Incubation (The Incubation Trilogy Book 1) Read Free Page B

sources were poisoned by the insecticides two decades back. Half of them work in the fish farms, harvesting and drying the country’s most reliable form of protein. The impressive-looking skyscrapers—hard to believe there were once enough people to fill them—are empty shells, unstable, one strong breeze from collapse. Hurricanes have demolished many, and rubble blocks the streets with no one to haul it away. Only a handful of urban outlaws live in the city center, scavenging to survive.
    As the train hums toward the arena, I stare out the window at old wheeled automobiles grown over with kudzu, a vine that has adapted so the locusts won’t eat it. It’s a poisonous chartreuse color now, and secretes a small amount of acid that makes it inedible for the locusts and, unfortunately, for us. I wonder yet again what genomic factors enabled it to mutate so quickly and effectively. Something to do with the alternative respiratory pathway of the kudzu’s mitochondria? I file the thought away to discuss with Dr. Ronan. The cars are unrecognizable except for a rusted tailpipe sticking through the vibrant leaves, or a glint off a broken windshield. Hillocks of kudzu mound beside the tracks, evidence of homes or warehouses that were bombed out in the resource wars, abandoned, devoured by termites, or all of the above. It’s eerie, the way the vines have taken over, growing a foot a day, impassively strangling the damaged and the intact alike, utterly undiscriminating. I spot what seems to be a mast rising out of the kudzu sea, with a tatter of sail sagging from it. It’s a boat washed inland by a hurricane, maybe. The sight depresses me and I turn away.
    “Dr. Ronan thinks my feather is from a frigate bird or an albatross,” I tell Halla, having looked up the Latin names.
    “Great,” she says, clearly distracted. Her fingers pluck at the sky blue fabric stretched over her thigh. She leans in, her shoulder pressed against mine, until her mouth is an inch from my ear. “Can we talk, Ev? When we get back from Assembly. I’ve got to talk to someone, and you’re the only one I—” She stops on something suspiciously like a sob.
    My brow furrows. Halla is the most upbeat person I know. “What’s wrong?” I whisper.
    She shakes her head hard. “Not now. We’re here.”
    “Here” is the arena, a former Baptist church built to allow ten thousand people to worship at once. The Pragmatists aren’t against religion, but most citizens stopped going to church—or to any other gathering place where they might get infected—round about the second wave of the pandemic. Most never went back, even when the flu threat diminished, because they were out of the habit, or maybe because they’d quit believing. With almost every citizen in the area in attendance, the arena is less than half full. The seats are raked so everyone has a good view of what used to be an altar but is now a podium with a huge screen behind it for the broadcast from Atlanta. It smells faintly of old candle wax, or maybe that’s my imagination.
    The arena is segregated as usual, with geneborns and their families on the left side of the aisle and nats like us on the right. The proctors have herded everyone from the Kube toward the back and Halla follows me to the second-to-last row. As I crab my way toward the middle, Wyck sidles around the students approaching from the other end and snags the seat beside me. I get a little flutter in my tummy and smile.
    “Missed you at the station,” he says, dropping into the chair with loose-limbed grace. My age, he has curly brown hair and hazel eyes that seem greener when they sparkle with mischief and browner when he gets moody. He came to the Kube relatively late, when he was almost seven, with a broken arm and lots of bruises, and he was a holy terror initially. He still manages to rack up more demerits than any other kid in the place, and Proctor Fonner told him last month that he’s arranged for him to enter