“We made the replica arm out of biogenetic matrix,” the Director explained.
“Is that from Duncan Hines?” I whispered.
“It functions exactly like the limb he lost—and even better,” the Director went on. “We laced titanium cells into the bone material, strengthening its stress resistance by four hundred percent.”
“And guaranteeing him hassles at airport security stations all over the world,” I murmured.
“Next we have one of our most successful human hybrids,” said Dr. Janssen.
A woman walked out, totally normal looking. Did she have wings? Was she an Eraser?
“Mara here had Panthera pardus genetic material grafted into her human DNA. It’s given her some unique qualities.”
“What’s that?” Angel whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Something feline,” said Ari.
He was right. Up on the platform, the woman opened her mouth to reveal humongous razor-sharp fangs, which looked even more lethal than the typical Eraser’s. Then she crouched down, sprang up as if made of rubber, and landed fifteen feet above the platform, clinging to a tall light stand.
Everyone who hadn’t gasped when they saw her fangs quit trying to be suave and went ahead and gasped.
The Director smiled and motioned her down. “As usual, the leopard genes were expressed in some unexpected ways.”
Meaning they still didn’t know what the heck they were doing.
Mara turned around. The Director unzipped her jumpsuit at the back, and an excited murmur raced through the crowd. Ol’ Mara had leopard spots trailing down her spine.
“Guess she can’t change that,” I said, and Total snickered.
“And Mara is just the beginning,” said the Director.
112
Growing up in the lab at the School, where we were surrounded by dog crates filled with mix ’n’ match genetic experiments, we’d seen pretty much any combination of two living things that you could imagine, and probably a thousand that you couldn’t. Virtually all of them had been unsuccessful, or “nonviable,” as the whitecoats said. A tiny percentage made it past the embryo stage, and a few struggled along for a year or two before their horrific deficits caught up with them. As far as I knew, we, the flock, had been by far the most successful hybrid. Us and the Erasers. Even the Erasers only lived about six years or so. We were ancient compared with them.
Today we were seeing some successful hybrids, like Mara. After SpotGirl, the Director trotted out two people who could control the color of their skin just by thinking about it.
“Can they turn blue?” Nudge asked, fascinated. “Or purple?”
“Who knows?” I said, and then my stomach twisted as the people onstage literally turned camouflage right in front of us. I thought about what the military people of various countries could do with that and felt ill.
We saw people who could increase their height by about four inches, just by controlling their muscles and skeletal structures with their minds.
“Combine that with the skin-changing types, and you’ve got a recipe for a bank robber deluxe,” I said. “They’d never be recognized.”
We saw people with hard, scaly, bulletproof skin, or GatorGuys, as we called them. We saw a woman who could scream at pitches too high for any of us to hear but had Total writhing in pain on the ground, biting his lip to keep from shrieking swear words. Her voice could break glass, which isn’t totally unusual, but it could also shatter metal, which seemed new and different—and completely horrifying.
“Think of what a successful nag she would be,” I said to Ari, and he tried to smile but couldn’t. His skin seemed to have a grayish cast, and he’d been unusually quiet for several hours. I wondered if he was near his end.
“These things all look like soldiers,” said Nudge. “Like they’d be good in a war, you know?”
“They look all warry because they were built to be an army,” I told her.
“Well, that would do it,” she said.
“Don’t these people ever think about anything else?” Total muttered in disgust. “There’s more to life than world domination, you know.”