The minute that door shut behind us, I screamed in frustration. For all the mental preparation I'd done for the moment when we met our adversaries, I'd not been prepared for any of what had just happened. The room we were in was a bedroom with an attached bathroom. It resembled a hotel room, although in all it was much nicer, and it had the same glass wall that had been at the side of the previous room. The sun had fully risen, now, and the daybright scene outside shimmered in all its morning dew, but I couldn't appreciate it. I walked straight to the wall and placed my hands against the glass--it was solid. This was no illusion. "What the hell is all of this?"

"How do you know them?"

I turned to look at Lucas. He stood in all his stolid ghostliness.

His rational aura calmed me. I rubbed my chin, placed a hand on my hip. "Obviously I don't know them. They were always these people. Always manipulating, like you said. The woman was a therapist when I was at Oliphant. And then she helped me figure out that it was Jason and not Henry who'd shot his dad. She'd helped. And then I found out she and the other guy--Enrique, I guess--were detectives. At least, they told me they were. And they helped me after everything happened with the Circuit. But then, they just kind of disappeared, and I saw Pinsky-Waters--the woman--again not too long ago. She was checking up on me or something. And Old Lisa--that guy at the door . . . Reality dawned on me. "No one has ever been looking out for me. No one! Even the people I thought were ineffective but well-meaning were just playing parts." I moaned. "Oh, God. Are they the ones who've been doing this all to us? But to what end, Lucas? I don't understand."

"I don't understand, either. They called us . . . possessions. It's how I've always felt, that I didn't belong to myself. All the time they kept me locked up--it's the only thing I've ever known. Being with you is the only time I have felt like I might, somehow, be more than just theirs." He turned away from me, but before he had, I thought his look was pained.

"But you don't recognize them?"

"I only ever saw the people with masks, with robes, with disguised voices. If those are them, I wouldn't know it."

I sighed deeply. "What do we do?"

He waved a hand around the room. "They're obviously watching and listening. There's no point in trying to make plans."

"I don't care if they're listening or watching. They've been doing it all along, haven't they? And it's pretty rude to imply that we aren't wholesome, or whatever he said. Condescending assholes."

"I think we should do what they asked . . ." Lucas faced me. His expression implied a for now at the end of his advice.

He was being more level-headed than I was. I knew he was. There might be a time for rash actions, but it wasn't now. Not if we wanted answers. Conceding (though not without a huff of exasperation), I took a better look around the room. Two sets of all-white clothing were laid out for us, a shirt-dress for me (identical to what they'd offered me at the beach house) and sweatpants and a t-shirt for Lucas. There were undergarments as well. I figured they must've known we wouldn't allow them to separate us, which was why both sets of clothing were there. Maybe they did know us better than we knew ourselves--that was unsettling. I reluctantly took my outfit into the bathroom and showered and changed. Lucas followed my example. And when we were both done, we looked boring and unimposing, just as they probably wanted us to look. No pockets in which to hide anything, either. Then we waited. The door was locked, and there was nowhere to go within the confined space.

I made some more rude comments on how insulting it was to make us shower and change before they'd speak with us, hoping they were listening in, but Lucas seemed preoccupied with things beyond my minor frustrations. I wondered if being this close to the people that had tormented him so personally for so long was messing with his mind. While I had to deal with surprise, he had to deal with a lifetime of past trauma, most of which I knew nothing about.

When the door did finally open, when we did at last get called from the room, it was by some of their people rather than the man and woman themselves, and we were led back into the living space and through a sliding door in the glass wall, out onto a large enclosed balcony that seemed a mile above the lake below. It was a protrusion of glass on the dome, its own separate bubble atop the larger--glass all around, under our feet, even, which was disorienting, somewhat nausea-inducing. Seated at a table of some clear material in chairs made of the same thing were Pinsky-Waters and Enrique, looking prim and pleased with themselves. They were drinking something that looked like champagne out of fluted glasses. It was as if they were having some sort of private party, and we were interrupting it.

They waved us into two chairs across from one another. I didn't want to part from Lucas's side, even though it was just on the opposite end of a table from him, but we did as they asked, for the moment. Two armed people stood behind us, an obvious threat if we tried anything. I sat and stared at them, trying not to appear as sullen as I felt, trying to look as dispassionate and calm as Lucas always seemed to manage. I was ready to wait for them to talk; I didn't want to sound as agitated as I was. And fortunately, I didn't have to wait long. The woman spoke almost as soon as we were in our chairs.

"My name is not Hope Pinsky-Waters, as you may have already guessed. It's Sabine. My partner is Enrique. You may call us by our names." She paused, as if waiting for something from either of us, but we didn't respond. Enrique was leaning back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, watching us like some benevolent spirit. I supposed Sabine was the talker. "We have waited for you for many years," she continued. "We knew you'd eventually find your way home, whatever the tribulations, but we weren't sure which of you it would actually be. So we were intrigued, at the manse, to see the attachment you've created. We always hoped it might be you, Layla, with some pushing--Amirah is far too volatile. But Lucas? We almost had him decommissioned five or six times; his turnaround surprises us. It's as if you've leveled one another; he's strengthened you, and you've softened him. For the longest time, we worked with Henry, thinking he was the best we'd yet produced. Enrique even made him his namesake, as you might be able to guess, and yet here we are, with seventh-generation Lucas, our dark horse."

Hearing her talk about us this way--it was unnerving, and her words did little to enhance my insight. There were strange, somewhat frightening terms: decommission, produced, seventh-generation. But I needed more before I'd allow myself fear. "You'll have to start at the beginning if you want us to understand what you're talking about." I narrowed my eyes, sarcastically added, "You've erased my memory, you know, so it's your fault if I need a more thorough explanation."

She tapped a slender, pale finger on the tabletop, exchanged an infuriatingly knowing smile with Enrique, as if I were some child she were about to indulge. "Many years ago, Enrique and I met, in graduate school. We became interested in a singular topic: abating the aging process. It's an eternal quest--that of immortality or, at least, that of remaining youthful as long as possible. The oldest stories in the world recount tales of heroes who unsuccessfully sought it. Our similar interest created a lasting partnership. We worked for a long while on cosmetic applications, methods of cheating though not of evading or ending the effects of aging. But as we grew more entrenched in our work, and as science and technology advanced, our work took a different turn. We received grants, benefactors, contracts--and we were offered some degree of immunity. Our work had taken a turn that the uninformed might unjustly view as unscrupulous. Over time, though, we've found that a more clandestine approach to our experimentation benefits all. You've made it increasingly more difficult to remain surreptitious, though; you've moved somewhat beyond the parameters we set for your development. Dissimulation has become more . . . demanding.

"In any case, where do you come in? That's what you want to know, isn't it? Do you remember the story of the white bear? That bear was both a magical creation as well as a curse; it was both human and animal, destined to forever walk as both until one day, it returned to the mage who had designed it. When the mystery was revealed--when the bear's dual-nature was identified (at great cost to the one who discovered it, I should add)--this precipitated the end. We told you the story before we sent you away from us, so that you would find your way home, had you the drive to do so. And just as that bear, so are you both: magical creations as well as cursed. For years, Enrique and I struggled to fight age, an impossible adversary, but after some while, we realized that fighting it was a dead end; instead, we must escape it entirely . . . we must create new life whose cellular structure prohibits division, prohibits senescence of any kind--is entirely void of the processes that cause human life in its present state to decay. And that is where you come in. Or, really, that is where the first generation of you came in."

"We don't grow--Lucas said we've always been this age--" I interjected, my thoughts in commotion.

"Yes. As life that never grows, never changes, if we'd made you babies, you'd have stayed babies." She laughed, turned to Enrique, and he laughed as well. "Can you imagine us doing all of this with infants?"

"But, then, how were we--how were we born? I don't understand--"

"You were not born so much as brought into being."

"Are we . . . are we even human?" My distress was mounting.

"In almost every sense of the word!" Sabine chimed, taking on a soothing tone. "The process was not as complicated as it might sound. You began as all life begins, as embryos. In fact, your genetic material comes from Enrique and me ourselves; creating life is quite the responsibility, you understand, and so the risks, we felt, should at first be our own."

"So . . . you're our--our parents?"

Enrique spoke for the first time since we'd sat down. "Somewhat. Sabine and I--we aren't those sorts of partners." He laughed in a weird, jolly way. It didn't fit what was being discussed.

"No," Sabine continued. "We certainly are not. You began your life in our lab."

I almost rose from my chair. "Does that mean--are we--siblings?" One of the guards behind me shifted in anticipation of me doing something rash, but when Sabine shook her head, I managed to sit back down.

"No, no. Enrique used his . . . material . . . and I used mine. Completely separate. The fertilization process involved something quite special, quite--up until this point--undisclosed. But as you are made of it, we've decided that you have a right to know. You see, what changed the course of our research all those years ago was that we were granted exclusive access to one of the most significant discoveries in all of history: alien genetic material, found in the core of an asteroid that fell to the northern territories back in the 60s--right where we're located, to be exact; it's why we built, here, above it. There was quite an international to-do over rights, but we were able to promise returns on the deal as well as the utmost secrecy in our experimentation. Because, you must have realized, that genetic material possessed the very secrets to destroying the aging process, as it was and is still supremely primordial and yet as young as it must have been when first formed. To spare you details of the process, our embryonic cells were spliced with the genetic material found on that asteroid and, from there, your first generation was printed, fully formed human beings, with all the beauty and intricacies you know as yourselves. I say first generation, because you, Lucas, are the seventh (along with Amirah), and you, Layla, are the eighth (along with Henry). You come from my line, Lucas, and Layla, you are from Enrique's. It's quite interesting how my line produced males and his produced females--one of the many idiosyncrasies that have come about working with this alien material, like the odd ability you have to communicate with digital machines."

Sabine paused, no doubt to let us take in everything she'd been saying. I couldn't believe most of it, and yet . . . "So, what you're telling us is that Lucas and I are, in a sense, your children? Yours and--what--some alien's?"

"Don't think of it like that," Enrique smiled, leaning forward, uncrossing his legs, elbow on the table. "It's not as if we found some crash-landed martian--it was genetic material, but it wasn't a lifeform in itself. Do you understand?"

"Not really."

"There are others, then, like us? How is that possible--did we come from them? And where are they?" That was Lucas. He'd remained deathly still and silent this whole time, almost to the point that I'd forgotten he, too, was hearing all this crazy information.

Sabine sipped her drink, raised two fingers and gestured to some nondescript person who'd come out with a tray of water glasses which they placed in front of me and Lucas. When that person had gone, she said to us, "Drink. You must stay hydrated. You've neglected your bodies for too long in getting here."

"I'm not thirsty--"

"Drink," she ordered me, leaving no room for protest. "Now, to answer your questions, Lucas, we strove to create the perfect, eternal human. You can't imagine we succeeded on the first try, especially using such a novel process and base material. Rather than grow the original embryos into humans, we copied them. Every generation has been a copy of the source material; we've maintained the original embryos from which all generations have been engendered and thought to potentially continue to use them, but with each copy, the source embryos have begun to deteriorate. We didn't realize until about the fifth generation that we must strive harder or risk losing our progress, regressing by using a decaying line. And with each generation, we found flaws that we then worked to eliminate, improving each time until, as I just said, we found we had to be less reckless, less experimental, in our most recent generations, nor count on producing countless more if you failed. So you see, we have put all of our efforts into you."

"So where are they, then, the ones who didn't meet your needs?" Lucas repeated. He was so much better than I was at maintaining his fortitude. He didn't even sound surprised at anything these people were saying.

"Not everything we created is as pretty as you've turned out," Enrique laughed uncomfortably. "We have had to . . . decommission those who've not met the necessary standards."

"You mean kill them," Lucas returned.

"Did you kill Henry?" I leapt from my seat for the second time, knocking my water glass over, startling everyone to the point that one of the guards strode toward me and almost grabbed me before Sabine stopped him with a lift of her hand.

"No, we have not decommissioned Henry," Sabine said firmly, angrily even, adding, "yet."

Panting, I stayed where I was. "This is insane. All of this is absolutely insane. If we're some creations of yours that you're so proud of, worked so hard on--why would you try to kill us and hurt us? Why torture Henry and Lucas? Why wipe our minds and make us hurt people and--and--all of it? Why?"

"Sit down," Sabine demanded between clenched teeth. I refused at first, but then she gave me a glare that could've burned paper, and I grudgingly returned to my chair again, though with more obvious disgruntlement than before. "You were not raised; you did not have a formative childhood. You were made as you see yourself now and were imparted with the knowledge of a normal young person. But you had to be tested. Strengthened. You were given bodies that neither thirsted nor hungered, survived cold and heat, needed little rest, healed quickly, and were difficult to extirpate. But this wasn't enough. You needed to be mentally and emotionally conditioned. You needed to learn resilience and perseverance. And you needed to be taught ruthlessness, because if you are going to survive in a world that will at first deem you dangerous, you'll have to want and be able to fight for your survival. Our methods are imperfect and unorthodox, perhaps, but they've worked. The final test we set was to give you the tools you'd need to return to us, and you have at last proven yourselves worthy of your very existence. Ready for what lies ahead. And if you'd known it was all a simulation, it never would've worked. So do not speak to me in that tone."

I felt like a scolded teenager. "But why . . . why take our memories?" I asked as politely as I could muster, needing the answer.

Enrique held up a hand to Sabine. "Let me take this one; she's getting you worked up. We'll get through this--don't worry." Then to me, he said, "That was a new technique, Layla. When we reached the seventh generation--Amirah and Lucas--one of the many quirks of the foreign genetic material began to grow more pronounced. In short, though each of you was created from a different embryo, because you were created in conjunction, some strange and incomprehensible bond formed. It was not in the first generations, became barely perceptible by the third or fourth, and was evident with the seventh. But in spite of the bond created, these two, while drawn to one another, didn't take advantage of that bond. We overlooked it, hoped it would disappear if we spawned one more generation . . . just one more, because the seventh were too severe in their ways, too cruel in their methods, lacking empathy. We risked an eighth generation, you and Henry, in the hope that we'd at last get it right, but it was always a gamble--tweak this, edit that--and what happened was that the bond grew far more marked in the two of you. You have always been drawn to one another. Even when you were in formation, your limbs reached toward one another, unwittingly, in your enclosures. And as Sabine has told you, the resilience and independence you needed to be taught were hindered by your connection, your bond, your desire to be always near one another. If we were to condition you, we must break that bond. And yet every time we began, you found each other once more. It was only by erasing your memories of each other that we were able to gain ground."

"So why didn't you just put us on opposite sides of the planet?" My sarcasm didn't amuse them.

Sabine narrowed her eyes at me. "You know the answer to that. Too far, and you begin to collapse; you grow ill." She sighed as if we were tiring her. "But we had to take the chance with you. We had to work so hard because if we continue to generate more of you, we risk corrupting the source material even further." She smiled. "And there was a time, as well, when we wondered if the bond was a good thing. We did toy with that notion, sometimes placing you near one another to study the connection and test its pliancy, look for weaknesses. When I helped Henry get those notes to you at Oliphant, opened doors—we'd given in to accepting your bond, working with it. At that time, Henry was showing such promise, such strength. And you, Layla—we hoped exploiting your bond would lead him to share his strength with you. Instead, you ended up weakening him. We saw it when he chose you without any thought over that friend of his at the Circuit."

Slim. "So making me choose between Paolo and Henry--that was some sort of test, too?"

"At that point, your roles had reversed. You were the strong one; we wished to know if your connection to Henry still clouded your judgment," Enrique replied. "It certainly was one of the more . . . difficult tests."

I trembled, looked down at the table. Difficult for whom?

"You said the asteroid landed in the 60s," Lucas suddenly said. "But you can't be more than forty."

Sabine winked at Enrique. "You see? He's learned a little charm, even. Sweet boy. We're both well into our nineties. Not all of our early experiments with slowing aging were a waste!"

"Then . . . if we've always been this way . . ." I raised my eyes. "How old are we?"

"I knew you'd ask at some point!" Enrique raised a fist gleefully. "Our smartest yet, Sabine. You've always been seventeen. The perfect age, in our estimation--old enough to forge your own way yet young enough to avoid many of the repercussions of your actions. But if you're asking how long you've been on this earth . . . well, in Layla's case, about thirty years, and in Lucas's, near thirty-five."

My mouth agape, I stared in disbelief at Enrique. "You--you've been splitting up me and Henry for . . . for thirty years?"

"Closer to fifteen. We did allow you some time together, our seventh and eight generations, when you were first awakened. You spent some time at the beach house, acclimating, learning, socializing; I think you might recall some of those years."

"But--how--how many times have you erased our minds? Mine and--and Henry's?"

Sabine said it so quickly it was as if she'd been waiting for me to ask, to hurt me with the answer: "Ten. Almost eleven, though you managed to evade us the last time, clever girl."

My head spun. Was spinning. Had been spinning since we'd sat down. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And when they said more things, things about giving us time to process and prepare before tomorrow's experience, and when their people lifted me out of my chair and led me back into a room, it all remained spinning. It was as if all of a sudden, hours later, I realized too late that I was on a bed, in the room I'd been in before, and Lucas was no longer with me.