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Her hand clamped on Nix’s arm.

  There was a long moment of staring. Nix could sense all the thoughts floating around them like transparent bubbles. He couldn’t hear them, but he sensed them. Thoughts of escape. Thoughts of apprehension.

  Violence.

  Nix reached up and gently squeezed her hand. It would be bad enough to be taken away. He wouldn’t be able to handle watching his sister punished for it. She was still shaking her head, mouthing the same word over and over.

  The agent reached up and lowered the suppression ring over Nix’s head to rest around his neck. It was cold against his skin, warming quickly.

  Heaviness fell on him as the biomites in his body slowed down, diminishing their activity. They were not deactivated, just reduced to keeping him alive, to keeping him subdued for his safety and others. Thoughts became dull; memories began to pale.

  But worst of all… Cali is alone.

  Nix was guided to the car. A few of the neighbors watched. One leaned on a rake, relief on his face that it wasn’t one of his kids.

  Cali wasn’t in the doorway when Nix sat in the backseat of the new-smelling sedan. The front door was closed. She was already in the basement.

  The suppression ring wasn’t fully powered. There was still time to say goodbye.

  Nix laid his head back and closed his eyes. The car rocked as it backed over the curb. Traffic sounds faded. He no longer heard the cars passing or felt the pavement grind under the tires. The world around him disappeared. Nix went to his safe haven, went to a place he discovered many years ago, a place that protected him from the world. Where he wasn’t different.

  He went to a lagoon deep inside his mind.

  4

  The lagoon was deep and clear with striped mussels and bright starfish on the sandy bottom. Sometimes sharks would find their way through a small channel that funneled water from the ocean. They would skim near the beach, their dorsal fins cutting the surface. They’d come so close that Nix could run his hand over their slick skin.

  A fire smoldered from inside a pile of sticks, a thick column of smoke withering in the still air. There was no scent, no sting in his eyes. He smelled very little in this dreamland, good or bad.

  The smoke obscured the view across the lagoon where, above the palms on the far shore, blue cliffs rose up. Halfway up was an opening that spewed water like a giant faucet, its roar heard a mile away. The water poured forth and sprayed misty droplets, leaving an ever-present rainbow stretching into the palms.

  [Away.]

  The smoke twisted away like a vacuum simply pulled it in the other direction. The waterfall hadn’t changed much over the ten years he’d been coming to the lagoon. In fact, it was exactly like the day he first saw it. He was only eight. In fact, it was the day after he showed his best friends, Alex and Parker, the biomites in his finger. Even though he was just a kid, he knew the dreamland wasn’t normal.

  But, then again, Nix was anything but normal.

  He knew his body was in the back of a biomite agent’s car. Time between the dreamland and fleshland wasn’t synced. Dreamland time went so much slower. Still, the ring would suppress the biomites that powered dreamland.

  Maybe he’d never visit again.

  He looked around for Raine. The fire was there; she must be getting ready for something. Nix pulled a stick hard against his shin, heard it crackle until the dry fibers gave way and split open. The pain on his shin was dull and slight.

  He dropped the branch on the smoldering fire. Sparks spit out from the bottom. He gathered the bark that flaked off and piled it onto the embers, waving and blowing it back into flames. Smoke billowed up. He squatted, rubbing his hands, as if he could feel the heat. Perhaps he could, but it was tepid. Like day-old dishwater.

  The foliage rustled behind him. Something dragged through the weeds and then across the sand.

  “Is the fire ready?”

  Nix smiled.

  “Such a slacker.” Raine pulled a cord with a wild boar tied to the end, the tusks curled out of its mouth. Raine’s skin was brown. Her black hair, cropped and choppy. Her eyes green, like the green of verdant forests when the sun rises.

  She was about Nix’s age, he guessed, eighteen years old or so. Her body was taut with muscle roiling around the bikini top. She showed up at the lagoon about five years ago. Before that, he would explore on his own, but now they did everything together.

  She slid a knife from a holster tied on her leg and cut the hog loose. Nix piled more sticks on the pathetic fire and watched her dress dinner. Grit and sweat smudged the perfect skin on her shoulders. She wiped the back of her neck with the knife wedged between her fingers.

  He swore he could smell her, that her fragrance—that essence that was Raine—permeated everything inside him. He knelt behind her, kneading the cords of muscle that flexed over her shoulder blades. She agreed with a guttural mmmm.

  “You know, I’d rather have a fire than a massage.”

  Nix pushed his thumbs into her back and worked the knots loose. He kissed her neck, a distant taste of salt.

  “Stop, now. I want to catch some waves and that fire looks like an ape built it.” She clapped. “Chop-chop!”

  She finished dressing dinner while he set up the spit. Reluctantly, he shaved more bark and gathered kindling. A fire was roaring before she was ready. He watched her wash tubers in the clear water of the lagoon and slice them into the beast’s splayed belly.

  They rested against a fallen palm trunk while dinner slow-roasted. If it all ended, he wouldn’t be disappointed. This was a good way to say goodbye. She nestled into the crook of his arm and lightly snored. He never got tired of that sound: the sound of her sleeping against him. The way her lips fluttered. The way her fingers twitched as dreams came.

  Did she dream? Did she snore when he wasn’t there to hear it?

  Nix always thought that question exposed the self-centered nature of humanity. If a tree fell with no one around to hear it, did it exist? The snoring question was different, though. The lagoon was his dream and Raine was part of it. Sometimes, he wasn’t so sure, but perhaps that was wishful thinking. The only thing that existed at the lagoon was what he wished to exist.

  The sun was close to setting when Raine pulled the meat from the roasted carcass. He wondered where the car was in fleshland—how close it was to the satellite office—as Raine dished the meal onto primitive coconut bowls and piled cooked tubers onto it. They ate with their fingers. The food didn’t do much for Nix’s appetite. He didn’t have one. And he hardly tasted it. Raine moaned with each bite. Grease glistened on her lips. She licked her fingers. Her joy pulsed through him.

  “You crying?”

  Nix wiped the corner of his eye. No, he wasn’t crying, but she caught him wishing this moment would never end. This might be the last time he watched her eat like an animal, listened to her snore, watched her swim…

  So, no, he wasn’t crying. “The fire… smoke… making my eyes itch.”

  They left the fire burning, left the meat for scavengers if they got to it in time. Raine grabbed a well-worn surfboard that she carved from the trunk of an ancient tree years ago. “Come on,” she said, shoving his on the ground. “Let’s catch a wave.”

  He lay there in the sand. The sun was low. Her skin, darker.

  “Something wrong?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Go on. I’ll catch up.”

  She hesitated, sensing the secret inside him. Or did she already know it, preferring to enjoy their last moments instead of soaking in them. He watched her push into the glassy surface, plowing the water with sun-kissed arms, powerful strokes driving her towards the narrow channel that led to the ocean, where she’d catch perfect waves.

  Always perfect waves.

  The water shimmered. Turned white.

  Then black.

  Nix stared at the black sedan’s roof. The biomite agent stood next to the car with the door open. He helped him out and led him toward a small brick building where they
’d test his biomite population again. Where they’d officially call him a redline.

  Where they’d power up the suppression ring.

  Where he could say goodbye to dreamland.

  5

  Albert Gladstone turned fifty years old.

  That was a few days ago. He ate birthday cake. It was vanilla with chocolate frosting. His wife and two teenage kids were there. They sang “Happy Birthday” and watched him blow out the candles. Someone cut the cake and took pieces to his family. His son ate. His wife and daughter didn’t.

  Albert ate his piece. Even licked the icing from the paper plate. It wasn’t particularly good.

  But that was a couple days ago.

  He didn’t have an appetite now. He couldn’t feel much of anything.

  Albert wore loose-fitting pants and a shirt that looked more like hospital scrubs. Felt like pajamas. He sat in a comfortable chair in a small room. A small empty room. The chair was cushioned but could’ve been made out of stainless steel and he wouldn’t have known the difference. His biomites began dumping synthetic morphine into his bloodstream an hour earlier.

  Life was bad, but didn’t feel as such.

  49.8%.

  “Jenny from across the street was walking her dog this morning,” Albert’s wife was saying on the other side of a thick square of glass, “and sends her best. She’s got four cats and three dogs now. I think it’s too much, if you ask me. But she says what else is going to happen to these animals? I mean, she goes to the shelter and finds these poor pets that were abandoned by their owners and they’re going to be…”

  Her words trailed off.

  She covered her face. Words had always been a buffer. They usually didn’t fail.

  An elderly woman put her arm around her shoulder. That was Albert’s mom. And behind her stood his dad and two kids. His daughter was leaking stained tears. His son wore a mask without emotions. Unlike his mother, he dealt with loss by killing his emotions.

  Albert could hear his wife’s sobs through a speaker. They sounded like tiny hiccups strung together with squeaky thread. His daughter stepped forward and smudged the glass with her hand.

  “Do you feel all right, Dad? Does it hurt?”

  Albert smiled as brightly and widely as possible, but it only translated into a slight upturn of his lips. He nodded once. The cushioned back of the chair crunched on the back of his head.

  49.9%.

  “I’m proud of you, kids.” His words were amplified into the other room. “If I was God and had to build a daughter and son, they would be just like you. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  He took a moment to draw in a breath. His lungs felt smaller.

  His daughter’s face was streaked with charcoal tears. She pressed both hands on the glass.

  “This is inhumane!” The old man shook his fist. “How can you murder a good man and refuse to let his family be with him? How can you force us to watch him die from another room? This is… this is… it’s diabolical! I am a lawyer and I will see to an end of these sinister laws! I will make sure this will never happen to another human being!”

  The old man hammered the glass with both fists.

  “THIS IS MURDER! YOU ARE A COLD-BLOODED MURDERER!”

  He was speaking to the odd-looking man that was in the room with Albert. Marcus Anderson stood off to the side like an observer, wearing a finely tailored suit and silk tie. He occasionally looked at a device in the palm of his hand. He represented the government in these halfskin matters. Anyone with a loved one near halfskin status knew his face well, a face one would not call handsome. He was the same age as Albert but looked more like Albert’s father. His thinning hair was prematurely gray, his head slightly misshapen much like the slight hunch on his back from an outward curvature of his spine.

  He was as emotionless as the son.

  A guard politely and gently guided the old man away from the glass, but words of protest still trickled through the speakers.

  “It’s all right,” Albert could be heard whispering. “We all have to end. This isn’t so bad.”

  They didn’t believe what he said. Later, they told the press that the gargoyle (they refused to call Marcus Anderson by his name, he was a monster, leave it at that) had drugged him so he would say stuff like that. They probably shouldn’t have called him a gargoyle.

  “Shhhhh.” Albert was too tired to say anything else, so he just made that sound so they would feel comforted.

  He didn’t want them to feel sad. He knew the rules. He knew he was pushing his luck with his biomite population. He’d exceeded the biomite seeding recommendation to his brain stem, but it had paid off. His memory and analytical abilities were computerlike. He won a record number of federal grants for his lab. He thought the seeding would boost his intelligence to find a cure for the runaway biomite replication before he went redline. It was a gamble.

  But Albert wasn’t much of a gambler.

  If he was honest, he didn’t like the way it felt. The more the biomites replaced the organic cells in his body, the less present he felt. He was smarter, more successful, more secure… but he was just less… real. The agents took him from his lab the moment he went redline. And as he neared the halfskin threshold, he wrote to his wife that everything felt the same, he just felt less real.

  He couldn’t explain it any better than that.

  Shutting his biomites down wasn’t such a bad idea. Not the way he felt.

  50%.

  Marcus put the device he was obsessively watching into his pocket and respectfully folded his hands. A doctor entered the room.

  The sandman began pouring his magical dust into Albert’s body. It started at the top of his head and filtered down to his toes. He was becoming heavy. Gravity pulled him into the chair. His head lolled back and forth like he was refusing. He barely heard the sobs get louder.

  His eyelids were too heavy.

  He wanted to see his kids one last time, but that wasn’t to be. He wouldn’t hear them again. All he heard, as the biomites slowly shut down, pulling his life with them, was the sound of a leaking tire. A sound that slid through his lips.

  “Shhhhhh.”

  The doctor knelt next to Albert and pressed his fingers to his neck. He checked an instrument that he briefly pulled from his pocket. He stood and nodded.

  “MONSTER!” The old man had to be restrained. “My son… was good—”

  The speaker clicked off. The glass dimmed.

  ______

  The family would remain in the room to grieve. Once Albert was fully examined, they would get to see him one more time but would not be allowed to take possession of his body for burial. Albert would be cremated and his ashes sent to them.

  Marcus Anderson let his people attend to Albert’s body. The man known as Albert Gladstone was gone from this world. If anyone asked Marcus, the man began dying the moment he chose to be seeded.

  Marcus stopped outside the room to rub antibacterial gel on his hands. He went directly to a room on the bottom floor of Cleveland’s Detainment and Observation Center, where a cadre of reporters would want a statement from the chief of Biomite Oversight and Regulation regarding the shutdown of another halfskin.

  He would be happy to report one less halfskin in the world.

  6

  Marcus Anderson sank into the soft leather of the heated backseat, taking comfort in the laptop’s blue glow. His flight from Ohio was uneventful. He stayed long enough to answer questions and went directly to the airport to fly home.

  The driver turned into the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Spring Valley. The streetlights illuminated the wet pavement.

  He adjusted the Bluetooth in his ear. The press secretary wanted to be briefed on the halfskin shutdown. When laws regulating biomites went into action, there was revolt throughout the world. But the evidence was overwhelming: if something wasn’t done to curtail biomite integration, the human species was in danger.

  The models predicted that biomites would essenti
ally consume the human population within twenty years without regulation. The Halfskin Laws declared that—until biomite replication was cured at the cellular level—no citizen would be allowed to contain more than 50% biomites. Once over that threshold, you were more machine than human.

  Marcus couldn’t agree more.

  The result of shutting down a person’s biomites was always death of the body. The president was concerned about the family and the halfskin’s comfort level. The president had signed the M0ther Oversight Agreement with the United Nations; America would abide by its laws. But still, the president needed to show compassion for the victim and his family.

  He is not a victim. He simply failed to exist.

  That was how Marcus framed the definition. If a healthy human could not exist without the assistance of biomites, then it was a failure to exist. There was a flaw in the definition (people were kept alive by artificial assistance all the time), but Marcus simply drew the line with biomites. These weren’t plastic arms or legs, they were artificial living cells. Replacing your God-given bodily cells with man-made ones was Marcus’s beef. A plastic arm was one thing, trading God’s temple for a slimmer, stronger, faster body with killer blue eyes was quite another.

  The car eased to the curb. The brick house was set back from the street; a sidewalk meandered toward the front door. Marcus packed his leather briefcase and checked the mailbox on his way inside. Crickets sang and the night smelled wet. He didn’t get outside much.

  One of the kids was crying upstairs while Marcus hung his coat in the closet. His shiny shoes clapped on the bamboo floor, making a harder click as he turned onto the kitchen tiles.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  Janine was sitting at the breakfast table with a phone pressed against her ear, surrounded by eternal stacks of documents. He’d had a discussion with her about that—orderliness of body brings orderliness of mind, especially for lawyers—but there were many things they disagreed upon. Their marriage was not a good one by conventional definition, but it was fruitful. It was powerful. Their children would be very successful, given the gene pool from which they were spawned. (Marcus knew this because he had their genomes mapped.) So, they called a truce on the paper stacking. Pick battles, not wars.