It’s fast. He had no idea how fast it would be. Another thing Arcadio never told him. He never told him about the dreams. About the fear. How his simulations would run double-time, near the end, how every possible end to every possible situation would pop up without his ever asking for it.
“We all have that kind of fear,” Ignacio tells him, the night the boy comes. He keeps Javier walking, for some reason. He did it with Dionisia, apparently. Javier tries to tell him that iteration is different, that the iteration won’t need to point any one way or another, but his mind is consumed by images of the thing inside him. Dionisia found a bunch of e-waste and fed him that. The pre-fab food only comes from the warden, and it comes only once a day. So who knows what his boy has been digesting. Who knows how he’ll come out. Maybe he’ll have four arms and four legs and crawl out of him like the spiders that come in for winter. Maybe he’ll have no eyes. Maybe his mouth will be sealed shut.
He loses all sense of what might be once his stomach opens.
It starts at the navel. A stretching sensation. His skin has never felt thin, before. But tonight, with the rain pouring outside, he feels as though it is he that is eroding, he that is wearing down to nothing. Lightning illuminates their cell; thunder shatters the air.
“Good,” Ignacio says. “They won’t send anyone after you, on a night like this.”
His navel bubbles with black smoke. For a moment, it looks almost like a chimney. Then his stomach splits. A seam inside him opens like the mouth of a coin purse. Ignacio lifts his son out and holds him up.
“Look at his hair!” Ignacio holds the boy confidently in one hand, the tiny stomach against his open palm. “Look, he’s fine! Five fingers, five toes, way too much cock. He’ll be fine.” He holds the child out. “Hold him. Go on.”
Javier shakes his head. “Just let me rest a minute.”
Ignacio frowns, but lets him roll over in the bunk and hold his stomach closed. It starts to crystallize, to knit itself back together in one glittering line. He sleeps. Ignacio sleeps. Even the child sleeps.
The dawn wakes him. Ignacio is still snoring, with the child on his chest. They look right together. Ignacio stirs only faintly when Javier wedges the bars in the window aside. The child looks straight at him. He’s sharp, that one. Smart.
“I’ll come back,” Javier says. “Someday, I’ll come back.”
Then he is out the window, in the rain, in the cold blue light of dawn. He is lighter, but also stronger. He runs across the yard. Not even the dogs are out yet. The fence looms above him. The wires looped across the top are difficult to see.
He clears them with ease.
On the other side, he is in the woods. He bounces from tree to tree. He takes his shoes off, so he can savour the wet moss. The birds are quiet. Everything is staying inside, except him. He will go see Dionisia, first. Tell her what happened. Then he’ll join up with los fabricantes, and he’ll help them organize an escape for Ignacio and the boy. He jumps a little higher, a little further, just thinking about it.
He pauses when he sees a woman standing beside a jeep with the hood folded up. The vehicle is smoking. It’s an overheat. Rough country out here, harmful to vehicles and humans alike. As he watches, fire begins to lick free of the engine block. Her back is to the flames. She is looking at something on her reader. Her braid swings down, into the smoke.
He has to save her.
“Wake up.” A chuckle. “Time to fly.”
Javier opened his eyes. The woman from the reception area was staring at him. Her hands were on her hips. She did not look pleased.
“Shit,” Javier said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Shit.” She jerked a thumb up at the display behind her. There, in blinking green LEDs was the number 2501. “It’s your turn. Get going.”
“Sorry.” Javier stood. The room was mostly empty, now. He clutched his fob and moved on down the hall. Overhead, fluorescent lights hummed coldly. The hallway was sparklingly clean, with only a single broad stripe of green paint at waist height along the right side, and a rail for wheelchair users on the left. At the end of the hallway was a set of double doors. When Javier pushed through it, a little chime sounded.
In the room was a group of glassed-in kiosks, with older men sitting inside of them. The majority of them were white, but it was a near thing. Some of them had tattoos. Their jumpsuits were the colour of fake cheese dust. LeMarque was at the end. He was reading a paper Bible. He closed it when Javier took the seat across from him.
LeMarque had Holberton’s eyes, too. Amy’s eyes. But he looked just like Holberton. He had the same angular face, the same thin lips, the same easy smile and deep dimples. Even his hair was the same shade of white. No wonder Holberton never came to see his father. It would have been like looking in a mirror.
LeMarque pointed at something on the little desk on Javier’s side of the kiosk. It was a very old kind of telephone, just the sort of thing Holberton would have tried to reproduce for a prison-themed environment. It was so old, Javier could hear its cord stretching and tightening as he moved. LeMarque picked up his own phone.