The Games

SHE HEARD him before she saw him. Thwump, thwump, thwump. She followed Benjamin around the side of the building and into a kind of courtyard. Bushy trees draped in tiny white flowers stood in staggered formation along one side of the clearing. Several picnic tables crowded at the far edge. Beyond them, a single basketball hoop cast its crooked shadow along the edge of a parking lot. The cars in the lot were parked at a respectful distance.

The ball left Silas’s hands in an arc. It bounced high off the rim, touched backboard, rim again, and then fell away. Missed.

Ben clapped loudly as they approached across the grass. “They told me you were out here. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”

The man turned, and Vidonia tried to conceal her surprise. He wasn’t what she expected.

“You must be Dr. Joao,” he said, extending a large hand. The pinkie, she noticed, was partly missing—the skin healed but still slightly pink. “I’m Silas Williams.”

“Nice to meet you. And it’s pronounced Zhoo-wow.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s quite all right, I get that all the time. It’s Portuguese. I’m familiar with your work.”

Silas smiled. Like many very tall men, he had a heavy jaw, and his smile seemed awkward perched across all that bone. Strong, high cheekbones balanced out his rectangular face. The complexion beneath the roughness of a few days’ stubble was smooth mocha, and his curly hair was graying vigorously upward from the temples, giving him a distinguished look, despite his size.

“Has Ben showed you the lab yet?” he asked.

“Yeah, she’s hooked,” Ben interjected.

Silas bent for the ball, then tossed it from one hand to the other. He turned and regarded the basketball hoop thoughtfully.

“There is something about this game that I’ve really missed,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” Ben asked, his voice, incredulous, rising an octave.

“When you’ve got the ball in your hand and you’re staring at the hoop, it’s easy to push everything else away.”

“When was the last time you touched a ball?” Ben asked.

“You focus on the rim, calculate distance, concentrate …” Silas flicked his wrist and sent the ball tumbling through the air. It connected firmly with the front of the rim and bounced back in his direction.

“Why the sudden interest in athletics?” Ben asked.

When Silas didn’t answer, Ben pressed, “Did something happen that I don’t know about?”

Silas grabbed the ball again and tossed it over to Vidonia. She caught it and turned it in her hands, looking at him. Looking at him.

“Shoot,” he said, finally.

She didn’t hesitate. She brought it up to her chest and heaved. The ball carved its little parabola across the blue sky. Air ball, not even close.

Silas picked the ball from the grass and stepped back onto the pavement, dribbling in long bounces. “Used to play a lot when I was a kid. You don’t have to think. You just aim and throw; your body does the math for you. There’s something to that, probably.”

“Did something happen today, Silas?” Ben asked.

“Yeah, something happened.” Silas shot again. This time the ball rasped through the net. He turned back to Vidonia. “You’re probably wondering why you’re here.”

“It had crossed my mind,” she said.

“You’re curious why we’d want a xenobiologist.”

“This isn’t a field where it’s common to get job offers in the middle of the night from halfway across the country,” she said. Particularly from Olympic Development, she thought.

“Well,” he said, as he bent to retrieve the ball, “as you’ve probably guessed, since you say you are familiar with my work, the organism in question isn’t of extraterrestrial origin. I should get that out of the way at the beginning. But it is alien. Yes, I think it fits the broadest definition of that word—alien—but it is from here, right from this facility. That’s why we called you.”

“So this is about the gladiator competition,” she said.

He nodded.

“Is it the contestant?”

“It’s supposed to be. We’re not sure what it is, actually. We were hoping you could help us find out.”

“I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

“We need you to help find out what it is we’re dealing with.”

She paused. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But with all due respect, shouldn’t you already know?”

“We should, but we don’t.”

“It is an engineered organism, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She crossed her arms in front of her, wanting to ask more. Instead, she said the only thing that really mattered. “I’ll help any way I can.”

“Thank you.”

Silas dribbled the ball.

“What went wrong today?” Ben asked Silas.

Silas turned toward him. “That’s a long story,” Silas said. He shot the ball again, and it sprang away from the hoop at a high angle. He trotted after.

“I don’t mind long stories,” Ben pressed. “What happened?” The glib undercurrent in his face had drained away now.

Silas tossed him the ball. “Three points, shoot.”

Behind his glasses, Ben’s blue eyes were bright in the angle of the sun. The ball rotated in his hands. He bent, straightened, shot. The ball spanked high against the backboard and skipped across the pavement, toward the grass.

Silas snagged it as it bounced. “Nothing so important,” he said. “And maybe not such a long story, really, come to think of it.”

Silas shot the ball. It dropped through the hoop with a swish of net.

“It opened its wings today,” Silas said. “That’s all. It stretched them out, eight feet, maybe.”

Ben’s face lost some of its tension. “That’s what has you out here shooting baskets?” he asked.

“No, you should have seen it. Those wings. It was goddamned beautiful, Ben. That’s what has me out here.”

“IT HAS wings?” she asked. Unless she was mistaken, there was little room for flight beneath the steel netting of the gladiator arena.

She followed alongside the two men as they walked through the grass toward the lab. From this perspective the buildings were low, squat boxes of glass and steel. The windows reflected green tress, blue sky, white clouds.

“Yeah, but it will never fly,” Ben said. “Too complicated. No one has ever bioengineered that trick from scratch.”

“I don’t know about that anymore,” Silas said. He hooked an arm around the ball and carried it against his hip. He turned to her. “C’mon, I guess it’s time we introduced you to Felix.”

“Felix?” she asked.

“A little nickname,” Ben said. “The petri dishes were labeled alphabetically alongside the Helix project heading. Embryo F was the first to start dividing in one of the surrogates. F-Helix.”

“Cute.”

“It’s been called a lot of things, but cute isn’t one.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But it’s beautiful?”

“Beautiful and cute are two different things,” Ben said. “Sharks are beautiful.”