Although we’d done more than that.
We’d met someone, one of Dad’s partners at House White, I think, though he’d carefully worn gray to indicate a human-service position as he helped us with our shopping. Even as a child, I’d thought that strange.
Quinten was more than capable of doing his own shopping, strange city or not, emergency or not. And the man we met never said his name.
Even more telling: Quinten never spoke of him again.
I was pretty sure we took home an extra box in our shopping bags that we hadn’t bought off any store shelf. A box the man had slipped into our bags.
When I was older and thought about it, I wondered why the man looked so much like my brother, although older and sadder. Their eyes were the same, and something about the curve of their chins and shape of forehead had made them similar.
I remembered the older man had patted Quinten’s shoulder once, while I ate my first gelato.
He may have been an uncle. I’d never asked. It was just one brief afternoon in a child’s life. I’d been more interested in the vanilla on my spoon than the family I’d never see again.
“Almost there,” Abraham said, as he finished inputting our destination, our business, our passenger list, and, of course, the credits to pay for the ride.
Then that dizzying sense of being off the ground while simultaneously rising at a steep angle hit my stomach and head as the pod and car was launched.
There was no sense at all that we were moving, but the readouts were green. We were bulleting at about 350 miles an hour over land, straight into a mess of questions in a world I knew nothing about.
And there was no turning back.
11
HOUSE ORANGE
He preferred to keep his hands clean. Nails short and smooth, palms soft and pink. Slater Orange had the resources to limit how much of the world’s dirt and grime came into contact with him. On the rare occasion when he touched something soiled, he pulled on gloves spun of silk and dyed the color of the setting sun.
This was such an occasion.
Slater Orange strolled into the sterilized chamber, pressing his gloves securely down into the webbing between each finger. The repetition of doing so, of donning the barrier between himself and the filth of the world, was methodical and comforting.
His surgeons waited for him, the hand-picked men and women he had employed—at great cost and no small amount of subterfuge—for the last five years. They stood, stiff-backed and at attention against the operating table behind them. The grim piles of their most recent failures cluttered the corners of the room.
“And here it is,” Slater said, pacing in front of the six brilliant doctors, his footsteps punctuating his words. “The day of your reckoning, after five long years. The end of your contracts. You may show me your progress.”
They parted, stepping aside like a curtain on pulleys to reveal the table behind them. A body, a man, lay stitched together with the finest black thread, wires fed into his shaved skull, tubes taped to his arms and snaking into his mouth, chest, heart.
Interesting.
“You may speak.” His stride slowed as a predator’s might when sighting prey.
The lead surgeon was a narrow-faced woman whose dark eyes showed no hint of human emotion. “The body lives, Your Excellency. The brain is no longer viable.”
“You are telling me you have failed in this task I set before you? A task you assured me you could complete?”
The words hung in the air and drew beads of sweat across every doctor’s forehead.
“We have failed, Excellency,” the lead surgeon agreed.
“Such a pity,” Slater said. “Are you sure there are no other avenues you can explore?”
This time it was a man who answered. “We have exhausted every report, every theory, every experiment. We have pored through all documentation collected in the world. Whatever it is that made the galvanized survive, whatever it is that makes them immortal, we cannot duplicate it with our present technology and knowledge.”
Slater folded his hands carefully behind him. “How unfortunate. However, your efforts have not gone unnoticed. Your debt to me and to House Orange is paid. You are freed of your contract.”
He could sense their relief like an exhale.
