Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (novel books to read .txt) 📕

I was giving away. It was a different time then. Mum was what Mum said, and did and made. She wasn’t something you could grow in a jar. And that’s just how I pictured it; faceless men in white coats and latex gloves growing a stomach or a kidney just because they could. Making it pulse and dance in a vat to see how long it twitched after they’d stopped feeding it. Mum’s parts would be born predisposed with an appetite for peat smoke, whisky, turps, and with fingers itching to hold a brush, to plunge into paint and smear dye.

It was such early days then, for all this.

How things change. Back in the waiting room surrounded by Grove veterans, I’d have taken any of their hearts, livers or tracts to piece together Nut, if it would end with the three of us going home together. I didn’t care from where the parts were sourced – Nut had always been worth more than the sum of her components.

It took forty-five minutes before the same tired-looking consultant returned and invited us into a private consultation room. Once we were in there, she dragged her chair closer to us as if she knew us well. Art leaned forward as if he knew her too. God, he looked terrible.

“I’m sorry, Fia isn’t on call tonight so I’m stepping in. I hope that’s OK?” The consultant’s name tag read “Zoe”. She seemed familiar, but I didn’t think I’d had an appointment with her before. Perhaps she was one of the consultants assessing us during the early interactions?

Her voice was soft. “So firstly, it’s awake, so don’t worry, you’ve done nothing wrong.” She smiled, one hand on my wrist and the other on Art’s arm. She spoke the next part very slowly. “These things happen sometimes, and I wanted you to know that neither of you did anything wrong.”

But would Nut be OK? Zoe hadn’t said explicitly that she’d be OK. If she wasn’t going to be alright, we must have done something wrong. It’s cause and effect. Art spoke up.

“What happened, then? Is there something physically wrong with her? It?”

Zoe squinted and ran her tongue along the edge of her teeth. It only lasted a second before she switched to a smile, shrugging her shoulders in a way that struck me as inappropriately casual.

“Not necessarily. We’re looking for the cause now, so we’re going to keep it here for a while. Best guess is some kind of seizure; hence the spasms and rigidity. It can seem like a body isn’t breathing at a time like this, when really it is. But the source of the seizure we don’t know yet. It could be a fault with the biology, true, or it could be something else entirely. We’ll look into it. It might be that if we find there’s some flaw we can’t fix, we’ll switch it for another. Another ovum organi that won’t be at risk.”

Switch her? Nut was ours. Made for us. How could they consider replacing her just like that? And if Nut reacted so violently, did that mean there was something wrong with us? I looked to Art for reassurance, a sign he felt differently, but he was lost in thought.

I sat forward on my chair and braced my shield. “But she’s been fine – not acting ill at all. I’d have seen if something wasn’t right, I know I would have.”

Zoe gave another irritatingly apathetic shrug. “It’s sometimes the case that non-human matter hides its weakness if perceiving threat. It might be that it was sick all along.”

Did she think I wouldn’t have noticed this? I knew Nut. For starters, three simple reasons why this couldn’t be; one, that for this to be true, Nut would have to consider us as predators, despite us being her only contact with a living world. Two, that Nut would have to understand her own illness and the sense of consequence to come from it if discovered. And three, that this meant she was pretending in order to survive, and that she could deliberately manipulate her own behaviour to manipulate ours in turn. Each of these meant that Nut was a thinking, feeling being, and this wasn’t what Easton Grove had prepared us for.

Next to me, Art shook his head furiously. “But how the hell did this happen? How didn’t you realise that it had a flaw at the beginning? It’s fucking substandard.”

That was it, turn it against her. Fight slander with slander. Besides, he was right. As part of the relationship with the Grove you offer up your trust to them completely. To give us Nut, a real living creature as a promise of our future, and then miss something in her physiology as vital as this? It beggared belief. It wasn’t just jeopardising our mental wellbeing but our physical health too. Imagine what would have been if this had happened when we hadn’t been there to check on her?

I reached for Art’s hand and squeezed it. It was cold and clammy. “Thank God,” he said, “that this happened sooner rather than later.”

“Sometimes these things can’t be detected in pup stage, and anomalies occur as they grow,” Zoe nodded. “We’ll do everything we can to save your ovum organi, but only if it’s viable.”

Zoe told us that they’d keep Nut in for a week or so to monitor her in quarantine. She assured us that we could visit in the evenings between 5pm and 8pm if we wanted an in-person update, but there wouldn’t be much to see.

It was around 3am by the time we were free to go, but I wanted to see Nut before we started the drive back. Zoe showed us to the quarantine tank and then scuttled off back to pass some notes to reception. Nut was up and trotting about as if nothing had happened, pacing the length of her incubator with long strides and investigating each glass corner with her twitching nose.

This was the