“Who?”
She tucked the book under her arm and walked to the circulation desk. The librarian—a woman with kind eyes and a name tag that read Ms. Odhiambo —scanned the barcode without looking up.
Lena stared at the page. Marcus stared at her. bornface biology book
Lena clutched the book to her chest. Outside the library window, a man with close-cropped gray hair crossed the street. He wasn’t there a second ago. He didn’t look back.
This book is your future. It’s also your past. I wrote it when I was fifty-two, after mapping the entire circuit. I dedicated it to my mother, who had the same mutation and never knew. “Who
Ms. Odhiambo finally looked at her. “Same way all books get here,” she said. “Someone returned it.”
She flipped faster. Chapter Four: The Developmental Cascade. Photographs of zebrafish embryos with her name in the caption: knockdown of LK-1 recapitulates the human phenotype. Chapter Seven: Population Genetics. A world map with her haplotype traced from the Rift Valley to Nairobi to a single hospital in Boston. Chapter Twelve: The Ethics of Prediction. A case study: L.K., a seventeen-year-old female with asymptomatic cortical hyperexcitability. Should she be told? Lena stared at the page
“Who is Bornface?” Marcus asked again.
