Kevin had tidied his room before he went away to college, but it still had a faint but distinct reek, as if the walls and floor were permeated with years of sweaty socks and gym clothes. Rex seemed oblivious to it, so I didn’t bring it up, but I remade the bed with fresh sheets and set the vent to HIGH and EXHAUST.
“Okay, there you go,” I said when I was done. “I’ll be next door if you need anything.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, flashing me a borderline lewd grin that was totally undermined by the yawn that interrupted it.
We laughed and kissed good night. I brushed my teeth and washed up in the bathroom, then put a new toothbrush out for Rex.
As tired as I was, I had a hard time getting to sleep, and when I finally did I was haunted by dreams of death. Dymphna and Del and Reverend Calkin, memories real and constructed surrounded me as I ran toward a dark, ominous horizon.
The next morning, I woke at seven thirty feeling unsettled and unrested. Rex emerged from Kevin’s room a few minutes later. He had already remade the bed.
My mom was already gone, which made the morning a little less awkward, but it still felt strange, Rex and I sitting there at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. When we were at his place, it felt natural and normal and comfortable. Here, it felt like we were pretending at something. Playing house.
As soon as we left, I felt more at ease. When we got to the Levstation, the people waiting for the train were oddly spread out. Usually, people clustered where the doors would be when the train stopped, but apart from a couple of pairs of people talking to each other in hushed tones, everyone seemed to be standing as far from one another as possible. Several people had on breathing masks, to filter out any pathogens. A few people looked over as we came up the steps, their faces filled with fear and suspicion, but I got the sense that it had less to do with anti-chimera bias than fear of the flu.
On the train, everyone looked out the windows, as if trying to get a sense of where things stood. From the train, you could always see drones and copters in the sky above and occasional emergency vehicles with flashing lights on the streets below, but there seemed to be a lot more of both than usual.
When we got to the coffeehouse, the front door was locked and a handwritten sign said CLOSED UNTIL 11 A.M.
We walked around to the back and Rex knocked on the door. A girl I’d never met before appeared in the window. She had a panda splice and looked mildly exasperated, as if maybe we weren’t the first to come knocking despite the sign.
“We’re closed!” she said, loudly, to be heard through the glass.
“We need to talk to Jerry,” Rex said.
“He’s busy,” she said. “Come back at eleven.” Then she turned away from us.
I understood that she was just doing her job, and it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know who we were, but I was getting a little impatient myself. Before I could say anything, Rex put his hand on my arm as he knocked again.
“It’s important,” he said. Then, when she came back, “Tell Jerry it’s Rex and Jimi.”
She rolled her eyes and muttered, “Hold on.” She disappeared for a few seconds, then returned and opened the door.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling sweetly. “I’m Jimi. Who are you?”
“Sorry,” she said. “Been a crazy morning. I’m Stacy.”
Rex said, “Rex,” and they shook hands.
“They’re all in the office,” Stacy said, stepping aside to let us pass. “It’s—”
“We know where it is,” I said. I knew it was petty, but I wanted Stacy to know that we knew the place well.
The office was small enough that the handful of people already in there pretty much filled it. Jerry was behind his desk. His expression seemed even more sour than usual, but Rex said he’d taken the news about his truck pretty well, so I assumed his demeanor was about Dymphna’s death and the way the world seemed to be spinning apart. Sitting around the desk were Sly and Dara, whom I knew, Martin, whom I’d met in Canada, and two others, a tall woman with olive skin and a giraffe splice and a heavyset Asian guy with pebbly, reptilian skin. It was weird seeing Martin. He and I had butted heads on Lonely Island—he was in charge there—but now I understood he was acting on Dymphna’s orders. And in the end, he’d been the one to let Dara help us in Gellersville, which saved a lot of lives.
“This is Rex and Jimi,” Dara said. “They were there, too. In Camden.”
A chorus of disembodied voices erupted with different versions of “Hello, Jimi” and “Hey, Rex,” coming from the speakerphone on Jerry’s desk.
Rex and I said hi, and the woman with the giraffe splice pointed at me and said, “Jimi from Pitman?”
I nodded, resisting the urge to correct her on where I was actually from.
She nodded back at me. “I’m Audrey.” She turned to the guy next to her. “This is Gary.”
Gary moved his eyebrows in acknowledgment, if not quite greeting.
“Dymphna was Jimi’s aunt,” Dara added.
Gary’s attitude thawed slightly amid a soft murmur of grunts from the Holocon.
“Oh, wow,” Audrey said. “So Jimi from Pitman is Dymphna’s niece. That’s perfect. You knew her pretty well, then, huh?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’m named after her, but she’s mostly been out of my life, until just recently.” My eyes clouded for a moment, but I willed myself not to cry.
“Okay, if you’re coming in, come in,” Jerry said. “And close the door behind you.”
We pushed far enough into the room that we could close the door behind us, then stood with our backs against it.
“Anyway,” Gary said, “like I was saying, it’s going to take at least a week to get the council together, and I’m just saying that we, as the ones who are here, on the ground, need to decide what is to be done with the body. We can’t wait for the whole group to chime in.”
“The body will to be released to the family, obviously,” said Audrey. “We can’t have anything to do with that; it’ll expose us. Maybe a private memorial within the organization is the safest bet.”
“Well, I was actually thinking more about what is going to happen with the body, literally,” Martin said. “I can’t imagine Dymphna wouldn’t have had clear ideas on her body’s disposition.”
Audrey tipped his head in my direction. “Maybe the family knows.”
Everyone looked at me, expectantly. I took a half step backward, my shoulders pressing harder against the door behind me. “I…I don’t know. I could ask my mother, my aunt. They might know.”
Audrey smiled gently and nodded.
“But there’s a more pressing issue,” I said, stepping forward again. Jerry raised his hands like he was going to shush me or tell me I was not on the agenda, but if I was going to get their attention, now was the time. “Dymphna told me about Howard Wells’s super-flu virus, and about the immunity virus she released through the splice medium, how it’s spreading through the population. We need to get word out about that, to tell the world that people can get immunity through contact with chimeras.”