“But Papa, you just said you’d give your right arm to get her back. What have we got to lose?”
“Your sanity? Who knows? Oh,” he lifted my leg off his knee and got up. “Do what you like, girl—you always do anyway. Now, if you don’t mind, I must go to bed. I have a meeting at seven o’clock tomorrow. Where is Dominic?”
“I think he’s in his room. Probably reading,” I said.
“Very good. Well, so sorry but I am very tired. Goodnight everyone.”
He pecked my cheek semi-automatically and wandered into his part of the apartment. I stared at Johnny and Cheri. It was Cheri who spoke first. “It’s the stress. Got to be. I don’t think he used to be as bad as this. Kestrella, don’t take it personally. Inside, he must be as worried as we are, and if he does have a private eye working for him, so much the better.”
“Yes,” agreed Johnny. “And three heads are better than one, especially if one of them is mine. Tomorrow, we’ll get to work.”
For the first time in the ten days since Maman disappeared, I began to feel just a little bit of hope.
Before Creep ended my childhood, I used to think life should be fair. Isn’t it weird how kids think that?
After Creep, I knew it wasn’t fair. So I started believing life was random—like the chance mutations that cause evolution. There was no point to anything at all.
But suppose I was wrong? Then there’d be a reason why Creep had got me. In my darker moments I thought I must have done something awful to deserve it and this was my punishment. Sometimes I thought it had given me special abilities to help me achieve something great. Maybe, just maybe, finding Kestrella’s mum was it.
Kestrella gave me a bed in a spare room where everything was white, including the thick duvet on the double bed and the long woollen curtains. It was like being in a cloud. Kestrella and Cheri slept somewhere else.
After a few hours’ sleep, Sim went off to work. He’d gone by the time we got up.
Over breakfast Cheri showed me a photograph. There was a lot of Kestrella in her mother’s face, but it was like a mask, made inscrutable with practice. She gazed blankly out of the photo like someone completely bored with life. But as she was a model, she was probably just bored with cameras. Her closely cropped blonde hair emphasised her high forehead, the large, deep pools of her blue eyes, the high cheekbones and red lips pouting from habit.
When I asked what type of hybrid she was, they told me Jacquelyn wouldn’t say.
“She was coy about it,” said Kestrella.
“There was no obvious difference in her appearance,” said Cheri. “And, you know, one doesn’t ask…”
“But you’re her sister!” I protested. “Surely she would have told you.” I saw a glance pass between her and Kestrella, but I couldn’t tell what it meant.
“She didn’t see fit to confide in me,” explained Cheri. “She said she was seeing a private doctor. But we don’t know who it was. Now, if you’re going to search, you need to know that she had two surnames: her married name, Chu, and our name, which was also her professional name—Dubois.”
“Are you still Dubois?” I asked Cheri.
She nodded. “Too busy to marry!” she said.
Cheri left after breakfast, making me promise on no account to go out till she came back. I began a web search. There were millions of references to Jacquelyn as a model and as a charity worker to filter out. As I expected, the most common search engines revealed nothing. The family would already have tried that themselves.
Cheri had suggested I look for people recently taken into police custody or hospital. Kestrella said, “We already tried to find out by phoning the hospitals and police stations, but turned up nothing.”
So I turned to trying to hack into their systems. I decided to check all the hospitals, the police stations and Gene Police HQs in the surrounding fifty mile radius. That took all day. For lunch and supper Kestrella fed me liquidised soup with chicken and real vegetables, and more smoothies. The work and good food made me tired. By the evening I’d given up.
“Sorry, Kestrella, the ones I can get into, she’s not there. The others are shutting me out.”
Kestrella looked at me in a way I liked, a mixture of gratitude, concern and hope. She phoned Cheri at Salvation House, who asked to speak to me.
“I thought that might happen,” she said. “I’m going to introduce you to a friend. His name’s Mark Jarrett and he’s a TV journalist. Don’t worry, he’s on our side. He’s got a small production company that makes current affairs programmes. Wait there till I come off duty then I’ll take you to meet him.”
To pass the time I let Kestrella use me as her personal jukebox and play some of the hundreds of hours of music stored in my system. I was surprised to find out we liked the same sort of music…Venus and the Blue Genes, Ghost in the Machine, and the Nanosplicers’ Naked in the Gene Pool.
And we talked. I wasn’t used to talking. I didn’t like it: it made me think and feel things I didn’t want to. She tried asking me about my parents. I told her I didn’t know where they were. She said she couldn’t believe parents could abandon their child like that. I changed the subject and she started talking about her mother.
“The last time I saw her was that morning at the breakfast table when she gave me my freshly squeezed orange juice. Because she wasn’t registered she hated being shut up in the apartment like a caged animal. In the evening we came back and she wasn’t there. She must have gone out on her own.”
I said, “The more I know about her the better. What kind of person was she?”
“She could be really nice one minute and the next…” Kestrella sliced her hand through the air. “She hated being judged by her appearance. She hated being judged at all. Zut!” She slapped her hand to her mouth suddenly. “Why am I talking about her in the past tense! It’s terrible!”
She grabbed hold of my hand and stared right at me as if she could see into my eyes. I found this very uncanny. “Johnny, she is going to come back. Isn’t she?”
I didn’t know what to say. Tears were running down her beautiful cheeks.
“Don’t worry, Kestrella. If she can be found, I’ll find her. I promise,” I found myself saying as I patted her hand awkwardly.
She gulped, blew her nose and wiped her eyes, then continued. “She started a charity. She thought of all the models with addictions that she knew, with eating disorders and drug problems. She’d lost two friends to crack cocaine. A support line specially for young ones seemed like a good idea. What was your mum like?” she said suddenly.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, annoyed. “I know you miss your mother, OK? But that doesn’t mean I miss mine. You like to remember your mother. I try to forget mine.”
Kestrella frowned. “So what would you say if you met her again?”
I’d thought about it before. I’d run no end of fantasies in my mind about what I would do if I ran into her, like, turning a corner on a street, or looking through a shop window and there she was, or if she just turned up at my door. I’d imagined all kinds of scenarios, all kinds of reactions. I finally said: “I’d ignore her.” It was the worst thing I could think of.
Cheri arrived and