A call from Northberg was always welcome.

A call from the educational department was unusual.

The fact that the caller was a five year old boy with pink hair was even more unusual, and a bit startling.

What startled the twins even more was the greeting he offered:

"Hi, Dad."

This boy had two arms. Howard took a fifth of a second to figure it out before he asked, "Is Carlie your mother?" Howard's one-moment fling had been a redhead. The white of the twins' hair is a pigment, not merely the absence of one. The laws of genetics and unintended consequences produced the result.

"Uh-huh."

"What's your name?" Howard asked. The screen simply said "Northberg Educational", not identifying the caller.

The boy became upset and the Dominator realized he had given serious offense. "You don't even know my name?!" he blurted in Latin. He looked like he was about to cry or throw a temper tantrum, things much rarer among engineered kids than normals. William felt a brief, guilty pleasure in not personally having anything to do with this. He dimly recalled Howard fucking someone at his eleventh birthday party, but William, then a servant, hadn't touched the Illuminated girl.

"I don't. Carlie and I never talked much. I wasn't told she became pregnant," Howard replied. Not finding out had been an error of omission (or perhaps an error of emission) on his part. She had clearly been after his DNA, after all.

"It's Stan. Stan Dominus," he said, pouting. The twins shared a glance. They knew very well that Quad was the only Dominus on record at Northberg. What had happened was clear: The boy had been named by his mother, and then changed it himself when he realized who his father was. He glared at the twins, tears welling up in his eyes, as if he expected them to know what he wanted.

This was a hard thing for the twins to deal with. People showing up on their screen and acting like five-year-olds were nothing new. The response to such generally ranged from 'Shut up and stop acting like a five-year-old' to 'Shut up and stop acting like a five-year-old before I kick your ass'. But when the caller was an actual five-year-old against whom no threats or intimidation could be used (unthinkable!), who had a serious grievance against the Dominator himself- that was a very thorny situation, and there was an awkward silence of about two seconds, the three of them waiting for someone else to talk, before Howard spoke up again.

"Stan, I apologize. You should have known this from the start. I should have realized that Carlie was going to have you," he said and got a No shit, Sherlock look in response. He could have followed this with 'Didn't she ever tell you?' but there was no way he was going to pass the buck, especially not in front of a child who was supposed to look up to him, especially not one he had directly sired.

Howard was about to ask the boy what he could do to put things right, before Stan burst out in Latin, "Quad gets everything! He gets all these fun things to play with, made only for him, because he's your son, and I never got anything like that!" Engineereds his age had IQs that could turn water straight to steam if they were Fahrenheit, self-control far higher than any normal kindergartener, and were taught the life skills they'd use forever in a way that was state-of-the-art, but still had the life experience of extremely well taken care of five-year-olds.

"Are you talking about the simulators and the toy weapons that require three or four arms to use?" William asked.

"Yeah, all the things that are just for him. Him and Tetrina."

"That's just because of their arms. There's going to be more four-armed people. The technical engineers need to know what one of them can actually use, and so they give Quad all that stuff so he can figure it out for them," William replied gently. The boy's lips were tightly pursed throughout- he didn't want to interrupt his father (accepting the two-as-one nature of the Duumvirate is easy for kids), and he understood the basic logic, but he still wasn't happy.

"It's still not fair," he protested. 'Life's not fair' was not an option as a response. The engineered youth were distinctly told that that was the way normals treated each other; engineered masters were to treat each other better than that. For the boy to learn even-handedness for the future, to correctly make hard decisions and judgments that could affect many thousands or perhaps millions of other engineereds, he had to have his developing sense of justice satisfied now.

To that end, one thing that had to be settled. "So, you're envious of him?" Howard asked.

"Huh?"

"You're jealous. You want what he has," William told him. Stan looked to his right, and then looked back.

"I didn't know there was a word for it," he said in Latin.

"You are invidious of him," Howard replied. Stan didn't know that Latin root either. It made a bit of sense; why would Xavier include something in the curriculum that wasn't supposed to, and seldom had, come up? Engineered kids were supposed to be raised with an entirely different concept of greed than normals.

"You should never envy your brother, Stan." Stan looked to his right again at something offscreen. "His four arms are because he was simply very lucky." Continuing that with 'so are you' never crossed either twin's mind. "Feel happy for him instead; he is, after all, your brother."

"Invidia has no place in our future," Howard informed him. "As a concept it is useless. For engineered society it is worse than useless. Does him having something that you don't make you any worse off, except in the phrase 'by comparison'? That shouldn't matter in the slightest. If you don't think you're getting your fair share of Northberg's resources, inform Xavier." Stan visibly chewed on the Duumvirate's wisdom in an attempt to swallow it.

There was a pause in the conversation; the twins didn't want to lecture and were about to shut the viewscreen off when another boy yelled, "Hi, Duuuumbracchi!" The twins recognized the speaker by the phrase. When informed of the first words he had said to his fathers, he decided to keep right on calling them something like that. "I didn't know either!" Two blue-sleeved left arms reached the screen's view.

"We just found out," William informed Quad. "Be nice to him. He deserves it."

"Okay. I will." Howard turned the screen off, leaving the boys to settle their own problems.

Quad's face twisted up and he looked at Stan like he had grown more arms of his own, or possibly another head. "You really ARE my brother?" he exclaimed in Latin. Stan had told him first, but Quad thought it was bullshit- they were slightly more similar than other engineereds, yes, but there were some big differences, too- Quad was different from everyone, and not just the arms..

"We have the same dads," Stan replied in the same language. "It's why I've been so jealous of you." The English word was alien in his mouth. Gelous? Like jelly (which he thought was spelled 'gelly') and gelatin? It made no sense. Another one of those English things.

"No, they're all jealous of me, you just found another way around!" Simple logic had been inculcated into them from a very early age, and Stan could not deny it.

"It's just- Fuck. It." Stan forgot who he had learned this conversation reset button from. Some servant, probably. "You wanna come with me?"

"Okay." They left the area, waving to the others. The door had been left open; some of them had overheard, smiled, and waved back.

What happened next was the result of some normal's idea; an Illuminated engineer had taken one look at it and immediately pilfered it, thumbing his nose at the normal requirements of a far thicker sole. The boys slammed their heels together Wizard of Oz style and a system of struts hinged out of the boys' soles at the heel, telescoping downwards, with axles telescoping out from that, connected to bearings, attached to wheel halves which telescoped out as well, stretching a specially-made plastic to form a single, solid wheel on the back of each foot; the axles and wheels' halves connected with a loud clack, the axles and bearings disconnected from their locked-in position, and in less than a fourth of a second the boys were rolling on wheels seemingly from nowhere. All in all, it was like something out of Transformers, which the engineer in question didn't deny. Five year olds loved that sort of technology, giving them something more in common with mechanical engineers.

"So, um.. what are you gonna ask him for?" Quad asked as they rolled along.

Stan looked aside for a bit, obviously not wanting to answer. "Quad, why didn't you believe me?"

"Because I thought you were lying!"

Stan didn't really know why that was funny, but he was laughing anyway and Quad joined in. "Hey, air vent!" Stan exclaimed as they reached a corner, gesturing to one in the opposite direction of Xavier's office, Stan turning to the right instead of the left and Quad following, puzzled.

"You don't want to talk to Xavier?"

"If I did, what would he say?" Quad shrugged with his uppers, then realized that Stan had learned something important as they pulled off the grate, climbed in, and pulled it back in with some bars on the inside. 'Know what will happen when you do things' was a recurring theme of their education. Did it have a name? Wait, they had been throwing around a lot of English big words at some point.. behavioral planning, behavioral... prediction, that was it.

The air vents were one of the kids' best-kept secrets in a world where secrets were priceless. It was a network of passages to anywhere in the complex. With gratings that snapped off and on easily, it was one of the most popular pastimes for engineered kids. There was at least one air vent at ground level in every corridor, and air vents above every room. Made of a specific grade of Illuminated steel and embedded within the walls, they didn't echo or clang in the slightest. They were usually warm, but it was a comfortable sort of warm, and the walls were never hot to the touch. There weren't any hand-holds on the inside, but that didn't slow down engineered kids any- the walls had good friction and the kids simply climbed by pressing their backs to the wall or doing a split. There was only one known injury; apparently someone had done something stupid, broken his (or was it her? Quad couldn't remember) leg, then held the bone back together and just laid there until he could limp off, never letting an adult know.

It was also dark, with the only light reflecting in from the outside. Both boys found it comforting, like burying themselves under a mountain of blankets.

They climbed generally at random, trying not to backtrack, helping each other through some twists.

"I know where we are," Quad said after a while, looking down a vent grate into a surgery room. He didn't like this section very much. He had discovered the vent system when he was almost four, and enjoyed the climbing, especially when he found he could get a break from everything in there. It gave him a place of his own to think and be alone for a while, and even if they looked for him, he knew no Enforcer could fit in there. The surgery section was one of his favorites; he loved watching normals be modified, especially since he almost never saw normals at all. Even the insertion of implants, an increasingly brief procedure, fascinated him.

On one particular day, however, he had overheard that the famed Paul had brought a servant in; he waited eagerly above the surgery rooms, rapidly crawling back and forth between them to see what would happen. He got more than he bargained for. The not-quite-grownup smelled like a toilet for some reason, and instead of the usual stuff like the eye work and the dentistry, Quad had watched the experts scalpel out wires, actual bloody wires, from his guts and his head. Was Paul's new servant a cyborg? Did wires grow in cyborgs, or was that even possible? Weren't cyborgs not real? He had a lot of questions about that which he didn't want to ask anyone and give himself away, searches yielded nothing relevant, and he remained fascinated until he went to sleep that night.

But that night he received a Grade-A, prime-quality nightmare, and had never visited the section again.

"Quad? You all right?" Stan whispered.

"Yeah. I was thinking. Let's move." Quad liked saying 'Let's move'. It made him feel like an action hero. They scurried- Quad propelling himself on the ceiling with his uppers and the walls with his lowers- until they heard a very familiar voice.

"But I didn't work on the embryo!" the Operator shouted, with much less professionalism than any of the kids were used to. "All she got from me was an engineered egg in her uterus. I assumed she had found an engineered boyfriend, I didn't know it was him!" Even engineered ears couldn't catch the response, and the boys scampered forwards to hear more. "No, I didn't check, and before you say anything about a duty to know these things, you know very well I refuse to discriminate between engineereds. I don't do any detailed work when the embryo has engineered parents, you know we need the sexual random factor. The embryo was dividing nicely before it got to me anyway. Your job is to handle the rest."

A sigh was a response, the voice Xavier's. "You know where they are now?"

"They're probably crawling around in the air vents or something." Stan and Quad shared a look. Had the Operator heard them? What the fuck, the Operator already knew about the vents?

"Well, I suppose if they're together, it's all right." Xavier sounded relieved somehow. "But fuck's sake, Operator.."

"I know. Let's not let this happen again." There was a click, the Operator went back to work, and the boys shrugged and moved on, neither of them fully realizing what the Operator was talking about.

They went in new directions intentionally. They really didn't want to come back any time soon; coming back might mean they'd have to deal with this, and they didn't want to do that. They climbed down some and moved in one direction for a while before they reached a lightless area save for a tiny dot far away, and stopped, sniffing the air. It was heated, significantly, yet a few wisps of chill came through.

"You think we can go this way?" Stan asked.

"Yeah. But.. go slow. There might be traps." Wait, wrong word, Northberg wasn't actually trapped.. "No, not traps, just falls."

They continued directly forwards towards the light, with the strange tenacity of the very young. The heat was all around them- not enough to scald them, but uncomfortable, offset only by the increasingly chill breeze blowing in their faces.

More intense cold greeted them as they continued towards the light, and they heard it: A fan was blowing directly from the outside.

They figured it out. Northberg was largely bipartite. The kids' side, with the training rooms, also contained the medical wing. On the other side were the Enforcer production facilities and research areas. Apparently this was a corridor linking the sides, and if the faint noise was any indication, it ran parallel to the tram.

"All right.. run!" Stan suggested, and started sprinting towards the fan. Quad followed him as fast as he could, ice crunching under his feet. The air blowing into their faces was easily thirty below. They blasted past it, pausing to rest only when they could no longer see in front of them.

"Quad, how can you be- huff- slower than me?"

"More weight." But he was faster climbing. "Come on. Let's keep going." They continued into the unknown, finally reaching the end and following a great many twists and turns over research labs, experimental facilities, and one room that smelled faintly of maple syrup.

"This one goes straight up. I wonder if there's an intake here?" Quad asked, feeling the lack of a ceiling on a corner.

"I'm not feeling the wind from it. That was the nonhuman lab. You know what's around here, don't you?"

"Isn't this.. the dragon!" Quad whispered excitedly, and rushed after his half-brother, who was gleefully making his way up, curling his body and pushing hands-and-feet up, finally launching himself with his feet around the top corner- and doing a weird half-sigh, half-sob.

"What the hell's up there?" Quad asked, in the middle of a six-limbed split-climb.

"See it yourself."

Quad neared the top, pushed off with three limbs, grabbed the lip, pulled his body up, and understood everything immediately.

Stan was mildly distraught, a bit like a normal kid his age who was told that Santa Claus was bullshit, because he was standing at the side of a miniature auditorium, with very dim lighting and sixteen child-sized seats, folding movie-theater style. The mini-auditorium looked down into the dragon's lair, where six legs and two tons of scaly fire-breathing death curled up and slept.

"They knew we were doing this, but they couldn't stop us, so they put this in," Stan reasoned. "Somebody told."

Quad sat down in one of the chairs, which was comfortable indeed. "No, Stan. They knew from the beginning. The vents that open are on the floor, but the ones on the ceiling don't open, because they don't want any of us falling through. They built it that way on purpose. For us. This is like.. the last room, where they let us know it was all just for fun." Quad was speaking slowly, mixing English and Latin to get his point across, making sure he had everything right, learning word choice. Insinuating- or was that admitting?- that they had been played with, or toyed with, or manipulated in some way would have caused bad reactions, in both Stan and himself.

"Isn't Skyler still working on that map?" Stan asked, reluctantly sitting next to Quad, watching the dragon sleep. 'That map' was a three-dimensional construct of all the air vents in the complex. A rather ambitious project for a five-year-old, even an engineered one. "Think we should tell him?"

"We don't have to. I wondered why he stopped talking about it. It was this great big thing for him, you remember? He had it more than half done and then.. he was suddenly interested in something else. This is the reason."

"Do you remember if anyone ever asked?" Quad shook his head, shrugging with all four arms. "I wonder if there's other last-rooms like this? We've got to ask him. Still can't believe that they would do this.. check this out. You hungry?"

"Oh, they didn't-" They had. A dispenser for energy bars in a hard candy shell, a water fountain, and a discreetly-placed toilet hidden around a small bend. The boys used all three. It was excellent after that much physical activity, but not satisfying in any meaningful way.

"Why does it suck now?" Stan asked as he sat back down, Quad sitting next to him with a glum look. "If it was all just a game, we've beaten it. We can watch the dragon from the best spots ever, in real life." Quad fished for an answer, but couldn't find one for lack of analogies. Engineered kids were taught from a very early age that it was the normals' world that was largely illusion, and the Illuminati the only social reality. They just didn't have this stuff happen to them.

It was like watching Mickey Mouse take his head off to reveal a sweaty immigrant's face beneath.

It was like seeing a spot on a movie screen when you were engrossed in the movie.

It was like seeing the strings holding the angel up.

It was learning that your secret hideout was neither.

And to top it all off, the dragon was taking a nap.

They looked at it anyway. It was still less than four years old, only slightly bigger than Quad, curled up in its blanketed nest, its wings wrapped around it as its six legs kicked. The kids were expecting smoke from its nostrils, but real dragons only expelled flame from the pyrogens in their noses and mouths. "I think it's having a nightmare," Stan said, and they sat down to watch. Quad was hoping for a shout and for it to jump out of its roost, soaring- but instead it quieted down and breathed easier.

"First they get bigger wings until they're about eight," Stan said after a bit, wanting to share his knowledge the way normal kids did with dinosaurs. "Then the wings shrink and disappear because they start getting really, really big and couldn't fly anymore anyway." Stan still didn't understand why that was in spite of the offered explanations. It weighed too much, but couldn't it have bigger wings, why didn't that work? Airplanes did it. "Not 'under their own power', well who else's vox would they fly under?" Or was that what he meant? Stan wished that Goldstein had used Latin instead of English, which had way too many meanings for 'power'.

Quad took about five seconds to figure it out. "Not vox, facultas. A jet's, probably. Wings of steel."

Stan's eyes lit up. He had originally been visualizing a dragon along the lines of fantasy; that changed to a dragon with tons of steel affixed to its back, blasting away with fusion engines at Mach 7. "I want to ride it."

"Me too! Like right into the middle of New York City." Screaming normals, fear galore, mass panic! Streak into the side of a building and come out the other ready for more! A good way to spend an afternoon.

They spent the next fifteen minutes talking about what would happen if they actually did that before they got bored and started heading back. Knowing there were no pits in the long vent, they sailed through it on their wheels, adding extra speed near the chilly fan.

They never did talk to Xavier, instead heading straight back to their area, laughing, knocking on Skyler's door. The boy had clearly been engrossed in something, and raised his eyebrows at them.

"Hey Sky, you have that map of the air vents?" Quad asked, and Skyler looked away as if he didn't want to talk about it.

"Oh, that. Yeah, I kind of stopped working on that, I've got so much other stuff-" Some of the kids liked English, some preferred Latin in casual conversation. Skyler used a mix.

"We know why you stopped. The real reason," Quad said, with a Dominator tone in his voice. "Can we come in?" Skyler gestured and shut the door after the half-brothers entered.

"So the two of you went to the training room?" Skyler asked.

"There's one in the training room?" Stan asked. "There's one looking at the dragon."

"The dragon? They must have just made it. I went in there, I mean I was in the room looking, and there wasn't any air vent attached to the system, and no cameras. It was heated on its own straight from the outside."

"Was there any glass?" Quad asked.

"There was a mirror, but.." His expression changed abruptly. "One way glass. Should have known." There was some contempt in his voice.

"What's the training room like?" Stan asked.

"You know how there's those eight cameras- have you two ever been there?"

"They bring me down there like every week for weapons testing," Quad answered, nodding. The eight well-shielded cameras were almost the only things in there that weren't meant to get shot.

"Maybe once. Can't remember," Stan replied, the envy still not quite gone yet.

"Well, of eight cameras on the ceiling, four of them are used for recording things. The other four, although they might still record.. are controlled in there. They even put in snacks, a bathroom,"

"And a water fountain," Quad finished for him. Skyler nodded.

There was a knocking at the door. Skyler answered it, removing the sorrow from his face.

It was Tetrina, all blond hair and pink ribbons and lower hands on hips and loud voice as usual. "Quad, tell me where you went!" Quad flashed a smile at Stan- see what I mean?- and then turned to Tetrina. "I'll tell you, okay? But I've got to talk to Skyler first. So, just.. wait."

"Did you go somewhere bad?" Tetrina asked. The concept of 'somewhere bad' felt strange to even consider. But what else was there?

"Yes, Tetrina. I went somewhere bad. But shut up about it or I'll never tell you anything again. I'll be out in a bit, okay?" Quad closed the door, not bothering to hear from Tetrina vis-a-vis whether or not it was actually okay.

"So did you just quit when you found out?" Stan asked.

"When I just found out? Guys- secrecy about this, okay?" Skyler did, in fact, wait until the half-brothers said it was okay before he proceeded. "I cried. I mean I just fucking.. cried. I mean, here I was mapping all this shit out, just for the hell of it really, and it turns out the whole thing's a fucking.. lie." He quivered as he spoke, as if he was about to cry again.

"I guess that was a.." Quad fished for the phrase. He wasn't four anymore, he knew adult English, he heard it a lot, what was it? "an unintended consequence. It was meant as a reward."

"No it wasn't," Skyler argued. "It was meant as a disappointment. I looked the whole concept up. Normals are disappointed all the time. Normals our age, even worse, it's psycho. Xavier can't do that to us because we'd kill him so fast his head would fly off." His tone of voice revealed that he had harbored fantasies about doing exactly that. "But they needed a way to teach us that not everything is right and that some things we like are just bullshit. But that was dumb because most of us are never going to know about it," The training room and dragon were both rather far, to the tune of a quarter kilometer for the training room and more than a half kilometer to the dragon. Larger spaces aside, that's a lot of vent crawling. "we're just going to grow up and forget this childish bullshit," he said in a tone intentionally defying his age. Wow, he was pissed. Talking about it was getting his anger up. He was almost four when he first heard of the vents, older kids talking in hushed tones about seeing one Dominator badly injured, his brother's hands embedded in his chest. He had seen it for himself, the twins asleep and physically joined together. The sight had led him to see what else he could discover; now he no longer cared.

"So that's why you didn't tell anyone." It was that and the fact that Skyler was the one who had snapped his fibula in that fucking vent and kept his mouth shut, tightly holding bone in place as best he could despite the horrific pain for about an hour until he could try to walk again, in silent agony for more hours because he didn't really make the fucking bone ends meet up after all, not even telling anyone it was he who had broken it (too embarrassing) but rather choosing to spread the word that 'someone' had...

"Yeah, Stan, you want to tell everyone about the secret little rooms at the end of a bunch of stupid fucking air vents? You do it, but leave me the motherfuck out of it. Keep my door closed. I never want to hear about this shit again." Skyler was a little over six years old, an age at which normal children would be still learning to read and playing pretend. Skyler was working on a scientific trade that would get him into the good graces of another Illuminatus and himself the fuck away from Northberg Educational.

"Last question, is that training room thing on your map?" Quad asked gently. They'd all learned as toddlers that there was no sense in pissing another engineered kid off. Nothing good ever came of it.

"I deleted that shit. All copies. You're from the Duumvirate and Sarah, you want a map, you can probably beat it out of Xavier." Skyler turned to his computer in finality, and Stan and Quad left his presence.

Once they did, he actually did delete the map he had made, simply out of spite and rage. He returned to his studies, trying to figure out how the architect Dr. Morris Flatland had improved his technique over twenty years, using such thinner materials. Wait, of course- his technique hadn't improved so much, it was the molecular constructors that came into the picture; Flatland didn't grow up as an adult, the fucking technology did! Duumvirate's balls, Skyler could probably get out of here just by offering to help rebuild his older stuff to modern specs, but he needed to grab some solid-minded servants before he did... and if that old bastard didn't help him out, he'd find a way to get the power to start the business himself...

"Well?" Tetrina asked as they left, with her lower lip out in a pout.

'I know she has four arms too, but why does she keep hanging on to me?' Quad thought. Tetrina had just turned five. She had paid particular attention when the screen was talking about normal family dynamics. In her fantasies, Quad was the 'husband', although he could be nothing like the husbands she saw, and she was the 'wife'. She'd have him even if she had to construct high-powered magnetic fields to do it.

"Don't tell anyone I was at the dragon. There's a special way to get there." Now, Quad figured, she'd ask for directions, and he'd have a hell of a time giving them.

"Take me there sometime," she said instead.

"Um.. okay." What was with girls, anyway? Why did older males want them hanging around all the time? He knew the biology part, and knew it was supposed to be pleasurable at 'puberty' (a concept he only understood in the abstract), but he'd seen Tetrina's vagina before, and didn't understand what was so special about it or where the pleasure was supposed to come from. If you put your dick in, did candy come out? Was that why normals called each other "honey" sometimes? Eww. Piss and shit came out right next to that. He didn't think he wanted girl-honey.

She did not ask for a promise, having been taught better. She swiftly kissed him on his forehead, Stan laughing although he wasn't sure why, and ran off to play with her friends. Quad's face got red, although he really wasn't sure why, and went into his room, Stan following.

Quad did not contact Xavier. He called up the maintenance man instead. The unnamed janitor-cum-caretaker-cum-jack of all trades was more approachable, less cryptic, and decisively did not have that 'I'm going to influence the rest of your life' gleam that Xavier occasionally got.

"I apologize, but that information is restricted." was the response. No further explanation, and Quad and Stan were rather surprised.

Okay, Xavier would probably tell him, or make the servant tell him, or he could go to the Operator and rip it out of him, because everybody knew that the twins had beaten the shit out of him a few years ago and he'd be scared.. but no. Quad wouldn't go to higher authority, here. He was the higher authority. So, for this, he had to act like Dad.

"You have two options. The first option is, you give us a complete map now. The second option is, we rip your testes off and feed them to you." Quad understood, almost intuitively, the need for a constant voice, and switched between English and Latin, not caring if the servant completely understood.

"You might find that harder than you think," the servant informed him neutrally. What? Why? What was he trying to say?

Stan got it first; he was trying to say he was retroviral. Well, duh. Did he think they didn't see that? "And when your testes grow back, we'll feed them to you again."

The servant actually had particular orders regarding this. Certain classes of information were off-limits to the youth, unless they could use what they were taught- manipulation, threats, duplicity, intensity of purpose- in a sound and reasonable way. He was instructed to use his best judgment, and at this point not to give it to them would be criminal. Also, on a personal level, he had no intention of finding out what his nads tasted like, and no intention of verifying the data that suggested Quad was significantly more deadly than any other engineered his age. He sent the map and turned off his end of the connection.

The boys broke out laughing. "Feed you your testes!" Stan shouted, and pantomimed salt and pepper shakers. "Chew them thoroughly before swallowing!"

"Ah, but seeeenyor, sometimes ze bull wins!" Quad said in a horribly fake Mexican accent. That joke, like almost every other one passed around normal elementary and middle schools, had made its rounds in Northberg Educational.

Like most bits of information, the actual map was decisively less interesting than the processes they had used to get it.