Zowan glanced across the small theater to where Terra stood with the other First Gen girls on his same level, her long red braids draped over the fronts of both shoulders. Seeming to feel his regard, her gaze shifted to meet his, and in it he saw all the helpless, furious sorrow that boiled in his own gut.
Why couldn’t Andros have just said the stupid Affirmation in the first place? He’ d been doing it all his life, most of that time unknowingly. What difference did it make whether he had come to the realization that he might not believe it all now? It was just a thing everyone did. Whether he meant it or not, who would know?
Now Andros would still have to say it, every day, morning after morning, but with who knew what handicaps. Memory loss, inability to concentrate, slurred speech, twitches, blackouts—those were only some of the recurring side effects of having gone through the punishment of the box. It had been a stupid, prideful, stubborn thing to do. But somehow Zowan couldn’t hold it against him.
Terra’s gaze flicked away from his and up to something behind and above him, then darted back to the stage below. It was Gaias she’d seen, Gaias who stood in the aisle at Zowan’s back and who had promised him this morning as he’ d brought him to the Sanctuary to say his own Affirmation that he would be watching him here. To be sure he did his duty. Even though the whole point of the Body doing this together was to allow each man to pull his lever as he deemed just.
The Elders reached the end of the first verse of their hymn, and the Body took up the chorus, voices filling the chamber. Beneath Zowan’s feet, the cement trembled, the faint vibration escalating to a violent shuddering as the distant stage blossomed in petal-like sections and a gleaming black point emerged between them, spearing toward the red-lit ceiling. Part of the technology of the ancients, largely lost to humankind now, it rose slowly, gaining width, until it was revealed to be a massive cube of smoked glass floating above the dark petals.
The rumbling vibration stopped, the chorus’s last note faded, and silence fell over the Justorium. Though Zowan’s hands were ice, sweat dribbled down his sides beneath his tunic. He swallowed on a dry mouth, straining to see through the glass, knowing Andros was within, alone and sick with terror.
Tall, skinny, gawky Andros, with the pimply face and the dark, sad eyes. Andros, who never hurt anybody, who always seemed caught up in a mental flight of fancy, concocting some peculiar new invention, who hated talking as much as he hated exercise but loved anything to do with numbers. And who asked way too many questions.
“What if all is not as the Elders have told us, Zowan?”
Each Elder placed a hand on his lever. The Body followed suit in a susurrus of rustling fabric—Zowan, as well, his fingers so cold the lever burned beneath them. He felt Gaias’s eyes on the back of his neck, imagined the oculus bulging in its bony socket.
“May the Body judge as the sin deserves,” the Elder intoned.
A thread of light snaked across one face of the glass, and inside the cube Andros yelped. It was followed by another and another as the sides began to lighten, revealing the man within, already hopping and shuddering and yowling as he tried desperately not to touch any of the surfaces that enclosed him—a hopeless impossibility.
“Do you ever wonder if they’re really telling us the truth?”
On Zowan’s every side, levers were pulled downward along the console, slowly, for they were designed to resist a quick pull. Zowan stood his ground, fingers poised on the red lever but applying no pressure. He flinched at every one of his friend’s cries, anger kindling within him, at both Andros and the system that punished him so unfairly.
More and more threads shivered across the glass. The young men at Zowan’s sides had pulled their levers halfway down the track now and were still going. He held firm.
But in the back of his mind, a coward’s voice said, Gaias is watching you. If you don’t do this, it will be you in there next time. It will be you. He’ll make sure of it.
Grimly he held to his conviction, reminding himself he had nothing to fear. The law said it was his right as a member of the Body to withhold punishment if he so chose.
As the flickering currents darted ever more thickly around the box, Andros became increasingly frantic. Revulsion rolled over Zowan in ever-intensifying waves, until he could hardly bear to stand there. He was on the verge of shoving his way past the youths and boys surrounding him in a bid for escape when the screams ceased.
Andros collapsed to the bottom of the Cube, and the glass walls darkened around him. As the floor trembled, the huge cube descended from whence it had come, the stage sections lowering smoothly into a flat surface once again.
It was done.
As the others returned their rods to the starting position, Zowan let go of his own, still in the full upright position. He was mildly surprised he’ d actually carried through on his refusal and, at the same time, horrified by the inevitable ramifications.
As he exited the Justorium and headed down the wide corridor to the Enclave’s central square and mall, Gaias stepped alongside him.
“You held back,” he murmured in Zowan’s ear. “There can be no holding back when it comes to supporting Father’s honor.”
“It will not be recorded.”
“It already has been.” Gaias tapped his temple. “Up here.”
Zowan refused to show intimidation. “You can bring no charges. I have the right to show mercy, even in this.”
I have the right to show mercy, even in this.”
“Yes, but everyone will want to know why you’ve chosen to exercise it now.” He smiled, the grotesque oculus swiveling under its translucent membrane. “You walk the edge of a precipice, brother. It would be a simple thing to push you off.”
With that, he stalked away, his black robes flapping batlike in his wake.
Chapter Seven
After her less than satisfactory conversation with Cameron Reinhardt during her morning break, Lacey returned to her work in the fifth-floor prep and supply room. There she spent the rest of the morning hefting trays of glassware and steel instruments in and out of the two autoclaves and overseeing the receipt of a new shipment of lab supplies. Except for the inventorying, her tasks allowed her plenty of think-time, during which she chewed the encounter with Reinhardt to bits, deciding at the end of each cycle of rumination that he was either hiding something or was simply absentminded, weak in social skills, and talking to a woman prone to panic attacks made him nervous.
Technically he hadn’t denied she’ d been cut, or that any of the events she’ d recounted had happened. He just hadn’t confirmed that they had. Perhaps rightfully so. He’ d not seen the intruder, after all— only the aftermath. For all he knew, she really had been hysterical and trashed the lab in her panic.
When the lunch hour came round, she bypassed the dining hall and went straight down to the animal facility, determined to find something to prove she hadn’t imagined last night’s intruder. As the elevator stopped at floor G, she half expected its doors to open onto barriers of yellow crime-scene tape, maybe even a guard and an investigative team searching for clues. But the floor was deserted. As she stepped into its quiet solitude, though, a sudden, irrational fear that last night’s intruder might have returned stopped her in her tracks.
It took her several moments to convince herself to move on.
She found the prep room in a state of quiet order. Every cabinet door was closed. The water bottle nozzles had been washed and stood in ranks on paper towels beside the empty, shining sink. Harvey slept in a corner of his plastic cage, a furry ball nestled in wood shavings. The room’s ivory vinyl flooring gleamed softly in the overhead fluorescent light, spotlessly clean. Even the first-aid kit stood in its place on the top shelf of the wall cabinet that ran perpendicular to the sink counter. And on the back of the prep room door on the hook where she always hung it was her oversized lab coat, Carlos red-stitched on the breast pocket. She stood before it, fingering its intact, unstained left sleeve as pro
found uneasiness churned in her middle.
Carlos undoubtedly had more than one lab coat, though, she told herself. This could be another one, different from the one I wore last night. . . .
Leaving the prep room, she went to peer through the small window in the locked door to Poe’s lab. Beyond the cracked pane, all had been put to rights. The shelves were as they had always been, the rubber tubs standing between the aquarium tanks filled with their various inhabitants, as if nothing had ever happened.
She exhaled slowly, reminding herself that Swain would want things put to rights as quickly as possible, so this wasn’t surprising, either. Still, she stared through the small window for some time, straining to find that one telling detail that would prove her rising fears wrong. In the end, she had to force herself to turn away.
Not surprisingly, a quick check of the frog room showed nothing unusual, either.
Increasingly unnerved, she descended a floor to B1, the technicians’ dormitory where she slept. Stopping in the small gray-walled elevator lobby, she bought a package of cheese and crackers and a bottle of green tea from one of the vending machines, then went to her room to visit the bathroom and examine her clothing. She clearly recalled the blood that had saturated her U of A T-shirt—not a stain that would be easily removed.
Yet the shirt wasn’t in the dirty-clothes hamper, nor even on the closet floor. Perhaps the clinic staff still had it or, more likely, had thrown it away as unusable. Despite that eminently logical rationale, she was dogged by the compulsion to check her T-shirt drawer and was horrified to find the garment neatly folded among her other shirts. Disbelieving, she pulled it out, unmindful of the two shirts that came with it. She held it up before her, aghast to find the white cotton knit behind the red-and-blue Wildcat emblem as clean and white as if it had never been worn.
Perhaps it hasn’t, she told herself desperately. Perhaps they replaced it like they did the lab coat, trying to cover the break-in. . . .
Her eyes strayed to the orange bottle of Valium standing accusingly on the desk beside a curling pink appointment slip noting her 2:30 follow-up exam at the clinic.
Though she couldn’t move her right arm without triggering a spasm beneath her shoulder blade, she refused to take the Valium. The possibility she might have been prescribed the drug for the same reason as her mother had, still made her sick and light-headed.
“Schizophrenia tends to run in families,” Ma’s doctor had said that day in the conference room after they’d admitted her to the hospital five years ago. He’ d regarded Lacey with cool, dispassionate eyes, as if he expected her to immediately confess some mental aberration of her own.
Drawing a deep breath, she cast Dr. Lane from her mind and stepped into the bathroom. Her reflection stared back at her from the broad mirror, dark eyes wide and haunted. Her face looked haggard, the wild, elfin look accentuated by her short dark hair. After a month’s time she still hadn’t gotten used to the new short cut, but today more than ever it was like staring into the face of a stranger.
“I did not imagine it all,” she told the face in the mirror.
“Prolonged, intense stress can trigger a psychotic episode,” Dr. Lane’s voice droned flatly in her head. “We see patients suffering from delusions, hallucinations, and a severe divorcement from reality such as what your mother has suffered here. . . . And she has been under a great deal of stress.”
Thanks to Lacey. And Erik. The arguments, the threats, the rancorous divorce, the stalking, the restraining orders . . . Yes, it had been very stressful for Ma, but Ma had always been prone to worry herself into hysterics, and hadn’t Lacey herself been under much more stress at that time? She’ d not come unglued then—why would she now?
Because overwork and lack of sleep fed into existing stress levels— like the deep sense of unworthiness that dogged her, like her desperate need to succeed at Kendall-Jakes, and even the trauma that remained from the years under Erik’s tyranny. . . .
What if she had imagined everything last night?
Nausea climbed up her throat as she braced both palms flat upon the counter. What if she hadn’t fallen as far from the crazy tree as she liked to think?
Her ears began to roar. For a moment she could hardly breathe.
Then she recalled the scar and sucked in a great gasp of air. She pushed back from the vanity to examine anew the white seam curving up from her elbow and across the pale skin of her inner arm.
I know I did not have this before last night.
The tightness in her chest eased.
Somewhere out in the corridor a door closed, and hurried footfalls recalled her to the fact that her lunch hour was fast running out. Pushing the doubts from her mind as she brushed the tears from her eyes, she regained her equilibrium and went about her business.
When she emerged from the bathroom, she grabbed her cheese and crackers, bottled tea, and appointment slip and returned to the main floor, where she took refuge in a small garden along the zig’s west wall, deserted now at midday because of the heat, despite its water-misting system.
There she called her mother, for once hoping Ma would actually pick up and sharply disappointed when she didn’t. Lacey left a message asking if they had any photos of the scar on her left forearm. Then she called her family physician to ask if he had any records detailing the injury that had produced the scar on her arm. Of course she couldn’t talk to him directly because he was seeing patients, but the receptionist promised he would return her call that night.
Flipping her phone shut, she tucked it into her lab coat pocket and sat down on a wooden bench to eat her crackers and drink her tea, feeling defeated and increasingly disturbed.
She wished she had someone to talk to, but even if Jade and the others had not been completely caught up in the problems of the day—a whole round of experimental data had been deemed corrupt and had to be redone—they’d already made it clear what they believed had happened to her. Her objection to her lab coat and T-shirt being in their usual places, her suggestion they were not in fact her garments but replacements put there to cover up what had really happened, would only persuade them further of her mental instability. Without more convincing physical evidence or someone willing to corroborate her story, she was stuck.
And the idea of trying to continue the conversation she’ d begun with Dr. Reinhardt provoked such a deep sense of embarrassment in her—knowing he was privy to her most humiliating family secrets— she wasn’t about to approach him again.
Worse were the unsettling questions that now began to nag her. How exactly would she explain the events she’ d experienced if she hadn’t imagined it all? Did she really believe K-J insiders would actually sneak a new shirt in her drawer, just to cover some Mohawk-haired adolescent’s act of vandalism? Except for the damage created in his struggle with her, what had he done but eat the legs off a few frogs?
The only answer she could come up with was that even if she couldn’t come up with an answer, that didn’t disprove her hypothesis. There were undoubtedly a multitude of pursuits K-J administrators did not want leaked to the public, and as always the fewer who knew the better. Their paranoia about keeping company secrets was well-known. And while that reasoning might not satisfy anyone else, it was enough to encourage her to keep going.
Back in the fifth-floor prep and supply room, she resumed her work of shelving the contents of a carton of gel extraction kits and continued to ruminate, especially on her conversation with Reinhardt and her need for an ally. With the passage of time and multiple iterations, she began to wonder if that conversation was as negative as she’ d taken it, or if Reinhardt was as absentminded as she’ d assumed. Maybe he was as mystified and conflicted as she. If he was part of the cover-up, wouldn’t he have denied flat-out that he remembered anything of what she was saying?
In the end she decided to swallow her embarrassment, and on her way to the clinic for her afternoon appointment took a detour by way of Lab 500.
Like all the la
bs on the fifth floor, 500 was a maze of rooms, aisles, and work spaces that seemed to have no logical pattern. At the door into the main lab, she hesitated. About thirty people worked in the lab, seated or standing at various stations along the lines of lab benches that marched in ranks before her. The work surfaces were jumbled with test tube racks and boxes of pipettes, prepackaged solutions, and latex gloves. Bottles of reagents stood amidst various pieces of equipment— shakers, chromatographs, a spectrophotometer. Reinhardt’s glass-enclosed office stood at the end of the long aisle down the back of the room, and she saw at once that he was in it.
Reluctance swelled in her again, but knowing how much she’ d regret leaving without pressing for answers, she threw her timidity off and strode boldly forward. Tapping on the open glass door, she stepped into the office and asked, “May I speak with you privately, Doctor?”
He looked up in surprise, and his expression quickly turned to one of displeasure, though he nodded and motioned her in. She closed the glass door behind her and stepped toward him, noting peripherally the stacks of folders and binders and boxes and books that cluttered the tiny office. At his back, a white laminate bookshelf bulged with volumes whose titles reflected his line of work. He’ d managed to prop his plaque for the Black Box Citation up against several on the second shelf.
“I don’t mean to be impertinent, Doctor,” she said, “but you never answered my question this morning when we met on the path outside. And . . . well, it’s very important to me that you do.”
His freckled face grew more guarded than ever. “Your question?”
“About what happened in the animal facility last night?”
He held her gaze for only a moment, then glanced across the room behind her as he settled back in his chair. Above the now-clear lenses of his glasses, his auburn brows drew slightly together. Finally he looked at her again. “Ms. McHenry, whatever you think happened last night, it really would be to your advantage to let it go.”