Regulators, p.12
Regulators, page 12
She laughed. “You’ll see.” She then walked into my bathroom and shut herself inside with the fabric she’d brought from her room.
I spent several minutes just standing there, doing nothing more than waiting. I didn’t know what else to do. I could almost swear that I heard shouting downstairs, but I couldn’t make it out. The boys, apparently, were not taking the information quite as well as I had. I’d had a difficult enough time with it, but I hadn’t shouted. I might have, if I’d been able to, but all I’d been able to do was just sit there.
Most of the time Paige spent in the bathroom, I spent trying not to think about what I now knew. It was all pretty damn horrifying. The rest of that time was spent talking myself out of opening the door to my bedroom, to potentially hear what was being said and how it was being taken. It was when really thinking about what I now knew that made me stay right where I was and be glad for it. I didn’t want to hear it again.
I was so glad I hadn’t stayed down there. It seemed easier to think that where I was opposed to where I had been, for some reason.
“Holy sh—” I heard myself say when Paige stepped out.
She was a very small female, but she had a shape to her that was concealed by both the uniform and the dress she’d been wearing the day before. Even the nightclothes, which hadn’t been much of anything.
“Fantastic,” she said in relief. “Your reaction is precisely what I was going for. Put yours on.”
I picked it up and looked at it. “I don’t . . .” I shook my head and asked, “Which way does it go?”
“This is the front of the bottom,” she said, pointing. “That’s the back.” They didn’t look so different to me. “I’m sure you can tell the difference between the two for the top.”
I almost began tugging my clothes off as I had the day before in the garage, but there was a different feeling about it. I assumed a lot of that had to do with bodies and . . . things. Knowing what could be done with them and what they could do.
“I saw it yesterday,” she reminded me nonchalantly. “It’s not a big deal. I’ve got the same parts.”
That was all true.
I was determined to feel as normal as I possibly could, so I began stripping down. Still, she turned her back to me despite having seen it yesterday and having the same parts. The fabric seemed to . . . stick to me once I had it on. It was so weird, but I had to admit that—all the exposed skin aside—it was more comfortable than the shorts I’d been wearing the day before. Somehow. At least where physical comfort was concerned.
“I am definitely going to fall out of this,” I said in disbelief, staring down at myself. I’d worried about the tanktop, but this?
“Holy shit,” she said the instant she’d turned. “Fantastic. Let’s get a look at ourselves before we go downstairs.”
“Why?” I asked warily. I didn’t know that I wanted to see it and I certainly did not want to go downstairs like this.
“For knowledge.” It didn’t make any sense at all until she added, “So we can see what it is before seeing what sort of effect it has on the boys. All knowledge is good. Even bad knowledge can be used for good things.”
Regardless of having no idea what she meant, I stepped over to the mirror with her.
She shook her head a little, looking at my reflection in the mirror before she said, “They removed your hair too, didn’t they? On your legs and . . . stuff?”
I nodded. “A while back, yeah.”
She brought her right wrist up to her mouth and said, “Laugh it up, you bastards.” Then she looked at me. “I’ll get us both towels.”
Seb took one look at us over his shoulder when we walked downstairs, put his face back into his hands and asked, “Are you serious?”
“What?” Paige asked innocently. “We’re going people-watching at the beach. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing? Learning?”
“Right now?” Seb was still speaking into his hands. “You come down here like that right after I have the conversation I just had with them? I expected more from you, Paige.”
That stung a bit. It likely would’ve stung more than a bit if I wasn’t so horrified. I was the one who hadn’t even wanted to.
She shrugged. “Might as well get it out of the way.” She then proceeded to walk over to the table—while not covering herself with the towel she’d retrieved—and turn herself around in a circle, saying, “Get a good look, boys. Get it out of the way now.”
Perhaps Brent and Garret had taken the information better than I had, given that they were both smiling at her.
Seb was still speaking into his hands when he said, “I swear to god, Paige.”
“You should probably get a good look at Jaycee,” Paige said, almost apologetically.
Seb glared at her. I could see it clearly on the side of his face.
She asked, “What? You should. How are we supposed to do any watching when everybody’s too busy staring at everybody else?”
“I don’t need to watch,” Seb shot at her.
“So it’s all right if you’re staring at her instead.” Paige bit down on her bottom lip.
Car accident. This was what I’d imagined a car accident was like yesterday—piling up of one thing, leading to another thing, to another thing. Progressively getting worse as it went along.
Brent laughed. “You did say you were going to keep two eyes on her.”
“I thought this was supposed to be natural?” Garret laughed as well. “Jaycee, if you’re wondering, apparently Seb over here wants to do—” He trailed off for a moment, staring up at the ceiling to ask, “Is it do or have?
“Have,” Paige told him impatiently. “It is have sex, Garret.”
“I like do better,” he told her. “It makes more sense. Anyway. Jaycee, if you were wondering, Seb wants to do—”
“I swear to god, Garret, if you finish that sentence,” Seb warned him. I didn’t know what he was warning, but he was certainly warning something.
“It’s not my fault you want to do sex with her,” Garret said in disbelief. “I’d say that’s your fault, or hers, or maybe both, or maybe neither.”
Garret had only just finished speaking when Seb grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and dragged him from the room.
“Understand something,” I heard Seb say to him.
I tilted my head to hear more clearly, concerned he would know if I moved more than that and speak quietly enough that I couldn’t hear.
“There is a very large difference between being physically attracted to a person and wanting to have sex with them. You should figure that out sooner rather than later.”
“Did you hear that, Jaycee‽” Garret shouted at me.
There was the sound of more dragging.
I stood there with wide eyes, listening to Brent and Paige taking turns laughing under their breath.
Seb came back about thirty seconds later with blood on his hand. “Give me your arm.” He extended his bloody right hand in the space between us.
I gave him my arm.
As soon as he’d removed my com and then his own, he pulled me from the room by my arm. It wasn’t necessarily dragging, but it was sort of close because my feet didn’t want to move. It was probably nothing to him. When we’d turned the corner, continued walking, and had a wall and quite a lot of space separating us from the table, he said, “Let’s get this over with.”
He pulled his shirt over his head and held his arms out. He spun in a circle, and when he was facing me again, he just stared at me. What was the look on his face? Expectancy? What did he expect from me?
Then I realized . . .
“You want to . . . look at me?” I asked in disbelief.
And I thought, for just a second, that he was almost laughing when he answered with, “Yes.”
Though I hadn’t given my hand permission to, it dropped the towel I was cradling in front of me for concealment.
It was when I was almost done turning around that he said, “This is not working.”
“I could’ve told you that,” I told him apologetically when I was facing him again. I’d already spent too much time thinking about what I’d seen of him yesterday since finding out what I had. It had been part of what kept me awake.
He had a scar on his abdomen. I’d seen enough pictures of wounds and what they looked like to know he’d been stabbed. By another Gen, if the look and size of it was any indication. I’d noticed it yesterday, among the many others he had. I was absentmindedly reaching out for it—wondering what it felt like—when his body stiffened and moved away.
“I’ll—” His eyes widened. “I’ll be back.”
And then he ran up the stairs, away from me.
“Well,” Paige said almost immediately after, just before Seb disappeared from sight. “Now we know what Jaycee in a bikini can do. Learning, knowledge, all that stuff.”
“What?” Brent laughed. “That it can send a Gen running off?”
Garret had been watching the scene from a ways off. He had blood on his face when he walked over, just a bit of it. He seemed quite unfazed by it when he looked down me and then back up to say, “I think it’s your chest, Jaycee.”
It felt like the skin on my back was crawling. I’d never felt it before. The only thing I could say was, “I’m extremely uncomfortable.”
Garret bent over and picked up the towel by my feet. His face scrunched a little when he extended it to me. “You can’t help what you’ve got.”
“You guys should go find some swim trunks,” Paige said. “We’ll look around for some sunscreen and the like.”
“We’re going to the beach too?” Brent asked her excitedly. “I saw it when I looked out my window earlier.”
“Of course,” Paige told him. “Go on. If you’re confused about what swim trunks are, bring them to me and I’ll tell you if they are or not. They look like shorts. Or like longish-underwear.”
“Right.” Garret nodded.
The two of them began filing off up the stairs, and Paige shouted after them.
“Don’t forget towels!”
All I was doing was staring off at nothing in front of me, thinking about Gens. He would probably rather get stabbed in the stomach again than look at me in a bathing suit. Bikini. Whatever. What was the difference? Why did the same things keep having multiple names? What did it matter? I doubted he’d run away from someone with a weapon, but he’d certainly ran away.
He’d run off. From looking at me.
“It’s all right,” Paige said quietly, patting a few times on my arm over the towel I was holding again.
“I must look horrible,” I said just as quietly, shaking my head. I’d never even thought about how I looked before, not like this.
“You don’t,” she told me assuredly. “We’re just . . . We just have some adjusting to do, is all. It’ll take a little while to figure out how to deal with all this.”
“Why are they doing this to us?” I whispered desperately to her.
“Maybe it has something to do with being normal,” she said with an uncomfortable shrug. “I don’t know. I have some ideas, but . . .” It seemed to pain her to say, “I’m hoping it’s that.”
I shook my head. “Why?”
She rubbed at her face. “The alternatives are worse.”
Chapter 10
Medicine
Seb didn’t look at me at all once he came back downstairs, nearly twenty minutes or so after running off. He just sat down on a sofa, appearing—for all intents and purposes—not to have a single problem in the world, but there was something about the way he was sitting. I didn’t know what it was, but it clearly told me that however he seemed to feel didn’t align with how he actually did feel, much like putting too much focus and thought into eating.
Paige and I had located sunscreen—which was a spray thing to prevent the sun from burning you—in his absence upstairs, and our sunglasses. It was more than a little worrisome—how much the sun could hurt you and all the ways it could.
Also during Seb’s absence upstairs, Garret had come down in underwear that Paige said were boxers. She then went with him to locate swim trunks while I tried to figure out how boxing was in any way relevant to them and vice versa. Paige seemed to be the only one who thought him wearing underwear downstairs was funny.
After giving up on the boxing and boxers mental dilemma, I’d gone next to the same wall where Seb had removed his shirt, which was still on the floor and had been replaced with another on his body, and I just stood there. I didn’t have my com and he hadn’t put it back on me when he returned. I didn’t know what else to do but stand and wait in a spot I thought he would go back to. I would’ve asked about my com, if I could’ve gotten my mouth to open to him.
It wouldn’t.
“Do I have to be Brent’s sister?” Paige asked when she and Garret were coming back downstairs. “I don’t want to be anybody’s sister. We could say that Jaycee and I are friends, which is true enough, and that Brent and Garret are friends. Brent can be your younger brother and Jaycee can be Garret’s older sister. Their hair is close enough to the same color. I don’t know how you think you fit where you put yourself, but I suppose that’s fine. Unless it’s not.”
“Why does she get to be older?” Garret demanded.
“Because her boobs make her look older than you,” Paige told him nonchalantly.
I supposed my chest was being spoken of again, but I didn’t know for sure.
“Can’t we be the same age?” he asked.
“And she acts older than you,” Paige told him with her nose somewhat in the air, which was strange. “You can only explain so much away with genetic flukes.”
Genetic flukes.
“That will only work if Garret can keep himself from staring at her,” Seb said, standing up from a sofa and walking over to Garret to remove his com. He also had on a pair of those swim trunks and his new shirt exposed every bit of his arms.
I liked it very much, for some reason. I just barely heard the com click to release itself before Seb moved on to Paige and added, “I don’t know that any of you being related will work out.”
“You can’t look at your sister?” Garret asked in confusion.
Seb stopped moving and looked over at him to very firmly say, “No.”
“All right,” Garret said. “I saw her earlier. I’ve got it in here.” He tapped on his head a few times.
Again Seb stopped moving and just stared at him. I noticed that he had a very large scar on the back of his right arm and what I could see of his shoulder. It looked like . . . a burn of some sort.
“What?” Garret held his hands in the air. “Does someone need your permission to look at her? Do you own all mental pictures of her?” He shook his head. “I don’t know what you think you could do about that.”
Paige was gnawing on her bottom lip until Seb moved on to Brent, who was standing next to me, without responding at all. I didn’t know if Garret was provoking him because he wanted to get hit in the face again, or if he really was just that stupid. As soon as Seb’s back was to Paige, she smiled hugely at me, which made no sense.
Nothing seemed very funny to me, and it felt like I was being singled out. That didn’t happen often, only occasionally with some of our instructors. I learned at a young age that I didn’t care for the feeling of it and had ensured I was passable enough to prevent it from happening as much as I was able. Sometimes they did it anyway no matter how passable you were.
Brent had been standing relatively close to me during Paige and Garret’s absence. I thought it might’ve had something to do with Seb’s mood and feeling more comfortable together. When Seb stepped over to remove Brent’s com, he didn’t look at me. Not even a glance. That would’ve been fine and nothing more or less than what could be expected, but his behavior about and with me was more than a little unsettling. As soon as he’d finished, Brent went to join the other two and Seb turned away as well.
“Are you angry with me?” I whispered. Maybe he didn’t like getting singled out either, and he was. Maybe he blamed them singling him out on me, because it kept having to do with me. Kelsey had gotten angry with me several times throughout the years. I really didn’t like that either.
Seb stopped and glanced over his shoulder at me to say, “No.”
I nodded because that was good enough and told me I at least hadn’t unknowingly done something wrong. He walked away somewhere, and when he came back shortly after, I followed him to the others. I stayed quite a lot farther behind him than I had in the garage yesterday. I didn’t want to run into him again, for so many reasons. But I watched him as he walked. He held himself straight like we all did, but his body was shaped so much differently than the other two boys. I wondered if all Gens were so spectacular-looking under their uniforms.
Probably. I’d never known they would be. I’d never contemplated it past curiosity. A different sort of curiosity than I was currently feeling. Before, it had been a complete unknown, sort of like wondering if they’d somehow had an ability to smile taken from them via altering genetic code. Now I knew . . .
He looked spectacular out of uniform. Sort of like Brent and Garret speaking on the lines that made up vehicles. I hadn’t been impressed by those.
They probably all had such spectacular lines beneath their uniforms.
The scientists didn’t really care what the Gens looked like, only what their bodies could do. I supposed what they looked like was a side effect of that. And no matter how spectacular-looking it was . . . it was also sad.
“What is that?” Brent asked as we stepped through the large glass door, all of us wearing our sunglasses. He gestured to a very large pit of water that looked like it had been built into the ground.
I had no idea what purpose it could serve. I thought maybe for drinking water despite there being better means, but there was an odd smell coming from it. Odd enough that I certainly wouldn’t dr—
Was that why the water from the faucet hadn’t tasted right? Was I not supposed to—
