The Winnowing by Vikki Vansickle

Author:Vikki Vansickle [Vansickle, Vikki]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Childrens, Dystopia, Fantasy, Fiction, Middle Grade, Science Fiction, Speculative, Young Adult
ISBN: 9781443148870
Google: hd8uDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07YP885MV
Publisher: Scholastic Canada
Published: 2017-09-01T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

TWENTY

I waited for the punchline, looking from Kamal to Dr. Lowry to Kamal again, expecting one of them to break into gales of laughter and tease me for being so gullible. It was the kind of joke Kamal would make. Only he didn’t look smug or superior. He looked uneasy, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing either.

Because it couldn’t be true. It was too unbelievable. SuperGen was made of alien DNA? But that would mean that any baby born with the aid of SuperGen would have alien DNA. It would mean that I had alien DNA. Everyone I knew — Kamal, Quin, Tavi, even Saren — we had little alien bits running in our veins and in our skin.

Dr. Lowry spoke first, calmly, quietly. “I know this must be shocking. Won’t you come into my room? There is a couch you can sit on.” Her concerned gaze fell on me. “Your friend looks quite faint.”

I’m not his friend, I wanted to say, and I’m not going to faint, but I couldn’t remember how to speak.

“I’m an alien?” Kamal said. I’d never seen him so sober. In any other situation I would have laughed at the look on his face, but I imagine my face looked exactly the same. Shocked. Scared. Skeptical.

“No.” Dr. Lowry stepped farther into the room, determined that if we weren’t going to come to her, she would come to us. “No, if anything you’re a hybrid. Though I have never used that term. There’s so little of their DNA in your system that that particular word doesn’t seem accurate.”

Kamal was full of questions, like me, only he was having no trouble getting his mouth to work. “A hybrid? How is that possible? How is that allowed?” he asked.

“Dr. Roddenberry’s experiments were strictly off the record. He was part of the team that arrived after the UFO crashed on July seventeenth, a geneticist. He was there when they recovered the bodies and stayed on with a small, elite team to do further testing.”

Finally, I found my voice. “The bodies?” I whispered.

“Alien bodies,” Dr. Lowry confirmed, her voice gentle, like Daisy’s. I was reminded that they were sisters. “There were three of them. They all died within seventy-two hours of crashing here.”

The sticky buns I had consumed felt like cement in my stomach. Any lingering taste of cinnamon had turned to dust in my mouth. What she was saying was crazy. Unbelievable. Totally and utterly impossible. But why would she lie?

“So he used alien DNA to create SuperGen,” Kamal said. He had started to pace across the room. “Wouldn’t the government, like, freak out and shut the project down?”

Dr. Lowry remained calm, following Kamal’s movements with her eyes. “When SuperGen worked, people were so thrilled they didn’t stop to ask how he arrived at his discovery. There were certain individuals in our government who knew exactly what was going on but they agreed to keep it quiet. After all, babies were being born again. And now they had a drug they could patent and sell to the highest bidder.

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