“Right,” I said, and looked around the dingy little room, feeling in my bones the actual smallness of it. I wondered exactly how long we would be stuck here.
* * *
We’d come unstitched from time. The room was a couple of hundred square feet, with one big bed that had been ruined by bloodstains, a bureau that held a small TV set. A mirror made the space look bigger, as though tucked inside a too-small birdcage. The four of us began an uneasy dance, trying to share space without complaining.
Cate was sick after she woke up—drowsy, glassy-skinned, shivering. Tom bought her Gatorade, and she drank down the lukewarm neon-yellow without comment as I propped her head in my lap, her hair tickling my skin. Slowly, over the next day, she perked up more, gaining some color, her eyes losing their dullness. I was relieved; the glow of wild vitality I’d felt after she saved me had started to seem stolen, like I’d drained her energy for myself.
We ended up in the bathroom together one evening, as I stood brushing my teeth.
I leaned over to delicately spit out the toothpaste, very aware of Cate’s reflection behind me as she pulled her hair into a bun, fingers working deftly. “Thank you,” I said impulsively, mouth stinging with mint. In the mirror, Cate stiffened. “I know that’s not enough, I mean, it feels so stupid to even say it like that. But thanks for saving my life and everything.”
“You’re welcome and everything,” Cate said.
We smiled, and I felt shy, everything zinging inside me. Cate brushed past me to get her own toothbrush, and my heartbeat quickened. “I didn’t know you could even do that,” I said. “Bring somebody back to life.”
“I didn’t know either.” She was trying to sound casual.
“Really?” I watched her squeeze a curl of green toothpaste onto the bristles. “You’d never—that was your—”
“My first time. Yeah.” Cate was looking at the toothbrush as if she’d forgotten what she was doing with it. “Yeah. I didn’t think it was possible. I’ve never done anything harder than a broken femur before. I didn’t think it was going to work until it did.”
“Holy shit.” If I hadn’t known how to thank her before, I never would now. The awareness of her sheer power filled this tiny space—the cracked tiles, the shell-pink shower curtain, the perpetually dripping tap—and I felt alive with it, like something integral had been split apart in Cate and placed inside me too, an unbreakable thread between us.
“Holy shit,” Cate repeated. “Being around you, it’s making me think about who I am. I guess your whole scientist thing is rubbing off on me. I have a theory.”
“All right.”
“Maybe it’s trauma connected to our mothers that triggers our abilities,” Cate said. “Loss, I guess. Grief. Fear. Think about it. I didn’t get mine until my mother died. Same for Emily, based on what Wanda told you. And Isabelle. You didn’t understand yours until your mother vanished, did you?”
“That’s true,” I said, thinking it over.
“Maybe we don’t have our powers when we’re with our mothers because our mothers are our powers. This is just a substitute.” She was silent for a moment. “Too romantic for you?”
“No,” I said. “No, I like it.” Something occurred to me, the shape of an idea rising at the back of my brain—I felt focused, like I was back in the lab, absorbing and recording the world around me. “One of the risks of parthenogenesis is that it makes communities more susceptible to threats, while sexual reproduction at least gives you some diversity. If there’s a—a sickness, or a common predator, offspring that are identical to their moms can’t always evolve past that threat. Maybe in our case, these powers are a correction. There’s something in human DNA that’s only triggered when women self-conceive. These abilities give us an edge—keep us from being too alike, because we each have our own strengths.”
Cate leaned against the cracked basin of the sink. “But it doesn’t really explain why we’re changing now.”
“Being around each other,” I said impulsively.
“Yeah?” She considered this. Her T-shirt was thin and worn, and I tried not to stare too openly at the slope of her collarbones, the swell of her breasts. “The same way our cycles are supposed to sync up? Pheromones?”
“Maybe it’s another way we stay strong as a group. We’ll always evolve as long as we’re together.”