THE HEADLIGHTS thrust forward, twisting on the blackberry bushes. The normals are driving right onto the grounds, their voices tumbling out in drunken shouts and bursts of ugly laughter. I think most of the kids have scattered by now, but I can hear Ms. Stuart trying to shout the invaders down, and Dr. Jacoway—oh, he’s singing to himself, his voice slurred and dreamy and utterly insane.
Red-shining bodies rush staggering over the grass. I see Dr. Jacoway holding up his arms, waving them back and forth.
“Not the children! You have no business, sirs, in tampering with miracles you could never understand. But, oh, I understand! I know these children for what they are. The spirit of life itself saw the coming risk of human extinction, and it made them, it made them to be our new hope!” The words come out as a weird, warped song, and he walks right into the path of a truck rumbling slowly onto the grounds, the same one that was here before, with the loudspeakers in the back. Ms. Stuart must be close enough to see what’s happening. Why doesn’t she run to him and drag him out of its way? “I will not allow it. Not a hair, not a scale, not one feather. I will not! I will—”
“Dr. Jacoway!” I scream. “They’re not stopping!”
But he doesn’t hear me, or he doesn’t care. He’s still singing as the truck rolls over him. I see him pulled under the wheels, I hear his breathy cry, and I’m struggling to free myself from the kime carrying me. To help him. But I can’t.
I hear his song end.
In the darkness and confusion, the stampeding humans don’t seem to notice us until we’re pretty close. The mob is bigger than last time, but even so, I’m pretty sure the frog chimeras have them seriously outnumbered. There’s a burst of light, maybe from a flashlight, and a strange woman’s face jerks to a halt inches from mine. Her mouth is wide, her hair sticking up and singed off on one side. She’s gawking at the kime holding me and trying to scream, but all she can make are these little gagging sounds.
But other people can still scream, and they do.
I hear gunshots, and I watch as one of the greenish kimes swipes a gun out of someone’s hand without even looking and drives it barrel-first into the ground.
Bright orange light flares through the grass, and then I realize that a man with a torch has been snatched up by his ankles so that the fire laps up around his arm. He shrieks and drops the torch, and the kime holding him treads out the fire with its bare damp feet.
I can hear the hiss as the flames are extinguished. I’d like to believe it doesn’t hurt, but the pale semihuman face is tight with pain.
But it doesn’t do anything to the man it’s gripping. His upside-down face is red and sweating, and his arms swing out in random, pointless punches. But the kime just lets him dangle, and my heart speeds up from hope: that the kime army has come here to stop them. To protect all of us.
Not to hurt anyone, even if they might deserve it. Not to fight.
Another of the frog people wrests a megaphone from a teenage human boy who’s just sitting on the ground in shock, and hands it politely to someone back behind us. I crane, but I can’t see who it is.
The chaos seems to be dying down. Maybe half the human mob has run away. The truck and a few pickups and cars are so tightly surrounded by silent green chimeras that they’ve stopped trying to drive. And the remaining normals are mostly caught by their feet or pinned in the grass. There’s a feeling of weary confusion in the air. Nobody knows what to do with a riot that has stopped before it could really get going—even if it’s stopped too late for Dr. Jacoway.
Someone climbs on top of a car and hefts the megaphone.
“You said you came for Ada Lahey. She’s here, and she’s fine, and she can leave with you. If she wants to. No one will stop her.”
Rowan. He’s the glimpse of warmth I saw before, squeezed in with the frog people. That’s where he was: he went to get help.
The chimera holding me sets me softly on my feet.
“The normal girl,” someone says, jumping down from the truck carrying the loudspeakers. I recognize him. It’s the man who was doing the talking the first night, when they threw a rock at me. Scott Held, Gabriel said, one of the leaders of the massacre at Novasphere, and now he’s murdered the last survivor from that night. Dr. Jacoway’s mind was shattered, I know that. And so was his heart.
But his courage and his kindness? Those were as strong and intact as ever.
“The normal girl,” Scott Held repeats, walking toward me. His dark hair crests in the wind. He must have been young when he killed those scientists, because he doesn’t look older than his early thirties now. “We should have known as soon as we saw you, that you couldn’t be one of these freaks. We never should have been fooled. You know they lied and told us you were dead? We know better now, Ada, better about all of it, and we’re here to get you out.”
He reaches for me. I pull away. How dare this man act like he’s my personal hero?
“Don’t touch me,” I say.
“She’s just frightened,” somebody croons. A woman. “The poor girl is in shock. Get her father, somebody, will you? He’s in the car just back around the bend.”
So my dad told the lies that started this mess, but then he decided to wait it out at a safe distance? He didn’t want to watch the kids here die because of him?
“We’ll take her and go peacefully,” Scott announces to the kime army, like he’s got anything to say about it. They stand still and watch him, a few of them holding human captives—though most of the humans have been set down now and are leaning on each other or huddling in the grass. “We’ll overlook—whatever this new freak show is, that you’ve all been getting up to.” He nods to indicate the frog chimeras, and he doesn’t even try to keep the disgust off his face. “As long as we never see anything that there shouldn’t be outside the grounds. Anything unnatural.”
I can tell from his voice that he’s lying. They’re outnumbered now, but he’s already plotting to come back. Maybe with more powerful weapons. Maybe with the real military. And he’s so sure everyone hates us that he’s not even worried about going to prison for what he’s done.
“I’m as unnatural as they are,” I say. “If I can leave here, then so can everyone else.”
“Now, Ada, that’s not true. They’ve told you so many lies that you’ve started believing them. But you’re a real, right, pure-human little girl, and this is no place for you.”
I never like being condescended to very much, but I like it even less from someone who just murdered my friend—because even if Dr. Jacoway couldn’t remember me for ten minutes at a stretch, that’s exactly what he was.
“I can prove what I am,” I say. “And I’m not ashamed of it.”
I keep waiting for Ms. Stuart to say something, but she’s watching from off to the side and keeping her mouth shut. She’s smart. Probably she’s calculating that anything she can say will just make the situation worse for her. Now that she’s been caught lying, it’s not a good idea to call attention to herself.
Gabriel’s nearby too, face-down on the ground with a frog chimera sitting languidly on his back. His visible skin is blinking like a traffic light, but no one is paying attention.
Rowan is the one who comes to me. He climbs down off his perch, the megaphone dangling from his hand, and twists his way through the tangle of humans and chimeras. His fur makes his red glow look softer and fuzzier than most people’s. When he gets close, Scott Held jumps back from us, looking at Rowan’s round, silky head with absolute loathing.
Rowan reaches a flipper toward my cheek and then drops it self-consciously. His brown eyes are riveted on mine.
“Ada,” he half whispers. He leans closer. “Ada, this is your chance to get out, and you should take it. You know what Gabriel would have—no one here deserves to have you stay.”
“You deserve it,” I tell him. “And so does Soraya.”
“Just—go have a normal life, Ada. No one could ever guess, not by looking at you. Don’t give up your whole future for us!” Tears are wobbling in his dark eyes. One slips free and soaks into the fur on his neck.
I have more than one possible future, though. It’s not about giving up my old ideas of my future; it’s about choosing a new future, one I’m just beginning to understand. But I don’t have time to explain that to Rowan now. I can see a section of the road through the broken gate, and my dad is there, running around the bend. Once he gets here and starts talking, I probably won’t be able to get anyone to listen to me. They’ll trust him instead. I might be carried out of here by force.
I turn to Scott Held. “Do you have a piece of paper? Or your jacket would work, too. Hold it up in front of one hand.”
There’s a wave of murmuring from the humans. The frog chimeras are just as quiet as ever. Rowan is tear-streaked and pink, like he’s holding his breath. “Why?” Scott Held asks. He’s too taken aback to keep simpering at me.
“So I can show you how unnatural I am.”