MARTHA VANCE POV
I haven't slept a full night since the day my Sarah walked out that door with Kwame and his notebooks. For fifteen years, this house has been a museum of silence, filled with the smell of lemon wax and the dust of things left unsaid.
Then he brought them here.
I watched through the screen door as Silas stood in the driveway with his shotgun. I saw the two of them step out of that sleek, black car. My heart didn't just break; it shattered. They had her chin. They had her height. But when they looked at me, I didn't see my daughter. I saw the cold, sterile light of a laboratory.
Now, after a few days, the house feels... heavy.
I was standing at the stove, watching Eve try to whisk cake batter. He was holding the whisk like it was a weapon, his knuckles white, his eyes darting around the kitchen as if the flour canisters were going to attack him. He's the restless one. He reminds me of a storm cloud trapped in a bottle.
"Eve, honey," I said, reaching out to wipe a streak of flour from his cheek.
He flinched.
It wasn't just a startle. It was a violent, practiced recoil. My heart sank into my stomach. What did that man do to them? What kind of world is so cruel that a boy is afraid of a grandmother's touch? I had to turn back to the stove so he wouldn't see the tears pricking my eyes.
"He really did a number on you two, didn't he?" I whispered.
"I am a Black-tier Hybrid, Martha," he told me, his voice trying so hard to be tough, to be a machine.
I didn't care about his "tiers" or his "hybrids." I saw the way he looked at the strawberry jam like it was a miracle. I saw the way he and Adam stood in the middle of the hallway at night, perfectly still, as if they didn't know how to just be without someone giving them a command.
Then there's Adam.
He went out with Silas this morning. Silas is a hard man—grief turned him into flint—but I saw the way he looked at Adam when they came back from the fence line. Adam's hands were blistered. Real, human blisters. I almost cheered. Kwame tried to turn them into gods, but the dirt is turning them back into boys.
I watched out the window as June Miller drove away in her rattling old truck. I saw Eve standing on the porch, holding a crate of eggs like it was a holy relic, watching her go with a look on his face that he didn't have a word for.
It's the look Sarah used to have when she talked about the stars.
"They're coming back, Silas," I said that night in bed, the room dark and smelling of cedar.
"They aren't her, Martha," Silas grumbled, though his voice was thick. "They're experiments. You saw that light in their eyes."
"I saw a boy who didn't know how to eat a biscuit, Silas. I saw a boy who didn't know he was allowed to be tired." I rolled over to face him. "Kwame gave them power, but he didn't give them a life. If we don't do this, if we don't love the machine out of them, then he really did kill her for nothing."
Silas didn't answer, but he took my hand.
Down the hall, in the guest room, I heard the floorboards groan. They were awake. They're always awake, listening to a world they weren't built for. I closed my eyes and prayed to a God I hadn't spoken to in years: Let them break. Let them be messy. Let them be human.
Because I can't lose her again. Not when her face is walking around my kitchen.