Girl One(13)

I still remembered Bellanger leaning over me, carefully explaining each experiment to me as if I could actually understand. Even at age five, I’d risen to the occasion, becoming a different girl than the one who ran outside, wild and barefoot, or fought my mother off at bath time. I became painstaking with him. Responsible. Hanging on his every word, eager for his smile of approval.

“But that was so long ago,” I said now. “Bellanger was always careful with us.”

“It wasn’t a long time ago for me.” Emily’s hand shook on her blanket, a sudden convulsion, and she cupped her palm over it as if her hands belonged to two different people. “It was just a way to make money. The first doctor my mother saw, he gave us five hundred. That was enough for two months’ rent. My mother didn’t let me do it at first. She said she’d put me through enough already. So she did it first. But I saw what it did to her, Josie. I saw how she got sick from it. I had to help out too.” Emily reached for me, and I didn’t hesitate before reaching back. She folded my hands into hers, her skin cold and dry. “I couldn’t make my mother go through it alone anymore. I was the one they wanted, anyway. We earned twice as much once I started. Didn’t you do it too?”

So these hacks had been experimenting on her. Sticking her with needles, slicing her open, giving her who knew what kinds of pills or potions. When I was growing up, my mother had hated doctors, doggedly fended off my colds with herbal tea and Dimetapp. The one time I’d fractured my collarbone too badly for a first-aid kit, my mother accompanied me to the doctor’s office and sat clutching my shoulder like I might fly away, or be removed from her care by a smiling social worker who’d decided that my life without a stable male presence was too dangerous.

“No,” I said at last. “We never did.”

Her face fell slightly. She nodded.

Dr. McCarter—my mentor at the University of Chicago, the principal investigator at my latest lab rotation—had been pressing me to take advantage of the genetic gold mine I carried around inside my body. “Plenty of famous scientists have volunteered their own bodies in the name of their scientific research. Jonas Salk injected himself with the untested polio vaccine. John Paul Stapp subjected himself to g-forces before man ever set foot on the moon. At least think about it, Jo.”

But I’d put it off. I was there as the researcher, not the researched: I was purposefully moving away from being the test subject. Anyway, most of the tests McCarter was proposing would have required my mother’s cooperation. Whatever impulse had led my twenty-three-year-old mother to agree to work with Bellanger, that curiosity had been bleached out by the intervening years, I assumed by the fires and the attacks and the prime-time preachers. But if I was going to truly restore Bellanger’s lost work, it would involve human test subjects at some point. I only hoped I’d find volunteers as agreeable as our mothers had been.

“These men weren’t very nice, Josephine,” Emily said. “I thought maybe they’d be like Dr. Bellanger. But in the end it was always the same. They did whatever they wanted and then they sent us home.”

Emily looking for Bellanger in these uncaring faces made a deep spasm of loss echo in my chest. “What did they want?” I whispered, curiosity and concern fighting inside me.

She let her hands slide out of mine, picking at the hem of her nightgown. “Different things. Some were trying to prove Dr. Bellanger was a fraud. Some were trying to do the same thing he’d done. And others…” She pressed her lips together.

“What?” I asked, feeling a sudden uncertain sickness. But Emily shook her head very slightly and I knew to back off.

My anger grew as I thought of these men. The lingering fascination that surrounded us could turn dark too easily. We were Bellanger’s great unfinished works. He’d guarded his secrets, the nine of us, so carefully during his life, wary of the death threats—people who wanted to vanquish us like vampires, cut off our heads, burn us at the stake. Then there were the calmer and no less chilling threats from people who wanted to rehome us with normal families. All of us had been born under the shadow of those threats, but they loomed darkest over Bellanger himself. He was the one who’d started it, after all. If he were shot, stabbed, poisoned, burned, then his unholy work would go with him.

And that was the problem. He’d always brashly and optimistically assumed he’d have plenty of time to finish his work. For every person like Ricky Peters, claiming that if Bellanger flew in the face of God by spreading parthenogenesis beyond the nine of us he’d surely burn in hell, there was someone hounding him to reveal his hard-won secrets and share his glory. Bellanger had stayed silent; he’d burned anyway.

In the years directly following his loss, there’d been an arms race of scientists—a pharmaceutical company in the United States, the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, an eccentric multimillionaire in Switzerland, a university in Japan—all attempting to take up the controversial mantle he had left behind. A few even managed to produce pregnancies, usually to great fanfare, until they’d ended in early miscarriages, the embryos revealed to be nonviable. After a woman in Berlin nearly died from an early stillbirth, research stalled, fettered with ethical concerns and reignited protests.

Growing up, I grieved these lost opportunities. We were such a small population already, winnowed down to a mere eight before we’d even left childhood. But now there was a secret, guilty satisfaction at the bottom of that grief. I was going to do it myself. I was destined to follow in Bellanger’s footsteps. Like father, like daughter.