(REWRITING) The Skylar Experiment : Coveting

Chapter Twenty-Four - Highway To Columbus

Man, you WANT to listen to this song whether you know it or not. It's Throwback Thursday, baby, both in the book and irl!

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RILEY

THE BELL RANG within the vacant roadside bistro. We sat at the booth against the windows. A young woman took our orders and I picked a egg sandwich with a muffin.

"Okay, so what was up with the metal trap?" I asked.

Luc toyed with the salt container. "Remember when I told you where we come from?" I nodded, and he continued. "The program was run by a certain organization that doesn't exist anymore. Our parents destroyed it, and we never heard of it again."

"Maybe it was there before you guys... you know, blew up the place."

His index tapped the surface of the table "Or the feds have been made aware that some of us are close and they're still searching."

The waitress arrived with our orders, setting down an oozing burger with fries in front of Luc. She offered him a big, honeyed smile, reminding me of those girls at school in the hallways. He winked at her in response, and the woman turned back to the counter with an extra swing of the hip.

Golly.

"What?" Luc smirked, plucking a fry from his plate. "You still on that vegetarian bandwagon?"

"I'm going to need holy water drops for my eyes." I held up my sandwich and buried that image deep in my brain, sealed in a drawer forever. "And no, I'm not vegetarian. I still have some, when it's not gross like yours."

He opened his hand, chewing. It took me a while to understand he was asking for my phone. I extracted it from my jean pocket, unlocked it, and put it on the table.

"You better not snoop where you're not supposed to," I warned.

"Why, you have nudes in your gallery?" he taunted, and I kicked his leg underneath the table.

"Don't be a dog."

I wasn't the type to have nudes in my gallery or to hide anything compromising in my phone. It didn't mean he could just nose into my phone as he pleased.

"Calm down, Sunshine, I won't pry," he said and opened my text messages. "Or else I'll be the one who needs the holy water."

"Hilarious."

He stared at the mysterious texts, lines creasing his forehead. "What I want to know is how this anonymous got your number and why they text you for all this stuff. It's not adding up. I almost thought it might be that Finn guy, given how fucking nuts he was about your book. He did do his homework, I'll give him that."

I swept fallen crumbs onto a napkin. "What homework?" 

"The artificial wombs. The first generation was all in vitro babies." A crooked side grin twisted his lips. "Much like Huxley's story, parenthood was a foreign concept. It was not allowed. Eventually, some did get pregnant naturally, but they were rounded up in nurseries for communal care."

"Why in the world would Finn try to tell me this? He wasn't even straightforward."

"Search me. Many adults today were conceived artificially. Kids were raised communally even after breakout because nobody knew who they might be related to. Real parents are still few and far between."

He scrolled until the beginning of the texts, analyzing the dates and hours they were sent. It left me to ponder over this new piece of information, whether there was any possibility I was one of theirs that just went missing somehow. People lose babies in some circumstances, right?