Across a Star-Swept Sea (17 page)

He looked like he wanted to punch something.

“The bigger problem we have recently discovered lies with the reg victims.” She poked at the glowing controls floating before her, and the oblet’s display switched to a new brain model.

The tension migrated up to Justen’s face. “What do you mean?” he asked softly.

Persis moved closer as well. She was no scientist, but she’d accepted responsibility for the refugees long after the Poppy had seen them safely into Albion.

“We’ve only recently received victims of reg origins,” Noemi explained. “While your government began by torturing only aristos, they’ve apparently expanded their reign of terror.”

“Yes,” Justen whispered. “I heard rumors …”

“And the regs—they aren’t recovering from the drug.”

Persis’s jaw dropped. In the muffled, blurry distance, she saw Justen nod again, heard him ask indistinct questions of Noemi, heard the older medic’s equally indistinct answers. She barely realized she was backing up until she felt the warm, geoheated wall of the room against her bare spine.

They weren’t recovering. They weren’t detoxing. She was saving them from Galatea, but it was too late—the damage had been done.

“While there appears to be some increase in brain and motor function after a week of detox, they show no signs of regaining their language, motor control, or memories. It’s not just that they seem slower to recover, as the aristo children do. The detoxification is having no effect at all.”

Those poor people. Those poor, poor regs who’d done nothing worse than speak out against the current regime’s cruel methods, only to have that very cruelty foisted upon them in an infinitely worse way. Brain damage.
Permanent
brain damage.

As bad as Darkening.

And the revolutionaries were doing it to everyone. Adults, children. For crimes and disagreements and even petty revenge plots. If any of her spies were captured, it’s what would happen to them. To her. Persis had thought the Poppy could save them. She was wrong.

Persis took several deep breaths and schooled her features into her signature vapidity. Panicking wouldn’t help anything now. She joined Justen and Noemi as they discussed the lab results, keeping her mouth shut and her ears open.

Noemi slid the first brain model up beside the second. “We’ve postulated that the Reduction drug hinders neural pathway functioning and development in the aristo brain, but if you look here”—she pointed at the other—“you can see that the response in the reg’s brain shows a marked difference. Here there is a chemical binding of nerve endings. It seals off neural pathways permanently.”

Justen was simply nodding as if this all made perfect sense. Perhaps to a medic, it did. “What does that mean?” Persis asked. For once, she didn’t have to play stupid. She really did feel out of the loop.

Noemi looked at her, and from the question in the older woman’s eyes, Persis could tell Noemi was wondering how much of Persis’s behavior was just for show. The medic had never had much patience with the subterfuge aspects of the Wild Poppy, but then again, Noemi knew from firsthand experience how difficult it could be for a woman to get things done on this island. Though she was obviously the most talented medic at the sanitarium, she was kept in the role of administrative official while a man was given the chief title. Noemi held a place of sympathy in her practical little heart for Isla and Persis and their conundrum.

“It’s the biological equivalent of putting a bit of resin at the tip of a rope to keep it from unraveling,” she explained. “In an aristo brain, we’ve seen that recovery from the drug involves creating new pathways—basically rerouting neurons around the damaged parts. But when the Reduction drug enters the regs’ systems, it changes their brains’ ability to reroute those pathways—forever.”

“And this is happening to all of them?” Justen asked.

“We’ve genetested them for DAR, of course,” Noemi replied, “given the similarity of symptoms. None are susceptible.”

“Are the patients lucid enough to give you a medical history?” he asked. “Do you know if they’re natural or Helo Cured?”

“If they’re natural regs, they can’t Darken,” Persis broke in before she even realized what she was doing.

Justen looked at her, his lips compressed into a tight line. He looked as stricken as she felt, as lost. There was no danger, in this moment, that he might see beneath her mask. Whatever he was thinking, his head was too full of it for anything else. “Yes. DAR only affects those regs whose ancestors took the Helo Cure. That’s why it’s called Dementia of
Acquired
Regularity. Not natural regularity.”

“We haven’t tried to get that information out of them,” Noemi said. “But even if they aren’t capable of telling us, we can test for it. Do you think it might be relevant?”

Justen jerked his head up and down. His jaw twitched as if he was clenching every muscle in his face. “Relevant, yes, but not helpful. We should test, just to make sure, but I think you’ll find that all your patients are descended from Helo Cured regs. If my hypothesis is correct, a natural reg wouldn’t have this problem.”

“Why not?” Persis asked, honestly curious this time.

Noemi looked grave as she put the pieces together. “He’s saying the problem is connected to how the cure works, Persis. The reason Reduction was so insidious for all those centuries is that it couldn’t be gengineered out of our genetic code. No matter what people tried, the genes would mutate right back into place in the developing embryo.”

“Right, but Persistence did something different.” Everyone knew that.

“Yes,” said Noemi. “The Helo Cure didn’t seek to
fix
the flawed code. It merely bypassed the architecture of Reduction, changing the way the brain developed in the womb. And that changes the way it functions. A natural reg, whose genetic code mutated the flaw of Reduction out, has a brain more like an aristo’s. But a Helo Cured reg has an—Well, I don’t want to call it an artificial boost. But it’s a different kind of brain from other humans.”

Justen gave Persis a curious look. “Does this really interest you?”

“How my brain might work?” Persis snapped. “A little.” Let him think she cared on behalf of her mother. That she was still thinking about DAR. He could allow Persis Blake to be serious about that, at least.

“All right. Imagine a road that’s perpetually flooded,” Justen said. “That’s Reduction. The road exists, but it’s useless. With aristos and natural regs, the road’s built on higher ground. It doesn’t get flooded. With the Helo Cure, we built a bridge. However, the flooded road is still there. The flaw that causes Reduction still exists in the reg’s genetic code, but there’s a workaround now. That’s what Persistence Helo did. She gengineered an early end to the Reduction.”

Before Persistence Helo and her cure, only one in twenty Reduced births resulted in a naturally reg offspring. If they waited around for generations, Reduction would have died out eventually. But Persistence Helo, like Persis, didn’t have that kind of patience. She fixed the entire population in one fell swoop.

Even though that meant side effects.

“There are some,” Justen said, “who argue that DAR is more common in genetic lines that were farther away from producing natural regs. But there’s no way to know now.”

“And that’s not relevant to this case,” Noemi added, practical and focused as always. This is why Persis had wanted her so badly for the League. She was older than most of her other confidants, and she rolled her eyes at many of Persis’s ideas, but her heart was true. Like everyone in the League of the Wild Poppy, Noemi Dorric cared only that Galateans were being tortured, and that was wrong. She wasn’t political; she wasn’t snobby. She just wanted to stop people from being hurt.

And now it looked like that was a lot harder than anyone had imagined.

“So the damage being done to the reg refugees is connected to the way their brains work?” Persis asked.

Justen nodded. “We’d know for sure if the Poppy comes across a Reduced prisoner who’s a natural reg. And they’re much rarer.”

If the Wild Poppy had her way, she’d start rescuing Galateans long before they became victims of this terrible drug.

Justen was still studying the lab results, his gaze intense, almost manic. Persis knew that look—it’s the one she wore when the Wild Poppy was in charge. It was the one where everything fell away except a singular focus on her quest. There was no chance of taking him on a splashy public outing this evening, no matter what Isla wanted. Tonight, people needed him.

It was a glory to behold, actually. She’d agreed to host Justen the way she’d support anyone who wished to take refuge from the revolution, but she hadn’t expected what she’d find in him. His medical skills might be a boon to her mother and now a boon to these poor Galateans, too. But even more than that, Justen had taught her the truth about the revolution.

All the other refugees she’d talked to after their detox so far had been real enemies of the revolution. Their feelings about it were purely negative, which was understandable, given their experiences. Upon meeting Justen, she saw a different side entirely, a side that she might have sympathized with before everything had gone so terribly wrong. Persis never would have understood Remy’s mind-set has she not seen it in her brother first.

These were the true revolutionaries, these Helos, these citizens who believed that things in Galatea were bad, that they had to change—but were horrified at the way Citizen Aldred had perverted their desires into cruelty, revenge, and torture. And the fact that Justen and Remy could hold these feelings while being raised in Aldred’s house—it was a testament to their inner strength.

There must be others in Galatea who thought the same way but were too frightened to act, given Citizen Aldred’s swift and severe punishments. Unlike the Helos, they didn’t have the protection of their names. But if others could be reached, if people who thought like Justen and Remy could be marshaled to pose a challenge to the reign of terror, then maybe they could find a way to stop all of it, and then no one would need asylum.

Or the Wild Poppy.

Could she ever be satisfied with merely running the estate and being a dutiful daughter to her parents after these months of adventures? Persis didn’t know. But once the Galateans were no longer in danger, there would be no need for her alter ego, or for the mask she wore when playacting as Persis Blake. Maybe then she could finally talk to Justen as an equal.

Or maybe even sooner than that. After all, he was already helping the League of the Wild Poppy by assisting the refugees. And even his sister was taking part in the operations.

Maybe it was time to tell Justen who she really was. This latest development should kill any remaining loyalty he had left for the twisted travesty his revolution had become. Justen, who held so much respect for his grandmother’s work, who had dedicated his life to fixing every flaw in her great achievement—he couldn’t stand by and watch his leaders take it apart. Couldn’t let them threaten his fellow citizens like that.

His fellow citizens, but not himself. Justen was a natural reg, she remembered with a sudden chill. He was natural, and she, though an aristo, might have a Helo-cured brain. If either of them were ever captured by the Galateans and dosed with this drug, Justen would recover, while Persis—

She might learn what it was like to Darken a few decades early.

Thirteen

S
EVERAL HOURS LATER, PERSIS
and Justen were still at the sanitarium, with no sign of departure on the horizon. Justen and Noemi had tested the regs in the facility and learned that Justen’s hypothesis was correct—every one of them was descended from those who’d received the Helo Cure. The next step was seeing if there was a way to counteract or bypass the effects. To pass the time, Persis was playing chess on the floor with a few of the other patients. But she wasn’t paying careful enough attention. She kept accidentally winning.

She’d also fired off a few flutternotes whenever she was sure no one was watching. She fluttered Isla that a problem at the refugee base was keeping her from fulfilling Isla’s public relations quest, but that she and Justen were working on it together. She fluttered Andrine to get an update on Remy’s transport back to Galatea. Andrine had been charged with giving the girl some very explicit instructions as to what she was to do when she arrived home, since Persis didn’t want to place Justen’s sister in the path of danger. Remy was to gather information, not hunt it down.

Finally, she fluttered her parents—on a frangipani flutter, naturally—saying she and Justen would be late for supper.

And she thought. Was it possible that the Galateans were not aware of what they were doing to their people with this drug? They’d begun by using it solely on aristos, a symbolic punishment meant to enslave the upper class as the aristos had once enslaved the masses. The revolutionaries’ first victim had been the old Queen Gala, followed by her entourage. It was only recently that they’d expanded to punishing regs who ran afoul of the revolution in this manner. Did they mean the sentences to be for life?

“Excuse me, Lady Blake?”

Persis looked up from her most recent game to see Lord Lacan standing there, his face grave. Lord Lacan was the first aristo she’d rescued who was aware of her true identity, thanks to Remy’s unmasking her during the man’s rescue. The other aristos in his party, thankfully, had been out of sight when Remy had knocked off her cap. Though every new person who knew her secret was one more node of danger, she was glad it had been someone like Lacan and not someone like Lord or Lady Seri.

She excused herself from the board—a good thing, too, as she was two moves away from another checkmate—and retreated with him into a quiet corner.

“Rumors have been flying around the facility like your little spun-sugar flower messages,” the old man said to her. “There is a problem, I understand, with the reg refugees?”