pair, Seth and Beth; the youngest, Roger and Dodger.” Her nose wrinkles as she says their names. Leigh has her idiosyncrasies: her hatred of the rhyming names assigned to the cuckoo children is the least of them.
“What happened to the middle subjects?”
“There was an accident.” Her voice remains level, but her eyes are filled with silent fury. “Beth—the control—convinced her family to take a vacation to Disney World. It was a ruse, of course.”
“Of course,” agrees Reed. They were the Earth and Air children. Beth had been placed with a family in Saskatchewan; Seth had been placed with a family in Key West. If she’d convinced her adoptive parents to take her to Florida, it was because the two somehow made contact. They were trying to come together.
“It looks like it really was an accident. Her father was driving the rental car, he was overly tired from the flight, and he lost control of the vehicle. They spun out and smashed up not half a mile from the Happiest Place on Earth.” Leigh smiles, a bitter grimace of an expression that shares as much with joy as it does with cold and righteous fury. “Beth was killed on impact. Seth had an aneurism in the middle of a presentation to his school’s academic review board. They were accusing the poor kid of plagiarism. He was dead before he hit the floor.”
“And the bodies?” The question is sharp enough that even Leigh notices, and calms herself.
“Already on their way here,” she says, a bit more softly. “The girl is pretty messed up, but we should be able to get a decent amount of tissue for analysis. The boy is basically intact, except for the bleed in his brain. At least now we know for sure that if you kill half a pair, you stand a good chance of killing the other half. That’ll make things a lot easier on our snipers in a few years.” She pauses before adding, “Erin’s current condition makes more sense now. She wasn’t as tightly linked to her counterpart. She’ll likely survive.”
“You said there was news about the youngest pair as well.”
“Roger Middleton and Dodger Cheswich. Yes. They’ve restored contact.”
Silence falls. It’s not the soft, pleasant silence that stretches between friends, or even the wire-tight silence that stretches between enemies. This is a silence with teeth and claws, ready to strike and destroy its prey. This silence hurts.
Slowly, Reed asks, “What do you mean, they’ve restored contact?”
“The Cheswich girl has been doing that chess tournament thing. It had a stop in Boston. The Middleton boy wound up going to see her play. They were seen speaking after the game. She looked upset.”
“And him?”
“He looked . . . You ever seen the look on a kid’s face right after they’ve seen their puppy reduced to beef stew in the middle of the highway? Like they can’t process what’s happening, so they’re going to be sort of shell-shocked and sad until someone tells them how they’re supposed to feel? He looked like that. He looked just this side of busted.” Leigh shakes her head. “He’s their control, and he can’t even handle a little accidental encounter with his imaginary friend. We should scrub them both and start over with something hardier. Something we raise under lab conditions. My subjects—”
“Are not under discussion,” says Reed sharply. “Was that all? Did they arrange to meet again? Were they seen in one another’s company?”
“No. The girl walked away. The boy left with another girl—pretty thing, completely natural, not tailored at all; we could modify her to suit our needs, if we started now—who didn’t look happy about him speaking to Miss Cheswich. Teenage boys being what they are, the situation has probably already sorted itself out.”
“You’re talking about the only pair of nestmates to have established independent connection without physical contact,” says Reed. “They found each other through sheer loneliness and need. Do you know what a huge leap forward that is?”
“I don’t care what kind of leap forward it is,” says Leigh. “It wasn’t part of the project outline. It isn’t safe, it isn’t right, and it isn’t necessary to the successful manifestation of the Doctrine. This isn’t something we planned for. We don’t control it. We should be treating them as rogues. We should be reacting to this encounter with full censure.”
There’s no question of what “full censure” would represent: with Leigh, there is never any chance of half-measures. She would take their child cuckoos apart if he allowed