Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

And if they refused their second chance… well.

It was Wayne’s job to ensure that they didn’t. Usually, he succeeded. A few times, he hadn’t.

In his first years at the agency, the PITs had posed obvious threats. Importing his first ones had felt like acts of heroism to Wayne: removing danger from the streets, giving it the opportunity for redemption. It felt like noble work, snagging those would-be troublemakers from the public arena, like defusing bombs for a living. He’d nailed a group of Black Web programmers who were building an entire alt-internet of lies, angry feminists on the brink of violence, and a few serious would-be terrorists from basements in Ohio and Texas.

As time passed, some of Wayne’s assignments felt less noble. Were his PITs less threatening, or had Wayne simply begun to grow up, to see the world in gradations of color instead of black-and-white? The PIT who’d leaked “fabricated data” on endocrine disruption, threatening the multibillion-dollar plastics industry at its core, had insisted that her research was valid and refused to back down from her position—that unborn males were facing a widespread risk of hermaphroditism—even after ten months at the Colony. She would not budge. She was still at the Colony today, along with other PITs who refused to revise their alarmist agendas: the pollution guy from Riverside, for example, who’d tried to convince thousands of cancer patients that their condition was a direct result of merely breathing the air of the Inland Empire. Or the women in Brownsville, Texas, along the Mexican border, who insisted their water supply was tainted with lead.

Criteria for importation had loosened since Wayne had joined the ISA, that was for sure. When he’d been assigned to Vivian Bourne—part of the ISA’s effort to assemble civilians affected by accelerated gestation—he’d almost laughed. What threat did a bunch of college kids, mostly at tony, soft liberal arts schools, pose to the general public? To the administration? What did it matter that tech geeks out in California were newly fascinated with accelerated gestation, a phenomenon that had faded out twenty years ago?

The situation, it turned out, was complicated.

But it was not Wayne’s job to get mired in the details. His job was to slip in and out of his PITs’ lives like water. He was merely an order-taker, an executor of protocol. The justifications were the responsibility of the Inner Panel, the top brass hemmed inside their desert fortress in New Mexico. Strategy happened from inside the Colony. Action—Wayne’s job—happened in the field.

Action, they’d taught him in training, must never involve attachment. Whether a PIT got attached to him, well, that was beyond his control.

Mutuality had never been a problem. Until now.

Never had mistaking the locations of his contacts for home been an issue for Wayne. He’d been trained to live in the moment, blind to context, his focus pure as new snow. The spirit of a good ISA agent was necessarily vagrant. Homeless. From nowhere. It was part of how they convinced their PITs to come willingly to the Colony. It was part of why he’d almost never resorted to force.

Almost never.

Outside Wayne’s bedroom window, the rain had begun to fall harder, tapping the glass like jittery fingers. He clicked on Viv’s file and opened her latest report. He’d begun it on the plane, after he’d closely reviewed his latest photos of her face, and the x-rays of her upper left leg, but he’d been unable to properly focus, on account of Tessa Callahan in the seat beside him. His proximity to Callahan was deliberate, of course. The ISA had wanted some read on the activity of Seahorse Solutions, her biotech company that was currently meddling in accelerated gestation. So they’d sent Wayne on a quick intel trip to the Bay Area, where he’d found Tessa practically impossible to access, cordoned behind an airtight security system at what appeared to be a high-end research compound. When he’d learned she was traveling to Boston, via a conversation he’d accessed between Tessa and her husband, he’d booked his own return flight according to hers, in hope of a break, and voila, she’d granted him a gift. While he’d pretended to work, she’d spent a full five minutes gazing at colorful visual diagrams detailing the nature of the work happening at Seahorse Solutions—precisely the information the Inner Panel had pressed him to deliver.

He’d memorized as much as he could, employing mnemonic devices he’d learned in early ISA training, and documented it on his own tablet when Tessa dozed after drinking a Bloody Mary.

Tessa’s presence on the plane had made it hard for him to concentrate on finishing Viv’s report. He kept imagining her jolting awake and somehow, in a single glance, absorbing all the data on his screen.

Which was impossible, of course. Even if Tessa had gotten a long look, she would not have been able to make sense of his work. His edginess was unfounded. Clearly, he’d become irrational in matters involving Viv. Clearly, he was edgy about his pending retirement. Sensitive, emotional… Lately, he’d been displaying all the qualities antithetical to the success of a good field-op.

Wayne drained his ginger ale and set the can down hard inside the tuna container, calling himself to attention.

An ache knotted his chest. He swallowed hard and clicked open the two images that would form the basis of his report: the first, a closeup of Viv’s face, unsmiling, neutral, per ISA guidelines. The second, an x-ray of her upper leg, where her femur was anchored to her hip bone with a titanium pin, the result of her accident on the lacrosse field last fall.

Slowly and lightly, as if the keyboard were too hot, Wayne began to type.

Thirty minutes later, he finished. He paused before sending it to the Inner Panel. Once they reviewed it, it was usually just a matter of days until they’d summon him to the Colony for a final meeting before the importation. To discuss his “action plan.” Wayne loathed those trips: the white-hot desert sun, the claustrophobic gravitas of the Blue Room, the subterranean office where he and the IP buffoons would discuss the final logistics of importations.

He did not want to think about going to the Colony. Not now. There was no point in ruminating on the inevitable. It was as futile as dreading nightfall. It would happen, regardless of how much you worried or didn’t.

For now, he would try not to worry.

Five minutes later, he clicked “Send,” snapped his laptop shut, and lay down on his bed, fully clothed. He sank into the pillow and rested his forearm over his eyes, listening to the rain. He wanted to call Viv so badly, to hear her voice, but he’d lied about his return date by twenty-four hours, to give him some cushion if he needed it. He’d also lied about his destination. Necessary lies that he’d been trained to tell and had told to so many PITs for so many years that they usually felt true. But with Viv, it was different. Even the smallest untruth felt like a transgression, unsavory and clumsy and wrong.

But the lie, like so many before it, was already done. He’d just have to live with it and wait. He’d see her soon enough.

He was just beginning to drift into sleep when his phone buzzed with a text.

I, um, miss you.

Reading Viv’s message jolted him like a hit of some narcotic. He was suddenly both more lucid and more distracted, his desire to see her like live voltage through his body.

He typed back. I’m pretty sure I miss you more. See you Saturday?

Cornball, she responded immediately, with a heart emoji. And yes. Sat.

Corny but true, Wayne wrote back, because it was.

He willed himself back to work.