“The reservoir conditions are an immune response,” I said. It wasn’t a question; it didn’t need to be. I could see the confirmation in Kelly’s widening eyes. “They’re the way the body copes with the Kellis-Amberlee infection, aren’t they?” She didn’t answer me. “Aren’t they?!” I shouted, and slammed my hand into the safety glass.
Maggie and Alaric jumped. Becks stepped up beside me. And Kelly flinched.
“Yes,” she said. “They are. They just… they just happen. We think it has something to do with exposure in infancy, but the research has never been… it’s never…”
All my sympathy for her was gone, like it had never existed at all. I wasn’t seeing a person anymore. I was seeing the CDC, and the virus that took George away. “I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead, and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr. Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”
Kelly nodded mutely.
“Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now, tell me: The reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”
“They teach the immune system how to handle an ongoing live Kellis-Amberlee infection,” said Kelly, meeting my eyes at last. She sounded oddly relieved, like she’d known we were going to wind up here and just hadn’t known how to force the issue on her own. “They teach the body what to do about it.”
“Meaning what?”
Alaric spoke abruptly, his own voice glacially cold: “That’s the wrong question, Shaun.”
“All right, you’re the Newsie. What’s the right question? What should I be asking her?”
“Ask her what would have happened if you hadn’t pulled the trigger.” Alaric looked at Kelly for a long moment, and then looked away, like he couldn’t bear the sight of her. “Ask her what would have happened to Georgia if you’d just left her alone in the van and hadn’t pulled the trigger.”
Kelly’s answer was a hushed whisper, so soft that, for a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The words seemed to get louder and louder as they echoed inside my head, repeating over and over again until I couldn’t bear the sound of them. I slammed my fist into the safety glass as hard as I could, so hard I could feel my knuckles threaten to give way. Then I turned on my heel and stalked away, back down the dank-smelling alley where the octopuses watched with their alien eyes, back pastn’nks of massive spiders, past the working lab technicians, who barely even looked up as I passed them. I was running by that point, running as I tried to outpace the words still echoing in my ears—those horrible, condemning, world-destroying words. It didn’t do any good. No matter how fast I ran, no matter how hard I hit the world, nothing could take those words back again.
Those five small, simple words that changed everything:
“She would have gotten better.”
Shaun and I had one of those awkward talks today—the ones that hurt the most because they’re the ones you don’t want to have, ever, but have to have eventually. This one was about our birth parents. Who they were, why they gave us up, whether they survived the Rising, all those things they say adopted kids are supposed to ask. Whether they wanted us. That’s a big one for Shaun. He’s always been more forgiving of the Masons than I am, but for some reason, it’s really important to him that we were wanted before we wound up here.
I know what triggered it. I got the same e-mail he did, from a service promising to “reunite the orphans of the Rising with their families.” According to the e-mail, these people would—for a modest fee, of course—run blood and tissue samples through every public and military database in the country, looking for a genetic match. Satisfaction guaranteed; they were clear on that point. We Find Your Family, Or Your Money Back.
That sort of scam fascinates me, but I don’t want the answers that they’re offering. I’ve had my genes tested for every nasty recessive and surprise health hazard we can test for, and that’s most of them—anything they don’t have a chromosome type for is so damn rare that at least it would be interesting to write about as it killed me. I have no pressing need to find the family that created me. The one thing I have in this world, the one thing I’m not willing to risk losing, is Shaun. And if I went out and found another family, I’d run the risk of losing him.
Whether the Masons rescued us from certain death—like the press releases say—or stole us, or hell, bought us on the black market, I don’t care. The girl I would’ve been if I’d grown up with a mother with my nose and a father with my funny-looking toes never got the opportunity to exist. I did. I was the one who got to grow up, and I grew up with Shaun, and that’s all I give a damn about. We got lucky. If he doesn’t see it, well… I guess there’s no way to make him.
But I still know.
—From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted May 13, 2034
The good thing about Kellis-Amberlee, as a virus, is that it only goes after mammals. I mean, think about it. Can you imagine an infected giant squid? It would be like the Sea World Incident of 2015 all over again, only this time with bonus tentacles. Not my idea of a good scene. If that doesn’t disturb you, consider this: The average crocodile well over the amplification threshold.
Yeah. That was my thought, too.
The bad thing about Kellis-Amberlee, as a virus, is that it goes after all mammals. From the smallest field mouse to the largest blue whale (assuming there are any blue whales left down there), if it’s a mammal, it’s a carrier. That means that any cure we devise will also have to work for all mammals, because otherwise there’s always the chance that Kellis-Amberlee can mutate and come back for another try. Viruses are tricky that way. At least we’re used to dealing with this form of the disease. I’m not sure how quickly we’d adjust if it somehow changed the rules.
—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, April 12, 2041
Ten
The outside air slapped me hard across the face as the door to Dr. Abbey’s lab clanged shut behind me. I stumbled to a stop, realizing two things at the same time—first, that I was alone in the middle of a mostly abandoned industrial park, and second, that while I had my standard field arms, I wasn’t wearing any armor beyond my basic motorcycle gear. It was like a recipe for suicide, and while it might have been acceptable when I was too out of it to realize what I was doing, that moment had passed. I let my gaze flick wildly around my surroundings, looking for signs of movement. I didn’t find any. What I did find was the van, sitting like an island of serenity among the ruins.
I took another step forward, barely aware that I was going to do it until it was already done. The van. That’s where I was going when I ran away. To the van, where George and I saved each other’s lives a thousand times… where I pulled the trigger and killed the woman who was my sister, my best friend, and my only real family, all with a single bullet.
She would have gotten better, whispered Kelly’s voice, in the black space behind my eyes where only George was supposed to speak. The world blanked out again.
The sound of the van door slamming forced me back into my surroundings for the second time. My index finger was slightly numb, with the deep, subcutaneous ache that meant I’d taken—and passed—a blood test to open the doors. No amplification for me. Not yet, anyway. I looked dully around the van’s interior, eyes flicking toward the ceiling in an automatic check for the Rorschach test that was formed by George’s blood immediately after I pulled the trigger. For a moment, I could see it, streaks of red trending into a dozen shades of brown as it dried. Then I blinked, and the blood was gone, replaced by pristine white paneling.