The Body Scout: A Novel Page 19

  “They aren’t ‘pets.’ That’s offensive, Lila,” Gerald said. He turned to me. “We prefer the term newforms.”

  “You breed zootech down here?”

  “When we free them, we keep a few specimens for our Eden Arks. I’ll show you. You’ll find it quite fascinating, I think. A vision of the future.” Gerald grabbed Lila’s hand. “Although taking any is, of course, out of the question.”

  We moved through the white-tiled tunnels Zunz and I used to run down, screaming, after school. There weren’t any subway cars anymore. No one selling churros or gas masks. The waiting area was walled off with glass, and inside was a cacophony of green. An entire ecosystem in the station. Red-ringed vines wrapping up the poles, blue moss covering the floor, translucent butterflies and pitch-black moths flapping around in the artificial breeze.

  It was bright and lush, a jungle in the center of the city. The wooden benches were sprouting glowing spiral fungi. Millipedes the size of forearms crawled across the station sign between the patches of glowing lichen. The colors were too bright to be natural but too soft to be machine. The tracks were filled with dark green water. Insects flittered about, sparking when they collided in the air. I saw long hornets buzzing around a hive on the top of a MetroCard machine, and a scaly gray cat rolling on its back below an artificial sunlamp. Hidden insects chittered from the ceiling. In the back corner, a cloud drone sprinkled rain on a nerve rose bush, keeping its deadly pollen from floating through the room.

  I stepped up close to the wall. Even through the glass, you could smell the lush air.

  “What do you think?” Gerald said. “Our own little Diseased Eden, right here in the abandoned old world.”

  It did feel like a vision of the Garden of Eden, albeit a garden that would kill you in a thousand ways.

  “Deadly zoo you have here.”

  “It isn’t a zoo. It’s a haven. These are newforms and are thriving. They evolved past their scientists’ attempt to control them.”

  “They have dozens of these stations all over the city,” Lila said. “Or rather all underneath it. Since most of them have flooded completely, no one ever comes down here.”

  “Be quiet, Lila,” he said, although he sounded proud.

  Not all the creatures were inside the sealed-off room. Cages and aquariums were stacked along the hallway. Filled with brightly colored lizards, turtles, worms, and grubs. Lila was looking at these. I tapped the nearest glass, and a black leech struck at my finger, its mouth splaying across the surface in a circle ringed with teeth. I guessed not every modified critter played nice with others.

  “This is what you want the earth to look like?” I stared into the buzzing, underground jungle. I imagined myself walking through it, letting the creatures shock, bite, and claw me. My flesh being slowly stripped apart. Eaten. Broken down until I was nothing except a few cleaned bones.

  “It’s what the world will look like,” Gerald said. “Or something akin. Even without our help, at some point the zootech will break out. Their genes will stabilize. They’ll create their own communities, displace ours. You can’t control life, no matter what patents you own.”

  “And all the people?”

  “Humans have been a mere blip in the history of life on the planet. What are you, six feet tall? If your height was life on earth, humans are the dandruff on your scalp.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  Gerald shrugged, spoke in a rehearsed way that indicated how little the words interested him. “Many will die. Many die as it is. Thousands every day from poverty or war. Some will evolve, but they will evolve naturally, without signing their gene data away to a corporation. Up to nature to decide. She’s harsh.”

  “But fair?” I offered.

  “Fairness has nothing to do with it.”

  Gerald led us to an egg-shaped centipod big enough for two. We stepped inside. Gerald whispered something into Lila’s ears while she nodded. I thought I saw him slip a silver case inside her pocket.

  He said something that sounded like “You promise?” She nodded.

  “Hey, listen. One question,” I said.

  Gerald arched one of his bushy eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “Are you guys getting the game down here? What’s the score?”

  Gerald snorted. Rolled his cart over to a console. Shouted back. “The Pyramid Pharmaceuticals Sphinxes have seven runs and the Monsanto Mets have one. It’s the seventh inning.”

  “Shit.”

  “Guess someone’s having even worse luck than us,” Lila said.

  “Come back anytime,” Gerald shouted as we closed the door. “That was a joke. Don’t come back.”

  The pod’s tiny legs shot out, clicking into divots in the wall. Lila waved goodbye.

  Our pod crawled slowly up the tunnel toward the surface. There were so many lost layers to the city. We passed through the floors and dirt and unused pipes. The archaeological remains of past New Yorks. Previous versions of the city compressed like fossils. We sat in silence as the darkness grew a shade lighter each minute until we were bathed in the sickly yellow light of the New York evening.

  Lila and I got out, and the pod crawled back down. The Brooklyn storm wall was in front of us, bending off into the distance on both sides like an enormous concrete intestine. Next to it, Lila and I were undigested pills.

  She turned to me. “Well, where are we going?”

  33

  THE HOT MEAL

  This isn’t exactly what I meant by a date,” Dolores said. She was leaning against the kitchen counter, watching Lila and me shovel food into our mouths. We must have looked like vacuum cleaners disguised as people. The table was steaming with bowls of rice, snow peas, pork cubes, charred protein reeds, kale clams, white and gold corn, blackened knobs, squints, cold noodles, butter bark in gum sauce, creamed cutlets, and bristled potatoes. I could feel life coming back to me with each bite.

  Lila wasn’t eating the meat, but she was hungry enough to not ask for the genetic history of the vegetables.

  It had taken us a long time to get to Dolores’s place. We’d walked around the storm wall for a mile before we found a boarded-up service tunnel. I had to power up my arm to smash the wood. Grunted in pain. My knuckles were dirty and dented. All Setek’s work had been reversed in a day.

  I’d done a few internal scans and hadn’t found a second grub beacon, but we didn’t know if there was another tracker in some other shape. Plus, Dolores was at game three so we couldn’t get to her place until it was over. Lila and I had wandered the smog for a while to make sure no one was tracking us, ducking into stores when we saw police lights.

  We sat on a bench in a supraway station for an hour watching the streams. The news stations didn’t have anything to say about the Edenist raid, or Zunz’s death for that matter. They’d moved on to the playoff odds, the starting lineups, exciting prospects in the upcoming draft. Or else other news stories. The state of the One China trade talks. Russia’s Neanderthal riot trials. A human-interest story about a boy whose drone had been lost on vacation in Florida and somehow made the long journey all the way to Boston to reunite. The boy hugged the blinking black machine and told the news anchor, “He’s my bestest friend in the world.”

  We wandered around for a while longer. Took a series of tubes and taxis to shake any potential tails. Finally we arrived at Dolores’s building, starving and half asleep.

  Now, Lila and I sat back. Patted our inflated bellies. The insides of our bowls were reduced to tiny puddles.

  I looked out the window at the city inching by. Dolores’s building was like mine, a spinner, although her full-time salary meant she could afford a partial view of the setting sun. The sky was a smear of red behind the lattice of the skystabbers.

  Dolores strolled over to Lila and me cautiously, like she was afraid we’d get confused and chomp on her fingers when she picked up the bowls. “I suppose there’s no room for dessert?”

  Lila gave a look of mock horror, su
cked in her belly as best she could. “There’s at least a slice of cake’s worth of stomach space here.”

  I cleared the table while Dolores brought over the cake.

  “It was good grub, lady.”

  “Say ‘thank you,’ not ‘good grub,’” I said.

  “I prefer ‘good grub,’ actually. It has a salt-of-the-earth ring to it.”

  Lila made a see-what-do-you-know face, then turned to Dolores. “Kobo says you can’t hear?”

  “Lila,” I snapped.

  Dolores opened her hands in the air. “I’m deaf, Kobo.” She adjusted something on her goggles, spoke to Lila. “I have only partial hearing. But I’ve got plenty of other senses. Plus, these goggles give me a real-time transcription.”

  “I think it’s cool you never upgraded your ears.”

  “I think it’s pretty cool you knew how to escape the police. Thanks for saving Kobo’s life there. I’m oddly fond of him.”

  “He’s nice but seems a bit useless.”

  “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  Lila was already digging into the cake. “You adults always say that. Maybe I’m not trying to understand.”

  Dolores smiled, big and wide. “I like this one.” She walked over to me, ran a hand across my belly, and put her mouth to my ear. “I’m going to make some calls,” she whispered. “Maybe my Pyramid coworkers have intel on the Edenist raid.”

  Dolores went out to the enclosed balcony. Slid the door shut behind her.

  “Hey, you know I saved your life too,” I said. “A little bit.”

  “A very little bit. I saved your whole butt.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, so didn’t. Instead I just watched Lila. It was strange sitting next to her. I’d been replaying Zunz’s death over and over in my mind. And now there was another Zunz, a daughter. A part of him that had split off and grown on its own. She seemed unreal to me. I still couldn’t fit her into my picture of the world.

  Lila was leaning forward in her chair, alive and smiling. At least for now. Her illness had receded, yet I knew it was just gearing itself up for another strike.

  “Being deaf isn’t the same as lichen lung, you know. You could die. Just because Dolores didn’t upgrade doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”

  Lila kept eating her cake. “We all die from something.”

  “I know I don’t understand your religion or philosophy or whatever. But why would god want you to die from lichen lung? It isn’t natural.”

  “Listen,” she said, licking the last icing off the fork. “My so-called father didn’t raise me. My uncle didn’t raise me. You didn’t raise me. The Edenists did. They’re the only ones who have been a family to me.”

  “But—”

  “But—” She cut me off. “Even if I told you I don’t fully buy what they’re selling, it doesn’t matter. Say I wanted to get an engineered lung, so what?”

  I shrugged, face scrunched in disbelief. Showed her my palms. “You live.”

  “Live how? I can’t pay for those lungs. My deadbeat dad didn’t leave me a trust fund. That Neanderthal isn’t hunting me down to deliver an inheritance check, right? I don’t plan to spend my life hounded by debt collectors.”

  I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be like that.”

  “I guess I could sell my womb to the rich. Grow a bunch of babies for billionaires who don’t want their bellies stretched.”

  “Come on, you don’t have to do that. Things aren’t that grim.”

  “You told me we can’t go to your place because loan sharks trashed it.”

  I muttered. Stewed in my chair. I felt angry but didn’t know why. It was Lila’s body. I didn’t even know her. Not really. She was some little kid I’d met this week who hated my dead brother.

  I finished smoking my eraser. Let it calm my nerves as I walked around Dolores’s apartment. It was small, yet comfortable. I guess a real estate algorithm would call it cozy. There were places to sit or recline on every wall, and mood orbs hummed pleasantly as they released a honeysuckle scent. It was the kind of place you could come back to after a long day at your shitty job and shut out the world.

  I noticed she only had a few items of Cyber League memorabilia. Animatronic bobbleheads next to framed videocards of her rookie and sophomore seasons. Above them was a team photo, back in our second season. Everyone was there. Frank “Stretch” Gibson, “Metalhead” Marissa Hellers, Otto “the Buzzsaw” Barrios, “Dialup” Di Liu, and all the rest. Dolores and I were in the middle row, her arm draped over my shoulders. I wondered where they all were now.

  Lila noticed me staring at the picture. “So, is Dolores, like, your girlfriend?”

  “We’re just friends.”

  Lila looked at me with her lips curled down and her eyes wide open. “Sure. I’m going to go watch cartoons.” She hopped on the couch and clicked on the holopad. The table lit up with transparent samurai slicing each other in half to a chorus of beeps and screams.

  I watched her from the kitchen chair, then went out to Dolores’s glass balcony. She was still on her video call, signing. It was almost night. From the side of the balcony, I could see the sun dip behind the towers of the city. The entire sky was turning bright red, as if someone had set off a nuclear bomb in the middle of Manhattan.

  Dolores banged her hip into mine. I let it be banged.

  Dolores had her screen set up on the table. She was signing with someone I didn’t recognize. Her hands danced through the air. When they finished up their conversation, she pulled out her own eraser and lit it off mine.

  “Is Lila your daughter now or what?”

  “She’s just a clue.”

  “She’s a girl.”

  “I don’t know what to do about her. I feel like she’s my only connection to Zunz. She has his eyes and smile, you know? Even a mole around where his birthmark was.”

  “You’d be a good father,” Dolores said.

  I laughed, good and hard. “I can’t even pay my own bills. And I hate children.”

  Dolores stiffened up. Her goggles were nearly the same red as the sky. “Okay, riddle this case with me. Your friend Zunz knocked up Kang’s sister, who died. He never wanted to be a father. Or he didn’t want to derail his baseball career. Whatever. He paid Kang a monthly sum to take care of the girl, which Kang began giving to an Edenist orphanage, minus his substantial skim. That all seems simple enough.”

  “And the Mets want her DNA,” I said. “Must have killed Kang because he wouldn’t cooperate. Setek said they were looking for a relative to compare. Figure out what happened to Zunz, but I don’t buy that. I think they already knew. Dash told me Zunz had to be carried off the practice field awhile before he died.”

  “So just an accident? I suppose it makes sense. We pump these players with untested drugs all the time. This was bound to happen eventually.”

  “I’ve watched baseball my entire life. I’ve never seen anyone die that way before.”

  The images came back to me. The blood. The chunks. The screams. I gripped the railing and shuddered.

  “Players die all the time,” Dolores said, as her fingers skied across the back of my hand. “Not normally on the field. But off it after years of chronic pain and illness. You know the turnover in this league. Even the best players only have a few peak years before their bodies start to break down. Look at you and me.”

  “We’re still missing something.”

  We stared out at the darkening city. Windows lit up erratically across the buildings like random pixels in a broken screen.

  “If so, it must have been something pretty extreme they were trying.” My screen pinged and I pulled it out. “Shit. I just got a message from Natasha. I forgot to tell you they were demanding we watch game four in the visiting owner’s box.”

  “Great. You owe me a date anyway.”

  “I don’t think Coppelius saw me flee with Lila. But if he did, he would have told Natasha. This could all be a trap.”

  I didn’t like
the idea of being out in the open and waiting for the hands of a lab-grown spook to land on my neck. Snap it before I could even notice.

  Dolores laughed. “Kobo, no one is going to kill you in the middle of the playoffs in broad daylight in a rival team’s stadium. Going to the game is the safest place you could be. And it’s the only way you’ll be able to feel out the Mouth and Natasha.”

  She was right. Although my gut told me it was a trap, my brain told me I didn’t have any other play. If Coppelius was on my tail, being in public was safer than hiding at home.

  The moon was high in the sky, barely visible in the dark.

  “God, the smog is so thick it almost looks like the city was just vaporized. Only rubble remains,” Dolores said.

  “Remember when we were kids and all anyone could talk about was the apocalypse? Nuclear war. Peak oil. The singularity. Something was going to happen one day and everything was going to come crashing down in a terrifying boom? I always found that kind of exciting.”

  Dolores nodded and then shrugged. “Instead things just keep crawling along somehow.”

  “Not quite as exciting.”

  I pulled out another eraser and lit it off the stub of my last one. Outside, the sun had set. The sky was an ocean of black oil punctuated by the lights of cars and blimps floating like strange amoeba in a dirty sea.

  34

  THE GAME NIGHT

  I normally don’t let the enemy in my box, but the enemy normally isn’t this beautiful.” The Mouth squeezed his meaty hand on Dolores’s knee. “How’d you end up with this scrub?”

  We were in the visiting owner’s box atop the red pyramid, waiting for game four to start. It was a warm day and even warmer in the sealed stadium. Although I wasn’t sure if it was the heat or my nerves making my clothes dampen with sweat.

  Dolores shooed his hand as if it was a stray leaf that had landed there by chance. “Oh, Kobo and I go way back to the Cyber League days.”

  The Mouth was sitting on a leather chair with a spider leg base. The metal legs tapped as they spun him around. He was wearing a black suit with gold pinstripes made of actual gold.