"Take that off," she whispered fiercely, and Sarah peeled it, cast it free, not even suspecting. It struck the rainstick, sent it falling to the rug for one last sprinkle of pebbles and bone.
She'd have been happy to let it happen there on the sofa, or to slip to the floor and spread each other wide upon the rug, but Sarah's plans were otherwise. This was to be no quickie. Adrienne let Sarah pull her up, to her feet, up to the bedroom and down on her back again, where the last of the clothing came off.
They embraced, they rolled; teeth bit and lips soothed, and tongues traced wet trails from mouths to breasts to navels to cunts and back again. Their hands were slippery, drenched with one another's dew. Adrienne bent her back across the bed, slid her hands along Sarah's risen inner thighs and lowered her head, peeling Sarah open with fingers and tongue. Tasting her damp and hot, teasing her with pointed flicking tongue tip, tickling her with soft blond hair, at last plunging her mouth into the wet fire.
And when Sarah came, it was hard, loud, powerful hips flexing and thighs clamping onto Adrienne's head. Then Sarah went scrambling for the night table where they kept their toys. Adrienne heard the scrape of the drawer, all aching mouth and wet face, gasping for breath as she saw Sarah coming for her — not empty-handed. No choice in the matter, just Sarah sculpting her onto knees and elbows, leaning across her back and wrapping one arm down and around her middle, with the other working the phallus into her. Roughly, but not without love, and Adrienne was about to strangle on her own cries. It was like being violated, willingly, and if she said to stop, Sarah would, but Sarah's power came from knowing it would never happen.
Adrienne looked back over her shoulder, saw Sarah first in profile, then as she turned to meet her eyes: Sarah in sweaty gleaming heat, with clenched teeth and furious stroking arm. For a moment she imagined the face from the T-shirt over Sarah's own, cannibal mask leering down; surely the symbol of what was going on here, the message implicit in every grinding twist of her hand…
You are mine, and so is control, and I will devour you and I will savor the taste of everything taken because you wanted to give it all along.
The body could never lie.
Nine
Ryker, from Arizona Associated Labs, came clean with Adrienne later that week. She still wasn't sure what to make of the fact that he had for days — days — sat on what could have the most significant impact yet on Clay Palmer's case.
Had it been a deliberate lie, or simply a withholding of facts for the sake of convenience, while Ryker and company figured out how to best address the situation for their own ends? Her guess leaned toward mercenary origins. The competition for leverage in medicine, particularly in research, was no less cutthroat than in most other private-sector ventures simply because human welfare was involved. There was also funding to consider. Funding meant the chance for greater accomplishment, which in turn meant prestige, and led to funding greater still…
They'd led her to believe that they thought Clay was the first of his kind, the first gross chromosomal abnormality discovered in over two decades — news that would have penetrated their world like a ricocheting bullet. Could they really have expected her to believe that they — immersed in the science of genetics — had not immediately recognized that this was not the case?
The bottom line?
While the numbers were tiny, there were others.
Clay was not alone in the world.
Ryker followed up his phone call apprising her of this shock with a package of records compiled on the others found to have a third copy of chromosome twelve.
The defect had been discovered six years ago, in the genetics division of a Boston research center named MacNealy Biotech, and had been christened Helverson's syndrome after the first scientist to document it.
Known cases prior to Clay were at an even dozen: five in North America, one in Venezuela, four across Great Britain and Western Europe, and two in Japan. Not all, however, were still alive. The Venezuelan, who had worked in the north coast oil industry, had committed suicide last year. A British soldier of fortune had been killed in Central America. As well, one of the Americans was on death row in Texas, following a string of gas station robberies that had left three attendants dead…
And Adrienne could see the pattern forming already, another aggression linkage to rival, even surpass, the panic button pushed by the discovery of the double-Y.
Still, one look at the overview was enough: Based on the few known cases, the hope that Helverson's syndrome was totally benign was not encouraging. Statistics on the group were broken down to demonstrate over and over generally maladaptive patterns. There was an inarguable trend here toward explosive temperaments, random acts of impulsive violence, self-destructive tendencies, and, to a lesser extent, schizophrenia. It cut across every national boundary and appeared independent of such variables as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education.
Interesting, though, how every last one was male, with none older than thirty-five. As well, she noticed another unifying factor: All came from industrialized countries. This said little in itself — the technology to map out chromosomes was far less prevalent in third-world nations, although more was being done in such places all the time as static local populations were found where various disorders plagued large numbers of the people. Such closed-system settlements constituted living laboratories in which to trace genetic disorders through multiple generations. Perhaps, in time, some agrarian society would yield its first Helverson's subject. Until then…
Here they were. Like bad omens.
In reading the overview, it was easy to forget that each one was a person who appeared to have undergone his own variation of Clay's life. They had been afflicted and did not even know by what, much less why.
Did they all feel the pain of the outsider, who does not even fit on a molecular level, and did they reprogram that pain into anger? Did they go through each day with heartbeats and brainwaves out of tune with those of the masses? She saw their lives as testament to a cruelty in nature that went beyond ill intent: nature's profound indifference, giving periodic mutant rise to her variants, then leaving them to struggle and thrive, or wane and die, on their own.
It caused her to stop and stare at the skin of her bared forearm, its smooth and pale underside. There, deep within, written in protein codes 100 trillion times over: herself. What guarantee did she have that there was nothing concealed in that text of life and death, hidden like a bomb in a skyscraper, ticking, waiting for its moment? Waiting to burst into terrible flower — tumors or breakdown of systemic function, something that might leave her mind intact while her body withered, or steal the mind while the body housed its deterioration for decades to come.
She was no less susceptible to the indifference of nature than any of them.
It made her all the more eager to set the overview aside, to quit thinking of them as a faceless aggregate and view them as individuals. She began to open each separately sealed case study, files and medical records and interview transcripts and photos.