“Whose is this?” he asked, even though he was sure of the answer. Taped diagonally across the lid was a black-and-white bumper sticker of two fish: a Christian fish symbol, and right behind it, a larger Darwin fish with stick-figure legs, its mouth wide open to swallow the fish in front of it.

“It was Mom’s,” Rainy said. “It’s ours now.”

He sat on the couch and put the laptop on the coffee table. “Where did you get this? Your house?”

They didn’t answer. He looked up, and Sandra was looking at Rainy. “Can you open it?” the girl said.

He thumbed the latch and lifted the lid. “Okay, what next?”

“No, unlock it,” Rainy said. “It has a password.” She sat next to him and pressed the power button. The computer started booting up.

“Why did you hide this?” he asked.

“We didn’t hide it,” Sandra said. “Reverend Hooke took it. Her and Tommy.”

“What? When?” Pax asked.

“The morning after,” Rainy said. “We saw her take it, and Tommy saw her too, but he didn’t say anything.”

“Why didn’t you speak up? This is important. It could have Jo’s-” He started to say “suicide letter,” but thought better of it.

“Can you open it?” Rainy said. On the screen was a prompt for a password. “We can’t get past this part.”

“How would I know the password?”

“Just try,” Sandra said.

He shook his head, put his fingers on the keyboard. He thought for a moment, then typed “BrotherBewlay” and pressed return.

“Incorrect password,” he said.

Rainy was looking at him intently, but as usual he couldn’t read her expression. “You’re not even trying,” she said.

“Okay, fine,” he said. He tried “BewlayBrother,” then several variations with different capitalization and spaces and plurals. Then “hunkydory” and “changes” and “prettythings.”

Pax said, “If we keep putting in bad passwords we may lock it up permanently.”

“But you could hack it, right?” Sandra asked. “You know about computers and everything.”

“What? No. I mean, I’ve used computers, but I don’t even own one right now. I use my roommate’s.”

“But you’re from Chicago!” Sandra said.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Forget it,” Rainy said, and slammed the lid down. Pax put a hand over hers.

“Wait. Leave it with me.” He looked at both of them. “I can call some people who are good at this kind of thing. Maybe we can figure out how to boot it without the password.”

“Really?” Sandra said, sounding relieved. Rainy seemed less sure.

“It’s ours,” Rainy said. “The laptop belongs to us now.”

Pax said, “I know that. I promise you I won’t let anyone else have it. Let me try some things, okay?” The twins didn’t reply. “But right now I’m exhausted. How about you come back tomorrow.”

He closed the door behind them and walked to the guest room. The vintage, frozen when he’d gotten it from Aunt Rhonda, had warmed to liquid again. He sat on the bed and swirled the plastic container, proving to himself that he didn’t need to rush into this. He could wait even longer if he wanted to.

He pried off the rubber cap, then lay back on the bed and tilted the vial over his mouth. The serum seemed to take forever to slide to the lip of the container; the first drop reached the edge and hung there, swelling.

He didn’t know what dose to use; most of his experience had been accidental, and at the extremes. Just a drop now, he thought. There was more in the vial if he needed it. Later he could even swab out the inside with a Q-tip if he needed to, or add water and rinse it into his mouth. And, he reminded himself, there was more where this came from.

He tapped the plastic with one finger and the drop broke loose, fell onto his tongue like a dollop of honey. He swallowed, and the warmth slid down the back of his throat. He put the cap back onto the vial and lay on the bed, waiting.

“And he returns,” his father said each time Pax arrived for his visit. He sounded both sad and relieved.

Rhonda had decided that the optimal interval was every other day. Pax would arrive with his armful of newspapers and they would sit by the big atrium windows. Harlan was most lucid and in control in the first hour. As they shuffled through the pages one of them would try to make small talk. It didn’t matter which one of them spoke first; it never went easily. One morning Pax said, “Did you know that some scientists think that the clades are an alternate strain of human evolution?” Harlan didn’t look up from his paper. He didn’t believe in evolution. “It’s got to do with quantum mechanics,” Pax went on. “These things called intron mutations prove that the disease is teleporting in from a parallel universe. They can prove it.” He tried to sound like he hadn’t learned this from an Internet weirdo a few weeks before. “People who went through the Changes are a whole different species. Technically, you and I may not even be related anymore.”

His father chuckled without looking up. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

The conversation went better when Pax had specific questions-about the house, the car, the finances. Harlan could coach him through the bank statements and bills, tell him how to light the oven’s pilot light, or how to jumpstart the Crown Vic and get it started without flooding the engine.

Harlan would grow more remote as the morning wore on. His gaze would shift to the middle distance, or else suddenly alight on Paxton’s face as if seeing him for the first time. Sometimes Pax seemed to be a beloved child, sometimes a rebellious teenager. “I won’t have this in my house!” he shouted during one extraction, and Travis had to put up a hand to stop Harlan from slapping the needle away. “Thank God your mother isn’t alive to see this, it would kill her. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

“I know, Dad,” Pax said. He leaned forward but did not touch him. That was still against the rules.

When the extraction began Pax would watch the serum color the body of the syringe, and then he would catch himself watching and look away.

“Oh law,” Rhonda would say when Travis delivered the syringes. “He’s like Old Faithful.”

Pax took his payment on Tuesday mornings with the rest of the employees. The chub boys started rolling in around 9:30, then sat around talking and looking at their hands until the clock struck 11:00 and Rhonda opened her office door.

Pax kept his distance, trying to hang back until the rest of them had been paid, but Clete went out of his way to get next to Pax, hugging him, slapping his back, punching his shoulder. “Looking a little rough this morning, Paxton,” he’d say. “Can’t wait to get that shot of ol’ Grandad, huh?”

Each time Pax resolved not to flinch, to give nothing away. Weeks after the beating both men’s bruises had faded, but Pax was still aching: the ribs along his right side still grated like a tire rubbing at a sharp fender; the headaches still woke him at night. So he smiled tightly and said nothing, waiting for Clete to become distracted by another conversation, or for Rhonda to tell them to line up.

The chubs were anxious to receive their checks and the little frozen vials they called the bonus, but their need seemed less immediate than Paxton’s. To hear the younger chubs talk, it wasn’t about getting high themselves, it was about impressing women and partying. “But you skips, man,” Clete said, circling an arm around Paxton’s neck. “You freak for it like the ladies, don’t you?”

Pax smiled his fuck-you smile.

The twins had become disappointed in him. He hadn’t been able to get past the computer’s log-in screen, and hadn’t even tried to find someone who could. “Never mind,” Rainy said, and the laptop vanished from his house.

They didn’t like how long he slept in the afternoons; they didn’t like how little he ate. They disapproved of his long, stringy hair, the way he’d go days without shaving.