The clinic’s first appointment was not scheduled for another hour. Dr. Ericson was already in his office, prepping for the day’s patients, including a few of her old ones, as well as a donor’s egg retrieval surgery in the afternoon. Emily, the embryologist, was in the clinic’s lab, checking on the growth of fresh embryos. Arianna swiveled in her chair to face the intercom on her wall and pressed a button: laboratory.
“Em, are you there?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
Arianna lowered her voice. “He’s here. We’ll be in soon.”
“Already? Christ, those jerks are fast.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Not one bit. Don’t worry, I’ll get out of your way.”
“Why do you think I called?”
During a routine inspection a few months prior, Emily had rolled her eyes at the back of an inspector who demanded three recounts. Although the man did not see the gesture, Arianna did. Both women realized then that Emily’s contempt was too blatant, and her self-control too scant, for her to be trusted around anyone from the DEP.
On the flat screen, the inspector’s picture still gleamed, his unsmiling face out of keeping with the pictures of sleepy newborns covering the wall. Arianna hit a button to clear the screen, and then rose gradually, willing her legs to carry her to the waiting room. By now, she was accustomed to the tingly, half-asleep feeling in her legs that bordered on total numbness. Instead she concentrated on where each foot was in space, and where it needed to go: out the door, to the left, into the hallway, forward.
But whenever she put pressure on her feet, the tingling sensation exploded into a furious, inside-out itch, and she willed her legs not to thrash. Soon, the sensation became too intense to ignore. There in the empty hallway she stomped and squirmed, feeling completely dissociated from her awkward body. She imagined watching herself from a bystander’s perspective. I must look totally crazy, she thought as she wiggled her legs like a dancer without rhythm or sanity. She chuckled in spite of herself, and the sound skidded off the white walls and faded away.
Then she stopped short, grinding her cane into the linoleum floor. Her own laughter, she realized, had become a foreign sound. In the corners of her eyes, tears pooled.
No, she thought simply. No.
Left foot forward, plant. Right foot forward, eye on the prize … The waiting room door was within reach. She yanked it open.
Inspector Banks rose from the sofa and smiled coldly. She could not bring herself to smile back, or to show any emotion at all.
“Good morning, Dr. Drake,” he said. “I take it you are not surprised to see me?”
“No. I read the paper this morning.”
His lips tightened. “I see.”
“It must be hard to have a traitor in the department.”
He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to spot a smirk on her lips. But she remained blank. “Shall we?” she asked.
“I need to see your most current record count,” he demanded.
“Of course. Follow me.”
They walked to her office. He did not ask about her cane, or why she was walking so woodenly, as if on the sea floor. When they reached her office, she motioned for him to sit down across from her desk.
“I’ll stand.”
She shrugged and turned to her filing cabinet. After rifling through it, she pulled out a stack of records and dropped them onto the desk.
“There’s all the patients’ records in the days since your last visit.”
He looked over the pages, signed by both doctor and patient.
“What’s the total EUE count?”
“I will have the computer add it up. One moment.”
She turned to her monitor, which faced away from him, and pressed her thumb on the upper right-hand corner of the screen. After a second, a box popped up that read UNLOCKED, which enabled her to navigate to patients’ records. She opened a program that automatically studied the records from a specific date forward and then calculated the total number of embryos that ought to be in the clinic’s lab. But before she hit the CALCULATE button, she checked the one record she had changed last night. It was of the most recent donor, not an actual patient. The woman—who was the daughter of a family friend—had given up nineteen of her eggs last week, but Arianna had changed the number to seventeen in order to compensate for the two they were short. Last night, Arianna had also called the donor and explained the change, so that in case the DEP ever contacted her to corroborate the record, her answer would be consistent. On screen now, the woman’s record still showed seventeen, so Arianna hit CALCULATE and then printed out the total.
“Here it is,” she said, handing Banks the paper. “Seventy-eight leftover embryos.”
Banks flinched at her condescending term—leftover—but Arianna didn’t care. It wasn’t illegal to call them what they were, she thought. Let him go to hell.
Anyway, she knew the number was correct; late last night, she had counted the embryos twice herself and checked each one under the microscope.
“Let me just check that number against your paper records here,” Banks said.
“Go ahead.”
He leafed through every page of records in the stack, scanning the numbers with a pen-sized device that added them on an internal calculator. Arianna held her breath when he came to the altered record she had replaced in the file. He passed it without incident. Finally, he announced the sum.
“Yes, seventy-eight is correct.”
Arianna nodded and led him to the lab. Inside, the freezer and incubator purred quietly, sustaining a veritable farm of embryos between them. Banks opened the freezer door, waited for the billow of icy mist to evaporate and then counted the embryos labeled JANUARY, including the ten undetectable clones. Then he turned to the incubator and counted the fresh ones growing
