Now it’s Eric’s turn to look disgusted. “You didn’t know her. She wasn’t thinking about the company. Her focus was always on creating that…that thing.” He looks over at Jinx, his face screwed up as if he wants to spit on him. “Do you think that had anything to do with following our company ideals? She was trying to create life. But she’s not Dr. Frankenstein. You think that I am evil, but Monica had the biggest ego of us all. She had the grandest designs; she was the one who thought she could play God! You idolize her, but you didn’t see what she had become. If she cared so much about her precious company, how would I have been able to take over so easily? At any point she could have raised her head and seen the truth, but she kept her nose firmly buried in that thing’s machinery. If she wanted to stop me, she would have.”

I shake my head. But even as he speaks, I feel like I can recognize what he is saying. When I get working on a project, it’s as if everything else melts away and nothing else matters. The world could be descending into chaos, meteors could be raining down, aliens could have landed, zombies could have risen up out of the ground, but if I was down in my locker and in the middle of tinkering, I don’t think I would have cared. What if Monica had been like that too? Had she just passively let all this happen, allowed Eric to go ahead and send any objectors to Lake Baku, let him steadily release updates to some of her most dedicated staff, while she playacted at being CEO, all the while developing her obsession?

And yet the result of that obsession is Jinx. Could I be too angry about that? Maybe in order to create something so amazing, something so innovative and out of this world, something so…real…it required 100 percent devotion.

Even to the total detriment of everything else.

Tears well up in my eyes. “I want to go home,” I say. “You…you’ve ruined everything for me. First you took away my dad. That’s him, isn’t it? That’s him out there with another one of those sloth bakus.”

“He wanted to stop the program.” He actually has the audacity to look sad, his palms open toward me as if he’s asking for forgiveness. “At least here, at Lake Baku, I knew where all my objectors were. Safe. Hidden.”

I want to run at him, to hit him with my fists and scream my lungs out, I want to tear at him with my teeth, I want to become a feral beast, just to show him exactly what he’s done to me—to us—and how I will never, ever forgive him.