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Rico and I were catching up in my office when I dropped a bomb on him. “I’ve decided to change things up with my little manhunt.”
He leaned back in his air chair like he was ready to be entertained by some crazy notion. “Oh, did you now?” He looked vaguely like a man in love—that tan, that relaxed way of being present and yet distracted with memories too private to divulge. All of this had to do with his recent vacation, undoubtedly. He had messaged my mobile several times to make sure I was okay while he was away, never revealing what he was doing.
“Oh cripes,” I said. “There I go again. Immediately talking about my life instead of asking about you. Did you enjoy your holiday?”
“Nothing to write home about.”
“Really? Where’d you go?”
“St. Tropez. Had about as much fun as I could stand—chillin’ with my sister and her chillen.”
I curbed the urge to call him on that blatant lie and mustered a bright smile. “Sounds lovely.”
“Tell me about this manhunt idea.” A little spring of nervousness was tightening his face.
I added more honey to my tone, girding for a fight. “I understand why you only want to use Luceel in this experiment of yours. Keep it pure, without any other technology involved. And that’s okay for some women. But I don’t have a lot of time, and the damned chip is torturing me. So I’m going to use Trilat.”
“Not if I’m staying in charge of this experiment!” he thundered.
“Please, just hear me out.”
I brought him up to speed. I’d purchased a Trilat system, which was hugely expensive. But it would be worth it if I could find out what man was always in the vicinity whenever the startle-eyed girl vision emerged. Once that was done, Trilat could predict where my chosen mate was likely to be at some point in the future, and I could arrange a “coincidental” encounter.
I’d schooled myself on how to use Trilat as best I could, but it was extremely complicated. So I enlisted the support of a Victory tech specialist without letting her know what I was trying to discover. In the end, she hadn’t been much help. If only I could get Rico’s support; he was so skilled in this sort of thing. But he was furious. It was clear he took my Trilat move as a challenge to his scientific authority.
“Please don’t be angry,” I said. “Yes, I took matters into my hands. But you can find more women to experiment on just using Luceel alone. Just think of my little Trilat deviation as a way of adding to the knowledge base, a form of business development.”
“Business development?” The acid in his tone could eat through steel.
“What if we roll out the Luceel system to the general public and other women have the same problem I have? That could generate a ton of complaints.”
“That’s not going to happen. I’m going to get Luceel right.”
“Eventually, maybe. But I’m down to six weeks—six weeks to conceive. After that, my reproductive system shuts down. Rico, please try to understand. I would so like your help getting Trilat to work.”
“Forget it. This is a private experiment. Nuhope has no control over it, and neither do you.”
“No, but I do have control over my body.”
“Do what you want,” he snapped and headed for the door.
Christ! The egos I had to deal with in Victory made me want to bash in my skull sometimes. While I had always directed Rico with very loose reins, he was leaving me no choice. Didn’t matter if this Luceel test was private. His future at Victory Star was entirely dependent on me, his boss. “I really want your support with this,” I said meaningfully.
He pivoted back around. “Let me see your arm,” he said. Pleasant calm voice with hot coals underneath.
“Sure.” I’d make him lighten up. Conflicts like this were so uncomfortable. He removed the bandage. The raging red inflammation was about three inches in diameter now. Rico looked stunned. “It’s time to call it quits. This experiment is obviously not working. I’ve got to do some more work on it.”
“But if we just used the Trilat –”
“I’d like to humor you, Cardinale. But that’s not going to happen.”
“Humor me?” Now he was really pissing me off.
“You’re obviously in a great deal of pain. Your emotions and judgment are completely out of whack because of that chip.”
A little flame of fear shot through me. What he was saying matched my worst imaginings. Yes, Whit had called me on some behavior issues, but since then, I’d pulled myself together. And yes, I was in pain, but I was entirely in charge of my mind.
My anger collected into a sharp little stinger. “I wish you’d stop lying, Rico. It’s disrespectful.”
“What makes you think I’m doing that?”
“That’s been clear since you walked in this door. You couldn’t even tell me you went to some hick town called Pompey Hollow instead of St. Tropez?” He had some lover in the lower class. That must be it, and it embarrassed him.
Now he was beyond furious. “Did you Trilat me?”
“I was trying to learn the system. I just used you as a test case.”
His rubbery face was uglier to gaze upon than I’d ever seen. “Who the hell do you think you are, dogging my movements?”
“Who do you think you are, lying to me?” I blazed back, then lowered my voice. “Trilat can help this whole process, and we both know it. We are so close to figuring out who’s triggering visions of that child.”
“That child?” Something caught his attention out the window. I looked outside but couldn’t see anything unusual at all. “Oh, I get it. That girl you told me about with the funny eyes. You’re obsessed with her.”
“Of course not,” I said, blushing hotly. “There’s no good reason why you can’t help me with this.” A dangerous silence settled over the room. My anger fell away. He was my friend. I shouldn’t forget that. And he needed to save face. Okay. “I’m sorry, Rico. You’re right. I shouldn’t have tracked you. I promise I’ll never do that again. Let’s not fight. We’ve come so far with this—this crazy Luceel system. And I’m grateful for all you’ve done for me.”
He was a mountain of cold. “As far as I’m concerned, your Luceel test has ended. Any doctor can take that chip out for you. There’s no need for me to do it.”
And then he was gone.
I fought off the shock. I’d done everything to end that fight except lay on my back and spread my legs like a dog in total submission. Surely, Rico would see that when he cooled down. In a little while, he’d come back in and say something funny to clear the air. Then he would show me how to use Trilat, and everything would be back to normal.
I worked on a presentation for Victory’s board of directors well into the evening. The argument with Rico kept repeating in my mind. I waited for him to come through my door, call me, something!
There was a slight movement over by the steel table. The startle-eyed girl was staring at me. Thank God! There was some speck of happiness in this day.
“Hello, little bird. Hello,” I whispered, walking across the hushed room. I ran my fingers over the inlaid stones speckling the steel table’s surface like a magic alphabet. The child was even more haunting to look at, and I couldn’t place why. Was her hair more golden now? Were her eyes darker? I felt her trying to speak, silently telling me, “Just wait, mother. We’ll be together soon. You’ll take care of me. I’ll take care of you.”
Something out the window caught my attention: Nuhope’s looming façade. The memory of Rico staring out the window came back. It wasn’t just today. When? When? It came to me. The first time I mentioned the startle-eyed girl. That look on his face, like someone had thrown soup on him.
A sudden possibility prickled up. It had never occurred to me to track the men in another building. The distance had seemed too far for the Luceel system’s range. But maybe Nuhope was close enough.
Rico must have had the same revelation. He probably didn’t think it was wise for me to fall in love with someone who worked for the competition. If that was his reasoning, it would be logical, in typical situations. But this was hardly normal.
I put my mobile screen into telescope mode and surveyed the Nuhope building. In a high window opposite my own, I saw the silhouette of a man. There was a bounce to his movement, a playfulness. It looked like he was talking to someone further back in the room.
“Is it you?” I asked him. A woman’s form joined the man. They talked for an instant, and then they walked away. I couldn’t see them anymore.
The startle-eyed girl dimmed, then snuffed out like a candle. The man must have walked out of Luceel’s range. I screamed in delight. Bloody hell!
# # #
THREE DAYS LATER, I parked my car on a desolate street in the Bronx and glided into a little dive called the Black Candy Bar. It was 2:25 AM, and I was the only customer there as the minutes ticked by. He won’t come. This is a total waste. Stop it! Relax a little. Trust a little. The words kept batting around my brain as I tried to get used to the stale-beer air.
The bartender, Butler, had a hang-dog look and sly humor, such relieving distraction. I was toasting him with my second scotch at the bar when a hubbub of people pushed through the door. There must have been 20 of them, laughing and shouting.
The very consistency of the air seemed to change. Every object in the room was crisply defined. I felt as if someone had shot me with adrenaline.
Staring into the scratched mirror above the bar, I strained to find the man of my desire. Through the muddle of conversations, a certain voice stood out, and I knew it was his. “Listen, listen, listen. That cat don’ dance. He can’t even ...”
Shouts for booze and laughter blocked out the rest of his words as some people in the posse bellied up to bar. And then I saw him through the glass—Dove Brown.
His silhouette was often visible in the Nuhope window in the late day. The startle-eyed girl’s appearance always told me when that was. I finally got the hang of the Trilat system, after a lot of impatient trial and error. And it had determined his identity quite quickly.
It was such a thrill. Trilat had predicted that Dove would arrive at the Black Candy Bar around 3 AM. And here he was, caught in some internal syncopation as he almost danced across the room. His loose black shirt and pants rippled around the edges, revealing a hard-toned chest and legs through long slices in the silky fabric.
“I wouldn’t throw her out of bed for eating crackers,” he was saying now. Two lovelies flanking him seemed to be caught in a dream. They had a post-teenage trash look. Their hair was caught up in high bouffant styles, apricot yellow and lime green, clothes barely covering their erogenous zones. They had to be a good 15 years younger than me.
I felt so old, suddenly, but it wasn’t surprising to see him with young things like that. According to what I’d been able to discover, he was Nuhope’s most popular news correspondent and a womanizer of the highest order.
Whenever he appeared on a newscast, the audience numbers spiked. Dove’s dashing swagger and sense of fun were incredibly magnetic. He’d been caught up in a scandal a few months back when he was found in the sack with a Senator’s wife in Philadelphia. But the social media backlash had disappeared after he took a little hiatus. People just loved the guy, no matter what.
Dove’s career track at Nuhope was unusual, to say the least. He’d started out in the advertising department, sweet-talking a whole new set of clients. Nuhope had made a killing off his work. And I had no doubt that he was a key reason why Victory’s revenue had weakened. Under normal circumstances, Nuhope’s senior VP of sales would have been adamant that Dove should keep selling ad opportunities. Why screw things up? But Dove had convinced someone in the chain of command to transition him to on-camera talent. He started doing kooky little news stories—the mating habits of fruit flies, that sort of thing.
According to the trade news sites, everybody thought Dove’s move to journalism was weird. But it turned out to be genius. Nuhope’s audience for newscasts didn’t just go through the roof; it shot up into the stars. A week ago, that had pissed me off to no end. Now here I was, enchanted by the root cause.
“Just a minute! Just a minute!” Butler shouted, cranking out a flurry of drink orders.
That’s when I saw her. The startle-eyed girl was hovering close by, looking the same as ever, but more defined. It was easier now to see that her eyes were surrounded with faint shadows, like Dove’s. She had his wide mouth, but her silvery blonde hair and the pale tone of her golden skin were echoes of me.
Tables and chairs screeched across the floor as people collected them together into a group near an antique piano. Conversations washed around Dove and his arm candy. He was at the center of the group’s universe.
“But darlin’, you should never fry fish in the nude,” he said.
“I’d never fry fish period,” purred an artfully coiffed thing. Victory had considered hiring her as a newsreader a few years ago. Now she was on some of Nuhope’s weekend shows.
A man shoved into a seat beside me at the bar, accidentally brushing my inflamed wound. The stabbing pain was overwhelming. I moved away discreetly, and it subsided somewhat.
“Hey, Butler! Give me another Vodka Trapeze,” the man shouted, then surveyed me with appreciation. I had taken extra time to look sultrier than usual. My hair was brushed into a wavy fall that draped my shoulders; my merlot-red dress invited thoughts of what was underneath.
“Hello there,” he said. There were telltale white semi-circles below his eyes where puffs of age and fatigue had been chemically removed. He was still weathered, but there was an arresting quality about him. Before the startled girl, I would have been highly interested. I’d seen this guy somewhere—a Nuhope exec whose name was escaping me. Maybe he was instigating some ghost children. I looked around discreetly. Nope.
His eyes brushed down my body to an empty glass. “Can I get you another?”
“No, I’m just fine, thanks.”
The room went hush as if some distant sound had caught everyone’s attention, but there was nothing there. A new blast of guests rushed in the door. They waved and shouted at Dove and the rest of his entourage. As Dove called back, he saw me for the first time in the mirror’s reflection. It almost seemed like he was a dog focused on a distant, irresistible sound. My whole being did a ka-thunk, ka-thunk as he glided toward the bar.
“Hey, got a stick, Max?” Dove asked the man next to me. He caught the smoking tube the man tossed, then looked at me directly, laugh lines crinkled up.
The astonished girl was luminous now, staring at the two of us from a distance of three spread-out hands. Maybe the pain in my arm was still shouting, but I couldn’t sense it anymore.
“Hello,” he said, drawing me into his stormy blue gaze.
“Hello.” My voice was lower than usual and so relaxed. “Tell me something.”
“Anything.”
“Have you ever fried fish in the nude?” I lingered over his every available glimpse of skin. “I don’t see any burn marks.”
He drew closer, his bourbon breath filling my nostrils. There was some other note in the scent too, strangely acrid but not unpleasant. “I’ll tell you what. There’s very little I don’t do in the nude, behind closed doors. But I sure learned not to do that.”
He held me in a trance. I couldn’t even breathe.
Someone at a table shouted at him. “C’mon, mate! Let’s get to it.”
Dove peeled away from me and walked over to the piano, spinning around on the stool, sloshing his drink a little before he found a beat, dribbling back and forth between two keys.
It was as if a skeleton was tickling the piano; the music was so dry and haunted. Dove’s baritone lapped out waves of delicious loneliness. He diddled over the notes, building the tune in circles, opening a heavy heart as he described a bedroom pungent with the scent of sex and stale emptiness.
Look at me again, I demanded silently. But he was deep in the belly of the tune. Everyone in the room was riveted by his swaying movements—by the smallest quiver of his sensuous mouth—as he moved from one song to the next and the next.
Dove laid his heart out so nakedly, for so long. When light started filtering in through a lone, dirty window, he ripped away from the piano.
“Jeesus. It’s 10 to 6! We gotta get out and let Butler hit the sack,” he said. His friends drained out of the club, hurling funny insults at each other.
I sank over my stool, forlorn. It would be too forward to throw myself at him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the girl. “Sorry.” While she was unchanged, something about her shone out, as if she were saying, “How could you do this? I could be here, in the world. You’ve found him. You could make me.”
Okay. One more try. Dove was in the doorway when I came up to him. “Let’s head down the road,” he shouted at the others. “To that greasy spoon. You know the one.”
“How about one last smoke?” I offered him a stick, and he looked me up and down as if I were some car ready for a test drive. We’ll see who’s driving who, I told him silently.
One of the arm-candy girls tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s get out of here, baby.”
“Go on ahead. I’ll be there soon.”
She kissed him. “Give you something more. When you get there.”
“Can’t wait, sweet cake. Bye now.”
He closed the door, muffling the sound of cars and bikes blazing away. His radiating presence was so focused on me. I was hyperaware of every surrounding object. Off to our left, there was a shelf containing castoffs from another day and age: a Thai soda bottle, a rusted hammer, a one-time mayonnaise jar filled with wooden matchsticks.
I hadn’t seen matches since I was living in Temecula. Dove watched as I picked one out and played with it between my lips, tasting sulfur and wood. I scraped the orange tip across the sole of my shoe. It spat into fiery yellow between two fingers. It burned down to my skin, and then I tossed it in the ice melting in the bottom of a nearby glass.
His eyes seemed bottomless. I could do breaststrokes in them. “Now, why would you come to a bar like this all on your lonesome?” he asked.
“I was waiting for someone.”
“He show up?”
“Yeah.”
He grinned. “What’s your name?”
“Rachelle.” My middle name.
“Rachelle.” In his mouth, the name sounded like a rare flower picked out of prickly vines. “You were letting off such a siren song all night long. You got some voodoo goin’ on?”
I laughed. “Something like that.”
He touched the edge of the long sleeve covering my right arm, only a few inches from my wound. A thrill surged through me. No one had ever made me feel so electric with sensuality. He massaged my palm lightly, hardly touching it at all. I could feel my vagina widening. It was so easy to imagine what was to come, how he’d fill me as no one ever had before. My whole being would rearrange as he kissed me with a drowsy obsession. It was going to be worth it, every second of pain and doubt, all the anger between Rico and me.
“PETRA! PETRA!” barked my mobile’s wake-up alarm. I had programmed it with a recording of Dab’s voice, the way he used to sound when I was a child. It always made me rip out of bed. Why the hell hadn’t I deactivated that?
“Petra?” Dove looked startled, just like the girl, with those dark-circled eyes.
“Yes. Petra Rachelle Cardinale.”
He stepped back like he was dizzy. “Wow. The Victory prez.”
“I didn’t want you to think of me as someone in the enemy camp right away, so I used my middle name. Forgive me?”
He stumbled away, stunned. “I gotta git.”
“Wait a minute. Wait.” I trailed after him out the door into the morning glare, trying to control my panic. He swung a leg over his bike. “What are you afraid of?”
He turned back toward me. He was 11 years younger than me, within the realm of romantic reason, but he was seeing me differently now. In the merciless sunlight, all the chemical enhancements that had carefully preserved my appearance seemed to fall away under his deprecating stare. “Honey, ain’t no way I’d ever make it with you,” he said. The sound of his bike ripped the air.
That’s when I lost it. I fingered his sleeve. “Please, please,” I cried. He jerked away angrily. I couldn’t curb myself from shouting, “Stop! We need to talk this through! I insist!” I regretted the demand as soon as it came out of my mouth.
“Insist?” His sneer was horrifying.
“No, no, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t m–”
“I’m not on your payroll, lady.” He blasted away.
# # #
I DID SOME “OHM FUCKING Shanti” chants on the way home to subdue my humiliation. How could I have groveled that way, and then shouted at Dove? Luceel had made my emotions far too extreme. There was no way to deny that any longer.
Usually, my condo apartment had a soothing effect on me, no matter how tumultuous the day had been. My collection of physical books and antique furniture just looked musty to most people. No one expected me to have such an old-fashioned décor. But I sensed the souls of so many creatives, carving the wooden embellishments in the chairs, crafting the words, and it gave me peace.
There was none of that feeling now. I canceled all my appointments for the morning and was intent on trying to get some sleep when a niggling little thought emerged. What if Dove and Rico knew each other? Maybe that’s why Dove reacted the way he did.
Pulling up the Trilat system, I discovered what I’d missed. When I had tracked Rico to Pompey Hollow, I was still learning the system. But now, a larger truth was in plain sight: Dove had been there, with Rico. They not only knew each other; they’d been on vacation together!
A message from Rico pinged up on my mobile air screen. He was resigning. It didn’t seem possible to be angrier than I already was. But this was a personal record. There was no way I’d let him leave without a showdown.
I made it to Victory in record time and sailed down the vineyard-scented corridor to Rico’s office, taking in his hard resolve as he packed his belongings. The last flicker of optimism, that I would ever get the upper hand—that we would ever be friends again—vanished.
He looked at me like I was a ghoul. “Charming new look your sporting there.” His sarcasm was lethal.
A glance in the mirror by his door revealed that I’d completely forgotten to fix myself up. My makeup from last night was faded and smeared, and my hair might qualify me for a witch’s coven.
“Please disarm the security cameras,” I said.
He obliged. “Now, what’s on your mind?”
“Aren’t you the funny one. What’s on my mind? I think you should give me a post mortem on why you’re leaving.”
He sniggered. “What do you want to know?”
“What don’t I want to know? But let’s start with: Why did you tell Dove Brown to stay away from me?”
Something shifted on his face. I’d guessed right. “Listen, Cardinale, I did you a favor.”
“Luceel’s calculations suggest otherwise.”
“Dove Brown would only break your heart. He’s a rake, and there’s no changing that.”
“You don’t –”
“And if you take the time to consider your behavior of late, you might come to the conclusion that this experiment is flawed. Badly. And I’m not going to be here to help you anymore. So you need to get that chip out of your arm.”
“Let me make one thing clear. If I learn that you ever torture anyone again with this Luceel thing, I will make sure you pay dearly.”
“And what makes you so sure you’ll ever know if I do?”
“Because I’ll be tracking you and all you do.”
He laughed. “All I do? I don’t think so.”
The black void in his eyes cleared away just long enough for me to grasp the ugliness I’d never seen before. It made me reel. Tears distorted my view of him as I asked, “Why do you hate me?”
“Jesus.”
“Why? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?”
“You sniveling child,” he said. “I want to remind you about the nondisclosure document you signed regarding Luceel—the one that completely absolves me from any wrongdoing.”
I thought back to the document, the memory of adding my signature—a sign of how desperate I had become.
“I’ve tried to counsel you, Cardinale, but you won’t listen. You’re on your own.” Rico strode to the door, and then he was gone.
Somehow, I made it to my office. Everyone along the way stared at me. I was insane with grief about losing any chance to build a relationship with Dove, losing the startled girl, losing my impression that Rico and I were actually friends. And if I didn’t watch out, I’d lose my job.
Whit could not be pleased about the resignation of his top scientific executive. Rico had informed Whit of his imminent departure in the same message he sent me. How long would it take Whit to find out about how I’d behaved this morning, or about the chip? The security cameras were everywhere. My disheveled, tragic state as I’d made my way back to the office would be in plain view.
I sent Whit a little note: “Would you like to discuss Rico’s replacement?” But there was no response. An ominous sign.
My first assistant, Meekoo, was so kind, leading me to the air couch and settling me on it. “Maybe you should sleep for a while?” she asked. “There’s that big press conference at 4.”
“Oh, blimey. I forgot.”
“We’ll get you spruced up after you sleep.”
“Thank you.”
I forwarded all my mobile messages to Meekoo, requesting that I not be disturbed for at least three hours, then tried to nod off. My arm’s inflammation was now so intense, and my mind so troubled. Sleep proved impossible. There had to be some way of saving this. How could I turn Dove’s mind around? Should I try to find an alternative, some other man, through Trilat? How could I?
I sobbed for the loss of a child that had never existed, an incendiary love affair I’d never had. It was insane. My helpless state was all-consuming.
Meekoo stuck her head in the door, trying not to react to my tears out of respect. “I know you don’t want any calls, but it’s your father.”
She’d contacted him, I had no doubt. Meekoo was so finely tuned to my ways that my appearance and strange behavior must have scared the poor girl. She knew that there was only one person in the world that could help me—even if she didn’t know most of what I’d been going through. Replace her with a bot? Never.
A swipe of the air and Dab’s holo popped up. He looked me over, the smeared war paint, the still untidy hair. “Get that damned thing out of your arm.”
“Just a few more days.”
“You’re addicted to it. Don’t you see? Get it out!”
# # #
THERE WERE ENOUGH WARDROBE and makeup supplies in the office to make me look presentable. I was in the middle of all that when Whit called.
“I’m really sorry,” I said without elaborating. He knew what I meant: Rico’s abrupt departure, my insanely ugly state of despair as I glided through the corridors.
“I’ll get someone else to front the press conference. You’re in no shape,” he said.
“I can do this. There won’t be any embarrassments.”
He didn’t respond right away. “Alright. But then we need to consider your future options.”
“Right.” A demotion? Forced resignation? Leave of absence? Nothing remotely positive, I was sure. The possibilities kept rotating through my head as I made my way down to the auditorium for the press event. It was tied to the launch of Lama-Who? a new game in which celebrities became Lamadoo holograms – half man/half shark, half woman/half leopard, that sort of thing. Then they faced off in contests to see who fought the hardest or raced the fastest or ... the list of competitive “est’s” went on and on.
The publicity department had spent weeks building up the suspense of which stars were involved. And one of them was a personal friend of mine, Sosha. We waited in the stage wings together as the auditorium filled up with journalists, various celebrity managers, and Victory’s PR staff.
Sosha looked like a black-hearted doll with long kohl-lined eyes that always reminded me of Cleopatra. Her hair was done up in a storm of fuchsia, aqua, and black, setting off her artfully tattered black dress from the fashion designer Maundy.
She stared suspiciously at my chain-mail dress. “Fetching. But what’s with the long sleeves? It’s hot as hell in here.” Her voice was a crackling snarl.
“What’s with the voice?”
“Strained it a bit at a Nuhope recording session doing some piece-of-crap song.”
“Anything I’ve heard?”
“A cover of ‘For the Love of America.’”
I let out a cynical stream of air. That teary, chest-thumping cliché wasn’t Sosha’s style, at all.
She went on: “Maybe I’d feel a little differently if they let me switch it up, give it a better beat.”
“If that’s possible.”
Sosha looked at me more closely and sang, “Somebody’s keeping a secret. And I’m going to get it out of her.”
I was saved from responding by the head of PR, who gave us the high sign that the event was beginning. “Later, sweetness,” I said and slipped into the stage light with a glowing smile for the crowd, then for the paparazzi drones hovering in the air above them. The sickening clash of several penetrating perfumes nearly overwhelmed me, but I forced myself to rally.
The presentation was going flawlessly. The room was full of enthusiastic awe as holograms of Sosha and the other stars pranced around the stage, human from the waist up, and looking like giraffes, antelopes, and lions down below. Things really couldn’t have been better until the Q&A began. We were only three questions in when I spotted the children. Standing behind the final row of seats were about 20 holograms.
Who did they belong to? I looked at all the men in the audience with a feverish hope. My arm was throbbing furiously. I wanted to walk out into the crowd and find him, whoever he was. Don’t do that. Don’t! A faint voice of reason shot through me, and somehow, I managed to heed it.
A reporter in the middle of the audience stood up. “What about Rico Reingold? He’s the guy who made these Lamadoos. Why isn’t he on stage?
Somehow, I controlled my emotions. “Yes, Rico was a force behind everything, everything you see, and a whole lot you probably never should. The cutting room floor is knee-deep in rejects. We’re sparing you the boa constrictor mash-up.”
The crowd laughed at that, but that reporter just wouldn’t let it go. “So, where is he?”
The imaginary children floated down an aisle toward the stage. I could barely hold it together. “Good question! But so much of what Rico Reingold created is right here among us. And, and look—look who we do have.” The crowd went wild as Sosha and some other celebs came on stage and started taking questions.
When the event finally ended, I went back to my office in a state of exhausted relief. I had managed not to humiliate myself. The day was almost over. Six months before, I would have been exhilarated by the launch of that show. Now that feeling was so dim.
And Rico? I knew somehow that we weren’t finished with each other. There was more to come. More anger? Or revenge? Something. But right now, I had to set aside all thought of him.
Relax a little. Trust a little. The mantra made me laugh. I glided over to the office window and put my hand on my middle where an embryo might have grown. Dove must have been there, somewhere beyond where I could see into Nuhope’s windows because the startle-eyed girl suddenly emerged by the table.
I began imagining a host of scenes: Dove as my husband, making me intensely happy but then betraying me with one woman after another. There would be terrible fights between us, with the astonished girl listening beyond our closed door.
That’s when it came to me: how beloved and perfect children could be, even when the people who made them were totally unfit to live with each other. The children were all so worth loving. Wasn’t I adored by Dab, even though he never fully understood me—even though the man whose genes I carried, Geoffrey, was long gone?
On the steel table, Meekoo had placed a small bag of items I’d asked her to pick up at the pharmacy. I sterilized a surgical knife in a tiny torch flame and applied a numbing spray to my arm. It didn’t hurt at all to slice open the wound. The chip came out easily with my tweezers.
In a few minutes, I’d call my medical doctor. I’d keep my tone carefree, delivering some excuse to explain away the gash. He’d send by one of his nurse bots over to stitch me up.
I covered the bloody wound with some gauze and looked at the startled girl one last time. My sorrowful love expanded toward her. “Go to sleep, little bird. Go to sleep,” I lilted.
And with that, the imaginary child vanished forever.
PART II
Intertwined Vines