“We can’t program the prompt command until we know what she is,” he explained.
“Why not?”
I laughed, amused to realize I understood what she did not. “Because that’s done by stimulating hormonal and neurological reactions through the needles penetrating my spine. Which you can’t do until you know what reactions to stimulate.” And they might never know how if I denied them that information by refusing to release my inner furiae.
Or if the furiae turned out not to be triggered by anything they could stimulate.
The woman’s gaze hardened, but Vandekamp looked suddenly intrigued. “How do you know that?”
His files were obviously incomplete, and I had no intention of filling in the blanks—until I looked down at him, sitting behind his desk, and a sudden moment of déjà vu reminded me where I’d seen him before.
“Willem Vandekamp.” I turned the syllables over in my head. “You’re Dr. Willem Vandekamp. I took your seminar at Colorado State.” During my senior year as a cryptobiology major. He hadn’t had the scar then, but... “You did a six-week lecture series on hormonal impulses in cryptid hybrids, and you had this theory that cryptids could be hormonally neutered.” A wave of nausea washed over me along with the obvious conclusion. “I guess that’s more than a theory now, huh?”
The woman’s eyes widened as she turned to him. “You taught her? In class?” Something in her voice—in the casual anger with which she addressed him—told me she was not an employee. Not just an employee anyway.
“You went to college.” Vandekamp stood and walked around his desk to sit on the front edge of it, eyeing me more closely, and suddenly I realized that though he was now addressing me, he hadn’t so much as greeted his own employee. “That’s not in your files.”
I shrugged. “Your university bio didn’t mention your ‘private collection.’” For obvious reasons. Even if the Spectacle wasn’t actually breaking any laws—and I found that hard to believe—its clientele would expect the kind of total anonymity that can’t come from a service advertised to the general public.
“You were my student. Fascinating!” Yet Vandekamp looked more like he wanted to dissect my brain than discuss my senior thesis.
“And you were a very good teacher. I may not understand how you’re doing what you’re doing, but I understand why it works. And in my case, why it won’t.”
“This one isn’t like the others,” the woman—his wife?—said, and the sharp edge in her voice could have cut glass.
“I’m like them in every way that matters,” I insisted.
“Yet you look human. Like a surrogate.” She spoke through clenched teeth. “What if she’s a surrogate, Willem? What if the government missed one? What if this is what they look like, all grown-up?”
Vandekamp twisted to pick up a file from his desk blotter. He flipped open the folder and scanned the first page. “She’s only twenty-five. Too young to be a surrogate.”
“Yes, and the test results say she’s human, but we know that’s not true. If she’s a surrogate, you could wake up one morning to find that you’ve stabbed me in some kind of psychotic trance. Doesn’t it say in that file that she made a man electrocute himself?”
My brow rose. “You believe that part, but not my birthday? I—”
She pressed her thumb against her remote screen, and pain shot through my throat. I cried out, and bent at the waist as I strained my shoulders trying to reach for my neck. But my voice carried no sound and my hands were still cuffed at my back.
The pain faded quickly, but my voice did not return.
“Cryptids don’t have birthdays,” the woman snapped, as I tried in vain to speak. My mouth opened. My lips and tongue moved. But my vocal cords did not vibrate. My brain was sending the signal to speak, but my body wasn’t receiving the order.
It was being intercepted by the collar.
In the menagerie, the handlers had sometimes muzzled cryptids, but that could only stop them from biting and speaking. Muzzles can’t prevent you from making sound. From hearing your own voice, as a reassurance that you do, in fact, still exist, even if only as property to be bought, sold or rented out.
But Vandekamp had found a way to turn off my voice, and the resulting claustrophobic terror felt as if the room was folding in on me. As if I were screaming into the void of some shrinking reality that no longer had enough space for me. As if soon they would cease to see me too, and start walking through me.
“So what do you suggest we do with her, Tabitha?” Vandekamp circled his desk again to sit behind it. “Sell her? Have her euthanized?”
My silent objection became a fruitless scream of rage. I strained the muscles in my throat, trying to be heard, until my eyes felt like they’d pop from my skull. But neither of them even looked at me.
I turned to Bowman to find him staring straight ahead, impervious to my frustration and fury.
“That seems a bit extreme,” the woman—Tabitha—said. “We’re going to have to inspect her. All monsters have telltale features. We just have to find hers.”
She turned to me, and again I tried to shout. To tell her that I’d already been inspected. I knew my desperate effort was pointless, but I couldn’t stop.
“Take off your clothes,” she ordered.
My profanity-laden refusal didn’t make so much as a squeak.
She pressed another icon on her remote, and pain exploded all over my body. I fell to my knees on the carpet, hunched over, my arms straining against my restraints. Screaming in silent agony.
What I’d felt when I’d slid my finger beneath my collar was a flash in the pan compared to the fire blazing through every nerve in my body.
“Tabitha,” Vandekamp said. “She can’t undress. She’s handcuffed.”
His wife finally released the button.
I slumped over my knees, breathing deeply as the pain slowly receded. I felt tender all over, but I couldn’t tell if that was a residual effect of the electric current or simply the knowledge that if I didn’t cooperate, she would press that button again.
“And anyway, she was inspected during the intake process. She has no cryptid features. Which is part of the problem.”
“I don’t understand,” she complained. “Even the most benign-looking monsters have an identifiable trait hidden somewhere. How could she have nothing?”
Finally, I made myself sit up and look at the Vandekamps, and the effort that took without the use of my hands was terrifying.
“What are we going to do with her?” Tabitha demanded as she smoothed a strand of brown hair back toward the simple twist it had escaped from. “No one’s going to pay to see that.” She waved one hand at me in disgust. “You’re going to have to figure out what she is. Make her talk.” She shrugged, and her cold gaze chased the last reverberating bolts of fire from my body. “Or I could do it.”
“I’ll figure something out.” He stood and kissed her on the forehead. “Why don’t you go tell the seamstresses what you want for the new costumes?”
She hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “I do have a few ideas...”
As the door closed behind her, he sat on the front of his desk again. “Wait outside,” he said, and I thought he was talking to me until Bowman turned sharply and headed into the outer office, closing the door at his back. Vandekamp looked down at me, where I still knelt on his rug. “You were the one responsible for the takeover of Metzger’s Menagerie?”
I nodded. The truth was more