I glared at her, trying to bend my mind around what was happening. This couldn’t be my mother. I wouldn’t let it be. My brain was getting spun up and caught on itself, but I needed answers and the need cut through like a knife.

“Tolerate for what?”

“Come closer,” she said. “Please. I’ll show you.”

I stood behind her as she flicked her fingers at a control pad, bringing an empty black screen to life. Our faces were reflected in the monitor and I could see the woman had turned and was staring up at me, but then the screen turned purple and our faces disappeared. I watched as tiny white lines floated across the screen and met in the middle, small blocks getting bolted together, growing taller. Stitched like sections of scaffold.

“We’re creating life,” the woman said, her voice little more than a whisper. “And your father was very good at it.”

“What is it?” My eyes were glued to the staircases growing in spiraled patterns on the screen.

“It’s DNA. Nucleotide sequences. The building blocks behind every living thing.”

“Science.”

“It’s nature. Your father was very bright, Banyan. He had a gift. He saw how things could fit together, the pieces that were missing.” She shifted in her seat so she was closer to me, almost touching. Her whole body so near I could smell her. Sour and soapy. Cold and damp with snow. “For almost five years, I taught him, showed him my work. I trained him in DNA geometry, helical modeling. But eventually he could see through complexities that had blinded me. He never built the monument GenTech hired him for. He worked in the lab. Making trees. With me.”

“Don’t look like much of a tree,” I said, and I felt her smile so hard beside me that her skinny shoulders bounced.

“Break something into small enough pieces,” she said. “And you get a code.”

“Like a map?”

“Exactly. A map you can change. Rebuild. We’re building trees, Banyan. Replicating the trees we found on this island, altering them to bring them back to the mainland.” I felt her hand on my arm. “We’ve been trying for decades. To modify the trees into something the locusts can’t consume.”

“Like the corn.”

“But what worked for the corn wouldn’t work for the trees. We’ve had to change their cellular structure into something more malleable. We’ve had to hybridize the tree DNA with that of another, more abundant species.”

I stepped back from the woman. Turned from the screen. I pictured the old Rasta and that chunk of wood I’d knifed out of him. I pictured Alpha’s skin, all plugged up with bark.

“Humans,” I said, staggering backward. “You’re using humans.”

It made me sick the way she frowned, the lines on her face all scrunched up like there was poison on her tongue. I lost feeling and swayed, caught myself on the back of a chair. This was Project Zion. GenTech was taking folk and twisting them and god knows how many and this woman right here was at the heart of it all.

“Only the hybrid cells can be modified,” she said. “And there’s nothing else to use. The corn’s too synthetic. We’d have used animals, but there’s nothing left. Nothing but people.”

“What do you do to them?” I whispered, as if the words had snuck out.

“We call it fusion.”

“You kill them?”

“I don’t kill anyone. It’s a sacrifice, that’s all.”

“A sacrifice? For what?”

“So we can regrow the world, clean the air and the water. Wood and paper. Shelter. And fruit trees, Banyan. Real fruit trees.”

“Right,” I said, yelling now. “Regrow the world and stamp GenTech on every damn part of it.”

She shot me a look like I’d punched her.

“And my dad helped do this?”

“He left when we realized what had to be done.”

“Didn’t want blood on his hands, that it?”

“He was afraid.”

“Sure he was. Shit. Maybe he was afraid of you.”

She stood and struck me, the back of her bony hand stinging my cheek. But somehow it was like I’d beaten her at something. Her eyes filled up and the breath shuddered out of her. And then she just turned her face to the machines.

“You still want to see him?” she said, like it was all she had left she could offer.

But I told myself it wasn’t just Pop I’d come looking for. Hell, I reckoned I’d come looking for a thing that don’t go leaving. And some damn thing that you can’t leave behind.

“You can keep him,” I said. “All I want to see is the trees.”

Zee wrapped me up in GenTech purple and tugged my head inside a bulky hood. I couldn’t say anything to her. I just let her dress me, my thoughts spinning slow like wheels getting stuck.

“Come on,” she whispered into the hood as she cinched up my jacket. “You’ll feel better when you see them.”

My head had drooped and I couldn’t see Zee’s face, but I figured she was smiling. And I tried to let the thought of that smile warm me, because all I felt now was lost and alone.

Don’t go believing in fairy tales, Pop had told me. Don’t go kidding yourself. No trees, he used to say. Nothing left.

But Pop had been lying to me. All of my life.

Zee led me down corridors and up steps, and finally we pushed outside, the freezing air trickling inside my coat.

I stared around at the patches of ice and the gray sky and the concrete buildings. Then Zee took my hand and guided me through the snow.

“She might’ve been a copy,” I said as we began to scale one of the powdery slopes, “but I liked your momma a whole lot more than the real thing.”

“Hina was real.”

“Real enough, I guess.”

“She was supposed to be a sign,” Zee said. “I don’t think I was even supposed to happen.”

“A sign? A sign of what?”

“The Creator said that once they could produce people the same way the trees here reproduce themselves, she knew they’d be able to splice the two species together. So they sent Hina south. To find our father. To show him they’d done it.”

“She went south, all right. Got herself to the South Wall.”

“Our father had joined up with rebels. People that used to fight against GenTech.”

“Yeah. I seen what was left of them,” I said, and I remembered what Jawbone had told me about the pirates. I remembered their flag. The Army of the Fallen Sun.

“Hina was the breakthrough,” Zee went on, sounding sort of proud about it. “Your mom thought our dad might come back and help, when he’d seen what was possible. When he’d seen they could make a perfect human copy. Your mom thought he might change his mind.”

“You need to stop calling her that.”

“The Creator, then. The Creator thought he’d come back.”

“To do what? Make fake people?”

“Copying people was the first step. But only certain people’s cells can be fused with the trees. The tattoo.” Zee ran her hand across her belly. “It was coded with these numbers. Protein numbers. They’d figured out which combinations worked with the tree cells. So now they knew they had to find the people with the right DNA.”

So the numbers weren’t coordinates at all. Just more science. The science that determined whether you lived or died in that factory. The science that had killed Sal.

“Same kind of shit they pulled on the corn,” I said. “Same shit. Just people this time.”

“They’re trying to fix things.”

“Well, I reckon they should give it a damn rest.”

“They grew my mom here,” said Zee, her voice quiet.

“They just used her.”

“I know.”

“And this Creator woman, she’s just using you, too.”

“I don’t care.” Zee pointed at her chest as she breathed the cold clean air. She tugged at her fuzzy GenTech coat. “I’ve been used my whole life, I’ll take this any day.”