training who would walk hand in hand through the forests of adolescence together. Right now I was the one she told everything to.
I wasn’t looking forward to the future.
Angelique sat nervously in the corner, a silent observer. She hadn’t said much since we got back from Fresh Start. Her tests, the ones she took while I argued with Russ, hadn’t turned out very well. Just like I thought last night, there seemed to be something missing, like a connection between her lives wasn’t firing properly, some sort of brain synapses thing. I couldn’t quite figure it out. And I definitely didn’t want to think about it now. I needed to get Isabelle downstairs before VR Grandma and Holo Grandpa arrived.
The house was already surrounded with a security team that rivaled the White House. All the children in Isabelle’s cell had been invited, as well as the children of every Fresh Start employee in the country. Apparently Russell had debated whether to make the invitation to all our employees worldwide, but decided it wasn’t right to put that kind of pressure on people who worked for him. They would have felt obligated to come, no matter the expense or danger involved in traveling with a child.
Funny. I didn’t get my invitation until this morning. I had the feeling that the rest of the country had known about it for a month. Something was bothering Russ, something he obviously didn’t want to talk about.
“Is it safe? Are you sure it’s safe?” Angelique asked quietly when my niece ran into the bathroom to comb her hair.
“What?”
“This party. All the children. I think I saw at least seventeen children downstairs.” She ran a finger along the hem of her skirt, her gaze lowered. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I was around that many kids all at once. I just—it doesn’t seem safe.”
I had my doubts too. But this had been a family tradition for the past one hundred years. There was no way Russ would disappoint Mom, not now, not when she probably wouldn’t live to see Isabelle’s next birthday.
My niece danced back into the room just then, her hat on backward, her hair in messy pigtails. She smelled like apple blossoms, and when she smiled, she revealed two rows of tiny perfect teeth. Her skin was a dusky cappuccino-colored Creole blend, like mine. In fact, she looked like she could have been my daughter. But of course that was impossible.
Russ got Dad’s death certificate, not me. And when the time was right, he had a TRS, the federally approved operation that temporarily reverses sterilization. And then, about a year later, voilà. Isabelle Eloise St. Marie Domingue. The most beautiful baby in the world. Ever. The fact that there were only 65 babies born that year didn’t matter. Or the fact that 250 babies were born every minute back at the turn of the twenty-first century.
To most people, Isabelle was exquisite.
But to me, she was perfect.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Chaz:
The spicy fragrance of crawfish gumbo and dirty rice steamed through the house. It was the sweet perfume of New Orleans, and jazz was its pulse. I paused at the foot of the stairs, not quite ready to join the party. People swirled past me, some familiar, some I’d never met. Everyone wore colorful costumes, gold masks, shiny beads and ostrich feathers: it was always Fat Tuesday here. If there was ever a city drunk with life, this was it.
And I was tired of trying to find fault with it.
Every corridor vibrated with the laughter and wild, untamed kinetic energy of children. Running. Jumping. Singing. A flash of light sizzled as Isabelle chased two of her friends through the living room, each child wearing a bright, slender BP collar. Beacon protectors were the latest child safeguard device, and Russ and I had fought hard to make them mandatory on children under the age of thirteen, just like seat belts and VR age controls were in the past. If a child’s heart rate increased drastically, like it would during an abduction, the device would automatically emit a blast of light outward in a complete circle, a blast that would temporarily blind anyone within twenty feet—with the exception of anyone wearing a BP—and thereby give the child an opportunity to escape.
“They were a good idea,” a familiar voice said next to me.
Cake. Definitely vanilla cake.
I looked to my left and saw a woman who looked quite a bit like Mom. A slight haze blurred her facial features and