The Adoration of Jenna Fox (13 page)

What. How.

Oh, my God.

I can't. Think.

Deep.

Blue

The stairs rock. Sway.

I clutch my gashed hand to my stomach. The
other gropes at the stair rail.

Only a small smear of blood stains my shirt. So
little. And it  is barely red. Is it red at all?

My feet stumble on the stairs, and I fall down
three at a time.

"Jenna?" A distant call from the
kitchen.

More stairs. And no pain. My hand doesn't hurt.

The hallway rocks and the doorway sways. Mother
and Lily are framed in light at the kitchen table.

They stop their conversation. Stare at me.
Mother focuses on my shirt. The bloodstain. She begins to rise, but a single
word from me stops her.

"When?"

"Jenna
—"

"When were you going to tell me!" I
yell. I shove my hand out in front of me.
"What is this?"

Mother's hand comes to her chin, half covering
her mouth. "Jenna, let me explain
—"

Lily rises. "You should sit down,"
she says. She steps behind her own chair and offers it.

I sit down because I don't know what else to
do. I look up at Claire. "What's wrong with my hand?" I lay it on the
table and spread the gash apart with my fingers. The skin lies on a thick layer
of blue. Blue gel. Beneath that is the silvery white glimmer of synthetic bone
and ligaments. Plastic? Metal composite? Mother looks away.

"What happened?" I ask. My voice is a
whisper.

"It was the accident," she says.

The accident.
"Was it cut off?"

Mother reaches out. She lays both of her hands
on my arm. "Jenna, darling."

"Tell me." "It was burned.
Terribly burned."

I look at my other hand resting on the table
next to the gashed one. M
y other perfect hand.
The perfect hand that
won't lace right. The monster hand. I look at Mother. She looks like she is
crumbling inward, caving like a terrible weight is pressing on her. "What
about . . .
this
one?" I ask, raising my other hand.

She nods.

Oh, my God. I look down, the world disappearing
beyond the circle of my lap. I am suddenly so cold. My skin that has never felt
right instantly feels foreign. I hear Lily move to the other side of the table.
The scraping of a chair. The sigh as she sits. It all pounds in my ears. My
hands twitch. I look at them. Can I even call them
my
hands?

I turn to Mother. "Is there anything
else?"

The tears flow. Her face is desperate.
"Jenna, what difference does it make? You're still my daughter. That's all
that matters
—"

My clumsy feet. My legs.

Oh, God no.

"Stand up," I say. I rise to my feet.
Mother looks at me confused. "Stand up!" I yell. She stands, inches
from me. We look eye to eye. We are the exact same height. "How tall are
you, Mother?" I whisper each word distinctly, like a string of knots in a
rope I am clinging to.

"Jenna?" She doesn't understand. She
doesn't know what I've seen. In the last video that Lily told me to watch where
I blurt out my height. Fear twists her face. She doesn't answer.

"How tall are you?" I demand.

"Five-seven."

I collapse back into my chair, shaking my head.
Mother is mumbling, rambling, saying something that is all noise for me. I
finally force myself to look at her. "Tell me everything."

"What?" she says, pretending she
doesn't understand what I'm asking. She does. I see it in her eyes, a frantic
back step, hoping all this will go away.

"How much is me?"

Her lip trembles. Her eyes pool.

Lily intervenes. "Ten percent. Ten percent
of your brain. That's all they could save. They should have let you die."

I try to understand what she is saying. I watch
her mouth move. I hear words. Ten percent.
Ten percent.

And then Mother is suddenly fierce. A lion.
Within inches of my face. "But it is the most important ten percent. Do
you hear me? The most important."

Pinned

I lie in my bed. I stare at the ceiling. Claire
paces. Leaves. Comes back. Pleads. Informs. I listen but I don't respond. Lily
comes in, too. Watches. Whispers to Claire. Steps closer to me. Leaves. And
comes back.

They don't know what to do with me. Father is
coming. Claire called him. Hours ago. It is now the middle of the night. Two
a.m.
He will explain it all, Claire
says. When he gets here. He will make me understand. And yet she sits on the
edge of my bed and tries to explain herself.

"You were burned so badly, Jenna. We tried
everything.  Even with all the temporary grafts, you were losing so much
fluid. We had you stabilized for a few days. I was so hopeful. But then the
infections set in and we were losing you fast. The antibiotics weren't working.
There wasn't time for a lot of decisions. Your father pulled me into a closet,
Jenna. A closet!
That's
where we had to decide. He whispered to me the
only possible way of saving you. We had to make a choice
—save you the only way we knew how or let you die. Any parent in the
world would have made the choice we did." Her hands knead the side of my
bed. She stands. Circles my room. Returns to the end of my bed.

"We had you moved. Immediately. To a
private facility. A private room. All physicians on your case were dismissed,
except for the ones who worked with your father at Fox Bio-Systems. The
infection was moving so rapidly through you. Your father actually injected you
with the
nanobots
while you were in an ambulance en
route to the new facility. They had to start the brain scan right away."

"Why?"

She stands again. Her face is alert. Careful.
Bright. She is encouraged that I spoke. She shouldn't be.

"Your veins were collapsing. We weren't
sure how much longer your heart could last. Blood circulation is critical for a
good scan. They take at least six minutes. Vital organs were already shutting
down. By the time they got you to surgery, your heart had stopped twice. They
had the Bio Gel waiting. They saved as much as was still viable."

She comes close. White. She falls to her knees
beside my bed and takes my gashed hand in hers. She holds it like it is keeping
her from dissolving away. "The butterfly, Jenna. That's what they call it.
The heart of the brain. That you still have."

And the rest. My memories? My history? Those
aren't all in the butterfly. What is the rest? How am I remembering so many
things? Nearly everything now. Except the accident.

I close my eyes. I want her to go away. I don't
want to talk about butterflies or hearts. I don't even want answers. I don't
want
her.
I feel her cheek against my hand. Her breath. Her need. And
then she slowly lets go and leaves.

I open my eyes again. My room is dark. The
silence of the house is a heavy blanket. It pins me to my bed.

White

There was a moment in the darkness
when the fear lifted.

A moment where white surrounded me.

Hope.

Lily, and someone else, and a
sprinkling of water.

"Holy water, Jenna."

"You can let go if you need
to."

"Forgiveness, Jenna."

But I couldn't let go.

It wasn't in my power.

I was already swirling, flying,
falling.

To someplace deep I didn't
understand.

Where all the sounds but my own
voice disappeared.

Only me.

For so long.

I don't want to be alone anymore.

Father

I hear a creak. My clock reads three
a.m.
Father stands in my doorway, the
soft yellow light from the hallway illuminating his face. A shadow of stubble
is on his cheeks. His hair is uncombed. His eyes are hollow. He looks like he
could have run here all the way from Boston.

"Angel," he whispers.

"I'm awake," I say.

He comes in and sits on the edge of my bed.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't want you to find out this
way."

"My hands are artificial," I tell
him. "My legs, too."

He nods.

I sit up and lean against the headboard of my
bed. I lift my hands in front of me and stare at them. "I loved my hands.
My legs." I say it more to myself than to him. "I had never thought
about it before. They were just there. And now I can see that these"
—I turn them, looking at the palms—"these are
different. They're not mine. They're imposters." I wait for him to deny
it, to erase the last twelve hours with just a few words. I watch his face.
Even in my shadowed bedroom I can see how tired he is. I can see the red rims
of his eyes. "They're nearly identical to the original," he says.
"All of your ballet recital videos allowed us to digitally measure every
centimeter of you."

"Hurray for videos, huh?"

He hears the sarcasm in my voice and closes his
eyes momentarily. I ache. Maybe for his pain. For Claire's. But mostly for
mine. My loss. I can't care about theirs. Not now. How did I get to this point?
How can I go back?

He takes my hand in his and examines the gash.

"It's not even real skin, is it?" I
say.

"Yes. It's real. Some of it is even yours."

"How?"

"It's lab skin. Grown in the lab and
genetically engineered to be nourished through the Bio Gel. It took months to
get all the skin types we needed. We could only harvest a small portion of
yours because of the burns and infection. But still, we did get some." His
voice is stronger, less tired. He is more confident as a doctor than as my
father.

"What do you mean, engineered?"

"We had to make some changes so nutrients
and oxygen could be delivered in a modified way."

"So it's not human skin."

"It is human. Completely human. We've been
genetically altering plants and animals for years. It's nothing new. Tomatoes,
for instance. We engineer them to withstand certain pests or to give them a
longer shelf life, but it is still one hundred percent a tomato."

"I am not a tomato."

He looks at me sharply. "No. You're not.
You're my daughter. You have to know, Jenna, I would do anything to save you.
You're my child. And I want to be honest with you. So let's cut the crap. Lab
skin is yesterday's news. You want to know more than that. Let's move on."

I always loved that about Father. He was
direct. Claire and I could dance around a subject for days and weeks. But not
Father and me. Maybe because he was around less. He didn't have time to dally.
Right now I want to dance. I feel like I could dance forever.

"Jenna," he says, nudging me.

"Skin, bone, that's one thing," I
say. "But Lily says you only saved ten percent of my brain. True?"

"True."

"Then what am I?"

He doesn't hesitate. "You're Jenna
Angeline Fox. A seventeen-year-old girl who was in a terrible accident and
nearly died. You were saved the way so many accident victims are saved, through
medical technology. Your body was injured beyond saving. We had to patch together
a new one. Your skeletal structure was replicated. You have all the bone
structure of a normal teenage girl. Muscle areas are taken up with additional
modified Bio Gel. Most movement is accomplished through digital signals within
the bone structure. Some is accomplished through the traditional method of
cabled ligaments. Your skin was replaced. Your brain, the ten percent we saved,
was infused with
addi-tional
Bio Gel. But obviously
ten percent is not enough for full function, so we scanned your whole brain and
uploaded the information for safekeeping until we had the rest of the elements
in place
—"

"Uploaded? You uploaded my brain?"

"The information. Every bit of information
that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind, Jenna. That
We've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is-groundbreaking. We
cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a
glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million
pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with
that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way. Illegal brain
scans have been going on for years.
Nanobots
the size
of blood cells are injected, sometimes even without a person's knowledge since
it's all wireless transfer. Bits of information are extracted. But the mind,
the
mind
could never be transferred. It's an entirely different thing from bits
of information. We found that it's like a spinning glass ball. You have to keep
it spinning or it falls and shatters. So we upload those bits of information
into an environment that allows that energy to keep spinning, so to
speak."