Doubt laces his tone. “You have any idea how transparent you are?”
“I think I’m pretty good at hiding how much you annoy me,” I retort.
His grin softens the angles of his face. “Always an answer.”
With a start, I realize the time. “It’s late. I have to go.”
“Daddy tightening the noose?”
“It’s called concern, Justin. It comes with love.”
“I wasn’t born with four legs so I wouldn’t know.”
His admission, and the bitterness underscoring it, startles us both. Maybe it’s the cloak of darkness loosening his tongue, spilling secrets the heart keeps close.
“I’ll say goodbye here,” Justin announces. “Wouldn’t want Daddy running outside with a shotgun at the sight of me.”
“When do we meet again?”
“Friday after work.” He names a coffee house close to SolomiChem.
I nod, feeling his eyes on me as I walk away.
The moment I open the front door, my dad calls for me to join them. Suppressing a sigh, I sit next to my parents on the couch in the living room. Fortunately, I’m not expected to chat, simply to sit and listen to Karina play some piece by Bruch. The music is haunting, and I try hard not to replay the day in my head.
When my sister finishes playing, I excuse myself and retreat to my room. I click on the SolomiChem file.
[EXTRACT FROM HEATHER’S LOG NOTES]
My first day working at SolomiChem. After an introductory lecture on company policy and safety procedures, I’m given my first assignment. A consignment of monkeys has arrived for a drug-safety study and I’m to assist in settling them in.
When I enter the room housing the monkeys, I see ten cages stacked together, roughly four monkeys crammed into each cage. Most of them are mothers with their infants still clinging to them. Some of the monkeys are screaming, rattling the cage bars, but many of them huddle as far back as possible in their cages.
They all look terrified.
When we try to remove the infant monkeys from the cages, it’s pandemonium. The mothers hold onto their babies with such desperation we have to forcibly separate them. The infants are taken out of the room. A senior researcher tells me the male babies are assigned to another drug-safety study, while the females are sent to a breeding colony where they’re warehoused until they can be impregnated.
I rub my eyes, the sheer hopelessness of the monkeys’ plight pulling at me. I’m right to expose this, I know I am, but I can’t help wondering how on earth I’m going to last a month at SolomiChem.
21
JUSTIN
––––––––
I turn recklessly onto the freeway and open the throttle, accelerating into the straight, the bike growling between my legs. Dropping down low over the tank, my eyes flick to the needle creeping up the speedo, the Ninja eating up the road.
Anger wells inside me, burning a hole in my belly. It seems I’ve spent most of my life in this revved state. Activism was the air I breathed growing up. My parents believed I should be informed, so Disney videos were replaced by undercover footage of slaughterhouses and fur farms. In school, the principal made me remove the animal rights sticker—DO YOU FEEL LIKE DEATH WARMED UP? HAVE A HAMBURGER—my mom plastered on my backpack.
Visitors to the house were simply reflections of my parents. They spouted the same phrases and their eyes glittered with the same injustices. I was molded so thoroughly I had no idea how to reshape myself. Or if I even wanted to.
I crouch even lower behind the windshield, the passing scenery a blur, the cold steel of the gas tank against my chest steadying me. I remember turning fifteen and strolling into a steakhouse, ordering chicken wings for starters, pork ribs for my main meal. In the gutter outside the steakhouse, I heaved it all up, a pathetic figure in a puddle of vomit and remorse. I never touched meat again after that.
The anger though, hasn’t dissipated. Now it seethes just below the surface of my skin, a kind of simmering rebellion that never reaches boiling point.
I ease off on the accelerator and throttle down, the muscles in my back groaning as I uncurl myself from my crouch. I have to do something. Everyone has an assignment. I’m the only one chained by inaction.
I recall a whistleblower’s report that landed in Kane’s inbox. After verifying the credibility of the informant—we’ve scrubbed a lot of operations because we didn’t trust the source—Kane forwarded the report to me. Unfortunately, we had to put it aside because of the constraints of other commitments.
