The Warden

I asked to see Voss the next morning, and this time the woman in coveralls did not send me away. She looked at her screen for a while, which I took to mean she was asking, and then she told me to follow her, and we went up the graded road past the administration block to the building I had heard crying in the night.

The shed looked different by day, the way all the island's buildings did. The steel door stood open, and the light inside was white and clean, and the cougar was not in her pen. The pen gate hung open too, and the hose was coiled, and I understood, with a small cold turn in my stomach, what the wet regular sound had been the night I stood on the road.

Voss met me in a room behind the shed, a laboratory with a long steel table and instruments arranged on a tray like cutlery. He was in the same white coat, and he had a bandage on his left forearm, and he saw me see it and touched it, almost absently, before he held out a chair.

"You want to know about the cougar," he said. "I would rather show you than tell you. Showing is faster, and it does not lie."

He opened a tablet and showed me a timeline. Photographs, dates, measurements. The first photograph was of a young cougar in a crate, all gold and bone, taken at a transfer station in Arizona. The second was the same animal on a table, and the third was not the same animal, and between the second and the third I stopped looking at the photographs and started looking at the dates, and the dates were forty-one days apart, and forty-one days was the whole of the making, from the table to the thing the table had produced.

"Forty-one days," I said.

"Forty-one days," Voss agreed. "Do you know how long the human nervous system takes to rewire a limb after amputation? Nobody does, because nobody has done it. Do you know what the word 'species' is worth? It is worth nothing. It is a line we drew on a map of life, and I have been erasing it, carefully, for fifteen years." He closed the tablet and set it on the table. "I do not add genes, Mr. Marsh. Genes are a rumor. I do what a sculptor does. I remove, and I shape, and I let the body decide what it can keep."

"You removed her face."

"I moved it. I am teaching her to be a person. It is the same work I did on the Kindred, the same work I am doing on the next generation, and it is the only work on this island that matters." He said it without heat, the way a man states a weather report. "The fence exists because the world is not ready for what I do. The world is never ready for what it has not asked for. When I was at the university, I asked for permission for twenty years, and I got committee meetings. Here I do not ask. I make."

I looked at the tray of instruments, and I looked at the bandage on his arm, and I asked him the question that had been sitting in me since the night on the road.

"Does she feel it?"

Voss's face did not change, but something behind it did, a shutter closing.

"Feeling is the raw material," he said. "Pain is the chisel. You do not ask the clay whether it likes the kiln. You ask what it becomes." He stood, and I stood with him, because there was nothing in that room I wanted to be alone with. "The cougar died this morning, Mr. Marsh. The procedure was clean, and her heart was weak, and she died on the table. The creature you met in the pen was the last of her. In four days you will leave, and you will never have to think about any of it again. That is the gift I am giving you. Do not refuse it."

I walked out of the shed with the white light in my eyes, and I did not think about the cougar, because I had been told not to, and I thought about her all day, and all night, and the following night I dreamed of her hands, working against the fence like a person trying to remember how to use hers, and I woke with my own hands raised in front of my face and no memory of putting them there.

In the morning I went to find Corbett, and I asked him, straight, what the Warden had been before he came to the island, and Corbett told me. He told me about the university, and the scandal, and the animals that had been found in the basement, and the settlement, and the company that had bought Voss's silence along with his patents, and the island that had no dot on most charts. He told me the way you tell a child about a war: fast, and flat, and with the understanding that the child will ask anyway.

"Why do you stay?" I asked him.

Corbett looked at me for a long time, and his eyes went to the fence, and then to the shed, and then back to me, and he said, "Because somebody has to make sure the boat comes."

I did not know, then, what that meant. I know now. The boat came, and the boat went, and the people who stayed on the island were the ones the boat could not take. Corbett was the last of the ones who thought the boat would take him.