Except that it was early morning, and this time the crowds of people were going to work instead of having lunch or leaving the office to add to the evening’s rush hour. And, of course, except that this was one of her last few hours alive. Violet and Six moved briskly through the crowd. While Violet felt oddly like she was a walking clock with a dying battery, this time Six seemed to be a little more attuned to the world around him. Apparently he’d embraced the idea that he needed to keep up rather than gawk at all the things he’d never seen before. Violet thought that was too bad; in a part of her mind that she didn’t want to acknowledge, she wished she could slow down and take the child shopping, buy him bags full of the toys he’d never had and never would, then take him for pizza and ice cream. There was one of those children’s pizza parlors down at the other end, next to the video outlet store. Had he ever tasted things like pizza and ice cream? She didn’t know for sure, but Violet doubted it—the only image her mind would provide when she tried to imagine his life at the lab was a tiny white room with a sterile metal cot, a toilet, and a slot through which someone shoved bowls of nutritionally complete mush, perhaps coupled with the nutritious capsules that Violet was convinced had been the bulk of his diet.
