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I ROCK BACK AND FORTH ON THE FLOOR,
hugging my knees, as the stranger’s voice echoes in my head.

Trust no one.

But why? Who was he?

The name Q is meaningless. It’s a letter, an answerless question. Yet one thing he said feels too true, too real. I’m not safe, and neither is Dyl. I haven’t felt safe since Dad died, and Carus is a shaky sanctuary, even with its needle-stabbing security system and plasma fences. Maybe they’re not truly afraid of invasion. Maybe it’s the inhabitants that need to be kept from the world. And here I am, locked in with them. No one here is trying hard to get Dyl back. No one cares as much as I do.

Her bag lies limp on the floor next to me, as if it’s died in her absence. The dirty orange hue from the fading sunlight retreats from the darkness already blotting out most of Neia. The artificial lights below are a sickly bluish white, and in a few hours they’ll wink out with the curfew.

She’s out there, somewhere. Maybe in Neia, maybe farther away. I can feel the enormity of land and space around me outside of my bubble room. “Out there” is limitless, out of my control.

Normally, when I had a problem I couldn’t solve, I had my lab director. Or Dad. Or my holo. But I have nothing now. I sit there in silence, waiting for the answer to plunk itself onto my dirty lap.

“No one’s coming to help,” I say to nobody. And nobody answers.

Finally, I take a few cleansing breaths, and sit a little straighter against the bean-shaped sofa.

“Access main,” I say. The screen glows blue to a portal offering news, weather, and entertainment stations. “Search Q,” I request. A million terms starting with Q come up. Useless. “Search Dylia Benten.” I’m rewarded with a blank search screen. Even her last fencing team site doesn’t show up. “Benten” alone shows a list of things wholly unrelated to my family. I try different combinations: my dad’s name, my name, New Horizons. “Search Dylia and c-u-e. Dylia and q-u-e-u-e. Dylia and k-e-w.”

Nothing, nothing, and nothing.

My eyes well up again. I grab Dyl’s purse and then pull out the book and her holo stud. I trace the embossed lettering on the cover.
Twentieth-Century Poetry.

When Dyl was little, I used to read her Silverstein and Stevenson poems before I’d put her to bed. We’d snuggle under the covers, late at night when Dad still hadn’t come home. She’d watch my holo with me as I read and pick out funny pictures to accompany them.

“Smart girls read poetry,” I told her. “You’re going to be smart, right?”

“I want to be like you, Thel,” she’d lisped.

Five years later, here she is, reading poetry. I’ve lectured her on the danger of trading her soul for trendy clothes, assuming there was nothing else in her pretty head. I hate myself right now.

Without thinking, I put her holo stud in my other earlobe. The warmth of my skin boots up the holo, and I pinch it on. Dad gave me voice-access to her holo, so someone could police her transmissions while he was out all the time. But I was always too busy to check.

Her peach-colored screen glows before me, the content headings spin around a lacy globe studded with gems. Music, movies, school textbooks, diary . . .

Diary?

I shouldn’t. It’s not for me. I should respect her privacy.

I rub my dripping nose with a filthy sleeve. Without Dyl, and not knowing for certain when I will see her again, I can’t resist. This diary is the closest thing I have to her.

“Access diary,” I order.

A new spinning globe of sparkling icicles emerges, the entries hanging from them like Christmas ornaments. I select the one entitled “Dad’s Poem.”

Dyl’s delicate face comes on-screen and her eyes settle on me. I never thought her face would ever be so agonizing to look at. It’s just like when I saw the hologram of Dad.

Her voice is musical, tentative. “Dad showed this to me. I just . . . it’s so . . .” Her eyes roam upward, trying to find the words. “He said I would understand what it was about.”

My face burns with quiet jealousy. Why didn’t Dad show it to me? Didn’t he think I could understand it?

“Anyway.” Dyl rubs her nose, and I freeze, because I’m rubbing my nose the same way. “Listen.”

Prayer for My Child

The chill heralds rain.

Replete with tears and wrongs,

The storm blurs in the distance

As I watch my child,

Asleep in the crib.

Dyl reads the entire poem, eight stanzas in all. It’s beautiful. My chest aches as I listen to her voice, to the words.

I replay the poem over and over, until my brain hurts from not blinking. Soon my eyelids droop and I put on my necklace, letting the rhythm of the box’s precise breaths take over. I make a pillow out of the poetry book and leave the holo on, letting Dyl’s voice pulsate in the recesses of dreams blooming in my head.

It was always me, not Dad, who helped Dyl fall asleep all those years. For once, she’ll do me the favor. I’m grateful, even for the pain it brings me. I want the dreams of cribs and Dyl and Dad, and their words melting into uncertain lullabies.

• • •

OH, THIS IS WHAT STIFFNESS IS.
I am seventeen going on seventy.

Something is attached to my head. In the murky, amber light of morning, I wake to find my cheek firmly embedded in the poetry book’s cover. The floor is hard and more unforgiving than it was last night. I push myself up, and my hand lands painfully on something irregular, both smooth and sharp. I unglue my eyelids to see what it is.

It’s a tiny chunk of plastic. A doll’s head, salmon-pink. The eye color has been scratched off with a fingernail so the sockets gape, empty and blind. The neck is ragged where it was cut off a plastic body. I drop it like it’s poison.

Someone has been in my room.

Whoever it was is gone now. It doesn’t seem as if anything else has been touched. Dyl’s purse is still next to me. I unclasp my necklace and suck in a huge lungful of air.

Slowly my mind clears, and one thought parks itself in my consciousness. I’ve got to find Dyl. Part of the puzzle is why she was taken in the first place. I have no way of knowing who Q is or if he’ll get in touch again, or if he’s an ally or an enemy. The only proactive thing I can do is get to a lab.

I head for the bathroom, peeling off my shredded clothes, and step into the shower. Under the spray, I examine my arms and Cy’s handiwork. There’s a hint of a lingering soreness there, but all the wounds are closed and with hardly a trace of scar. Amazing.

I wrap myself in a tiny towel and head for the closet. Oh frick. There are hangers, but nothing on them. My pile of discarded clothes look like they’ve been gnawed and spit out by a rabid animal. I can’t put those on either. Didn’t Wilbert say that Vera was supposed to show me my room?

“Vera?” I say, using my nicest voice. “Vera, are you there? I’m having some wardrobe issues. Um, can you help me?”

Only a minute later, my room door opens. “You rang, Princess?”

Vera is wearing purple yoga pants and a matching halter top cut low in the front to show off her bouncy green cleavage. Her long brown hair is tidily wrapped in a bun on her head.

I jerk my thumb toward the closet. “I’m sorry, but . . . I need some clothes.” I put on my most helpless expression, which at this point is not a thespian effort at all. “Please, Vera?”

Vera narrows her eyes and eyeballs me critically. “Come with me.” She spins around and marches out of my room.

“But—” I’m still in a towel. Oh well. I don’t really have a choice. I pad behind her, skulking in her magnificent shadow as she leads me down the hallway, turning left, then right, and finally into her room.

At least, I think it’s a room. It could be an indoor jungle. Grow lights cover the ceiling, and every inch of table space is occupied by vines twisting out of control and delicate seedlings trying to grasp the light. Next to a few dwarf palm trees is an old-fashioned tanning bed, its clam-shell halves slightly open, as if ready to bite. I guess that’s where she sleeps. Or grills really big sandwiches, who the hell knows.

Inside her closet are racks of brightly colored clothes. Vera taps her foot, waiting for me to pick something out.

“Look,” I say, “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. But I don’t have that”—I point at Vera’s curvy figure—“and I prefer to hide this,” I say, waving at my own body.

Vera rolls her eyes. She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a wadded bunch of black items. “Take these.” There’s lace on some of the pieces, I can tell already. I’m itchy just thinking about it. “It’s the most conservative lingerie I own, from a few cup sizes ago.” She glances at my chest and I pull the towel tighter. “Never wore it, though. I was an early bloomer.”
Bloomer.
Ha.

Vera reaches into the back of her closet. “Here,” she says, handing me another dark armful. “Leggings and skirts fit for a nun.”

Before I can look through them, she hooks a perfectly toned arm through mine and I nearly lose my towel in the process. She drags me to another transport and we go up to the top floor (Wilbert’s vertigo-inducing tour is long forgotten—I’m totally lost) and down the hallway to a darkened room.

Taking up half the room is a gigantic sewing machine constructed of mismatched junky components. A long robotic arm with ink cartridges ends in a grouping of about ten needles. It hovers over a table big enough for a person to lie down on. A laser attachment lies unused on the floor.

One wall is covered in prints depicting bodies in agony—burning alive in tombs on fire, drowning in an oily, black river. Another has skeletal humans beseeching demons who stab them with prongs to keep them in cauldrons of fire. Really relaxing stuff.

While I’m wondering why getting dressed has to involve depictions of otherworldly torture, something else catches my eye. Across the room is a desk with four enormous screens above it.

The first screen has a map of the States, with several red dots aglow in a random configuration across the country. A map key is scrawled in handwriting on the screen. Next to the largest red dot, it says
“Previous known Aureus locations.”
One dot, in contrast, luminesces in blue over central Neia. Beside it is a question mark.

On the second screen, a graph containing photo IDs—babies, kids, and teens as old as I am—is tagged to a third screen with a list of body parts and various gene sequences. There are lists of companies, products, and addresses.

The fourth screen is dark and empty.

“Here you go, sweet pea.” Vera’s tone is so caustic, she might as well have called me fermented cabbage. She hands me an armload of shirts, all dark-hued—blacks and browns and several dusky blues and grays.

“Thanks. Uh, so whose room is this?” I ask.

“It’s Cy’s,” she says, already halfway out the door.

“Wait, wait. Is he okay with me taking his clothes?”

“Probably not. But happily, that’s your problem now, not mine.” Vera takes off, leaving me feeling and looking like a very guilty thief. As I head for the hallway, a hiss sounds behind me.

Oh, no. Is Cy in here? I turn to find the sound, but the machine hasn’t moved, and I’m positive the room is empty. Something moves in the fourth screen, which was turned off before. A blob expands within the frame. A pair of glittering eyes find mine and blink twice. I see a fall of disheveled dark hair, and reddened lips that open, ready to speak.

I clutch the clothes closer to my chest, as if they’ll provide some feeble protection. She doesn’t speak, just watches me, but I’m filled with a different fear than when I first saw the mutant kids. Instinct tells me this girl is damaged and dangerous and that logic doesn’t exist in her world. She stares at me like I’m the last drop of water in a desert. I step away from the screen, and the girl moans in pain at my retreat.

I turn around and run to my room. I don’t look back.

• • •

IN MY ROOM, I GET DRESSED IN
the least lacy set of black lingerie, a pair of black leggings with a tube-miniskirt, and one of Cy’s dishwater-gray shirts. It’s perfect—loose, shapeless on my small frame, and soft. I can’t quite ignore the boy pheromones embedded in the fabric. Kind of spicy and smoky with a woodsy note.

I pick up Dyl’s purse, and mentally brush away the freaky girl, the sewing machine from hell, even Q’s static-filled warnings. But I can’t remove the memory of that list of body parts. I think of Dyl and her delicate fingers, her doe-like eyes.

No, I can’t go there. Not now.

I take out the hairbrush and examine it minutely. I find three strands of her hair.

DNA. My ticket to figuring out what Dyl’s trait is.

I put it all back in Dyl’s purse and sling it diagonally across my shoulder. Didn’t Wilbert say Cy was supposed to show me the labs? I leave my room and pause in the hallway, wishing I had a compass for this place.

“Where is everyone?” I wonder out loud.

A calm, electronic voice emerges from the walls. “Marka is in her laboratory, level one. Hexus, Cyrad, and Wilbert are in the holorec room, level two. Vera is—”

“Thank you,” I say, cutting off the voice.

“You’re welcome,” the voice responds.

The walls give me directions down some winding stairs and a long corridor. I find the holorec room and push the door open a tiny crack. The sounds of squeaking sneakers and a bouncing basketball hit my ears.

“I still think we should go get her. It’s her first day,” Wilbert says.

“Technically, her second. So get her,” Hex says, huffing. More squeaking sneakers, and a whoosh.

“This isn’t fair, I only have two hands!” Wilbert pants. “I don’t want to play anymore.”

Someone dribbles the ball quickly. “C’mon Wil. Who else can I play with?”

“How about Cy? He’s good.”

“Cy knifed my basketball last month when I invited him. So, yeah.
No.
”

Cy’s low voice erupts from the distance. “I can hear you both, cretins. Shut up.”

Wilbert drops his voice. “Anyway, I gave her a tour yesterday.”

I hear him plunk down on the floor, and I open the door a bit more and peek in. Half the room is a perfect reconstruction of a last-century New York City corner basketball court, complete with a partially cloudy sky, chain-link fence, and faded paint on asphalt. Cigarette butts litter the ground, from a time when they were as easy to buy as bubble gum.