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"I don't know," Amanda whispered back. "Once you're in there she'll never let you out. Those Compounds are like castles, they're like jails. She won't ever let you see me. She hates me."
"I don't care what she thinks," I whispered. "I'll get out somehow."
"My phone," Amanda whispered. "Take it with you. You can phone me."
"I'll get you in somehow," I said. By this time I was crying silently. I slipped her purple phone into my pocket.
"Hurry up, Ren," said Lucerne.
"I'll call you!" I whispered. "My dad will buy you an identity!"
"Sure he will," said Amanda softly. "Don't take shit, okay?"
In the main room, Lucerne was moving fast. She dumped out the sickly looking tomato plant she'd been growing on the windowsill. Underneath the soil there was a plastic bag full of money. She must've been ripping it off, from selling stuff at the Tree of Life -- the soap, the vinegar, the macrame, the quilts. Money was old-fashioned, but people still used it for small things and the Gardeners wouldn't take virtual money because they didn't allow computers. So she'd been stashing away her escape money. She hadn't been such a doormat as I'd thought.
Then she took the kitchen shears and cut off her long hair, straight across at neck level. The cutting made a Velcro sound -- scratchy and dry. She left the pile of hair in the middle of the dining-room table.
Then she took me by the arm and hauled me out of our place and down the stairs. She never went out at night because of the drunks and druggies on the street corners, and the pleebrat gangs and muggers. But right then she was white-hot with anger and filled with crackling energy: people on the street cleared out of our path as if we were contagious, and even the Asian Fusions and the Blackened Redfish left us alone.
It took us hours to get through the Sinkhole and the Sewage Lagoon, and then the richer pleebs. As we went along, the houses and buildings and hotels got newer looking, and the streets emptier of people. In Big Box we got a solarcab: we drove through Golfgreens and then past a big open space, and finally right up to the gates of the HelthWyzer Compound. It was so long since I'd seen that place it was like one of those dreams, where you don't recognize anything, yet also you do. I felt a little sick, but that might have been excitement.
Before we got into the cab, Lucerne had mussed up my hair and smeared dirt on her own face, and torn part of her dress. "Why'd you do that?" I said. But she didn't answer.
There were two guards at the HelthWyzer gateway, behind the little window. "Identities?" they said.
"We don't have any," said Lucerne. "They were stolen. We were forcibly abducted." She looked behind her, as if she was afraid someone was following us. "Please -- you have to let us in, right away! My husband -- he's in Nanobioforms. He'll tell you who I am." She started to cry.
One of them reached for the phone, pushed a button. "Frank," he said. "Main gate. Lady here says she's your wife."
"We'll need some cheek swabs, ma'am, for the communicables," said the second one. "Then you can wait in the holding room, pending bioform clearance and verification. Someone will be with you soon."
In the holding room we sat on a black vinyl sofa. It was five in the morning. Lucerne picked up a magazine -- NooSkins, it said on the cover. Why Live With Imperfection? She riffled through it.
"Were we forcibly abducted?" I asked her.
"Oh, my darling," she said. "You don't remember! You were too young! I didn't want to tell you -- I didn't want you to be frightened! They might have done something terrible to you!" Then she began to cry again, harder. By the time the CorpSeMan in the biosuit walked in, her face was all streaky.
39
Be careful what you wish for, old Pilar used to say. I was back at the HelthWyzer Compound and I was reunited with my father, just as I used to wish long ago. But nothing felt right. All that faux marble, and the reproduction antique furniture, and the carpets in our house -- none of it seemed real. It smelled funny too -- like disinfectant. I missed the leafy smells, of the Gardeners, the cooking smells, even the sharp vinegar tang; even the violet biolets.
My father -- Frank -- hadn't changed my room. But the four-poster bed and the pink curtains looked shrunken. It also looked too young for me. There were the plush animals I'd once loved so much, but their glass eyes looked dead. I stuffed them into the back of my closet so they wouldn't be able to look through me as if I was a shadow.
The first night, Lucerne ran a bath for me with fake-flower bath essence in it. The big white tub and the white fluffy towels made me feel dirty, and also stinky. I stank like earth -- compost earth, before it's finished. That sour odour.
Also my skin was blue: it was the dye from the Gardener clothes. I'd never really noticed it because the showers at the Gardeners were so brief, and there weren't any mirrors. I hadn't noticed, either, how hairy I'd become, and that was more of a shock than my blue skin. I rubbed and rubbed at the blue: it wouldn't come off. I looked at my toes, where they stuck up out of the bath water. The toenails looked like claws.
"Let's put some polish on those," Lucerne said two days later, when she saw my feet in flip-flops. She was acting as if none of it had ever happened -- not the Gardeners, not Amanda, and especially not Zeb. She was wearing crisp linen suits, she'd had her hair styled and streaked. She'd already had her own toes done -- she'd wasted no time. "Look at all these colours I bought for you! Green, purple, frosted orange, and I got you some sparkly ones ..." But I was angry with her, and I turned away. She was such a liar.
All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright, and the outline had been too large: Frank was shorter, greyer, balder, and more confused-looking than what I'd had in mind.
Before he'd come to the HelthWyzer gatehouse to identify us, I'd thought he'd be overjoyed to find that we were safe and sound and not dead after all. But when he saw me, his face fell. Now I realize that he'd last known me when I was a small girl, so I was bigger than he expected, and probably bigger than he wanted. I was also shabbier -- despite the drab Gardener clothes, I must have looked like one of the pleebrats he might have seen running around if he'd ever even been to the Sinkhole or the Sewage Lagoon. Maybe he was afraid I was going to pick his pockets or grab his shoes. He approached me as if I might bite, and put his arms awkwardly around me. He smelled of complex chemicals -- the kind of chemicals used for cleaning off sticky things, like glue. A smell that could burn right down into your lungs.
On that first night I slept for twelve hours, and when I woke up I found that Lucerne had taken away my Gardener clothes and burnt them. Luckily I'd hidden Amanda's purple phone inside the plush tiger in my closet -- I'd cut open the stomach. So the phone didn't get burnt.
I missed the smell of my own skin, which had lost its salty flavour and was now soapy and perfumy. I thought about what Zeb used to say about mice -- if you take them out of the mouse nest for a while and then put them back, the other mice will tear them apart. If I went back to the Gardeners with my fake-flower smell, would they tear me apart?
Lucerne took me to the HelthWyzer In-clinic so I could be checked for head lice and worms, and for being interfered with. That meant a couple of fingers up you, front and back. "Oh my goodness," the doctor said when he saw my blue skin. "Are these bruises, dear?"
