Toys

“If I’d tried,” she said, putting down a hammer and removing leather work gloves, “you’d be dead.”

Was the woman deliberately trying to provoke me? Clearly she and whomever she was working for were a step ahead of me. Maybe several steps. How was that even possible?

“Where are my parents?” I asked as I judged the height of the roof and got ready to leap up there, fight her, and kill her.

“They’ll be out in a minute to say hello to their favorite son. Calm down, Hays. No need for you to come up here and try out your fancy commando moves on me.”

This time her condescending tone-as if she were soothing an upset child-was a little too much for my nerves.

“Don’t tell me to calm down. You’re a common killer-a criminal and a skunk.”

“I guess by your standards I am. But by most other standards, you’re the criminal. How many humans have you killed in your life, Hays Baker?” she shot back. “Or have you lost count? And what does that say about you?”

Just then the front door of the house swung open, and out came my mother. She hurried toward me with a welcoming smile and open arms.

“Hays, darling, it’s so wonderful to see you! I’m so happy you’re here.”

Mom was thinner and noticeably older than the last time I’d been here, but her eyes were more luminous than ever. She looked healthy and spry enough.

“I see you’ve met Lucy,” she said, gesturing up at the roof. But then her eyes were back on me, her favorite son. Of course, I was her only child.

“What a sight you are,” she said, looking me up and down, then clasping me again in her warm embrace. Ah, the feel of her, the scent of her skin, the sound of her voice… I really was home, wasn’t I?

She finally stepped back, taking hold of my hands and looking me over again. “But for heaven’s sake-what happened to your beautiful hair?”

I ran my hand over my bald head. “It’s the new look in the city,” I said. Then I asked, “Who is she, and why is she here?”

My mother looked deep into my eyes, and then she said, “She’s here because she’s your sister.”

Chapter 39

I immediately swiveled my head back and forth from the smart-mouthed criminal-and, perhaps, murderer-up on the roof to my mother. My mom was clearly not under any kind of duress or threat. If anything, I sensed embarrassment coming from her.

“What do you mean, my ‘sister’?” I asked the obvious question.

“We just couldn’t tell you about Lucy. It would have been too risky,” my father said, stepping out of the house. “It was too important that you accomplish what you’ve done so well. Become one of them. Become an Elite bastard.”

What the hell was going on here?

What was my father talking about? What had they done? Had my parents played me like some sort of unwitting pawn? Had they purposely set out to make me a traitorous “bastard”? Was I a sleeper agent?

“Come with me. Please, Hays,” he said. “Just come. I have something to show you.”

I obediently followed him to the outbuilding that he used as a workshop. It was all so very familiar, especially the cloying smell of oil and paint inside.

“Nothing changes, does it?” I muttered. “It’s as if I never went away.”

“Looks just like what you’d expect from a harmless, bumbling eccentric, right?” my father said, gesturing with his hand at the contents of the musty, cluttered space. Several tables were covered with a jumble of random electronic gadgetry. None of it seemed to point to any unified purpose or goal.

“That’s a good way to put it,” I agreed. Like most young kids, I had never paid too much attention to what my parents actually did in their work.

In my human-history studies at university, I’d come across countless descriptions of the “hippie” movement of the 1960s. Richard Brautigan, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, a movie called Woodstock. I soon realized that my parents-with their off-the-grid, tuned-out-of-the-mainstream lifestyle-bore more than a passing resemblance to the long-haired movement of that time, years before the humans had taken their full-on path toward world destruction.

In fact, my parents had even dressed the part of hippies. My mom usually wore her hair in a long, graying braid, and she favored baggy jeans, or sometimes ankle-length dresses. My father, almost always in a beat-up leather hat and faded work clothes, had sported a heavy commune-style beard. And they kept a large collection of books, magazines, and other print-based relics from the era before 7–4 Day. I’d read most of the material myself.

Now I picked up a silicone circuit board and examined the chip array. It was from a top-of-the-line processor, as far as I could tell anyway.

“You were always a mad-professor type,” I said.

“Well, in some ways you’re right, Hays. In others, though… Well, that was actually a bit of a pose,” he said. “A charade. A bold-faced lie, if you will.”

He opened the door of a closet crammed with more junk. The closet’s back wall swung inward, revealing a concrete staircase that led down under the earth. The steps were old and worn. The passageway must have been here all along, but I never knew that it existed. Or that I had a sister, of course.

I gave him a sharp glance. “Another thing that was too risky to tell me about?”

“Probably still is,” he said, unperturbed. “Come this way. It’s time you knew.”

“It’s a fallout shelter,” my mother said, coming up behind us. “People built them in the old days so they could hide in case there was a nuclear war. That’s part of why we moved to this place. It was a good space for our laboratory.”

“Laboratory? You have a laboratory? What are you doing with a-”

She touched her finger to my lips to shush me. “Look first,” she said. “Talk later.”

The large underground chamber we had entered was very much the opposite of the chaos and goofy ineptitude featured upstairs. Everything in it was cutting-edge, modern, ordered, very precise.

There were gleaming metal worktables, well-organized racks of equipment, a row of incubating chambers. Vats filled with clear liquid appeared to have living tissue growing in them. Through a doorway, I glimpsed a fully equipped surgical operating room.

My parents had set up all this? A pair of gentle, aging homebodies? Two hippies?

My mother guided me into a side room that had a few comfortable chairs, a couch, and an ancient video apparatus known as a television-I’d never seen a real one, only pictures of them.

“We’ve saved these all this time, Hays, hoping you’d see them someday. And these discs you should watch,” she said. “They’re what used to be called ‘home movies.’ You’re the star of most of them.”

Chapter 40

I put in a disc, and the TV screen came alive with grainy images that must have been shot with a camera as old as the television.

A cute little boy, about age three, was toddling along at his mother’s side, clinging to her hand. They were walking toward a pebbly beach on a lake with a house in the background.

The smiling, familiar woman was short-haired, young, and very beautiful. One of the most beautiful women