The Breeders Read online

  “I’d still be sad,” she insists.

  “Maybe you would be. Or maybe the world would be sad without you. How’s that for an argument?”

  “I like arguments.”

  “Yes, Pix, I know you do. That’s why it’s impossible to get you to eat beets when we make them.”

  “Abraham can eat mine.” This makes Stuart smile. Then: “Daddy, do you think I’ll be a carrier when I grow up?”

  From the corner of her eye, she sees her dad grimace and turn toward the daffodils. He thinks he is hiding the reaction from her by turning away, but he isn’t. “Being a carrier can be sad,” he says. “You have to say goodbye to the babies you bring into the world. Once you’re a carrier, the NRO has a lot of control over you. Would you like that?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Grace jerks her head toward the snapdragons, her favorite flower. One of the tiny people had been peeking out of a flap on the petal; she will swear it to anyone who asks. “But Daddy?”

  “Yeah, Pix?”

  “What would happen if the NRO sent me to the Sanctuary?”

  “They won’t send you to the Sanctuary, honey.”

  “But what if they do?” There, another tiny person, climbing up the rope on her garden swing! It had to be! She was close to seeing it this time. And they might very well so send her to the Sanctuary. Her dad is just making light of her question. Everyone knows girls are always at risk of being sent away. That’s just how things are.

  “If they took you to the Sanctuary, I’d come and find you and we’d fly back home on a penguin!” Stuart says, making the kind of joke a parent makes when the conversation becomes uncomfortably serious. He thinks Grace doesn’t know why he did that, but she does. It is because her questions scare him.

  They scare him.

  CHAPTER 9 (HER)

  THE LIGHT FROM THE OPEN CAB DOOR made Salt and Pepper’s eyes more visible: grayish blue with a spark of kindness. He closed the door, and his face turned black against the street lights. Grace’s pulse quickened, but not out of fear. It was just unexpected, even though she had been ordering mocktails at Sterile Me Susan’s every night for the past two weeks. Here he was now, in the flesh: all her imagined, hypothetical scenarios made real. Either he was too drunk to ask why she had just broken down into tears, or he was too polite.

  “I’m Dex, by the way.”

  Grace turned and caught his eye, hoping the blush on her face was invisible in the darkness. “Thanks. I never quite caught your name.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, we were a little busy last time, weren’t we?”

  Dex drummed his fingers on his knee, staring downward, looking shy. He was older than Grace, a very fit late thirties. Attractive though, in a gentle way most men lacked, except perhaps for her own dad.

  “Wayzata,” she told the driver. “Ferndale Woods Road.”

  They left the city.

  WAYZATA WAS ONE OF THE LAST suburbs of Minneapolis to have maintained the natural landscape that had borne it. It was also one of the oldest “upscale” areas in the Twin Cities region, having been home to some of the most prominent businessmen in the region’s history as far back as the 1900s. As doctors, Stuart and James Jarvis were on the lower crust of Wayzata’s social ladder, but they were still on the upper crust of luck. James’s father, trained as a nutritional geneticist, had also pioneered a startup venture called DoMe Clinic, which provided safe, simple, and one-time gene modification sessions that would increase the body’s ability to regenerate muscle tissue, ensuring men a simplified path to physical perfection. The business had earned him nearly half a billion dollars.

  The home his money had afforded the Jarvis family was a perfect throwback to the olden days, before survivors of the Bio Wars had sought refuge in the Midwest and forced an unprecedented amount of suburban sprawl to be constructed. The mansion’s cobblestone driveway stretched through a grove of maple trees, then looped back in a circle, ringing around an aging fountain depicting a nude Zeus. His phallus pointed outward in erect sexual reverence, and Grace would never forget the sparkle that had lit her Grandpa Jarvis’s eyes every time he passed the statue. “My favorite sculpture,” he always said. “His member looks just like the one your Grandfather Soren had, God rest his soul.”

  Grace had always smiled widely, loving Zeus’s penis, too, solely because it made her one living grandparent so happy.

  Men. All they think about is sex, she thought now. I wonder if Dex is the same.

  The cab driver whistled and leaned forward, peering out the window with a jealous glower. “Nice place you got here, sister. Funny how someone like you can still have it so good.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you I live in the guest house,” Grace replied, leaning toward the wraithlike fag, who for some reason smelled like pork. “You can just drive around past the front door, then drop us off by that smaller driveway around back.”

  “How about you get out right here?” the driver sneered.

  Dex opened his door and gestured for Grace to do the same. Following his lead, she climbed out and shut her side of the cab. Dex leaned down, into the driver’s face. “How about we don’t pay you?” he yelled, then slammed his door. When the taxi sped away, he turned to Grace and laughed. “I don’t have a lot of patience for people like that anymore.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  Risk it, she thought. Feel him out. See if telling him will do any good.

  TWO HOURS LATER, Grace wondered how it was possible they were still talking. Dex Wheelock, mysterious and beautiful, had suggested after a quick tour and a round of small talk that they make tea. Herbal, so as not to upset their eventual sleep. There, at her kitchen table, he grew sober, looking more and more comfortable in the transition. Dex’s smile had different forms, but it was always there. Drunk, he could not hold back an edgy brand of silliness: jokes about hetero bars, fleeting over-dramatic swooshes of his thick eyelashes, fingers dancing like ballerinas on the granite tabletop. Sober, his gentleness remained, though it was underscored by something serious. Loneliness, perhaps? Soon, Grace had the skinny on his life. Born to two lesbians, he had been self-outed as a failsafe at fifteen, had lost his best friend to a hate crime eight years later, and still had one mother who wished he had been engineered normally, even after thirty-seven years.

  Only nine years my senior, Grace thought. Not yet old enough to make this creepy.

  Dex was also a camera operator for Twin Cities Com and usually worked from ten in the morning until seven at night, for the noon and early-evening newscasts. He liked chocolate macadamia nut cookies; they were a rare indulgence. He had once posed in an underwear commercial without having to scan his TruthChip and thereby divulge his sexual orientation, only to be removed from the ad once an acquaintance from the newsroom saw it and ratted him out to the marketing agency in charge. He enjoyed exercise and being physically fit, and not just for the usual reasons of vanity instilled in their culture by the New Rainbow Order. It gave him a sense of peace in a world that often felt like a giant maze of sameness.

  “Work, exercise, women—wash, rinse, repeat,” he said.

  Hmmm.

  Grace told him about herself: the social development work with Obesaland, her teenage weight problem, her politically polarized fathers, and the recent attack in front of Pommie’s Pub. Her privileged life had still managed to hand her lemons, and now she was trying to make lemonade. Dex chuckled at the ancient cliché. For the second time that night, his laughter made Grace nervous. Her imminent revelation was about to make him the victim. If he was wise, he would then run as far away from her as possible. Wash, rinse, repeat.

  “I’m a genetic mistake, and you got me pregnant.” The words were desperate, stuck in her throat. To utter them now would mean giving up the comfort growing between them. “Sorry, I can’t get involved,” he’d say. “If the Bio Police find out, they’ll take you, and they’ll take me too. I can’t risk throwing my life aw
ay.”

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Grace Jarvis.”

  She blinked, covering for the spark that jumped to life in her heart.

  “You’re just saying that because you want to screw me again.”

  Dex smiled. “I’d be a lucky man to have you twice. I’ll keep that ball in your court. I’ve been going through some stuff lately anyway, so it might not be smart.”

  Oh, really?

  The story of Diana Kring came out suddenly and left Grace in shock: a girlfriend who had disappeared, a mysterious bleeding episode witnessed by others, a cold trail left to the caverns of speculation. The woman had bled, then disappeared from society without a trace. Nobody but Dex and her father seemed to care.

  “I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. I shouldn’t be putting you in this position.” Dex placed a slab of cheese on a cracker and put it into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed. “I mean, either the Bio Police took her, or she disappeared on her own. I just don’t know. I keep thinking, though, that if Diana was some sort of genetic mistake and the Bio Police got her, they’d have come for me, too. And with a lot of her clothes and stuff being gone, it makes me think she did leave on her own, you know? Maybe to get an underground abortion or something, before anybody found out she was a genetic mistake. If that’s even what the bleeding was. I’m hoping Fletch’s friend might have a clue, if she ever returns his calls. God, you must think I’m insane.”

  Grace could only shake her head no; she was too frightened to speak.

  Dex seemed to take the gesture as sympathy. He ate another cracker, then buried his shimmering eyes in the heels of his hands and rubbed outward, leaving his forehead red. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I don’t really have a lot of people to talk to.”

  Confusion and dread had replaced Grace’s guilt over having lured this man into her life. Dex Wheelock, whom she had remembered for the past two months only as Salt and Pepper, had just become inextricably woven into the fabric of her life. With her next words, Grace tied the final, frightening knot. “If I tell you something, do you promise to keep it to yourself?”

  Dex nodded, and Grace spoke.

  CHAPTER 10 (HIM)

  THIS WAS NEVER supposed to be my context. I was never supposed to create life.

  Dex was on the train back into the city, purposefully a different one than Grace would be riding to work in half an hour. They had spent the night together but not slept, ultimately agreeing on something simple but obvious: they needed a game plan before moving forward together publicly, if they were going to do it at all. The options were all horrible, and at one point in the night silence of Grace’s bed, she had whispered something terrifying: “I just don’t think I can bring myself to kill it.”

  The irony was almost comical. Dex’s ability to create life was the very reason he was the way he was. Failsafes were nature’s backup, in case society crumbled and the survival of the species depended on old-fashioned breeding methods. If he had not been meant to create life, why was he sexually attracted to women at all? Why had his engineer even bothered to mix him this way, when his mothers had asked for a random surprise?

  NRO quota orders, Dex thought. Even the government knew its plan had inherent pitfalls.

  Now, Grace Jarvis was almost nine weeks pregnant, and he was a father. A father.

  It left him at a toilsome crossroads. There was no way around it. He was half responsible for putting both their lives in danger, but he also now had to choose either to support whatever decision Grace made about the life growing inside her or to disappear and save his own skin. She had promised not to expose him if he decided to run, but what kind of man would do that? A weak one, surely. Was he weak?

  It might not matter what I think if the Queen has his way, Dex thought. He already has enough military power to back his agenda.

  Furthermore, if government officials really were killing off people at the Antarctic Sanctuary instead of offering them a chance to exist as old-fashioned breeders, fighting the system was not just the noble option but also the smart one. In a way, it was the perfect time to fight, because people might finally be scared enough of the New Rainbow Order to start an uprising. At worst, they would be captured and possibly face persecution or death. At best, they could hide, maybe even retreat to the Unrecoverable Territories and hope to survive in the wild.

  And there was another angle to all this, one that sent Dex into the clouds. Who was that little human being growing inside Grace? It was quite literally the result of something as simple and pointless as an orgasm. The very implications of it were astounding: they, Dex and Grace, really were like every other animal after all. It was comforting somehow. For all humanity’s collective intellect, there existed a primal beauty in life still untouchable by power and suppression.

  What would this baby look like? When would it take its first steps? Experience its first kiss? Would it ever fall in love?

  The thoughts brought tears to Dex’s eyes, there on the train, as he approached the towering, rainbow-tinted buildings of downtown Minneapolis. If there was going to be any hope for this child, if they really wanted to do the brave thing and fight, Grace needed to find a way to hide. Or disappear. Which led to one final question: Would he have the courage to follow?

  CHAPTER 11 (HER)

  AT FAMILY DINNER the following Sunday, James Jarvis cornered his daughter in the kitchen as she was shucking fresh corn from their communal greenhouse.

  “You’ve been avoiding the house, Grace. Hasn’t your rectal bleeding stopped by now?”

  Grace closed her eyes, pasted nonchalance onto her face, then turned to her father. “Sort of. Dad didn’t tell you the details of the appointment, did he? That would just be embarrassing.”

  “He could have set you up with Dr. Spriggs.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near a lesbian I barely know. At least I can trust Dad.”

  James reached around her, coming closer than was necessary. She heard him breathe in as he did so, as if he were trying to sniff out a lie. “That makes one of us, at least.”

  The kitchen’s cool air danced on Grace’s heated, damp palms.

  Goddamnit.

  “One of us? What do you mean?”

  James sighed in an overly dramatic manner as he dumped the corn cobs into the kettle. He pretended to loosen the top of his dark magenta turtleneck. “You know, I would think it ill if your dad were to have examined you for one real reason and disclosed to me something completely different.”

  Play dumb. Just play dumb!

  But Grace’s voice cracked as she spoke. “What? What do you mean?”

  “You know very well what I mean, Grace.”

  “Anal fissures? Father, I really don’t want to be talking about this, especially with Lars in the next room. It was embarrassing enough having him witness that and know what I was doing with my . . . boyfriend.” To her credit, her nervousness looked identical to embarrassment, and her face complied with an appropriate blush. But this was close. Too close.

  James nodded with a tight, unconvinced smile, then delicately lifted his wine glass and sipped. “Boyfriend? Was this the gray-haired man I saw sneaking out of the guest house on Thursday morning?”

  “Sneaking? He wasn’t sneaking. He had to get back to the city. He works for Twin Cities Com.”

  “And he walked to the train, did he?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did. He had a lot of things to think about.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s really none of your business, but he felt horrible for having hurt me with his huge…talent.” As straight-laced as James Jarvis was, he was just like any other fag. His concentration would quiver at the mention of a large penis.

  The bluntness in her lie seemed to catch him off guard. When his eyes cleared of their momentary lust, his entire face contorted with the type of shattered naiveté only a father could show for his daughter. Perhaps his image of Grace as a beautiful, laughing child did not mix well with the image of her
being stretched into the realm of anal sex.

  But James Jarvis’s guard never stayed down for long. He lowered his voice but spoke in the singsong way that implied stupidity on the part of his listener—his way of imposing intimidation. “Promise me one thing,” he said.

  “Okay. What?”

  James swirled his wine. “Promise me that if your bleeding two weeks ago was indeed what it looked like, not to mention the weight you’ve put on recently, which is unflattering I might add, you’ll do the right thing and find a way to get it taken care of. Or turn yourself in before someone does it for you. I’ll give you this one chance.”

  Grace’s defensive act flirted with terror, and for a moment, it almost faltered. Then, some primordial force helped her maintain it. It was a protective instinct she had never felt before. Her words came out solid, convincing, and angry.

  “If you would willingly destroy your own daughter’s life in favor of helping a humanity-hating dictator rise to power, you don’t deserve my company. The next time you deal a threat like that, it’ll be the last time you ever see me.”

  James turned back to the boiling corn cobs without a response.

  Grace suffered through Sunday dinner with her family, sure now the tradition would soon be ending. At one point, her father, as always sipping his wine like a curious snake, silently shook his head at her in arrogant disapproval.

  CHAPTER 12 (HIM)

  AT THE EXACT MOMENT Grace was standing up to her father with a lie, Dex was in downtown Minneapolis, readying holocamera B for recording that evening’s Twin Cities Com broadcast. He studied the two shirtless news anchors being misted down in front of the green screen. They were perfect: Adonis bodies, shallow grins, sex drives that were visible with every ripple of their muscles. They rarely made eye contact with Dex, and when they did, the message was clear: Either fuck me, or get the hell out of this world. Failsafes like you don’t belong.