At the Chasm of the Split Gene

The cargo elevator doors slid open, revealing cages crammed back-to-back and side-to-side. The first shipment of 50 hybrids had arrived. The musky, animal scent reminded me of a farm, of goat manure. They resembled bald children, but not so much at close inspection. Their skin tones covered humanity’s spectrum, but all had a number of large, irregular black splotches. A very short and sparse overlay of hair covered their backs and legs. Raspy hoots and moans rankled me and the other techs as some of the hybrids gripped the bars of their imprisoning crates. A few curled up silent on their cage floor, shivering with anxiety, eyes wide. Still others swung from the top spars and howled.

I covered my mouth and nose with a shop towel. These stank worse than other lab animals. Liam, the stocky representative from the genetic engineering firm Meskhenet stood beside me, smirking. “Zarina, right?”

I nodded and watched as an autodolly grasped the first cage with its manipulator arms and rolled it to a position against the far wall. Keeping my face shielded from the odor, I walked over for a close inspection. A child, essentially a strange naked boy with about 10 standard years of growth, stared back at me with its round, brown eyes. I stuffed down my uncanny-valley nausea as I looked it over. The hair, skin, flat ears lacking a helix, and those small eyes were the significant physical departures from a fully genetic homo sapiens.

Xaman-Ek, my employer, was the medical engineering firm designing and building the hibernation pod system destined for the Adria system, a 200-year trip. So how do you thoroughly test a system that will maintain human lives for that long? Well, that’s the billion-dollar question.

Meskhenet had developed the hybrids: a clever blend of human and pig genes resulting in a body quite human, the brain mostly sus domesticus. Legally, a lab animal. Gened with twice the normal growth rate, five years had elapsed before we received these human simulations of 10-year-olds. Beginning tomorrow, they would undergo the hibernation procedure and sleep away a decade.

I inspected this caged hybrid as it inspected me. I had to act unrattled. I asked the rep, “What happened to it?”

“What do you mean?”

Was he trying to pass inferior specimens? I cleared my throat. “The tip of its left fifth digit is missing. Healing lacerations and punctures on the right thigh and left forearm. Scabbing around the nose and lips.” I pointed at marks on its right shoulder. “Are those red stripes burns?”

Liam’s eyebrows raised. Apparently, he found my ignorance surprising. “These are bred on an open ranch. They fight, they bite, they figure out their pecking order.”

“Why don’t you keep them in cages?”

“Well, your lab needs healthy organs, strong muscle, and bone. Naturally stimulated brains. Cages don’t cut it.”

“All right. What about the scabbing around the mouth and nose?”

“Rooting. Some retain the natural tendency of a pig to dig in the dirt with their snouts. It’s disastrous with a human face.”

“And those stripes?”

Liam frowned. “We have to break up some fights, separate those in a tangle. The shockers sometimes cause burns. Can’t be helped. But their hide is a little tougher than ours, more porcine.”

The look in my eyes told of my surprise and disgust.

“These hybrids, they don’t have a natural history,” Liam explained as if he possessed the patience of a saint. “They have zero behaviors that evolved out in the wild, no set way of establishing a social order. The mother’s job is done after birth, then they’re bottle-fed by the ranch hands. No rearing mothers, no history—they’re making it up as they go along. It’s sometimes messy. Don’t worry. You have perfectly useable specimens.”

The next cage the autodolly rolled in contained a female with my face as a little girl, and a red streak of a burn above her left ear. We stared at one another, both of us wide-eyed. The hybrid released a high-pitched whine.

My stomach opened like a yawning canyon. I quickly excused myself.

Violet, the lab director, found me in the restroom retching over a toilet. I spit, flushed, wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my lab coat. My voice hoarse and shaking, I said, “How…how the hell did my embryos end up here of all places?”

“Did you do a DNA read on them?” Violet asked, arms crossed.

“I just looked into my own face as a child. It’s the face from my fifth-grade school picture.”

Violet nodded, but her eyes remained skeptical. She knelt, pushed a lock of her dark hair behind her ear. “Let me check.” She accessed the data on her watch as I waited, feeling as if there wasn’t enough air. “I retrieved the DNA donor signatures of the whole list. There’s three hybrids out there with some of your genes.”

“Fuck.” I also wondered how many more of my sisters suffered in the confusion and violence on that damned ranch. Nausea bubbled in my gut with redoubled ferocity. The human portion of the hybrid’s DNA, by law, must be procured from living people signing off. I traded my code for the money, decent money, years ago and never really thought about it since. Now I wondered if I could ever stop thinking about it.

Since the dawn of cloning, the laws have been strict: No lab could grow anything involving human DNA to birth. Human rights trumped everything, and even certain primates and cetaceans had protections. The hybrids were deliberately created to not have rights. So far, these hybrids were the only animals with significant human code to be bred mass-production-style.

Voilet sighed. “Well, we can reject these specimens and have them replaced.”

My mouth opened to shout agreement, but I stopped before breath gave sound. What would happen to them? Likely, they would either spend a few more weeks caged or dropped back off at a ranch. No. I could not do that to them. Here they would be put to sleep. And soon. Peaceful, dreamless, sleep. “No. It’s okay.”

Violet’s expression and tone softened from corporate to motherly. “I know you share genetic material with them, but you’re not actually related. You can’t think like that. They’re lab animals.”

I nodded.

She grasped my shoulder. “Can you handle this?”

“I think so.”

Violet stood. “Take the rest of the day off.”

#

The scars I had carved in my skin as a teenager had long been erased. When I was 13, my psychiatrist had taught me to physically pinpoint where the urge developed in my body. If I felt anything welling up from there, that was the warning and I had a chance to counter it.

But the source wasn’t physical, even though it certainly felt that way. It lay miles deep in my chest, arising through vast depths of thick, tar pit ooze. Slowly at first, then it would race to break the surface and envelop me in a cold, wet, dark cloak. At first, when making every effort to put her words into action, I had always been too late. The black thing crowned from my chest cavity, the blade already in hand and blood dripping.

The parting of my skin served both as a release and a punishment. The weight would lift, the python constricting my chest would uncoil as the tiny droplets of blood slipped from the precise incisions.

Like now.

Back then, I had created “punishment mandalas.” They were complex, like a snowflake. The designs had been taken from the mandalas that hung in the hallway of our Persian home. The one I considered my masterpiece occupied the top of my left thigh, an intricate floral design. Dr. Gilani had complimented my artistic and surgical skills. She told me to try and make one on paper the next time the urge came visiting. “Use red ink,” she said, handing me a pen.

Eventually, I had managed to stop.

But now, years later...the center of my new mandala was complete, three barbed concentric circles dripping the misery down the side of my thigh, draining the guilt, the failure, making stark red splotches on the dun tile of my kitchen.

I stained a white napkin as I wiped the blade. I blotted the fresh mandala. Three barbed circles. One for each of my sisters caged back at the lab.

I breathed freely again.

#

In just over two weeks, all the hibernation pods gently hummed, their occupants’ metabolisms reduced to a thousandth. I entered the spacious pod chamber and paused by each sister in turn, peering through the full-length observation windows on the clamshell doors. None of my prep duties involved my sisters. Violet had made sure of that.

Medical hibernation was a two-part procedure. First, the sleeper must be prepped. This was partially accomplished by activating GABA-a receptors, inhibiting neuronal activity in the raphe pallidus area of the brain with an intravenous dose of Thermosilas-V. Next, within the pod, a state of profound hyperthermia was slowly induced over days, the body temperature lowered to three degrees Celsius.

To non-medical personnel, hibernation might appear a little frightening. I gazed at my sister, whom I named Laleh, as she lay strapped to her bed at the chest, naked. For every body function to be controlled and monitored, there twined a nest of tubes and hardwired sensors, all redundant. The upper left of the pod monitor displayed her heartrate in beats per hour, currently 44 and declining.

This was the key to reach the stars as a biological entity.

Lilting notes of a song broke my reverie, the language unfamiliar. Med tech Sasha made her rounds, palette in hand and the soft song on her lips. I smiled self-consciously. Noticing me standing by Laleh’s pod, her song paused, and she asked, “You like that one?”

“Lost in thought, I guess.” As far as I could tell, Violet had never released my secret. “What were you singing?”

“A Russian lullaby,” she replied and rubbed her small baby bump. “Triplets.”

“Wow. Congratulations.”

She whispered conspiratorially, “They’re not mine.” Pointing to Laleh’s pod, she added, “They’re these guys.”

I managed to maintain my smile. “Oh! The surrogate program. Did you use your own genetic—”

“No! I mean, working here, that would be weird, yes?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t thinking.”

“I might be putting my own babies down, someday, right? Anyway, seven months of pregnancy and they remove these little guys, and they even sculpt my belly back into virgin shape as part of the deal.”

“Well. Neat.”

Sasha went on with her rounds, resuming that haunting lullaby, manually checking the patients, her blonde ponytail bobbing as she flitted pod to pod.

I looked down to Laleh. She was at peace now, eyes closed for a long sleep. The horrors of the ranch, the transport, the cages, all behind her.

What could be done to save her from the future?

#

Every hybrid made it safely to the target three degrees Celsius as a full month had passed since their arrival. Nothing in my job description required my presence in the pod chamber, but I visited my three sisters daily. Sometimes more. All unnecessary—I could pull up their vitals anytime on my watch. But my need to see them through the pod windows with my own eyes could not be overcome.

Eventually, Violet called me into her office, her monolithic mahogany desk a great barrier between us.

“No one knows, but you and I,” she began.

I didn’t bother to play stupid. I waited.

“Do you see how your daily visits indicate a problem?”

I knew it was no problem to the testing, or the company. My duties were completed satisfactorily. I still didn’t reply.

“This is my personal concern for you, Zarina. This meeting isn’t going on the books.” Her smile was that of a concerned boss, not a friend. “Why don’t we head out for a drink? We used to do that before I got the big office. It’s not appropriate, really, but screw protocols. Let’s talk and unwind a little, all right?”

You can’t say no to your boss, especially when she notices your questionable behavior. “Okay.”

“Great. We’ll have some fun.” Her tense smile morphed into a relaxed grin.

Like a drink would solve everything.

#

Violet chose a pricey bar, as if we had the same salary. Did she forget we weren’t in the same class strata? Regardless, I was glad it was autumn, so my dress with the long sleeves didn’t appear out of season.

I arrived 20 or so minutes late, searching for Violet among the well-dressed crowd. The plum-painted walls were adorned with an artist’s disturbing depictions of the pastoral farm life. The cows, chickens, and goats ignored me. But the pigs. The pigs looked at me, mocking and accusing, their small, round eyes glaring with judgement.

At a little table in a corner, I discovered her. “Catch up,” she said, pointing at her drink. I sat down, mumbling apologies. Violet signaled the waiter with a wave of her hand. “It’s not work, so I’m not worried about you being late. I just really need to relax with an old friend. And I’m buying, by the way.” She patted my hand, indicating that her boss hat remained at the office.

Well, my opinion of the manufactured “fun” evening elevated. I drank. We gossiped. After the second Long Island, we were both laughing.

“You know Sasha’s carrying hybrid babies, right?” Violet intimated.

I nodded, hands chilled and wet around my third cocktail.

“What if she gets attached to them?” asked Violet. “That sometimes happens to surrogate moms, you know.”

“I’ve heard that,” I replied. After another sip from my drink, I said, “She’s been a little temperamental.”

“Seriously, pregnant women! She bit my head off earlier this week! I asked her about the high count of ALT liver enzymes of 731c—”

“Laleh.”

“What?”

Oh, fuck me. It just jumped out of my mouth when I recognized the pod code for one of my sisters. I tried not to shrivel in embarrassment. The alcohol helped.

Violet leaned forward, all mirth had fled her face. “You name them?”

“Well, it’s better than the numbers,” I replied, trying to brush it off. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Honey, this is a little weird, don’t you think? I’ll bet you don’t name them all. Just the ones with your DNA.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“You visit them. Every day. You named them. What’s going to happen when we revive them?” Violet’s brow wrinkled as she leaned in. “What about when we put them down?”

“I’m going to the restroom.”

Violet said something as I left the table. Probably asking me to come back. Maybe an apology. I kept going. It was brighter in the ladies’ room, white walls and no pigs, just a green glass mosaic of a mermaid that didn’t judge me. The light and the quiet was just enough to balance me away from the noise and the chatter. And Violet. I braced myself on the sink, the cold of the granite seeping into my palms. Sweat trickled down my back. This was going horribly.

Two chatty girls entered, cackling drunkenly. I inwardly groaned and sought the solitude of a stall. I sat with my purse in my lap, a mental mantra on repeat, “I will not cry, I will not cry…”

By the time I emerged to sit again with Violet, she genuinely looked surprised. “I thought I scared you off and you ditched me.”

“No.” I didn’t know how much time had passed, but Violet had visibly transitioned from buzzed to lightly drunk.

“I feel I have to bring this up.” She looked so earnest. “Away from work. What you’re doing isn’t normal. I’m concerned. Maybe, the hybrids are not a good idea. Sasha sings lullabies to her fetuses, you…doing your thing.”

That stall time had emboldened me. “And? I do my work. There’s no problem with that, right?”

Violet paused. Her mind turned behind those drink-glazed eyes. She focused, eyes clearing and locking to mine. “This isn’t about work. I’m worried this is unhealthy.”

“Unhealthy? It’s a perfectly natural bond. We share enough genetic code to be cousins.”

“Not remotely true. Regardless, they’re lab animals!”

“So are the fully human volunteers! No one gets all bent if someone has an attachment to them!”

Violet pinched the bridge of her nose, as if a sinus headache struck. “So, you don’t think having these ‘related’ hybrids affect you at all?”

Everything had changed with the hybrids. I had a familial with my sisters, a protective instinct, magnified by the knowledge of what they had endured at the ranch.

“Did you—” she stopped, her eyes drawn to my left arm.

Before I dared follow her stare, it felt as if I were falling from the roof of a skyscraper. Shit, shit, shit. Blood seeped through in small blotches on my dress sleeve. I had toilet paper wrapped around it. How could this be happening?

“I need to go.” I stood, picking up my purse. “Thank you for the drinks.”

Violet protested as I fled the bar nearly running.

#

“Stupid, so stupid,” I whispered to myself over and over as I sat curled on my sofa staring at my wrestling hands. Why did I have to do that there? And what had happened that I bled too much? And now Violet knew. Would she fire me?

I deserved it.

“So stupid…”

I had to intercept the black thing rising again in my chest. God, not two times in a day. I told the homescreen to power up and welcomed the blue light of potential entertainments, potential distractions. I needed stupid comedy to carry me away. Yet that’s not what I ordered from the screen. “Hybrid ranches,” I said.

Company-sponsored ads popped up, which I skipped.

Hybrid fights! blared a sketchy channel with a lurid graphic of two hybrids growling at one another, one with spit flying from his mouth.

Was it even real?

“Run it,” I told the screen.

A man with a big smile, a big beard, and a baseball cap talked about the ranch life against a backdrop of blue sky and green grass and distant, leafy oaks. “It’s pretty boring out here some days, so we like to make things interesting once chores are done.” The video cut to two men, each holding a kicking hybrid by the back of their neck and another arm across their chest, pinning their arms. Bald, naked children, maybe about eight years, their eyes more round than a typical human’s, their skin blotched with pig patches. One bared his lower oversized canines. The men approached one another with their captives. They mashed the hybrids’ faces together roughly, banged their skulls. The men laughed. The hybrids screamed and growled and twisted about in their grip, snapping their teeth. The men stepped back a few paces and released. The hybrids dove for one another, biting and scratching and grappling.

A short, sharp scream escaped me and I covered my mouth.

The ranch hands cheered them on.

“Stop video!” A cesspit of sorrow and stress roiled in my gut. Tears blurred my vision. My breath hitched.

I wiped the tears, took deep breaths, and searched the web more, finding that the video creators had been fired. But this clip kept resurfacing hosted by different venues. They had been dumb enough to film their abuse. There were some not so stupid, surely.

With deep breathing, I diminished the weeping. I could never stomach cruelty. Not to animals or people.

But how much was I contributing to this horror show? Every donor had access to this information. Before now, I never wanted to know. I called up the Meskhenet website and confirmed my DNA with a touch. Data scrolled.

One hundred seventy-four.

I stopped breathing. My heart hammered in my ears.

There was no stopping now. A circle for each related hybrid might be more skin that I could reach. That I even had.

I slid from the dress I wore to the bar, numb.

Kitchen table.

Blade.

Carve.

There was far too much wrong to catch up with. But what was my suffering when compared to the hybrids’? Nothing. A mere drop in the sea.

Another completed circle. Crimson trickles down my thigh in beads.

Circles. Mandalas.

A complete circle represented the nature of life, of everything. Life and death and rebirth.

How did returning to life as a hybrid fit in with all of this? A horrible karmic debt, I figured. I wasn’t certain of my beliefs, but I’d been raised with ideas of reincarnation which never completely left me, haunting my mind when I thought of death. Always the dread. I never thought that a better life awaited on the other side, like perhaps a hawk free and flying. No. Always a frog in the swamp eating flies or a mole digging, hiding, feasting on worms.

I had to alter the karmic debt exchange rate. Maybe a stroke for every hybrid? Just the thought of punishing myself less when more was so obviously necessary added guilt like stones to my slow death by pressing.

Tears dripped. Sweat dripped.

And blood.

#

The next day, I called off sick. Fatigue and guilt constrained me to the bed and I could not rise.

The following day, I returned with my mask of normalcy, of competency, and time slid by. Violet avoided me, which was good, and the next two weeks were a blur of rote labor and evenings of artful cuts.

Sasha invited me out for tea one Saturday. The count of my sisters born had grown to over 200, but I needed to spend time with Sasha, who carried three hybrids in her womb.

Tibet-themed, the teahouse walls were lined with pine shelves and an endless leaf selection in clear, corked apothecary jars. A black firestove in the center radiated warmth on this cold autumn day.

Sasha’s baby bump had grown, and she grunted as she wedged herself into the cushioned bench. I sat beside her. A porcelain teapot patterned in blue and white steamed at the center of our little table. Sasha had ordered a plate of hot momos, dumplings, that she kept to herself. She ate daintily but steadily.

“Three of them are mine,” I began.

She raised her eyebrows in a question, probably thinking I meant the momos.

“731a, b, and c,” I clarified.

Her mouth formed an “O” as understanding dawned.

“Sabella, Wera, and Laleh.” My light smile faded. “I’m not allowed in the hibernation chamber. Not anymore.”

Sasha whispered, “Those are beautiful names.”

“All Persian names. Our ancestry.”

“Your babies.”

“They’re my sisters, my little sisters.”

Sasha smiled. “Of course.” She looked down into her tea, and her timbre went dark. “And now you can’t see them anymore.”

“No. Would you—”

“I would be happy to. I’ll be their nanny. I was wondering why you were in there so often. It makes sense now.”

I pointed to her belly. “Did you name them?”

Sasha nodded. “I have two boys and a girl. Vova, Konstantin, Katerina.”

I had hoped Sasha would understand, and she did, instantly. Now it felt like we were sisters. Sisters, sharing tea and secrets. I wanted to broach a difficult topic, but I hesitated, not wanting to damage our new bond. “You know what will happen to your babies, right?” I quietly asked.

“I see that every day. The wounds, the scars.”

A silence stretched, a long one.

“They fight them,” I blurted. “For fun. I saw the video.”

Sasha’s eyes did not rise from her tea. “I heard about that.”

“Did you see?”

“No. I couldn’t.”

“I shouldn’t have looked. It’s made me a wreck.”

Another silence. Sasha’s fingertips lost color gripping her teacup. After a moment, Sasha released her tight grasp on the tea, took the teapot, and warmed our cups. “There is no place for them but inside me,” she said, her voice small. Rubbing her belly briefly and lovingly, she continued, “Here, they understand, the warmth of the womb. But once they’re born, it’s all confusion, all chaos both within and without. Their instincts, their genetic memory is mismatched with their bodies. There’s no hardwired kinship with the faces they see. It’s all wrong.”

I shook my head. “It must be hell.”

“But here,” her hand stroked her belly once more, “their eyes are closed, they feel warmth and comfort, the heartbeats of their siblings and their mother. Here is peace.”

“It’s sad they have to wake up.”

Sasha’s expression darkened. “The ranch. Then cages. Then a 10-year sleep. And their end is awakening to medical testing, then being put down, then dissection.” She sipped again, closing her eyes for a pause and a breath. “You have access to the hibernation drugs.”

I didn’t understand. My face crinkled.

Sasha whispered, “I need to abort.”

“What do you need me for? You can go—”

“No, I can’t. I’m on the surrogate list. It’s published. My babies are property of Meskhenet. No doctor will do it. So I got the drugs, black-market. But…it’s pretty late. I need help.”

I would steal whatever necessary to help Sasha and spare her hybrid babies suffering.

#

I entered Sasha’s apartment at the appointed evening with the key she’d loaned me. The sweet smoke stung my nostrils, which reminded me of the filter. I fitted it securely, checking that the edges sealed about my face.

The dying rays of the day radiated weakly through drawn curtains and a haze of smoke lingered in Sasha’s living room. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. Sasha reclined on the sofa covered in sheets and blankets. Propped by several pillows she smiled as she exhaled again from the opium pipe. I sat on the coffee table to be close to her.

Sasha took my hand. “Sing with me,” she said, words slurred and slow. She must have been smoking for a while before I arrived. She stroked her belly and sang the final lullaby. I didn’t know Russian, but I knew the melody, so I hummed. She grunted and grimaced as a contraction quaked her body.

“Is that the first one?” I asked.

“No. Over an hour ago.”

“You didn’t tell me, I could have—”

“It’s fine,” Sasha waved at me like it was no big deal.

That was the opium talking. Terminating her pregnancy in her apartment was a big deal. She’d taken the pills she ordered on the dark web hours earlier. The opium was to make it easier on her babies. They were three months along, equivalent of six with their doubled growth rate.

Before we hatched the plan, we had gone over the Meskhenet contract carefully. There were steep fines for endangering the pregnancy, for terminating the pregnancy. She considered it a small sacrifice to save her babies from suffering on the ranch.

Against my advice, Sasha took a two more hits from the pipe. Her eyes glazed and her small, relaxed smile only broke for the next contraction.

Another hour and the contractions were spaced by only four minutes. A stolen syringe I pulled from my purse, filled with Thermosilas-V, the first drug in the hibernation process. We had figured a single CC would be enough to bring her to a comfortable unconsciousness. Sasha nodded.

I looped and tightened a latex band above her elbow. I tapped her median cubital vein at the crook of her arm. Unnecessary, since the blue channel contrasted quite well with her alabaster skin. I removed the needle cap and paused. Our eyes met. “Thank you,” she said. There was no hesitation: The needle penetrated the vein, and I slowly pushed the plunger carefully and watched the tiny bit of gold liquid invade her vein.

Sasha’s eyes went wide, then shrank to slits as a blissful sigh escaped her lips. She didn’t want to see her babies.

Now the difficult, lonely part. I wished to smoke the opium, but no. The filter stayed on. I would not let her down. Would not let her babies down.

The abortion drugs and nature did their work. Contractions continued and the first baby crowned silently and without trouble. Blood and fluids were minimal. These were preemies, a bit longer than my hand. With two sterilized clamps, scissors, and a bit of gauze to catch and staunch blood, I cut the cord. The baby’s eyes were closed and as I held her, she didn’t move. Was she even breathing? I placed an ear to her mouth. The faintest of breath. It could have been air circulating in the room. The needle came out again. I could not think of her as a lab specimen. But I must not think of her as human infant, either.

The urge to cut my skin swam and clawed through the ooze in the depths of my chest, also wanting birth.

Not now. Wait.

I overdosed the newborn.

Two more times I repeated the procedure. Each lifeless infant hybrid I placed in the same black garbage bag.

As I cleaned up sleeping Sasha, I checked her heartbeat, making sure she was okay. Her heart thumped erratically. Shit, shit, shit…what had we done wrong? We’d checked for drug interactions. We had been so thorough in planning. In execution.

Too much opium?

I couldn’t panic. I couldn’t chance her dying, either. I ordered her apartment to call a 911 medical emergency.

A few minutes the sirens came singing from maybe a mile away. I took the trash bag down the steps to my car trunk. I pulled over to across the street where I could observe.

The flashing lights of the ambulance illuminated the work on the fourth mandala on my left thigh in reds and blues.

#

Every grand human endeavor involved sacrifice. In the old days of rockets, people strapped themselves in a capsule and a sustained explosion powered them heavenward. Sometimes, people had died. I felt no sorrow for them. They knew the risks. They had volunteered. It was the dogs and monkeys that had no desire to leave earth. Somewhere, memorials stand for these involuntary explorers. But these stone and bronze statues don’t matter one bit to today’s generation of dogs and monkeys.

In the hospital, Sasha recovered in good spirits. Her mission had been accomplished: Her lullaby of opium had sung her babies to sleep. And I had saved her. She knew the risks; she’d gambled and won.

And lost. Meskhenet fined Sasha and sent word to Xaman-Ek about their employee’s destruction of company property and breach of contract. Violet fired her.

I hadn’t been as stealthy in the theft of the vial of Thermosilas-V as I thought. Violet had invited me to her office and had security escort me out. She couldn’t meet my eyes. I’d never seen her so sad.

Sasha lamented, “No one’s watching your sisters now?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do. I wanted to sabotage their pods so they die in their sleep, but now…”

She nodded. “Maybe there’s a way.”

It’s nice to speak of hope even where there was none.

I changed the subject. We chatted for a long while. It was good to see her glowing again now that she was no longer pregnant. With pecks on cheeks, we said our goodbyes.

To date, there were 321 hybrids matured from the fetal stage with my DNA. I finally looked at more of the data. Not just for hibernation experiments. I shivered as I walked back to my car.

As soon as I closed my apartment door behind me, I dropped my purse and slipped off my maroon sweater dress, allowing it to pool on the floor. The full-length mirror in the bedroom revealed the galaxy of mandalas: most in white scar tissue and the more recent works in rings of scabs. Circles within circles overlapping circles in patterns floral and flame.

I was ugly.

I was beautiful.

I was both, like humanity. Like the universe.

Space. I needed space for more. My neck, hands and feet were out-of-bounds. There. The insides of my upper arms. Maybe a mirror would help in the development of the latest mandala.

I fetched the small standing mirror from the bedroom vanity and sat it on the kitchen table, blade close to skin, mentally sketching the first lines.

I paused.

Would it bring relief? Would the punishment be fair? The karmic debt paid?

No. No to all.

I sat the blade down. The relief had been always temporary. The punishment never balanced. The karmic debt impossible to pay.

Seeing Sasha lowered down the apartment porch steps alive had brought me relief.

And peace.

I was determined to bring my sisters peace.

The blade would do them no good.