Fava Beans
Oranges
Each underlined heavily. I smiled.
Apella, your final gift to us was a good one.
I could have screamed, but everyone’s eyes were on me as I walked away from the infirmary. How could this happen? How could it all end like this? With a grocery list scrawled over ink-smudged paper. She must have gone crazy, the sickness invading her brain or something. I was so angry with her… for not saving Orry, for leaving me with nothing but a useless scrap to hold onto, for dying. How could she just… die like that?
I pictured her hanging over that desk. All the things that made her alive suddenly pulled from her like pulling a hermit crab from its shell. I thought she looked like a ghost when she was alive, now she was one. And she would always haunt me. Because I hated her and loved her at the same time. So much.
I squatted down and put my hands to the wet rocks.
Damn it, damn it, damn it, I thought as I wiped my sniffling nose with a shaky hand.
Could this please be a dream? I wasn’t even half the person I would need to be to deal with this. I pulled my hair back from my face and shoved down the bile that was rising in my throat. I thought about Addy, Clara, Deshi, and now Apella. They were all gone, dead, lost. There was no fairness to this. People were going to drop away, dissolve into the stacks of bodies, because we were in a war. We could hide underground, pit ourselves against the idea of it, but it was always there. And it was going to take everyone and everything if we let it. I felt my organs seize in my chest, because now it was going to take my son.
I punched the rock, my knuckles splitting, the skin opening, bleeding. The pain was a nice feeling. It was on the outside of me, instead of the pain that ran back and forth over my insides like a two-man saw.
Stop. Just stop. Please.
Whoever’s controlling this puppet show we’re all in, please cut the strings. Don’t make me do this. Go through this.
But it was done. No one was listening. I was tied to the sky, and the strings that bound us together were breaking.
J oseph
Fava beans and oranges. I knew to Rosa this meant nothing, a grocery list, some random items. And on their own, they didn’t mean anything. But combined with Orry’s symptoms, they meant the world. Thanks to Apella, he would live.
In those months before I found Rosa, I learned the process of how Orry was made, how they were all designed and produced. There were steps you had to follow, important steps. You couldn’t skip one. I knew Este had been in a hurry, that she’d doubled the amount of embryos to be produced and implanted. She’d also messed around with chromosomes, trying to make the offspring more All Kind, but I never thought she’d be this reckless. It was as obvious to me as it must have been to Apella… that Este had skipped over the pre-implantation genetic screening. This would check the embryos for predispositions to different intolerances and genetic disorders. One disorder, which had shown to be particularly common in the embryos that had been produced, was a G6 PD deficiency. It was a severe intolerance to fava beans that caused vomiting, seizures, jaundice, anemia, and eventually death if not treated.
I stood over Apella’s body. She was almost grey. Alexei had stopped crying, but his face remained contorted in anguish. I put my hand on hers and mentally thanked her. I squeezed Alexei’s shoulder. He looked up at me and smiled. “So she did it?” he asked quietly.
I nodded somberly. “She did.”
“Good,” he said. “I knew it couldn’t be for nothing.” There was a glimmer of hope in his eyes, and pride. “I think she held on as long as she could, so that she could find the answer. I watched her work. She wrote down the final word, smiled, and sighed her last breath before she laid her head down on the table.” He swept his thinning hair back and straightened his glasses. “I can’t believe I’ll never see that smile again.”
My heart broke for him.
Matt ushered me from the bed and pulled the curtain around them.
I still gripped the paper in my hand. I wanted to find Rosa, but I needed to get Orry’s treatment organized before I did anything else.
“G6...” I said to Matthew, waving the paper in front of him like it was made of gold.
Matthew smiled. “PD deficiency. Of course!”
I pulled up my sleeve. “Take as much as you can,” I said, flopping down in a chair.
Matt already had a needle in his hand.
To think, all he needed was a transfusion and to never, ever touch a can of fava beans again. He would have to be careful about too much vitamin C as well. I sunk into the chair and let some of the stress escape my wound-up body. My universal donor blood tracked slowly up a tube. I was the vaccine, the solution.
I was lost. Actually lost. In a stupor, I had dragged my sorry feet through several tunnels looking for a difference, a distraction. I kept seeing her head, her pale blonde hair fanned out like a silk, straw broom, her arm kind of stiff when I went to lift it. She was like a piece of wood burned in the fire, its whole body turned to ash yet holding its shape. All you had to do was poke it for the form to collapse and whir into the sky with the sparks and the smoke. I leaned against the curve of the tunnel, staring down at the steel train track in front of me. My feelings were a tangle, a mess. I wished there had been another way. I wished that my son wasn’t soon to be caught in the ashy swirl of death too. When he did, I could see myself turning to flame and joining him. It would leave Joseph alone, but he wouldn’t want what was left of me. No one would.
I slapped the stone with my palms in anger, mossy green slime staining my fingers. I had to find my way out of here, I needed to find Rash and the others, tell them what was going on, and then I needed to spend whatever time I had left with Orry, with my family, before it all disappeared.
I picked a direction, cursed, and started walking.
*****
Long shadows crept up the walls, people talking and jogging towards me. Each voice was high with emotion, accents clashing and words not making sense. It didn’t make sense because they sounded jubilant.
“You go to the hospital. Here’s the list. They just need clean blood bags and needles still in their sterile wrappings.”
Someone gruff and familiar said, “She can’t be too far away. That girl just has to stand still somewhere, and trouble will find her. But the boy will want to see her when he wakes.” Gus.
I was beyond confused, but the words sounded good together. They glowed on the page in my head, when he wakes. Those words were golden and sparkling. I felt myself being pulled to the sky, that string I was attached to trying to make me dance.
They finally collided with me, a few monkeys scampering around their feet. Gus saw me, stared at me, and then he did something I’ll never forget. He laughed. I peered into the yellowing enamel like his smile was a specimen to be studied. His eyebrows drew together, and then he grabbed both my shoulders and shook me with force.
“She did it,” he said.
I winced a little at the resemblance to Cal when I looked into his eyes. But this wasn’t Cal; this was Gus. Harsh, stoic Gus who loved Orry like the rest of them did.
My lips were trembling, my whole body rattling like a wooden door in a storm. “She… did?”
He nodded. “The boy will live.”
The boy will live.
Something snapped gently inside me, a door opening and filling me with floodwaters.