Authors: Rachel McClellan
“But what was it?” Jenna asks. “And are there a lot of them?”
“Three at least that I’ve seen. As far as I can tell they are genetically mutated Junks, which doesn’t make sense because where would Junks get new pDNA injections?”
“Someone’s doing it to them,” Colt says and the room goes quiet. “Probably the Institute.”
Footsteps come into the room. “How is she?” Tank’s voice.
“I think she’ll make it. How’s Max?”
“He’s staring at a clock on the wall,” Anthony’s voice says. “I tried getting him to do something else, but he won’t budge.”
Max. My heart aches to see him. I need this poison out of me so I can go to him. He’s probably so nervous by everything that’s happened that he’s retreated into his mind, to a place that’s far better than this world. Sometimes I wish he could take me there too.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Tank asks.
“She could’ve died out there,” Colt says. “Why would you ever concoct a plan that put her in such danger?”
“It was Sage’s plan, not mine. I tried to talk her out of it, but she was determined to get the Canine off her back. She was afraid he would track her here and she was probably right.”
“None of that matters now,” Anthony says. “Let Sage rest. She’s going to wake soon and then we’re going to have to leave this place. Just because the Canine isn’t tracking her anymore doesn’t mean the Institute has given up. Let’s go. We have a lot to plan.”
“I’ll stay with her,” Colt says.
“No. I’ll stay with her.” My father’s voice is firm.
“Right. Okay.” Colt stands. I can tell by the sound of his movements that it takes him great effort. He must’ve had another seizure. After a few seconds, the whirling sound of his chair leaves the room.
My father doesn’t say anything, but his hand presses against mine. After several minutes of silence I fall asleep.
I dream of monsters. Deformed, hairless, with teeth the size of railroad spikes. They are tearing through the flesh and bones of a body, the first of many. A long line of humans, standing erect, each waits their turn to be feasted upon. Their eyes are open, yet they don’t run.
After each ravaged body, the monsters glance back at me as if to make sure I’m watching. No matter how hard I try, I can’t look away. The blood of their victims runs together and pools at my feet, rising higher and higher until I’m almost drowning. When the copper-smelling blood reaches my lips, pours into my mouth, my eyelids snap open and I sit up screaming.
“Whoa! Calm down. You’re safe.”
The room is dark and warm. I don’t think it’s the same room Tank brought me into earlier. I’m lying on a hard cot pressed against a wall. A lamp is in the corner of the room, turned on a dim setting. There’s a table . . . my eyes narrow. Maybe this is the same room I was in. The table is the same length as me, but there are books and papers back on its top. There’s no window, which bothers me. I really want to see the moonlight. I want to know
there’s light out there away from the dark images carved into my mind like a branding.
“Lay back,” my father says. He helps lower me onto a pillow. “How are you feeling?”
I turn my head and stare at him, at the scruff on his face, at the deep lines etched into the corners of his eyes, at the way he is looking at me in the same way he looked at my mother. I throw my arms around his neck.
He squeezes me back. “I’ve been so worried about you. I just kept praying that you’d remember your training.”
My body tenses, and all the nostalgia I was just experiencing turns rotten at the mention of what the last several years of my life have been like. I let him go and drop back to the pillow. I can’t hide the bitterness in my next words. “You taught me well.”
He raises his hands like he’s preparing to stop an attack. “I know I was hard on you, but it was for your own good. I couldn’t take care of you forever.”
“You left us,” I say.
He drops his hands and sighs deeply. “I didn’t want to, but there were too many of them. If I tried to fight back then we all would’ve been captured.”
His explanation leaves a bad taste in my mouth even though his answer is logical. Maybe that’s the problem. “Why didn’t you try to find us?”
“I knew you were at the Institute, but I had no way to get you out. I had to trust that you’d remember your training.”
“You could’ve tried.”
He shakes his head. “I couldn’t risk it. I’m the only scientist left in the HOPE movement who has any chance of finding a cure to the Kiss or at least a way to prolong the lives of Primes without using oDNA. We must fix the human race. This is the priority.”
“There’s a lot more wrong with humans than their DNA. All people care about anymore is surviving, and you fixing their DNA isn’t going to change that.” My chest begins to ache right where my heart is. “You’ve become like them, Dad. You knew the layout of the Institute just as well as I did. You could’ve saved us, but instead you cared more about your self-preservation.”
“That’s not fair,” he says, but that’s all he says.
Across the room, I spot my backpack. I take a moment to stand. The pain in my leg is gone, but I’m shaky and weak.
“Nothing is fair in this world,” I say and walk to the bag. I fish through it until I find the vials I’d taken from the Institute’s lab. With two hands, I remove all eight of them, careful not to drop them. “I took these. Maybe they can help with whatever it is you do.”
He stands and flips on the overhead lights. I flinch and lower my eyes. The bright lights make my head pound to an unpleasant beat.
“Where did you get these?” he asks as he takes them from me.
“Some lab in the basement of the Oscar Johnson Pavilion.”
He holds them up to the light, wonder turning to excitement. “I can’t believe it! Do you know what these are?”
“I think it’s the latest and greatest oDNA serum the Institute has been advertising.”
My father’s smiling big, turning them over in his hand. “I’ve been trying to get my hands on these for months! I snuck into their lab from the tunnels a couple of times to find them, but they were never there. They’ve got something in here that’s helping humans live longer than ever before. At first I thought it was extra phosphate causing the mutation, but that proved inaccurate.” He chuckles to himself, an inside joke I will never know.
I glance toward the doorway, wondering about Max. My father keeps talking about possible mutations, gene therapies, until I tune him out altogether. I don’t remember his obsession being this bad. Before, when he was with us, he was
with
us, but he’s barely noticed I’m back.
“Maybe it has something to do with the MT-TL1 gene,” he says and finally looks up at me. His eyes blink twice. He sees me. “This is going to help so many people. I must get working on it right away. Do you understand?”
Save the world or comfort your recently discovered daughter? “Of course. Do what you’ve got to do.”
He hugs me briefly. “I really am glad you found your way back to me. I never doubted.”
He turns and disappears, leaving me alone in the room. A room that is suddenly very small. The walls squeeze toward me, and I suck in air at the suddenness of the movement. I force myself to move before I start to hyperventilate and go out the same doorway my father just exited, taking my backpack with me. There’s a long hallway with a few doors on each side. I walk to the first one but find that it’s locked. The next one, however, opens. Inside are a bunch of boxes, cabinets—not what I’m looking for.
The next few doors have a thin window at their tops, allowing me to peer inside. Jenna is in one of them. She is sitting on a bed, staring down at something in her hands while bobbing her head in time to music that plays low. Anthony is in another room, but he’s fast asleep. I’m getting close.
After two more rooms, I find what I need. Max. He’s lying in bed with the lights turned low, but he’s not alone. Colt is asleep on a chair shoved into the corner. His legs stretch long, and he’s so far slumped into the chair that I’m afraid he’ll fall to the floor.
I quietly slip in and close the door. No one stirs. After placing the backpack next to the wall, I pick up a small blanket at the foot of Max’s bed and drape it carefully over Colt. He inhales deeply, and I think he’s going to wake, but his head flops to the other side, eyes still closed. Something bad must’ve happened to him. I clench my jaw. He’s sacrificed so much for us. They all have.
The sooner we get to Eden the better.
I slowly climb behind Max on the bed and rest my hand on his arm, which seems bigger somehow. I try not to think about what he might’ve gone through, but these thoughts are forceful and invade my sleep only moments later.
Max is being hunted by the creature in the tunnel. He’s running fast, alone and scared in a never-ending maze. I’m a witness to his terror, a useless ghost unable to offer even a word of encouragement. I think all is lost when a tall figure of a man appears at the end of the tunnel; light from behind silhouettes his muscular frame. Slowly and deliberately, pointed wings unfold from behind his back. The relief I feel is instant. Max is no longer alone.
My eyes open. Gray light squeezes through a dirt-stained window. It’s morning, probably only six o’clock. Max is tucked
safely in my arms. His breathing is slow and steady. I lift the edge of the blanket and tuck it around his arms, leaving mine exposed. The hairs on my arm rise, and I look up.
Colt is sitting up in the chair, watching me. Our eyes meet, but we don’t speak. Eventually I fall back asleep.
When I wake again, it’s because Max is shaking my arm. I throw my arms around him, and he does the same to me.
“You do that so easily,” Colt says.
“It’s what you do when you love and care for someone.” I keep hugging Max, but loosen my grip. Max curls into me like a cat in front of a fireplace. When I glance at Colt, he averts his gaze and stares into a shaft of sunlight, illuminating a sea of dust fairies spinning and twirling through the air. He looks deathly pale.
“What happened to you out there?” I ask. He doesn’t seem to have heard me. I give him a moment longer to answer, but when he doesn’t, I add, “Thank you for keeping Max safe. It’s what I wanted.”
Colt’s chest rises and falls as he takes one giant breath. He slides to the edge of the chair and pushes himself upright. It takes him longer than it should. “You two need to eat. We’ll be leaving soon.”
This surprises me, and I swing my legs to the side of the bed, taking Max with me. “Why the rush? The Canine is dead. We should be safe for a while.”
“We can’t be sure of that. It’s better to get you two out of here as soon as possible.” He turns and leaves the room.
“Wait!” I go after him, but his strides are so much longer than mine that he’s at the end of the hallway and around the corner before I have a chance at stopping him.
A door opens suddenly, and I jump, nearly dropping Max.
“Just because you were raised in a forest where you didn’t have to worry about your loud mouth, doesn’t mean you can shout here.” Jenna is standing in the doorway, rubbing her matted hair. “People are trying to sleep.”
Another door opens on the other side.
“Sure you were,” Anthony says. His hair is wet like he just showered. “How are you feeling, Sage?”
“Much better, thank you.”
“And how about you, Max? I bet you were glad to see your sister.” He goes to rub Max’s head but stops himself. “Is Colt already up?”
I nod. “He’s eating.”
“Good. He needs it.” Anthony walks away. “See you guys at breakfast.”
“I swear that’s all they think about,” Jenna mumbles and turns back into her room. She drops onto a mess of covers crumpled on her bed.
I follow her in and close the door. Max clings tightly to me. “So, um, can you tell me what happened? Why is Colt so messed up?”
“Because you’ve messed him up.”
“What do you mean?”
Jenna moans and turns over, kicking at the mound of blankets until they are on the floor. She tucks her hands behind her head and looks at me. “We ran into some trouble. A lot of it actually. Some Rhine spotted Max and was yelling in the streets until a whole pack of Primes, and not the good kind either, were hunting us like turkeys on Thanksgiving Day. Colt didn’t want them discovering this place so he took them on while the rest of us escaped.”
“How did he get away?”
“He didn’t. When he didn’t show up after about an hour, Anthony went looking for him. He found him in an alley in the middle of a massive seizure, probably brought on by having the crap kicked out of him.”
My legs weaken, and I drop to the foot of her bed. My arms go limp too, but Max doesn’t fall. His arms are firmly entwined behind my neck.
“Anthony brought him to your father, who was able to bring him out of it, but just barely.” Jenna sits up. “I know how you feel about Colt, but it’s better if you face reality now before it explodes in your face. Colt is dying, Sage. One more of those and he’s worm food.” She rolls back over. “Now get out of my room. I want to sleep more.”
I don’t feel myself moving as I stand and leave the room, even Max feels weightless. Maybe that’s how people in this world survive, by feeling numb. I don’t want to get like that. Stop all emotions just so I can survive.
I think of what Colt must have endured just to protect Max and the others. I let myself feel emotions of all kinds. Anger toward the men who hurt him, fear for his life, frustration that I couldn’t be there to help. Tears burn my eyes.
It hurts a dark and ugly pain when I think of his suffering, but then I feel something unexpected. A beautiful comfort that I have someone in my life that would sacrifice so much for others.
I follow the sound of voices until I reach the kitchen. It’s bigger than I expect. Three long tables divide the room evenly. On the back wall are a short counter, sink, and refrigerator. Colt is sitting next to Anthony at one of the tables. A few others who had helped me the night before are engrossed in a conversation at another table.
I set down Max and say, “One second.”
Colt turns toward me and stands when he sees me coming toward him. I don’t stop moving until I throw my arms around him. “Thank you.”