Vox(74)

“We’ll never get them out of here.”

He opens the refrigerator door and slides out the tray with the deadly neuroproteins, the poison that, even in the smallest of quantities, killed a dozen mice. “We only need one, Gianna.”

I check the clock on the lab wall. Both hands point straight up. When I came in this morning, Sergeant Petroski was on duty at the security station. He yawned, said hello, and yawned again. If he was up all night, the only ally I have in this building will be at home, sleeping off a graveyard shift.

All right. On to plan B.

Except I don’t have a plan B.

Or maybe I do.

There’s a closet-sized washroom off the main lab, nothing more than a five-by-five square of tile with a toilet, a sink, and one of those hand dryers that roar like twin jet engines and make the skin on your hands stretch into a taut, science-fictiony special effect. I lean over the fridge, pluck one of the vials from its tray, and wedge it into the front of my bra, then take a single surgical glove—the kind with no powder—from the dispenser on the counter.

“Be right back,” I say, blowing air into the glove. After considering what I’m about to do, I take two more and head in the direction of the washroom.

Lorenzo raises an eyebrow.

“Six vials, right?” I say, and hear a cabinet opening behind me, followed by the running of water from the lab sink’s tap.

The soldiers never check us over thoroughly when we enter the building in the morning or when we leave it at night. They’re men, after all. Perhaps, after a year of not having to worry about mouthy women and girl power and female wiles, perhaps after so long in their men’s world, they’ve forgotten our secrets, our ways of hiding small cylindrical objects. Perhaps, after all this time of our silence, even their suspicions have lapsed into nothing.

I check the vial’s stopper five times before I’m satisfied it’s secure, then fit the tube inside the latex finger of one glove, tie a knot before trimming the excess bulk, and repeat the process with the next two gloves. The end result is a wad of blue latex, not exactly cylindrical anymore, and not small, but likely leakproof. What the hell, I think. I’ve had four baby heads the size of Nerf balls pass through me. I can stand some minor discomfort for the next hour.

Once I’ve straightened myself out and blown my hands dry, I rejoin Lorenzo in the lab. He gives me a single warning look, and Poe steps toward me. For some reason, he seems even larger when I’m standing up.

“Problem, Dr. McClellan?” Poe says.

“Only if you lower my daily quota on bathroom visits.”

Poe has no response to this, but after checking each room in the lab and stopping to regard Thumper in his plexiglass cage, he turns to us. “Follow me.”

“We’re not done here,” I say. “Are we, Enzo?” The look I give him is hard and unmistakably a different question.

“We’re done,” he says.

Poe snoops around for another five minutes, and I hold my breath as he opens the storage refrigerator and spends more time than I think is necessary counting the vials. Then he leads us through the lab doors and down the corridor and presses the up button on the elevator. “Key cards, please.” He holds out one meaty hand.

“That’s it?” I say, pulling the lanyard over my head. It gets stuck in my hair, and Poe reaches over to untangle it. His hand brushes my temple and sends a shiver through me. He’s ice-cold.

I think of Del again, and Sharon, and their three girls. For the oddest of reasons, I wonder who’s feeding the animals on the Rays’ farm.

Once, when he was more child than man, Steven asked me if animals had language.

“No,” I said.

“Do they think?”

“No.”

He’d read a book about bees in school and showed it to me one afternoon in the kitchen. That was when Steven, not Sonia, wanted hot cocoa every day at four o’clock.

“It says that bees can go find pollen and then come back to the hive and tell the other bees where the pollen is.” He read part of the chapter aloud. “The bee dance is like a language. So there.”

I checked over the book, examining the bio of one of the authors. She was an apiarist with a long line of credentials, none of which had much to do with linguistics. “So there, nothing,” I said. “Yes, the bees dance. They do a little ‘Hey, guys! Here’s the good pollen!’ sort of a jig. But that’s it, kiddo. Tie their wings down and make them walk back to the hive, and they’re giving directions to the nearest rock. What bees have is communication, and only a specialized form of it. That’s not language. Only humans have language.”

“What about Koko the gorilla?” His book was cowritten by a team of animal experts.

“Koko’s terrific and she knows a few hundred signs, but she still doesn’t do what your brothers can.” Sam and Leo were four at the time. Koko was forty-five.

Steven took his textbook and went to his room to sulk. Another bubble burst, I thought. It’s pleasant to imagine our four-and two-legged friends have a linguistic mechanism of their own. Maybe that’s why people keep searching for proof. But it isn’t true.

Here, in the elevator, I find myself wishing it were.

“That’s it,” Poe says when we reach the first floor. “You can collect your laptops. They’ve been scrubbed.”