“Japanese arrowroot.” Elmer leaned back in a molded plastic chair and took a pull from his Styrofoam cup.  He’d brought the girls to a break room, just down the hall from the Cade showroom.  Aunt Delilah sat in an adjoining office, filling out reams of forms and customer satisfaction surveys, to indicate which Cade she preferred.

            “Japanese arrowroot?” Melisma repeated.  “I don’t know what that means.”

            “It’s a plant,” Elmer said, “a type of vine.  Also known as ‘kudzu.’  It grows naturally in Asia, and on some Pacific islands.”

            He paused to gauge the girls’ reaction to this information.  Melisma stared at him blankly.  Lyddie sprawled across the break room floor and tried to shove her empty juice box into one of the holes on her shape-sorting toy, not even pretending to pay attention.  Doria leaned forward in her chair and took a slow sip of juice, listening closely.  For her, botany and zoology facts were their own reward.

            “Okay,” Melisma said.  “And?”

            Elmer shifted his weight.  “So, over a hundred years ago, someone brought a kudzu plant from Japan to the United States.  It caused all kinds of problems.  Kudzu grows faster and stronger than other plants, you see.  Once they put a little bit in the ground, it spread in all directions.  As it grew, the kudzu twined and wormed its way over other trees and flowers, blocking out the sun.  Everything else for miles around withered, as the kudzu vines grew stronger.”

            Doria grinned.  “That’s so cool,” she whispered.  “I want a kudzu.”

            Elmer shook his head.  “It wasn’t ‘cool’ for the farmers who lost their crops and their fields.  Kudzu was what we call an ‘invasive species.’  It was a weed.  People spent decades finding ways to beat the kudzu back before it could spread again.”

            Lyddie yawned from the floor.  “Hey, Mister,” she interrupted, “do you got anything to eat?”

            “Shut up, Lyddie,” Doria snapped automatically.  “What does kudzu have to do with Cade?”

            “Good question, Doria.”  Elmer set his coffee cup down and moved to a break room cabinet.  He retrieved a sleeve of crackers and passed it to Lyddie.  “Last night, I spoke with your brother Cadence.  We talked for quite a while.  Your brother is a complicated young man.”

            Melisma frowned.  Cade didn’t seem any more complicated than the average teenage boy.  He was just moody and quiet.

            “He’s also a jerk,” Lyddie said, spitting crumbs across the floor.

            “Lyddie!” Melsisma snapped  “Don’t say that!”

            “It’s true,” Lyddie grumbled. “Just ‘cause he’s gone, it doesn’t make him nice.”

            Doria accepted a cracker from Elmer.  “I actually agree with Lyddie on this one,” she said.  “Cade’s… not great.”

            Elmer sighed.  “He’s certainly has a lot to deal with right now.  But I realized something last night, as I drove back to the office.  None of our Cadences, the ones we developed through our actuarial models, got your brother quite right.  They were more like photocopies of Cadence than the real thing.”

            Melisma nodded, thinking back to Study-Time Cade and Party-Time Cade.  They were action figures, not brothers.

            “So, I did something very stupid,” Elmer said.

            Lyddie perked up at the word ‘stupid.’  She liked stories where grown-ups made mistakes.

            “Headquarters said we should just replace Cadence’s personality with one of the showroom Cades you saw outside.  I thought we could do better.  The problem, I assumed, was that we didn’t get a strong enough baseline at the start, when your brother was seven years old.  We didn’t know who he truly was.  It’s what we talked about earlier, Melisma.  A child that young would still be forming their personality.  They could grow to become anybody.”

            “I’m going to be rich,” Lyddie interjected helpfully.

            Doria rolled her eyes.  “And you’ll still wipe your boogers on the wall.”

            “No, I’ll pay somebody to do it for me.”

            Elmer ignored their argument.  “The point,” he continued, “is that we needed better materials to truly capture Cadence’s personality.  So, late last night, I brought Cadence himself to our Actuarial Modeling Unit.  I started a new tree.  Whatever his personality’s condition was now, I assumed he might have core elements we could draw from to make a better model.”

             “So the real Cade is here!”  Melisma raised her head.  “We just need to get him and go home!”

            Elmer scratched the tip of his nose and pushed his glasses into place.  “Well, not exactly.  See, Cadence is not only a very complicated personality, he’s also a very strong one.  When I placed him among the actuarial trees in the middle of the Man-Groves, something… happened.”

            “What?” Melisma demanded.  “What happened to my brother?”

            “Kudzu.”  Elmer said quietly.  “Or rather, ‘Cadezu.’  Cadence is an invasive species.”

            “What does that mean?”  Doria’s eyes widened in concern.

            “It means,” Elmer said, “that your brother sprouted thousands of creeping Cadence vines, which spread across and overran our entire Actuarial Modeling Unit.  He's ruining everything.  As an emergency measure, headquarters plans to implement a complete system purge.  And they're doing it tonight, at 10:00.  If you don’t find the Cadence you want by then, he’ll be destroyed for good.”