Unsuitable

by Dawn Norwell

  Unable to handle looking at her barren body any longer, I tiptoed away from her side, allowing others to take my place around the casket. I found myself hiding in a dark corner, far from the grieving crowd, as sobs racked my body.

  I was still sobbing when Ximea found me hours later, long after the memorial had ended.

  “There you are. I was worried!” Ximea exclaimed. Her eyes were wide with worry, rimmed with red from the sorrow of losing a loved one. “You can’t just disappear on us like that, Kai. Not after everything that happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” I sniffled, wiping tears from my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to concern you. I just needed a moment alone.”

  Ximea gave a sad nod. “I understand. It’s a lot to handle, especially given you current… situation,” she said, her eyes falling to my abdomen. “Have you talked to Zander, yet?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t even know if we’re still together,” I admitted. “Bringing the pregnancy into the situation would only make things messier than they already are.”

  “I know it’s none of my business, Kai, but don’t you think he has the right to know the truth?”

  Fresh tears began to fall from my eyes. “How am I supposed to tell him, Ximea? You saw the way he looked at me in the auditorium yesterday. He hates me.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said, consoling me as I continued to cry. “He doesn’t hate you. He’s just upset about losing his mother, and he’s taking it out on the wrong person. He’s struggling right now, but he’ll realize how wrong he is in time. That’s all the more reason why you need to be by his side.”

  I knew that she was right. Despite the hostility between us, now was not the time to make a hasty decision about our relationship. I didn’t like the current dynamic between me and Zander, but what kind of girlfriend would I be if I abandoned him after he’d just lost his mother? Athena wasn’t even in the ground yet; how could I contemplate leaving right now?

  But at the same time, why would I fight for a one-sided relationship? Why would I waste any more time pursuing someone I couldn’t have? I couldn’t force Zander to want me, no matter how much I might want him.

  My hand fell to the little bump protruding between my hips. “It’s not just me now, Ximea,” I said, my voice small. “I have to think about the baby. I have to do what’s right for both of us.”

  Ximea sighed. “No matter what may be going on in your relationship, Zander is a father now, and he has to start acting like one. Whether you want him involved in the baby’s life or not, he should know the truth.” When I didn’t respond, she continued, “You can’t wait much longer to tell him, Kai. You’ll start showing soon, and before long, he will put two and two together. It will only upset him more that you didn’t tell him the truth.”

  “I know,” I mumbled, wiping my runny nose with a tissue. “I will tell him. Eventually.”

  She eyed me skeptically. “Well, eventually may come sooner than you think. Your recovery has been going better than expected. So well, that I’m releasing you this afternoon. This will give you the chance to go home and talk to Zander,” she said, cutting me off before I could refuse. “It’s better to just get it out of the way.”

  As promised, Ximea signed my release papers a few hours later. I lingered around the hospital for a while, pretending to check some last-minute patient files, delaying the inevitable. Eventually, when niceties failed, Ximea threatened to call security if I didn’t go home.

  I paced outside of the cottage for about thirty minutes, trying to gather the nerve to walk through the door. I was nervous, my palms and neck sweaty, and my hands trembling. Would Zander be home right now? Should I knock, just in case, or would that only make things more uncomfortable? After much contemplation, I took a deep breath and banged on the door three times. No one answered, so I tried again. Still nothing.

  “What are you doing?” a voice called. Startled, I turned to see Zander leaning against the front gate, his eyes scrutinizing me. “Did you lose your key?”

  My face heated. “I have my key. I just wasn’t sure if I was welcome,” I admitted, peeking at him from beneath my lashes.

  “I guess you’re welcome. It’s your house as much as it is mine,” he said coolly, walking past me and through the front door. I followed him tentatively, lingering in the doorway as he went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and took a big gulp.

  We looked at each other for a moment with careful eyes, each unsure what to say. I had never been this uncomfortable around Zander- not when we first met, not when he saw me naked on the bathroom floor, not even when he left me for being a suit.

  The agonizing silence lingered. Finally, Zander broke it, shifting uncomfortably. “I have several meetings this afternoon, so I’d better go.” Without meeting my wandering gaze, he rushed past me, and out the front door without a second glance.

  I let out a deep exhale, staring longingly after him. Zander made it clear that he could no longer see me the way he had before my captivity, before my carelessness got his mother killed. It hurt to think of how distant we had become, but with the ache, came a sense of relief. I’d wanted answers, and now I had them. At least I knew where I stood with him. The pain in my heart was still better than the uncertainty of not knowing how things could have been.

  **********

  I was thankful when my injuries were healed enough that I was cleared to start working in the clinic again. I was eager for a distraction, something to take my mind off of things. Between navigating the new world of pregnancy and the icy environment at the cottage, the last thing I wanted was to have idle hands and a wandering mind.

  Unfortunately, the hospital wasn’t as busy as I’d hoped it would be. Most of the soldiers who had been wounded in the retrieval mission had already been released, so there was only a handful of patients to tend to. This gave me far too much free time, a dangerous thing when you had as much to contemplate as I did.

  “You look bored,” Ximea said with a playful smile, watching me sanitize the forceps and suturing scissors for the fifth time that day.

  I laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Only because I know you,” she smiled. “If you need something to distract yourself, care to lend me a hand?” she asked, setting a laptop on a nearby desk.

  I furrowed my brows. “What is that?”

  “Homework,” she sighed. “When we went to Concord to liberate you, we decided to take advantage. We knew that we would never have an opportunity like that again. So while our soldiers were fighting the Concord army, we had another team who was downloading Syndicate files from their system.

  “This,” she said, pointing at the laptop, “contains classified medical documents from Concord’s database. Zander wants us to comb through the material and see what we find- if there are any medical advances that we could use for our people, any record of newly created viruses the Syndicate plans to hit us with, or anything that might be useful in the battle to come.”

  I nodded and reached for the laptop, eager for something to do. I clicked on one of the decrypted folders, and my mouth fell open in shock as the long list of documents loaded.

  Ximea read my reaction. “I know. It’s a lot.”

  That was an understatement. The laptop stored over 150,000 lengthy medical documents; it would take us years to decipher the information! With a sigh, I set to work; it’s not like I had anything better to do. At least the task would keep my mind off of other things.

  During the next few days, I became fixated with the laptop, spending most of my work hours doing research, and taking the device home with me to continue my investigation. I was determined to find something, anything, that could be of use. If I could find even the tiniest thing to help Nova, perhaps the trip to Concord wouldn’t have been a waste; that Athena’s death wouldn’t have been in vain.

  The hours and days blended together as I continued researching the files, page after page of medical documents filling the screen, reading one after another unt
il my eyes blurred and my head ached. Most of the paperwork discussed mundane procedures or irrelevant inquiries, nothing of significance to Nova. After a week of combing through the files, I had almost determined that the intel was a waste of time, when something caught my interest.

  At the top of the folder was an orange Tiger Lily symbol. I double-clicked the file, opening a group of documents from a research clinic that studied fetus brains in vitro. I skimmed through the pages, hesitating when one name kept repeating over and over on the documents- Maggi Markavitch.

  My mother.

  I ran my hand across the cursive script that was untidily sprawled across the bottom of the pages. For a long time, I just gazed at her signature, a dull ache in my heart, my stomach twisting into knots. Tears pricked at my eyes as gut-wrenching pain consumed me. Oh, how I wished my mother was there with me. She would know what I should do with Zander and the baby. If ever there was a time to need your mother, it was when you had just learned you would become one yourself.

  I stared at the computer screen as the sun set in the distance, mesmerized by the documents before me. There was something about viewing her work that made it feel like she was still with me, like a part of her remained behind after the accident. My mother had been intelligent, that much was obvious. Her research had cured three illnesses in undeveloped fetuses, preventing dozens of infants from being discarded to the wastelands. She was revolutionary in her field. I couldn’t help but wonder how much more good she would have done in this world if she hadn’t been snuffed out at such a young age.

  I became lost in the pages, staring at the screen well into the night, reading article after article, until my eyelids grew heavy. Before long, sleep consumed me.

  My rest was not peaceful. I tossed and turned, waking up every half hour by a pressing need. For whatever reason, the documents, as insignificant as they seemed, were weighing heavy on my mind. They nagged at me, as though reminding me of something I hadn’t known I’d forgotten. I chalked it up to the shock of seeing my mother’s name, of being reminded of her death. But deep down, I knew there was more to the story, something obvious that I was missing.

  After hours of restlessness, I sat up with a huff. Even though it was late, the other side of the bed was empty. I wasn’t surprised- Zander hadn’t spent the night at home since I was released from the hospital. Always too busy with work, he said, but I knew that he was just avoiding me. I gripped the sheets where he should have been, biting back angry tears at what our relationship had become.

  Knowing that I would never get back to sleep now, I clicked on the laptop, the bright screen lighting up the dark room. My forehead creased in thought as I scrolled through the pages. Something was badgering me, an idea right on the tip of my tongue, a thought teetering on the precipice of being lost forever, the missing piece in a straightforward conundrum. It was something of importance, that much I knew, yet, I couldn’t bring this vital information to the forefront of my mind.

  I was beginning to think that I was just creating things to stress about for the sake of worrying, but then I saw it. My breath caught as I hovered over the file titled Project Tiger Lily, trying to muster the courage to click it.

  My heart was racing when I opened the file. I was alert as I skimmed the documents, searching for vital data. My stomach sank with disappointment when I realized that it was nothing more than a research project to battle a brain ailment in fetuses during the conception process.

  I scrolled through the file with less enthusiasm, still hoping to find something of significance. At the bottom of the page, tied to the research project, the name Maggi Markavitch appeared once again, this time as the head scholar. I leaned forward, my shoulders tense, and my body rigid. There were hundreds of researchers in Nova; why was my mother’s name on so many of the medical reports?

  This was something, I just knew it. Whatever I was looking for, I would find it here. I double-clicked the folder but was disappointed to see that

  I shook my head. Don’t give up.

  There was something that I wasn’t seeing. This had been my mother’s project, her research documents with the Tiger Lily symbol on every page. It was all connected somehow- I just had to find the missing link.

  I narrowed my search to all documents with my mother’s name associated with them. Nothing was of interest. It was just routine medical and research paperwork that any medical scholar would process during any given day.

  At least, that’s what it appeared at first glance. When I delved further into the documents, I noticed an alarming number of patients who had been diagnosed with and treated for “PTL”.

  PTL was an illness among embryos that was first discovered in the mid-2200s, the abbreviation short for “parietal and temporal lesions”. Infants with this diagnosis died immediately after birth due to brain hemorrhages, a side effect of the prevalence of radioactivity left from the Dominate War. The disease was seemingly random, with no precursor as to why the lesions would appear in some babies, but not in others, an unsolved mystery in the medical world. It was a common diagnosis, but not so common that my mother would have this many patients who were predetermined to have it.

  It was only after grouping the documents in this way that I saw a pattern forming. All of the patients who were under my mother’s care and diagnosed with PTL, had undergone additional procedures on their frontal lobes during the conception process to prevent the illness. Additional grey matter cells were injected into the cerebral cortex for all patients to prevent the lesions from forming.

  It would have been oblivious from the outside, nothing of significance from anyone who had not been trained to think like a doctor and see medical abnormalities in groups of patients. But, to me, the procedure was a red flag, a flashing, neon sign that screamed conspiracy. Only a doctor would understand that increasing grey matter cells could not prevent PTL.

  But it could change the mindset of the patient if done correctly.

  The cerebral cortex is the control panel of our minds. It is the area of the brain responsible for problem solving and judgment. Grey matter contains most of the brain’s neuronal cell bodies, so by injecting additional gray matter cells into the brain, you are essentially increasing that person’s ability to think rationally, to express their emotions, to fight against reason.

  A person who had undergone this procedure could, in theory, see right through the smoke and mirrors of a corrupted society. They could analyze the conspiracies in a flawed government that had programed their citizens to think they were impeccable. They could see the Syndicate for what they truly were- a fraud, a falsehood, a ruse to sway their citizens’ mentality.

  All of a sudden, it clicked. PTL didn’t stand for parietal and temporal lesions, as I had originally thought. It stood for Project Tiger Lily. These patients weren’t being treated against an in-vitro illness- they were part of a study that my mother was conducting to create a new version of suits, one that could undermine the Syndicate’s authority.

  My mother wasn’t researching embryo illnesses like it appeared- she was building an army to overpower the government.

  And my name was on the top of her list.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: TROUBLED & TRANSFORMED

  A million tiny puzzle pieces fell into place, and for the first time, I could see the whole picture. After twenty years of thinking I was bizarre, out of place, of accepting that I didn’t see things the same way as my peers, but not knowing the reason behind it, things finally made sense. I could see things differently because I had been designed to do so from the very beginning.

  To know that there was an entire organization to bring down Concord, hidden right under the Syndicate’s nose, was more than we could have ever hoped to learn from the encrypted files. To see the words on the file before me, to read the medical documents with my own eyes, it lifted a weight from my shoulders. I felt as if I was so light that I could float.

  “Incredible,” Ximea murmured when I showed her the files. Her eyes met min
e. “This explains a lot.”

  It was strange to know that there was a legitimate reason for my thinking, to have my insecurities and doubts confirmed, to realize that there was nothing wrong with me, but that this was how I was always meant to be. My mother had given me this opportunity, a final gift, an ability to see things clearly, rather than through rose-colored glasses. My parents didn’t want that life for me. They didn’t want me to grow up being a mindless robot.

  I owed my parents a lifetime of gratitude. Without their intervention, I would be blinded like the rest of Concord. I would still be inside the dome, mindlessly living my life with no idea that another world existed, a world that would be obliterated had it not been for my intervention. I shuddered just thinking about it.

  Just like me, my mother and father saw the Syndicate for what they really were. It was the reason my father gave food to a displaced unsuit on the brink of starvation. It was why my mother used her intelligence and cunning to change the minds of individuals using science, rather than politics. They were trying to work with Nova from inside the dome, to help the unsuits succeed in overthrowing the Syndicate.

  My parents were part of the resistance.

  I had a chilling suspicion that the Syndicate had made the connection long before I had. An unnerving notion dawned on me, and I nearly dropped the laptop. What if the accidental cave-in that took their lives, wasn’t an accident at all? What if the information before me was the real reason that my mother and father died? They knew too much and were going to share that information with others. The Syndicate couldn’t have that, so they shut them up for good.

  This idea sent angry tremors down my spine. To know that your parents passed away is one thing, but to suspect that they were murdered by the government and that their deaths could have been prevented was another thing altogether.