And he won’t get a face until I design one.

I chew on my lower lip. Okay, then.

Brow. Shouldn’t be low, I don’t like low brows. I don’t want it too high, just higher than average.

Where there’s a brow, there’s hair. Blond? Brunette? Redhead?

Rupert Grint has red hair. He seems nice.

Am I looking for nice?

No. Not Rupert nice. A little less nice.

Daniel Craig. He has blond hair. He may be nice in real life, but he doesn’t play nice in the movies. Blond can be cruel.

“This is idiotic,” I say.

“What is?”

I jump. I don’t know the voice. I spin around and see an extremely strange person. He appears to be tattooed everywhere except his face. No, scratch that: He has a tattoo on his brow. Speaking of brows.

“What’s idiotic?” he demands sharply.

“Who are you?”

“I happen to be Dr. Holyfield. I’m in charge of Project 88715.”

“Oh.”

“I would like to know what’s idiotic.”

I’m not intimidated. He wants me to be, he’s frowning, but I’m not easily intimidated. Certainly not in a building with my family’s name on the outside.

“Hair. I was debating hair color,” I explain.

He stares at me like he can’t accept my answer. Like there must be a better answer that I’m just refusing to tell him.

I hold his gaze.

He doesn’t like that, either. Too bad.

“Hair color is irrelevant,” he says at last. “It’s nothing but aesthetics. That’s not why you’re running this simulation. Your mother didn’t task you to discover your preferences in hair color.”

“Huh. Then why did she ‘task’ me?”

“Because she wants to keep you occupied, I assume.” He shrugs when I fail to take offense. “And, I suppose, because it might be informative to see what an ordinary person comes up with.”

“Ordinary.”

He stares at my work so far—eyeballs and hands. “Why would you start with hands and eyes?”

I take a deep breath. The truth is, I haven’t spent much time thinking about the “why.” But I don’t want to admit it. This guy is annoying me. Set aside the tattoos, and he’s like a lot of the other Spiker scientists I’ve been introduced to: arrogant and in love with his own IQ.

So I say, “Because gods want to be seen, and they want to be served.”

“Gods?”

I lift my shoulders in what I hope is a parody of his too cool for school attitude. “Don’t give me the job of creating a human unless you want me to have delusions of God-hood.”

“It’s just a sim,” he says, and his eyes narrow suspiciously.

“Okay, and I’m just a God sim.”

The conversation is not going his way. “If there were a God in this process, it would be the guy who created the RDSS-3 software and married it up to the CGMs.”

“The what?”

“The Rapid DNA Selection System and of course the Controlled…” He stops, glares, and actually thumps his chest. “Me. That’s who designed the RDSS and realized its potential.”

“So you’re God.”

He snorts. “Well, you’re not. I designed this system. You’re just using it.”

“Yeah. Like an artist uses paint. Right?” I ask it innocently. “I’ll bet the guy who sold Da Vinci paint thought he was the artist.”

“Mmm,” he says, his eyes hard. “It must be nice to be you, kid. Rich and privileged. Everything handed to you on a silver platter. Must be very nice.”

He turns on his heel and walks away.

What on earth is a CGM? I wonder. Controlled … That’s as far as he got, and then he stopped himself.

I Google it. CGM and the word “controlled.” Plenty of results, none of them very interesting.

“Dark hair,” I say to no one.

Dark hair it is. I tap the screen, I move the jelly beans. But the program informs me that I have made an error. We’re going to need a scalp and an entire head before we can grow hair.

I have no idea how to decide on a head shape. In my entire life I’ve never spent three seconds thinking about head shapes.

I get back on Google and start educating myself.

“Wait a minute,” I mutter aloud. “Is that what she’s up to?” Is my mother trying to entice me into majoring in genetics? Nah, that would be too motherly, not sufficiently subterranean.

Hmm.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m enjoying this. And it’s a good way to take my mind off Aislin and Solo and The Leg.

For the next three hours I barely look up from the screen.

And when at last I do look up, there’s Adam, looking back at me.

He has a very handsome face. The nose is perfect. The cheekbones could belong to a male model. The black hair is lush and lustrous. The mouth … that’s the only thing I’m not entirely happy with. That mouth, those lips, are almost too perfect. There’s something unnerving about a perfectly shaped mouth.

The eyes are blank, no glimmer of intelligence or thought or awareness behind them.

And suddenly I realize that I was right in my glib answer to Dr. Holyfield. I want my creation to see me.

For that, I will have to give Adam a brain.

– 18 –

SOLO

My phone goes off at 2:14 A.M.

I roll out of bed, stand up, realize the phone is still ringing, turn around, try to remember where the hell the phone is and what the hell it would be doing ringing. I find it and fumble with it and hold it the wrong way to my head.