“We don’t even know where she is.” Moira groaned and planted her face in her hands. “Who am I kidding? It’s over anyway. Andreyev will find out that everything’s gone wrong and he’ll pull out. We’ll lose what little funding Corpus gave us. It’s over.”
“Is that a bad thing?” It seemed to Sophie that she’d arrived just in time. If by replacing Lux she’d thrown a wrench into Corpus’s plans to make and market mindless slaves, perhaps her coming to Skin Island wasn’t going entirely awry after all.
“Sophie.” Her mother gave her a grave look. “If they cut the Vitro Project, they cut the Vitros.”
At first, she didn’t get it. Then the reality of her mom’s words slammed into her brain and she felt sick. “You mean—”
“No loose ends.” Moira stood and turned around, and her fingers brushed over the photos on the whiteboard. “I know you see them as mindless. But Sophie. I’ve seen these children grow up. I was there when each of them opened their eyes for the first time. Maybe they’re damaged, maybe they’d have even been better off never being born. But they were. And I’m responsible for them.” When she turned back around, Sophie expected, from the catch in her voice, that there would be tears in her eyes. But Moira’s gaze was smooth as glass. “I will do whatever I must to save them.”
Sophie nodded once. “I understand, but . . .”
Her mother folded her arms on the back of her chair. “I know. You’re still judging me for what the Vitros are, and I don’t blame you. But you have to understand—it’s out of my control. I help them as much as I can, but in the end, I’m powerless.”
Sophie didn’t believe her. She thought that if it was her in Moira’s place, she’d fight tooth and nail to stop what was going on. The essential wrongness of Skin Island was noxious to her, but it seemed Moira had already given up without a fight. That isn’t really fair, Sophie thought. You don’t know the whole story. She always hated it when people assumed the moral high ground and judged others from a position of self-righteousness; but it was hard to be objective after what she had seen. She wondered, then, how much her father knew about the Vitro Project. After all, he’d once worked here too, side by side with her mother.
“Dad walked away, didn’t he?” she asked softly.
Moira nodded, her gaze going distant. “He was stronger than I was.”
“That’s why you two split.” For years Sophie’s mind had struggled to untie the knots of the past, and all at once the knots came undone, unraveling in her hands. “He wouldn’t do it, would he? He refused to be part of this and you argued about it and finally, he left. So . . . what? You compromised on me and Lux? I went with Dad, you kept Lux?”
“You don’t belong on Skin Island. You never have. It was right for you to go with your father. He is . . . he has always been the better parent.”
Sophie saw her father in a new light. She’d always thought he was the weaker one, the one who gave up and quit and went home while her mother stayed to continue what Sophie had thought was noble work for the good of humanity. Her mother had been the heroic, self-sacrificing scientist and her father had been the mundane biology teacher who envied her mother’s success and resented Sophie’s admiration for her. I got it all backward. All along, it’s been the other way around— Mom was the weak one, the one who left us, and Dad is the one who was strong. He had to know the truth about Skin Island. Had he hidden the truth from Sophie because he knew how much she adored Moira and he didn’t want to break her heart? Had he wanted her to come to the truth herself? Suddenly all the warnings her father had given her made sense. He was protecting me. Did she wish he’d just been truthful? Did she resent his secrets? At first she thought she did, that she should be as angry with him as she was with her mom. But then she wasn’t so sure. If I had known the truth, I would never have known my mom at all. Perhaps the happy memories she had of her mother were tinged with lies, but if she’d known what her mother’s work truly was then she’d have no happy memories at all.
Sophie was torn with confusion, unable to decide which was better—the happy lie or the painful truth—but one thing was clear to her—her father wasn’t the one to blame. He’d tried to tell her the truth and she had refused to listen. It was Moira who had lied, Moira who had left, Moira who was growing designer slaves and selling them to the highest bidder.
She looked long and hard at her mother, a woman whom she was only just beginning to truly know, and she hoped— desperately—that she could find some way to redeem her.
They both jumped when a knock rattled the door. Moira froze, whispered “Be Lux!” and then snatched a clipboard off the desk as she called out, “Who’s that?”
The door burst open and Strauss strode in, her eyes suspicious. “There you are! What are you doing?”
Immediately Sophie let herself glaze over. Her mother was perched on the edge of the desk as if she’d been there all along. She gave Strauss an irritated look. “I’m going over a quick psych evaluation with Lux. What’s wrong?”
“I heard there was an incident with Andreyev.”
“I already settled that,” Moira said calmly, scrawling with great concentration what Sophie could see were meaningless loops on her clipboard.
Strauss looked more closely at Sophie. “Why are you in here? Shouldn’t she be in physical therapy?”
“She should be in here, taking her psych eval!” Moira retorted. “And now you’re distressing her.”
Sophie blinked at her mother, then winced and tightened her hands around the armrests, trying to look distressed.
“Well, don’t take all day about it,” Strauss said, still studying Sophie through narrow eyes. “I can only keep Andreyev entertained for so long.”
When she’d left, Sophie let out a long relieved sigh. Moira shook her head grimly and set down the clipboard. “She’s not stupid. This is bad, so bad.” She gave Sophie a solemn look. “It’s only a matter of time before she figures out who you really are.”
“So what if she does?”
“Sophie. If she does—she may take it in her head that you’re more of a liability than you’re worth.”
It took Sophie a moment to interpret what that meant.
When she realized what Moira was saying, her spine tingled as if ice had been dropped down the back of her shirt. “She wouldn’t!”
“Never underestimate her, Sophie.” Moira’s eyes went distant, as if she were looking backward into the past. “You wouldn’t be the first threat Strauss has had eliminated.”
EIGHTEEN LUX
Lux sat in a tangle of limbs and stared at the horizon with wide, unblinking eyes. Outwardly, she was still as stone, but inwardly she trembled.
The moment the boys hit Jim, something terrible and powerful had snapped inside of her, and she lost all control. She did not understand it and she did not like it but she could not stop it. It was as if the entire world stopped existing except for one all-consuming command roaring inside her head: protect Jim.
Then her body took over and left her behind: it whirled and danced and moved with a speed that made her thoughts spin.Protect.
The words took over, pushing her aside and moving her hands, her feet.
Kick. And her body followed. She spun and threw out a leg and her foot slammed into the stomach of the one who had hit Jim.
Punch the other one. Her fist plowed into his jaw.
Still not down. Kick him. A sharp upward kick between his legs. He gasped and doubled over, but still remained on his feet.
Bring him down. She snapped her head against his and he fell at last, groaning and writhing.
Now the girl. The girl was the leader. She had to be stopped. Lux dropped onto her hands as her legs swung in a wide arc, knocking the girl’s feet from under her.