Chapter 57

“Who are you?” he asks. “And why don’t you appear to be injured? Are we on the set of some movie? Were they firing blanks? Because I thought I saw real blood. And what kind of name is Chancery?”

I switch to Mandarin, which I assume he speaks. “You keep asking who I am, but it’s less about who I am, and more about what I am.”

His eyes widen, and he responds in Mandarin. “You speak Mandarin, and you’re super duper hot.” He swallows. “Are you—” He blinks repeatedly. “You’re an alien, aren’t you?” He bites his lower lip, the lip I was just kissing.

I laugh. “I’m not an alien. But before I explain. . . what do you know about DNA?”

“DNA?” His eyebrows rise. “Like, adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine? That kind of DNA?”

“Yes, exactly that DNA.”

“Uh, I know that it replicates.”

“Good,” I say. “What else?”

“Umm, it tells our cells what to do, like a blueprint so they can reproduce over and over.”

“Also correct, but here’s where we dip into something different.”

Noah watches me more than the road as we jog toward the Roosevelt Island Bridge. “Okay. Are you going to tell me?”

“I’ve never told a human before.”

His eyebrows rise and he stops. “A human? As in, you’re not human?”

“You’ve heard of Adam and Eve?”

He nods. “Yep, they’ve come up. I may not be religious myself, but I have heard of the origin story that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam share.”

“Okay, well, they aren’t wrong. Even the Hindus still have quite a few details right. You’ve read the Rig-Veda, I assume?”

Noah shakes his head.

“It doesn’t matter, really, but there’s a quote in there I liked a lot. ‘Whence all creation has its origin, He, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, He, who surveys it all from highest heaven, He knows, or maybe even He does not.’ So even some of the Hindus envision a single creator of some sort, whether it’s a combination of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, or something else.”

“Okay, sure. It’s either that, or we came from monkeys, right?” Noah shrugs.

“Actually, evolution posits that we share an ancestor with apes, but not that we came from them. But we’re getting sidetracked. The point is that Adam and Eve did live, and they were the first humans. They also had perfect DNA, handed to them from the creator.”

Noah snorts.

“You think it sounds unlikely, and that’s fine. But for me, Adam and Eve were my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.”

“Let’s assume I believe this, which I don’t, to be clear, but assume I do. Why is it that you’re only a few generations away from good old Grandpa Adam and Grandma Eve?”

I sigh. “Their DNA was perfect. With time, the DNA in your body starts to break down, hundreds, thousands, millions of replications later. Then your skin isn’t as elastic, your body sags, wrinkles, and so on. You get age spots, and your body doesn’t heal quickly.”

“Sure, we all age.”

I shake my head this time. “No. We don’t all age at the same rate.”

“People are always saying my dad looks amazing for his age. Is that what you mean?”

Could his dad be half-evian? “Maybe. But it’s more than looking good. The average human doesn’t live more than a hundred years.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll live a thousand years, or close to it, before I begin to experience the same aging issues that you’ll face in less than one hundred.”

“Wait, why will you live so long?”

“My DNA is better,” I say simply. “I heal more efficiently, run faster, process data better, and jump higher than you do. It’s not arrogance or superiority that I’m spouting. Those are all facts. We aren’t human, which is a word we developed for those with degraded DNA. Those of us with very few genetic deletions call ourselves evian, from the pure line of Eve.”

Noah starts walking then, not looking in my direction, hands stuffed in his pockets. We turn on Vernon Road, and he still hasn’t said another word.

“Look, the issue is that our DNA hasn’t suffered any decay. But human DNA has been through thousands of tiny genetic deletions.”

He stops and swivels to face me. “Deletions?”

“Yes, the very end of the DNA chain drops off the sequence sometimes when cells split. Maybe once every couple thousand replications. Maybe less, or maybe more. It’s not exact, but that’s why we age, remember?”

“Fine, I’ll play along.”

I don’t scowl at him. It’s natural that he doesn’t believe me. “Eve’s youngest daughter lived as long as Eve, but was born nearly a thousand years after Eve and Adam were created on Earth.”

“Okay, sure. Why not?”

“Her name was Mahalesh, and Alamecha the name of Mahalesh’s youngest daughter. She was technically the heir to all that Mahalesh had, or should have been. Alamecha was also my great great great grandma.”

“So you’re seven generations—”

“Six,” I say, cutting him off. “I’m six generations removed, or seventh generation myself, from the woman the Bible calls Eve.”

“So you’re like super old?”

I laugh. “No. I’m actually seventeen, just like you.”

“Are you being serious right now? You’re some kind of superhuman and you call yourself evian? Like the water?”

Mom and her weird sense of humor. “Yes, like the water.”

“For real?”

“My mother has a warped idea of what’s funny.” I roll my eyes. “She started that company as a joke, but it’s kind of taken off, and now we’re stuck with it. Edam thinks it’s hilarious and refuses to drink anything but Evian.”

“Wait, who’s Edam?” he asks.

“Right, sorry. Coach Renfro’s real name is Edam.”

“Oh! So that guy is one of you? He is like Eve’s great-great-grandson. No wonder he looks so old.” Noah smirks.

“Noah, this isn’t a joke.”

“It has to be a joke,” he says. “Because otherwise I’d have heard something about it. People would know about this.”

I shake my head. “People knew, thousands of years ago, but it caused problems. First, humans tried to worship us. That may sound awesome, but it’s not. It gets really old. Then people grew envious and attacked us.”

“You heal fast though, right?” His eyes sparkle. He doesn’t believe me.

“Yes. We do.” I grit my teeth. “Look, I’m not supposed to be telling you. We have very strict laws about this.”

“You could like dominate the entire world, but you don’t? You hide in the shadows, because you’re so benevolent?”

Boy does he have this wrong. “No, nothing like that.” I wonder whether this was a mistake. I could stop now and no one would ever believe a word. Heck, he doesn’t even believe me. But he’s so earnest in his mocking, and he has been so supportive up until now. I plunge ahead. “So here’s the deal. My mom was sort of a pioneer, okay? We’ve been ruling the entire world for millennia, but once we realized how problematic it is to be different, we grew weary of dealing with human tantrums and attacks and whatnot. We developed our own societies outside of humanity, but we—”

I stop. We use them. We use the humans around us, because we don’t care about them. They have no value to us. How can I say that to him, even though it’s true? It sounds so wrong.

Which probably means it is wrong.

“Look, my mom decided that humans would be more helpful, would produce more cheerfully if we provided them with freedom.”

Noah lifts one eyebrow. “Your mother’s an altruist?”

Not exactly. I cringe, inwardly. “Maybe this will help. Look, hundreds of years ago Mom had a menagerie.”

“You mean, like a zoo?”

“A private zoo. She loved it, but her animals got depressed, right? They moped around, did nothing, and then some of them ate nothing. It got bad enough that they died. Cheetahs first, and then others, too. She brought in specialists to figure out what was wrong. She loved the predators most of all.”

“And?”

“And she discovered that while they loved having food provided for them, and they even loved my mother, they hated feeling enclosed. So she created a new park for them with habitats ten times the size of the old ones.”

“What happened?” Noah asks.

“The animals flourished. They bred in captivity, they played, pounced and thrived.”

“Because they needed freedom.”

I shake my head. “Not quite. They needed the appearance of freedom.”

Noah frowns. He should frown. Saying this out loud depresses me.

“Mom realized her humans were suffering in a similar way. They would chafe at the laws, the rules, the demands. They would even refuse to eat, figuratively. She ignored everything her mother taught her, everything her rivals did. She fashioned a new model. She decided to give them a pen that was ten times bigger. She engineered a fake rebellion that made a bunch of the humans think they were in charge. They believed they were free from England.”

“America?”

I nod. “And it worked. They thrived on the appearance of freedom.”

Noah tosses his hands in the air. “America is free. I’ve seen the elections. People travel wherever they want. They own their own homes and property.”

I drop my voice to a whisper. “They love their really large and spacious pens.”

“Huh?”

“Passports, taxes, bureaucracy. How much do you think humans in America pay in taxes?”

Noah shrugs.

“They pay local taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, social taxes, sales taxes.”

“You’re saying all of that flows through to you?”

“Of course it does. And some of the humans know it, and some of the others know something is wrong on a subliminal level. Have you heard of pork barrel spending? Humans decry the horrible waste of government. They gripe and do exposés on how terrible it is that so much money just disappears.”

“You guys are pork barrel spending?”

“Of course we are. And on top of that, the highest level humans all know who we are, and they do what we say.”

Noah shakes his head again. “What about the elections?”

“Bigger pen,” I say. “They’re obviously rigged. Do you really think Americans voted for that guy everyone hated so vocally? Come on.” I shrug. “But humans believe their pen isn’t there, so they ignore the fencing when they see it.”

His mouth drops.

“Look, some Presidents have even come close to blabbing. They’ve walked a fine line.”

“Like who?” Noah’s eyes light up.

“One time, President George W. Bush was on some talk show and someone else had just taken over. People were freaking out, and they asked him, ‘aren’t you worried about this!?’ His response ticked my mom off, but I thought it was clever. And people didn’t credit George W. with a lot of smarts, but that was mostly an act. A very good act, but an act.”

“What did he say?”

“He pointed to the desk in the Oval Office and he said, ‘Don’t worry. Whoever occupies that seat behind that desk, will quickly find out that their hands are tied and they’ll end up doing almost exactly as I have done.’”

“He didn’t say that. You couldn’t possibly recall exactly what he said.”

I shrug. “Look it up. I’m evian.” I tap my forehead. “Perfect recall.”

“Did he really?”

“Look, the humans all assumed he meant that the checks and balances kept them safe from sweeping change in the executive branch.”

“But that’s not what he meant?”

I tsk. “We control all three branches. We can do or change whatever we want. But. . .”

“Bigger pen,” Noah says, his eyes shuttered.

“You’re catching on.”

“And it worked.”

“Mom’s holdings and power have only grown, because happy humans work harder, produce more, and well, they thrive.”

Noah whistles.

“Except I wasn’t kidding when I said my mom died.” My throat closes off. “On her nine-hundreth birthday.”

“Oh man,” he says. “I am really sorry. I was hoping that was part of your cover.”

“She was poisoned,” I say. “She would’ve lived a few more decades at least if she hadn’t been.”