Fear My Mortality (24 page)

Next to me in the glass, Reid’s form hovered, a green blur as he spun toward the door. His voice broke my thoughts before I had the chance to look through the panel and see beyond my own face.

“As directed, sir.”

“Good.”

I looked out of the corner of my eye at the newcomer—Cheyne—Michael’s godfather. He seemed to suck all the light out of the room with his big form as he said, “That will be all, officer.”

Reid hesitated, looked as if he wanted to stay, but gave a curt nod and left the room. Once alone with Cheyne, I wasn’t sure I wanted Reid to leave. At least he was predictable. I didn’t like the way my heart rate increased as Cheyne stepped behind me. Up close, he was even bigger than I remembered. Thinning hair in a long braid, sharp hazel eyes. He smelled like tar in the boiling sun, as though he’d ignite at any second and burn me with him. Was he about to grab me? Put my head through the glass? Bitter nectar trickled into my back. Even my body thought I was in trouble.

He ran a hand down the back of my arm and my eyes squeezed shut. There was a click. The handcuffs clattered to the floor.

My eyes flew open and I flexed my fingers, waiting for his next move.

His voice was soft, curling around my ear. “They’re not dead.”

“Who?” Was he talking about my parents? About Michael?

He gestured at the glass. “We keep them like that because they’re useful. Everything you see here has a use. If it doesn’t, we get rid of it.”

I focused beyond the glass. Before I could stop myself, I drew a quick breath and took a step back, bumping into a muscled arm and thigh.

The bodies in the other room were all lain out on single metal pallets, four of them in a row, their heads cushioned on padded indents. Each one was connected to a separate machine, multi-colored tubes leading to different parts of their bodies.

“I believe that one is your late neighbor.” Cheyne leaned against the glass and pointed a thick finger at a bed toward the middle. “She’s a fast healer. We needed to test your mortality against the strongest ones.”

“Mrs. Hubert.” I pressed closer to the glass, putting my hands up beside my face, trying to hide my shock. I scanned the other faces, dreading whom else I might see. In the bed next to her was an older man I didn’t recognize. But there was Jeremiah and his younger brother, Thomas, wrapped in white robes with tubes protruding from their feet. They’d ended up there because of me and it made my heart sink.

“Right now, we’re trying to identify what part of the body is most vulnerable to your mortality. The armpits seem best so far, but that’s hardly practical during combat.” He imitated a soldier with a gun. “Hey, lift up your arms so I can shoot you dead.” A smirk. “Yeah. Not likely.”

“You’re talking about me like I’m … ”

“A weapon.” His keen eyes landed on my face. “That’s exactly what you are.”

My heart sank. Michael was right … He’d said the Bashers wanted to use my genetics to kill, and now I knew that his dad and Cheyne had the same agenda.

Cheyne circled around me and I cringed as he moved up close. “You’re the weapon we’ve needed for so long. Now Seversand will think twice about attacking us.”

I stared at him. “People are saying Seversand will attack us
because
of me. Because I can die.”

He shook his head, cutting me off. “What is it they teach you in school about why the world war ended?”

“The nuclear bomb failed. War is pointless.”

“My great-grandfather was there the day they dropped that bomb. He said it was the first time he ever felt pain. Seversand split an atom.” His expression became incredulous. “They
split
an atom. And still nobody died. So yes, it makes sense to say that war is pointless. But in all the years since that failure, Seversand hasn’t stopped trying to find another weapon. They’ve never stopped searching, infiltrating, threatening us. We even suspect that the Bashers are affiliated with them. But everything changed when the truth about your brother went public.”

He stared directly at me. “Our President didn’t travel to Seversand to beg for mercy. He went to tell them to back off. Because we beat them to the ultimate weapon and we will use it if we have to. We have you, and now Seversand fears us.”

“What about the Bashers?”

“For the first time, we’re stronger than they are.”

He was triumphant, but the feeling of despair that spread through my body was like nothing I’d felt before. It was so huge and hot and undeniable that I could have withered to a crisp right there. They were going to turn me into something I wasn’t, something I didn’t want to be.

They were going to use me to kill.

I tried to focus, to get my bearings, there were things I needed to know, answers to questions that had plagued me. “Why did you let me go from the recovery center? You could have kept me there.”

He sighed. “We thought we had everything we needed from you to synthesize your DNA into a mortality weapon, and Robert … he’s not a big fan of keeping people against their will unless we have to. It’s a particular weakness of his.”

I remembered Robert Bradley’s name from the news reports. He was Michael’s dad.

Cheyne’s lips thinned. “But we discovered two things after we let you go: first, the mortality serum has a shelf-life, which means we need you alive to produce more of it. And second, we didn’t count on the reaction of the general community. You won’t believe me, but we actually hoped you could go back to your life.” He held up a finger. “You know what, this is going to be a whole lot easier if I just show you.” He smiled as if he was my friend, as he inclined his head toward the door. “C’mon.”

He pushed on the metal door and waited for me. It reminded me of the door at the recovery center, right down to the dent in the middle.

He saw me looking at it. “Your brother caused us a lot of trouble too.”

My eyes snapped to his, wondering what he meant. I wanted him to say more, but he didn’t. I followed him out, expecting to see another swarm of soldiers. Instead, the quiet corridor stared back at me.

“This way.” He pulled me to the left.

I could try to run, but it seemed pointless, so, for now, I followed him. He strode on down the corridor, boots thumping, passing five other closed doors before he turned and stopped outside another opening, this one without a door. He gestured inside to a row of chairs and an old wall screen, the kind my parents said they had when they were kids.

He nudged me into a chair facing the screen and stood back as it flickered on to reveal the same green-lit room they’d taken me to at the recovery center. There was a time stamp at the bottom of the screen, seconds ticking over, but it was years ago.

There was a boy inside the room on the footage. He was young, maybe thirteen. He bashed himself against the door.

It was Josh.

As I stared at the footage, a pair of speakers crackled on and I wanted to block my ears as sound filled the room around me.

Josh cried and screamed at the same time, an anguish that wrenched through me. With each impact of his head into the door, a split on his forehead opened, started to bleed, and then closed again. I couldn’t see anyone else in the room. The surveillance drone circled, not getting too close.

Cheyne’s voice was low, hushed. “This footage is from the day your brother killed that little girl. What was her name?”

I started. Josh killed someone?

He clicked his fingers. “Kristy. Her parents used to work here. They tried to smuggle a sample of nectar out of the country. Their little girl got hold of it and shared it with your brother at school. It was experimental and it gave him some pretty bad hallucinations. He didn’t know what he was doing. The Hazards who attended the scene reported the unusual substance and we were alerted as a matter of security.”

I tried to remember back when I was twelve. Mom’s stricken face. Josh gone all of a sudden. He hadn’t come home one night and after that, I didn’t see him so often anymore. After that, he was always disappearing on me.

Cheyne pressed a button and the footage skipped forward three hours and I didn’t want to think about how alone and scared Josh was during that time.

The footage slowed and Josh was curled up on the floor in the corner, so still, not even trembling. A man entered the room with a glass of water. His hair had the first hints of gray speckles, reached a little more than halfway down his back, and he wore a beard cut short around his jaw. He looked so much like Michael that it had to be his dad. The older man approached Josh, but kept his distance, telling Josh to drink. Josh unfurled and got to his knees. He scooted forward and snatched up the glass, drinking the whole lot.

The man’s voice was gentle. “How are you doing, Josh?”

My brother inched away from the man, shoulders hunched, but he said, “I’ve been better.”

Cheyne bumped my shoulder. “We used to test nectar on homeless people—nobody noticed when they went missing—and we made sure it was safe enough before we tried it on Josh again.”

I thought about the homeless addict in the park who’d been desperate to get at the ampule in my back. “Safe enough doesn’t mean safe.”

He inclined his head. “Over time, we perfected it. We got rid of the hallucinogenic effects, but nothing seemed to change the extra strength it gave him, no matter how we adjusted the formula.” His eyes were suddenly hard and piercing. “When we first gave you nectar, it was the raw stuff like Josh had the first time. But you compartmentalized your brain, protecting the part of your mind that controls reason and logic.” He tapped my temple before I could shove his hand away. “It’s like you built a barrier in there. A
wall
.”

Walls. The ones Michael didn’t want to talk about.

“Unlike your brother, you stayed aware of what was happening—you controlled the effects and tried to escape. Your strength increased even more than Josh’s. That room’s made of concrete, Ava. It’s twelve inches thick and you put cracks in it. If we’d let you get to the door, you wouldn’t have just dented it.”

He gestured at the now frozen screen and my brother’s small face. “It was only because of Josh’s reaction to nectar that we tested his blood and discovered he was nothing like the rest of us.”

My teeth chattered. I tried to stop them, but it was no use. They’d known all along about Josh, about his mortality.

“If you had him, why do you need me?”

“You’re a girl.” His expression was grim. “We tried for years to replicate Josh’s DNA, but it was too unstable. We finally realized that the male Y chromosome was making it impossible. We hoped that two X chromosomes would make a difference and we were right: the gene that inhibits regeneration exists on both your X chromosomes. But here’s the thing: both genes are active.”

I must have given him a blank look because he said, “Usually, the genes on one X chromosome are inactivated. In your case, the additional gene contains the extra information we need to stabilize the formula. Think of it like a bullet without gunpowder. Josh’s DNA gave us the bullet, but without the gunpowder it’s useless. Even as a mortal, you’re a scientific anomaly.

“We always suspected you’d be like Josh, but we didn’t want to pull you in unless we had to. Keeping his secret was hard enough, let alone keeping two of you under control.”

“And the park? Why did you leave me in the park?”

“For so many reasons. For starters, we needed to give you the nectar ampule and place you in a situation that would trigger it. We could have done that here, as you’ll soon see, but we realized something else. Well, Robert realized it. You have a strong protective instinct. We saw it in your brother many times, especially the night he tried to save you. We always thought it was a personality thing with him, trying to help other people. But then we saw it in you too. You remember that little boy who got hit by the car outside your house? I watched you, Ava. You wanted to rescue him.”

I remembered the drone that morning, hovering in front of my face, studying me. I remembered his mom calling the Hazards, but hardly looking at him, worrying about being late for work.

Cheyne scratched his chin. “It made us wonder—what else do mortals feel? Could you have instincts, reactions, that we don’t have? If those instincts are dormant, but coded into your DNA, then we need to activate them somehow. Your reaction to nectar was exponential and if we combine that reaction with instincts that make you move faster, that cause you to protect people you love, then there’s no limit to what you could do.” He studied me, a look of wonderment in his eyes. “Boy, you didn’t disappoint. That drug addict in the park didn’t know what hit him. We left you out there as long as we could, but the Bashers were closing in.”

I didn’t move. “You gave me the ampule to keep me alive, and then you used Michael as leverage to get me to come in.”

“If we calibrate the dose of nectar exactly right, we can give you the gift of healing without the side effects. We did the same for Josh. He went on with his life. If things were different—if your mortality wasn’t public—you could have done the same.”

The image of my brother bashing himself against the metal door wouldn’t leave me. Instead of pulling away from Cheyne, I snatched at his shoulder, pressing my fingertips into him, wrenching closer. “If my brother had a nectar ampule, why did he die?”