Amira stepped onto the roof and a pair of skinny arms slipped around her shoulders. D’Arcy’s wide grin faltered slightly as her eyes met Amira’s.
“What happened?” she asked. “You got placed, didn’t you? There’s no way––”
“It’s Pandora,” Amira said.
“You too?” D’Arcy said with an excited shriek. “I’m going to be in the quantum division, programming the Stream to work in space, to get ready for the Titan colony. We’ll be working together. Do you know which team you’ll be on?”
“Not a team so much as a den of wolves,” Amira said, unable to suppress the note of bitterness. “It’s the cloning project.”
D’Arcy opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. In the crowd at the center of the roof, several students shot brief glances in Amira’s direction, their expressions a mixture of pity and suspicion. Word traveled quickly.
“But why?” D’Arcy managed to say, shaking her head. “You’re not a geneticist. Why put a therapist on a cloning project?”
“I’ve got an idea.” The voice belonged to Julian, Amira’s friend and D’Arcy’s long-term partner. He reached for the old-fashioned radio the Canary House students kept on the rooftop and raised the volume.
“The increased scrutiny of the Pandora cloning project,” the radio announcer said, “comes as inside reports suggest that the third and last surviving subject of the project, an unnamed young woman, is in precarious health and displaying increasingly erratic behavior. The nature of her complications has not been revealed, but similar reports preceded the deaths of the previous two subjects, both of whom died while carrying their unborn clones in the third trimester. Pandora, a rare collaborative effort between high-ranking Aldwych scientists, encompasses a number of controversial and challenging projects. With the latest setback to Pandora’s cloning effort, Dr. Valerie Singh faces renewed pressure to shut down a lifelong dream.”
“So the last one’s dying,” D’Arcy said with disgust. “They’re getting desperate. It’s not just the compound crazies, everyone in Westport will turn on Pandora.”
“Notice what they said, though,” Julian replied. “Erratic behavior. It’s not just a medical problem, or something to do with the cloning process. They need a neuroscientist because there’s a psychological component at play.”
“But what about the last two?” D’Arcy asked impatiently. “Did they both have nervous breakdowns and commit suicide? It seems unlikely.”
“Maybe not so unlikely. They’re using former compound girls, because they’re the only ones desperate enough to volunteer. They—”
Amira turned away from her friends, leaving them to continue their argument as though she wasn’t there. The ground swayed slightly before she remembered to breathe. She steadied her hands on the rooftop rails. Julian and D’Arcy’s sparring voices faded into the background as the cityscape stretched out before her. The distant towers of Aldwych, normally a source of awe, even hope, never looked more ominous than they did now.
Amira replayed the interview with the Placement Panel in her mind, finding new hints in the woman’s questions about her compound upbringing. Although cautious, she had greeted the assignment as an endorsement of her talent, to join the most high-profile experiment in North America. Now, her placement seemed too coincidental. Did the panel believe that, as a former compound girl, she could empathize with the dying subject in ways that others could not? Or was she being used as a political prop, a compound girl done well, to deflect from the young, pregnant woman dying in the Soma building? Amira’s resume did offer a perfect counterbalance to the rumors shouted across the Stream that Pandora was exploiting some of Westport’s most vulnerable citizens – a compound escapee, overcoming adversity to survive, thrive and help other compound escapees. Amira winced at the potential headlines, not that she was likely to warrant her own feature story. Compound survivor, overcoming her past to help others. In Pandora, a chance to make a difference. Amid turbulent cloning effort, a story of triumph.
Aldwych loomed over the city, its heart in more ways than one. All roadways, train tracks, air shuttle pathways gravitated to it, like a whirlpool dragging ships into an unstoppable current.
And the next morning, Amira would become part of that current; a new world in which she would either navigate or drown beneath its glassy surface.
* * *
That afternoon, the Blue line departed Westport under a gloomy, gray sky for the mountains northeast of the city. Amira gazed through the window with wonder, as beyond the Pines district the dense topography of brick and concrete slowly gave way to nature. Rows of vertical farms were Westport’s final compromise with its surroundings. Located on the edge of the city zone, the towering structures were stacked with layer upon layer of lush farmland, its vines and branches hanging over the buildings’ sides. The vines curled around the windows like fingers and Amira smiled to herself, imagining green hands emerging to wave at the passing train. The lower levels contained the final remnants of legal livestock, milk cows lazily chewing cud under artificial lights, while the upper levels carried everything from basic vegetables to exotic tropical fruits, each floor climate controlled to suit the produce’s natural environment. Massive panels of vertical grassland sat on rolling green hills in the distance, their inclined surfaces rotating in the direction of the sun. Amira squinted, unable to find workers tending the farms. Had they been replaced by machines, spared from toiling under the cruel elements that she had been forced to endure in the compound? Or were they laboring somewhere in the structures’ shadows, invisible to those who didn’t want to see them?
The mountains drew near. Amira never tired of their familiar outlines, the quiet power of their permanence. The temperature always dropped slightly when the train crossed into the shade of the snow-capped peaks. The quiet unsettled her – living in Westport for so long, she sometimes forgot how silent and still it could be in the world’s final stretches of wilderness. She shook off another residual memory of compound life, its bitter aura lingering after her holomentic exam.
Dr. Paul Mercer lived above Clementine, a mining town on a remote pathway into the mountains. Once Amira exited the station at the town’s entrance, it required a bus ride followed by a brief hike to reach his property gate. He greeted her at the front door with outstretched arms and a warm smile.
“My favorite student!” he said. “How long has it been?”
They sat on the main deck, absorbing the sun’s waning warmth and enjoying a breathtaking view of the mountains. Dr. Mercer’s humanoid robot, named Henry, brought them glasses of iced tea.
“What’s its purpose exactly, other than housework?” Amira asked Dr. Mercer in a soft voice when Henry returned to the kitchen, wondering if robots possessed a hearing range.