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I HAVE THREE DAYS. THREE INSANE DAYS
to do the impossible.

“How many links are you making?” Cy asks. He studies the electronic tablet I’ve been scribbling on with manic abandon since last night. Two cups of coffee, a plate of parsmint squares (from Vera), and a plate of mini bacon burgers (from Hex) remain untouched on the lab desk.

Before I can answer, a squeal breaks through the usual noise of the lab.

“Hoinch!”

Wilbert walks in with Callie struggling in his hands.

“Callie, calm down!” Wilbert is flushed red in both heads and trying not to drop the pig. “I have a medical problem. Are you busy?”

“We’re making sticky ends,” I explain.

“Is that like sticky buns? I love those.”

“No. DNA sticky ends.”

“I don’t get it,” Wilbert says. “I do electronics, not genes.”

I don’t have time to explain, so Cy talks while I start up the first batch of chromosome clasps, setting instructions on the rusty DNA fragmenter.

“Each chromosome is one long string of DNA, right? To make DNA like Zelia’s, we have to connect the ends, like fixing a broken necklace.”

“Oh. That sounds easy.”

“But we have to make forty-six different ones, individualized for each chromosome. Otherwise, you’d get a tangle of different chromosomes attached to the wrong ends.”

“That would be one ugly necklace,” Wilbert says, getting into the swing of things.

“Right. And we have to cut the chromosome ends in a way that makes them stick only to their assigned, new clasps. That is, forty-six individualized scissors that cut sticky links on each chromosome for each matching clasp.”

“Uhh, this is going to take a while, isn’t it?”

“Three days,” I say under my breath. Luckily no one hears me.

“Anyway, what brings you here? You didn’t really want a lesson in chromosome clasps, did you?”

“It’s Callie. She’s getting arthritis. Can I borrow some of your brew?” Wilbert asks. When Cy shakes his head, Wilbert’s face tightens with anxiety. “Please?”

Cy sighs. “Only this one time. It takes me a while to make enough for one person, let alone a pig.”

“How old is Callie?” I ask.

Wilbert scratches Callie’s rump, and the rump responds with a sad twitch. “She’s two. But she’s only got another year or so. It’s her hybrid genes.”

“Haven’t you done enough experimenting on her?” Cy looks at Callie with a critical eye.

“What? She’s like a guinea pig-pig?” I ask.

“Yeah. Callie’s gotten Hex’s stuff and Vera’s too. But so far, she only grew extra hair follicles, and the green stuff we injected took a week before it started to affect her breathing. Isn’t dat wight, my widdle puddums.” Callie licks Wilbert’s nose in what can only be described as a trans-species make-out session. I cover my eyes. Gross.

“Here,” Cy says. From the back specimen fridge, he produces a tiny needle-tipped syringe filled with lavender fluid. “We could try intravenous, see if that works. Zel, help me hold Callie’s leg down.”

“I don’t have time to play vet!” I yell over my shoulder, taking down an armful of beakers from the cupboards.

“Please, Zel? I can’t hold her down! She’ll be mad at me all day,” Wilbert says.

Great. I pull on a pair of lab gloves and hold her neck and body while Cy pins her leg down. He injects a mini-dose of the liquid into her vein, but a few loud pig cusses later, she looks the same. Wilbert puts her on the lab floor and she walks with a kind of stiff, crotchety gait.

“She looks the same,” Wilbert complains.

“She looks like she has something stuck up her ass,” I observe.

“It should work immediately.” Cy dumps the syringe in a sharps container. “And I don’t even know if it’s compatible with pig physiology. Maybe a joint injection next time?” He disappears into another room to find a separate batch of his brew.

I can’t be doing this. I back away and fetch more glassware.

“Time,” I whisper, and my holo pops up. The counter is ticking down to my rendezvous with Micah. I have exactly two and a half days left, and I really need five. If only I could forgo sleep. I walk over to Wilbert, who’s coaxing Callie toward him with a cube-shaped strawberry. Cy is still out of the room.

“Wilbert, the sleepless wonder.” I smile. “I have a proposition for you, but it’s just between me and you, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Got any Wilbert-brand of caffeinated beverage?”

His nose twitches. “Maybe.”

• • •

I WAIT UNTIL CY IS RUNNING THE
next set of clasps in the fragmenter, and sneak out before he realizes I’m missing. I run to Wilbert’s room, where he’s waiting for me, holding a transparent vial in his hand.

“It’s old, but it should work. Callie stayed up for a whole week using this stuff. For you, maybe three or four days.”

“Has anyone remotely human tried it?”

“Not this batch, but it should be fine. It puts a portion of your central neurons in sleep mode, but you have others to do your awake thinking. So your brain is constantly resting. But watch out, the simultaneous dreams can be a little odd.”

“Hey, wait. Don’t they have something like this on the market? What’s it called . . . ForEverDay?”

Wilbert shrugs, bumping his extra head. “Yeah, I guess my brew’s not so special. But this is custom-made and lasts longer.” Wilbert pours his elixir into a tiny glass. It’s yellow, like pee.

I sniff it. “Are you sure—”

“It’s not piss, I swear. I made it lemon-flavored.”

“Oh.”

Well, down the hatch. It tastes like lemon and liquid plastic. I don’t feel strange at all. After a minute or two of waiting for the world to split into two existences, nothing happens.

“How do I know it’s going to work?” I say.

“Wait till bedtime. Then you’ll know. Now”—he rubs his hands together—“for your part of the bargain.”

“I’ll test my elixir on Callie first chance I have a complete set. Once the cell culture shows it’s actually working, she’ll be next.”

Wilbert nods with satisfaction, and I get back to work.

In the lab, I’m so stressed out that Cy keeps his distance from me, which I appreciate and hate at the same time. Around ten thirty, his head falls onto his arms at the desk. He’s out cold. After fifteen straight hours of work, it’s no surprise.

On his desk, the formula for the Cy-derived bio-accelerant is nearly ready. It turned out to be three separate proteins that make a trimer. It’s so exquisite, in concept. Trust Cy to be beautiful, even on a molecular level. He had said it would be interesting to synthesize, but he’s been spending more time working on my stuff than his.

Half an hour later, something happens to me. I blink my eyes, and my vision is layered with another image that fades in and out. It’s the white dome and the agriplane under a yolk of a sun, complete with Vera sunbathing in all her verdant beauty, down to a microscopic black thong. Cy is there with her, slathering almond oil on her legs. She arches her back to give him a crooked smile.

This is the dream I’m having?

Good god. The price of sleeplessness is going to be pretty damn high.

• • •

I GET THREE MORE CLASPS MANUFACTURED
before Cy wakes up at his desk at two a.m.

“Hey,” I whisper, and let him wrap his arm around me as I walk him out of the lab. He must be mostly asleep, because he doesn’t question why I’m working so late.

Inside his bedroom, a new dream springs up in the quiescent side of my brain. We’re in the shoddy little room of my old apartment, before the magpod accident that started it all. Cy is in my arms
and
in my dreams. Two for the price of one. Not bad.

“Don’t leave,” he says in the dreamscape.

“I want to go. It just reminds me of bad things now.” I’m tugging on his shirt, pulling it down low enough to expose the top of his chest. Tattoos of tiny skeletal baby dolls plaster his skin.

“It’ll all change if you leave. Make it stop. Now.”

“But where will you be?” I ask. “If I don’t leave, my father won’t die, but then we’ll never meet, will we?” My logic is spot on, even unconscious.

Cy kisses me, bending my neck back with the force of his embrace. It feels so real that my hands and belly tingle from the experience of it, even though the real and nearly unconscious Cy is stumbling into his bed. He exhales a mighty puff of air as he reaches for a pillow, but I climb over him, unable to shut off the image of him and me, swirling in our embrace, our clothes slowly peeling away.

I straddle Cy in the bed, asleep and so peaceful. His lips are open just enough to accept mine, and his dark lashes flutter a little. I wonder if he dreams of me too.

In my dream, we are saying good-bye with our bodies, wrestling with a desperation, warm and uncontrolled. My own heart runs quickly, like legs galloping down a steep bank. Faster and faster. I want it to be real.

My awake body dips lower, and I kiss him, gently at first, then with more strength as he begins to respond. His hand slides around my waist, and I let him pull me closer. The dream and reality are almost in sync. Cy begins to peel off my shirt.

The door to my dream-world room opens abruptly, and Dyl stands there, emaciated and white. Her sundress is torn and the dirty hem drags on the floor of our almost-abandoned apartment.

“We have to go, Zelia.”

Both Zelias stop kissing both Cys.

“We have to go,” she repeats, insistent and commanding.

“Why are you making me choose?” I say in the dream.

“Oh, Zel. There’s no choice. There never was.”

And with that, I’ve jumped off Cy’s bed, my breath caught in my throat. I back away from Cy, who groggily comforts himself by embracing a pillow and falling deeper asleep. I close his door and walk back to the lab in the silence of the phosphorescent-lit hallways. The dream is over. Reality is the only thing I have now, and my task.

Oh, Zel. There’s no choice. There never was.

I know she’s right.

• • •

TWO DAYS LEFT.

I change my clothes at dawn after a fast shower. Turns out the dreams don’t come all the time, but in short bursts. If I close my eyes, my eyeballs start whizzing around. It’s disconcerting, so I hardly blink. Then my eyes dry out like rubber balls.

The visits from Dyl keep occurring, interspersed with ones from Dad and Cy, of course. Cy and I have a pretty healthy sex life in my dream world, and the mind-porn during work is really disruptive. It makes Wilbert’s elixir kind of useless during the dream cycles, as I can’t take advantage of all the time gained by using it.

I finish hiding the new clasps and scissors I’ve made just before Cy shows up at nine, freshly scrubbed and wide awake. I don’t have to fake a smile.

“You’re up early,” he remarks.

“Only just. I’m on the fifth batch.” I’m impressed at how easily the lie comes. The truth is that fourteen batches are done. At this rate, I’ll have them finished with a few hours to spare.

“That’s it? Well, we’ll get there, eventually. We’ve got time.” He slurps a coffee and sits in front of his monitors, watching the news.

No, I think. Thirty-nine hours until midnight tomorrow. And meanwhile, Dyl could be getting sicker and sicker every hour that goes by. No one suffers from that knowledge but me.

I snap the fragmenter shut, punch an order in, and check on the cell cultures needed to test the first round. I could test all fourteen, but try to be content with just two for now. If the chromosome makes the telltale infinity sign, then I’ll know the scissors and clasps worked.

Two hours later, I fist-pump in victory.

“What?” Cy comes running over, slipping his hands around my middle. I can’t have him think things are different, so I allow it. My eyelids succumb to gravity for a second, and I memorize the sensation of his hands encircling my waist.

God, I feel like a drug addict taking morphine for a hangnail.
It’s okay. I’m not really going back on my promise to Dyl. It is a necessary thing.
Well, the necessary thing is kissing my cheek now.

“You haven’t let me kiss you in a while,” he whispers.

“I’ve been busy.” I throw him a bright smile, brushing off his complaint. “Here, look.” I hook up the microscope to the screen that feeds to his desk. He peers at the screen, where there are twenty-two pairs of normal X-shaped chromosomes . . . and a single figure eight.

“It worked?”

“Your confidence in me is astounding.”

“How’s this for confidence?” he says, pulling me into an embrace. I swerve out of his open arms, shaking my head.

“Mm, no. Back to work.” Cy’s disappointment darkens his eyes. The guilt weighs on my shoulders, and I hunch over. “I’m sorry. The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can . . . you know, Marka can get Dyl out of there.”
Crap.
Cy catches my Freudian slip. He crosses his arms and doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“That reminds me. Marka wants to talk to you.”

“Sure.” I have precious little time, but enough for Marka. I head toward the door and Cy follows me like a shadow.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going with you.”

“You’re guarding me, aren’t you?” My hands rest on my hips. It’s the small girl’s version of fluffing my feathers to look bigger.

“Maybe.”

“I don’t need a sitter. Really. Call Marka in a minute to prove I’m there. And then I’ll come right back.”

Cy leans over for a kiss, and I let him. After what feels like forever—a delicious, forbidden forever—he lets me go.

A few minutes later, I enter Marka’s lab, but it’s empty. The bottled scents still sparkle behind their glass doors, a museum of all things human captured in convenient, travel-sized containers. I wait for Cy to check in, but the room stays silent. I guess he does believe me, which is good. Trust is essential when you’re planning to lie to everyone you know.

Hmm. Where’s Marka? It’s quiet as death in her lab, unlike ours, which constantly buzzes with elderly, arthritic machines.

“Marka?” I call.

“Be there in a minute. I’m on my way,” her voice intones from the walls.

To pass the time, I start reading the handwritten labels on the bottles, stoppered like fragile, expensive scents at the store. The liquid is clear as water.