The Unedited Guest

They called themselves the Cohort, and Dev was the only person at the reunion who had been born by accident.

Everyone else in the rented hall had been written. Twenty years ago, in the first wave of legal germline editing, their parents had sat in pastel clinics and chosen from menus — perfect pitch, marathon lungs, the gene variant that lets you wake at five and feel rested, the one that quiets the dread that used to be called anxiety. The Cohort were the proof-of-concept babies, and now they were twenty, gathered to celebrate the experiment they had been.

Dev was here because his mother had refused the menu. Not on principle, she always said, just on instinct — I wanted to meet you, not order you. He had grown up in the same town as half of them, the unedited boy among the designed, and he had spent two decades feeling like a first draft someone forgot to revise.

The Cohort were dazzling. Aria, who had been built for music, played the hall's old piano so beautifully that conversation stopped. A man named Felix ran the buffet table like a logistics general, calm, exact, effortless. They were taller, clearer-skinned, quicker to laugh. Nobody had a stammer. Nobody, Dev slowly noticed, ever looked lost.

He had braced himself to feel small here. He had not expected to feel, by the second hour, faintly haunted.

Because something was missing from the room, and he could not nameit. The laughter was warm but it arrived on time, like a train. When Aria finished playing, the applause was perfect and brief and nobody's eyes were wet. When Felix told the story of his father's death, he told it well, with good pacing, and felt — Dev could see him checking — nothing he could find.

"You keep staring," Aria said, sitting down beside him, her smile flawless. "Go on. Ask the thing the unedited ones always ask."

"What did they take out of you?" Dev said, before he could soften it.

Aria's smile did not change. That was the first thing that frightened him.