I turned and faced my audience.
Dr. Jacobs looked me up and down in evaluation. His lips pursed in displeasure.
“Pull your hair up.” He fished around in his pocket and pulled out a dirty green rubber band that looked as though it had recently been wrapped around mail or something.
“What exactly is the point of this?” I asked, hoisting the backpack onto my shoulder and then gathering my heavy hair into a rough ponytail. Were we going to be judged by our ability to assemble a ridiculous ensemble from items from the lost and found?
“No,” he snapped. “Braid it.”
“I don’t know how,” I said through clenched teeth. I hated him so much, sometimes it felt as if it were burning a hole outward through my chest.
He paused, seemingly mystified by this gap in my education.
“Not a lot of slumber parties in my recent past, remember?” I asked.
He heaved an impatient sigh. “I don’t care what you do with it. Just make it look normal.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. As if I hadn’t been trying to do that for most of my life, with little success. “Is this a costume party?” I asked, wrenching my hair up into the barely contained ponytail I’d worn to school every day back in my “real” life. “I’m going to look like a little kid playing dress-up.”
He pursed his lips. “It doesn’t matter, 107. The point is simply for them not to recognize you for what you are.”
I raised my eyebrows. Wasn’t the whole point of this to show us off?
With some impatience and more than a little pride, he explained, “We’re emphasizing our strengths.”
“By dressing me in someone else’s clothes?” I asked slowly.
When that wasn’t enough, he elaborated impatiently. “We want to give them a chance to see what they’re getting, 107. First impressions are everything, and we want to win them over as close to the start as possible by demonstrating our advantage.”
And Jacobs’s big advantage in me? That I already knew: I played human far better than Ford.
I stared at Dr. Jacobs. That was his magical plan? I was going to walk in and…out-human her? By what? Looking normal and harmless, I suppose. It was either the most brilliant or ridiculously stupid scheme in the history of such things. And in other circumstances, where I didn’t intend to strike first, it might well have gotten me killed by giving off “easy target” vibes.
“Sounds great,” I said in response to his questioning look. Whatever. I wasn’t here to see him succeed in selling me.
I managed to get my hair somewhat under control, though the individual strands would continue to frizz and wave without the addition of product.
“Good enough,” Jacobs said in a tone that suggested anything but. He took my elbow, pulling me along down the hall, toward a door I hadn’t noticed until now.
“Just remember,” he said to me as the guards fell in behind us. “You’re a regular human.” A vein in his forehead, throbbing and blue, pulsed with intensity behind his words, as if it might burst at any second.
This from the man who’d done everything he could to take that “regular” humanity away from me, to remind me that I had no right to it?
The urge to help that vein on its way to an embolism right now seized me, but I resisted. Barely. The idea, though, made me smile, twisting my mouth into something ugly. And I found I didn’t care anymore.
I wanted to defeat Dr. Jacobs, to stand over him in triumph.
Or, okay, at the very least, see him howling in immense pain and possibly—no, definitely, bleeding.
See? Compromise. That really is the key to success.
THE DOOR DR. JACOBS PULLED me through led to, what else, another hallway. This one, though, was in the hotel proper. Music played faintly in the distance, and my feet, which were still in my old Chucks, sank into plush carpet. Dim, soothing lighting, a harsh contrast to the brightly lit service corridor, made it difficult for me to see more than a few feet ahead.
Fortunately, we weren’t going far. Dr. Jacobs headed toward the first door on the left, marked THE MEADOWLANDS. It was a glossy wooden door, not the banged-up, overpainted versions I’d seen in the service portions of the hotel, and it was closed, with another pair of black-clad guards in front of it.
But as we approached, they didn’t move away or defer to Dr. Jacobs as I would have expected.
“Let us pass,” Jacobs said through clenched teeth.
It was only then that I noticed the bright blue logo of Laughlin Integrated on their sleeves. Oh, now it was a party. BYOST. Bring Your Own Security Team.
They backed up a step reluctantly, so much so that I wondered if Laughlin had given them specific instructions to give Jacobs a hard time.