The Legacy Lab Solutions lobby smelled of new commercial carpet and something antiseptic underneath, the kind of clean that didn't come from scrubbing but from surfaces too recently installed to have collected any history. Eugene held the industrial, double pane glass door for his mother and then stood beside her, the old gas station receipt from Silas Meadow folded in his back pocket. More than week had passed. Seven days of Ruby not quite meeting his eyes across the breakfast table, of Wyatt spending hours at the north fence, and of Eugene checking his phone for a call or a message that never came.
A receptionist behind a curved, white quartz desk looked up from a monitor. She was young, maybe mid-twenties, with wavy hair pulled back tight enough to lift her micro bladed eyebrows. "Name?"
"Pull," Ruby said. "Eugene and Ruby Pull. We sent samples in. Two of them."
The receptionist softy stroked her keyboard. "I see one on file as received. The second is pending. If you'll both have a seat, someone will be with you shortly."
Eugene didn't sit. He drifted toward a wall-mounted display showing a looping animation of double helixes unwinding and recombining, the nucleotides color-coded in pastels. His reflection in the glass looked thinner than he remembered. The tremor in his right hand had started somewhere around thirty-five east and hadn't stopped. He tucked the hand into his wrinkled jacket pocket.
An inconspicuous door to the left of the desk opened and a woman appeared, this one older, in heavy lab coat over dark slacks. "Mr. Pull? If you'll come with me." She gestured toward the hallway behind her. "Ms. Pull, my colleague will take you to a separate room for your intake."
"Separate?" Ruby's weathered purse strap sweated in her grip. "He's seventeen. I'm not leaving him alone in some back room."
"Standard protocol for family submissions," the woman said. " Don't worry, both rooms are in the same hallway. You'll be thirty feet apart."
Ruby gazed at Eugene. He gave her the smallest smile he could manage, the kind that said he didn't like it either, but they'd driven all that way, and the farm wasn't going to save itself. She belted out a frustrated sigh, then followed a second lab-coated figure through a door on the right. Eugene walked through the left door.
The room was compact and windowless, furnished with two chairs and a sturdy table bolted to the floor. A dome camera blinked red in the corner of the ceiling. Eugene sat in the chair facing the door, his legs antsy. The air tasted recycled, faintly metallic, the way his grandfather's well water tasted before they put in the new filter. He counted the perforations in the ceiling tile above the light fixture. Forty-eight. Then forty-nine, because he'd missed one near the edge.
After minutes of Jeopardy music playing in his head, the door opened and a tall, thin man in a dark suit entered. He was not the lab-coat woman, and he was not anyone Eugene had seen in the lobby. The suit fit him like it had been sewn onto his shoulders by someone who didn't believe in extra fabric. His face seemed perplexed, in a way that suggested he'd often held this expression long enough for it to leave a mark. He closed the door behind him and sat in the second chair. He stared at the camera almost as if ensuring it worked.
"Eugene Pull," he stated. "I'm Director Albright. Your DNA sample has been flagged for review."
"Flagged how?" Eugene's drawl stretched the words out longer than he intended. "We sent that in for ancestry verification. Cherokee lineage. It's for a tax credit program."
"Your sample shows markers that don't correspond to any known terrestrial population." Albright's gaze didn't move from Eugene's face. His hands rested on the table, fingers interlaced, perfectly still. "The lab ran it three times. The results are consistent. Your genetic profile contains sequences that are not human."
Eugene's hand rubbed his forehead. "That doesn't make any sense."
"Agreed. Which is why I'm here." Albright leaned back. The chair didn't creak. "The federal government maintains an interest in individuals whose biological profiles present anomalies. You are now such an individual. I need you to tell me where you're from."
"I'm from a farm just outside of Satin, Texas. I raise cattle. I ride bulls." Eugene heard his own voice go flat at the edges. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Your mother is in the next room answering the same questions. Her sample was normal. Yours is not. That tells us the anomaly entered through your paternal line. Who is your father?"
"I don't know. He wasn't around."
"You've never met him."
"No, genius I never met him."
Albright's annoyed fingers tapped against the tabletop, a quick rhythmic beat, then stopped. "You understand my position. A seventeen-year-old boy with DNA that doesn't match any known human profile appears in a routine screening. No father on record. No explanation for the markers. That makes you a security risk until proven otherwise."
"A security risk." Eugene's chapped lips quivered. "I'm a high school student who's about to lose his family's farm. How exactly am I a risk?"
"That's what we intend to find out. You'll submit to an extensive medical examination, advanced blood testing, tissue samples, and neurological screening. If the results come back favorable, you walk out. If they don't, your case escalates."
"I want to see my mother."
"Not possible."
Eugene stood. The chair legs scraped against the floor, a sound too deafening for the small room. "You can't keep us separated. I'm a minor. She has rights."
"Sit down Mr. Pull!"
Eugene didn't sit. His hand trembling with that fine vibration in his fingers that always surfaced when the pressure crested – right before the chute opened and the bull beneath him became the only thing in the world. He'd learned to ride through it. He'd never learned to talk through it.
The overhead light flickered. Once. Twice. Then it steadied.
Albright opened his mouth to speak and stopped. His lips remained parted, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere past Eugene's left shoulder. He did not blink. He did not move. His hand hung in the air where it had risen to gesture, frozen like a photograph of a man mid-argument.
Eugene turned toward the door.
Alistair Crow stood in the doorway. His dark brown eyes moved from Albright to Eugene and back again, calm yet determined. In his right hand he held a silver device, no larger than a cigarette lighter, its surface etched with unworldly patterns that caught the flickering light. A low hum came from it, barely audible, a frequency that sat at the edge of hearing and made Eugene's back teeth throb.
"Eugene," Crow said. His voice was measured, quiet, the same tone he'd used years ago when he first met Ruby at a chili cook off and when he told Ruby their son had a path to walk that she couldn't see yet. "We need to leave. Now. Your mother is already in the hallway."
Eugene looked at Albright, still frozen, still mid-sentence, a man turned to stone in a sharp suit. Then he looked at Crow, at the silver device, at the open door behind him where the fluorescent light of the hallway spilled in.
" Who are you?" Eugene asked.
"Later," Crow said. "First, the car."
Eugene stepped past the frozen interrogator and followed Crow into the hall.