Risa can feel the heaviness of the vibe around her, as if they’re all watching some awful global event unfolding before their eyes.
“We need to get the escape plan ready,” Connor says. Risa knows he’s talking more to himself than to her. “We can’t do a dry run, because the spy sats will pick it up, but everyone needs to know what to do.”
Risa feels the same blast of communal intuition. Suddenly getting the hell out of the Graveyard sounds like a very good idea. Even without a safe destination.
“Composite human . . . ,” someone grumbles. “I wonder what it looks like.”
“C’mon, haven’t you ever seen Mr. Potato Head?”
There’s a smattering of nervous laughter, but it doesn’t lighten the mood.
“Whatever it looks like,” Risa says, “I hope we never see it.”
17 - Cam
With a finger he traces the lines of his face, down the side of his nose to his cheek. Left, then right. Out from the symmetrical starburst of flesh tones on his forehead, then beyond to the lines that spread beneath his hairline. He dips his finger into the graft-grade healing cream again and spreads it across the lines running down the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his chest, and every other place he can reach. He can feel the tingling as the engineered microorganisms in the cream do their job.
“Believe it or not, the stuff is actually related to yogurt,” the dermatologist told him. “Except, of course, that it eats scar tissue.” It also costs five thousand dollars a jar, but, as Roberta has told him, money is no object when it comes to Cam.
He’s been assured that when treatment is done, he’ll have no scars at all, just hairline seams where every little bit of himself meets.
His cream-spreading ritual takes half an hour, twice a day, and he’s come to enjoy the Zen-like nature of it. He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between—and while he’s had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands he’ll never reach.
There’s a knock at his door. “Are you ready?” It’s Roberta.
“Reins in your fist,” he tells her.
A pause, and then, “Very funny. ‘Hold your horses.’ ”
Cam laughs. He no longer needs to speak in metaphors—he’s created enough bridges in his mind to bring some normality to his speech—but he enjoys teasing Roberta and trying to stump her.
He dresses in a tailored shirt and tie. The tie’s muted colors, yet bold, fractal pattern, were specifically chosen to project a sense of aesthetic composition; a subliminal suggestion that an artistic whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. He fumbles with the tie. While his brain knows how to tie it, his virtuoso fingers obviously had never learned to do a Windsor knot. He must focus and overcome the frustrating lack of muscle memory.
Roberta knocks again, a little more insistently now. “It’s time.”
He takes a moment to admire himself in the mirror. His hair is just about an inch long now. A virtual coat of many colors; streaks extending out from the focal point of multiple skin tones on his forehead. Blond runs down the middle, blending to amber on both the left and right. Shades of red and brown arc back from his temples, then give way to jet black above his ears, and tight, dark curls at his sideburns. “All the famous hairstylists will be trampling one another to get to you,” Roberta said.
Finally he opens the door before Roberta’s knocking becomes frantic. Her dress is a little more elegant than the slacks and blouse she usually wears, but still very understated. It’s all calculated to keep the focus on him. For a moment she seems annoyed at him, but now that she gets a good look at him, her irritation melts away.
“You look spectacular, Cam.” She smoothes out his shirt and straightens his tie. “You look like the shining star you are!”
“Let’s hope I don’t give birth to complex elements.”
She looks at him quizzically.
“Supernova,” he says. “If I’m a shining star, let’s hope I don’t blow up.” He wasn’t even trying to stump her. “Sorry—it’s just the way I think.”
She gently takes him by the arm. “Come, they’re waiting for you.”
“How many?”
“We didn’t want you to be overwhelmed by your first press conference, so we limited it to thirty.”
His heart beats heavily, and he must take a few deep breaths to slow it down. He doesn’t know why he should be so nervous. They have prepared him with three mock press conferences already, where questions were hurled at him in multiple languages. In each one of those he did just fine—and this time it will be only in English, so he has one less variable to worry about.
This one, however, is real. This time he’s about to be officially introduced to a world that is unprepared for him. The faces he saw at those fake press conferences were friendly ones pretending not to be, but today he will be facing actual strangers. Some will just be curious, others amazed, and some might be flat-out horrified. Roberta told him to expect this. What he’s worried about are the things that not even she can predict.
They walk down the hall to a spiral staircase that leads to the main living room—a staircase he had not been allowed to use for his first weeks, until his coordination improved. Now, however, he could dance his way down those stairs if he chose to. Roberta tells him to wait until she announces him. She goes down first, and Cam can hear the rumble of chattering reporters die down. The lights dim, and she begins her presentation.