes with his hands, as if this helps to uncork his brain. “Micah had arrived a few years before that. I suspected something was going on between them, but I ignored it. Micah was my best friend in Carus. He made it look completely platonic, like she was his kid sister too. He said he was going to take Ana on her first junkyard run, and then, poof. They took off.” Cy looks down to me, and scrunches his forehead. “Zel, I don’t like talking down to you.”
There’s no chair nearby, so he scoots to the end of his bed to make room for me. It’s a little overwhelming—his bed smells like him, of course. It’s intoxicating. It reminds me of that night in Argent, that real or unreal kiss with him, where he was all over me. I stare at my hands, afraid he’ll read my thoughts. Now is not the time to be thinking of such things.
“Marka tried to find them, but I wouldn’t leave Carus to help her. I was terrified of Aureus. More afraid for myself than for Ana.”
“But . . . she came back, right?”
“Yes. But by then, it was too late.” He won’t look at me, and I can barely hear his whisper. “Zel, she was pregnant.”
“But—that’s not possible. Infants are all vaccinated, no one can get pregnant until they turn eighteen, when it’s reversed.” The idea of a girl pregnant at age fourteen is so repugnant I can hardly fathom it. There haven’t been cases of pregnancy under the age of eighteen in the States for almost fifty years. Not since the vaccines became mandatory.
“No. That’s not true. We’re not everybody, and those vaccines are carefully registered. Once you’re off the grid, you’re off the grid. Micah’s always been obsessed with transmission of mutations to new offspring. He used to joke about little baby Micahs running around, and we just laughed it off. I should have paid more attention.
“Micah took Ana straight to Aureus, hoping they’d be interested in her and the baby. But her body reacted badly to the pregnancy, or Micah’s DNA, I don’t know. Her blood started clotting all over the place. She had a stroke and lost the baby.”
“That’s what she lost,” I whisper. It makes sense. Oh god, and now he’s with Dyl, who stared at him as if he was the only thing in her otherwise empty universe.
“I saw him kissing my sister.”
Cy’s expression remains unchanged. He’s not surprised at all. “He’s using her. Because Dyl’s family has power and potential.”
“You mean me?”
“Yes.”
“But how would he know that?”
“They must have realized Dyl was completely normal. Your blood tests at New Horizons must have been switched by accident.”
The incompetent technician who drew our blood . . . I remember. I get up from the bed and walk to the giant machine and touch the old-fashioned pistons attached to the needle. I run my finger down to the cluster of smooth needles, covered by a hard cap for safety.