Turn 193 of 228

Check in the other parents. Billy Jo finds out the meaning of the latest frequency in the hum

Lena leaves the eating bay and finds Emeka Adeyemi in the corridor between the writing station and the climbing bay. He is sitting on the floor — the first time she has seen him sit all day. His belly is full and round and pressing against his thighs and his skin has the warm sheen that Lena recognizes from her own body, from Diane's body, from Claire's body. The sheen of the gradient finding the surface. He is 420 pounds today. He was 380 on Monday. His shirt is unbuttoned to the navel and he hasn't noticed. His eyes are half-closed.

"My wife keeps calling," Emeka says. His voice is deep and slow and the accent is Lagos and the words are arriving from somewhere far away, from the place where the body goes when the warmth takes over.

"She wants to know if Chioma is safe. I keep telling her — Chioma is on the ceiling. Chioma is eating bread with a girl who weighs twelve hundred pounds. Chioma is safe. Folake doesn't believe me. She thinks I'm losing my mind."

He opens his eyes. Looks at his belly. Looks at Lena.

"I think I am losing my mind. I think that is the point."

Kenji Watanabe is at the engineering station. He is standing — barely. His frame has widened since Monday in ways that are not subtle. The shoulders that were narrow and precise and architecturally proportioned on Monday are broader now, the chest thicker, the belly pushing against a shirt that has been unbuttoned and re-buttoned and unbuttoned again. He is watching Haruki on the climbing wall and his hand is on his own stomach and the hand is pressing and releasing and pressing again. The gesture of a man testing something he isn't ready to believe.

"The structural calculations," Kenji says. His English is precise and clipped and the Osaka accent makes every consonant sharp.

"For the building. I ran them. The load tolerances Marcus specified — they are not theoretical. They are predictive. He designed this building for bodies that do not exist yet. He designed it for us."

He looks at his hand on his belly.

"I am an architect. I design structures. And the structure is designing me."

Billy Jo is on the research bay floor. She is not at her desk. She has not been at her desk since Tuesday. Her 451 pounds are spread across the concrete and the composition books are around her in a circle — not Iris's books, her own — and the symbols on the pages are the ones she doesn't recognize. The ones she wrote and can't read. Her hand is moving. The pen is scratching. She is crying. Not from grief. From the pressure of receiving something that is too large for the container.

"Seventeen," Billy Jo says. Her voice is thin and tight.

"I've been counting seventeen since the children arrived. Seventeen frequencies. I mapped them. I documented them. I built the taxonomy. And now there's an eighteenth and I can't —"

She stops writing. Looks up at Lena. The tears are running down her round cheeks and her hand is shaking and the pen is still moving without her, scratching a symbol she isn't directing.

"It's not a new frequency. It's a meta-frequency. It's the frequency that emerges when a parent crosses the threshold. When a parent stops observing and starts participating. It's the sound the gradient makes when a child's body recognizes its parent's body as part of the same system. Not separate. Not watching. Joined."

She drops the pen. The pen keeps writing. Billy Jo stares at her own hand moving without her.

"Claire triggered it. When she took her clothes off and walked into the climbing bay. The gradient registered a parent joining. Not visiting. Joining. And the eighteenth frequency appeared and it's — it's not separate from the other seventeen. It contains them. It's the chord that the seventeen notes make when they're played together. It's the sound of the whole thing. The sound of the gradient becoming complete."

She picks up the pen. The pen that kept writing without her. Looks at what it wrote.

"Every parent who joins adds a new meta-frequency. Claire was the first. Emeka will be second. Kenji will be third. And each one changes the chord. Each one makes the whole sound different. More complex. More —"

She looks at Lena. The tears have stopped. The shaking has stopped. Her hand is still. The pen is still. The symbol on the page is complete.

"More comfortable. The meta-frequency is comfort. That's what the wish was. Not a wish for comfort. A wish that IS comfort. And comfort is contagious."