them so, all the members of their terrible generation, raised outside the lab and under the all-seeing eye of the unforgiving sun. Someday he’ll see that she was right all along. Until then . . .
She opens the door to her private lab, revealing a white room with bright lights set into the ceiling. Erin is strapped to a chair, writhing and wailing, while several technicians stand around her with solemn faces, making notes.
“Outside,” snaps Leigh. “Reed’s made a mess by the door. Clean it up.”
They go without complaint. They know their place.
Quickly, she crosses to the girl and kneels, reaching up to touch her face. Erin stills. Even in the face of a pain she can’t understand, she knows when danger is at hand.
“Hello, sweetheart,” says Leigh, and smiles. “It’s time.”
BREAKDOWN
Timeline: 8:15 EST, September 5th, 2003 (three more years).
Cambridge is beautiful in September. The weather isn’t always accommodating—some years it seems to rain from the beginning of the month all the way to the end, or to trip over itself in its hurry to present the first iced-over sidewalks—but the city is glorious in the fall. Roger leans against an old maple tree at the edge of campus, smoking a cigarette and watching underclassmen stream through the doors, smirking at the chime of the warning bell. There are certain perks that come with being both a senior and one of the smartest kids in school. Among them is starting the day with a free study period. As long as he’s on school property, he’s neither truant nor tardy, and can do what he likes for the first hour of his day.
Most of the kids in his class chose the end of the day for their free period, wanting to get out of school as fast as they can. He understands that. But he has things to do with his morning—essential things, that can’t be moved—and so he went with the beginning. Besides, Alison is in his seventh-period American History class, having chosen a full course load for her senior year, and he likes to have the excuse to spend the time with her. They’re looking at different colleges, and both of them know their relationship, mutually satisfying as it has been, won’t survive the end of high school. They’re not in love. If they were once, it faded into friendship and physical attraction long ago. That’s been more than enough for both of them.
Roger takes one more drag on his cigarette before dropping it to the dirt and grinding it beneath his heel. Then, calmly, he closes his eyes. 8:20 here is 5:20 in California, and Dodger will be getting out of bed in three . . . two . . .
“Good morning, asshole.” She sounds groggy. She always does when she wakes up. Neither of them is good about going to bed at a reasonable hour, but he at least tries to get five hours a night, if only for the sake of his ability to conjugate irregular verb tenses. When last he checked, Dodger was running at three hours, tops. He’s not sure how much longer she can do that. He’s sure nothing he says is going to make her stop.
They fight more now than they did when they were kids. Part of it is that they’re different people: more rigid, more adult, less willing to accept everything as inevitable and reasonable just because someone else says it’s so. Part of it is that she’s never really forgiven him for cutting off contact the way he did. She says she has, and he knows she’s lying, and she knows he knows, and neither of them does anything about it, because neither of them is sure what there is to do. They have the kind of connection that looks good on paper, but it doesn’t fix anything: they’re not telepaths, he can’t read her mind and figure out the exact right things to say to make her understand that he’s sorry, he’ll always be sorry, he’d change it if he could. She can’t see his thoughts. All they can do is worm into one another’s heads, like the world’s least explicable telephone line.
(At least they can shut each other out now. They can bar the mental doors and throw the mental locks and have some sense of privacy. They couldn’t do that when they were kids. It still doesn’t work if they don’t make an effort. It’s not enough to be unreceptive. They have to be actively opposed,