Ripple wakes up, drenched in sweat, and rolls over to look at his alarm clock, where the digits display in glowing orange, like the dragons themselves are spelling out the time: 4:26 a.m. Abby is going to a Quiet Place at 5:30. He lies still for almost a full minute in the darkness. He can hear the sound of his own heartbeat pulsing in his ears. What is he supposed to do? He tries to picture tomorrow morning at breakfast, Abby gone, another day cranking up just like nothing’s happened. His father and Osmond, reading books or working puzzles at the table while truffled frittata cools on ignored plates. Pippi lecturing his mother on the merits of different coffee roasts. Swanny stabbing a grapefruit to squirt him in the eye or, more likely, taking breakfast in her bed upstairs, so sick of him she’s made herself an invalid. And Abby, meanwhile, locked into some collective insanity he can only imagine, the smell of disinfectant, restraints on beds, involuntary hose-downs…when all they needed to do was set her free…
He almost doesn’t hear the knock, but Hooligan, ears swiveling, jumps up, pads to the door, and stands at it, eagerly wagging. Ripple retrieves a pair of boxers from the bed boat’s stern and pulls them on.
“Open it, boy.”
Hooligan’s prehensile fingers grasp the knob and twist. Ripple claps on the lights.
“Hi, Mom,” he says. He isn’t surprised to see her, somehow, even though it’s the small hours of the morning after his wedding night, even though he can’t remember the last time she came into his room. It’s like he’s been expecting her.
“Where is your wife?” she asks. Not pointedly; his mother has a way of making any question, any statement, sound bland and neutral. Maybe because the words aren’t really hers? She’s almost never spoken her native tongue to him; his dad thought it would “contaminate his language development.” So when he was born, he and his mom learned English together. Sometimes, when she lets her guard down, he can still hear something singsong, babyish in her inflection. If she has an accent, she picked it up from him.
“Yeah, that didn’t work out. Don’t tell me she went crying to Dad again.”
“I’m not here because of her.” Katya bends down to pick up his crumpled tuxedo jacket from where he tossed it on the floor. She shakes out the wrinkles. She barely shows her age —she’s still the youngest mom of all his friends’—but for just a second, Ripple sees how much she’s changed over the years. She was practically a kid when she had him, a few months younger than he is now. But she knew just what to do. It wasn’t the kind of thing you learned from a book. Based on the family Holosnaps, she breast-fed him a lot the first year, or at least that was when Osmond felt inclined to whip out the camera. Ripple remembers her getting down on the ground to play with him—none of the other adults ever would. They had one game where she curled up into a shy hedgehog whenever he tackled her. They understood each other, before language, without either of them knowing the first thing about how to live in his father’s world, how to be Ripples. What happened? When did they lose each other?
Who’s going to take care of him now?
Katya looks at him. Her face is as neutral as her spoken words—maybe it isn’t really hers either. Maybe that’s the cost of being so beautiful: your face no longer belongs to you. Kind of creepy to think of his mom like that, but there it is. She got where she is on looks alone. And maybe when that counts for so much, all the time, you learn to hide beneath what people see. Still, he reads her anyway, much easier than text on a page.
“You want me to save Abby.” He wonders if there’s still an umbilical cord to his brain.
“You have to do what you think is right.”
“I can’t believe you’re actually encouraging me to run away. Isn’t that the opposite of your job?”
“Maybe my job is done. Maybe you’re all grown up.”
“Uh, sorry, no.”
“Dunky…”
He flops on the bed, hugs a pillow to his face. Muffled: “Dad is going to kill us.”
“I’ll pack your bag, leave it outside your door. I wish I had time to make you some sandwiches…”
“Don’t forget my lucky socks.”
* * *
Ripple goes up to Abby’s room with no plan, no idea where they’re going to go or what they’re going to do there. This whole thing is way off script. He reaches Abby’s door and punches in the code—R-I-P-L—and lets himself in without knocking. He’s almost surprised to see her in the flesh, zipped into his old hoodie, watching Toob. Smaller than he remembered, dimmer somehow, like the lightning bugs he once caught on the fifth-floor terrace and left in a glass canister overnight. She’s petting Hooligan, which is weird too, how did he get in here? She stares at Ripple for a good thirty seconds, as if she’s not quite sure he’s really there.
“Nice to see you too,” says Ripple, who was expecting more of a hero’s welcome.
“Dunk? Are you real? Are you free?” She glances at the Toob. “How did you get out of it?”
“I’m not divorced or anything. But I’m as free as I’m going to be for a while.”
“What about the girl from Hollow Gram? Is she back out in the world too?”
Thinking about Swanny annoys him. She has nothing to do with this, with anything; he wants her edited out of the final cut of his life. “I’m here, that’s what matters. I’m going to take you anywhere you want to go.”
“OK.”
But now Ripple is peeved: “I don’t think you appreciate what’s happening. It’s my wedding night, and I’m running away with you. We’re going to live on the streets and fight hobos for food scraps, probably. I’m giving up my name and my house and my Slay Bed, and I’m doing it all for you.”
“I don’t want to live on a street.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Uh-huh.”
This should be interesting. “Uh-huh…?”
“Go back to my ‘previous owners.’ Find out where I belong.”
“What are you talking about?”
Instead of answering, she holds out her foot. “Feel.”
Ripple, feeling pretty silly, palpates the callused skin. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he finds it anyway. There’s a bump just under her arch, a little pellet the size of a BB, with a trademark bull’s-eye injection scar just beneath. He rolls his finger against it. No way. “Fem, are you serious? You’re ’chipped?”
The BlackBean is the ultimate subcutaneous status symbol. He’s been hearing the jingles since he was a kid (“For when you’re burned beyond re-re-recognition!”), noting the locations of his classmates’ injection scars—the newer models usually go in the biceps, but bottom of the foot is a classic placement. Maybe an old-money thing? Anyway, what makes the BlackBean so special in the crowded market of ID chips is its indestructibility. It can withstand searing heat, crushing blows, the digestive juices of every land predator known to man. Ripple always enjoyed the commercials, but he wouldn’t want to be one of those alpha testers.
“Hooli found it. He says it’ll tell me where I was bred, who owned me first. He says, maybe they have a big yard.”
Ripple glances at his dog, who wriggles onto his back for a belly rub. Maybe Abby would’ve fit in at the Quiet Place better than he wants to admit. “Hooli told you?”
“Was it a secret?”
All those years of isolation must have messed with her head—she and that vulture were always supposedly having conversations. It’s probably a survival skill she learned, to keep her from going even crazier. Obviously she was normal once. Somebody’s sweet little girl, back earlier than she can remember.
Nobody bothers tagging a mental defecto.