“And now?”
He hesitated long enough for the silence to become its own answer. “Now they move before anybody speaks. They wake from sleep together. They stop crying together. The littlest one falls, the others turn white before she strikes the floor. Two months back, Ada cut her thumb splitting apples in the kitchen. Before I could fetch cloth, Thomas grabbed his own hand and bled where no blade had touched him.” His voice dropped. “And last week, when I asked my eldest girl her name, she said, ‘We are Ada.’”
At that, the eldest child, a long-faced girl of perhaps seventeen, tilted her head almost imperceptibly.
“I see,” I lied.
“No, doctor,” Lenora said, with the faintest shadow of a smile. “You do not.”
I began with the ordinary things because habit is the last refuge of a rational man. I checked pulses, eyes, tongues, throats, reflexes, respiration. Their temperatures were normal. Their lungs were clean. Their hearts sounded strong, though I noted with unease that several of the rhythms seemed to steady when the others were touched, as though twelve bodies were quietly negotiating a common tempo. Not one child resisted my hand. Not one flinched. When I asked the youngest girl, Pearl, to open her mouth, she obeyed before I had fully spoken. When I turned to the boy beside her, he was already doing the same.
“State your name,” I said at last to the eldest.
