“I thought you had minders assigned to them.” Reed’s tone is mild, but the accusation it harbors is clear: if his cuckoos have made contact, it’s because Leigh has failed to do her job. She’s failed to keep them apart, distracted, maturing in their separate shells. They put a country between these children, and yet the children have come together over and over again, as if to spite their creators.
“The Middleton boy’s minder had to be . . . removed . . . from the program due to a failure to hold his attention,” says Leigh, with a surprising degree of delicacy, at least for her. “I thought you had convinced the girl that her ‘brother’ was a fantasy.”
“Compulsions never stand up to confrontation with reality,” says Reed, dismissing the idea of his culpability with a wave of his hand. “What of the Cheswich girl’s minder?”
“Doing her best, but she’s limited. They’re inherently chaotic creatures, and she channels the opposing force. Once they came together, she was overwhelmed.”
Reed narrows his eyes. “How?”
Leigh shakes her head. “They met by accident, but Middleton tracked Cheswich down after he realized she was on campus. He seemed very invested in getting her to talk to him.”
“Are they still capable of communicating non-verbally?”
“I don’t know.” The admission clearly pains her. “After the amount of time they spent apart, the ability should have atrophied—but we didn’t expect them to be so tightly bonded that the Cheswich girl could call for help after she opened her damn wrists.” She makes no effort to hide her disappointment. A cuckoo that attempted to kill itself was weak, as far as Leigh was concerned: it had no business in the program. Had things been allowed to progress to their natural conclusion, the Cheswich girl would have bled out, the Middleton boy would have died of shock, and that entire generation of cuckoos would have been excised. She could have closed the book on a failed experiment, not been forced to devote time and resources to continuing to monitor their progress.
For Leigh, there is nothing more terrible than a waste of time. Time is the most precious commodity of all.
“Tell your remaining minder to find out. We need all the information we can acquire on how they interact . . . and tell her not to interfere.” Reed folds his hands behind his back, coin still dancing from knuckle to knuckle. “I want to see how they’ll mature without roadblocks. They should be old enough to have fully distinct senses of self; that will keep them from blending into each other to such a degree that they become useless.”
“Sir—”
“Leigh.” He looks at her. This time, there’s no mercy in his eyes. “Have I not been right up until now? Have I not fed you, clothed you, kept you, given you the materials for your own experiments, and covered up the signs of your less . . . savory interests? I could have discarded you as a failed Eve when I found you in that lab, but I took you as my own, testified to your stability before the Congress. I took responsibility for you, and all I’ve ever asked in return is that you obey me without question. Trust me. Believe in me, and I will lead you into the light.”
“I’m sorry.” She ducks her head, that old, not-quite-human motion that presses her chin to her sternum and reveals the extra vertebrae tucked into her neck. “I’ll tell my girl to watch without interfering.”
“Good. Very good. How is your generation?”
Suddenly Leigh is all smiles again. “Good,” she echoes. “Very good. Two of them have abandoned the idea of individual bodies. They treat themselves as a single thought-form entity with four hands and four feet that sometimes needs to be fed. Two more committed a ritualized form of murder-suicide without even needing to be asked. They’re all coming along nicely.”
Reed doesn’t remind her that she’s just described losing two of her subjects as “coming along nicely.” Instead, he looks at her, and says, “I thought you had three pairs. Multiples of three are ritually important.” Roger and Dodger started as one pair out of three, and have outlived their fellows by a matter of years. Of the pairs he created after them, two remain, neither showing their early promise, neither showing their early problems.
“I wish you’d been willing to sign off on twelve,” she says. She shakes her head. “My third pair is good around the lab. They pull their own