They killed their way inside. The Lady didn’t enjoy watching the security guard bleed out the throat, but the good Lord always did like a sacrifice. It was once they were in that she got a funny feeling down in her guts. The rooms were tiled white and shiny, heaven and a bathroom combined, but the animals in them were just that: animals. Like no machine she ever knew, shitting and shedding, growling and howling, molting their feathers on the floor. The lab rats squeaked when you stomped them. The monkeys were worse. The Lady lost her toleration for it quick. God whispered in her ear, “I got a special mission for you. Check down the hall.”
She snuck away from the others. There wasn’t but a single room down the hall he chose, all sealed up in one-way glass. The Lady took a gander in. It was a child’s room, mostly stark and plain except for a few clowns painted on the walls and a picture of a ship. A plasma ball nightlight crackled in the corner, some scientist’s idea of a joke. Electricity woke you up, electricity will help you sleep again. But the child—the child. The child was alive.
No more than three years old, but vanishing small, there in the hospital bed she lay. Soft blond hair fanned out on the pillows. A mouse of a girl. Hands like milk glass. She’d never been outside a day in her life. A more delicate creation God had never made. But God had made her, the Lady felt sure of that.
It was then, as she heard the footsteps of the other Flesh Soldiers coming down the hall, that God told the Lady exactly what to do.
* * *
The laboratory still looks like a crystal city from outer space. At least, it does to Abby. She does not want to go in, not right away. Although she’s been on Empire Island for weeks, this is the first time since her own Island that she’s seen the waves, felt the sand beneath her feet. Scavenger has guided her and Hooligan here, routing and rerouting them through the maze of skyscraper canyons and alleyways, past the Ladies of Rags and Cans, past the shaded windows of incurious Survivors just waiting for the flame, past the looming walls of Torchtown, ever southward. Now the lab rat points his little pink nose like a quivering compass needle at the entrance’s code-locked double doors.
—FINAL DESTINATION in 15 METERS.
Abby looks back out toward the water, where the wet lip of beach lies smooth and blameless, unnamed.
—Maybe I should go home. I miss my Island.
—that is your prerogative. but we could mutually benefit from a reciprocal information exchange.
The apehound wags his tail, tilting his head in confusion.
—no go inside?
—Maybe in a minute, Hooli. Want to walk down by the water first?
But Hooligan is too cold and damp already. While the dog and lab rat watch, Abby strips off the Dalmatian costume to wade the surf alone and naked, chilly froth lacing the tips of her toes, her ankles. Her unshaven legs. The waves never linger long. Stay, she thinks, stay. She’s freezing and miserable, but some part of her wants this moment to last.
I don’t know who I am. Or where I came from.
What will Abby’s life be like without those questions? She can’t imagine it. Some other Abby lies in wait behind those laboratory doors: an Abby with eyes like searchlights, with hair like wires. An Abby who knows too much. An Abby no longer innocent.
“The People Machines take out your heart and put in a gear,” the Lady used to say. What if all the explanations fill up the space inside Abby for hope, for wonder, for love? But the gears turn in her already. She picks up a scrap of driftwood, gnarled by the tides, and scratches a message in the sand. She does not know how to spell much, but she’s learned a little by now:
The letters will wash away; they aren’t hers any longer. That time is done. She does not belong to Duncan. She owns herself.
It is a kind of freedom to exist outside the gaze of man. Before she met Duncan, Abby was invisible, the soul of someone who might never be. She did not know where she ended and where the world began, so she was one with it. It was Duncan who defined her, fused her to this body. This skin, molded into the shape of woman by his groping hands. He gave her that much, at least. Now, alone again, she is not invisible but Unseen. A thing apart. Like God. Though she no longer feels God’s presence—she hasn’t felt it in a long time. Maybe what she once believed to be his force, his holy will, was simply the stirring of her own secret power.
She licks sea salt from her lips. It tastes like her blood.
“Let’s go inside,” she calls to the animals. Her human voice rings out, clear and musical, and though they do not speak this language, they understand. She climbs back up the dunes and meets them at the lab entrance. The architecture, a shattered mirror, reflects the looming clouds.
* * *
No human has stepped inside the laboratory for decades, not since they euthanized the final monkey, shredded the last of the files, and locked the doors forever. How much the place has changed. When Abby enters, naked and wet from the sea, she sees the logo over the information desk.
Abecedary. Abby mouths the word. But it isn’t her name. The spelling isn’t right, and it is far too short.
Abby turns down a hall overgrown with cords and cables and wires, white and black and blue and gray, spliced together, plugged into jacks and outlets, the root system of a dozen ThinkTanks. At every keyboard, there’s a lab rat, tapping at the letters with paws and nose, squinting at streams of indecipherable data with beady red eyes. It is like nowhere she has ever been. Yet, at the same time…it reminds her of a hallway long ago, cold and sterile. Tile everywhere gleaming. A ceiling of electric white.
It is like walking into a dream. Only now, Abby walks this hall alone.
Lab rats turn to stare as she passes, her hair dripping, soles leaving footprints in seawater on the tile. Who else walked these halls the last time she was here, so long ago? Abby can no longer remember the faces of the scientists. Her years on the Island wore away their particularities, left behind only nightmare ghosts in bleached robes who drew her blood for examination. Who shaved patches of her scalp to attach the brain-imaging sensors. Who bathed her and measured the volume of liquid displaced.
But those ghosts did once live—perhaps they live still, somewhere far from here. Does a small Abby still dwell in their memories, trapped there forever, like a girl in a Toob? Or is it to them as if she never existed? She takes a scientist’s bleached robe—a lab coat, the name returns to her like breath—from a hook on the wall and slips it on to cover her nakedness. The pocket is full of pens. The sleeves are much too long. They will always be too long. She is all grown up.
Abby remembers that the scientists never looked her in the eye, though she laughed and babbled and reached for their glasses and bonked them on the nose. She never understood why.
Now Abby reads the words written on a frosted glass door: LIVE SPECIMEN TESTING—LAB 4. She turns the handle and steps inside.
The laboratory faces the sea. A single massive picture window forms the room’s far wall, framing the storm that’s just begun: water above meeting water below.