Niobe turned inward, focused on Zenobia. The filing cabinet was locked. Zenobia reached inside with a phantom finger and tripped the latch. It took a bit of searching to find Drake’s file.
Got it, Mom. Zenobia pulled out a thin hanging folder. The tab said “Thomas, Drake.”
Good job, kiddo. Don’t keep me in suspense.
Zenobia started reading. “No. Freaking. Way.”
Drake was, apparently, the only survivor of the accident in Texas that had been on the news. An Air Force reconnaissance patrol had found him, naked but otherwise apparently healthy, near the center of the devastation. SCARE suspected that Drake had played a role in the event. Whatever it had been, it wasn’t a grain silo explosion.
A page slipped out of the folder and fluttered to Zenobia’s feet. It was the end of an e-mail. Pendergast believed in paper trails, apparently, and kept hard copies of everything.
In a report to his superiors in Washington, Pendergast had concluded: “ . . . constant danger to this facility, its staff, and the other patients. As the trump virus has failed, I see no choice but to euthanize the subject.”
My God. Reading those words revived the sickly feeling in Niobe’s gut. The newest entry in Drake’s file, dated that morning, recommended that he be moved to the deepest part of Q Sector for “containment” in case of an accident. Pendergast stressed the importance of keeping Drake calm—which Niobe found at odds with tossing him in BICC’s worst neighborhood—until he could be subtly euthanized. Pendergast suggested piping carbon monoxide into Drake’s new cell.
The television blared. Zane jumped. Pham, a player in Christian’s secret mistigris game, had picked up the television remote and was cranking the volume.
“Hey, not so loud!” Loud!-loud!-loud!-loud! . . .
He ignored Zoë’s echoing protest, plopped down in a recliner, and tore open a bag of corn chips. Niobe hoped his lewd fantasies of superpowered starlets would distract him from wondering where her third child had gone.
Pham shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. After a moment he grunted, unhooked the jangly key ring from his belt, and tossed it on a side table.
“Mom.” Om-om-om-om. Zoë whispered, “It’s too loud for Zane.” Ane-ane-ane-ane-ane . . .
“Hush, kiddo. Don’t make me lose my train of thought.”
Zen, can you put Drake’s file back and pull mine?
The file marked “Winslow, Niobe” was twice as thick as any other. It began with a capsule biography summarizing her life, the long journey from a Connecticut mansion to a subterranean government laboratory.
Next, the file detailed every child she hatched at BICC: photographs, medical examinations, descriptions of their abilities. But they weren’t catalogued by name. The paperwork reduced each child to a serial number, starting with 1-A-1 for her darling and dearly missed little strongman Aaron, all the way to 1-Z-3 for Zenobia.
Like Drake’s, Niobe’s file contained Pendergast’s handwritten observations. Not long after her admission to the facility, Pendergast had enthused to his superiors: “The subject’s unprecedented ability to circumvent the natural statistics of the wild card virus, most notably the routine suppression of the Black Queen among her hatchlings, presents tremendous possibilities. Isolating the mechanism should be our highest priority.”
Back in the lounge, Niobe hugged Zane and Zoë to her. Zenobia kept reading.
Unraveling the peculiarities of Niobe’s children had proven difficult. Slow progress dampened Pendergast’s tone. Six months in, he’d become paranoid that Niobe might decide to leave the facility before BICC could achieve its research goals. He’d had her elevator card deactivated, and as a further precaution he’d filed papers with SCARE.
She’d been a prisoner for over a year and hadn’t known.
Six months after that, he’d written: “We have met with moderate success extending the mean hatchling life span. If more resources are devoted to this work, future clutches may be turned into deployable assets. In this vein, the subject should be utilized as a biological reactor until reliable suppression of the Black Queen has been achieved.”
Niobe hugged her children until they gasped. Reactor? That’s all I am? An egg factory? You want to turn my children into weapons?
Zoë huddled closer to her mother. Mom, what are they going to do to us? It was hard to believe she could sound so quiet, so mousy, so frightened.
Niobe didn’t know what to say.
Zenobia read further. Pendergast had been reading all of Niobe’s incoming and outgoing e-mails. Her correspondence with Bubbles prompted lengthy and graphic speculations on Niobe’s sexuality.
The final entry, dated two days earlier, was terse: “Fulfilling our research objectives will require several hundred clutches. Recommend accelerated schedule, with multiple partners.” A chart accompanied this note. Pendergast intended to pair her not only with nats, but also with aces, deuces, and jokers. Including some from Q Sector. “Staff should develop techniques for forced insemination should subject prove uncooperative.”
Niobe shivered. The entire family fell silent. Niobe wiped at her face, flicking away tears before Pham or another orderly noticed.
Zane rode on her shoulder as they walked back to her quarters. The picture frames on her shelves rattled when the door slammed shut behind her. Her children—row upon row of them—smiled, grinned, mugged, gave the thumbs-up from dozens of photographs. The picture frame on her desk housed an autographed photo of Michelle Pond. Two photos cropped side by side, in fact, contrasting thin Bubbles and large Bubbles.
Niobe clicked the remote for her stereo. The little Bose player was plugged into her iPod. Haunting vocals and mournful guitars echoed from the cinder-block walls and wrapped around Niobe like an acoustic blanket. Espers’s “Children of Stone” had become her anthem the moment she first heard it. Stone children never age, never die.
She flopped down on her bed and cried. Christian’s betrayal had been painful enough. Two years. Two years, she had let them poke her, prod her, humiliate her, all in the stupid belief that they wanted to cure her children. But they didn’t give a shit about any of that.
She felt stupid. Ashamed.
They were going to chain her to a table and use her like a machine. But not before they murdered Drake.
Zoë and Zane climbed into her lap. Zane, a mournful cobalt blue with spots of jade, nuzzled her hand. Zoë’s tears, hot with sorrow, trickled down Niobe’s neck. They sat that way until Zenobia said, Uh, Mom?
She had unlocked the lower compartment of Pendergast’s TV cabinet. The shelves were crammed with DVDs. Many had austere white labels on the spine: “Genetrix Insemination Session, 1-H,” and so forth. But others had garish sleeves plastered with titles such as “All Joker Action,” “Tentacle Tramps,” and “Herne Takes Jokertown, volume 3.”
Mom, there’s magazines here, too, with—
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
She’d thought nothing could be worse than how he viewed Niobe and her children as tools, means to an end. She was wrong. He spent half his time jacking off to her sessions and the other half trying to turn her children into weapons.
She felt filthy.
“Mom,” Zoë whispered, “we can’t stay here.”
Niobe blew her nose. “If we leave, you’ll get sick.” She didn’t add “soon.” “If we stay, you have a chance.”
“No.” Zenobia shook her head. “No we don’t. A few extra weeks at best.”
Her siblings agreed. “Besides.” Ides-ides-ides-ides. “Drake needs our help.” Elp-elp-elp-elp-elp-elp.