Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

Published by HarperVoyager

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2018

Copyright © Arwen Elys Dayton 2018

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Arwen Elys Dayton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008322380

Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008322397

Version: 2018-10-25

Dedication

To the next generation

and the next and the next

(and hopefully the next)

Epigraph

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

—Jay Keasling, professor of biochemical engineering, University of California, Berkeley, in Wired, 2009

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: Matched Pair

Part Two: St. Ludmilla

Part Three: The Reverend Mr. Tad Tadd’s Love Story

Part Four: Eight Waded

Part Five: California

Part Six: Curiosities

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

A few years from now …

PART ONE

Human!

Stop!

… is what I’m thinking. As if I’ve already become something else, a different species, and I’m tired of hearing all of his worn-out, human-person logic.

The man is reminding me that Julia’s heart will be combined with my own heart, so it’s not like I’m “taking” hers. It’s a synthesis. The new heart will fuse both in a way that’s better than either of the originals. A super-heart, I guess you could call it.

He is reminding me of this, and every time I say “But—” he cuts me off by continuing his explanation, only more loudly. Now he’s almost yelling, though he’s just as cheerful as he always is.

Did I mention that he’s my father? And he’s only repeating what my doctor has explained so many times. Although, let’s be honest, my doctor explains the same things very differently. She discusses recovery rates and reasonable percentages and acceptable outcomes. She tells me about other patients, though of course, my case and Julia’s case—the case of Evan and Julia Weary, semi-identical twins—is unique, so we are, as she likes to say, “medical pioneers.” I’ve come to think of us as the season-finale episode of a show about strange medical cases. Tune in for the outrageous conclusion!

I’m in my hospital room, but I’m sitting in a chair in the corner, because it’s dangerous to stay in the hospital bed, which can be wheeled away for CAT scans or blood draws or surgery, or whatever, so easily. You have the illusion of control if you’re sitting in a chair.

Julia is in the adjoining room. She’s on the bed, of course. And though I can hear our mother in there with her, she’s only saying a few quiet words to my sister, and my sister is not saying anything in reply.

“This is fortune smiling on us, Evan,” my father says, using what has become one of his favorite phrases. He looms over me, because I’m sitting down while he’s standing and also because he’s six foot five. “Years from now, you’re going to look back on these weeks and wonder why you ever hesitated. Julia would want her heart and yours to be joined.”

Whenever he senses me becoming skeptical about what we’re going to do, my father finds a new angle to convince me. This is the new angle for today: Julia’s fondest wish is for our twin hearts to become one.

“But I’m the only one who will get to use the heart,” I tell him. “It’s not like we’re turning into one person and sharing it. I get the heart. She gets nothing.”

He raises his voice another notch as he says, “Would you rather put hers in the ground? Alone and cold? To rot?” Even he can hear the hysteria that has snuck into his argument. He lowers the volume to something like normal conversational level and adds, “You know she wouldn’t want that. She does get something. She gets you, alive.”

“I’m the one who gets that!”

“She gets it too, Evan.”

I hope that’s true.

“You sound out of breath,” my father says. “How about we keep our voices calm?”

This is an infuriating suggestion since he’s the one who’s not calm, but his observation is accurate; I’m having trouble catching my breath. I concentrate on forcing air in and out of my chest.

I notice that we’re only talking about Julia’s heart, even though she’ll give me so much more—her liver, part of her large intestine, her kidneys, even her pancreas. It’s too depressing to keep mentioning all the pieces of both of us that aren’t working right, so my parents and I have begun using the heart as a stand-in for everything.

I look up at him wearily. “Dad, why do we keep talking about it, anyway? You already decided.”

“You decided too, Evan.”

I sigh, and though I try to sound as angry as possible, he’s right. I did decide.

When the nurses show up to do tests, my father leaves. He doesn’t like to stick around for the nitty-gritty, which used to annoy me but now is a relief. If my father is present, he considers it an obligation to insert as many positive comments as possible into whatever uncomfortable hospital procedure is happening. It’s not ideal to have to make appreciative noises about the weather and baseball scores when a male nurse is putting a catheter into your penis, for example.

With my father gone, I hardly have to say anything.

Nurse: “Does that hurt?”

Me: “A little.”

Nurse: “Is this better?”

Me: “A little.”

Nurse: “Can you roll over onto your back now?”

I don’t even have to answer that. I just have to do it.

Later, I’m left alone in my hospital room. This is the last day. It will happen in the morning. Julia and I have just barely made it to our fifteenth birthday. And now comes … whatever is next.

I am not immune to daydreams. I imagine slipping on my clothes, walking out of the hospital, and asking my mother to bring me somewhere peaceful to die. My favorite fantasy locations are on a beach overlooking Lake Michigan, or on the moon base, while staring up at the small blue face of Earth.

Yes, I know there isn’t any moon base, but I’m not sneaking out of the hospital either.

The daydreams are tempting, but here’s the truth of it: death sucks more than life, almost no matter what. There. I’ve admitted it. I want to live. Blech. It feels wrong.

I get off my hospital bed and go into the connecting room, Julia’s. My heart races as soon as I’m on my feet, but if I move slowly, I can keep it from getting out of hand. Julia’s room is kept nice and quiet and mostly dark, though it’s still daytime, so cloudy light comes in through the slatted blinds over the window. Her ventilator hisses and clicks. Her bed is surrounded by IV stands that are providing her food, her water, her drugs. Dripping, dripping, dripping away.

“Hey,” I say, out of breath when I reach the edge of her bed.

Hey, she says. Not out loud, of course. But I know she says it.

Julia is gray and her cheeks are hollow, but she’s still beautiful. Her hair is red, like mine, but hers is much longer and it’s been fanned out across her pillow (by our mother, probably), as if she’s posing for an illustration in a book of fairy tales. Here is Snow White, awaiting the kiss of a prince to wake her. Here is Sleeping Beauty, for whom the rest of the world has been frozen. I slide myself onto the bed next to her and lie there as my heart and lungs slow down, listening to the sounds of the machine that is breathing for her.

“Hey,” I say again.

It’s so boring here, she tells me quite clearly, though, again, not out loud. The time when Julia can speak out loud is over.

“I’ve realized that being a medical pioneer is mostly about surviving the boredom,” I tell her.

Julia sighs, silently of course. Then she tells me, When the doctor calls us that, I imagine us in a covered wagon with one of those old-timey black doctor’s bags.

“Why do people think being a pioneer is good?” I wonder aloud. “Isn’t it better to be waaay at the back of the line, after all the kinks have been worked out?”

This is going to sound mean, Julia tells me, but I never even liked real pioneers. In those Little House books, I kept wondering why they didn’t stay in New York or Chicago, where all the fun stuff was happening.

“You’re a snob,” I tell her. “They were brave.”

Yeah, they probably were, she admits. Then: You’re going to be brave too, Evan.

“Yuck. You sound like one of those greeting cards with the fancy cursive.”

I got sappy there for a second. Sorry. It’s from being in the hospital. She changes the subject. Where have you been all afternoon?

“Tests. Oh—this is exciting—they took a sample of my poop. New test. I guess it was to see what my large intestine is doing.”

What were the results of this poop test?

“It was poop. They confirmed that.”

Well … that’s a huge load off my mind, she says.

“After the test they plopped me back onto the bed.”

I’m flushed with relief that everything’s okay.

“It would have been so crappy otherwise.”

We both laugh. Me out loud. Julia, you know, not out loud. Annoying puns are kind of our thing. I scoot over until my head is against hers.

I forget what that’s like, she says.

“What? Tests?”

Moving.

“Oh. Right.” Even though I’m here with her so much, sometimes I forget too.

We’re both quiet for a while, but I know what Julia’s thinking about. She’s remembering that time when we were five years old, and she beat me twenty-four times in a row running down the street outside our house. I can feel her gloating.

I tell her, “Look, you beat me that one time—”

It was twenty-four times, Evan.

This is an old argument.

“Fine. You beat me on that one day. But I never let you beat me again,” I remind her.

What neither of us says is that we didn’t have many races after that day when we were five. Running became too difficult for either of us, and the following year, it was apparent that very few of our organs were growing at the proper rate.

Relax, Evan, she says. You’ve won forever now.

I don’t answer her because that’s a horrible thing to say. If we were having one of our competitions to see who could say the most despicable thing, she would totally win.

Oh shit, are you crying? I didn’t mean it. I was only joking!

I put my hand over Julia’s heart, and then I put Julia’s cool, limp hand over mine. It’s possible that I am crying, but there’s no reason to dwell on it.

In that calm way of hers, Julia tells me, We shared a womb, Evan, and a crib, and a room for the first six years of our lives. Now we’ll share more things. It will be okay.

Possibly you have never heard of semi-identical twins, so let me explain. Semi-identicals happen when two sperm fertilize the same egg. (I really hope you already know what sperm and eggs are, because I don’t want to be the one who has to tell you.) At some point after this cellular three-way, Mother Nature realizes that something is not right, and the egg splits into two, which in our case meant that it split into me, Evan, and her, Julia. But it’s not quite as simple as that. There are some mixed-up DNA signals with semi-identicals. Some become intersex (boy parts and girl parts), and some have other glitches in the embryo-formation process. We had none of those issues—our problem is that our hearts and livers and several other organs never learned how to grow to full size, even though the rest of us made a go of it.

I’m taller than you are, Julia helpfully points out as I float toward sleep.

She’s taller by about an eighth of an inch, by the way. Fifty percent of our DNA is identical—from the egg we both shared.

And the other fifty percent, from the sperm, is not identical, but it comes from the same person (our father, unless our mom has really been hiding stuff from us). So we’re as closely matched as any boy and girl can be.

But around our thirteenth birthday, Julia’s organs started lagging behind worse than mine did. At first, for months and months, she was just tired. Then she was just asleep. Then it wasn’t really sleep anymore, and she was in the hospital and the machines were brought in to keep her alive. And now she is on this bed, silent to everyone but me. Vegetative is what they call it, as if she is a stalk of wheat or a spear of asparagus. This sucks so deeply that there aren’t really words. This is as close as I can come:

That’s me in the middle, drowning.

I fall asleep next to Julia and I wake up when I hear voices in my own room. At first I think it’s nurses who’ve come to give me a second rectal exam—just to make sure—but that’s not who it is. It’s my mother, and a man—not my father. This man has a different voice entirely, smooth and deep and sort of … stirring, I guess you could say. Except that he’s using it to argue with my mother, and almost immediately I know exactly who the voice belongs to.

Don’t keep me in suspense! Julia says, startling me. I didn’t think she was awake. Who is it?

“It’s that weird minister Mom’s been talking to all month. I’ve heard his voice when she’s talking to him on the phone.”

Oh, yeah. She keeps mentioning things “the Reverend” says. I didn’t even know we were Christian until Mom started having all these Jesus feelings.

“I’m not sure Reverend Tadd even is Christian,” I whisper to her, still trying to hear what they’re arguing about.

His name is Reverend Tadd? Julia asks skeptically. Is that his first name or his last name?

“I don’t know. But I do know that he’s an asshole. The way he speaks—it’s like Jesus was his roommate at summer camp and if you’re lucky he’ll introduce you.”

How does Mom even know him?

“She wanted someone to ‘guide her to the right choices’—about us, I guess. I heard her tell Dad. They argued and Dad won, but Mom said she still needed to talk to someone. And talking people out of medical procedures is, like, Reverend Tadd’s thing.”

“Wait! You look angry.” Our mother’s voice rises suddenly on the other side of the door. “We’ve had beautiful discussions, and I said you could come bless them, but I don’t want you to argue—”

The door from my room to Julia’s room flies open a moment later, and the man is in the room with us, trailing our mother. He approaches the hospital bed, one hand raised, with a finger directed upward, as if he has a personal, finger-pointing connection straight to heaven and he’s calling in a favor.

“You!” he says, his eyes locking onto me where I lie next to my sister. I’m not ashamed to say he’s scary, because he is scary; his eyes are wild and his face is screwed up with outrage, but he’s also …

Much younger and better-looking than I thought he would be, Julia says calmly.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. The Reverend is young, perhaps only in his late twenties. He has thick, wavy black hair that falls over his forehead, and piercing dark eyes that are alight with passion.

Before our mother can stop him (which, to be honest, she is making only a very feeble attempt at) he’s on his knees at the side of the bed, his eyes beseeching me. I’m startled by his sudden presence, but it’s hard to be too startled when Julia is with me.

“You,” he says, bowing his head over his hands briefly, as if to let me and Julia know that he’s not too proud to beg—in fact, that he relishes this opportunity to beg.

“Reverend,” our mother says, without much force. “It’s been decided. And this is family business.”

Ignoring her, he looks at me and says, “You know there’s still time.”

I should be cringing away from him, but I’m so tired of the sympathetic looks from nurses and my parents that his energy fascinates me.

“Time for what?” I ask him, propping myself up onto my elbows.

Don’t ask! Julia says. She has understood immediately what sort of man he is. Why would you encourage him?

“Time for ev-er-y-thing.” (That’s exactly how it sounds.) “You’re a young man now, a person.” He’s gripping the railing of the bed in his zeal. “If you do this thing, Evan Weary, you will become something that’s not meant to be.”

His voice and his certainty are mesmerizing. I feel as though he has pressed something sharp into my malfunctioning heart. The Reverend Tadd-not-sure-if-it’s-his-first-or-last-name sees that he’s gotten to me, and he follows up immediately.

“Do you want to turn yourself into a demon? A life-devouring creature?” he asks me, his face getting close enough to mine that his minty breath washes over me. “Is that your goal?”

Do you know the sensation when you’ve been injured but the pain hasn’t reached you yet? I am having that feeling now. I think it was his use of the word life-devouring.

I know resistance is called for. “Um … I don’t know if I even believe in demons—” I begin, but he rides right over me.

“You don’t want to be one! That’s the answer. No good person wants that!”

I can feel Julia’s outrage that I’m taking these insults lying down. Roll over and kick him in the nuts! she tells me.

But I don’t have to, because our mother has finally found her courage, and she grabs the Reverend Tadd by his shoulders.

“You have to leave now,” she tells him, her voice quaveringbut firm. When he doesn’t budge, she puts her hands on her hips and says, “If you don’t leave, I will call the nurses—and security! I mean it, Reverend.”

He stands up, unrushed, as if he were done anyway and is leaving only because it’s his own choice. He brushes off his pants and stares down at me and Julia, calmer now that he’s succeeded in calling me a demon—or, I guess, a soon-to-be-demon. The full demonification hasn’t happened quite yet, as he has thoughtfully pointed out.

“Reverend!” our mother says, warning him against further pronouncements.

Close-lipped, Reverend Tadd walks to the hospital room door, yet before we’re rid of him, he looks back at me and takes another stab. “You don’t have to do this selfish thing,” he says.

Selfish. It’s the word that’s always there, in the back of my mind. How did he know?

Sensing that I have become paralyzed before this man, Julia steps in. Can’t you see it’s already eating Evan up? she yells at him. If Jesus were here, He’d slap you! You—you—creep!

But Reverend Tadd, of course, has not heard her, and he’s already left the room.

“I’m so sorry, Evan,” our mother says. “I said he could say a prayer here, that’s all.” She’s leaning against the closed door and has dissolved into tears, which, actually, has been her most common state over the past few months.

What’s Mom crying about? Julia asks, still half yelling. She’s the one who let him in here. Oh, Evan … are you crying too?

I wake up and know that my parents have tricked me, or rather, that they had the nurses drug me. I’m in my own hospital bed, even though I don’t remember moving back. Sunlight is pouring in my window. It’s morning. The Day.

“Julia,” I say as my eyes open.

The room is full, but empty of her. Nurses are crowding in with prep carts and rubbing alcohol and IVs. They’re checking my vitals, slipping tubes into my veins, talking to me with that impersonal friendliness they must learn in nursing school.

I catch sight of my father, so tall that it feels like he’s in the way, even though he’s standing in the corner to stay clear of the bustle. He smiles benignly at me.

“It’s okay, Evan. She’s gone on ahead of you.”

“Julia!” I say again, louder this time.

The nurse closest to my face makes little noises that are half shushing, half consoling. Well, mostly shushing.

I hear Julia very distantly. Evan. Evan. That’s all there is, only the ghost of her voice from somewhere far below me in the hospital. Evan …

It is … I’m not sure how many days later. Maybe four?

They took Julia’s heart while I was unconscious, and then, inside my chest cavity, they used her “compatible tissue” to rebuild my own heart, and then they jolted the super-heart into action, and (I heard later) they all clapped when it began pumping blood. Pictures were taken. A day later they did the kidneys, the liver, and everything else that required renovation.

I have a line of metal staples down the middle of my chest. They look pretty badass, like Dr. Frankenstein was given free rein to close me up. There are stitches and staples in lots of other places too. Supposedly, modern medicine is excellent at minimizing scars, but my nurses assure me that mine will still be amazing after they heal. I’ll look like a scattered train track for the rest of my life. It feels like the train on that broken track hit me, then backed up to finish the job. Except … even with all the pain, I actually feel better. My heart is beating strongly and regularly, my body seems lighter. How crazy is that?

“Here I am,” I say.

The hospital room is empty except for me, so I can get away with talking to myself without drawing frowns from the nurses. I lay a hand across the mess of staples down my breastbone. “And here you are,” I tell Julia. “Keeping me alive.”

She doesn’t answer. It’s rainy today, and the only response I get is the patter of raindrops on the hospital window. Even if you’re one of those people who love the rain, I think you’ll agree that the things it says are, at best, extremely boring. At worst, they’re only raindrops, which are no substitute for your dead twin sister.

“Dead,” I say, trying out the word that I haven’t let myself think. I’ve shied away from it since the operations. Now that I’ve said it aloud, though, I have to ask her what I’ve been afraid to ask.

“Julia, were you dead when they took out your heart? Or did I steal it from you while you were still alive?”

She doesn’t answer. Of course, she doesn’t need to. Everyone—the doctor, my parents, the nurses—danced around this question. But I always knew the truth.

I am growing again.

It’s been twelve days since the last surgery and there’s enough oxygen in my blood, and my digestive system actually gets nutrition out of the food I eat, and and and and, you know, all the things the doctor optimistically suggested would happen, are happening. I’ve grown an eighth of an inch and gained three pounds. That eighth of an inch, by the way, makes me as tall as Julia was, though I’ll keep growing, they assure me. I might even get as tall as my father.

“Fortune has been smiling on us all this time, Evan,” my father is saying. Did I mention he was in here with me? He is. He’s helping me get into my clothes. I’m strong enough to dress myself, but I’m letting him feel useful.

My mother’s here too, though she’s outside the room, to give me privacy while I get dressed, and probably also because she feels guilty about letting Reverend Tadd crap all over the last few minutes I had with my sister.

They’re releasing me from the hospital today. Over the past several years, Julia and I have spent a combined total of over five hundred days here. During those five hundred days, I’ve imagined this final day many times. In my favorite version, we walk out the front doors, and shortly afterward, the hospital is leveled by an earthquake, and then ripped apart by a tornado, and then set on fire by roving bands of zombies. After that, if “fortune keeps smiling on us,” packs of wild dogs will urinate all over the rubble as a warning never to rebuild.

“It’s nice to see you smiling, Evan,” my dad says, when my head emerges from the sweater he’s pulling into place over my Frankenstein torso.

I decide to let him in on the daydream. “I was thinking that after we walk out of the hospital’s front doors—”

“You know we’re going to wheel you out in a wheelchair, right? No walking just yet. But soon!” he tells me cheerfully.

“Oh, right,” I say. He is so literal.

Every doctor and nurse on this floor is lining the hallway as I’m wheeled toward the elevator by my parents. Even some of the more mobile patients are standing in their doorways to watch us, the medical pioneers. My father waves and smiles at all of them. My mother is soundlessly mouthing thank you, as though she were always one hundred percent behind this whole cannibalize-your-sister’s-organs scenario.

I’m dying to hear what Julia would say about this sad parade to the elevator. Would she tell me to feign a stroke? Or clutch my heart?

“That’s right, smile,” my father says quietly. “Let them see how grateful you are.”

Am I grateful? I haven’t heard her voice for two weeks.

In the main lobby, and the world outside is visible through the huge glass doors. My mother’s gone off to pull the car around, and when we see her driving into the pickup area, my dad says, “Here we go,” and pushes me out through the doors.

“Oh!” I cry out, because the strangest thing happens the moment I cross the threshold: the super-heart stops. There’s a heartbeat, and then there is nothing, stretching out from one instant to the next and the next and the next. I cannot breathe, I cannot move. My super-heart has walked off the job without giving notice.

My father’s smile falters, and then, in a panic, he shakes me. “Evan? Evan! Is it your heart?”

There’s a thunk! in my chest as the heart starts up again. Then, thump-thump, thump-thump, it’s going—as if nothing at all went wrong. If anything, I feel a new surge of vitality.

“Evan?” he says again, frantically.

I wave him away. “My heart … is fine,” I tell him.

“Are you sure?” He looks back through the doors, ready to flag someone down.

I nod, give him an emphatic thumbs-up. My mother has pulled the car up right in front of us, so I push myself to my feet, and before he can even catch up to me, I’ve opened the back door of the minivan and climbed inside. In moments, we’re all in the car and my mother is driving away.

I watch the hospital growing smaller as we get to the end of the street. When at last I can see only a sliver of the hospital’s upper floor above neighboring buildings and it’s about to disappear from sight entirely, I think, Cue the earthquake!

Julia should laugh at that, but she doesn’t. I’m sitting in the back of the minivan alone, looking past my parents at the road ahead. Traffic and life are out there, ready to take me in.

It’s not until we are stopped at a long traffic light that I hear it. Very quietly, a voice asks, Do you want to kill all the other patients? The voice sounds not so much upset as curious, and it’s as soft as the murmur of an insect or a mouse.

I’m so startled, so unsure of what I’ve heard, that I can only bring myself to whisper an answer. “I don’t mind if they’re all evacuated first,” I breathe. “But the building has to go.”

There’s silence in response and I sit there, holding my breath. I’ve imagined the voice; it’s nothing but my hopeful ears playing tricks on me. The quiet stretches on as we travel through the city. My ears strain for anything besides the noise of the traffic, and they are disappointed.

But when we’ve gone a very long way and the hospital is nothing more than an anonymous mass far behind us, I hear this:

I agree. The hospital building has to go. The voice is growing as it speaks. It’s not a mouse’s voice anymore, it’s a kitten’s. So …, it says, growing into a child’s voice, what were the results of the operation?

“Just the usual,” I whisper, for fear of scaring her away. “You know, new heart, liver, pancreas, blah, blah, blah.”

No new brain? she asks. Her voice has become her real voice.

I shake my head.

So they screwed up the one thing you actually needed?

I nod. And smile.

Did you hear about that kid who was taken into the operating room, but then he had a change of heart?

“He didn’t know if he was going to liver die,” I whisper.

Aorta laugh at that.

“Like me—I’m in stitches.”

I don’t mean to cry, but tears spring to my eyes and a bunch of them are pushed out by a sudden burst of laughter that is incredibly painful to all of my recently sutured parts, which doesn’t make it any less magical.

“You were so quiet,” I whisper.

That was on account of being dead, she tells me. By the way, I heard you call it “your heart.” That was a little cold.

“I didn’t mean it,” I say, squirting out another set of unstoppable tears. “I meant our heart.”

I’ve said this last part loudly, and my father and mother both turn back to look at me.

“Our heart!” I say again to her.

“That’s right, Evan. Our heart,” my father says.

Is he serious? Julia asks. Are they going to take credit for everything forever?

“Probably,” I answer.

Julia sighs. Eventually she says, I guess it doesn’t matter what they think. What do we care?

There.

She has said it: we.

And I am happy.

I invite you to look beyond the current capabilities of tissue and bone repair. Those will soon become unremarkable. In a very short time, we will be able to create novel structural elements, forms that don’t naturally occur in the human body—forms that we haven’t yet imagined. I find myself a pioneer, daunted by the infinite size of the frontier.

—Dr. Emily Brownstone-Naik, at the British Medical Association symposium on genetic engineering, London, 2029

A few more years from now …

PART TWO

1. GO GET ’EM TIGER

How can I tell you what happened in the right way? If I explain it wrong, you’ll probably hate me. But if I can tell it right, maybe you’ll understand.

I knew he saw me inside Go Get ’Em Tiger, which serves coffee so good I actually tingle all along the border of … parts of me. I knew Gabriel saw me inside, even though his eyes slid past me, as though he were just looking, just browsing, just checking out the bags of coffee beans and logo mugs for sale on the shelves along the walls and not seeing Milla sitting right there, staring at him over the top of my newspaper. Before you ask, I’ll answer: Yes. I’m a sixteen-year-old girl who gets the newspaper, by special order, delivered twice a week, because I do the crossword puzzle, because it focuses me, and when I focus, I relax, and when I relax … well, things work right—like my lymph system and most of my hormones. The doctors all agreed that I needed to find calming techniques,and this is one. Plus, holding a newspaper is deliciously retro; it makes me feel like a girl from the year 2015, to whom nothing catastrophic has ever happened.

But back to Gabriel. He ignored me. It was so crowded, he had plausible deniability, and I had … I had the echoes of thirty people laughing at me the week before as I shoved my lunch into the trash can and ran out of the school courtyard. Not crying. If I could have cried, that would have been awesome.

But why had the laughing bothered me so much? There was a story in the newspaper I was holding about a teenager beaten into unconsciousness in the stands of his high school football stadium in Ohio. He’d had one of those partial spinal replacements where he could walk, but not a hundred percent properly. His assailants had been watching his gait when he got to his seat. They’d waited out the whole game, and then they’d attacked him at the end and spray-painted the word WRONG across his chest. They were drunk teenagers, but still, it was an example of the way some people were offended by anyone who’d been severely damaged and then put back together. “Fanatics Behaving Badly” was practically a regular newspaper column. In my case, you couldn’t tell what had happened to me. I walked normally, I spoke normally. You wouldn’t know, unless somebody told you. And I’d only had to put up with laughter.

Gabriel left Go Get ’Em Tiger and I watched through the window as he stood on the sidewalk outside, rooting around in the brown paper pastry bag he’d gotten with his cappuccino. He’s kind of tall, and I could keep an eye on him easily among the crowds of passersby. He had those headphones that hide behind your ear, and he idly tapped his right ear to turn them on—just a guy eating a scone and listening to music.

He didn’t spare a glance back to see if I was watching him. And he also wasn’t trying to get away quickly. Maybe he hadn’t seen me after all. But that was worse in a way, wasn’t it? That would make me just wallpaper or something, not even enough of a presence to ignore. Anger made my heart beat faster. It was necessary to go after him.

Gabriel took another bite of scone and I drained my mug, already feeling the tingle of the caffeine along the meshline and furious that he’d ruined my coffee time by being there. (Okay, I’ve said it. Meshline. There’s a meshline zigzagging through my body. It’s why I’m here now instead of in a grave or cremated or whatever. Fair warning, zealots: you can turn away right now if my existence offends you.)

When I was out on the sidewalk, I caught sight of him at the crosswalk. Well … no. I want to be honest. The truth is that I searched the crowds wildly until I spotted him again, and then I fought my way over.

What was I thinking at that moment? I’ve asked myself this question a hundred times. And the answer is this: I wanted to radiate my fury, my humiliation, at him. That’s all. I’m pretty sure that was all I wanted.

The light there takes forever, and a bunch of people were waiting at the crosswalk. Next to me was a girl with a subdermal bracelet implant, and for a moment I was distracted by the patterns it was projecting up through her skin. Flickering lights danced around her wrist, looking too cheerful with her heavy black makeup and the safety pins through her eyebrows. She obviously didn’t mind tinkering with herself, and no one nearby seemed to mind either. But some of them probably did.

It was hard to breathe. I wanted to cry.

The sound of Gabriel slurping his coffee brought me back. He was right at the curb and I was directly behind him. He turned his head, so I could see his face in profile. It was so odd. He was still really good looking, all blond, with dark brown eyes and thick lashes and that square jaw. But his looks had morphed into something I associated with pain, and staring at him wasn’t the same as it had been a week ago.

I thought, Can’t he feel me standing here boring holes into his back with my eyes?

Obviously he couldn’t.

The traffic from the north was coming at us—four lanes at full speed, half of the vehicles without drivers, including a huge, automated City of LA bus that filled up an entire lane. The noise of the cars was punctuated by the constant whine of the air-drones that fly north and south above La Brea Avenue all day, along the route to the airport. I could have whispered Gabriel’s name and he wouldn’t have heard me. I didn’t, though. I gave him no warning, other than my silent, hostile presence.

I stepped forward so I was right behind him, reached out my hands …

Shit. You’re going to hate me.

I have to start earlier.

2. CHURCH BELL

I go to an Episcopal school that only has about three hundred students. Everyone knows everyone, even if everyone isn’t friends with everyone, if that makes sense. I’m pretty smart, maybe a little bit nerdy, but honestly, a lot of kids at my school are smart and a little nerdy. I’m reasonably good looking, but again, there are plenty of good-looking girls at St. Anne’s. So I’m average, socially, economically, academically. Is this even relevant to my story? I don’t know. It’s possible I’m stalling.

So.

A week earlier, a week before what happened outside Go Get ’Em Tiger, my mom dropped me off at school. I’d been leaning against the passenger door, using the minimum possible number of words to respond to her attempts at good-morning-sweetheart-how-are-things conversation. Then, just as we arrived, she asked the question she’d probably been working up the courage to ask all along: “How was your date last night?”

My reaction surprised even me. My dark mood snapped into something worse, something that could not be contained in sullen silence. Without any warning, I yelled, “Can’t you let me live my own life for one second, Mom, for chrissakes? I’m not five! Can’t I keep a secret if I want?”

I slammed the door behind me, leaving her sitting behind the wheel, shocked but resigned. (“Just let her be angry,” my father was always saying.) I stomped off into the main building, knowing that fury directed at my mother was ridiculous and unfair. And seriously, how would her asking me about my date imply that I was five years old? There was no logic. Also this: I hadn’t meant to yell, I honestly hadn’t, but it’s weird what I can and can’t regulate. Sometimes the volume of my voice is in the “can’t” category.

People at school were looking at me, but, you know, obviously, I thought, because I’d just slammed the car door like a five-year-old. It wasn’t until my friend Lilly caught my arm, pulled me into that weird little alcove by the trophy case, and whispered, “Did you really, Milla? You hardly even know him,” that I realized I had no secret to keep. Everyone already knew.

I walked to class feeling like an accident victim staring back at the rubberneckers who’d slowed down to watch me bleeding all over the roadside. That last part had literally happened to me, though when it did, I wasn’t awake to watch. I don’t even think I was alive.

I digress.

Kevin Lopez smirked as he leaned against the wall. Next to him, Kahil Neelam was making a weird hand gesture at me—he was using one hand to snap at the pointer finger of his other hand, like a fish biting a stick.

I was pushing through my homeroom door when I saw Matthew Nowiki—Matthew, who had been my friend since middle school—doing the robot and snickering as his gaze swept over me. He disappeared into his own homeroom, but not before snapping his fingers, pointing, and bestowing upon me a dramatic wink.

I had taken a seat at my desk when I realized what Kahil’s hand gesture had meant. The pointer finger had been a penis, and the other hand grabbing it was supposed to be a robot vagina crushing it, over and over.

Humiliation spread between my organs like sticky black tar. Heat bloomed across my face, informing me that I was turning red. The thing is that I don’t really blush anymore, because blushing, in my current configuration, is almost impossible. That it was happening now meant so much adrenaline was flooding into my blood, it was literally bypassing the entire meshline to set my face aflame. I was blushing and sweating, which attracted everyone’s attention.

Just kidding. They were already looking at me anyway.

“I don’t even see where …” I heard behind me in a loud whisper.

“How did he even …,” someone else asked.

“He has no fear, obviously,” a third person said, in a whisper so loud people on the other side of the city probably heard it.

This would have been an excellent time to cry. But I haven’t managed to do that in a year. Instead, I sat through my morning classes as the humiliation slowly hardened into something else.

At lunch, I went up to Gabriel in the courtyard where we all ate and I threw my soup in his face. It felt wonderful, it felt like vindication, even though the soup was lukewarm clam chowder and didn’t make much of an impact. Still, every person in the courtyard was watching me as I screamed, “How could you be such an enormous dick?”

Looking back, I realize this wasn’t the worst insult I could have chosen. I’m not sure anyone noticed my phrasing, though, because the words had come out so unbelievably loud that I thought the church bell on top of the chapel had somehow rung at the exact moment I opened my mouth.

It wasn’t the church bell. It was my voice. Gabriel stared at me, spellbound.

Jesus H. Christ, this is still making it look as though I came after Gabriel like the unhinged robot girl people were whispering that I was. Correction: no one was actually whispering. At that moment, Kahil Neelam, a few yards away from Gabriel in the courtyard, was yelling, “Does not compute! Does not compute!” again and again and miming smoke coming out of his ears. He was pretending to be me. Get it?

I’m sorry for using Jesus’s name to swear. I’m trying to be better about that. I’m pretty sure Jesus would be solidly on my side, so I don’t want to piss him off too.

Shit.

I have to explain the night itself.

The drive-in movie and the making out.

I’m blushing even to think about it. (I’m not, though. There’s a sensation in my cheeks, but no redness—I checked in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. I’m glitchy.)

Anyway.

3. CAST OF THOUSANDS

It was the night before that day in school. We were at Cast of Thousands, the drive-in movie theater in Sherman Oaks with the huge screen that doubles onto your own car’s windshield. You look through the movie image on the windshield to the much larger screen in the distance and somehow your eyes combine both into the most oh-my-God-that’s-incredible 3D image. The sound was piped directly into the car’s stereo system, so it was like our own private movie, and I was in Gabriel Phillips’s car.

I haven’t explained my history with Gabriel because there was no history, except for a long trail of lustful thoughts that were, as far as I knew, all on my side. Still, I should fill you in. He came to our school when he was fourteen. He was kind of gangly and his voice was still kind of high, but the blond hair and dark eyes really got to me. I became weirdly focused on his hands too, which were too big for the rest of him, the hands of a man, I thought, and right away I wanted them to touch me. It was the first time I had ever lain in bed and imagined a specific boy doing specific things to me. Jonas and I had been boyfriend and girlfriend before he moved away (before I’d even met Gabriel) and we’d actually done specific things, but I’d never fantasized about Jonas. I’d never had to; he was always with me. The at-a-distance crush on Gabriel was something new.

Other girls liked Gabriel too, in a more general way—he was good-looking and he went to our school, so, yeah, he was naturally on the list of Guys to Like. It wasn’t until he was fifteen and had shoulders and biceps and a deep voice, though,that other girls really started to pay attention. They liked him when he was an obvious choice. I’d liked him so much longer. He flirted with girls at school, but the rumor was that he had “other girlfriends” outside our little St. Anne’s group.

I thought about him for a year, and then in the hospital, when the lights were off for the night and I was alone with the sounds of machines that were keeping me alive, while the meshline and its various internal components were being created, I thought about him some more. That fantasy Gabriel diverged more and more from the one I had vaguely known at school, until, when I finally returned to St. Anne’s, it took me a moment to recognize him. But only a moment. Then the real-world crush was back, as strong as ever.

So here we were, in his car together, the first time I’d even been alone with him. We were in the front seats, with a cardboard tray of tacos between us, and I’m not going to lie to you, the conversation was awkward. In my imagination, conversation hadn’t been necessary, if you know what I mean. Fantasy Gabriel had done whatever I wanted. But here we were, stuck with words.

“Is the volume okay?” he asked, fiddling with the knob unnecessarily. It felt like our taco tray was the Pacific Ocean and he was all the way on the other side of it, by Japan, maybe.

“It’s fine,” I answered.

“Seems like we never really talked before this year. Why is that?” he asked. Before I could answer, he added, “When you came back to school, I realized that—that I wanted to get to know you.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said, trying not to stare at his sexy hands. “We’ve been at the same school for almost three years. Why don’t we know each other better?”

Honestly, I was spouting almost random words to fill up the space between us; I wasn’t looking for an answer to this question. I already had a theory as to why Gabriel had finally noticed me after basically looking through me for years. (Even back when we were fourteen, when he’d still been short and really skinny and I’d had breasts, he hadn’t been interested.) But when they’d rebuilt my left eye, the orbit had changed shape a little bit; I’m talking about just the ordinary plastic surgery when the surgeon had to put it back together, not fancy stuff like they did with the rest of me. Then, because the left was different, they’d changed the right eye socket to match so it didn’t look like the two halves of my face were arguing with each other. When this was done, something in the overall appearance of my eyes and eyebrows had been subtly altered for the better. I don’t think it was on purpose, but when I healed, my eyes were a little wider and more perfectly shaped, and I was a little bit prettier.

So … Gabriel’s new interest was easily explained: I’d been attractive when I got back to school, and he assumed I was just growing into my looks, because as far as anyone at St. Anne’s knew, I had only broken my legs and my jaw in the accident. It felt like cheating, getting his interest this way, but why should I be ashamed of finding a silver lining?

We lapsed into silence as, up on the screen—or rather, hovering in the air outside our car, so crisp and hyper-detailed that they were almost more real than reality—a parade of superheroes in the coming attractions threw 3D stuff at each other, stuff like cars and horses and battleships and, I am not kidding you, even an orca that appeared to spin around right in front of our windshield, spraying water from its toothy smile onto the glass. I laughed involuntarily and made a sort of choking snort—a sound my friend Lilly had kindly pointed out was like a barfing dog. (Laughs are weird sometimes; it’s something to do with the partial larynx, or maybe the way the meshline travels through it. I forget exactly.)

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, because of, you know, the barfing dog sound.

“Um, yeah—taco went down the wrong way,” I lied.

He held my drink out chivalrously, and as I took it, his hand brushed against mine, sending a shiver up my arm.

“Is, uh, is Milla short for something?”

I dread this question, because the answer usually takes too long—but this time it didn’t. I said, “I’m named for St. Ludmilla, who lived in the Czech Republic like twelve hundred years ago—”

“Wait,” he said, interrupting, “are you talking about St. Ludmilla of Bohemia?”

I was thrown. “Yes.”

“I know her.”

“What, like personally?” The sarcasm slipped out. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the genuine interest that had appeared in his eyes.

“I know who she is,” he said. He was shaking his head in mild disbelief. “St. Ludmilla.”

I stared at him a moment. “You are seriously one of the only people who has ever known who she was.”

“She brought Christianity to her people,” he continued, very pleased with himself. And even better, our conversation no longer felt awkward.

“Well, she tried,” I said. “Then her daughter-in-law had her strangled.”

“You mostly don’t get to be a saint by living happily ever after,” he pointed out, with what struck me as a rather sophisticated worldview.

“That’s true. Getting murdered helps a lot. Are you Catholic?” We recognized saints in the Episcopal church, but he seemed unusually knowledgeable.

“My mom’s sort of Catholic, but the Episcopal school was less expensive and she says it’s basically the same. My grandmother thinks I’m going to school with a bunch of dangerous nonbelievers, so she made me memorize the life stories of a hundred saints before I started at St. Anne’s.”

“And Ludmilla was one of them?” There were thousands and thousands of saints. This was a huge and unlikely coincidence. Had he secretly been researching me? Had he been as in love with me all this time as I’d been with him? When I’d imagined him touching me with those hands, had he been imagining the same thing?

“My grandma’s from the Czech Republic, so it was, like,mostly saints from around there that she wanted me to focus on,” he explained. “I liked St. Ludmilla. She was cool.”

Ah. I felt a stab of disappointment. Only a coincidence. Still, the ice had broken. Gabriel was gazing at me and I fancied there were hidden depths in him that I hadn’t suspected.

“You have really pretty eyes,” he told me.

I smiled, and mentally I thanked Dr. Watanabe for his facial reconstruction skills.

On the screen were more movie trailers, and on every side of the car were rows of other cars, all the occupants trying hard to block out the rest of the audience and pretend, like I was doing, that they were the only people in the world at that moment.

His comment about my eyes, and the way he kept glancing over at me, sent hormones racing into my bloodstream in poorly regulated batches. He was into me, I realized. More than I could have hoped. My body translated this knowledge into an unbearable level of excitement and an equal portion of terror. The adrenaline and make-out hormones were sliding past each other like aggressive rival gang members. All the parts beyond the meshline were beginning to give me that weird tingle/hotness/overload feeling that meant the fake parts didn’t know what to do with everything I was throwing at them. I started to freak out. What had I been thinking, coming on this date with him? My body, my voice, any part of me might do something drastically wrong—

“Do you care about the movie, Milla?” Gabriel asked. The trailers had ended and the theater was dark as the movie began. His voice had gone all whispery. He was leaning toward me so his breath brushed my cheek.

Holy shit, he was really into me. Something was going to happen right now, unless I stopped it. But Gabriel was giving me his full attention, those dark eyes, his jawline, the curve of his shoulder muscles beneath his shirt, his hands …

“No, I don’t care about the movie,” I found myself whispering back.

He turned down the volume, inched closer, and said, “Hey.”

Stop him! I yelled at myself. Get out of here!

I did neither of these things. Instead I sat rooted to the seat as he gently put his lips on mine.

Gabriel Phillips was kissing me. Alone in my hospital room, alone in my bedroom at home, I had seen this moment a thousand different ways. But now it was real: lips, pressure, warmth.

When the kiss was over, my mind replayed it obsessively on an auto-loop. I might have been staring at him in mute shock for a full minute.

He didn’t notice. “Do you want to get in the backseat?” he asked, with that combination of excitement and nervousness that I used to see on Jonas’s face when we were first boyfriend and girlfriend. “We could, I don’t know …”

“Okay.” My body was telling me to Run! but it was also, very much, telling me to stay.

It’s not like I’ve had so many boyfriends (I’ve had two, if you count the one from middle school), but I knew what was what with the kissing and whatnot, even if I hadn’t done any of it in ages. (Jonas had moved away, and then I’d been in the hospital for almost a solid year. Believe me, no one wanted to kiss you there.) I liked making out, and the sexy hormones were winning out over the adrenaline, even as the parts behind the meshline continued to send me uncomfortable warning signals.

In the semidarkness, I climbed between the front seats into the wide backseat, and Gabriel slithered after me, laughing as he pulled his legs through. One of his feet hit the radio and it switched from the movie soundtrack to a talk radio station.

“… but it’s about our definition of what it means to be human. What did the Lord intend for us? What was His vision for humanity in this world?” a smooth, slightly Southern male voice was saying, filling the car. Half preacher, half rabble-rouser. “What did He withhold from us? He made us in His image. We know that. This, this ordinary human body is in His image, then.” He sounded young, but his voice made me think of liquor and cigars. He emphasized words I would never have expected him to emphasize, as though he paid more attention to the cadence of his sentences than their content. “We can’t go tinkering around and making fake hearts and livers and growing new stuff Jesus never wanted to see—”

“Ah, sorry.” Gabriel was obviously embarrassed. He hurriedly reached forward and switched the radio back to the movie track.

When he got to the backseat, he leaned over to kiss me again. It was a shock to see myself move out of reach, but that’s exactly what I did. A sense of dread was spreading through me, the real parts and the fake, crossing the meshline like no other emotion usually could. I had stumbled upon something here.

“Was that … was that what’s-his-name?” I asked, nodding at the radio.

“Reverend Tad Tadd? The one with two first names?” he said with a laugh. “Yeah. My grandma listens to him all the time.”

It took a few moments to unpack the various implications of this answer. I grasped at the easiest piece to question and said, “Wait, this is your grandma’s car?”

It was a big, old car, which I’d thought was kind of cool when I thought it belonged to Gabriel. I mean, it’s retro for a teenager to even have a car, and having a really old car is doubly retro. But now that I looked around the backseat a little more closely, in the movie’s low light, I saw old-lady signs that he’d failed to hide before our date: a crocheted blanket spread across the space behind the head rests, a pair of very thick reading glasses in the little rear door pocket, next to a lace handkerchief. These unsexy articles, that voice on the radio—

“Yeah. I mean, I use the car all the time,” he said, following my gaze and seeing traces of his grandmother. “It’s, like, a family car. My grandma sometimes still drives it—and listens to Tad Tadd, like half the people in LA.” He shook his head as if to say, Grandmas—what are you going to do? Then, seeing something in my face that told him everything was not okay, he added, “She barely drives it anymore, if that’s what’s bothering you. It’s basically mine.”

My eyes were fixed on the front seat, where I envisioned an old woman turning to stare at me in disgust as she listned to Tad Tadd. She wagged a disapproving finger in my direction.

“What’s the matter?” Gabriel asked.

“That guy spews hate. Why would your grandmother listen to him? How can he use faith to attack people who have medical problems? And why can’t he have a normal last name?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. The meshline was tingling with adrenaline, an unpleasant version of how it felt when I drank coffee. It was like needing to pee, but feeling that sensation everywhere.

“Have you ever listened to talk radio?” he asked me, laughing a little. “It’s full of crazy people. It’s mostly crazy people. Hey, come on.” He reached over and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. Despite the dread and adrenaline, I was touched by this. Like he and I were a team. Or we could be.

“Does your grandma agree with him?” Again, the words were out before I could stop them. Why was I arguing about his grandmother’s political/religious/racist views on our first date? I shouldn’t even be here in a backseat where … But since I was here, I definitely shouldn’t be bringing up this subject. I hadn’t brought it up, I reminded myself. The radio had been set to that station. Even if Gabriel’s grandmother was the one who’d set it, he must have listened in at least once or twice.

“I don’t know,” he said. The romantic energy was visibly leaking out of him. “I guess she agrees with him. She’s really old and super religious. They were going to grow her a new heart last year, you know, where it’s mostly real heart, but some of the parts are, like, robotic or something?”

I did know. I knew because a heart matching that description was currently beating way too fast in my half-real chest. And I cared about that heart very much.

“She refused, because she thinks God wouldn’t approve,” he went on. And then he shrugged. “She’s old. You can’t argue with her.” He wasn’t saying whether or not he agreed with his grandmother, but his tone hinted that he didn’t.

It was dark again, because up on the screen, something was happening in a shadowy hallway. Gabriel was close to me, the outline of his face traced by movie light. When he saw my expression soften, he touched my lips with his own. A light kiss, an exploratory kiss, but ready for something much better.

“What do you think?” I asked, pulling away. I wanted to kiss him more, but I could not keep my mouth shut on this topic. It was like the mesh was my baby sister and even though I fully intended to keep it hidden, I felt honor-bound to root out any signs of prejudice. Because prejudice was everywhere. You didn’t know that until you crossed an invisible line and you yourself were in its crosshairs.

“Why do you care so much about Reverend Tadd?” he asked. “He’s just a nutjob on the radio.”

This was the precise question I didn’t want to answer. I felt myself retreat in fear and I stammered, “I—I just wanted to hear what you think. I’m trying to get to know you.” I managed to make the last part sound flirty.

Gabriel shook his head, as if he would humor me because obviously he was so into me. “I don’t know.” He shrugged again. “I mean, we’re religious, all of us at St. Anne’s, aren’t we? And, like, should we be doing everything that God can do? What about these people who are going to other countries to freeze themselves and avoid a natural death? Even kids? They might be frozen forever. Is that what their lives are supposed to be? Does that seem like something we should be doing? I don’t know.”

“So you agree with Reverend Tad Tadd?” I whispered the question, knowing that if I tried to say it in a normal voice, it would come out too loud.

Here’s the thing. I’d heard snippets of Reverend Tadd’s broadcasts from time to time and seen him spouting sound bites on TV, but I’d never really thought about him too much. Sure, he was a ridiculous bigot, yet the important word had always been ridiculous. Tonight, though … tonight his hatred had unexpectedly intruded upon our intimate space, and it was like his voice and his sentiment had somehow become tied up with the pain and with the monstrous weight of death that had pressed down on me for so many months. And now, even if I was scared of where the conversation would lead, I couldn’t let him go.

Gabriel said, “I think Reverend Tadd is crazy. He sounds like … like …” He groped for the words.

“Like he tells everyone else how to be holy and then he goes back to a house full of alcohol and hookers?” I suggested. The words had been enraged inside my head, but they came out sounding more like a joke. Thankfully.

Gabriel gave me a whispery laugh. “Something like that. Maybe not that bad. It’s just … My grandma’s from a different generation—”

“But what’s the difference between a half-real heart and taking antibiotics, or getting a doctor to set a broken bone?” I asked, still whispering. I was starting to feel ill. And I needed to hear him say the right thing.

“Yeah, that’s what’s crazy,” he agreed. “How are they drawing the line? It’s so …”

“Arbitrary?” This word came out too loud, but it was only one word, so I don’t think he noticed. I bit my lower lip to try to rein in my voice.

“Right, arbitrary. But my grandma is so sure certain things are too close to what God is supposed to take care of. Or not take care of. Maybe certain people aren’t meant to live—she thinks,” he quickly added.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, tried to untie the knot in my stomach. I was not lying unconscious, crushed inside a car. I was not watching helplessly as doctors called for more blood. I was here at the drive-in and no one was singling me out. To Gabriel, this was only a theoretical debate and I was one of those religious girls who loved to argue. Maybe he was walking a fine gray borderline between skeptical friend and thoughtless objector, but what he was saying wasn’t terrible. No matter what his grandmother thought, Gabriel was trying to be tolerant, which was all I could hope to ask in a world where the Reverend Tadd and others were turning medicine into philosophy.

“I didn’t know you were so into politics,” he said, teasing me a little.

“I guess this isn’t the best topic for a first date.” I managed a little laugh.

The adrenaline pumping through me was calming down. And I was calming down. His arm was around my waist, which was keeping the make-out hormones flowing, in spite of everything. My attention came back to his hands, his lips, the backseat. I was here because I wanted to be here.

So we kissed then. I mean we really kissed. We started out sitting up, but soon I was lying wedged in the corner of the seat and he was almost on top of me, and it felt so good. Like, unbelievably good. The only damage I’d received to my face had been a small jaw fracture and that thing with my eyes, so my mouth and tongue and teeth and everything were totally normal. They wouldn’t feel weird to him, which was important because he was totally in my mouth with his tongue. Which I liked.

But then I didn’t.

As the adrenaline settled, the make-out hormones (some of which were naturally mine, and some of which were, you know, added extras from the meshline) were also cutting out,my body sputtering like an old-school gas engine with dirt in the fuel line. Suddenly it was like watching myself kiss him, like this was another movie, playing inside the car, and I could think that it looked sexy, but I couldn’t feel that it was sexy. It was more like our mouths were raw chicken breasts we were mashing repeatedly against each other.

I was thinking about this while still kissing him, trying to recapture why I’d wanted to put my tongue into his mouth when that now seemed, essentially, disgusting. Because I was distracted, I didn’t notice that he had worked my shirt out of my pants and his hand was sliding beneath it.

“Wait—” I said, struggling to sit up.

“You’re so pretty. I want to touch you …”

“Wait—”

But it was too late. His hand had expertly worked its way up my torso and his fingers were under my bra. Yes—that quickly. The tips of his fingers—some of the most sensitive and discerning parts of the human body—had touched the exterior skin-layer of the meshline. His fingers stopped and I watched confusion vying with arousal in his face. His hand slid out of my bra, down my torso, this time sensing more artificial skin, which he had not noticed the first time he’d touched it.

“What’s …,” he began. That question had already led him up a blind alley he didn’t want to be in. He sat back, confused. “Are you—are you all right?”

4. CAST OF TWO

I pulled my shirt down, wiggled upright. He had felt that some things were wrong, but he didn’t have to know the extent of it.

“It’s just, in the accident,” I mumbled. “Some things had to be fixed.” This sounded weak, possibly because it was an absurd understatement.

“Lilly told us it was just your legs. You broke your legs.” The movie played out across his cheek as his shadowed eyes studied me.

“That was … mainly what happened,” I hedged. It was not right that anyone should pass judgment on me if I told the truth. And yet I did not, I did not, want to tell the truth.

“Is it your skin under there?” He sounded almost mesmerized. A lump of fear had formed just above my stomach. He reached for my shirt, but I held it down.

“Mostly.”

That was a lie. The artificial skin he’d felt, covering more than half my torso, was based on my skin, maybe you could say it was partly my skin, but it was combined with the mesh that made a bridge from the parts that were all me to the parts that weren’t me anymore. It felt like skin—until you touched my real skin right next to it, which was what had happened when his fingers traced the meshline across my right breast. Then the difference became glaring.

He was already pulling my shirt back up and I didn’t stop him this time; panic held me motionless. He would see, he would know! What should I have done? Slapped him? Escaped from the car and run from the drive-in?

The movie had gotten brighter and in its light, the variance in texture and color of my body was discernible. The meshline traveled up from beneath my bellybutton, curved across my stomach and then cut across my right breast. On one side of the mesh was me, real flesh, one hundred percent Milla. On the other side, things were harder to categorize.

“How far does it go?” he asked, looking at where the line disappeared beneath my waistband, down toward my “lady parts,” as my mother referred to them.

I was transfixed by … by his searching look, maybe? By the shock and concern in his face?

“You’re looking at most of it,” I whispered.

Another lie. Not visible from my current position was the line that ran from my right breast across the ribs beneath my right arm and then traced a path down the right side of my back. Nor could he see how the damage extended inward to my heart and one of my lungs, to my other organs, and yes, to my lady parts too.

“Your heart?” he asked, as if I had spoken those thoughts aloud.

I could have said that I was burned and the fake skin was just to cover burns. Why did I owe him any explanations? But … the heart in my chest had saved my life. It deserved better than a shamefaced excuse.

“It’s like what you said for your grandmother,” I whispered. “It’s a real heart, mostly. From my own cells, but there are some other parts that make up for the parts they can’t grow yet. Tiny little robotic parts made out of squishy stuff. It’s a combination.”

He sat back, and I yanked my shirt down. A series of emotions marched across his features. Not all of them made sense.

“This is why you hate Reverend Tadd,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Why haven’t you told anyone? Lilly told the whole school it was just your legs. It’s—it’s—”

“More than my legs,” I said. What was I seeing on his face? Fear?

“How much of you is real?” he asked. He was starting to sound agitated. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, as if unconsciously scraping off the taint of my counterfeit lips.

“My mouth is real,” I whispered. He was repulsed.

But he wasn’t.

Tenderly, he asked, “You’ve been living with all of this, with no one to talk to about it?”

I was undone by the sympathy of this question, and in the face of his concern, the tension in my chest shifted. It was as though the meshline itself began to relax.

“People don’t need to know all the bad things, Gabriel,” I said quietly. “And how do you even tell people?” I could feel things bubbling up inside me, things I had promised myself I would never say. “How do I even explain that when the car crashed, my mom was thrown free and only broke her arm and her hip? But I was pinned in my seat when the truck came spinning into us? That, like, the whole dashboard went through the right side of my body, crushing it to pulp?” I had begun in a whisper but knew I was about to lose vocal control. Now that I was letting the truth out, it would be no gentle trickle. Wedged in the corner of the backseat, I was going to unload it on Gabriel like a drunk sorority girl spouting the remains of her half-digested tuna sandwich all over the floor. “That the dashboard was what was holding me together all that time while the paramedics and firemen were cutting me out of the car? That I should totally have been dead, first when the truck hit, then before the ambulance got there, then in the ambulance? I should have been dead like ten times, and I probably even was dead for a little while, but we were so close to UCLA, and they began culturing my cells as soon as I arrived, and the doctors are, like, the best in the world at this stuff? So because of a chain of lucky breaks, I’m here, but half of my torso is fake, and my heart is fake, and one of my lungs is fake, and I will never have children because they don’t know how to fix that stuff yet.” The sorority girl was emptying out the full contents of her stomach right into her party date’s lap. And that relief you feel when you throw up? I was beginning to feel that. “And that I can want to make out with you and I can think you’re really good-looking, but I can’t count on how my body will respond to anything? Kissing, laughing, hiccupping—hiccupping is the worst. I sound like a howler monkey when it happens. That I thought about you while I was in the hospital, and I wondered if anyone would ever want to touch me again? How do I tell people that I’m so grateful to be alive, when I know they’ll never be able to look at me with anything but pity, or, or, or judgment from here on out?”

Gabriel was sitting on the seat next to me, the red and blue color from the screen dancing across his face and through his blond hair. I hadn’t been yelling, quite, but almost.

“I’m sorry, Milla,” he whispered.

“Me too.”

We sat in the backseat, looking at each other. I had emptied myself and I felt hollow, but it was a clean sort of hollow, the kind of hollow that is ready to be filled with something new.

Very gently, Gabriel pulled me toward him and wrapped his arms around me. I leaned into him, and I almost cried—I even had the feeling of tears forming behind my eyes.

“You don’t have to tell anyone, you know,” he murmured into my ear.

I nodded into his chest. “Some people, they get weird about this stuff. My dad says when he was a kid, everyone wanted medical advances—any kind, they were all good. But now people get … funny.”

“Not very funny,” he said ruefully.

“No, not very funny,” I agreed.

When my breathing had evened out, I became more aware of our bodies touching, of his arms around me. The meshline had no idea what to do with the changing emotional tides of the last few minutes, but somehow the make-out hormones were taking over again.

“It feels really good to tell you,” I told him.

He drew back so he could look down at me. “Did you really think about me when you were hurt?” he asked.

“A little bit.” It was a lie, but it was the best I could manage.

“Can I kiss you again?” he asked softly.

I nodded.

He gently touched his lips to mine. And it was different this time. I had been holding myself back before, and now I wasn’t.

We were kissing and then, by inches, we were doing more than kissing. My bra was unhooked and hitched up by my neck. His lips were everywhere. You may be familiar with how it goes. At some point I realized that my pants were off and his hand was moving gently but insistently. “Can you feel that?” he asked, his lips by my ear. “Does it feel good?”

“Yes,” I whispered urgently. I was actually feeling. Everywhere.

“Can you feel it all the way? I’m not touching …” I was grateful he didn’t finish the sentence: I’m not touching parts that aren’t real, am I?

“Yeah, I feel it all the way.”

That part of me was me. It was above that, the uterus, the ovaries—those had been crushed into oblivion and replaced with, well, nothing.

I was touching him and I knew what I was doing because of, you know, Jonas; I’d had practice. “Wait,” he breathed, pushing my hand away from him. “Let me … Can we …?”

I looked at him carefully from only inches away. He was asking to have sex with me, and I was so blissfully wrapped up in hormones that I almost said yes immediately.

“No, I can’t,” I said, pulling back a little.

“Why not?” he asked gently. He was kissing my neck and Jesus Christ (I’m sorry to use your name again in this vulgar context) it felt heavenly (again, sorry).

“Because I’ve never done it before,” I managed to say, while at the same time my body was screaming Let him do it!

“Never?” he whispered.

“My boyfriend and I got close one time, but we didn’t. And then he moved away. And I … I was in the hospital for a year. And I … haven’t been ready.”

“It’s okay.”

We were kissing again, and he was lying on top of me. The make-out hormones spiked and the meshline was letting just enough of everything through …

“Oh God, Milla, don’t you want—”

“Yes,” I breathed, “I do.”

My pants came off. My underwear came off. Was I really going to do this?

“Wait,” I whispered. “Do you have a condom?”

“A condom? But if you can’t …?”

“It’s not that …”

I couldn’t get pregnant, but I could still get diseases (how many girls had he been with?), and the effect of a disease would be so much worse in my current state—

“Right, of course,” he whispered, still kissing me.

He sat up, scrabbled with his backpack on the floor of the car and then with the crinkly condom packet, before coming back to me.

And then we were doing that thing that was supposed to be such a momentous experience in my life as a teenager. I expected pain, but I felt only good sensations.

When it was over, we lay in the backseat together, with my head on his chest and his arm around me.

“That was amazing,” he said, catching his breath.

I intertwined my fingers in his hand, marveling that I was touching one of those hands I’d been lusting over for so long. “That’s not how I expected it to happen,” I murmured. The tides were changing inside me again. I felt as though I were floating in an in-between state.

“What?” he asked.

“You know, my first time,” I said. “Kind of a big deal. You imagine how it might be and then—”

“It’s not really the same, though, is it?” he whispered. “I mean, it’s not really like virginity exactly.”

“What?” It took a few moments for me to be sure I’d heard him correctly. When he said nothing else, I sat up enough to look down at him. In the semidarkness, he was nearly hidden in shadows. “What?” I said again.

“Well … you were all cut up inside there,” he said, lifting himself up onto an elbow.

A flower of misgiving bloomed inside my chest. “What are you saying—”

“The doctors’ hands were everywhere,” he whispered earnestly, “and the robots. They use robots, right, to fix stuff? All over you and in you and through you.”

The flower grew, twisted itself into outrage. Was I understanding him correctly? “What does that—?”

“I’m just saying, I wouldn’t have tried if you were really … but it’s not like you were still actually a—”

“Do you think I fucking lost my virginity to a surgical robot? I was in a car accident, not an orgy!” I had totally lost control of my voice and was, like, SHRIEKING. His sympathy, my admission of what had happened—had it only added up to an easy way for him to sleep with me? “I’ve never had sex with anyone before. It’s kind of a big deal to me!”

I pushed him away and I yanked up my pants, and then I started to open the back door, even with my bra poking out the neck of my shirt.

“Wait, Milla! Stop, please.” He’d gotten up and was half kneeling on the floor, trying to pull the door shut. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!”

“How could you say that?” I screamed. “How could you think that?”

“Please, Milla!” he whispered frantically, knowing my voice would carry to other cars now that the door was open. “I didn’t mean it. I said the wrong thing!”

The light had come on when I opened the door, and in the brightness, he looked desperate and repentant. I had just remembered that we were parked in the middle of the crowded drive-in, with cars all around us. My voice and the dome light were beacons. People in other cars were turning toward us.

When I tried to picture myself actually getting out of the car and walking away, my anger deflated. I pulled the door closed, extinguishing the light, and then I ducked down until the heads in other cars turned back toward the screen.

Gabriel had his hands out as though I were a wild animal he was trying to soothe. “Of course it’s a big deal, Milla,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t … I’m sorry.”

I leaned against the closed door, waiting for my heartbeat and breath to slow.

“You said it because it’s what you think, isn’t it?” I asked him, when I’d gotten my voice under control. The damned movie was still playing out beyond the windshield and across our bodies. “You think I’m something different, something less.” I nodded toward the radio, which had broadcast Reverend Tadd’s voice. “You think I’m like …”

He was shaking his head. “I didn’t want to think that I’d pressured you, that I’d made you do something you didn’t want to do, so I said—”

“You didn’t pressure me.” I had chosen, willingly. Didn’t he understand?

“I’m sorry.”

Every emotion I’d felt throughout the evening seemed to have been mixed in a blender and poured down my throat. They added up to exhaustion. I leaned against the backseat and looked out through the windshield at the enormous images hovering in the air.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Can we just stop talking and watch the movie?”

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

He eased closer to me on the seat. I stared at the movie images without seeing them. When a few minutes had passed without me yelling, he tentatively took my hand, and when I didn’t resist, he continued to hold it.

We sat together like that until the end of the movie.

He took me home after that.

At the bottom of my parents’ driveway, he pulled over, turned off the car. We kissed again. This time, there was no adrenaline, no make-out hormones. I was wrung out, the real parts and the parts beyond the meshline equally numb. He leaned his forehead against mine.

“Milla?” he whispered.

“Yeah?”

I could feel his hesitation. “You still don’t want to tell anyone about …” He gestured toward my body in a way that let me know he was referring to the damaged parts. “Right?”

“Honestly it’s kind of a relief that it’s not a complete secret anymore. I don’t know. Eventually I might. Or not. I guess I’ll have to see how I feel.”

I pulled away from him, and then I paused, my hand on the door handle. Something about his demeanor was odd. He looked almost scared. I wondered if he was worried that I would tell people he’d forced me.

I touched his hand. “I’d never make you look bad, Gabriel,” I whispered.

“Right.” He nodded, first at me, then toward the view beyond the windshield, as if to a large, invisible audience out there. “Sure,” he said.

We glanced at each other, contemplating another kiss. Without a word, we both decided against it. Those moments of intimacy had passed and they already felt a long way away.

5. MIRACLE

So, yeah. That happened.

And then the next day at school, everyone knew. Gabriel must have started telling people immediately, maybe even on his way home that night. He had told them everything—but mostly about the strange new contents of my body.

Kevin Lopez smirking in the hall, Matthew Nowiki doing the robot with extra hip thrusts thrown in, Kahil Neelam making that hand gesture that told the story of my robotic vagina eating Gabriel’s penis, over and over, because obviously that’s what robot vaginas would be designed to do.

It wasn’t like I could yell back, I don’t have a robotic vagina, okay? That part of me is still real! I don’t think that would have helped.

After I threw my soup in Gabriel’s face and yelled at him so loudly my voice echoed off the Hollywood Hills, I ran out of the courtyard. Behind me I heard hoots and high fives, and girls giggling, and Kahil going on and on with the robot jokes. My meltdown was the most exciting thing to happen at St. Anne’s in at least a year. I like to think someone back there stood up for me. Maybe Lilly came to my defense, though maybe not. She was upset that I hadn’t told her about the sex. Or the injuries. She felt left out, and it was true, I’d left her out.

The headmaster, Mr. Kinross, found me by the back fire stairs, sitting in the shadows and not crying. My eyes stung, the meshline was pulsing with my shame, and that was all the relief I could hope for. He took me to his office, where he offered me a large bowl of wrapped toffees. I immediately stuffed two into my mouth and was surprised at how much they helped.

Mr. Kinross was fairly young, in his midforties maybe, Irish with black hair and blue eyes. There was even a hint of an accent still in his voice, kind of retro, because he’d come to the US when he was a teenager. It was as though the board of St. Anne’s had found him through a casting call. He was nice.

He let me eat my toffees in silence for a few moments, and then he said, “Ludmilla”—he was one of only a few people who insisted on calling me by my full name—“your parents told me about the extent of your injuries, when you came back to us. It’s not my place to discuss them with anyone else, of course, but I do have some idea what you went through. You sitting here is a miracle. I want you to know that we treasure miracles at St. Anne’s.”

Through the side windows bracketing his door, I watched students passing by in the hall. A few glanced in at me but turned away quickly when they realized there was a chance I might make eye contact.

“It’s like they think I’m a heretic,” I said.

It was such an old-fashioned word, but it felt right. Mr. Kinross thoughtfully unwrapped a toffee and put it in his mouth.

“There’s nothing so medieval as high school,” he muttered.

“I didn’t want to tell people because I thought they would feel sorry for me. Or secretly think I was unnatural. I didn’t think they would, you know, decide that I was a disgusting joke.”

My voice broke and I looked down, trying to blink away the burning in my eyes.

“Something ugly is happening to our world,” he said. “If God gave us minds, should we not embrace the fruits of those minds? Surely it is a mercy, and a beautiful calling, to minister to the injured and the ill?” This didn’t sound as formal as it might have, because it was said while sucking at a piece of toffee that kept clicking against his teeth. His kind eyes studied me—sad, seething, half-artificial me. “And yet, I see families with an entirely different view. They have taken it upon themselves to decide what God allows—which is surely exactly what they accuse the doctors of doing.”

It was a relief to hear an adult—a religious adult—say what I was thinking. Even so, I kind of wanted to get out of there, because he’d probably heard about the sex too, and I guessed I would be in for a lecture about the evils of premarital intercourse if I lingered in his office too long. The prickle of a nonblush was coming over me.

But all Mr. Kinross said was “I will have a chat with the boys.” He must have seen the worry in my face, because he quickly added, “I won’t let them make it worse for you, Ludmilla. There are some advantages to running a religious school. I can call on the fear of God when it’s warranted.” He smiled. “Think of your namesake, St. Ludmilla,” he said gently, when he saw my lingering doubt. “She faced opposition at every hand and yet she held to her faith.”

I muttered, “Did she? Or is she a saint only because she died?” And then I asked him the question that had been haunting me all year. “And was … was I supposed to die?”

“Ah. Do you think you were meant to be St. Ludmilla of Los Angeles?”

“I could never be a saint,” I said, “but I do wonder if I’m supposed to be here at all.”

“Perish that thought, Ludmilla,” he told me with a gentle certainty that was as soothing to my ears as the toffee was to my stomach. “You are being tried. Do you know that it’s often much harder to stay alive? You’ve chosen the thornier path. I admire you for that.”

Even if this sounded like a speech he’d lifted from a 1950s film, it made me feel better.

6. ST. LUDMILLA

Gabriel told Matthew Nowiki that I had been so desperate to prove I was still normal, I’d begged him to have sex with me. Actually begged. Like a prostitute offering her “wares” to a policeman to avoid arrest. Gabriel had been very clear with Matthew that my parts “didn’t feel right”—the implication being that something down there had been irregular, that Gabriel and his manhood had had a lucky escape.

According to Matthew (as relayed to me by Lilly), Gabriel had wanted to take me home early in the evening, but I hadn’t let him because I’d wanted to lose my “human virginity.” As if I’d been having sex with aliens and werewolves and centipedes for years and was trying to prove that I was still a real girl. “My human virginity.” This phrase captivated everyone. In an objective corner of my mind, it even captivated me, and I recognized how well it summed up my differences, my desperation, and how I’d abused Gabriel. That the latter two were entirely fabricated didn’t matter. And I was weird. Let’s face it. Everyone sensed that something had been off since I’d returned to school.

I didn’t go outside for lunch that week, but when I peeked through a second-floor window at the courtyard below, I could see and hear Lilly and my other friends gossiping with everyone else over the details and whether I was still, technically, a normal human. Maybe I would have done exactly the same thing if it had been someone else they were talking about. Even nice people didn’t want to commit themselves until a general consensus could be reached: Was I a perversion of nature to be shunned, or was I in the category of the meek and thus worthy of protection and sympathy? What if I was both?

So I was standing right behind Gabriel on the street corner outside Go Get ’Em Tiger. There was a tingle all up and down the meshline from the coffee, but this sensation was at war with the hot jitters rushing through me. Gabriel was slurping his coffee, and when he turned his head slightly, I saw his square jaw, his dark eyes beneath his blond hair. So handsome, but painful to look at now. Can’t he feel me standing here boring holes into his back with my eyes?

Four lanes of traffic came at us. In the closest lane was the huge City of LA driverless bus, so wide it almost didn’t fit in one lane.

I was overcome with thirst, which wasn’t real thirst but a side effect of internal imbalance. She wanted it so bad, and I gave it to her so hard, but it was weird down there …

I was so close to Gabriel that none of the other pedestrians could see my hands. They were crowded around, but all looking at the crosswalk light, or at the traffic.

How much of you is real?

I flexed my fingers. There was an irresistible gravity between my palms and his body.

It’s not really like virginity exactly.

So help me God, Jesus, and all the saints, I pushed him. The bus was bearing down on us, the last vehicle through the light, and I shoved him, both hands at his hips, every bit of strength I could muster in the move.

Gabriel had been taking a drink of coffee, off balance on one foot. He flew off the curb. I reached after him, as though trying to grab him back, as though I’d seen him tripping before he even realized it himself and was attempting to save him. Was I really trying to save him? I don’t know. What I do know is that Gabriel flailed wildly, the coffee going everywhere, and I accidentally grabbed one of his arms.

That kept him from dying, because I yanked him back toward me on reflex. The top half of Gabriel’s body was tugged to safety. The bottom half … well, the bus hit him full on. I mean, the bus was programmed to protect human life, including pedestrians, but what the hell was it supposed to do? If it came to an immediate stop, it would endanger everyone inside. So the bus passengers got a moderate jolt, and Gabriel got … all the rest. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, if you don’t count those few moments I was still conscious, when I saw the windshield break in front of me and the dashboard dislodge and go through my rib cage, taking out the vital organs in its path. I only saw that for a moment or two; I saw the whole Gabriel incident in full consciousness, from beginning to end.

The bus struck him and the sound was of something both firm and wet colliding with something very hard. Maybe like what you’d hear if you stomped on stalks of celery with heavy boots, or if you dropped a half-melted bag of ice from a second-story window onto concrete. He was shattered from the ribsdown. His hand, grasped tenuously in my own, was pulled free, and he was thrown a dozen feet as the bus screeched to an immediate halt.

“Oh my God!” I yelled.

Everyone was yelling some version of that. We rushed in a mass to his limp form lying half in the traffic lane, half on the sidewalk. His eyes were open, and as we all crowded around him, they fluttered closed. Not before he’d seen me, though. There was a moment: his eyes, my eyes, recognition.

More people were looking at me as someone called 911. A siren was already audible only blocks away.

“What happened?” one woman asked me. “You tried to pull him back, I saw you.”

“Did he fall, or did he jump?” someone else demanded urgently.

“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “I just reached out …”

“You saved him.”

And just like that, I was not the villain of this moment but the hero.

7. GO GET ’EM AGAIN, TIGER

I think my parents suspected.

It was too much of a coincidence, me happening to be on hand at the time Gabriel was hit by a bus. Yet they asked me very little about that afternoon. I gave them the official version of events and we didn’t discuss it further. But as the days passed, I noticed they never mentioned to any of the other parents from school that I had been there, that I had tried to save Gabriel, just as I never mentioned it. The topic was a gray cloud that hovered in the air between us. Days turned into weeks and the cloud dissipated into a thin fog, but it never went away. They had decided, I suppose, that they would rather not know.

Now here I was, months later, with my mother driving me to school in silence. Sometimes we chatted in the car, in the way we had always done, but other times, like this one, there was nothing to say. I leaned against the door, my eyes half closed, and concentrated on my breath, in and out. Since the accident with Gabriel, I had learned to achieve a better state of equilibrium with the meshline. If I kept my body steady, my motions smooth, things felt almost normal—my lymph system, my lungs, my hormones. The doctors had told me I would get there eventually, and I had.

My mother smiled when we pulled up in front of the school. I was her broken girl, put back together now. “Have a good day, Milla.”

The moment I got out of the car, I sensed that something was different. For no clear reason, my heart rate increased. I knew he was there even before I turned around.

Gabriel. He was walking through the front door of the school, surrounded by friends who were welcoming him back. His time in the hospital hadn’t been kept a secret. Rumors had floated back to school weekly: the rift in his family when his father and mother decided to allow the doctors to use every tool at their disposal to save him; his grandmother’s disavowal of his parents and him; the fact that the bus had absolutely demolished his lower intestine, his liver, his pelvis. There was rampant speculation about whether he had a working penis or not. The most up-to-date rumors suggested his man parts were fake, but they still worked—a miracle of squishy biomachinery.

If he saw me, he gave no sign, but it took me an hour to get my body calmed. At lunch, I sat in my normal spot, at the rickety picnic table in the far corner of the courtyard, my back to everyone, alone. Sometimes Lilly and a few others sat with me out of a lingering sense of duty, but mostly they had given up. I’d stopped being friendly.

The newspaper that day carried the story of a hate crime in Boston against a woman who had just returned from the hospital, rebuilt. I scanned the words, then folded them away so only the crossword was showing. I had been chewing my sandwich methodically, staring at the half-finished puzzle, when Gabriel sat down across from me. I couldn’t help sweeping my gaze over his midsection, looking for any sign of what might be underneath his uniform pants. His face was the same, his blond hair a little longer, some light stubble on his chin, his dark eyes still beautiful, if I could ignore the uneasy mix of feelings they provoked in me.

I assumed people in the courtyard were staring at us, because I could hear multiple whispered conversations, but I was turned away, and I ignored them all. Gabriel unwrapped his own lunch and started eating across from me. He wasn’t avoiding my eyes, nor was he seeking them out. He was simply sitting there, an inescapable presence. I continued to chew, the food cardboard in my mouth.

“Why are you sitting here?” I muttered after a while.

He shrugged. Then, looking at me without malice, he said, “I saw you there.” He didn’t need to explain. I knew he meant at the scene of the accident. “And before, in the coffee shop.”

I forced down a bite of sandwich, made myself take a sip of water. For months I’d been living in a state of hopeless isolation with the knowledge of what I’d done. Hearing Gabriel say those words out loud made me feel wretched, guilty, caught.

But also relieved.

His gaze on me was searching. “Did you do it on purpose?” he asked.

He was giving me a chance to lie. But I had already died once in my life. Keeping this secret any longer would kill me again.

I met his eyes and I whispered, “Yes.”

All the parts beyond the meshline felt like jelly, unstable, dissolvable.

“It was … it was the most awful, evil thing,” I said. “And I did it.”

He stared at his burger for a little while. At last, meditatively, he said, “I hated you for months. I lay in the hospital, hating you. But … I did it on purpose too. After the movie, telling people. I wanted to … I don’t know …”

“Keep away from the freak?” I prompted, still in a whisper.

“Yeah.”

“Make it your story, not mine?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I kept thinking about my grandma finding out. I thought she’d get into the car and she’d just know—what we’d done, and what you are.”

It didn’t offend me to hear him say what you are. Because whatever I was, he was too. He’d been scared that people would learn about me, and he would be tainted by association: the guy who got off on machines; the guy who liked weirdos; the guy who had sex with the artificial girl because he couldn’t get anyone else. So he’d thrown me to the wolves preemptively. And I’d thrown him to the bus.

“I shouldn’t have told people,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have told people,” I agreed. “But I shouldn’t … It was …”

“You, like, martyred me for my beliefs,” he murmured, taking a bite of his burger. He licked a gob of ketchup from the corner of his mouth.

“You didn’t die,” I pointed out. “A martyr has to die.”

“Did you want me to die?” he asked. He was looking at me with open curiosity. I imagined him in the hospital, turning over this question in his mind.

I shook my head. Even a moment after I’d pushed him, I’d wanted so badly to take it back. Undo, Undo! If there had been such a button, I would have pushed it over and over, taking back the bus, the theater, my accident, everything.

“If I’d died, then I really would have been a martyr,” he went on, as if the idea pleased him. “Or even a saint. You’d have to light candles to me and memorize my life story, Milla.”

“Hagiography,” I told him. “That’s what you call the life story of a saint.”

“Yeah. I think I knew that,” he said around another mouthful of burger. “You’d have to memorize my hagiography and ask for my help warding off evil and interceding with God on your behalf and finding your lost keys and stuff.”

I smiled at that, and then, setting down my sandwich, I declaimed, “St. Gabriel. A true warrior of faith. Succumbed to temptation and slept with a cyborg, then became one himself.”

He laughed.

And there was nothing more to say about what had happened between us.

“Want my fries?” I asked. “I’m not that hungry.”

“Yeah.” He dumped the fries on his napkin, squeezed ketchup all over them. He ate the fries with an expression I recognized. He knew he liked fries and the taste was good, but they didn’t provide him with quite the same feeling he was used to. “Ugh. They’re like fry-flavored Styrofoam,” he said, his mouth full. “But coffee’s different now, isn’t it? It’s, like, way better.”

My eyebrow quirked up almost lasciviously. Coffee. “It tingles around the edges,” I told him, hearing dreaminess in my own voice, “like the coffee is eating the mesh, digesting it so—”

“—so it blends back into everything else,” he finished for me, in the same rapt tone. “Like the fake parts are starting to become real again.”

Yes. That was exactly what drinking coffee felt like now. It was why I’d been in that coffee shop in the first place.

“Have you had the coffee at Go Get ’Em Tiger since …?” I asked him.

“No. Is it special?”

“It’s like what you were describing,” I told him, “but ten times more.”

“Hm. Maybe we could go there sometime,” he suggested casually.

I snorted at that, sounding less like a barfing dog than usual. Laughs, snorts, coughs—they were all getting better. Was he really asking me out?

“Sure, we could get coffee,” I told him, “but don’t think that I’m going to have sex with a robot.”

It’s a popular myth that the most deadly animal in history is the human, because murder and war and genocide can be laid at the feet of our species. However, the deadliest animal is of course the mosquito.

Fortunately, both species can now be significantly improved.

—Erik Hannes Eklund, Chair of Bioethics and Species Design, Columbia University, in his opening remarks to first-year medical students, 2041

Let’s leap ahead a little more …

PART THREE

Elsie Tadd woke up in a room she did not at first recognize, with a dry throat, a throbbing head, and aches and pains all over. It appeared to be nighttime when she first opened her eyes, but when she sat up on the edge of the cot with the faded patchwork quilt, she noticed a hint of sunlight coming in through the window up by the ceiling.

“Church basement,” she whispered, identifying her location.

This was the spare room of her father’s old church, where he would sometimes sleep if he stayed late to speak with parishioners or to work on a sermon. Elsie knew the room well, though she hadn’t seen it in a long time. Besides the little bed, there was an old desk and a couple shelves full of dusty books—mostly rare versions of the Bible. One wall was covered by a rather beautiful mural that had been painted by Elsie’s own mother. The painting depicted God, in radiant robes, up near the ceiling, and below him was Jesus, healing the ten lepers who had called out to him on the way to Jerusalem. In the Bible, the men had said, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” but Elsie had always wondered how they’d been sure it was Jesus and whether they might have started out with something like “Excuse me, young fellow with the beard. Are you that Jesus everyone’s been talking about?” or maybe they’d called out “Jesus!” really quickly and waited to see if he looked around. When she was younger, Elsie had spent hours in this room, drawing and doing her homework, and she’d imagined painting speech bubbles over the lepers’ heads and filling in their words.

“But how am I here?” she whispered, because her presence in the church basement didn’t make much sense. Elsie’s father had been the minister of the Church of the New Pentecost for all of Elsie’s life, until a year and a half ago. Since he’d lost his ministry, no one in their family had set foot in the place. Yet here she was. “Did I dream about Africa?” she murmured.

No. Africa was there, in her mind, though it was like a mirage that lost its shape when you tried to look directly at it. Still, she recalled details—the city of Tshikapa in the Congo, the feel of thick cardboard in her fingers as she held up her protest sign; wet, miserable heat; everyone chanting.

The church was silent around Elsie, but she could hear the distant whoosh-whoosh of auto-drones commuting across the city. Her little brother, Teddy, used to run around this room saying “Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!” while pretending that he could fly.

Teddy. The image of her curly-haired, seven-year-old brother brought other images along with it: Elsie’s mother sweating in her blouse and skirt, her green eyes alight with energy, leading the chant. Teddy holding a sign as big as himself that read I Am GRATEFUL For The Hole In My Heart!

Elsie swallowed, which reminded her of her sore throat and by association of every other part of her body that hurt. She felt her face. There were no bandages, only several spots that were painful to the touch, including all the skin around her right eye. The eye itself felt uncomfortable and strained, though she could see out of it perfectly well. She pulled up her long skirt to find bandages covering both of her knees, with scabs poking out beneath the edges of the gauze.

Another trickle of recollection came, as if through a haze of painkillers: A fall on a rocky patch of ground. A trampling of feet. Her father on a makeshift stage, singing and lifting his arms. Teddy, singing next to Elsie with all his heart: I was made this way! Oh, I was made this way! And the sensation in Elsie’s chest, the feeling that came over her whenever she thought about Teddy’s birth defect—the hole between the chambers of his heart that made him tired and one day might kill him—the sense that a giant had taken hold of her and was squeezing her ribs.

Maybe there had been painkillers, lots of them.

Elsie let her skirt drop.

“There really was a hospital,” she whispered to God in the mural on the wall. She imagined a speech bubble above His head that said, “No argument here.”

More images crept out of the shadows. There had been a clinic in a small building of decaying plaster on the edge of amuddy town square, a banner announcing Malaria Prevention and Treatment for Birth Defects. A line of Congolese women and children, waiting to be seen. Aid workers watching with irritation as Elsie’s father ushered his followers out of trucks to take places in front of the hospital.

More. A little Congolese girl, with beautiful dark brown skin and a sad face, standing stoically while a doctor gave her an injection beneath her belly button. Elsie knowing what the injection was: Castus Germline, the reason her father had dragged them to the Congo. Save the Third World, even if the First World has been lost. Once inside the body of a young girl, Castus Germline would edit diseases out of all her eggs and edit in protections against malaria and other infections, so that her children’s and grandchildren’s health would be close to perfect. Elsie’s father chanting: Arrogance! Blasphemy! That’s not how God created me! Pointing at the tiny girl and the others waiting in line, enraged that no one in the hospital was listening. Elsie lifting her own protest sign—Why Do You HATE What You Are?—so she didn’t have to see the girl’s face, because that giant had been compressing her chest again.

The giant was squeezing her right now. She rose from the cot, fought off a spell of dizziness, and dashed out of the room into the cold hallway outside. Across the hall stood a little bathroom, which she stepped into in order to examine herself in the mirror over the sink.

Except the mirror was gone. Someone had pulled the whole medicine cabinet from the wall—recently, judging by the freshness of the broken plaster surrounding the large cavity that had been left over the sink. The cabinet was sitting on the floor with the mirror side toward the wall, as if the mirror had been offensive, as if it had been ordered to stand in the corner.

Elsie noticed deep scrapes on her elbows now, and these tugged more memories free: Congolese men pouring into the town square, rocks being thrown, people yelling. An old woman with her head wrapped in a brightly colored scarf, spitting at Elsie’s father, throwing clods of dirt. Elsie’s mother leaping forward.

“Mama,” Elsie whispered. “What happened to us?”

Elsie was afraid she already knew the answer. There had been another hospital, bright lights. People lifting Elsie onto a rolling bed, the endless floating of drugs in her bloodstream …

She reached for the medicine cabinet, to turn it around, but a sound from down the hall stopped her. It was her father’s voice, deep and soothing, and he was saying, “Elsie, are you awake? Come here to me, girl.”

“Daddy?” she asked, sticking her head out of the bathroom. It was slightly frightening to hear him in the stillness of the basement. She’d been hoping for her mother’s voice, she realized. Or Teddy’s.

“Daddy?” she called again. Elsie was fourteen years old. Calling her father Daddy was beginning to sound childish. Yet that was the only way she’d ever been allowed to address him.

He didn’t say anything else to her, but her father’s voice continued on in a murmur. She followed the sound down the hall and found him in the old storage room, among the props for the Christmas pageant and the Easter decorations, the extra folding tables and chairs, and stacks of out-of-date paper hymnals that had long since been replaced by tablets. The Reverend Mr. Tad Tadd, Elsie’s father, was kneeling in one corner of the room, facing a large plaster Jesus that had once hung on the wall in the room where Elsie had woken up, before one of its feet had fallen off. Elsie had thought the Jesus looked more roguish with one foot missing, and perhaps more historically accurate, considering his injuries on the cross; however, most people were not looking for roguishness or perfect realism in their Savior, Elsie’s mother had explained, and so the broken Jesus had been relegated to the storage room.

Her father, turned toward the wall, was murmuring to himself, with his personal Bible open in his hands. Elsie could catch only a word here and there. He might have been saying, “We are all the fish … You tried to tell me … Fish of different sorts, the fish …” Which made no sense, since her father did not care to eat fish of any kind. And yet he sounded as though he were holding up one end of a quite serious conversation with God.

His hands and arms, like Elsie’s, were scratched, but she could see nothing else amiss from where she stood.

Tentatively, she asked, “Daddy, what are we doing here?” She didn’t like the idea of interrupting, but her father sometimes spoke to God at such length that it wasn’t practical to wait until he was done.

“They never changed the door codes,” her father said,without turning from the plaster Jesus. “I didn’t want to bring you home just yet.”

“But how did we get here?” Elsie asked.

“Joel helped me. We got you released and brought you here so you could wake up in peace.” Joel, a doctor, had been one of her father’s parishioners and his best friend, before the Reverend’s fall from grace.

“But … Tshikapa, the Congo,” she said.

“Yes, Africa,” her father answered heavily. And then, as if to explain, he added, “Airlift and two hospitals.”

Yes. That. The mirage in her head was taking on solid form. The mob, and the rocks.

Elsie had been standing just inside the doorway, but now she got closer. Hoping the words were wrong, she asked, “Mama and Teddy are dead? I didn’t dream it?”

One of her father’s hands went to his face, and when it came away, Elsie could see that it was wet. He was crying. He turned his head slightly as he said, “You didn’t dream it, baby girl.”

She wanted to feel shocked, but she didn’t. Part of her had known the moment she woke up.

Elsie took a seat on an aged footstool with the stuffing coming out of it. A broken hymnal tablet shared the stool with her. When her leg brushed against it, a four-inch-high three-dimensional Japanese woman sprang up from the tablet’s screen, lifted her arms, and began to sing the Japanese version of “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” A crack down the center of the tablet caused half of the woman’s body to be a smudged rainbow of disconnected colors. Elsie switched off the tablet.

“Are they gone?” her father went on. “In a sense, yes. My beautiful wife and beautiful little boy, but—”

“But they’ll live on in heaven at the end of time?” Elsie interjected automatically, because that was the sort of thing her father would say at a moment like this one.

“Yes, they will. But they don’t have to wait, because they are living on already.”

A rock to the back of her mother’s head. Teddy trampled. She had seen those things.

“How?” she whispered.

The Reverend had his forehead leaned against his Bible in an attitude of most fierce prayer, and Elsie wondered if it was possible that he had conjured up a miracle. She imagined a mural of this very moment, herself and her father and God hovering above them in his radiant robes, and she saw the speech bubble above her own head: “Excuse me, Lord God? Have You got something remarkable up those flowing sleeves of Yours?” But the God in the imagined mural looked as curious as Elsie was to hear what her father was going to say.

“If there’s one thing I’ve always said,” the Reverend told his daughter, “it’s that a man who cannot admit he’s wrong is not much of a man.”

It was true, she’d heard him say that, but—

“Do you mean you, Daddy?” she asked.

“I do.”

This surprising admission took several seconds to unfold within Elsie. Her father was criticizing himself?

“What—what were you wrong about, Daddy?” she asked.

In the mural, God gave Elsie a look of disappointment. “You know what he was wrong about, Elsie,” His speech bubble admonished her.

Elsie’s speech bubble said, “I need to hear him say it.”

The Reverend Tadd said, “A revelation, my sweet girl, is like turning on a light or opening a window. Have I told you that?” Elsie still couldn’t see his expression, but she imagined that it looked as it often did during the most ecstatic portions of his sermons—one part joy, one part pain. “You’re in a dark room and then—poof!—the sun floods in. And what you thought were formless shapes and terrible shadows are not. In God’s light, you understand that they’re something else entirely.

“Do you want to know what I’ve been shown?” her father asked. “Should I try to put it into words, even though words won’t do it justice?”

“Sure, Daddy.” If there was one thing Elsie understood about her father, it was that he knew how to use words that would do his ideas justice. His pride in his verbal skill burned intensely. In the mural in Elsie’s mind, she saw that pride like a glowing coal where his heart should be. Her father’s skill with words was the only thing that had buoyed him in the face of his lost ministry, his failure with the church board, his public humiliation. And his skill with words was part of that tight grip the giant had around Elsie’s chest.

“I’ve been shown that my expulsion from the Church of the New Pentecost was fair. I was as wrong as a man could be,” he told her, the words coming out in a toneless stream. “I went on the radio all those years, I stood at the pulpit before my congregation and told them they were defying the Lord. Changing themselves, growing new hearts and lungs and now even eyeballs!” His voice grew more resonant, as if he were in rehearsal for a public performance.

In the mural in her mind, God said, “He impresseth Me greatly with his beautiful voice! At least he’s got that going for him.”

She silently agreed with the Lord; she’d always loved her daddy’s voice. But would he say the things Elsie could feel caged up inside her own chest?

The Reverend continued, “But what if I am the one who defied the holy design? I can still see the look in that boy’s eyes, Elsie, years ago, when I told him he was turning himself into a demon!”

He stood up and reached for Elsie’s hand without turning toward her. Elsie got to her feet and slipped her hand into his. She thought they were going to pray together, but instead he led her out the door and back into the hall. The Reverend moved swiftly, pulling her along in his wake as he walked up the stairs, through the vestry, and out into the church itself. The lights were off, but late-afternoon sunlight came in through the stained-glass windows, turning dust motes into burning stars. He walked to the very edge of the dais, still holding Elsie’s hand, and there he faced the empty pews as if they held a Sunday’s worth of worshippers. He raised his arms toward heaven, and because Elsie’s hand was clasped in his, her arm was lifted too.

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