CHAPTER 1

SpeciMen

I’d never known any other place. The 28th floor of Tower 7 was my home. Yesterday, I realized it was a prison, too. I probably should have suspected something. The two-hundred-year-old marble skyscraper had many dark sides to its existence and I knew most of them. There were 39 floors, and on almost every one was an abomination. I was an abomination. I’d read many books and this was clear to me. However, this building was still my home.

Home: a. One’s place of residence. Yes, it was my home.

They gave me all the 3D movies I could watch, but it was the plethora of books that did it for me. A year ago, they gave me an e-reader packed with 700,000 books of all kinds. No matter the topic, I consumed those books voraciously, working my way through over half of them. When it came to information, I was given access to anything I requested. That was part of their research. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now.

Research. This was what all The Towers were about. There were seven, all in American cities, yet they were not part of the American government. Not technically. If you dug for information, you would not find one governmental connection on file.

I had access to information about all the towers, and I read extensively. However, Tower 7 was where I lived, so I studied this tower the most. They gave me many “top-secret” files on Tower 7. As I said, I was always given what I asked for; this was part of the research. But also, they did not see me as a threat, not to them. I was a perfectly contained classified “speciMen.” And for a speciMen, knowledge wasn’t power.

Tower 7 was located in Times Square on the island of Manhattan, United States of America. Much of Manhattan was underwater, but geologists were sure this part of it was stable enough for Tower 7. It was in the perfect position for top surveillance and security. I’d read about each floor and some of the types of abominations found on them. I’d listened to audios of the spiritual tellings of long-dead African and Native American shamans, sorcerers and wizards. I’d read the Tanakh, the Bible, and the Koran. I studied the Buddha and meditated until I saw Krishna. And I read countless books on the sciences of the world. Carrying all this in my head, I understood abomination. I understood the purpose of Tower 7. Until yesterday.

Each tower had . . . specializations. In Tower 7, it was advanced and aggressive genetic manipulation and cloning. In Tower 7, people and creatures were invented, altered, or both. Some were deformed, some were mentally ill, some were just plain dangerous, and none were flawless. Yes, some of us were dangerous. I was dangerous.

Then there was the tower’s lobby on the ground floor that projected a completely different picture. I’d never been down there but my books described it as an earthly wonderland, full of creeping vines covering the walls and small trees growing from artistically crafted holes in the floor. In the center was the main attraction. Here grew the thing that brought people from all over the world to see the famous Tower 7 Lobby (only the lobby; there were no tours of the rest of the building).

A hundred years ago, one of the landscapers planted a new tree in the lobby’s center. On a lark, some Tower 4 scientists who were there to visit the greenhouse on the ninth floor emptied an experimental solution into the tree’s pot of soil. The substance was for enhancing and speeding up arboreal growth. The tree grew and grew. In a place where people thought like normal human beings, they would have uprooted the amazing tree and placed it outdoors.

However, this was Tower 7 where boundaries were both contained and pushed. The tree grew ravenously and in a matter of weeks it reached the lobby’s high ceiling. Tower 7 carpenters constructed a large hole so that it could grow through the second floor. They did the same for the third, fourth, fifth. The great tree eventually earned the name of “The Backbone” because it grew through all thirty-nine of Tower 7’s floors.

 • • • 

My name is Phoenix. I was mixed, grown and finally birthed here on the 28th floor. One of my doctors said my name came from the birthplace of my egg’s donor. I’ve looked that up; Phoenix, Arizona is the full name of the place. There’s no tower there, so that’s good.

However, from what I’ve read about the way they did things there, even the scientists who forced my existence don’t know the names of donors. So, I doubt this. I think they named me Phoenix because of something else.

I was an “accelerated organism,” born two years ago. Yet I looked and physically felt like a forty-year-old woman. My doctors said the acceleration had stopped now that I was “matured.” They said I would always look about forty, even if I lived to be five hundred. To them, I was like a plant they grew for the sake of harvesting.

Who do I mean by “them,” you must wonder. All of THEM, the “Big Eye”— the Tower 7 scientists, lab assistants, lab technicians, doctors, administrative workers, guards, and police. We speciMen of the tower called them “Big Eye” because they watched us. All the time, they watched us, though not closely enough to realize their great error and not closely enough to prevent the inevitable.

I could read a 500-page book in two minutes. My brain absorbed the information and stories like a sponge. Up until two weeks ago, aside from mealtimes, gazing out the window, running on my treadmill, and meetings with doctors, I spent my days with my e-reader. I’d sit in my room for hours consuming words upon words that became images upon images in my head. Now they gave me paper-made books, removing the books when I finished them. I liked the e-reader more. It took up less space, I could reread things when I wanted, there was a lot more to read and the e-pages didn’t smell so old and moldy.

I stared out the window watching the cars and trucks below and the other skyscrapers across from me as I touched a leaf of my hoya plant. They’d given the plant to me five days ago and already it was growing so wildly that it was creeping across my windowsill and had wrapped around the chair I’d put there. It had grown two feet overnight. I didn’t think they’d noticed. No one ever said anything about it. I was so naïve then. Of course, they’d noticed. The plant was not a gesture of kindness; it was just part of the research. They’d never cared about me. But Saeed cared about me.

Saeed is dead, Saeed is dead, Saeed is dead, I thought over and over, as I caressed one of my plant’s leaves. I yanked, breaking the leaf off. Saeed, my love, my only friend. I crumpled the leaf in my restless hand; its green earthy smell might as well have been blood.

Yesterday, Saeed had seen something terrible. Not long afterwards, he’d sat across from me during dinner-hour with eyes wide like boiled eggs, unable to eat. He couldn’t give me any details. He said no words could describe it. He’d only held my hand, pulling at his short dark brown beard with his other.

“What does your heart tell you about this place?” he’d earnestly asked.

I’d only shrugged, frustrated with him for not telling me what he’d seen that was so awful.

“Behiima hamagi. Xara,” he muttered, glaring at one of the Big Eye. He always spoke Arabic when he was angry. He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You read all those books . . . why don’t you feel rebellion in your heart? Don’t you ever dream of getting out of here? Away from all the Big Eye?”

“Rebellion against whom?” I whispered, confused.

“I’d even settle for being a mild speciMen,” he muttered. “They are fucked up, but not that fucked up. At least the Big Eye let them go out and live normal lives like normal people.”

“Mild speciMen aren’t special,” I said. “That’s why the Big Eye release them out there. I’d never want that, I like who I am.”

He laughed bitterly, touched my cheek and lightly kissed me, looking deep into my eyes. Then he sat back and said, “Eat your jollof rice, Phoenix.”

I tried to get him to eat his crushed glass. This was his favorite meal and it bothered me to see him push his plate away. But he wouldn’t touch it.

“I can live without it,” he said.

Before we returned to our separate quarters, he asked for my apple. I assumed he wanted to paint it; he always painted when he was depressed. I’d given it to him without a thought, and he’d slipped it into his pocket. The Big Eye allowed it, though they frowned upon taking food from the dining hall, even if you didn’t plan to eat it.

His words didn’t touch me until nighttime when I lay in my bed. Yes, somewhere deep deep in my psyche I did wish to get out of the tower and see the world, be away from the Big Eye. I did want to see those things that I saw in all the books I read. “Rebellion,” I whispered to myself. And the word bloomed from my lips like a flower.

 • • • 

They told me the news in the morning, during breakfast-hour. I’d been sitting alone looking around for Saeed. The others, the woman with the twisted spine who could turn her head around like an owl, the man with long-eyelashed expressive eyes who never spoke with his mouth but always had people speaking to him, the three women who all looked and sounded alike, the green-eyed idiok baboons who spoke using complex sign language, the woman whose sweater did not hide her four large breasts, the two men joined at the hip who were always randomly laughing, the woman with the lion claws and teeth, these people spoke to each other and never to me. Only Saeed, the one who was not of African descent (aside from the lion lady, who was Caucasian), spoke to me. Well, even the lion lady was part-African because her genes had been combined with those of a lion.

One of my doctors slid into the seat facing me. The African-looking one who wore the shiny black wig made of synthetic hair, Bumi. They always had her deal with me when I had to experience physical pain, so I guess it made sense for them to send her to break upsetting news to me, too. My entire body tightened. She touched my hand, and I pulled it away. Then she smiled sympathetically and told me a terrible thing. Saeed hadn’t drawn the apple. He’d eaten it. And it killed him. My mind went to one of my books. The Bible. I was Eve and he was Adam.

I could not eat. I could not drink. I would not cry. Not in the dining hall.

 • • • 

Hours later, I was in my room lying on my bed, eyes wet, mind reeling. Saeed was dead. I had skipped lunch and dinner, but I still wasn’t hungry. I was hot. The scanner on my wall would start to beep soon. Then they would come get me. For tests. I shut my eyes, squeezing out tears. They evaporated as they rolled down my hot cheeks, leaving the skin itchy with salt. “Oh God,” I moaned. The pain of losing him burned in my chest. “Saeed. What did you see?”

 • • • 

Saeed was human. More human than I. I’d met him the first day they allowed me into the dining hall with the others. I was one year old; I must have looked twenty. He was sitting alone and about to do something insane. There were many others in the room who caught my eye. The two conjoined men were laughing hard at the sight of me. The idiok baboons were jumping up and down while rapidly signing to the woman with lion claws and teeth. However, Saeed had a spoon in his hand and a bowl full of broken glass before him. I stood there staring at him as others stared at me. He dug the spoon into the chunks of glass, scooped out a spoonful and put it in his mouth. I could hear him crunching from where I stood. He smiled to himself, obviously enjoying it.

Driven by sheer curiosity, I walked over and sat across from him with my plate of spicy doro wat. He eyed me with suspicion, but he didn’t seem angry or mean, at least not to the best of my limited social knowledge. I leaned forward and asked what was on my mind, “What’s it like to eat that?”

He blinked, surprised. “‘What’, she asks. Not ‘Why’.” He grinned. His teeth were perfect—white, shiny, and shaped like the teeth in drawings and doctored pictures in magazines. Had they removed his original teeth and replaced them with ones made of a more durable stuff? “The taste is soft and delicate as the texture is crunchy. I’m not in pain, only pleasure,” he said in a voice accented in a way that I’d never heard. But then again, the only accents I’d ever heard were from the Big Eye doctors and guards.

“Tell me more,” I said. “I like your voice.”

He’d looked at me for a long time, then he smiled and said, “Sit.”

After that, Saeed and I became close. I loved words, and he needed to spill them. He could not read, so I would tell him about what I read, at least in the hours of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes, he grumbled with annoyance when the current series of books I was reading were romance novels or what he called “woman tales,” but he couldn’t have disliked them that much because he always demanded to hear these stories from beginning to end as well. “I like the sound of your voice,” he said, when I asked him why. He may have, but I believe he liked the stories, too.

Saeed was from Cairo, Egypt, where he had been an orphan who never went hungry because he could always find something to eat. He ate rotten rice, date pits, even the wooden skewer sticks of kebabs; he had a stomach like a goat. They brought him to the tower when he was thirteen, six years ago. He never told me exactly how or why they made him the way he was. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were who we were, and we were there.

Saeed told me of places I had never seen with my own eyes. He used the words of a poet who used his tongue to see. Saeed was an artist with his hands, too. He had the skill of the great painters I read about in my books. He most loved to draw those foods he could no longer eat. Human food. Portraits of loaves of bread. Bowls of thick egusi soup and balls of fufu. Bouquets of smoked lamb and beef kebabs. Oniony fried eggs with white cheese. Plates of chickpeas. Pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Piles of roasted yellow corn. They allowed him to bring the paintings to mealtime for everyone to view. I guess even we deserved the pleasures of art.

Saeed could survive on glass, metal shavings, crumbles of rust, sand, dirt, those things that would be left behind if human beings finally blew themselves up. They tasted delicious to him. Nevertheless, eating a piece of bread would kill him as eating a giant bowl filled with sharp pieces of glass would kill the average human being.

The first time he kissed me, we were sitting together at dinnertime. I’d just finished my own meal of fried chicken curried rice. I was telling him the chemical makeup of the flakes of rust he was eating and speculating on how green rust would probably taste different to him. “I think you will find green rust tastier because it’s more variable and complex.” We were sitting close, a habit we’d gotten into when we’d realized that my natural body temperature was usually warm and his was cool.

He took a deep gulp of water from his full glass, turned to me, cupped my chin and kissed me. All thought of iron oxide and corrosion fled my mind, replacing it with nothing but amazed shock and the soft coolness of his lips.

“No affected behavior,” we heard one of the nearby Big Eye bark and immediately we pulled away from each other. I couldn’t help the smile on my face. I had read and watched many stories where people kissed, this was nothing like what I imagined. And I’d never thought it would happen to me. Saeed took my hand under the table and my smile grew bigger. I heard him snicker beside me. And I snickered, too.

Everyone in the dining hall stared at us. I remember specially the idiok baboons pointing at Saeed and me, and then signing energetically to each other. “They’re just jealous,” Saeed whispered, squeezing my hand. I grinned, my stomach full of unusual flutters, and my lips felt hot. Even if it were from within, it was the first time that I had ever laughed at the Big Eye.

Now, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. He took my apple and he ate it. He took my apple and he ate it. He took my apple and he ate it. The Big Eye explained that then his stomach and intestines hemorrhaged and Saeed was dead before morning. I couldn’t stop stressing about the fact that I never got to tell him what was happening to me. I was sure that it would have given him hope; it would have reminded him that things would change. I wiped a tear. I loved Saeed.

 • • • 

As grief overwhelmed me for the first time in my life, I pressed a hand against the thick glass of my window and longingly looked down at the green roof of the much shorter building right beside Tower 7; one of the trees growing there was in full bloom with red flowers. I’d never been outside. I wanted to go outside. Saeed had escaped by dying. I wanted to escape, too. If he wasn’t happy here, then neither was I.

I wiped hot sweat from my brow. My room’s scanner began to beep as my body’s temperature soared. The doctors would be here soon.

 • • • 

When it first started to happen two weeks ago, only I noticed it. My hair started to fall out. I am an African by genetics, I had the facial features, my skin was very dark and my hair was very coily. They kept my hair shaved low because neither they nor I knew what to do with it when it grew out. I could never find anything in my books to help. They didn’t care for style in Tower 7, anyway, although the lion lady down the hall had very long, silky, white hair and Big Eye lab assistants came by every two days to help her brush and braid it. And they did this despite the fact that the woman had the teeth and claws of a lion.

I was sitting on my bed, looking out the window, when I suddenly grew very hot. For the last few days, my skin had been dry and chapped no matter how much super-hydrated water they gave me to drink. Doctor Bumi brought me a large jar of shea butter, and applying it soothed my skin to no end. However, this day, hot and feverish, my skin seemed to dry as if I were in a desert.

I felt beads of sweat on my head and when I rubbed my short short hair, it wiped right off, hair and sweat alike. I ran to my bathroom, quickly showered, washing my head thoroughly, toweled off and stood before the large mirror. I’d lost my eyebrows, too. But this wasn’t the worst of it. I rubbed the shea butter into my skin to give myself something to do. If I stopped moving, I’d start crying with panic.

I don’t know why they gave me such a large mirror in my bathroom. High and round, it stretched from wall to wall. Therefore, I saw myself in full glory. As I slathered the thick, yellow, nutty smelling cream onto my drying skin, it was as if I was harboring a sun deep within my body and that sun wanted to come out. Under the dark brown of my flesh, I was glowing. I was light.

I pulsed, feeling a wave of heat and slight vibration within me. “What is this?” I whispered, scurrying back to my bed where my e-reader lay. I wanted to look up the phenomena. In all my reading, I had never read a thing about a human being, accelerated or normal, heating up and glowing like a firefly’s behind. The moment I picked up the e-reader, it made a soft pinging sound. Then the screen went black and began to smoke. I threw it on the floor and the screen cracked, as it gently burned. My room’s smoke alarm went off.

Psss! The hissing sound was soft and accompanied by a pain in my left thumbnail. It felt as if someone had just stuck a pin into it. “Ah!” I cried, instinctively pressing on my thumb. As I held my hand up to my eyes, I felt myself pulse again.

There was a splotch of black in the center of my thumbnail like old blood, but blacker. Burned flesh. Every speciMen, creature, creation in the building had a diagnostics chip implanted beneath his, her, or its fingernail, claw, talon, or horn. I’d just gone off the grid. I gasped.

Not twenty seconds passed before they came bursting into my room with guns and syringes, all aimed at me as if I were a rabid beast destroying all that they had built. Bumi looked insane with stress, but only she knew to not get too close.

“Get down! DOWN!” she shouted, her voice quivering. She held a portable in her hand and her other hand was in the pocket of her lab coat.

When I just stood there confused, one of the male Big Eye guards grabbed my arm, probably with the intent of throwing me on the bed so he could cuff me. He screamed, staring at his burned, still-smoking hand. The room suddenly smelled like cooked meat. “You’re not going anywhere,” Bumi muttered, pulling a gun from her pocket. Without hesitation, she shot me right in the leg. It felt as if someone kicked me with a metal foot and I grunted. I sunk to the floor, pain washing over me like a second layer of more intense heat. I would have been done for if someone else had not shouted for the others to hold their fire.

Thankfully, I healed fast and the bullet had gone straight through my leg. Bumi said she’d shot me there knowing the bullet would do that; I believed her. If the bullet hadn’t gone straight through and remained in my flesh, I don’t know what would have happened with my extreme body temperature. Bumi knew this more than anyone.

One minute I was staring with shock at the blood oozing from my leg. Then the next, I blacked out. I woke in a bed, my body cool, my leg bandaged. When they returned me to my room, the scanner was in place to monitor me, since I could not hold an implant. They replaced my bed sheets with heavy heat-resistant ones similar in material to my new clothes. The carpet was gone, too. For the first time, I saw that the floor beneath the carpet was solid whitish marble.

Bumi took me to one of the labs soon after that. This would be my first but not last encounter with the cubed room with walls that looked like glass. Maybe they were thick clear plastic. Maybe they were made of crystal. Or maybe they were made of some alien substance that they were keeping top secret. I knew nothing. I didn’t even know what the machine was called. They simply put me in it, and it heated up like a furnace. I felt as if I were on fire and when I started screaming, Bumi’s voice filtered in, smooth like okra soup, sweet like mango juice, but distant like the outside world.

“Phoenix, hold still,” she said. “We are just getting information about you.”

I believed her. Even through the pain. I always believed everything they told me. The space was just large enough for me to sit with my long legs stretched before me, my back straight, my palms flat to the surface. The smooth transparent walls warmed to red and orange and yellow, so it was like being inside the evening sun I watched set every day.

“Does it have to hurt?” I cried. “I’m burning! My skin is burning!” It did not get so hot that my flesh caught fire, but the parts of me that touched the walls—especially my legs—received first-degree burns.

“Nothing great comes without pain,” she said. “Just relax.”

I closed my eyes and tried to retreat into myself. But the memory of the sound of Bumi’s gun firing was still ricocheting in my head. I hadn’t been fighting. I wasn’t as dangerous as some of the other speciMen became when in some kind of distress. I wasn’t doing anything but standing there in confusion thinking about the fact that I was off the grid. Yet, she’d shot me.

I couldn’t help my legs flexing and twitching whenever the pain hit. My legs ran, like a separate part of my body.

“Relax,” Bumi said.

Relax. How could I relax? I frowned. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was as if my thoughts had become tangible and were bouncing off the walls, getting faster and faster, like a heated atom. Maybe thoughts were just atoms made of a different type of material for which even the Big Eye lacked tools to study.

“I am trying,” I said.

“Do you want to hear a story?”

For the first time, I was able to pull back from the sound of the gun firing and the kernel of whatever I was feeling deep in my chest. “Yes,” I said, looking up. All I saw was the machine’s artificial burning sun.

“Ok,” Bumi said. She paused. I listened. “You read so much, so I know that you know my country, Nigeria.”

“Official name is the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Capital is Abuja. Most known city is Lagos, the second largest city in the world. West Africa. One of the world’s top producers of streaming films, crude oil, and fine literature,” I whispered.

I heard her chuckle. “You know my country better than I do.” She paused. “But to really know it, you must go there. I was born and raised in the metropolis of Lagos. My parents lived on Victoria Island in one of the high-security gated communities. Big big houses with columns, porches, marble and huge winding staircases. Manicured palm trees and colorful sweet smelling flowers. Even the houseboys and house girls dressed like movie stars. Paved roads. Security cameras. Well-dressed Africans with perfect wigs, suits, jewelry and flashy cars. Can you see it?”

I nodded.

“Good. So, I was born in that house. I was the first of five children. My mother was alone when she went into labor. My father was on a brief business trip in Ghana. The two house girls had gone to the village to visit their families before coming to stay in the house until I was born. She only had a virtual doctor to guide her through it all. She’d never had to use one before then. They could afford to have an actual doctor come to check on her and they’d hired a midwife. But she went into labor with me ten days early and the midwife got stuck in go-slow, Lagos traffic. My mother said it was like being instructed by a ghost.”

“I was born healthy and plump in my mother’s bedroom. She’d shut the windows and turned on the air purifier, so my first breath was not Lagos air. It was air delivered from the Himalayas.” She laughed. “My mother took me outside for the first time three weeks later. I took one breath of the Lagos air and vomited from coughing so hard. Then I was ok.”

I had my eyes closed. Though I could smell my skin slowly baking as the heat increased in the tiny room, I was strolling down the black paved road of Lagos beside Bumi’s mother who was dark-skinned, pretty and short, like Bumi. She was pushing a light-weight stroller with baby Bumi in it, coughing and cooing.

“When I think of my youth in Nigeria, I know that I can never be fully American, even when I am a citizen.”

“So you are not American?” I asked. “But you live here. You work here. You—”

“I’m legal, but not a citizen. Not yet. I will be. My work with you will earn me the pull I need.” She paused. “Do you want to know about how you were when you were a baby?”

I frowned. I remembered life from when I was about a month old; I was like a three year old.

“Do you know when I was a baby?” I asked.

“I was there when they brought you,” she said. “You were so small. Like a preemie. But strong, very very strong. You never needed an incubator or antibiotics or special formula. You took easily to life.”

The lights in the machine went off and something beeped. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Time’s up. Let’s get you to your room,” Bumi said. She didn’t say any more about first meeting me, as we walked back to my room, following the red lines. I was curious, but Bumi always had a set look on her face when she had switched back to her Big Eye self. I knew not to ask for more of my own story.

When we arrived at my room, it was evening.

“May the day break,” Bumi said. This was how she liked to say goodnight to me every night. She said she’d once heard it in a Nigerian movie she’d watched. She only said it to me and usually when she said it, I laughed and smiled.

Tonight, I was in too much pain to smile, but I responded as always, “May it break.”

My body ached from the burns, but by the time I entered my room, removed my clothes and inspected myself, there wasn’t a mark left on my body. But I remembered the pain. You never forget the smell or the pain. I took a long cool shower.

As the days progressed, I learned that when I grew hot and luminous like this, electronics died or exploded in my hands, except that cubed room. This was why they started giving me paper books, despite the risk of me setting them afire. These paper books were limited, old and difficult to read, as I couldn’t turn the pages as quickly as I could with the e-reader. And they could now easily monitor what I was reading. Although now I realize that, with the e-reader, they were probably monitoring my choices, too.

I didn’t tell Saeed about the heating and glowing because at the time I didn’t want to worry him. I enjoyed our talks so much. I wish I had told him.

 • • • 

The door slid open and my doctors came in, Debbie and Bumi. I took a deep breath to calm myself. Though the heat did not go away, it decreased, as did the glow.

“How do you feel?” Bumi asked, as she took my wrist to check my pulse. She hissed, dropping it.

“Hot,” I flatly said.

She glared at me and I glared back thinking something I had not thought until Saeed was dead—You should have asked first.

“Open,” Debbie said. She placed the heavy-duty thermometer into my mouth.

“She’s not glowing that brightly,” Bumi said, typing something onto her portable. I resisted the urge to grab it and hold it in my hands until it exploded. Saeed was dead because of these people. I steadied myself, thinking of the cool places sometimes described in the novels I read. I once read a brief story about a man who froze to death in a forest. How nice it would have been to be in that cold place at that moment.

“It might just be menopause approaching,” Bumi said. “I believe the two factors are correlated.”

I tuned out their talk and focused on my own thoughts. Escape. How? What would they do to me? What did Saeed see? My internal temperature was 130 degrees, but the temperature of my skin was 220. They couldn’t take my blood pressure because the equipment would melt.

“We need to get her to the lab,” Debbie said.

Bumi nodded. “As soon as the scanner says she’s reached 300 degrees. We don’t want her any higher or things around her will start to ignite. Maybe by morning.” She looked at me and smiled. “May the day break.”

“May it break,” I responded.

They left. I paced the room. Restless. Angry. Distraught. They would be back soon.

How am I going to get out of here? I wondered. As if to answer my question, Mmuo walked into my room. He came through the wall across from my bed. My heart nearly jumped from my chest. “Mmuo, good evening,” I said. He’d scared me, but I was glad to see him. Without Saeed, Mmuo was my only other friend now.

“Did you hear?” he asked, sitting on my bed. He spoke quietly, his low voice like distant thunder.

I blinked, feeling the rush of sadness all over again. He was Saeed’s friend, too. “Yes,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Phoenix.”

My face was wet and drying with sweat. “I’m getting out of here,” I declared.

Mmuo softly laughed. “You?”

“Will you help me?” I asked. “You once did things against the Big Eye in Nigeria. Can’t you . . . ?”

“You get it wrong. I went up against Nigeria’s government, but the Big Eye . . . I know better than anyone what the Big Eye will do when you cross them.”

“What? What will they do?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “I’m not telling you that,” he snapped.

“Then help me get out of here,” I begged. “Please.”

He frowned. “What is wrong with you? I can feel you from here.”

I sighed. “I think it has something to do with how they made me. It’s been happening for two weeks and it’s getting worse.”

We looked at each other, silent. I knew we were thinking the same thing, but neither he nor I wanted to speak it. If we spoke of my name, I didn’t think I’d be able to move, let alone run.

“Yes, that would make sense,” he said.

He called himself Mmuo, which meant spirit in a Nigerian language. He was a hero to all those who were created or altered in Tower 7. Like Saeed, Mmuo had been taken from Africa. He said he was from “the jungles of Nigeria,” the same country as my doctor Bumi. I didn’t believe he was from any jungle. He spoke like a man who had known skyscrapers, office buildings, and streaming movies. He knew how to disable the security on several of the floors and was known for causing trouble throughout the building. Not that he really needed to do so to get around the tower; Mmuo could walk through walls. The only walls he could not pass through were the walls that would get him out of Tower 7. Mmuo could not escape; obviously, his abilities were created by Tower 7 scientists.

He was a tall, thin man with skin the color of, and as shiny as, crude oil. He never wore clothes, for clothes could not pass through the walls with him. He was so proud and frank in his nakedness that I didn’t even notice it any more. Mmuo stole what food he needed from the kitchens. He was the only person/creature who’d successfully escaped the Big Eye’s clutches.

Why Tower 7’s Big Eye tolerated him, I do not know. My theory is that they simply could not catch him. And since he was contained, they accepted the trouble he occasionally stirred up. Most of those in the tower were too isolated and damaged to be much trouble if freed, anyway.

“It looks like your skin is nothing but a veil over something greater,” he mused, after an appraising look. It was something Saeed would have said, and the thought made my heart ache again.

“Can you open the door?” I finally asked. I paused and then pushed my request out of my mouth. “I want to see what is down the hall, near Saeed’s room.”

Mmuo met my gaze and held it.

“What did Saeed see, Mmuo?”

He shook his head and looked away.

“Show me, then,” I said, suddenly wanting to sob. “And help me. Help me escape.”

“Saeed and I, we had plans,” he said. “He always said that it was right beneath your skin,” he said with a slight smile.

“That what was?”

“Your taste for freedom.”

He moved close to me, and I was sure he was going to hug me.

“Don’t touch me,” I said. “You’ll . . .”

He raised a hand up and made to slap me across the face. “Don’t move,” he said. His hand passed right through my head. I felt only the slightest moment of pressure and there was a sucking sound.

“Wha . . . ?”

“Can you hear me?” I heard him loudly say through what sounded like a microphone. I looked around.

“Shhh! They’ll hear you!” I hissed. I frowned. His lips hadn’t moved.

“No,” he said. He held his finger to his lips for me to quiet down and grinned, his yellow-white teeth and black skin shining in my glow. “They won’t. You are hearing this in your head.”

“Not even the Big Eye know I can do this,” he said aloud, but lowering his voice as before. “Whatever they did to enhance my abilities, I can pass it into people, and they can hear me until the tiny nanomites are sweated from their skin.

“I did this to a little Tanzanian boy on the fifth floor. He had a contagious cancer, so they kept him in isolation for tests. Hearing me talk to him from wherever I was, kept him sane. At least, until he died.”

His disease could have killed you, though, I thought.

He started to descend through the floor. “Fifteen minutes,” he said in my head, then he was gone.

I whipped off my pants and t-shirt and threw on a white dress they’d recently given me made of heat resistant thin plastic. The dress was long but light, and it allowed me to move freely. I didn’t bother with shoes. Too heavy.

For a moment, I had a brief flash in my mind of actually stepping outside. Into the naked sunlight, under the open sky, no ceiling above me. I could do it. Mmuo would help me. He and I would both escape. I felt a rush of hope, then a rush of heat. The scanner on my wall beeped. I had reached over 300 degrees.

Just before the door slid open, I had the sense to spread some shea butter on my skin. Then I ran out of my room.

 • • • 

“If you want to see, turn right and then go straight. Do it quickly, they will soon know you are missing. I can’t delay it long.”

I was working hard not to look at the floor. I’d never left my room without instruction from the floor. Usually a yellow line appeared that told me where to go. There was none now. With nothing to guide me, I felt like I was free-falling into the heavens; like if I didn’t fly, I’d die; I just had to figure out how to do it.

I jogged, my feet slapping the cool marble floor. The hallway was quiet and empty, and soon I was in a section of my floor that I had never graced. This was where they kept Saeed. His prison, I thought.

I crossed a doorway and the floor here was carpeted, plush and red. I paused, looking down. I had never seen red carpet. How could a “guiding line” show through a carpeted floor? Before they took it out, the carpet in my quarters had been black, thin and flat. I wanted to kneel down and run my hands over the redness. I knew it would feel so soft and fluffy. I also knew that I wasn’t supposed to be here.

“See what you must but you have to make it to the elevator in two minutes,” Mmuo’s voice suddenly said into my head. “Go down the hall and turn left. You will see it. Hurry. Do not press any buttons when you get in.”

“Ok,” I said aloud. But he could not hear me. One-way communication. I ran down the red hallway. Through glass windows and doors, I could see lab assistants and scientists in labs. Each large room was partitioned by a thick wall. There was bulky equipment in most of them. If I were careful, no one would notice me. After sneaking past three labs, I saw the one that Saeed saw. It had to be. I stopped, staring and moaning deep in my throat. This lab was much bigger than the others and ten black cameras hung from its high white ceiling.

There were two wall-sized sleek grey machines on both sides of the room. I could hear them humming powerfully. Between them, the world fell away to another world where it was daytime, and all that was happening was perfectly bluntly brutally visible. There were old vehicles, trucks from long, long ago, boxy, ineffective and weak. But strong enough to carry huge loads of cargo to dump into a deep pit. And that cargo consisted of human bodies. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Dead. Not Africans. These dead people had pinkish pale skin and thin straight-ish hair like most of the Big Eye and the lion woman. When was this? Where was this? Why were the Big Eye scientists just standing there watching with their clipboards and ever-observing eyes?

It was not like watching a 3D movie. Even the best ones could never look this . . . true. Bodies. And I could smell them. The whole hallway reeked with their rot and blood and feces and bile and the smoke of the trucks. My brain went to my books and recalled where I had seen this before. “Holocaust,” I whispered, fighting the urge to turn to the side and vomit. I shut my watering eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. I nearly gagged on the stench. I opened my eyes.

This genocide happened during one of the early world wars. The Germans killed many of these people because they were sure that they were inferior or a threat or both. The book I read spoke as if wiping them out was the right thing to do. It certainly looked wrong to me. Were these Big Eye looking through time? Is this all they could do? Look? I whimpered. Why this time period? Why this nasty moment? Couldn’t they stop it? For a moment, the portal disappeared and there was lots of scrambling, adjusting machines, pushing buttons, cursing. And then the portal reappeared showing the same activities, in the same time period in the same place. Happening.

The surge of heat in my body was like a deep heartbeat of crimson flames. I shuddered and felt it ripple over every surface of my skin. I couldn’t move. Saeed had probably stood here just like this, too. Acrid smoke stung my eyes. My feet were burning the red carpet. A fire alarm sounded.

Finally, I ran.

The elevator was open. It was empty. I got in and it quickly closed behind me. I wished Mmuo would say something. If it went up, I was caught. If it went nowhere, I was caught. If it went down, I might be caught, but I might escape, too. I shut my eyes and whispered, “Go down, go down, please, go down. Have to get out!” Sweat beaded and evaporated all over my confused body and the elevator quickly grew humid.

If I hadn’t rubbed all that shea butter on my skin at the last minute, I’d have been in horrible pain, my skin drying and probably cracking. I was hot like the sun, there was a ringing in my ears, as if my own body had an alarm and it was going off, too. I looked at my hands. They were glowing a soft yellow. My entire body was glowing through my dress.

The elevator jerked upward. I grabbed the railing, pure terror shooting through me. At least, I would make it outside. I could take two breaths before they caught me. I sank to the floor. Saeed was dead, and I was still trapped. Tears dribbled from the corners of my eyes and hissed as they evaporated down my cheeks.

The elevator jerked again. “Sorry about that,” I heard Mmuo say in my head. He sounded distant. The elevator started moving down. I jumped up. I still had a chance. I watched the numbers decrease, 28, 27, 26. A louder alarm started to go off. They’d realized I was missing. “I can get you to nine,” he said. His voice was fading, and I had to strain to hear it. “Two stairways in there. Run to the emergency one on the other side of the greenhouse, straight ahead when the doors open. You’ll be on the side of the greenhouse. Just go straight ahead! Do NOT go near the center! There’s . . .” His voice faded to nothing.

Had my heat burned away his nanomites? Probably. As the elevator flew down, my feet began to burn the elevator floor. 12, 11, 10, 9. The elevator came to a sudden stop and the doors opened. The blare of the Tower 7 alarm assaulted my ears but the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen caressed my eyes. An expansive room full of trees, bushes, flowers, vines. In pots, on shelves, tangled within each other. A contained jungle that reminded me of the green roof of the building next door. I could see the city through the windows on my left. The sky was the deep rose of evening. I started quickly walking down the narrow path before me. Moss grew on the sides of trees. The humid air smelled green, fragrant, soily, I had never smelled anything like it.

I heard a rush of footsteps from amongst the plants to my right. Between the foliage, I could see them. Big Eye guards. In tough black armor with shields, with guns.

“Phoenix!” one of them yelled, spotting me. The voice pierced me, and I gasped, my eyes wide. I’d been hearing this voice all my short life. All their guns went up. “Put your hands up. We will not hurt you.” It was Bumi. Now I could see her clearly. My legs felt weak.

Behind me I could hear the elevator rumbling. I still didn’t move. Saeed was dead. There was nothing for me here. I was two years old, and I was forty years old. The marble beneath my feet absorbed my heat.

“Please, put your hands up,” Bumi pleaded. “You know what you are. We can stabilize you.” She paused, obviously considering how much to tell me. I knew enough, though. Saeed was dead, and I wanted to be free.

“You’re a weapon,” Bumi admitted. “If you wanted to know, now you do. My job has always been to help you, to keep you alive. This wasn’t supposed to happen, you being like this. Please, let us help you. I can help you.”

She is lying, I thought. I shocked myself. Why did her voice sound so different to my ears now? She’d always been lying. I heard the elevator beep then the doors open just as I felt the light burst from me. There was warmth that started at my feet. It rolled up to my chest and pulsed out with a wave of heat. My shoulders jerked back, and I stumbled to the side, getting a glimpse behind me. If I had blinked I still wouldn’t have missed it. My skin prickled as my glow became a light green shine. The light steadily radiated from me. It bathed every plant in the room.

The guards behind me in the elevator and on the far right side of the room all ducked down and for a moment it was quiet enough that you could hear it. All the plants were growing. Snapping, pulling, unfurling, creeping. Thick vines and even tree roots quickly crept, stretched and blocked the elevator door. Leaves, branches and stems grew so thick around the guards to my right that they were blocked from view. This was something they didn’t know I could do. This was not something they had created.

The entire greenhouse swelled and flooded with foliage. Except a few steps ahead to my right. There was what I could only call a tunnel through the plants. It diagonally passed the cowering Big Eye. I ran into it just as the guards behind and to my right began to shoot toward where I’d initially been. “Phoenix!” I heard Bumi scream. “You can’t do this to me! Stop!!”

I didn’t stop. Were they shooting through the plants or shooting at me, I do not know. And in many ways these two things were one and the same.

Mmuo had said to go forward to find the doorway. But I lost all sense of direction. So when I ended up standing before the giant glass dome I didn’t know which way to run. My first thought was of the same book that spoke of the treacherous apple of knowledge. The Bible. Except that the man with enormous wings was not held up by any wooden cross. He was suspended in mid-air with his arms out and his legs tied together. His eyes were closed. His brown-feathered wings were stretched wide.

He was naked, his ebony-skinned body, muscled and very very tall, at least compared to my six feet. He had deep African facial features and a crown of wooly hair. He was magnificent. Behind the glass dome was a rough wooden wall. The trunk of The Backbone.

Behind me, I could hear them coming. Hacking through the plants and calling my name. I wasn’t going to get out. I walked up to the glass and placed a hot hand on it. The glass was thick and very cool. Was there even air in there? Was that how they held him? Was it like being in outer space? What was space like for a creature made to fly?

His eyes opened. I gasped and jumped back. They were brown, soft, kind, eyes.

“Oh my God, Phoenix! Please! Step BACK!” one of the guards screamed, shoving aside a bush. I noticed the guard did not point his gun. Nor did the others who emerged beside him. I looked back at the man with wings. He was looking right at me, no expression on his face. I was surrounded by guards, all begging me to step away, pleading that this creature was “unique and dangerous.” However, none of them came to capture me. I didn’t move. Bumi appeared beside the guard. When she saw me, her eyes nearly popped out of her head. She reached for me with an outstretched hand but then brought the hand to her mouth. She was afraid to speak, to make too much noise. She recoiled, behind the guard.

Seeing the Big Eye cower, seeing their fear and raw horror had a strange effect on me. I felt powerful. I felt lethal. I felt hopeful, though all was hopeless. I turned to the caged winged man and my hope evolved into rage. Even he was a prisoner here. I vowed that if I didn’t get out, at least he would.

This time, I did it voluntarily. I was already so hot and I grew hotter when I reached into myself, into all that I was, all that I had been and all that I would be, I reached in and drew from my source. Then I turned to a nearby tree and let loose a pulse of light. I sighed as it left me, feeling relief. Immediately the tree’s roots began to buckle and creep toward the glass cage.

CRASH! They easily forced their way through and the rest of the dome cracked in several places. The Big Eye turned and ran for their lives. I didn’t bother running. There was no better way to die. He burst through, knocking me aside with the intensity of his wake. Into the now dense foliage of the greenhouse. I saw none of what happened, but I heard and smelled it. Wet tearing sounds, screams, ripping, snapping, choking, not one gun was fired. The air smelled like torn leaves and blood. Was Bumi’s shed blood causing some of the smell? It was still happening when I spotted the stairway between the plants and ran into it. I fled down and down flights and came to a heavy open door and entered the lobby.

For a moment, even after all that I had seen, I forgot what I was doing. Again, a sight took my breath away. Tower 7’s lobby was more spectacular than I’d ever imagined. No words could make up for actually seeing this place. This space. The ceiling was so high and the marble walls were draped with gorgeous flowering vines, the small trees and plants growing through the soil-filled holes in the floor. I fought not to fall to my knees. There was the base of The Backbone. Its trunk had to be over thirty feet in diameter.

I was dizzy. I was burning up. I was amazed. I was exhausted. There was a freed angel beast massacring its captors nine floors above. I could hear more Big Eye guards coming down the stairwell. The alarm was blaring and the lobby was empty . . . except for a lone figure standing near the exit doors. He was grinning. He’d been trying to get to this very spot unnoticed for nine years and my escape gave him the chance.

“Hurry,” Mmuo cried. “Phoenix, MOVE!” I heard them burst through the stairway. I was running. I dodged small trees, scrambled around benches and leapt over plants. The door was yards away. I was going to make it. Outside, people walking by stopped to look.

Then I saw the guards come running onto the tower’s wide plaza. They seemed to come from all directions. They shoved gaping people aside. They pulled up people who were sitting on benches enjoying the lovely evening. Then they formed a line blocking the exit and stood there, guns to their chests. I ran to Mmuo and would have given him a hug, if it weren’t for my heat. We’d both almost made it.

“Go,” I told him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” I was having trouble thinking straight and I could smell the floor burning beneath me. I didn’t know marble could burn. “Saeed would have been proud. I am proud. I set an angel free.”

His eyebrows went up. “You . . .”

“Go!” I shouted, looking at the approaching Big Eye coming from the stairwell. They were flooding from doorways and were coming down an escalator on the other side of the lobby. “Don’t ever let them catch you!” I said.

He sank through the floor and was gone.

I stood tall. There were hundreds of them. Men and women armed with the guns I had seen them carry all my short life. No Big Eye guard went anywhere in the tower without them. I knew how they sounded. Nearly silent. I had been hearing shots fired all my life. For a multitude of reasons but always with the same result. Something or someone who’d gotten out of control was dead or severely injured. “Protect the scientist from the subject.” “Observe and learn.” “We will all be better for it.” “For the Research.” I was taking all the pieces I had read and finally putting them together. The Big Eye crowded around me, nervous with anticipation as if I were evil. After all I had done, to them, I guess I was evil. Or crazy.

I held up my hands, feeling myself shining. The light bloomed from my body. The release felt glorious and I moaned with relief. Then more sighing than speaking, I said, “I give . . .”

“No don’t! Hold your fire!” someone shouted. Bumi. There she was, a few yards to my right. The right side of her lab coat was red with blood and her cheek was shredded into wet ribbons. I could see the white of her twitchy eyes. Dragging her left leg, she limped toward me, stepping in front of three Big Eye guards, putting herself between me and their pointed guns. She coughed and said, “We don’t know . . .”

But someone couldn’t stop his or her trigger finger. First one shot and then several more opened fire. “WAIT!” I heard Bumi scream. No one waited.

It was as if I were punched with steel fists in every part of my body—chest, neck, legs, arms, abdomen, face. I was blown toward the door and my vision went red-yellow. I lay on my back. Everything was wet, the smell of smoke in the one nostril I had left. Smoke, but also the perfume of The Backbone. I was looking at it, gazing at how it reached, up, up, up, through the high marble ceiling, through the 39 floors above. Into the sky. Reaching for the sky.

I felt the radiance burst from me, warm, yellow, light, plucked from the sun and placed inside me like a seed until it was ready to bloom. It bloomed now and the entire lobby was washed. The Big Eye covered their faces and dropped their guns. A few ran to the stairwell, others to the far side of the lobby. Most of them ran past my mangled body and out of the building. Those ones must have known what would happen next.

I knew. I was burning as the light pulsated and pulsated from me there on the floor. My body convulsed with it as my clothes burned and then my flesh. There was no pain. My nerves had burned already.

My light shined on the plants and tiny trees of the lobby and they began to grow wildly, stirred and amazed with life. Vines strained, lengthened, thickened. Flowers twisted open. Pollen puffed the air sweet. Leaves unfolded and widened. The stone floors were covered with green yellow white brown black, the strongest roots cracking its foundation.

My light shined on the great tree that was The Backbone. Its roots groaned as they shifted, coiled, expanded, and caused the entire portion of the floor around its roots to buckle and fall apart. The tree’s colossal trunk twisted this way and that, shrugging off the building that was its shackle. Chunks of the floors above began to crash down around me. I was ashes being scattered by vines and roots when Tower 7 fell.

The Backbone stood tall, stretching its branches and opening its enormous leaves over buildings and streets. At its base, a small lush jungle sprang from the rubble of Tower 7 like a wild miniature Central Park. Helicopters hovered, news crews streamed footage live, people gaped from afar. When the debris settled, there was a moment where my brilliant light shone into the now dark night time. The news cameras recorded the winged man flying out of the rubble, but not much else lived, except the man who could walk through walls. Mmuo walked out of The Backbone’s trunk and stood before it. “This is what you all deserve!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the eyes of the hovering cameras. Then he sunk into the ground and was gone.

 • • • 

No one in the city would approach what was left of Tower 7. So those ruins sat for seven days, a pile of those things Saeed used to eat: rubble, glass, metal and . . . ash. And then I realized the meaning of my name.