Stella sat in the back of the truck, behind the plastic barrier, feeling confused. Miss Kantor climbed into the front seat. Joanie closed the door for her and went back to the tent. “Is he there, now?” Stella asked.
“He’ll arrive in an hour or so,” Miss Kantor said. “You two just got approval. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
“What do they want?” Stella asked suddenly, before she could control her tongue.
“Nothing. It’s a family visit.”
Miss Kantor switched on the truck motor. Stella could feel her disapproval. Parental visits were futile at the best of times, Miss Kantor believed. The children would never be fully integrated into human society, no matter what the school policy said. She knew the children too well. They just could not behave appropriately.
Worse still, Miss Kantor knew that Stella’s father had served time in prison for assaulting Emergency Action enforcement officers. Having him as a visitor would be something of an affront to her. She was a holdover from the times when Sable Mountain School had been a prison.
Stella had not seen Mitch in three years. She hardly remembered what he smelled like, much less what he looked like.
Miss Kantor drove over the gravel to the paved road, and then between the brush half a mile to the brick building they called the hospital. It wasn’t really a hospital. As far as Stella knew, for sure, the hospital was just the administration and detention center for the school. It had been a hospital once, for the prison. Some kids claimed the hospital was where they injected salt into your cheeks, or resected your tongue, or Botoxed the new facial muscles that made your expressions so compelling.
It was the place they tried to turn SHEVA kids into humans. Stella had never met a kid who had undergone such torments, but that was explained, some said, by the fact that they sent those kids away to Suburbia, a town made up of nothing but SHEVA kids trying to act just like humans.
That was not true, as far as Stella knew, but the hospital was where they sent you when they wanted to draw blood. She had been there many times for that purpose.
There were lots of stories in the camps. Few of them were true, but most were scary, and the kids could get ominously bored.
As they drove through a razor-wire fence and over a moat, Stella felt something sad and cold grow in her.
Memory.
She did not want to lose her focus. She stared through the window, resenting Mitch for coming. Why now? Why not when she had her act together and could tell him she had accomplished something worthwhile? Life was still too confused. The last visit with her mother had been painful. Stella had not known what to say. Her mother had been so sad and full of needs neither could satisfy.
She hoped Mitch would not just sit and stare at her over the table in the family conference room. Or ask pointed questions. Or try to tell Stella there was hope they would get together again. Stella did not think she could stand that.
Stella dipped her head and rubbed her nose. She touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye and then to her tongue, out of sight of the rearview mirror. Her eyes were moist and the tears tasted of bitter salt. She would not cry openly, however. Not in front of a human.
Miss Kantor stopped the truck in the parking lot of the flat brick building, got out, and opened Stella’s door. Stella followed her into the hospital. As they turned a corner, through a gap in the brick breezeway she saw a long yellow bus drawn up beside the processing office. A load of new kids had arrived. Stella hung back a few steps from Miss Kantor as they passed through the glass doors and walked to the detention center.
The door to the secretary’s office was always open, and through the wide window beyond, Stella thought she would catch a glimpse of the new kids from the shipment center. That would be something to take back to the deme; possible recruits or news from outside.
Suddenly, irrationally, she hated Mitch. She did not want him to visit. She did not want any distractions. She wanted to focus and never have to worry about humans again. She wanted to lash out at Miss Kantor, strike her down to the linoleum floor, and run away to anywhere but here.
Through Stella’s brief, fierce scowl—a more intense scowl than most humans could manage—she caught a glimpse of the lineup of children beyond the secretary’s window. Her scowl vanished.
She thought she recognized a face.
Stella dropped to remove her shoe and turned it upside down, shaking it. Miss Kantor looked back and stopped with hands on hips.
The nosey on her belt wheeped.
“Are you scenting again?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” Stella said. “Rock in my shoe.” This pause gave her time enough to chase down the memory of the face in the lineup. She stood, shuffled awkwardly for a moment until Miss Kantor glanced away, then shot a second look through the window.
She did know the face. He was taller now and skinnier, almost a walking skeleton, his hair unruly and his eyes flat and lifeless in the bright sun. The line began to move and Stella flicked her gaze back to the corridor and Miss Kantor.
She no longer worried about Mitch.
The skinny kid outside was the boy she had met in Fred Trinket’s shed in Virginia, when she had run away from Kaye’s and Mitch’s house.
It was Will. Strong Will.
13
BALTIMORE
Kaye shut down the displays and removed the specimens, then carefully returned them to a preservation drawer in the freezer. She knew for the first time that she was close to the end of her work at Americol. Three or four more experiments, six months at most of lab work, and she could go back to Congress and face down Rachel Browning and tell the oversight subcommittee that all apes, all monkeys, all mammals, probably all vertebrates, even all animals—and possibly all forms of life above the bacteria—were genetic chimeras. In a real sense, we were all virus children.
Not just Stella. Not just my daughter and her kind.
All babies use viruses to get born. All senators and all representatives and the president and all of their wives and children and grandchildren, all the citizens of the United States, and all the people of the world, are all guilty of original sin.
Kaye looked up as if at a sound. She touched the bridge of her nose and peered around the lab, the ranks of white and beige and gray equipment, black-topped tables, lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling like upside-down egg cartons. She felt a gentle pressure behind her eyes, the cool, liquid silver trickle down the back of her head, a growing awareness that she was not alone in the room, in her body.
The caller was back. Twice in the past three years, she had spent as much as three days in its presence. Always before, she had been traveling or working on deadline and had tried to ignore what she had come to regard as a pointless distraction.
“This isn’t a good time,” she said out loud and shook her head. She stood up and stretched her arms and bent to touch her toes, hoping exercise might push the caller into the background. “Go away.” It did not go away. Its signal came in with even greater conviction. Kaye started to laugh helplessly and wiped away the tears. “Please,” she whispered, leaning against a lab bench. She tipped a stack of petri dishes with her elbow. As she was rearranging them, the caller struck full force, flooding her with delicious approval. Kaye shut her eyes and leaned forward, her entire body filled with that extraordinary sensation of oneness with something very close and intimate, yet infinitely creative and powerful.