“This woman’s name was Rena. Rena Malik.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he knew that name, knew her.
“That was her name,” I said softly. “Wasn’t it?”
It was a funny thing not to know about your own mother, but since my father and I didn’t talk about her, I’d never actually known her name.
“Rena,” my father said, like she was standing right there in the kitchen with us, an ever-present ghost.
“Rena Malik,” I said again. “I guess she never took your last name.”
“We weren’t married,” my father said absently.
“You weren’t?”
I don’t know why that surprised me, but I guess I’d always just assumed that they were. My father wasn’t the type of guy to have a kid out of wedlock.
“Kali, your mother and I weren’t … together.” My father chose his words very carefully. “She moved in with me after you were born, but the two of us were never … that is to say …”
If I hadn’t wanted to hear my father give a lecture on sexual selection, I certainly didn’t want to hear a play-by-play of my own conception, via a one-night stand.
“Where did you see her?” With that question, my father seemed to gain his composure—and an intensity that I hadn’t heard anything but academia bring out in him in a very long time.
“She didn’t see me.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d asked, but it wasn’t like I could tell him that I’d seen my mother in Paul Davis’s basement lab.
“Okay,” he said. “Good.”
“Good?” I repeated.
“Your mother,” he said. “Rena—she … she’s not the motherly type, Kali.”
“And you’re the fatherly type?” I asked him. He blanched.
“Fair enough,” he said after a moment. “I know I’m not perfect, but—your mother didn’t leave, Kali.”
Of all the words he might have said, those were the last ones I was expecting.
“What?”
She didn’t want us, and she left. That was what he’d told me for as long as I could remember.
“I left. I left her, and I took you with me.”
I tried to imagine a world in which my father would have volunteered to be a single parent. I tried to imagine what could possibly have compelled him to do a thing like that.
The tests. The secrets. The games.
It was all hovering right out of reach, my memory hazy and incomplete.
“What did she do?” I asked, my voice hoarse, my hands shaking.
My father turned, busying himself with something at the counter. “It was a long time ago, Kali.”
Can you say gun? a voice whispered from somewhere in my memory.
“What did she do to me?” I asked, my body running cold, my muscles hardening to stone.
Sit still, Kali. Sit so still.
Time for my shot.
A possibility occurred to me, one I should have thought of much, much sooner. One that made sense of the splinters I’d seen of my own past, one that answered every question I’d ever had about why I was the way I was.
Maybe they’d made me that way.
I’d spent my entire life thinking that maybe my mother was like me, that maybe my condition was hereditary, but what if it wasn’t?
My father was a scientist.
My mother worked for Chimera.
Chimera specialized in making monsters.
Something snapped inside of me, and I walked over to the counter and opened the knife drawer. I pulled out a cutting knife, the largest of a set of five. I turned calmly back to my father. His brow wrinkled, and he realized what I was going to do a second before I did it.
He reached out to grab my hand, and I threw him off—threw him too hard, and he skidded across the floor, eyes wide. I took a step forward and brought the knife to my arm.
Slice, slice, slice.
Steel slid into my flesh. Blood welled up on the surface of my skin. I’d cut myself long and deep, and from his spot on the floor, my father made a choking, strangled sound.
I threw the knife down. With my right hand, I wiped the blood off my left. It smeared, and I turned to the sink and turned on the water. Mechanically, I washed off the cut.
I held my arm up, and my father watched in sick fascination as the skin began knitting itself back together.
“Am I even your daughter?” I asked. Maybe they’d just found me somewhere. Maybe I’d been their specimen, the way Zev was Chimera’s.
“Yes,” my father said, his voice shaking. “You’re my daughter. And Rena’s.”
There were words then, so many words, coming out of my father’s mouth. He’d been a junior professor. Rena had been a graduate student. She’d come to him with a mysterious blood sample.