Turn 171 of 228

Billy Jo is right. She gets fatter. Marcus and Carl start having growth spurts. The triplets development accelerates even faster. Even you and Diane have a second growth and weight gain spurt

The first sign is Marcus's shoulders. Lena notices it on a Wednesday morning — the way the 980-pound frame fills the corridor differently, the shoulder span wider than it was last week, the arms thicker, the chest broader. Not softer. Wider. The bones are moving. Marcus is standing at the kitchen counter cutting sweet potatoes and his elbows hit the walls on both sides and the corridor is twelve feet wide.

"Marcus," Lena says.

He turns. The knife in his yellow-nailed hand. The face — the same face, the beard, the eyes, but the skull is wider. The cheekbones are broader. The jaw has expanded. He looks at her and his brow furrows and then his hand goes to his own shoulder and he traces the new width with his fingers and his mouth opens and nothing comes out.

"How long," Lena says.

"I don't know," Marcus says. "A week. Maybe less. I thought the clothes were — we don't wear clothes. I thought the corridors were — I designed the corridors. They fit last month."

"They fit last month," Lena says.

They stand in the corridor. The twelve-foot width that Marcus designed. The corridor that was comfortable six weeks ago. The corridor that his shoulders nearly touch now.

Carl is next. The growth starts in his hands — the fingers lengthening, the knuckles widening, the palms spreading. He is chopping onions on the commercial cutting board and the knife feels small in his hand and the cutting board feels narrow and he looks down at his bare feet and the feet are longer. The 910 pounds is redistributing. The skeleton is expanding. Carl has been in the facility for six weeks and the gradient has found him.

"My hands," Carl says to Diane that evening. He holds them up. The yellow nails. The fingers that are longer than they were yesterday.

Diane takes his hands in hers. The 1,340 pounds. The ten-foot-four frame. The bearded face looking down at Carl's palms. She turns them over. Traces the new growth. The touch is careful — the touch of someone who has watched this happen to her own body and recognizes it in someone else's.

"It's the building," Diane says. "Billy Jo was right. The concentration. We're all in it now. Full exposure. No distance."

Billy Jo's acceleration is visible within two weeks. The 203 becomes 214. Then 221. The gain is not dramatic — not the forty-pound months that Lena experienced — but the trajectory is unmistakable. Billy Jo's belly softens. Her thighs thicken. Her face rounds. The body that was the control is becoming a body that is not the control. The body is joining the study.

She stands on the scale every morning now. The yellow nails on the railing. The numbers climbing. 221. 227. 234. The line on her own graph — the graph she keeps in the laptop, the graph that was flat for eighteen months — is bending upward. She watches it bend and her face does the thing it does when the data is good. The excitement. The scientist whose body is the data.

"Fourteen pounds in three weeks," she says to Lena. They are sitting in the research bay. Billy Jo's belly rests on her thighs now — a new sensation, a new weight, the soft fold of flesh that wasn't there last month. She rests her hands on it. The gesture is Lena's gesture. The gesture that spread.

"The rate is accelerating. If the curve holds — and I see no reason it won't — I'll be at 260 by end of year. Possibly higher. The gradient is steeper than I modeled."

"How do you feel?" Lena says.

"I feel like I want more," Billy Jo says. The drawl. The flat delivery. The scientist reporting a finding.

"That's new. That's — I've been documenting that thought in the study. The intrusive cognition. The wanting. I've been observing it in all of you for two years. I never expected to observe it in myself."

She pauses. Looks at her belly. The hands on the belly.

"It's not intrusive," she says. "That's the wrong word. It doesn't feel intrusive. It feels like mine. Like my own thought. Like I've always wanted this and didn't know it."

The triplets' second-year development was extraordinary. The third year is something else. June's sprint time drops from 1.8 seconds to 1.2. She runs the bay and the air moves with her — the thermal curtains billow in her wake, the monitoring equipment registers atmospheric disturbance. She is three years old. She weighs 410 pounds. She is eight feet tall. She has begun climbing the exterior of the facility — the reinforced concrete walls, the handholds that Marcus designed for the interior wall, adapted by June for surfaces he never intended. She finds holds where there are no holds. Her fingers find purchase in concrete seams. Marcus watches her climb the building he designed and his face does something between pride and terror and he says, "She's going to find a flaw. She always finds a flaw."

Iris's composition books multiply. Twenty-three at age two. Forty-one at age three. The symbolic language has expanded beyond Billy Jo's capacity to decode it. Iris offers to teach her. Billy Jo sits with her three afternoons a week and Iris explains the symbols with the patience of a professor and the vocabulary of a child and Billy Jo takes notes and the notes are the best data she has ever collected. Iris has begun predicting things. She predicted Marcus's skeletal growth two weeks before it started — a notation in the SELF notebook that Billy Jo found after the fact. The notation reads, in Iris's symbols: DA'S BONES WILL MOVE WHEN THE BUILDING HOLDS HIM LONG ENOUGH. Billy Jo stared at that page for twenty minutes.

Mae is 680 pounds. She is nine feet tall. She is three years old. The exponential curve Iris charted has not flattened. Mae eats 18,000 calories a day. Carl cooks for fourteen hours. The eating bay runs continuously. Mae's belly is enormous — round, heavy, resting on the floor when she sits. She sits the way Lena sits. The hands on the belly. The comfort. She says, "I'm getting closer, Mama," and the number 1,940 is not as far away as it used to be.

And then Lena feels it. The hum shifts. The hum that has been steady and low and constant for three years changes pitch — a deeper vibration, a resonance in the bones, the feeling of the skeleton preparing to move. She wakes on the sleeping platform and the platform feels different. The 1,940 pounds is the same but the body is not the same. The shoulders are wider. The hips are wider. The ribcage is expanding. The bones are growing.

She stands. The twelve-foot body. The body that fit the facility. The body that fit the thirty-foot ceilings and the twelve-foot corridors. The body is changing. The body is growing again. The wish is not done. The wish was never done. The wish was waiting for the concentration to reach the threshold and the threshold has been reached and the building is full and the gradient is at maximum and every body in the building is responding.

Diane feels it the same morning. She is at the research bay desk and her shoulders press against the thermal curtain brackets on both sides — brackets that were comfortably distant last week. She stands. The ten-foot-four frame. The 1,340 pounds. The bones are moving. She can feel them — the slow expansion, the spreading, the skeleton that grew once and stopped and is growing again.

"Lena," Diane says across the research bay. The voice is lower than it was yesterday. The vocal cords are stretching again.

"I know," Lena says. The voice is deeper. The twelve-foot chest resonates.

"We're growing again."

"We're growing again."

They look at each other across the research bay. The 1,940 pounds and the 1,340 pounds. The twelve feet and the ten-four. The bodies that are about to get bigger. The bodies that are about to get more. The hum is loud — louder than it has been since the first night, since the wish, since the warmth in the stomach that said *this is better, let it keep going.*

The building holds them. The building is the gradient. The building is the experiment. And the experiment is accelerating.