“I’m sorry,” Kaye said.
“Sublimation is the soul of accomplishment,” Cross said. “I can’t say I understand what it means to be a parent. I can only make comparisons with how I feel about my companies, and that probably isn’t the same.”
“Probably not,” Kaye said.
Cross clucked her tongue. “This isn’t about funding or firing you or anything so simple. We’re both explorers, Kaye. For that reason alone, we need to be open and frank.”
Kaye peered out the taxi window and shook her head, amused. “It isn’t working, Marge. You’re still rich and powerful. You’re still my boss.”
“Well, hell,” Cross said with mock disappointment, and snapped her fingers.
“But it may not matter,” Kaye said. “I’ve never been very good at concealing my true feelings. Maybe you’ve noticed.”
Cross made a sound too high-pitched to be a laugh, but it had a certain eccentric dignity, and probably wasn’t a giggle, either. “You’ve been playing me all along.”
“You knew I would,” Kaye said.
Cross patted her cheek. “Cheek-flashing.”
Kaye looked puzzled.
“How can something so wonderful be an aberration, a disease? If I could fever scent, I would be running every corporation in the country by now.”
“You wouldn’t want to,” Kaye said. “If you were one of the children.”
“Now who’s being naÏve?” Cross asked. “Do you think they’ve left our monkey selves behind?”
“No. Do you know what a deme is?” Kaye asked.
“Social units for some of the SHEVA kids.”
“What I’m saying is a deme might be the greedy one, not an individual. And when a deme fever scents, we lesser apes don’t stand a chance.”
Cross leaned her head back and absorbed this. “I’ve heard that,” she said.
“Do you know a SHEVA child?” the driver asked, looking at them in the rearview mirror. He did not wait for an answer. “My granddaughter, a SHEVA girl, is in Peshawar, she is charmer. Real charmer. It is scary,” he added happily, proudly, with a broad grin. “Really scary.”
29
ARIZONA
Stella sat with Julianne Nicorelli in a small beige room in the hospital. Joanie had separated them from the other girls. They had been waiting for two hours. The air was still and they sat stiff as cold butter on their chairs, watching a fly crawl along the window.
The room was still thick with strawberry scent, which Stella had once loved.
“I feel awful,” Julianne said.
“So do I.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“Something’s screwy/ Made a mistake,” Stella said.
Julianne scraped her shoes on the floor. “I’m sorry you aren’t one of my deme,” she said.
“That’s okay.”
“Let’s make our own, right here. We’ll/ Like us/ join up with anyone else/ locked away/ who comes in.”
“All right,” Stella said.
Julianne wrinkled her nose. “It stinks so bad/ Can’t smell myself think.”
Their chairs were several feet apart, a polite distance considering the nervous fear coming from the two girls, even over the miasma of strawberry. Julianne stood and held out one hand. Stella leaned her head to one side and pulled back her hair, exposing the skin behind her ear. “Go ahead.”
Julianne touched the skin there, the waxy discharge, and rubbed it under her nose. She made a face, then lowered her finger and frithed—pulling back her upper lip and sucking air over the finger and into her mouth.
“Ewww,” she said, not at all disapprovingly, and closed her eyes. “I feel better. Do you?”
Stella nodded and said, “Do you want to be deme mother?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Julianne said. “We’re not a quorum anyway.” Then she looked alarmed. “They’re probably recording us.”
“Probably.”
“I don’t care. Go ahead.”
Stella touched Julianne behind her ear. The skin was quite warm there, hot almost. Julianne was fever scenting, desperately trying to reach out and both politely persuade and establish a bond with Stella. That was touching. It meant Julianne was more frightened and insecure than Stella, more in need.
“I’ll be deme mother,” Stella said. “Until someone better comes in.”
“All right,” Julianne said. It was just for show, anyway. No quorum, just whistling down the wind. Julianne rocked back and forth. Her scent was changing to coffee and tuna—a little disturbing. It made Stella want to hug somebody.
“I smell bad, don’t I?” Julianne said.
“No,” Stella said. “But we both smell different now.”
“What’s happening to us?”
“I’m sure they want to find out,” Stella said, and faced the strong steel door.
“My hips hurt,” Julianne said. “I am so miserable.”
Stella pulled their chairs closer. She touched Julianne’s fingers where they rested on her knee. Julianne was tall and skinny. Stella had more flesh on her frame though as yet no breasts, and her hips were narrow.
“They don’t want us to have children,” Julianne said, as if reading her mind, and her misery crossed over into sobs.
Stella just kept stroking her hand. Then she turned the girl’s hand over, spit into her palm, and rubbed their palms together. Even over the strawberry smell, she got through to Julianne, and Julianne began to settle down, focus, smooth out the useless wrinkles of her fear.
“They shouldn’t make us mad,” Julianne said. “If they want to kill us, they better do it soon.”
“Shhh,” Stella warned. “Let’s just get comfortable. We can’t stop them from doing what they’re going to do.”
“What are they going to do?” Julianne asked.
“Shh.”
The electronic lock on the door clicked. Stella saw Joanie in her hooded suit through the small window. The door opened.
“Let’s go, girls,” Joanie said. “This is going to be fun.” Her voice sounded like a recording coming out of an old doll.
A yellow bus, like a small school bus, waited for them on the drive in front of the hospital. The bus that had brought Strong Will had been a different bus, secure and shiny, new; she wondered why they were not using that bus.
Four counselors in suits moved five girls and four boys forward, toward the door of the bus. Celia and LaShawna and Felice were in the group once again. Julianne walked ahead of Stella, her loose clogs slapping the ground.
Strong Will was among the boys, Stella saw with both apprehension and an odd excitement. She was pretty sure it wasn’t a sexual thing—based on what Kaye had told her—but it was something like that. She had never felt such a thing before. It was new.
Not just to her.
She thought maybe it was new to the human race, or whatever the children were. A virus kind of thing, maybe.
The boys walked ten feet apart from the girls. None of them were shackled, but where would they run? Into the desert? The closest town was twenty miles away, and already it was a hundred degrees.
The counselors held little gas guns that filled the air with a citrus smell, oranges and limes, and a perennial favorite, Pine-Sol.
Will looked dragged down, frazzled. He carried a paperback book without a cover, its pages yellow and tattered. He did not look at the girls; none of the boys did. They appeared to be okay physically, but shuffled as they walked. She could not catch their scent.