CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
The Promise
As much as I wanted to tackle the Chinese dragon design, it was already well past quitting time by the time I got back to the design lab. Well, my quitting time at least. It was the busy season at Summer’s architecture firm, so I wouldn’t get to see her until the weekend. I climbed into the Tesla and enjoyed the fact that it, too, kept me ensconced in Nappa leather.
“Good evening, Noah Parker,” said the car.
“Hello, beautiful.” I took a deep breath. “Let’s go to Mom’s house.”
I let the autopilot take over. As we circled our way to the exit of the parking garage, I noticed how many spots were empty. Granted, it was later in the day than I usually left, but the wide-open spaces reminded me of the hatchery with its mostly dark pods. Maybe people at Build-A-Dragon had lost some of their dedication to the work or lost their work period. Either was possible given the bad publicity and sales outlook. I shook my head, determined to avoid negative thoughts.
Despite the apparent lull at Build-A-Dragon, traffic getting out of Scottsdale lived up to its reputation. Thus, it was pushing dinnertime by the time I reached my mom’s house. I expected to park in my usual spot out front between the mailbox and the neighbor’s driveway. I still laid claim to that spot, at least in my mind, even though I’d moved out years ago. Unfortunately, it was occupied by the time I got there. By a black Tesla Model 3 that was so new it practically sparkled.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
There were no other options, so I had to turn around and park across the street like a relative from out of town. I armed the highest security setting as soon as I closed my door.
“Security system armed,” said the car.
“Damn right.” I crossed the street to get a look at the rival Tesla that had dared take my spot. There was a custom Arizona plate on the back. c-wrthy.
“Oh, hell no,” I muttered.
Sure enough, the front door opened to reveal the grinning mug of my younger brother, Connor.
“N-capacitated,” he said in greeting.
“C-cucumber.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “Someone parked in my spot.”
He put on a furrowed brow, as if confused. “It’s almost like you’ve been entirely replaced with a new version.”
“Don’t worry, I keyed it up pretty good.”
His composure broke. “Oh, man, don’t even joke. It’s a lease!”
I groaned. “Thought you weren’t allowed to drive.”
“My doctor signed off last week.” He gestured at his legs, and then it hit me. He was standing there, without a walker or even a cane, for the first time in . . . I couldn’t remember how long. The gene therapy was working. If his doctor had really signed off, it meant he’d retained his nerve sensory abilities. He moved back to let me in.
I marched past him, muttering “Let’s go, C-worthy.”
“You like that, huh?”
“I almost threw up in my Tesla.”
We walked into the too-warm interior—Mom liked to keep the temperature a firm three degrees above ambient—and the nostalgia flooded over me. The rooms, the furniture, even the smell of roast beef and mashed potatoes wafting in from the kitchen. No matter how irritating my brother could be, the food here was worth it.
“Hi, sweetie!” Mom came around the kitchen island and hugged me.
“Hey, Mom.” I tried unsuccessfully to avoid a kiss on the mouth. Her breath smelled only faintly of wine, which I took for a good thing. She’d prepared the “Parker Special” which was a nod to our Irish roots—peas alongside the beef and potatoes. We squeezed around the little square table that occupied most of Mom’s kitchen space.
“How was it today?” Mom asked.
“A little strange,” I admitted. I was half-tempted to tell them about losing virtually the entire design team. It wasn’t my fault, not directly at least, but it felt vaguely embarrassing. I settled for a vague truth. “Lots of people are out right now.”
Mom raised her eyebrows. “I imagine so.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, given what came to light about the company and its CEO—”
“Ex-CEO,” I said.
“Yes. Well, it probably has some people reevaluating whether they want to work for the company. Or buy its products.”
“They’re crucifying you on social media,” Connor said.
I groaned. I’d avoided social media as best I could and this was why. “How bad is it?”
His phone appeared in his hand like a magic trick. “Well, bad company is still trending.”
“Bad company?”
“Capital B-A-D company.”
Build-A-Dragon Company. “Yikes.” I hadn’t given much thought to the acronym. Neither had the marketing department, by my guess.
“There’s another hashtag coming up, though,” Connor said.
“Yeah?” A small part of me hoped it was something positive, like buy dragons or dragons forever.
“Yep, it’s BoycottBAD.” He grimaced. “Whoops. I just boosted it.”
“Dude!”
He shrugged. “I don’t work for the company.”
“You’re driving a Tesla because of the company,” I shot back.
“No one is saying this is your fault, honey,” Mom said.
“Um, good, because none of it is. Greaves is responsible, and now he’s out.”
“Which is a good thing. It’s just . . .”
“What?” I demanded, and my tone was too rough. I could tell from the way she blinked, and how Connor raised his eyebrows. I took a calming breath and softened my voice. “What is it?”
“Well, it’s surprising you’re going back to work there,” Mom said.
“Evelyn needs me,” I said.
“You don’t owe her anything.”
I almost said that I did owe her something, that she gave me just enough free rein to achieve my secret goal when I’d joined the company. Beyond that, she’d offered me her old job, which was still a desirable posting in the biotech field no matter what social media said. And beyond that, I couldn’t deny that Build-A-Dragon exerted a strange gravitational pull on me. I’d felt hollow when I was gone, and more complete when I went back. But it was hard to put all those things into words. Harder still to do so in a way that wouldn’t leave me open to criticism. So I settled for “It’s complicated.”
“Well, I’m sure it will all blow over soon,” Mom said.
Somehow I doubted that, but I let it go. “Yeah.”
“As long as you’re still going to be there, I wanted to ask you about something,” Connor said.
Mom frowned at him. “Connor, now is not the time to—”
“Why not?”
“He’s only been back one day.”
“He said he’s staying,” Connor said.
“I’m also right here, and I can hear you,” I said dryly.
Mom threw up her hands. “Well, you might as well go ahead.” She got up to refill her wineglass.
“We joined a group,” Connor said.
“A cult?” I whispered.
“It’s an online support group for BICD2 families.”
BICD2 was the symbol for the gene that caused Connor’s muscle disease. The full name was bicaudal D cargo adaptor 2, so named because it had been discovered in Drosophila melanogaster, better known as the fruit fly. That’s how important the gene was. It was found in every species from human to fruit fly.
“Oh.”
“We joined last year, when things . . . weren’t going so well.”
Well, now I feel like a jerk. I hadn’t known that, and I felt mildly guilty that they hadn’t told me. If anything, Connor and Mom had worked extra hard to hide his decline from me. But I guess they had their reasons. “Did it help?”
“Yeah, some.” He shrugged. “My symptoms were progressing, but I was still on the milder end of the spectrum. For some families, it’s only the parents who join.”
Because the child doesn’t survive. It happened sometimes, especially with the patients who were born with new and severe mutations. Hell, maybe that’s what Connor was planning for. Without the gene therapy, it might have happened. And they hadn’t told me.
“Anyway, they follow all of the latest research on the gene.”
“Really?” I did, too, but I’d come up in academia.
“Oh, yeah. They’re all over it.”
Ordinary people reading the latest research. I shook my head in amazement. “I had no idea.”
“So when they heard about my variant, and how you proved it was causal, there was a lot of excitement.”
“Oh, come on. You’re pulling my leg now.”
“I’m dead serious.”
Finally, someone had read my work. Finally, someone cared. I mean, other than Connor and Mom and his doctors. I hadn’t experienced this feeling in a while, not since I published my graduate thesis. “That’s awesome.”
“The thing is, I’m not the only person who had a maybe-diagnosis due to a variant of uncertain significance.”
A VUS. They were a real problem in the current genetic testing paradigm. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not really. The medical genetics community set stringent guidelines on what was required to classify a new genetic variant as disease-causing. The problem was that new mutations were cropping up all the time. New variants by definition haven’t been studied yet, so it was difficult to get them over the bar. Even if the symptoms fit the known disease perfectly. If your variant was classified as a VUS, as Connor’s had been, you didn’t qualify for most gene therapy trials.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“In our support group alone, there are dozens. Some of them have messaged me, asking if you can help.”
“With dragons?”
“They’re the only synthetic organism that’s close enough to humans.”
Wow, they really are following the research. “We got lucky with your results. Like, really lucky.” The test dragons themselves, the Condors, had escaped into the desert. I’d thought that was the end of the whole experiment. Then they showed up, for one day only, and I got the sample I needed. I hadn’t seen them since. Part of it still felt like a dream.
“I know, and I told them that. But they’re desperate, and they don’t all have brothers like you.”
That might be the nicest thing Connor had said to me in recent memory. An obvious ploy, maybe, but he wasn’t wrong. These families didn’t have the privilege that we did. Still, it wasn’t like I ran the company. Even if I did, functional testing of genetic variants for random patients wasn’t exactly in the mission statement. “It’s not the best timing.”
“Hear that, Connor?” Mom interjected. “Not the best timing?”
“Nothing is ever perfect timing,” Connor said. “That’s life.”
He’s not wrong about that, either. “Are they local?”
He shook his head. “All over the world.”
“Could you find out the variants they have?”
He chuckled. “We share everything. I could tell you their Social Security numbers.”
“Well, send them to me. The variants, not the Social Security numbers.”
“You think you can help out?”
“Don’t promise them anything.” I sighed. “But I’ll see what I can do.”