Read Origin for Free Online Page B

Fields,
if you please
.” Uncle Paolo is not happy. Not happy at all. I decide to pull out of this one and keep my mouth shut tight. Dr. Klutz gives me a dirty look as she leaves the room. Uncle Paolo lingers a moment longer. There’s a look on his face that reminds me of Alai when he’s hunting a mouse in the menagerie.
    “Pia, it would be best if you didn’t speak to Dr. Fields for a few days.”
    “Is she in trouble?” I ask.
    The
look
grows even colder. “Please go to your room.”
    Well, now I’m just mad. “No!”
    “Pia. Your room. Please.” The
please
sounds more like a warning than a request.
    I can’t face that look any longer, so I relent. “Fine.” I stalk from the room. If I had a tail like Alai, or that white tigress of Dr. Klutz’s, it would be twitching.
    In my room I sit on my bed with my legs crossed and back stiff, hugging a pillow while I stare at the outside world. Beyond the iron bars and electric fence, the jungle is still, as if waiting for something. Or someone. For a wild moment I imagine it’s waiting for me.
    I have only been outside that fence once. I was seven, and it was a delivery day. The gate opened, the trucks came in, and I darted out. Thirteen steps. That’s as far as I got before Uncle Timothy scooped me up like a bag of bananas and dumped me back inside the fence. I got at least five lectures from five different people, most of them containing grisly stories of people getting lost in the jungle and swallowed by anacondas. It didn’t take me long to realize that even a girl who can’t bleed can still be swallowed whole. Needless to say, I never did it again.
    But as I stare out the window into the shadowy teal and blue and green of the rainforest’s depths, I think about that day and those thirteen steps. It’s about thirteen steps from the glass wall of my bedroom to the fence.
    “Pia, time for dinner!” my mother calls from the living room.
    Shaking myself from my reverie, I join her on the walk to the dining hall. It’s still a little early, so the room is mostly empty. Thanks to the delivery, we have steak and shrimp. Both are rare treats, and I usually dive face-first into meals like this. But I can’t stop thinking about that day when I almost made it into the jungle. I remember the excitement and theeuphoria that came with those thirteen steps of freedom as if it were yesterday, and the memory leaves me with a haunting emptiness no amount of food could fill.
    One scientist sits at a table in the corner, and my mother and I join him. I call him Uncle Will, but if I wanted, I could call him Father—because he is. I don’t see him much. He lives in the dorms with the others and spends nearly all of his time tucked away in his lab, where he studies insects my Uncle Antonio gathers in the jungle. Uncle Will is nuts about bugs.
    Both he and my mother were born in Little Cam, as were their parents, and
their
parents before that. Each generation of my family tree is stronger than the last, a result of the elysia assimilating into their genetic codes. My parents each have unusually high IQs and nearly perfect immune systems, but already their cells have begun to deteriorate—as mine never will. According to Uncle Paolo’s calculations—drawn from observing the various immortal animal species in Little Cam—once I’m around twenty years old, my cells will continue to regenerate, instead of deteriorating like those of normal humans. I’ll stay young forever.
    Unlike Uncle Paolo, Uncle Timothy, Uncle Jakob, and the others, who all came to Little Cam from the outside, my parents—as well as Uncle Antonio—were born in the compound and have lived here their entire lives. They were educated by the scientists just as I am now, and they have taken on roles in Little Cam that were once filled by scientists brought in from the outside world.
    Uncle Paolo told me once that the scientists hope to discover a way to create immortals without resorting to