A mystery flowed in her veins, like her body wasn’t hers. And according to Congress, that was somewhat true. ABP had a say in what it put inside their intellectual property.

And if they put the wrong thing inside? Maybe a helpful injection had backfired and triggered Sibs through Yaya’s DNA. Her last checkup on October 12 might have started a countdown, and only a month later was she getting the toothy memo.

Was ABP to blame?

Freaking out seemed natural, but Yaya tapped her foot to the teeth song until the Jumpies bell rang her out the glass sliding doors and onto the street.

November clouds capped distant skyscraper peaks, their grays mixing into a sooty miasma. Ashen concrete covered Newark the way green kudzu smothered trees down south. In the last five years, Springfield-Belmont had turned from any other smattering of urban buildings into a breeding ground for hideous luxury condos. AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical filled the first of Newark’s glassy skyscrapers, with their claws grasping for others. More marketing teams, more research centers, more everything they could catch.

As if their hold on Yaya and every other chimera weren’t enough.

Nowadays, the city was a new thing built on the grave of the old, its name inherited. Some brick apartments and shops lingered from when Yaya was a kid, but every year a shiny new skyscraper crested the horizon. She didn’t mind the new bus lines or population boom, but to think of Newark as a big deal seemed

fantastical.

The bus let her off up the block from her apartment, and she followed the sidewalk between a chain-link fence and the street. Kids with spray cans clustered beside a neighboring apartment building, tagging the bricks with a graffiti mural of twin girls, their skin painted in warm browns, reds, and yellows over turquoise letters that read Gemini. Though their eyes were only amber paint, Yaya felt watched and known. These girls could tell that misery laid heavy stones on her mind. Joy could wet those stones, but it would never dislodge them.

“Mind your business,” she muttered, and hoped the painter kids scattered before a cop tank rolled through, its treads kicking asphalt chunks every which way.

At least the kids had each other. She didn’t want to be alone right now. Last night’s hookup had been a rock, unfazed by Yaya’s slipup this morning, the kind of personality she could wrap her arms around in a stormy sea. She could call Starts-With-D from the text’s number.

Yaya wasn’t the type to stalk, text, or call back. Only once had anyone tried to dig hooks in after their hookup, and she retreated when Yaya made it clear she wasn’t biting. Flowers, jewelry, and restaurant dates seemed like overcomplicated rituals to mask cavalier promiscuity. Yaya preferred honesty when she went rocketing from bed to bed. Sure, sometimes those rituals paved the way to concrete relationships, but did that concrete build a home where lovers lived, or cement shoes that helped them drown?