Vitro by Jessica Khoury

slow. She caught them at random, a word here and there: boat and fly and away and remember and drug and Sophie and boat.
She seized on that last one with desperation. “Boat.” Ones and zeroes crowded her mind; faded into an image of a boat on water.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, stay with me. It’s me, it’s Jim. Jim Julien?”
It’s me, it’s Jim.
Her heart jerked. She could understand this! He was Jim. The boy was Jim. She held the word close and the whole of her identity hung upon it: Jim Jim Jim Jim Jim.
“Jim,” she said, delighting in the sound of it.
“Yeah, that’s right.” He followed with more words, but they rushed over her and evaporated before she could gather them in. That was okay. She had enough for now.
She had Jim.
And Jim was everything.

TWELVE
SOPHIE
T he second time Sophie woke was like a sudden fall, an instant leap into full consciousness. Her eyes shot open, and the first thing she saw was an unfamiliar face. It was a man, somewhere in his fifties she guessed, with a receding silver hairline and oddly dainty lips, as if he were halfway into a kiss, but it was his eyes that transfixed her: stunningly blue and focused sharply on her, his pupils pinpoints of black. When her gaze met his, the skin around his eyes tightened, forming a network of wrinkles from their outer corners. She swallowed, half hypnotized, confused, waiting for her other senses to catch up. It was as if her brain had forgotten to alert her ears to the fact she was awake, because the sounds around her were murky. They slowly took shape, forming into voices, words—her mother was there.
    Sophie blinked, and the spell was broken. The man leaned back, his eyes still on her but his features relaxing a bit. She licked her lips, which she found were dry and rough, and moaned.
    “Is that it?” the man asked. He was seated in a plastic chair, facing her squarely. She herself was sitting in a metal chair that looked like something out of a dentist’s office, slightly reclined, her hands perched on padded armrests.
    Her mother stood behind the man, but a bright light was concentrated on Sophie and all else was in shadow. She could only see her mother’s shoes and the hem of her lab coat, and beside her someone stood in a pair of white heels, a woman dressed in a white pantsuit, so bright she seemed to glow. But her face was also lost in shadow.
    “That’s it,” her mother replied. Sophie heard the click of a pen; somewhere behind her, someone was scratching on paper.
    “ Mmmom,” Sophie moaned.
“What did she say?” The man turned around in his seat. He was wearing a silver suit that looked like it cost as much as Jim’s plane.
“Nothing. She can’t talk yet, of course. She’s disoriented.”
No, I’m not, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t form the words. She’d never been so thirsty in her life.
“What do we do now?” asked the man, turning around again. He studied Sophie with his frigid eyes, his mouth pursing even further. He seemed wary of her, as if she might bite.
“We wait a little,” Moira said. She finally stepped forward, into the light, and Sophie’s heart jerked painfully in her chest. Her mother looked the same as she always had, as if she were agelessly frozen at thirty, with short, tight black curls and large blue eyes; she looked like one of the Victorian china dolls Sophie’s stepsister Emily collected, minus all the lace.
Mom, look at me. It’s me, Mom, please see!
But Moira was looking at the man, not Sophie, and she remembered that her mother still thought she was the other Sophie. What was her name? The memory was vague, difficult to catch. She’d heard them talking earlier, when she’d started to wake up . . . Lux. That’s what they’d called her.
“It will take about twenty-four hours for her to acclimate,” Moira was saying. “Walking, talking, basic motor functions— it comes pretty quickly in the newer models, but still, it isn’t instant. She’s imprinted on you, Mr.