Chapter Eleven

I was in the dining room by seven forty-five, dressed complete with wig, my back flat against the chair. And what a chair! It looked more like the set piece for an emperor's dining room. The cushion was crimson with flora embroidered in gold thread. The back had been elegantly carved into the likenesses of two twisting phoenixes with gilded detailing, each of their feathers a different kind of polished wood.

It was also hard as hell. I shifted constantly. Finally, I started sitting on my hands.

Ms. Fujita clanked around in the kitchen. The minute she noticed that I was there, she started talking: simply, slowly, like I was an idiot. When she finally emerged, holding a silver tray, she was still talking: a sweet, pleasant, happy sound, like a little bird greeting the sunshine.

A hand settled on the back of my head, and Mom replied in Japanese. Ms. Fujita beamed, bowed, and approached the table, setting the tray down. It was a spotless silver affair. The plates, I noted with a small twinge of wariness, were remarkably small. There were bowls of rice, strange little dishes of vegetables, miso soup, fish. Ms. Fujita began arranging the tray into two places at the table: dishes for me, dishes for Mom. Mom took a bowl of rice.

"Japanese is the first language you will learn," she said, reclining in the seat opposite from me. "And when you do begin to learn, I will expect you to use it at all times."

I glanced back at the corridor, but Takeru did not appear.

"Takeru will not be joining us. He leaves early for school." Mom still hadn't looked up. Suddenly I realized she hadn't looked at me since she stepped into the room. I thought of my conversation with Takeru and wondered if she had bugged his room.

"Mom." I looked up at her, setting my jaw. "If you hurt my family and I find out…"

She flung her head up. Her eyes were blazing. I nearly choked on my own breath.

"The past is the past," she said. "What happened there stays there."

I took a deep breath. "Please."

Her eyes were flinty. "'They,'" she said, with a nasty punctuated note, "are not your family. They were thieves."

"Were?" I jumped up. "You mean you attacked them anyway? When? Why?"

"Calm down. They are not dead yet."

"What?"

"They did not surrender you." Her hands were trembling. "Just as you did not come of your own free will. Why should they be rewarded?"

"You know what Dad said?" I snapped.

"I do not remotely care."

"He said he wouldn't have taken me if you'd just let me see him," I said. "That's all he wanted. But you couldn't even give him an hour a week or… or whatever it was. You pushed him. It was your fault."

"Thus far, I have let you say anything you desired," Mom said, leaning back in her chair. "If you persist in saying foolish things, you will not like the outcome. Now sit down."

I flopped into my seat. It hurt.

"Japanese," Mom said to herself, "and manners."

The Bunker was a nondescript office building on the edge of town. A faded sign announced that it was the Watanabe Shipping Company. Blinds hung askew in the tinted windows, and the parking lot was filled with nondescript cars. Mom didn't speak to me all morning, which normally I would have preferred—but this time, the silence was heavy and terrible. When her hand fell on my shoulder, it was heavy, and her fingers pinched like a falcon's claws.

The foyer was very small and much plainer than I expected. A few faded photos of landscapes hung on the wall in basic black frames, and there was a muted flatscreen on the wall tuned to CNN. A single ratty man sat in one of the threadbare chairs, his feet flung up on a battered coffee table, a cap down over his eyes.

The receptionist looked up from her phone call and blanched. But Mom didn't look at her. She nodded to the man in the chair, who lifted a single crooked finger in response. Then we walked through a door labeled "Employees Only," and were in a plain white hallway lined with offices.

I could feel that roof pressing down on me like a shoe on a beetle's back. Dad had laid out a map of the place for me to memorize when I was very small, and it startled me to actually recognize the layout. I could hear his voice in my head narrating the lay of the building: "These are offices for lab employees. Here's financial. Here's HR..."

What a dreadfully silent place it was. All you could hear was the hum of the lights and the air conditioning. We met no one, but I heard doors closing far away and hurried footsteps rushing in the opposite direction. Our own footsteps echoed back at us over the tiles and our reflections shivered below us as though on water. Mom took what seemed to be a hundred turns, and it was hard to keep myself oriented. We wandered down a random stairwell that only seemed to exist for one floor, although the office building had obviously had at least six stories. Then she slipped a keycard into a card reader for what appeared to be an office, but when we opened the door, we stepped into an elevator. Another keycard swipe, and she pressed a button labeled B3. There were six Bs, I noticed, and six upper floors besides.

"Beware the basement levels," Dad had said.

I shivered. Her grip only tightened.

"It is nothing to be afraid of," she said.

"They experiment on things down here," I said through gritted teeth.

"Only things," she said. "Never people."

The door opened onto another maze of corridors. This time, however, there was an old woman in a white lab coat standing before us, a crooked grin on her face. She had bound her salt-and-pepper hair back with a purple hair tie, and had dramatic laugh lines.

"Good morning, Ms. Watanabe," she said.

"Good morning, Dr. Hernandez." She pushed me forward. "This is Saya."

"Saya, ah. Good to meet you at last." She reached out; I gingerly gave her my hand. She did not shake it very hard, instead opting to press the back of my hand with a thumb.

"Let's see what's going on with you, shall we?" she asked, and gently led me down the corridor. Mom's claws released. Even though she still walked behind us, suddenly I felt like I could breathe.

I was weighed and my height was measured. Dr. Hernandez and another doctor took X-rays of my entire body, a process that seemed to take an infinity. Then I had to disrobe in a sterile white room with humming lights and take off my wig. I couldn't look Dr. Hernandez in the eye as I set it on top of my shirt.

"This is incredible," she said softly, gently lifting one of my arms. "I can't believe she's alive. Simmons and Takehara are geniuses, to be sure, but two species like this…" She whistled.

"They told me it would have been twice as hard if the father did not already possess mammalian traits," Mom said. "Apparently his transformation involved human DNA."

"This is still incredible. I just can't believe everything works so well. What I wouldn't give to get my hands on some of that mutagenic agent and see what we could cook up here!" She smiled up at me. "You're a real miracle, Saya. I just want you to know that."

I looked at my feet.

"Why does her skin look like this?" Mom asked, pressing my arm. "Like sharkskin. And why is she still so small?"

"Nothing we can't test for," Dr. Hernandez said.

So I was pinched and prodded and scraped and swabbed. Then the needle came out. Dr. Hernandez told me to look away so that she could draw blood.

"You won't feel it that way," she said, and winked. This was only halfway true.

Then Dr. Hernandez looked at my ears, my eyes, down my throat. At last, I was flipped on my back on the table. When I realized what was about to happen, I clapped my tail down and stared red-faced at the ceiling. Dr. Hernandez was full of apologies at first; then there was a concerned silence.

"Hmm," she said. "I need to look at her internal organs and see how they integrated. It will give us a better glimpse of how she works and what might not be working correctly."

My heart thudded. "But I feel fine."

"Then you are probably all right." Dr. Hernandez patted me on the shoulder. "But in your case, it's better to be safe than sorry. Let's schedule an MRI for tomorrow afternoon."

Dr. Hernandez talked to Mom outside the room while I put my clothes on. When Mom grabbed me by the shoulder and steered me down the hall, her grip was looser, her face was paler.

"What happened?" I asked in the elevator. "What's wrong with me?"

"It is impossible to tell." She looked away. "You will have to fast until your appointment tomorrow."

My stomach grumbled. "What?"

"Fast. You won't eat."

"But how am I different?"

"We will find out tomorrow," she said.

"If you don't like that I'm a mutant, why'd you do this?" I asked. "You could've had a human baby with no problems."

She didn't answer me.

My stomach grumbled forever. It grumbled as I met the tutors. It grumbled when I was given water. It grumbled at gum especially.

When I showered I wondered how I was different. I certainly tried to look, although it's impossible for me to see anything. I can't bend over terribly far and the ridge of my plastron hangs down; I haven't even seen my own tail. Dad had to change my diaper—he would have had to know—but of course, this isn't something you bring up in civilized conversation. It must not have been something he worried about, or he would have told me, wouldn't he?

Why, I wondered, did it have to be this? And there?

I turned on my new computer and tried to access the internet. It wasn't set up. So I went and knocked on Takeru's door.

"What?" he asked, peeking out of the crack.

"I need the Wi-Fi password."

"I can't give it to you."

"Please, come on!"

But he slammed the door on me.

So I slipped into Mom's library because I'd seen a computer there.

No luck. Password protected. So I turned to the shelves, which stretched to the ceiling on each side. It was full of books, and almost all of them were in Japanese. My heart sank. No way to tell in a glance what I was looking at. So I began to pull them out by the spines and look at the pictures.

"What are you doing here?" Mom asked.

I whirled around. She was standing at the door in a silk robe, a glass of wine hooked in her fingers.

"Looking for a book," I said in a low voice.

She strode past me to the desk at the window. "For what?"

"Anatomy," I said. "I can't get on the internet, so I thought…"

She set her wine down. "A human woman has three openings. A turtle has a cloaca, which is… ah… all-purpose. You have that." She practically spat out the word.

"Oh." I sighed and relaxed. "So I'm like Dad."

"This is not a good sign," she said sharply. "Your height may be due to the malfunction of your internal organs."

"Dad is short, too," I said. "Maybe I'm just like him."

"No," she said. "Something isn't right."

"For a human, maybe," I said, squatting to peer at the lowest part of the bookcase. "But I'm not a human."

"We shall see," she said coolly.

"If you wanted a human baby so much, you should've kept Takeru," I said without looking at her.

She didn't say anything, although I heard her chair creak. Then I heard the soft beeping of a phone, and her clearing her throat.

The minute I heard his voice I whirled around, my eyes bugging out. She held a thin black cell phone in front of her, but she wasn't looking at it. She was looking at me. His voice came out of the speaker, fuzzy, but distinct.

"Karai," he said. "What do you want?"

"Dad!" I rushed to the desk.

"Saya? Is that you? Are you all right?"

"Yeah! Yeah, I'm fine!" I said. "Gimme the phone!"

Mom's lip twitched. "Have you taught your daughter nothing but insolence?"

"No. She developed that on her own."

I thought I heard Mike laughing in the background, and suddenly I was hit by homesickness so hard that I thought I was going to throw up. I stretched out over the desk, waggling my hands.

"Please, Mom, please! Let me talk to him."

She grudgingly held the phone out to me. I ripped it out of her hands and scuttled behind a bookcase.

"Dad! Is everyone okay?"

"We're fine. Don's got us covered on all fronts. Why do you ask?"

"I think she knows where you are," I said.

"We'll keep that in mind." He breathed a long sigh. "God, I'm so glad… she hasn't taken you to the Bunker, has she?"

"She took me this morning," I said. "She says she's worried about my growth." I glanced around the corner of the bookcase. She was swirling her wine with an unreadable expression.

"Told you," Raph said in the background.

"Don't let her do anything you aren't comfortable with," Dad said. "Fight if you have to."

"I don't think she is," I said. "She just gave me a checkup, and tomorrow they scan all of my insides. She doesn't like how much I'm like you."

"What a surprise," he said drily.

"But… she did buy me a wig." I swallowed. "She bought me all kinds of clothes, and a computer, and a TV."

"She did?" His voice warmed. "What does the wig look like?"

"Dark brown and down to my chin, and I put a pink clip in it. I wish I could show it to you."

"I wish I could see it."

I gulped. "I wish I were home."

"Then keep practicing," he said. "Practice hard. Let Karai teach you. She's one of…"

Suddenly the phone was jerked out of my hand.

"Hey!" I said.

Mom slipped the phone up to her ear. "Do not get comfortable. I know where you are in Northampton." She looked down at me; Dad's voice was obscured against her cheek. "The camper was bugged."

Silence.

"I am aware of everything you do," she said. "The minute that Saya goes missing is the minute your entire pathetic farm goes up in a fireball."

"No!" I leapt up. "No, don't do that, don't…"

"Karai." Dad's voice was heavy. "For Saya's sake, please."

"If you do that, I'll kill you!" I said, and I swung at her.

The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back with ringing ears, and her foot was on my throat. For the first time, I saw raw feeling on her face—mingled panic and rage. Dad was shouting something over the phone that I couldn't quite understand.

"You did this!" Mom hissed. "You stole her away, you turned her against me. You told her nothing but lies, and now she does not respect me, she does not listen to me."

"Of course she doesn't! You can't rule everyone with an iron fist! Listen to her. Talk to her. Buy her more things. Take her to the zoo or the library or… anywhere. Take her anywhere. Just… don't hit her again, for the love of god!"

The look on her face smoothed out and then was gone. She closed her eyes.

"Please, listen to me," Dad said. "I've been wrong. I've done some foolish things."

"Yes."

"Kidnapping her was… one of those things."

Her eyes flashed open. "Yes."

"But don't punish me through her. It doesn't make sense, Karai."

She lifted her foot and I squirmed away. "Your daughter threatened to kill me."

"She's more like you than me," he said. "She wanted to kill Raphael, too. Meet someone who causes problems, take them out. End the problem before it begins."

My heart went out of me and I stuffed my fist into my mouth.

"Please, be good to her," he said. "Please. I will help in any way I can."

Her brow furrowed. "You? You were never supposed to be involved."

"Maybe not, but I was. Look. She loves us. She'll listen to us. We can help her transition. Just don't kill anybody."

"I don't want to transition," I said in a low voice.

"Do you hear me, Saya?" he asked. "Everybody's lives are riding on this. Do what she says."

"But Dad!"

Mom held the phone out until it stood between us, a thin black totem.

"I've had ten years with you, which is more than I ever expected," Dad said. "You're smart; you can take care of yourself. I know without a doubt that you can."

"But I want to go home!" I flung myself to my feet. "I don't want to stay here! Nobody likes me here!"

"No! Lower your voice," Dad said. "How old are you?"

"…ten."

"You know more about patience than I did at your age," he said. "Be patient. Wait. Watch. Use your head. Do what is best for yourself. You should only come home if your life or health is threatened. Do you understand?"

"So if Mom hits me?" I asked.

He hissed. Mom clenched her hand into a fist.

"She won't hit you," he said firmly. "She was… just… surprised."

"I'll learn to fight back." I looked Mom in the eye.

"No!" Dad said. "Karai, I swear that I won't encourage this. Just don't… don't ever do that again."

She raised the phone to her ear, turned the speakerphone off, and started speaking in Japanese. Very slowly. Very measured. She turned and stared off into the New York skyline. I crept up behind her, straining to hear, but Dad was speaking in Japanese, too. She leaned on the desk and hung her head.

When she dropped the phone, I saw that she hadn't ended the call yet.

"Go to bed," she said.

"What did he say?"

"What does it matter?" She touched my cheek. "I apologize. It won't happen again. Go to bed."

Before I shut the door behind me, she raised the phone to her ear.