Cipher had returned and was hanging out near the reception area to give me and my brother some privacy, keeping an eye on me, nonetheless. Always standing guard. My brother glanced over at Cipher, eyes narrowed, then looked at me again.
“So, will you hang around for me, Josh?” Santiago asked.
“You didn’t ask about Little Miss Purrfect,” I said, thinking of all the times Cipher gave me his leftovers so that I could feed some of it to my cat, how he congratulated her every time she caught a roach or a mouse and didn’t complain about the smell of the litter box in our room. He watched out for her, just like he did the rest of us, and even let her sleep in our bed with us at night. And every once in a while, I’d catch him scratching her head.
“You brought her with you?” Santiago asked, shocked that I would do such a thing.
“Of course I did. She’s part of our family.”
“Wow, okay. So, how is she?” he asked.
I looked him hard in the eye. “She’s fantastic.”
* * *
“How was your visit?”Cipher asked me once we’d left the lab and were making our way back home.
“Fine.”
He glanced over, probably expecting my usual detailed play-by-play, but I’d left my brother feeling conflicted and more than a little gloomy. He wanted me to wait for him. Again. And his reason for leaving me was that he didn’t think he could take care of me, or that I could take care of myself, so what had changed?
I said to Cipher, “He’s halfway through the trial. He’ll be released in six weeks. He says we’ll be set up by then. The lab wants him to stay here so they can monitor him.” I watched him, looking for any sort of reaction, but he was closed off and quiet.
“So, you’re going to stay here?” he asked after a while.
Is that what he wanted? Was he relieved to be moving on without me? If I stayed here, that was one less mouth to feed, and one less person he had to care for. Maybe that was why he’d been so motivated to help me find my brother, to be rid of me like everyone else.
“I guess so,” I said, hoping he’d try to argue me out of it.
He didn’t.
* * *
Teresa had been hoardingcandy ever since we arrived in Atlanta. The morning after visiting my brother, Artemis found her in bed with almost an entire frosted birthday cake that the church ladies had given her as leftovers, a fork in each hand, and half of it already eaten. She wouldn’t let Artemis take it away from her, even after she puked from eating too much. Teresa told me her side of the story while I helped her clean up. Artemis put the remainder of the cake in the common area for someone else to eat, which upset Teresa even more. Now, Teresa was bawling and Artemis was trying to explain to her why the human body needed more than just sugar to function. I decided it was probably best to give them some space.
Cipher and Macon had already left that morning to gather intel on Promised Land without me. I wanted to go to the library and see if I could find the third book in our vampire series, but I wasn’t supposed to go out alone, so I knocked on Gizmo’s door, hoping I could convince him to leave his room for a bit.
“Gizmo, you in there? It’s me, Kitten.”
The door unlocked automatically thanks to some contraption Gizmo worked up when we first arrived, on account of him not wanting to get up every time someone was at the door. The room looked like the Death Star exploded, with disassembled appliances and bits of tech scattered everywhere. The only part of the room that was absent of wires and metal contraptions was the top bunk, which belonged to Macon.
Gizmo was hunched over his work table with a jeweler’s loupe over one eye and the light shining on the very tiny pieces of a watch face. Gizmo had tooled all sorts of attachments for his hand–tweezers, a scalpel, tiny pliers, and even a soldering iron, and now had a side hustle of repairing watches in addition to modifying prostheses. People paid him in food or money or bartered with other broken objects that he could fix or take apart. A lot of times, he did it for free.
No disrespect to Gizmo, but their room smelled rank–a mixture of body odor and spoiled food. Gizmo rarely left his room, so we delivered his breakfast, lunch, and dinner to him every day. If we didn’t, he’d forget to eat. But we didn’t clean up after him, and there were bags of old takeout and piles of dirty clothes everywhere. Not only that, I could smell him from across the room. Gizmo was a no-nonsense sort of guy, so I asked him, straight up, “When’s the last time you showered?”
“Showered?” he said like it had never occurred to him.
“Had a bath?”
“How long have we been here?”
“Almost three weeks. Have you not showered since we got here?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get my hand wet.”
