Authors: S.M. McEachern
Bron’s eyes opened wide. “You’re going to
what
?” She pointed to the mountain peak that housed the Dome. “Leisel Holt
is just as crazy as her old man. I strongly advise you not to make her mad.”
“Then what do you suggest, Bron? Give her what she wants? Round up everyone from the Pit and put them in the corrals?”
Bron opened her mouth to say something but then closed it. She gave me a hard stare. “How can I help?”
Jack wasn’t thinking very clearly if he thought for one minute I was going to let him get
anywhere near Doc and his designer virus. If there really was a virus, I wasn’t convinced Jack would be immune to Doc’s hatred. Even if Jack was the only successful recipient of the nanobots, that didn’t mean Doc wouldn’t make another successful attempt in the future. Yet how often would the chance to study the offspring of someone injected with nanobots come along? That was a longer shot, and
it was why I was willing to gamble that Doc wouldn’t endanger my baby.
There was a hidden entrance to Doc’s lab in the caverns through his office in the medical center. But since the comings and goings of a militia through the med center would raise suspicions, we had created a concealed entrance in the trees behind the medical building. As I arrived in the subterranean hallway, I took off my
sunglasses and let my eyes adjust for a moment. Doc had installed cameras in the hallway, so he was probably already aware that I was here. I walked the short distance to the reinforced door and hit the buzzer. There was no response at first, so I pressed the button again. Finally the door opened.
Doc was in his usual spot, at his table with his computer monitor in front of him. The whir of
replicators was louder than usual, and I wondered what he was up to. He didn’t look surprised to see me.
“I just made a pot of tea,” he said.
I motioned toward the refrigerator. “Do you have any tomatoes?”
He exhaled a laugh. “I would have sent for some if I had known you were coming.”
“Surprised to see me?” I asked, sitting in the empty stool across the table from him.
He glanced away
from his screen to stare at me. “Not really. You’ve proven yourself to be quite capable on many occasions. However, you have completed your mission more quickly than I thought you would. I trust you were successful?”
“I was, thank you. Jack is home.”
“Excellent. You must be delighted.”
“I’m very happy.” I tilted my head to one side and appraised him. “Are you happy he’s back?”
Some emotion
that I couldn’t quite determine flickered across his face. “The Senate hasn’t been the same without him.”
“No. It certainly hasn’t. Although I’m happy he wasn’t here when you decided to assassinate bourge senators.”
Doc’s face remained emotionless. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “I would never have harmed Jack Kenner. He’s too important to my research. But don’t expect me
to apologize for wanting to get rid of the others. Powell and West should
never
have been allowed to run for office. In fact, I’ve uncovered enough evidence to prove that they fixed the election.”
“So why didn’t you just share that information with everyone? Have them removed from government?”
Doc jerked forward, an angry glint in his eyes. “I’m not going to make the mistake of playing by
the
rules
with men like Powell and West. If the rules were fair, if they had any moral basis at all, those men would have been tried as war criminals and sentenced to death.” He slapped his hand on the table, startling me. “Why the hell are we still playing
their
game? It’s bloody well time we played our own.”
“Does that include killing every bourge with a super virus?”
His angry expression
softened, and his mouth drew into a contrite line. “There is no bourge virus. I haven’t been able to isolate a gene specific to them yet.” I could see no apology in his eyes, only regret. “But I wasn’t going to let Leisel Holt’s threat go unanswered.”
I blew out a sigh of relief. “So you were just bluffing.”
“There are lots of viruses, Miss O’Donnell, and I haven’t discounted infecting the
Dome with one. It’s a completely sealed environment and would pose little risk to the population outside.”
“Aren’t there still a few people living in the Pit? Summer’s parents are there.”
He dropped his gaze. “A small price to pay to stop the threat of nuclear annihilation.”
“Or,” I said, leaning toward him, “you can make me invisible and I’ll infiltrate the Dome and neutralize Leisel.”
“And by ‘neutralize’ you mean?”
“If I can do this without killing her, I will.”
Doc mimed spitting, complete with the noise. “She’s the last of the Holts. She should have died with her father.”
“I know you hate her, Doc, but not everyone does. She has a loyal boyfriend, Desmond, who is a trained soldier. The West family has adopted her since her father’s death. She has friends among the
Dome’s most influential families. If we kill her, someone will come looking for revenge, kick up a stink, and make a public issue out of it. David Chavez is a prime example—he and his family have received death threats since Powell’s assassination.” I put my hand over one of Doc’s. “Three hundred years later, and the War still hasn’t ended. Someone has to stop it, Doc. And I know how much you hate
it when I talk about it, but the Alliance is the way. It’s the common ground between bourge and urchin.”
He paused, studying me as he considered what I’d said. “Metamaterial doesn’t provide complete invisibility,” he said. “I haven’t perfected the technology yet.”
“Is it complete enough to fool the cameras in the Dome?”
He nodded. “Especially if you stick to the shadows.”
“Do you have
enough of it made?”
“I can fashion you a cape in a reasonable amount of time.”
“Then let’s get to work.”
Jack
Teegan was in the hands of the doctors, tucked into a hospital bed and hooked up to IV antibiotics. She screamed at the top of her lungs when they stuck her with the needle and tried to rip it back out, but someone brought in a bowl of pudding
to distract her. It was the first time she’d tasted chocolate. I tried to leave her a few times to go in search of Sunny, but she was too agitated to let me out of her sight. Four hours later she was finally asleep.
I was a little agitated myself. Sunny should have met me at the hospital hours ago. Was there trouble? I exited the hospital and was greeted by a nearly empty street. A few armed
sentries patrolled the sidewalks, but otherwise there were no pedestrians to be seen. The effect was a little eerie, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which direction to go. Then I saw Ted coming out of a building and ran to catch up with him.
“What’s the latest?” I asked.
“Everyone is still in a stand-off, and Mom and Dad are stuck inside the Dome with that lunatic,” Ted said, frustration giving
his voice a hard edge.
I was concerned too. Tact and diplomacy weren’t exactly Mom’s strengths, and I almost hoped Leisel had everyone under house lockdown so Mom wouldn’t have the opportunity to aggravate her or the Wests.
“Have any communications come out of there yet?” I asked.
“None. The Dome was built to be sealed off, and it is. Where’s Sunny?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you knew.”
“I thought you two were going to see Doc to get an invisible suit,” Ted said with a smirk.
“Yeah, it sounds stupid, but…” I glanced at my brother out of the corner of my eye and wondered how he would react to the knowledge that I couldn’t die. “Nanotechnology is real. I have… personal knowledge of it.”
“Do you have a suit too?” he asked. “Because those things are
sweet
. I want to know how
I can get one.”
“No, I don’t have a suit, but I’d like…” And then a thought occurred to me. Would Sunny go to Doc alone for fear of me being infected with a virus? Was she going to head off to the Dome on her own? “I gotta go.”
I ran in the direction of the medical center, wracking my brain to remember where the entrance to Doc’s underground lab was. I had only been there twice, but if I remembered
correctly, it was about twenty-five feet into the woods directly behind the medical center, sandwiched in the crevice between two large boulders. I prayed Sunny wasn’t there alone, in a locked office with that madman. If he was capable of killing a bunch of bourge, who’s to say he wouldn’t kill her too since she was a bourge lover?
I left the back parking lot of the medical center and entered
the forest, dead leaves and pine needles crunching under my feet. I was so intent on saving her that I almost ran right into her.
“Jack,” she said, a little startled. “What are you doing here?”
I took a moment to catch my breath. “No, what are
you
doing here? You were supposed to meet me at the hospital.”
A guilty blush stained her cheeks. “I thought it was best to deal with Doc on my own.”
“He’s a madman, Sunny!”
“He’s a little eccentric. And he really does hate the bourge, which is why I thought it was better to talk to him by myself. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me.”
I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Sunny, I will
lose it
if you pull another stunt like you did last year. You should
never
have gone into the Dome without me.”
It was a moment I couldn’t forget. Right after the
battle with the bourge, as we were securing Powell and his soldiers in the corral, she’d just disappeared. I had been insane with worry, and then she’d called me
from the Dome
. From President Holt’s office! It was a nightmare. And there was no way, after spending the last few weeks tied up and forced to endure one atrocity after another without being able to lift a finger to stop them, that I
was about to go through it again.
“You don’t leave my sight! Do you understand me?”
She grabbed my wrists, her eyes wide with shock. “Jack! What’s gotten into you?”
I folded her into a hug and pressed her against me. “I’ll kill anyone who touches you.”
We stood quiet for a few minutes, hugging each other. How many times over the past two weeks had I dreamed about holding her against me?
Feeling her warmth, her breath against my neck, her strength seeping into every inch of me? And when I finally had her right next to me, my first reaction was to be angry with her.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She pushed a little bit away from me so she could see my face. “While I was helping Doc put together the cape, I realized something: it was a year ago today that I was sent to serve at
your bachelor party. A year ago today that Leisel Holt put into motion her plan to betray us both, frame you for treason, and try to claim the title of president for herself.” She traced my bottom lip with her finger. “You and I have come a long way since then. The Dome and the Pit have come a long way. But Leisel Holt is still playing the game. She’s still trying to become president.” Sunny took
my face in her hands and kissed me. “Let’s go finish this, Jack. Let’s finish the game.”
There were no tears in her eyes. No fear for the journey she was about to embark on. No fear of dying. But what she didn’t understand was that she and the child she was carrying were my world. And I was still reeling from all the evil our planet held. Could I take the chance of losing them?
“But what if
she wins?” I asked.
Sunny
The riots had stopped, and the streets were now devoid of people, save for the official-looking Domers patrolling the sidewalks. I wondered where the Pit militia was. They should have been there, alongside their equals, ensuring peace while we tried to defuse Leisel Holt.
Jack and I borrowed a bike parked in the street and set
out for the hidden entrance to the Pit. There was something poetic, if not a little desolate, about Jack and me racing out of an empty town all on our own, headed back to a place we hadn’t stepped foot in since we’d left it last year. Jack’s question—
What if she wins?
—echoed through my thoughts, and I clung to my husband tighter, refusing to believe that all of the hardships of the past year had
been for nothing. That years of slavery and suffering would never be avenged. That in the end a Holt would triumph and finish the job they had started three hundred years ago.
If ever there had been any doubt in my mind that Leisel was not my sister, the fact that she could so conscionably threaten thousands of people was overwhelming proof that she was not. She was a Holt through and through.
The sun was just beginning to set as we passed the corrals. Jack turned the bike offroad and navigated the stony trail to the tunnel. Oddly enough, I wasn’t afraid. It was as if we had always been meant for this moment, Jack and I, and it occurred to me that defeating Leisel had never been about saving ourselves. From the very beginning, we had accepted that we would eventually be executed, and
so we lived our last days in the name of saving humanity, making alliances, bridging enmity, and falling in love along the way. The seeds of betrayal so carefully planted by Leisel had failed to produce their crop. Solidarity had grown in their place.
The hidden entrance to the Pit was located at the base of the mountain peak that contained the Dome, through a crevice and at the back of a cavern.
It was a small, narrow tunnel that had formed due to a collapse. It was thought that the collapse occurred during the first major battle with Domers last year, but since it was located in a closed-off section of the Pit, it could have happened at any time and gone unnoticed. The truth was that prior to liberation, both the Dome and the Pit had exceeded sustainable living conditions, and excavations
to make room for a growing population had to stop because we were coming dangerously close to the outside world. Now that I lived in the outside world and knew of all the caverns that ran beneath the valley, I wondered how it hadn’t happened earlier.
As we came up to the entrance to the Pit, we were surprised to see several soldiers milling around.