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Suddenly, the char gets deathly silent. Everyone stares out the windows as if I didn’t ask the question. I guess I’ll have to get my answers another time.

Soon, it’s clear we aren’t being followed. Vera waves off the tension and leans over to me.

“So. Did you have a good time?”

I widen my eyes. “We just ran away from a club with him”—I throw my head in Cy’s direction—“flashing that Masters of the Universe cutlery and you want to know if I had a good time?”

“Well . . . yeah.” As if Vera does this every weekend. “I want all the illegal details,” she says. “Speaking of illegal, you’ll never guess how many guys—”

“I REALLY don’t want to know!” I say, plugging an ear with one hand and driving with the other.

“In any case, I’d call this a successful night.” She beams. And then, for no apparent reason, she holds her breath in and puckers her lips, like a kid on the verge of a tantrum. It’s so odd that I jerk myself out of my anxiety-filled funk for a second.

“What are you doing?” I ask her. “I thought I was the only person with breathing problems.”

“I need more carbon dioxide when my skin is covered up,” she explains, shrugging. “I’m gonna have a massive hyperoxia headache tomorrow. My chloroplasts are cramping.”

“Sounds like female issues,” Hex snorts from the back.

“Everybody shut up. I told you to drive faster,” Cy orders from behind me.

“Fine!” I rev the engine afresh, and the char thrusts ahead with a roar. The speed is therapeutic, but does nothing to erase the memory of two very different kisses and the phantom vision of Dyl.

I glance at Cy, who’s touching his lips as if they were sore. He sees me watching him, and pointedly turns away. I turn a sharp corner and Wilbert opens the window for a second puke-fest.

I’m so ready for this night to be over. Not that it matters. Some parts of it have been stitched into my soul.

THE NEXT MORNING, I WAKE UP STILL
wearing my club clothes. I stink of stale chemicals and cigarette smoke.

My head throbs with a distinctive shade of pain I only get after oxygen deprivation. A hypoxia headache, thanks to my spell of breathlessness in Argent’s Alucinari Room. I wonder if the rest of the crew feels like this, a can of condensed awfulness. I unclasp the necklace from my neck, stretching my chest to its max with a deep inhalation. If only I could exhale all the ugliness of last night. The confusion of meeting Micah, the pain of seeing Dyl, the torture of not getting her back.

I’ve got a week to try to find what Micah is looking for. I switch on Dyl’s holo, listening to the poem again, letting her voice soothe me. And then I search her diary for mentions of traits, but there’s nothing. Like me, she’s in the dark. Unlike me, she’s being slowly killed for it.

I do a secondary search within her diary for Dad. At first, there’s nothing substantial. But then there’s this. She’s reading a different poem, when she stops.

“I wish Zel would read this one. I wanted to show her, but there’s no point. Dad says she doesn’t like poetry anymore.” She huffs dismissively. “Sucks.”

I pause the diary, shocked. Dad told me to stop obsessing over poetry to focus on cell bio classes four years ago, so I could work in the lab more. I never stopped loving poetry. I only stopped reading it because he wanted me to. I always thought Dad knew me so well.

Now I’m wondering if he knew me at all.

All those years, he guided my education, my likes and dislikes. And for what? So Dyl could have nothing in common with me?

My search leads me back to the original poem. I close my eyes, listening.

Remember the mind.

Let it shift and move like water,

First to understand

Then to turn with ease

The boulders of the earth.

Boulders. Right. I have to do the impossible. Dad always emphasized my weak and flawed body, my Ondine’s curse. But I have this brain. I’ve got to make impossible things happen. My skills in the lab were a gift that he nurtured and subsequently told me to dump. But right now, there’s no way I’m giving them up.

I have a week. I’ll get her out of there; I have to believe it, because I cannot consider the horror of other possibilities.

After a quick shower, I walk as fast as my throbbing head will allow. The common room and kitchen are empty. I don’t want to be alone this morning, not with Marka gone and Ana wandering the darker hallways of Carus.

I run through the selections on the efferent and order a huge pot of strong, black coffee and half a dozen pieces of dry toast. Some headache patches would be nice.

“Cy?” I call. At first, I’m rewarded with silence, but after a minute his gravelly voice enters the kitchen.

“What?”

“Can you . . . please . . . get some headache patches from the medic room and bring them down to breakfast? Enough for everyone?”

Cy grunts in reply. I can’t believe he didn’t cuss me out. Then again, maybe he’s still sleeping and not really listening.

I bring the coffee, toast, jam, and sunseed butter into the common room and lay out creamer and agave sugar. Might as well make enough for everyone, I figure. I put my hands on my hips and call out loudly.

“Wilbert, Vera, Hex, Cy—there’s hot coffee and toast in the common room.”

Cy walks in as I say this, rumpled and gorgeous in what must be his pajamas. A loose white T-shirt hangs off his angled shoulders and a pair of drawstring pants barely hang on to his hips. Yesterday’s tattoo mask is completely gone and his skin is uninked as yet. His face looks softer, kinder. I watch him toss several medicine-infused patches onto the table, then peel one for myself and place it on my neck as he grabs the coffee decanter.

“And there’s headache medicine too,” I add loudly to everyone.

“By god, you’re good,” Hex mumbles from his room.

Within minutes, Vera, Wilbert, and Hex all shuffle in. Vera collapses into a chair at the table and immediately puts her head down. I place a patch in her open palm, and without lifting her head, she slaps it onto the side of her neck. Her index finger lifts, as if it’s the last effort she can manage.

“Coffee,” she mumbles against the tabletop. “Industrial strength.”

Wilbert grabs two patches and slaps one on each of his heads, and Hex actually lies down on the floor with four hands covering his face. He groans miserably.

“Hex, are you okay?”

“I will be, if everyone will go mute for a few days.” He drops two hands to gently massage his stomach.

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t make any cocktails for breakfast,” I say lightly. At the mention of cocktails, Hex jumps off the floor, beelines into the kitchen, and pukes noisily into the sink.

Vera lifts her head to look at the kitchen door and then me. Cy emits a noise that sounds like air escaping from a balloon. We all burst into laughter. It’s the warmest sound I’ve heard in days. Wilbert starts pouring cups of coffee, when Hex stumbles back into the common room.

“Please don’t say that word again. Or anything that means the same thing.” He sits down at the table and Vera pushes a fresh cup of coffee over to him.

“Thanks,” he murmurs, and Vera’s lips twitch against her raised mug.

I survey the scene, realizing that for once, we’re all in the same place and not trying to yell at each other. “So, uh. How often do you guys do this club thing?” I ask, yawning so widely that my jaw actually cracks.

“Occasionally,” Wilbert says.

“Never,” Cy adds. I watch Cy after he speaks, and he turns to watch me right back. Finally, I drop my eyes to my coffee.

“But it’s never that exciting, that’s for sure. This one’s going into the books,” Vera says. “Locked away, never to be spoken of again.”

“Locked away would be nice. I saw things I never want to see again,” Hex says between coffee slurps.

As did I,
I want to say, but I don’t. “Did you have fun, Wilbert?” I ask.

“All I remember is puking,” he says, grabbing some toast. “And wishing I had a mouth on this guy”—he pats his faceless head—“so I could puke twice as fast.”

“Schweeeeeet,” Hex slurs, and there’s another round of laughs. Even Wilbert’s being a good sport, joining in.

“Did Marka come home yet?”

“Not yet,” Wilbert answers. “She might be there for a few days. We never know until she shows up.”

“How often does she bring kids home? I mean, there aren’t a lot of you guys here,” I say.

“Not often. Well, before you there were the twins, little Edgar and Pria. They had these extra eyes on their body. Creepy, but kind of cute after a while. Something wasn’t right with their brain development, though. They couldn’t walk, or eat right. They died within a few months.”

“How did they . . . you guys . . . get the traits? Can they be undone?” I ask, thinking of Dyl.

Vera shakes her head. “No way. Every cell we have is altered—”

“Undone? We’re not errors that need fixing,” Cy interrupts, glaring at me.

“I didn’t say that!” I retort, exasperated. I turn my back to Cy and ask Hex, “So, is there something in the water that I don’t know about?”

“No,” Vera says, softly rubbing her skin. “It’s not something in the water. Our traits aren’t random mutations. You can’t get subdermal chloroplasts without purposeful tinkering.”

“Then how?”

It’s silent for a while. Everyone steals a look at Cy, but no one speaks, as if they’re afraid of him. Finally Cy clears his throat. “New genomic sequences, directly targeting the oocytes of women. With the right cell uptake vector, you could make it into a pill. The women would never know until something like Wilbert showed up on ultrasound.”

“That technology doesn’t exist,” I counter.

“You’re looking at proof that it does,” Cy says, sitting up and returning my glance. “No legal lab has access to that kind of technology.”

“And it’s been going on for a long, long time,” Wilbert adds. “Way before we were born. I mean, look at Marka.”

“But who could possibly be doing that to women? Is it Aureus?” I wonder aloud.

“I don’t think so,” Hex says, rubbing his unshaved chin. “The way they keep trolling the orphanages and foster homes? It’s like they’re Easter egg hunting, only someone else hid the eggs out there, you know?”

The conversation dies, right then and there. Everyone grows silent, thinking of their own twisted beginnings, all with the same empty space of an answer. I attempt to restart the conversation.

“So Wilbert, you came here two years ago?”

“Yep,” he responds, then smiles shyly when Vera doesn’t add some scathing remark afterward.

“And before that . . .” He trails off, eyeing Cy.

“We came five years ago,” Cy says.

“We?” I say.

He puts his coffee mug down on the table. Everyone flinches when he gets up, but he only walks calmly to the door. “My sister and I. And Ana doesn’t deserve to be in a hangover discussion.”

I feel bad. I wasn’t trolling for gossip, but Cy probably doesn’t know that. Before he leaves, he says quietly, “Thank you, Zelia, for the coffee.”

We all breathe a sigh of relief at his exit.

“Girl! What did you put in that drink? An elephant tranquilizer?” Vera asks.

I shake my head, surprised myself. I reach for a piece of dry toast, thinking about Cy, seeing him in my mind’s eye walking within Carus. Maybe he’s going to the lab. My heart thumps an extra beat in anticipation of going there myself to work.

“
I’m home, guys.
”
Marka’s voice sounds from the room’s wall-coms.

“How’d it go? Got a new rugrat to introduce to us?” Vera asks.

“No
.
” The deadened tone of Marka’s voice immediately squelches any good feeling in the room. Maybe she knows about our excursion.

Minutes later, she walks in and dumps her overnight bag on the floor with an exhausted sigh. Hex sits up to watch her every movement and Vera pours a cup of coffee for her.

“What is it, Marka?”

“I got there too late,” she says, her voice slightly hoarse. Vera puts her hand to her mouth.

“Too late? Too late for what?” I ask her. “Did Aureus try to take him?”

“No. Aureus probably passed on this kid a long time ago. Not a useful trait. By the time I got there, they’d already put him down. He was just five years old. If only I’d gotten there sooner.”

I shake my head. “You sound like you’re talking about dogs or—”

“We are dogs.” She grimaces at her cup. “No, we’re less than that. We’re nonexistent mistakes in the eyes of the government. They’re trying damn hard to keep up the nonexistent part of their promise. I’m lucky they didn’t kill me too.” She lifts her head from her coffee, her eyes rimmed with red. “My contact there isn’t willing to risk her neck for me much longer. I’m so glad you guys were all safe here while I was gone.”

At this, Hex coughs guiltily. I know we’re all thinking the same thing—there won’t be another club excursion for a long time. Maybe ever. We each give Marka a hug and disappear to our separate sanctuaries, to swallow down the reality of who we are, and how close to dead we could be.

I practically run to the lab, hungry to finish the next step and bury myself in work, formulas, lab protocols. Dyl constantly invades my thoughts, and I use the panic to work even harder. The hours fly by before I realize it’s the middle of the night. Cy never appears. Although I’m disappointed at first, I welcome the solace and lack of distraction.

Finally, exhaustion overtakes me and I head to bed. My feet take a path that swings by Cy’s room. Stupid feet. I don’t really want to talk to him, but it doesn’t matter, because his room is empty. I’m so tired that I bump against the walls a few times on the way to my room. Finally, the door to my bubble room comes into view.

Well, half of it comes into view.

Cy is sleeping there, propped against the doorjamb and obscuring the lower half of the closed door. I walk over and stoop down next to him. He must have put on some tattoos after breakfast, but they’re so faded now I can’t tell what images they were. He looks like he just rolled around in some ashes. His face is serene and relaxed. And beautiful.

I nudge his arm with my knuckles. Softly at first, then more firmly.

“Cy,” I say. He doesn’t flinch. I try a louder volume, but he’s really out. Too bad I have to do this.

I hit the button for the door, and it slides open. He falls with a clunk onto the floor. I think his skull actually bounced.

“Goddammit!” he curses, rubbing his head. “Why did you do that?”

“How else was I going to get in, with you barricading the way?”

“You could have asked.”

“I tried,” I say, squeezing by him and making my way to the closet inside. Any glamour I had from the club night is long gone. I’m exhausted and edgy from my lab work, which isn’t going as fast as I’d like. Now is not the time for any arguments with Cy. I shut the door and start undressing. I’ve got my shirt over my head when Cy slides the closet door open and walks in.

“Hey!” I protest.

“I’m not done.”

“Can you be ‘not done’ somewhere else?” I clutch my shirt to my chest, but it doesn’t hide my bare legs and underwear. “Get out!”

“No. I want to talk to you.” He’s wearing his hostility all over again, as if I’ve somehow insulted him between breakfast and now. “I want to know why you were with that piece of trash Kw.”

“Ugh. Fine. But turn around so I can change,” I warn him. Thankfully, Cy obliges me. I throw my shirt down and find one of Cy’s stolen shirts long enough to cover the top of my thighs. After I’m decently covered, I look up to see Cy’s reflection in the mirror by the closet wall. He’s been watching me the whole time.

“Arrggh! I told you not to look!”

“You told me to turn around. I obeyed you. I didn’t put that mirror there.”

I push past him, but he follows close behind.

“Answer my question.”

I sit on my bed, bunching up my bedcovers against my chest. As if that will remove the image of my half-naked body from his mind. It’s not going to work, but what the hell.